Introduction - Text
One of the longstanding criticisms most often levelled at “experimental” filmmakers is their lack of professionalism and their tendency to engage in “bricolage,” in contrast with a noble conception of film production which valorizes work that is “well made,” with “well-framed” and “properly exposed” shots, etc.
These accusations have been countered by filmmakers who, far from refuting them, have fully taken up their consequences by rejecting the film industry’s prescriptions around so-called “good practices.” Praising spontaneity, chance and the creative potency inherent in the technological and financial constraints with which they are faced, they have championed a conception of cinema which valorizes expression by technical means rather than the ability to use these means to conform to an established program. The history of experimental cinema is thus run through with practices and ideas which interrogate, contest or inflect the uses of film technology ordained by the film industry. Whether filmmakers are pushing their equipment to their fullest capabilities, using this equipment for purposes other than that for which it was designed, rebuilding equipment that has disappeared from use because it was deemed obsolete or simply inventing what they are lacking, in experimental film a large portion of technical inventiveness is devoted to conceiving technical get-ups which will enable filmmakers to invent original forms rather than to repeat tried and true strategies.
In 1962, in a chapter of his book The Savage Mind (La pensée sauvage), the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss employed the metaphor of bricolage to describe the connection between magical thinking and scientific thinking. He contrasted the bricoleur with the engineer, who uses technology according to a preconceived plan, whereas the former allows for meanders, the aleatory, randomness, risk and error, making bricolage a means with itself as an end.[1] Although Lévi-Strauss argued for bricolage reasoning to be given consideration, as Michel de Certeau would do later,[2] this did not mean that he denigrated engineering; rather, he placed the two opposite each other in dialogue. The hypothesis of this parcours, deriving directly from these ideas, is that bricolage and engineering constitute different but complementary orders of rationality and inventiveness. Or, in Lévi-Strauss’ words, that the two are :
parallel modes of acquiring knowledge. Their theoretical and practical results differ... [but each] requires the same sort of mental operations.[3]
This idea of a bricolage mode of thinking will be a touchstone in the present parcours, which seeks to cast light on the history and practices of experimental cinema with respect to the “regimes of individuation”[4] seen in this cinema’s relations with technology. These run counter to industrial practices, which most often employ machines whose functions have been standardized and whose uses have been highly prescribed. The goal of this parcours will be to cast bricolage reasoning in a positive light; this reasoning sees technical thinking less as the resolution of an immediate problem than as a way to open up a field of possibilities. This parcours will also endeavour, however, to show how the demands of efficiency which underpin cinematic engineering can be found even in its “margins,” with sometimes spectacular results.
