University of Rochester professor David N. Rodowick has ventured into territory largely ignored by American scholars with a new book about French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his theories about cinema.
In Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine, Rodowick presents the first comprehensive study, in any language, of Deleuze's work on film and image. Deleuze, one of France's most celebrated 20th-century philosophers, is becoming more known outside of France as one of the most productive and important philosophical thinkers of this century.
Rodowick places Deleuze's two books on cinema in the context of French cultural history of the 1960s and '70s. He shows not only how Deleuze changed the dominant traditions of film theory but also how the study of cinema is central to modern philosophy.
"David Rodowick, well versed in philosophy and cinema studies, is the perfect person to bring these important works into focus for the American critical establishment," writes Dana Polan of the University of Pittsburgh. "This book will become a standard work for anyone who wants to learn about Deleuze on cinema and about Deleuze more generally."
Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine was published in September by Duke University Press ($49.95 cloth, $16.95 paper). Rodowick is a professor of English and visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. During the 1997-98 school year, he is teaching in the University's Study Abroad program in Paris.