Deleuze and the Time-Image: a Cinema of the Virtual Mind

When Gilles Deleuze proposed a theory of second cinema, a cinema in which time is the dominant mode of audiovisual communication, he used modern films as examples to prove his theories. And yet, what he describes – a cinema where virtual and actual, real and imaginary, subjective and objective are indistinguishable – is a postmodern cinema, one that translates the images of the human mind into a pure cinema, and creates a simulacra based on a variety of images. In her essay “Gilles Deleuze and a Future Cinema”, Barbara Filser posits a theory of a third cinema, one that would develop from Deleuze’s theory of the time-image into a cinema of the 21^st century¹. This third cinema is a virtual reality, embedded in Deleuze’s time-image theory to create a cinema of the mind, directly from the thoughts of the spectator/character. Deleuze’s modern - or I would argue, postmodern cinema - is an attempt to show how the image is “the system of the relationships of time.”² In order to understand and interpret Deleuze’s theories of the time-image, I will analyse these theories and other analyses of Deleuze’s work, using as examples two postmodern films: Abre los ojos (Alejandro Amenábar 1997) and Solaris (Steven Soderbergh 2002).³ In these films, a virtual construct is created from the minds of the main characters and each becomes a part of this cinema. In effect, this is the cinema that Deleuze envisions, one coming from the mind of the character/spectator and in which they exist, as opposed to watch. The films are representations of the type of cinema that Deleuze theorises, and thus ideal for understanding and interpretation of these theories.

Deleuze once said in an interview that, “the brain is the screen.”⁴ It would seem, though, that the brain is also the projector. Much as a projector is fed information that it then displays onto a screen through a lens like an eye, so the brain is fed a variety of images and sounds that are then projected onto a screen, either inside, or in the case of a virtual reality, outside. As the technical object is replaced by an organic one, so the distinction between the real and the virtual becomes blurred. Much of postmodern cinema examines the difference between the real and the virtual image, ideas created by the human mind. For Fredric Jameson, “the postmodern looks … for shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation of things and the way they change.”⁵ This comes about in the time-image, a shift in representation and the interpretation of that representation, through a cinema that is self-aware as cinema, drawing attention to itself by virtue of an imitation of the cinematic experience. If cinema separates itself from other art forms by virtue of its similarity to dreams, then to understand Deleuze’s theory of what cinema is means to explore its relation to the dreams and memories of the human mind. The time-image is the postmodern in its hyperreality: where the real and the imaginary, the virtual and the actual, co-mingle and interact so as to become indistinguishable. Abre los ojos and Solaris are examples of the execution of this third cinema, this cinema of the time-image.

Abre los ojos begins with a young man, César, wearing a mask, recounting supposed recent events of his life to a psychiatrist in a prison where César is awaiting trial for murder. César’s life had been fairly ideal: he was handsome and rich, and enjoyed himself sexually with a number of one-night stands. One of the women with whom he slept, Nuria, became obsessed with him; in a fit of jealousy over another woman, Sofía, Nuria drives her car off a bridge, killing her and disfiguring César. At first, César is unable to cope with his disfigurement, but doctors are able to restore his face and he wins over Sofía. However, Sofía and Nuria keep interchanging, though both claim to be Sofía, and he murders her. Eventually, he and the psychiatrist discover that César had killed himself decades before. It is not 1997, but the 22^nd century, and César had himself cryogenically frozen; his life is in fact a virtual reality program. But something went wrong; hence his brain confused the images of Sofía and Nuria. Rather than let the program begin again, César jumps from a virtual building, where he will either die or begin life in the real world of the future.

Based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem, Solaris tells the story of Chris Kelvin, a psychiatrist on Earth in the distant future. He is asked by the government to travel to a distant planet, where the crew of a space station orbiting the planet Solaris has begun behaving strangely. When he arrives on the station, one crew member has committed suicide, and the remaining members, Snow and Gordon, have isolated themselves and are refusing to say what has happened. After his first sleep on the space station, Chris awakes to find his wife beside him; but it cannot be his wife, as she has been dead for several years. Chris discovers that the planet has made a psychic connection to the crew and recreates people from their memory. But they are not the actual people, rather the crew’s memorial interpretations. Chris first intends to return to Earth with her, but when the Visitor discovers that she is not really Rhea (the wife), she chooses to let Gordon disintegrate her. Chris decides to remain on the space station in the hopes that she will return, even though it eventually plummets into the planet.

In the first chapter of Cinema 2, Deleuze writes: “A camera-consciousness … would no longer be defined by the movement it is able to follow or make, but by the mental connections it is able to enter into.”⁶ In Abre los ojos and Solaris, the camera, in effect, enters into the minds of César and Chris, to connect and create a cinema based on their memories. They are no longer only viewers of the cinema, but characters in their own cinema. At the beginning of Abre los ojos, César has a dream that Madrid has emptied of people, save himself. He runs down a normally busy street, screaming for someone to see him; this scene is then repeated, except with the city full of its usual population. As César drives down the same street, a camera crew would seem to be filming him; this suggests that already, César is in a film of his life, one that he is recounting to his psychiatrist as narrator and unwitting actor. He is creating his own cinema while in an unconscious state, with a computer program accessing his memories to give him his ideal life. In the same manner, in Solaris, as Chris approaches the space station, editing moves between a close-up of Chris’s face and one of the planet, large and round like a camera lens, as though from this moment, the planet is filming him. It is not long after his arrival that the planet recreates Chris’s dead wife, and a cinema is played out with this recreation. Deleuze posits that as the distinction between subjective and objective loses its relevance, optical situations or visual descriptions will replace action.⁷ In his cinema, the viewer/character no longer knows what is real. “It is as if the real and the imaginary were running after each other, as if each were being reflected in the other, around a point of indiscernability.”⁸ César’s mind confuses Sofía and Nuria; the virtual Rhea looks and sounds like the real Rhea. Their internal cinemas have been externalised, and become bidirectional, as the internal affects the external and vice versa, as each attempts to compensate for the unreality of their respective situations.

Deleuze interprets contemporary cinema as a combination of opsigns and sonsigns; these refer to images, memories, and dreams/fantasies. This is what Slavoj Žižek calls the “reality of the virtual,”⁹ in which these varying images can replace the real. These signs are the visual and auditory components of the time-image film; they are neither caused by nor extended into action. Therefore, they represent the purely audio-visual situation.¹⁰ César’s life is only in his mind, in the absence of an actual corporeal (i.e. movement-based) existence. His life is now a series of opsigns and sonsigns, which make time and thought visibly perceptible and audible. For Deleuze, these signs are fantasy, as César’s virtual life is a fantasy. But César’s mind cannot keep Sofía and Nuria separate. A subjectivity is created by opsigns and sonsigns, which according to Deleuze create the “pure-image”, one that he relates to a concept by Henri Bergson, in that “we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it … by virtue of our ideological beliefs and psychological demands.”¹¹ The force of César’s memories “combine the optical-sound image with the enormous forces that are not those of a simply intellectual consciousness, nor of the social one, but of a profound, vital intuition” ¹² to create this excess of opsign and sonsign. This is a kind of simulacrum, or hyperreality, one that Jean Baudrillard would look upon negatively, as having no relation to the real, in the postmodern context. For Baudrillard, the real is the alibi of the model.¹³ Translating this to Deleuze’s time-image, the opsigns and sonsigns refigure themselves into a simulation of the real, a virtuality that does have some relation to the real; but that reality has been lost in the cinema, refigured through its conception of time.

And that conception of time becomes traced and retraced through circuits of the molecular biology of the brain; this brain is the being, which he translates into the “One”, becoming an entity within time. Alain Badiou attempts to unlock Deleuze’s concept of the One, seeing a “Deleuzian discovery of beings as merely superficial intensities of simulacra of being”¹⁴. The One emerges in cinema as a being in multiplicity, as opposed to a singular entity. There is a mimetic vision of being, created as images pass through the circuits and planes of the mind. This is related to Deleuze’s concept of the body without organs, which is all things of possibility together in a kind of liquid form, waiting for formation.¹⁵ Anna Powell writes, “The spectator’s perceptions, struggling to process their undistilled affects, slide into a molecular assemblage with the body of the film.”¹⁶ In the time-image postmodern cinema, the spectator is both Chris, whose cinema is being created from his mind, and the Visitor, who becomes this molecular assemblage, or body without organs. Each watches the other as cinema. By positing a cinema that comes directly from the mind, Deleuze integrates the body without organs, the multiplicitous being, into “a division … [an] emptiness in order to find the whole again.”¹⁷ The “white holes and spaces” made by the opsigns and sonsigns in the fabric of the One create a cinema of dualities: objective and subjective, and real and imaginary. The Visitor is not the actual wife, but she is real; she is virtual, but corporeal; she is indiscernible, but not imaginary. She is One, in multiplicity.

Deleuze does not see the body as separate from thought and subject to its will; rather the body forces thought. This is an interpretation from Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson, who writes that in consciousness, all images depend on the central image of the body and its variations, and that there is a system of images that form an individual’s perception of the universe, changed in the image of the body.¹⁸ For Bergson, the body is the conductor, a conduit between objects that influence it and those on which it acts.¹⁹ Deleuze’s body is that around which memory is formed, leaving a present that is open to past and future. Like memory, “the body is never in the present, it contains the before and after, tiredness and waiting.”²⁰ In his essay “Belief in the Body”, Patrick Ffrench writes of Deleuze’s cinema of the body that, “the connection between the visual field and movement has been interrupted. The individual now finds him or herself confronted by a vision to which the body no longer has the capacity to react.”²¹ As the virtual and the actual images of his real and imagined past become confused in his mind, César’s body changes. He refuses to remove his mask for his psychiatrist, as he remains convinced his face is still deformed. Deleuze writes, “to mount a camera on the body … [makes] it pass through a ceremony … imposing a carnival or a masquerade on it which makes it grow into a grotesque body.”²² When César believes he has killed Sofía/Nuria, he sees his once beautiful face transformed back into a monstrosity, as though this cinema he has created returns him to the grotesque. Bergson sees the body as the boundary between the past and the future; it is what Deleuze interprets as the pointed end of the present. In Solaris, a metaphoric camera is placed on the body of the Visitor; her body is the grotesque of Rhea’s, created from the mind of Chris. By extension, the planet is a camera, acting through the Visitor to view the cinema of Chris, in order to observe him. The postmodern cinema passes through the circuits of memory and imposes itself on the body, how the body must now move and how it must perceive. Chris must find a way to incorporate the corporeality of the Visitor, to confront his memory of his wife as a separate entity as opposed to in the circuits of his mind. Her body is the boundary between the past and the future. The time-image ultimately rests in the body and its cinematic, crystalline representation.

The world of this new Deleuzian cinema does not just present images to the spectator; it surrounds them.²³ It is created by the crystal image, or crystalline description. This occurs when an actual image crystallizes with its own virtual image. The subject cannot discern between real and imaginary; more to the point, each one takes on the other’s identifying marks and can be reversed. The indiscernibility between the two is an “objective characteristic of certain existing images which are by nature double.”²⁴ Deleuze equates the crystal image with the mirror, literal and figurative. A subject or object stands in front of a mirror in an actual state, to view their virtual state in the mirror. Laura Marks writes that there is no objective record of the past; the indiscernibility of actual and virtual is the crystal image.²⁵ These crystal images start as seeds; César and Chris’s memories are the seeds from which the crystalline images are formed into the virtual reality they encounter in their cinemas. The layers of their past memories form the crystal image that lies at the base of the cone of their present, and from which images emerged filtered by those layers; images both actual and virtual. In Abre los ojos, César’s mirror is literal: near the beginning of his story, it shows him in his beauty. After his accident, it shows him in his monstrousness. When his virtual world begins to confuse Sofía and Nuria, it also begins to confuse his face between its pre- and post-accident appearance. The mask he wears becomes a mirror to those who would look on his apparent disfigurement. He does not know which woman is actual or virtual, or indeed if he (or his facial appearance) is virtual or actual. In Solaris, Chris looks at the Visitor as a mirror to his own memory of his wife, and the image he has of himself in her. Deleuze writes that when the actual and the virtual come together they de-solidify; the virtual becomes limpid and the actual becomes dark. In each film, as César and Chris confront the virtual and the actual together, each desolidifies and melds into the other. Deleuze writes, “It is as if an image in a mirror … came to life, assumed independence and passed into the actual” and then could go back to that mirror.²⁶

But how do the virtual and the actual come to separate, and mirror each other at the same time? Between the planes of the mind, Deleuze envisions circuits, and “the broad circuits of recollection in dreams assume this narrow base”²⁷ of the point of the present, and the circuits run between the layers of planes of the past. Powell writes, “The purely optical and sound description is an actual image on a circuit of exchange with a virtual one.”²⁸ She further writes that the crystal image is the point on the smallest internal circuit. Deleuze’s vast circuits correspond to deeper layers of reality and consequently higher levels of memory, which moving along these circuits through the planes of the mind take on virtual forms. “It is this most restricted circuit of actual image and its virtual image which carries everything, and serves as internal limit.”²⁹ The virtual image grows along these circuits. Bogue writes, “We perceive objects through our accumulated experience of them.”³⁰ Chris perceives Rhea through his accumulated experience of her; that experience is run through the circuits of his mind to create the crystalline representation of her in the Visitor. For Deleuze, there is no virtual that does not become actual. The Visitor becomes an actual Rhea for Chris, so much so that he chooses to remain in the cinema created for him rather than return to the reality of Earth. The opposite is the case for César. Deleuze writes, “It is the whole of the real, life in its entirety, which has become the spectacle, in accordance with the demands of the purely optical and sound perception.”³¹ César cannot live in this space where the real and the virtual are indiscernible, and chooses to return to reality, although it is a reality of which he has no concept. The circuits created through postmodern time-image cinema lead to such a melding of the actual and the virtual in the crystalline image that it forces the subject to realize and assess the state of the cinema their minds have created.

Deleuze proposes that the state of cinema lies in the crystalline regime. The organic regime is independent of the description of setting; it exists on its own. This is the regime of the real, which is or is recognized by continuity, actual linkages and logical connections. This organic/real regime consists of two modes of existence: “linkages from actuals from the point of view of the real, and actualizations in consciousness from the point of view of the imaginary.”³² The crystalline regime stands in for its object, and creates it; this is the regime of the imaginary. Here, “the actual is cut off from its motor linkages … and the virtual, for its part, detaches itself from its actualizations, [and] starts to be valid for itself.”³³ The two are now combined, running intertwined on a circuit that makes one indiscernible from the other. In Abre los ojos, César is no longer able to discern between the actual and the virtual. Indeed, for him all is virtual, but this virtuality has itself become confused with the organic. In César’s mind, he wants what for him is the real: Sofía. But the circuits can no longer discern between this real and the imaginary; the actual and the virtual have become one, and the virtual replaces Sofía with Nuria. Deleuze extends the organic/crystalline regime concept to organic/crystalline narration. In organic narration, there is the development of movement as a result of which characters react to understand and/or reveal a situation. In crystalline narration, the collapse of the sensori-motor schema into purely opsigns and sonsigns means a character cannot or will not react. This new status of narration means that, “narration ceases to be truthful, that it, to claim to be true, and becomes fundamentally falsifying.”³⁴ The space station in Solaris becomes a crystalline space, a setting that can only have virtual materials that cannot be explained in a spatial way. Movement derives from the time-image, and non-chronological time produces false movements.³⁵ As both Abre los ojos and Solaris present their stories in non-linear time, the movement derived from the time-image becomes false as it moves through the crystalline regime in crystalline spaces, where the actual and the virtual are indistinguishable.

For Deleuze, “The formation of the crystal, the force of time, and the power of the false” coordinate to be at the centre of the time image. False narration is outside of the system, but all participate in this narration. The crystalline regime works with crystalline option and sound descriptions to create false chronic narratives. The power of the false is liberated time.³⁶ César, by virtue of his cryogenic state and dream existence, has been freed from chronological time; he has entered the pure time-image, the aeonic time, where false narration can give him the life he was denied. He is a participant by virtue of his consent, and the characters created by his virtual reality participate, as do those monitoring the computers that generate the virtual reality. In Solaris, a false narrative is created through the presence of the Visitor. Bogue writes that narratives of (Deleuze’s) crystal films issue from a split connection of the virtual and actual, making the true and the false indistinguishable, thereby making it almost impossible for the characters to distinguish between the false and the true, since they look the same. The Visitor looks (and sounds) exactly the same as Rhea; only his memory of the real (factual) prevents him from assuming she is Rhea. But as the false narrative is created through the circuits of his mind into the crystalline regime, so the false narrative forces Chris into the role of the forger. Both César and Chris are forgers of their cinemas, as it is created from their minds. Marks writes that experience cannot be represented directly and in its entirety.³⁷ The postmodern cinema’s state of narration “ceases to be truthful, that is, to claim to be true, and becomes fundamentally falsifying.”³⁸ As such, the crystalline regime must be created in order to fill in the gaps of experience that cannot be represented, which requires the forger, the characters from whom the virtual is created.

César occupies an aberrant physical space, in that he is unconscious; the life he leads is one of time, the images are trapped in a time created by and for a cinema. In considering Christian Metz’s theories of the language of cinema, Deleuze divides cinematic narration between fact and approximation. The cinema of fact presents a story and rejects its other possible directions (which, according to Deleuze, would create a language of cinema); the cinema of approximation is a sequence of images that are assimilated to propositions³⁹. César exists in this postmodern cinema of approximation, one without language, where time disturbs narrative. Deleuze equates a language system of cinema to the movement-image: visual imagery, created by time-image, is a-signifying and a-syntactic. Cinema is a plastic mass and not formed linguistically. The Visitor in Solaris is a proverbial plastic mass, a body without organs; she has been formed by the imagery in Chris’s mind. In Temenuga Trifonova’s essay on Deleuze, she writes that the information system of the brain is “pre-human, neutral, pre-linguistic”, and that the pre-human state of the world is revealed through cinema. There is no language to describe either the Visitor or the reason for her presence, only suppositions. She is coming directly from the mind, pre-linguistic, and therefore not a fact but a cinema of approximation.

Although Deleuze believes that the time-image is the dominant mode of cinema, he also states that time cannot be represented directly. And while opsigns and sonsigns are direct presentations of time, “the present is the sole direct time of the cinematographic image.”⁴⁰ That is to say, the camera can only ever show the present, but all presents are haunted by a past and a future. As the characters are creating their own cinemas in the present, these cinemas are haunted by the past (the invasion of Nuria’s image, the virtual Rhea) and affected by the possibilities of the future (will César be in a virtual jail for a virtual murder, and will Chris remain with the virtual Rhea?). Kerslake examines Deleuze’s interpretation of Kant, according to whom, “there is no beginning or end to time itself.”⁴¹ If, then, the present is the time-image, then all times are the present, in the sense that the present is so fleeting (a moment ago it was the future and a moment from now it will be the past,) that cinema becomes a repetition of experience and that can only be represented in the present time. Deleuze writes, “The aberration of movement specific to the cinematographic image sets time free from any linkage.”⁴² This time-image is the potential to free images from a fixed perspective; specifically, as Deleuze would have it, a fixed time perspective. According to Kerslake, Deleuze follows the Kantian philosophy of time, which states that the structure of time “conditions our experience of moving bodies.”⁴³ As César and Chris move their bodies through space, their bodies are subject to time; not linear time, but Deleuzian cinematic time, one that would place the present in a kind of stasis, where past and future and layered onto the past. This is the “power of time to overturn one’s most intimate memories.”⁴⁴ If the time-image supposes something beyond linear time, a space where time is layered with past, present, and future, then cinema, and especially postmodern cinema, is the means through which that time can be explored.

Deleuze describes modern cinema as retaining from the object, only that which is of interest to the subject – “richness is thus superficial.”⁴⁵ Opsigns and sonsigns relate to the recollection image, which brings in only an aspect of the object; those aspects which the subject wishes to remember, or can only remember. Deleuze places recognition into two categories: automatic and attentive. Automatic recognition is that of the habitual, everyday – for example, we recognize a glass of water, or a bus, or a person whose face has been seen before. But attentive recognition “inserts itself between stimulation and response,” reinforcing it with psychological causality. This attentive recognition comes from a description that replaces the object in its independent state, selects certain features and makes for different descriptions that are always questioned. Deleuze separates this state into organic and inorganic. Deleuze envisioned the human mind, or more specifically human memory, as a series of planes. The image of an organic object passes through these planes, which in turn each retain part of the image, through which the subject’s perception reconstitutes the image into the inorganic. Each plane cancels another out, or contradicts, or joins, or forks another.⁴⁶ Bergson posits that memory images are a combination of pure memory and perception. But as perception remains attached to the past and is inextricable from the subject, pure memory is subsumed, which forms the seeds of the inorganic. “A human being who should dream his life instead of living it would no doubt … keep before his eyes at each moment the infinite multitude of the details of his past.”⁴⁷ César is in effect dreaming his life; the memories he has of Sofía and Nuria have passed through the planes of his mind and that which he has extracted from each. His present existence, being in a dream-like state, is a simulacrum of his past and in that state he cannot distinguish between the memories of the two women. Trifonova writes that Bergson’s theory of duration is based on his idea that déjà vu is an authentic expression of mental life, a preservation of the past in the present. This is similar to Deleuze’s thought of the time-image and memory, with time as “a continuous forking into the incompossible presents and not necessarily true pasts.”⁴⁸ César’s dream is formed by two objects from the planes of his memories that have collided and become entangled. His attentive recognition of the inorganic object is the “recollection-image [that] is not virtual, it actualizes a virtuality on its own account.”⁴⁹ As the inorganic takes the place of the organic, déjà vu becomes the organic remnants of memory, colliding with what the subject sees and hears and what he believes he should see and hear.

Further expanding on Bergson’s dream theories, Deleuze writes,

The Bergsonian theory of dreams shows that the dream is not at all closed to the sensations of the external and internal world. However, he no longer relates them to specific recollection-images, but to fluid, malleable sheets of past which are happy with a very broad or floating adjustment.⁵⁰

In what Bergson calls pure recollection, Deleuze interprets as essentially (or necessarily) a virtual image. For Deleuze, virtual is not the opposite of real, but the opposite of actual. The Visitor is not actually Rhea, in that she is the virtual representation of Chris’s image of Rhea, but she (the Visitor) is still real. According to Bergson, that which is real is something that the subject can reach out to and touch.⁵¹ Unlike César, Chris is not dreaming; rather, the Visitor is his dream made into a virtual reality. Deleuze proposes a different kind of dream: the implied dream of cinema. Chris is not sleeping, therefore he is not literally dreaming; yet, a dream image, a recollection-image, of Rhea comes to him in the form of the Visitor. “It is no longer the character who reacts to the optical-sound situation, it is the movement of world which supplements the faltering movement of the character.”⁵² In her book on Deleuze, Claire Colebrook suggests that Deleuze’s core idea of cinema is that which frees images from a fixed perspective.⁵³ The implied dream takes the fixed dream perspective from the subject and places it outside, in the movement of the world. César and Chris are both “motionless at a great pace.”⁵⁴ César cannot make any physical movement, so the world revolves around him. Chris, in the isolation of space, also is unable to move and so the implied dream is created from his mind to move around him. If as Kerslake writes, Deleuzian cinema would cut us off from our bodies and social beings, then the characters of the time-image postmodern film are not only characters or subjects, but also spectators. Richard Rushton writes, “Deleuze’s spectator … is created almost entirely by the film.”⁵⁵ And while he is referring to a more literal spectator, i.e. the audience watching the film, Chris and César are also watching: Chris watches the cinema of his dead wife, and César watches the cinema of what could have been his life. The virtual representations of the real are created by implied dreams; these implied dreams are the postmodern interpretations of the time-image cinema.

But from where does this virtual come? How is it a semblance of the actual, and how can it be discerned as virtual? According to Deleuze, it is not necessarily possible to differentiate between the two. This is because of time: the virtual image is defined in accordance with “the actual present of which it is the past simultaneously.”⁵⁶ In his book The Logic of Sense, Deleuze writes,

Only the past and the future inhere or subsist in time. Instead of a present which absorbs the past and the future, a future and past divide the present at every instant and subdivide it ad infinitum into past and future, in both directions at once.⁵⁷

Deleuze places the virtual image outside of consciousness, in time, preserved there. Powell interprets Deleuze’s two time categories: chronos (actual spatialized time that is measured by clocks) and aeon, the virtual existence of duration where “the present moment has two sides contemporaneously: its actual, physical extension and its virtual side that is already part of duration.”⁵⁸ The actual image and the virtual image become two sides of the same moment. In Solaris, the Visitor is an actual recreation of Rhea, and at the same time a virtual recreation of Chris’s conception of Rhea. Bogue writes that for Deleuze’s cinema, “the past is conserved not in the material brain but in itself, and all past memories coexist in a virtual dimension.”⁵⁹ César’s past exists in a virtual dimension, one that in the process of being actualized sifts through the planes of his memory and cannot coalesce into the real, as the aeon of time does not permit the virtual to understand the chronos of his memories and how the two women are separated. His past being nothing but, Deleuze’s time-image would have his past be uninterpretable in its virtual state. Kerslake sees Deleuze’s conception of the past as layered at the ever-increasing base of a cone – the tip is the present reaching in to the future, and “these layers of the past have a virtual existence.”⁶⁰

In examining the time-image, Deleuze investigates what makes cinema, cinema. Postmodern cinema, in finding its primary mode in time as opposed to movement, focuses on the mind and its circuits of virtual and actual, real and imaginary, as the creator. Through exploration of the creation of virtual cinema, Abre los ojos and Solaris are examples of Deleuze’s third cinema. If the brain is the screen and the projector, and takes time from the linear to the aeonic, this would seem to be the cinema Deleuze is attempting to find. Deleuze’s time-image cinema places the character in the role of creator and spectator simultaneously, discarding the sensori-motor schema in favour of time along the planes and circuitry of memory. This cinema becomes the crystalline image, where the actual becomes virtual, and opsigns and sonsigns replace the relation of movement to understanding, to the relation of time. As the present is split between past and future, so the memory is split between virtual and actual, and cinema is derived from this dichotomy. Deleuze’s vision of modern cinema moves into postmodern cinema and the state of virtual reality.