Cinema 1

Having now completed Cinema 1, I'll try to give an overview of it, to the best of my abilities. As the movement-image, it is concerned with three different kinds of movement images which represent the three different ways of making films, and then the fourth that calls them into question These are:

1.The affect-image, or affection. This mode of filmmaking corresponds to Peircean firstness; it is a thing in and of itself. It emphasizes close-ups to get the emotional affect of a human face. It does not take place in a realistic setting (which would render it secondness) but rather in an "any-place-whatever." The affect-image
2. The impulse image, or naturalism. The impulse image is a transitional place between firstness and secondness. It is concerned with real milieux, places that are really there, but it imposes on them an "originary world" where human beings are under the control of their animal impulses. It is neither an any place whatever nor a real milieu, but something in between.
3. The action image, or realism. The action image takes place in a real milieu, and it seems to be the dominant form of the movement image. It is the mode of secondness, what Deleuze calls the binomial or the duel, in which two terms are in conflict with one another and one must work to overcome the other.
Deleuze divides the action image into two main forms, the large form and the small form. The large form takes the form SAS' . A situation (a real milieu, it seems) is presented, a character must take an action to deal with that situation, and a new situation (S') is created due to the characters action. This is the mode of most westerns and of the gangster film. A negative corollary is SAS", where the new situation is worse than the previous one.
The small form, which is often dictated by a low budget and encompasses a noir, instead takes the form ASA'. What opens the film is action, which brings about a new situation, to which the character must respond with a new mode of action. The alcoholic hero is a version of this; he opens the film in a rut, a new situation presents itself, and he either rises (or fails to rise) to the situation and ends up with a new way of acting at the end of the film.
4.The mental image, or the crisis. This is a version of thirdness: not just the emotional affect, not just the relationship between the two things, but a third play considers them, interprets them, considers them logically. What matters in Hitchcock is neither who committed the murder (firstness) nor how they did it (secondness) but "the set of relations in which the action and the one who did it are caught" (200). Deleuze argues that this is the mode of logic and philosophy, and thus Hitchcock is the philosopher of the cinema. Unfortunately, the cinema could not rest there, although he wanted it too. By opening up the idea that the cinema could have a version of thirdness, could question its precepts, a crisis was opened up. Film moves beyond SAS and ASA (no longer believing that situations or actions can be changed) in favor of a much more diffuse and problematic mode of filmmaking. This mode, which appears in Italian neo-Realism, the French New Wave, German neues Kino, and certain films of American New Hollywood (Lumet, Scorsese, Altman), has these characteristics: "dispersive situation, the deliberately weak links, the voyage form, the consciousness of cliches, the condemnation of the plot" (210).