Cinematicity: City and cinema after Deleuze

Abstract

Abstract In light of Deleuze’s conception of cinema as an autonomous thinking machine – a ‘spiritual automaton’ in which moving images are substituted for human thought – the article presents the cinema as a pre-eminent thinker of the city. It contextualizes a range of scholarship committed to exploring the potential of Deleuze’s thought in relation to the ‘cinematic city’ – precipitating a Deleuzian encounter with a process that we have chosen to call cinematicity: the automatic thinking of the city by the cinema. In the course of their remarkable co-evolution, cinema’s unhinging of space– time has projected the unhinging of the space–time of the city, forcing its inhabitants to think otherwise about space, time and the human condition in the machine age. Taking these notions as a point of departure, the contributions to this issue, which variously serve to explicate the connections between city and cinema, are introduced, framed by this sense of cinematicity.