A Deleuze glossary

Plain-language definitions of the cinema concepts the sightlines use as lenses. Each essay links its terms here, so the prose can stay about the films. Deleuze worked them out across two books — Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). You don't need to have read them; you need these.

Honesty note: the contemporary terms at the bottom (neuro-image, post-continuity, the mind-game film) are later scholars', not Deleuze's — attributed where they appear. Where a sightline connects a modern film to a Deleuzian concept, that connection is the essay's argument unless a cited scholar made it.

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The two regimes

movement-image

The classical way film organizes itself: perception leads to action leads to a new situation, link by link — a world where characters act and acting changes things. Most cinema before WWII (and most mainstream cinema since) runs on it. Deleuze divides it into perception-, affection-, and action-images, with the relation-image as its summit. See‑also: time-image, action-image.

time-image

What appears when the chain of action breaks — when a character can no longer act on a situation, only see it. Time stops being measured by movement and is shown directly: as memory, as waiting, as duration. Born in Italian neorealism (a man who can only wander and look) and the lifeblood of modern art cinema. See‑also: crisis of the action-image, opsigns--sonsigns, crystal-image.

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Images of the movement-image

perception-image

The image attuned to how it perceives — and to who is perceiving. Its great form is free indirect discourse: the camera perceives with a character and beyond them at once, neither pure point-of-view nor pure objectivity. Deleuze's exemplar: Pasolini. See‑also: affection-image.

affection-image

Feeling before action — the image held at the threshold where something is felt but not yet done. Its home is the face in close-up, and its space is the any-space-whatever. Deleuze's exemplars: Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc), Bergman (Persona). See‑also: any-space-whatever.

impulse-image

The image of raw drive and degraded appetite — naturalism's "originary world" of cruelty and compulsion erupting beneath the social surface. Between the affection- and action-images. Deleuze's exemplars: Buñuel, Stroheim.

action-image

The sensory-motor image proper: a character sizes up a situation and acts to change it. Its large form moves from situation to action (the Western, the epic); its small form moves from action to revealed situation (the detective film). The engine of genre. See‑also: crisis of the action-image.

relation-image (the mental-image)

The summit of the movement-image, where the image is no longer of things but of relations between them — and where the spectator is folded into the film, made to assemble the connections. Deleuze's exemplar: Hitchcock, whose suspense is built from relations the viewer holds that the characters don't.

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The break, and the images of the time-image

crisis of the action-image

The historical moment (post‑WWII, neorealism) when the sensory-motor link snaps: situations arise that no action can resolve, and the character becomes a seer. This crisis is the birth of the time-image.

opsigns & sonsigns

"Pure optical and sound situations" — moments when a character (and we) simply look and listen, severed from any action that would follow. The texture of dead time: Ozu's emptied rooms, Antonioni's drifting figures. The everyday made strange by duration. See‑also: time-image, any-space-whatever.

any-space-whatever

A space drained of its coordinates and its dramatic function — disconnected, emptied, no longer a stage for action. First glimpsed in the affection-image, it becomes autonomous in the time-image: the deserted island, the vacant corridor, the non-place.

crystal-image (hyalosign)

The image where the actual (what is happening) and the virtual (memory, dream, the imagined) become indiscernible — the smallest circuit of time, time caught in the act of splitting. Deleuze's exemplars: Welles (Citizen Kane), Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad), Fellini (8½). See‑also: powers of the false, time-image.

powers of the false

Narration that abandons the true — the forger in place of the truthful narrator, a telling that contradicts itself and cannot be verified. Not lying so much as making the true/false distinction undecidable. Deleuze's exemplars: Welles, Robbe-Grillet. See‑also: crystal-image.

noosign (cinema of the brain)

The image as thought — the screen as a brain, the film thinking rather than depicting. The "spiritual automaton." Deleuze's exemplars: Resnais, Kubrick (2001). See‑also: neuro-image.

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Contemporary extensions (later scholars)

neuro-image

Patricia Pisters (The Neuro-Image, 2012) proposes a third regime after the movement- and time-images, for 21st-century digital cinema: the screen as brain ("neuroscreen"), where the viewer "no longer looks through a character's eyes" but moves through their mind, and database/recombinant logic echoes the brain's synapses. The digital heir of the noosign.

post-continuity

Steven Shaviro: a digital-era editing style where classical continuity has stopped governing — "a preoccupation with immediate effects trumps any concern for broader continuity" (Michael Bay, Tony Scott). The action-image collapsed into pure sensation; space and time "unhinged." Notably, Shaviro declines to call this a new image-type — he reads it through affect, not a Deleuzian taxonomy.

post-cinematic affect

Shaviro: the claim that digital + networked media constitute a different media regime and mode of production, analyzed by "affective mapping" rather than by a successor to Deleuze's images. The chief rival framing to Pisters' neuro-image for "what comes after the time-image."

the mind-game film

Thomas Elsaesser: post-1990s films that suspend or reverse cause-and-effect and break the contract that "a film does not lie to the spectator" (Memento, Lost Highway, Fight Club, The Matrix, The Usual Suspects), shifting from narrative to database/rhizome logic. This atlas reads the mind-game film as the contemporary heir of the crystal-image and powers of the false — that connection is our argument, not Elsaesser's (he does not use Deleuze's terms).

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Beyond Deleuze — the wider vocabulary

The concepts the per-film readings also draw on, from the broader tradition of film theory and craft.

montage

The art of the cut. In its strong, Soviet form (Eisenstein), two shots are collided so the edit itself produces a third meaning the images don't hold alone — editing as argument. More loosely, any expressive cutting.

mise-en-scène

Everything arranged within the frame — staging, set, light, blocking, the actors' placement — and what it means. The opposite emphasis from montage: meaning made by composition rather than the cut.

the long take

A shot held without cutting, often for minutes. It can build tension, assert realism (the unbroken record of real time and space), or — pushed to excess — become duration itself. See also opsigns & sonsigns.

deep focus

Keeping foreground, middle ground, and background all in sharp focus at once (Gregg Toland's work on Citizen Kane), so the eye chooses where to look and several planes of action coexist in one shot.

the auteur

The idea (from the Cahiers du cinéma critics, via Andrew Sarris) that a director can be the true author of a film, stamping a personal vision and recurring style across a body of work.

film noir

Less a genre than a mood and a look: shadow, fatalism, moral murk, the doomed protagonist and the femme fatale — born of 1940s Hollywood crime film and German-émigré expressionist lighting. Its later return is neo-noir.

the gaze

Whose looking the camera adopts — and on whom. Laura Mulvey's argument that classical cinema is built around a controlling male gaze that makes women its object; a tool for reading how a film positions its viewer.

genre

The system of types (Western, musical, horror, the heist) and their conventions — and the way films honor, revise, or subvert them. Genres evolve.

vérité / direct cinema

Documentary-rooted realism imported into fiction: handheld cameras, available light, the look of caught rather than staged life (the New Wave, Cassavetes, the Dardennes).

the jump cut

A cut that breaks continuity within a single action, leaving a visible jump — popularized by Godard's Breathless as a deliberate rupture, a refusal of seamless classical editing.

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Source texts: Deleuze, Cinema 1 & Cinema 2; Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine; Pisters, The Neuro-Image; Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect / "Post-Continuity"; Elsaesser, "The Mind-Game Film"; Bazin, What Is Cinema?; Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema."