analyzes the «time-image» in search of a general structure not bound to the sequential form of film as a medium, but also evoked in Graham’s «Cinema.» [26]

Deleuze understands a «movement-image» to be an image subject to a general sensory-motor schema; the «movement-image» can therefore also be understood as an «action image.» The spectator’s question is not what the current image shows, but rather what the next image will show. The image experience is molded by the rhythm of irritation and reaction, affect and action. The movement can thus be elevated to the level of a metaphysical «world movement» without ever questioning the way the images are linked to one another. After the war, however, a cinema emerged (in Italian neorealism, the nouvelle vague, the new American cinema, etc.) in which the sensory-motor scheme is broken. Situations arise that no longer allow a reaction; increasingly, random empty or detached spaces appear with no continuation in action and reaction. Purely optical and acoustic situations emerge in which the figures gain in far-sightedness what they lose in action; in so doing they remain undecided, stroll or behave in a way that seems to indicate that

they are indifferent to what happens to them. The situation only has inherent value. For Deleuze, the decisive question is therefore how the optic and acoustic images are linked to one another when a continuation of action is not realized. Images of reminiscence and dreams or flashbacks (psychic memory) do not provide the answer, since they still belong to a sensory-motor situation and are linked as virtual images to a current image (the present). What Deleuze terms the «time–image» only emerges when the current image can simultaneously be considered a virtual image and «steps in relation to its own virtual image as such.» What at first is a pure description is doubled, repeats itself, begins again, branches out and contradicts itself, constituting a «two sided, multi-sided image» in which the current and the virtual cannot be distinguished from one another and find themselves in continuous exchange (the Resnais and Robbe- Grillet film «Last Year in Marienbad» is an excellent ‹didactic› example of this.). With this «the distinction between subjective and objective […] also tends to lose its importance, to the extent that the optical situation or visual description replaces the