Browsing by Author "Rantanen, Jarno"

My thesis focuses on Gilles Deleuze’s (1925 – 1995) views on cinematographic images and signs as forms of thinking that are pre-linguistic, thus constituting in Deleuze’s terms a ”pure semiotic”. Primary sources for the work are naturally Deleuze’s two volumes on film, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, but due to the challenging and often ambiguous nature of Deleuze’s thought I endeavour also to acknowledge a variety of commentaries. In addition, I attempt to outline some connections between Deleuze’s semiotics of cinema and the underlying traditions of pragmatism and bergsonism from which Deleuze himself draws. My principal aim, however, is to present a holistic perspective on Deleuze’s theory of cinema and to elucidate its position with regard to his broader views on ontology, cinema thereby appearing as a form of creative thinking alongside other forms of art as well as science and philosophy, all of these operating in different ways and with different materials. In this sense Deleuze regards cinema as a technology – a practice increasing the diversity and potentials of life, yet a practice that is external to thought, thus making possible new ways of thinking. In cinema, thought is tied to images in movement, meaning the moving images themselves as well as the connections established between them in montage. Central to this movement of images is the dimension of time, cinema facilitating an understanding of time as released from its subordination to movement, thus presenting us with the movement of time itself – an Image of Time.