Deleuze v. Bordwell

Just a string of (possibly) incoherent thoughts. I finished reading Gilles Deleuze's Cinema I: The Movement-Image and Cinema II: The Time-Image, both for the second time. While I'm fascinated by Deleuze's theories, I'm not sure if they hold up under scrutiny.

My concerns came from reading over random blog posts on David Bordwell's site. Mainly, it's difficult to say whether a film is capturing a cultural zeitgeist because they're in development so many years before they actually hit screens. Furthermore, that it's more important to analyze what's on the screen VS. any sort of theoretical interpretation (psychoanalysis, semiology [both of which Deleuze agrees with forgoing, I think], post-modernism, etc.). The reason being, that if you go in to analyze something with a theory in mind, then you can stretch almost any meaning to fit that theory.

One of Bordwell's biggest studies, conducted alongside Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, was studying if there was a coherent style to classical Hollywood cinema (1930 - 1960) and how that style communicated ideas to the audience, how it evolved, etc. For this study, they made a list of 100 randomly chosen films that were lesser known in status at the time (mid-80s) rather than a canonical masterpiece (this meant no Citizen Kane) to gauge what an average film was doing. This also helps cement what an innovative technique truly is and why certain films are considered landmarks.

Reading this along with Bordwell's On the History of Film Style, it becomes clear that Deleuze is repurposing (and sometimes misinterpreting) what has already been written about specific eras of film history, but in a less than coherent manner. Instead he's warping ideas about montage found in a nation's cinema – yes, Soviet montage was a thing, but not all Soviet directors were adhering to this style.

So then what does one make of Deleuze's work?

I have no idea. And I'm trying to grasp what this means. Perhaps it means taking some of Deleuze's concepts of what a Movement and Time image are, putting them under scrutiny under a vast array of films from his selected eras, and trying to come up with a more coherent dialogue to present his ideas.

But who am I to question whether or not one of the most famous philosophers was wrong.

The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906, Charles Tait)