The Latvian publisher Aminori, together with the Latvian Academy of Culture, has completed the translation of the first part of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s seminal two-volume book Cinema. Deleuze (1925–1995) is one of the most important thinkers, theorists and semioticians of cinema, whose ideas on the image of movement and time have influenced several generations of filmmakers, scholars and philosophers.

The publication of the first part of Deleuze’s Cinema, translated by Dace Līdumniece, is an important event in the development of theoretical thought on cinema in Latvia, especially since professional literature on the topic in Latvian is scarce. In Cinema, part 1 and 2 published in 1983 and 1985 respectively, Deleuze links the concepts of philosophy and cinema. In the preface to the French edition, Deleuze explains that his study is not a history of cinema but rather a taxonomy – an attempt to classify images and signs.

In the epilogue to the book, Andrejs Balodis, the scientific editor of the Latvian edition, writes: “To think cinematically within philosophy means to place concepts on the screen, on the surface, to study them in the body and the brain, to play out dramas and relationships between them, to investigate conceptual crimes, to sink into the passions of the characters. This method of Deleuze’s is characteristic of his philosophy as a whole, and Cinema thus becomes a kind of illustration and summary of this approach.”

This translation of Deleuze’s work is published with the support from the State Cultural Capital Foundation.