In a text on the relation between the music of Pierre Boulez and the literature of Marcel Proust, Deleuze observes that the nameless narrator of Proust’s expansive masterpiece was a person haunted by time (2007: 297). Indeed, the same might be said of Deleuze himself. Temporality is a near constant theme from Deleuze’s earliest publications (on Hume, as well as a scintillatingly brief review of Simondon) to his final publication (‘Immanence: A Life’). Much like Bergson did with his unique concept of duration, Deleuze continually added further nuances to his philosophy of time. Temporality is a theme to which Deleuze continually returned throughout the twenty-five monographs that were published during his lifetime, in countless seminars and interviews, as well as in the texts co-authored with Félix Guattari – the two Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes, the book on Kafka and What is Philosophy?

The ambit of Deleuze’s philosophy could scarcely be more expansive. In the Foreword to Éric Alliez’s Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time, Deleuze explicitly affirms Plotinus’ claim that time is involved in the movements of the universe’s soul (1996: xii). A few lines later – through oblique reference to Fitzgerald, Iberall, the Stoics, Nietzsche, Kant and Shakespeare – Deleuze further characterises these movements as aberrant, in the sense that they are akin to the decoupling of a door flying off its hinges; time is a cosmic dice throw that affirms the actualisation of possibilities. In his two Cinema texts, as well as his other works on Bergson’s philosophy, Deleuze suggests that temporal movements involve the ongoing creation of virtual and actual modes of being. (Here, one might also observe a subtle modification of Étienne Souriau’s aesthetics.) The sheer number of texts that Deleuze published also hints at a further aspect of his philosophy of time: it is non-reducible to the thought of one key figure – to encounter Deleuze’s concept of time is to participate with a plurality of thinkers.

Deleuze’s concept of temporality undergoes radical revision with his elaborations of time’s expressions in cinema. In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze elucidates aspects of Bergson’s thought to present a concept of time that is no longer tethered to the movements of entities. Deleuze – in what is perhaps one of the oddest definitions in the history of western philosophy – characterises cinema as attempting to move beyond the representation of the movements of existents to give viewers a ‘direct presentation of time’ (1997b: 38). In the present chapter, I elucidate Deleuze’s tantalising suggestion that cinema, the art form that has moving images as one of its ontic bases, involves a direct representation of a sort of temporality that is conceptually discrete from the movement of existent entities. I further suggest that filmic expressions of time reveal it to be a singularity that enjoys the attribute of radical indeterminacy. Deleuze further suggests that time – as it is presented in film – obtains as that ongoing continuum of variation.

My argument progresses through four stages: (1) I will critically assess the suggestion of various commentators that the Cinema texts offer a fraught addition to Deleuze’s philosophy of time; (2) I suggest that Deleuze’s innovative reading of Bergson’s concept of duration is key to understanding how time is expressed in cinema; (3) I observe – through reference to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s theory of artistic descriptions – that a direct image of time enjoys nascent expression in the form of ‘pure optical and acoustic situations’ (i.e., moments of profound change in any of the diegetic elements of a film story); (4) finally – through reference to Deleuze’s nuanced reading of Bergson’s ontology of virtual and actual modes of existence – I suggest that time gains direct cinematic expression in the peculiar ‘crystal-images’ that proliferate in post-Second World War cinema. I observe that time’s expression in cinema involves a diminishment of the relative importance of the relation of temporal succession, a prioritisation of time’s involvement with fundamental ontological change, and a specification of the strictly simultaneous emergence of past and present. Further, I suggest that this temporality forms a continuum of variation without end.