Sjöström’s The Wind and the Transcendental Image

Gilles Deleuze explains the crisis of the movement-image and the ad-vent of the time-image as results of World War II, the unsteadiness of the American dream, the new consciousness of minorities, and the influence of literary modes of narration on the cinema. This formulation of the time-image as a response to historical events obscures Deleuze’s own insight that the time-image already works within the movement-image. In the pref-ace to the English edition of Cinema 2, Deleuze suggests that we look in silent cinema for a time-image that “has always been breaking through, holding back or encompassing the movement-image.”1 Following this second formulation, I argue that a certain kind of time-image precedes and enables the movement-image. I call such image transcendental (in a Kantian sense) because its characteristic forking produces the two poles of the movement-image: the empirical (appearances) and the metaphysical (truth)