demystifying deleuze: french philosophy meets contemporary u.s. cinema david martin-jones

During the 1980s, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote two books on cinema, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983), and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). For some scholars working in Anglo-American fi lm studies, Deleuze’s works appear to be throwbacks to the “bad old days” of the 1970s and early 1980s, when high theory dominated the fi eld. Deleuze’s at time dense and complicated texts are often criticized for being impenetrable, too focused on auteur cinema, and only applicable to European art fi lms. By contrast, this chapter unpacks Deleuze’s fi lm philosophy to demonstrate its usefulness for analyzing contemporary US cinema, both in its mainstream and alternative, independent forms.