On Wed, 7 Oct 1998 12:49:25 GMT lmarks <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
 
> Let me interrupt this diverting exchange to point out that Deleuze does
> describe several genres in Cinema 2 that can emerge in any historical
> period.
 
I'm not sure what you mean here, do you mean that he is being
ahistorical, or that he is describing the genres as 'small' forms?
I'm not really sure that any period can support them, because the
claim in itself implies specific events which would accomodate the
filmmakers in order to provide a 'period'. This sounds like
tautology, but it's an important point. Deleuze's classifications are
historically specific by default, because these forms can only occur
within cinema history, and a history of which he is aware. What *is*
interesting here, I think, is that he doesn't seem to search for
similar forms pre-1917. I might ask what marks the early parameter of
his search, and why ignore films before it? Could it be Bergson's
relative dismissal of cinema? The long held, and highly inaccurate,
belief in the primitiveness of early film? Or an idea that the cinema
was even then an enormously commercial phenomenon which pandered to
the Working and emerging Middle Classes before it developed complex
narrative structures which would attract the wealthy and educated?
 
 
 
----------------------
Damian Peter Sutton
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