“Death-Images: Revisiting Deleuze’s ‘Time-Image’ in Cinema after 1985”

Abstract

Marking forty years since Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image, this special issue brings together essays on films and filmmakers working after 1985 whose practices develop new modalities of “death-images” that Deleuze could not have foreseen, yet which sharpen our understanding of what is at stake in his cinematic theory. Across the selected case studies, death is not treated uniformly; rather, its heterogeneous forms show that the death-image is not a single figure but a constellation of cinematic strategies through which time becomes thinkable. These analyses, which explore the convergence between “time-images” and Viegas’s conceptualization of “death-images” (2023), also reopen the broader question of what lies between the two Cinema volumes, and beyond them, in the conceptual evolution of the “time-image” itself. Thus, the special issue constructs a corpus capable of re-evaluating the time-image after 1985, while the essays demonstrate how contemporary “death-images” expand, challenge, and transform Deleuze’s insights, revealing how cinema continues to think about time (and life) through its manifold encounters with death.