I'm still not convinced, Ed, (and other 'listers') Deleuze makes himself clear, in the preface to Cinema 1, that his job is not a historian's, that point is not in dispute. Nor is the fact that Deleuze himself muddies his own water by analysing Renoir and the time-image after he had placed the 'break' in film development at WWII. However, he _does_ make the break, and sets this out in the preface to Cinema 2. On the whole, he is not absolutely clear. (most of the Hitchcock films his praises as being classic movement-image stuff are in the post war period, so I quite understand the point you make about Renoir) Deleuze's decision to describe WWII as an appropriate juncture is supported by his argument, but nevertheless it is a social-historical event which marks this boundary, not a conceptual one. Deleuze is still defining the devlopment of film language around a historical framework. The point I would make is that Deleuze contradicts himself, and that this should be seen as an opportunity to view his work as presenting a history. When Deleuze says that he is not going to write a film history, I do believe he means that a categorical history based on arbitrary points of invention and social incident is not his intention. I don't think that he would ever have been interested in such a project. On the point of conceptual vs historical, I would say that is is this argument which is at the heart of my original question. In short, the teaching and research of film history is often science based, and seems to place inventions and developments in film language/exhibition in the realm of the arbitrary. There is rarely a chance to examine the concepts behind the scientific of semiotic developments. Deleuze's valuable example of this is his discussion of Beckett's 'Film', which itself is an attempt to make films to a very strict conceptual framework. Whilst this is valuable, Deleuze also intimates in his discussion of more mainstream films that there is a conceptual framework behind the development of film language by Hitchcock, Kubrick, and of course, Eisenstein as exemplirs. So my argument is precisely for the use of conceptual frameworks alongside the sociological frameworks which direct historical analysis. My suggestion is for the introduction of philosophical viewpoints on Cinema history. If Hegel is better for you, then great, but I find a certain illumination in understanding Deleuze as seeing the development of film language and exhbition as the 'englobant' of a process of changing - logically progressive - concepts. ---------------------- Damian Peter Sutton [log in to unmask] ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama.