First published in France in 1983, this is at once a revolutionary work in philosophy and a book about cinema. For Deleuze, philosophy cannot be a reflection of something else; philosophical concepts are, rather, the images of thought, to be understood on their own terms. Here he puts this view of philosophy to work in understanding the concepts-or images-of film. Cinema, to Deleuze, is not a language that requires probing and interpretation, a search for hidden meanings; it can be understood directly, as a composition of images and signs, pre-verbal in nature. Thus he offers a powerful alternative to the psychoanalytic and semiological approaches that have dominated film studies.

Drawing upon Henri Bergson's thesis on perception and C. S. Peirce's classification of images and signs, Deleuze is able to put forth a new theory and taxonomy of the image, which he then applies to concrete examples from the work of a diverse group of filmmakers—Griffith, Eisenstein, Pasolini, Rohmer, Bresson, Dreyer, Stroheim, Buñuel, and many others. Because he finds movement to be the primary characteristic of cinema in the first half of the twentieth century, he devotes this first volume to that aspect of film. In the years since World War II, time has come to dominate film; that shift, and the signs and images associated with it, are addressed in Cinema 2: The Time-Image.

"The appearance of [this book] is an exciting event for film study and one that well deserves serious attention and commentary." —Film Quarterly

吉爾·德勒茲，法國後現代主義哲學傢，生於巴黎，曾任教於索邦大學及梵森大學。思想影響後世甚廣，範圍包括哲學、政治、心理分析及哲學等。著有《差異與重復》、《什麼是哲學》和《韆重颱》等書。