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Gilles Deleuze’s Structuralist Cinema-World

Gilles Deleuze’s Structuralist Cinema-World cover

Gilles Deleuze’s Structuralist Cinema-World

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Pre-order. Available 11 Dec 2025
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Description

This book is an explanation of Deleuze's cinema books that fleshes-out a structuralist “method” applicable to film and media today.

Gilles Deleuze's Structuralist Cinema-World outlines a way of analyzing the meaning we interpret from film-its images, sounds and their combinations-and, in so doing, makes space for Deleuze's vision of critical resistance and creative thinking. It argues that this method is Deleuze's radical version of Structuralism, as Deleuze borrows elements of Structuralism and deploys them throughout his entire oeuvre. This book distils this Deleuzian Structuralism down to a practical system of four criteria of analysis, including a special structuralist element called the joker. Its analysis of film serves to explicate Deleuze's Structuralism and realize the experimentation potential to Deleuze's method.

This book investigates this perspective of Structuralism on Deleuze's philosophy, his cinema books, and cinema generally. In so doing, it develops the system of analysis described above; it offers a novel reading of cinematic examples in line with this system, while at the same time outlining a method of analysis easily translatable to film and media studies more broadly; and, in its final chapter, it makes inroads into the application of this system beyond cinema to image-based platform media today.

It includes detailed analyses of more than 12 films, from current well-known cinema (Top Gun: Maverick, Mr Bean's Holiday), to Australian Indigenous cinema (Ten Canoes), and including less recent independent films such as What Time is it There?

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Introduction
Operative Cut: Letters to Ali

Part I: Foundations and Structure
1. Towards a Film Theory: Metaphysics, Relation, Structure
Operative Cut: The Shape of Water

2. Structuralism: A General Theory of Production Aligned with Revolutionary Praxis
Operative Cut: A Scene at the Sea

3. Deleuze: Interpretative Structuralism
Operative Cut: Morning of the Earth

Part II: Interpretative Structuralism in Cinema and Beyond
4. Transcendental Field
Operative Cut: Beau Travail

5. Immanent Causation and Sign
Operative Cut: What Time is it There?

6. The Differentiator: Presenting the Empty Square (the Joker)
Operative Cut: Casting JonBenet

7. Becoming Active
Operative Cut: Mean Streets, Morvern Callar and Force Majeure

8. Beyond Cinema
Operative Cut: Ten Canoes

Conclusion
Operative Cut: Mr Bean's Holiday

References
Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 11 Dec 2025
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 224
ISBN 9798765128305
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations 9 bw illus
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Roger Dawkins

Roger Dawkins is Associate Dean of Learning and Te…

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