In Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze distinguishes two regimes of audiovisual thought. In the regime of the movement-image, such thought is constituted by two processes. The first, differentiation/integration, expresses a whole that changes through the intermediary of the shifting relationships between the objects and people on screen. The second, specification, gives images a determinate function in a sensory-motor schema, through which perceptions are linked to actions in rational intervals of movement. With the regime of the time-image, as I understand it, thought instead comes to mean, as Deleuze puts it in Foucault, to experiment and problematize, and “knowledge, power, and the self are the triple root of a problematization of thought” (95). It is my argument in this thesis that Deleuze’s work on cinema is of great utility in carrying out filmic analyses that seek to detect and draw out the consequences of strategies of filmmaking that make knowledge, power, and self problematic. Furthermore, such a mode of analysis is particularly valuable in attending to new films that confront us with novel means of organising problematic audiovisual thought. My arguments are made through consideration of two films each from four directors: Wong Kar-wai, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Pedro Costa, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. While there are many important differences between the works of these filmmakers, their films nevertheless lend themselves to an approach that seeks to determine how thought becomes problematic in specific cases. Similarities and resonances are brought out between these films and those that Deleuze uses himself in making his arguments and shaping his concepts, but I also identify new problems that we encounter in the works of these filmmakers, which extend the range of meaning of some of those concepts. One such concept that is of particular importance in this thesis is “belief in the world”. There is always something in those films that pass into the regime of the time-image that is asystematic, which breaks up and multiplies thought, multiplies the thinkers we are made to inhabit. Our relation to the world of the film is therefore unstable and uncertain, and calls for belief, since films themselves in this regime produce new links between humans and the world, rather than firmly establishing a realistic state of things, a temporal and spatial matrix that accords with that which we experience in everyday existence. Such films thus make us receptive to a thought different from that interiorised thought through which, as Nietzsche writes, the apparatus of knowledge abstracts, simplifies, and takes possession of the world and others (Will, no. 503, 274).

Ce travail de recherche tente de redéfinir l’émancipation intellectuelle et sensible que permettent certaines expériences cinématographiques. « Le spectateur, pour l’auteur, n’est autre qu’un autre auteur » écrivait Pasolini. Danièle Huillet et Jean-Marie Straub, Harun Farocki et Pedro Costa (mais également Jean-Claude Rousseau,James Benning, Robert Kramer, ou parmi les jeunes cinéastes, Wang Bing, Albert Serra et Lisandro Alonso) inventent des dispositifs cinématographiques qui profanent le cinéma. En déconstruisant le langage cinématographique, en mettant au jour leur« armature artistique », les films profanes libèrent et transmettent des énergies, des capacités d’imagination et de production (ou création). Les cinéastes profanes ne se déclarent pas éducateurs ou enseignants. Leur fonction n’est pas de communiquer un message, de donner une leçon ou de transmettre un savoir au spectateur. Ils considèrent le spectateur comme un égal, « un collègue éventuel ». Ils disséminent les traces de leur travail dans leurs films. Le spectateur peut alors recueillir ces traces afin de reconstruire une méthode de production, de fabrication, d’un film. La transmission d’une méthode (ou d’une énergie créative) nécessite une rencontre entre un cinéaste qui a l’intention de transmettre – par la bande – un savoir faire, une manière de représenter, de mettre en image une expérience, et un spectateur qui reconnaît dans les traces la maîtrise de l’auteur et souhaite l’exproprier de ce savoir faire. / This research work tries to redefine sensitive and intellectual emancipation that allows some cinematographic experiments. "The Viewer, for the author, is other than another author" wrote Pasolini. Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, Harun Farocki and Pedro Costa (but also Jean-Claude Rousseau, James Benning, Robert Kramer, or among young filmmakers, Wang Bing, Albert Serra and Lisandro Alonso) invented cinematographic devices that profane film. By deconstructing the film language, by updating their "artistic frame", profane films release and transmit energy, imagination and production (or creation) capabilities. Profane filmmakers do not declare themselves educators or teachers. Their function is not to communicate a message, give a lesson or to transmit knowledge to the Viewer. They consider the Viewer as an equal, "a potential colleague. They spread the traces of their work in their films. The spectator can then collect these traces in order to reconstruct a method of producing, manufacturing, a film.The transmission of a method (or a creative energy) requires an encounter between a filmmaker who intends to pass - band - know-how, a way to represent, implement image a viewer who recognizes in traces the mastery of the author and wishes to expropriate this know-how and experience.