ABSTRACT
The movement-image is “matter itself”; the six kinds of movementimage are the elements “that make of this matter a signaletic matter”; and the fourteen to twenty-three signs of the movement-image are “the features of expression [traits d’expression] that compose these images, combine and ceaselessly recreate them, borne or carried along by matter in movement” (IT 49; 33). Through montage, the movement-image offers an indirect image of time as the open whole, but Deleuze argues that beyond the movement-image is a separate category of images and signs that provide a direct manifestation of time-the time-image. The first indications of the time-image in film occur in pure optical and sonic images that break with the sensori-motor schema (what Deleuze calls opsigns and sonsigns). Memory-images and dream-images (mnemosigns and onirosigns [IT 358; 273]) interconnect opsigns and sonsigns. But only in the time crystal, or crystal-image, with its corresponding hyalosigns, does “time in person” begin to “surge forth” (IT 358; 274). Our concern for the moment is with crystal-images and hyalosigns, but in subsequent chapters we will examine other forms of the time-image: chronosigns, which present either coexisting relations and simultaneous elements of time (the order of time) or a before-andafter in a single becoming (the series of time); noosigns, which reveal a
new relation between thought and images; and lectosigns, which manifest a new relation between the visual and the sonic.
