System & semiotics
Paola 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.
Major works
Atlas further reading: debates
Begin with how a taxonomy is produced and how signs change, then test its reach through action relations, actual–virtual circuits, and powers of the false.
Replacement or coexistence?
The time-image reverses the subordination of time to movement; both regimes persist and can shift locally within one film.
Taxonomy or generator?
Fixed labels invite mere example-hunting; an open taxonomy requires new concepts to transform existing relations and explain across cases.
How do we use Deleuze precisely?
Test four layers: sensory-motor relation, actual/virtual circuit, audio-visual connection, and regime of truth.
Atlas further reading: concepts and films
Related concepts
- Sensory-motor schemaschème sensori-moteur
Record what the figure perceives, how the body is affected, and what action follows; then ask whether that action alters the milieu and supplies usable cues for the next perception. At which link does the circuit break?
→ - Actual / virtualactuel / virtuel
Identify the unactualized yet already operative relations, memories, or tendencies that constrain the shot, then show how they differentiate into this actual composition, performance, sound, or narrative form. Merely imagining a possible future does not pass the test.
→ - Powers of the falsepuissances du faux
Does the film expose a lie to restore truth, or alter the rules by which truth and falsity are produced?
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Related films
- Late Spring1949 · Yasujirō Ozu / 小津安二郎
The vase still life intervenes between the daughter’s smile and tears, placing change within time’s unchanging form.
→ - Citizen Kane1941 · Orson Welles / 奥逊·威尔斯
Witnesses search different sheets of the past for Kane; a complete truth remains unactualized.
→ - F for Fake1973 · Orson Welles / 奥逊·威尔斯
Each expert, forger, director, and narrator passes the tribunal to another. The question becomes whose power can create.
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Sources
- 01Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy
A concise study of cinema as autonomous thought and of the relations among world, subjectivity, and belief.
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