Cinema 2: The 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:^[4]

• 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.^[5]

According to Rodowick, 'time-images emerge from what Deleuze calls, in Difference and Repetition, the three passive syntheses of time'.^[6] A number of other theorists have gone on to suggest very different relations between Deleuze's full taxonomy of cinema and Difference and Repetition.^[7] 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'.^[8] 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.'^[9]

Deamer coins the term "cineosis" to describe Deleuze's "cinematic semiosis", designating the images and the images with signs.^[10]

Specific

General

• Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London & New York: The Athlone Press, 1989.
• Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London & New York: The Athlone Press, 1989.
• Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 2002.
• Peirce, Charles Sanders. "Pragmatism and Pragmaticism" in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce: Volume V and VI. Eds. C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974

• Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Cinema. New York and London: Routledge, 2003.
• Colman, Felicity. Deleuze & Cinema: The Film Concepts. Oxford & New York: Berg, 2011
• Deamer, David. Deleuze's Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
• Rodowick, D.N. Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

• Buchanan, Ian and Patricia MacCormack, eds. Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema. London and New York: Continuum, 2008.
• Deamer, David. Deleuze, Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.
• Flaxman, Gregory (ed.). The Brain is the Screen: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
• Martin-Jones, David. Deleuze and World Cinemas. London and New York: Continuum, 2011.
• MacCormack, Patricia. Cinesexuality. Aldershot, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.
• Marrati, Paola. Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy. Trans. Alisa Hartz. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
• Pisters, Patricia. The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working With Deleuze in Film Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
• Powell, Anna. Deleuze and Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
• ---. Deleuze, Altered States, and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
• Rodowick, D.N., (ed.). Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze's Film Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
• Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
• Shilina-Conte, Tanya. Black Screens, White Frames: Gilles Deleuze and the Filmmaking Machine. New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2024.
• Skoller, Jeffrey. Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film. University of Minnesota press, 2005.