SOURCE: “As Time Goes By and By,” in New Statesman, Vol. 112, No. 2889, August 8, 1986, pp. 27-28.

In the following favorable review, Gordon perceives Cinema I as an “essay in the classification of filmic signs and images.”

Of all the famous French intellectuals of the last generation, Gilles Deleuze is probably the most underappreciated in this country and the most engaging. His international celebrity derives almost entirely from one book, The Anti-Oedipus (1972), an eccentric and gargantuan essay-pamphlet on ethics, politics and psychiatry which became a gauchiste bestseller in France and earned Deleuze and his co-author Félix Guattari a durable status as bogey figures of the older Marxist-Freudian new Left.

In France, where Deleuze is widely seen as, with Michel Foucault, the outstanding philosopher of his generation, his reputation has had a rather broader footing in an output of some 20 books including a series of studies of past thinkers which...