Abstract

In the final pages of his Cinema books, Deleuze explains that his aim is not to understand films, but to extract from them concepts that the cinema has itself given rise to ‘which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices’. Cinema does not resemble concepts, it creates them. The Cinema books are not a guide to reading films. Instead, we are invited to see how concepts such as ‘image’, ‘plane’ or ‘orelations of thought’ correspond to and interfere in creative ways with other practices outside the cinema. So, a cinematic concept such as ‘image of thought’ can help us think in new ways about developments in widely differing fields, such as the history of painting and philosophy.