Layering Images, Thwarting Fables: Deleuze, Rancière and the Allegories of Cinema

Abstract

This essay evaluates Jacques Rancière’s apparently devastating critique of Gilles Deleuze’s film philosophy. In “From One Image to Another,” Rancière offers two arguments about Deleuze’s distinction between the movement-image and the time- image. First, Rancière questions whether this distinction could correspond to the historical distinction between classical and modern cinema. Second, Rancière claims that this distinction remains allegorical to the extent that Deleuze derives it from film fables.

I claim that Rancière’s arguments involve a perspective foreign to Deleuze’s ontology. Rancière’s first argument overlooks that Deleuze evokes history to explain not a development in the natural history of images but our lack of belief in the action-image. Rancière’s second argument relies on the assumption that fable and image entertain a dialectical—rather than an expressive—relationship. In evaluating Rancière’s criticism of Deleuze, I offer an alternative account of these two apparent contradictions in Deleuze’s film philosophy.