A return to Deleuze's cinema books: four theses on the cinematic, and a film studies of movement

Revisiting Gilles Deleuze's work on cinema, this article extracts from the two books a “new analytic of the image” that operates as an “immanent analysis of movement”. It argues that despite four decades of commentary, the cinema books' core proposition—the object of analysis with cinema is movement, and not form or some derivative of it—remains insufficiently grasped. Four theses are developed: first, the need for an immanent analytic that takes movement itself as its object; second, the distinction between relative movement in relation to a closed whole (movement-image) and absolute movement in relation to an open whole (time-image); third, a redefinition of what cinema is, that is, its essence, in terms of the frame, shot, and montage rather than conventional formal categories; and fourth, a plural genealogy of cinema grounded in Bergson's concept of creative evolution, opening the possibility of multiple, emergent “cinemas” beyond human-centered ontology. The article contends that such an approach not only reorients film studies but also has broader implications for cultural analysis and cultural studies, offering an expanded, non-anthropocentric understanding of moving images as generative forces in the world. This has strong implications for all cultural studies and their treatments of objects of analysis.