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5 - Action-images (large form, situation → action)

from Section II - Second Introduction – A Series of Images and Signs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2019

David Deamer
Affiliation:
Manchester Metropolitan University
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Summary

If the situation is already a given, then the sensory-motor trajectory no longer has a requirement to reveal the world. Instead, action-images can explore how determined situations engender actions, conduct and behaviour. We move from action → situation to situation → action (from the small form action-image to the large form). Such reciprocity is actualised from the two aspects of the affection-image. The affect is a centre of indetermination making determinations (perception = action) indeterminate (perception ≈ action). The affection-image, in other words, is both a reflection of the world and oriented towards acting upon the world. Therefore, if the action-image (action → situation) was concerned with actualising reflective affects, the action-image (situation → action) is concerned with actualising reactive affects. With this second action-image the logic of the sensory-motor system as a linear trajectory (perception → affect → action) reaches its fullest expression, the most glorious manifestation of realism. Given a perceived situation that affects the character, the character must act; and such acts result from the situation already determined. This is not an impulse-image which explicates a world of overpowering primal forces, but an action-image, that which both actualises and interrogates a determined environment. Accordingly, with such an interrogation we encounter a possibility of changing the world (something beyond the possibility of the small form, which can only reveal conditions). No doubt a certain deadlock is apparent here: for a determined and determining situation will necessarily circumscribe action. The possibility of changing the world thus occurs within specific limits, or – as Deleuze puts it – through a bestowing of certain laws and modes. The five laws of the action-image (large form) describe the movement from situation to action. The first law is that of the situation in space and time, spatially as S and temporally as S1→S2. S appears as the ‘encompasser’ within the frame, while the passage from S1 to S2 occurs through alternate parallel montage at the level of ‘the succession of shots’ (C1: 151). With the second law ‘the passage from S to S` takes place through the intermediary of action’ (A): thus S→A (C1: 152). This passage is constituted through ‘concurrent or convergent’ montage, cutting from one section of action to another, back and forth, to bring the elements together, embodying the forces inherent in the situation (C1: 153).

Type
Chapter
Information
Deleuze's Cinema Books
Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images
, pp. 97 - 104
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2016

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