Richard Rushton’s concise and useful commentary on (and guide to) Gilles Deleuze’s cinema theory, Cinema After Deleuze (2012), provides an appropriate counter-valence to Hoberman’s concerns with 21st century cinema. Deleuze’s monumental Cinema books (Cinema 1: The Movement-Image / Cinéma, tome 1 : L’Image-mouvement, first published in 1983, and Cinema 2: The Time-Image / Cinéma, tome 2 : L’Image-temps, first published in 1985) have remained an imperative standard in high-end film theory, and together they form a colossal reevaluation of cinema not so much as a history of moving images but as a veritable philosophy of thinking-through-images. If for Deleuze philosophy enacts and stands for the “creation of concepts,” then cinema, as philosophy, generates thought (or the possibility of thought) through the formation of images. Deleuze’s Cinema books, much like the bulk of his philosophy texts, have gained a reputation for abstruseness and stylistic opacity, and Rushton performs an exemplary job of summarizing, clarifying, and highlighting the central tenets of Deleuze’s two books. As an introduction to Deleuze’s formulation of cinema-as philosophy, Rushton’s slim yet sufficiently thorough text will be invaluable to those who find Deleuze’s style too onerous for parsing.

As an introduction to Deleuze’s formulation of cinema-as philosophy, Rushton’s slim yet sufficiently thorough text will be invaluable to those who find Deleuze’s style too onerous for parsing.

What might a “cinema after Deleuze” signify? Deleuze, who passed away in 1995, would not have been able to experience what a 21st century cinema has come to entail, nor did the question of what a post-photographic cinema might come to mean for cinema as a whole definitively present itself in his time. But Deleuze’s concepts, most importantly those of the “movement-image” and the “time-image,” remain pivotal toward formulating a conceptual language capable of dealing with the problematic Hoberman sets up in Film After Film. Rushton’s book distinguishes itself from other texts on Deleuze’s cinema-thought by applying these very concepts to the current trends of 21st century cinema. Similar to how Hoberman provides us with a film “syllabus” for the 21st century that investigates the attributes of a post-photographic cinema aesthetic, Rushton utilizes the Deleuzian optic to critique the virtues of the latter-day cinema of directors like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Luc Besson on one side (all of whom in their work demonstrate different features of the “movement-image”), and that of the cinema of directors like Lars von Trier, Abbas Kiarostami, and Wong Kar-wai on the other side (whose work demonstrates qualities of the “time-image”).