States of Affection: Gilles Deleuze and the In-Between-Ness of Becoming Cinema

Abstract

This article explores the rich and generative spaces poised between Gilles Deleuze’s movement-image and time-image semiotic regimes as laid out in Cinema I: The Movement-Image and Cinema II: The Time-Image. Using a transhistorical approach, this investigation provides insight into the myriad strands that cross between the proposed ‘breaks’ in cinema’s evolution of style and structure. Using the works of Loïe Fuller and Agnes Varda, as well as the theoretical support of theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson, Jean Epstein and Gilles Deleuze himself, this research proposes a new mode of engaging with cinema’s history and semiotic evolution that re-immerses cinema within the ceaseless flow of its duration. In doing so, Deleuze’s historical break between the movement- and time-image regimes becomes an enriched and often contradictory space that offers a reimagining of cinema’s possibilities.