With a small but important handful of exceptions, the chapters are quite short and easy to read, with minimal overtly ‘academic’ language. Encompassing punchy and substantial review essays of individual films, charged quasi-manifestos and political critiques of contemporary cinema, wide-ranging interviews, and some much more elaborated philosophical accounts of cinema per se, the book ultimately offers a striking, chronologically arranged portrait of Badiou’s developing response to what he asserts is the most important and philosophically significant modern form. ‘Of all the arts,’ he suggests in the early pages, ‘this is certainly the one that has the ability to think’.

Although Badiou is clearly an admirer of much canonical ‘art cinema’, a consistent theme throughout much of the book for both political and philosophical reasons is the argument that film’s real strength is in being what he calls a ‘Saturday night art’, non-élitist, and democratic in the proper sense. Frequently citing Charles Chaplin’s films and F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) as examples of cinema reaching its zenith as a popular form, Badiou is less forthcoming about more recent accomplishments. Nearly all the films addressed in these pages exemplify art-house releases and are almost without exception Western in origin. These historical and cultural factors give Badiou’s otherwise immensely rewarding writing a slightly nostalgic and unconsciously Eurocentric tone.

The book’s introductory interview with Cinema’s editor, Antoine de Baecque, effectively sets up the different and sometimes conflicting attitudes that Badiou has held towards the cinema over many years, in which his fascination and frequent love is palpable, but so too is the crucial element of a radical-left political critique. Badiou suggests that, considering cinema’s unique strength for being ‘associated in an intense, unique way with the contemporary’, such a dialectically driven response should be hardly surprising. If we are necessarily conflicted about the modern world, so too surely will be our response to its primary media form and expression. The interview also sets up an even more important and (for a philosopher) striking theme in the book, with Badiou arguing that philosophy can get more out of cinema than vice versa.

The earliest piece here, a substantial essay from 1957, features in embryonic form some key Badiou ideas that will later be taken up with much more precision and depth, the political dimension for now largely absent. Things then hot up with a series of short, highly polemical texts from Badiou’s self-described Maoist period of the 1970s. Yet if the reader does not share his politics (essentially a non-party far leftism), it arguably matters little. Radical ‘commitment’ can, in the right hands, motivate productive questions and critique that transcend any perceived need for shared ideological positions. With its searing indictment of recent would-be radical narrative films, ‘Revisionist Cinema’ (1977) is a case in point. The essay’s account of such cinema as representing the politics of a ‘new bourgeoisie’ self-righteously opposing the ‘old bourgeoisie’ mired in postwar nihilism and decay (Ingmar Bergman is cited as the latter’s prime film essayist), one now purportedly on the side of, and even presumptuously speaking for, ‘the people’ yet in complete denial about its own vested interests, still reads as immensely relevant (just think pious ‘liberal Hollywood’), irrespective of whether we concur with Badiou’s own starting point.

A series of punchy 1980s pieces, the highlight of which is a bullet-point missive on Jean-Luc Godard (whose films are touchstones for Badiou throughout the book), suggest something of a midway between politically imbued critique and burgeoning philosophical inquiry. Beginning in the 1990s, the latter dimension really starts to flower, as does Badiou’s more fully integrated account of film. Rather than simply the Seventh Art, we read in ‘The False Movements of Cinema’ (1997) that film ‘is an impure art. Indeed, it is the “plus-one” of the arts, both parasitic and inconsistent.’ This, he writes, is ‘its force as a contemporary art’. Meanwhile, the following essay, ‘Can a Film Be Spoken About?’ (1998), should arguably be set on every university film studies course for its forthright, clearly enunciated discussion of why saying we ‘liked’ a film doesn’t get us very far at all in trying to understand it.

Badiou’s particular notion of the ‘event’ (which has often eluded new readers) is here given precise shape in a long 1998 Cahiers du cinéma interview, in which he explores what for him is its exemplar, ‘May 1968’. More than his own interest and revolutionary politics, Badiou sees this famous and forever contested event as the key example of what is, or should be, the prime interest of both philosophy and cinema: seeking to foment and understand a ‘rupture’ (another frequently used word), a moment when unpredictable change, creativity and futures seem palpable. After discussing in the interview how such an event is far from transformational for the majority culture (the June 1968 French elections saw a resounding victory for the right) yet has its complex, multiple subterranean effects, in a later piece from 2005 Badiou goes on to explore with much contextual detail one of the great filmic reflections on the rather depressing post-1968 years, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s film Tout va bien (1972).

For me, Cinema’s remarkable centrepiece arrives in the form of a transcribed 2003 lecture given in Buenos Aires and published here for the first time as ‘Cinema as Philosophical Experimentation’. While the subsequent essay, ‘On Cinema as a Democratic Emblem’ (2005), offers a more polished and partial version of its contents, the lecture, despite some repetition, works like a crystal through which Badiou’s prime film-philosophy claims are given their most magisterial expression, enfolding the personal, political, and philosophical in a fully integrated way. In this detailed account of cinema’s secret power – including a whole section called ‘Tribute to Gilles Deleuze’, appropriately crediting the famous French philosopher for, in many respects, initiating the ever-escalating film-philosophy exchange with his seminal 1980s books, Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 – Badiou writes that, while the older arts tend to start from an ‘aristocratic’ point, emphasising both cultural knowledge but also the ‘purity’ of blank page or canvas, cinema starts from the other end: the messy ‘impurity’ and excess of the world, trying to home in on whatever specialness might be gleaned there. In the former scenario, ‘the artist doesn’t have enough things; he has to create out of nothing’. For the cinema, ‘there are too many things, absolutely and always’. For this reason, Badiou asserts, even film ‘masterpieces’ feature much that is banal, frivolous, and unnecessary. But this is precisely why cinema both remains the art most closely engaged with modern reality and, he argues, exhibits what philosophy itself should be particularly concerned with – an emphasis on rupture and the unforeseen event. Hence Badiou’s summary of a good film’s ‘promise’ to the viewer: ‘The sudden appearance of something is always possible … Cinema is the miracle of the visible as an enduring miracle and as an enduring rupture. This is without a doubt the greatest thing we owe to cinema, and philosophy should try to understand it with its own devices.’

In addition to the above highlights, Cinema features often strikingly original pieces on a wide range of nonetheless almost entirely Western subjects (peppered with the odd reference to Japan’s canonical film-makers, Mizoguchi Kenji and Ozu Yasujiro): Jacques Demy, F.W. Murnau, Manoel de Oliveira, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Volker Schlöndorff, Guy Debord, Hugo Santiago, Udi Alondi, Clint Eastwood, French comedy films, Swiss cinema, filmic treatment of the Israel–Palestine issue, American cinema from 1999 such as The Matrix (compared with ExistenZ and Cube), and Magnolia, as well as multiple admiring but still rigorous essays on Godard.

Understood through the book’s finest material, a late essay from 2003 offers effective concluding remarks when Badiou writes that for all its charting of the world’s banality, indeed also ethical debasement and horror, cinema offers ‘a lesson of hope’ through showing ‘the possibility that something can happen even though the worst may prevail’. Distinct from the facile and nearly always ideologically complicit hope affirmed at the end of so many bad films, Alain Badiou charts the cinema’s offering of another kind – one we might better be able to believe in. It depends very much on whether the reader shares at least some of the hard-earned and always complicated love for such an impure, thereby inherently modern, politically and philosophically important form as presented so efficaciously in this book.