David Deamer
The cinema books of Gilles Deleuze explore cinematic images through the visceral signs they give rise to. These signs are the way in which cinematic images are encountered, the way in which meaning appears. Deleuze attempts to catalogue these signs, to define them, to examine their distinctive features as well as their relationships and correspondences. In so doing a taxonomy is made possible, a sign system that describe cinematic processes, a semiosis.
Deleuze’s semiosis is complex. Deleuze outlines two different schemas. There is the movement-image, a cinema of continuity which constructs narratives linking images of perception, emotion, action and thought. There is the time-image, a cinema of false continuity where images are ambiguous, and their narratives open up onto complex temporal structures. This two-fold schema does not form a hierarchy; each is possible of generating beauty. And each is composed of a system of signs, differential cinematic co-ordinates. However, Deleuze’s taxonomy can be contradictory and has many silences.
Cineosis = cinematic semiosis: exploring Gilles Deleuze’s cinema-sign taxonomy, attempting to fill some silences and resolve some contradictions. Where the cinematic image is not just an image encountered in a cinema, but images that move in time on screen. Where the semiotic system is universal, but has an infinite number of possible outcomes, is a process, a semiosis. Necessarily, cineosis is but one way to encounter movement-images and time-images.