Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to lay the groundwork for an interpretation of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image as works of film poetics. English-language commentators tend to treat the books primarily as philosophical works and only secondarily as contributions to film theory. I argue that this interpretive strategy gets things exactly backwards. To understand both the philosophical and film-theoretical value of the Cinema books, we need to see them mainly as contributions to the field of film poetics. My argument for this claim proceeds in three main steps. First, I explain what film poetics is and isolate the claims it's primarily in the business of making. Second, I situate Cinema 1 and 2 within this tradition and compare the books’ theoretical approach to the methodology developed in David Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film. And finally, I gesture towards some of the implications that Cinema 1 and 2 have for philosophy, showing how the books extend and challenge Kant’s “aesthetic” inquiry in the Critique of Pure Reason.