Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (review)

Rodowick, D.N. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997.

Most readers of Gilles Deleuze’s two volumes on the cinema initially find themselves confronted with a sense of vertigo as they follow Deleuze simultaneously traversing the fields of philosophy and film studies in an exploration of movement and time. Interestingly, those who identify strongly with the disciplines of philosophy or film studies seem the most hesitant to give serious thought to Deleuze’s philosophical engagement of the cinema. D.N. Rodowick, author of the only comprehensive study devoted to these two volumes, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, explains that philosophy and film studies have treated Deleuze’s two volumes as anomalies. Given that the books are poised exactly between the two disciplines, Rodowick suggests [End Page 159] that the philosophical community often resists the volumes because of a lack of knowledge of film history, as well as an understanding of the arguments in which film theory has been engaged. For those who associate themselves with film studies, the volumes seem to inadequately address the Saussurean and Lacanian origins of Anglophone film theory, precisely because Deleuze’s unique philosophical approach to the analysis of the cinematographic image undermines the foundations on which many discussions in film theory have been erected. It comes as no surprise then that Deleuze’s volumes on the cinema most often appeal to those who, like Rodowick, emerge from a literary or interdisciplinary perspective.