David Deamer

In Cinema 1 Deleuze creates the taxonomy of the movement-image by extending Henri Bergson's account of the sensory-motor process in Matter and Memory through the semiotic system of Charles Sanders Peirce. Through this nexus of Bergson and Peirce, Deleuze can account for each image and sign, their impetus and their relationship to one another. In contrast, the taxonomy of the time-image, the focus of Cinema 2, is given no such genesis. Rather, the images and signs appear in situ, as if ready-made. This article proposes that the impetus for the taxonomy of the time-image lies in the account given of the three passive syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition, and that the nine aspects of the passive syntheses can be seen to correspond to the nine proper signs of the time-image

Deleuze, Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb establishes the first ever sustained encounter between Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema books and post-war Japanese cinema, exploring how Japanese films responded to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From the early days of occupation and political censorship to the social and cultural freedoms of the 1960s and beyond, the book examines how images of the nuclear event appear in post-war Japanese cinema. Using Deleuze’s taxonony of cinema, each chapter begins by focusing upon one or more of three key Deleuzian themes – image, history and thought – before going on to look at a selection of films from 1945 to the present day. These include movies by well-known directors Kurosawa Akira, Shindo Kaneto, Oshima Nagisa and Imamura Shohei; popular and cult classics – Godzilla (1954), Akira (1988) and Tetsuo (1989); contemporary genre flicks – Ring (1998), Dead or Alive (1999) and Casshern (2004); the avant-garde and rarely seen documentaries. A series of tables clarify the conceptual components deployed within the text; and each film is illustrated with a number of stills.

What is called “time travel” cinema is but one aspect in a tripartite series of interweaving modes of disjunctive narration which is also – simultaneously – a cinema of “many worlds” and “altered states”. Exploiting Gilles Deleuze's three syntheses of time, space, and consciousness from Difference and Repetition (1968) allows a conceptual development of these cinematic series through three popular Hollywood film cycles beginning with Planet of the Apes (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1968), The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), and Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985). In so doing, film and philosophy are deployed as two series which together create inexhaustible atemporal, aspatial, and ahuman disjunctions, ungrounding everyday spatio-temporal identities, and affirming productive images of cinematic thought.

Deleuze’s two Cinema books explore film through the creation of a series of philosophical concepts. Not only bewildering in number, Deleuze’s writing procedures mean his exegesis is both complex and elusive. Three questions emerge: What are the underlying principles of the taxonomy? How many concepts are there, and what do they describe? How might each be used in engaging with a film? This book is the first to fully respond to these three questions, unearthing the philosophies inspiring Deleuze’s classifications, exploring every concept and reading a film for each. Clearly and concisely mapping the Cinema books for newcomers to Deleuzian film studies, as well as opening up new areas of enquiry for expert readers. > An interpretation of Bergson’s Matter and Memory through Deleuze’s Bergsonism describing the ground of Deleuze’s film-philosophy > A reading of Peirce’s semiosis from Pragmatism and Pragmaticism explicating the genesis and components of the movement-image > An examination of Deleuze’s syntheses of time, space, and consciousness from Difference and Repetition illuminating the genesis and components of the time-image > Concise engagements with each of the cinematic signs to assist reading Deleuze’s Cinema books, as well as commentaries and monographs that draw upon them > 44 film readings – one for each cinematic sign – to clarify their application