Meanings
plural sonsigns
- film theoryParticularly in Gilles Deleuze's cinematic philosophy, a pure sound that exists independently of any immediate action or narrative progression.
Opsigns and sonsigns are direct presentation of time.
2009 July, Irini Stamatopoulos, “Time as visualized by the cinematic medium”, in offscreen, volume 13, number 72 more examples
By presenting purely optical and sound situations in which no action is involved, opsigns and sonsigns place time at the centre of the cinematic image.
2015 November 10, Marcello Garibbo, “Deleuze’s Philosophy of Cinema: Reflections on Subjectivity, Images, and Visual Artworks”, in THE DARK PRECURSOR International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research: DARE 2015 / Orpheus Institute / Ghent / Belgium / 9-11 November 2015Thus, instead of what Deleuze had described as perception-images, affection-images, action-images, and mental images (all types of movement-image), there are now “opsigns” and “sonsigns” which resist movement-image differentiation.
2025 February 9, Wikipedia contributors, “Cinema 2: The Time-Image”, in English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation
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Cite this entry
sonsign. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/sonsign
“sonsign.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/sonsign. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “sonsign,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/sonsign.
Source: sonsign on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.