Cinema 1: The Movement Image

Cinema 1: The Movement Image (French: Cinéma 1. L'image-mouvement) (1983) is the first of two books on cinema by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the second being Cinema 2: The Time Image (French: Cinéma 2. L'image-temps) (1985). Together Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 have become known as the Cinema books, the two volumes both complementary and interdependent. In these books the author combines philosophy and cinema, explaining in the preface to the French edition of Cinema 1 that "[t]his study is not a history of cinema. It is a taxonomy, an attempt at the classifications of images and signs"; and that the "first volume has to content itself with […] only one part of the classification". To make this division between the movement-image and the time-image Deleuze draws upon the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson's theory of matter (movement) and mind (time).

In Cinema 1, Deleuze specifies his classification of the movement-image through both Bergson's theory of matter and the philosophy of the American pragmatist C. S. Peirce. The cinema covered in the book ranges from the silent era to the late 1970s, and includes the work of D. W. Griffith, G. W. Pabst, Abel Gance, and Sergei Eisenstein from the early days of film; mid-20th century filmmakers such as Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Alfred Hitchcock; and contemporary – for Deleuze – directors Robert Bresson, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, and Ingmar Bergman. The second volume includes the work of a different series of filmmakers (although there are some overlaps).