A Sensorimotor Collapse?: Deleuze and the Practice of Cinema

Abstract

This essay discusses the central historical proposition of Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books, the “sensorimotor break” that separates the classical cinema of the movement-image from the modern cinema of the time-image. That proposition is more or less in line with dominant accounts of the politics of periodization in twentieth-century aesthetics. Jacques Rancière’s thought offers a powerful challenge to any such notion of a break or rupture, and Rancière pays particular critical attention to Deleuze’s work on cinema. A work by the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi ( The Mirror ) is introduced in order to show up some shortcomings of Rancière’s critique insofar as it impacts Deleuze’s project, and to illustrate the difference between understanding cinema as a medium of thought and as a practice.