Is 1945 a rupture or a model?
Postwar Europe is a crucial constellation, not the sole birthplace of the time-image.
SCHOLAR MAP / GLOBAL, BUT NOT FALSELY COMPLETE
An open research community, not a closed school roster
The current verifiable sample contains 75 researchers across English-, French-, German-, Italian-, Spanish-, Portuguese-, Chinese-, Japanese-, and Korean-language contexts. It is not a global census but an extensible map with explicit inclusion criteria.
30—50operational estimate for sustained direct research
50—80estimated core Deleuzian film-philosophy community
55+conservative verifiable sample in the source review
These are bounded scoping-review estimates, not precise global totals. Citation counts, one-off terminology, or database hits do not automatically establish research depth.
A
SEVEN OPEN DEBATES
Disagreement constitutes the field
Do not first ask who is closest to Deleuze. Ask which problem each interpretation changes, what it sacrifices, and what it opens.
Replacement or coexistence?
The time-image reverses the subordination of time to movement without abolishing the movement-image; local shifts can occur within one film.
How can the field de-centre Europe?
Adding countries is insufficient; world cinemas must be allowed to modify the taxonomy itself.
Taxonomy or generator?
Fixed labels invite mere example-hunting; an open taxonomy requires new concepts to transform existing relations and explain across cases.
Does the digital require a Cinema 3?
The neuro-image, no-time-image, and interface theories test the boundary, but no third regime has achieved consensus.
Is temporal rupture automatically political?
No. Non-linearity can serve nostalgia, trauma markets, control, or paralysis; ask who may see, who must wait, and whose past is preserved.
How do we avoid over-Deleuzing?
Test at least four layers—sensory-motor relation, actual/virtual circuit, audio-visual connection, and regime of truth—instead of labelling slow shots.
B
PEOPLE / WORKS / PROPOSITIONS
Researcher index
Filter by system, history, body, digital, death, and Chinese-language research. Affiliation is not nationality, and studied region is not author location.
75 verifiable researchers
01United States
System & semioticsD. N. Rodowick
Reconstructs the Cinema books as a time machine of signs, time, truth, and thought, extending the inquiry toward the ethico-political relation between world and time in audiovisual culture.
- Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine
- Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze’s Film Philosophy
02United States
System & semioticsRonald Bogue
Offers one of the clearest guides to Deleuze’s taxonomy of cinematic signs and connects the time-image to the ethical problem of restoring belief in this world.
- Deleuze on Cinema
03France / United States
System & semioticsPaola Marrati
Rejects the reduction of films to illustrations of philosophy, arguing that cinema independently creates problems of time and subjectivity that compel philosophy to invent concepts.
- Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy
04United States
Field-building & interdisciplinaryGregory Flaxman
Consolidated the early English-language field through The Brain Is the Screen and foregrounded the immanent relation among image, screen, brain, and thought.
- The Brain Is the Screen
05United Kingdom
System & semioticsDavid Deamer
Reconstructs the complete taxonomy through cineosis and proposes the three passive syntheses of time as a generative account of nine time-image signs.
- Deleuze’s Cinema Books
- Cineosis: Deleuze’s cinematic semiosis
06United Kingdom / Australia
System & semioticsFelicity Colman
Uses ciné-system, TransSemiotics, and ciné-ethics to turn taxonomy into an open relational system generated across bodies, technologies, sound, space, and affect.
- Deleuze and Cinema: The Film Concepts
07Italy
System & semioticsDaniela Angelucci
Reads the transition as a move from organic totality to gaps, fractures, and the impossibility of thought, keeping philosophy in close contact with films.
- Deleuze e i concetti del cinema
08France
History, politics & world cinemasJacques Rancière
Mounts the strongest challenge to mapping movement-image and time-image onto two epochs divided by 1945, prompting later accounts in terms of tendencies, polarities, and analytical regimes.
- Film Fables: From One Image to Another?
09United Kingdom
History, politics & world cinemasDavid Martin-Jones
De-centres Europe through national and world cinemas, allowing films from Hong Kong, India, Korea, Argentina, Iran, and elsewhere to modify the taxonomy rather than merely fill it.
- Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity
- Deleuze and World Cinemas
10United Kingdom
History, politics & world cinemasWilliam Brown
Argues that there are as many routes to the time-image as there are films, opening the concept to religion, genre hybridity, digital bodies, and local aesthetics while exposing the risk of over-expansion.
- Deleuze and Film
- Supercinema
11United Kingdom
History, politics & world cinemasRichard Rushton
Emphasizes the persistence of the movement-image in modern and contemporary cinema, shifting the field from historical replacement to coexistence, mixture, and local transformation.
- Cinema After Deleuze
12Chile / United Kingdom
History, politics & world cinemasCristóbal Escobar
Proposes the intensive-image to connect movement, time, body, sound, and space, contesting a rigid assignment of classical and modern cinema to separate regimes.
- The Intensive-Image in Deleuze’s Film-Philosophy
13United Kingdom
Body, affect & sensesBarbara M. Kennedy
Develops an aesthetics of sensation in which colour, rhythm, movement, desire, and molecular bodies make time felt as bodily tension and intensity.
- Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation
14Canada / United States
Body, affect & sensesLaura U. Marks
Develops haptic visuality, extending the past in intercultural and diasporic cinema from mental memory to skin, food, fabric, sound, and multisensory embodiment.
- The Skin of the Film
15United Kingdom
Body, affect & sensesAnna Powell
Studies dreams, hallucination, trance, ecstasy, and altered states, focusing on how sound, colour, and rhythm induce states in viewers rather than merely represent them.
- Deleuze, Altered States and Film
16United States
Body, affect & sensesAmy Herzog
Reads musical moments as temporal interruptions that reorganize space, body, and history, while warning that interruption can also reproduce gendered, racial, and class conventions.
- Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same
17Spain / Canada
Body, affect & sensesElena del Río
Uses performance and affect to show sensory-motor crises within American genre cinema, challenging the confinement of the time-image to European art film.
- Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance
18United Kingdom
Body, affect & sensesPatricia MacCormack
Develops cinemasochism as an ethics of relinquishing interpretive mastery and allowing cinematic intensities to traverse the body, making passivity a condition of perceptual reorganization.
- Cinemasochism
19United Kingdom
Body, affect & sensesDamian Sutton
Extends the crystal-image to photography, resisting the view of the photograph as merely a frozen or dead past and opening it to virtual futures and depths of recollection.
- Photography, Cinema, Memory
20Sweden
Body, affect & sensesMalin Wahlberg
Brings time into documentary, archives, and social memory, examining how waiting, retrospection, archival recomposition, and sound relations construct nonfictional time.
- Documentary Time
21Netherlands
Digital, interface & post-cinemaPatricia Pisters
Proposes the neuro-image: viewers no longer see only through a character’s eyes but move through brains, networked memories, and informational landscapes.
- The Neuro-Image
22Spain
Digital, interface & post-cinemaSergi Sánchez
Proposes the no-time-image, reading digital media’s wish to resist fading, wear, ageing, and material death as a negative illumination of the time-image’s materiality.
- Hacia una imagen no-tiempo
23United Kingdom
Digital, interface & post-cinemaDavid H. Fleming
Uses the digital human assemblage to study how effects fork bodily age, identity, and temporal direction, turning bodies into continuously rewritable data composites.
- Unbecoming Cinema
24South Korea / United States
Digital, interface & post-cinemaSeung-hoon Jeong
Uses the quasi-interface to show that crystalline relations can inhabit screens-within-screens, digital surfaces, object networks, and layered interfaces without depending on mirror imagery.
- Cinematic Interfaces
25United States
Digital, interface & post-cinemaTimothy Murray
Extends the time-image into video, installation, electronic art, and interactive media, asking how databases, storage, interfaces, and computation produce time.
- Digital Baroque
26United States
Digital, interface & post-cinemaGarrett Stewart
Develops digitime to examine how digital technologies rewrite cinematic time, mnemonics, and the frame, bringing media infrastructure into temporal analysis.
- Framed Time
27Portugal
Death, negativity & timeSusana Viegas
Conceptualizes the death-image through disappearance, finitude, coexistence of past and present, and future nonexistence entering the present—not as a label for films about death.
- Death as Film-Philosophy’s Muse
- Death-Images special issue
28Brazil / Portugal
Death, negativity & timeLucas Ferraço Nassif
Co-edited the 2025 Death-Images issue, defining the death-image as a constellation of heterogeneous strategies and retesting Cinema 2 through films made after 1985.
- Death-Images: Revisiting Deleuze’s Time-Image
29Italy / Portugal
Death, negativity & timeMarco Grosoli
Co-edited the Death-Images issue, placing life, death, history, and post-1985 cinema within an open time-image research agenda.
- Death-Images special issue
30Portugal
Death, negativity & timeVasco Baptista Marques
Co-edited the Death-Images issue, advancing intersections among the time-image, disappearance, material images, and contemporary cinema.
- Death-Images special issue
31China
Chinese-language research徐辉 / Xu Hui
Systematizes perception, affection, recollection, and thought in Living Images, establishing a major Chinese-language entry into Deleuze’s theory of cinema.
- 《有生命的影像》 / Living Images
32Taiwan
Chinese-language research杨凯麟 / Yang Kailin
Moves from thought-image to the conditions of thought = image, linking non-chronological time, non-representation, and non-identity to virtuality.
- 〈德勒兹“思想—影像”或“思想＝影像”之条件及问题性〉
33China
Chinese-language research姜宇辉 / Jiang Yuhui
Connects time-crystals, neuro-images, deepfakes, and algorithmic politics, using negativity to revise one-sided optimism about becoming and virtuality.
- 《后人类影像》 / Posthuman Images
- 深度伪造与电影之真
34China
Chinese-language research汪民安 / Wang Min’an
Highlights the spatial problem of the time-image in Chinese lectures: any, heterogeneous, and multiple spaces undo the natural unity of action and space.
- 德勒兹：一个新型的电影放映员
35United States
Body, affect & sensesSteven Shaviro
Challenges language- and representation-centred film theory through the cinematic body, intensity, and passive feeling, anticipating affective and post-cinematic turns.
- The Cinematic Body
- Post Cinematic Affect
36Hungary
History, politics & world cinemasAndrás Bálint Kovács
Connects the history of modern film style with time, narration, and Deleuzian modernity and is a recurring contributor to the central edited collections.
- Screening Modernism
- The Brain Is the Screen
37United States
History, politics & world cinemasAngelo Restivo
Approaches Deleuzian film philosophy through space, globalization, and national cinema; part of the verifiable core edited-volume sample.
- The Cinema of Economic Miracles
- Afterimages
38United States
Field-building & interdisciplinaryDorothea Olkowski
Brings work on difference, perception, and philosophical aesthetics into the Cinema books as an important early interdisciplinary voice.
- The Brain Is the Screen
39United States
Field-building & interdisciplinaryDudley Andrew
Situates Deleuze within film-theory history, the Bazinian tradition, and world cinema, helping locate his place in cinema studies.
- The Brain Is the Screen
40France
System & semioticsFrançois Zourabichvili
Provides rigorous philosophical grounding through work on event, literality, and Deleuzian concept creation.
- Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event
41Italy / United States
Body, affect & sensesGiuliana Bruno
Extends cinematic experience through space, travel, architecture, and affective mapping within the embodied turn organized by Afterimages.
- Atlas of Emotion
- Afterimages
42United States
Field-building & interdisciplinaryGregg Lambert
Approaches cinema through Deleuze’s image of thought, literature, and philosophical expression, contributing to cross-media dialogue in the core collections.
- The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
- The Brain Is the Screen
43Australia
Field-building & interdisciplinaryIan Buchanan
Connects Deleuze–Guattari studies, cultural studies, and film analysis as an organizer and contributor in the English-language field.
- Deleuze and the Contemporary World
- Deleuze and Film
44United States
History, politics & world cinemasJames K. Chandler
Places historicity, time, and cinematic thought within a longer trajectory from Romanticism to modern culture.
- The Brain Is the Screen
45France
System & semioticsJean-Clet Martin
Approaches Deleuzian cinema through folds, worlds, and multiplicities, representing the encounter of Francophone philosophy and film studies.
- The Brain Is the Screen
46United States
Field-building & interdisciplinaryJohn Rajchman
Contributes work on Deleuze in modern thought, art, and architecture to the early formation of the cinema–brain–thought field.
- The Deleuze Connections
- The Brain Is the Screen
47France
System & semioticsMarie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier
Studies writing, montage, and Blanchot-inflected thought in audio-visual relations, a key point of entry from Francophone film theory.
- The Brain Is the Screen
48Cyprus / United Kingdom
Digital, interface & post-cinemaMarkos Hadjioannou
Studies digital cinema, materiality, and modes of image existence, contributing to the turn from the time-image toward digital ontology.
- From Light to Byte
- Afterimages
49United States
Field-building & interdisciplinaryMartin Schwab
Participates in the foundational English-language edited discussion of Deleuzian film philosophy, thought, and audiovisual form.
- The Brain Is the Screen
50United States
Body, affect & sensesMelinda Szaloky
Approaches Deleuze through affect, gender, embodiment, and film form, extending the experiential dimension of the original taxonomy.
- Afterimages
51United States
System & semioticsPeter Canning
Contributes to the foundational Brain Is the Screen discussion through cinema, time, and philosophical concept creation.
- The Brain Is the Screen
52France
Field-building & interdisciplinaryRaymond Bellour
Develops the space between images across cinema, photography, video, and installation, a key reference for intermedial time and spectatorship.
- Between-the-Images
- Afterimages
53Turkey / United Kingdom
Body, affect & sensesSerazer Pekerman
Uses gender, space, and Deleuzian film concepts in the central edited collections, extending embodied and political analysis.
- Deleuze and Film
54United States
Field-building & interdisciplinaryTom Conley
A recurring contributor across core collections, linking maps, space, writing, and Deleuzian film philosophy.
- The Brain Is the Screen
- Afterimages
- Deleuze and Film
55France / Brazil
Field-building & interdisciplinaryÉric Alliez
Connects Deleuzian philosophy with aesthetics, war, and contemporary art, grounding political and visual-cultural extensions of film philosophy.
- The Brain-Eye
- Afterimages
56Brazil
History, politics & world cinemasJorge Vasconcellos
Represents sustained Lusophone work connecting Deleuzian film philosophy with education, thought, and Latin American moving images.
- Deleuze e o cinema
57France
Field-building & interdisciplinaryDork Zabunyan
Places Deleuzian film philosophy within the reciprocal risks of seeing, speaking, and thinking, while connecting film aesthetics, political images, and contemporary media at Paris 8.
- Gilles Deleuze – Voir, parler, penser au risque du cinéma
- Les Cinémas de Gilles Deleuze
58France
System & semioticsPierre Montebello
Treats movement and time as zones of interference between cinematic and philosophical practices, showing why the Cinema books are neither film history nor applied philosophy.
- Deleuze, philosophie et cinéma
- Cinéma, subjectivité et aliénation chez Deleuze
59Canada
System & semioticsSerge Cardinal
Reads Deleuze through relations among sound, sensation, and thought, treating cinema as an audiovisual practice that reorganizes perception rather than a merely visible object.
- Deleuze au cinéma
60France
System & semioticsSuzanne Hême de Lacotte
Offers an early Francophone account of how Deleuze turns cinema, movement, and time into philosophical problems across the two Cinema books.
- Deleuze: philosophie et cinéma
61Australia
Body, affect & sensesTeresa Rizzo
Brings becoming, embodiment, and affect into concrete film analysis through a feminist method that also tests the taxonomy against gendered spectatorship.
- Deleuze and Film: A Feminist Introduction
62United States
History, politics & world cinemasKara Keeling
Reworks cinematic perception, common sense, and temporality through Black feminist and queer theory, testing Deleuze against racialized visibility and Black femme subjectivity.
- The Witch’s Flight
63Australia
System & semioticsAllan James Thomas
Asks what cinema does for Deleuze’s philosophy itself, organizing interval, disaster, duration, and the crystal-image into a thought of the world.
- Deleuze, Cinema and the Thought of the World
64Canada / United Kingdom
Death, negativity & timeNadine Boljkovac
Uses Marker, Resnais, and Second World War images to study untimely affect, memory, and cinematic ethics, linking the time-image to irreducible historical trauma.
- Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema
65Canada
Body, affect & sensesAlanna Thain
Studies bodies in postdigital cinema through suspense, time, and affect, treating the body not as time’s container but as a surface where temporal difference happens.
- Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema
66Sweden
Field-building & interdisciplinaryJakob Nilsson
Distinguishes philosophy’s creation of concepts from cinema’s thinking in blocks of movement/duration, then develops the cinecept through Godard–Miéville’s audiovisual practice.
- Cinecepts, Deleuze, and Godard-Miéville
- Deleuze, Concepts, and Ideas about Film as Philosophy
67Australia
Digital, interface & post-cinemaTimothy Deane-Freeman
Carries the cinematic outside and out-of-field into digital images, information, noise, and control, testing how digital media can both close and compel thought.
- Deleuze, Digital Media and Thought
68Australia
System & semioticsRoger Dawkins
Derives a method of film analysis from Deleuze’s transformation of structuralism and extends relational, semiotic, and differentiating structures into platform images.
- Gilles Deleuze’s Structuralist Cinema-World
69Argentina / Brazil
System & semioticsPablo Enrique Abraham Zunino
Provides an open Spanish-language route through movement-image, time-image, and labyrinthine image relations for Latin American readers.
- Deleuze: el laberinto de la imagen
70Brazil
Field-building & interdisciplinaryAndré Parente
Connects Deleuze, cinematic narrativity, video, and new media in Lusophone scholarship and built a durable image-research node through N-Imagem at UFRJ.
- Cinema/Deleuze
- Cinema et narrativité
71Japan
Body, affect & sensesKuniichi Uno
Advances Japanese Deleuze studies through the interpenetration of body, image, and becoming and contributed to the Japanese reception of Cinema 2.
- 映像身体論
72Japan
Field-building & interdisciplinaryTatsuya Higaki
Connects philosophy of life, moving images, and East Asian Deleuze communities through research projects, regional networks, and close-reading courses on Cinema.
- ドゥルーズの『シネマ』読解からみる哲学と映像
73Japan
System & semioticsTatsuya Kimura
Offers an early Japanese-language account of the image’s monism/dualism and of the overall structure of the Cinema books.
- ジル・ドゥルーズの映画論
- ドゥルーズ『シネマ』の全体像
74Japan
System & semioticsKosaku Tozawa
Differentiates layers of croyance in the Cinema books, clarifying narrative belief, relation to the world, and the ethics of modern cinema.
- ジル・ドゥルーズ『シネマ』における Croyance 概念の層構造
75South Korea
Digital, interface & post-cinemaJi-young Lee
Extends the Cinema books in Korean scholarship toward spectator-images, network-images, and contemporary Asian cinema, updating the taxonomy through spectatorship and digital culture.
- 들뢰즈의 영화철학: 『시네마』를 넘어서
- 들뢰즈의 관객-이미지(들)과 그 현대적 확장