A movie character is not an entity, but a dispositif. One that involves at least three elements.

Elements

1. A character is not initially a biography, individuality, body or iconography, but a symbolic circulation consisting of plastic elements, narrative schemas and semantic articulations. Often (and this could be a characteristic of one classical use of film), the circulation is intended to crystalize and produce synthesizing effects in the sense of a typical personification or the personification of a singular individuation. But many other models of circulation are imaginable: for instance, dissemination, fragmentation and removal.

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959): In cinema, anything can be a character, it suffices to throw out a name, any name, even to nobody in particular—“Mr. Kaplan!” and the story begins. A body joins the name and that's the end of it. A vertiginous fiction sucks it in and carries it away. The body keeps running after nothing, encountering empty signs (a grey suit, a hotel room…) to fill with its anxieties and desires.

Something merely needs to act as a sign for a circulation to begin grasping for motifs. These are connected in an attempt to create a scenario, as Roger Thornhill does in North by Northwest and Jeff does in Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954). This always works. Between two motifs, two events, or two situations, there is always a relationship to uncover (the Rear Window version) or produce (the North by Northwest version). Even more radically, Kōkaku Kidōtai (Ghost in a Shell, Mamoru Oshii, 1995) is the story of how in New Port City in the year 2029, the intense circulation of an extremely powerful spy program liberates itself from its own programming logic, becomes autonomous and engenders itself as a creature. This phantom created via centrifugation and parthenogenesis searches for a host body. It finds one that it destroys when they come into contact and the only one that will really host it belongs to a cyborg that manages to eliminate it but, as a result, will always remember it.