The cinema of the time-image – for Deleuze – describes disjunctive temporalities and displaced spatialities dissolving subjectivities. Such discords are the affirmation of a new image of filmic thought. The actual images on the screen undergo problematisations of every kind: preserving indeterminacies, creating caesuras, proliferating false continuities. In this way, the actual image opens up to virtual correlates forcing the propagation of perspectives and interpretations. This idea of the time-image begins with Bergson's exposition of spontaneous thought, pure memory, and duration – a nexus of correlates opposed to the matter-images and memory-images of the sensory-motor system. Deleuze appropriated Bergson's sensory-motor system to describe a cinema of the movement-image: perception-images as creating a body around which the film will revolve; affections-images expressing emotions and feelings through this centre; action-images obligating this privileged image to act in and upon the world; mental-images actualising the character's thoughts, dreams and memories. Such movement-images create a coherent consciousness in comprehensive space through chronological time. The time-image thus indicates the collapse of the domains and determinates of the movement-image. This collapse, however, is only the destructive moment of the ascension of a new regime of images, a regime that will propel Bergson's exposition of spontaneous thought, pure memory and duration into a new cinematic semiotic.

This new regime of the cinematographic image is described by Deleuze through a series of sign progressions. In the wake of the collapse of the movement-image there are opsigns and sonsigns (pure optical and sound situations), the undifferentiated image actualised on-screen. Opsigns and sonsigns are organised in a multitude of ways so as to open up the image to virtual correlates. Deleuze names these organisations ‘hyalosigns’, ‘chronosigns’ and ‘noosigns’. The virtual appears through new conceptions of the image (the fragment in itself) as a hyalosign; narration (or coexistence of images) as a chronosign; and narrative (storytelling creating an indeterminate filmic event) as a noosign. Together these three aspects of the time-image are lectosigns: images which must be interpreted – the purest function of the virtual. Without doubt, this cineotic regime of time-images – opsigns/sonsigns; hyalosigns; chronosigns; noosigns; lectosigns – describes a logical development of the cinematic actual and virtual; yet, for Deleuze, ‘[c]inema's concepts are not given in the cinema’ (C2: 280).