Cinema – the cinema of the movement-image – begins for Deleuze with perception-images, affection-images, action-images and mental-images. The sensory-motor system as explicated by Bergson describes the world and its bodies as a nexus of perceptions, affects and actions; a nexus traversed, underlain and sustained with memory-images. These Bergsonian coordinates give Deleuze the fundamental taxonomic elements composing the cinema of the movement-image: perception-images extract from all the images of the world a body around which the film will revolve; affections-images express unfilmable internal intensive states through this centre as character emotions and feelings; action-images allow and obligate the privileged image to act in and upon the world; and mental-images permeate the film actualising the character's thoughts, dreams and memories. Deleuze – however – goes on to expand this fundamental taxonomy: ‘there is every reason to believe that many other kinds of images can exist’ (C1: 68). To create these new images, Deleuze unfolds the movement-image beyond the primary Bergsonian coordinates through a conjunction of identifying and determining interim states and devolving such images into a series of compositional signs. The movement-image cineosis becomes complex: a web of signs, images, avatars and domains. Such complexity, however, is haunted by ambiguity. Deleuze will give three iterations of the extended movement-image taxonomy – the text of Cinema 1, the glossary of Cinema 1 and a recapitulation of images and signs early on in Cinema 2 – and each iteration is different. Not only that, but after the supposed final summary in Cinema 2's recapitulation there appears to be the designation of even more types of movement-image. Across the Cinema books, lucid expositions of the movement-image cineosis see repetitions interweaving with differences. This chapter attempts to explicate, justify and even resolve some of these ambiguities, as well as acknowledging the limit of such an enterprise. Either way, the aim is to present a full and complete framework for the coordinates of signs, images, avatars and domains of the movement-image regime, where all the different enunciations of that taxonomy appear as moments of a process of unfolding.

Such an exposition rests upon an engagement with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce.