Educational Media Reviews Online

Celebratory, rather than expository, this documentary features interviews with eight artists of different media sharing their enthusiasm for the theories and ideas of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), one the most influential French postmodernist philosophers of the 20th century. Though much of Deleuze’s extensive and challenging corpus is engaged with the history of Western philosophy, including social and political philosophy, his expansive breadth of interests also reached out to extended treatments of literature, the arts, music, architecture, and cinema, which the documentary reflects, though without much clarity for the uninitiated viewer.

The artists featured in the film include American architect Greg Lynn, Dutch architect Lars Spuybroek, American hip hop musician DJ Spooky, American abstract painter Lydia Dona, Dutch organization and economic theorist Bernard Cache and, providing a modicum of explanatory content, a professor of film studies at University of Amsterdam. Each of the artists shares their understanding of the inspiration they draw from Deleuze, and how their work reflects or instantiates particular ideas he developed, such “nomadism”, involving movement and change unfettered by any central organizing force, and the “rhizome”, involving dynamic multiplicity without unity. (The style of the documentary itself reflects director Ijsbrand van Veelen’s attempt to instantiate these ideas stylistically.) While the artists’ accounts and illustrations of these ideas in their work is provocative, viewers lacking acquaintance with these ideas directly in Deleuze’s formidable prose or through the secondary literature will have difficulty making their way through the film.