Gilles Deleuze

The claims upon philosophy by the explosive consciousness of the fact and the art of cinema—not alone claims upon the philosophy of art but upon philosophical thinking at large, upon what is to be called thinking—are, still surprisingly to me, not something that has attracted the sustained attention of most philosophers. However intensely and consecutively and concretely I recognized these claims to be met with in the work of Gilles Deleuze, I had in several attempts over the years not been able to find my way into a convincing draw through the manner of it. The appearance of Paola Marrati’s admiring and sustained attention to this thinking, placing and featuring Deleuze’s principal volumes on cinema (it is essential to her view that these are indeed featured, in important ways climactically, in Deleuze’s expansive body of work), changes the intellectual odds in this demanding challenge. I imagine that many others will also find education in Marrati’s sophisticated and generous and clarifying articulation of Deleuze’s educative venture over the entire constellation of the major cinema of the world, but I think no one could be more grateful to her achievement than I am. It is a relief to be in the presence of Deleuze’s intellectual originality and Paola Marrati’s meticulous responsiveness to it, free of the many fashionable repetitions in the field of film study (e.g., film is a language, film is unconscious of its ideological slants and economic drags), and to watch other of its slogans (e.g., film is a mass art, film is a producer of dreams, Hollywood never appreciated its geniuses), given surprising derivations that release a sequence of genii from their jarred formulas.