This course explores the underlying principles of Deleuze's philosophical approach to cinema. The course will systematically follow the structure of the books using clips from films explicitly mentioned in the texts and also extending the analysis by considering other examples from classical and contemporary cinema. Part 1 taught in Semester 1 examines Cinema 1: The Movement -Image. Part 2 will follow later in the year.
As D. N. Rodowick writes in his preface to Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine, "Deleuze challenges contemporary film theory to confront its blind spots and dead ends, as well as to question its resistances to other philosophical perspectives on image, meaning, and spectatorship" (Rodowick: xi).
Deleuze's aim in his cinema books is to elucidate the concepts proper to cinema, but they are concepts which can only be formed philosophically. This course aims to identify the means by which Deleuze achieves this task by reading the cinema books alongside the films that form the substance of the work. While he does not provide still images to illustrate his theses, it is important to nevertheless remember that the moving images of which he speaks are without doubt the driving force behind them, "it is in fact our text alone which aspires to be an illustration of the great films" (Deleuze, MI: ix).
Course Schedule
Week 1: Bergson's theses on movement
Week 2: Frame, Shot and Montage
Week 3: Montage: the Four Schools
Week 4: The Movement-Image
Week 5: The Perception-Image
Week 6: The Affection-Image: The Close-up
Week 7: The Affection-Image: Qualities, Powers, Any-Space-Whatevers
Week 8: From Affect to Action: The Impulse-Image
Week 9: The Action-Image: The Large Form
Week 10: The Action-Image: The Small Form
Week 11: Figures, or The Transformation of Forms
Week 12: The Crisis of the Action-Image: The Relation-Image
- Deleuze, Gilles Cinema 1: The Movement-Image
Level of Difficulty: Introductory course taught at graduate level