DescriptionThis dissertation provides a new philosophical periodization of Russian film history according to Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema volumes. Chapter One argues that Deleuze’s film-philosophy should not be disengaged from its larger metaphysical basis provided in his Difference and Repetition, since the latter structurally organizes his overall argument in Cinema volumes. I demonstrate that Deleuze’s reading of Euro-American cinema is framed according to his theory of the dynamic genesis modeled after the three syntheses of time and the doctrine of the faculties derived from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgment: the first synthesis of the present provides the ground for the movement-image, the second synthesis of the past underlies the structure of the Bergsonian crystal-image, and the third synthesis of the future gives the way to the thought-image. Viewed in the context of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze’s Cinema project presents itself as a cinematic version of the epistemological progression of the image from matter to the virtual through the faculties of sensibility, memory and thought. Chapter Two contextualizes this progression within the historical evolution of Russian cinema. Given its long imprisonment within the doctrinal confines of socialist realism, Russian cinema begins its ascendance toward the virtual only after Stalin’s death in 1953, i.e. in the Thaw era when the Soviet action-image undergoes a definitive crisis. Chapter Three explores the second synthesis of time exemplified by Andrei Tarkovsky’s crystal-images. I argue that Tarkovsky’s emphasis on time and memory shares intrinsic affinity with Bergson’s philosophy and that his visual poetics of specular reciprocity could be explained as that of resonance between divergent film components. Chapter Four examines the emergence of the Soviet thought-image in Alexander Askoldov, Vadim Abdrashitov, Necrorealism and Alexander Sokurov, whose poetics follows the logic of the third disjunctive synthesis which foregrounds caesura between film components as the main principle of cinematic representation. In the light of such alternative genealogy, I argue that the historical coincidence of the collapse of the Soviet empire and the appearance of the thought-image in Russian cinema in the late 1980s testifies to the revolutionary potential of cinematic thinking promoted by Deleuze.