"We must act quickly if we still want to see anything. Everything disappears... Where is the color that continues to emanate from the substance of the thing? What remains as substance for the eye?"

Peter Handke, The Sainte-Victoire Doctrine.

JEAN-LUC GODARD, Video stills de Histoire(s) du cinema, 1987-1998

1. Rhapsody

For years I have been trying to look more deeply into the arts, their points of interference and their resonance, convinced that there is no contradiction between the specific nature of their languages and their contamination. This is the case of the aesthetic process involved in the relationships between cinema and painting, cinema and music or cinema and theater, where it is as important to consider the diversity of the territory they cover as their meeting points -the common underground flow of the arts as well as the very copulative union that separates them. But in the relationship between cinema and photography only the family perspective seems to count. An ontological history presides over their meeting like a formative genetic process -a genealogical matter in which a process of substitution undoubtedly is often used as an historical explanation. In the same way that photography interfered with and changed the development of painting, redirecting it toward abstraction, cinema took over the realist function of photography by appropriating movement and the time-image relationship. In any case, this is a family relationship between two visual arts that have broken perceptual and conceptual moulds for over a century.

This family history, lived out between the fairground and the laboratory, between art and magic, could well have begun with pre-cinema (a questionable term that should be used very carefully) and the archeological procession of the magic lantern, the camera obscura, chronophotography, stroboscopic devices and dioramas. I must confess, however, that I am not especially interested in going over these optical devices, though I understand their interest in the realm of visual phantasmagoria. I could refer, of course, to the experiments by Eadweard I. Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey, who knew that their photographic series were not a driving force, but rather the result of a perceptual process which "had to be believed in". In fact, "scientists" were never interested in recreating movement at real speed, but rather in that which could not be seen at that speed: they were interested not so much in seeing as in seeing in another way. The family history thus seems suspect from the start. "Not movement but its silent specter..." as Maximo Gorki remarked in The Kingdom of Shadows on the cinematographer Lumière. An invention Marey did not hesitate to call entirely idiotic, adding the following question: "Why film at normal speed what can be seen by the eye?". A simple, "blinkered" scientific question, but one which leads to complex answers, among them the declaration that the search for organic continuity through visual devices responds to evolutionary dreams (which would also explain Godard's strange, though plausible "boutade" of considering the video track to be the missing link between Marey and Lumière, the "machine manquant" capable of responding to perceived movement and time). We could also put forward Foucault's idea that great changes in form may result from a scientific discovery, but that they respond especially to appearance of new ways of searching for truth.

DAVID LYNCH, Man with instrument, 1987

2. To Be Another

My intention is not to deal with technical questions or epistemic wisdom, even cross-sectionally (such as the different "voyages of the image" in its analogical evolution from Brunelleschi's "tavoletta" to the video world and the synthesis of its images, as has been done by Raymond Bellour). Nor do I want to give an historical retrospective on analyses of the photographic mimesis that was so characteristic of the 19th century passion for realism and which, notwithstanding brief interludes provided by historical avant-gardes who used the "mechanical eye" to configure the visible in new ways, has continued on to modern times with film-making as the flagship. (…)