Deleuze on Cinema

Rating:
Summary: learn it....love it....LIVE IT!
Review: My friends all think I hate movies. This isn't true, but I admit that I'm often reluctant to see them--like most important artistic media (contemporary poetry and the plastic arts, to say nothing of ubiquitous pop music), there is too much worthless drivel to wade through.

I've always held that cimema can be a powerful artistic medium, but until recently I was much too ignorant of classic films. A life-long student of literature, I decided to educate myself in 'reading' films. This book is where I started--correction: this book, my local dvd rental store, and a friend to watch some great movies with.

I'd known of Bogue's three-volume study of Deleuze and the Arts (see my review of Bogue's _Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts_), so after my cinema-knowledgeable friend drew up a list of the 50 most important classic films I needed to know, I ordered a copy of _Deleuze on Cinema_.

This book, like the others in the series, is not a "Deleuze for Dummies." Bogue--like Deleuze--assumes quite a bit of knowledge on the reader's part. This is refreshing. It's a supplement--something to read in preparation for watching the movies as well as for making sense of them after the show's over. Just paging through the ample index will offer a taste of what's offered: directors include Hitchcock, Resnais, Eisenstein, Robbe-Grillet, Bunuel, Godard, Bresson, Kurosawa, and Antonioni, among others.

Take this insightful passage on Orson Welles as one example of the clarity and brilliance of Bogue on Deleuze: "In each of Welles' films, sheets of the past coexist within a transpersonal memory, but Deleuze argues as well that in individual shorts one can actually see characters inhabiting a region of time....Deleuze observes that others before Welles had used deep focus shots, but usually with the planes of the image remaining relatively isolated from one another. What Welles achieves by contrast is a communication and interpenetration of foreground, middle ground, and background, each shot a dynamic space-in-depth" (pgs 142-43).

This book will be of essential interest to students and lovers of Deleuze, film, literature--and especially to those who, like me, need a little extra meat and potatoes with their buttered popcorn.