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In Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, Gilles Deleuze posits a huge change in the nature of cinematic time in the postwar years. In "Postscript on the Societies of Control," he also claims to identify a change in power relations and control strategies that takes in a number of other media transformations. Taken together, these arguments point toward a broader transformation in the history of thought that is developed across Deleuze's work, but also raise a number of problems. This essay will critique and rearticulate the terms of Deleuze's media philosophy in relation to work by Paul Virilio on media and warfare. This critique is organized around a study of the recent films of Jean-Luc Godard, which focus on the recurrence of the images of the mainstream culture industry and their transformation in wartime Sarajevo. It argues that Godard's work is concerned with a cinema of cliché, following Deleuze's conceptualization of cliché in Cinema 1 and Cinema 2, and that this raises important political dimensions to Deleuze's cinema philosophy and his theorization of media control.

Among the films of the Dziga Vertov group, a Marxist-Leninist group led by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin between 1967 and 1973, there are two of them which naturally escape the accusation of austerity, which usually focuses on militant film productions. Vladimir and Rosa (1970) and everything goes well (1972). While these films deserve our attention, they beat a subversive comic power without concealing their radical political influence or taste for theory. A heterogeneous scene with the opposite: popular rire and theory of class struggle, Burlesc gesture to the American and radicality of experimental figures, Karl Marx and Marx Brothers. While the move to the Comic Register has considerably opacified the reception of these two films, it coincides with a certain reassessment of the idea of political cinema itself. Aware of the difficulty of reconciling images and concepts, Godard and Gorin are abandoning the overwhelming view offered to them by the theory to dive into the materiality and humanity of fighting. In this way, they avoid the major stumbling block of the film activist of their time: didactism, which is generally enough to cut the films of their target audience altogether. Humour is a language that is used to be more natural to the ears of the popular class, but above all it is a very precise way of speech, leading to a more equitable relationship between the author and the viewer. Through their marxist re-appropriation of the Burlesc tradition (depiction of film-makers in idiots, tastings, sketchs, use of regional accents, extravagant gestures, absurd humour, etc.), Godard and Gorin are working to transform their cinema practice in the name of a principle of autoderision that does not forget its marxist roots. From a figurative point of view, humour could well be the prime instrument of this film policy, which defeats the strength of the strengths and creates the skills of the weak, humanising the former and offering the latter the body that was denied to them in the social order. Because the ...