Deleuze uses Bergson’s sensory motor schema to define what he calls the ‘movement image’. For Bergson the world is made up of actions and reactions between all that is within it. These actions and reactions are not limited to the subjective, or even biological, but are the state of the world. For example, just as water has a particular relation to limestone (and vice versa), water also has a relation to heat, air, my tongue and the walls of the large intestine (and vice versa). In this model consciousness is a special case not because it is privileged, but because in Bergson’s schema consciousness occurs at the point between action and reaction where a gap is introduced between action and reaction as a sensory system intervenes. Such a gap affords then an opportunity for an alternative reaction, a choice if you like, between an action and the reaction undertaken (and also introduces perception as a particular sort of action).

This, for Deleuze, underwrites the beginnings of the cinema (at least until its deep rift at some point coincidental with World War Two which saw the time image manifest itself where, and apologies for the reductionism, the action - reaction model of the sensory motor schema was broken) and accounts for its anthropomorphic use of things like actors so that an economy of action and reaction can be naturalised. Hence, a character looks, cut, we see what they are looking at. Or boy meets girl, they are attracted to each other yet misunderstand, and the film becomes the playing out of this reaction, with a nested and sequential series of action and reaction episodes all the way along. 

From this Deleuze is able to identify cinematic varieties of the movement image that emphasise perception, reaction, and the interval between them. These become the perception image, action image and the affect image respectively. Within the action image the interval between seeing and doing is, more or less, immediate, which becomes the domain of the action film. Those films where the relation, or distance, between action and reaction is enlarged, almost made slow, is what he labels the ‘affect image’. In a work that is dominated by the register of the affect image the story a character, is required to act (all characters are required to act within the realm of the action image) yet there is indecision, uncertainty, so these moments of decision about what to do next are slowed so that the film, through this almost intervention, wants us to see or at least notice, witness, the distance between knowing and doing. 

This distance, an interval between perceiving and some form of response or action, is fundamental to an interactive work such as a Korsakow film as it is exactly (not nearly, not similar to, but isomorphic with) that point in the film where the work offers possibilities to the user where the user not only has the opportunity but is required to make a decision - through for instance its interface. How a Korsakow film enables this decision, technically and thematically (for example how literal, indexical or poetic the interface and clip options provided might be) largely defines where a Korsakow film lies upon the varieties of the action image, and therefore how it will be experienced and understood. 

The affect image revolves around the insertion of this interval which, as Deleuze (following Bergson) makes very clear, is a “zone of indetermination”. In a Korsakow film these regular moments when the user has to choose a next clip or sequence, each of these points becomes such a zone of indetermination between the film, the screen, and a user.