If you want a history of cinema that switches from popular cinema to 'art' cinema [i.e., from Ford to Resnais], then one could certainly use Deleuze's distinction between the action-image and the time-image as an historical distinction. But this is not what Deleuze does--i.e., take the distinction as an historical one. To take Deleuze's distinction between two types of images as a distinction between two periods would necessitate leaving out a great deal of post-WWII popular cinema--most of it, in fact. That's what Deleuze does: he switches from talking about a wide range of films to leaving out great popular genres (as Damian Peter Sutton points out). But this demonstrates that the distinction he's making is not an historical one. Deleuze is not offering a film history. Nor can the concepts he offers be mistaken for descriptions of either periods or movements. A glance at the table of contents supports this. E.g., Hitchcock represents one turning point from the action-image to the time-image. While Deleuze does not cite Hitchcock's early British films, it would not be difficult to take what he says about the post-WWII Hollywood films and apply them to the earlier films. Thus the conceptual distinction is not an historical one. Two other clues to the fact that the distinction between the time-image and the action-image is not historical are: (1) the way Renoir's pre-WWII work is used to explain the time-image, and (2) the way Welles' 1941 _Citizen Kane_ also presents an example of the time-image. If the time-image described a post-WWII period or movement, then neither Renoir nor _Kane_ would fit. FROM DAMIAN PETER SUTTON: > I realise that Deleuze never professes that his work is an historical > one [....] > Deleuze historicizes film into two distinct periods, separated in > time by the Second World War, and in development by the achievement > of a narrational movement-image of final complexity. This seems to me a bit strange: Deleuze never says his work is historical; but he "historicizes film into two distinct periods." But isn't the distinction between action-image and time-image conceptual and not historical? > Historical problems with this approach are his starting and finishing > points (1917-80ish), whilst genre problems exist in his not dealing > with popular genres, and in particular actions films. Well if the concepts Deleuze offers, which he never calls historical, are in fact problematic when taken as historical concepts, then maybe there's a problem with so doing. If one *does* take Deleuze's work as a film history, then it is a Hegelian one, in which concepts follow each other in historical order because of their logical development. I think many people are not so sanguine as they once were about reducing history to a logic of concepts. Sincerely, Edward R. O'Neill UCLA Sociology/General Education ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama.