ABSTRACT
Jacques Rancière can be said to fi gure marginally in European fi lm theory. A philosopher of history, he is hardly by profession or reputation a theorist of cinema in the way of three or four generations of French critics of a great tradition beginning at the end of the Second World War. Although his work bears some resemblance to the tenor of André Bazin’s refl ections on the ontology of the image, and however much his writing draws inspiration from the tensions of history and taxonomy in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinéma 1 and Cinéma 2, it is a product of ample refl ections on historiography and the philosophy of aesthetics. La Fable cinématographique, the cornerstone of his theory, stands at a distance of light years from the ontological aims of Bazin’s writings and either the linguistic or the psychoanalytical tenor of Christian Metz’s earlier and later works. La Fable and related pieces do not have the texture of Serge Daney’s chronicles about the international character of fi lms made during the meltdown of the Cold War, nor do they approximate the speculations of Jean-Michel Frodon, the current editorin-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma, on the ties that bind the digital technology of cinema to globalized economy.1
