The Scene of Action is DIfferent

Female agency in the films of Jean Renoir

“…In fact, although Deleuze's taxonomy illuminates the complex relationship between cinema and the human experience of time across films featuring some of the most famous female-centred films in cinema history -among them All About Eve (Mankiewicz, 1950), Lola Montès, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Varda, 1962) and Vivre sa vie (Godard, 1962) -it generally disregards questions of gender. Indeed, prior to the release of the English translations of Deleuze's Cinéma volumes, Keith Reader (1987) had already noted 'Deleuze's seeming blindness to questions of gender' (p. 102), and since then, D. N. Rodowick (1997) has similarly observed that Deleuze's film-focused work has 'little to say' on issues of sexual difference (p. xiii), while Elizabeth Grosz (2008) cautions that 'Deleuze is no feminist' (p. 216). 2 This absence is particularly surprising since Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue the following in Mille plateaux:…”