Cinema 1: The Movement Image

Blurb

Cinema 1: The Movement Image is a 1983 book by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze that combines philosophy with film criticism. In the preface to the French edition Deleuze says that, "This study is not a history of cinema. It is a taxonomy, an attempt at the classifications of images and signs" and acknowledges the influence of the American pragmatist C.S. Peirce and the French philosopher Henri Bergson. The cinema covered in the book ranges from the silent era to the 1970s, and includes the work of D. W. Griffith, Abel Gance, Erich von Stroheim, Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, Luis Buñuel, Howard Hawks, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Sidney Lumet and Robert Altman. The second volume, Cinéma 2, L'Image-temps was published in 1985. Both books are clearly about cinema, but he also uses cinema to theorise time, movement and life as a whole.