On Cinema — Deleuze
VI. Crisis of the Action Image
The crisis of the action image marks the transition from Cinema 1 to Cinema 2, from the movement image to the time image. Deleuze locates this crisis in the aftermath of the Second World War, when Italian neorealism broke from the closed logic of the sensory motor schema. In neorealism, characters are no longer agents who perceive a situation, form a plan, and act to resolve it. Instead they wander through dispersive situations: fragmented, open, and resistant to resolution. The world they move through is no longer organized around them. It presents itself as something to be witnessed rather than something to be acted upon.
The dispersive situation replaces the coherent milieu of the classical action image. Where a unified environment once gathered its pressures around a character and demanded a response, the dispersive situation offers no clear shape or logic. Characters in neorealist films often appear lost not because they are confused about facts but because the category of purposeful action has been undermined. The gap between perceiving a situation and being able to act meaningfully within it widens until it becomes the subject of the film itself.
Out of this crisis emerge new kinds of signs. The optical sign, or opsign, is a pure visual image that has been severed from its motor extension: what is seen no longer automatically triggers movement or response. The sound sign, or sonsign, performs the same function in the register of sound: a heard event that floats free from its source or its dramatic consequence. Together, opsigns and sonsigns describe a cinema that has lost confidence in the sensory motor connection. The character sees and hears, but the link to action has broken down. What remains is pure perception suspended in time, which is the condition that opens toward the time image and the new forms of cinema Deleuze will address in his second volume.
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