Straddling genres, Deleuze’s cinema project is truly a queer beast (and I use both terms here lovingly, and with all potential meanings!). Philosophers often ignore them as being about film, and film-makers are often baffled by their dense, philosophical prose. And I find this research to be of such a fruitful nature, it forces you to reconstruct the gesture behind a text, and in the process, come to understand what might be at stake to give birth to something singular as well.įew know exactly what to make of Deleuze’s two volume Cinema I & II. In order to even begin to understand how they came to be, one often has to do arduous work of reconstructing the situation of the philosopher-artist who put them together. Texts like Leibniz’s Monadology, Spinoza’s Ethics, Bataille’s early essays, Bergson’s strange phenomenology, etc. I find also that I am drawn to texts that are singular, so odd that one wonders how they came to be in the first place, even as these texts are too brilliant to be ignored. And I think part of the reason I keep teaching these books, aside from the fact that at an art school they are so incredibly relevant, is that they are so incredibly, polymorphously fertile texts. I’m currently teaching Deleuze’s Cinema I & II, once again, to my students. The Strange Case of the Cinema Books: Some Context as an Introduction What does it mean, for Deleuze, to do cinema, to image an aspect of the world?įor the start of the reading guide, skip a few paragraphs down to the section called ‘The Deleuzian Notion of the Image’, but first, a little context.
It’s like putting on glasses, or at least, for me it was.
Many find his cinema books impenetrable, but once one understands precisely what he means by the term ‘image’, these books just open up. What precisely does Deleuze mean by cinema, and with it, the image? And why should a philosopher, or filmmaker, care? It seems to me that his radical notion of the image, straddling both philosophy and film, is so incredibly powerful, if often misunderstood. Crystal-image-eye: Deleuze's Worldslicing
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