In “From One Image to Another,” Jacques Rancière offers one of the most illuminating evaluations of Gilles Deleuze’s film philosophy. Taken as a whole, the chapter presents a devastating critique of Deleuze’s theory of cinema. Rancière offers two distinct arguments: the first one addresses the connection between ontology and history; the second one involves the relationship between theory and its exemplification.

The tension between ontology and history in the Cinema books becomes apparent in the break Deleuze proposes between classical and modern cinema. Rancière questions whether an internal development in the natural history of images — the passage from the movement-image to the time-image — could correspond to the historical distinction between classical and modern cinema.[1] Rancière’s second argument takes issue with the way in which Deleuze interweaves the ontology of cinema with its fables. Rancière claims that, despite privileging the undetermined molecular world over the system of representation, Deleuze’s “analyses always come to center on the ‘hero’ of a story.”[2] Paradoxically, Deleuze’s attempt to do away with the representative tradition relies on an allegorical fable emblematic of the collapse of representation.