Cinema 2: The Time-Image

Using the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Deleuze offers an analysis of the cinematic treatment of time and memory, thought and speech. The book draws on the work of major filmmakers like Fellini, Antonioni and Welles.

Content

The first three chapters of Cinema 2, each outlining a number of ways of approaching what Deleuze calls "the time-image". The first chapter explores the works of various filmmakers who were, according to Deleuze, precursors to time-images. The second chapter takes a "taxonomical" approach, showing how the time-image goes beyond what the author has defined as "movement-image" in Cinéma 1. The third chapter introduces two more types of movement-images in order to better differentiate time-images.

Beyond the movement-image

In the first chapter of Cinema 2, Deleuze picks up where he left off in Cinema 1 to discuss how the time-image is born from a crisis of the movement-image. Thus, instead of what Deleuze had described as perception-images, affection-images, action-images, and mental images (all types of movement-image), there are now "opsigns" and "sonsigns" which resist movement-image differentiation. As David Rodowick writes: 'In the absence of a predetermined trajectory' the image becomes 'what Deleuze calls opsigns and sonsigns, or pure optical and acoustical images.' Deleuze explores opsigns and sonsigns through the cinema of the Italian neorealists and Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu.

From movement-image to time-image

Deleuze then goes on to give a partial overview of Cinema 1 from the perspective of his taxonomical project, before once again deriving opsigns and sonsigns.

Limit of movement-images

In the third chapter of the book, Deleuze discusses recollection-images (flashbacks) and dream-images. These images seem – says Deleuze – to be time-images, however, they remain movement-images. Nonetheless, they point the way toward time-images.

One more chapter is free with a Lably account.

Analysis

Types of time-image

The second part of Cinema 2 concerns Deleuze's classification of types of time-image, which he will summarize in the second section of chapter 10, the final chapter of the book, and the conclusion to both Cinema books:

opsigns and sonsigns
hyalosigns (or crystal-images)
chronosigns
noosigns
lectosigns

In Cinema 1, Deleuze's use of the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce allowed him to expand the taxonomy of movement-images. However, in Cinema 2 Deleuze does not provide any rationale for his taxonomy and there has been some debate as how the author justifies his categorisation.

According to Rodowick, 'time-images emerge from what Deleuze calls, in Difference and Repetition, the three passive syntheses of time'. A number of other theorists have gone on to suggest very different relations between Deleuze's full taxonomy of cinema and Difference and Repetition. However, in 2011 David Deamer published an essay titled 'A Deleuzian Cineosis: Cinematic Semiosis and Syntheses of Time' in what was then called Deleuze Studies, which returned to Rodowick's brief comment and explored the claim in depth, writing 'the impetus for the taxonomy of the time-image lies in the account given of the three passive syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition,' and 'the nine aspects of the passive syntheses can be seen to correspond to the nine proper signs of the time-image'. Deamer went on to develop this relation between Cinema 2 and Difference and Repetition in Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images (2016). Therein he sees a much wider connection, and goes on to show how it goes beyond the concerns of just the temporal syntheses, writing on the 'three constitutive syntheses of time, space, and consciousness' and that 'it is these three constitutive syntheses that can be seen to inspire the structure of the time-image taxonomy.'

"Cineosis"

Deamer coins the term "cineosis" to describe Deleuze's "cinematic semiosis", designating the images and the images with signs.