Raymond Bellour: Cinema and the Moving Image 9781474422901

Citation preview

Raymond Bellour

Raymond Bellour. Photographed by Dan Dennehy for the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A., October 6, 2000.

Raymond Bellour Cinema and the Moving Image With Selections from an Interview with Raymond Bellour

Hilary Radner and Alistair Fox

For Christian Metz and Thierry Kuntzel, with gratitude for their kindness, erudition, and inspiration

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cuttingedge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © Hilary Radner and Alistair Fox, 2018 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2288 8 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2289 5 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2290 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2291 8 (epub) The right of Hilary Radner and Alistair Fox to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Preface ix Introduction: Cinema and Its Discontents: The Place of Raymond Bellour in Film Theory from the Twentieth to the Twenty-first  Century Hilary Radner

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Part 1 Raymond Bellour: Cinema and the Moving Image Hilary Radner   1. Film Analysis: Image and Movement   2. The Digital Challenge: From the Theater to the Gallery   3. Cinema and the Body: The Ghost in the Theater   4. An Elegy for Cinema

11 33 52 70

Part 2 Bellour by Bellour: Selections from an Interview conducted by   Gabriel Bortzmeyer and Alice LeRoy in December 2015 Translated and Edited by Alistair Fox   5. Formative Influences   6. Film Analysis and the Symbolic   7. Thierry Kuntzel and the Rise of Video Art   8. Arrested Images and “the Between-Images”  9. Spectators, Dispositifs, and the Cinematic Body 10. Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality

91 105 119 130 145 155

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Part 3 Biography and Publications of Raymond Bellour Alistair Fox Raymond Bellour (1939–  ): A Biographical Sketch A Select Annotated Bibliography of the Publications of Raymond  Bellour

177 185

Select List of Sources Cited 210 Index 217

Acknowledgments

Many people have contributed to the genesis and development of this volume. I particularly wish to acknowledge the Translation Committee of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and its, then, chair, Masha Salazkina who enabled the translation (by Alistair Fox) and the publication of a chapter from Le Corps du cinéma in Cinema Journal 53.3 (2014), with a brief introduction, which I wrote with Cecilia Novero – the first step in moving toward this current volume. A number of scholars, not the least of all Raymond Bellour himself, provided invaluable advice and support when I was generating the proposal itself, including Martine Beugnet, Anne Gillain, Murray Pomerance, Michel Marie, and Tom Schatz. I would also like to record a special thanks to Christa Blümlinger, who was unfailingly encouraging about the project. I also wish to thank the Humanities Division of the University of Otago, New Zealand, for awarding me a Research Grant to pursue the project and my Head of Department Professor Takashi Shogimen who supported my proposal. My students Alex Dickie, Sophie Gilmore, and Campbell Walker may have wearied of my obsession, but were always full of lively comments and intuitions. Frédéric Dichtel, our research assistant, was, as always, a staunch and loyal companion in our many wrestling matches with the French language. Carolijn Guytonbeck read and annotated a draft of the interview (with contagious enthusiasm), and Allan Cameron and Cecilia Novero also provided us with valuable information. Alistair Fox wishes to acknowledge a special debt of gratitude to the librarians at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, unfailing in their courtesy and helpfulness during several months tracking down Bellour’s publications in the sources in which they originally appeared. We also benefited from the thoughtful and tempered intellectual excitement conveyed to us by the press’s readers in their reports. Finally, we wish to thank Gillian Leslie at the Edinburgh University Press, who believed in the project from the beginning and who has proven to be the most understanding and encouraging of editors.

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In a final note, I wish to highlight the contributions of my partner on this project, Alistair Fox, who, in addition to producing the biography and annotated bibliography that constitute the third section of this book, edited, annotated, and translated the interview that comprises the second part of the volume, furnished numerous notes on my own opening chapters, rectifying and clarifying my thought and style, and finally compiled the select list of works cited that concludes the volume. One could not ask for a better helpmeet in scholarship and in life. Hilary Radner

Preface

Some may think that to attempt a synthetic overview of Raymond Bellour’s major contributions to what is now known as film and media theory constitutes a violation of the very principles that he advocates, the most crucial being an attentiveness to specific art works, whether it be a film, a poem, or an installation, over time. Not coincidentally, he titles the longer version of the interview included here, published in French in September 2017 with Rouge Profond, as Dans la compagnie des œuvres, “In the Company of the Work,” or even “In the Presence of the Work.” For Bellour, art comes before theory. Furthermore, for Bellour, whatever we can say about art will always be inadequate and incomplete with regard to the experience of the work itself. Nevertheless, this volume proposes to offer a route, un parcours, into a very thickly wooded terrain of dense vegetation that must be examined in detail to understand its full effect and import. Bellour’s corpus chronicles a complex journey, marked by twists and turns, that takes place over half a century, in which he explores the evolving new worlds of the moving image. His careful recording of that journey is such that the reader will inevitably find many points of entry (“des passages,” in Bellour’s terms), through which he or she may join this scholar on his multi-faceted voyage of discovery. This study aims to offer one such point of entry, un passage, to the interested reader in the hope that she or he will find it useful in forming an understanding of this significant scholar’s contribution to our knowledge of twentieth-century cinema and its avatars in the twenty-first century. Bellour’s writing style itself presents a potential impediment for the English-language reader, especially those with academic intentions. Philippe Azoury, writing for the trendy French publication Les Inrockuptibles, in his review of Bellour’s third volume of collected articles, L’Entre-images 2: mots, images,1 explains, “The thought [thought-process] of Bellour is new, because it reacts though trafficking, rhizomes, hypertexts.”2 Azoury also notes that in the two volumes L’Entre-images and L’Entre-images 2,3 published ten years apart, “Bellour refers more and more frequently to the writings of Blanchot

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on Mallarmé,” suggesting the “French-ness” of the tradition in which Bellour himself approaches the work of art – that is, an approach that is deliberately hermetic, in a way that is characteristic of modernism itself. One element that is missing from this investigation is a detailed discussion of the works with which Bellour engages – “les œuvres” that his writing serves to draw to our attention. This choice was made not only with a view to a certain economy of analysis and comprehension, but also because many of the most important of these works, and Bellour’s view of them, are signaled in the Annotated Bibliography of his publications in Part Three of this book. It is essential to remember, however, that a full grasp of the import and impact of Bellour’s thought in its entirety requires a sustained investment both in the more speculative dimension of his scholarship, and also in the works – film, art, and literature – that, borrowing from the subtitle of his latest book, “accompany” him. A viewing or reading of them is a necessary complement to finding un passage into the thought of this innovative scholar and writer. Hilary Radner Notes 1. Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-images 2: mots, images (Paris: P.O.L, 1999). 2. “La pensée de Bellour est nouvelle, puisqu’elle réagit par trafics, rhizomes, hypertexts.” Philippe Azoury, review of L’Entre-images 2: mots, images by Raymond Bellour, lesinrocks.com, November 30, 1998, http://www.lesinrocks.com/ cinema/films-a-l-affiche/lentre-images-2-mots-images/, accessed May 22, 2017. 3. Bellour, L’Entre-images 2; Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-images: photos, cinéma, vidéo. (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1990).

Introduction Cinema and Its Discontents: The Place of Raymond Bellour in Film Theory from the Twentieth to the Twenty-first Century

by Hilary Radner Raymond Bellour, while one of the most influential early theorists of cinema and the moving image, remains less well known among contemporary film scholars than he should be, even though he has exerted a formative influence on the field at large. One reason for this neglect is that his work is scattered across a myriad of essays published in French, the majority of which have not been translated into English. Bellour has also shown himself to be an exceptionally subtle and complex thinker, which makes it doubly difficult to gain an overall impression of the coherency of his thought. A characteristic of his approach that is often baffling to readers trained in Anglo-American traditions is an awareness of the complexities inherent in any proposition, acknowledgement of which undermines the possibility of reaching a definitive conclusion based on simple generalizations. He also displays a propensity for metaphoric and other figurative forms of expression that can render his propositions elusive. In consequence, he often appears to contradict himself over time. Notwithstanding the fact that his way of thinking lies outside the mainstream of twentieth and twenty-first century film and media theory, the trajectory of his thought and his careful recording of his intellectual responses to developments in film as a medium, a technology, and an art provide a kind of signage that marks out the significant debates in research on the moving image over a period of more than fifty years. The purpose of this book, then, is to provide a pathway through his works that should lead the AngloAmerican reader to a better appreciation and understanding of Bellour’s theories and perspectives on a range of important topics that are currently topics of renewed interest and debate within film and media scholarship. It will do so by focusing on what may be regarded as a nexus of issues that form the core of his practice. The coherency inherent in this large body of writing derives, at least in part, from the way that it represents a practice of analysis that developed and evolved with the emergence of cinema studies as a field of scholarly research. Through this practice, Bellour initiated and developed modes of analysis

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and perspectives that, while extremely influential, were soon incorporated as givens into scholarly research on film. To a certain extent, his formative input at times remained unacknowledged because his approach had become “naturalized” as part of what it means to be a film scholar in the late twentieth century and early twentieth. Contemporary attitudes toward his contributions to the area of film analysis offer a particularly salient example of how his importance as a foundational theorist is frequently underappreciated. He was, in fact, among the first film scholars, and certainly one of the most influential, to look at popular American cinema with the same attention and respect that would be given to a novel or a great work of art – in other words, to see these films principally as aesthetic objects. In addition, Bellour’s work sets him apart from other notable French scholars of the second half of the twentieth century, such as Roland Barthes and Christian Metz, because its trajectory moves from considering the singularity of cinematic experience in the period of classical cinema to discussing new forms of spectatorship under the aegis of digital media in the twentyfirst century. As Bellour’s oeuvre encompasses this historical juncture, a reconsideration of his impact on film theory is both necessary and timely. In the first instance, however, his writings and perspectives, in spite of their undeniable impact, remain difficult to classify. He began his career by writing film reviews for a general public in Lyon, while simultaneously completing an M.A. thesis (the equivalent to a Ph.D. in most universities today) on the poetry of the esoteric writer and artist Henri Michaux. While best known in the English-speaking world for his work on cinema and video art, he nevertheless did not abandon literature when he turned to film theory and criticism; indeed, his interests in, and explorations of, literature continued to inform his scholarship throughout the twentieth century, culminating in a Pléiade three-volume edition of the work of Henri Michaux.1 An attachment to the word and the literary work would continue to inform his relations to cinema as something that needed to be translated into written language. Perhaps in consequence, his approach to film has been marked by a double movement: a fascination with the image and a need “to read” and explain the work in its textual detail. Although he abandoned his role as a film reviewer once he had begun to work on film as an object of scholarly inquiry, he continues to underline that his work arises out of his initial role as a critic: “I started as a film reviewer,” he maintains as recently as October 2016.2 The first characteristic of his scholarship is, then, that it remains linked to the idea of a work with which an initial confrontation, an “encounter” as he calls it, is at the origin of any project of analysis. This confrontation with, or experience of, the work, and its close reading or viewing (depending on the terminology of the discipline in question) remain at the heart of any analysis that may



Introduction

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subsequently emerge. The work comes first, before theory, in a process that is explicitly inductive. A second characteristic of his approach is that it is inhabited by nostalgia for the past – for the cinema as Bellour once experienced it, notably before the advent of television. While his fascination has led him to attempt to describe, to reanimate the image, in particular the photograph and its near neighbor, the moving image, through words, he also continually emphasizes the actual impossibility of this project. To announce defeat before the battle has been fought does not necessarily recruit supporters to a cause. As a result, many scholars who in one way or another remained wedded to a practice of close analysis, of reading a film in terms of its most minute formal details, such as David Bordwell, lost interest in his publications, meaning that many of the latter have remained untranslated. Another consequence of this obsession with describing the image is a singular attentiveness to the object; cinema, the moving image (rather than philosophy), provides his moments of inspiration, meaning that his writing fails to be as philosophical as philosophers may wish, while being overly abstract for scholars whose interests arise out of certain Anglo/American traditions such as genre studies. For many scholars who went on to become engaged with post-structuralism, Bellour’s perspective remained overly mired in a certain kind of empiricism that ran counter to their practice. This is not by accident, because Bellour has always asserted his ideological independence from successive trends in critical and cultural theory, refusing to align himself exclusively with any movement or school.3 The fact that his research fell into no particular camp, however, constituted an impediment in terms of his reception within the Anglo/American context. This resistance to the conventions of scholarship was underlined by the fact that he did not encourage acolytes, and was reluctant to supervise Ph.D. students who, had they been successful, would have introduced him to younger generations of film students. This reticence notwithstanding, his approach has had a major effect on a number of American academics, many of whom went on to hold academic appointments in which they, in turn, became influential in the field of film studies. For whatever reasons, in spite of the fact that his name is recognized by almost all scholars working in film theory today, very little of it has been translated into English. His most notable legacy has manifested itself in attention to the detail of a film, a gesture that came more naturally to scholars in film and literature, rather than in communication studies, a subject area in which many film programs are increasingly incorporated, which accounts, at least to some degree, for this neglect. As Bellour explains in the interview included in this volume, his method is

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inductive, taking as its point of departure specific details, the isolated example, rather than a larger hypothesis that may inspire him deductively to seek examples from specific films that illustrate his model (as is the case, for example, with the philosopher Slavoj Žižek in his analysis of Alfred Hitchcock).4 As Constance Penley points out in her preface to Bellour’s Film Analysis, belatedly published in English in 2000,5 this method (if one wishes to call it that) was prominent in the development of feminist film theory, which initially evolved out of a close reading of various films, often now considered iconic, in which the part is taken as representing the whole. Bellour’s approach to film analysis is also discernable in the ongoing tradition of formal analysis inaugurated by David Bordwell and represented by his and Kristin Thompson’s textbook Film Art: An Introduction,6 repeatedly re-published over a period of thirty years. Bellour, however, is cited only in the earliest versions. Another animating force, in addition to his attention to the details of the work, that extends throughout Bellour’s research, is a marked preference – one may say even nostalgia – for the films of the past, starting with those that populated his relatively brief period as a film critic, and extending back to the beginning of the twentieth century, including the experience of a cinema that was characterized by of a mode of viewing that, by its very nature, could never be repeated. If his scholarship in the field that is now loosely known as film analysis constituted an attempt to recreate the moving image through its analysis in words, his nostalgia for a certain cinema also projected him into a future in which cinema in his terms was no longer possible. He was very early implicated as a critic, curator, and researcher in experiments in what are now known as time-based art installations, and has gone as far as to say, in 2013, that over the last decade he found more “cinema” at the Venice Biennale than at the Venice Film Festival.7 This focus on what some scholars call “new media” evolved from his investment in what he called the “entre-images,” a diffused space in which new kinds of images appear as a consequence of the interpenetration, translocation, and translations of different media forms, the existence of which led to an announcement of what he calls the “querelle des dispositifs” (the argument concerning, and the quarrel between, different dispositifs).8 A collection of articles gathered under this title appeared three years after his weighty volume Le Corps du cinéma (The Body of Cinema),9 a sequence that implies a false chronology in that, in both cases, these volumes include articles that had been published many years earlier. In La Querelle des dispositifs, Bellour affirms the death of cinema, aligning himself with other French intellectuals, most notably Jean-Luc Godard, for whom cinema as an art form and an institution had been transformed by new technologies and social practices to such an extent that it could no longer be recognized as such.



Introduction

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The concepts that animate Le Corps du cinéma, revolving around the emotions, hypnosis, and animality, have their roots in research by Bellour that dates back to the 1970s, and thus may initially seem unrelated to his focus on video and digital art in the decades that precede its publication; however, the focus on video and digital art put into relief for Bellour the specificity of cinema as it once was. In fact, Le Corps du cinéma itself offers a kind of postmortem examination of a cinema that no longer exists, dissecting it almost as a coroner would a corpse. He brings into play in this examination the notion of “body” in order to invoke the work of Daniel Stern, the American psychiatrist noted for his work on young children in the areas of developmental psychology and psychodynamic psychotherapy, who would have a sustained influence on Bellour’s thought.10 Bellour’s intellectual path has taken him from his beginnings as a reviewer for a cinema that, by his own admission, no longer exists, to becoming one of the primary apologists and supporters of the new moving image art that is located not in the theater, but in the gallery or museum. This evolution in his preoccupations means that his oeuvre is of particular value to a scholar who seeks to understand the place of cinema within the twentieth and twenty-first century as a historical phenomenon in which are implicated the significant shifts – in economic, cultural, and technological institutions – that have marked this period. At the same time, however, the sweeping expanse of his corpus suggests the difficulty of attributing the kind of sustained vision that Anglo/American readers, in particular, seek in a body of research. To a degree, then, Bellour himself seems deliberately to thwart any possibility of constructing something that may be deemed a method or set of premises out of his writing, as though he were imitating the illusiveness/ elusiveness that he attributes to the films (or rather the experience of them) that he discusses. In his most recent books, which include many chapters published earlier and revised for re-publication, a number of statements and ideas emerge that lend a greater degree of consistency to Bellour’s perspective than may at first be apparent. His larger project has been, proceeding inductively, to produce a definition of cinema – of what it was, and why we can no longer accurately understand the “screen narratives” of the twenty-first century as part of the same institution, even if these narratives – events or texts (depending on the point of view taken by the scholar) – have their origins in, and continue to maintain relations with, the cinema of the past, as well as with other art forms such as the theater, the novel, painting, and sculpture – the traditional arts as they have been described since the eighteenth century.11 Bellour’s collective writings, therefore, point to the arbitrariness with which certain disciplinary boundaries have tended to be defined. The film

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scholar is perplexed by the array of objects that provoke his interest, from literature to video art, as well as by his refusal to address, or even watch, television, which for many scholars in the field today constitutes a natural extension of classical Hollywood cinema defined as a mass medium, at least until the end of the twentieth century. Notwithstanding, his work provides crucial insight into the nature of the image in the twenty-first century, marked by a digital explosion of platforms and productions. The chapters that follow lay out in chronological order the primary ideas that inform the seven volumes of essays, from L’Analyse du film (Film Analysis)12 to his latest collection, Pensées du cinéma: les films qu’on accompagne, le cinéma qu’on cherche à ressaisir (literally, “thoughts of and about cinema: the films that accompany one, the cinema that one seeks to grasp again”),13 demonstrating their importance to an understanding of what persists of “cinema” as defined within contemporary visual culture. Notes  1. Henri Michaux, Œuvres complètes, ed. Raymond Bellour (with Ysé Tran) (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, vol. I, 1998; vol. II, 2001; vol. III, 2004).  2. Raymond Bellour, “Je viens de la critique,” November 8, 2016, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=9rBlfn-uFUo, accessed May 14, 2017.  3. Raymond Bellour, Alice Leroy, and Gabriel Bortzmeyer, Raymond Bellour: dans la compagnie des oeuvres: entretien avec Alice Leroy et Gabriel Bortzmeyer (Paris: Éditions Rouge Profond, 2017).  4. See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock) (New York: Verso, 1992).  5. Constance Penley, “Preface,” in Film Analysis, Raymond Bellour, ed. Constance Penley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), ix–xviii.  6. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 11th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2016).  7. Raymond Bellour, “La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations,” January 22, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq_QCi4d3sE, accessed May 15, 2017.  8. Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs: cinéma, installations, expositions (Paris: P.O.L, 2012).  9. Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L, 2009). 10. See, in this volume, Chapter Nine, “Spectators, Dispositifs, Hypnoses.” 11. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma. See also “Le Corps du cinéma. Entretien avec Raymond Bellour,” http://pourunatlasdesfigures.net/entretiens/le-corps-du-cin​ ema-entretie.html, accessed May 15, 2017. 12. Raymond Bellour, ed. Constance Penley, The Analysis of Film (Bloomington:



Introduction

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Indiana University Press, 2009); Raymond Bellour, L’Analyse du film (Paris: Édition Albatros, 1979; 2nd edition, Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1995). 13. Raymond Bellour, Pensées du cinéma: les films qu’on accompagne, le cinéma qu’on cherche à ressaisir (Paris: P.O.L, 2016).

Part One

Raymond Bellour Cinema and the Moving Image

by Hilary Radner

CHAPTER ONE

Film Analysis: Image and Movement

A Literary Sensibility Grounded in the French tradition of “explication du texte” as a means of approaching literature, and formed by his initial postgraduate work on French poetry (on Henri Michaux, in particular), Raymond Bellour was among the first film scholars to bring a French literary sensibility to the analysis of classical Hollywood film, which enabled him to recognize the rhetorical refinements of the cinematic medium and its potential for poetic expression. One of his most important contributions to the practice of film analysis, therefore, was his application of the techniques of literary analysis to the “body” of a film, specifically by paying close attention to shots, frame by frame, in order to identify the rhythms and repetitions that structure its presentation, as well as its apprehension by the spectator.1 His work in this area was widely circulated in the form of individual articles and book chapters in French and English, and then anthologized in a volume in French in 1979 (reprinted in 1995), with the latter belatedly translated into English as The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana Press, 2000). The studies included in this English-language book would prove influential because they provided a tool that served to highlight the sophistication of cinema as a visual medium, thereby lending it legitimacy as an art form. Bellour showed that the apparent transparency of film narrative masked the opacity of its mechanisms of expression, which owed their efficacy to a hidden complexity rivaling the hermetic strategies that had become the hallmark of modernism. The specificity of Bellour’s approach was shaped by a set of contradictory intellectual currents arising out of structuralism, on the one hand, especially the work of Christian Metz (a grammarian by training), expressed most obviously in the latter’s concept of the grande syntagmatique 2 and, on the other, by psychoanalysis (both Freudian and Lacanian), and by the later work of Roland Barthes. The influence of the latter led Bellour to an impasse in which

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his structuralist tendencies were at odds with his engagement with Barthes. This is expressed most vividly in his 1985 article “L’Analyse flambée,” translated somewhat misleadingly as “Analysis in Flames,”3 in which he was interpreted by scholars as announcing the death of film analysis – such as by Constance Penley in her preface to the English version of Film Analysis in 2000.4 This impasse is expressed most clearly in Bellour’s methodology, which is caught between his desire to codify the textual mechanisms of a given film and a sense that the meaning of any text will always escape any finalizing attempt to reveal it through a pre-determined analytic procedure. This dilemma resulted in Bellour (along with other French intellectuals such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) rejecting certain aspects of psychoanalysis, particularly as it informed his heretofore firm conviction in the centrality of the Oedipal moment as foundational to narrative forms. This conundrum coincided with the rise of new art forms that offered heretofore unexplored visual terrains, surfacing in response to new technologies that initially manifested themselves under the rubric of “video art.” Bellour pursued an investigation of these new art forms without abandoning, however, either the practice of film analysis, or his intellectual investment in cinema, as his later work attests, given that it includes a close analysis of Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1930 silent film Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday).5 His most recent book, Pensées du cinéma (Thoughts of and about Cinema), also contains many instances of film analysis.6 Segmentation The emphasis on segmentation in Bellour’s earliest work suggests his alliance with structuralism and its impact on his analytic approach, underlining the influence of Christian Metz (1931–93), who, in Bellour’s terms, sought to generate a “breakdown of the codifying units” that constituted the film narrative .7 Metz, reflecting his initial training as a grammarian, attempted to construct an exhaustive typology of the different organizational strategies employed in a segment as the smallest unit of narrative meaning, the accumulation of which constituted the film’s plot, or a narrative, as part of his investigation into cinema as a corollary of what is known in English as a language system, or a natural language (for example, French, Italian, or Mandarin). The shot – literally a continuous strip of film without ellipses in time and space – rarely constitutes a “segment” in and of itself, except in the case of the autonomous shot, that is, the equivalent of the scene in a play unrolling in real time, recorded continuously by a single camera. This strategy, although common in early cinema, was quickly superseded by the scene, which mimics



Film Analysis: Image and Movement

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the autonomous shot, but includes (sometimes minute) ellipses of time and space, and may be shot by several cameras running simultaneously. Scenes are comprised of shots that are subsequently edited for dramatic effect, and to achieve narrative economy. Narrative economy refers to the idea, for example (familiar to the screenwriter), that a film, in order to keep its viewer engaged and ultimately entertained, must balance the flow of information such that the viewer remains curious, but is not confused. By the 1960s, the decade in which both Bellour and Metz began their projects, films regularly deployed any number of strategies, manipulating time and the representation of space in order to control narrative pacing and invite the viewer’s emotional engagement, while inventively creating new strategies in response to a growing viewer sophistication and new technologies. The reality of these mutating practices created a phenomenon that forever defeated the attempts of those like Metz to achieve a definitive codification of the rules of film language. In the words of film scholars Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie, “The analysis of a film never ends because something to be analyzed will remain, regardless of the degree of precision or length achieved [by a given analysis].”8 Notwithstanding, the idea that film narrative and its construction at the level of editing depends upon a set of conventions has generated any number of handbooks on editing, and is now a staple of any course in which aspiring filmmakers are indoctrinated into the “art of film.” To a degree, as a culture, we have internalized the precepts that informed Metz’s project as recognized by Metz himself in an unpublished manuscript.9 Bellour’s approach, arising out of literary analysis (particularly of works by the modernist writer Henri Michaux, who sought to undermine and interrogate the conventions of rhetorical and lyrical expression) took a different slant. Rather than attempting to define a generalized set of rules, he sought to unravel the complexities of a given film sequence, or set of sequences. His emphasis on the segment reveals, however, a crucial commonality with Metz, in that for both of them cinema was not so much the art of the moving image, but of editing – of the possibility that film offered a linking of multiple images over time to make a particular statement or tell a particular story. La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), composed almost entirely of still images, demonstrates the broader influence of this perception. It is no accident that Marker, and this film in particular, were singled out by Bellour and other scholars of his generation for particular attention. Although Bellour was not overtly influenced by the notion of what is commonly called “the specificity thesis” (the idea that each art has formal properties that define it as such), his preoccupations suggested the way that a privileging of editing subtends both his approach as well as that of Metz, who, according to film scholar Dudley Andrew, argued that “[e]very artform, indeed every communicational system,

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has . . . a specific material of expression which marks it off from other systems.”10 Metz’s schematic description of what he called the grande syntagmatique du cinéma, is practically unknown to Anglophone film students today; however, sequence analysis, and the analysis of an entire film as a series of segments, remain common exercises in courses devoted to understanding film, a practice facilitated by the new media platforms and technologies available to film viewers, including film students, serious cinephiles, and dedicated fans. In France, a version of film analysis as it was initiated by Bellour and to a degree Metz was resurrected and kept alive through Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie’s L’Analyse des films, widely used as a textbook in France, with early editions dedicated to Raymond Bellour, who is acknowledged in the introduction as having initiated the research on which the volume is based. First published in 1988, Aumont and Marie’s book was published in a new edition in 1996, republished in 2004, with a further updated edition appearing in 2015.11 For Aumont and Marie, film analysis assumes that a film exists by itself as an autonomous, singular, unique work of art that creates a narrative through the use of sound and images. Through its formal attributes and narrative, a film thus is able to induce a specific effect in the spectator, but one that is inscribed in the evolving history of forms and styles.12 Even though film analysis as a practice has continued into the twenty-first century, the idea that “the narrative capacity of cinema” derives from, or was the “product of, the application of a code of interrelationships between shots” that can be defined, described, and catalogued13 as a taxonomic project has fallen by the wayside. The process of “segmentation” (while a crucial analytic tool in film and media analysis) is broadly understood as an interpretive strategy or a hermeneutic methodology, rather than a scientific, or empirically grounded method as such. Metz’s project to catalog or provide a handbook of film grammar on the order of those that were routinely furnished to school children, or those manuals that govern algorithmic theory in computer science today, has provoked little or no sustained engagement among twentyfirst century film theorists; however, an interest in the particular way in which a film is edited has been retained, with contemporary directors routinely attempting to reproduce particular sequences from famous or cult films,14 suggesting how ingrained the kinds of analyses initially performed by Bellour have become within a larger film culture. Bellour’s approach, in which he meticulously attempted to describe, and thus encompass, the specificity of particular films, has been routinely adopted by twenty-first century cinephiles, encouraged by filmmakers, for example, Quentin Tarentino, who mimic the visual rhetoric of earlier directors whom they admire. Thus, Bellour’s most enduring legacy in this area



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is the manner in which his work in the 1960s not only paved the way for, and encouraged, several generations of film scholars, but also those in the film industry whose business it was to create new films, by emboldening them to scrutinize the detail of a film’s organization at the level of editing and mise en scène. Precedent existed for the analysis of dialogue (literary studies) as well as the analysis of individual images in terms of composition (art history); however, the concerns of Metz and Bellour highlighted a new problematic, that of the relations between images as played out through time. The focus on montage, or editing (the word “montage” being the French word for “editing”), underlined the manner in which film, while a plastic art, mobilized time as the fourth dimension in a way heretofore only associated with performance. Unlike other kinds of performances, film’s passage through time was seen to be regulated and inscribed to a very high degree and could also be repeated with an unprecedented accuracy from a mechanical, if not experiential, perspective. Although projecting a film could entail subtle variations, these were viewed as being due not to the art work itself, but to imperfections in the technology available to “show” it; a comparable analogy, for example, would be in the case of faulty lighting that besmirches the exhibition of a painting, to a degree that the viewer’s experience of this work is forever marred by this seeming irregularity. A preoccupation with the ways in which new technologies were to create new relations between images, and with the performative aspect of the viewing experience itself, would mark Bellour’s subsequent engagement with the moving image over the next four decades. Similarly, the degree to which the experience of a film could be faithfully replicated would become a source of debate in Bellour’s later work, and within the field of film studies as a whole. A Genealogy of Film Scholars Bellour’s and Metz’s engagement with what Bellour refers to as the “materiality of film” (somewhat ironically with regard to a medium that consists of the projected play of light – the “games of light,” as the Germans used to call cinema, Lichtspiele)15 testifies to a shift in approach that marks their generation in opposition to that of André Bazin, a figure who looms large in France as the intellectual grandfather of any writer who seeks to take film seriously as a work of art on the same level as the paintings and, particularly, novels that constitute France’s cultural legacy. If cinema were to have a patron saint, André Bazin would be one of the strongest contenders. Deeply imbued with a certain form of Catholic thought associated with French intellectuals such as Guy Léger, a Dominican priest who taught philosophy at the Institut

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Catholique de Paris,16 he, in the words of film scholar Dudley Andrew, “in 1958 was in command of a complete, coherent, and thoroughly humanistic view of cinema.”17 Andrew quotes the French director Jean Renoir who said of Bazin, “He created a national art. After considering his writings I changed my filming plans.”18 For Metz and Bellour, cinema was, as it is today, “a field of research rather than a human reality,” as Andrew maintains it was for Bazin.19 As part of a generation that inaugurated cinema studies as a formal area of scholarly inquiry, Metz and Bellour changed the nature of the relation between writer and object, highlighting a break between what had been fundamentally a belletristic tradition, in which the line between a critic and a scholar was seldom drawn. By the 1960s, however, both roles, that of critic and that of scholar, had become professionalized and distinctive, with both Bellour and Metz enjoying high-profile appointments within the French academy on the grounds of their status as researchers: Bellour at the Centre national de recherches scientifiques (CNRS), and Metz at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). The term “science” is not without significance; with a view to the social legitimation of cinema studies and the humanities more generally, scholars in these fields sought to produce methodologies that corresponded to the criteria used to evaluate so-called scientific results in terms of “validity, reliability and generalizability.”20 Metz, in particular, was influenced by linguistics and semiotics as the science of signs and symbols.21 While Bellour would systematically deny that he sought to define a “method,” as evidenced in his interview included in this volume,22 he was nonetheless influenced by this same framework, as were subsequent scholars, such as the American David Bordwell, who developed an approach to film analysis that emphasized a formal and systematic description of the material elements of film style and narrative.23 In order to provide such a framework, Bordwell was obliged to remove any discussion of the meaning of a given film beyond the most rudimentary description of narrative events; in contrast, the meaning of a particular segment, its organization, and its description, remained a crucial focus of Bellour’s work on classical cinema, in which a very traditional interpretation of psychoanalysis also played a crucial role. Defining the Legible Text The form of analysis that defines Bellour’s approach to film in this early period borrows from Sigmund Freud in order to underline how the latent meanings of a film, expressed in visual terms, are presented as evolving over time (as in a dream). Such an approach cannot yield a definitive interpretation of a given work, a problem that Sigmund Freud encountered repeatedly



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in his analysis of patients and their dreams.24 Bellour’s work illustrates how a film’s meaning depends on a fluid, dynamic system, rather than on a defined static structure (the very structures that Metz’s work posited as underlying and generating cinema as a communicative system). Bellour’s conundrum is expressed in the first chapter of The Analysis of Film, titled “The Unattainable Text,” in which Bellour describes the capacity of film to elude a definitive interpretation. This notion of a text endlessly reinterpreted paved the way for what we now think of as “spectator studies”: a theory of interpretation in which contingency must play a critical role, and according to which there can be no ultimate interpretation of a given film. Thus, Bellour’s work opened the field to studies that depend upon historically and regionally defined interpretations that are meaningful not because they are “true,” but because they are representative of the contexts that define interpretive strategies of particular groups of spectators. The same may be said of Roland Barthes, one of the major influences on Bellour’s work, with books like S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text provoking, ironically, a field of studies in which the “text” all but disappears in favor of the reader (or viewer in the case of cinema) as the object of study.25 Dana Polan, in his review of L’Entre-images, acknowledges the importance of Bellour’s “recognition that the ‘analytic’ act is as much creative as analytic” as a fundamental founding precept for textual analysis as it relates to film studies.26 Bellour’s article “The Unattainable Text” was originally published in 1975, in the middle of the period during which the essays collected in the English-language version were written (1969–80); it is therefore indicative of the way that his larger project remained caught between structuralism and post-structuralism. “The Unattainable Text” does not conclude his project of film analysis, but, rather, recorded a position that was integral to it. The initial excitement that his work generated depended at least in part upon this ambiguity: Bellour’s analyses were extremely precise and detailed, and yet also “open” in that they did not offer a definitive reading of a film. As a consequence, they generated discussion and debate across the field at a utopian moment in which the study of cinema history and theory were not as yet considered incompatible. This idea was further expanded upon in “L’Analyse flambée” (1985), translated as “Analysis in Flames,”27 which was written in response to the notion that one could describe a film in its entirety on account of the continuing development of new analogue (and eventually digital) technology. In this article, Bellour reaffirmed his view that arresting and repeating the flow of images within a film did not essentially change the fundamental fact that a full description in words of a film is “unattainable,” or “introuvable” in the French version of the essay’s title, given that its meanings are caught in an ever-expanding and shifting web of human experience.

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Bellour would not abandon this idea of comprehensively accounting for a film analytically until 1990 (five years after the publication of “Analysis in Flames”), when he attempted to describe a silent film by working on an editing table, only to lose all his notes due to a computer error (he was working on a laptop). As a consequence of this mishap, he gave up on the idea of describing “le tout” of a film.28 Notwithstanding, he would subsequently return to film analysis in its various guises, most notably in his reading of Ritwik Ghatak’s film Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1960), published initially in 1991.29 These later analyses testify to his continued attention to strategies of alternation and rhyming. He explains in 2015 that “it is necessary to remember that a systematic model, relatively detached from its psychoanalytic frame of reference, can be applied to all kinds of films relating to a certain formal logic, including experimental films, across a whole range of possible modalities of rhymes and rhythms that are activated through the repetition and alternation of shots.”30 In his later exercises, he engages with these same modalities and their relations in terms of the emotions.31 Similarly, he reprises the idea of “le texte introuvable” (literally “the missing text,” published in English as “The Unattainable Text,” as noted above) in “Trente ans après: le ‘texte’ à nouveau introuvable?” that outlines how the philosophical problem posed by the experience of a text (textuality) had been exacerbated by new forms of art arising out of digital technologies, the same technologies that had made the literal film increasingly available in ever greater detail and intimacy.32 “Le Blocage Symbolique” Bellour raised, and continues to raise for the Anglo-American scholar, a set of issues that revolve around the relationship between psychoanalysis and cinema as historically defined social institutions. Again, Bellour’s contribution to this area of inquiry, which cuts across the disciplines of literature, art history, film studies, gender studies, and history, among others, is the manner in which he stresses the concrete detail of a given film as the bedrock of any interpretation, including those relying on psychoanalysis. For example, in his analysis of Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), he describes how what he calls “a classical alternation,” the conventional series of “shot/reverse-shots” used to render dialogue, conveys the lead character’s identification with his collection of stuffed birds: “In the various ways in which Norman is framed, he is associated with the outstretched beaks and widespread wings of one or several of the stuffed birds.”33 Bellour also demonstrates how it would be a mistake to set up an analysis in which “bird” routinely comes to signify “Norman.” Through the same device, the film’s heroine is also associated with the birds,



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but this association has a different order. Marion is “angel-woman-bird”; Norman is “bird-fetish-murderer.”34 The order of these associations, then, defines Marion as victim and Norman as murderer. Bellour found himself “stuck,” or perhaps trapped, at least to a degree, in a certain kind of argument during the decade or so in which his major emphasis was the project of “film analysis,” for want of a better word. His predicament was a consequence of his interpretation of psychoanalysis with regard to what he termed “le blocage symbolique” (the symbolic blockage).35 The idea of le blocage symbolique derives from an interpretation of psychoanalysis that characterized the first half of the twentieth century – an interpretation that places the Oedipal complex and its resolution at the center of psychoanalytic analysis as a result of the codification of Freud’s work by American psychoanalysts, in particular. Within this perspective, the male subject is, arguably, defined and confined, at least metaphorically, within an Oedipally defined scenario.36 David Rodowick explains in 1991: Bellour coins the term le blocage symbolique to describe the peculiar circularity shared historically and ideologically by the nineteenth-century novel and the twentieth-century fiction film as tautological manifestations of the binary machine [that creates sexual difference]. The Oedipal scenario that informs the most general levels of narrative content is also found, in Bellour’s analysis, to replicate itself in the most minute and specific levels of the text . . . This is a striking example, as Bellour himself is entirely aware, of a historical process, emerging with the norm of the bourgeois family and an economic system based on industrial capitalism, that attempts to universalize an image of sexual difference.37

As Rodwick’s comments above imply, by 1991 the centrality of the Oedipal scenario was in question, being considered by many a largely historical phenomenon in terms of the evolution of culture and also of psychoanalytic theory. Subsequent theoretical explorations in psychoanalysis, including those of Freud’s own daughter, Anna Freud, emphasized the fundamental influence of pre-Oedipal experiences in childhood. In the decades that followed, analysts like Joyce McDougall, for example, went so far as to claim, “Narcissus plays a more important role than Oedipus in the elucidation of certain of man’s graver psychic ills.”38 At the time when Bellour began his project in the 1960s, however, the idea of the Oedipus complex as offering the defining moment in the development of all human subjects was still the gold standard within the analytic community, an idea that undoubtedly had currency in the culture that produced classical Hollywood cinema itself. What Bellour calls le blocage symbolique is the way, as Rodowick describes above, in which the male protagonist seems inevitably destined to reproduce some version of the Oedipal scenario (in which a male subject is largely

20

Raymond Bellour

motivated to marry his mother, something that Oedipus as the protagonist of the famous Greek tragedy actually did). He does so by either reproducing that structure through marrying a woman like his mother, as Bellour argues is figured forth in North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959),39 or by entering into a form of psychic retreat in which he becomes the mother (as in Psycho as described by Bellour).40 In this way, this subject is ineluctably “blocked” or “stuck.” While the universality of the Oedipal complex and its resolution as a symbolic matrix has now been largely rejected or at least questioned, Bellour’s analyses of the films of Hitchcock, including North by Northwest and Psycho, retain their validity as the coming together of a cultural context and the concerns of a specific auteur director. Perhaps counter-intuitively, given the many feminist attacks on Freud’s ideas, Bellour’s treatment of film and psychoanalysis has proven notably influential in feminist film analysis and feminist film theory because of the way that he attempted to demarcate a symbolic field that provided a generative matrix for film narrative within Hollywood cinema. In many such cases, as in that of Mary Ann Doane,41 feminist scholars argued against the universality of the Oedipal structure, particularly with regard to a feminine subject, often taking their cue from later psychoanalysts, including Jacques Lacan, who posited the primary founding relationship of the subject as being with the mother, one that would indelibly mark her and her relationship to the image. Bellour attributes his growing skepticism toward this model to his reading of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in 1972.42 Nonetheless, his major works on film, such as his article on North by Northwest, in which he invokes psychoanalysis, were published in the 1970s: “Le blocage symbolic,” for example, appeared in 1975, the same year as “Le texte introuvable.” This somewhat convoluted itinerary of thought testifies to the ways in which his final and most substantial contribution to cinema studies, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (2009),43 emerged out of an accretion of intuitions, ideas, and influences over several decades, rather than through systematic exploration of a particular set of assumptions – an approach that characterizes many projects in film theory, such as that of Christian Metz, or the recent An Elegy for Theory by David Rodowick published in 2014.44 Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, one could say that Bellour’s method followed a “rhizomatic” structure, depending upon strands of association, rather than on a hierarchical root and branch construction. And even though Rodowick would have been introduced to film theory by scholars such as Christian Metz and Raymond Bellour at the Centre américain des études cinématographiques, and subsequently during his many visits to Paris, the contribution of these scholars, according to Rodowick, is



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negligible with regard to the theory for which his volume is an “elegy.” This is particularly true of Bellour, who is mentioned only in passing, possibly because the latter’s influence has been felt more strongly among scholars who engage directly with films themselves as opposed to attempting to formulate a more general aesthetic theory or, in Rodowick’s words, “a philosophy of the humanities critically and reflexively attentive in equal measure to its epistemological and ethical commitment.”45 Indeed, even in Bellour’s metacritical volume, Le Corps du cinéma, he remains concerned with the specificity of a certain kind of cinematic experience and its reflection in specific film narratives at a particular moment in the medium’s history. In that context, his analyses of particular films remain one of his most enduring legacies. This “passion des œuvres” (or “love for the works” – films in the case of cinema),46 should not be taken as implying that Bellour’s research does not constitute an intervention within the larger domain of what Rodowick calls “the philosophy of art.”47 Rather, it indicates how his research arises from a focus on the work of art itself, its materiality and its relations to its spectator, its capacity to at least temporarily take hold of a viewer and occupy his or her attention at a number of different levels. The Textual Volume The continued relevance of Bellour’s readings of Hitchcock’s films, especially of Psycho and North by Northwest, depends upon another significant concept, that of the “textual volume.”48 This notion would have a substantial, if largely unrecognized, effect on succeeding scholars’ approaches to individual films. The concept itself, as in the case of film analysis, reflects the influence of Thierry Kuntzel (1948–2007), Bellour’s second most influential interlocutor after Metz. Bellour and Kuntzel were in deep sympathy with each other in terms of their ideas about film, and Kuntzel may in some ways be considered a protégé of Bellour with regard to his age and his position in the field of film studies at the time (which he would abandon quite quickly to pursue a career as an artist) were it not for his undeniable influence on Bellour’s thought. In his own analyses, Kuntzel foreshadowed the idea of a textual volume that is implicit in Bellour’s analyses of the films noted above.49 “Textual volume” as a term suggests its literary origins from a conceptual, if not a terminological perspective. As a concept, it can be summarized as the idea that the film exists in the viewer’s memory as an integral and integrated form. Although the film narrative itself must move forward inexorably, once viewed, it exists whole and outside of time in a literalized fourth dimension through the memory of the viewer. For the reader of a book (such as a novel), understanding that its text exists as a whole – literally, as a “volume” in which

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he or she can move backwards and forwards, re-reading especially significant passages, and even returning to particular pages again and again to construct, in anthropologist’s Clifford Geertz’ terms, a “thick interpretation”50 – is taken for granted as a dimension of the reading process. The viewer’s engagement with this “volume” is not linear, but constantly moves backwards and forwards (and even “sideways” in his or her extrapolation of the larger story world of the narrative) in assimilating the elements that are provided by the film in a linear and ordered manner. Film scholars David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson describe how the viewer assigns meaning by assigning chronology, duration, frequency, and cause and effect to events presented by a film:51 however, the notion of textual volume implies something more than these simple cognitive assessments, asking us to the think about how the film text assigns meanings at a number of different levels. In particular, Bellour maintained that the nature of filmic narrative drew upon mechanisms of the mind such as symbolic displacement and metonymic condensation, as described by Freud, a point that would be contested vigorously by formalists like David Bordwell.52 Influenced by Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Bellour posits that meanings are produced, or “figured,” along multiple pathways that are not always rational. The use of the term “figure” suggests ways in which the notion of a textual volume draws upon rhetorical strategies associated with poetry in particular, and also literature more broadly defined, in which proximity and similarity, as in synecdoche and metaphor, produce another level of meaning beyond a literal interpretation. Thierry Kuntzel expressed these ideas most clearly in a now canonical article “The Film-Work, 2,” initially published in 1975, in which he explored how “the filmic system” operates through “displacement,” generating “a film-work” that is analogous to Freud’s “dreamwork.”53 In David Bordwell’s words, “Kuntzel treats a film [The Most Dangerous Game, Ernest B. Shoedsack and Irving Pichel, 1932] as analogous to Freud’s ‘dreamwork’ in that the opening offers a matrix of images like that of the primary process, a passage of condensed motifs that the later portions of the film will ‘linearize’ into displaced fantasy forms.” Bordwell considers that Bellour and Kuntzel posit textual analysis as revealing “the film’s unconscious, its repressed material that may surface in the slightest details of form and style.”54 Consequently, he categorizes this approach as “symptomatic,” regarding it as a deductively produced interpretation in which scholars seek confirmation of what they already believe. The concept of a textual volume, while animated by the analyses of Bellour and Kuntzel who drew on psychoanalysis, is not in and of itself “psychoanalytic,” but rather invokes an analogy between the film and the book. The idea



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that films may function as a “volume of memory” (another term used by both Bellour55 and Kuntzel)56 for the viewer (as opposed to the director and editor, for example), in the way that the literary “volume” does for the reader, was unfamiliar in the 1960s and early 1970s, because without digital technology, or even the primitive analog technology represented by video-recorders, practices of close analysis were not easily effected (which is obviously not the case with literary volumes). As Bellour has emphasized in his later writings, the viewer at that time was a captive in the theater, even if a voluntary captive, who was obliged to watch a film at a certain time, with the parts of action unfolding in a certain order, or not watch it at all.57 This assumption about how a film creates its narrative, its story, and story world as a volume is fundamental to contemporary scholarship and even fandom, now that viewers are able to access a wealth of paratextual material to support their understanding of this “volume” – or a set of volumes, in the case of franchises. Initially, “paratext” referred specifically to materials published in conjunction with a novel, such as the title page, a preface, and so forth, that were not part of the novel per se; however, the term is currently used much more broadly in cinema studies to designate the large amount of material circulated that viewers may access, and that informs their viewing of a film or screen n ­ arrative – trailers, interviews, and reviews, for example – through the Internet, in particular.58 Film analysis had an ambivalent relationship to paratextual material, while ultimately contributing to it in the broader definition adopted by media scholars today, with the result that what may be considered an ever expansive and even formless paratextual volume has been created through the circulation of various interpretations over the Internet, for example. Hitchcock and Psychoanalysis Bellour’s argument about how the narrative of North by Northwest was regulated by a blocage symbolique depended heavily on a more restricted concept of a textual volume in which the protagonist, from his perspective, is trapped into a new relationship with the woman who becomes his wife, which mirrors or repeats the protagonist’s relationship with his mother in a self-enclosed loop. In Freud’s terms, this outcome is literally the resolution of the Oedipal complex, marked by an overly invested attachment between mother and son. The protagonist is condemned, by an accretion of events within the textual volume, so to speak, the meaning of which is illuminated through an accumulation of visual constructions or figures over the course of the film, to live out a certain kind of Oedipal relationship that the female character serves to represent and ensure. Bellour explains in the opening of his article on Psycho that the “principle of classical film is well known: the end must reply to the

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beginning; between one and the other something must be set in order; the last scene frequently recalls the first and constitutes its resolution.”59 Psycho defies this particular operation, disappointing the viewers’ expectations by strikingly killing its “star” in the first third of the film, and reaching its ends by less obvious means, as Bellour’s article clarifies: “Norman,” the film’s protagonist as played by Anthony Perkins, literally becomes the “mother” as a means of preserving that attachment. North by Northwest, in contrast, reaffirms these conventions in terms of plot, if not in tone, which is light-hearted, not unlike another romantic comedy wedded with a thriller, Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955), which also stars Cary Grant. In each case, the film begins with a mother and ends with a wife who in one way or another reproduces the mother. Bellour argues that a more obvious interpretation of these films as thrillers or romantic comedies masks a latent narrative revolving around what psychoanalysts of the period would have described as a successful resolution of the Oedipal complex. Bellour underlines his position with an initial quote from Deleuze and Guattari: “Nous sommes tous Chéri-Bibi au théâtre, criant devant Oedipe: voilà un type dans mon genre! voilà un type dans mon genre!” (We are all Chéri-Bibi at the theater, shouting in front of Oedipus: here’s a guy like me! Here’s a guy like me!) signaling what he feels to be the deep narrative stakes of the film.60 “Chéri-Bibi” is the protagonist of a popular French serial novel originally published in 1913–25 and adapted many times.61 He is wrongly accused of a crime; however, by assuming the face of the actual criminal through the miracle of cosmetic surgery, he finds marital happiness with the woman who he has always loved. The popularity of the story makes him a kind of French Everyman. Deleuze and Guattari are referring to the theater and not the movie theater; however, Bellour’s point is that classical Hollywood films, at least this film, revolve around an Oedipal configuration, whether historically determined or fundamental to the human subject. This point is further underlined by another long introductory quotation from Roland Barthes, which also opens “Le blocage symbolique,” in which Barthes asks, rhetorically, whether all stories do not return us to Oedipus (“Tout récit ne se ramène-t-il pas à Oedipe?”).62 Only in Bellour’s later work does he completely clarify this structure, that of the return to Oedipus, as one that is historically defined. Although the use of Freud’s conceptualization of what may be loosely referred to as an Oedipal scenario was not innovative in terms of a critical analysis of literary texts, and probably not even of film texts, Bellour’s emphasis on the visual mechanisms (as opposed to the plot or story) of the film as an expression of this scenario (what he refers to as the “materiality” of film) did break new ground, with Bellour and Kuntzel joining forces in underlin-



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ing the rhetorical or “figural” force of the sequencing and concatenation of images, sound, dialogue, music, and even printed words in the production of the film text. As David Rodowick explains in “The Figure and the Text,” a chapter from Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (published in 2001), according to Kuntzel (and Bellour): If one is to understand the condition of the film’s textuality, the film must be broken down and reconstituted. In both of Kuntzel’s film-work essays, the process of fragmentation and reordering . . . is aimed at producing an account of the film’s figural activity; a particular weaving of visual and aural motifs that, like Freud’s notion of the dream-work, is unavailable to conscious consideration save in the form of secondary revision.

Rodowick continues, drawing upon Roland Barthes, “For Kuntzel, textual analysis is therefore a specific activity of decipherment and transcoding in which the object of analysis is transposed from a ‘readerly’ to a ‘writerly’ modality.”63 Bellour, too, maintained in his analyses what Rodwick calls a “writerly modality,” in which the seeming transparency of the Hollywood text is unveiled in all its complexities; however, he also retained an interest in authorship. Enunciation A final element crucial to Bellour’s method (in so far as he has one, which he routinely denies) consists of enunciation in relation to the place of the author. “Enunciation” is a term borrowed from linguistics in order to talk about “who” is speaking, as opposed to what is said. The person and tense of a verb, for example, refer to the enunciator (the speaker), as opposed to the enunciated (what the speaker says), and contributes to techniques such as point of view in literary texts.64 Scholars such as David Bordwell and Edward Branigan have devoted long discussions to the issue of point of view and what is known as “focalization,” the way in which a film is organized around the experiences of particular characters, usually the protagonist, and then typically mediated by the viewer’s understanding of that character.65 Point of view, focalization, and enunciation are related but not coterminous,66 with “enunciation” in film often identified with the means by which a film “naturalizes” its story. Scholars such as Colin MacCabe would demonstrate how films are coded to create a particular worldview, reproducing a specific ideology.67 Bellour’s interest in the term was narrower. He used it to evoke a particular mode of authorship. In his article “Hitchcock, the Enunciator,” he explains: “Since the camera never ceases showing, constituting shot by shot, that unreal real which we

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call film, the director takes the position of enunciator so that he may delegate the look, the possession of which he never relinquishes.”68 According to Bellour, Hitchcock would thus signal himself as “the author” of his film, by placing himself (or his image) within his film at a strategic moment in the narrative, challenging the dominant view at that time that films (and novels) are culturally written by the reader, or generated by an ideologically loaded entertainment machine, on the assumption that they are informed by a set of prescribed codes that are historical givens, which the reader brings to any text, and that are activated by the text.69 In Bellour’s terms, Hitchcock situates himself “at that point in the chain of events where what could be called the film-wish is condensed. An authorial signature, but expanded, punctuating the logical unfolding of the phantasy originating in the conditions of enunciation.”70 Hitchcock highlights that the film is an expression of him as the director, or author (auteur) of the film. The emphasis on the author, the “auteur,” a term that Bellour repeatedly uses to describe Hitchcock, differentiates Bellour’s position from that of Christian Metz, especially as it is meticulously described in the latter’s final book, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film, which was translated into English in 2016.71 In the words of Cormac Deane, Metz’s translator: “Impersonal Enunciation describes cinema as a machine whose impersonal logic is more or less prominent at different times and places.”72 Metz himself insists: When the filmmaker appears in the image, as Hitchcock does in his films, . . . it is not . . . Hitchcock the film-er that we see, a filmmaker-auteur (an “external” instance), but a filmed Hitchcock, a character, a little piece of the film.73

Bellour, in contrast, highlights how a close reading of his films suggests that Hitchcock very purposefully signals his ownership of the film, and the fact that the film is constructed in such a way as to underline that this deliberate structure of the film, including the placement of his image, is constructed as a demonstration, a manifestation, of his desires, conscious or unconscious. Unlike Metz, who wished to discount “paratextual” material outside the film, Bellour emphasizes this material, in particular with regard to Hitchcock as someone who deliberately manipulated the industrial practices of the film industry, especially that of Hollywood, in order to make the films that he wanted to make, how he wanted to make them. Bellour thus deliberately refers to Hitchcock as an “auteur” as opposed to “réalisateur” (the French term for director) in his review, initially published in 1967 in Cahiers du cinéma, of François Truffaut’s Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock.74 He asserts his allegiance to auteurism more directly as a function of style in an earlier article, not available in English, “Pour une stylistique du film,” published in 1966.75



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Bellour’s unwillingness to give up the notion of an author paradoxically served him well when approaching art in the subsequent decades of the twentieth century. While he would later return to Hollywood film, he does so in an attempt to create a meta-critical position from which to understand it as a form that no longer exists as such; however, before reaching this moment, he would spend considerable time exploring the concerns of contemporary moving-image installations. Notes  1. For comment on these techniques, see Raymond Bellour, “Cine-Repetitions,” trans. Kari Hanet, Screen 20:2 (1979): 65–72; also see the review article by Constantine Verevis, “The Analysis of Film,” Film Criticism 25:2 (2000/1): 63–71, 78.  2. Warren Buckland, “Metz’s Critique of ‘Cinema: Language or Language System,’” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, ed. Edward Branigan and Warren Buckland (London/New York: Routledge, 2013), Kindle edition, location 12,825–57 of 18,091. See also Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie, L’Analyse des films, 2nd edition (Paris: Nathan, 1996), 43–5.  3. Raymond Bellour, “Analysis in Flames,” Diacritics 15:1 (1985): 54–6; originally “L’Analyse flambée,” Carte Semiotiche 1 (1985): 88–91. An alternative, perhaps more accurate, translation would be “Analysis under Fire.”  4. Raymond Bellour, ed. Constance Penley, The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Raymond Bellour, L’Analyse du film (Paris: Édition Albatros, 1979; 2nd edition, Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1995). Constance Penley, “Preface,” The Analysis of Film, Bellour, ed. Penley, ix–xviii.  5. Raymond Bellour, Les Hommes, le dimanche, Menschen am Sonntag de Robert Siodmak et Edgar G. Ulmer (Crisnée, Belgium: Côté films/Yellow Now, 2009).  6. Raymond Bellour, Pensées du cinéma: les films qu’on accompagne, le cinéma qu’on cherche à ressaisir (Paris: P.O.L, 2016).  7. See Bellour’s comments on Metz in “Bellour by Bellour,” in this volume, Chapter Five, “Formative Influences.”  8. “L’analyse de film est interminable, pusiqu’il restera toujours, à quelque degré de précision et de longueur qu’on atteigne, de l’analysable dans un film.” Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie, “Pour une définition de l’analyse de films,” in L’Analyses des films, Aumont and Marie, 29. [Translation by author.]  9. See Martin Lefebvre, “Présentation de ‘Théorie de la communication versus structuralisme’ de C. Metz,” Mise au point: cahiers de l’association française des enseignants et chercheurs en cinéma et audiovisuel 8 (2016), posted April 24, 2016, http://map.revues.org/2242, accessed April 2, 2017. 10. J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theorists: An Introduction (London/Oxford/ New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 217. 11. Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie, L’Analyse des films, 1st edition (Paris: Nathan, 1988); Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie, L’Analyse des films, 2nd

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edition (Paris: Nathan, 1996); Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie, L’Analyse des films, 2nd edition (Paris: Armand Colin, 2004); Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie, L’Analyse des films, 3rd edition (Paris: Armand Colin, 2015). 12. Aumont and Marie, “Pour une définition de l’analyse de films,” 7–32. 13. Andrew, The Major Film Theorists, 234. 14. See, for example, the 1998 re-make of Pyscho by Gus Van Sant. 15. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Part II Benjamin,” in Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), Adobe Digital edition, 259. 16. Mélisande Leventopoulos, “Présentation – La correspondance Bazin/Ayfre, miroir inversé de la cinéphilie spiritualiste,” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt 73:2 (2014): 123–6, published online September 1, 2017, http://1895.revues. org/4833, accessed September 3, 2017; J. Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 44–9. 17. Andrew, André Bazin, 5. 18. Jean Renoir, quoted in Andrew, André Bazin, 5. 19. Andrew, André Bazin, 6. 20. For use of these terms see, for example, Laurence Leung, “Validity, Reliability and Generalizability in Qualitative Research,” Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care 4:3 (2015), 324–7, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC4535087/, accessed September 3, 2017. 21. See Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974 [repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991]); and Sándor Hervey, Semiotic Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2016 [1982]). 22. See, in this volume, Chapter Five, “Formative Influences.” 23. See, for example, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 4th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 63. Film Art, at least at one time, was the most popular introductory film textbook in cinema studies. See also David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1989). 24. Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Macmillan, 1955); Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 18 (1937), 373–405. 25. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975); Roland Barthes, S/Z: Essai (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970); Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973); Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975). 26. Dana Polan, “Review of L’Entre-images: Photo, cinéma, vidéo by Raymond Bellour,” Discourse 16:2 (1993–4): 196–200, esp. 198. 27. Raymond Bellour, “Analysis in Flames,” Diacritics 15:1 (1985), 54–6; originally “L’Analyse flambée,” Carte Semiotiche 1 (1985), 88–91.



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28. Raymond Bellour, email correspondence with author, March 24, 2017. 29. Raymond Bellour, “Le Film qu’on accompagne,” Trafic 4 (autumn 1992), 109–30. 30. See, in this volume, Chapter Six, “Film Analysis and the Symbolic,” 114. 31. With regard to the emotions, see in particular the discussion of vitality affects, in this volume, Chapter Three, “Cinema and the Body: The Ghost in the Theater,” 63–5, and Chapter Nine, “Spectators, Dispositifs, and Emotions,” 149–50. 32. Raymond Bellour, “Trente-cinq ans après, le ‘texte’ à nouveau introuvable?,” in Images contemporaines, ed. Luc Vancheri (Lyon: Aleas, 2009), 17–33. See also Raymond Bellour, “Trente-cinq ans après: le ‘texte’ à nouveau introuvable?” in Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositfs: cinéma, installations, expositions (Paris: P.O.L, 2012). 33. Raymond Bellour, “Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion (on Psycho),” trans. Nancy Huston, in The Analysis of Film, Raymond Bellour, ed. Constance Penley (Bloomington/Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2000), 246. 34. Bellour, “Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion,” 247. 35. “Le blocage symbolique” is the title of an article by Raymond Bellour originally published in French in 1975 on North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), republished in Raymond Bellour, L’Analyse du film (Paris: Albatros, 1979/ Calmann-Lévy, 1995) and published in English as “The Symbolic Blockage,” in The Analysis of Film in 2000. See Raymond Bellour “Le Blocage symbolique,” Communications 23 (1975): 235–350; Raymond Bellour, “The Symbolic Blockage (on North by Northwest),” trans. Mary Quaintance, in The Analysis of Film, Raymond Bellour, ed. Constance Penley (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 77–215. A literal translation of the term le blocage symbolique into English never acquired currency among film scholars. 36. For a discussion of the history of this concept, and its persistence, within conventional psychoanalysis in an American context, see Bennett Simon, “Is the Oedipus Complex Still the Cornerstone of Psychoanalysis? Three Obstacles to Answering the Question,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 39:3 (1991): 641–68. 37. D.  N. Rodowick, The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference and Film Theory (London/New York: Routledge, 1991), 123. 38. Joyce McDougall, Plea for a Measure of Abnormality (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1992), 302. 39. Bellour, “The Symbolic Blockage,” 77–215. 40. “Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion (on Psycho),” 239–61. 41. See, for example, the analysis of Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), in Mary Ann Doane, “Female Spectatorship and Machines of Projection, Caught and Rebecca,” in The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 155–75. 42. See, in this volume Chapter Six, “Film Analysis and the Symbolic.” See also Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie (Paris: Minuit, 1972); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,

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trans Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977). 43. Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L, 2009). 44 D. N. Rodowick, Elegy for Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 45. D. N. Rodowick, “An Elegy for Theory,” October 122 (2007): 92. 46. “La passion des oeuvres” was the initial title (subsequently discarded) of a long interview with Bellour, excerpts of which are included in this volume. The interview in its entirety has been published by Rouge Profond under the title Dans la compagnie des oeuvres (2017). 47. Rodowick, “An Elegy,” 92. 48. See Raymond Bellour and Janet Bergstrom, “Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Raymond Bellour,” Camera Obscura 1–2 (3–1 3–4) (1979): 70–103, esp. 86. 49. Thierry Kuntzel was initially a student in the first class that Bellour taught, in 1968. See Alice Leroy and Gabriel Bortzmeyer, Raymond Bellour: Dans la compagnie des oeuvres: entretien avec Alice Leroy et Gabriel Bortzmeyer (Paris: Éditions Rouge Profond, forthcoming), 60–1. See, in particular, Thierry Kuntzel, “The Film-Work 2,” trans. Nancy Huston, Camera Obscura 2 (2 5) (1980): 6–70; Thierry Kuntzel, “Le Travail du film, 2,” Communications 23 (1975): 136–93. 50. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–32. 51. See David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 4th edition (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 1993), 49–52. See also David Bordwell, “The Viewer’s Activity,” in Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 29–47. 52. Sigmund Freud, “The Dream-Work,” in The Interpretations of Dreams, Freud, 295–511; Bordwell, Making Meaning. 53. Thierry Kuntzel, “The Film-Work 2,” 6–70, esp. 7; Thierry Kuntzel, “Le Travail du film, 2,” Communications 23 (1975): 136–93. See also Thierry Kuntzel, “The Film-Work,” trans Lawrence Crawford, Kimball Lockhart, and Claudia Tysdal, Enclitic 2.1 (1978): 38–61; Thierry Kuntzel, “Le Travail du film,” Communications 19 (1972): 25–39. 54. Bordwell, Making Meaning, 87. 55. See also Raymond Bellour, “Thierry Kuntzel and the Return of Writing,” trans. Annwyl Williams, in Between-the-Images, ed. Raymond Bellour and Allyn Hardyck (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2012), 35. 56. See Thierry Kuntzel, Title TK (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2006), 161–6; and the commentary by Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical to New Media Art (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 91. 57. For Bellour’s description of the viewing experience in precisely these terms, see “Loop Talks,” “Passages de l’image,” recorded June 3, 2016, https://loop-



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barcelona.com/video-conference/passages-de-limage/, accessed September 2, 2017. 58. Gérard Genette and Marie Maclean, “Introduction to the Paratext,” New Literary History 22:2 (1991): 261–72. See also Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010). 59. Bellour, “Psychosis, Perversion, Neurosis,” 238. 60. Raymond Bellour, “Le blocage symbolique,” Communications 23 (1975): 235; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie: 1: l’Anti-Œdipe, nouvelle édition augmentée (Paris: Minuit, 1973), 367. 61. See Jean-Claude Vareille, Le Roman populaire français (1789–1914): idéologies et pratiques: le trompette de la Bérésina (Limoges: Presses Universitaires Limoges, 1994), 71–8. 62. Bellour, “Le blocage symbolique,” 235. 63. D. N. Rodowick, “The Figure and the Text,” in Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media, D. N. Rodowick (Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press, 2001), 81. 64. On focalization, see Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). 65. See Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London/New York: Routledge, 1992), 100–7. 66. For a useful untangling of some of this term’s uses, see André Gaudreault and François Jost, “Narration and Enunciaton,” in A Companion to Film Theory, eds Toby Miller and Robert Stam (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), 46–9. 67. Colin MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses,” in Tracking the Signifier: Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 33–57. 68. Raymond Bellour, “Hitchcock, the Enunciator,” trans. Bertrand Augst and Hilary Radner, Camera Obscura 1 (2 2) (1977): 86. [originally published in English.] 69. Other directors have subsequently imitated Hitchcock. Thus, the New Zealand director Jane Campion appears in her film In the Cut (2003), dancing with a serial murderer at the precise moment before which the film’s protagonist meets him for the first time. See Kathleen McHugh, Jane Campion (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 138. 70. Bellour, “Hitchcock, the Enunciator,” 73. 71. Christian Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film, trans. Cormac Deane (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016); Christian Metz, L’Énonciation impersonnelle, ou, le site du film (Paris: Méridiens-Klincksieck, 1991). 72. Cormac Deane, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, xvii. 73. Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, 19. 74. Raymond Bellour, “Ce que savait Hitchcock,” Cahiers du cinéma 190 (May 1967): 32–6. François Truffaut with Helen G. Scott, Hitchcock (New York:

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Simon and Schuster, 1967); François Truffaut, Hitchcock selon Hitchcock (Paris: R. Laffot, 1966). 75. Raymond Bellour, “Pour une stylistique du film,” Revue d’esthétique 2 (1966): 161–78.



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CHAPTER TWO

The Digital Challenge: From the Theater to the Gallery

A New Art Raymond Bellour’s work on video art, while a product of his own preoccupations, emerges within more general speculations about spectatorship before 1990, including such notions as “suture,”1 and Brechtian “distanciation,” or “alienation,” that marked film scholarship as it was widely discussed in France, in Britain, and to some degree in the United States, primarily among what were known in English for a variety of reasons as the “Screen” theorists, including their association with the journal Screen. Bellour, together with Thierry Kuntzel conceived of this new medium (or rather media as it turned out) as having the potential to transform the viewer’s relationship to the moving image. In this regard, he introduced the concept of “le spectateur pensif,” or “pensive spectator,”2 recalling for many film theorists Bertolt Brecht’s notion of an active, as opposed to passive, spectator.3 In Bellour’s case, however, the pensive spectator, originating in cinema, but encouraged by new multi-media art installation (as distinct from Brecht’s spectator), is not an entirely rational spectator, nor one who is completely sutured into the narrative as many scholars, in particular those associated with the journal Screen in the 1970s, deemed was the case with the spectator of classical cinema. Thierry Kuntzel’s influence on Bellour was fundamental at this juncture. Kuntzel (1948–2007), a film theorist turned video and then multi-media artist, used the possibilities of the new technologies with which he was presented to explore the ontological nature of the image. For Bellour, these same possibilities gave rise to new sets of relations between images and movement, as well as new relations among images from different media, including images arising out of traditional art forms, such as painting. He saw the nature of the image as thus being further transformed along the lines first observed by Walter Benjamin and then John Berger with regard to photography and the cinema.4 Photography was not only a new mechanical technique of

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r­epresentation, but changed forever the social and cultural understanding of the nature and function of an image through its capacity to reproduce the “same” image endlessly. Bellour argues for the need to see similarly significant, if not all-embracing, changes at the end of the twentieth century, postulating, among other things, that new technologies enable the use of images, especially moving images, as a kind of “writing.”5 In addition, one of Bellour’s major concerns, which would gain more purchase with the development of his further publications, was that, as a consequence of new potentials made possible by emerging technologies, the moving image was passing out of the cinema theater to reappear in the art gallery as a newly legitimate and sustained art form, now routinely referred to variously as “moving image installation art,” and “time-based art,” with the nature of cinema itself being revealed as what he calls as an “impure” art.6 Cinema is an “impure” art because it already contained images from other arts within it, such as paintings, photographs, architecture, and sculpture; however, with the advent of television as a delivery system and video as a technology, this dimension of cinema had become even more marked and obvious. For Bellour, video art did not simply arise out of classical cinema, but also out of traditions of painting and sculpture reanimated by time as a fourth dimension. His investments in these new art forms logically extended his initial and sustained interest in modernist art and poetry – to the ideal of an image that may be manifested in a distilled and disinterested form, as suggested in his continued research on the poet and visual artist Henri Michaux. It is also seen in his explorations of the work of Thierry Kuntzel, who was an intellectual companion and fellow traveler until his death in 2007. Bellour’s thinking with regard to these new art forms marked a substantial shift in his approach with regard to his earlier concerns, which had focused on problems relating to film analysis. The Impasse of Film Analysis Arguably, Bellour’s turn toward video art or time-based installation art arose in response to his disenchantment with psychoanalysis and his earlier use of the Oedipal scenario as a lynchpin in his understanding of classical Hollywood cinema. Kuntzel confronted a similar impasse. His initial research focused on isolating the function of the image as movement, and as an element in what he termed the défilement, or succession of images (see below), which he saw as working co-extensively with what both Bellour and Kuntzel would call “the volume of memory,” an iteration of the term “textual volume.” In 1981, Bellour, quoting Kuntzel, describes this concept



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as “a volume, a film free from temporal constraints – where all the elements would be present at the same time, i.e., without an effect of presence – [screen presence] – but constantly referring to each other.”7 Bellour develops the idea in this same article that, through time, the défilement or succession of “images piled up on top of the other, as in memory, a volume” transforms them into the memory-volume of a specific experience.8 In this context, film, rather than “the mystic writing pad” invoked by Freud,9 offers the metaphor that best represents “the functioning of the psychic apparatus,” an analogy initially proposed by Kuntzel.10 Kuntzel, like Bellour, would confront the impossibility of recovering through description and analysis the essential meaning and nature of the film-experience. In particular, he realized through his work on La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962) that all he could do was reproduce the film-experience in another equally impenetrable (from a rational perspective) form, which he would call La Rejetée (“The Re-Jetty,” but also “The Thown Again,” or “The Rejected”).11 In David Rodowick’s terms, “[w]riting may capture succession. Yet it fails to reproduce film’s peculiar quality of an automated, ineluctable movement.” He notes that “one of the curious consequences of structuralist film theory is their demonstration of film narration as a complex, highly elaborated, and codified system that nonetheless escapes notation.”12 Kuntzel thus turned to art as the practice most likely (as opposed to scholarly research) to yield a productive iteration of this search for essential properties and experiences. For Kuntzel, video represented a medium through which to pursue this same project, in which he sought to explore the relations between image, movement, and memory as art, as opposed to a form of auto-analysis (the solution pursued by Roland Barthes).13 Kuntzel very obviously turned away from a descriptive project – that is, one that attempted to explain the moving image and its meaning across a wide symbolic field logically and systematically; instead, he chose to figure forth in visual form the nexus of memory and desire together with the ensuing emotions that this kind of conjunction evoked for him. Video, and later digital media, became a means through which he attempted to recreate relations that would be described as primary, being associated with the child’s initial experience of what the pediatrician and psychologist Daniel Stern describes as “vitality affects.”14 Barbara London, then assistant curator, writes on the occasion of the exhibition of his installation Winter (the Death of Robert Hasler) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City in 1991: “Kuntzel is interested in the way simple patterns of light depicting ordinary representational images can have a deep, emotional impact on the viewer’s mind. He is preoccupied with time and memory, and with what happens below the surface of representation, beyond a story line.”15 For

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artists of Kuntzel’s generation, heavily influenced by writers such as Maurice Blanchot, a philosopher and theorist who argued that literary language is distinct from everyday experience, making meaning and reference allusive and ambiguous,16 such a re-creation was tied to the utopian ideal of accessing the image in its pure form, beyond its cultural role within a given society. Kuntzel, however, was profoundly postmodernist in his compulsive reiteration of the impossibility of this project. Art provided him, paradoxically, with the possibility of pursuing what he already knew to be impossible. Although his art arose out of a very personal investment in memory, the sense of loss that his work expressed echoed the broader concerns of his generation. Kuntzel and Bellour avoided any facile correlative between the frequently melancholic re-iterations of loss that united the artists in this group in fin-de-siècle Europe and the United States and the larger concerns of the era; however, it was not a coincidence that the sense of searching that both Kuntzel and the American artist Bill Viola shared (with Viola giving this search a more spiritual tenor) spoke to intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic.17 This pervasive melancholy stood in stark contrast with the more Bacchanalian playfulness characterizing much of postmodernism as theorized by the architect Charles Jencks,18 and evident in the films of directors like Quentin Tarentino – a playfulness that marks late twentieth-century thought generally, in the view of the American film scholar and cultural theorist Jim Collins.19 Both strands, however, shared a sense that art was not primarily political. For artists such as Viola and Kuntzel art retained a certain humanism, if only by preserving a space for an experience that had the potential to speak to “humans,” no matter whether they are divided by history and circumstance. This utopian dimension is most clearly felt in the work of Viola, but Bellour, in his persistent recognition of, and inability to relinquish, the author, joined Viola in many ways, particularly through his advocacy for the new art form and the artists that practiced it. Bellour was for a period one of the most significant voices who, while not an artist, sought to explain and justify the practices of this group as contributing to a deeper knowledge of what it meant to be human, thereby also recalling the Bazinian project, which was also fundamentally humanistic in nature. New Forms of Spectatorship Video art, including Kuntzel’s conversion to its possibilities as a means of expressing what the intellectual project of film analysis was unable to capture, arrived at a moment in Bellour’s career in which his fascination with classical Hollywood cinema, tied to an equal engagement with an Oedipal problem-



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atic, had exhausted itself with regard to offering a way to understand the cinematic experience. In the case of Kuntzel, video provided an alternative access to an image that stopped time, offering the promise of an originary moment that gave rise to art, one that is often associated with a primary attachment to the mother.20 For Bellour, the museum offered him another realm of experience that in some ways would be more satisfying than that of cinema, which for him would always be the cinema of his childhood and adolescence. Bellour continued to discuss films, particularly those of Jean-Luc Godard and other directors, such as the late Chantal Akerman; these were, however, very often films by filmmakers who themselves came to prefer the museum or gallery to the cinema theater or the television screen, now located in every home, or, even later, the computer screen with its multiplying platforms and delivery systems. While Bellour claims that he enjoys watching films on his computer, he utilizes files provided by others as well as DVDs; he is not really interested, and never was, in new media as the term is popularly used – that is, to designate the ever-proliferating platforms through which viewers engage with the moving image on the Internet. Rather, he uses his computer, viewing against the grain, for the same purpose that found him sitting at an editing table in earlier decades. Bellour’s engagement with the many popular forms that the moving image would take, and with popular culture more generally, from YouTube to Netflix, to French films destined for a general audience and successful at the box office, was minimal, with the exception of Hollywood films of a particular period made by a very limited group of directors, and a few international auteur directors such as Yasujirō Ozu, Ritwik Ghatak, and Ingmar Bergman, among others, who occupied a space between the mainstream and the experimental. The museum was a refuge for him, a world that often re-enacted self-consciously the aesthetic issues that preoccupied him, in contrast to the contemporary popular mediascapes that have multiplied with increasingly rapidity in the form of games, social media, video-blogs, and advertising. He describes these emerging mediascapes in terms of a “confusion” that “has not stopped growing, with the rise to power of the Internet, virtual access to all images, and an ever-increasing incapacity to differentiate between them.”21 Bellour’s negative view of these new popular-culture forms has been frequently echoed by the artists whose work he admired, signifying their shared sensibilities. He has continued to ignore the economic and political dimensions of the media, all the while remaining faithful to his initial adhesion to what in the Anglo-American world would seem to be a form of inveterate leftism in his personal life. In his professional life, art, not politics or economics, have been his concern. Kuntzel was not, however, the only artist who, enamored of the easy

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access, flexibility, immediacy, and intimacy of the new medium, deployed it to evoke and explore the nature of the image. In a panel discussion held in 2016, Bellour refused to comment on whether or not contemporary artists can be said to have a theoretical practice, in spite of the fact that one of the artists on the panel clearly viewed himself in that light.22 Nonetheless, Kuntzel, in Bellour’s perspective, continued along the same “lines of flight” (to borrow a term from Deleuze often used by Bellour himself)23 that defined his scholarly publications. Bellour describes these years as a period of significant intellectual fecundity, during which he felt stimulated by what he viewed as a new art form that clearly located the moving image as a plastic art that harnessed time as one of its defining formal properties. He describes his “leap” into video art “as the biggest adventure of the whole decade.”24 In this same period (which also saw the publication of a number of works by Bellour on literature, including a monumental edition of the writing of Henri Michaux), his writings lack the coherency and sense of distance associated with his work on the classical Hollywood films. The ideas that would come together in his meta-critical volume, Le Corps du cinéma,25 were already in the process of forming as he confronted what he considered to be a new form of “cinema” or “moving image” art, particularly with regard to what he calls “the condition of . . . projection and . . . presentation.”26 In this context, in the volume of his collected essays from this period, L’Entreimages, first published in 1990,27 he considers the relations between what he calls photography, cinema, and video; however, his interest in photography was chiefly focused on the appearance of still images within what he refers to as the cinematic “défilement.” Défilement “Défilement” is one of a series of terms that Bellour decides to leave in French, in this volume, at least. His translator, Allyn Hardyck, offers a definition of the term at the back of the book, citing a French handbook of technical terms commonly used in French film and television production. In this context, “défilement” means the “progression, the sliding of the [film stock] through the gate of the projector.”28 In technical explanations of these earlier projection systems that used a celluloid strip, the term “film movement” is used in English to describe what in French is referred to as “le défilement.” This literal “movement,” the focus of considerable technological experimentation that resulted in the inventions of both Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers, is a fundamental element in the process that gives the illusion of movement to what is basically a strip of still images, due to the mechanics of human perception. Debate about why, precisely, humans perceive a series of still



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images projected at a particular speed as a single continuous movement persisted long after the invention of cinema and then television;29 the fact that animals are not necessarily subject to the same illusion is widely accepted.30 Television, video projection, and digital media operate somewhat differently, but, nonetheless, depend upon illusions that trick (or perhaps encourage) the mind’s eye into interpreting sets of discrete images as presenting a coherent mise en scène and sense of movement on the part of objects and characters within the frame. The particular structure of the “trick” played on the human perceptual system by original film projectors was of special interest to Bellour, because for him it implied a critical link between cinema on the one hand, and photography on the other, with film analysis dependent upon freezing a frame of a film, often reproducing it with the assistance of a camera. Bellour focused on the appearance of such images within the film itself – that is, on photographs appearing within a film and on what are known in English as “freeze frames,” such as the famous conclusion of The 400 Blows (Les quatre cent coups) (François Truffaut, 1959), and later The Soft Skin (La Peau douce) (1964) by the same director. Paradoxically, the impression of a “frozen frame” (in a film as opposed to at an editing table or on a video cassette recorder, or later a DVD player or computer) does not stop the strip of celluloid as it “slides” through the gate of the projector. On the contrary, the impression of stillness is created by repeating the same image (still moving through the gate) on the strip of celluloid and is considered a special effect in which the same image is printed several times from a particular negative often created with an optical printer. Freeze frames in video editing were also considered a special effect and created as part of the editing process, using various technologies as video was quickly replaced by digital editing systems employed in the industry for feature-length films as well. This use of the “freeze-frame” must (it cannot be said too often) be distinguished from the manner in which, through the use of an editing table, video recorder, and later a DVD player, or computer (not to mention the laser disk player and the Blu-ray player), a viewer may stop, freezing the image, on any frame at any moment in the défilement of a given screen narrative. Strangely, while film theorists such as Bellour were fascinated by this seeming paradox of an image that was both still and moving at the same time, they were not interested in exploring the perceptual processes that made these illusions possible, or the way that these were decoded by the human brain. Neurologists and neurobiologists, whose work has been circulated by popular science writers such as Oliver Sacks, have consistently emphasized that “seeing” is “understanding.” The brain offers an interpretation, not a representation of what is “out there” in the world, meaning that our m ­ otivation to

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“see” film or television images as replicating that world is part of how we misunderstand still images as moving images, or moving images as still images.31 For Bellour, the appearance of still images in the form of freeze frames, or as photographs included within the mise en scène of a particular film, suggested an inherent instability at the heart of the cinematic image and its relationship to reality. While Kuntzel was exhilarated by the idea of becoming absorbed in a world of images that had no (or very few ties) to a reality that existed through its relations to an empirically verifiable world, for Bellour, the thought was fascinating and terrifying at the same time. He views the new media as producing an “esthetics of confusion,” and “a vague catastrophic whirlwind.”32 In the introduction to the 2002 edition of the first volume of L’Entre-images, he bemoans what he will later term “the death of cinema,” seeing it as being attacked initially by its “insinuating enemy,” television, “from which its destiny could no longer be separated.”33 Television was followed by new enemies: “two others,” the computer (or, more properly, digital technology, including a multiplicity of screens and delivery platforms through the Internet, in particular), and the art gallery, or museum. For Bellour, this multiplication of set-ups and relations (or what he calls “dispositifs”) in the museum, where “cinema becomes . . . really an art” while “endlessly mutating” (like some sort of alien virus), has not only irrevocably changed the spectators’ relations with images, but also the relations between images. His sense of this new cinema chimes with the prevailing view among French theorists that somehow the cinema of the past has been lost, irrevocably changed by what he summarizes as “the between-images” (“l’entreimages”). “The between-images” refers to the ways in which meanings are produced among images, in which images circulate across multiple mediaplatforms, are embedded and juxtaposed, sharpened and dulled, quickened and slowed. David Rodowick, following on from Bellour, describes how “contemporary art has become increasingly attentive to the complexity of the spatiotemporal variables both defining and crossing between still and moving images in ways that completely transform their usual structures of creation and reception.”34 From Rodowick’s perspective, producing works that were “entre-images,” meant invoking: “the translation and transposition of one spatial or temporal material into or onto another, setting up systems of exchanges between photography, film, video and electronic display.”35 For Bellour, it was not simply the nature of the images that changed, but the viewer’s relationship to that image. For him, the ability of a viewer to stop the film at a particular point, freezing a frame on a home video recorder, irrevocably changes the meaning of that image and the film as a whole. His concept of the “dispositif ” played a crucial role for him in pointing to the importance of these transformations.



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The Dispositif The notion of the “dispositif,” another term preserved in French by Allyn Hardyck, initially translated as “apparatus” (its literal translation in scientific circles), has proven to be of critical importance to Bellour’s later work, with an entire volume devoted to debates on the topic.36 “Apparatus” as a translation was rejected because it was confusing to many due to an earlier translation of “appareil de base” as “apparatus” in an influential article by Jean-Louis Baudry, a member of the Tel Quel editorial committee.37 The article discusses the economic and ideological nature and function of cinema (the “apparatus”) from a basically Althusserian Marxist perspective in which culture is deemed to reproduce capitalism by obscuring the real relations between production and consumption; in the capitalist system, subjects were deceived into believing that the world operated to their benefit, when in reality they were the victims of oppression. The tautological nature of this perspective, in which all human subjects were considered to be produced by the instruments (the ideological apparatus) of culture (of which cinema was one), being endowed with little or no agency, did not prevent it from gaining a considerable foothold within film scholarship, especially in Australia, where it continues to inform a significant strand of research on the media. Retaining the term “dispositif ” in English differentiated this concept from Baudry’s initial notion of an “appareil de base.” Baudry himself created further confusion by using the term dispositif (translated as “apparatus”) in a way that was generally consistent with Bellour’s usage,38 in which “his [Baudry’s] aim was to take into account the cinematic environment as a whole . . . an environment that fully incorporates the spectator’s psyche, and that is equivalent to the dream state.”39 Bellour, according to Hardyck, was also influenced by Michel Foucault’s use of the term in Discipline and Punish “to describe the series of machinic systems for which Bentham’s Panopticon was the historical prototype.”40 For Bellour, the dispositif was tied to the material circumstances that constrained, enabled, and defined the viewer’s relationship to a film, including the “mind-set” that he or she brought to that situation, which was further modified by a particular situation, as well as his or her experiences of other situations. Film critic and scholar Adrian Martin offers the following formulation: “a dispositif is basically this: the arrangement of diverse elements in such a way as to trigger, guide and organize a set of actions.”41 Bellour’s particular slant on this issue became much more clearly formalized when he applied it in his later work to classical cinema, at which point he distanced himself from both Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry who had privileged the metaphor of the dream, and cinema’s relations to the Lacanian concept of

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the mirror stage, as a means of grasping the power of cinema over the human mind. Bellour’s position distinguishes itself from that of Metz and Baudry in fundamental ways, in particular through his conception of the human subject (which will be explored in Chapter Three below). New Forms of Spectatorship While Bellour in L’Entre-images does not emphasize the importance of the dispositif as a concept to the same degree as he would do in his later work, he does highlight the idea that film typically encourages one form of spectatorship, while also allowing for other kinds of relations to the film from time to time. His view of a particular regime of spectatorship, what he calls “le spectateur pensif,” or the “pensive spectator” in English, demonstrates the continued influence of film analysis at the same time as he broaches issues that fall outside the purview of this approach or methodology. “Pensif ” in French may suggest the kind of melancholy typically associated with the term “pensive” in English – the idea that a subject is “lost in thought” or “daydreaming”; however, in the context of this article, the expression “the spectator-engaged-in-thought” may be a more useful and equally valid translation, suggesting a clear association with the idea of thinking (“penser” means “to think” in French). The notion of a “spectator-engaged-in-thought” aligns Bellour’s explorations with discussions in the 1970s and 1980s about the way that certain films (such as the post-New Wave films of Godard) encouraged a viewer to distance himself or herself from the world of the film and to think about it rather than consume it, creating an active spectator whose engagement was intellectual rather than emotional. While this division has been challenged in many different ways, in particular because of how it privileges a certain kind of film and viewing experience as more politically engaged than others, it was still influential at the time during which Bellour initially wrote the article, published in 1984, titled “The Pensive Spectator.”42 The distinction between a film that encourages activity, and one that elicits passivity, as invoked by film scholars such as Colin MacCabe,43 pre-supposed that the rhetorical structure of the film “text” combined with the dispositif to position the viewer in a particular way. For example, a film may draw attention to the fact that the viewer was engaged in watching a film by including a character who directly addresses the audience, thus breaking the convention of the fourth wall. This convention was one of many that were thought to preserve the integrity of the film experience as a window on another world that fostered a passive acceptance of this world and its story. Because classical cinema avoided such strategies, or was assumed to do so,44 the spectator of



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this cinema was often considered to be sutured into what later what was more diplomatically referred to as a “preferred reading,” irrevocably sewn (literally “seamed”) into the film narrative and its ideology. Scholars working on reception, drawing on the work of media scholars such as Stuart Hall, Charlotte Brunsdon, and David Morley,45 recognized that, although a text may invite a particular interpretation, viewers had a high degree of agency in terms of whether they accepted this invitation, resulting in the production of a range of interpretations. Hall describes these as falling into three coarse categories: dominant readings, negotiated readings, and oppositional readings. Television as popularly defined by Marshall McLuhan was assumed to be a “cool” medium, that is one governed by a viewing regime marked by intermittent attention. In contrast, cinema, again according to McLuhan’s definition, was considered a “hot medium,” one that absorbed the viewer.46 As such it was less likely to produce negotiated readings and more likely to induce a trance-like state in the viewer. This subdued viewer, immersed in the cinema-experience and its narrative, would have no choice but to accept the film’s invitation to take up a particular ideological position – hence the notion of “suture.” Initially, Bellour’s definition of this new spectator, whom he calls “the pensive spectator,” was based on his identification of certain strategies in classical Hollywood film that he saw as indicating a subtle if important break with the assumptions, such as “suture,” shared by scholars publishing in the 1970s in the journal Screen. In Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948), for example, a photograph, a still image, appears, highlighting the paradox of the défilement, as explained above. According to Bellour, this intrusion of the still image arrests the spectator, permitting him or her in retrospect “to reflect on cinema” by “[c]reating a distance, another time.”47 This effect is only one of many that, in Bellour’s words, allows what he calls cinema’s “hurried spectator” to become “a pensive one as well”; however, Bellour describes it as “in retrospect, the most visible.” In his view, the insertion of a photograph, or the use of the freeze frame, thus offers a pronounced example of how films invite the viewer to engage intellectually with the film as a work of art and the product of an auteur director, because it “lingers in memory when the film is over.”48 By focusing on the use of the still image and its effects in particular films within particular sequences of these films, Bellour remains largely tied to film analysis as an approach to understanding cinema; however, in other ways, this article on “Le spectateur pensif” constitutes one of many significant steps he takes in this period toward articulating a notion of cinema that is tied to a specific dispositif. Thus, he calls the film spectator a “hurried spectator,” because watching a film in a theater means that the viewer is tied to a

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d­ éfilement (the movement of the film-as-a-strip-of-celluloid through the projector that results in the progression of the film-as-a-narrative on the screen) in a process that is not under his or her control. He or she does not have the leisure to double back and review what he or she has seen, to pause and consider before moving forward, to isolate particular images or shots for review. A film watched in a theater moves forward inexorably. The only way that the viewer may interrupt this défilement is to leave the theater. Notwithstanding, the intrusion of the still photograph nurtures, according to Bellour, a retrospective re-evaluation of the cinema and its nature, in the same way that an actor who breaks the fourth wall by addressing the spectator may incite him or her to reflect on the artifice, the constructed-ness, of the events that he or she has witnessed, or will witness, as part of the diegetic reality of the film narrative. The appearance of this reflection on film, including classical Hollywood movies (with the most recent film mentioned in the article dating back to 1966), in the context of a volume mostly dedicated to video suggests the way in which the growing influence of television, with viewers increasingly watching films on the small screen, the emergence of video technology that encouraged this tendency, and of new delivery systems such as cable and satellite television, as well as the increasing development of moving-image installation art, required Bellour to reevaluate his ideas about cinema itself. Ironically, in this same period, cinema as he understood it was increasingly a cinema of the remote past, unknown to many contemporary spectators who, for the most part, would have been introduced to film initially through broadcast television, thus in an already “contaminated” form, to use Bellour’s terminology.49 Accordingly, in his introduction to the first edition of L’Entreimages in French, published in 1990, Bellour describes “video” as having a fundamentally historical role as a “passageway” (“passage” in French), “a system of transformations of images interpenetrating each other,”50 with the further iterations of “new media” more definitive in their break with earlier moving-images forms. In this same introduction, he also launches a further iteration of the spectator-engaged-in-thought; thus, he notes: “The spectator at an installation is a flâneur” who “circulates between the images.”51 Here, he invokes an exhibition, at a museum or gallery, of installations through which the individual strolls, lingering, or even stopping, in control of the process of viewing, which highlights the importance of the context and way in which a work is displayed in terms of creating a particular experience. Consequently, for Bellour, moving-image installations, in part because of a veritable explosion of technologies, but also because of the consequent myriad possibilities in which a moving image may be displayed, generate an ever-multiplying set



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of dispositifs in which the artist in creating a work may also produce variations, or even a new dispositif, as part of his or her engagement with his or her practice. The new museologically defined spectator, who himself or herself moves through an exhibition, becomes “all the more aware of” what Bellour calls the “passages” (translated as “passageways”) between images, as he or she literally passes between them. Bellour’s innovation here was to emphasize not the “meaning” of the moving image itself, but rather the context, in particular the spatially determined environment in which the image was placed in order to produce the viewer’s experience. In focusing on context as opposed to text, Bellour joins, then, with popular-culture scholars such as Janice Radway,52 who, in the same period, explored period romances known as “bodice-rippers” and their readers, underlining the reader’s role, within groups such as book clubs, in producing a particular set of meanings and attitudes toward a particular novel, extending and expanding on what may be considered “paratextual” material. In the context of Bellour’s explorations of video art, the physical conditions under which the viewer encounters the work constitutes one of the most important paratexts that serves to define the text itself.53 From “Passages de l’image” to “an Other Cinema” In this period, Bellour appears to be testing a hypothesis about the state of cinema that he would confirm definitively in his major volume Le Corps du cinéma.54 His thoughts on this topic are relatively scattered, but began to take a significant form in his article “D’un autre cinéma,” which describes his experience at the 1999 Venice Biennale. This article was originally published in the journal that he was editing at the time, Trafic, and was later republished in his volume of essays La Querelle des dispositifs (The Debate about the Dispositifs) in 2011.55 Initially appearing in the same year as L’Entre-images 2, the second volume of Bellour’s collected essays that address the shifting terrain created by new media, “D’un autre cinéma” (Of an Other Cinema), provides a moment of punctuation in terms of his involvement with the moving-image arts.56 Significantly, he mentions the exhibition at the 1999 Venice Biennale in his 2011 Foreword to Between-the-Images along with documenta X (1997), the tenth anniversary of documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition held in Kassel, Germany, and the 2001 Venice Biennale, as turning points in the evolution of this “other” cinema. His concerns in this 1999 article depart from the issues raised through an earlier exhibition held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1990, for which he was one of the principal curators, “Passages de l’image.” This exhibition is described as the first significant international exhibition

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dedicated to the relations between “photography, cinema, and video”57 – a collocation that is also repeated as the half-title of Between-the-Images in its original French version. The works on display were designed to highlight artists who reflected upon “the role of images in our society,” emphasizing the relations between different kinds of images as defined by the medium. Bellour concludes the first chapter of L’Entre-images 2, “La double hélice” with a relatively ambivalent perspective on the metamorphosis of the media landscape. “La double hélice,” or “The Double Helix,” was initially written expressly for the exhibition “Passages de l’image” (which opened in Paris in October 1989)58 and published by the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. On the one hand, in this chapter, he proclaims: We are beyond the image, in a mixture without a name, a discourse image if you like or sound-image . . . in which television occupies the facing side and the computer the other second side, in our society of machines that do everything.

On the other hand, he seems willing to consider these explorations as still having something to do with cinema – not, at least as yet, subscribing to Jean-Luc Godard’s negative prognosis as laid out in his Histoire(s) du cinéma, an eight-part video project completed in 1998 shown mainly in museums and distributed as a set of videocassettes, audio-disks, books, and ultimately DVDs.59 In episode 2a, recorded in 1988, Godard asserts the death of cinema in a discussion with the French critic Serge Daney (co-founder with Bellour of the journal Trafic), four years before Daney’s own death from acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in 1992.60 Bellour, in contrast, in “La Double Hélice,” assumes an almost celebratory tone in his discussion of what he calls “l’image de synthèse,” or “the synthesis-image,” a consequence of the confluence of media that characterizes the works included in “Passages de l’image.” For Bellour, we confront “a new art” for which a new name must be invented, or, and, why not, we can just as well continue to call it “cinématographe.” On the condition of putting into graphein the power of the voice as well the physicality of words, and into kinema the touch of the hand as well as all types of time.61

Nevertheless, in “Of an Other Cinema,” published in 2000 in French,62 a little over ten years later, Bellour emphasizes much more strongly that this new art is not cinema, opining that [i]t seems time for a new inventory . . . To fix the terms of it is a delicate task. In effect, one would have to describe the explosion and dispersal by which that which one thought to be or have been cinema . . . now finds itself redistributed, transformed, mimicked and reinstalled.63



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While not necessarily proclaiming the “death of cinema,” Bellour proposed in this article that cinema should be considered one installation in a “history of installations” that begins “with the invention of the camera obscura and projection,” and that encompasses “television” as “a ‘projection without projection.’”64 Cinema’s uniqueness, in Bellour’s eyes, derives from the fact that, as an installation, it dominated the realm of the projected moving image “for half a century” until the advent of what he still considered to be its major competitor, television, as a particular dispositif.65 In this article, Bellour’s focus shifts to understanding the specificity of each installation and its dispositifs, which would ultimately lead him in the twenty-first century to argue, along with Godard, that cinema’s loss of its dominance as a medium and popular-culture form, which it enjoyed in the first half of the twentieth, should indeed be equated with its death at the end of this same century. Significantly, the episode of Histoire(s) du cinéma that includes the interview with Serge Daney noted above is titled “Seul le cinema,” or, in English, “Only the Cinema,” emphasizing the unique position that film held within the social arena, a position now occupied by a multitude of what we have learned to call “devices,” all of which qualify as “projections without a projector.” Bellour’s position reflects not only on the continuity existing between installations and cinema, as well as the distinctiveness of each form (which he discusses at length in the rest of the article), but also on the uniqueness of cinema, that that distinguishes it from proto-cinematic inventions as well as the other plastic arts, particularly in terms of the relations that it established with its audiences. These distinctions would bear fruit in his magnum opus, Le Corps du cinéma,66 a project in which, importantly, he leaves to one side the problems that he sees arising out of what he calls the “contamination” of images, which was fundamental to his work on the “entre-images” (the “between-images”), to focus more specifically on issues arising out of a multiplication of dispositifs that he would identify. Notes  1. Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” Screen 18:4 (1977): 35–47. https:// doi.org/10.1093/screen/18.4.35; Ben Brewster and Colin MacCabe, eds, Screen 15:2 (summer, 1974) [“Brecht and a Revolutionary Cinema”]. For a succinct definition of distanciation or alienation see Susan Hayward, “Distanciation,” in Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, 3rd edition (London/New York: Routledge, 2006), 105. For an example of the term’s use in the analysis of a film, see Jan Uhde, “The Influence of Bertolt Brecht’s Theory of Distanciation on the Contemporary Cinema, Particularly on Jean-Luc Godard,” Journal of the University Film Association 26:3 (1974): 28–30, 44.

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 2. Raymond Bellour, “Le spectateur pensif,” Photogénies 5 (1984): n.p.; Raymond Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” trans. Lynne Kirby, Wide Angle 9:1 (1987), 6–10. See also Raymond Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” trans. Lynne Kirby, in Between-the-Images, ed. Raymond Bellour and Allyn Hardyck (Zurich: JRP/ Ringier, 2012), 86–93.  3. Bertolt Brecht, “The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre: Notes to the Opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964), 33–42.  4. Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, eds Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–55; John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC/Penguin Books, 1972).  5. Raymond Bellour, “Thierry Kuntzel and the Return of Writing,” trans. Annwyl Williams, in Between-the-Images, ed. Raymond Bellour and Allyn Hardyck, (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2012), 30–61. Previously published as: Raymond Bellour, “Thierry Kuntzel et le retour de l’écriture,” Cahiers du cinéma, 321 (March 1981), 40–50; Raymond Bellour, “Thierry Kuntzel and the Return of the Writing,” trans. Annwyl Williams, Camera Obscura 4 (2 11) (1983): 28–59.  6. Raymond Bellour, “Note for the Century,” trans. Allyn Hardyck, in Raymond Bellour; Allyn Hardyck, Between-the-Images (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2012), 5.  7. Raymond Bellour, “Thierry Kuntzel and the Return of Writing,” 35; Thierry Kuntzel, “A Note upon the Filmic Apparatus,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 1:3 (1976), 271.  8. Bellour, “Thierry Kuntzel and the Return of Writing,” 45.  9. English-language readers may be familiar with the children’s toy called a “magic slate” or “magic writing pad.” The toy consists of a sheet of clear plastic (in Freud’s day, wax paper and a sheet of celluloid) covering a dark wax-like surface. Using a stylus, the child writes or draws on the plastic surface and then he or she lifts the sheet. The image seems to disappear, though the stylus will have left traces on the surface below. Versions of this simple toy still exist today. See Sigmund Freud, “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad,’” (1925 [1924]), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), 226–32. See also Kuntzel, “A Note upon the Filmic Apparatus,” 266–7. 10. Bellour, “Thierry Kuntzel and the Return of Writing,” 47; Kuntzel, “A Note upon the Filmic Apparatus,” 266–71. 11. Raymond Bellour, Alice Leroy, and Gabriel Bortzmeyer, Raymond Bellour: dans la compagnie des œuvres: Entretien avec Alice Leroy et Gabriel Bortzmeyer (Paris: Éditions Rouge Profond), 108. 12. D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), Kindle edition, location 303–20 of 2,633. 13. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New



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York: Hill and Wang, 1977); Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975). 14. Stern elaborates this concept in Daniel N. Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 53–61. Bellour would draw extensively on the theories of Stern in his later work, especially in Le Corps du cinéma. 15. Barbara London, “Projects 29: Thierry Kuntzel,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, exhibition dates June 28–September 2, 1991, https://www.moma.org/ calendar/exhibitions/339?locale=en, accessed September 3, 2017. 16. For Blanchot’s theory of the indeterminacy of literary language, see Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); originally published in French as L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955). 17. In 2010, Raymond Bellour curated an exhibition that, signaling their aesthetic affinity, brought the works of Thierry Kuntzel and Bill Viola together in “Deux Éternités proches/Two Close Eternities,” at Le Fresnoy, 26 February–24 April 2010. See Raymond Bellour, ed., Thierry Kuntzel – Bill Viola: Deux Éternités Proches/Two Close Eternities (Tourcoing, France: Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains, 2010). 18. Charles Jencks, What is Post-Modernism? (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986). 19. Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures: Popular Culture and Post-Modernism (New York: Routledge, 1987). 20. See, for example, Alistair Fox, Speaking Pictures: Neuropsychoanalysis and Authorship in Film and Literature (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016), 168. See also, Thierry Kuntzel, “Time Smoking a Picture,” single-track video, silent, 38’, color, ¾ format (Paris: Production INA, 1980). 21. Raymond Bellour, “Foreword,” trans. Allyn Hardyck, in Between-the-Images, ed. Raymond Bellour and Allyn Hardyck (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2012), 9. 22. See “Loop Talks,” “Passages de l’image,” recorded June 3, 2016, https://loopbarcelona.com/video-conference/passages-de-limage/, accessed September 2, 2017. 23. Raymond Bellour, “Note for the Century,” trans. Allyn Hardyck, in Betweenthe-Images, ed. Raymond Bellour and Allyn Hardyck (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2012), 5. 24. See, in this volume, Chapter Seven, “Thierry Kuntzel and the Rise of Video Art,” 121. 25. Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L, 2009). 26. Raymond Bellour, “Foreword,” in Between-the-Images, 9. 27. Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-images: photos, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1990). 28. Maurice Bessy and Jean-Louis Chardan, quoted in Allyn Hardyck, “Vocabulary and Translator’s Notes,” in ed. Bellour and Hardyck, Between-the-Images, 396. 29. Joseph Angerson and Barbara Fisher, “The Myth of Persistence of Vision,” Journal of University Film Association 30:4 (1978): 3–8.

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30. “Dogs see us move in SLOW MOTION,” dailymail.co.uk, July 10, 2014, http:// www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2685860/Dogs-SLOW-MOTIONAnimals-brain-processes-visual-information-faster-humans-study-finds.html, accessed September 3, 2017. 31. Oliver Sacks, “To See and Not See,” in An Anthropologist on Mars (New York: Vintage, 1995): 108–52. 32. Bellour, “Note for the Century,” 6. 33. Bellour, “Note for the Century,” 6. This note was published in the 2002 revised edition, L’Entre-images: photo, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2002). 34. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, location 1,968 of 2,633. 35. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, location 2,101 of 2,633. 36. Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs (Paris: P.O.L, 2012). 37. See Jean-Louis Baudry, “Cinéma: effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base,” Cinéthique 7–8 (1970): 1–8; Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28:2 (1974–5): 39–47. 38. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Le Dispositif,” Communications 23 (1975): 56–72; JeanLouis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” trans. Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst, Camera Obscura 1 (1 1) (1976): 104–26. 39. Hardyck, “Vocabulary and Translator’s Notes,” 396. 40. Hardyck, “Vocabulary and Translator’s Notes,” 396. 41. Adrian Martin, Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media (Basingtoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Kindle edition, 179. 42. Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” 86–93. 43. Colin MacCabe, “Realism and the Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses,” in Tracking the Signifier: Theoretical Essays: Film, Linguistics, Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 33–57. 44. Scholars such as David Bordwell have pointed out that Classical Hollywood film was far less homogeneous than the scholars associated with Screen had initially posited; see David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Routledge, 2003). 45. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 128–38. David Morley, The “Nationwide” Audience: Structure and Decoding (London: BFI, 1980). See also Charlotte Brunsdon, Everyday Television – Nationwide (London: BFI, 1978). 46. Marshall McLuhan, “Media Hot and Cold,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 22–32. 47. Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” 88. 48. Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” 92. Bellour in this article claims that the insertion of the still image into a film is the only such strategy that the viewer remem-



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bers; however, it is clear from other articles that this statement was written in a moment of rhetorical flourish, the consequence of an impulse similar to the one that inspired the title “L’analyse flambée” or, in English, “Analysis in Flames,” which he later described as a “devastating title.” Raymond Bellour, email correspondence with the author, March 29, 2017. 49. With his notion of “contamination,” Bellour is invoking, and reapplying to a new object, the concept of “contaminatio,” a term referring to the practice of importing into a play “a small portion from a second original,” as found in the works of Roman playwrights such as Terence and Plautus. See George E. Duckworth, Nature of Roman Comedy: A Study in Popular Entertainment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952 [repr. 2015], 203. 50. Raymond Bellour, “Between-the-Images,” in Bellour, Between-the-Images, 20. 51. Raymond Bellour, “Between-the-Images,” 20. 52. Janice Radway, Reading the Romance (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984). 53. For a definition and further discussion of “paratext,” see, in this volume, Chapter One, “Film Analysis: Image and Movement,” 23. 54. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma. 55 Raymond Bellour, “D’un autre cinéma,” Trafic 34 (summer 2000): 5–21; Raymond Bellour, “Of Another Cinema,” in Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, ed. Tanya Leighton (London: Tate Publishing in Association with Afterall, 2008), 406–22; Raymond Bellour, “D’un autre cinéma,” in La Querelle des dispositifs: cinéma, installations, expositions (Paris: P.O.L, 2012), 153–70. 56. Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-images 2: mots, images (Paris: P.O.L, 1999). 57. “Passage de l’image,” Press Release, centrepompidou.fr, 1989, https://www.centrepompidou.fr/media/document/5e/61/5e610229fe13d64f3e0ff28991aa1eee/ normal.pdf, accessed September 3, 2017. 58. “Passages de l’image,” centrepompidou.fr. 59. Raymond Bellour, “La double hélice,” in Bellour, L’Entre-images 2, 41. [Translation by author.] Originally published as Raymond Bellour, “La double hélice,” in Passages de l’image, ed. Raymond Bellour, Catherine David, and Christine Van Assche (Paris: Centre George Pompidou, 1990), 35–56; Raymond Bellour, “The Double Helix,” trans. James Eddy, in Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation, ed. Timothy Druckrey (New York: Aperture, 1996), 173–99. 60. Serge Daney (1944–92) represents Bellour’s third important interlocutor, after Christian Metz (1931–93) and Thierry Kuntzel (1948–2007). 61. Bellour, “La Double Hélice,” 41. [Translation by author.] 62. Bellour, “D’un autre cinéma.” 63. Bellour, “Of Another Cinema,” 407. 64. Bellour, “Of Another Cinema,” 407. 65. Bellour, “Of Another Cinema,” 407. 66. Bellour, Le Corps du cinema.

CHAPTER THREE

Cinema and the Body: The Ghost in the Theater

Le Corps du Cinéma Bellour’s magnum opus, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (The Body of Cinema: Hypnoses, Emotions, Animalities), a massive volume of more than 500 pages, brings together many themes that have marked his exploration of classical cinema over the previous decades.1 Described as “the first large-scale work on the rhythmic and formal aspects of cinema that unify the animal, the viewer, and the production and unfolding of film,” the volume focuses on the relations among these last, within the context of a particular dispositif or apparatus. Bellour uses this term to refer to the “set-up” within which the viewer engages with the moving-image narrative or “the cinema-situation”2 that characterized the film experience at a certain moment in time – the period after the rise of the studios and before the dominance of television, roughly from 1925 to 1965, with a high degree of variation between national contexts.3 In Bellour’s, terms, the cinema-situation must meet the following requirements to be deemed to offer the cinema-experience (“le cinéma”) to a given spectator: it must consist of the projection of a film, in a darkened (“dans le noir”) theater (“salle de cinéma”) over a prescribed period of time (with a beginning and an end), in which the viewer sits with others at the screening (“une séance . . . collective”). These requirements constitute “the condition” that permits “a unique experience of perception and memory” (“une experience unique de perception et mémoire”). This experience defines the cinema spectator as a specific embodiment that any shift in the viewing situation changes, more or less.4 For Bellour, only this cinema-situation (and the experience that it produces) “deserves to be called ‘cinema’” (“Et cela seul vaut d’être appellé ‘cinéma’”).5 Bellour sees his goal, in the above analysis, as moving toward an understanding of cinema as part of “an archeology,” in Foucault’s terms, in which the cultural and social forces of the late eighteenth and of the nineteenth century came together to produce “psychoanalysis and cinema.” In this trajectory, both of the latter “appear to have been born together out of



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hypnosis, which, for Freud, led to an enlargement of the field of memory – an enlargement that cinema, in its own way, also achieved.”6 The Body The “body” cited in the title is two-fold: for Bellour “there are two bodies of/ in cinema” (or, more idiomatically in English, two cinema-bodies) “that ceaselessly bend the one to the use of the other to better appear to be only one single body.” Among these two bodies, Bellour distinguishes “the body of film(s) (the film-corpus), of all films that one by one, shot by shot, come together and fall apart.”7 Here he depicts the film-body as existing in time, and coming together over time. He echoes the distinction made by the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg writing at the beginning of the twentieth century between “what he calls ‘film’s ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ developments.”8 As Dudley Andrew explains: “Munsterberg argues that technology provided the body of this new phenomenon and society animated that body, forcing it to play many actual roles.”9 Bellour attributes a number of characteristics to this “body” not present in Münsterberg’s definition. First, the body of film (its technology) for Bellour refers specifically to the film strip as it moves through the projector, as distinct from the cinema-situation or dispositf, which is also implied in Münsterberg’s notion of technology, but not in Bellour’s analogy, in which the dispositif enjoys a separate status. Second, for Bellour the viewer is also a “body,” whose “mind” cannot be understood as distinct from its embodiment. Münsterberg, as a neo-Kantian, did not conceive of the activities of the mind as embodied. In contrast, the late-twentieth century philosopher John Searle asserts that “mental phenomena are caused by the neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain,”10 a view widely held by contemporary neuroscientists. Third, for Bellour the body of film is defined in time, through its unfolding, or literally “un-reeling” as it passes through the projector to produce the narrative that the viewer sees on screen. Once a film projection has finished, the “body” that the projection has built is also progressively dismantled. The end of the film is the end of its body, which can then exist only in memory. Elsewhere, he explains that this film-body is formed by the material that constitutes the film as such, its formal properties in material form as a play of light, sound, and apparent movement.11 This film-body then acts upon the subject or viewer as a body, the second body of cinema, the body of the spectator, which in turn catalyzes the viewer’s emotions as embodied. Together, these two bodies create the cinema-body. In underscoring these connections, Bellour’s view is radically different from that of “cognitive” film theorists who posit the experience of a film as a purely mental operation. Bellour explains that “it is less crucial than

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one might think to speak in terms of ‘the body of a film’ rather than a ‘filmic text,’”12 elaborating further that, in his terms, “the body of the film and the body of the spectator mirror each other.”13 This notion of “mirroring” is, however, misleading because, for Bellour, the film-body (in a sense, a concretization through experience of a “textual volume”) takes form only as the specific embodied experience of a given spectator in a particular time frame, which leads Bellour to describe the spectatorbody as a “temporal body, a body of memory and forgetfulness that is seized by the body of film.”14 In other words, the spectator experiences the film as a materially specific phenomenon (a specific place, time, group of people, and so on), as a “body” in which emotions as well as thoughts are engaged, lived through, forgotten (edited, if one likes) and re-remembered. Such specificity is inescapable, given that it is impossible for most human subjects to remember a film in its entirety, in every single detail, even to a greater degree than a novel, for example. In this sense, Bellour implicitly points to the ways in which many theories of spectatorship maintain a mind/body split. These same theorists ignore the discoveries of contemporary neurobiological researchers, such as Antonio Damasio, cited by Bellour in Le Corps du cinéma, who have underlined that “thought” itself cannot exist independently of a given “body,” which includes the brain and its emotions. Feelings, or emotions, and cognition are inextricably linked and governed by the bio-chemical processes inherent in the body as a living organism.15 The concept of hypnosis, which Bellour elaborated on the foundation of this two-body concept, enabled him to resolve the Cartesian mind/body split that had continued to trouble French philosophers since René Descartes. Hypnotism, for Bellour, acts directly upon the spectator-as-body, with the hypnotist positioned outside the body. In his view, the cinema-situation, in its entirety, including the film-body, takes the place of the hypnotist insofar as it induces a trance-like state in the spectator. Bellour’s major point is, then, that the spectator is first and foremost a “body” (not a “mind” or “spirit” independent of the body) and acted upon by the film-body, its materiality, and also its representations as a dimension of that materiality, of which the dispositif was a fundamental component. Bellour’s emphasis on the body suggests the influence of Deleuze who states: “I don’t believe that linguistics and psychoanalysis offer a great deal to cinema. On the contrary, the biology of the brain – molecular biology – does.”16 Dispositif: An Entranced Spectator For Bellour, the terrain of cinema remains relatively circumscribed, delimited by a set of fairly specific constraints: a film is projected by a specific nexus of



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machinery, over a specified time period, at a specific speed, in the dark, to a group of spectators who watch it according to a specific set of conventions that are followed by the group, and that includes a required level of attention.17 It is precisely this cinema that interests him – a cinema that would be familiar to only a few moviegoers today – one that harkens back to Bellour’s own youth, in which the film experience was characterized by what he calls a “unique experience of memory, that any other viewing situation alters more or less.”18 For Bellour, this particular situation, or dispositif, encouraged the spectator to give himself or herself over to a light trance-like state, similar to that induced by hypnosis, or in this case a “light hypnosis.” Hypnosis itself has a range of meanings. For Bellour, the principle idea that he retains from earlier speculations on the nature of hypnosis is that through hypnosis the subject is somatically engaged and encouraged to assume thoughts, ideas, and emotions as his or her own that are suggested to him by the hypnotist. In the same way, the spectator to a degree (a light trance is always involved), and to varying degrees (each spectator experiences a film in his or her own way), accepts the “story-world” of the film as his or her world, temporarily experiencing this world as his or her own, and identifying with it in its entirety. Hypnosis represents a hinge moment in his inquiry into the terms of this cinema, and also underlies his preoccupation with the points of commonality he detects between hypnosis and animality (the qualities of “animalness”) through which, according to Bellour, we may come to understand the nature of cinema’s physical impact on the body (“le corps du cinéma”). Bellour posits that the way in which hypnosis is represented in film allows for a mise en abyme of cinema as itself a device that captures, or entrances, a viewer (and by extension an audience) through a process whereby he or she becomes prey to somatic affects – emotions experienced as the viewer’s own, but that are introduced from elsewhere, being registered through the body itself. In evoking hypnosis in this context, Bellour recalls what Laura Marks has described as the “haptic visuality” of cinema – the means whereby cinema appeals to embodied senses beyond sight and hearing. Marks explains that “thinking of cinema as haptic is only a step toward considering the ways cinema appeals to the body as a whole.”19 Bellour’s investigation of cinema, hypnosis, the emotions, and animals therefore moves us yet another step closer in our understanding of how cinema engages with the body: this capacity of the cinema to produce the illusion of an array of sensations in the viewer, including emotions. In this sense, when a spectator watches a movie and is captivated by the experience, she or he is not, as it were, herself or himself. He or she is captivated by a force of suggestion emanating from outside the self. We might call this “the

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magic of movies.” This magic brings us back to the theater, accounts for cinema’s enduring hold on our imagination, and links the cinematic experience to that of hypnosis. Historian Ruth Leys maintains that a certain strand of early twentieth-century thought understood “hypnosis” and “suggestion” as “involving a kind of imitation or mimesis.”20 Within this paradigm, “hypnosis dissolves the distinction between self and other to such a degree that the hypnotized subject comes to occupy the place of the other in an unconscious imitation or identification so profound that the other is not apprehended as other.”21 Bellour posits the spectator as similarly immersed in the cinematic experience. Animality Bellour relates this dimension of cinematic experience to the position of animals, which he describes, citing François Roustang (a French psychoanalyst who has published extensively on animals) as being “in a state of permanent hypnosis.” That is to say, animals exist in a state in which they are alive, but unconscious of themselves, as is the cinematic spectator whose consciousness has been invaded, inhabited, or even replaced by another, that of the film.22 Bellour posits the recurrent introduction of animal motifs in films as a reminder of this primal relationship between the cinematic state and the animal state, of the continuum between the animal and the human. Thus, he postulates a “child who sleeps in every spectator,” who is mobilized by the cinematic dispositif.23 Susceptible to hypnosis, this “child-viewer” operates as the “animal that he is” in a very particular context because the cinema serves as the catalyst that activates the qualities that the human subject (the child who sleeps) shares with animals.24 Indeed, according to Bellour, the viewer “enters into” a hypnotic state “as soon as the film begins”: “Animality . . . embodies the inner element of hypnosis that is intrinsic to the emotional body.” 25 From this same perspective, “the infinite variety of emotions aroused by films” are equivalent to “the effects of hypnosis that they induce.”26 For Bellour, the ways in which a film acts upon the body in eliciting emotions, which are somatically driven, are both the consequence and the proof of a hypnotizing mechanism. The latter is generated by a specific, historically determined cinematic dispositif or “apparatus.”27 This specificity is engendered in tandem by the dispositif as a socially and architecturally inscribed institution, and by the filmwork itself (the work of the film on the spectator) – that is, by “the rhythms of light, by the alternations between appearing and disappearing forms, by the various repeated intervals generated by moving images.”28 On the one hand, according to Bellour, the film is the effect



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of a historically specific cinematic apparatus; on the other, the “machine” that film itself is, the “games of light,” as the Germans used to call cinema (Lichtspiele),29 is intrinsically, by virtue of its technicity, hypnotic. Hypnosis The dark space, the anonymous audience, the surrounding sound, and other aspects of the dispositif, however, are also all elements that play a key role in subduing the viewer into the receptive/active state of hypnosis, the state of “innervation” as a promise of agency of which Walter Benjamin spoke.30 Significantly, Bellour remarks in Le Corps du cinéma that “[t]his viewer who gives himself over to the light hypnosis of film is as active as [he is] passive.”31 This concept of the active/passive viewer explicitly resonates with Benjamin’s line of argument that recognizes both the dangers and the possibilities inherent in cinematic experience. As critical theorist Miriam Hansen explains, for Benjamin, “the idea of film as a form of play (Spiel) . . . allows for a nondestructive, mimetic innervation of technology” that is grounded in the “notion of an imbrication of physiological with machinic structures.”32 In focusing on hypnosis, Bellour challenges the very influential intrapsychic model of the cinematic spectator associated with one of his interlocutors, Christian Metz. Largely informed by a French psychoanalytic tradition, Metz posited the cinematic experience as a form of regression analogous to the dream state (as described by Sigmund Freud), but especially with the Imaginary and the Mirror Stage (in the terms of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan), and grounded in a psychology of disavowal associated with fetishism.33 Bellour’s model, as outlined earlier in this volume, builds on this psychoanalytic tradition; it enfolds, however, the kinds of psychic investments (which may or may not be mobilized to varying degrees through actual narratives) that Metz proposes within a system that remains both social and historical in its origins. Bellour’s definition also takes into account the mechanisms of the film experience itself as produced by a strip of projected images moving through the viewer’s field of vision at a particular and uniformly regulated speed, while she or he sits in the dark with other viewers. Bellour, thus, construes his conceptualization of the cinema-situation as analogous to the phenomenon of hypnosis (acting directly on the spectator as a bundle of somatically driven emotions) but also proposes that a symbolic field of emotional investment, or cathexis, is superimposed on, and intermingled with, the somatic through the double role of the défilement: construed as, first, the mechanical flickering of projected light (the games of light) produced by the celluloid strip as it passes through the gage of the projector, and, second, the unfolding of the narrative that is being projected, the plot

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of the story that is laid out and signified through this projection. The film experience, then, is the product of this double process, which is both material (figural) and symbolic (representational). In this context, Bellour returns to his notions of a “pensive spectator,” the spectator-engaged-in thought, with “Un spectateur pensif” the title of an extended chapter in Le Corps du cinéma,34 part of which was published in 2006 as “Daniel Stern, encore,” (Daniel Stern, Again).35 Mathieu Bouvier, who conducted a series of interviews with Bellour, summarizes Bellour’s position on the cinema-spectator: The focused (or attentive) viewer is a “pensive” spectator, in the sense that he [or she] is both active and passive, alienated (the flow of consciousness synchronized with the flow of the film), and emancipated (his [or her] capacity for and freedom to evaluate are markedly active and strongly sought).36

Drawing upon the theories of neurobiologist Antonio Damasio and the pediatrician/psychologist Daniel Stern, Bellour describes how the cinemaspectator is initially seized by emotions that originate in the forms of expression that constitute the film-body; however, he also posits the spectator’s experience as an integrated experience in which the viewer “never stops thinking during a cinematic projection.” He or she thinks of all kinds of things: about one’s own life, about other films by the same filmmaker, about other shots in other films of which we are reminded by the quality of an image, etc. In this way, provided that the film invites it, specific effects of interruption and reflexivity are constantly produced.37

By invoking Damasio in particular, Bellour offers a definition of a filmviewer whose emotions and thoughts are embodied and integrated. Through Stern, he articulates a theory of spectatorship that foregrounds the child’s early emotional experiences in terms of what Stern calls “vitality affects,” as will be explained below. While Bellour retains the reflective potential that he posits in his initial definition of the pensive spectator, or spectator-engagedin-thought,38 he also endows this thought process with a body. In so doing, he links the human implicitly to the animal. Animal Presence(s) Not coincidentally, Bellour takes many of his examples from early films in which both animals and hypnosis were prominent as images of film’s own workings, points of reference, mechanisms, and effects. Bellour’s exploration of hypnosis in the context of the viewer’s experience lends weight and detail to what otherwise may be interpreted as an impressionist metaphor, while



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at the same time echoing the fears of mass-culture theorists who attacked cinema because in their view it produced a narcotized, passive spectator.39 Indeed, the great director Luis Buñuel, who claimed to be an accomplished hypnotist himself in his youth,40 noted in his autobiography that [m]ovies have a hypnotic power . . . [c]inematographic hypnosis, light and imperceptible, is no doubt due, in the first instance, to the darkness of the theater but also to changing shots and lights and to camera movements, which weaken the spectator’s critical understanding and exercise over him a kind of fascination.41

The figure of the animal is a lynchpin in Bellour’s historical understanding of cinema and its relations to hypnosis; “the attested primordial link between animals and cinema” in Bellour’s terms arises as a result of the historical coincidence between the invention of the cinema and a change in function and position accorded to animals in European society. This transformation manifested by, for example (in the words of Étienne Souriau, whom Bellour quotes): “the sudden and almost total cessation of the use of the horse” in combat and as a means of locomotion, at which point the horse becomes a favored subject and actor in cinema.42 Akira Lippit, echoing Souriau and later John Berger, explains that “the elimination of animals from the immediate environment coincided with accelerated industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the rise of technological media.”43 This shift in the status of the horse, and animals more generally, reflects other larger changes through which “another order between humans and animals would emerge.”44 The numerous appearances of animals in art, most notably at the cinema, where animals function as indicators of this new technology (such as cinema itself) and this new order, attest to these changes. In Lipitt’s words, “cinema best embodied the transfer of animals from nature to technology.”45 While Bellour aligns himself in many ways with the philosophical tradition represented by Lipitt, his position is also distinctive, and in some ways more modest, because he claims that, if in some ways the role of the animal in contemporary European culture has shifted, the animal is not “alwaysalready-dead.”46 We still live very much in a world populated by animals. The ubiquity of the animal is foregrounded by popular narratives such as the television series Zoo (CBS, 2015–  ). In this program, based on Zoo (2012), a novel written by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge, animals throughout the world cooperate and turn on humans with the seeming intent of exterminating the species. The narrative draws its strength from the plausibility of its premise, which depends upon the way that animals, from wild birds to pets, permeate every aspect of human life. Notwithstanding the ubiquity of animal life in contemporary society, few

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would argue that modifications in the relations between humans and other animal species have not occurred, in particular with regard to how other species are perceived. These variations have resulted in an evolving view of the human subject, engendering debates in this same period about what it means to be human and about the relations between humanity and animality. More recently, diverse thinkers, from the French philosopher Elisabeth de Fontenay to the popular historian Joanna Bourke, have come to claim that the lines dividing the human from the animal can no longer be maintained as givens, meaning that neither humans nor animals can be considered to fall into clear categories on a Cartesian model.47 Bourke comments that “[t] he boundaries of the human and the animal turn out to be as entwined and indistinguishable as the inner and outer sides of a Möbius strip.”48 For Bellour, drawing upon a Western philosophical tradition, what makes us human is our consciousness of self and our capacity to exercise agency over that “self”: it is this that distinguishes us from animals who are prey to instinct, to forces that provoke action without the possibility of thought or consciousness. Here he draws upon nineteenth-century ideas about hypnotism and animal magnetism. While current philosophical positions and research on neurobiology strongly doubt these assumptions with respect to other mammals,49 the terrain of Bellour’s explorations is neither abstract philosophy nor science, but rather acquired forms of representation. The manner in which animals and hypnosis are represented, and how their mechanicity seems to speak to the effects of the cinematic machine, is what concerns him. He is interested in the ways in which these often overlooked yet foundational (if now, perhaps, outmoded) cinematic representations disrupt deeply held views about what it means to be human, and what it means to be a cinema spectator. The difficulties inherent in these representations do not impinge on their effects, on film’s innervation of “a strange reality aroused by moments that can only be described by the word ‘hypnotic.’”50 Bellour’s primary concern is, in the words of Miriam Hansen, “what cinema does, the kind of sensory-perceptual experience it enabled.”51 Emotions For Bellour, a defining moment of this experience is that the film makes a “mass of emotions” available to the spectator that arise out of the relations between what he calls the two bodies of film.52 In order to explain this level of emotion, he draws upon the research of pediatrician/psychologist Daniel Stern who posited that the infant experiences a kind of pre-cognitive emotion that is purely sensorial, and that is intensified by what Stern calls “vitality affects.” Vitality affects, according to Stern, continue to influence our per-



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ception of experience and provide the groundwork for the expression and reception of structures of feeling throughout the life of the subject.53 While other forms of apprehending the world are accessible to the subject as he or she matures, particularly within the symbolic field as described by psychoanalysis, vitality affects, which are a-modal in nature, continue to furnish the bedrock of aesthetic experience in particular, in which “art” is a “rhythmical extension of nature.”54 At this level, then, the film-body as material acts initially upon the spectator-body, who, in addition to these sensorial emotions that vitality affects convey and intensify, also identifies with story and character. These sensations remain outside the register of Freudian psychoanalytic theory (although they are important in the emerging field of neuropsychoanalysis)55 because they are physical in nature and pre-exist any sense of biography or psychology within the human subject. For Bellour, the one does not preclude the other. This primal experience is the source of the rudimentary emotions evinced by the spectator confronted with the cinema-situation or dispositif, but does not prevent him or her from engaging in the film’s narrative in other ways simultaneously. In Le Corps du cinéma, then, he attempts to understand the appeal and attraction of the cinema-situation, which he feels had not been significantly explored in his earlier work on film, given that it had been grounded in Freudian psychoanalysis.56 He points to Edgar Morin as a significant predecessor, who hypothesized that the spectator at the cinema identifies with everything that he or she sees.57 Bellour also evokes, if indirectly, theorists such as Christian Metz who posited the viewer as identifying with the camera/screen as a first level of identification, a primary identification recalling the dream state, in which the dreamer is the dream in its entirely (it is his or her dream), that precedes identification with specific characters that may shift along with focalization throughout the narrative.58 Bellour parts ways with Metz because he evokes a scientific model of human development – that pioneered by Stern. Bellour also emphasizes hypnosis as the physical product of a cinema-situation that induces the spectator to identify at a primal level (at the level of these a-modal affects) in which, importantly, one sense is confounded with another, as though these last were his or her own experiences. In this elaboration, his notion of the dispositif was fundamental, because it is the dispositif that provides the basis for the analogy with hypnosis. In pioneering a neurobiological model, in which he draws upon the work of neurobiologists such as Antonio Damasio as well as psychiatrists such as Daniel Stern, Bellour may appear to have abandoned psychoanalysis.59 Again, this perception is misleading. He does indeed abandon a conviction that the Oedipal scenario has legitimacy outside a historical context, on the grounds

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that it does not offer a universal model for human development; however, he still retains other concepts associated with a psychoanalytic model. Thus, although he posits hypnosis as offering a model for the spectator’s investment in the cinematic experience, marked by emotions that are intensified by vitality affects at a primary level, he also posits secondary levels of identification, drawing upon psychoanalytic concepts promoted by a strand of psychoanalysis that came to dominate French thought in the second half of the twentieth century based on a re-reading of the works of Sigmund Freud. While Jacques Lacan was the most visible members of this movement, if it could be termed as such, given the divisive nature of the members and groups that composed it, he was not the only one, though, perhaps, the most influential insofar as he inaugurated a specific school of thought. The Ideal-Ego For Bellour, then, the spectator, in a second turn of the screw, identifies the dispositif with what is known as the “ego ideal,” or “idéal du moi.” Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, in what is perhaps one of the “Bibles” of French psychoanalysis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, define the ego-ideal in the following way, drawing upon Freud: an agency of the personality resulting from the coming together of narcissism (idealization of the ego) and identification with the parents, with their substitutes or with collective ideals. As a distinct agency, the ego-ideal constitutes a model to which the subject attempts to conform.60

Bellour posits that the cinema spectator identifies with the dispositif as the ego-ideal, in the same way that Freud posits the hypnotized subject as identifying with the hypnotist. He explains that “for the spectator, the ego ideal becomes identified with the dispositif of cinema itself.”61 According to Bellour, his hypothesis that the spectator identifies with the dispositif as the ego ideal provides a means of linking “this ego ideal to the corresponding ego ideal of the Lacanian mirror stage in the context of the cinematic situation – a hypothesis that Baudry and Metz had both developed.”62 Bellour brings his theory of the spectator closer to that of scholars like Metz and Baudry who drew upon Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage as a moment in which the infant mis-recognizes himself or herself as the mother – as a fully formed adult, rather than an as-yet-unconsolidated subject outside of language, with Lacan positing the image with which the infant identifies in the mirror stage as the ego-ideal. In this context, the cinema spectator was described as engaging with cinema as a form of regression in which the spectator confounds hallucination with reality, because she or he is momentarily



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in the safety of the cinema-situation. Bellour, in contrast, does not posit an intra-psychic relationship. Following Freud, Bellour posits that the hypnotist comes to take the place of the ego-ideal in the psychic geography of the hypnotized subject, a position that is then occupied by the cinema-situation, including the film-body. In reinstating a concept related to the mirror stage, Bellour attempts to formulate a syncretic approach that operates through a subtle sense of accretion, a model of “and/and” rather than “either/or” – one that accounts for competing theories of hypnotism itself (with Roustang disagreeing with Freud).63 “Hypnotism” operates as a cornerstone in this articulation of the spectator–cinema relationship. As Bellour points out, however, [T]he primacy I accord to hypnosis . . . does not entail an exclusion of psychoanalytic models of the dream and the mirror such as Metz, Baudry, Kuntzel and others have construed them. On this issue, I agree with the position of Stern, who explains that his own construction in no way refutes the construction of psychoanalysis.64

While Bellour has frequently mentioned the importance of the ego-ideal in his lectures on Le Corps du cinéma,65 as a concept it has had less impact on his analysis of specific films than his discussion of hypnotism more generally, and of the emotions. Importantly, he calls attention to the fact that the type of hypnotic effect he associates with cinema and the cinematic dispositif is also present in other aesthetic experiences; however, he qualifies this by claiming, “Cinema simply sustains it in a more developed way, to the extent that the psycho-physiological conditions induced by its dispositif promote a fuller capturing of the spectator.”66 Vitality Affects Cinema’s capacity as a time-based visual art is crucial to the manner in which Bellour proposes that it supports the trance-like engagement of its spectator. While his earlier film analyses tended to describe a symbolic field engendered by, in his words, “a principle of totality that is applied to the film as a whole and to each of its fragments,” his later analyses emphasized what he would call “the specificity of cinema – namely, variations of speed, of light and of color.”67 This opposition is reflected in his approach to the depiction of animals in American cinema, which he sees as marked by “a fundamental tension” or “opposition between the animal as a symbol and the animal as an intensity, the former pertaining to the psychoanalytic logic of the signifier, and the latter to figurative and figural values of movement.”68 Here, loosely following on Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and Thierry Kuntzel (all of whom have at one point or another set up an opposition of the nature

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raised below), Bellour distinguishes between the animal as a symbol that stands in for something other than itself, and the animal on film as a source of emotion (feelings, or sensations) that derives from its status as “in movement” within the ever-moving image of the frame itself, with variations in intensity of movement (rather than the status of the thing moving) experienced as a vitality affect. In his analysis of Young and Innocent (Alfred Hitchcock, 1937), for example, Bellour describes a “close-up teeming with birds,” in which “birds, their bodies blurring together . . . appear in an extreme close-up – as they shriek and flap their wings, with the sea in the background – for barely two seconds.” This shot appears strategically at the beginning of the film, immediately after a corpse is discovered, that of a wife murdered by her jealous former husband. For Bellour, “the violence of man and his phallus is represented here by the bird’s flight and beaks.” He also notes, however, that the impact of the sequence, its literal violence, derives from “the intensity that is produced, even in such a sort span of time, between the wings and bodies of birds, in the appreciable but almost imperceptible intervals imposing themselves from one turn of the body and one beat of the wings to another, without exhausting that intensity.”69 For Bellour, then, these two levels of engagement reinforce each other with the latter, the figural, the literal “intensity,” provided by the movement of the birds engaging the spectator at, for want of a better word, a primal and corporeal level in which the movement that he or she sees, its intensities produced by the cadence of intervals, is experienced as his or her own. The concept of “vitality affects” highlights what traditional semiologists have referred to as the “material of expression” and the forms that this material may take in the production of an aesthetic experience. To put it simply, a metaphor signifies not only in terms of that to which it refers, such as “fire” for “passion,” but also in how that symbol, “fire,” is presented – a slow burning ember, for example, or a flickering flame on the cinematic screen, with all that this entails in terms of duration, varying intensities, movement, and so on. The experience of vitality affects takes place at this level. Alistair Fox explains, quoting Daniel Stern, that “vitality affects” or “forms of vitality” . . . invest the experiences depicted with affective force. Vitality affects make up a fundamental dynamic pentad (movement, time, force, space and intention/directionality) that gives “a temporal and intensity contour to the content’ of a representation and hence evokes ‘a dynamic experience.”70

Just as all forms of aesthetic experience may, to a lesser or greater degree, induce a trance-like state in the viewer or listener as the case may be, so will



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he or she become engaged in terms of vitality affects, again to a greater or less degree. The role of vitality affects in aesthetic experience is as yet not as directly or as fully explored as it might be. Bellour’s intervention is to recognize the ways in which cinema (as he understands it – that is, as defined by a specific dispositif ) by its nature, as a machine operating under particular conditions, engages the viewer in a certain kind of experience initially grounded in vitality affects. Here, again, he seems to echo certain intuitions of Christian Metz in which the latter posited the cinema spectator as initially regressing to an earlier stage in his or her development; however, Bellour’s formulation also constitutes a break with the Metzian perception of the film viewer. Vitality affects as experienced in the movie theater differ fundamentally from those experienced by the child in the first eighteen months of his or her life, before he or she has mastered language. Cinema is a social institution, one that assumes a high level of culturally developed knowledge, together with an array of interpretive skills. Thus, Bellour is careful to specify that although the viewer may be in a light trance, he or she is also a spectatorengaged-in-thought, with the balance between the two conditions shifting from film to film, and from spectator to spectator. In particular, the film experience depends upon the spectator’s memory of, and attention to, the film as it unrolls before him or her, in which a process of forgetting (the irrelevant detail, for example) is also implicit, with a kind of emotionally motivated intellectual triage taking place that allows the viewer to make it into his or her story. An Embodied Spectator One of Bellour’s main contributions to an understanding of this process has been to insist upon the embodied state of the spectator, taking into account an emerging view of human consciousness that has been influenced by contemporary affective neuroscience, in which the interrelation between the psychic space and the embodied space of the spectator is construed in embodied terms, taking into consideration the neural processes involved in the brain that relate to memory and the emotions.71 In this account, the spectator has no psyche that exists independently of his or her embodied condition. Bellour insists upon this again and again, drawing a clear line between his account and that of other contemporary film theorists. His preference for hypnosis as providing a means for understanding cinema spectatorship derives from the fact that hypnosis acts in the very first instance on the body as the site of perception and emotion. He stresses, however, that his goal is not to construct the “truth” of cinema as validated by the phenomenon of hypnosis. Rather, he underlines that he considers his recourse to hypnosis as

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well as to concepts promoted by Stern, as “the construction of an analogy rather than the application of a model.”72 Le Corps du cinéma, in which Bellour sums up his position on what cinema was, provided a framework through which he would solidify a position vis-à-vis the now commonly called “new” media. Video in Bellour’s taxonomy operated as a transitional technology that heralded a proliferation of dispositifs, or viewing situations and relations, which would, for Bellour, irrevocably alter the conditions of cinema, which itself was always in the process of undergoing transformation. Serge Daney, who died tragically in 1992 – arguably the third important interlocutor in Bellour’s intellectual journey, with whom he founded the influential journal Trafic – never ceased to remind Bellour that the formulation of “cinema, alone” (“le cinéma, seul”) as “a unique memory” was an idealization belied by the interactivity between spectators, screens, and theaters that characterized any number of cinema audiences.73 Thus, alongside Le Corps du cinema, Bellour, in more or less the same time period, consolidated a particular vision of new media and its spectators that would gain more traction within the world of the art gallery and museum than the academy, and that complemented his now extended and elaborated exegesis on the cinema-situation. Notes  1. Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L, 2009).  2. Raymond Bellour, “Le Corps du cinéma, 1/2,” recorded January 26, 2011, University Paul-Valery Montpellier 3, https://vimeo.com/44716462, accessed April 18, 2017. See, in this volume, Chapter Eight, “Spectators, Dispositifs, and Emotions.”  3. Roger Célestin, Eliane DalMolin, and Anne Simon, “Editors’ Introduction,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 16:5 (2012): 590, November 29, 2012, http://www.tandfonline.com.ezproxy.otago.ac.nz/toc/gsit20/​16/5?​nav​=​ toc​List, accessed September 3, 2017.  4. Raymond Bellour, “Querelle,” in Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs (Paris: P.O.L, 2012), 14. [Translation by author.]  5. Bellour, “Querelle,” 14. [Translation by author.]  6. See, in this volume, Chapter Nine, “Spectators, Dispositifs, and Emotions,” p. 148.  7. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, 16  8. For Münsterberg’s film theory, see Hugo Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg on Film: The Photoplay – A Psychological Study, and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York: Routledge, 2002).  9. J. Dudley Andrew, “Hugo Munsterberg,” in J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film



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Theories: An Introduction (London/Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press), 15. 10. John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 1. 11. See. in this volume, Chapter Ten, “Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality,” 161–2. 12. See, in this volume, Chapter Nine, “Spectators, Dispositifs, and Emotions,” 151. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 152. 15. See Antonio R. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando: Harcourt, 2003), and Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010). 16. Gilles Deleuze, “The Brain Is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze,” trans. Marie Therese Guirgis, in The Brain Is the Screen, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 377. 17. Gabriel Leroux, “L’art des dispositifs: entretien avec Raymond Bellour,” ManiFeste, 2013, http://manifeste2013.ircam.fr/index.html?p=476, accessed May 23, 2017. 18. Raymond Bellour, “Le spectateur de cinéma: une mémoire unique,” Trafic 79 (2011): 32. [Translation by author.] 19. Laura Marks, The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 163. 20. Ruth Leys, “The Real Miss Beauchamp: Gender and the Subject of Imitation,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 172. 21. Leys, “The Real Miss Beauchamp,” 172; emphasis in the original. 22. Raymond Bellour, “From Hypnosis to Animals,” ed. and trans. Alistair Fox, Cinema Journal 15:3 (2014): 16. 23. Bellour, “From Hypnosis to Animals,” 13. 24. Bellour, “From Hypnosis to Animals,” 13. 25. Bellour, “From Hypnosis to Animals,” 13. 26. Bellour, “From Hypnosis to Animals,” 14. 27. For an explanation of the term “apparatus,” see Jean-Louis Baudry, “Le dispositif,” Communications 23 (1975): 56–72; Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” trans Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst, Camera Obscura 1 (1 1) (1976): 104–26. 28. Cyril Béghin, “L’animal-analyse,” Cahiers du cinéma 647 (July–August 1990): 76. [Translation by author.] 29. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Part II Benjamin,” in Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), Adobe Digital Editions, 259. 30. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., trans. Rodney Livingstone, Edmund Jephcott, H. Eiland, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), 124; Hansen, “Part II Benjamin,” in Cinema and Experience, 134. 31. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, 179. 32. Hansen, “Part II Benjamin,” in Cinema and Experience, 139, 188.

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33. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington/ Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1982). See, in particular, “Part III, The Fiction Film and Its Spectator: A Metapsychological Study,” 99–147. 34. Raymond Bellour, “Un spectateur pensif,” in Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, 179–221. 35. Raymond Bellour, “Daniel Stern, encore,” Trafic 57 (2006): 52–62. 36. “Le spectateur focalisé (ou attentif) est un spectateur ‘pensif,’ au sens où il est à la fois actif et passif, aliéné (flux de conscience synchronisé au flux du film) et émancipé (sa capacité et sa liberté de jugement sont fortement actives et sollicitées).” Mathieu Bouvier, “Le corps à corps,” pour un atlas des figures, http://mathieu. mathieu.free.fr/pourunatlasdesfigures/articles/image-et-temps/le-corps-du-cinema--hypnose/le-corps-a-corps-du-spectat.html, accessed September 3, 2017. 37. See, in this volume, Chapter Nine, “Spectators, Dispositifs, and Emotions,” 153. 38. Bellour’s notion of le spectateur pensif first appeared in print in 1984 in French; it appeared in English in 1987. See, in this volume, Chapter Two, “The Digital Challenge: From the Theater to the Gallery,” 42. 39. See, for example, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). 40. Luis Buñuel, Mi Útimo Suspiro (Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2003), 76–8. 41. Ibid.,79. [Translation by author.] 42. Étienne Souriau, quoted in Bellour, “From Hypnosis to Animals,” 14. 43. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Towards a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis/ London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 23. 44. Lippit, Electric Animal, 23. 45. Lippit, Electric Animal, 23. 46. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, 437. [Translation by author.] 47. See, for example, Joanna Bourke, What It Means to Be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011); Elisabeth de Fontenay, Le Silence des bêtes: La Philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité (Paris: Fayard, 1998). 48. Bourke, What It Means to Be Human, 10. 49. See, in particular, Jaak Panksepp, “Brain Emotional Systems and Qualities of Mental Life: From Animal Models of Affect to Implications for Psychotherapeutics,” in Diana Fosha, Daniel J. Siegel, and Marion Fried Solomon, The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience, Development, and Clinical Practice (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2009), 1–26. 50. Bellour, “From Hypnosis to Animals,” 10. 51. Hansen, preface to Cinema and Experience, 21; emphasis in the original. 52. Raymond Bellour, “Le Corps du cinéma, 1/2,” recorded January 26, 2011, University Paul-Valery Montpellier 3, https://vimeo.com/44716462, accessed April 18, 2017. 53. See Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, 53–61. Stern would later come to prefer the phrase “forms of vitality” to “vitality affects”: see Daniel N. Stern, Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts,



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Psychotherapy, and Development (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 54. Bellour, “From Hypnosis to Animals,” 1–24, esp. 20. 55. See Alistair Fox, Speaking Pictures, 81–9. 56. Raymond Bellour, “Le Corps du cinéma, 2/2,” recorded January 26, 2011, University Paul-Véry Montpellier 3, https://vimeo.com/44470466, accessed April 18, 2011. 57. Edgar Morin, Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire: essais d’anthropologie (Paris: Minuit, 1977). 58. See Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 101–8. 59. See, for example, Mireille Berton, “Cinéma et hypnose (Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités); Stefan Andriopoulos and Besessene Körper: Körperschaften und die Erfindung des Kinos; Ruggero Eugeni, La relazione d’incanto. Studi su cinema e ipnosi; Rae Beth Gordon, Why the French Love Jerry Lewis: From Cabaret to Early Cinema,” 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze 58 (2009): 154–68, published online on October 1, 2012, http://1895.revues.org/3971, accessed September 3, 2017. 60. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Ego-Ideal,” in Jean Laplache and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (New York: Norton, 1973), 144. 61. See, in this volume, “Spectators, Dispositifs, and Emotions,” 159. 62. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly 28:2 (December 1974): 39–47; Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 45–9. 63. See François Roustang, Qu’est-ce que l’hypnose? (Paris: Minuit, 1994). 64. See, in this volume, Chapter Nine, “Spectators, Dispositifs, and Emotions,” 157. 65. See, for example, in this volume, Chapter Ten, “Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality,” 159. 66. See, in this volume, Chapter Ten, “Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality,” 160. 67. See, in this volume, Chapter Ten, “Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality,” 164. 68. See, in this volume, Chapter Ten, “Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality,” 166. 69. Raymond Bellour, trans. Allyn Hardyck, “Hitchcock – The Animal, Life and Death,” in Animal Life and the Moving Image, ed. Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon (London: British Film Institute/Palgrave, 2015), 288–97. 70. Alistair Fox, “Metaphor and Vitality Affects,” in Alistair Fox, Speaking Pictures: Neuropsychoanalysis and Authorship in Film and Literature (Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016), 81–2. 71. See Fox, Speaking Pictures, 151–7. 72. See, in this volume, Chapter Ten, “Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality,” 164. 73. See, in this volume, Chapter Ten, “Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality,” 169. See also Bellour, “Querelle,” 18. Note: Some material in this chapter appeared in Hilary Radner and Cecilia Novero, “Introduction” to Raymond Bellour, “From Hypnosis to Animals,” trans. Alistair Fox, Cinema Journal 53:3 (2014): 2–8.

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CHAPTER FOUR

An Elegy for Cinema1

What Cinema Was In the new millennium, returning to a preoccupation with classical cinema, Raymond Bellour argued, as discussed in the previous chapter, that hypnosis rather than the dream (as proposed in the view of Christian Metz) offers the most accurate metaphor for understanding the cinematic viewer’s relationship to the screen narrative. Bellour posits a viewer caught by, and subject to, somatic responses, like an animal, that are basically emotional in nature (hence not under his or her rational control) and generated from outside him or her, but that he or she experiences as autogenic in origin. The physicality of these responses draws attention to the tenuous dividing line between that which is human and that which is animal, within a worldview that dispenses with “the soul” under modernity. Thus, Bellour maintains that the images of animals that appear in films “mirror” the condition of the spectator in the theater. This strategy of reflexivity extends to other elements that are part of the cinematic experience, which, in Bellour’s view, are consistently reproduced in rhetorical form within the film’s narrative and mise en scène. The body of cinema is always minimally doubled, according to Bellour, for whom the body represented on the screen serves as the double of that of the spectator himself or herself sitting in the theater. The cinema is, then, an embodied experience in which it is not the ideas portrayed on the screen to which a spectator initially responds, but rather the emotions that the film evokes before the spectator may even consciously know what he or she has seen. In this context, Raymond Bellour was one of the first scholars to stress how the radical transformations in technologies of the moving image had consequent ramifications in terms of the spectator’s viewing experience. Defining what cinema was highlighted what it is not. If cinema was once characterized by the shared experience afforded theatrical audiences in the classical era, which produced a “unique” memory in the spectator that would mark the film retrospectively as an experience, this experience is no longer



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available to contemporary audiences who view and review films through any number of different platforms. According to Bellour, the expectation of repeat viewings, of being able to control, fragment, and re-watch a film, both as a whole and in parts, has produced a new type of spectator who can never know the unique, singular experience that characterized cinema-going from the 1930s through the 1940s and early 1950s in France (that is, the cinema of Bellour’s own childhood and adolescence). Bellour’s perspective no doubt grows out of the fact that his relationship with cinema predates television – something that no one born after 1950 into what is popularly referred to as Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” will have encountered.2 Bellour argues that the kind of initial experience of cinema that members of his generation enjoyed is foreign to subsequent generations who have grown up expecting – an expectation that is only rarely disappointed – to find their favorite films available on television and elsewhere. Expectations, then, have a fundamental role in determining a dispositif, or in this case the cinema-situation. Filmmakers caught in these evolving expectations may also create new kinds of films that respond to the new cinema-situation – what Adrian Martin calls a “dispositif film,” citing Bellour. The “dispositif film” plays with viewers’ expectations by generating new sets of rules or “systems” usually specified “at the outset – in the opening scene, even in the work’s title.” The film “then must follow through with it, step by step, all the way to the bitter or blessed end.”3 The “dispositif film,” such as Five Obstructions (Lars Von Trier, Jørgen Leigh, 2003), which Martin describes as “an exercise in conceptual art,”4 depends upon the kinds of knowledge and experiences that twenty-first century film-viewers bring with them to a cinema-situation, including a grasp of the conventions of classical Hollywood cinema as well as a self-awareness about his or her own position as a spectator, even if in some ways, and at some times, this situation may appear to mimic a cinemasituation of the past. New Delivery Systems and New Communities With the advent of television, exacerbated by by new media technologies represented by VHS, DVD, and other forms of delivery, cinema no longer offers a singular experience over which the viewer exercises little or no control. Rather, the second half of the twentieth century has witnessed a radical decentralization of viewing and production in comparison with the structures generated in the previous few decades. Currently, popular advertisements for home-delivery services promise that each individual viewer may revel in the opportunity to watch what he or she wants, when he or she wishes, as many times as he or she desires. A sense of community and cohesion that marked

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earlier viewing situations makes way, therefore, for relationships founded on aggregations and networks of overlapping experiences that are grounded in choice and are essentially individualistic.5 The formation of communities that may be geographically dispersed, but united in terms of aesthetics, politics, and ethics, offsets this initial risk of solipsism; notwithstanding, viewers’ choices remain constrained and directed by what the larger institutions governing distribution, from the Hollywood conglomerates to national internet providers, deem financially advantageous. The majority of viewers are loyal to the blockbusters pushed by the Conglomerates; however, a form of cinephilia initially associated only with large urban centers, in particular Paris, beginning with the French New Wave, is now a global phenomenon. Digital media have made available rare films by directors such as Jacques Rivette and Jean Eustache, some of which have not been screened theatrically for decades, but that devotees distribute globally, manipulating networks perhaps initially generated for monetary gain, but here serving a different purpose.6 Bellour is cognizant of what he calls “a splendid community of desire,” constituted by “people . . . soliciting” funds “via the internet to a rent a commercial hall . . . for the purpose of organizing a screening”;7 however, he does not see them as offering the same kind of collective experience that he associates with classical cinema. The nature of the audience and its relations was not the only factor to produce notable transformations. Technology had a fundamental role. With cell-phone film festivals, as well as the development of national cinemas such as that of Nigeria (otherwise known as Nollywood) founded on digital technology and digital release systems, more people are making more movies than ever before. Scholars such as Roger Odin, in contrast with Bellour or Godard, take an optimistic view, arguing that the twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of a new cinematic culture.8 Yet all scholars, whether in one camp or the other, or, more typically, located in-between, agree that cinema as an economic and social institution has undergone crucial changes. The first set of changes was generated in the American context by the 1948 Paramount decree, which required that the Hollywood studios set up safeguards that would prevent them from exercising a monopoly over the three arms of the cinematic institution (production, distribution, and exhibition). Given the dominance of Hollywood at a global level, these structural transformations were felt worldwide. The effects of this decree were exacerbated by the rise of television and a significant population shift from urban centers to more fragmented suburban townships. By the end of the 1960s, and certainly by the 1970s, the package unit system of production was in place, creating what Thomas Schatz has described as New Hollywood, which preempted the old studio structures.9 While in Europe and elsewhere these movements were



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manifested differently, the 1970s saw the development of national cinemas and art cinema across a number of world markets, with television at times actually stimulating these new forms, as in the case of New Zealand, where national film production peaked dramatically alongside the development of national television networks.10 In this same period, the star and his or her agent, rather than the studios, became the most influential forces in Hollywood, with their power growing across all markets. This influence is seen both in national and independent productions, and also in international blockbusters. By the 1990s, stars knew how to take advantage of digital technology as offering new forms of communication through which they could further promote themselves beyond their performances in films, recognizing that, in the words of Pamela Church Gibson, “images now ‘bleed’ right across the whole spectrum of the media through its formerly discrete strands.”11 Stars became franchises rather than merely actresses or actors, performing in a range of media while functioning as entrepreneurs in developing their brand through selling a range of commodities. This tendency intensified in the 1990s as new media became more pervasive, underlining the continued cultural and social shift toward “rhizomorphic” structures, to use the metaphor proposed and popularized by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari12 – in other words, structures that were closer to a geometrical decentralized figure called the rhizome than the hierarchies and structures identified with the vertical integration of the studio system. This notion of “bleeding images,” and the rise of rhizomorphic structures can be considered another way of conceptualizing what Bellour termed “l’entre-images” or “the between-images” at the end of the twentieth century, producing a phenomenon that has intensified with each subsequence decade. An Ontological Shift Whereas some scholars claim that digital technologies and the proliferation of diverse viewing platforms merely mark a further development, a continuation of what was once cinema (and perhaps even the nineteenth-century novel, the photo-roman, and the comic book), Bellour sees these changes as constituting a fundamental break, an ontological shift in the nature of the medium. In this respect, he considers not so much the modifications in the larger structures outlined above, but rather a radical and fundamental alteration in the nature of the viewer’s relationship to the moving image as defined by the dispositif – by the cinema-situation. As he repeats frequently, for Bellour, the dispositif – the apparatus (its physical setting, its technological and psychic potentiality for interaction, and its set of conventions/expectations) within

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which the viewer confronts and makes meaning out of a narrative, visual or otherwise – is fundamental to the experience of cinema and the experiences that it generates. This division, between those who wish to see cinema everywhere and those, such as Bellour, who wish to attribute a material and historical specificity to cinema, constitutes what Bellour calls “une querelle,” “a quarrel,” “a dispute,” “an argument,” a “squabble,” or perhaps within a scholarly context, “a debate.” This dispute is not simply academic wrangling among scholars, but among dispositifs now competing for the viewer’s time and attention, hence the title of Bellour’s fourth collection of essays La Querelle des dispostifs, which can be construed both as “the debate about dispositifs” and also “the quarrel among dispositifs,” with cinema in a contest with new media forms. In Bellour’s words, published in 1999, “We increasingly understand that what we usually call cinema . . . what is projected in a movie theatre through a specific system and a specific device – has been variously challenged today.”13 The choice of the metaphor “querelle” allows Bellour to evoke a sense of a mast, not only of competing dispositifs, but also of scholars whose differences may in fact be less significant than their commonalities. Not insignificantly, he structures his introduction to the volume, entitled simply “Querelle,” as a dialogue between two contending voices, either of which, or both, could be said to represent the “author,”14 thus highlighting his own ambivalence as someone who both mourns cinema and celebrates installation art. The choice of presenting his argument as dialogue in which, unlike the classic Socratic dialogue, the positions of instructor and instructed are not clearly demarcated underlines yet again a continuing thread in Bellour’s work: a painful recognition that the complexities of the viewer’s relations to the moving image defy simple generalizations that lead to a clear-cut conclusion. This choice also throws into relief his preference for metaphor and rhetoric as a means of expressing these complexities. The movement of his thought – the doubling back on ideas, followed by their re-presentation in different, often seemingly contradictory, forms – mimics the ebbs and flows of the wider social and intellectual reception of the media transformations to which Bellour responds. Indeed, his published work painstakingly records his responses to these evolving currents. As the twenty-first century progressed, understanding how a certain tendency that begins with video, and culminates in something Bellour calls the “death of cinema,” became a significant focus in his research and writing.15 He describes video as a defining moment because for him “it constitutes a point of junction and contamination between words and images to an extent that had never been attained before.”16 This double movement of juncture and contamination characterized the phenomena he associates with his



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notion of “l’entre-images” or “the between-images.” Perhaps in consequence of his now more profoundly elaborated understanding of what cinema was as expressed in Le Corps du cinéma,17 he comes to see that this concept does not fully describe the transformations in what younger scholars confidently refer to as twenty-first century “mediascapes,” new virtual geographies made possible through digital culture and the Internet. He turns, then, to his notion of the dispositif to further elaborate the nature of these transformations. Here, Bellour distinguishes between film as a medium and cinema as an experience, noting that his interest has shifted from a focus on the relations between images (that is to say, a focus on the moving-image itself and the relations that it produces) to a focus on the dispositif (that is to say, the relations between a viewer and moving images as defined by a specific situation). He remains convinced, however, that even in the rare cases in which spectators gather to watch a film together anachronistically, so to speak, in the now outmoded manner, they can no longer recreate the experience of what cinema was. The experiences that these twenty-first-century audiences bring to the theater “contaminate” their relationship to the images and hence they engage in activities that appear to be deliberately designed to thwart the entranced attention that Bellour associates with the cinematic dispositif, or cinemasituation, doing so, in his view, for the sake of enhancing this process of contamination. These gestures, that of consulting a cell phone for example, are meaningful because they externalize the regime of attention (or inattention) and memory that characterizes the twenty-first century viewing subject. Similarly, while Bellour accepts that a museum may now include film theaters that replicate the cinemas of the past, the spectators will not have that same unique experience because of what they bring to the theater. He also points to many instances in which museums or galleries include moving images, or literally “images in movement,” that are exhibited in very different situations than that which he ascribes to the cinema-situation. While earlier he had been happy to consider these as being at least part of cinema,18 in the twenty-first century he has come to reject this position, saying that these images can no longer be called “cinema. We must call them whatever name we want, I don’t have one at hand . . . but it’s not cinema.”19 With these kinds of statements, he suggests a definitive break with his seemingly more forgiving position at the end of the twentieth century. In laying out what he considers to be “the debate about dispositifs,” he emerges to a degree from the kind of confusion with which he greeted first the analogue and then the digital explosions of the late twentieth century. He delineates a clear definition of cinema as a distinctive, if perhaps idealized, form: the great invention of the twentieth century, which created a new gaze, or relationship of looking, in which the terms of visuality were transformed. In

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Francesco Casetti’s words, in the twentieth century, cinema had the “role of being a device though which vision regulated its own internal contradictions, new categories of thought emerged, and a true ‘direction of the eye’ took place.”20 Having come to this understanding, however, Bellour subsequently turned his back on the popular media, preferring to concern himself with the museum and the gallery. Concurrently, he has come to distinguish cinema from “art” by categorizing the former as a “popular” form, in the sense of “populaire,” or of the people. Cinema and Art For Bellour, then, to see the history of cinema as a subdivision of art history, with cinema surviving through contemporary art in the form of time-based moving-image installations, is also a mistake. Cinema may be an “art,” and participates in the arts, like all other arts; however, it has a different relationship to the history of art than the other contemporary arts, including timebased installations. He objects to the idea that “all images in movement” are a form of cinema (or “du cinéma”), wanting to draw a line in the sand, particularly with the publication in 2011 of La Querelle des dispositifs: “There are films everywhere, including in contemporary art, but in my opinion, there is no cinema . . . in contemporary art.” 21 He “denounces” the idea that the future of cinema lies in contemporary art: cinema was a more “popular” and “vulgar” form – “more common.” In this sense, he sees a connection between what cinema was and the proliferation of poular media platforms, while maintaining that there exists a conceptual “frontier” between that cinema and what we see today.22 Nevertheless, these distinctions should not suggest a lack of interest on Bellour’s part in the installations of images in movement in their various forms within the museum and the gallery, which have been an object of sustained attention for him. Bellour does not engage with the economic implications of the movements that have resulted in the dispersion and dissolution of cinema as it was; he seems, nonetheless, to be well aware of the financial pressures that are driving them. Thus, when George Didi-Huberman suggests that certain directors have moved into the museum as a result of a political motive – implicitly, to gain legitimation – Bellour ripostes that this move is a consequence, rather, of economics. The museum offered these directors a means of continuing their practice in a context in which theatrical release was no longer viable. Such remarks imply that Bellour is fully cognizant of the institutional changes that are implicated in the so-called “death of cinema.”23 Clearly, however, this aspect (its socio-economic dimension) is not the prime concern of his research. He is motivated, instead, by a drive to specify the nature of a certain



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cinematic experience that clearly marked his initiation into, and his consciousness of, the medium. In distinguishing “cinema” from contemporary art more generally, he raises questions about the specificity of cinema as an art, routinely known, especially in France, as the Seventh Art. To what “art” – painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, music, or poetry – do these new installations belong? In response, Bellour takes refuge in the sense of an ever-mutating, transformational multiplicity that he sees as characterizing not only media today, but also contemporary art. Two Cinemas In the conclusion to his long opening chapter in La Querelle des dispositifs, “Querelle,” Bellour suggests that there are two cinemas: next to, or in addition to, the first, which he calls a “bachelor” or “celibate cinema,” is a second cinema that has “exploded” and become “metaphorized,” being animated by a concern with “blurring” or “scrambling the limits of art, which in itself becomes an art.”24 In this conclusion, then, he echoes the introduction that he wrote for the first volume of L’Entre-images, published in 1990.The English translation of the volume, titled Between-the-images, published in 2012, is preceded by no fewer than three introductions. In the final introduction produced for this edition, he remarked: “Nearly ten years have passed since the previous words were written. [He is referring to the 2002 introduction to the second edition of L’Entre-images, in French.] The confusion has not stopped growing, with the rise to power of the Internet, virtual access to all images, and an ever-increasing incapacity to differentiate between them.”25 Not coincidentally, the dialogue that Bellour employs in “Querelle” ends abruptly, with the final word being addressed to his interlocutor, who is also the “author” – or rather, both “Bellour” and his interlocutor appear to “speak” as the author: “It is done, I don’t need you anymore, the debate is over,”26 which intimates the impossibility of resolving the identity and specificity of these new border-crossing forms. What remains is the concept of what cinema was – “the cinema, alone,” as Bellour is fond of saying, quoting Serge Daney.27 Cinema, then, stands out as a uniquely demarcated aesthetic experience, clear in the sense in which it can be described within a precisely delimited historical period, but also undoubtedly idealized, its status as such being promoted in the memory of its spectators, in particular in that of Bellour himself. Whatever it is that cinema has become, what dominates in Bellour’s description is a sense of loss, the loss of cinema as a specific kind of collective experience grounded in a unique shared memory of a particular event. The memory of cinema as it was, as “a single unique memory,” stands

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out as a beacon, the light of which extends from the past into the present, underlining the confusion that characterizes both art (as it is consecrated and legitimated in the museum) and popular media forms that promulgate cinema’s initial impurity into an increasingly chaotic future of uncontrollable and unregulated image consumption. Here, Bellour re-introduces some of the attitudes that greeted what is known as mass culture in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, when modernity was conceived as inflicting an almost unbearable excitation on the human subject, what German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel describes as the “intensification of nervous stimulations.”28 Yet elsewhere, Bellour claims that “cinema continues,” citing the director Jean-Luc Godard, but affirms that its survival is a “mystery” (mystère) because it has also died.29 To put it another way, the particular dispositif that characterized the cinema of the past continues today (and we continue to call it “cinema”), but it no longer holds the same place in our imagination, because it is no longer “seul le cinéma” (in Godard’s terms) – meaning both “only [solely] the cinema” and “the cinema alone.”30 The Remains of Cinema While Jean-Luc Godard constitutes a “north star” for Bellour in his nostalgia for a cinema that once was, but is no more, Bellour’s sentiments also evoke François Truffaut, who felt that he had been born into the wrong era, which reminds us that Godard and Truffaut both grew up in the 1930s, with Bellour being born shortly after them in 1939. Godard and Truffaut experienced the influx of Hollywood films that flooded France after the end of World War II, a phenomenon that was fundamental to the formation of the French New Wave in the same period in which Bellour would have had his first cinematic experiences. Cinema at that time dominated the cultural field. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, in his introduction to Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, avers, “One century of movie viewing has certainly had an impact on the human self, as has the spectacle of globalized society now instantly broadcast by electronic media.”31 Godard, Truffaut, and Bellour matured in worlds in which cinema and radio were primary cultural hubs. Even in 2015, Bellour admits that “for the news, I prefer the radio, a marvelously economic medium.” Concomitantly, he completely dismisses television, preferring to use his computer “for looking at images.”32 Similarly, he discounts what Damasio calls “the digital revolution,” the consequence of which “is just beginning to be appreciated,”33 whereas most scholars in the twenty-first century acknowledge it as having penetrated into every aspect of life from communication to reading a newspaper. Bellour, like



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Godard, is inhabited by a nostalgia for his youth, a youth in which cinema for most young men his age held a privileged place. This cinema continues to animate their imagination and memory. Comparing Bellour to other scholars who have engaged in the debate over the “death” (or otherwise) of cinema illuminates his distinctiveness as well as his points of commonality. Francesco Casetti is arguably the most influential scholar to have systematically explored this phenomenon of new cinema incarnations, commenting in particular upon the ideas that Bellour put forth in “Querelle,” with which he both agrees and disagrees. Others include Jacques Aumont who asserts, in Casetti’s words “with some reason,” that one of the important characteristics “that define the experience of cinema is an uninterrupted and completed vision,”34 with other uses of the moving image dismissed as a diversity of unspecified cultural or social practices, which would include such banal occurrences as what we think of as “Skype calls,” in which the image of the caller is transmitted along with the sound of his or her voice. Cinema for Aumont entails a sustained “gaze,” or “looking,” over time in a particular space or dispositif (the film theater), in which the spectator looks as long as the film lasts.35 The passage of time, then, is the substantive proposition for Aumont, to which the viewing subject submits and gives his or her sustained attention or “gaze.”36 Aumont posits an integral relation between the particular dispositif of a film theater and fiction, assuming the latter as a defining characteristic of “cinema.” He states: “Why should we be surprised that cinema, right from the time it was invented, should have been above all a vehicle for fiction? Its dispositif, based on the receptiveness of a spectator who is seated, receiving an outsize moving image and sound presented only in a dark space, favors a fictionalizing predisposition.”37 The position held by Aumont chimes with that of Bellour insofar as film is something that unfolds over time; however, this articulation does not take into account what the spectator brings to the viewing of the film, his or her “self” as defined by Damasio. More radically, Philippe Dubois posits cinema “as an already-diffuse presence,”38 an imaginary of the image, deep, powerful, solid, and persistent, that enters deeply into our minds and thoughts, to the point of imposing itself on other forms. It is an imaginary that serves as the basis upon which we conceive of our relationship to all other types of modern images.39

In this view, then, the effects of cinema, of “one century of movie viewing,” have been permanently incorporated into an ongoing sense of self; however, this definition leaves no space for the way in which not only the image but also the self itself are both in a state of continual adaptation, a point on which

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Bellour, Damasio, and Casetti agree. Whether or not cinema as “film” can be defined in one way or another is less important than the idea underscored by Bellour (and Damasio) that what the spectator brings to the theater, his or her self, will have a significant impact on his or her experience, and that what a spectator brings today in terms of a cultural and social situation is very different from that which defined a cinema viewer even thirty or forty years ago, a dimension discounted by both Aumont and Dubois. In the same vein as Aumont, Francesco Casetti opines that even when we “binge-watch a series on Netflix” that experience includes “something deeply cinematic.”40 His argument differs from that of Aumont because he takes into account the cultural induction, for want of a better word, of the viewer. For Casetti, we bring what we know about watching movies to our homes when we watch them on the small screen, echoing Dubois, but according a greater degree of specificity to the way that cinema inflects our imagination. Casetti also argues that the extension of cinema into the home is not a departure from its original social or cultural purpose, but rather the fulfilling of a promise that was always an implicit possibility in, for example, protocinematic devices that were devised as home entertainment. For Casetti, the history of cinema through its invention and mutation into the twenty-first century has a coherency that suggests, perhaps, that the cinema that Godard and Bellour mourn was, in fact, a momentary aberration in its destiny. Daniel Fairfax explains, reviewing Casetti’s book The Lumière Galaxy, that in the context of this account “the cinema was at best a brief interregnum, wedged between the magic lantern and the kinetoscope before it, and the iPhone (2) and the jumbotron after it.”41 In Casetti’s view, “new technologies are preserving cinema but making it different at the same time.”42 Like Bellour, Casetti contradicts himself, in that he wants to say that cinema is still cinema, but that it is also “different,” promoting ideas such as dividing cinema into “cinema 1.0” and “cinema 2.0.”43 Unlike Bellour, however, Casetti does not acknowledge the contradictions inherent in his argument: if cinema continues, why bother to name it “cinema 1.0” and “cinema 2.0,” for example? Casetti’s virtue, then, is his lucidity, which makes the contradictions that underlie his argument all the more obvious – contradictions that (ironically) align him with Bellour. While Bellour proposes, following on from Godard, that cinema is ending, but never stops ending, Casetti makes a similar proposition that is signaled in his final chapter title, “The Persistence of Cinema in a Post-Cinematic Age.” The title of this chapter expresses sentiments very close to those of Bellour (and Godard), insofar as it implies an era that is “after cinema” in which cinema, paradoxically, continues to exist – not unlike Godard’s claim that cinema is dead but it never stops dying.44



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Casetti also resuscitates the model of hypnosis, paraphrasing Antonello Gerbi, an early Italian film critic, to describe what cinema was: Darkness creates a condition of suspension: The environment loses its consistency and becomes an indistinct container; individuals lose all conception of themselves and enter into a kind of hypnotic state. It is precisely this state of suspension that allows the spectators to consolidate into a single body to the point of forming a small community, as well as to become one with what they are watching, immersing themselves in the events recounted on screen.45

Here, Casetti evokes the dispositif described by Bellour in order to confirm that if there is one element in the relocation of cinema toward new environments that is particularly striking, it is precisely the absence of the dark . . . Exaggerating just a bit, we could say that the disappearance of the dark may sign the dissolution of the cinematic experience itself.46

Again, Casetti seems to tip the scales in favor of Bellour’s hypothesis, suggesting a degree of unacknowledged indebtedness to Le Corps du cinéma. Two Generations Where Bellour and Casetti do differ radically is in the direction that their research takes them. Casetti looks to what we call very loosely “new media,” manifest in the proliferation of technologies and accompanying platforms, with media services such as Netflix even threatening the existence of what has been the mainstay of theatrical release in terms of box office since the late 1970s: the block-buster event film.47 As already mentioned, Bellour, in contrast, turns to the museum and the gallery, to the more rarefied atmosphere of art as the object of his fascination. In some ways, theirs is a “quarrel” over semantics; in other ways, it speaks to two different sensibilities, and two different generations. Casetti was born in 1948 and would have matured with television. The cinema that accompanied his maturation as a scholar in the 1960s and 1970s, which was marked by the demise of the American studio system and the rise of national cinemas and art cinema, was already a very different institution compared with what it had been in Bellour’s time. Equally at home with television as much as with cinema, Casetti was already a very different kind of spectator, watching films in a different dispositif according to Bellour’s argument. While Aumont and Bellour belong to the same generation, Casetti represents a new generation, one that looked to television as the primary culture hub of his cohort. In this sense, Casetti’s position re-affirms Bellour’s;

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Casetti’s cinema was not the same as the one evoked nostalgically by Bellour, a cinema that Casetti would not have known. Echoing Bellour, Casetti remarks in The Lumière Galaxy, “Memory of cinema is a question of generation,”48 later specifying that [i]n the past, there was always and only cinema. The emigration of the screen out of the theater does not guarantee the same result: The multiplication of screens and their co-existence with other elements lead cinema to become a presence that is at once both noticeable and more uncertain and vague.49

Not content with this vagueness, Bellour demarcated the perimeters and parameters of his cinema as he knew it. Bellour in his quest to understand the power that cinema held over his generation asks the next generation to interrogate the privileged vehicles of their imagination. He asks these new generations to attempt that same gesture of pondering the nature of the self-experience that these vehicles enable, in which it is the specificity of that experience as an embodied spectator that he emphasizes. Both Casetti and Bellour represent how a scholar’s journey is one in which personal and intellectual history are deeply intertwined. Both, however, agree that cinema in the studio era, what is known as classical cinema on both sides of the Atlantic, provided the defining moment in the creation of a new visual culture. Cinema provided audiences around the globe with the possibility of watching the same film, the same work of art, if not at the same time, in the same way. It was, arguably, the first step toward the intensely global culture that marks the twenty-first century world, the effects of which, to repeat Damasio’s words, are only “beginning to be appreciated.” The Embodied Spectator: Cinema and the Emotions Damasio here is not talking merely about a social environment, but rather referring to the ways in which the self is an embodied self, acted upon by the environment in a variety of ways that have an impact upon the brain as the seat of perception, but also as part of the body. Casetti remains within a neo-Kantian model, that of Hugo Münsterberg, for example, who posits the film experience as a mental activity that is not corporally defined but that exists within an interior space, “le monde intérieur du spectateur.”50 One of Bellour’s great contributions (as discussed in detail in Chapter Three above) was to understand that film experience is an embodied experience in which emotions and cognition cannot be separated. His second great contribution, which also extends beyond his definition of cinema as a specific dispositif, is to realize that the human subject reacts not only to the story, but also to how it is told, to the material of expression, which results in an experience that is



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invested with the same vitality affects, or at least a correlative thereof, that a young child experiences even before he or she can speak. These two discoveries, or ways of conceptualizing the cinematic experience, are significant because they represent a movement away from the problematic posed by a mind/body split, the legacy of René Descartes, toward a new conception of the human subject that assumes a fundamental affinity between humans and animals. While Bellour has explored these ideas with regard to what cinema was, a particular dispositif, we have yet to explore how these ideas may affect the way that we conceive of contemporary media consumption. One thing is certain, however; if Antonio Damasio and his colleagues are correct, the new media also capture our bodies, although undoubtedly in different ways, with different but equally profound consequences. Casetti’s model of spectatorship, in contrast, foregrounds “performance,” thus separating the body’s actions from what its feels. Bellour makes no distinction; actions and feelings are embodied, as is cognition. This focus on embodiment may seem trivial, but it speaks to the heart of Western European conceptions of the self. It allows no obvious place for the “soul.” It puts into question what in many secular societies has arguably superseded religious beliefs, the belief in romance, in love, whether between two individuals or between parent and child. In a profoundly disturbing article, “Can Tylenol Help Heal a Broken Heart?” published by a neurobiologist in The New York Times, a woman describes the elation and comfort of being in love and the heart break of rejection in bio-chemical terms, raising questions about those emotions that we hold most sacred. The writer confesses, looking to the future, when she will be ready to seek love elsewhere: “Now I know what I want: a relationship that will fill me with dopamine and steady my heartbeat when he entwines his fingers with mine.”51 While we may express love through the performance of certain codified gestures and routines, we must also feel in order for that performance to have any meaning. For the performance of love to be “love” it must arise out of the emotions that we experience as embodied subjects. The romantic novel that moves us is similarly tied to those same emotions albeit perhaps in attenuated form. The ever-proliferating ways in which we experience romance vicariously should lead us back to the cinema that Bellour remembers so nostalgically, in which romance was one of the significant motors driving the film audience into the theaters. Beyond Cinema: “What’s Past is Prologue” Bellour offers a plausible model that may help us understand the power of movies to generate the feeling of romance vicariously in its viewers – and the array of other feelings and sensations that it evokes. The questions that

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he leaves for the next generation are: how are these emotions elicited today? How do we become entranced in that “existential bubble”52 that Casetti views us as creating when we watch a movie on an airplane in a group of people who are with us and apart from us, and from whom we are irrevocably separated by that bubble? By delineating the specificity of one kind of emotional experience, Bellour invites us to interrogate the many other alternatives offered to the viewer today. Bellour’s importance as a film theorist and scholar who has extended his reach into new forms of viewership and new image-forms through his interest in installation art within the museum, resides in his innovative speculations in a number of key areas. First, his account of the specificity of what was cinema for a particular generation of cinema-goers is unrivaled, because he traces a history not only of cinema itself, but also of “fictionmaking” regimes. Second, he has provided a model for new scholarship in his pioneering use of formulations of the emotions that arise out of recent neurobiological research, which has produced findings that challenge our notions of what it means to be human. Third, he explores these avenues while remaining faithful to the work itself as an aesthetic object, whether it be a film, a novel, or an installation, and also to the experience of that work, returning again and again to that experience in its details and its full materiality, to test, modify, and re-test his understanding of its effects, as well as his own evolving engagement with those effects. While in a number of respects he has turned his back on the scholarly preoccupations of other theorists in the field of film and media studies – popular uses of digital media in particular – his work in the three areas noted above is so innovative and foundational that it deserves to be known, remembered, and recognized by a wider audience that includes readers of English. This is especially important at the present time, given that the full harvest to be gathered along the pathways opened up by Bellour’s pioneering investigative and speculative work is likely to be reaped by a younger generation of scholars who build upon the foundations he has laid. Notes  1. Some of the material in this chapter initially appeared in a different form in Cinema Journal in Hilary Radner and Cecilia Novero, “Introduction,” to Raymond Bellour, “From Hypnosis to Animals,” trans. Alistair Fox, Cinema Journal 53:3 (2014): 2–8.  2. CBC TV, “Marshall McLuhan – The World Is a Global Village,” March 12, 2004, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeDnPP6ntic, accessed May 24, 2017.



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 3. Adrian Martin, “The Rise of the Dispositif,” in Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Kindle edition, 179.  4. Martin, “The Rise of the Dispositif,” 177–8.  5. In Chapter One of Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia, “Movie Mutations: Letters from (and to) Some Children of 1960: Jonathan Rosenbaum, Adrian Martin, Kent Jones, Alexander Horwarth, Nicole Brenez and Raymond Bellour (1997),” Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin document the exchanges of such a group (somewhat artificially constituted) by publishing a number of letters exchanged between prominent cinephiles around the world, including Raymond Bellour himself, with a view to establishing a new cinematic canon. See Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin, eds, Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 1–34.  6. Campbell Walker, personal communication, November 7, 2014.  7. See, in this volume, Chapter Ten, “Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality,” 169–70.  8. See Roger Odin, “The Amateur in Cinema, in France, since 1990: Definitions, Issues, and Trends,” in A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema, ed. Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner (Chichester/Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 590–611.  9. For a further discussion of the changing structures of Hollywood and its international reach, see Thomas Schatz, “The New Hollywood,” in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher Collins (New York: Routledge, 1993), 8–36; Tom Schatz, “The Studio System and Conglomerate Hollywood,” in The Contemporary Hollywood Industry, ed. Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (Oxford/Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2008), 13–42; David W. Ellwood and Rob Kroes, eds, Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of Cultural Hegemony (Amsterdam: VU Press, 1994). 10. See Lawrence McDonald, “Waking from a Fretful Sleep,” in New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History, eds Diane Pivac et al. (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2011), 155–80. 11. Pamela Church Gibson, Fashion and Celebrity Culture (London/New York: Berg, 2012), 11. 12. For an explanation of this term in the context of new media, see Francesco Casetti, “Relocation,” in The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 29–30. See also “Introduction: Rhizome,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 1–25. 13. Raymond Bellour, “Challenging Cinema,” Lier en Boog [L&B] 15 (1999): 35–43. [Interview conducted in English by the editors of the issue.] 14. Raymond Bellour “Querelle,” in La Querelle des dispositifs (Paris: P.O.L, 2011), 13–47. He uses this dialogic form on other occasions. See, for example, Raymond

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Bellour, “Un spectateur pensif,” in Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L, 2009), 186–94. 15. Raymond Bellour, “Raymond Bellour La Querelle des dispositifs,” December 13, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLXUz2LDBiA, accessed May 25, 2017. 16. See, in this volume, Chapter Eight, “Arrested Images and ‘the Between-Images,’” below. 17. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma. 18. See, in this volume, Chapter Seven, “Thierry Kuntzel and the Rise of Video Art,” 119–29. 19. Raymond Bellour, “Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions 2/3,” CRAL – Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage, January 22, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAb0Y5ClfZA, accessed May 25, 2017. [Translation by author.] 20. Francesco Casetti, The Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity (New York: Columbia Press, 2008), 192. 21. Raymond Bellour, “La Querelle des dispositifs 1,” December 13, 2012, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FauirOOd7o, accessed May 25, 2017. 22. Bellour, “La Querelle des dispositifs 1.” 23. “Question de G. Didi-Huberman à Raymond Bellour ‘La Querelle des dispositifs,’” CRAL – Centre de Recherches sur les arts et le langage, posted February 11, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJHUGFpKp0Q, accessed September 3, 2017. 24. Bellour, “Querelle,” 40. 25. Raymond Bellour, trans. Allyn Hardyck, “Foreword,” in Between-the-Images, trans. Allyn Hardyck (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2012), 9. 26. Bellour, “Querelle,” 41. 27. Serge Daney’s “le cinéma, seul” is a variation of Jean-Luc Godard’s “seul le cinéma.” Daney is featured in a conversation with Godard, recorded in 1988, included in the second episode of Histoire(s) du cinéma, episode 2A, “Seul, le cinéma,” 1994. For further discussion, see, in this volume, Chapter Three, “Cinema and the Body: The Ghost in the Theater,” 52–66. See also Bellour, “Querelle,” 21–2. 28. See Georg Simmel quoted in Francesco Casetti, “Strong Sensations,” in Cassetti, The Eye of the Century, 112. 29. Raymond Bellour, “Question d’audience à R. Bellour ‘La Querelle des dispositifs,’” CRAL – Centre de recherches sur les art et le langage, February 13, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch”?v=tfXt70rDUdY, accessed May 25, 2017. 30. Bellour, “Querelle,” 21. 31. Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Vintage, 2010), 13–14. 32. See, in this volume, Chapter Seven, “Thierry Kuntzel and the Rise of Video Art,” 137.



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33. Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 14. 34. Francesco Casetti, “Performance,” in Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy, 192. 35. See Daniel Fairfax, “The Experience of a Gaze Held in Time: Interview with Jacques Aumont,” trans. Daniel Fairfax, Senses of Cinema 83 (2017), posted June 2017, http://sensesofcinema.com/2017/film-studies/jacques-aumontinterview/, accessed September 7, 2017. 36. Casetti, “Performance,” 192. For a more extended discussion of these issues, see Jacques Aumont, Que reste-t-il du cinéma? (Paris: VRIN, 2012). 37. Jacques Aumont, Limites de la fiction: Considérations actuelles sur l’état du cinéma (Paris: Bayard, 2014), 14; translation by Alistair Fox. 38. Casetti, “Relocation,” 38. 39. Philippe Dubois, quoted in Casetti, “Relocation,” 38. 40. Bess Connolly Martell, “In Conversation: Francesco Casetti on a New Era in Cinema,” interview with Francesco Casetti, posted April 8, 2016, http://filmstudies.yale.edu/news/conversation-francesco-casetti-new-era-cinema, accessed September 3, 2017. 41. Daniel Fairfax, review of The Lumière Galaxy by Francesco Casetti, in Senses of Cinema, March 2015, http://sensesofcinema.com/2015/book-reviews/still-anobject-to-be-discovered-the-lumiere-galaxy-by-francesco-casetti/, accessed May 25, 2017. 42. Francesco Casetti, quoted in Martell, “In Conversation.” 43. Francesco Casetti, “Remains of the Day,” in Casetti, Eye of the Century, 187–93. Francesco Casetti, “Acknowledgements,” in Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy, xi. 44. Antoine de Baecque, “Jean-Luc Godard et la critique des temps de l’histoire,” Vingtième siècle 117:1 (2013): 149–64. 45. Francesco Casetti, “The Persistence of Cinema in a Post-Cinematic Age,” in Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy, 204, 46. Casetti, “The Persistence of Cinema,” 205. 47. Gwilym Mumford, “Blockbusters Assemble: Can the Mega Movie Survive the Digital Era?,” The Guardian, April 7, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2017/apr/07/blockbusters-assemble-can-the-mega-movie-survive-the-digital-era?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other, accessed May 25, 2017. 48. Casetti, “Relocation,” 33. 49. Francesco Casetti, “Hypertopia,” in Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy, 139. 50. Bellour, “Querelle,” 19. 51. Melissa Hill, “Can Tylenol Help Heal a Broken Heart?,” The New York Times, June 3, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/fashion/breakups-rejection-neuroscience.html, accessed May 25, 2017. 52. Francesco Casetti, “Introduction,” in Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy, 10.

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An Elegy for Cinema

Part Two

Bellour by Bellour:

1

Selections from an Interview conducted by Gabriel Bortzmeyer and Alice LeRoy in December 2015

Translated and Edited by Alistair Fox

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CHAPTER FIVE

Formative Influences

[In this section of the interview, Bellour describes how he began to engage in film analysis in the 1960s, beginning with a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, with the aim of establishing the way that it worked as a “text.” He proceeds to describe his personal encounters with major figures like Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Michel Foucault, and his friendship with Christian Metz, suggesting how his interchanges with them helped to shape his own thinking, and how it diverged from theirs.] The entire period leading up to May 1968, and after, was one of general excitement about theory. At this time, the very idea of criticism was reformulated: critical analysis discovered the tools that it still uses, to a large degree. In particular, this period dethroned artistic activity itself for a while, redefining it so that it became a transgressive, avant-gardist practice at the forefront of a historical moment. Several of your works reflect this radical atmosphere. Some of them, collected in Le Livre des autres at the beginning of the 1970s, extol the “renewed power of commentary,” as if the potentiality of all contemporary upheavals could take place in that form. How did you make your way through this theoretical field, from Barthes to Lévi-Strauss, and then Foucault? And how did this migration of concepts from the human sciences to cinema come about? In 1968, I had begun teaching cinema (very much on a part-time basis) at Université Paris 1 [Pantheon-Sorbonne University], pursuing, in particular, the analyses that would later feature in my book The Analysis of Film.2 The most important of these was the analysis of a sequence, or more exactly a long fragment, from Hitchcock’s The Birds.3 I saw it as an attempt to approach as closely as possible the materiality of what was then called “the filmic text,” and doing this provided the basis for my work on cinema during the years that followed. This was not as apparent at an intellectual level – where it appeared to be some kind of transgression – as it was at a practical level, because access to copies of a film at the time was very difficult. After that . . .

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I had the good fortune to be invited by Louis Daquin [French film director and actor] to conduct a workshop on the analysis and theory of film at the IDHEC.4 As a result, all the other essays featured in The Analysis of Film were written using copies of films. For the first time, I was able to work in ideal conditions that made it possible to move from the actual film to the writing of an analysis, which is always a complicated matter, involving a process that is rather elusive. Most of my activity during this period consisted of analytical work, inspired by a mosaic of influences: specifically, Barthes as far as textual analysis was concerned; Lévi-Strauss for the analysis of myth; and Metz, on account of his breakdown of codifying units in his essay on the “grande syntagmatique du film narratif.”5 Without any doubt, all of this influenced me without, however, leaving me feeling that I needed to present the analyses that I was developing as the application of any particular method. Personally, I have never believed too dogmatically in a “method,” and, strictly speaking, I have never followed any model that I would be able to identify exclusively as such. I certainly could never have written the essays in The Analysis of Film without Barthes or Lévi-Strauss, but, in spite of that, I never felt that I was applying the so-called “structuralist” method as articulated by Barthes in his almost utopian article on the structural analysis of stories,6 or by Lévi-Strauss in his Anthropologie structurale, and in Mythologiques, the four large volumes of which I read from the first to the last line with unwavering enthusiasm.7 This is why, as I emphasized in the introduction to The Analysis of Film, I did not call it “The Structural Analysis of Film,” a title that would have seemed excessively pretentious at the time. I did not want it to seem dependent on a formal structural method that would have constrained the book, had I done so, into being the application of such a method, or of appearing to be so. And so, for you, your readings of Barthes and Lévi-Strauss provided a stimulus, rather than an epistemological influence as such? They certainly influenced me, in the sense that reading S/Z confirmed my intuition that one could tackle the details in a film in the way that Barthes dealt with the detail in a text.8 I was greatly inspired by reading these theorists. I conducted some lengthy interviews with Barthes and Lévi-Strauss, and, in collaboration with Catherine Clément [French philosopher, feminist, novelist, and literary critic], I devoted an edited volume to the latter in the series published by Gallimard called “Idée,” focusing mainly on the Mythologiques. Both Barthes and Lévi-Strauss were what I would call “beneficial influences” rather than prescribers of methods.



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Similarly, I pursued an ongoing conversation with Christian Metz right up until his death, without ever subscribing to the semiological method that he was seeking to develop, which even he recognized as being utopian and hypothetical in its intellectual character. Also, when reading the interviews you conducted with each of these thinkers, one senses a degree of resistance to Metz’s semiological model. It is not a question of a resistance, strictly speaking, but simply a consequence of the fact that, because we engaged in dialogue so often and freely on account of our great friendship, we were both acutely aware that we were not talking about exactly the same things, and that our aims were different. At that time, from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1970s, Christian and I had already become very close friends, and I remember that we even thought of a project in which we would work together on a fragment of film that we both liked. But once we were confronted with the actual images, we found that we had nothing to say to each other – quite simply because, without having really admitted it until then, we realized that our approaches to this fragment of film were very different, and that there was an unbridgeable gap between his theory of the code, as he had construed it in Langage et Cinéma,9 and my desire to develop an analysis governed by an approach assuming that a text is not capable of being reduced to a codifying prescription. We are struck by two aspects of this work: on the one hand, the way in which these interviews provide a panorama of the thought of a particular period, by representing a large number of disciplines, and on the other hand, the implicit conversation that takes place between the various authors and their works – one can see clearly, for example, the dialogue that exists between the Mythologiques of Lévi-Strauss and the Mythologies of Barthes,10 which is then extended by Foucault’s The Order of Things.11 Beyond the disparity between the different fields and methods of your interlocutors, one can see the outline of a certain kind of unified enquiry. Could you perhaps comment on what was motivating the artificial fragmentation of this work – the issues being investigated, your theoretical concerns? I do not believe that any genuine linkages were involved. We have already seen how two authors were to be crucial influences on what I would go on to develop in The Analysis of Film: Barthes and Lévi-Strauss, in the sense that textual analysis and mythological analysis furnished tools that prompted me to attempt an analysis of films. I remember how, in the second interview with Lévi-Strauss (conducted for the book that Catherine Clément and I published on him), I asked him about the extent to which American cinema

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was a system constructed out of myths. There is no doubt that these ideas were working away in my mind. The interviews that proved most important for me, however, were those I conducted with Foucault. My depressing experience of a year of philosophy at high school had left me feeling alienated from philosophy, and, at the same time, with an interest that had not been satisfied by the personal reading that I had been able to accomplish – in this regard, Merleau-Ponty had been invaluable to me for a long time because I found him – doubtless naively – relatively simple to understand.12 For me, then, the publication of The Order of Things was a crucially important event, because this book linked philosophy to the very keen interest I had always had in history. It was the book through which a relationship with philosophy that had escaped me was restored, owing to the fact that Foucault saw philosophy as historically determined. Later, Deleuze would inspire me to take a further step by imparting to me, or rather returning to me, an enthusiasm for philosophy as a subject in its own right.13 But Foucault was a true mediator, insofar as through him I could grasp the shifts that took place between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, meaning that the nineteenth century, with which I was closely acquainted through literature, was illuminated in a completely different way from how it had been in a work like Paul Hazard’s La Crise de la conscience européenne, for example.14 Foucault opened up for me an epistemological vision of the transformation of mindsets [“mentalités”] that he believed had taken place – whatever he might have thought of this term later. At the same time, it was a decisive factor in conditioning my approach to the literature of the nineteenth century, that of Dumas, in particular.15 Does this mean that while Foucault reoriented your personal relationship with philosophy on the one hand, and a historical reading of the entry into modernity in literature on the other, his influence on your thinking about cinema was practically negligible? Foucault himself was not really interested in cinema at that time. I knew him around 1962, when I was preparing the first issue of Artsept. I had just read his excellent introduction to Le Rêve et l’Existence by Binswanger,16 and I was convinced that Foucault ought to write an essay on Last Year at Marienbad.17 And so I spoke to him about it, but the idea did not appeal to him, because he felt too remote from cinema at that time. From then on, nevertheless, we entered into a friendly relationship that was strengthened by the interviews we did together. So, Foucault did not supply me with anything specific on cinema, but the thought expressed in his writing completely bowled me over. I remember that when I read The Order of Things, I felt a state of extreme exaltation.



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During the period when he was writing “The Order of Things,” Foucault was also composing an essay on Blanchot, “The Thought from Outside,” a text in which he theorized the paradox of a language without a subject.18 During your second interview with him, you maintained that such a condition of anonymity is “impossible,” and you affirm, in fact, the “irreducibility of the subject, unknown by virtue of being itself, unknown by virtue of incorporating the totality of voices within the form of a discourse that is fragmentary.” Your own discourse has always operated at the antipodes of this hypothetical way of thinking that posits a form of écriture [writing] without a subject. To a certain extent, your question relates to the issue of politics that we were talking about before. I always felt, during this period, that there was a utopian demand on the part of Barthes, Foucault, and others for a kind of anonymity which, in my opinion, despite all the respect and admiration that I had for them, and the insistence with which they asserted the idea, belonged to a kind of intellectual leftism [“gauchisme”].19 As soon as they formulated such extreme propositions, they ended up articulating a subjective point of view in their writings that grew more and more intense. There was something like a game of sleight-of-hand going on, whereby there was a desire to have things said without “I” [“je”] at the very moment at which, in a certain way, this “I” was soon going to triumph with Barthes, from Les Fragments d’un discours amoureux to the autobiography of La Chambre claire.20 Moreover, all of Foucault’s work on ancient philosophy would end up revealing his research on the history of sexuality as a reflection of a personal itinerary. In my opinion, the demands for anonymity, for de-subjectification – and, more generally, all the accumulated observations by Barthes on the death of the author, and by Foucault in his remarkable “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?”21 – are positions that are designed to force one to regard the reality of what is being enunciated as comparable to that which these authors were trying to execute as individual subjects of their own writing. Basically, this is something one can already find in Blanchot: the more Blanchot writes about Blanchot, the more, in fact, he asserts the anonymity of a form of writing that never ceases to personalize him.22 There is an infinitely respectable paradox implicit in doing this, but it is one that derives from an entirely hypothetical way of thinking. More than simply being residual or irreducible, the subjectivity involved in your essays is very clearly asserted. What role does it have in your writing, in the resolution of theoretical issues? I think that there are few things that would displease me more than to undertake a genuinely autobiographical book – even though, in fact, your

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request to interview me, together with this contract that we have entered into, and the questions you are asking me, with the answers I am giving you, amount to much the same thing; however, this is something that I would never have dared, nor desired, to undertake myself. Furthermore, the form of an interview imposes natural limits on this para-biographical exercise. Nevertheless, the small traces of subjectivity that I measure out almost homeopathically within this or that essay are a way, not of retelling my life, but of showing that the author or the subject upon which I am commenting is also inscribed within a certain relationship to my own history, almost in the sense of an encounter. These traces are placed there as a proof of authenticity. I would not have been able, for example, to write regularly about Hervé Guibert [French writer and photographer], as I have, without alluding to the circumstances surrounding our meeting when he was a candidate for IDHEC, when I found myself on the jury, to recount that, however briefly, was a way, on one hand, of acknowledging the quality of his performance during the competition, which he failed for having refused to respond to one of the tests that he rightly found completely idiotic, and, on the other hand, of indicating a certain degree of familiarity with his work. To sum up, it is a light-handed, very delicate way – shall I say – of underlining the relations that I have formed in the course of time with various authors who are significant in this discussion. And also of shedding light on a body of work? Yes, but more than that: of showing the way in which one is personally implicated in a body of work, and also to attest to the fact that an experience has taken place that is relevant to the reading of a work, given that the latter would not be the same without the actuality of this concrete experience of the event, of the encounter, and of one’s complicity in it. So, it is “autobiographical” in the most subtle and restricted sense of the word. I always find it important to emphasize that an event, however intangible or trivial it might seem to be, in the end forms the basis for an object of study, as a result of an experience of one kind or another. Debates at that time on the future of literature, traces of which are reflected in your essays, revolved around the idea of an advent of literature “per se,” of a revelation, finally attained, of “the being of language,” to use a formulation devised by Foucault with respect to Blanchot. This is an issue that it seems impossible not to transpose to cinema: was it in any form, amidst the old representational structure, the site of a comparable concept of “the very essence of an image”? Or is it the case that the two histories are, in fact, completely unrelated?



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That may be a good question, but I don’t know how to answer it. It is true that the intellectual affinity of Foucault and Blanchot confirmed what I had been reading for years in Blanchot: an approach to the essence of literature through its infinite variations – a practice that Blanchot traced in a genealogical line extending from Rousseau to Foucault, involving an irruption of subjectivity in the transition from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century. This view was a decisive influence on me in the domain of literature. But how to compare the two arts, or two domains, which have such a different history, given that during their cohabitation in the twentieth century, they exhibit their own separate developmental logics? The result of this disparity is that we needed to wait for what Deleuze and others have called “modern cinema” in order to see a formal rapprochement between cinema and literature taking place explicitly – a rapprochement that a film like Hiroshima Mon Amour might seem to sanction through the alliance formed in it between a filmmaker and a writer.23 There is also the fact that cinema, as Jacques Aumont and Jacques Rancière have strongly emphasized, given that it is an art that is both technical and popular, and preoccupied with worldly affairs, has never been a truly “modern” art in the more restricted sense of the word as art historians use it – that is, as a term describing a kind of painting that seeks to discover its own essence. Were “modern” to be used in this sense, the cinema of the historical avant-gardes and experimental cinema in general would be the only comparable equivalents of such a quest for specificity – in other words, a cinema that is very marginal in relation to the totality of cinema as a historical and anthropological phenomenon, bearing in mind that other forms of cinema display just as much artistry in their most accomplished works. But, in a final turn of the screw, it is clear that for many years now all these distinctions have been tending to become blurred within cinema itself – which is undoubtedly the main problem – because of the existence of ever more massive works in which many different levels of reality and art intervene, bringing literature and cinema closer together through that means – delivering a certain kind of literature and a certain kind of cinema. It would seem, for you, as if the attention you paid to myths – those found in the western, or in German romanticism, for example – constituted a kind of prelude to the analyses inspired by psychoanalysis that you subsequently developed (not that the two are mutually exclusive, of course). In what ways did you find the notion of myth useful? I can only answer you by trying to define what the word “myth” means, or used to mean, in my way of thinking. For me, myth has long been a unifying term. First, because it is a story, and tells a story; like all children, what I liked

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most was to be told stories. My childhood passion was for Greek mythology, and to a certain degree, it has remained so – if not in actuality, at least as an aim and a form. And the reason I liked to read the Mythologiques so much, as I have already explained, was as much because of the artistry its author displayed in ordering the elements of an oral tradition into a written narrative, as it was owing to his ability to categorize them logically so as to explain the underlying foundations of many interconnected cultures that are dispersed across both the Americas. Myth thus seemed like a narrative formulation of the rationale underpinning a culture, whether of a civilization, a nation, a group, or a family milieu. In this respect, both classical American cinema as a cultural whole and the writings of the Brontë family struck me as forming a mythology, close to Greek mythology (Greek myths were the first ones I encountered) – and, because of this, in the mid-1980s I wrote a quick study along these lines titled “Nostalgies.”24 We should bear in mind Freud’s apt saying: “O what power humans have to forge myths!” The word “myth” thus serves as a unifying principle underlying what might at first seem a syncretic facileness in Freud when he posits a relationship between the neurotic, the primitive, and the child. In this very respect, the idea-reality of myth has been subjected to many robust critiques – by Barthes in his Mythologies, in which he demonstrates the hold of ideology over French society; and by Deleuze and Guattari who address, in a general way, the idea that myth is a function of territorialization (suggesting that the Oedipus complex is a prime example). But it is interesting to note that in their critique of Lévi-Strauss’s view that the unconscious is “a form that is empty, indifferent to the impulses of desire,” as stated in The Elementary Structures of Kinship,25 they are careful to add a note: “It is true that the Mythologiques series develops a theory of primitive codes, encodings of flows and organs, that extend beyond all parts of such an interchangeable system.”26 This leaves the door open for what one might call – by slightly inverting and forcing one of their favorite terms – a “micropolitics” of myth. This amounts to privileging the function of storytelling itself, as something that is governed by rationality for the sake of crystalizing what can be told, which is a kind of fictive principle inherent in art. The same principle shapes the telling of stories, the “and after that, and then” that they display, and on which they depend, in the forced manipulation of time that is necessary in order to deal with the myriad of events they presuppose. According to a somewhat analogous perspective, I once noted (in a study on Deleuze reprinted in L’Entre-images 2)27 that André Parente made good use of the Deleuzian notion of event to contrast the idea of “narrative-imaging processes,” partly inspired by Blanchot, with the idea of pure “imaging processes,” which Deleuze sees as responsible for cinematic narrative itself, thus denying such narrative the power of a first principle.28



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Before leaving Le Livre des autres, we would like to hear you comment on the interviews you were able to conduct during that period, especially the one with Lyotard you mention in the preface. What did you make of his book Discourse, Figure when it came out in 1971? 29 And what has been the place of the figural in your thinking about cinema since then? That is a delicate question that must be unpacked carefully. First, I no longer know why that interview was not able to take place, but at least I do know that there was a lot of preparation for it, judging by the mass of notes and underlinings in my copy of Discourse, Figure. It is an important book, a strong book, especially because of its passionate bias toward a Freudian reading of art and images detached from any dependence on a linguistic model. Why didn’t I make more use of this concept of “figure” in my analytical work on films, given that it has great instrumental value, both practically and theoretically, when even my closest interlocuters, Thierry Kuntzel and Christian Metz, drew upon Lyotard’s book (the former in “Le travail du film 2,”30 and the latter in “Le référent imaginaire” – a major text, which is unrecognized to the point of being one of the great unknowns in the theory of cinema)?31 I don’t really know. I think I used it at least twice in an emphatic way, but without drawing attention to it, in “Le monde et la distance,” in 1966 (“a certain number of figures, the signs of privilege”),32 and twenty years later on several occasions in my essay on Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon (“the vivid intensity of the figure”).33 I suppose that, for a long time, I spontaneously chose other means of expression for defining what was happening in shots, between shots, and within films. But I addressed the issue more directly, as is indicated in the title, in “Figures aux allures de plans,” a long presentation delivered in one of the programs organized by Jacques Aumont at the Cinémathèque in 2000.34 This played a central role in the elaboration of Le Corps du cinéma, which occurred at the time when the three concepts of “figure, figurative, and figural” were beginning to be used in the work of Nicole Brenez, Jacques Aumont, and Philippe Dubois. Why have I not been concerned with the notion of the “figural” since then? First, because I had already found that it was variously defined, as can be seen in the difference between Lyotard’s prescription, which places the figural in a strict dependence on Freudian theory, and the a-psychoanalytic view (which is not to say “anti-psychoanalytic”) of Deleuze, who regarded the figural as the perceptible form deriving from the pure sensation of the body (in his book on Bacon35 – and it should be noted that, as often happens with him, Deleuze limited a strong use of the word “figure” to this book, a term that is more casually used in his books on cinema).36 Then again, I have always found that I am not so interested in strictly contrasting the figural to the

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figurative, as I am in assessing the endlessly variable proportion of the one in relation to the other (as of the one in the other, and under the other) in any given example of a figure – with gradations of thought always being preferred to an opposition defining essences. And beyond that, I think of Deleuze saying, with regard to Minnelli, that nothing is worse than being caught up in someone else’s dream: sometimes the same is true of the language of others if one wishes to try to preserve one’s own. What I was seeking for a long time without knowing it – and would end up discovering much later, thanks to the inspiration I derived from Daniel Stern37 – was undoubtedly a way of protecting myself against words that might have prevented my own language from arising spontaneously. Let us end with a notion that is recurrent in Le Livre des autres: an expression that recurs again and again, both in the articles and the interviews – that of the “circularity of analysis,” which you sometimes link to its never-ending aspect, by anchoring it in a reference to Freud’s “Unendliche Analyse.”38 What does this loop signify, in your view? I wanted to suggest, quite simply, that analysis begins without one ever being able to predetermine its destination, which is why it is properly “unending.” There is always a surplus in analysis. That is why I have always had such an admiration for Barthes’s S/Z, his attempt to exhaust analysis to the point that it tends to be reduced, across certain of the five codes chosen, to an enumerative cartography that ends up seeming to be purely a repetition of the text under consideration.39 That is the “Bouvard and Pécuchet” aspect of analysis:40 the inescapable fate of copying that recommences, until you end up with the fundamental paradox of re-writing Cervantes’ Don Quichotte in Borges’s Pierre Ménard, Author of the Quixote.41 All great literature is constructed to a greater or lesser extent according to this principle of circularity without end, and even more so every critique that repeats the work in the course of attempting to illuminate it. Notes  1. A translation of selected extracts from Raymond Bellour, Alice Leroy, and Gabriel Bortzmeyer, Raymond Bellour dans la compagnie des œuvres (Paris: Éditions Rouge Profond, 2017), an interview conducted by Alice Leroy and Gabriel Bortzmeyer in December 2015. Unless otherwise stated, translations of passages quoted from French sources are by the translator.  2. Originally published as Raymond Bellour, L’Analyse du film (Paris: Éditions Albatros, 1979). [Republished, Calmann-Lévy, 1995.]



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 3. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963).  4. The Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) was a film school in Paris that was reorganized as La Fémis in 1986 and 1988, regarded as the top film school in France. Louis Daquin (1908–80) was a French film director and actor who was Director of Studies at IDHEC from 1970 to 1977.  5. Christian Metz (1931–93) was a French film theorist who helped to establish film theory by applying Ferdinand de Saussure’s theories of semiology to film, for example in “La Grande syntagmatique du film narratif,” Communications 8 (1966): 120–4. An English translation of Metz’s theory of cinematic syntagmas has been published in Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).  6. Roland Barthes (1915–80) was a French literary theorist and philosopher whose writings influenced the development of the theoretical schools of structuralism, semiotics, and post-structuralism. Bellour is referring to Roland Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits,” Communications 8 (1966): 1–27.  7. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) was a French anthropologist whose ideas had a formative influence on the development of structuralism. Bellour is referring to Lévi-Strauss’s Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958) and the Mythologiques series, consisting of Le Cru et le Cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964), Du miel aux cendres (Paris: Plon, 1966), L’Origine des manières de table (Paris: Plon, 1968), and L’Homme nu (Paris: Plon, 1971). These works were published in English as, respectively: Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), From Honey to Ashes (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), The Origin of Table Manners (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), and The Naked Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1981).  8. Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970). Published in English as S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974).  9. Christian Metz, Langage et Cinéma (Paris: Éditions Albatros, 1977); published in English as Language and Cinema (The Hague: Mouton, 1974). 10. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1957); published in English as Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). 11. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Published in English as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970). Foucault (1926– 84) was a French philosopher, historian, and social theorist whose thought on the relationship between power and knowledge strongly influenced the evolution of post-structuralist and postmodernist critical theory. 12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) was a French phenomenological philosopher who wrote on perception, emphasizing the body as the primary site of knowing the world. 13. Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) was a French philosopher whose rejection of the idea that constructed modes of perception (art, philosophy, and science) have any intrinsic, objective capacity to identify any existential “truth” had a strong influence on postmodernist and post-structuralist theories.

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14. Paul Hazard, La Crise de la conscience européenne (1680–1715) (Paris: Boivin, 1935). Published in English as The European Mind, the Critical Years, 1680– 1715, trans. J. Lewis May (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953). 15. Alexandre Dumas (1802–70), a French writer of historical novels and plays, including such famous works as The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–6), The Three Musketeers (1844), and La Reine Margot (1845). 16. Foucault’s essay originally appeared as an introduction to the French translation by Jacqueline Verdeaux of Ludwig Binswanger’s Traum und Existenz. For an English translation, see Michel Foucault, Ludwig Binswanger, and Keith Hoeller, Dream and Existence (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993). 17. L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) (Alain Resnais, 1961). 18. Michel Foucault, La Pensée du dehors. An English translation can be found in Foucault/Blanchot: Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, by Michel Foucault; Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, by Maurice Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey Melman (New York: Zone Books, 1987). 19. The term “gauchisme” is often used in a pejorative sense to indicate an extreme leftist tendency in groups or ideologies that advocate extreme solutions. 20. Roland Barthes, Les Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977); Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). Published in English, respectively, as A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978); Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). 21. An English translation of this essay, “What is an Author?” [trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon], can be found in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 124–7. 22. Maurice C. Blanchot (1907–2003) was a French philosopher and literary theorist whose work influenced Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and other poststructuralist theorists, as well as writers like Georges Bataille. 23. Hiroshima mon amour (Hiroshima Mon Amour) (Alain Resnais, 1959). 24. In Michel Boujut, ed., “Europe, Hollywood & Retour,” Autrement 79 (April 1986): 231–6. 25. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1949). Published in English as The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969). 26. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, L’Anti-Œdipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 219, footnote 39. Published in English as Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). The note is omitted from the English version. 27. “Penser, raconter: le cinéma de Gilles Deleuze,” in L’Entre-images 2; originally published in English as Raymond Bellour and Melissa Mcmuhan. “Thinking, Recounting: The Cinema of Gilles Deleuze,” Discourse 20:3 (1998): 56–75.



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28. Bellour is referring to what he describes as a “Deleuzian critique of Deleuze” by André Parente in his unpublished work “Filmic Narrativity and Non-narrativity (see Bellour, “Thinking, Recounting,” 74, note 12). 29. Jean-François Lyotard, Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). Published in English as Discourse, Figure, trans Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 30. Thierry Kuntzel (1948–2007) was a French film theorist and artist known for his detailed analysis of La Jetée (The Jetty) (Chris Marker, 1963) and his experimental videos and installations. His long essay “Le travail du film, 2” was originally published in Communications 23 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975), and was published in English as “The Film-Work, 2,” Camera Obscura 2:2 5 (1980): 6–70. 31. Bellour is referring to “Part IV: Metaphor/Metonymy, or the Imaginary Referent,” in Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, trans Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 149–314. 32. Reprinted in The Analysis of Film. 33. “Croire au cinéma,” Jacques Tourneur, Caméra Stylo 4 (1986): 35–50. 34. “Figures aux allures de plans,” in La Mise en scène, ed. Jacques Aumont, (Brussels: De Boeck Université, 2000), 109–26. 35. Bellour is referring to Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1981); published in English as Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London/New York: Continuum, 2003). 36. Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1. L’Image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit, 1983), and Cinéma 2. L’Image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985); available in English as Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 37. Stern (1934–2012) was a prominent post-Freudian American psychiatrist and psychoanalytic theorist whose research focused on mother–child interaction and the development of the self. 38. Sigmund Freud’s “Unendliche Analyse” is a long essay in eight sections, originally published in 1937, that explores the potential and limitations of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic technique. For the full text in English, see Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” International Journal of PsychoAnalysis 18 (1937): 373–405. 39. Roland Barthes’ S/Z adopts a structuralist approach to Sarrasine, a short story by Honoré de Balzac, in order to analyze it according to five codes of meaning (hermeneutic, proairetic, semantic, symbolic, and cultural), insisting on the plurality of meaning in a text and the role of the reader as an active producer of interpretations. 40. Bouvard et Pécuchet was a satirical work by Gustave Flaubert published in 1881

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about two Parisian copy-clerks who search fruitlessly through every branch of knowledge until, disillusioned, they return to simple copying. 41. A short story by the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, describing the attempt of a fictional French writer to re-create Don Quixote line for line in its original Spanish.



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CHAPTER SIX

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[Bellour explains the difference between Christian Metz’s semiological approach and his own approach to film analysis, and the degrees to which he became disenchanted with psychoanalysis, despite his debt to Lacan’s notion of the imaginary, the real, and the symbolic. With reference to his analysis of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, he proceeds to comment on how he evolved such key notions as “symbolic blockage” and “the undiscoverable text,” and proceeds to describe the influence of the Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and his interest in American cinema and filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Curtiz, and Fritz Lang.] In 1979, you published The Analysis of Film, a compilation of essays, the earliest of which go back to 1966. All of them occurred during the era of structuralism, but the publication of this book also coincided with its historical decline, and its debunking by theorists. Also, in the introduction to the book, you state that you eliminated the word “structural” from the title. Why? Does this mean that these essays cannot be categorized under that banner, and that something else was already beginning to take shape in the book? As I was explaining to you just now, the reason I did not want to call this book “The Structural Analysis of Film” was so that I could avoid adopting any kind of a recurrent method in my work as a whole that could be reductively objectified. Whatever reinforcement I might have found in the analytical approaches of different authors, such borrowings never took the form of the application of a single method. At the time when I wrote the preface to this compilation of essays, which Christian Metz had persuaded me to assemble, structuralism seemed both dated and ahistorical, at least to me; one could see that beyond structuralist methods proper and their formal applications in the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, the way structure worked within the context of analyses could not be reduced to the lineaments of a model that existed outside it. Just think of the infinitely subtle play that is deployed in

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Barthes’s works, especially in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977), in which the effects of structure extend into events, ever more minute accidents that are irreducible to any meaning by which they could be constrained.1 It therefore seemed important, to me, to insist on the fact that film analysis such as I understood it was an open discipline, and that my essays, regardless of how rigorous they might be, did not derive from the application of an extrinsic method. The Essais sur la signification au cinéma by Christian Metz was published in 1968, right in the midst of the political and critical upheaval.2 What echo of Metz’s work is there in your own? In a certain sense, you accomplished what he himself was calling for without realizing it, which was to produce a book of film analyses. But it shouldn’t be forgotten, since you seem so aware of dates, that the foundational essay on the semiology of cinema, “Le cinéma: langue ou langage?” appeared in 1964,3 well before the events of 1968, which you erroneously seem to want to see as a determining cause. Moreover, one should not conflate a lengthy search with the sudden eruption of a historical event, however influential the latter may have been. Unless you imagine that a sudden, militant illumination can trigger the abandonment of theoretical work, how do you see the events of May 1968 as effecting a difference to the logic of the code units in the grand syntagmatic of narrative film? Finally, as I have repeatedly insisted, Metz’s approach and my own are really two distinct operations that are complementary, whatever affect one might have had on the other. Film analysis and the semiology of cinema were both necessary, but the work of theorizing about codes should never be confused with that which engages with the reality of a text. To put it simply, both Metz and I acknowledged the work of the other, accepting the necessity for each one of these approaches. In “Le signifiant imaginaire” (the essay published in 1975 that preceded the book to which it would later give its name), Metz acknowledged the extent to which my essay on North by Northwest seemed, to him, to be the first exercise in film analysis such as he understood it.4 But our two approaches could not accommodate one another, even though the term “semiology of cinema” might have seemed to constitute a general vision and a discipline that could encompass film analysis. The essay in which I most clearly articulated the disjunction between the two theoretical regimes is the one I wrote on Gigi,5 the film by Vincente Minnelli (“Segmenter/Analyser”), in which any attempt at segmentation – in the Metzian sense of the term – ended up by self-destructing as a result of the logical development of the analysis. When Metz constructed the



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code of the grand syntagmatic, it seemed a priori to apply remarkably well to classical cinema; but analysis nevertheless reveals a certain point at which the filmic text resists the application of the code that is supposed to produce it. Thus, this film ideally segmented a priori made it possible to demonstrate the limits of the code on which it appeared to depend, and, as a result, of any general theory applicable to the analytical approach to a film. I recently touched upon all that, and our friendship, which had been very important for me, in a paper delivered at the first colloquium devoted to Christian Metz since his death – one to which I gave the title “Deux façons de penser” [two ways of thinking] for the reasons I explain above. Together with Metz and Kuntzel, you formed a kind of theoretical triad, with each of you developing your conceptual tools in relation to the others, working on subjects that were very close, while each of you pursued a different line (Metz’s codification, Kuntzel on the way a film works, your research on the symbolic matrix). Moreover, the end of the introduction to The Analysis of Film offers a resounding tribute to them. How did this theoretical ménage à trois work? At the time we decided to edit the special issue of the journal Communications on “Psychanalyse et Cinéma” jointly, we all had a very close relationship to psychoanalysis, but from three rather different points of view: Christian Metz had a deep affinity with Freudian thought – accordingly, he defined the imaginary signifier in terms of the large modalities of the psychic apparatus as Freud had described it (with borrowings from Melanie Klein and Lacan, in particular); Thierry Kuntzel, situating himself explicitly on the analytical side, was interested in the “work of film,” and thus with the primary and secondary processes involved in the work of images: he insisted on the effects that could be produced by an interruption to the proper unfolding of a film, thereby demonstrating how the standardized procedure of cinematic projection invest it with an unconscious vision; I myself entertained a much more troubled relationship with psychoanalysis. Although I had believed for a long time, in a rather desultory way, that psychoanalysis had a kind of objective reality, gradually, and without knowing it, but also rather suddenly, I changed my view. It happened that in 1972, while having lunch with Michel Foucault (even I, who forgets so much these days, can still see the scene precisely, the table, near a window looking on to the street), he informed me, in response to some personal and intellectual problems that I confided to him, of the impending publication of a book that he instantly recommended I read (“It’s a book just made for you”). It turned out to be the Anti-Oedipus. When I read it, I felt the same theoretical devastation, although of a very different sort, that The

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Order of Things had provoked in me. This book called into question the belief, undoubtedly ripe to be shaken, in the truth of the psychoanalytic model that I had used up until then. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was the instrument that allowed me to untie the relationship that I had entertained with classical psychoanalysis. As soon as I had read it, I conducted a very long interview with Deleuze and Guattari – it remained unpublished for a long time, for various reasons6 – which intensified my shock while fostering a friendly relationship with them. And so I developed an intuition, the implications of which I found difficult to grasp at that time, and still do: it seemed possible, to me, to adopt a historical position with respect to psychoanalysis, meaning that, rather than contesting its validity head-on, one could relativize it by regarding it as a historical object – the product of a history in which, of course, we were still caught up, but from which we could begin to emerge. Far from having the historical retrospection with which Freud invested it – if only through the very appellation of the Oedipus complex – psychoanalysis could thus be viewed as existing within the context of a certain historical configuration and, for this very reason, could be regarded one day as if not dead, at least more or less relativized, having been supplanted by other conceptions of human subjectivity. It was therefore a matter of asserting that psychoanalysis had derived from a cultural model constructed at a particular moment, during the turning point that took place between the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, between the classical world of representation and a modernity founded on the primacy of the subject (one thus finds the break so forcefully asserted by Foucault, here and there suggested by Blanchot, and which would be developed in other terms by Rancière). This is the reason for which the writing of my essay on North by Northwest,7 conceived around the notion of symbolic blockage, was concomitant with, and in my eyes the corollary of, a first version of my book Mademoiselle Guillotine, which was only published fifteen years later because I did not manage to find a form for it until then. It has always seemed to me that this book on Dumas was, in a very modest way, my own little Anti-Oedipus: it allowed me to loosen the grip of the psychoanalytic model by trying to describe how this model had been able to constitute itself historically, and thus had never been inscribed as a psychic inevitability within the human subject. That is why, in my essay on North by Northwest, I foregrounded a quotation from Deleuze and Guattari taken from Anti-Oedipus: “We are all Chéri-Bibi at the theater, crying in front of Oedipus: there’s a man like me! There’s a man like me!” It was a discrete way of indicating that the “symbolic blockage” I had used to characterize the textual construction of a classical film from American cinema only had functional value to the extent that it illustrated the general épistémè within which



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psychoanalysis was a dominant paradigm. This meant that one could imagine a time when, as people emerged from the ideality characteristic of classical cinema and from the approach that it seemed to determine, they would also simultaneously abandon the psychoanalytic paradigm, at least in its classical form, obviously without these two realities continuing to coincide, however. In a certain way, this is what I would do thirty years later with Le Corps du cinéma. While we are on the topic of psychoanalysis: what, if one might be so bold as to put it this way, was “your” Lacan? We know how much he influenced a whole section of thought on cinema at the time. But his name surfaces less regularly in your work, even though certain passages (on the “Name of the Father” in North by Northwest, and your speculations on the gaze) indicate a similar degree of influence. Lacan was very important.8 I more or less followed his seminar for two years at the École normale [supérieure] [higher education establishment outside the framework of the public university system] in the middle of the 1960s. It was something extraordinary. Few spectacles have aroused such an emotion in me – it made one think of a bullfight: Lacan’s entry into the hall was like that of a bull into the ring. I even remember attending the session in which Lacan, in the presence of Foucault, talked about the phallus hidden under the skirts of the Infanta, with a kind of relish. But more seriously: the Lacanian tripartition of the imaginary, the real, and the symbolic was crucial for me. In this sense, it is Lacan as much as, or even more than, Freud whom I found myself questioning after the publication of Anti-Oedipus when I sought to expose the historical machinery at work in the stories of Dumas, in order to demonstrate the similarities between his scheme and the narrative regime one finds in classical American cinema, which seemed, to me, to derive from the model constructed by psychoanalysis. The notion of “symbolic blockage” was central to this approach. Indeed, in my analysis of North by Northwest, I tried to show that symbolic blockage such as it operated at the level of the large units of the story – whether through the fulfillment of the Oedipus complex or castration – was found to operate equally across a sample sequence of 133 shots, at the same level as the textual detail of the film, that is, the relationships between shots arranged in accordance with a complex system of alternations and ruptures of alternations, and through that a mise en abyme of detail in relation to the story as a whole. Symbolic blockage thus functions like a machine that is simultaneously open and closed, and circular, drawing the spectator into its own logic, comparable in that regard to the destiny that psychoanalysis assigns to the human subject

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by implicating him in the inevitable scenario of the Oedipus complex and castration. How, then, should we understand this notion of the “symbolic” that extends through all your essays from this period up until the book on Dumas? The symbolic is the Lacanian notion that specifies the register of the Law embodied in the name of the father and in the phallus as signifier, and, through that, more generally in language, which he sees as serving for the human subject under the sway of the Law as a means of not being plunged into the abyss of the imaginary. A mirroring thus occurs between the larger units of the story and the arrangement of the individual units that make up the mise en scène, in other words, the shots. It is apparent to varying extents in classical films, and is exemplified in American cinema, in particular. In my view, the very machinery at work in the script of North by Northwest seemed to exemplify the odyssey of a subject who ends up “reentering” the symbolic owing to the final resolution provided by the possibility of a couple who are at last brought together – we know how completely American cinema is preoccupied with the symbolic power of marriage, the normativity of desire sanctioned by marriage. The extraordinary itinerary that is accomplished by the protagonist of La Mort aux trousses9 (it would have been better to keep the Shakespearean reference in the title of the original, North by Northwest)10 – and I mean the most minute details of filmic form embodying this trajectory as well as the metamorphoses through which the character passes – provides an exemplary illustration of a symbolic “bouclage” [lockdown, or closure], and thus “blocage” [blockage] of this imaginary trajectory. I devised this term in the course of writing the essay on North by Northwest; it seeks to express the expansive movement of the filmic text as an imaginary machine that, at the same time as the film’s story unfolds progressively, finds itself simultaneously subjected to a movement whereby it becomes closed in upon itself – denoted by the term “blockage.” The “symbolic” aspect refers to the great machine that defines a relationship of resolution between desire and the law. It is the play of the symbolic that allows a closure of the imaginary, permitting a conformity to the law through objectifying instances. Hence marriage, with which the majority of American films end – when it is not with the death of the protagonists – symbolically resolves the contradiction between the narrative elements that are laid out in the course of the film, which thus find in this final resolution a last element of this blockage working retroactively on the film as a whole, to the extent that it has been anticipated all along. We can understand from this the quasi-organic form of American films, which function like a big clock, the organization of which is retro-



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spectively justified by the resolution of the story. In North by Northwest, the central sequence with the airplane, the 133 shots of which I analyzed, seems to exemplify the stylistic machine of the film even at the level of the relationship between the shots (shot/reverse shot, alternations and interweaving of shots and of series, etc.). That is undoubtedly why, of the two stars of this book, Lang and Hitchcock, the latter ends up taking precedence over the former, because he more clearly accomplishes this effect of closure that analysis reveals. That’s true. Whereas I had once envisaged writing a doctoral thesis focusing more on Lang than Hitchcock (this was before the possibility eventuated of a doctorate based on published work), by the time I wrote the preface to The Analysis of Film, I realized I had reversed the relative emphasis. The reason I ended up paying more attention to Hitchcock is because his work highlights this inevitable logic of an arrested desire in the symbolic machinery more explicitly than in the case of many other filmmakers. But couldn’t this symbolic machinery also function perfectly well in something other than American cinema? It can obviously function elsewhere, but American cinema is exemplary in this respect – and within American cinema, Hitchcock provides the most remarkable demonstration of it. But a year after the publication of The Analysis of Film, when I edited the volume on American cinema, I selected two films, William Wyler’s The Westerner and Michael Curtiz’s The Mystery of the Wax Museum as “Symboliques” [Symbolic Films] in order to show how these two films confirmed the same hypothesis, even though the films concerned were made by directors who were less exemplarily auteurs than Hitchcock.11 I also concentrated on the film by Curtiz because the figure of Marie-Antoinette was at the center of it, which allowed me to link it in another way to what I was looking at more extensively in my work on the story by Dumas. I should also add, with respect to Hitchcock, that I called the essay devoted to Psycho “Psychose, névrose, perversion” in order to emphasize the presence and systematic overlaying in this exemplary film of the three big pathological conditions distinguished by Freud, in the same way that the circuit of the Oedipus complex and castration that worked so well in North by Northwest is found to govern Psycho in an intensified and almost exemplary form, as is demonstrated in the epilogue of the film, which is dominated by the speech of a psychiatrist.12 I should add that in the same book on American cinema, I devoted an

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analysis to one of the short films of Griffith, The Lonedale Operator (1911),13 focusing on the detail of its ninety-seven shots (at least in the copy on which I was then working – I have found more since) ordered according to a system that is simultaneously “primitive” but already very subtle in terms of rhymes and alternations, a system that struck me as a matrix for what would later develop in classical Hollywood. In this very simple story, there is certainly neither the odyssey of the Oedipus complex, nor the elaboration of a problematic involving castration, but everything is present in embryo. There is a couple who have to negotiate reality between the beginning and the end of the film by experiencing an action in which the rigorous organization of shots and sequences assures a form of regulation, until the final dissymmetry that marks the difference between the sexes – in other words, between the young telegraphist and her friend the train driver, the former using a simple tool that looks like an (imaginary!) revolver to keep the bandits at a distance, and the latter bursting on to the scene at the appropriate moment to threaten them with a real revolver (symbolic!). To return to what we were saying earlier, could the categories that work so well with respect to Hitchcock’s oeuvre, such as symbolic blockage, be applied equally well, for example, to Lang’s German period, even to some films from his American period? Does this mean that psychoanalysis “comes up short” as soon as it is not attached to American cinema as its preferred object? In actual fact, had I been interested in pursuing a detailed analysis of certain select figures and particular shots in my essays on Lang, I think that such an exercise might very well have prefigured, in a certain sense, the approach that I have since adopted in Le Corps du cinéma. But, in spite of everything, Lang’s films, both in his German period and his American period, generally involve the same psychoanalytic machinery that inevitably links the gaze and desire to death, even though they embody an exemplification of them that is less immediately noticeable at a stylistic level. When we did the issue of Trafic on “Hitchcock/Lang,”14 I wrote an essay called “Pourquoi Fritz Lang serait préférable à Hitchcock?” so as to reinforce the idea that Lang found himself less subordinated to the closed perfection of his own machine, whereas Hitchcock was more closely marked by a systematic exemplification of a particular story and its revelation in a logic of forms – which also undoubtedly explains, together with his unrivaled art in seducing the spectator, his success on television. The key concept in The Analysis of Film, as with structuralism generally, is the notion of “system.” The application of this systematic principle within analysis also



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allows for the identification of the essential characteristics of a genre or an age: North by Northwest thus becomes the key to the golden age of Hollywood as a whole. Again, how far can this principle be legitimately extended? To what extent can one affirm that a particular film can provide the formula for a whole period? The group of films I examined in The Analysis of Film, and also in the book on American cinema, seemed, to me, to provide a possible matrix for apprehending classical American cinema generally. But it is obvious that this involves a virtual construction – and that all kinds of American films are far from conforming to it in as strict a manner. The same thing can be said about the conclusion David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson reached in their monumental book, The Classical Hollywood Cinema,15 even though they worked on an infinitely greater corpus of films and from a perspective that was deliberately historical as well as stylistic. On the other hand, it is obvious that in modern American cinema since the 1970s, even if it perpetuates the Deleuzian image-action to a large extent, there is a deflation of the closed perfection that marked classical cinema.16 The end of the very long essay you wrote on North by Northwest is preoccupied with internal systems within a film, types of analytical modelization, the workings of structuration. But, significantly, all the extensive analyses conducted in these terms have only succeeded with classical texts: Baudelaire for Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson, Balzac for Barthes, and, as far as cinema is concerned, the golden age of Hollywood for Kuntzel and you. That makes one think that this systems-based formula only applies to this particular cinema, one that embodies the notion of an economic system par excellence, with all the aesthetic implications that follow. Doesn’t this constitute a fatal limitation inherent in this structural type of analysis? Could one imagine applying this system-logic to more “modern” cinema? There is undoubtedly a hypothetical match between a method and its object, and it is obvious that this collusion works less well on objects that are more contemporary, given that they are generally more open, more indeterminate, or differently determined. The films I studied in The Analysis of Film and the work I edited on American cinema organize the diverse elements of which they are composed in a way that calls for a systematic approach in analyzing them. From the 1980s, when I began to be interested more overtly in different kinds of films, I found that I needed to invent, gradually, a different kind of approach, which led me to the one I eventually formulated in Le Corps du cinéma. That said, it is important to underline that “classical” films (and classical to varying extents, given that it is a question of degree) can be considered

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in terms of a more open approach involving a focus on intensively realized symbolic images, detached, as it were, from the systematization in which they could be seen as being inscribed. That was the whole preoccupation of Thierry Kuntzel’s work, for example on The Most Dangerous Game in “Le travail du film 2.”17 In this regard, your essay on Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star18 can be viewed as a transition – there is still an emphasis on a system of rhymes, but a consideration of emotions is already surfacing, as if certain tools developed during the heyday of structuralism have survived to become integrated within new frameworks (as is the case with the idea of the “texte introuvable” [the undiscoverable text]). It is indeed a transitional essay, one that was made possible by the impact of an admirable film. But before coming to that, and to counterbalance what I have just said, it is necessary to remember that a systematic model, relatively detached from its psychoanalytic frame of reference, can be applied to all kinds of films relating to a certain formal logic, including experimental films, across a whole range of possible modalities of rhymes and rhythms that are activated through the repetition and alternation of shots. When shots are repeated, or recur, within the same film or moment in a film, this repetition generates a form of progression, that can be narrative to a greater or lesser degree, or else completely stripped of all narration properly speaking, but constructed according to a logic of systematicity (we can think of all the “flicker films,” from Peter Kubelka to Tony Conrad).19 But, on the other hand, when I chose the sequence from L’Avventura showing a love scene near a railway track to illustrate a possible mode of emotion in Le Corps du cinéma,20 it was to demonstrate that it was composed of two types of shots that were being systematically alternated, even though this was not apparent at a first glance owing to the narrative weight and, above all, the beauty of the actions and postures; so that in spite of the barely narrative and essentially sensory nature of the scene, this scene functioned like a little matrix closed upon itself, a microsystem within the general economy of the film. As far as the notion of the “undiscoverable text” is concerned, it is historically relative; at a strictly pragmatic level, it refers first, as has already been emphasized, to a time when films were physically hardly available for analysis. It was extremely difficult to gain access to copies, and even when you were lucky, you no longer had the film at hand during the writing of the essay, but merely notes that one had taken during the privileged moments when the film was made available. A film thus remained a fleeting object, whatever precautions one might have been able to take.



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At a more theoretical level, the notion of an “undiscoverable text” quite simply conveys the fact – but this simplicity is dizzying – that a film is a collection of images and sounds deployed in time, meaning that something fundamental inevitably escapes from what language is able to grasp, whereas there is no problem in quoting from a text, novel, or poem. One can never include an image in movement in the way one summons a quotation in the course of an analysis. Thus, in a certain sense, the text of a film is always undiscoverable. In La Querelle des dispositifs, I returned to this topic in an essay called “Trente ans plus tard, le texte à nouveau introuvable?” for the sake of affirming that, although this problem has largely been overcome because of the development of technologies that have endowed us with computers and DVDs [digital versatile discs], after first having given us access to video recorders and VHS [video home system], as a rule it remains attached to a partially irreducible experience of the capability of cinematic moving images (unless one opts for the mixture of text and moving images that the Internet allows). The notion of “rhyme,” which occurred to me spontaneously when I was writing the essay on The Birds, serves simply to underline in a very polyvalent way, it seems to me, recurrences, homologies, visual recollections of brief units in the shot, motifs, figures, etc. Obviously borrowed from classical poetry, it constitutes, as it were, the most material basis of the whole idea of a system, from its most minimal reality to its maximal extension. Description occupies a central place in your work, both practiced with a dizzying dive into details that has become your signature, and also regularly advocated as a task that is simultaneously necessary and impossible, always in default with regard to a filmic text that is as unquotable as it is inexpressible. But what part of its object is description supposed to aim at, what elements and details ought it to pick out? In this respect, Metz had a very apt saying: “one never exhausts the material in a shot.” In effect, one cannot completely describe an image, especially when it is moving. But I find it almost impossible to answer this question, in so far as I believe that, in the last resort, it is a question of style, according to the economy of means involved. There is an indisputable pleasure in description, and the inherent difficulty in such an exercise relates to the problem of writing: how to write it? Where to arrest it? Where to resume it? And how to integrate it with the elements of theory it is able to serve, and which justify one’s indulging in it? These issues relate purely to intuitions, and their resolutions vary according to different authors. For me, the very difficulty of grasping images has always motivated the relationship that I

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have with their substance. One has to find words with which to translate them, express them in a different language, and integrate them with elements that are more theoretical (but theory also begins with description). In sum, there is no good descriptive method for doing this. To a certain extent, the difficulties might seem comparable to those encountered in the secondhand description of literary works as soon as one tries to grasp the plot elements of a story (that is a difficulty I found insurmountable for a long time when I was analyzing the huge story by Dumas). But nothing is more problematical and indecisive than the kind of description that needs to be generated for moving images. One encounters all the problems that Daniel Arasse has emphasized so astutely in his book on the details to be found in paintings,21 but multiplied by the singular reality of the variation of movement enacted in time. That is why, I will repeat it once more, I think that, above all, this is a matter of style. Moreover, this is a problem we implicitly raised during the planning stages of Trafic, when the issue of whether or not to have images in the journal was being deliberated; right from the time the first essays were submitted, we felt that there could never really be a sufficient number of images to accompany the description or take the place of it, and so we simply preferred to do away with them, which has the effect of taking a gamble on the text as it is. The use of description, therefore, is a choice that I owe in part to Trafic, because of needing to apply myself all the more to the descriptive, evocative dimension of the films on which I had undertaken to comment; to a certain extent, I was constrained by the rule of “no images,” which ended up becoming invaluable for the purpose of critical writing. For a long time now, I have had a crazy project relating to this order of ideas, like one often has when one confronts a difficulty of principle that one would like to resolve. I have dreamed of an “integral” description of a film. I chose a silent, relatively simple film that I liked a lot in order to progress things: Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows.22 I had the use of a copy and an editing table at the British Film Institute, and began to make fairly elaborate notes on one of those small portable computers that were around in the early days of the digital age. In due course, it broke down – so I lost everything, which not only avoided the major crisis I saw looming, but also prompted me at once to turn this misadventure to my profit. Notes  1. Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1977); published in English as Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).



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 2. Christian Metz, Essais sur la signification au cinéma (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968); published in English as Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).  3. Christian Metz, “Le cinéma: langue ou langage?” Communications 4 (1964): 52–90.  4. Christian Metz, Le Signifiant imaginaire (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984 [originally published in 1977]), 47. Published in English as The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).  5. Gigi (Vincente Minnelli, 1958).  6. It has only recently been published in the third volume of the writings of Gilles Deleuze compiled by David Lapoujade, Lettres et autres textes (Paris: Minuit, 2015), 198–239.  7. North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959).  8. Jacques Lacan (1901–81) was a French psychoanalyst known for his re-reading of Freud, emphasizing the agency of language in subjective constitution, postulating that the unconscious is structured like a language.  9. La Mort aux trousses is the title given North by Northwest for its French release, the literal meaning of which is “Death at one’s heels.” 10. In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2, Hamlet says to his former friend Guildenstern, “I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw” (ll. 380–1). 11. The Westerner (William Wyler, 1940); The Mystery of the Wax Museum (Michael Curtiz, 1933). See Le Cinéma américain, sous la direction de Raymond Bellour (Paris: Flammarion, 1980). 12. Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). 13. The Lonedale Operator (D. W. Griffith, 1911). 14. Trafic 41 (spring 2002). 15. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 16. See the book by Jean-Baptiste Thoret, Le Cinéma américain des années 70 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006). 17. Thierry Kuntzel, “Le Travail du film 2,” Communications 23 (1975): 136–89; translated by Nancy Huston as “The Film-Work 2,” Camera Obscura 5 (spring 1980): 7–69. 18. Meghe Daka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star/L’Étoile cachée) (Ritwik Ghatak, 1960). 19. “Flicker films” refer to experimental films that play with the effects of stroboscopic light (produced by regular flashes of light), such as Arnulf Rainer (Peter Kubelka, 1960), or The Flicker (Tony Conrad, 1966), both of which alternates black and white, to produce a hallucinatory effect. 20. L’Avventura (L’Avventura) (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960).

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21. Daniel Arasse, Le Détail: pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1992). 22. Schatten – Eine nächtiliche Halluzination [original title] (Arthur Robison, 1923). The title of its French release was Le Montreur d’ombres.



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CHAPTER SEVEN

Thierry Kuntzel and the Rise of Video Art

[Bellour describes how his interest in video art grew out of his personal friendship with Thierry Kuntzel and the latter’s growing interest in experimental filmmaking using the new technology, and how this interest prompted him to seek to understand how the new medium was leading to a modification of perception. He goes on to explain how video technology enables the production of images that escape the natural conditions deemed to constrain photography, also emphasizing the influence of painting on video art.] Your book Between-the-Images was the fruit of your encounter with video, which led to a decentering of your work, a stroll along the edge, even to the antipodes of what had constituted your corpus up until then. How did you arrive at this dimension of your work? To answer that requires me to retrace a bit of history. From the end of the 1970s, as we have seen, I was very closely linked to Thierry Kuntzel, both intellectually and emotionally, and I remained so right up to his death a few years ago. Shortly after the issue of Communications we did together, which was published in 1975, he progressively stopped writing in an explicitly theoretical mode in order to direct his work gently toward the creation of conceptual art in the first instance, and then video art soon after that. In a great burst of inspiration, when he was working at INA during 1979 and 1980, he made six films during this brief period of time .1 When I saw them, I experienced a real shock, like a revelation, with a strong feeling that I was seeing images that did not resemble anything I had encountered before, but demanded to be taken into consideration. I thought they involved something very different, extending beyond many of the things that I had glimpsed in experimental cinema up until then. At this point, I need to add a parenthesis by recounting a little interlude. In 1972, I had been invited to the film festival at Hyères, devoted mainly to experimental cinema, on the pretext of evaluating whether the semiological

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methods could be applied to this different form of cinema, and, with this in mind, I had also managed to get Thierry Kuntzel invited. I no longer entirely remember the debates that must have taken place; but I do know that on this occasion I discovered La Région centrale by Michael Snow,2 and that we were very arrested by the films of Werner Nekes, particularly his last one, T-WoMen.3 The treatment of the material, the variation of rhythms, the approaches to bodies in this work, which was simultaneously animist and symphonic, completely bowled us over. We met Nekes there, who was touched by our enthusiasm. The result was that Thierry and I decided to engage in an investigation of the films of Nekes in a venture that we indeed sensed would lead us far from the relatively well marked out terrain of the classical films on which we had mostly been working. My memory is so bad these days that I can recall only two pieces of material evidence relating to this initiative that allow me to bear witness to it: a spiral-bound notebook, unfortunately not dated, in which I very carefully recorded a shot-by-shot segmentation, adorned with simple sketches, of Amalgam, one of the films by Nekes that interested me most4 – a segmentation that twice includes the words “Thierry tells me,” which attests to the fact that we found ourselves together in front of an editing table and thus were in possession of a copy for the sake of noting down all these elements with a shared project of analysis in mind; I no longer know why or how we abandoned this initiative. Apart from that, I attested to this project several years later when – at a colloquium organized in Lyons by Jacques Aumont and Jean-Louis Leutrat, “Où en est l’analyse de film?” – for practical reasons that undoubtedly relieved me, I had to replace a concrete approach to one of Nekes’s films with a number of observations concerning the difficulties pertaining to this kind of exercise, emphasizing in particular those entailed in studying a film that written language is powerless to describe.5 The reason I am retelling this story is to emphasize that the shock I felt several years earlier in response to Nekes’s films was one of the inspirations that led Thierry Kuntzel to his own creative endeavors, and was a prefiguration for me of what gripped me so forcefully when I found myself looking at his video works. I was then staggered to see someone who had been so close to me in the domain of film analysis suddenly accomplishing something so specific, in a completely independent way, with that small hand camera that was called a “paluche” in those days,6 which allowed one to film in very intimate circumstances and in extreme conditions of underexposure. In short, I experienced a shock of admiration, and I wanted to be able to shed light on it. Consequently, at the end of 1979 and the beginning of 1980, I wrote a long essay, “Thierry Kuntzel et le retour de l’écriture,” that Serge Daney7 had the imagination to incorporate with more than seventy images in the Cahiers du



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cinéma, prefacing it with several lines that say a lot about his foresight and generosity. (“After Nam June Paik and Jean-André Fieschi, we are continuing our (patient) account of the experiences of video which, both practically and theoretically, have been responsible for shifting our relationship to filmed images. Obviously, Thierry Kuntzel’s films are of this type.”)8 For me, this essay had a self-founding function: faced with a new difficulty, I had to find a way of describing images that were invested with an intense artistic plasticity, very removed from those of the cinema on which I had been working, and from the visual architecture employed in a narrative. I experienced this business as a great breath of fresh air, without, however, feeling that there was any breach involved with the cinema from which both Thierry and I were coming. I immediately felt a desire to be able to grasp everything in its totality, to connect the different aspects. Thierry got to know Anne-Marie Duguet, the author of the first important book on video published in France,9 and it was thanks to them that I very quickly gained access to a certain number of things. At the same time, the American Center was organizing visits to Paris of artists like Bill Viola, Gary Hill, and Juan Downey, and so I leapt from the world of cinema and film analysis into something quite different. For me, this was the biggest adventure of the whole decade, in which, by fits and starts, I had an opportunity to collaborate on a certain number of catalogs and edited volumes that allowed me to deepen my knowledge of video. In particular, in New York, thanks to the cooperation of Lori Zippy at Electronic Arts Intermix and Barbara London at MoMA [the Museum of Modern Art], I saw an incalculable number of films, almost too many. In short, I built up a culture. Today, it is hard to imagine what the flowering of video – born in the 1960s – was like, especially in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. French production was more modest, and was generally very different from the explorations of Kuntzel. It tended more toward militant activity, or else the intimate diary, immediately exploiting video for these two purposes because of the new opportunities for recording it offered. The truly artistic dimension emerged later than in the United States – with the big exception of Jean-Christophe Averty who tried to promote it within television, as Anne-Marie Duguet has fully detailed in the book she devoted to him.10 What was the turning point that made Thierry Kuntzel move from writing to video? To some extent, this kind of personal revolution remains shrouded in mystery, but I think there is, nevertheless, one particular element that should be underlined: the main important aspect of his critical practice arose from

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the possibility of arresting films on the editing table and, because of that, of thinking about the contrast between what was called “le film-pellicule” [the film as a physical property] and “le film-projection” [the film resulting from its projection]. Obviously, the former was the condition of the other, but Kuntzel’s enquiry concerned what happened between the two: it therefore depended upon an act of immobilization, upon arresting an image, and thus focusing on what arose from this suspension; his investigation tried to figure out the psychic and theoretical modification provoked by the resumption of film-projection from the moment at which one had experienced the filmpellicule. Thierry is the person who was most struck by this antinomy. It is not insignificant that for his article “Le défilement,” which constitutes the theoretical nub of his viewpoint, he chose as a central example the animated short film by Peter Folds, Appétit d’oiseau,11 organized around the visual “repression” of the sexual organs of animals: an animated film is built image by image, thus allowing one all the more efficiently to pose the problem entailed in commencing with the decomposition of twenty-four images per second in the film, in order to arrive at their recomposition. It is difficult for me to say more about this – we are touching here on something that one often wishes to illuminate by using a word that does not shed any light on the issue: a “vocation.” But what drew him more and more, as he explained in 1975 in his final two essays of a purely theoretical character – “Note sur l’appareil filmique” (at that time published only in English), and “L’autre film” (which remained unpublished for a long time)12 – was the desire to make this other film literally emerge. At that time, he was greatly preoccupied with Marker’s La Jetée.13 He thought that this film, which is composed of still-images, raised the issue of the nature of vision, of the return of the image and of memory, par excellence. Apart from numerous notes devoted to this film in his work diaries (today we have them collected along with many others in the volume called Title TK),14 he made it the object of a theory-in-practice experience that took the form of a re-editing of the film called La Rejetée, which is presumed to be lost, and of which I saw only one fragment, presented by Thierry during a colloquium in the United States. An experience that was not very convincing as such, if my memory serves me – but that was not the issue, the main thing was how he could affect the film through the movement that video allowed, beyond the work of analysis, and thus transport the image to somewhere else, without his knowing at this point where it would lead him. This was how Thierry Kuntzel, having abandoned any kind of university or scholarly work, gradually turned toward conceptual art projects, and then video art. But this transition in no way put an end to his practice of writing. One could even say that he never wrote as much as he did from the moment



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he stopped publishing. Apart from very intimate personal diaries, he constantly maintained work diaries that are also theoretical elaborations pursued by other means, closely interrelated with his creative projects. Put simply, he thought that theory as such was no longer capable of responding to the nature of the questions he was asking himself, which could only be illuminated through the act of creation itself. As far as the dominant approach in Between-the-Images is concerned, one is tempted to appropriate a statement by Deleuze to say that it involves an attempt to “come out of cinema via cinema,” but this would perhaps be a bit hasty. The book clearly signals a turn toward video, and, as a result, a relative farewell to cinema, but one sometimes gets the impression that the issues raised with regard to video were actually formulated through the experience of cinema. There has never been any question of saying goodbye to cinema. During the years when it might have sometimes seemed as if I were distancing myself, first of all, I continued to teach in the master’s seminar I gave at Paris 3, and I was also the driving force for five years (1988–92) behind the colloquia on “Cinéma et Littérature” at the Valence CRAC,15 which entailed programming, as well as writing on a number of films – by Lang and Hitchcock, for example for the catalogs. Above all, I continued to write more broadly, for various events and edited volumes, on essential issues relating to specific films and thought about cinema generally: hence the essays on Metz, Godard, Rossellini, and Deleuze.16 But, for the most part, it was a question of seeing how one could talk about cinema in the context of the shifts introduced by video, and also by photography. To take an example: when I wrote “Le spectateur pensif” for a small catalog called La Photo fait du cinéma, published in 1984, on the occasion of the “Cinéma et Photographie” exhibition at the Centre National de la Photographie and an accompanying program at the Cinémathèque française (both conceived in collaboration with Sylvain Roumette and Catherine Sentis), I sought to understand how the experience of the perception of photographs within films was modified in the vision of cinema.17 This was an issue that never would have attracted my attention had I not engaged in the practice of freezing an image on the editing table for purposes of analysis. That was what allowed me to think of the presence of photographs in films as an auto-process of immobilization, one that occurs in cinema itself during the continuity of its projection according to a uniform rhythm of twenty-four images a second. I thus addressed something that did not concern video at all, but pertained to cinema, on account of this presence (of a photograph) that is both inside and outside it; my aim was to understand the nature of the

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­ odification of perception, almost anthropological, that produced its presm ence in the process of scrolling the film during projection. This specific phenomenon is part of a whole series of processes that started to become apparent to me, and which very gradually converged toward the somewhat enigmatic place that I ended up naming “l’entre-images” [between-the-images]. What does video have that is unique in the regime of images? Its distinctive capacity is the ability to produce, owing to a synthesizer, a substantial modification of the image from an electronic recording that is close, analogically and chemically, to that of cinema – a process that allows it to be drawn toward the thresholds that escape the natural conditions deemed to constrain photography. One is therefore able to distort the image as one is recording it and to then alter it at leisure so as to remove the analogical representation to which cinema is fundamentally bound, regardless of the means that might have been used to remove it to a greater or lesser degree. For this reason, the video image favors an incessant transformation of the image in relation to itself. Its impact derives from this capacity, from this constant metamorphosis. In this respect, La Peinture cubiste is a good example, in a way that is almost demonstrative;18 for this television film, produced by the INA in the context of a broadcast on research (one dreams today of such a possibility!), Thierry Kuntzel collaborated with the filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux with whom he was close; the result was that the latter filmed the daily life of Jean Paulhan with his partner, the author of the book on cubist painting which their fiction dramatizes, in some beautiful cinematic shots that looked like tableaux; and these shots were then transformed by video, which was used as a process to distort – deform – the images that one had just seen in the form of film images. It was a model work in that it shows the transformation of one image by another, on a subject that is a priori the very same painting that furnishes its argument. For good reasons, painting is the only art to remain in a minority position in the two volumes of Between-the-Images, in which, apart from the very important “Sur la scène du rêve” [on the dream scene], it hardly has a prominent place, even though, at the very time the first volume of Between-the-Images was about to appear, you were organizing a colloquium on “Cinéma et Peinture” [cinema and painting]. This absence is all the more surprising given that painting is, if one can be so bold as to say it, the starting point of all the articles you include, and, historically, the place where this interrogation of the relationship between words and the image that runs through your books first formed.



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Painting is not as absent as you are suggesting. You can find it as early as my first essay on Thierry Kuntzel, because of the importance that it had for him. For example, he had started work on a whole series of short films, of which only one was finished, La Desserte blanche,19 inspired by Matisse’s Desserte series, that he explicitly reworked as a video reformulation of painting. Shortly afterward, this practice led to the project pursued by Kuntzel and Grandrieux, La Peinture cubiste, which associated film and video, as we have just seen, and to which I devoted a third of a long essay, “D’entre les corps.”20 I thus thought from the outset that painting was a central component of the modalities whereby the video image allowed one to treat the analogical representation of cinema by making it conform to the non-analogical part of the pictorial image to be found in both classical and modern paintings. Later, the simple dedication in Between-the-Images to Nicolas Poussin and Francesco Guardi was included to bear witness symbolically to the ability of painting to bring into play a freezing of the image. I had always felt that Poussin was the “inventor” of this strategy, because of the distinctive way in which he organizes the postures of the bodies within the frame. For me, Guardi was the one who ritually causes the numerous silhouettes in his canvases to float with a quivering that is similar to that in a video image (in Les Rendez-vous de Copenhague),21 I had included a fictional article devoted to “Guardi’s gaze” (a disturbing anticipation of this later essay that confirms the continuity of personal obsessions). Painting was thus present from the outset, but without my devoting a specific essay to it before “Sur la scène du rêve,”22 for which I found a pretext a bit later in the profusion of films inspired by painting during the years from 1989 to 1992. More than anything else, it was painting that allowed one to consider the potential disfigurement of the supposedly “real” photographic image. And then, in the first volume of Between-the-Images, there is the essay that I have just mentioned, “D’entre le corps,” which tackles all these issues. The three chosen examples were, as we have just seen, La Peinture cubiste, which addressed the issue of cubism with respect to the transformation of the analogical image by video, through a systematic comparison of film-images and their transformation by video processes; next, the sexual sequences from Godard’s Numéro deux,23 in which the representation of something that it was impossible to show, the sodomization of the mother as seen through the eyes of a little girl, was suggested by a special effect achieved through video that modified the analogical nature of the image; and, finally, the attempt, very much under-estimated from a theoretical point of view, embodied in The Mystery of Oberwald,24 in which Antonioni tried to grasp what he called “the color of feelings” for the first time, in a film that is otherwise a sumptuous failure because its plot is so conventional – in other words, to express the

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inner feelings in the psyche of the characters through sudden variations in color. What linked these three examples was both the molecular vision of the Proustian young women on which Deleuze and Guattari focused in L’AntiŒdipe to emphasize the passage to another level of perception, and also the between-world of Michaux,25 that place which, especially in his watercolors, challenges representation to move in the direction of an attempt to express the most inner states of subjectivity through bodies-faces. The brief preface, “De 1 à 2 et au-delà,” that you wrote for the proceedings of the colloquium on “Peinture et Cinéma,” contains a condensed version of your argument: the center is the “and,” the intersection or the hollow, the indivisible space between the arts, and between arts and forms of knowledge (we find this “and” in your essay on Christian Metz, an essay that portrays every theoretician as a man who places things side by side and adjoins them). And, at the end of this essay that plays with endless arithmetical accumulations, demolishing any pretension to unity, you credit postmodernism with having renewed the old problem of the connections between the arts as a result of this play of disjunctions. What kind of connection is there between them, apart from hybridization or simple mixing? I had completely forgotten this short essay, but it seems to me that this “and,” this principle of addition, is an allusion to the pages devoted to Godard by Deleuze in L’Image-temps, on “la méthode du ET” (“this and then that, which staves off the whole cinema of Being”).26 The idea is rather similar: one art can be added to an other more readily when there are mechanisms which, like video, can activate a metamorphosis of one art into another by making this passage visible and capable of being the object of experimentation. Video struck me as a mechanism for the movement of one art into another, a mechanism for circulation that anticipated everything we see today with the digital image and the alteration of the image by a computer. That is why I accorded a privileged place to video artists, among photographers, filmmakers, and painters. I don’t deny the potpourri element, but I find it impossible to theorize a connection that assumes that any particular art prevails over any other art, or which encompasses them under a blanket general theorization. This is precisely what the notion of “between-images” is meant to guard against, given that “between-images” is not a concept, but a place that is both real and mental. On the other hand, it has been essential for me, in conformance with an active phenomenology, to be able to observe the presence of these modifications in an extremely varied range of works at the end of a long decade. This is also the reason why, in answering you, I give examples rather than general ideas.



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It would seem that, in this view of things, any issue relating to the “specificity of the medium” has been eliminated – an expression that you seldom use. You prefer different terms, those of “support” and “dispositif.” The former allows the idea of a technical essence to be replaced by the notion of an existence that is understood in terms of uses, and the latter, a very Foucauldian notion, imbricates each art into a structure that exceeds it and displaces the problem so that it becomes a historical one. I had the cowardliness or originality not to tackle problems that I would have been unable to resolve, and which may not be resolvable, in my opinion. With each of the cases I explored in Between-the Images, I addressed problems relating to the specificity of different arts, but without claiming to adhere to an encompassing theory. When I talk about photography in Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman or Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt,27 I am speaking about films before anything else. Each time, I remained on the terrain of each of the arts under consideration while being able to demonstrate the transformations that were at work in the film concerned, but without pretending to have a theory of the arts in which video would have been the integrating model. Quite simply because I did not believe it. “Between-images,” I repeat, is a place of exchanges and passages, not a unifying concept. On the subject, there is no clarity. Moreover, I had always paid a lot of attention, even before exploring this issue further in La Querelle des dispositifs, to the way in which each art was able to preserve the specificity characterized by its dispositif within all the blends to which it could be subjected as a result of the way one art can contaminate another (without even mentioning the mixing up of dispositifs). What I was most concerned with, then, was to evaluate the modes of transformation and production of the image in each work. I was thus fascinated by the way in which, in Woody Vasulka’s Art of Memory (a work of historical reflection),28 new techniques for creating an image were shown to be capable of addressing the issue of war and violence which, until then, had been largely the prerogative of literature, paintings of battles, or war films (this was what prompted me to choose two images from American war films for the frontispiece, so as to indicate the subjects that video was allowing people to address, to think about through its own means). Each of the arts involved was thus calling on the other. Notes  1. INA stands for the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (National Audiovisual Institute), which contains a repository of all French radio and television audiovisual archives.

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 2. La Région centrale (Michael Snow, 1971).  3. T-Wo-Men (Werner Nekes, 1972).  4. Amalgam I-IV (Werner Neke, 1974).  5. “A bâtons rompus,” in Théorie du film, eds Jacques Aumont and Jean-Louis Leutrat (Paris: Albatros, 1980), 21–7.  6. “Paluche” is a slang word for “hand.”  7. Serge Daney (1944–92) was an influential French film critic who wrote for the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma from 1964 to 1981, taking over as editor in 1973. He later founded the quarterly film magazine Trafic with Jean-Claude Biette in 1991.  8. “Thierry Kuntzel et le retour de l’écriture,” Cahiers du cinéma 321 (March 1981): 40–50 (reprinted in L’Entre-images); emphasis in the original.  9. Anne-Marie Duguet, Vidéo, la mémoire au poing (Paris: Hachette, 1981). 10. Anne-Marie Duguet, Jean-Christophe Averty (Paris: Dis Voir, 1991). JeanChristophe Averty was a famous television director who was noted for his avantgarde and artistic productions. 11. Un Appétit d’oiseau (Peter Foldes, 1964). 12. These two essays have been reprinted in the catalog of the exhibition on Thierry Kuntzel organized by Anne-Marie Duguet at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, and also in the volume of Kuntzel’s writings that she has edited, Title TK (Anarchive/Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 2006). 13. La Jetée (La Jetée) (Chris Marker, 1962). 14. Thierry Kuntzel: Title TK (book/DVD-ROM), ed. Anne-Marie Duguet (Paris: Les Presses du Réel; co-published with the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 2006). 15. CRAC stands for Centre de recherche et d’action culturelle. 16. See “Cinema and …,” Semiotica 112:1–2 (1996): 207–29 (on Metz); “I Am an Image,” Camera Obscura 8–9–10 (1982): 117–23, and “The Power of Words, the Power of Images,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 8:3 24 (1990): 7–10 (on Godard); “Voix d’images,” Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, Special Issue, Trafic 50 (summer 2004): 467–71 (on Rossellini); and “Thinking, Recounting: The Cinema of Gilles Deleuze,” Discourse 20:3 (October 1998): 56–75, “Plier l’image,” Trafic 25 (spring 1998): 41–4 (on Deleuze). 17. Reprinted in L’Entre-images. 18. La Peinture cubiste (Thierry Kuntzel and Philippe Grandrieux, 1974). 19. La Desserte blanche (Thierry Kuntzel, 1980). 20. Reprinted in L’Entre-images. 21. Raymond Bellour, Les Rendez-vous de Copenhague (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). 22. Reprinted in L’Entre-images. 23. Numéro deux (Jean-Luc Godard, 1975). 24. Il mistero di Oberwald (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1980). 25. Henri Michaux (1899–1984) was a Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter whose poems, like his paintings, seek to convey an impression of the creator’s inner space. 26. Gilles Deleuze, L’Image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 235.



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27. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948); Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Fritz Lang, 1956). 28. Art of Memory (Woody Vasulka, 1987).

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Arrested Images and “the Between-Images”

[Bellour explains his concept of “between-images,” and comments on the status of the arrested image in relation to the time-image, suggesting how video was an instrument of transformation at a brief historical moment that is already in the past because of the advent of the digital. In the contemporary world, he suggests, the computer now enables a continuous, ideal passage between all the domains of words, images, painting, and photography, obliterating the boundaries that formerly distinguished them. He concludes this section by speculating on the nature of images, ways of forming them, and how they only make sense when related to psychic and physiological factors.] Why do you prefer the notion of “dispositif” to that of “medium”? I was very sensitive to the use of the notion of dispositif from the moment I had an impression that there was an impure scrambling taking place between moving images from cinema and those of contemporary art, and that, as a result, dispositifs that were widely disparate were beginning to be confused. At the time when I was working on the essays included in Between-the-Images, this issue preoccupied me to a much lesser extent, even though I was already using the term for the purposes of description. It is fascinating to note that in 1975, the same year (only a few months separated the separate publication projects), Jean-Louis Baudry1 used the term in the essay he contributed to the issue of Communications on “Psychanalyse et cinéma” that Christian Metz, Thierry Kuntzel, and I jointly edited: “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité” [The dispositif: metapsychological approaches to the impression of reality];2 and Foucault, for his part, introduced this word-idea forcefully, as we know, in Discipline and Punish.3 From then on, the term began to take off, being used by important authors (Deleuze, Agamben, etc.), and it is true that it is extremely useful, given that it allows one to identify specificities while simultaneously allowing one to avoid reducing them to an issue of the medium. On top of that, a dispositif



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has a constructive dimension, supposing from the outset the existence of an intersection between the psychic and mechanical aspects. In this regard, it is necessary to remember something that rather tends to be forgotten these days, which is that up until the 1990s video was only shown on monitors. When I organized the exhibition Thierry Kuntzel-Bill Viola: deux éternités proches, in Fresnoy, in 2010, I wanted to take account of the historical transformation inherent in the fact that people can now show video images on big screens. At the middle of the four short films by Viola and Kuntzel that were projected within an equal number of spacious cubicles forming a big circle in the immense covered market at Fresnoy [Hauts-deFrance, France], we arranged the four monitors for which these images had originally been created in the center of the space so formed, illuminated through the top, and thus given prominence. Artists themselves have increasingly transformed their dispositifs by treating images as projections; but these dispositifs are quite different from those of cinema, since they involve projections that one can walk past, or sit down in front of for a moment, or choose to remain for the whole duration of the work, which completely changes the situation of the spectator, who thus becomes a visitor. Certain artists discussed in Between-the-Images invite a Greenbergian reading:4 their effort to achieve “reduction,” or “extremization,” the way they play with the possibilities of cinema and video, slot smoothly into the well-known frame of modernity-as-a-search-for-the-specificity-of-the-medium. In terms of your language, one would say that they are traversing the radical polarities of the “double helix,” between the analogical relationship of photography to the world and an uncluttered reflection on movement and its arrest. How do you position yourself relative to this kind of analysis, which, in certain respects, does not seem very far from yours, given that these axes allow you, too, to postulate a certain destiny for images? Freezing an image, which is so dear to you, could be regarded as a cipher for modernity. I don’t pay much attention to Greenberg. Neither the issue of modernism, about which we have already spoken, nor the issue of the specificity of the medium have really preoccupied me, undoubtedly because cinema is, above all, as Bazin said, and like Jacques Rancière and Jacques Aumont have insistently reiterated, each in their own way, an impure art, ill-defined by the term “modern” in its purist sense, which, above all, concerns the historical evolution of painting. Instead, I have been preoccupied with a precise definition of objects, of their relationship to one art or another – but I have never sought, as Greenberg did, to defend dogmatically either a particular moment, or one particular paradigm of art against any other. My aim has never been to elevate

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the status of video as answering to the values of modernity or postmodernity. I prefer to take account of the way in which it allows images to be produced that have never been seen before – which experimental cinema was also trying to do, and is still doing today, through its own means. I am concerned with history in the sense that I am preoccupied with the genealogy of forms, with their inscription in a historical situation – why, for example, certain things were not possible before a particular moment owing to technical or ideological reasons. But this historicization does not equate to a defense of modernity, or of any kind of completion. My analyses focusing on the freezing of the image, and on all the different potential ways of suspending movement, have allowed me to think about the process of transformation that cinema is undergoing, rather than seeking to prove that through this process it is becoming fulfilled as a manifestation of modernity. With Greenberg, there is an intense valorization of modern painting as such, a strategy to which I remain unresponsive. Between-the-Images is also a different way of returning to the technique of freezing the frame that you applied in the analysis of film. You pursue this suspension of movement, but each time with different avatars. Here it is no longer simply a critical strategy (even though “L’analyse flambé” provides an update on its achievements), but also a cinematographic technique, and a ghost from cinema’s history. It is also the issue that subsequently you brought to the fore with your two great companions along the way, Kuntzel and Daney. In short, the notion, as is often the case with you, operates through a process of differentiations, in order to designate things that are irreducible. Which prompts a rather naive question: given that fact, what is the point of thinking about the issue? And what is its place in the confrontation between the dispositifs of different arts? There are two very different kinds of freeze-frame. On the one hand, that which one practices on the editing table, in a way that is necessarily improper, as a means of examining films made to be seen in a projected, not a static form. On the other hand, there is the kind that filmmakers embed within their film. Furthermore, one can either take the freeze-frame in its narrow definition as a simulated interruption of movement within the projection (which, by definition, is never actually arrested), or else in a broad sense that encompasses the variety of effects of immobilization that cinema is capable of producing as the film passes through the projector. The presence of a photograph in a film is not a freeze-frame in the same sense as a straightforward freeze-frame in a film by Vertov or Barnet. In addition, all of that relates to a single category, which is all the stronger because it is in the process of evolving, and because it is valuable as an agent of passage, a point of contact between the arts.



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On the other hand, it is not insignificant that this category came into being, historically, from the moment when we film analysts began to arrest images on the editing table, and that this or that version of it began to be multiplied in films and on television. Daney, who was literally transfixed by the great historical examples of freeze-frames, protested strongly that it was in the process of becoming the corniest of rhetorical devices, both in run-off-the-mill cinema and in television. He had been adversely affected by the final freeze-frame in the last shot of The 400 Blows,5 which he feared might announce the possibility of an imminent death of cinema – a cinema that might one day arrive at a stage where it no longer believed in the natural movement upon which it was based, continuing to immobilize itself until the point where it coincided with photography. The freeze-frame, then, provides the key to reading a certain history of cinema. Yes, absolutely, along with all the mystery that surrounds certain of these arrested images. Daney was fascinated by the one in Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life,6 that sudden immobilization of the face of James Stewart that revolves, engaging the film in an entirely different direction without warning. Furthermore, in a classical American film of the 1930s, it is a device that is totally unexpected. Serge [Daney] insisted that a history of such freezes would be “instructive.”7 It is very interesting to track the elements that we have known since Vertov or, in a different style, in René Clair’s At 3:25,8 to pick out the physical immobilization of actors in the films of Griffith and Dovjenko, which are not frozen images but frozen actions. The freezing of an image is, in fact, a rather extraordinary historical and aesthetic device, which allows one to consider what is distinctive about cinema, and think about its relations with the other arts. From this point of view, “L’interruption, l’instant” is an essay that serves to crystallize things in Between-the-Images.9 In it, I tried to draw together moments of interruption, the heightening of instants that struck me, if not as constituting a history, at least as illustrating a symptom – one that was both historical and aesthetic – that lies at the heart of a certain cinematic modernity, from Rossellini to Godard, from Marker to Eustache. “L’interruption, l’instant” seeks to grasp how cinema has a tendency to be focused on “pregnant” moments in the sense established by Lessing, whereas by virtue of its own nature it escapes from this problematic since it is always carried along by the movement and development of time.10 It seemed to me that modern cinema was defined by the way it worked on this tension, in both the broad and ordinary sense of the term, beginning with the avant-gardes of the 1920s, which constituted a prefiguration.

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It is a bit surprising, on the other hand, to find that you always reduce this freezing to a death-freeze, that you constantly relate it to a possible disappearance of cinema. Such a preoccupation, however, could also have less morbid ­underpinnings – the whole mythology of love at first sight, for example, also depends upon a freezing of the image. It is true that the examples selected rather tend in this direction, whether it be in The 400 Blows or one of those that I like better, Rossellini’s The Machine That Kills Bad People,11 in which the freezing of an image is of an extremely distinctive sort, given that it consists of stopping life itself, in the form of executions through a process that is as brilliant as it is perverse, consisting of re-photographing a photograph, and of never freezing the subject who is photographed in the posture he had in the photo. It is a way of thinking about cinema in relation to death that could already be found in René Clair’s At 3:25, in which, under the appearance of a comic fantasy, the fiction clearly thematizes this association of an arresting of time with death. But it is also true that with Vertov it involves something very different, an arrest that functions purely as a variator of speed and of life. It’s the same with the film we were discussing, It’s a Wonderful Life, in which the freezing serves to accelerate the story. The figurative meanings of frozen images are polyvalent, but it is true that, from a certain moment in the cinema of the 1940s–1950s and beyond, the use of this device inscribes the possibility of a death of cinema. But we also know that thinking about an end, at the same time, is only ever a way of thinking about a transformation, and that “the death of cinema” has been the means at a particular moment of allowing us to think about how cinema might evolve. As we know, Barthes has stressed the idea that a photograph is inherently linked to death, given that it captures a moment that is passing, a moment that has already passed.12 This is also why Deleuze’s vitalist philosophy has shown itself to be so little concerned with, and harsh in its attitude toward, the photograph. With him, there is something like a denial of the freezing of an image, of any force linked in one way or another to an immobilization of time. In my opinion, the proof of this is that the film that might appear emblematic of the time-image, La Jetée, is never alluded to in his book13 – an omission that is symbolically repaired by David Rodowick in Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, in which, as quietly as can be, he presents Marker’s film as an emblem of time-image cinema.14 Let us return to video. Your passion is directed almost exclusively at video art, from Bill Viola to Gary Hill, neglecting the other extensive side of its production: for instance, the video of intervention, and “poor” or democratic video, and



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finally all the video that, before the digital age, made possible a massive production created by all and sundry. When I was making regular visits to the United States in the 1980s, and was taking advantage of that to build up some knowledge in this huge field, I watched everything I could find, and therefore also saw a lot of militant videos. But I never had the feeling that, outside these distinctive worlds in which I was only slightly involved at a personal level, there was any particular reason to engage with this domain of video as such, other than for what one could learn from it, and was essential in it at an informative level, socially and politically. I am undoubtedly exaggerating, and I’m giving you a general impression. On the other hand, one might just as well return to politics and the social space through video art – for example, the implications of images of war and the representation of violence in the film by Vasulka that we were talking about a while back, or many remarkable works by a large number of American artists engaged in a veritable crusade against television. Are you therefore saying that those who are best able to fight against the televisual empire are the video artists rather than militant filmmakers using video? Who can answer that question? But one thing is certain: in the United States, video art quickly developed both as a critique and as an ideal outcome of television. There is a long list of artists one could cite, from Antoni Muntadas to Dara Birnbaum, from Nam June Paik to Doug Hall and even Bill Viola, with his emblematic Reverse Television.15 There are also those collectives at which art and activist work are mingled, Ant Farm, General Idea, and Paper Tiger Television (together with Anne-Marie Duguet, I accorded them their rightful place in the big issue on “Vidéo” in Communications that we edited in 1988, which was devoted entirely to the different aspects of video creation taking place at an aesthetic and historical level).16 In France, an equivalent tendency, but one that is hardly comparable, was embodied by the work of Godard in the 1960s, in the two big series that he made with Anne-Marie Miéville, with whom he tried to conceive something that was intended to be another type of television. France/tour/détour/deux/enfants is the finest critical essay on French society ever conceived for television.17 In a seminar given at New York University, I remember having paired it with Barthes’s Mythologies in an effort to explain France to the Americans. In the same vein, Chris Marker used “Proposal for an Imaginary Television” as the subtitle for Zapping Zone, an installation he devised ten years later for our exhibition “Passages de l’image.”18 The main preoccupation of American video makers during this period, as with a certain number of French filmmakers (I am

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thinking of Jean-Paul Fargier, who unwaveringly believed that video creation could make a potentially positive contribution to television, and obviously of Jean-Christophe Averty), was the idea that television had abdicated what the electronic image should have allowed it to construct as a mode of expression, in order to pack up and move into communication and advertising. Television also largely made a mess of cinema as such: it did not know how to reorientate its future, apart from ensuring its simple diffusion (commercial and cultural), or simply by providing additional support for its production. When it began to be developed, great filmmakers like Renoir, Rossellini, Godard, and others placed a great deal of hope in it, seeing it as a means of transforming cinema. But if one is to compare the two histories of cinema on one hand, and of television on the other, it becomes apparent that there are only a few works attesting to a great art that is unique to television. For good reasons, you have never touched on television. There is a moment one can see in the recording of the conference at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, an arts center for modern and postmodern photography and media, in which Daney turns to you and asks whether you think that there is anything to say about the material that appears on mainstream television, and your reply is categorically negative. For you, it seems to be simply a visual pandemonium to which every powerful image can be opposed. Which gives rise to a twofold question: is there not a zest for positivity in spite of everything, or at least a movement of contamination rather than of simple opposition? And even if television might be an eternal Gehenna, why not, for that very reason, attempt an analysis of what is bad about it, just as Daney had fun with it? Let’s say, quite simply, that I don’t know how to do that. It is only admiration and intellectual curiosity that prompt me to write. The idea of writing a polemic against bad objects has never appealed to me, once I had moved on from an impulse in my earlier life that I quickly got over (apart from several very rare instances, for example, when I expressed indignation at a worthless book by Françoise d’Eaubonne on Emily Brontë). I am neither sufficiently ideological nor political to feel capable of satisfying both the need to undertake the necessary work involved in critical analysis and also to engage in polemic. In any case, television is an extraordinarily vast and complicated phenomenon for which I have no competence, whereas someone like Gilles Delavaud, for example, devotes a remarkable amount of work to it. It is a polyvalent object, concerning which one should not confuse the instance of broadcasting – I have, indeed, been one of the fervent television viewers for years who watch Patrick Brion’s cine-club on Antenne 2 – with the instance of production; in the 1960s, it provided a good part of the financing for the



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new documentary: certain of the greats of cinéma-vérité spent their resources in it. But, at the end of the day, I simply have to admit that I don’t like watching it very much, even at the level of an appliance, and for the news, I prefer the radio, a marvelously economical medium, and my computer for looking at images. In my approach to video, for many years now, I have regarded television in terms of the foil that it has historically been for artists. Think, for example – it is worth returning to it for a moment – of Bill Viola’s project Reverse Television, originally conceived in the 1980s in the form of a long minute of absolute silence concentrated on motionless television spectators sitting in the position in which they usually watch television – a radical project amended by the network, in whose eyes it was unthinkable to have noise, speech, and flow interrupted in this way for the unbearable duration of a whole minute. In this respect, I am reminded of an amusing story. Antoni Muntadas had lent me his loft in New York for several weeks.19 When I entered it, I realized that there was a television set there that was perpetually on, but with the sound turned off, which showed, covering the whole screen, a gigantic transparent dollar note that veiled the image to the point that it was scarcely discernible. I spent three weeks in that loft: I hated having to sleep with the light from the television, but I never dared to turn off the set because I realized that this kind of installation was a condensed symbol of the resistance of American artists to television, a denunciation of its links with the machine of Capital. And on the other side, there was the utopian project to which television had been able to give embodiment: in this regard, Godard once again springs to mind,20 or Rossellini, the great filmmaker who literally abandoned cinema for television in an attempt to create a popular model of cultural education, and who thus created an oeuvre during these years that is often not well viewed by cinephiles, but which is fascinating nevertheless, if only because of the excessive degree of conviction that this unique project conveyed.21 One might get the impression that, for you, video enjoys a special place in the domain of the arts, that it is an honest art, more or less transcendental, presenting the truth of images that preceded it because it directs and transforms them in a certain way, sometimes because it even accomplishes a certain destiny for an image. And because, in this sense, it represents the only true future of cinema, its rescue – in an essay on Thierry Kuntzel, you compare its appearance to that of free verse in poetry: a modern rupture that opens up an exploration of the being of language, and which makes video the first and only art that is capable of pursuing this issue in the domain of images. Are these false impressions?

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Expressed like this, it seems excessive, to me. What strikes me about video, and I hope I have conveyed this, is the fact that it was an instrument of transformation during a brief historical moment, but a historical moment that is already behind us. Video, defined by the specific nature of the electronic image, appeared toward the middle of the 1960s and gradually became self-dissolved as a result of the subsequent reality of the digital. Today, we talk more in terms of installations, or of multimedia art, than of video art. The video moment involved a grand utopia in which all sorts of images were transformed by other ones, a general phenomenon of crystallization in the evolution of different arts, everything that the digital has both accomplished and virtualized today. The privilege of video is, then, above all historical: a reflexive privilege attached to an obligation to think about the nature of other images, to think about them by placing them into relationships that video has made operative between them. This play of explicit confrontations no longer has great meaning today because the digital has become an infinitely more powerful site of transformation. If there is one medium of transformation par excellence, it is indeed the computer; it embodies a new synthesis, and not only for things that relate to images: it constitutes a point of junction and contamination between words and images to an extent that had never been attained before. This does not prevent photography from continuing to be photography if it still wants to do so, or cinema from continuing to produce films, while also continuing to experiment with its own dispositif, if it wants to tell stories that are tied to world affairs, or painting from still wanting to display itself on canvas. But what a computer produces is a continuous, ideal passage between all these domains, all these dispositifs, and all these materials, just as it does between all the domains of human culture. In both the first and the second volumes of Between-the-Images, there are recurrent references to someone who seems to be viewed as a forerunner for a certain future of the image: Mallarmé, who was a theoretical angel for Marker, Godard, and Kuntzel. He brings with him his weighty mythological baggage, the idea of the “Livre,” a confrontation between art and what lies outside it (poetry against journalism, video against television) and, of course, all the noise surrounding the idea of the line as an image. Why, all of a sudden, did you feel a need to resort to Mallarmé as a reference point? One gets an impression that these references function as the marker of a historical break with the past. As you know, in the work I did for L’Année 1913, I went back to the model that Mallarmé had devised in order to understand the issues involved concerning the transformation taking place in poetry.22 What impressed me most about Mallarmé was the fact that he was able to conceive of a utopia



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in the form of a project that was never finished, the project of “Le Livre.”23 Even in its hypothetical form, it continued to undergo a metamorphosis until, paradoxically, it acquired reality as a point of reference for various arts. The idea of impossibility, as in the hypothetical nature of “Le Livre,” is what made Mallarmé a preeminent influence on thought throughout the twentieth century. As soon as a work – it does not matter what kind of work – is invigorated by an intense degree of projection and ideality in relation to itself, a reference to Mallarmé inevitably arises, because the conception of “Le Livre” opened up an unprecedented space for hypothetical projection. In this sense, every work foregrounding the syndrome of the impossibility of achieving that which it nevertheless contemplates places itself, to a certain degree, under the sign of Mallarmé. Marcel Broodthaers displayed a diabolical intelligence in that respect by devising an intensified version of Un coup de dés,24 a hypothetical actualization of “Le Livre,” in the graphic form of a material correspondence that transformed the free-verse lines of the poem into a pure abstract design of thick lines of variable length. (In his “Exposition littéraire,” he noted that “Mallarmé is the source of contemporary art.”) And when Marker created his CD-Rom Immemory,25 the virtuality that he thus opens up, and on which he has broadly insisted, maintains, as if by nature, an analogous relationship with the opening-up that Mallarmé posited. Let us return to the notion in Between-the-Images that is expressed in the title of its two volumes. You have claimed, and repeatedly said, that between-images is a place without a place, unassignable, founded by dispersion and multiple by nature, and simultaneously physical and mental, both everywhere and nowhere. Its only specific characteristic is a historical date: it has not always existed, its birth being recent, and marks the advent of a new kind of image. How far back do you think its emergence extends, what have been the factors involved, in other words, its archeology? I am not sufficiently well informed to be able to outline a comprehensive archeology, given that it would need to consider the illuminated books of the Middle Ages, the paragone of the Renaissance (that debate about the respective merits of sculpture and painting), along with a range of other forms in Western culture that blend images, and words and images. For this, I would direct you to the work of Hans Belting, among others.26 Closer to our own time, one can date such an emergence to the end of the eighteenth century, with the appearance of the first machines to endow the image with new movements: the phantasmagoria that developed with the old camera obscura; the panorama, in which an enlarged painting is invested with a strange movement. The turning point between the two centuries was also

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the moment when the first great de-compartmentalization of traditional norms took place, owing to Romanticism, German idealism, and a variety of attempts in European literature. To a large extent, this amounts to taking up both Rancière’s views on the opposition between the aesthetic regime of the arts and classical representation,27 and also the archeological break Foucault posited between the classical age and the emergence of a human age characterized by a “work–life–language” triad. The manner in which Stendahl, for example, drew the little sketches of himself in his Vie de Henry Brulard seems something that is hard to imagine without a prior unsettling of the relations between language and the image.28 I am pleased to be able to cite this example because when I began to work on self-portraits, especially video self-portraits, it served as a model that was both retrospective and projective, in terms of understanding how the relations between words and images could be conceptualized in the new regime that the appearance of video had established. After that, it would be necessary to trace what the invention of photography introduced as a rupture with the painted image, and how these two immobilized images were subjected to the beginnings of movement produced, in the course of century, by innumerable machines that were foreshadowed by the phantasmagoria and the panorama, as has been outlined in a number of good books. All of these developments are unequivocally reflected in literature, from L’Eve future to Le Château des Carpathes,29 and in many other stories, as I have already suggested. And one could also mention, if one were so inclined, several lines in which Mallarmé, once more, questioned three years after the birth of cinema about an illustrated book, expressed his view, with his unique sense of ambiguity: “What I am for is – no illustration, given that anything evoked in a book should take place in the mind of the reader.” Instead, he refers the questioner “to the cinematographe, which will be a good replacement for many a volume, both image and text, once it develops further.”30 That is to say, without actually saying it, that the book, “le Livre,” is caught up in a network of images from which it would like to escape, but of which it is actually an equivalent. Thus, as soon as cinema emerged, it found itself already on the same level as this regime that preexisted it, and the link that it formed thereafter with the photograph is the first obvious sign of a relationship marked simultaneously by inclusion and exclusion between the two types of images. At the same time, cinema only really participates in the between-images from a certain stage in its development that more or less coincides, post-war, with its modern age – that moment when, as we have seen, in the course of technical changes and historical traumas, the interchanges between cinema and photography, cinema and painting, and then cinema and video become more and



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more significant, inducing a kind of progressive transformation, and one that always virtually extends images through introducing them into a relationship with other ones. Between-images is thus an appropriate notion for designating the ideal place in which all these constantly changing and renewed operations come to be converged – the ones that I analyze, virtually all those that accumulate in a great number of works. From this point of view, there are, or there tend to be, between-images everywhere after a certain historical moment – and the reason I date this to the appearance of video, in particular, is because video inherently confers on the phenomenon a new extension and obviousness, a kind of boundlessness. Why did you choose this term “between-images”? And what is its relationship to the idea of “passage”? When I chose this expression as the title for a collection of essays, I was careful to qualify it with a subtitle, Photo, cinéma, vidéo, so as to delimit the essentials of the kind of transitions that it was positing. I no longer know when the expression “entre-images” occurred to me – probably when I began to assemble the essays, given that the only one I wrote especially for the book to introduce and complete it had the very same title. I thought that the term “between-images” was capable of designating the boundaries of a place that was extraordinarily general by nature in a way that was almost geographical, because in a certain sense it subsumes all the possible relations between images at the same time as it designates the function of each detail encountered within a work between a fixed image and a moving image, between an image arising (always to a greater or lesser extent) from pure analogical representation and its transformation, which one could describe with a term that is less elegant but very precise: “dis-analogization.” “Entreimages” [between-images] is thus a synthetic term that oscillates between the hypothetical virtuality of all potential images and the experience, local in every case, of the specific detail in which this potential image takes on a body. What happens to the idea of “the image” in all of this? The concept seems a bit buffeted around because of its need to encompass multiple contradictory elements, because of being located everywhere, in paint brushes as well as computers, and especially in the mind, given that the real image, or at least the most powerful one, the ultimate one, seems to remain, in your account, a mental image, the only one capable of merging language and the visual within itself. So, what does this “image” actually designate, given that it needs to cover all these things?

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Actually, this word “image,” which is very polyvalent, has only two main meanings, which we constantly manipulate in various directions. The first is descriptive, pertaining to the physical nature of the different arts that display it in accordance with their own dispositif and materiality – painting, sculpture, bas-relief, photography, cinema, video, architecture, theater, and also dance (the digital image being what links or subsumes all the different dispositifs and materials together). But this range of material images only makes sense when related to the different ways of forming images in both a psychic and physiological sense, whether this is via a dream image, a mental image, a memory, a perception, or a hallucination. By definition, every experience of an apparently objectifiable image only has meaning when referred to the subjective experience of a real-life image in terms of the range of its methods of expression. Thus, as Barthes strongly emphasizes, we absolutely do not have the same existential relationship to a photograph – a rather isolated, inanimate, and self-sufficient object – as we do to the projection of a film containing thousands of photograms, even though each one of them individually is the simple equivalent of a photograph. The psychic regimes of images are determined by the supposedly accessible, describable, and assessable nature of each of the works in which these images are deployed. The physical nature of the image, prescribed by the medium out of which it is constructed in each case, induces different mental operations that pertain to the nature of the experience being created. The ways in which this occurs, however, does not allow one to envisage any strict correspondences of an automatic kind. In addition, this experience is also dependent on the singularity of each individual subject. Notes to Chapter Eight  1. Jean-Louis Baudry (1930–2015), one of the original members of the editorial board for Tel Quel, an avant-garde literary magazine, was an important early theorist of cinema, known for his advocacy of “apparatus theory,” which supposes that cinema serves to induce an ideological perspective in the spectator.  2. For the essay to which Bellour refers, see Jean-Louis Baudry, “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité,” Communications 23:1 (1975): 56–72; published in English as “The Apparatus,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 1:1 (1) (1976): 104–26.  3. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). Published in English as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).  4. Clement Greenberg (1909–94) was an influential art critic who supported abstract impressionism.  5. Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows) (François Truffaut, 1959).  6. It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946).



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 7. Serge Daney, L’Exercice a été profitable, Monsieur (Paris: P.O.L, 1993), 27.  8. Paris que dort (At 3:25) (René Clair, 1924).  9. Originally published as Raymond Bellour, “L’Interruption, l’instant,” La Recherche photographique 3 (December 1987): 51–61. 10. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) was a German Enlightenment philosopher who, in Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), developed the idea that pictorial art presents bodies in pregnant moments of time, whereas literature presents actions in succession. 11. La Macchina ammazzacattivi (Roberto Rossellini, 1952), for which the title of its French release was La Machine à tuer les méchants. 12. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 14–15. 13. Gilles Deleuze, L’Image-temps (Paris: Minuit, 1985). Published in English as The Time-Image, trans Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989). 14. D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). 15. Reverse Television (Bill Viola, 1983) presents a series of video portraits of subjects ranging from sixteen to ninety-three years of age sitting in their living rooms, looking at the video camera as if it were a television set. 16. Raymond Bellour and Anne-Marie Duguet, “Vidéo,” Communications 48 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988). 17. France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, 1977), a twelve-part miniseries made for French television. 18. Zapping Zone (Chris Marker, 1991), an interactive multimedia installation. 19. Antoni Muntadas, born in Barcelona in 1942, is a pioneering multidiscipinary installation and media artist who has lived in New York since 1971. 20. For example, Jean-Luc Godard’s TV mini-series such as Six fois deux/Sur et sous la communication (1976), which deals with topics such as women, labor, and history, or France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1977), which investigates the lives of two children in contemporary France to express a critique of the capitalist organization of society. 21. Bellour is referring to Roberto Rossellini’s historical TV mini-series, such as Acts of the Apostles (1969), and The Age of the Medici (1972), and films made for TV, for example Socrates (1971), and Augustine of Hippo (1972). 22. Raymond Bellour, “La Naissance du cinéma,” étude chronologique 1909–1915, in L. Brion-Guerry ed., L’Année 1913 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), 885–921. 23. “Le Livre,” or “Grand œuvre,” was an ambitious project by the French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé to put his theories about the need to crystallize essences into practice. The work was never completed and only a few preparatory notes remain. 24. Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard [A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance] is a poem by Mallarmé written and published in 1897, in various typefaces, with the text flowing back and forth across different pages,

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with irregular lines. Broodthaers’s Un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard copies Mallarmé’s poem, but with all the words removed, being replaced by black strips that foreground the work’s structure as an object in its own right. 25. Immemory (Chris Marker, 1997) assembles postcards, newspaper clippings, catalogs, and posters in order to discover the hidden structure that lies within what appears to be a maelstrom of images. 26. Hans Belting (1935– ) is a German art historian and theorist, noted for his work on the image, the new media, and the relations between modernity and art. 27. Jacques Rancière (1940– ) is a French philosopher whose aesthetic theory, revolving around a notion of “art regimes” and the political dimensions of art, has become a point of reference in the visual arts. His aesthetic theory is summarized in Jacques Rancière, Le Partage du sensible: esthétique et politique (Paris: Fabrique: Diffusion Les Belles Lettres, 2000), published in English as The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London/ New York: Continuum, 2006); while his views on spectatorship are expressed in Jacques Rancière, Le Spectateur émancipé (Paris: Éditions La Fabrique, 2009), published in English as The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009). 28. Stendahl is the pen name for Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), who wrote an autobiographical work thinly disguised as La Vie de Henri Brulard (The Life of Henri Brulard), left unfinished as his death. 29. L’Ève future is a Symbolist science-fiction novel by Auguste Villiers de l’IsleAdam, published in 1886; Le Château des Carpathes is a gothic novel by Jules Verne, published in 1892. 30. Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, eds Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 878. The full text of the passage Bellour quotes reads: “Je suis pour – aucune illustration, tout ce qu’évoque un livre devant se passer dans l’esprit du lecteur: mais, si vous remplacez la photographie, que n’allezvous droit au cinématographe, dont le déroulement remplacera, images et texte, maint volume, avantageusement.”



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CHAPTER NINE

Spectators, Dispositifs, and the Cinematic Body

[Bellour explains why he returned to a preoccupation with cinema in general, and the spectator in particular, and how he came to write Le Corps du cinéma, emphasizing his interest in the diverse dispositifs represented by Foucault’s Panopticon on one hand, and by the phenomena of panoramas and phantasmagorias on the other. He describes how his discovery of Daniel Stern’s The Interpersonal World of the Infant marked a critical turning point, leading him to explore an analogy between the infant and a spectator watching a film in the cinema – an analogy that enabled him to break with the psychoanalytic model, reflected in his eventual substitution of the notion of the body for that of the text.] The four books that mark the different stages of your intellectual journey during the past three decades seem, on each occasion, to have taken a sort of malicious pleasure in foiling the dominant discourse of the period in which they have burst on to the scene: at the time when there was a desperate defense of a cinema-citadel, in Between-the-Images you dealt with what lay at its borders; when, toward the beginning of the century, the dominant critical discourse reversed itself to celebrate, instead, the joys of contamination and hybridization, Le Corps du cinéma and La Querelle des dispositifs put a stop to that elevation of this principle of mixture to insist on the uniqueness of a particular historical experience – what you call the “unique memory” of the spectator. Why did you move from having an open-minded position to one involving a defense of cinema? And what is the relationship between the first phase – the jaunt in the environs surrounding cinema – and the second – cinema “behind barricades”? I find it difficult to evaluate the relationship between a history that might be characterized as objective – that which has occurred during the past two decades with respect to the history of cinema and the development of contemporary art – and the manner in which my personal relation with these two domains came to be formed. A major reason for the shifts you mention

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derived from various changes that occurred in the works themselves, and by the rise of discourses proclaiming the possibility of a death of cinema that they provoked. These emerged during the celebration of the Centenary of Cinema in 1995 as a result of a decline in audience attendance, and of the imminent disappearance of film as a material medium. I am thinking, for example, of the very fine book by Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age, published in 2001, as symptomatic of this trend.1 This fear that cinema in the form one had known it would end corresponded with the advent of the digital, of access to DVDs, which allowed, as Dominique Païni was very quick to point out, a new use of cinema and, more generally, of all kinds of moving images in exhibition spaces, and, as a result, an ever greater extension of interfusion between cinema and contemporary art, or, more precisely, moving images in contemporary art. The development that led to Between-the-Images and La Querelle des dispositifs is also linked to the general movement that filled many artists with a desire to become filmmakers (and too often to believe that they were so). This impulse saw the advent of more and more artist-filmmakers, on account of the growing difficulties of independent production and also because they were moved by a desire to explore the new expressive possibilities offered by the gallery and the museum. You may be aware of a saying by Varda, who likes to describe herself as “an old filmmaker and a young visual artist.” As a result of this phenomenon, I wanted to continue to explore and identify the issues in the course of encountering installations, films, and exhibitions as I had done for the previous twenty years. That said, La Querelle is a book that serves a twofold purpose. It is both the third volume of Betweenthe-Images, given that most of the book, three-quarters in fact, consists of a compilation of previously published essays, as in the first two volumes, taking over the baton from the articles gathered in Between-the-Images 2, and it is also a continuation of Le Corps du cinéma, on account of the slightly polemical part with which the book opens. As far as Le Corps du cinéma itself is concerned, it simply attests to my love for, and curiosity about, cinema (I almost want to say “my primitive passion,” as Baudelaire said about images)2 – which was maintained for years by the seminar in which I sought to address various aspects, spurred on by the appeal of the critical atmosphere that the creation of Trafic generated. Given my passion for cinema, I ended up wanting, at least once, to say everything about it, or at least the essential things about it, from my own point of view, in a book that inevitably grew into a very big book as a result. Le Corps du cinéma does not just bring to a close the theoretical reflection in which you have engaged since The Analysis of Film and pursue one on hypnosis

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that was initiated in the book on Dumas, but it also inaugurates an archaeology of images, the same one that Foucault outlined, even though he did not pursue it himself – although Words and Things may talk about Velásquez’s Las Meninas, it focuses only on discursive forms. In returning to this pivotal moment at the end of the eighteenth century, in the first pages of Le Corps du cinéma, to describe the invention of a new kind of gaze at that time, you sketch out, as it were, this archeology of moving images in cinema. However, you do not do it as a historian of techniques, but as an epistemologist of the regimes of visibility and invisibility that inaugurated two optical-dispositifs that were emblematic of the French Revolution: on one hand, the guillotine, a machine of invisibility whose relationship with photography you emphasize, and, on the other hand, hypnosis – more precisely, the magnetism of Mesmer, a capricious character in whom one cannot fail to see a parent of Dumas’s Balsamo-Cagliostro.3 To what extent does the conjunction of these two optical-dispositifs, the invisibility of the guillotine and the omni-visibility of magnetism, strike you as constituting a new economy of the gaze? In what way does cinema inherit this double regime? To describe this first part of the book called “Perspectives rétrospectives” as an archaeology is to give it too much credit, considering its brevity and lack of original historical research. But it is true that the link that I am proposing between various dispositifs that converge at the end of the eighteenth century are inscribed in a history of the gaze, which means that cinema can be situated in Foucault’s archaeological perspective. To shed light on that, I will need to retrace the genesis of this book. Le Corps du cinéma had a complicated history. I had been implicitly working on it since the end of the 1980s, in the context of my master’s seminar, by reflecting on various issues each year that I thought cinema entailed, but without having any idea for a long time that these issues would end up being interconnected. I thus developed, in particular, courses on the three aspects or domains specified in the book’s subtitle: “Hypnoses, Emotions, Animalities.” The reason I dealt with the second of these terms first – historically, the first, in my view – was because I had actually been preoccupied with the issue of emotion for a long time without really identifying it as such, as a way of readdressing, of redynamizing the question of film analysis by identifying its components. If I were to retrace the origins of this interrogation, I would go back, for example, to my essay on “Le monde et la distance” that was published in the Dictionnaire du cinéma in 1966: in it, I made an inventory of various films with respect to the variable distance employed in the mise en scène between the shots in the film, the impact of images, speed, and multiple modalities that I later described as “emotions.” In The Analysis of Film, I treated the issue of emotions either parenthetically,

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or else veiled under other terms (for example, alternations and their interruptions, which are also mini-effects, or the succession of close-up shots in Hitchcock). Subsequently, after this attempt at systematization, emotions would re-emerge as a central topic for me across a number of different forms of analysis. In actual fact, I experienced all that as one and the same phenomenon, even though it took years for me to make it emerge from within a general theoretical configuration. It took time for me to realize that these three aspects could be grouped together in a single book. It required a course given at the Free University of Berlin in 2000–1 to make it click, owing to the fact that sometimes one is prepared to talk about things that one does not dare to write. And it was only from that moment that I felt obliged to devise this archeological overview that forms the first chapter of the book, framing it in a way that is both historical and theoretical. For this section, Foucault seemed to me to be a major point of reference because of having succeeded, in The Birth of the Clinic, in defining and dating a new position of the gaze, from which cinema one day would emerge.4 I therefore thought that it was necessary to link together two series of dispositifs that furthered this mutation of the gaze at the end of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, besides the Panopticon as illustrated by Foucault, dispositifs that were more explicitly dedicated to the viewing of images, such as the panorama and the phantasmagoria that I have already mentioned, as well as the guillotine, which sanctions the invisibility of death, and thus prefigures the development of what would become the photographic snapshot. On the other hand, hypnosis appeared in the guise of “animal magnetism,” a psychic dispositif that seems to extend the inner vision of the human subject infinitely. Thus, in a cavalier fashion, one can review the nineteenth century in terms of the way in which these two series of psychic and mechanical dispositifs developed. They became increasingly interlinked to the point where, at the end of the century, psychoanalysis and cinema appear to have been born together out of hypnosis, which, for Freud, led to an enlargement of the field of memory – an enlargement that cinema, in its own way, also achieved. And so, thanks to Foucault, I could partially be a historian, without actually being one, and pull hypnosis and cinema together into the idea of a general dispositif. What this means is that Le Corps du cinéma is not a book born from a clear decision, one that could have been written consecutively from the first to the last page. To the contrary, everything was conceived by stages, and the process of making the parts cohere was slow and difficult. I am thinking, in particular, of the section on animality, given that, for years, I had wondered whether this topic should be the subject of book in its own right, but had

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decided not to write it – simply because, before I could do so, I would need to wait until I could conceptualize the manner in which the animal as found in cinema could be understood simultaneously as a body of emotion and as a body of hypnosis. In many respects, Le Corps du cinéma is a deferred response to The Analysis of Film: the same interrogation of description and the same attempt to specify the logic systems that constitute cinema run through it, whereas hypnosis comes to occupy the place of psychoanalysis – as if you found it necessary to address once again the issues that had been set aside thirty years earlier. What differences do you perceive between the analytical methods deployed in these two books? In Between-the-Images, the choice of films was largely motivated by the many interchanges I saw operating between the photograph, cinema, and video, not to mention painting and the relations between words and images. For me, the return to cinema – never forgotten as such – occurred in the first instance through two articles already mentioned: the first on Tourneur’s film Night of the Demon,5 dealing with hypnosis, which constitutes the central motif in the film; the second on a film by Ritwik Ghatak, emphasizing emotional values. This second essay, published in Trafic in 1992, marked a particular turning point for me. I didn’t know Ghatak’s cinema at all, and I was thunderstruck when I saw The Cloud-Capped Star at the Rotterdam Festival. In order to pay respect to the film and the experience I had had, I felt I wanted to write an essay to accompany it (moreover, I gave it the title “Le film qu’on accompagne,” so as to underline moments, instants that seemed more gripping, more moving than others). Moreover, there was a link that I only noticed later between instances occurring in many other films that illustrated the effects produced by the irruption of photographs or the transformations induced by video, and the foregrounding of emotions that were provoked by the relationship between shots, the postures of actors, and the effects of placing and mise en scène. In writing the way I did on The Cloud-Capped Star, I was emerging out of the formal approach known as structural analysis as I had practiced it until then – an approach that was guided by a principle of totality that was applied to the film as a whole, and to each of its fragments. It was obviously no accident that this film escapes from the world of Hollywood, which more naturally lends itself to an analysis in terms of systems. Of course, this study still retains several remnants of such an approach, elicited simply in response to the presence of a certain narrative classicism – for example, all the passages devoted to the recurrent figure of a tree that appear from the first shot onward, saturating the film as a whole, with many different variations. But

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above all, I really wanted to highlight discontinuities of emotion in the film resulting from the effect of different shots, and the intensity of symbolic images – in short, to describe formally the elements that were responsible for the stunning effects. Then, through a happy coincidence, having been invited by Nicole Brenez and Emmanuelle Ferrari to an event aptly named “Émotions” at Aix-en-Provence in 1992, I directed a seminar on this film, and gave my first conference paper on emotion in cinema, drawing tentatively on the concepts of Daniel Stern, whose book The Interpersonal World of the Infant I had just discovered.6 Reading this excellent book about the development of the very small child, I immediately felt as if he were speaking to me personally, as well as to the cinema spectator. This unanticipated encounter was crucial in so far as I was able, thanks to the concepts Stern had developed, to envisage and construct a kind of general analogy between the infant and a spectator watching a film in the cinema, while avoiding an excessively simple equation between the two. The development of the section on “Emotions” in Le Corps du cinéma thus draws heavily on the developmental phases described by Stern, which allowed me to deal with both emotion as emotion and also film as film, using a form of analysis that is less systematic than my earlier attempts, but no less minutely detailed, being attached to an even greater extent to the materiality and detail of specific shots. Stern thus allowed me to achieve a smooth break with the psychoanalytic model, given that without contesting it as a whole, he relativized it, suggesting, as a preliminary, that this model has no real validity as far as the first eighteen months of the child are concerned – a period that, in his eyes, is crucial in the life of an infant. Drawing upon the central notion of vitality affects, he proposes a model that is both experimental and hypothetical, based on the workings of corporeality and affectivity, emphasizing the way in which these early acquisitions remain inscribed in each person during their ongoing human development, and underlining, in particular, their link with artistic creation. In “La chambre,” I mentioned Stern’s theory in a short passage on the child’s room as a prototype for the world of cinema.7 It should be mentioned that Stern was very important for Félix Guattari who devoted several crucial pages to him in his final book, Chaosmose.8 I still have in my house his richly annotated copy of the American edition, which he lent to me several months before his death. Obviously, that helped to reassure me about joining Stern’s concepts with everything that Deleuze had concluded concerning emotion, both in his books on cinema and in Le Pli.9 And so, the complementary relation I established between Stern and Deleuze forms the theoretical framework for Le Corps du cinéma.

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The separation between your two books is also one that suggests the difference between the notion of text and that of the body. What differences do these two notions entail in terms of analytical practice? To speak candidly, it is less crucial than one might think to speak in terms of “the body of a film” rather than a “filmic text.” It is also partly a question of changing fashions, of cultural and historical branding, even though it is obviously a way of moving away from any reference to the linguistic model, in favor of one that presupposes an embodied experience. You will observe how Barthes – despite adhering to his model – modified it constantly, to the point where it dissolves, by making use of the term “tissu” [fabric] as a way of passing through a kind of natural transition from the notion of text to that of body. I think it is important to stress once more that all the commentaries in The Analysis of Film pertain to American cinema, a cinema that is particularly organic, extremely consistent, meaning that analysis inevitably reflects its characteristics, to some degree. The symbolic blockage found in American cinema was not imported from outside, even though it was necessary to invent this term and elaborate its use; it was inherent in the narrative machinery and stylistic approach that produced it. As soon as I began to distance myself from it in order to pay attention to films coming from other horizons, I found myself confronted by configurations of images that did not lend themselves to the same theoretical frameworks. I had already emphasized the importance of all the film and video works considered as “entre-images” during this process. Accordingly, for the systematic development that had regulated my essays with a structural complexion, I was able to substitute, within a single film or by moving from film to film, a seemingly more flexible mode of analysis, even though in reality it was very deliberately designed, passing from moment to moment in order to isolate striking configurations that I saw as ideal images of pure affect. That is why there are fewer American films mentioned in Le Corps du cinéma, except in the section on animals. I feel that the only genuine specific tool remaining from my earlier period is the notion of rhyme, which refers to the recurrence of a particular element, and which can emerge both from a totalizing method as well as a more sporadic approach. But the reason why I eventually substituted the notion of the body for that of text, without even being particularly cautious about doing so, was because I wanted to reflect the world invoked by Stern, and in this way detail to a greater extent the way in which the body of a film and the body of the spectator mirror each other. I aimed to show that the body of cinema is developed as a continual double exposure of the two bodies, the former being unable

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to live except through the latter for the length of time that the experience of the film lasts. It is this conviction that led me to defend the absolutely unique nature of the projected film, which alone is capable, in my view, of truly guaranteeing the existence of this experience of the body, a temporal body, a body of memory and forgetfulness that is seized by the body of the film. We would like to return to the concept of the “pensive spectator,” derived partly from Barthes, but also contrived against him, or at least behind his back and against his aims. The first time that I had recourse to this notion of the “pensive spectator,” which in fact comes from La Chambre claire,10 was in an article on cinema and photography with this title that we have already discussed.11 To enrich the view of cinema by adopting a position that was complementary, I sought to modify what Barthes had said about the relation between photography and cinema. To summarize it briefly, Barthes’s argument is that, when watching a film, I am presented with an uninterrupted scrolling of images, whereas I can stop at a photograph, take it in my hand, look at it, and take the time to think about it. Cinema, to the contrary, does not allow me time to think – that is the reason, Barthes explains, why he “resists” cinema. For my part, I hypothesized that during the scrolling of cinema, the physical presence of a photograph, of whatever sort, does not create the illusion of a real immobilization of a film, because it does not really involve an arrested image, but at the least a psychic gap, a splitting of the perception of the spectator – with the result that a shot inhabited by a photograph implies a distancing of the spectator. He is no longer a spectator carried along solely by the movement of images, but a spectator who is at the same time seized by a perception of the photographic image buried in the film, the sight of which thus appears partially suspended, meaning that the spectator approaches the position that Barthes designates as that of a “pensive spectator.” Among several other examples, I took the scene from Letter from an Unknown Woman in which Louis Jourdan, a pianist and a dandy, the casual lover of a woman he encountered years later without recognizing her, receives a long letter from this woman, accompanied by three photographs of the child they conceived, of whose existence he had been ignorant. While he is reading this letter at night, seated at his table, three photographs of the child, his son, appear one by one before him, which he goes to scrutinize with the aid of a magnifying glass. He is in such a state of stupor and shock that at this moment he himself embodies the figure of a pensive spectator, and the reallife spectator in the theater is simultaneously seized by the same mechanism. Another example struck me in The Shadow of a Doubt by Hitchcock, at the

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moment in which the sister of Joseph Cotton, the psychopathic murderer, comes to warn him that photographers are waiting to interview him. When he replies that he has never been photographed in his life, she immediately tells him that there does indeed exist a negative of him, taken just before his accident – the implicit thesis being that this trauma is probably the origin of the mental problems of this character – and she brings him the famous photograph: the delightful portrait of a little child that we are shown framed in a close-up shot. The most interesting thing is that at that very moment the face of Joseph Cotton is arrested, while the camera performs a turning movement around this amazed face, as if the effect of the photograph had already propagated itself in his body, provoking his immobilization. On the basis of this type of mechanism, I think it is possible to argue that the cinema spectator, although obviously always carried by the movement of the images of a film, is arrested at the same time, like these characters, by the sight of a photograph, and drawn through that into a regime of thoughtfulness. I returned to these questions a bit later, while working on various types of arrested images, seeking at that time to extend this phenomenon of thoughtfulness to all the phenomena of suspension, of interruption that one finds in cinema.12 Then, once more, working on all the kinds of emotions that I sought to distinguish in Le Corps du cinéma, I got a sense that it was possible to extend this notion of the “pensive spectator” to all the entirely virtual and imponderable moments during which a spectator, while a film is running its course, thinks about what he is in the process of seeing, under the influence of the shock to which he is subjected, to a greater or lesser extent. Because one never stops thinking during a cinematic projection – one thinks of all kinds of things: about one’s own life, about other films by the same filmmaker, about other shots in other films of which we are reminded by the quality of an image, etc. In this way, provided that the film invites it, specific effects of interruption and reflexivity are constantly produced. Besides, in Le Corps du cinéma, one of the reasons I chose to privilege the term “emotion” over that of “sensation” or “affect” was because it seemed, to me, to convey a certain degree of awareness, as if the experience of emotion were always simultaneously an awareness of emotion. Notes  1. Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age (London: BFI, 2001).  2. Bellour is alluding to a statement by Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), the French symbolist poet, in which he declared his intention to “Glorify the cult of images

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(my great, my only, my primitive passion)” (“Glorifier le culte des images [ma grande, mon unique, ma primitive passion]”). See “Journaux intimes,” in Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard, 1975–6), 701.  3. Joseph Balsamo, also known as Cagliostro, is a character who appears in Joseph Balsamo (1846), Le Collier de la reine (1849), and La Comtessse de Charny (1853), in which Alexandre Dumas, the French historical novelist best known for The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1844–5), portrays him as an alchemist, conspirator, and Freemason who contributed to the downfall of the French monarchy.  4. Michel Foucault, Naissance de la clinique; un archéologie du regard médical (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1963). Published in English as The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973).  5. Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur, 1957).  6. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985).  7. Bellour is referring to his article “La chambre,” Trafic 9 (winter 1994): 45–75.  8. Félix Guattari, Chaosmose (Paris: Galilée, 1992). Published in English as Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).  9. Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1988). 10. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). Published in English as Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1881). 11. Bellour is referring to his article “Le spectateur pensif,” Photogénies 5 (April 1984): [12]–[15], published on the occasion of the exhibition “Cinéma et photographie” at the Centre national de la photographie conceived in collaboration with Sylvain Roumette and Catherine Sentis. The article was also published in English as “The Pensive Spectator,” Wide Angle 3:4 (1984): 6–10. 12. In “L’interruption, l’instant,” reprinted in L’Entre-Images.

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CHAPTER TEN

Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality

[In this section, Bellour explains why he thinks hypnosis is superior as a model for explaining the effects of cinema, on the grounds that it involves a somatic displacement that comes from outside the spectator. At the same time, he explains his objections to cognitivist film theory. Finally, Bellour recounts how his interest in animals, which began in the 1970s, derived from his perception of the way in which animal figures were being used in American cinema in films like Howard Hawks’s Bringing up Baby and Monkey Business and Hitchcock’s The Birds, which in turn led him to consider the issue of animality itself.] A number of these questions – on the affective power of the image, the hypnotic state and the reflexivity that it maintains, and the play of suspension that it ­introduces – had been formulated in other terms by the filmmakers and theoreticians of the 1920s, in particular Epstein and Eisenstein. You only allude briefly to the latter. I have to admit that I rather neglected Eisenstein,1 largely because others had accomplished remarkable work on both his films and his theoretical ­writings – Jacques Aumont, for example. Generally, I tend to avoid repeating what others have already said, and said well. In Le Corps du cinéma, I was content to include a small note on Eisenstein’s relation to Disney, which I find fascinating, on the issue of the effects that can be produced in conjunction, moreover, with animality,2 but I am very aware that this mention falls well short of all that could be said concerning Eisenstein’s thoughts on these matters. On the other hand, Epstein3 is very much present in my book, since he is one of the very rare authors to emphasize the overlap between emotion and hypnosis, in a way that is often dizzying. I read Epstein very early on, always with enthusiasm, in the beautiful edition of his writings in two volumes edited by Pierre Lherminier in 1974.4 I was also interested in the fact that Michaux had read his writings on alcohol and had cited him in one

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of his early works in 1922. In the context of this body of ideas, one should also mention a third name, that of Artaud,5 who also contributed, on another level, the idea of a psychic energy pertaining to the experience of cinema – but Deleuze has dealt with that magnificently. Roustang strongly asserted this idea [of a psychic energy peculiar to the experience of cinema] by postulating that hypnosis makes us lose contact with our immediate environment in order to make us plunge, instead, more directly into the sphere of the body, in its own thickness. And you take up this bodily recentering to show that film projection, as a hypnotic experience, does not simply involve a psychic operation, since it engages the whole body. What should we think, then, about psychoanalytic readings of cinema, all those developments that invoke analogies with the dream and the mirror, and which accord a unique place to the psyche? If I think the dispositif of hypnosis is superior as a model, especially to that of a dream, for grasping the experience of cinema, it is because it shares with the latter a determining cause that comes from outside the subject. Likewise, I have a feeling that the somatic displacement induced by the former is found in the latter. In Le Corps du cinéma, I relied a lot on an analysis of the first Mabuse by Fritz Lang, released in 1922,6 one year after Freud published Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,7 the only one of his works to include a significant elaboration on hypnosis. This film – in two parts, Mabuse the Gambler, and Inferno – is preoccupied with hypnosis from one part to the next. The scene in Inferno with a double suggestion, individual and collective, which induces a hallucination leading back to the dispositif of cinema from the scene in the theater, allows one to demonstrate that this construction of a hypnotic body is identical to that of a cinema body. In particular, the commentary based on this film helped me to equate emotion and hypnosis, and thus suggest that the mass of emotions experienced during a screening induce a state comparable to that of hypnotic suggestion. A correlative for this process is suggested by three primordial figures of composition that traverse the film (the square or rectangle, taking the place of the screen, the circle, taking the place of the eye and of the camera lens, the triangle and the beam taking the place of the beam of light of the projection) – figures that support, through many iterations, the general equivalence of the cinematic dispositif to that of the situation involved in hypnosis. More generally, at the level of a comparative phenomenology of the two experiences, I was greatly inspired by an American study that was noteworthy and very innovative in its time, “The Process of Hypnotism and the Nature of the Hypnotic State.”8 Its two authors, Lawrence Kubie and



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Sydney Margolin, maintain that it is necessary to distinguish two phases in the hypnotic process, the process of induction that leads the subject toward sleep as a result of a generalized regression, and the hypnotic state proper, in which, contrary to what happens during the first phase, a manifest relation is established between the subject and his or her hypnotist, and with the external world – as if, once asleep, the subject regains a full capacity for coherency. The situation with cinema thus seemed, to me, like a permanent superimposition of these two states, since the spectator is always led by the marriage of the film and the dispositif toward a state that is close to sleep, while being kept awake by the film itself, which has intercepted the sleep. One can see this double process at work particularly clearly in L’Année dernière à Marienbad, owing to a relationship that is established between the long prologue composed of interminable tracking shots of the ceilings and features of the château, accompanied by the voiceover of an actor reciting a text in a continuous loop, very similar to the formulas used by hypnotists to induce hypnosis, and the moment when his words are taken up by actors on a theater stage, precipitating us into the action and the reality of the film proper. But the primacy I accord to hypnosis, however, does not entail an exclusion of psychoanalytic models of the dream and the mirror such as Metz, Baudry, Kuntzel, and others have construed them. On this issue, I agree with the position of Stern, who explains that his own construction in no way refutes constructions developed by psychoanalysis, and that he is merely proposing a model that he thinks is more fundamental because it is, chronologically and logically, anterior. Similarly, I do not think that classical analysis, which sees the mirror as the equivalent of the cinematic dispositif, contradicts my own view; instead, it is included within a broader perspective that hypnosis allows one to entertain. That is the issue that the chapter “Métapsychologie du cinéma” in my book addresses. Mademoiselle Guillotine had already used the notion of hypnosis to replace a concept of psychoanalysis that was excessively broad, taking it back to its historical origins by inscribing it in a broader archaeology. You were able to do this because taking Dumas as your subject enabled you to situate your own view at the level of the Ursprung [beginning] of this evolution. The phenomenon is less obvious when one comes to cinema. How do you justify loading the one on to the other, and, above all, what paradigmatic modification does this displacement of psychoanalysis in favor of hypnosis entail? Above all, the book on Dumas, as we have seen, allowed me to attempt to relativize psychoanalysis historically, showing how it was developed in accordance with certain conditions pertaining to the nineteenth century (it

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concerns an intensified narcissism), and that, as a result, it could be seen as a response to contemporary developments rather than authorizing an overwhelming retrospective teleology. When I went back to the issue of hypnosis in Le Corps du cinéma, my aim, among other things, was to emphasize that at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries hypnosis seemed to emerge at the same time as psychoanalysis and cinema, being announced by a whole genealogy of machines which, in my eyes, extend back to the guillotine. After that, there occurred a relatively short-lived effacement of hypnosis when it seemed to be subsumed within psychoanalysis, before it returned in a blaze of glory in the last part of the twentieth century – as if, in the course of this relative effacement (which was much more noticeable in Europe than in the United States or Russia), cinema came to occupy its function as a magical spectacle – hence the inherent relationship it has with psychoanalysis, as a result of their common origin. It was this relationship that I tried to shift by placing hypnosis in the foreground so as to lessen the hold of psychoanalysis on cinema, and to emphasize an analogy between the hypnotic dispositif and the cinematic dispositif as constituting the spectator’s experience. This analogy, I repeat, derives from the fact that these two dispositifs involve a force of suggestion that comes from the outside the spectator, whereas the production of a dream is completely endogenous, without any exteriority. The theoretical equivalences postulated between cinema and a dream are thus based solely on an analogy in terms of psychic processes which, as important as such an analogy may be, cannot stitch together this cleavage between outside and inside that the hypnotic situation, by its very nature, reconfigures from the outset on a broader basis (also not forgetting that one can induce the equivalent of a dream under the influence of hypnosis; obviously, a film can be seen as one manifestation of this kind of phenomenon). The subtitle of the book refers to hypnosis in the plural [“hypnoses”], invoking the idea that it does not exist in one form alone, but accommodates different degrees and states that are functions of the quality of the emotions distributed through a film. How does one find a basis for making these distinctions? Through aesthetic regimes, or historical ones, rather like Deleuze arranges different types of affects in series in the course of his two books on cinema? There are obviously a variety of factors involved. First, there is the fundamental variable between spectators: no spectator is the same as another, and thus none is hypnotized in quite the same way (individual variations in terms of suggestibility are constantly emphasized in writings on hypnosis). Then comes the differences between films: an American film that is organic, clas-



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sical, does not hypnotize its spectator in the same way as a modern, critical film, or in the way contemporary blockbusters exploit the possibilities for immersion to an extreme degree. Experimental films present yet another case that is different again, given that they appeal more intensely to perception and access the sensorimotor system more directly. By putting hypnosis in the plural in the subtitle of the book, I wanted to imply all these differences. I also wanted to do justice to different theories of hypnosis, including that of Freud, for example, who rationalizes it to an extreme degree, defining the hypnotist as an ego ideal.9 I found this view very valuable when I was developing the idea that, for the spectator, the ego ideal becomes identified with the dispositif of cinema itself. This is what allows one to link this ego ideal to the corresponding ego ideal of the Lacanian mirror stage in the context of the cinematic situation – the hypothesis that Baudry and Metz developed in turn.10 But Roustang did not share this view of hypnosis as involving the ideal and the identifications that it implies.11 To the contrary, Roustang sought to undermine all the main metapsychological functions posited by psychoanalysis in order to turn hypnosis into an experience of dispossession for the subject, one that was much more directly somatic. Using the word “hypnosis” in the plural is thus aimed at the differences between spectators on the one hand, and the differences between theorists of hypnosis on the other. It is also meant to suggest the evolution of hypnosis itself in the course of what has already been a very long history, since it is more than two centuries old. It is very difficult to assess the links between the evolution of theories about hypnosis and those of cinematic representation. One cannot fail to be fascinated by the concomitance of the first Mabuse film and Freud’s book, which describes at length the makeup of the leader of a crowd in terms that very powerfully evoke Lang’s hero. Nearly eighty years later, when Benoît Jacquot made Seventh Heaven,12 it is divided between a classically Lacanian problematic and a real fascination for hypnosis, reflected by his inclusion in the film of both a failing psychoanalyst and a hypnotist who is presented as successful in his practice because he cures the heroine of her frigidity. Jacquot thus dramatizes a conflict between the two approaches (even making an explicit reference to Roustang – we see the heroine in the process of reading Qu’est-ce que l’hypnose?).13 It is interesting that when he later made Deep in the Woods, reviving a model that one could describe as “full” of hypnosis, a hypnosis that was literally ravaging,14 he needed to achieve this by setting his story in the nineteenth century, based on a historical case – in other words, at the time when hypnosis was at its height. To complicate things still further, and to show the extent to which one can interconnect the two historical trajectories, one can point to the hero

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of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse,15 a character who has devoted himself to the study of Mesmer, and who is in the grips of a very violent crisis that leads him to commit murder. In this film, a relationship is established between contemporary Japan and the historical origins of hypnosis by means of a psychic fantasy. This relationship underlines the fact that although links can be formed between the evolution of theories of hypnosis and its different figurations, these links cannot be in the form of a single strict parallelism, but rather one that is marked by a back-and-forth movement over time. The reason for these oscillations can be found in Léon Chertok’s very comprehensive, and hence inevitably paradoxical, definition of hypnosis, which is worth recalling: It is a fourth state of the organism, not able to be objectified in reality (in contrast to the other three: wakefulness, sleep, and dream): a kind of natural potentiality, of an inward dispositif with its roots in animal hypnosis, characterized by traits that seem to relate to pre-linguistic relations of attachment in the infant, being produced in situations in which the individual is perturbed in his relations with the environment.16

This relative indefiniteness explains why hypnosis can be both the object of a radical rejection and of legitimate doubts for many people, and one of fascination for many others. And it seems that a comparable kind of indefiniteness may help to clarify and explain the deep attraction that cinema once exerted, and continues to exert. The second part of Le Corps du cinéma elaborates your hypothesis that cinema, because it depends upon a dispositif involving projection, produces a condition that is necessary but not sufficient for the achievement of a state of hypnosis; it is important that the film being projected is charged with emotions so that they grip the body of the spectator. How, following on from that, is one to understand the concept of emotion in cinema? How do these emotions distinguish themselves from other emotions and aesthetic impacts? Are they inherent in all types of films, or do they just constitute the privileged avant-garde of a certain type of film, or of a given period in the history of cinema? First, it is necessary to explain that the analogy between cinema and hypnosis can be extended to all the other arts, in the sense that the effect aroused by any particular work of art does indeed seem to arise, to varying degrees, from a form of hypnotic fascination. Cinema simply sustains it in a more developed way, to the extent that the psycho-physiological conditions induced by its dispositif promote a fuller capturing of the spectator. This state of capture always runs the risk of being more fleeting, as in the case of reading, for



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example, or of the gaze we direct at a painting; in neither case is the spectator automatically “seized” by these arts in the same fashion. The case of music in a concert situation, which also relates to a prescribed length of time, seems to be closer to cinema in this regard. Music is also used during rituals in many societies, as one can see from the fine book by Gilbert Rouget, La Musique et la Transe;17 one can also recall another extreme case, the example cited by Barthes of Farinelli the castrato lulling to sleep “the morbid melancholy of Philip V of Spain, by singing the same romance every evening for 14 years.”18 The variation between periods of cinema, like that between cinematic styles, is obviously of a kind that arouses very different experiences, but in spite of everything, they strike me as unified by a shared capacity to capture the recipient – so long as this experience does not occur in cultural situations in which the effects of distraction and of interactivity end up by dissipating it, as Daney loved to insist19 – especially given that certain common forms are found in genres or styles that one rightly identifies as being at the antipodes of each other. Hence, the alternation of images that can innervate both the sequence with the plane in North by Northwest and Griffith’s The Lonedale Operator, and also a film by Kubelka or one by Ernie Gehr, such as Serene Velocity.20 Put simply, in one case it is intrinsic to a narrative perspective, whereas in the other it merely governs the processes of image-scrolling. But in both cases, a force is put in place, as a result of this repetition of figurations and intensities, which is capable of inducing hypnosis through a focalization of the gaze. That is why the notion of rhyme continues to be important for me, as it was in my analyses of classical films. Kubie and Margolin, in their classic article, propose two formulas as a condition of hypnotic suggestion: either a stimulus invested with a constant intensity, or a stimulus that is discontinuous but recurrent.21 The text or the body of a film, as soon as it is subjected to a satisfactory formal elaboration, however varied this might be, always seems to arise from such a logic to a greater or lesser degree. But it is obvious that when one is dealing with an experimental film, one is mainly dependent on intensities of light, colors, speed, designed to induce effects that are more directly physiological. In a narrative film, however, even if it is impossible to avoid questions of rhythm, light, variations of distance – in short, everything that bears on the composition of the image and of the shots – one cannot detach them from narrative identifications that are put in place, projecting the spectator in accordance with a variety of possible relationships with the characters. That is why the issue of emotion, even its existence, is inseparable from the diversity of films. This is what is responsible for the range of cases discussed in Le Corps du cinéma, and it is also the rationale for the chapter specifically devoted to experimental cinema. The variety of cinematic emotions is unlimited. When Godard, in

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his Histoire(s) du cinéma, engages with one of the shots he finds iconic, the woman running on the beach in Barnet’s Au bord de la mer bleue,22 there is a moment of emotion that he feels very intensely and transmits to his spectator. The Histoire(s) are constructed in such a way as to constantly provoke the possibility of emotions. The fragments of films call each other into existence according to a discontinuous but persistent system of shocks. Through his Histoire(s), Godard is attempting to recapture all the emotions experienced during his life as a spectator, as much as he is seeking to develop a general theory of historical, social, and political correspondences between the trajectory of cinema and the trajectory of the century itself. The very way in which shots are constructed, organized, related to each other according to constant collisions of images, words, music, and sounds, reproduces and condenses the emotional shocks dispersed in a discontinuous fashion within the films from which they derive. Does narrative identification enter into the process of induction? Obviously. The reason I insisted to such an extent on Stern’s vitality affects, in order to oppose them to the traditional categorical emotions, was to redefine cinematic emotions in relation to the content of emotions, and to show that it is the physical materiality of all the formal components of a film that constitutes the autonomy of the hypnotic process and the quality of the emotions experienced in the course of it. But it is obvious that narrative identification in the usual sense of the term continues to function fully. That is one of the reasons why I greatly appreciate the theory of identification offered by Edgar Morin in Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire,23 when he maintains that, in a film, we identify with everything, in accordance with a kind of polymorphism baptized with the marvelously barbarous name of “anthropocosmomorphism.” Let me finish by saying that one identifies to a greater or lesser extent with everything with which one identifies, in the sense that the richness and capacity of the production of emotion in certain films compared to others is related quite simply to the richness and material diversity of the operations put in play at different levels of construction of the image and the elaboration of the story. Let us return to the cognitivists; the least one can say about them is that you do not share their positions. You criticize them for a kind of obsession with science that goes against the perspective you assert in Le Corps du cinéma, which is not to treat thought about cinema as a science, given that the latter is motivated by a desire for empirical knowledge. Could you explain and expand upon this conviction? What kind of knowledge concerning cinema is it possible to attain, in your view?



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As soon as I began to address the issue of cinematic “emotion,” I paid attention to the work of “true” scientists, Daniel Stern especially, of whom we have already spoken at length, and, to a lesser extent, Antonio Damasio, both of whom have worked on different aspects of the psychic mechanisms involved in cognitive and perceptual learning. During the same period – the 1980s – a whole “literature,” as the Anglo-Americans say, appeared, supported by psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and certain film theorists who had been converted to the idea that the neurosciences were applicable to various fields of knowledge, cinema in particular. (To me, this phenomenon seemed like a modern and much more intolerant version of what French filmology in the 1950s had attempted using the human sciences.) Consequently, a certain number of authors, from Noël Carroll to Torben Grodal, explicitly claimed that it was possible for a cognitive perspective to shed light on cinema emotions in a way that had never been done before.24 I therefore had to deal with these works, which, I have to confess, are not presented in a very engaging way because they rely unrelievedly on a rather complex conceptual arsenal. In the process, I confronted two pitfalls: on the one hand, the definition of emotions as a rule is very traditional, coinciding for the most part with the big categorical affects classically listed since Darwin, such as pity, fear, disgust, shame, sadness, etc. On the other hand, apart from invoking these categories, the cognitivists violently oppose, and are sometimes hostile toward, everything that psychoanalysis produces with regard to a psychology or metapsychology of the spectator. As a result, a notion such as that of identification is challenged, being replaced by a kind of “programming” of the spectator in response to the succession of narrative developments within which this logic of emotions is inscribed. I will not enter into the details I encountered during this reading, which I found prodigiously boring, and which, to conclude, says very little about the films themselves, with very few exceptions. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of examples chosen are American blockbusters, the success of which these authors attempt to explain – in other words, to understand why these films succeed in exciting such large numbers of spectators. In reading them, one gets the feeling that these “scientific” works are almost designed to serve as manuals addressed to Hollywood producers, so that their films might convey emotions capable of arousing the enthusiasm of the greatest number of spectators. The technical nature of these books, were one to go into their detail, would undoubtedly require a more conscientious approach than the one I am adopting here; but, to put it succinctly, I was confronted by a very drab sort of writing that I tried to understand, but from which I gained almost nothing. For example, I read a study of a film by Bruce Baillie written by a “specialist” on experimental cinema, James Peterson, which showed itself incapable of dealing with the very things that constitute

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the specificity of cinema – namely, variations of speed, of light, and of color. Indeed, everything that relates to the material affectivity of the image is ignored in this study; instead, it invokes an obscure “beauty” of the image, in terms that suddenly become idealist ones.25 Additionally, it became apparent to me as a result of attending various meetings that the perspective of these cognitivists entailed a form of autarky, not to say a certain scientific autism, meaning that it would not tolerate any kind of critical questioning. All things considered, even though it is obviously challenging to do so, it is easier to have a dialogue with real scientists than with “converts” to the neurosciences and cognitivism. But given that the neurosciences are starting to pay increasing attention to the cinema spectator, what approach would you present today as an alternative to that of contemporary cognitivists? As an alternative, I think that one can only offer a form of knowledge that is intrinsically relativized. If I were to accept the view of Barthes – who believed in “the impossible Science of the unique being,” and formulated the paradoxical proposition of “a science by purpose” in La Chambre claire – and were then to follow it to its logical conclusion, I would say that the universalism involved in classifying objects according to categories that are external to them leads nowhere. Deleuze and Guattari, in What Is Philosophy?,26 have traced, at a very general level, dividing lines between science, art, and philosophy, emphasizing possible passages from one to the other, but always relative. From a more pragmatic viewpoint, as far as film analysis and thinking about cinema is concerned, I believe that everything that produces work worthy of the name arises from a form of inductive intelligence operating on objects that one has chosen to investigate. From there, this inductive process can be extended to other objects until a point is reached at which broader suppositions can be configured. But, there will never be any true knowledge that avoids singularity, whether this be knowledge of a shot, an author, a genre, a period of cinema, this or that instance of figuration, history, or style, remembering always that everything that is gained from extension is lost in comprehension. All kinds of configurations of knowledge are possible, provided one keeps in mind the fact that this knowledge will never have the validity of a strictly scientific model involving proof. Hence my insistence in characterizing my approach to films, drawing on the view of Daniel Stern, as the construction of an analogy rather than as the application of a model. We come now to the last part of Le Corps, which is a vast bestiary in which, like a modest Cuvier of the cinema,27 you provide a catalog of cinematic species,



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distributed in a fine geography showing the distribution of animals, distinguishing those in Europe from those in the United States – adopting a position that you guard against the unlikely probability of devising a zoological history of cinema. Of what is this geographical partition of animals in cinema a symptom? What is its contribution to an understanding of figures used in hypnosis – and also its relevance to the possibility of creating a typology of the latter and of the regimes of emotion that they engage? There is no book of any sort on animals in cinema, with the possible exception of the small, modest book by Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film, which, significantly, was not written by a specialist on cinema, but by a specialist on animals.28 Burt is English, and was initially interested in the mistreatment of animals during film-shoots – the protection of animals in Great Britain is the object of a veritable arsenal of laws. He has progressively expanded the field of his interests to include the representation of animals in cinema, so that currently, as far as I am aware, his book is the only “generalist” study of animals in cinema (obviously, I am excluding the many articles, special journal issues, and edited volumes that attest both to the importance of the subject and the difficulty of grasping it). Although Burt discusses a number of significant films, his book indeed offers proof that it is almost impossible to devise a systematic history of animals in cinema, given that the presence of animals, of all species, has been integral to its development. This presence is apparent from the earliest days of cinema, both in Lumière’s Le Déjeuner du chat,29 and Edison’s famous film, Electrocuting an Elephant,30 and occurs in all the cinemas across the world. Why have I been particularly interested in two main areas – American cinema, and European cinema (more precisely French and Italian, with the exception of Werner Herzog’s GermanAmerican Grizzly Man)31 – without ever pretending to compile a history? I did so being very fully aware that I was foregoing the extraordinary presence of animality in other cinemas, for example, Japanese cinema, as in the work of Imamura, one of the great filmmakers using animals. But including them would have made my book even more sprawling than it already is, and would have also entailed the problem of interpreting an alien culture, for which I felt insufficiently prepared. The issue of animals gradually emerged, for me, toward the end of the 1970s, from the time I sought to extend the analysis of processes of symbolic blockage, of articulation between the logic of narratives and of the organization of shots, to a broader body of films than those addressed in The Analysis of Film. I was particularly interested at that time in two films by Howard Hawks, Bringing up Baby and Monkey Business,32 without having the slightest awareness that my keen interest in these films was associated with the animal

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figures that they were presenting so prominently. Instead, I was preoccupied with the coincidence between the similar endings of Bringing up Baby and North by Northwest, and the effect achieved through repetition that I have already talked about. It took me a while before I realized that the first big analysis that I pursued had been on The Birds,33 and that with the same methodological tools one could attempt to sketch a kind of panorama of animal figures in American cinema (I also remember having edited a book on the western). Thus, I presented my first paper on this theme in 1981, at the University of Santa Barbara in California, titled “L’animal comme symbole.” To do this involved departing from figures participating in the logic of symbolic blockage, in the psychoanalytic and stylistic sense of the term. But, over time, I began to extend what had progressively become my “animal corpus” by identifying parallels, continuities, and variations between all sorts of films, and by becoming aware that this issue of animality was actually interesting me in its own right. The first thing to do was to present a range of animal figures drawn from the immense continent of American cinema as best I could, by making choices concerning what was significant, in so far as they struck me as being different from those one would find in European cinema, French cinema in particular. It seemed to me, with regard to the animal body I was imputing to the spectator (by linking animal figures to the interconnected issues of hypnosis and emotions), that a crucial divide could be established between two cultural logics. Because of the historical origins of America as a nation, and then the circumstances that gave rise to Hollywood production, animals that appear in American cinema need to be understood from an anthropological perspective: they embody a particular relationship to nature, in the two combined forms of pastoralism and the wilderness, which are deeply inscribed in American identity. (Two works were especially valuable to me in this regard: the excellent essay by Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, and the book by Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind).34 And so I selected a certain number of works from the immense corpus of Hollywood that I thought exploited a fundamental tension that was animating them: an opposition between the animal as a symbol and the animal as an intensity, the former pertaining to the psychoanalytic logic of the signifier, and the latter to figurative and figural values of movement. Obviously, it was necessary to limit the corpus to several dozen films: if I remember rightly, there are something like 300 dogs – I am speaking of main characters, of real heroes – in the index of the American Film Institute between 1930 and 1940, only one of which I retained, George, in Bringing up Baby by Howard Hawks. Similarly, from the silent period, I only mentioned one of the Rin Tin Tin films, Clash of the Wolves,35 which



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I thought was representative of the whole period. This relationship of conaturalness between man and animals, like everything else, was shattered, distended, diverted, and displaced in modern American cinema – the famous cinema of the 1970s and beyond – in which it persists, remaining imprinted with energy and marked to a greater or lesser extent by symbolism, in the films of Cimino, Coppola, and Cassavetes in his admirable Love Streams.36 In European cinema, particularly French and Italian, it seems to me that things function rather differently – not that animals in them are not occasionally invested with this tension deriving from the symbolic and the figural, but this cinema more directly incorporates philosophical machinery that relates to the cinematic dispositif itself, along with a general interrogation of human nature (one only needs to think of what Bazin wrote on animals). The way animals are characterized in cinema thus attests to an exteriority in relation to the human, the nature of which it helps in no small measure to define, as one sees in the philosophical tradition: from Elisabeth de Fontenay to Derrida, from Heidegger to Agamben, and to Deleuze and Guattari. Animals in cinema are placed in a matrix that contemplates two ontologies at the same time, that of images in movement, and that of the human. Two films quickly come to mind, Rossellini’s La Machine à tuer les mechants, and De Sica’s Umberto D.37 The former is about photography and its power to fix forever in death those whose image is photographed anew: it is a donkey, a symbol of innocence, that first authenticates this sinister power of photography, in an exemplary way, since the death of this animate demonstrates its efficacy. The latter film presents us with an extraordinary dog that does not consent to the suicide into which its master wants to lead it – a metaphysical animal that is opposed to death and leads the man to reason. But the philosophical animal par excellence is obviously Bresson’s donkey, Balthazar, who is described as “holy”: his Christic odyssey shows the extent of the range of human creatures for whom, in turn, he is an object of devotion and of derision, until his martyrdom.38 The genealogy of these philosophical animals is extended today in the work of Leos Carax, for example, in Holy Motors, and of Godard in Adieu au langage, two films in which the presence of animals allows a discourse on the implications for cinema of the fact that it confronts an accelerated mutation of its technical dispositifs.39 With Godard, especially, the animal embodies an awareness of “Das Offene” [The Open] (you will remember that he cites the famous poem by Rilke)40 – it belongs to the perpetual pure present with which no human being can ever coincide, but for which cinema can aspire to be an image equivalent. You present La Querelle as the third volume of Between-the-Images, but it would not have been possible without the tools developed in Le Corps. We now

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have three interwoven concepts that we don’t know precisely how to unknot: body, dispositif, between-images, which you say can be grouped together without any overlap. How can one tie them together? While we understand the specification in terms of a dispositif, and the destabilization inherent in between-images, the role of the body here is disorienting: we have an impression that it is supposed to tie and untie at the same time, to make a bridge while determining the specifics of each art. The body only ever follows the particular dispositif in which it is involved. This means, for each individual, that there is a multiplicity of possible bodies, determined by the variety of experiences to which it is subjected. Here is a small example: several years ago, I was at the Biennale in Lyons, at the time when, for better and often for worse, a goodly number of works had been enthusiastically made promoting the idea of a political community. I was rather bored – until the moment when, passing through a door, I found myself confronted by a stunning image: five colored dish towels hanging on lines arranged in racks – their aligned shadows being projected flat on a wall, owing to the magic of a white-light projector. This installation by Eulalia Valldosera, titled La Cocina, attests purely to the experience of projection by reducing it to its most rudimentary expression.41 It also showed how a banal sight in ordinary life can be transformed into a work of art, in a minimal but keen sense of the term, simply through the effect wrought by a particular dispositif.42 The work as a whole operated through an instantaneous sensation, an immediate fascination that did not require any specific length of time to seize the body, whereas it is time, concentrated time, that the majority of works involving moving images cruelly lack in such exhibition spaces that are all too easily susceptible to strolling and distraction, with the body walking through them in a mostly casual manner. That is why certain artists, such as Bill Viola and James Coleman, for whom duration, almost in the Bergsonian sense of the term, remains something that it is essential to preserve, contrive their dispositifs in a way that fights against the space in order to produce a kind of above-time, by maximizing the conditions of isolation of the work, and by asking visitors who are willing to accept a contract to transform themselves into above-spectators who invent for themselves a body that is appropriate for, and capable of, sustaining the experience these artists want their works to invite. Installations have the advantage of being able to invent a unique model for each occasion, and to involve an appropriate body on demand in response to this model. Take, for instance, Agnès Varda’s Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (the work shown in a gallery, not the televisual object that she extracted from it to make it available to a larger number of people).43 There were fourteen seats



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arranging each of the headphones opposite a wall-screen containing the same number of video monitors, with each of these monitors devoted to a woman who is recounting her experience, and all of them surrounding a large central image showing widows revolving around an immense table on a beach. The most extraordinary thing was to see what was being produced socially in this space: people, exchanging headphones among themselves, thus risking a great disorder of cables, were passing from seat to seat and started to talk amongst themselves. Varda had thus created a distinctive community of participants, beyond the erratic community of visitors who choose whether to sit down or not in a black box, or the indistinct community of spectators involved in cinema projection. In the argument you make to defend the unique character of cinematic experience, you appeal not only to this specification by the body, but also to the idea of cinema as a “social fact,” as a historical institution. This “social fact,” however, remains rather undefined, and you hardly refer to the essays of the pioneers who wrote an enormous amount on that subject, on cinema as an art of the crowds, as a new cathedral or way station deriving from the old theater, in brief, you do not speak of the quasi-Wagnerian myth that surrounded cinema at its beginnings. If this is not what it is, what do you mean by “social fact”? What I mean by “social fact,” very modestly, is not to be identified specifically with the discourse you mention, given that it is necessary, above all, to grasp this experience in its historical dimension, because this “social fact” is multiple. What we have learned from good historians is that the cinematic dispositif, and cinema as an institution have been in a state of constant change. In effect, there is the configuration of the 1920s, that of cinema as an “art of the crowds” that Delluc theorized, which would subsequently form the terrain of Benjamin’s enquiry (I discuss all that in “Le spectateur de cinéma, une mémoire unique”).44 And one obviously finds the source of it in various works, Vidor’s The Crowd,45 for example, the final shots of which I analyze in Le Corps du cinéma: that incredible backward movement that discloses, behind the familial trio, a crowded cinema hall that grows larger and larger, ending up evoking a sky filled with stars – a shot that attests to the gigantism of the period, and one that would be unthinkable today unless presented as a parody. When Daney, many years later, speaks of “cinema, alone,” he is obviously thinking, among other things, rather sadly, of smaller theaters, with screens that are too often the size of a postage stamp, and ten people in the hall. That does not prevent there still being a social factor, however restrained it might be. I was greatly moved by a phenomenon I read about in Le Monde: some people came up with the idea, in order to watch or see again a film that

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they did not have at their disposal, of soliciting a collection via the Internet to rent a commercial hall during its down time for the purpose of organizing a screening – apparently, this becomes profitable with twenty-five spectators or more. Here we have a splendid community of desire, rather like the affiliation of those who belonged to ciné-clubs in earlier times – as was the case with me. Thus, even though attendance at cinemas may have undergone drastic reductions, one can justifiably surmise that there are a sufficient number of spectators for this experience to mean something, that it remains distinctive. And it is necessary to nuance this discourse concerning the depopulation of cinema halls. A noteworthy phenomenon of recent years is the multiplication of festivals around the world, festivals that are attended by more and more people (around 80,000 spectators for the past few years at the Festival of La Rochelle, for example). In such festivals, we find the big, crowded halls that commercial circuits have gradually lost for the majority of respectable films, and, in addition, that they are imbued with an almost religious atmosphere. But one can also think about ways in which the dispositif of the cinema hall has been affected in its very essence. A young friend, a teacher at Université Paris 8-Vincennes-Saint-Denis, was telling me about having a feeling that her students, even when they saw films in a theater, did not watch them “like we do,” in the sense that they attest to a veritable impatience when confronted by the continuity that constitutes the experience of a film, which tears them away for too long from their other preoccupations. They trifle with their portable phones; they need to be trendy in other ways. That is a historical phenomenon that is difficult to evaluate. Because, in that case, it is the dispositif of the hall itself that is being affected, as if it is being eaten away from within by the private disaffection of a new kind of spectator. Michel Serres does not talk about cinema in Petite Poucette, but it could very well serve as one of his examples, and several of his words make one think of it: “Now there are only conductors, motor functions; no more spectators, the space of the theater is filled with actors, mobiles.”46 Notes  1. Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (1898–1948) was a Soviet filmmaker and theorist who is known for his theory and practice of montage, which he regarded as a form of emotional speech.  2. Eisenstein’s essay on Disney was published posthumously in abridged form in 1985, based on manuscripts held in the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art written from 1940 to 1946; published in English as Eisenstein on Disney, ed. Jay Leyda, trans. Alan Y. Upchurch (Calcutta: Seagull, 1986).  3. Jean Epstein (1897–1953) was a French filmmaker and film theorist who is best



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known for his concept of photogénie, which assumes the uniqueness of the ability of cinema to mobilize such things as movement, temporality, rhythm, and choice of camera shots (for example, the close-up) in order to intensify emotion and create an experience that operates through the senses.  4. Jean Epstein, Écrits sur le cinéma: 1921–1953, édition chronologique (Paris: Seghers, 1974–5).  5. Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) was an actor, writer, and critic who engaged in a polemic concerning filmmaking and film appreciation, demanding “phantasmagorical films,” which he saw as acting “directly on the grey matter of the brain” (Antonin Artaud, Collected Works: Volume Three, ed. Paule Thévenin, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Calder and Boyars, 1972), 166–7).  6. Dr Mabuse, der Spieler – Ein Bild der Zeit (Fritz Lang, 1922), known in its American release as Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler.  7. Sigmund Freud, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1921).  8. Lawrence S. Kubie and Sydney Margolin, “The Process of Hypnotism and the Nature of the Hypnotic State,” The American Journal of Psychiatry 100:5 (1944): 611–22.  9. Freud hypothesized that the hypnotist takes the place of the subject’s ideal, comparing it to the experience of being in love: “there is the same compliance, the same absence of criticism, towards the hypnotist as towards the loved object. There is the same sapping of the subject’s own initiative; no one can doubt that the hypnotist has stepped into the place of the ego ideal” (Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1949), 77). 10. On the successive attempts of Jean-Louis Baudry (1930–2015) and Christian Metz to develop an analogy between the spectator’s identification with cinematic narrative and the narcissistic identification posited in Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage of human development, see Jacques Aumont, Alain Bergala, Michel Marie, and Marc Vernet, Aesthetics of Film, trans. Richard Neupert (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 216–17. 11. François Roustang (1923–2016) was a French philosopher who began as a Jesuit, became a psychoanalyst, and then repudiated Lacanian psychoanalysis to become a hypnotherapist, publishing Qu’est-ce que l’hypnose? in 1994, an influential work on the practice of hypnosis. 12. Le Septième Ciel (Seventh Heaven) (Benoît Jacquot, 1997). 13. Roustang, Qu’est-ce que l’hypnose? (Paris: Minuit, 1994). Whereas Qu’est-ce que l’hypnose? extols hypnosis as an effective therapeutic method, Roustang’s next book Comment faire rire un paranoïaque? (1996), published in English as How to Make a Paranoid Laugh: Or, What Is Psychoanalysis?, trans. Anne C. Vila (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), debunks the pretensions of psychoanalysis as objective scientific method, so that between them the two books foreshadow the opposition that Bellour sees symbolically replicated in Jacquot’s film.

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14. In Au fond des bois (Deep in the Woods) (Benoît Jacquot, 2010), a vagrant, Timothee, hypnotizes a young woman, Josephine, in order to take advantage of her sexually. 15. Kairo (Pulse) (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001). 16. Léon Chertok, L’Hypnose (1965), revised and enlarged edition (Paris: Payot, 1989), 261. Chertok (1911–91) was a French psychiatrist known for his work on hypnosis and psychosomatic medicine. 17. Gilbert Rouget, La Musique et la Transe: esquisse d’une théorie générale des relations de la musique et de la possession (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), in which Rouget argues that, whether one conceives of it as a process of identification, possession, incantation, chamanism, or as an emotional phenomenon, music triggers a trance that has a soothing effect. 18. Roland Barthes, “En sortant du cinéma,” in “Psychanalyse et cinéma,” Communications 23 (1975): 104. 19. “All you have to do is see a kung-fu film in Le Trianon cinema, near Barbès, to realize how for a long time the theater has had to play an interactive role as far as film is concerned, taking advantage of intermediary scenes to go and light up a cigarette in the smoking room with the intention of coming back in to the hall when the combats start up” (“Du défilement au défilé,” La Recherche photographique 7 (1989): 49). 20. Serene Velocity (Ernie Gehr, 1970). 21. See note 8 in this chapter. 22. The cinematography and montage of U samogo sinego morya (By the Bluest of Seas/Au bord de la mer bleue) (Boris Barnet, S. Mardanin, 1936) have been praised for the power with which they evoke “the joy of the body exuberantly plunged into sensations” (Nicole Brenez, video essay on U samogo sinyego morya, alsolikelife.com/shooting, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7ghMxw548w, accessed January 25, 2017). 23. Edgar Morin, Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire. Essai d’anthropologie (Paris: Minuit, 1978 [1956]). Edgar Morin (1921– ) is a French philosopher and sociologist who is known for his work on complexity theory and his promotion of transdisciplinarity. 24. See, for example, Noël Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Torben Kragh. Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 25. See James Peterson, “Is a Cognitive Approach to the Avant-Garde Cinema Perverse?” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 108–29. 26. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991). Published in English as What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 27. Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) was a French naturalist and zoologist known as the “father of paleontology.”



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28. Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2002). 29. Le Déjeuner du chat (Louis Lumière, 1895). 30. Electrocuting an Elephant (Thomas Edison, 1903). 31. Bellour is referring to Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005), a documentary on the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, an animal protection activist, who, together with his girlfriend, had been killed and eaten by a grizzly bear in Alaska in 2003. 32. Bringing up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938); Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, 1952). 33. The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963). 34. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). 35. Clash of the Wolves (Noel M. Smith, 1925). 36. Love Streams (John Cassavetes, 1984). 37. La macchina ammazzacattivi (The Machine That Kills Bad People/La Machine à tuer les mechants) (Roberto Rossellini, 1952); Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica, 1952). 38. Bellour is referring to Au Hazard Balthazar (Robert Bresson, 1966), which traces the life of a beloved donkey Balthazar and the farm girl who owns him, depicting the cruelty to which both are subjected. 39. Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012); Adieu au langage (Goodbye to Language) (JeanLuc Godard, 2014). 40. VIIIe Elégie, translated as “L’Ouvert” bu Jean-Pierre Lefebvre in Rainer Maria Rilke, Œuvres poétiques et théâtrales (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1997). 41. La Cocina (Eulalia Valldosera, 1992), shown at the Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon in 2009. 42. See “La plus simple émotion,” La Querelle des dispositifs, 366–9. 43. Bellour is distinguishing Varda’s installation Les Veuves de Noirmoutier (Agnès Varda, 2004) from her later television documentary Quelques Veuves de Noirmoutier (Agnès Varda, 2006). 44. Trafic 79 (autumn 2011), 32–44. 45. The Crowd (La Foule, King Vidor, 1928). 46. Michel Serres, Petite Poucette (Paris: Le Pommier, 2012), 41. Addressed to “the networked generation,” this book has a title that alludes to Thumbelina (La Petite Poucette), a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, and, more indirectly to Le Petit Poucet (Little Thumb) by Charles Perrault, and plays upon the word “pouce,” which means “thumb” in French, with the idea of fingers moving over the touch screens of mobile devices.

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Part Three

Biography and Publications of Raymond Bellour by Alistair Fox

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Raymond Bellour (1939–  ): A Biographical Sketch

An understanding of the education, professional experiences, and cultural activities that have influenced Raymond Bellour’s intellectual formation helps to explain the breadth of his research interests, as well as many of the distinctive dimensions of his film theory. What follows is designed to give a brief outline of the intellectual and cultural factors that shaped his preoccupations, the range of his interests, and the course of his career. Early Life and Schooling A native of Lyon, Raymond Bellour was born in that city on January 18, 1939, where he would remain until 1964, before relocating to Paris. A precocious child, Bellour began to read voraciously at a very young age, having read Racine and Homer by the age of ten, and having devoured the whole of Shakespeare by the age of fourteen.1 This passion for literature would persist through the whole of his career, leading him not only into literary scholarship as a parallel interest alongside his research into cinema, but also to become a creative writer in his own right. High school was not a particularly gratifying experience for Bellour, who confesses that during this time he felt very restless, finding it difficult to remain cooped up in a classroom all day. Consequently, instead of undertaking the hypokhâgne (the preparatory class for advanced studies in arts and literature in the École normale supérieure), as would usually be expected of a youth with his precocity, he wanted to go on the stage, persuading his parents to allow him to enter the Conservatoire de Lyon at the end of high school with the intention of becoming an actor. Theatrical Experience For the next five years, Bellour pursued theatrical activities, first at the Conservatoire, and then with the playwright and director Roger Planchon,

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who, in 1952, had founded the Théâtre de la Comédie on the rue des Marronniers, in Lyon. As a member of this company he acted in several productions directed by Planchon of plays by Molière, including Les Fourberies de Scapin and Le Médecin malgré lui, in which he played opposite the acclaimed French actress Catherine Rouvel. During this time, Bellour also served as assistant to the director. A number of his close friends in the theater company were members of the local network of the Front de libération nationale (FLN), which was supporting the Algerian War of Independence against France. Attracting the attention of the police, they were arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison, meaning that Bellour’s theatrical plans fell to pieces, which forced him to look for a new pursuit. University Study With his theatrical ambitions in tatters, Bellour pursued studies part time for five years (between 1957 and 1963) toward his Licence de Lettres modernes (equivalent to a Bachelor of Contemporary Literature) at La Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines de Lyon. Displaying the same independence that had marked him during his school years, he did not attend the university full time, but preferred to study alone at his own home for intensive bursts of several weeks at a time, in preparation for examinations, which one could do at that time. After gaining his Licence, Bellour decided to pursue a Diplôme d’études supérieures (equivalent to a master’s degree today in a British or American university) at the same institution. This qualification was designed to initiate students into research methods through the writing of a dissertation. After tossing up between Simone de Beauvoir, Madame de Staël, and Henri Michaux as potential topics, Bellour settled on Michaux, the Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter, as the subject of his thesis. This thesis constituted the first version of what would later be developed into his book on Michaux, Henri Michaux, ou une mesure de l’être (1966), a book that was, in turn, successively expanded and elaborated in subsequent editions. Interest in Cinema Following the collapse of his theatrical ambitions, Bellour, in addition to pursuing his academic studies, began to focus his attention on cinema. His interest in this art form was accelerated by having the good fortune to meet Bernard Chardère, the founder of the film journal Positif, and also the Secretary General of Roger Planchon’s Théâtre de la Cité. Chardère invited



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Bellour to help him catalogue his vast library, which allowed Bellour to absorb all kinds of writings on cinema, including foreign publications on cinema, such as Bianco e Nero, the oldest film journal in Italy, and Sight and Sound, the British monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI). As a result, he was able greatly to expand his knowledge of cinema as an art form and the current debates surrounding it. Chardère also involved Bellour in Les Films du Galion, a small Lyonnais production company that the former had founded in 1959. In this context, Bellour acted as Chardère’s assistant for the shooting of his film Autrefois les canuts (Bernard Chardère, 1960), a documentary short film dealing with the historical uprising of the Lyonnais silk workers, and also helped Francis Lacassin shoot Mon ami Mandrin (Francis Lacassin, 1960), another documentary short film dealing with the famous French highwayman, Louis Mandrin (1725– 55), known as the Robin Hood of France. Other short films followed for another production company created by Lacassin and Bellour called Les Films Atalante: namely, Prière pour Robinson Crusoé (Raymond Bellour, Francis Lacassin, 1960), and Satan mon prochain (Raymond Bellour, Francis Lacassin, 1961). Bellour also acknowledges that one film in particular made an enormous impression on him: Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). It was this film, he says, that motivated him to write on cinema: “It was a film-world, a film on our world, joining in its new form history and memory, love and politics.”2 Career as a Film Critic and Journalist Filled with this desire to write about cinema, Bellour viewed films with the same voracity that he had shown in devouring literature. There was a film club in Lyon that he would attend religiously each Sunday morning, at which he saw all the great French, Italian, and American classical films that were considered canonical, including those of Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Georg Wilhelm Pabst. This, in turn, led to Bellour becoming a freelance journalist, writing on cinema for various local publications, mainly in the daily newspaper L’Echo-Liberté, for which he wrote articles and reviews until he was about twenty-one years of age, under the pseudonym Claude Gil. As the editor chose to review all of the quality films himself, Bellour was assigned largely B-movies to review, along with many American films. At this time, he had a motorbike that allowed him to flit around all the cinema theaters in Lyon, meaning that he was able to see many dubbed movies, films noirs, and horror films – all the films that have since become the preserve of cinephiles. In particular, he developed a taste for the movies of Vincente Minnelli.

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Bellour’s involvement in film journalism was not limited simply to the writing of reviews. Together with a number of friends, he also produced a small-format magazine called Écrans lyonnais, which listed all the films being shown each week in Lyon, accompanied by brief critical appraisals – a sort of equivalent in Lyon of L’Officiel des spectacles in Paris. In 1963, Bellour proceeded to found the journal Artsept, largely because he and his colleagues, who were leftists, were rather wary of the films coming out of the New Wave because of their lack of political engagement. Instead, they preferred an alternative kind of cinema that was truly “de gauche,” and that was closely linked to literature: the films being made by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Agnès Varda, who were known as the “rive gauche” group. The convergence of Bellour’s attendance at screenings of the local film club, his reviewing assignments as a journalist, his understanding of the theatrical and practical dimensions of filmmaking, and the combination of his aesthetic and political inclinations provided him with an unusually substantial preparation for pursuing his future investigations into the nature of cinema. As a Researcher and Teacher By the early 1960s, he reveals, Bellour had a vague feeling that he wanted to be involved in cinema in some form or another, but not by entering the profession as an assistant-director, which was an avenue open to him. His experience in writing reviews for the local newspaper in Lyon left him feeling that he remained above all a critic. Consequently, in 1964 he relocated to Paris to enter the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), which is a national, governmental research organization in France, the mission of which is to produce knowledge and make it available to society. It employs permanent researchers, who are recruited through annual competitions.3 Having been admitted, Bellour took a position initially in the Psychology Section of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, and subsequently in the Philosophy Section, in order to conduct research on film analysis at the Institut d’esthétique et des sciences de l’art, under the direction first of Etienne Souriau, and then of Liliane Brion-Guerry. Simultaneously, he pursued research on his other major interest – modern and comparative literature. Eventually, Bellour would rise to become Directeur de Recherches (First Class), and, once he retired from the CNRS in 2004, Directeur de Recherches Émérite. At the CNRS, Bellour was responsible for conducting research in his two given areas, and for participating in the training of doctoral students, postdoctoral scholars, and young researchers. This eventuated in an extensive



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involvement in teaching, which saw him conducting classes on film analysis as a Chargé de cours (Lecturer) at Université de Paris I, from 1969 to 1972, and then directing seminars at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris, which was the foremost school for training filmmakers in France – (it was subsequently reorganized as La Fémis in 1986). From 1986 to 1988, Bellour also delivered a master’s course at Université Sorbonne nouvelle – Paris III. One of his most significant contributions to teaching, however, consisted of his input into the Centre américain d’études cinématographiques, later the Centre parisien d’études critiques, an American study abroad program run by a consortium of universities, from 1973 to 1992. During this period, many American students studied at this center who would subsequently become distinguished film scholars in their own right, including Janet Bergstrom, Jim Collins, Timothy Corrigan, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Elizabeth Lyon, Constance Penley, Dana Polan, David Rodowick, Maureen Turim, and Susan White, to mention just a few. Meanwhile, Bellour issued a sequence of publications on film analysis that led to the award of the degree of Doctorat ès Lettres from the Université Paris I in 1979, based on a body of work titled “L’Analyse du film,” which would subsequently be published as a book under that name. Significantly, the director of this thesis was Bernard Teyssèdre, the eminent art theorist and historian. Roland Barthes served as a member of the jury or “examiner.”4 His entry into the CNRS and his research on film analysis did not mean that Bellour abandoned his literary and critical interests. During these years, he also continued to write film criticism for Cinéma, and La Nouvelle Revue française. As far as literature was concerned, he wrote articles for France-Observateur (later Le Nouvel Observateur) and Les Lettres françaises, conducted a series of interviews with Barthes, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, and others on developments in the “human sciences” (until the cessation of the latter journal in 1972), and wrote on books for the new Magazine littéraire, which had been created in 1967. In the domain of literary research, he pursued work on his massive edition of the works of the Brontës, and in private life engaged in his own creative writing, with a number of poems and stories (some of which remain unpublished), and a novel, Les Rendez-vous de Copenhague, which was conceived originally as a film script, and published by Gallimard in 1966. Expanding his sphere of activities, he participated in radio broadcasts for France-Culture on the Brontës, and in another broadcast on the novelist Nancy Huston called “Scènes littéraires, scène de ménage.” As his career advanced, Bellour became deeply involved in promoting certain developments in French intellectual life. In 1989, he helped to organize a major exhibition, “Passages de l’image” at the Centre Pompidou, which opened on September 19, 1990, the first international exhibition

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focusing on contemporary issues relating to the photograph, cinema, and video, designed to elucidate the nature and role of images in present-day society. Two years later, together with the eminent film critic Serge Daney, he contributed to the creation of the cinema journal Trafic, published by Les Éditions P.O.L, for which he has continued to serve as an editor. Apart from these major enterprises, he has acted as a specialist advisor concerning Arts and Audiovisual matters for the research organization Sciences de l’homme et de la société (SHS) from 1982 to 1984, and in 1983 was a founding member of the Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (CRAL), which consists of a multidisciplinary team of literary scholars, art historians, musicologists, philosophers, linguists, and sociologists drawn from the CNRS and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). From 1991 to 1995, he served as Director of the CRAL. In the course of his career, Bellour has delivered lectures and courses in many countries, including the U.S.A., Sweden, Great Britain, Switzerland, Venezuela, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Spain, and Germany. As a result of the combined sum of his experience, he has come to the conclusion, as he confesses, that “what I love most of all, and the thing that I feel I am least incapable of doing, is, quite simply, to write. It is the impulse to write that ceaselessly nourishes and informs my relationship to images.”5 Bellour’s Publications In a career that has spanned about half a century, Raymond Bellour has amassed an immense number of publications, mainly in the form of articles, many of which have been selected and combined for publication as booklength studies focusing on a single area of scholarly interest. These may be roughly grouped in terms of the following categories: (1) film analysis; (2) video and the digital image; (3) cinema and its effect on the body; (4) the different dispositifs in which the contemporary viewer may look at film, and their effects on perception; (5) literary studies; and (6) creative literature. Specific articles are individually described below in the Annotated Bibliography. Bellour’s major books can be classified according to the subject areas listed above as follows: Film Analysis Alexandre Astruc (Paris: Seghers, 1963) Le Western (Paris: IO/18 U.G.E., 1966; republished, 1969) L’Analyse du film (Paris: Albatros, 1979) Le Cinéma américain: analyses de films, 2 vols (Paris: Flammarion, 1980)



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Pensées du cinéma: les films qu’on accompagne, le cinéma qu’on cherche à ressaisir (Paris: P.O.L, 2016) Video and the Digital Image L’Entre-images: photos, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1990) L’Entre-images 2: mots, images (Paris: P.O.L, 1999) Dispositifs La Querelle des dispositifs: cinéma–installations, expositions (Paris: P.O.L, 2012) Cinema and the Body Le Corps du cinema: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L, 2009) Literary Studies Lire Michaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1966 [and subsequent augmented editions]) Le Livre des autres (Paris: L’Herne, 1971 [and subsequent augmented editions]) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights [edition] (Paris: Pauvert, 1972); Emily Brontë, Hurlevent [edition] (Paris: Gallimard, 1991) Charlotte Brontë and Patrick Branwell Brontë, Écrits de jeunesse (Paris: Pauvert, 1972) Alice James, Journal suivi d’un choix de lettres [edition] (Paris: Café-Clima, 1984) Mademoiselle Guillotine: Cagliostro, Dumas, Œdipe et la Révolution française (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1989) Henri Michaux, Oeuvres complètes [edition] (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1998–2004) Creative Literature Les Rendez-vous de Copenhague (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) Oubli (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1992) Partages de l’ombre (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2002) For descriptions of the contents of these books, together with brief abstracts of Bellour’s most important articles, see the detailed Annotated Bibliography in this volume that follows.

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Notes 1. Many of the details of Bellour’s life recorded in this biographical sketch are drawn from Raymond Bellour, Alice Leroy, and Gabriel Bortzmeyer, Raymond Bellour: dans la compagnie des œuvres: entretien avec Alice Leroy et Gabriel Bortzmeyer (Paris: Éditions Rouge Profond, 2017, 9–16), supplemented by information provided directly by Bellour in personal communications. 2. Ibid. 3. See the website for the CNRS, http://www.cnrs.fr, accessed May 31, 2017. 4. “Catalogue général des thèses (1971–1979),” Université Paris 1/PanthéonSorbonne, https://www.univ-paris1.fr/fileadmin/Service_recherche/PV-CS/ THESES_1971-79_02.pdf, accessed May 15, 2017. 5. Raymond Bellour: dans la compagnie des œuvres, 15.



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A Select Annotated Bibliography of the Publications of Raymond Bellour Compiled by Alistair Fox

Apart from the articles reprinted in The Analysis of Film and Between-theImages, the vast majority of Bellour’s books and articles have been published in French only, and hence are unavailable to readers who are unable to read them in their original language. Gaining a grasp of Bellour’s thought is also complicated by the fact that each of his books on cinema comprises a mosaic of individual pieces that have been written at different times, and published in a range of different outlets, often being republished, with revisions, over the span of Bellour’s career. This annotated bibliography is designed to furnish a brief abstract of each publication so as to provide the reader with a sense of the topography of Bellour’s thought on particular issues, along with a sense of how it has evolved. Articles that have been subsequently reprinted in Bellour’s books are arranged according to the book in which they appear, and are presented in chronological order. The listings can thus serve as a guide to specific topics and works discussed in the books, even for readers who are not able to read French. The arrangement of the annotated bibliography is as follows: Introduction Books   On Cinema, the Moving Image, and Art   On Literature   Critical Editions   Creative Works of Fiction and Poetry Journal Articles   Articles Reprinted in L’Analyse du film   Articles Reprinted in L’Entre-images: photo, cinéma, vidéo   Articles Reprinted in L’Entre-images 2: mots, images   Articles Reprinted in La Querelle des dispositifs   Articles Reprinted in Le Corps du cinéma

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  Articles Reprinted in Pensées du cinéma   Articles in English Not Otherwise Republished in Bellour’s Books   Miscellaneous Articles Supplementary Interviews Introduction Raymond Bellour has been a prolific writer throughout a very long career, and, even though he retired from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (French National Center for Scientific Research) (CNRS) in 2004, the output of his publications shows no sign of diminishing. One of the most striking aspects of this output is the wide range of topics he covers, which include: film reviews; critical studies of literary figures; editions of literary works; analyses of the work of significant filmmakers; film theory; the relations between cinema, new media, and art; not to mention original works of prose fiction and poetry; and numerous edited volumes, special issues, and exhibition catalogs. To present a comprehensive bibliography of Bellour’s publications would require more space than is available in the present volume. For that reason, this bibliography will necessarily be a select one, focusing mainly on his major books and a selection of articles that should give an idea of the range of his preoccupations as a critic and theorist of cinema. For the sake of conserving space, the plethora of early film reviews that Bellour wrote during the 1960s have been omitted, as have most of his edited volumes, special issues, and exhibition catalogues, given that in many cases his actual written contribution in these publications was comparatively small, and that, where significant, they have frequently been reprinted in his books. As is common in French practice, Bellour’s articles and books have been reprinted in different outlets, sometimes on several occasions, frequently with revisions. Apart from providing brief abstracts of the reprinted articles centered on a common theme in his books, this bibliography also includes separate sections dealing with articles translated into English that do not appear in any of his book-length compilations, along with other articles that Bellour has not selected for inclusion in his books. In cases where articles included in the books have been translated into English in other publications, this fact is noted in the entry for the French version of the article concerned. Within each section, the entries have been arranged in ascending chronological order to allow the reader to gain some sense of the evolution of his thought – generally, as well as on particular topics – and brief annotations have been provided to assist Anglophone readers who may not be able to read the originals in French.



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Books On Cinema, the Moving Image, and Art Bellour, Raymond. Alexandre Astruc. Paris: Éditions Seghers, 1963. 224 pp. An introduction to Astruc and his work, including extracts from printed texts that illustrate the filmmaker’s views on cinema, interviews in which he comments on his films, and appraisals of Astruc’s films by a range of critics, including André Bazin, Jacques Rivette, Jean Domarchi, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and others. Bellour, Raymond. Le Western, Paris: IO/18 U.G.E., 1966 (republished, 1969), 392 pp. New edition: “Tel,” Gallimard, 1993, 410 pp. One of the first books to analyze the western as a genre, comprehensively provides a commentary on its major themes and motifs, a dictionary of filmmakers who have attempted the genre, and an inventory of westerns made from 1946 to 1968. Bellour, Raymond. Le Livre des autres. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1978, 448 pp. [Originally published as Le Livre des autres. Paris: L’Herne, 1971, 316 pp.] A compilation of interviews – conducted over a period from 1966 to 1975 and published earlier in Les Lettres françaises, Semiotica, le Monde, and le Magazine Littéraire – with Michel Foucault (two interviews), Claude Lévi-Strauss (two interviews), Roland Barthes (two interviews), Pierre Francastel, Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Clémence Ramnoux, Michel Zéraffa, Christian Metz, Guy Rosolato, Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, and Pierre Clastres. The interviews are designed to clarify key aspects of the authors’ published works. Bellour, Raymond. L’Analyse du film. Paris: Éditions Albatros, 1979. 320 pp. [Republished, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1995.] [Published in English as The Analysis of Film. Edited by Constance Penley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.] A collection of reprinted essays, informed by structuralist semiology and Freudian psychoanalysis, that outlines a theory of film analysis, emphasizing the serial form of composition, or alternation, with systematically distributed oppositions from one shot to the next, that constitutes cinematic narrative structure, together with the influence of the Oedipus complex and castration complex on screen-writing, especially as found in American cinema, exemplified in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Bellour, Raymond, ed. Le Cinéma américain: analyses de films, 2 vols. Paris: Flammarion, 1980, 276 pp. and 324 pp. An edited volume of essays by a variety of French and American film s­ cholars,

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including Jacques Aumont, Noel Burch, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Thierry Kuntzel, and Nick Browne, on films ranging from those of David Wark Griffith to those of Michael Curtiz, Fritz Lang, and John Ford (Volume 1), and by Michel Marie, Stephen Heath, Marc Vernet, David Rodowick, and Pierre Baudry (among others), on films ranging from Citizen Kane and Cat People to The Maltese Falcon and Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (Volume 2). The volumes contain three essays by Bellour himself on a variety of films, as well as images used in cinema advertising. Bellour, Raymond. L’Entre-images: photos, cinéma, vidéo. Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1990, 352 pp. New edition, 2002. [Published in English as Raymond Bellour: Between-the-Images. Translated by Allyn Hardyck. Zurich: JRP/Ringier; Dijon: in co-edition with Les Presses du Réel, 2012.] A collection of essays, which, through an examination of three genres that reflect the idea of a “passage,” explores the transition of images from one discipline to another, focusing on their relation to television, photography in motion, and the presence of cinematographic techniques in video art. The study concludes with an analysis of four gallery installations as examples of a form of video art that avoids televised distribution. Bellour, Raymond. L’Entre-images 2: mots, images. Paris: P.O.L, 1999, 384 pp. A series of reflections on theoretical issues relating to cinema, the nature of narrative, and the status of the moving image that draws both on the semiology and the philosophy of the image to explore the work of multimedia artists, computer graphics artists, video artists, and others who use the new technologies of the image. Bellour, Raymond. Le Corps du cinema: hypnoses, émotions, animalités. Paris: P.O.L, 2009. 648 pp. Through an examination of a wide range of films, Bellour argues, drawing upon contemporary neurobiology, that there is an equivalence between cinema and hypnosis in terms of their respective dispositifs, the metapsychology that can be applied to each, and the affective experience they induce. Bellour concludes that this experience is linked to the animal nature of human beings, showing how, throughout its history, cinema has been preoccupied with the figuration of this animality, and how “the emotion of cinema seems to be none other than a form of hypnosis.” Bellour, Raymond. Les Hommes, le dimanche, Menschen am Sontag, de Robert Siodmak et Edgar G. Ulmer. Crisnée: Éditions Yellow Now, 2009. 112 pp. A detailed study of what Bellour describes as “the best German fiction film,” tracing the genesis of the film, the oscillation between documentary scenes and fictional moments, and the juxtaposition of fixed and animated images.



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Bellour, Raymond. La Querelle des dispositifs: cinéma–installations, expositions. Paris: P.O.L, 2012, 537 pp. By considering examples of the “glissements, chevauchements, scintillements, emboîtements, hybridations, métamorphoses, transitions, migrations, assimilations et similarités” [slidings, overlappings, flickerings, interlockings, hybridizations, metamorphoses, transitions, migrations, assimilations, and similarities] between cinema and the multiple ways of showing moving images in the domain of contemporary visual arts, Bellour, in a series of essays written between 1999 and 2012, argues that a film projected in a theater, in the dark, during a finite duration defined by the length of a collective screening, constitutes a unique perceptual experience that conditions the spectator, and that it is this experience, and this only, that can properly be called “cinema.” Bellour, Raymond. Pensées du cinéma: les films qu’on accompagne, le cinéma qu’on cherche à ressaisir. Paris: P.O.L, 2016, 218 pp. A compilation of previously published articles that deal mainly with the sources of the somatic effects induced by cinema in the spectator, focusing on the oscillation between different “voices,” diverse levels of memory, narrative disruptions, stylistic variations, and the use of mise en abyme, and including analyses of films by such filmmakers as Roberto Rossellini, Philippe Grandrieux, Jean-Claude Biette, Gus Van Sant, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Pierre Guerín, Stephen Dwoskin, Federico Fellini, John Ford, Chris Marker, and Ritwik Ghatak. On Literature Bellour, Raymond. Henri Michaux, ou une mesure de l’être. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. 288 pp. Situating Michaux’s oeuvre in the context of a period in which “anxiety, indifference, and the wildest hopes converge” to deliver an image of human beings very different from that that animated poets of the past, Bellour shows how Michaux’s work effaces literary categories, especially those of poetry and prose, concluding that, while Michaux may embody the end of something, he also announces the dawning of another reality, in which the poet refuses to be limited or to deny anything to human beings and the world. Bellour, Raymond. Henri Michaux, L’Herne, no. 8, 1966 (republished, 1983), 528 pp. Bellour, Raymond. Henri Michaux. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. 344 pp. [An expanded, revised edition of Henri Michaux ou une mesure de l’être. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. 288 pp.]

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Argues that Michaux invites his reader to undergo an experience that replicates the process that operates in the author himself during the act of creation, as the result of a confrontation with issues that stimulate, nourish, wound, contradict, or destroy conscious awareness. Bellour, Raymond. Mademoiselle Guillotine – Cagliostro, Dumas, Œdipe et la révolution française. Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1989. 264 pp. An analysis of the fictionalized accounts of Marie Antoinette by Alexandre Dumas in the four books he wrote devoted to the years that produced the French Revolution. Bellour explores the consequences of the secularization of French culture, symbolized in the axe that cut off Marie Antoinette’s head, arguing that the historical novel provides a metacommentary on its own genesis. Bellour, Raymond. Lire Michaux. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. 648 pp. Offers a “Parcours de Michaux,” in the double sense of the route followed by Michaux in his career and the thematic pathways that the reader can trace in Michaux’s works, with the aim of constructing a critical discourse that is simultaneously discontinuous and continuous, paying attention to the particularities of each work, while giving an account of the general development of his oeuvre, its logic, and its personal relevance. Critical Editions Brontë, Charlotte, and Patrick Branwell Brontë. Écrits de jeunesse (choix, d’après les manuscrits originaux). Paris: Pauvert, 1972. 584 pp. An edition of French translations (by various translators) of certain juvenilia written by Charlotte Brontë and her brother Patrick Branwell Brontë, including Charlotte’s Albion and Marina (1830), High Life in Verdopolis (1834), and The Spell (1834), among others; and Patrick’s Branwell’s Blackwood’s Magazine (1829), The Pirate (1833), and And the Weary Are at Rest (1845), among a number of poems and plays. In a long preface, Bellour argues that the perspective offered on the Brontës by Anglo-Saxon critics has produced a form of “cultural repression,” owing to their neglect of these early works by the members of this gifted family, and that, conversely, a consideration of these juvenilia can illuminate the sources of their creative imagination and their published novels. James, Alice. Journal et choix de lettres. Edited by Raymond Bellour. Translated by Marie-Claude Gallot. Paris: Café-Clima Éditeur, 1984. 282 pp. An edition – the first to be published in French – of the journal and a selection of letters that Alice James, the sister of the novelist Henry James and the psychologist William James, began to write four years before her death,



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showing how her writing assumes a place within the context of the literary preoccupations of the rest of her family, thus illustrating the cultural and political milieu of an American in exile at the end of the nineteenth century. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Edited by Raymond Bellour. Translated by Pierre Leyris. Paris: Pauvert, 1972. 404 pp. An edition in Emily Brontë’s novel in French, with an introduction by Bellour in which he suggests that the singularity of Wuthering Heights in the family’s collective oeuvre would not be so apparent if the manuscripts containing Emily’s juvenile texts had not disappeared. Brontë, Charlotte and Patrick Branwell Brontë. Oeuvres. Edited by Raymond Bellour. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992. 1,046 pp. A republished edition of the juvenilia of Charlotte Brontë and Patrick Branwell Brontë published as Écrits de jeunesse, augmented by the addition of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley. Michaux, Henri. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Raymond Bellour (with Ysé Tran). Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, vol. I, 1998, 1,432 pp.; vol. II, 2001, 1,420 pp.; vol. III, 2004, 1,960 pp. A critical edition for the French series of books Bibliothèque de la Pléiade of the complete works of Henri Michaux, with a long introduction, in which Bellour emphasizes Michaux’s recurrent descriptions of the experience of writing, his exploitation of fragmentation to suggest a dislocated unity of resistance, his simulation of the rhythms of the body, and his use of typographical marks, all of which serve to express “the failure of self outside oneself,” in the quest for health and “in order to thwart anxiety, weakness, and to quell a deficiency that is experienced as having no remedy.” Brontë Emily. Hurlevent. With an introduction, afterword, and a critical dossier by Raymond Bellour. Translated by Jacques and Yolande de Lacretelle. Paris: Gallimard, 2005. 480 pp. Another edition of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, in which Bellour, in a “Postface,” draws attention to André Gide’s high esteem for the novel, and its influence on French filmmakers such as François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, André Téchiné, and Jean-Luc Godard. Creative Works of Fiction and Poetry Bellour, Raymond. Les Rendez-vous de Copenhague. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. 266 pp. A novel that presents the story of a couple, Elsa and Michel, who meet at a conference in Copenhagen, in winter, and have a love affair, illustrating

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the reflexivity of the state of being in love and the difficulty of capturing a stable image of the beloved. Bellour, Raymond. Oubli. Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1992, 96 pp. A collection of verse poems on topics associated with memory, forgetting, and the presence of the past in the present. Bellour, Raymond. Partages de l’ombre. Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2002. 112 pp. A collection of prose poems organized in three sequences: “Partage de l’ombre,” “Suite sans nom,” and “Les jours.” Bellour, Raymond. L’Enfant. Paris: P.O.L, 2013. A series of poetic meditations, mainly in prose, on childhood, memory, and the experience of cinema of the child-spectator. 112 pp. JOURNAL ARTICLES Articles Reprinted in L’Analyse du film Bellour, Raymond. “Sur Fritz Lang,” Critique 226 (March 1966). [Reprinted in English as “On Fritz Lang,” Substance 3:9 (April 1974): 25–34.] [Reprinted also in Raymond Bellour, Le Livre des autres.] Argues that Lang incarnates the concept of direction or mise en scène, in the way he visibly poses as scenarist of destiny, enclosing the viewpoint of his characters within the continuity of his own viewpoint, keeping the point of view in perpetual hesitation, so that the film always seems to be in the process of creating itself. Bellour, Raymond. “Le monde et la distance.” In Raymond Bellour and J.J. Brochier, eds. Dictionaire du cinéma. Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1966, 29–45. [This article appears only in the original French version of L’Analyse du film.] Explores the nature of the distance that a filmmaker adopts when observing what is shown in the frame of the shots within a film, and raises the question of the intention that motivates a director when making his or her choices in that regard, including an analysis of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) among the examples he discusses. Bellour, Raymond. “Ce que savait Hitchcock,” Cahiers du cinéma 190 (May 1967): 32–6. A review article on François Truffaut’s extended interview with Alfred Hitchcock published as Le Cinéma selon Alfred Hitchcock, emphasizing the alliance between painting and the theater in the space within the cinematic frame that the two filmmakers reveal, and a narcissistic relationship between Hitchcock’s life and art.



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Bellour, Raymond. “Les Oiseaux: analyse d’une séquence,” Cahiers du cinéma 216 (October 1969): 24–38. A detailed shot-by-shot close reading of a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (the scene with Melanie in a boat at Bodega Bay) designed to identify all the elements in a prescribed segment that constitute a cinematic “text,” emphasizing how meaning is produced through the double constraint of repetition and variation in the succession of images that constitute the story as it unfolds. Bellour, Raymond. “L’évidence et le code,” Revue d’Esthétique, Special Issue: Cinéma: théorie, lectures, ed. Dominique Noguez (Ezanville: Klincksieck, 1973), 219–26. Examines a sequence from Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946) to show how in even the simplest narrative situations – two people talking in a car – a series of coded operations (for example, variations of scale between shots, movement and fixity within the shot, and the camera angle) come into play to assure the integration of the episode into the development of a story. Bellour, Raymond. “Le blocage symbolique,” Communications 23:1 (1975): 235–350. A detailed analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) to show how it illustrates a dialectic in the experience that leads the hero from an enigma to its resolution, showing how the director manipulates the genre of the spy thriller so as to make it retrace an Oedipal trajectory, in which the heroine, Eva, becomes a substitute for his mother. Bellour, Raymond. “Le texte introuvable,” Ca 7–8 (1975): 19–27. [Reprinted in English as “The Unattainable Text,” Screen 16:3 (1975): 19–28.] Argues that while a film is comparable to a work of literature insofar as it is a text (in the Barthesian sense), it is nevertheless unobtainable because it cannot be quoted, which means that the word “text” as applied to a film can only be metaphorical, raising a doubt as to whether the filmic text should really be approached in writing at all, or whether quotability can only be achieved through the use of film to film. Bellour, Raymond. “To Segment, to Analyse,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 1:3 (1976): 331–53. Starting from a consideration of Metz’s “Grande syntagmatique,” Bellour focuses on the systematic modeling of the narrative units of the classical American film, using an analysis of Gigi (Vincente Minnelli, 1958) as an example, in order to show how segmentation, through the differential play it sets up between various levels (involving rhyming and repetition), reveals Oedipus to be the code generator or macro-code of the whole narrative.

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Bellour, Raymond, Bertrand August, and Hilary Radner. “Hitchcock, the Enunciator,” Camera Obscura 1(2 2) (1977): 66–91. A detailed analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964), showing how the director’s variation of the distance between camera and object serves to inscribe cinema within the regime of the scopic drive, and how Hitchcock defines his place as enunciator by monitoring the modalities of the scopic relationship to the object. Bellour, Raymond and Nancy Huston. “Psychosis, Neurosis, Perversion,” Camera Obscura: 1–2 (3–1 3–4) (1979): 104–32. [Reprinted in French as “Psychose, névrose, perversion,” Ça cinéma 17 (January 1979), 21–42.] Compares Psycho with other films by Alfred Hitchcock, in order to demonstrate the presence in the former of an opacity that contravenes the classical model of a story, concluding that Psycho presents a narcissistic redoubling that allows the male subject to constitute himself, through the body of the woman, according to a double play of differential identification that allows him to confront the threat of lack in his own being. Articles Reprinted in L’Entre-images: Photo, cinéma, vidéo Bellour, Raymond. “Thierry Kuntzel et le retour de l’écriture,” Cahiers du cinéma 321 (March 1981): 40–9. [Reprinted in English as Raymond Belllour and Annwyl Williams, “Thierry Kuntzel and the Return of Writing,” Camera Obscura 4 (2 11) (1983): 28–59.] Argues that Kuntzel’s videos reflect a change of direction, involving a shift from film to video, as cinema tries to reinvent itself, which may be compared to the move away from the alexandrine and toward free verse in poetry, having a similar effect in promoting the evolution of a new kind of language. Bellour, Raymond. “‘Proust et la photographie’ de Jean-François Chevrier: Quand s’écrit la photo au cinéma,” Cahiers du cinéma 342 (December 1982): 44–6. In reviewing Chevrier’s book, suggests that Proust’s enterprise has become a model for the contemporary photograph (and, by extension, cinema), in that it provokes a kind of superior awareness of photography as an art – despite Proust’s own rejection of photography – and the fact that in certain respects it has an uncertain, fragile quality. Bellour, Raymond. “Les bords de la fiction.” In Jean-Paul Fargier, ed., Actes du colloque Vidéo, Fiction et Cie, Montbéliard: CAC, 1983, 34–7. [Reprinted in English as “The Limits of Fiction.” In Elke Town, ed. Video by Artist 2. Toronto: Art Metropole, 1986, 49–57.] Through an examination of a range of works by filmmakers such as Bill



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Viola and Danielle Jaeggi, proposes that experimental and avant-garde cinema and video art share a desire to escape from the all-powerfulness of the photographic analogy, representational realism, and the regime of belief in the story. Bellour, Raymond and Susan Suleiman. “I am an Image,” Camera Obscura 3–4 (2–3–1 8–9–10), special issue, Godard (1983): 116–23. [Reprinted in French as “Moi, je suis une image,” Jean-Luc Godard: les films, Revue belge du cinéma 16 (summer 1986): 109–10.] Analyzes Jean-Luc Godard’s Sauve la vie (qui peut) (1981) to argue that Godard creates a new kind of fiction that marks a movement from cinema as construed by, for example, Bazin toward a painting-writing freed from the deceptive imaginative plenitude invited by the défilement of the machine, because of the way it opens up a gap between two gazes as a result of a decomposition of the image through the use of freeze-frames. Bellour, Raymond. “Le spectateur pensif,” Photogénies 5 (April 1984): [12]–[15]. [Reprinted in English as “The Pensive Spectator,” Wide Angle 9:1 (1987): 6–10; reprinted again in The Cinematic. Ed. David Campany. London: Whitechapel; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, 119–23.] A short essay included in an issue of a journal published by the Centre national de la photographie on the place of the photo within cinematic fiction films, in which Bellour contrasts the experience of a spectator before a moving picture with that of someone who stands before a still image, suggesting that a photograph within a movie retains its power, by taking the spectator out of the fiction even while participating in, and adding to it. Bellour, Raymond. “L’analisi a la flamma,” Carte Semiotiche 1 (September 1985): 88–91. [Reprinted in French as “L’analyse flambée,” Cinémaction 47 (1988): 168–70; and in English as “Analysis in Flames,” Diacritics 15:1 (1985): 54–6.] Argues, polemically, that film analysis has become an art without a future, because the “text” of a film is an elusive body that cannot really be quoted or grasped, being polysemous, and molded by iconicity and analogy, thus pushing language into check and forcing film analysis to take refuge in its own (theoretical) domain. Bellour, Raymond. “L’utopie-vidéo,” Où va la vidéo? Cahiers du cinéma, extra series (spring 1986): 87–92. [Reprinted in English as “Video Utopia,” Catalogue National Video Festival. Los Angeles (1986), 87–92.] Draws an analogy between video’s relation with television and the dialogue between experimental literature and the industrialization of the press that took place in the late nineteenth century, proposing that the connection

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linking video art to TV is what gives video its particular texture, using an analysis of three American tapes for exemplification. Bellour, Raymond. “L’interruption, l’instant,” La Recherche photographique 3 (December 1987): 51–61. With reference to the theories of Bergson, Deleuze, and Barthes, traces the genealogy of the use of the freeze-frame in cinema from Vertov and René Clair onward, showing how the stilled image reflects a relentless search for a different kind of time compared with the time-movement of which cinema is normally composed. Bellour, Raymond. “La redevance du fantôme.” In Michel Frizot, eds. Le Temps d’un mouvement. Paris: Centre national de la photographie, 1987, 109–13. [Reprinted in English as “The Phantom’s Due,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 16:2 (1994): 164–74.] Shows how lack of focus and blur affirm both the primitive and the artificial in photographs, with movement in the image implying a sort of “internal rumbling,” and, if not an encounter, at the very least a friction between the body-gaze and the reality that appears “in a shudder, in a shutter.” Bellour, Raymond. “La lettre dit encore,” Vertigo 2 (1988): 99–104. [Reprinted in English as Raymond Bellour and Elizabeth Lyon. “The Letter Goes On . . . ,” Camera Obscura 8 (3 24) (1990): 206–15.] An appraisal of the video letter, consisting of sixteen letter-fragments, made up of images and sounds, conceived jointly by the poet and avantgarde filmmaker Shuji Terayama and the poet Shuntaro Tanikawa, and sent to one another. Bellour concludes that this technique reveals a confusion of identities that implies a questioning of subjective non-identity. Bellour, Raymond. “Autoportraits,” Vidéo, Communications 48 (1988): 327–87. Commencing with an examination of the way that Thierry Kuntzel’s Still explores how the video image can represent an unstable, vibrant image of thought with all its jumps and disorder, this essay considers how the “I” has been represented in cinema, placing this in the context of previous attempts to depict the actuality of subjectivity, such as Stendhal’s Vie de Henry Brulard. Articles Reprinted in L’Entre-images 2: mots, images Bellour, Raymond. “Les mots-images,” Magazine littéraire 259 (November 1988): 63–4. Considers Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Mirror of Ink,” in which Yaqub the Ailing, a tyrant, sees the images he wants to see in a mirror formed from a pool of ink in his hand as symbolically paradigmatic of



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a general dispositif in which words and images, literature and cinema, exchange their properties. Bellour, Raymond. “Le cinéma et …” In “Christian Metz et la théorie du cinéma,” Iris 10 (special issue): Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1990, 15–35. [Reprinted in English as “Cinema and …,” Semiotica 112:1–2 (1996): 207–29.] Considers Christian Metz’s theory of cinema in the context of the theorizing of discursivity launched by Michel Foucault; the pioneering film theory of André Bazin; and the convergence of semiology and psychoanalysis. Raymond Bellour, “La double hélice.” In Raymond Bellour, Catherine David, and Christine Van Assche, eds. Passages de l’image. Paris: Centre George Pompidou, 1990, 35–56. [Also published in English as Raymond Bellour. “The Double Helix.” Trans. James Eddy. In Timothy Druckrey, ed. Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation. New York: Aperture, 1996, 173–99. ] Explores the way in which contamination of “beings and systems” is occurring more and more often between images as a result of the fact that spectators are increasingly passing in front of images, just as images pass in front of the viewer, explaining that the coexistence of these multiple processes, which creates a visual image that is contained within an “audiovisual or scriptovisual” image that envelops it, is what the term “L’Entre-images” is designed to intimate. Bellour, Raymond. “L’ici-là-bas,” Chimères 15 (autumn 1992): 73–80. Discusses Maurice Sendak’s Outside over There (1981), a picture book for children, as illustrating, in its depiction of the passage of a child into adulthood, the parallel sensation of a passage effectuated between, and simultaneously away from, the image modes of cinema, painting, and the photograph. Bellour, Raymond. “La mort inassouvie,” Trafic 1 (winter 1991): 91–6. Explores the way that video has enlarged “the field of the obscene,” when compared with cinema, in terms of the ways in which installations have been used to depict death, involving different technology and a different type of dispositif. Bellour, Raymond. “L’Entretemps,” Trafic 11 (summer 1994): 77–84. Analyzes The Saga of Anatahan (Josef von Sternberg, 1953) and The Scarlet Empress (Sternberg, 1934) to show how they play upon the uncertainty generated by the relationship between elements within the shot that move and those that seem to remain immobile, together with the unexpected quality of things that one glimpses rather than sees clearly. Bellour, Raymond. “Avant, après,” Trafic 10 (spring 1994): 5–16. Examines Alain Resnais’s Smoking/No Smoking (1993) as a cinematic reply

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to the accelerated development of interactive technologies, which seeks to exploit a similar kind of interactive form and artifice, assisted by the presence of theatrical elements. Bellour, Raymond. “La matrice,” Trafic 14 (spring 1995): 91–4. A critical reflection on Picture Story (1979), written for the catalogue of the exhibition of Gary Hill, Sites Recited, Long Beach Museum of Arts, December 1993–February 1994, emphasizing how the work establishes a relationship between machines and the body that induces a transformation in the thinking and feeling body of the spectator. Bellour, Raymond. “Sur la scène du rêve,” Trafic 13 (winter 1995): 59–91. Considers eight films – Cézanne – Conversation with Joachim Gasquet (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1990); Dreams (Akira Kurosawa, 1990); La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette, 1991); Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (Léos Carax, 1991); Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, 1991); Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders, 1991); Border Line (Danièle Dubroux, 1992); and The Quince Tree Sun (Victor Erice, 1992) – to trace the growing intersection of cinema and painting. Bellour, Raymond. “L’arrière-monde,” Cinémathèque 8 (autumn 1995): 6–11. Analyzes a series of early photograms, invoking Deleuze’s notion of the interval, to theorize how images can be extended, prolonged, and transferred out of their context through such devices as contiguity, approximation, and juxtaposition, relating these strategies to the work of Jean-Luc Godard and others. Bellour, Raymond. “Sauver l’image,” Trafic 18 (spring 1996): 90–3. Through an analysis of the diverse elements in Christian Boltanski’s installation “Les concessions” and Terry Gilliam’s remake of Marker’s La Jetée (1962), demonstrates how each particular dispositif is “an act of thought.” Bellour, Raymond. “Penser, raconter – Le cinéma de Gilles Deleuze.” In Oliver Fahle and Lorenz Engell, eds. Der Film bei Deleuze/Le Cinéma selon Deleuze. Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar; Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997, 22–60. [Reprinted in English as Bellour, Raymond; Mcmuhan, Melissa. “Thinking, Recounting: The Cinema of Gilles Deleuze,” Discourse 20:3 (1998): 56–75.] Outlines his response to Deleuze’s two books on cinema, The MovementImage and The Time-Image, demonstrating how these induce a new relation between philosophy and cinema and develop a taxonomy of images and signs. Bellour, Raymond. “Plier l’image,” Trafic 25 (spring 1998): 41–4. Applies Deleuze’s notion of “perception in the folds” to an analysis of a film by Resnais in order to show how the filmmaker includes shots that



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reveal the presence of the past in the present depicted in the film, thus generating a pulsation of movement that expresses the pure passage of time. Articles Reprinted in La Querelle des dispositifs Bellour, Raymond. “D’un autre cinéma,” Trafic 34 (summer 2000): 5–21. [Reprinted also in Tanya Leighton, ed., Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader, London: Tate Publishing in Association with After all, 2008, 406–22.] With reference to various works by Pipilotti Rist and others, examines the place of video art and film installations in relation to cinema, arguing that they should neither be considered as cinema, nor as a supplement to cinema, given the historical and formal uniqueness of the dispositif of the cinema proper. Bellour, Raymond. “L’effet Daney ou l’arrêt de vie et de mort,” Trafic 37 (spring 2001): 75–86. Considers the implications of Serge Daney’s speculations on the effect of a freeze-frame, as classically exemplified at the end of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), linking the importance of this device to Daney’s view that an image is “always-already-arrested,” thus associating it with a subliminal awareness of death. Bellour, Raymond. “Quelques motifs de chérir *Corpus Callosum,” Trafic 45 (spring 2003): 32–4. An appraisal of Michael Snow’s film *Corpus Callosum (2002) as one that invents a radical solution to the perennial tension in cinema between the tendency to draw and the tendency to record by using a computer program to transform and metamorphose scenes shot realistically of life in an office, thus creating a form of meta-realism. Bellour, Raymond. “The Waves,” artpress 297 (January 2004): 80–1. Discusses Thierry Kuntzel’s installation “The Waves” (2003) to show how it activates a perceptive feeling through the effect of movement, while the freezing of the image witnessed by the spectator-actor illustrates Gilles Deleuze’s propositions in Le Pli concerning multiple, ungraspable “folds” in awareness that are always recommencing, so that the installation itself represents the dispositif in which it is viewed. Bellour, Raymond. “Un peu plus de réel,” Trafic 54 (summer 2005): 5–12. An appraisal of Agnès Varda’s “3+3+15 = 3 installations,” exhibited from January to March 2005, as an example of how filmmakers are being increasingly drawn to the making of gallery installations, partly because, in Varda’s words, they give “permission not to tell a story.”

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Bellour, Raymond. “Trois gestes (Jonas Mekas, Rinko Kawauchi, Chris Marker),” Trafic 60 (winter 2006): 13–27. Examines work by three avant-garde filmmakers to show how each, in different ways, pushes the boundaries that draw together and separate a moving image and an image that remains motionless, in order to induce a “pure experience of time” that is created by a multiplication of spaces – a necessary condition for remembering the twentieth century. Bellour, Raymond. “Flo, Flo, Flo,” Trafic 59 (autumn 2006): 66–70. Examines Flo Rounds a Corner (Ken Jacobs, 1999) in order to show how Jacobs complicates a very simple story through using the device of “flicker,” in such a way as to create an effect of agitated dislocation that reflects the volcano nearby, thus disrupting the apparent transparency of simple reality. Bellour, Raymond. “Être au cinéma,” Trafic 62 (summer 2007): 13–16. An appraisal of Chantal Akerman’s film-installation Là-bas (2006), suggesting why it induces a sensation of being at the cinema as few other films do, owing to the effect of watching the forty-six shots that constitute it in complete darkness. Bellour, Raymond. “Ce que peut une installation,” Trafic 61 (spring 2007): 14–17. An appraisal of Agnès Varda’s installation Les Justes de France, set during the Nazi occupation, exhibited in Paris in January 2007, exploring the interplay between fiction and documentary, as well as the intrusion of expressionism, in the two films that constitute it. Bellour, Raymond. “L’Image-tableau,” L’Art absolument 21 (June 2007): 10–17. An analysis of the last video work by Thierry Kuntzel, Gilles (De l’obscur à l’obscure clarté), exploring the relation of this installation to the painting by Watteau that it invokes. Bellour, Raymond. “Varda ou l’art contemporain,” Trafic 69 (spring 2009): 16–19. Examines Agnès Varda’s representational strategy in her autobiographical portrait, The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda, 2008), identifying how chronology constantly implodes because of the zigzags of memory and the presence of mises en abyme, which causes the film to function like a series of installations. Bellour, Raymond. “Le futur antérieur,” Trafic 70 (summer 2009): 5–15. [Also reprinted in Pensées du cinéma.] An analysis of Philippe Grandrieux’s Un lac (2008), showing how it exhibits a distinctive characteristic of a certain kind of modern cinema: a reversibility of time that corresponds to future-anterior verbal form in the



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French language, through its creation of a mise en abyme in the audiovisual dispositif. Articles Reprinted in Le Corps du cinéma Bellour, Raymond. “Le dépli des émotions,” Trafic 43 (autumn 2002): 93–128. [Reprinted in English, in an abridged form, as “Going to the Cinema with Félix Guattari and Daniel Stern.” In Eric Alliez and Andrew Joffey, eds. The Guattari Effect. London/New York: Continuum, 2011, 220–34.] Draws upon the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Daniel Stern to demonstrate the co-presence in films of two realities that are superimposed and appear indivisible, but are nonetheless different; the simultaneous operation of conscious and unconscious perception; and the role of these in generating emotion in the spectator that issues a hypnotic response. Bellour, Raymond. “Daniel Stern encore,” Trafic 57 (spring 2006): 52–62. Gives an account of the psychiatrist Daniel Stern’s theory of vitality affects as dynamic forces that influence not merely infants during their early life, but extend into human experience at all stages, showing how this theory can illuminate how cinema exerts its power on the spectator. Bellour, Raymond. “Bringing up Baby: Monkey Business,” Trafic 63 (autumn 2007): 116–27. An examination of two films, Bringing up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) and Monkey Business (Howard Hawks, 1952), placing them in the context of other films about animals in order to show the importance of the movement of animals in furthering the dynamic of the story, by stimulating and animating its actions from within the fable. Articles Reprinted in Pensées du cinéma Bellour, Raymond. “Le film qu’on accompagne,” Trafic 4 (autumn 1992): 109–30. [An updated version is printed in Sandra Alvarez de Toledo, éd. Ritwik Ghatak. Des films du Bengale. Paris: L’Arachnéen, 2011, pp. 154–73; reprinted in English as “The Film that We Accompany,” Rouge (2004), http://www.rouge.com.au/3/film.html, accessed September 3, 2017.] A crucial essay in which Bellour analyzes the films of Ritwik Ghatak to show how, through insistence, variation, and repetition, they express themselves in a very physical fashion, with action-images and perceptionimages instantly transmuting into affect-images, particularly because of the use of close-up shots.

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Bellour, Raymond. “Pour Sombre,” Trafic 28 (winter, 1998): 5–8. Examines Philippe Grandrieux’s Sombre (1998) to argue that, despite its formal and artistic aspects the power of its impact, the film’s true obscenity, is to be found in the clarity of its pretended reality, in its ideology, and in the brutality of its subject, which deals with an excess of violence toward women – even though it appears to be about childhood and the cinema at its beginning. Bellour, Raymond. “Ces images d’un malheur sans partage,” Trafic 35 (summer 2000): 20–4. [Reprinted in English as “Images of an Indivisible Order,” A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry 1:6 (January 2002): 30–41.] Examines Chantal Akerman’s use of images of confinement, showing how it is her extraordinary capacity for constructing shots and shot-durations, in order to link them in a calculated way, that confers on her cinema a power that simulates a sense of enclosure or confinement. Bellour, Raymond. “Des corps renouvelés,” Trafic 44 (winter 2002): 21–4. Argues that cinematic emotion relates to three bodies – the body of animal sensation that draws the spectator into the reality of the image on the screen; the somatic effects that are generated in the spectator by the mise en scène; and a barely internalized emotion that feels as if it is ready to pass back outside the body to become suspended as pure sensation – concluding that all three bodies are activated by Philippe Grandrieux’s La Vie nouvelle (2002). Bellour, Raymond. “Le tremblement,” Trafic 47 (autumn 2003): 67–70. Examines Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m., a 2001 French documentary film directed by Claude Lanzmann, to identify the strategies that generate its nearly unbearable emotional power, showing how Lanzmann’s handling of shots and his approach are varied for effect in the second part of the film, thus illustrating Bellour’s contention that cinema depends not only on the reproduction of movement, but also on the physical speed of the défilement whereby this movement is presented to the eye through the moving of the camera. Bellour, Raymond. “Le parti pris du réel,” Trafic 49 (spring 2004): 5–13. Discusses several films by Gus Van Sant (Elephant, 2003, in particular) to show how, by deliberately deconstructing conventional cinematic techniques, the filmmaker has created a new kind of cinema that contrasts with traditional American cinema, in which energy is brought into action through the need to address some crisis. Bellour, Raymond. “Voix d’images,” Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, Special Issue, Trafic 50 (summer 2004): 467–71. [A modified version of an article originally published in English as “L’Amore (Ways of love).” In Mary Lea



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Bandy and Antonio Monda, eds. The Hidden God. Film and Faith, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2003, 51–7.] Analyzes two films by Roberto Rossellini to show the power of voices: on the one hand, the human voice, which cinematic technology endows with an illusion of presence, and, on the other, the “divine voice” of the other, whose enigmatic silence is evoked by the human voice, thus creating a relational coexistence between a religious dimension and a technological dimension out of which Rossellini’s art is created. Bellour, Raymond. “L’affolement,” Trafic 53 (spring 2005): 111–18. [Published in English as “Panic.” In Joë McElhaney, Vincente Minnelli. The Art of Entertainment, Detroit: Wayne University Press, 2009, 405–9.] Considers a variety of films – including Brigadoon, Tootsie, and Tea and Sympathy – to illustrate a principle of “overreaction” that provides the dynamic informing every aspect of each film as a whole. Bellour, Raymond. “Made in U.S.A.,” Spécial Politique(s) de John Ford,” Trafic 56 (winter 2005): 33–7. Uses Peter Handke’s novel La Courte Lettre pour un long adieu, in which the hero decides to visit John Ford at his ranch in California, as the pretext for a reflection on the qualities of American cinema, exemplified in Ford’s “organic” films, that have drawn European filmmakers to want to borrow from it. Bellour, Raymond. “Le plus beau visage, le plus grand acteur – Lillian Gish, Cary Grant,” L’Enigme de l’acteur, Trafic 65 (spring 2008): 82–5. Considers the impact on the screen of the face of Lillian Gish and the charisma of Cary Grant as an actor, demonstrating how the apparent fixed “visagéity” of the former is a constructed illusion achieved through the use of close-up shots, whereas the dynamic presence of the latter is created by the coincidence of his acting with the tempo of the shots. Bellour, Raymond. “Fellini roman” (à propos de Federico Fellini, romance de Jean-Paul Manganaro), Trafic 71 (autumn 2009): 85–90. Asserts the significance of Jean-Paul Manganaro’s book on Fellini as a redletter day on account of its indifference to the scholarly conventions that normally govern the writing of monographs, which are replaced, instead, by a “sumptuous plenitude” of writing that turns it into an unforgettable work that “ceaselessly forms and reforms itself.” Bellour, Raymond. “Saraband d’Ingmar Bergman,” “20 ans, 20 films,” Special Issue, Trafic 80 (winter 2011): 108–13. Considers the effect of Bergman’s placement of a photograph within the mise en scène of Saraband (Ingmar Bergman, 2003), showing how a vacillation is established between the supposed memory of the character concerned and that of the film that is induced by this initial memory,

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­ roducing a “question en abyme” as to who took the photo, and from when p the photo came, thus generating an uncertainty about the hundreds of images that compose the film. Bellour, Raymond. “Souffles de vie: Age Is . . . de Stephen Dwoskin,” Trafic 81 (spring 2012): 12–16. Examines Dwoskin’s exploration of the mysteries of suffering, contrasting its style, which is marked by a slowness of the camera as it follows subjects whose movements are uncertain and fragile, with that of the same filmmaker’s The Sun and the Moon (Stephen Dwoskin, 2008), which is characterized by images of nature that constitute a kind of “energetic metaphor.” Bellour, Raymond. “Marker forever,” Trafic 84 (winter 2012): 15–21. Appraises several films and installations by Chris Marker – including Level Five (Chris Marker, 1997), Immemory, and La Jetée – to argue that the filmmaker has returned to the photo as his primary passion and come to regard the computer as the ideal site for reinventing cinema after its supposed “death.” Bellour, Raymond. “Le Champignon des Carpathes, un grand film politique,” “Jean-Claude Biette, l’évidence et le secret,” Trafic 85 (spring 2013): 149–55. Analyzes Biette’s film, likening Biette to Jacques Tourneur, to show how Le Champignon des Carpathes (Jean-Claude Biette, 1990) is animated by a double movement: on the one hand, a logical succession of linked events; on the other, a pressure exerted by apparently irrational ruptures that destabilize the narrative and make it float above the soil on which it is built – with the intrusion of illusions and wordplay that detach the image from the literal story. Bellour, Raymond. “Sylvia quitte ou double,” Trafic 86 (summer 2013): 51–6. Examines two closely related films by José Luis Guerín, In the City of Sylvia (2007) and Guest (José Luis Guerin, 2010), showing how the differences between them mean that the former is not simply a draft for the latter, but a separate film in its own right because of their different representational procedures, with the former exploiting the enigmatic quality of static images, and the latter giving way to a sequential cadence that gives rise to the narrativity of cinema. Bellour, Raymond. “Comment être Avi Mograbi,” Trafic 88 (winter 2013): 5–12. Identifying the Israeli director as one of the filmmakers who, along with figures such as Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, and Nanni Moretti, play themselves on occasions to crystallize the reality to which they wish to bear witness, Bellour shows how the auteur, simultaneously real and fictional,



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elicits a confusing identification in the spectator as a means of stimulating a growing critique. Bellour, Raymond. “Pourquoi Harun nous était si précieux,” Trafic 93 (spring 2015): 66–73. An appreciation of Harun Farocki as filmmaker and critic, praising his attention to minute detail and the care he took in describing individual shots, finding equivalent qualities in Farocki’s films and installations, such as Les Ouvriers quittent l’usine (1995), Contre-chant (2004), and En sursis (2007). Articles in English Not Otherwise Republished in Bellour’s Books Bellour, Raymond and Stanley E. Gray. “Ideal Hadaly,” Camera Obscura 5 (3 15) (1986): 110. A speculation as to why Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, in The Future Eve, serialized in L’Étoile française from December 1880 to February 1881, assigned a feminine gender to his electro-human machine, concluding that Villiers prophetically outlines the institution of cinema by constructing a mass product, infinitely multipliable, that equates to the first love of humankind. Bellour, Raymond and Elisabeth Lyon. “The Power of Words, the Power of Images,” Camera Obscura 8 (3 24) (1990): 7–10. Using Jean-Luc Godard’s Puissance de la parole (1988) as an example, explores developments that have been taking place in the presentation of images: an oscillation between the mobility and immobility of the image; an oscillation between maintaining photographic analogy and a tendency toward defiguration; and a more profound relationship between words and images – suggesting that these tendencies have become more marked with the advent of video. Bellour, Raymond and Dana Polan. “Believing in the Cinema.” In E. Ann Kaplan, ed. Psychoanalysis & Cinema. New York and London: Routledge, 1990, 98–109. [Originally published as “Croire au cinéma,” Jacques Tourneur, Camera Stylo 4 (April 1986): 62–70.] Through a consideration of Jacques Tourneur’s Curse of the Demon (1957), demonstrates how the filmmaker uses such devices as frames, gazes, camera distances, and lighting to harness the power of cinema for the purpose of building up a fascination that leads a spectator to suspend his or her belief in the fantastic elements that constitute the story. Bellour, Raymond and Jeffrey Boyd. “‘. . . rait’: Sign of Utopia,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14:2 (2001): 477–84. [Originally published as “‘. . . rait,’ signe d’utopie,” Rue Descartes 34 (December 2001): 37–44.]

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Argues that both Roland Barthes and Henri Michaux were obsessed by forms of utopia “of which the utopia of the sign, the vanishing point shared by both text and image, is the crucial marker,” as signified in the inflection of the conditional mood cited in the title of this article. Bellour, Raymond, Alistair Fox, Hilary Radner, Cecilia Novero, and Masha Salazkina, “From Hypnosis to Animals,” Cinema Journal 53:3 (2014): 1–24. A translation of a key chapter in Bellour’s magnum opus, Le Corps du cinéma, in which he proposes that cinema induces a state of mild hypnosis in the spectator, accompanied by an activation of emotions that are linked to animality and the human body. Bellour, Raymond and Allyn Hardyck. “Hitchcock – The Animal, Life and Death.” In Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon, eds. Animal Life and the Moving Image. London: British Film Institute/Palgrave, 2015, 288–97. Proposes that the animal, as an image of life, of the living as such, is especially suited to embody death’s inevitability, which explains why animals feature so prominently in Alfred Hitchcock’s films, for example The Birds, for the purpose of creating a universe of fiction where murder is a primary motif. Bellour, Raymond, Elise Harris with Martine Beugnet. “Homo Animalis Kino.” In Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron, and Arild Fetveit, eds. Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017, 288–96. Through a consideration of Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012), Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, 2013), and Adieu au langage /Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014), explores how the deployment of animal presence is linked to technological mutations through which cinema survives by transforming itself. Miscellaneous Articles Bellour, Raymond. “Un cinéma réel,” Un cinéma réel, Artsept 1 (January– March 1963): 5–27. Argues that cinema should be considered “real,” rather than merely “realistic,” because, in the course of its communication with reality, it generates an awareness that has an impact that is greater than that of ordinary reality, owing to its mode of artistic expression. Bellour, Raymond. “Les signes et la métamorphose,” Le Cinéma et la Vérité, Artsept 2 (April–June 1963): 131–8. Addressing the fundamental question of the relationship between the real and the imaginary, argues that cinéma-vérité, rather than being considered



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simply as a transposition, translation, or reflection, constitutes, in fact, a “conduit” that is informed by “a secret law of exchange” that eventuates in a metamorphosis. Bellour, Raymond. “Le gai savoir,” L’Amour, Artsept 3 (October–December 1963): 55–60. An examination of François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, proposing that the allure of the film springs from the way that its characters incarnate an ideal of freedom and live in accordance with their own law, even though the liberty they experience exists on the verge of an abyss. Bellour, Raymond. “Pour une stylistique du film,” Revue d’esthétique 19:2 (1966): 161–78. Speculates on ways in which a stylistic approach to film differs from other approaches (historical, filmological, psychoanalytic, semiological) identifying the principles, methods, and perspectives of the former, defining it in terms of an intrinsic aesthetic to be found in each film, which, as a work, exists in a universe of other works, informed by sociological, cultural, and ideological realities that exist outside it, thus inviting “a double reading.” Bellour, Raymond. “Ciné-répétitions.” In René Passeron, ed. Recherches Poïétiques IV, Création et Répétition. Paris: Clancier-Guénaud, 1982, 137–43. [Reprinted in English as Raymond Bellour, “Cine-Repetitions,” trans. Kari Hanet, Screen 20.2 (1979): 65–72.] Outlines the various meanings of the word “repetition” as it pertains to films, identifying as the formative movement of cinematic language the “toing and froing between the subject and the object of his vision” (point of view); the alternation of shot-reverse-shots; the to-and-fro process between motifs that occurs in scales of framing; the opposition between static and moving shots; and the narrative distributions between shots. Bellour, Raymond. “La sculpture du temps: entretien avec Bill Viola,” Cahiers du cinéma 379 (January 1986): 35–44. [Originally published in English as Bellour, Raymond and Bill Viola. “An Interview with Bill Viola,” October 34 (October 1985): 91–119.] An interview in which Bellour explores with Bill Viola the latter’s distinctive approach in making video films, characterized by a greater degree of silence, a depth of interior movement, and a lesser investment in outer spectacle and realistic immediacy when compared with the contrasting tendency to be observed in American video-filmmaking. Bellour, Raymond. “Michaux l’intermédiaire,” L’Homme 29: 111/12 (July 1989): 194–207. Argues that Henri Michaux’s works occupy in the real world a role that is analogous to that that was played by myth in the societies that produced

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them, with a myth that is “minimal, flottant, aléatoire, blanc” residing under the “forme multiple et ouverte indéfiniment.” Bellour, Raymond. “L’autre,” Cahiers du cinéma 458 (July–August 1992): 44–6. A eulogy of Serge Daney, in which Bellour proclaims him not only the greatest film critic of his generation, but also describes him as “l’autre” [“the other”] given Daney’s desire to ensure that his journal, Trafic, would serve as a space in which all “the others of the other” could find a voice with regard to cinema as a threatened object. Bellour, Raymond. “Quatre cents hommes en croix,” Littérature 115 (1 September 1999): 31–41. A consideration of Henri Michaux’s short book, Quatre cents hommes en croix, arguing that it reveals Michaux’s recognition that writing is destined to become a substitute for religious belief, displaying the same concerns and forms, with the image of Christ crucified embodying the humanity of the suffering body, reflected in Michaux’s autoportrait. Bellour, Raymond. “L’animal comme corps du cinéma,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 16:5 (2012): 593–601. A condensed version, in French, of the chapter “De l’hypnose à l’animal” in Bellour’s major work, Le Corps du cinéma, outlining his theory of the relationship between hypnosis, animality, the emotions, and human spectatorship. SUPPLEMENTARY INTERVIEWS Bellour, Raymond and Janet Bergstrom. “Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Raymond Bellour,” Camera Obscura 1–2 (3–1 3–4) (summer 1979): 70–103. An extended interview conducted by one of the students who attended Bellour’s year-long seminar at the Centre universitaire américain du cinéma in Paris (1977–8), in which Bellour discusses the relationship between his work on nineteenth-century fiction and the American classical film; his theories about alternation and segmentation; and the symbolic significance and movement of the Oedipal trajectory in classical American film. Bellour, Raymond, Guy Rosolato, and Thomas Y. Levin. “Dialogue: Remembering (This Memory of) a Film.” In E. Ann Kaplan, ed. Psychoanalysis & Cinema. New York/London: Routledge, 1990, 198–216. An interview with Guy Rosolato (1924–2012), a prominent French psychoanalyst, on the relationship between psychoanalysis and cinema, in which Bellour speculates on how psychoanalysis can be invoked as a



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framework for approaching the analysis of a film, or as an instrument for examining psychological effects induced at the level of a single image that can be loaded with the entire weight of a film. [See also Le Livre des autres, under “Books/On Cinema, the Moving Image, and Art,” for interviews between Bellour and Michel Foucault, Claude LéviStrauss, Roland Barthes, Pierre Francastel, Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, Clémence Ramnoux, Michel Zéraffa, Christian Metz, Guy Rosolato, Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, and Pierre Clastres.]

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Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. –––––. Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque. Paris: Minuit, 1988. –––––. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. –––––. “The Brain Is the Screen: An Interview with Gilles Deleuze.” Trans. Marie Thérèse Guirgis. In Gregory Flaxman, ed. The Brain Is the Screen. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 377. –––––. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. London, New York: Continuum, 2003. –––––. Lettres et autres textes. Ed. David Lapoujade. Paris: Minuit, 2015. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking Press, 1977 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983]. –––––. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Duckworth, George E. Nature of Roman Comedy: A Study in Popular Entertainment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952 [repr. 2015]. Duguet, Anne-Marie. Vidéo, la mémoire au poing. Paris: Hachette, 1981. –––––. Jean-Christophe Averty (Paris: Dis Voir, 1991). –––––, ed. Thierry Kuntzel: Title TK (book / DVD-ROM). Paris: Les Presses du Réel; copublished with the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 2006. Eisenstein, Sergei Mikhailovich. Eisenstein on Disney. Ed. Jay Leyda. Trans. Alan Y. Upchurch. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1986. Epstein, Jean. Écrits sur le cinéma: 1921–1953, édition chronologique. Paris: Seghers, 1974–5. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Tavistock Publications, 1970. –––––. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. –––––. Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. –––––. “What Is an Author?” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977, 124–127. –––––, and Maurice Blanchot. Foucault / Blanchot: Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside, by Michel Foucault; Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him, by Maurice Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey Melman. New York: Zone Books, 1987. –––––, Ludwig Binswanger, and Keith Hoeller. Dream and Existence. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993. Fox, Alistair. Speaking Pictures: Neuropsychoanalysis and Authorship in Film and Literature. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016. Freud, Sigmund. “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 18 (1937): 373–405. –––––. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1949. –––––. Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Macmillan, 1955.



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Index

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Index

Adieu au langage (Jean-Luc Godard) see Goodbye to Language Agamben, Giorgio, 130, 167 Akerman, Chantal, 37, 200, 202 Amalgam (Werner Nekes), 120 American cinema, 98, 108–13, 151, 166, 187, 202, 203 Analysis of Film, The (Raymond Bellour), 11, 12, 17, 91, 92, 93, 99, 105, 107, 111, 112–13, 147–8, 151, 165 Andrew, Dudley, 13, 14, 16, 43, 53 animals, 5, 39, 53–60, 122, 148, 151, 155–67, 201, 206 Anthropologie structurale (Claude LéviStrauss), 92 Anti-Oedipus (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), 20, 98, 105, 107, 108, 109 Appétit d’oiseau (Peter Folds), 122 Arasse, Daniel, 116 Artaud, Antonin, 156 Au bord de la mer bleue (Boris Barnet) see By the Bluest of Seas Aumont, Jacques, 79–80, 81, 97, 99, 120, 131, 155, 188 Autrefois les canuts (Bernard Chardère), 179 Averty, Jean-Christophe, 121, 136 Barnet, Boris, 132, 162 Barthes, Roland, 11–12, 17, 24, 92–5, 98, 100, 106, 134–5, 142, 151–2, 161, 164, 181, 187, 196, 206, 209 Baudelaire, Charles, 113, 146 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 41, 62–3, 130, 157, 159, 188 Bazin, André, 15, 16, 131, 167, 187, 195, 197 Beaches of Agnès, The (Agnès Varda), 200 Belting, Hans, 139 Benjamin, Walter, 15, 33, 57, 169

Berger, John, 33, 59 Bergman, Ingmar, 37, 189, 203 Bergson, Henri, 196 Between-the-Images (Raymond Bellour), 45–6, 124, 125, 130, 133, 145–6, 149, 167 Between-the-Images 2, 146 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Fritz Lang), 127 Biette, Jean-Claude, 189, 204 Binswanger, Ludwig, 94 Birds, The (Alfred Hitchcock), 91, 115, 166, 192, 193, 206 Birnbaum, Dara, 135 Birth of the Clinic, The (Michel Foucault), 148 Bis ans Ende der Welt (Wim Wenders) see Until the End of the World Blanchot, Maurice, 36, 95, 97, 98, 108 blocage symbolique, 18, 19, 23; see also under symbolic blocage Boltanski, Christian, 198 Border Line (Danièle Dubroux), 198 Bordwell, David, 3, 4, 16, 22, 25, 42, 113 Borges, Jorge Luis, 100, 196 Branigan, Edward, 11, 25 Brenez, Nicole, 99, 150, 162 Bresson, Robert, 167 Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli), 203 Bringing up Baby (Howard Hawks), 155, 165, 166, 201 Brion, Patrick, 136, 138 Brion-Guerry, Liliane, 180 Brontë, Charlotte, 190 Brontë, Emily, 191 Brontë, Patrick Branwell, 190 Broodthaers, Marcel, 139 Brunsdon, Charlotte, 43 Buñuel, Luis, 59

218

Raymond Bellour

Burt, Jonathan, 165 By the Bluest of Seas (Boris Barnet), 162 Carax, Leos, 167, 198, 206 Carroll, Noël, 163 Casetti, Francesco, 76, 79–84 Cassavetes, John, 167 Cat People (Jacques Tourneur), 188 Cézanne (Jean-Marie Straub and Daniéle Huillet), 198 Chardère, Bernard, 178, 179 Chertok, Léon, 160 Chevrier, Jean-François, 194 Church Gibson, Pamela, 73 Cimino, Michael, 167 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles), 188 Clair, René, 133, 134, 196 Clash of the Wolves (Noel M. Smith), 166 Clastres, Pierre, 187 Clément, Catherine, 92, 93 Cloud-Capped Star, The (Ritwik Ghatak), 18, 114, 149, 18 Coleman, James, 168 Collins, Jim, 36, 181 Conrad, Tony, 114 Contre-chant (Harun Farocki), 205 Coppola, Francis Ford, 167 *Corpus Callosum (Michael Snow), 199 Corrigan, Timothy, 181 Crowd, The (King Vidor), 169 Curse of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur), 205 Damasio, Antonio, 54, 58, 61, 78, 80, 82, 83, 163 Daney, Serge, 46, 47, 66, 77, 120, 133, 161, 169, 182, 199, 208 Daquin, Louis, 92 de Fontenay, Elisabeth, 60, 167 de l’Isle-Adam, Villiers, 205 death of cinema, 40, 74, 76, 134 défilement, 34, 38, 39, 43, 44, 57, 161, 195, 202 Delavaud, Gilles, 136 Deleuze, Gilles, 20, 24, 54, 63, 73, 94, 97–100, 108, 126, 134, 150, 156, 164, 196–99, 201 Delluc, Louis, 169 Derrida, Jacques, 95, 167 Descartes, René, 54, 83, 205 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 76 Discipline and Punish (Michel Foucault), 41, 130

Discourse, Figure (Jean-François Lyotard), 99 dispositif(s), 41–7, 54–7, 61–3, 127, 130–1, 138, 142, 147–8, 156–60, 167–70, 197, 198, 201 Doane, Mary Ann, 20 Domarchi, Jean, 187 Don Quichotte (Cervantes), 100 Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques, 187 Dovjenko, Alexander, 133 Down There (Chantal Akerman), 200 Downey, Juan, 121 Dreams (Akira Kurosawa), 198 Dubois, Philippe, 79, 80, 99 Duguet, Anne-Marie, 121, 122, 135 Dumas, Alexandre, 94, 108, 109, 111, 116, 147, 157, 190 “D’un autre cinéma” (Raymond Bellour), 45, 46, 199 Dwoskin, Stephen, 189, 204 Edison, Thomas, 38 Eisenstein, Sergei, 155 El sol del membrillo (Victor Erice), 198 Electrocuting an Elephant (Thomas Edison), 165 Elementary Structures of Kinship, The (Claude Lévi-Strauss), 98 Elephant (Gus Van Sant), 202 embodied spectator, 65 En sursis (Harun Farocki), 205 Epstein, Jean, 155 Eustache, Jean, 72, 133 Fairfax, Daniel, 80 Fargier, Jean-Paul, 136 Farocki, Harun, 205 Fellini, Federico, 189, 203 Ferrari, Emmanuelle, 150 Fieschi, Jean-André, 121 figural, the, 99 Five Obstructions (Lars Von Trier, Jørgen Leigh), 71 Flo Rounds a Corner (Ken Jacobs), 200 Folds, Peter, 122 Ford, John, 189, 203 Foucault, Michel, 41, 93–5, 97, 107–9, 130, 140, 147–8, 187, 197, 209 400 Blows, The (François Truffaut), 39, 133, 134, 199 Fox, Alistair, 64 Francastel, Pierre, 187 France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (Jean-Luc Godard), 135



Index

freeze-frame(s), 39, 40, 132, 133, 195–6, 199 Freud, Anna, 19 Freud, Sigmund, 16, 19–20, 22–5, 35, 53, 57, 62–3, 98–100, 107–9, 111, 148, 159 Geertz, Clifford, 22 Gehr, Ernie, 161 Gerbi, Antonello, 81 Ghatak, Ritwik, 18, 37, 114, 149, 189, 201 Gide, André, 191 Gigi (Vincente Minnelli), 106, 193 Gilles (De l’obscur à l’obscure clarté) (Thierry Kuntzel), 200 Gilliam, Terry, 198 Gish, Lillian, 203 Godard, Jean-Luc, 4, 37, 42, 46–7, 72, 78–9, 125–6, 133, 135–7, 161–2, 167, 187, 191, 195, 198, 204, 205–6 Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard), 167, 206 Grandrieux, Philippe, 124, 125, 189, 200, 202 Grant, Cary, 203 Greenberg, Clement, 131, 132 Griffith, D. W., 112, 133, 161, 188 Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog), 165 Grodal, Torben, 163 Guardi, Francesco, 125 Guattari, Félix, 12, 20, 24, 73, 98, 108, 126, 150, 164, 167, 201 Guerín, José-Luis, 189 Guest (José Luis Guerín), 204 Guibert, Hervé, 96 Hall, Doug, 135 Hall, Stuart, 43 Hansen, Miriam, 15, 57, 60 Hardyck, Allyn, 33, 34, 37, 38, 41, 64 Hazard, Paul, 94, 167 Heidegger, Martin, 167 Hill, Gary, 4, 16, 17, 22, 35, 43, 92, 93, 95, 106, 121, 198 Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais), 97, 179 Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard), 46, 47, 162 Hitchcock, Alfred, 18–26, 64, 91, 111–12, 148, 152–3, 187, 188, 192, 193, 194, 206 “Hitchcock, the Enunciator” (Raymond Bellour), 25 Holy Motors (Leos Carax), 167, 206

219

hypnosis, 54–60, 61–3, 65, 146–9, 155–60, 206 Imamura, Shohei, 165 Immemory (Chris Marker), 139, 204 In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín), 204 Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud), 17, 22 It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra), 133, 134 Jaeggi, Danielle, 195 James, Alice, 190 Jencks, Charles, 36 Jules and Jim (François Truffaut), 207 Kawauchi, Rinko, 200 Klein, Melanie, 107 Kubelka, Peter, 114, 161 Kubie, Lawrence, 156, 161 Kuntzel, Thierry, 21–3, 24–5, 33–8, 40, 63, 99, 107, 114, 119–25, 130–1, 188, 194, 196, 199, 200 Kurosawa, Kiyoshi, 160 “L’analyse flambée” (Raymond Bellour), 12, 17, 18, 43, 45, 195 L’Entre-images (Raymond Bellour), 38, 40, 42, 44–5, 98, 121–5, 153, 194, 197 L’Entre-images 2 (Raymond Bellour), 46 La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette), 198 La Chambre claire (Roland Barthes), 95, 152, 164 La Cocina (Eulàlia Valldosera), 168 La Desserte blanche (Thierry Kuntzel), 125 “La double hélice” (Raymond Bellour), 46, 197 La Jetée (Chris Marker), 13, 35, 99, 122, 134, 198, 204 La Machine à tuer les méchants (Roberto Rossellini) see Machine That Kills Bad People, The La Mort aux trousses see North by Northwest La Peau douce (François Truffaut) see Soft Skin, The La Peinture cubiste (Thierry Kuntzel and Philippe Grandrieux), 124, 125 La Querelle des dispositifs (Raymond Bellour), 41, 45, 52, 115, 127, 146, 168, 183, 199 La Région centrale (Michael Snow), 120 La Rejetée (Thierry Kuntzel), 35, 122

220

Raymond Bellour

La Vie nouvelle (Philippe Grandrieux) see New Life, A Là-bas (Chantal Akerman) see Down There Lacan, Jacques, 4, 20, 57, 62, 107, 109, 159 Lacassin, Francis, 179 Lang, Fritz, 111–12, 123, 127, 156, 159, 179, 188, 192 Langage et Cinéma (Christian Metz), 93 Laplanche, Jean, 62, 187, 209 Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais), 94, 157 “Le blocage symbolique” (Raymond Bellour), 20, 105, 108, 109 Le Champignon des Carpathes (Jean-Claude Biette), 204 Le Corps du cinéma (Raymond Bellour), 20, 21, 38, 45, 47, 52–66, 99, 112–14, 146–53, 155–8, 160–11, 169, 206 Le Déjeuner du chat (Louis Lumière), 165 Le Goff, Jacques, 187 Le Livre des autres (Raymond Bellour), 91, 99, 100, 187, 209 “Le monde et la distance” (Raymond Bellour), 99, 147, 192 Le Pli (Gilles Deleuze), 150, 199 “Le spectateur pensif” (Raymond Bellour), 33, 42, 43, 123, 195 “Le texte introuvable” (Raymond Bellour), 17, 18 “Le travail du film 2” (Thierry Kuntzel), 99 Léger, Guy, 15 Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (Léos Carax), 198 Les Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Roland Barthes), 95 Les Justes de France (Agnès Varda), 200 Les Ouvriers quittent l’usine (Harun Farocki), 205 Les Plages d’Agnès (Agnès Varda) see Beaches of Agnès, The Les quatre cents coups (François Truffaut) see 400 Blows, The Les Rendez-vous de Copenhague (Raymond Bellour), 125, 181 Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls), 43, 127, 152 Leutrat, Jean-Louis, 120, 187, 188 Level Five (Chris Marker), 204 Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel), 206 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 91–3, 98, 181, 187, 209 Leys, Ruth, 56

“L’interruption, l’instant” (Raymond Bellour), 133 Lippit, Akira, 59 London, Barbara, 35, 121 Lonedale Operator, The (D. W. Griffith), 112, 161 Love Streams (John Cassavetes), 167 Lyotard, Jean-François, 63, 99 Mabuse (Fritz Lang), 156, 159 MacCabe, Colin, 25, 42 McDougall, Joyce, 19 McLuhan, Marshall, 43, 71 Machine That Kills Bad People, The (Roberto Rossellini), 134, 167 Mademoiselle Guillotine (Raymond Bellour), 108, 190 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 138, 139, 140 Maltese Falcon, The (John Huston), 188 Mandrin, Louis, 179 Margolin, Sydney, 156, 157, 161 Marie, Michel, 13, 14, 188 Marker, Chris, 13, 35, 99, 122, 133–5, 139, 180, 189, 198, 200, 204 Marks, Laura, 55 Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock), 194 Martin, Adrian, 13, 23, 36, 41, 71 Marx, Leo, 166 Meghe Dhaka Tara (Ritwik Ghatak) see Cloud-Capped Star, The Mekas, Jonas, 200 Menschen am Sonntag (Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer) see People on Sunday Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 94 Metz, Christian, 12, 13–17, 20, 21, 26, 41–2, 57, 61–5, 92–3, 99, 105, 106–7, 115, 130, 157, 159, 187, 193, 197, 209 Michaux, Henri, 13, 34, 38, 126, 155, 178, 189, 190, 191, 206, 207, 208 Miéville, Anne-Marie, 135 Minnelli, Vincente, 100, 106, 179, 193, 203 Mograbi, Avi, 204 Mon ami Mandrin (Francis Lacassin), 179 Monkey Business (Howard Hawks), 155, 165, 201 Moretti, Nanni, 204 Morin, Edgar, 61, 162 Morley, David, 43 Most Dangerous Game, The (Ernest B. Shoedsack and Irving Pichel, 1932), 22, 114 Münsterberg, Hugo, 53, 82 Muntadas, Antoni, 135, 137



Index

221

Mystery of Oberwald, The (Michelangelo Antonioni), 125 Mystery of the Wax Museum, The (Michael Curtiz), 111 Mythologiques (Claude Lévi-Strauss), 92, 98

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock), 18, 20, 21, 23–4, 100, 111, 194 Puissance de la parole (Jean-Luc Godard), 205 Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa), 160

Nam June Paik, 121, 135 Nash, Roderick, 166 Nekes, Werner, 120 New Life, A (Philippe Grandrieux), 202 Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur), 99, 149 Nollywood, 72 Nora, Pierre, 187 North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock), 19– 24, 106, 108–11, 161, 166, 193 “Nostalgies” (Raymond Bellour), 98 Numéro deux (Jean-Luc Godard), 125

“Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (Michel Foucault), 95

Odin, Roger, 72 Oedipus complex, 19, 20, 23–4, 98, 108, 109, 111, 112, 187 Order of Things, The (Michel Foucault), 93, 94, 108 Outside over There (Maurice Sendak), 197 Ozu, Yasujirō, 37 Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, 179 package unit system, 72 Païni, Dominique, 146 Paramount decree (1948), 72 Parente, André, 98 “Passages de l’image” (Raymond Bellour), 23, 38, 45, 46, 135, 181 Paulhan, Jean, 124 Penley, Constance, 4, 6, 12, 18, 19, 181 pensive spectator, the, 33, 42, 43, 58, 152–3 People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer), 12, 188 Peterson, James, 163 Pialat, Maurice, 198 Planchon, Roger, 177, 178 Pleasure of the Text, The (Roland Barthes), 17 Polan, Dana, 181 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 62, 187, 209 “Pour une stylistique du film” (Raymond Bellour), 26 Poussin, Nicolas, 125 Prière pour Robinson Crusoé (Raymond Bellour, Francis Lacassin), 179 Proust, Marcel, 194

Radway, Janice, 45 Ramnoux, Clémence, 187 Rancière, Jacques, 97, 108, 131, 140 Renoir, Jean, 204 Resnais, Alain, 94, 97, 179, 180, 197, 198 Reverse Television (Bill Viola), 135, 137 Rivette, Jacques, 72, 187, 191, 198 Rodowick, David, 19, 20, 21, 25, 35, 40, 134, 181, 188 Rosolato, Guy, 187, 208 Rossellini, Roberto, 123, 133–7, 167, 189, 203 Rouget, Gilles, 161 Roumette, Sylvain, 123, 152 Roustang, François, 56, 63, 159 Rouvel, Catherine, 178 S/Z (Roland Barthes), 17, 92, 100 Sacks, Oliver, 39, 40 Saga of Anatahan, The (Kusakabe), 197 Saraband (Ingmar Bergman), 203 Satan mon prochain (Raymond Bellour, Francis Lacassin), 179 Sauve la vie (qui peut) (Jean-Luc Godard), 195 Scarlet Empress, The (Josef von Sternberg), 197 Schatz, Thomas, 72 Searle, John, 53 segmentation, 12, 14, 106, 120, 193, 208 Sentis, Catherine, 123, 152 Serene Velocity (Ernie Gehr), 161 Serres, Michel, 170 Seventh Heaven (Benoît Jacquot), 159 Shadow of a Doubt, The (Alfred Hitchcock), 152 Simmel, Georg, 78 Siodmak, Robert, 12, 188 Smoking/No Smoking (Alain Resnais), 197 Snow, Michael, 120, 199 Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (Claude Lanzmann), 202 Soft Skin, The (François Truffaut), 39 Sombre (Philippe Grandrieux), 202

222

Raymond Bellour

Souriau, Étienne, 59, 180 Stendahl, 140, 196 Stern, Daniel, 5, 35, 58, 60–4, 66, 100, 150–1, 157, 162–3, 164, 201 Sternberg, Josef von, 197 Sun and the Moon, The (Stephen Dwoskin), 204 Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock), 188 symbolic blockage, 19, 105, 108, 109, 112, 151, 165 Tanikawa, Shuntaro, 196 Tarentino, Quentin, 14, 36 Tea and Sympathy (Vincente Minnelli), 203 Téchiné, André, 191 Terayama, Shuji, 196 textual volume, 21, 22, 23, 34, 54 Teyssèdre, Bernard, 181 To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock), 24 Tootsie (Sydney Pollack), 203 Tourneur, Jacques, 204, 205 Truffaut, François, 26, 39, 78, 133, 191, 192, 199, 207 Ulmer, Edgar G., 12, 188 Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica), 167 Un lac (Philippe Grandrieux), 200 Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders), 198 Usai, Paolo Cherchi, 146

Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat), 198 Van Sant, Gus, 189, 202 Varda, Agnès, 146, 168, 169, 180, 199, 200 Vasulka, Woody, 127, 135 Vertov, Dziga, 132, 133, 134, 196 Veuves de Noirmoutier (Agnès Varda), 168 Viola, Bill, 36, 121, 131, 135, 137, 168, 194, 195, 207 vitality affects, 18, 35, 58, 60, 61, 62–5, 150, 162, 201 volume of memory, 23, 34 Warning Shadows (Arthur Robison), 116 Waves, The (Thierry Kuntzel), 199 Welles, Orson, 179 Wenders, Wim, 198 Westerner, The (William Wyler), 111 White, Susan, 181 Winter (the Death of Robert Hasler) (Thierry Kuntzel), 35 Young and Innocent (Alfred Hitchcock), 64 Zapping Zone (Chris Marker), 135 Zéraffa, Michel, 187 Zippy, Lori, 121 Žižek, Slavoj, 4 Zoo (CBS, 2015–current), 59