ABSTRACT
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze (b. Paris 1925-95) published two books devoted to the cinema-Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985). These contribute to his philosophical oeuvre, and have yielded specific methodologies for the discipline of the Philosophy of Film, in particular for the continental style of FilmPhilosophy (cf. Bogue 2003; Colman 2009, 2011; Mullarkey 2009; Sinnerbrink 2011: 90116), and for feminist film theories that think difference creatively (cf. Kennedy 2000; Butler 2002; MacCormack 2008). Deleuze’s work on the system of images that the cinema produces arises from an historical era of the emergence of telematics in the late 1970s, where the convergence of information and computers enabled a networked environment that caused society to undertake a reappraisal of the perimeters of its aesthetic domains (Nora & Minc 1981: 4; Lyotard 1984; Deleuze 1986: 18-19). Through this, Deleuze’s philosophy of film enables analysis through an attention to the units of experience that the cinema creates, and provides an open system of expressive language with which to articulate the dimensions of ideas, events, and information that the cinema opens up, registering changing conditions in the world. Deleuze’s philosophy of film, and his philosophical system in general, provide film
scholars with a number of expressive tools, as well as a creative philosophical approach with which to describe their responses to cinema. In particular, an inspection of some of the divergent ways in which concepts labeled as “Deleuzian” are used in feminist film theories reveal a number of different theoretical positions, and often conflicting accounts of what Deleuze’s philosophy of film actually contends in relation to the notion of spectatorship and cinema. Deleuze mentions “the spectator” several times in both of his Cinema books, a point that is often overlooked in discussions of Deleuzian approaches to spectatorship. This chapter begins by setting out Deleuze’s position on the cinematic spectator, and then examines some of the differing applications of what might constitute a feminist oriented “Deleuzian spectator.”
