ABSTRACT
At the time of his death on 4 November 1995, Gilles Deleuze was recognized as one of the leading French philosophers of his generation. Of his many books, his two volumes on film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986 [1983]) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1989 [1985]), are among his most impressive and challenging works – whose status, both within his own oeuvre and within philosophy and film studies in general, continues to be debated. He makes reference to hundreds of films from the silent era to the 1980s, discusses such specifically cinematic issues as framing, shot, montage, depth of focus, and so on, proposes a semiotic model of cinematic images, and yet insists that his is a work of philosophy, pure philosophy. For Deleuze, philosophy and the arts are both modes of creation, but philosophers create with concepts, whereas artists create with sensations. Hence, his theory of cinema “is not ‘about’ cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to” (Deleuze 1989: 280). Those concepts do not preexist within cinema, and “yet they are cinema's concepts, not theories about cinema. So that there is always a time, midday–midnight, when we must no longer ask ourselves, ‘What is cinema?’ but ‘What is philosophy?’ ” (Deleuze 1989: 280). Deleuze's cinema books, then, might be regarded as a philosophical “thinking alongside” cinema, an exercise in opening philosophy's conceptual practice to cinema's “new practice of images and signs” (Deleuze 1989: 280).
