Time’s Arrow, Time’s Bow

This chapter frames Gilles Deleuze’s cinema books as a late twentieth-century phenomenon, engaging with many of the period’s key concerns, including history, memory, and belatedness. Deleuze recognizes his status as a latecomer to philosophy and film theory and develops a theory based on the rediscovery of radical thought in the modern past, as in his study of Leibniz, the fold, and the baroque. His cinema books adopt a similar approach to film history and theory by framing the medium as an art that opens onto the totality of time. If nostalgia in the late twentieth century viewed a “golden age” as the proper destination of historical inquiry, Deleuze radicalizes the concepts of return and memory by reimagining them through the cinema’s lens. One key lesson drawn from the century of cinema is that any moment in time, including the neglected or potentially revolutionary, is accessible from any other point in history.