If Bergson’s ontology is thus a circulation and interchange of different types of image, viewers-as-bodies can themselves be seen as images, on the same plane of immanence as the filmic image. This allows us to radically deconstruct theories of spectatorship, dissolving hierarchical differences between spectator and screen, and the question of the controlling ‘gaze’, into a difference-as-multiplicity. Our terms of reference are now various types and classifications of cyclical movements between and across images, in which neither spectator, screen, apparatus, nor viewed object are privileged. Instead, a deterritorialized flow exists between images, which constantly reformulate themselves in various forms of combination and separation. With this definition of the image, desire is no longer the privileged realm of the spectator but must now ‘be posited as the unifying force of the entire cinematic plane.’

This is why Deleuze turns to Peirce to create a semiotics of the movement-image, for ‘Peirce’s strength, when he invented semiotics, was to conceive of signs on the basis of images and their combinations, not as a function of determinants which were already linguistic.’ Peirce’s classifications of firstness (affect), secondness (action) and thirdness (relation) are deduced from movement-images only as they are related to intervals. They qualify perceptions, not meaning. This is why the interval of film – the gap between a received movement and an executed movement, an action and a reaction, represented by the cut and montage – becomes a determining factor in how certain films and national cinemas are characterized, ….

It is the autonomy of the interstice that allows the immanent Whole – Bergsonian difference as a durational multiplicity – to well up from below.