page_title: Cinema 1: The Movement Image
section_title: Mental images
hierarchical_section_title: Cinema 1: The Movement Image / Types of movement-image / Mental images
caption_attribution_description: English: Theatrical poster for the film Rear Window
context_page_description: Cinema 1: The Movement Image is the first of two books on cinema by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the second being Cinema 2: The Time Image. Together Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 have become known as the Cinema books, the two volumes both complementary and interdependent. In these books the author combines philosophy and cinema, explaining in the preface to the French edition of Cinema 1 that "[t]his study is not a history of cinema. It is a taxonomy, an attempt at the classifications of images and signs"; and that the "first volume has to content itself with […] only one part of the classification". To make this division between the movement-image and the time-image Deleuze draws upon the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s theory of matter and mind.
  In Cinema 1, Deleuze specifies his classification of the movement-image through both Bergson’s theory of matter and the philosophy of the American pragmatist C. S. Peirce. The cinema covered in the book ranges from the silent era to the late 1970s, and includes the work of D. W. Griffith, G. W.
context_section_description: “We hardly believe any longer that a global situation can give rise to an action which is capable of modifying it – no more than we believe that an action can force a situation to disclose itself, even partially”.
  Hitchcock, according to Deleuze, introduces the mental image, where relation itself is the object of the image. And this takes movement-image to its crisis. After Hitchcock, both the small form and the large form are in crisis, as are action-images in general. In Robert Altman’s Nashville the multiple characters and storylines refer to a dispersive, rather than a globalising situation. In Sidney Lumet’s Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon characters “behave like windscreen wipers”. Deleuze develops this theory by detailing the chronology of Italian neorealism, French New Wave, and New German Cinema. Deleuze states that we must think "beyond movement"… Which leads us to Cinema 2: The Time-Image.
caption: Poster for Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954)
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