Deleuze On Cinema

In this video from a 1987 conference, Gilles Deleuze asks the question: “What does it mean to have an idea in cinema? If one makes cinema, or if one wants to make cinema, what is it to have an idea, specifically at the moment that one says 'I have an idea.'

“everyone knows that to have an idea is a rare event, it occurs infrequently. To have an idea is a sort of celebration.”

Gilles Deleuze on Cinema: What is the Creative Act

1987

Gilles Deleuze’s ideas on film propose that cinema actively invents philosophical concepts through sound and image itself. His basic claim is: Cinema creates new ways of thinking. Different kinds of cinema produce different kinds of perception, emotion, and thought.

These are his central concepts:

Movement-image: Classical cinema is organised around action and continuity. Characters perceive situations, act, and change the world. Time is understood indirectly through movement and narrative progression.

Perception-image: Cinema structures how the world is seen/perceived. The camera becomes a system of perception, organising space, viewpoint, and attention. Film  creates modes of seeing reality.

Affection-image: The image expresses pure feeling or intensity. Close-ups, especially of faces, detach emotion from action and narrative. The viewer encounters fear, grief, desire, or wonder directly.

Action-image: Characters respond effectively to situations through meaningful action. Narrative develops through conflict, decision, and consequence. The world appears coherent and transformable through human agency.

Time-image: Modern cinema (post-WWII) breaks the link between perception and action. Characters drift, wait, or observe rather than resolve situations. Time appears directly through memory, duration, ambiguity, and disconnected events.

Crystal-image: Actual reality and virtual reality coexist in the same image. Memory, dreams, reflections, and the present become inseparable. Cinema reveals time splitting into present and past simultaneously.

Opsign / Sonsign: Pure visual or sound situations detached from action. Empty spaces, silence, ambient sound, or disconnected observation replace narrative movement. Modern cinema emphasizes perception and sensation over plot.

Cinema thinks: Cinema itself becomes a mode of thought through images, rhythm, and time. Directors create philosophical thinking audio visually rather than conceptually.

Montage: Rather than just a technique for editing cuts together, montage involves how a film combines different aspects of the universe to create thought.

The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze’s assertion that cinema constructs a "spiritual automaton." Great films bypass passive viewing, acting directly upon the brain to force the viewer to think and create new ideas.

The People are Missing: A recurring theme where cinema portrays marginalized or oppressed societies that cannot easily express themselves, highlighting the artistic duty of the filmmaker to fabulate or invent a new "people."

Deleuze's other work

Gilles Deleuze developed a wide range of Philosophical concepts, cinema was just one of his many interests, but his other works are just as interesting. Here is a list of his concepts ranging from his solo work to his collaborations with Félix Guattari, including but not limited to:

Rhizome: A model for thought and culture that operates like a bulb or root system, spreading horizontally with no fixed center or hierarchy. It emphasizes multiplicity and connection over rigid, tree-like ("arborescent") structures.

Body without Organs (BwO): A concept adapted from Antonin Artaud, it refers to a body freed from its functional, biological organization. It represents a state of pure, unformed intensities, potential, and desire prior to being captured by societal norms.

Assemblage (Agencement): The temporary arrangement of heterogeneous elements—bodies, words, things, and ideas—that come together to function as a whole. Assemblages are dynamic and constantly undergoing processes of transformation.

Virtual: Far from meaning "fake" or "digital," in Deleuze's philosophy, the virtual is a realm of pure potential, multiplicities, and unactualized tendencies that is fully real but not yet manifested (like the potential for a hurricane in atmospheric conditions)

Difference in Itself: Deleuze argued that difference is not a derivative of identity or a comparison between two objects, but a primary, creative force. He sought a philosophy that affirms difference for its own sake rather than reducing it to categories.

Desiring-Production: Instead of defining desire as a lack or a void (as in traditional psychoanalysis), Deleuze and Guattari framed desire as an active, productive, and connective engine that builds, creates, and connects with the world.

Deterritorialization: The process by which something breaks free from its established territory, borders, or coding. It is always paired with reterritorialization, the process of settling into a new form or code. These two dynamics explain how systems and societies constantly mutate.

Becoming-Minor (Becoming-Minoritarian)

In Deleuzian philosophy, "minority" does not mean a small number of people, nor is it about identity politics. Instead, becoming-minor is a political process of resisting dominance.

Palestinians as "The Native Americans"

In his analysis of israel, Deleuze drew a direct comparison between the colonization of Palestine and the historical treatment of Indigenous peoples in the United States. He argued that this differs from traditional European 19th-century colonialism, which relied on exploiting indigenous labor for economic gain. Deleuze described the Israeli colonial project as an attempt to "empty the land". The goal was (and is) either to physically displace the native population or reduce them to a marginalized workforce isolated in ghettos. Denial of Existence: Central to this settler-colonial strategy is the systematic denial of a distinct Palestinian identity—often framing them simply as "Arabs of Palestine"—as if the native culture and geography never historically existed.

Challenging the Hegemony: It is the movement by which an oppressed, deterritorialized group disrupts the rigid, majoritarian power structures of the State. A People Like Others: Deleuze highlighted the Palestinian resistance slogan, "We are a people like others," as a profound political rallying cry. It is an assertion of agency and right, forcing the international community to recognize their distinct political existence in the face of erasure

Plane of Immanence: A philosophical landscape where all concepts, thoughts, and entities exist within the same single, unified fabric of being, without relying on any external, transcendent God or higher power.

Event: An occurrence, occurrence, or happening that ruptures the normal state of affairs. In The Logic of Sense, it is the incorporeal, surface effect of physical bodies interacting, allowing for new meanings and possibilities.

Line of Flight: A path of escape or creative mutation within a system or structure. It represents the moment when an assemblage deterritorializes and breaks away, forging new potentials, changes, and trajectories.

Nomadology is the study of how human thought, creativity, and societies resist rigid control. It contrasts the free, fluid movement of the "Nomad" with the rigid, top-down structures of the State. States create "striated" spaces using borders, laws, and fixed grids (like a chessboard). Nomads navigate and occupy "smooth" open spaces (like the desert or ocean), moving freely without fixed destinations (like the game Go). Nomadic thinking is thinking without boundaries or set axioms. It encourages constant experimentation and connection, exploring life through continuous movement and change.

Noology: (derived from the Greek nous, meaning mind) is the analysis of "how people think" and the hidden rules that govern knowledge. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that traditional "State philosophy" forces thought into rigid, hierarchical, and universal frameworks. It relies on transcendent truths and fixed categories. Noology seeks to expose these dogmatic structures and free thinking from the "State apparatus" so the mind can create new, wild, and heterogeneous concepts.

*Simplified explanations, for a deeper dive into Deleuze: Difference & Repetition, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia.

This segment of a foreword by translator Brian Massumi for the book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (By Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari), gives a nice introduction to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze:

"This is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy subsets and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how to approach it. What do you do with a book that dedicates an entire chapter to music and animal behavior—and then claims that it isn't a chapter? That presents itself as a network of "plateaus" that are precisely dated, but can be read in any order? That deploys a complex technical vocabulary drawn from a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, mathematics, and the humanities, but whose authors recommend that you read it as you would listen to a record?1 "Philosophy, nothing but philosophy." Of a bastard line. The annals of official philosophy are populated by "bureaucrats of pure reason" who speak in "the shadow of the despot" and are in historical complicity with the State. They invent "a properly spiritual... absolute State that ... effectively functions in the mind." Theirs is the discourse of sovereign judgment, of stable subjectivity legislated by "good" sense, of rocklike identity, "universal" truth, and (white male) justice. "Thus the exercise of their thought is in conformity with the aims of the real State, with the dominant significations, and with the requirements of the established order."Gilles Deleuze was schooled in that philosophy.

The titles of his earliest books read like a Who's Who of philosophical giants. "What got me by during that period was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, what amounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous."5 Hegel is absent, being too despicable to merit even a mutant offspring.6 To Kant he dedicated an affectionate study of "an enemy." Yet much of positive value came of Deleuze's flirtation with the greats. He discovered an orphan line of thinkers who were tied by no direct descendance but were united in their opposition to the State philosophy that would nevertheless accord them minor positions in its canon. Between Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson there exists a "secret link constituted by the critique of negativity, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority of forces and relations, the denunciation of power."7 Deleuze's first major statements written in his own voice, Difference et repetition (1968) and Logique du sens (1969), cross-fertilized that line of "nomad" thought with contemporary theory. The ferment of the student-worker revolt of May 1968 and the reassessment it prompted of the role of the intellectual in society8 led him to disclaim the "ponderous academic apparatus"9 still in evidence in those works. However, many elements of the "philosophy of difference" they elaborated were transfused into a continuing"