TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

Introduction, by André Habib

The goal of good film projection practices (inspecting the film, keeping the projector clean) is basically to protect the film from scratches and dust – and to draw as little attention as possible to the mediality of the projection and of the film stock itself in order to guarantee the perfect illusion of movement and of the reality depicted. It is thus not surprising to see throughout the history of experimental cinema works with an opposite concern, valorizing the interruption of the film stock, the way it jumps out of its mechanism, scratches, dust and tears, and which treat the film stock not as a transparent imprint of reality but as a material surface to be occupied.

Lettrist cinema, the heir to the Dada aesthetic emblematized in the field of cinema by Man Ray’s first film, Le retour à la raison (Return to Reason, 1923), — see on this topic the parcours Bricolage and Engineering in Experimental Cinema, section “The Film Stock and the Light-Sensitive Surface”) can be seen, particularly in the work of Isidore Isou and Maurice Lemaître, as consisting in destroying cinema in order to liberate a revolutionary poetic potential. The tears, scratches, graffiti, drawings and layers of paint put on strips of film stock in Lettrist cinema — including Isou’s Traité de bave et d’éternité (Treatise on Venom and Eternity, 1951), and Lemaître’s Le film est déjà commencé? (1951) —, as well as the systematic disjunction between sound and image, are some of the ways in which cinema was deflected from its realist function of representing a fiction or a documentary reality. From a visual perspective, the “cinematic material” (in 16 or 35 mm), whether it consists of shots taken by the filmmaker or found in the garbage, is used as a surface on which there appear the scoria, scratches, stains and blots that film projection normally seeks to avoid.