Cinema 2: The Time-Image by Gilles Deleuze, ISBN-13: 978-0816616770
[PDF eBook eTextbook]
- Publisher: University of Minnesota Press; 1st edition (October 22, 1986)
- Language: English
- 362 pages
- ISBN-10: 9780816616770
- ISBN-13: 978-0816616770
Cinema 2: The Time-Image (French: Cinéma 2, L’image-temps) (1985) is the second volume of Gilles Deleuze’s work on cinema, the first being Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (French: Cinéma 1. L’image-mouvement) (1983). Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 have become to be known as the Cinema books, and are complementary and interdependent texts.
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 film-makers like Fellini, Antonioni and Welles.
The first three chapters of Cinema 2 each outline a number of ways of approaching the time-image. The first chapter looks at a number of filmmakers who were precursors to and early proponents of time-images. The second chapter takes a taxonomical approach, reviewing Cinema 1 and showing how the time-image goes beyond the movement-image. While the third chapter introduces two more movement-images in order to better differentiate time-images.
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 the perception-images, affection-images, action-images, and mental images of the movement-image, there are opsigns and sonsigns which resist movement-image differentiation. Deleuze explores opsigns and sonsigns through the cinema of the Italian neorealists and Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu. 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 then goes on – in the second chapter – to give a partial overview of Cinema 1 from the perspective of his taxonomical project, before once again deriving opsigns and sonsigns.
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.
The second part of Cinema 2 concerns Deleuze’s classification of types of movement-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 this creation arises.
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.’
Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. He died in November 1995. Among his many works are The Logic of Sense, Difference and Repetition, and Nietzche and Philosophy, all published by Columbia University Press.
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