ABSTRACT
Of all the arts, cinema is the one Deleuze examines most thoroughly. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, he makes reference to hundreds of films by directors from around the world, cites the major film theorists, and comments on the development of cinema from the silent era to the modern age. Yet his two-volume study, he says, is not a history of cinema, but “a taxonomy, an essay in the classification of images and signs” (IM 7; xiv). The “great auteurs of cinema” Deleuze sees as comparable “not only to painters, architects, and musicians, but also to thinkers. They think with movement-images and time-images instead of concepts” (IM 7-8; xiv). His object is to articulate the logic of that thought in movement-images and time-images and to situate it within a general account of the relationship of matter to images, movement and time. In this chapter, we will consider some of the broad philosophical concerns that guide the formation of this taxonomy of images and signs.
DELEUZE’S BERGSON
