Astrid Söderbergh Widding is associate professor at the Department of Cinema History and Theory, University of Stockholm. She is the editor-in-chief of the magazine Aura and published recently Blick och Blindhet (1997). by ASTRID SÖDERBERGH WIDDING

It is rather easy to draw at least a superficial sketch of the field of cinema studies, even if this means neglecting the big difference between the dominating Anglo-American and the French research community. On one hand there has been a historical tradition, initiated by classic scholars such as Jean Mitry or Georges Sadoul, and another, decidedly theoretical on the other, where the impact of classical theorists, like André Bazin, was replaced in the sixties by a theoretic revival, with a tangled web of film theories drawing heavily upon linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminism. Since then, New Historicism has proclaimed the death of theory and renewed the heritage from the old historians, although the theoretical tradition of course has continued to develop alongside.     Then, towards the middle of the eighties, Gilles Deleuze suddenly entered the scene with his two volumes of film theory, Cinema 1 and 2, The movement-image and The time-image. It is little to say that they caused a sensation, at least in the French context. No wonder, since it is striking to what extent philosophers had up to then ignored this new field of cinema, which has been called the blind spot of philosophy.    Anyone who steps out of his own theoretical context in so remarkable a way is likely to be subject to criticism. I would like to note three common points in this critique of Cinema 1 and 2, the first of them concerning the concept of history in cinema. Explicitly, Deleuze tells that his books are no attempt of writing film history. Still, he is approaching and dealing with historical matters. The intersection between the theoretical and the historical is in several respects quite problematic, especially as concerns the main s us back right where we started, to the frontier which has seldom been crossed between philosophy and cinema studies. Thus, by philosophers, the books on film have sometimes been considered as minor works, or some kind of deviations onto a territory that to them seems rather apart. By not so few film scholars, the books have been looked upon as intrusions from an outsider into a quite independent and rapidly evolving discipline, although of course their interest has also been recognized, and in the last years caused quite a lot of readings and interpretations. But it is striking that leading film scholars such as David Bordwell still very frankly admit that they have never read Deleuze - the two volumes have obviously not yet been canonized as part of the necessary reading for any film theorist or historian. ... In contrast to many film scholar, I would suggest that one of the most fruitful aspects of Deleuze´s work lies in the way that they treat the film material. It is not that I don´t recognize the problem with the auteurism that dominates his work. Still, the main point is not the directors, but the films. Deleuze obviously was a most frequent movie-goer, his choice of films naturally enough being that of the Parisian art cinemas, and he has an impressing capacity of rendering in few words the most significant stylistic or thematic features of a film, whether it is the rhytm and the mecanics of fluidity in French cinema before World War 2 which is discussed, or the so-called Ómedia effectÓ in the films of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, the division between the visual and the acoustic in his films that according to Deleuze serves to express the complexity of the society of information.     It is this intimate knowledge of the films themselves and the concreteness in detail that enables him to classify and to sort out, to formulate his Logic of cinema or as he calls it himself in Negociations, a natural history of cinema, with a classification of types and signs. The French cine-semiology took the unhappy analogy with language and signs as its point of departure while dealing with the question of how to think the cinema, to think both of and with the cinema. In answer to that, Deleuze reposes the problem of how to think cinema by turning back to the senses and to the image from the former emphasis upon intellection, signs and meaning.     It is also precisely because he aims at a second degree of classifying, at establishing a kind of taxonomy of signs in cinema, that the critique of the historical dimension of the books looses something of its relevance. To Deleuze it is always the images, the films themselves which must remain the principal focus of interest, because it is only these films which are bearers of these concepts of cinema that are neither theories applied to cinema from the outside, nor anything that is purely and simply present in the films, naturally accessible to the spectator. The radicalism of his standpoint in this respect is striking; both the absolute refusal of the theoretical heritage from other disciplines which has often been so dear to film scholars, and the idea that the concepts of cinema as he defines them may only be born from practice. It is this practice of philosophical analysis which serves as a kind of plane, to organize and give consistency to the limitless construction of new concepts.~