Not the best book of film criticism/theory I've read, but certainly interesting. The affection-image in particular is something that will undoubtedly affect how I watch and enjoy cinema.

This is a brilliant analysis of how the history of film impacted its form, its style and the technological advancements of it. Deleuze argues that before WW II cinema can best be defined by looking at how directors attempted to capture movement and how that movement is related to time. As a a result of these developments, Deleuze argues that cinema is the logical progression in the development of human thought (philosophy) so that cinema represents the ways in which the mind, body, and time constantly relate and react to form some type of human experience.
Deleuze displays a passion for abstract ideas and a refined sense of the technical qualities of film and how those qualities may be used to make films. For anyone interested in thinking more deeply about cinema and philosophy this is a must read.

Breaks down cinema to its most semiotic: the image. I have some reservations about the relation of certain types of films transposed against what “image” Deleuze duscusses but there’s some really essential stuff here on hawks, Ford, Losey, Herzog, and especially Eisenstein. Made me sit back in ponder, stroke my chin and furrow my brow.

While there are solid theoretical sections of this book, the hardest part of reading it is having the cinematic references Deleuze is writing about. This book is excellent from the considering the film references I have access to, but the difficulty is (1) that he wrote without consideration of how cinematic reference might change, and (2) he isn't clear about the separation between metaphysics and film theory, which makes it hard to interpret which parts of this book I "need" from film or from metaphysics.

I need a compendium, annotated work, or interactive publication to really feel like I understand. But from my 2nd-ary reading so far, this isn't a limitation fo Deleuze's theory so much as a difficulty of the technology at the moment of publication.