The Cinema books of Gilles Deleuze are a maze of mirrors. An encounter between film and philosophy where philosophy and film produce ideas: film through images, philosophy through concepts. The Cinema books enmesh images and concepts developing a complex taxonomy of signs: a cinematic semiosis – a cineosis. Always an alliance between the two intensive surfaces, sometimes the cineosis is a shining path, sometimes a trajectory through convex and concave recursions. Deleuze is Daedalus, the cunning architect and builder of labyrinths. And the reader sometimes the Minotaur, sometimes Ariadne, sometimes Theseus. Film philosophy (film theory, cinematic thought) – for Deleuze – is neither the site of a privileged discourse by philosophy on film, nor film finding its true home as philosophy. Neither discipline needs the other. Yet together philosophy and film can create adventures: correspondences, resonances, relations – coalesce, discover secret escapes, silences and ellipses. This is the cineosis: a complex matrix of ideas, concepts and images, signs. And this complexity is a consequence of the complexities of both film and philosophy. Accordingly, while the Cinema books outline a rigorous development and proliferation of elements (appropriated, displaced, half-forgotten and neologistic), they are also composed through elusive and allusive writing processes. Deleuze wants the reader to explore, become lost, find their way once more, be tested and test themselves: for this is the purpose of his film philosophy – to create an atmosphere for thought.

The Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images explicates and exposes some of the complexities of Deleuze's cineosis. To do so, each of the introductions takes a different approach, exploring the cineosis from one of three different standpoints: a philosophical genealogy of the taxonomy; a serial procession of component elements; and a dynamic encounter between the cineotic signs and the movies. These films are all taken from the first two decades of the second century of cinema, a period as vibrant and creative as any in the history of film: they include Inception (Christopher Nolan, USA | UK, 2010); Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand et al., 2010);