It has now been four decades since Gilles Deleuze published his major two-volume treatise on film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. In France, where the books were reportedly something of a publishing sensation, commentators immediately recognized that Deleuze was working in the tradition opened by André Bazin and the critical lineage of Cahiers du Cinéma. The usual vagaries of translation and interpretation meant that recognition in the English-speaking world came only after a lag, but since the late ’90s the books have gained traction there too, with several academic studies attempting to draw out their concepts in a variety of directions. Ambitious in scope and rich in implications, the Cinema volumes constitute one of the most significant contributions to film theory since Bazin.
They cannot, however, be considered among the most clear or lucid of film-theoretical writings. Like Deleuze’s other works, the books pose severe rhetorical and stylistic challenges to even the most sympathetic reader. Open to any page across the two volumes and you will be bombarded not just with the titles of numerous films (approximately 700 in total), but also with the concepts of thinkers such as Aristotle and St. Augustine, Hume and Kant, Nietzsche and Bergson. The writings of so-called “classical” film theorists like Eisenstein and Vertov are well-represented, as are affiliates like Serge Daney and assorted American writers like Annette Michelson and P. Adams Sitney. But, in addition, one is confronted with concepts from across art history, literary theory, physics, mathematics, and even neuroscience. This dizzying array of references may of course be taken to signal an immense respect for the reader, though as in the late films of Godard, the experience of struggling to keep up with the text can be less than flattering. Referring to this encyclopedic tendency of Deleuze’s work, Jean-François Lyotard eulogized him as a walking “library of Babel.” As in the Borges story being referenced, however, there is in that plaudit the less salutary
