On Cinema — Deleuze
IV. The Affection Image
The affection image occupies the interval between perception and action. It is what happens in the pause: after something is received and before a response is produced. Deleuze identifies the face as the primary site of the affection image in cinema, because the face is uniquely capable of expressing intensity without movement. A face in closeup suspends the logic of action and situation; it becomes a surface of pure affect, registering states that exceed what the narrative around it can contain. The closeup does not locate the face in a place or a time — it abstracts it, lifting it out of the set and into a kind of duration that belongs only to the feeling itself.
In Jaws, the affection image operates through withholding. The shark is rarely shown directly in the early portions of the film, and the tension builds not through action but through the registered fear on the faces of characters and the manipulation of the viewer's anticipation. What is generated is an affect that precedes any concrete encounter with the threat. The image produces dread as its primary content, independent of what is actually represented in any given frame. The spectator's body responds before the mind has fully processed what is happening, which is precisely the quality of affection that Bergson and Deleuze describe: a reaction that bypasses conscious deliberation.
Un Chien Andalou takes this further by severing the affection image from any coherent narrative at all. The famous opening sequence — an eye sliced by a razor — produces a visceral affect that cannot be resolved into meaning. The image does not lead anywhere. It is not a perception that prepares an action. It is pure intensity, and the face and eye become instruments for generating feeling in the viewer without providing any framework for that feeling to settle into. The affection image in Buñuel and Dalí becomes the primary material of the film, rather than a transitional moment within a larger structure.
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