On Cinema — Deleuze

V. The Action Image

Reading notes, Fall 2021

The action image is the dominant form of classical Hollywood cinema, structured around the movement from situation to action and from action to transformed situation. Deleuze uses the term synsign to describe the totality of qualities that characterize a milieu — the environment, atmosphere, and forces that surround and condition a character. The synsign is not a single image but a gathering of signs that defines the world as it presents itself before the character must act. In genre filmmaking, the milieu is typically established quickly through iconic images: the dusty street of the Western, the rain-soaked city of noir. These configurations are legible almost instantly because the genre conventions train the viewer to read them as complete situations that demand a particular kind of response.

Blade Runner constructs its synsign through accumulation. The film opens with a vast industrial landscape, perpetually lit by flame and rain, in which no natural light or organic form survives. Every detail of the image — the scale, the texture, the color temperature — contributes to a milieu that is oppressive, entrapping, and morally ambiguous. The action that follows is inseparable from this atmosphere. Deckard's task is shaped by the world he moves through, and the world in turn is defined by the actions and transgressions of its characters. The milieu and the agent are continuously conditioning each other, which is the structure of the large form of the action image: situation drives action, and action modifies situation.

The Matrix offers a different configuration. Here the synsign is duplicated: there is the apparent milieu of the simulated world, and there is the actual milieu of the war-ravaged earth beneath it. The action image is complicated because the character must act within a situation that is revealed to be false, which means that every action undertaken before the revelation was based on a misreading of the environment. Nobody Knows, by contrast, abandons the action image structure almost entirely. The children in Kore-eda's film are surrounded by a situation — abandonment, poverty, slow dissolution — but the film refuses to allow them to act in any way that would transform it. The milieu overwhelms the possibility of action, which anticipates the crisis Deleuze will go on to describe.