On the usefulness and harmfulness of film studies for epistemology.

Abstract

The article offers a critical examination of Gilles Deleuze’s cinematic theory—particularly its reliance on Henri Bergson’s ontology—in order to assess the extent to which film studies can contribute to epistemology. Using an analytical and comparative approach, the author argues that Deleuze’s framework, grounded in the notions of movement-image and time-image, suffers from conceptual ambiguities inherited from Bergson, who conceives reality as a set of “images” whose ontological status remains unclear. As a result, Deleuze interprets cinema as a form of “acentred perception,” independent of any subject—an idea the author deems untenable from both cognitive psychology and genetic epistemology. Through historical examples ranging from the Lumière brothers to Welles, and including Eisenstein, Griffith and Hitchcock, the article demonstrates that cinema cannot be understood as an autonomous perceptual process but rather as a product of complex intellectual operations involving decentration, abstraction, reversibility and cooperative creative activity. The main objective is to show that an epistemology of cinema must be grounded in the comparison between cinematic structures and human cognitive processes, particularly perception, intelligence and narrative construction through editing, montage and audiovisual technology. The study concludes that although Deleuze’s theory illuminates certain aspects of cinema’s historical evolution, it is insufficient as a basis for an epistemology of film; instead, examining cinema through the lens of human cognition offers a more accurate understanding of its structure, production and epistemic potential.