• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Articles
  • Books
  • People

DeleuzeCinema.com

  • Films
  • Websites
  • Contact Us

An Imprint of Godzilla: Deleuze, the Action-Image and Universal History

September 30, 2018 by

David Deamer

This essay explores director Honda Ishiro’s 1954 monster flick Godzilla as a cultural artefact at the epicentre of Japanese cinema in the wake of the atom bomb. In respect to Deleuze’s taxonomy of film in the Cinema books, Godzilla becomes an example of what Deleuze calls an action-image imprint, the monster an object capturing up the emotions of Japanese post-war society. Godzilla is constructed through what Deleuze calls the five laws of the action-image (diagrammatized), laws which not only constitute the narration but also situate the story within a socio-historic environment aligned with Friedrich Nietzsche’s analysis of universal history. Such an exploration of the film not only gathers up previous readings, but extends and turns them in new directions. Godzilla, it is often claimed, simply substitutes the rampaging monster for destructive atom bomb. ‘An imprint of Godzilla’ comes to a very different conclusion.

Aspects of this essay are revisited and reworked in Deleuze, Japanese Cinema, and the Atom Bomb: The Spectre of Impossibility (Bloomsbury, 2014), where the reading extends to the fourteen sequels of the Showa series (1954-1975).

 

Citation: 
Deamer, David. “An Imprint of Godzilla: Deleuze, the Action-Image and Universal History.” Deleuze and Film. Ed. David Martin-Jones and William Brown. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ Press, 2012. Print.
Title of Book: 
Deleuze and Film
Author: 
Deamer, David

Filed Under: Books

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • The Squid Cinema From Hell
    Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulumedia
  • Cinema Against Doublethink
    Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History
  • Contemporary Political Cinema
  • You tube channel with a research for the signs of the Cinema works
  • Webdeleuze

Archives

Website established with generous support from the University of St Andrews (2011-2013).
Website maintained with generous support from the University of Glasgow (2014-present).

Copyright © 2021 · Twenty Seven Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in