The time-image, on the other hand, came into real dominance after World War II, when the films of directors like Vittorio de Sica, Michelangelo Antonioni, Max Ophüls, Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Luc Godard (among others) brought into relief a different conception of time that was no longer indirect but powerfully present, and even a bit unstable and undifferentiated, in the suddenly deconstructed space of the shot/frame. Italian Neorealism provided a natural transition from the cinema of “solving (or attempting to solve) problems” via movement, to a cinema in which the problems are no longer clear-cut nor solvable, and the solutions are either absent or fruitless — because the mass destruction which World War II wreaked on the collective consciousness and on the geopolitical landscape had nearly eradicated any optimism in the ability of social and aesthetic movement to rectify wrongs and set things right again. The poverty that followed in the aftermath of World War II cultivated a solution-less atmosphere of despair or helplessness, if not a nostalgia that recalled the past within the very fabric of the present. In such a landscape of erasure only time continued to exist in a “pure state” unmolested by the subjective idealisms and manipulations of the human eye; time was, in a sense, allowed to roam free among the ruins of the post-World-War-II landscape.

Yet all was not lost, only changed: the objectivity of the camera eye would still be capable of redeeming fragmented reality in its pure temporal state and reawakening in the human spectator what Deleuze calls “spiritual automata.” Rushton explains:

Rushton emphasizes that the importance of the “spiritual automaton” in Deleuze’s cinema-philosophy is not split between movement-image cinema and time-image cinema, but is native to the intrinsic principle of cinema in all its forms: “What [Deleuze] argues is that what is most valuable about cinema is precisely that it turns me away from the thoughts I own. Instead, it introduces thoughts that are not mine; it makes me experience the act of thinking as something which comes from the outside, external to me.” In other words, cinema makes automatons of us too, though in a manner which does not preclude human thought and emotion, but rather opens us to the possibility of the “unthought” of thought, those thoughts which we would not have been able to bring up on our own without the outside-objectivity of the camera eye, the cinematic image.

…cinema makes automatons of us too, though in a manner which does not preclude human thought and emotion, but rather opens us to the possibility of the ‘unthought’ of thought, those thoughts which we would not have been able to bring up on our own without the outside-objectivity of the camera eye, the cinematic image.

Though the conceptual machinery of “spiritual automata” can be readily found in movement-image films, it is perhaps even more useful in helping us to understand the more cryptic qualities that define, and set apart, the time-image. The anarchic openness of the time-image, in which past, present, and future are immanent in each other, and are constantly open to change in their relations with each other, is accommodated and deciphered by the possibility of a temporality that lies, crucially, outside our own sense of time: the time-image generates other temporalities that emerge from, and merge with, each other, in the porous, montaged space of the shot/frame. Thus, with time-image films, “there is no longer any distinction between actual and virtual, past and the present.” If, according to Deleuze (who takes his stance from Spinozist philosophy and Humean skepticism), thought only begins to happen when we cease to impose meaning on ideas or concepts and allow for them to express themselves in us, then cinematic images, when we allow them to think for us through our perceiving them in movement and time, open us to the “unthought” that lies outside us, since “the only thoughts we have come from the outside”: