RADNER, Hilary Raymond Bellour - Cinema and The Moving Image PDF

H I L A R Y R A D N E R A N D A L I S TA I R F O X
R AY M O N D
BELLOUR
C I N E M A A N D T H E M OV I N G I M AG E
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
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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 1
Hilary Radner
Part 1
Raymond Bellour: Cinema and the Moving Image
Hilary Radner
1. Film Analysis: Image and Movement 11

2. The Digital Challenge: From the Theater to the Gallery 33
3. Cinema and the Body: The Ghost in the Theater 52
4. An Elegy for Cinema 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 91
6. Film Analysis and the Symbolic 105
7. Thierry Kuntzel and the Rise of Video Art 119
8. Arrested Images and “the Between-Images” 130
9. Spectators, Dispositifs, and the Cinematic Body 145
10. Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality 155
vi Raymond Bellour
Part 3
Biography and Publications of Raymond Bellour
Alistair Fox
Raymond Bellour (1939– ): A Biographical Sketch 177

A Select Annotated Bibliography of the Publications of Raymond
Bellour 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 encourag-
ing 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.
viii Raymond Bellour
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 help-
meet 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 con-
stitutes 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
x Raymond Bellour
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 discus-
sion 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, hyper-
texts.” 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 defini-
tive 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 Anglo-
American 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
2 Raymond Bellour
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 contribu-
tions 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 singu-
larity of cinematic experience in the period of classical cinema to discussing
new forms of spectatorship under the aegis of digital media in the twenty-
first 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 3
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 phi-
losophers 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, consti-
tuted 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
4 Raymond Bellour
inductive, taking as its point of departure specific details, the isolated example,
rather than a larger hypothesis that may inspire him deductively to seek exam-
ples 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, belat-
edly 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 inau-
gurated 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, trans-
location, and translations of different media forms, the existence of which led
to an announcement of what he calls the “querelle des dispositifs” (the argu-
ment 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 5
The concepts that animate Le Corps du cinéma, revolving around the emo-
tions, 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 post-
mortem 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 psy-
chiatrist 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 sus-
tained 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
6 Raymond Bellour
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, tel-
evision, which for many scholars in the field today constitutes a natural exten-
sion 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 contempo-
rary 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 7
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 influ-
ential 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 obvi-
ously 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
12 Raymond Bellour
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 final-
izing 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 accumu-
lation of which constituted the film’s plot, or a narrative, as part of his inves-
tigation 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 13
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 pro-
jects, 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 strate-
gies 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 inter-
rogate 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 multi-
ple 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,
14 Raymond Bellour
has . . . a specific material of expression which marks it off from other
systems.”10 Metz’s schematic description of what he called the grande syn-
tagmatique 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 avail-
able 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 appear-
ing 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 narra-
tive 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 strat-
egy 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 twenty-
first 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 direc-
tors whom they admire. Thus, Bellour’s most enduring legacy in this area
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, per-
spective. 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 technolo-
gies 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 “material-
ity 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 genera-
tion 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
16 Raymond Bellour
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 meth-
odologies that corresponded to the criteria used to evaluate so-called scientific
results in terms of “validity, reliability and generalizability.”20 Metz, in par-
ticular, 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 interpreta-
tion of a given work, a problem that Sigmund Freud encountered repeatedly
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 histori-
cally 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 mean-
ings are caught in an ever-expanding and shifting web of human experience.
18 Raymond Bellour
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 sub-
sequently 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 contin-
ued 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 emo-
tions.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 contribu-
tion 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 collec-
tion 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,
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 empha-
sis was the project of “film analysis,” for want of a better word. His predica-
ment 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 psycho-
analysts, 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 circular-
ity 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 analy-
sis, 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 histori-
cal phenomenon in terms of the evolution of culture and also of psychoana-
lytic 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 fol-
lowed, 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 gen-
erative 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
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 meta-
critical 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 philoso-
phy 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
22 Raymond Bellour
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 engage-
ment 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 “psychoana-
lytic,” but rather invokes an analogy between the film and the book. The idea
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 technol-
ogy, 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 funda-
mental 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 conjunc-
tion 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 par-
ticular.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 regu-
lated 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 accu-
mulation 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
24 Raymond Bellour
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’ expecta-
tions by strikingly killing its “star” in the first third of the film, and reach-
ing 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 thrill-
ers 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 nar-
rative 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 empha-
sis 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-
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 (pub-
lished 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 con-
scious 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 view-
er’s understanding of that character.65 Point of view, focalization, and enun-
ciation 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
26 Raymond Bellour
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 situ-
ates himself “at that point in the chain of events where what could be called
the film-wish is condensed. An authorial signature, but expanded, punctuat-
ing 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 “exter-
nal” 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
Bellour’s unwillingness to give up the notion of an author paradoxically

served him well when approaching art in the subsequent decades of the twen-
tieth 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
28 Raymond Bellour
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.
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 symbol-
ique,” 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 con-
ventional 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,
30 Raymond Bellour
trans Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press,
1977).
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 inter-
view 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 com-
pagnie 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-
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:
32 Raymond Bellour
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.
Digital Challenge: Theater to the Gallery 33
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 preoccupa-
tions, 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 pre-
sented 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
34 Raymond Bellour
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 sig-
nificant, 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 sug-
gested 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 classi-
cal 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
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 recre-
ate 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
36 Raymond Bellour
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 reitera-
tion 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-
atic, had exhausted itself with regard to offering a way to understand the cin-
ematic 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 experi-
ence 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 inter-
national 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 “confu-
sion” 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, signify-
ing 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
38 Raymond Bellour
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 sig-
nificant 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’Entre-
images, 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 projec-
tion 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
images projected at a particular speed as a single continuous movement per-

sisted 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 pho-
tography 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 repre-
sentation of what is “out there” in the world, meaning that our m otivation to
40 Raymond Bellour
“see” film or television images as replicating that world is part of how we mis-
understand 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 fol-
lowed 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 mutat-
ing” (like some sort of alien virus), has not only irrevocably changed the spec-
tators’ 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, irrevo-
cably changed by what he summarizes as “the between-images” (“l’entre-
images”). “The between-images” refers to the ways in which meanings are
produced among images, in which images circulate across multiple media-
platforms, 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, irrevo-
cably 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.
The Dispositif
The notion of the “dispositif,” another term preserved in French by Allyn
Hardyck, initially translated as “apparatus” (its literal translation in scien-
tific 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 con-
strained, 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 for-
mulation: “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
42 Raymond Bellour
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 spectator-
ship, 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 trans-
lation, 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 explora-
tions 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 atten-
tion 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
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, highlight-
ing 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 inser-
tion 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 specta-
tor,” because watching a film in a theater means that the viewer is tied to a
44 Raymond Bellour
d éfilement (the movement of the film-as-a-strip-of-celluloid through the pro-

jector 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 con-
sider 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 retro-
spective 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’Entre-
images 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 installa-
tion 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 explo-
sion of technologies, but also because of the consequent myriad possibilities
in which a moving image may be displayed, generate an ever-multiplying set
of dispositifs in which the artist in creating a work may also produce varia-
tions, 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 particu-
lar 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, extend-
ing 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 repub-
lished 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
46 Raymond Bellour
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 redis-
tributed, transformed, mimicked and reinstalled.63
While not necessarily proclaiming the “death of cinema,” Bellour pro-

posed 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 ‘projec-
tion 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 posi-
tion 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 mul-
tiplication 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.
48 Raymond Bellour
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
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://loop-
barcelona.com/video-conference/passages-de-limage/, accessed September 2,
2017.
23. Raymond Bellour, “Note for the Century,” trans. Allyn Hardyck, in Between-
the-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.
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.
50 Raymond Bellour
30. “Dogs see us move in SLOW MOTION,” dailymail.co.uk, July 10, 2014, http://
www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2685860/Dogs-SLOW-MOTION-
Animals-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; Jean-
Louis 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 inser-
tion of the still image into a film is the only such strategy that the viewer remem-
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 cor-
respondence 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.cen-
trepompidou.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.
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 dis-
positif 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 . . . col-
lective”). 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 embodi-
ment 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 nine-
teenth century came together to produce “psychoanalysis and cinema.” In
this trajectory, both of the latter “appear to have been born together out of
Cinema and the Body: The Ghost in the Theater 53
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 cease-
lessly 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 phenom-
enon 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 con-
temporary 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
54 Raymond Bellour
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 spec-
tator in a particular time frame, which leads Bellour to describe the spectator-
body 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 specific-
ity 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 emo-
tions, 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 sug-
gests 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
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 atten-
tion.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 specta-
tor 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
56 Raymond Bellour
magic of movies.” This magic brings us back to the theater, accounts for cin-
ema’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, “hypno-
sis 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 psycho-
analyst 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 emo-
tions, 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 engen-
dered 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
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 inher-
ent in cinematic experience. As critical theorist Miriam Hansen explains, for
Benjamin, “the idea of film as a form of play (Spiel) . . . allows for a nonde-
structive, 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 intra-
psychic model of the cinematic spectator associated with one of his interlocu-
tors, 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 invest-
ments (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 uni-
formly 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 intermin-
gled 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
58 Raymond Bellour
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 posi-
tion 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] capac-
ity 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 cinema-
spectator is initially seized by emotions that originate in the forms of expres-
sion 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 film-

viewer 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-engaged-
in-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
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 nine-
teenth 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 technol-
ogy.”45 While Bellour aligns himself in many ways with the philosophical tra-
dition 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 “always-
already-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 extermi-
nating 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
60 Raymond Bellour
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 hyp-
notism 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 mech-
anicity seems to speak to the effects of the cinematic machine, is what con-
cerns 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-
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 psychoa-
nalysis, 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 pre-
decessor, 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 recall-
ing 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 con-
founded 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
62 Raymond Bellour
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 vital-
ity affects at a primary level, he also posits secondary levels of identification,
drawing upon psychoanalytic concepts promoted by a strand of psychoanaly-
sis 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 substi-
tutes 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 spec-
tator confounds hallucination with reality, because she or he is momentarily
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 disa-
greeing with Freud).63 “Hypnotism” operates as a cornerstone in this articula-
tion 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 posi-
tion 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 gener-
ally, 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
64 Raymond Bellour
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 move-
ment” within the ever-moving image of the frame itself, with variations in
intensity of movement (rather than the status of the thing moving) experi-
enced 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, imme-
diately 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 repre-
sented 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 “inten-
sity,” 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 mate-
rial 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
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 recog-
nize 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 con-
ditions, 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 spectator-
engaged-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 con-
dition. 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
66 Raymond Bellour
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 posi-
tion 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
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=
tocList, 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
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.
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.
68 Raymond Bellour
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 éman-
cipé (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-cin-
ema--hypnose/le-corps-a-corps-du-spectat.html, accessed September 3, 2017.
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.
51. Hansen, preface to Cinema and Experience, 21; emphasis in the original.
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,
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.
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 Nicholson-
Smith (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).
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.
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.
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.
70 Raymond Bellour
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 relation-
ship 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
An Elegy for Cinema 71
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 cinema-
situation of the past.
New Delivery Systems and New Communities

With the advent of television, exacerbated by by new media technologies rep-
resented 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
72 Raymond Bellour
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 gov-
erning 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 tech-
nology 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 safe-
guards 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 trans-
formations 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
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 com-
munication 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 function-
ing 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 subse-
quence 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 consti-
tuting 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
74 Raymond Bellour
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 speci-
ficity 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 recogni-
tion 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 seem-
ingly 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 ten-
dency 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
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 pos-
sible 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 cinema-
situation, 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 inatten-
tion) and memory that characterizes the twenty-first century viewing subject.
Similarly, while Bellour accepts that a museum may now include film theat-
ers 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 ana-
logue and then the digital explosions of the late twentieth century. He deline-
ates 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
76 Raymond Bellour
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 relation-
ship to the history of art than the other contemporary arts, including time-
based 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, par-
ticularly 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
cinematic experience that clearly marked his initiation into, and his con-
sciousness 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, transforma-
tional 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 addi-
tion 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 pro-
duced 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
78 Raymond Bellour
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 char-
acterized 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
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 some-
thing 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
80 Raymond Bellour
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 imagina-
tion. 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, proto-
cinematic 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 technolo-
gies 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 contradic-
tions 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
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 con-
sistency 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 environ-
ments 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, suggest-
ing 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 con-
trast, 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 dif-
ferent 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;
82 Raymond Bellour
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
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 discov-
eries, 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
84 Raymond Bellour
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 emo-
tional 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 “fiction-
making” 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 path-
ways 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.
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 docu-
ment the exchanges of such a group (somewhat artificially constituted) by pub-
lishing 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 inter-
national 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
86 Raymond Bellour
Bellour, “Un spectateur pensif,” in Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, ani-

malités (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.
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 dis-
positifs,’” 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.
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 dis-
positifs,’” CRAL – Centre de recherches sur les art et le langage, February 13,
2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch”?v=tfXt70rDUdY, accessed May 25,
2017.
31. Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New
York: Vintage, 2010), 13–14.
137.
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-aumont-
interview/, 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://film-
studies.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-an-
object-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-digi-
tal-era?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other, accessed May 25, 2017.
48. Casetti, “Relocation,” 33.
49. Francesco Casetti, “Hypertopia,” in Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy, 139.
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-rejec-
tion-neuroscience.html, accessed May 25, 2017.
52. Francesco Casetti, “Introduction,” in Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy, 10.
88 Raymond Bellour
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
90 Raymond Bellour
Formative Influences 91
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 excite-
ment 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 particu-
lar, 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 migra-
tion 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 . . .
92 Raymond Bellour
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 applica-
tion 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, novel-
ist, 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.
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 represent-
ing 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
94 Raymond Bellour
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 philoso-
phy 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 deter-
mined. 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 twenti-
eth 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 practi-
cally 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 con-
vinced 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 remem-
ber that when I read The Order of Things, I felt a state of extreme exaltation.
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 resolu-
tion 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
96 Raymond Bellour
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 authentic-
ity. 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 “autobio-
graphical” 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 rev-
elation, 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?
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 genea-
logical 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 dif-
ferent 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
98 Raymond Bellour
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 prin-
ciple 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 interest-
ing 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 some-
what 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
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
100 Raymond Bellour
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 con-
structed 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.]
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 structural-
ism, 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 evolu-
tion of post-structuralist and postmodernist critical theory.
12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61) was a French phenomenological philoso-
pher 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 influ-
ence on postmodernist and post-structuralist theories.
102 Raymond Bellour
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 transla-
tion 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 theo-
rist whose work influenced Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and other post-
structuralist 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 uni-
versitaires 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.
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 experi-
mental videos and installations. His long essay “Le travail du film, 2” was origi-
nally 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, origi-
nally published in 1937, that explores the potential and limitations of psy-
choanalysis as a therapeutic technique. For the full text in English, see Sigmund
Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” International Journal of Psycho-
Analysis 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
104 Raymond Bellour
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.
Film Analysis and the Symbolic 105
CHAPTER SIX
Film Analysis and the Symbolic
[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
106 Raymond Bellour
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 there-
fore 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 segmen-
tation – 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
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
108 Raymond Bellour
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 dif-
ficult 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 func-
tional value to the extent that it illustrated the general épistémè within which
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 narra-
tive regime one finds in classical American cinema, which seemed, to me, to
derive from the model constructed by psychoanalysis. The notion of “sym-
bolic 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
110 Raymond Bellour
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-
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 relation-
ship 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 accom-
plishes 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 remark-
able 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
112 Raymond Bellour
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 prob-
lematic 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 par-
ticular 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
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 apprehend-
ing 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 analy-
sis? 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 differ-
ent 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
114 Raymond Bellour
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 speak-
ing, 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 histori-
cally 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.
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 com-
puters 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, accord-
ing 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
116 Raymond Bellour
have with their substance. One has to find words with which to translate
them, express them in a different language, and integrate them with ele-
ments 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).
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 [origi-
nally 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, postu-
lating 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 strobo-
scopic 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).
118 Raymond Bellour
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.
Thierry Kuntzel and the Rise of Video Art 119
CHAPTER SEVEN
Thierry Kuntzel and the Rise of Video Art
[Bellour describes how his interest in video art grew out of his personal friend-
ship 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 antipo-
des 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
120 Raymond Bellour
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-Wo-
Men.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 inves-
tigation 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 power-
less 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 expe-
rienced 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
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 plastic-
ity, 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 total-
ity, 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 col-
laborate 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
122 Raymond Bellour
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 film-
pellicule. 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 pre-
sumed 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
he stopped publishing. Apart from very intimate personal diaries, he con-

stantly 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 program-
ming, 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 occa-
sion 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
124 Raymond Bellour
odification of perception, almost anthropological, that produced its pres-

m
ence in the process of scrolling the film during projection. This specific phe-
nomenon 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 rep-
resentation 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.
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 rep-
resentation 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 sumptu-
ous failure because its plot is so conventional – in other words, to express the
126 Raymond Bellour
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’Anti-
Œdipe 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 argu-
ment: 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, filmmak-
ers, 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 conform-
ance 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.
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 unify-
ing 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 preroga-
tive 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 audio-
visual archives.
128 Raymond Bellour
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). Jean-
Christophe Averty was a famous television director who was noted for his avant-
garde 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).
21. Raymond Bellour, Les Rendez-vous de Copenhague (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).
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.
27. Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948); Beyond a Reasonable
Doubt (Fritz Lang, 1956).
28. Art of Memory (Woody Vasulka, 1987).
130 Raymond Bellour
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, oblit-
erating 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 publica-
tion 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: metapsycho-
logical 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
Arrested Images and “the Between-Images” 131
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-de-
France, 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 increas-
ingly transformed their dispositifs by treating images as projections; but these
dispositifs are quite different from those of cinema, since they involve projec-
tions 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 lan-
guage, 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 insist-
ently 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 evolu-
tion 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
132 Raymond Bellour
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 ideologi-
cal 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 freez-

ing 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 defini-
tion, 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 valu-
able as an agent of passage, a point of contact between the arts.
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 moder-
nity, from Rossellini to Godard, from Marker to Eustache. “L’interruption,
l’instant” seeks to grasp how cinema has a tendency to be focused on “preg-
nant” 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.
134 Raymond Bellour
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 disappear-
ance 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 func-
tions 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 acceler-
ate 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 produc-
tion: for instance, the video of intervention, and “poor” or democratic video, and
finally all the video that, before the digital age, made possible a massive produc-
tion 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
136 Raymond Bellour
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 (com-
mercial 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 contamina-
tion 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 admira-
tion 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 under-
take 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
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 watch-
ing 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, present-
ing 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?
138 Raymond Bellour
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 elec-
tronic 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 recur-
rent 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 func-
tion 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 con-
cerning 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
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 achiev-
ing that which it nevertheless contemplates places itself, to a certain degree,
under the sign of Mallarmé. Marcel Broodthaers displayed a diabolical intel-
ligence 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 analo-
gous 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
140 Raymond Bellour
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 char-
acterized 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 pho-
tography 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 fore-
shadowed 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 illustra-
tion, 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 simultane-
ously 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 pho-
tography, cinema and painting, and then cinema and video become more and
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 desig-
nating 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.” “Entre-
images” [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?
142 Raymond Bellour
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 physi-
ological sense, whether this is via a dream image, a mental image, a memory,
a perception, or a hallucination. By definition, every experience of an appar-
ently 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 expres-
sion. 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 deter-
mined 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 experi-
ence 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 sup-
poses 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).
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 philoso-
pher 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,
144 Raymond Bellour
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, cata-
logs, 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 sum-
marized 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’Isle-
Adam, 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’allez-
vous droit au cinématographe, dont le déroulement remplacera, images et texte,
maint volume, avantageusement.”
Spectators, Dispositifs, and the Cinematic Body 145
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 phantas-
magorias 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 prin-
ciple 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 con-
temporary 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
146 Raymond Bellour
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 possibili-
ties 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 exhi-
bitions 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 Between-
the-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
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 relation-
ship 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 situ-
ated 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 iden-
tifying 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,
148 Raymond Bellour
or else veiled under other terms (for example, alternations and their inter-
ruptions, 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 phe-
nomenon, 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 his-
torical 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 pre-
figures 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 dis-
positifs 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
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 consti-
tutes 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 experi-
ence 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 foreground-
ing 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 pas-
sages 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
150 Raymond Bellour
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 equa-
tion 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 proto-
type 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.
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 machin-
ery 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 spo-
radic 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 specta-
tor 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
152 Raymond Bellour
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 immobi-
lization 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 real-
life 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
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 move-
ment 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 thought-
fulness 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 simultane-
ously 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
154 Raymond Bellour
(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 pho-
tographie” 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.
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 theoreti-
cians 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 conjunc-
tion, 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
156 Raymond Bellour
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 experi-
ence 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 re-
centering 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 par-
ticular, 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 correla-
tive 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 note-
worthy and very innovative in its time, “The Process of Hypnotism and
the Nature of the Hypnotic State.”8 Its two authors, Lawrence Kubie and
Hypnosis, Emotions, and Animality 157
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 rela-
tion 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 dern-
ière 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 psychoanaly-
sis 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
158 Raymond Bellour
concerns an intensified narcissism), and that, as a result, it could be seen as

a response to contemporary developments rather than authorizing an over-
whelming 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 hyp-
nosis 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 funda-
mental 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-
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 devel-
oping 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
160 Raymond Bellour
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, charac-
terized 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 indefi-
niteness 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 devel-
oped 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
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
162 Raymond Bellour
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 specta-
tor. 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 trajec-
tory 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 iden-
tification 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 “anthropo-
cosmomorphism.” 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?
As soon as I began to address the issue of cinematic “emotion,” I paid atten-

tion 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 emo-
tions 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, every-
thing that psychoanalysis produces with regard to a psychology or metapsy-
chology 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 specta-
tors. 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
164 Raymond Bellour
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 universal-
ism 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 think-
ing 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,
distributed in a fine geography showing the distribution of animals, distinguish-

ing 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 excep-
tion 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 pre-
cisely French and Italian, with the exception of Werner Herzog’s German-
American 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 organiza-
tion 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
166 Raymond Bellour
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 sym-
bolic 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 hypno-
sis 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 anthropo-
logical 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
I thought was representative of the whole period. This relationship of co-

naturalness 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 occa-
sionally 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 rela-
tion 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 mar-
tyrdom.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
168 Raymond Bellour
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 sensa-
tion, 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
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 specifi-

cally 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 obvi-
ously 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
170 Raymond Bellour
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 port-
able phones; they need to be trendy in other ways. That is a historical phe-
nomenon 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 theo-
rist 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
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 “phantasma-
gorical 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 influ-
ential 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.
172 Raymond Bellour
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 rela-
tions 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 pho-
tographique 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 soci-
ologist 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.”
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) (Jean-
Luc 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.
174 Raymond Bellour
Part Three
Biography and Publications of

Raymond Bellour
by Alistair Fox
176 Raymond Bellour
A Biographical Sketch 177
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 preoccupa-
tions, 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 preco-
cious 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 undertak-
ing 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,
178 Raymond Bellour
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 pro-
ductions 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 initi-
ate 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, suc-
cessively 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
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.
180 Raymond Bellour
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 alter-
native 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
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 ciné-
matographiques, 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 lit-
téraire, 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
182 Raymond Bellour
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 book-
length 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 dif-
ferent 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)
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.
184 Raymond Bellour
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/Panthéon-
Sorbonne, 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.
Select Annotated Bibliography 185
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-the-
Images, 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
186 Raymond Bellour
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 scienti-
fique (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 rela-
tions 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 contribu-
tion in these publications was comparatively small, and that, where signifi-
cant, 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 chrono-
logical 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.
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, emphasiz-
ing the serial form of composition, or alternation, with systematically dis-
tributed 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,
188 Raymond Bellour
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 exam-
ples 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 semi-
ology 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 metapsy-
chology 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.
Bellour, Raymond. La Querelle des dispositifs: cinéma–installations, expositions.

Paris: P.O.L, 2012, 537 pp.
By considering examples of the “glissements, chevauchements, scintille-
ments, emboîtements, hybridations, métamorphoses, transitions, migra-
tions, 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 experi-
ence 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.]
190 Raymond Bellour
Argues that Michaux invites his reader to undergo an experience that repli-
cates the process that operates in the author himself during the act of crea-
tion, 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 juve-
nilia 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, con-
versely, 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 selec-
tion 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,
showing how her writing assumes a place within the context of the liter-
ary 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 experi-
ence 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
192 Raymond Bellour
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 observ-
ing 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 cin-
ematic frame that the two filmmakers reveal, and a narcissistic relationship
between Hitchcock’s life and art.
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 cin-
ematic “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.
194 Raymond Bellour
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 demon-
strate 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
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
196 Raymond Bellour
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 artifi-
cial in photographs, with movement in the image implying a sort of “inter-
nal 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 avant-
garde filmmaker Shuji Terayama and the poet Shuntaro Tanikawa, and
sent to one another. Bellour concludes that this technique reveals a confu-
sion 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
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 theoriz-
ing 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 occur-
ring more and more often between images as a result of the fact that specta-
tors 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
198 Raymond Bellour
to the accelerated development of interactive technologies, which seeks to

exploit a similar kind of interactive form and artifice, assisted by the pres-
ence 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 intersec-
tion 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 trans-
ferred out of their context through such devices as contiguity, approxima-
tion, 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 instal-
lation “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 Movement-
Image and The Time-Image, demonstrating how these induce a new rela-
tion 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
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.”
200 Raymond Bellour
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), sug-
gesting 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 autobiographi-
cal 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
French language, through its creation of a mise en abyme in the audio-

visual 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 demon-
strate the co-presence in films of two realities that are superimposed and
appear indivisible, but are nonetheless different; the simultaneous opera-
tion 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 move-
ment 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 perception-
images instantly transmuting into affect-images, particularly because of the
use of close-up shots.
202 Raymond Bellour
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 obscen-
ity, 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 – conclud-
ing 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 gener-
ate 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
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 red-
letter 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,
204 Raymond Bellour
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 film-
maker’s The Sun and the Moon (Stephen Dwoskin, 2008), which is charac-
terized 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 sup-
posed “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,
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.]
206 Raymond Bellour
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 espe-
cially 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 deploy-
ment 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 “realis-
tic,” 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
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) iden-
tifying 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, cul-
tural, 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 distinc-
tive 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
208 Raymond Bellour
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
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 Lévi-
Strauss, 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.]
210 Raymond Bellour
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–––––. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl
Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,
1982.
–––––. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974
[repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991].
–––––. L’Énonciation impersonnelle ou le site du film. Paris: Méridiens-Klincksieck, 1991.
–––––. Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film. Trans. Cormac Deane. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2016.
Morely, David. The “Nationwide” Audience: Structure and Decoding. London: British Film
Institute, 1980.
Morin, Edgar. Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire: essais d’anthropologie. Paris: Minuit, 1977.
Münsterberg, Hugo. Hugo Münsterberg on Film: The Photoplay – A Psychological Study, and
Other Writings. Ed. Allan Langdale. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1967.
Odin, Roger. “The Amateur in Cinema, in France, Since 1990: Definitions, Issues, and
Trends.” In Alistair Fox, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, and Hilary Radner, eds. A
Companion to Contemporary French Cinema. Chichester/Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2015,
590–611.
Oudart, Jean-Pierre. “Cinema and Suture,” Screen 18:1 (1977): 35–47.
Panksepp, Jaak. “Brain Emotional Systems and Qualities of Mental Life: From Animal
Sources Cited 215
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and Marion Fried Solomon, eds. The Healing Power of Emotion: Affective Neuroscience,
Development, and Clinical Practice. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2009, 1–26.
Penley, Constance. “Introduction,” in Raymond Bellour. Film Analysis. Ed. Constance
Penley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, ix–xviii.
Peterson, James. Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1996.
Polan, Dana. “Review of L’Entre-images: Photo, cinéma, vidéo by Raymond Bellour.” Discourse
16:2 (1993–4): 196–200.
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1984.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Trans. Gabriel
Rockhill. London/New York: Continuum, 2006.
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Rilke, Rainer Maria. Œuvres poétiques et théâtrales. Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la
Pléiade, 1997.
–––––. The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference and Film Theory. London/
New York: Routledge, 1991.
–––––. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke
–––––. Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media. Durham, NC/London: Duke
–––––. The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. [Kindle
edition.]
Rodowick, D.N. Elegy for Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Rosenbaum, Jonathan, and Adrian Martin, eds. Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World
Cinephilia. London: British Film Institute, 2003.
Rouget, Gilbert. La Musique et la Transe: Esquisse d’une théorie générale des relations de la
musique et de la possession. Paris: Gallimard, 1980.
Roustang, François. Qu’est-ce que l’hypnose? Paris: Minuit, 1994.
–––––. How to Make a Paranoid Laugh: Or, What is Psychoanalysis. Trans. Anne C. Vila.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Schatz, Thomas. “The New Hollywood.” In Jim Collins, Ava Preacher Collins, and Hilary
Radner. eds. Film Theory Goes to the Movies: Cultural Analysis of Contemporary Film. New
York: Routledge, 1993, 8–36.
Searle, John. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Simon, Bennett. “Is the Oedipus Complex Still the Cornerstone of Psychoanalysis? Three
Obstacles to Answering the Question,” Journal of the American Psychanalytic Association
39:3 (1991): 641–68.
Stern, Daniel N. The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
–––––. Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy,
and Development. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Thoret, Jean-Baptiste. Le Cinéma américain des années 70. Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006.
Truffaut, François. Hitchcock selon Hitchcock. Paris: R. Laffot, 1966.
–––––, with Helen G. Scott. Hitchcock. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.
Uhde, Jan. “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
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216 Raymond Bellour
Usai, Paolo Cherchi. The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age.
London: British Film Institute, 2001.
Vareille, Jean-Claude. Le Roman populaire français (1789–1914): idéologies et pratiques: la
trompette de la Bérésina. Limoges: Presses Universitaires Limoges, 1994.
Verevis, Constantine. “The Analysis of Film,” Film Criticism 25:2 (2000/1): 63–71, 78.
Žižek, Slavoj, ed. Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask
Hitchcock). New York: Verso, 1992.
Index 217
Index
Adieu au langage (Jean-Luc Godard) see Berger, John, 33, 59

Goodbye to Language Bergman, Ingmar, 37, 189, 203
Agamben, Giorgio, 130, 167 Bergson, Henri, 196
Akerman, Chantal, 37, 200, 202 Between-the-Images (Raymond Bellour),
Amalgam (Werner Nekes), 120 45–6, 124, 125, 130, 133, 145–6, 149,
American cinema, 98, 108–13, 151, 166, 167
187, 202, 203 Between-the-Images 2, 146
Analysis of Film, The (Raymond Bellour), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Fritz Lang),
11, 12, 17, 91, 92, 93, 99, 105, 107, 111, 127
112–13, 147–8, 151, 165 Biette, Jean-Claude, 189, 204
Andrew, Dudley, 13, 14, 16, 43, 53 Binswanger, Ludwig, 94
animals, 5, 39, 53–60, 122, 148, 151, Birds, The (Alfred Hitchcock), 91, 115, 166,
155–67, 201, 206 192, 193, 206
Anthropologie structurale (Claude Lévi- Birnbaum, Dara, 135
Strauss), 92 Birth of the Clinic, The (Michel Foucault),
Anti-Oedipus (Gilles Deleuze and Félix 148
Guattari), 20, 98, 105, 107, 108, 109 Bis ans Ende der Welt (Wim Wenders) see
Appétit d’oiseau (Peter Folds), 122 Until the End of the World
Arasse, Daniel, 116 Blanchot, Maurice, 36, 95, 97, 98, 108
Artaud, Antonin, 156 blocage symbolique, 18, 19, 23; see also
Au bord de la mer bleue (Boris Barnet) see By under symbolic blocage
the Bluest of Seas Boltanski, Christian, 198
Aumont, Jacques, 79–80, 81, 97, 99, 120, Border Line (Danièle Dubroux), 198
131, 155, 188 Bordwell, David, 3, 4, 16, 22, 25, 42, 113
Autrefois les canuts (Bernard Chardère), 179 Borges, Jorge Luis, 100, 196
Averty, Jean-Christophe, 121, 136 Branigan, Edward, 11, 25
Brenez, Nicole, 99, 150, 162
Barnet, Boris, 132, 162 Bresson, Robert, 167
Barthes, Roland, 11–12, 17, 24, 92–5, 98, Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli), 203
100, 106, 134–5, 142, 151–2, 161, 164, Bringing up Baby (Howard Hawks), 155,
181, 187, 196, 206, 209 165, 166, 201
Baudelaire, Charles, 113, 146 Brion, Patrick, 136, 138
Baudry, Jean-Louis, 41, 62–3, 130, 157, Brion-Guerry, Liliane, 180
159, 188 Brontë, Charlotte, 190
Bazin, André, 15, 16, 131, 167, 187, 195, Brontë, Emily, 191
197 Brontë, Patrick Branwell, 190
Beaches of Agnès, The (Agnès Varda), 200 Broodthaers, Marcel, 139
Belting, Hans, 139 Brunsdon, Charlotte, 43
Benjamin, Walter, 15, 33, 57, 169 Buñuel, Luis, 59
218 Raymond Bellour
Burt, Jonathan, 165 Discourse, Figure (Jean-François Lyotard), 99

By the Bluest of Seas (Boris Barnet), 162 dispositif(s), 41–7, 54–7, 61–3, 127, 130–1,
138, 142, 147–8, 156–60, 167–70, 197,
Carax, Leos, 167, 198, 206 198, 201
Carroll, Noël, 163 Doane, Mary Ann, 20
Casetti, Francesco, 76, 79–84 Domarchi, Jean, 187
Cassavetes, John, 167 Don Quichotte (Cervantes), 100
Cat People (Jacques Tourneur), 188 Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques, 187
Cézanne (Jean-Marie Straub and Daniéle Dovjenko, Alexander, 133
Huillet), 198 Down There (Chantal Akerman), 200
Chardère, Bernard, 178, 179 Downey, Juan, 121
Chertok, Léon, 160 Dreams (Akira Kurosawa), 198
Chevrier, Jean-François, 194 Dubois, Philippe, 79, 80, 99
Church Gibson, Pamela, 73 Duguet, Anne-Marie, 121, 122, 135
Cimino, Michael, 167 Dumas, Alexandre, 94, 108, 109, 111, 116,
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles), 188 147, 157, 190
Clair, René, 133, 134, 196 “D’un autre cinéma” (Raymond Bellour),
Clash of the Wolves (Noel M. Smith), 166 45, 46, 199
Clastres, Pierre, 187 Dwoskin, Stephen, 189, 204
Clément, Catherine, 92, 93
Cloud-Capped Star, The (Ritwik Ghatak), Edison, Thomas, 38
18, 114, 149, 18 Eisenstein, Sergei, 155
Coleman, James, 168 El sol del membrillo (Victor Erice), 198
Collins, Jim, 36, 181 Electrocuting an Elephant (Thomas Edison),
Conrad, Tony, 114 165
Contre-chant (Harun Farocki), 205 Elementary Structures of Kinship, The (Claude
Coppola, Francis Ford, 167 Lévi-Strauss), 98
*Corpus Callosum (Michael Snow), 199 Elephant (Gus Van Sant), 202
Corrigan, Timothy, 181 embodied spectator, 65
Crowd, The (King Vidor), 169 En sursis (Harun Farocki), 205
Curse of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur), Epstein, Jean, 155
205 Eustache, Jean, 72, 133
Damasio, Antonio, 54, 58, 61, 78, 80, 82, Fairfax, Daniel, 80
83, 163 Fargier, Jean-Paul, 136
Daney, Serge, 46, 47, 66, 77, 120, 133, 161, Farocki, Harun, 205
169, 182, 199, 208 Fellini, Federico, 189, 203
Daquin, Louis, 92 Ferrari, Emmanuelle, 150
de Fontenay, Elisabeth, 60, 167 Fieschi, Jean-André, 121
de l’Isle-Adam, Villiers, 205 figural, the, 99
death of cinema, 40, 74, 76, 134 Five Obstructions (Lars Von Trier, Jørgen
défilement, 34, 38, 39, 43, 44, 57, 161, 195, Leigh), 71
202 Flo Rounds a Corner (Ken Jacobs), 200
Delavaud, Gilles, 136 Folds, Peter, 122
Deleuze, Gilles, 20, 24, 54, 63, 73, 94, Ford, John, 189, 203
97–100, 108, 126, 134, 150, 156, 164, Foucault, Michel, 41, 93–5, 97, 107–9,
196–99, 201 130, 140, 147–8, 187, 197, 209
Delluc, Louis, 169 400 Blows, The (François Truffaut), 39, 133,
Derrida, Jacques, 95, 167 134, 199
Descartes, René, 54, 83, 205 Fox, Alistair, 64
Didi-Huberman, Georges, 76 Francastel, Pierre, 187
Discipline and Punish (Michel Foucault), France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (Jean-Luc
41, 130 Godard), 135
Index 219
freeze-frame(s), 39, 40, 132, 133, 195–6, hypnosis, 54–60, 61–3, 65, 146–9, 155–60,
199 206
Freud, Anna, 19
Freud, Sigmund, 16, 19–20, 22–5, 35, 53, Imamura, Shohei, 165
57, 62–3, 98–100, 107–9, 111, 148, 159 Immemory (Chris Marker), 139, 204
In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín),
Geertz, Clifford, 22 204
Gehr, Ernie, 161 Interpretation of Dreams (Sigmund Freud),
Gerbi, Antonello, 81 17, 22
Ghatak, Ritwik, 18, 37, 114, 149, 189, 201 It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra), 133,
Gide, André, 191 134
Gigi (Vincente Minnelli), 106, 193
Gilles (De l’obscur à l’obscure clarté) (Thierry Jaeggi, Danielle, 195
Kuntzel), 200 James, Alice, 190
Gilliam, Terry, 198 Jencks, Charles, 36
Gish, Lillian, 203 Jules and Jim (François Truffaut), 207
Godard, Jean-Luc, 4, 37, 42, 46–7, 72,
78–9, 125–6, 133, 135–7, 161–2, 167, Kawauchi, Rinko, 200
187, 191, 195, 198, 204, 205–6 Klein, Melanie, 107
Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard), Kubelka, Peter, 114, 161
167, 206 Kubie, Lawrence, 156, 161
Grandrieux, Philippe, 124, 125, 189, 200, Kuntzel, Thierry, 21–3, 24–5, 33–8, 40, 63,
202 99, 107, 114, 119–25, 130–1, 188, 194,
Grant, Cary, 203 196, 199, 200
Greenberg, Clement, 131, 132 Kurosawa, Kiyoshi, 160
Griffith, D. W., 112, 133, 161, 188
Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog), 165 “L’analyse flambée” (Raymond Bellour), 12,
Grodal, Torben, 163 17, 18, 43, 45, 195
Guardi, Francesco, 125 L’Entre-images (Raymond Bellour), 38, 40,
Guattari, Félix, 12, 20, 24, 73, 98, 108, 42, 44–5, 98, 121–5, 153, 194, 197
126, 150, 164, 167, 201 L’Entre-images 2 (Raymond Bellour), 46
Guerín, José-Luis, 189 La Belle Noiseuse (Jacques Rivette), 198
Guest (José Luis Guerín), 204 La Chambre claire (Roland Barthes), 95,
Guibert, Hervé, 96 152, 164
La Cocina (Eulàlia Valldosera), 168
Hall, Doug, 135 La Desserte blanche (Thierry Kuntzel), 125
Hall, Stuart, 43 “La double hélice” (Raymond Bellour), 46,
Hansen, Miriam, 15, 57, 60 197
Hardyck, Allyn, 33, 34, 37, 38, 41, 64 La Jetée (Chris Marker), 13, 35, 99, 122,
Hazard, Paul, 94, 167 134, 198, 204
Heidegger, Martin, 167 La Machine à tuer les méchants (Roberto
Hill, Gary, 4, 16, 17, 22, 35, 43, 92, 93, 95, Rossellini) see Machine That Kills Bad
106, 121, 198 People, The
Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais), 97, La Mort aux trousses see North by Northwest
179 La Peau douce (François Truffaut) see Soft
Histoire(s) du cinéma (Jean-Luc Godard), 46, Skin, The
47, 162 La Peinture cubiste (Thierry Kuntzel and
Hitchcock, Alfred, 18–26, 64, 91, 111–12, Philippe Grandrieux), 124, 125
148, 152–3, 187, 188, 192, 193, 194, La Querelle des dispositifs (Raymond
206 Bellour), 41, 45, 52, 115, 127, 146, 168,
“Hitchcock, the Enunciator” (Raymond 183, 199
Bellour), 25 La Région centrale (Michael Snow), 120
Holy Motors (Leos Carax), 167, 206 La Rejetée (Thierry Kuntzel), 35, 122
220 Raymond Bellour
La Vie nouvelle (Philippe Grandrieux) see “L’interruption, l’instant” (Raymond

New Life, A Bellour), 133
Là-bas (Chantal Akerman) see Down There Lippit, Akira, 59
Lacan, Jacques, 4, 20, 57, 62, 107, 109, London, Barbara, 35, 121
159 Lonedale Operator, The (D. W. Griffith),
Lacassin, Francis, 179 112, 161
Lang, Fritz, 111–12, 123, 127, 156, 159, Love Streams (John Cassavetes), 167
179, 188, 192 Lyotard, Jean-François, 63, 99
Langage et Cinéma (Christian Metz), 93
Laplanche, Jean, 62, 187, 209 Mabuse (Fritz Lang), 156, 159
Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais), 94, MacCabe, Colin, 25, 42
157 McDougall, Joyce, 19
“Le blocage symbolique” (Raymond McLuhan, Marshall, 43, 71
Bellour), 20, 105, 108, 109 Machine That Kills Bad People, The (Roberto
Le Champignon des Carpathes (Jean-Claude Rossellini), 134, 167
Biette), 204 Mademoiselle Guillotine (Raymond Bellour),
Le Corps du cinéma (Raymond Bellour), 108, 190
20, 21, 38, 45, 47, 52–66, 99, 112–14, Mallarmé, Stéphane, 138, 139, 140
146–53, 155–8, 160–11, 169, 206 Maltese Falcon, The (John Huston), 188
Le Déjeuner du chat (Louis Lumière), 165 Mandrin, Louis, 179
Le Goff, Jacques, 187 Margolin, Sydney, 156, 157, 161
Le Livre des autres (Raymond Bellour), 91, Marie, Michel, 13, 14, 188
99, 100, 187, 209 Marker, Chris, 13, 35, 99, 122, 133–5, 139,
“Le monde et la distance” (Raymond 180, 189, 198, 200, 204
Bellour), 99, 147, 192 Marks, Laura, 55
Le Pli (Gilles Deleuze), 150, 199 Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock), 194
“Le spectateur pensif” (Raymond Bellour), Martin, Adrian, 13, 23, 36, 41, 71
33, 42, 43, 123, 195 Marx, Leo, 166
“Le texte introuvable” (Raymond Bellour), Meghe Dhaka Tara (Ritwik Ghatak) see
17, 18 Cloud-Capped Star, The
“Le travail du film 2” (Thierry Kuntzel), 99 Mekas, Jonas, 200
Léger, Guy, 15 Menschen am Sonntag (Robert Siodmak,
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (Léos Carax), 198 Edgar G. Ulmer) see People on Sunday
Les Fragments d’un discours amoureux Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 94
(Roland Barthes), 95 Metz, Christian, 12, 13–17, 20, 21, 26,
Les Justes de France (Agnès Varda), 200 41–2, 57, 61–5, 92–3, 99, 105, 106–7,
Les Ouvriers quittent l’usine (Harun Farocki), 115, 130, 157, 159, 187, 193, 197, 209
205 Michaux, Henri, 13, 34, 38, 126, 155, 178,
Les Plages d’Agnès (Agnès Varda) see Beaches 189, 190, 191, 206, 207, 208
of Agnès, The Miéville, Anne-Marie, 135
Les quatre cents coups (François Truffaut) see Minnelli, Vincente, 100, 106, 179, 193, 203
400 Blows, The Mograbi, Avi, 204
Les Rendez-vous de Copenhague (Raymond Mon ami Mandrin (Francis Lacassin), 179
Bellour), 125, 181 Monkey Business (Howard Hawks), 155,
Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max 165, 201
Ophüls), 43, 127, 152 Moretti, Nanni, 204
Leutrat, Jean-Louis, 120, 187, 188 Morin, Edgar, 61, 162
Level Five (Chris Marker), 204 Morley, David, 43
Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Most Dangerous Game, The (Ernest B.
Véréna Paravel), 206 Shoedsack and Irving Pichel, 1932), 22,
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 91–3, 98, 181, 187, 114
209 Münsterberg, Hugo, 53, 82
Leys, Ruth, 56 Muntadas, Antoni, 135, 137
Index 221
Mystery of Oberwald, The (Michelangelo Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock), 18, 20, 21, 23–4,
Antonioni), 125 100, 111, 194
Mystery of the Wax Museum, The (Michael Puissance de la parole (Jean-Luc Godard),
Curtiz), 111 205
Mythologiques (Claude Lévi-Strauss), 92, 98 Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa), 160
Nam June Paik, 121, 135 “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” (Michel

Nash, Roderick, 166 Foucault), 95
Nekes, Werner, 120
New Life, A (Philippe Grandrieux), 202 Radway, Janice, 45
Night of the Demon (Jacques Tourneur), 99, Ramnoux, Clémence, 187
149 Rancière, Jacques, 97, 108, 131, 140
Nollywood, 72 Renoir, Jean, 204
Nora, Pierre, 187 Resnais, Alain, 94, 97, 179, 180, 197, 198
North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock), 19– Reverse Television (Bill Viola), 135, 137
24, 106, 108–11, 161, 166, 193 Rivette, Jacques, 72, 187, 191, 198
“Nostalgies” (Raymond Bellour), 98 Rodowick, David, 19, 20, 21, 25, 35, 40,
Numéro deux (Jean-Luc Godard), 125 134, 181, 188
Rosolato, Guy, 187, 208
Odin, Roger, 72 Rossellini, Roberto, 123, 133–7, 167, 189,
Oedipus complex, 19, 20, 23–4, 98, 108, 203
109, 111, 112, 187 Rouget, Gilles, 161
Order of Things, The (Michel Foucault), 93, Roumette, Sylvain, 123, 152
94, 108 Roustang, François, 56, 63, 159
Outside over There (Maurice Sendak), 197 Rouvel, Catherine, 178
Ozu, Yasujirō, 37
S/Z (Roland Barthes), 17, 92, 100
Pabst, Georg Wilhelm, 179 Sacks, Oliver, 39, 40
package unit system, 72 Saga of Anatahan, The (Kusakabe), 197
Païni, Dominique, 146 Saraband (Ingmar Bergman), 203
Paramount decree (1948), 72 Satan mon prochain (Raymond Bellour,
Parente, André, 98 Francis Lacassin), 179
“Passages de l’image” (Raymond Bellour), Sauve la vie (qui peut) (Jean-Luc Godard),
23, 38, 45, 46, 135, 181 195
Paulhan, Jean, 124 Scarlet Empress, The (Josef von Sternberg),
Penley, Constance, 4, 6, 12, 18, 19, 181 197
pensive spectator, the, 33, 42, 43, 58, Schatz, Thomas, 72
152–3 Searle, John, 53
People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak, Edgar segmentation, 12, 14, 106, 120, 193, 208
G. Ulmer), 12, 188 Sentis, Catherine, 123, 152
Peterson, James, 163 Serene Velocity (Ernie Gehr), 161
Pialat, Maurice, 198 Serres, Michel, 170
Planchon, Roger, 177, 178 Seventh Heaven (Benoît Jacquot), 159
Pleasure of the Text, The (Roland Barthes), Shadow of a Doubt, The (Alfred Hitchcock),
17 152
Polan, Dana, 181 Simmel, Georg, 78
Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 62, 187, 209 Siodmak, Robert, 12, 188
“Pour une stylistique du film” (Raymond Smoking/No Smoking (Alain Resnais), 197
Bellour), 26 Snow, Michael, 120, 199
Poussin, Nicolas, 125 Sobibór, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. (Claude
Prière pour Robinson Crusoé (Raymond Lanzmann), 202
Bellour, Francis Lacassin), 179 Soft Skin, The (François Truffaut), 39
Proust, Marcel, 194 Sombre (Philippe Grandrieux), 202
222 Raymond Bellour
Souriau, Étienne, 59, 180 Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat), 198

Stendahl, 140, 196 Van Sant, Gus, 189, 202
Stern, Daniel, 5, 35, 58, 60–4, 66, 100, Varda, Agnès, 146, 168, 169, 180, 199,
150–1, 157, 162–3, 164, 201 200
Sternberg, Josef von, 197 Vasulka, Woody, 127, 135
Sun and the Moon, The (Stephen Dwoskin), Vertov, Dziga, 132, 133, 134, 196
204 Veuves de Noirmoutier (Agnès Varda),
Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock), 188 168
symbolic blockage, 19, 105, 108, 109, 112, Viola, Bill, 36, 121, 131, 135, 137, 168,
151, 165 194, 195, 207
vitality affects, 18, 35, 58, 60, 61, 62–5,
Tanikawa, Shuntaro, 196 150, 162, 201
Tarentino, Quentin, 14, 36 volume of memory, 23, 34
Tea and Sympathy (Vincente Minnelli), 203
Téchiné, André, 191 Warning Shadows (Arthur Robison), 116
Terayama, Shuji, 196 Waves, The (Thierry Kuntzel), 199
textual volume, 21, 22, 23, 34, 54 Welles, Orson, 179
Teyssèdre, Bernard, 181 Wenders, Wim, 198
To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock), 24 Westerner, The (William Wyler), 111
Tootsie (Sydney Pollack), 203 White, Susan, 181
Tourneur, Jacques, 204, 205 Winter (the Death of Robert Hasler)
Truffaut, François, 26, 39, 78, 133, 191, (Thierry Kuntzel), 35
192, 199, 207
Young and Innocent (Alfred Hitchcock), 64
Ulmer, Edgar G., 12, 188
Umberto D (Vittorio De Sica), 167 Zapping Zone (Chris Marker), 135
Un lac (Philippe Grandrieux), 200 Zéraffa, Michel, 187
Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders), Zippy, Lori, 121
198 Žižek, Slavoj, 4
Usai, Paolo Cherchi, 146 Zoo (CBS, 2015–current), 59

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H I L A R Y R A D N E R A N D A L I S TA I R F O X

With Selections from an Interview

Hilary Radner and Alistair Fox

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in

© Hilary Radner and Alistair Fox, 2018

Edinburgh University Press Ltd

Typeset in Adobe Garamond by

ISBN 978 1 4744 2288 8 (hardback)

The right of Hilary Radner and Alistair Fox to be identified as authors of

Introduction: Cinema and Its Discontents: The Place of Raymond

1. Film Analysis: Image and Movement 11

Raymond Bellour (1939– ): A Biographical Sketch 177

Select List of Sources Cited 210

Many people have contributed to the genesis and development of this

In a final note, I wish to highlight the contributions of my partner on

Some may think that to attempt a synthetic overview of Raymond Bellour’s

on Mallarmé,” suggesting the “French-ness” of the tradition in which Bellour

and perspectives that, while extremely influential, were soon incorporated

Indiana University Press, 2009); Raymond Bellour, L’Analyse du film (Paris:

Film Analysis: Image and Movement

A Genealogy of Film Scholars

Defining the Legible Text

Bellour would not abandon this idea of comprehensively accounting for

“Le Blocage Symbolique”

but this association has a different order. Marion is “angel-woman-bird”;

motivated to marry his mother, something that Oedipus as the protagonist

The Textual Volume

he or she can move backwards and forwards, re-reading especially significant

Hitchcock and Psychoanalysis

ing the rhetorical or “figural” force of the sequencing and concatenation of

Rodowick continues, drawing upon Roland Barthes, “For Kuntzel, textual

Bellour’s unwillingness to give up the notion of an author paradoxically

barcelona.com/video-conference/passages-de-limage/, accessed September 2,

The Digital Challenge: From the Theater to the

r­epresentation, but changed forever the social and cultural understanding

The Impasse of Film Analysis

artists of Kuntzel’s generation, heavily influenced by writers such as Maurice

New Forms of Spectatorship

access, flexibility, immediacy, and intimacy of the new medium, deployed it

images projected at a particular speed as a single continuous movement per-

New Forms of Spectatorship

d­ éfilement (the movement of the film-as-a-strip-of-celluloid through the pro-

From “Passages de l’image” to “an Other Cinema”

dedicated to the relations between “photography, cinema, and video”57 – a

While not necessarily proclaiming the “death of cinema,” Bellour pro-

Cinema and the Body: The Ghost in the Theater

hypnosis, which, for Freud, led to an enlargement of the field of memory – an

Dispositif: An Entranced Spectator

machinery, over a specified time period, at a specific speed, in the dark, to a

of a historically specific cinematic apparatus; on the other, the “machine”

Drawing upon the theories of neurobiologist Antonio Damasio and the

By invoking Damasio in particular, Bellour offers a definition of a film-

The figure of the animal is a lynchpin in Bellour’s historical understanding

in the safety of the cinema-situation. Bellour, in contrast, does not posit an

While Bellour has frequently mentioned the importance of the ego-ideal

raised below), Bellour distinguishes between the animal as a symbol that

Just as all forms of aesthetic experience may, to a lesser or greater degree,

he or she become engaged in terms of vitality affects, again to a greater or

well as to concepts promoted by Stern, as “the construction of an analogy

Theories: An Introduction (London/Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press),

Psychotherapy, and Development (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press,

An Elegy for Cinema1

What Cinema Was

representation, but changed forever the social and cultural understanding

d éfilement (the movement of the film-as-a-strip-of-celluloid through the pro-

odification of perception, almost anthropological, that produced its pres-