## 16 Pl Plastic figure
TEST: Does a single on-screen object, action or cut stand in, in one stroke, for a real situation that is never itself shown (metaphor/metonymy/synecdoche), while the film's own drive is still action discovering situation?
COUNTERFEIT: An insert of a ticking clock during a wait looks like a plastic figure but is only a literal action-image detail (time pressure inside the situation), not a trope standing for an unshown situation.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 35% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)

## 17 Th Theatrical figure
TEST: Is a fictitious action (performance, game, allegory, parody) being played out over a sequence as a precursor of a real action that has not yet happened and keeps being deferred?
COUNTERFEIT: A scene of actors on a stage in a backstage musical looks theatrical, but if the show is just the narrative's own situation (putting on a show) it is plain action-image, not a figure prefiguring some other real action.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 20% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)

## 18 Ma Mise en abyme
TEST: Do figures nest inside figures such that, watching, you cannot say whether a performed sequence contains an emblematic image or an emblematic image contains the performed sequence?
COUNTERFEIT: A shot of a TV playing the same film we are watching looks like mise en abyme, but if it is a one-off gag that does not fold the film's small and large forms into one another it is only a visual quip.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 25% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)

## 19 Su Figure of the sublime
TEST: Does the character's action visibly exceed anything the situation requires, so that the grandiose act makes the situation look futile (a steamship hauled over a mountain)?
COUNTERFEIT: An action hero single-handedly storming a fortress looks sublime, but if the plot's threat really does require the feat it is large-form action (SAS), not an inverted sAs.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 35% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)

## 20 En Figure of enfeeblement
TEST: Do a weak character's small, futile acts make an immense, indifferent world swell into view (the tiny point fleeing to the horizon), rather than the world merely sitting there?
COUNTERFEIT: An establishing extreme long shot of a hiker on a ridge looks like enfeeblement but is just a perception/milieu shot unless the character's acts across the film are shown as futile against that world.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 35% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)

## 21 Qu Quotidian
TEST: Is an everyday act shown so that you cannot decide whether it is trivial or heroic, the situation both inconsequential and unfathomable at once?
COUNTERFEIT: A montage of morning routines (coffee, commute) looks quotidian but is merely exposition unless the film makes the routine simultaneously petty and weighty.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 15% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)

## 22 Ll Limit of the large form action-image
TEST: Before acting, does the character have to extract a question hidden in the situation (what is a samurai now?), so action is delayed into a considered response rather than an explosive reaction?
COUNTERFEIT: A detective interrogating witnesses looks like a problem being extracted, but a whodunit's question is a missing fact, not a question hidden in the milieu that redefines what action can be.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 10% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)

## 23 Ls Limit of the small form action-image
TEST: Do parallel, heterogeneous lines of action connect only as pieces from different puzzles, so the situation they reveal remains an unanswered cipher, a sustained ellipsis?
COUNTERFEIT: An ensemble hyperlink film cutting between strangers looks like special homogeneity, but if the lines converge on a revealed answer (the crash, the twist) it is small-form action, not its limit.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 10% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)

## 24 Xl Limit of the action-image (extreme limit)
TEST: Is the film permeated by problems from start to end so that you can no longer tell whether they are posed by the situation or discovered by action, the world itself appearing as a field of indeterminate forces?
COUNTERFEIT: A sci-fi film full of enigmas (a mysterious monolith) looks like a world of problems, but if the enigma is a plot device eventually explained it is ordinary action suspense.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 10% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)

## 25 Rd Rich dream
TEST: Is the passage into the dream explicitly marked and ornately made (dissolves, superimpositions, effects), with an equally marked exit, so the dream is attributed to a dreamer and recognised as dream by the viewer?
COUNTERFEIT: A psychedelic music-video sequence of superimposed abstractions looks like a rich dream but lacks the dreamer-centred entry and exit, so it is formal abstraction (perhaps a gaseous perception), not a dream-image.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 45% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)

## 26 Rs Restrained dream
TEST: Is the dream entered by an invisible cut and made of concrete everyday things with one impossible unhinging, so that the film's task becomes deciding whether we are awake?
COUNTERFEIT: A shot that looks slightly 'off' (odd colour grade, eerie silence) seems like a restrained dream, but without a later revelation or impossibility it is mood, not a dream-image.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 5% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)

## 27 Mw Movement of world
TEST: Is there no entry or exit at all: does the world itself carry the character along (song, dance, impossible events treated as natural) so that no one is the dreamer?
COUNTERFEIT: A realist street scene with a busker singing looks like a musical number, but the world doesn't move the characters: song is diegetic performance, not movement of world.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 35% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)

## 28 Sd Strong destiny
TEST: Does a marked flashback (pause, dissolve, monochrome, reverb) return to the present and pass through affect into an action it determines, closing a causal circuit?
COUNTERFEIT: A dissolve to a nostalgic childhood scene looks like strong destiny but is merely a memory-illustration if it doesn't determine any action in the present.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 30% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)

## 29 Wd Weak destiny
TEST: Is the flashback ambiguous, incomplete or shared, so it saturates present feeling as a clue to an ellipsis that must be reconstructed before any action can follow?
COUNTERFEIT: A non-linear edit that shuffles chronology for suspense looks like weak destiny, but if it isn't a character's memory saturating affect, it is simply narration order.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 10% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)

## 30 Fp Forking paths
TEST: Do flashbacks fork within flashbacks, irreconcilably, so the past is explored for its own sake as an inexplicable secret and psychological causality is shown to be a ruse?
COUNTERFEIT: A multi-narrator courtroom film looks like forking paths, but if the versions are adjudicated and one truth emerges, it is weak destiny.
SINGLE-SHOT CEILING: 5% (how much of the sign one isolated shot can carry; the rest must come from the sequence)