Death-Images: Revisiting Deleuze’s "Time-Image" in cinema after 1985
In her article “Death as Film-Philosophy’s Muse: Deleuzian Observations on Moving Images and the Nature of Time,” Susana Viegas has shown that Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “time-image” (i.e. a way for moving images to present time breaking with the conception of the latter as a discrete sequence of moments, each mechanically linked to the previous and the next) is inseparable from conceiving of death in ways other than the mere interruption of a linear progression called “life.” That is to say, the “time-image” qua direct, non-mediated presentation of time cannot but be as well a “death-image” foreshadowing the presence of death before it happens in the future; an indirect, oblique way of expressing future nonexistence; a direct image of passing over time.
The “Lazarean subject”, i.e. the subject coming back from the dead as theorized most effectively in the cinematic practice of Alain Resnais (among others, in Guernica, 1950, Night and Fog, 1955, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959), is perhaps the most fitting exemplification of this convergence between “time-image” and “death-image”. To some extent, this convergence can be regarded as Deleuze’s contribution to a strand of French 20th century thought (e.g. Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, among others) fruitfully elaborating on what lies “between two deaths”, i.e. between the subject’s symbolic and real deaths.
The relationship between Deleuze’s cinematic taxonomy and history is a complex one – suffice it to mention the paramount importance of World War II (qua ultimate, collective trauma) in structuring his classification, down to the very division between his two tomes (Cinema 1: Movement-Image, 1983, and Cinema 2: Time-Image, 1985). Without going into the intricacies of this relationship, to affirm that a relationship of some kind with history is there in Deleuze’s taxonomy in the first place is safe enough for the following question to be legitimate and, arguably, inevitable: what happened to the “time-image” after the publication of Cinema 2?
Forty years after the release of Cinema 2: Time-Image, this special issue will collect essays on films and directors working after 1985 that exemplify the convergence between “time-image” and “death-image” in ways that are not perfectly coincident with the ways Deleuze put it in his cinema books but possibly illuminating it with the hindsight of a later historical perspective. We are looking for essays reflecting on post-1985 cinematic instances of this convergence and showing kinds of “death-images” that Deleuze could not have envisaged writing in 1985.
Essays dealing with films and directors from non-Western areas will be particularly welcome. As it is well-known, the section(s) of Cinema 2 on non-Western cinemas are deliberately tentative, and thus implicitly calling for future specification. Several major figures in recent so-called “World Cinema” (to name but a few: Jia Zhang-Ke, Lisandro Alonso, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Abderramahne Sissako, Lav Diaz) engage deeply with “time-image”, and in a lot of cases their cinemas strongly relate to death and the “death-image” too. Essays on lesser-known figures would, however, be no less welcome.
Japan is of course a particularly important case in point. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their large-scale impact, profoundly informs Deleuze’s cinema diptych, and there is no shortage of Japanese works reflecting on them in a Deleuzian way (e.g. from Shohei Imamura’s Black Rain, 1989, to Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Labyrinth of Cinema, 2019; also, Yoji Yamada’s Tora-San series could hardly be seen as very Deleuzian as it unfolded in the 1970s and 1980s, and yet its 2019 culmination Tora-San, Wish You Were Here lends itself to be analysed at the intersection between “time-image” and “death-image” like very few others).
Manuscripts should be submitted online RCL - Journal of Communication and Languages.
Full manuscript submission deadline: May 31, 2025
Review process: July to October 2025
Editors’ decision: October 2025
Expected publication date: November 2025
Articles can be written in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese and will be blind peer reviewed. Visual essays will also be accepted. Formatting must be in accordance with the journal’s submission guidelines, and the submission must be made via the OJS platform.
Editors: Marco Grosoli, Lucas Ferraço Nassif, Vasco Marques e Susana Viegas
📸 Hiroshima, Mon Amour [1959], by Alain Resnais
