The philosopher Gilles Deleuze, author of an influential two-volume work on cinema, argued that a crisis of conviction, following roughly in the wake of the Second World War, necessitated new forms of filmmaking. Deleuze considers post-war developments in cinema to parallel the revolutionary shift that philosophers have already traced in the history of philosophy, beginning with Immanuel Kant’s attempt to account for the sense that philosophers are no longer in touch with and are incapable of accessing what is ultimately real. Deleuze’s view is that the reconception of reality that began in the thinking of philosophers, especially in Europe and then briefly and sporadically in America as filmmakers grappled with the changes that faced them in the aftermath of the Second World War. Insofar as metaphysics, from its beginnings, inquired into the nature of reality understood as what contrasts with mere appearance, this new form of inquiry, into the nature and reality of appearance, involves a redirection of metaphysics.