D. N. Rodowick (ed.),
Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010
ISBN: 978 0 8166 5007 1
US$27.50 (pb)
396pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

In Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (1997), one of D.N. Rodowick’s primary aims was to reposition Deleuze’s cinema books from the margins to the centre of both film theory and philosophy in English-language scholarship. Rodowick’s explication and application of the ideas put forward in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985) did much to enhance the Anglophone appreciation of the texts, which had by that point already proven vastly influential in France and other western European countries but had not yet made a significant impact within English-speaking academia. Rodowick’s strategy in Time Machine was twofold, relating Deleuze’s theory of cinematic images back to its philosophical antecedents (including Deleuze’s own previous work, alone and in collaboration with Félix Guattari) in order to emphasise its philosophical rigor while simultaneously broadening its applications to film and new media outside of the European auteurist canon that constituted, in large part, Deleuze’s cinematic frame of reference.

Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy, the new collection of essays edited by Rodowick, functions in many ways as a continuation of the project initiated in Time Machine. Its contributors can roughly be divided into those who approach Cinema 1 and 2 primarily as philosophical works and those who approach them primarily as works of film and media theory, while a notable few maintain a balance between both of these directions and thus help to define the real potential and underlying assumptions of what constitutes a “film philosophy”. The essays are for the most part based upon presentations delivered at the 2005 colloquium Time@20, which marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The Time-Image, and the majority were previously unpublished, or appear here for the first time in English translation. Afterimages is thus the first collection of original English-language essays on Deleuze’s film theory published since The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (edited by Gregory Flaxman; 2000), and on that basis alone it represents a significant contribution to Deleuzian cinema scholarship.

The essays in Afterimages are divided into five parts titled as follows: Doublings, Ethics, Becomings, Experiments, and Futures. Part one, Doublings, contains essays which are probably of the least interest to someone approaching the text from the point of view of film studies. Raymond Bellour is the first of five contributors to this section, and his short essay titled “The Image of Thought: Art or Philosophy, or Beyond?” is in fact a combination of two previously published French pieces (from 2002 and 1998). While any new translation of Bellour’s work into English is a welcome event, this brief but elegant essay does little more than collect a number of references in Deleuze’s corpus to the concept of the image, and then offer a comparison between Deleuze’s and Henri Michaux’s notions of thought in its relation to imagery. Bellour only mentions the cinema books in passing, and the essays which follow likewise engage with Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole rather than specifically with his theory of the film image. Melinda Szaloky’s “Mutual Images: Reflections of Kant in Deleuze’s Transcendental Cinema of Time”, however, offers valuable insight into the influence of Kant’s reconceptions of perception and temporality on Deleuze’s theory of the postwar cinema of the time-image. Part one then ends with a fascinating essay by Dorothea Olkowski titled “Darkness and Light,” which draws upon concepts ranging from Zeno’s paradoxes to phenomenology to particle physics in order to define the spatiotemporal model through which Henri Bergson and Deleuze elaborated the theories of movement and its perception, which premised the cinema books. In the process, Olkowski offers a lucid formulation of the basic ontological differences between photography and cinematography and sketches out a theory of genre based upon the physical behaviour of dynamical systems.

Ethics, the second part of the collection, contains complementary essays by two prominent Deleuze scholars, the first by Rodowick himself and the second by Ronald Bogue, author of Deleuze on Cinema (2003). Both examine the current of intriguing references to ethical imperatives that runs through the cinema books. Taken together, the essays offer a thorough and provocative approach to this important but often neglected aspect of Deleuze’s writings, and demonstrate the way in which the cinema books bring works of philosophy and film-making into new and mutually illuminating relations, including his reading of Nietzsche through Welles, Pascal through Bresson, and Kierkegaard through Dreyer. This pair of essays could easily be considered the centrepiece of Afterimages, and their inclusion alone recommends the collection to any admirer of Deleuze’s philosophy, of the cinema or otherwise.

Parts three and four, Becomings and Experiments, contain a number of essays which propose to connect Deleuze’s theories of film to concepts developed in his other philosophical texts, including those written with Guattari. These include Ian Buchanan’s “Is a Schizoanalysis of Cinema Possible?”, Patricia MacCormack’s essay on “cinemasochism”, Rodowick’s essay on conceptual personae and sexual difference in cinematic contexts, and Giuliana Bruno’s “Pleats of Matter, Folds of the Soul” (which applies Deleuze’s writings on the Baroque to cinema via actual and virtual fabrics). While these essays are engaging for the most part, their premises raise an issue relevant to any form of Deleuze scholarship: namely, the risk of systematising the thought of a philosopher whose work is definitively and intentionally opposed to systematisation. There is an important distinction to be made between a productive use of Deleuze’s philosophical concepts – for example, innovatively applying his thought in other areas to the medium of film – and a reductive use – the drawing of fixed relationships between his cinema-related ideas and his other concepts in a way that is constrictive to the potential understanding and application of both. Though these essays for the most part adhere to the former practice, Buchanan in particular flirts with the latter in his assertion that Deleuze’s theory of the cinematic image is “already schizoanalytic” (p. 146).

Unquestionably more productive uses of Deleuze’s film theory are employed in the final essays of the text, the Futures section, in which the ideas put forward in the cinema books are used to theorise the changing situation and nature of art and images in the era of digital representation. Of the four essays in this section, the strongest is John Rajchman’s “Deleuze’s Time, or How the Cinematic Changes Our Idea of Art.” Rajchman, drawing upon an array of filmic and theoretical works identifiable with the postwar cinematic dispositif Deleuze addressed in The Time-Image, convincingly demonstrates the continued relevance of Deleuze’s mode of inquiry into thought, and in particular thinking-through-art, to our understanding of contemporary film, digital imagery, and other forms of visual art.

Rajchman’s essay, like Olkowski’s and the pieces on ethics by Rodowick and Bogue, stands out even amidst the excellent standards of the contributions to Afterimages because it captures in its premise and engagement with Deleuze something approaching a true apprehension of film philosophy. Deleuze famously ended his second book on cinema with the assertion that “there is always a time…when we must no longer ask ourselves, ‘What is cinema?’ but ‘What is philosophy?’”[1] , erasing the distinctions that can be made between cinema at its fullest conceptual power and philosophical thought itself in our time. Afterimages effectively demonstrates the potential fruition of this emergent form of thought while simultaneously hinting at how much further Deleuze’s ideas can take us towards a fully realised conception of the moving image. It is highly recommended to anyone with even a passing interest in Deleuze’s writings on the cinema.

Christopher Rowe,
Melbourne University, Australia.

Endnotes

[1] Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Continuum, 1989, p. 269.

Created on: Monday, 23 August 2010