Cinema – for Deleuze – is time-images and movement-images. Two regimes of the cinematic image describing a multiplicity of complex connections, interrelations, exchanges and transformations. Accordingly, the cinema can be described as a univocal cineosis explicating the ‘differenciation’ of movement-images and de-differenciation of time-images, the actualisation of filmic matter-images and their virtual correlates (C2: 276).

The fundamental division between the movement-image and the time-image was theorised by Deleuze in the wake of the philosophy of Bergson. Such was the concern of Chapter 1, which explored Matter and Memory as an assertion of the radical dissimilarity between pure matter (image, sensory-motor system) and pure memory (spontaneous thought, duration). Deleuze's cinematic appropriation of Bergsonian theory, as was seen, was both taxonomic and philosophical. On the one hand – and with respect to the fundamental coordinates of the cineosis – pure matter (image, sensory-motor system) gave us the regime of the movement-image; and pure memory (spontaneous thought, duration) gave us the regime of the time-image. On the other hand, it necessarily could not be said that movement-images = pure matter and that time-images = pure duration. All cinema is a practice of matter-images; and both movement-images and time-images engender cinema-thought. The distinction, rather, lies in the different ways in which cinema-thought is encompassed, effaced, released or discharged through movement-images and time-images. Accordingly, such an analysis is found in Bergson's account of pure matter and pure memory.

A strange dualisma

The ‘Introduction’ to the fifth edition (1908) of Matter and Memory begins: ‘[t]his book affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter … It is, then, frankly, dualistic’; a position, Bergson readily admits, ‘to be held in small honour among philosophers’ (MM: 9). The question of Bergson's dualism – its status as ontology and epistemology – is essential to an engagement with Bergsonism; furthermore, it is crucial not only to Deleuze's philosophy in general but also to the film theory of the Cinema books. Why does Bergson adopt such a discredited position? Deleuze anticipates such a question much earlier than the Cinema books, and much earlier than Difference and Repetition.