Given that many of the more prominent members of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image (SCSMI) were contributors to David Bordwell and Noël Carroll’s edited collection, Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies,[1] it might seem strange to put a conference report of its 2010 meeting alongside a report of the 2010 Deleuze Studies Conference.

For, in his opening broadside against theory, Noël Carroll comes straight out and says that the growth of (North American) film studies over the two decades preceding the publication of his and Bordwell’s book had been influenced — negatively in his eyes — by, among others, Gilles Deleuze.[2]

That said, Deleuze only gets mentioned a handful of times in Post-Theory’s significant number of pages and, Carroll aside, he does not really come in for much criticism. (And it is worth noting that Carroll’s beef is mainly with those that use Deleuze, and not with Deleuze’s work itself.)

The next year, David Bordwell mentions Deleuze in one of his solo works, On the History of Film Style, but only to give a very brief overview of the Frenchman’s two Cinema books, before, some thirty pages later, griping that Deleuze has “seized upon the findings of traditional film historians and reinterpreted them according to a preferred Grand Theory.”[3]