‘Deleuze and the Image of Film Theory’ in Benoît Dillet, Iain MacKenzie & Robert Porter (eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, Edinburgh University Press (2013), 333-351 (original) (raw)

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Deleuze’s contribution to film theorizing was largely ignored within the field of film studies during the decade following the publication of Cinema 1 and 2. In an era of film writing which was seeking to distance itself from the theoretical excesses of the 1970s, Deleuze’s approach seemed to lack both the empirical rigour and the modesty of aim which was required of any critical engagement with film form. The problem with such a wholesale rejection, however, is suggested by Annette Kuhn in her introduction to the fiftieth anniversary issue of Screen, in which she claims that the retreat from Grand Theory that has occurred within film studies over the past three decades has also ‘entailed a wholesale distaste for the essential activity of conceptualization, of theorizing’ (p5). Thus, in turning away from any over-arching theory of cinema and its institutions, we are forced to question what constitutes film analysis’ proper object of enquiry. Is film analysis an exercise in description, seeking to isolate discreet elements of the cinematic process for empirically verifiable analysis? Or is its nature always inevitably prescriptive, containing within its forensic enquiries an implied vision of the cinema that could be? In distinguishing between ‘Theory’ and theorizing, Kuhn seeks to move beyond any one ‘hypostatized’ image of Theory for an understanding of theorizing as an open-ended process of enquiry. For if a fixed notion of ‘Theory’ works to close down what may be considered knowledge, the task of the film theorist nevertheless remains to produce new knowledge through theorization, through the creation of concepts. It is Deleuze’s commitment to concepts that perhaps explains the belated ‘Deleuzian turn’ within film studies since the turn of the millennium. For Deleuze, the goal of film theory is to create concepts that ‘relate only to cinema…Concepts proper to cinema, but which can only be formed philosophically.’ If, by the 1980s, Theory in its dominant forms struggled to yield useful new insights into the cinematic experience, then Deleuze’s cinematic concepts have offered film studies the possibility of a reconnect between the filmic object and the theorizing process. The focus of this chapter, therefore, is on the use value of Deleuze for film studies. It considers some of the insights of his two Cinema books into the nature of the cinematic process, focusing in particular on cinema’s privileged relationship to time. However, it also acknowledges the impossibility of separating Deleuze’s writing on film from his wider body of work and examines how film theorists have productively applied his understanding of difference or the process of schizoanalysis to a variety of texts. Any understanding of Deleuze’s impact upon film studies must necessarily address the relationship between his ideas and the other key explanatory frameworks that have dominated the discipline, in particular psychoanalysis. However, underlying any such comparisons or evaluations are the questions raised regarding the nature of film theory and its proper goal. To this end, this chapter ultimately argues that Deleuze offers us an understanding of film theory as creative intervention and an ethical standpoint towards the history of the image which is predicated upon an adequate understanding of time.