Cine-Dispositives - Essays in Epistemology Across Media - Maria Tortajada & Francois Albera

FILM
CULTURE
IN TRANSITION
Cine−Dispositives
E ssay s in
Epistemology Across M edia
E D I T E D BY
FRANÇOIS ALBERA
MARIA TORTAJADA
Cine-Dispositives
Cine-Dispositives
Essays in Epistemology Across Media
Edited by François Albera and Maria Tortajada
Amsterdam University Press

This publication was supported by Réseau Cinéma CH, Université de Lausanne (UNIL), as
well as the Faculté des Lettres and the department of Film History and Aesthetics at the
UNIL.
Translations by Franck Le Gac.
Cover illustration: Still from the lost film Voyage de noces en ballon (Honeymoon in a
balloon) directed by Georges Méliès (1908).
Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.
isbn 978 90 8964 666 8

e-isbn 978 90 4852 344 3
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© F. Albera, M. Tortajada / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2015
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
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without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Contents
Acknowledgments 9
Questioning the Word “Dispositif” 11

Note on the Translation
François Albera and Maria Tortajada (editors);
Franck Le Gac (translator)
Foreword 15
François Albera and Maria Tortajada
I. Dispositives: Programs
The Dispositive Does Not Exist! 21

François Albera, Maria Tortajada
Between Knowing and Believing 45

The Cinematic Dispositive after Cinema
Thomas Elsaesser
II. Dispositives: Issues
“You Do Not Even Know Where You Are” 75

Dispositive and Dizziness
Patrick Désile
Marey and the Synthesis of Movement 93

The Reconstruction of a Concept
Maria Tortajada
Notes on the Bergsonian Cinematograph 115

Elie During
The Stereopticon and Cinema 129

Media Form or Platform?
Charles Musser
On Some Limitations of the Definition of the Dispositive “Cinema” 161
André Gaudreault
The Moment of the “Dispositif” 179

Omar Hachemi
The “Dispositive Effect” in Film Narrative 195

Philippe Ortel
III. Dispositives: Histories
The Social Imaginary of Telephony 217

Fictional Dispositives in Albert Robida’s Le Vingtième Siècle and the
Archeology of “Talking Cinema”
Alain Boillat
Between Paradoxical Spectacles and Technical Dispositives 249

Looking Again at the (Serpentine) Dances of Early Cinema
Laurent Guido
Forms of Machines, Forms of Movement 275

Benoît Turquety
The Amateur-Dispositive 299

François Albera
Two Versions of the Television Dispositive 319

Gilles Delavaud
Reality Television as Dispositive: The Case of French-Speaking

Switzerland 341
Charlotte Bouchez
Dispositive and Cinepoetry, around Foucault’s Death and the

Labyrinth 359
Christophe Wall-Romana
Archaeology and Spectacle 379
Old Dispositives and New Objects for Surprised Spectators Stopping
by the Museum
Viva Paci
About the Authors 393
Index of Titles 399
Index of Names 403

Acknowledgments
The editors are grateful to Thomas Elsaesser for making this publishing pro-
ject possible. They would like to emphasize that the University of Lausanne
(UNIL), the Faculty of Humanities of the UNIL and the Réseau/Netzwerk
Cinema CH contributed to the realization of this project. They would also
like to thank the editors at AUP, and especially Jeroen Sondervan, for their
help with producing this book.
Questioning the Word “Dispositif”
Note on the Translation
François Albera and Maria Tortajada (editors); Franck Le Gac

(translator)
Since the nineteenth century, the term “dispositif” has been used extensively
in French, from the most trivial sense to the most theoretically sophisti-
cated. Its function as a concept developed within what has been called
“French theory” in the anglophone world – and more specifically within
the work of Michel Foucault, where it appears next to that of “archeology” in
The Archaeology of Knowledge, before taking hold in Discipline and Punish.
In film studies, the notion of “dispositif” was central to the theorizations
referred to as “apparatus theory” that emerged in the 1970s.
In French, however, the term frequently designates a technical setup
– the basis for a mechanical arrangement, a small appliance or the most
complex machinery – while also pointing to any concrete or abstract system.
It also shares its original meaning in the legal domain with the English
“dispositive,” which, unlike its French counterpart, is rarely used. As for
“dispositif” in its technical sense, in English it is translated as “appliance,”
“device,” “setup,” “system” or, in some cases, “apparatus.” Finally, some of
the theoretical senses of the term appear as “apparatus” in English, nota-
bly in the discourse of ideological film criticism in the 1970s and in some
translations of Foucault. Still, some other translations of the philosopher’s
work simply repeat the French “dispositif,” a choice fully justified by the
specificity of the Foucauldian concept, which implies both a method for
discursive analysis supported by an epistemological practice and a concep-
tion of processes involved in power.
The present collection of essays sets out to explore different uses of the
term “dispositif,” starting from its polysemy in French, and aims to open the
field to new forms of theorizations of viewing and listening dispositives by
exploiting the rich potential of the notion. One particular aim is to move
away from the historically circumscribed use of “dispositif” by apparatus
theory – not to overshadow it, but rather, to revitalize the concept by open-
ing it up to new approaches.
During the translation of most of the studies in this book into English,
we met with several difficulties. The first is the complex history of the
translation of the term “dispositif” in English, a translation wavering
12 FR ANÇOIS ALBER A AND MARIA TORTA JADA
between several formulations, forcing those who confront it to reposition

themselves. A second obstacle was to take stock of the very different uses of
the notion of “dispositif” in the two linguistic spaces that force francophone
and anglophone scholars into starkly contrasting positions. In French, the
term “dispositif” is polysemic and, in spite of available synonyms, it may be
found in all kinds of writings in the most diverse fields, in scientific as well
as common usage; in English, the notion invites specification, and assumes
multiple guises (the terms “apparatus,” “device,” “appliance” or even the
French “dispositif,” as we already pointed out). A last issue was that we were
confronted with two strong theoretical uses of the term “dispositif,” already
mentioned, which brought the risk of restricting notions that we wanted
to make available for new reappropriations. This is the challenge that has
been met by the contributors to the book, each of them in his or her own
way, yet always with the historicity of the term in mind.
The question remains, then: how to translate the polysemy and the con-
ceptual diversity of the French term “dispositif” in English? We abstained
from systematic use of the French “dispositif,” convinced that the violence
done to a language is justified only when the foreign term, in a neologism
of sorts, refers to an extremely structured concept in its source language.
Philosophy is familiar with this practice, which is justified where Foucault
is concerned. On the other hand, “apparatus” appeared marked by its very
dated use in apparatus theory; while it may have technical aspects, it is not
as broad as the French term “dispositif” as arrangement.
We are therefore putting forward a radical proposal, playing on the con-
nections between French and English, the history of the two languages, in
which many words have common roots and sometimes even similar spell-
ings. “Dispositif” and “dispositive” are cousins; brothers even, perhaps, in the
sounds conveyed by language, in their etymology, as well as in their original
legal definition. In our view, “dispositive,” once reappropriated, could account
for the specificity of the French term, thanks to these origins and proximity.
Some may see in our proposition another form of violence, consisting
in the redynamization of a word within the same language, a word that
in itself perhaps “spoke” very little. Still, this is a common method in all
living practices of language, one that is not only legitimate but also neces-
sary in a theoretical or historical project. We wanted to see the polysemic
theater of the French use of the term play out in the English versions of the
studies presented here. With the issue of translation, the volume travels
the passage between the two languages: what does it mean to theorize
in French and in English? Or to work through concepts in their historical
value across languages? Our answer is partial yet pragmatic. It was not
Questioning the Word “Dispositif” 13
enough to underscore the French origin of the word “dispositif”: the plurality
of notions tied to the term in English also had to be taken into account.
English synonyms for “dispositifs” have thus been added to the English term
“dispositive” when specification was imperative. In short, with this dual
choice, we sought to keep explicit the tension between two aims whose
contradiction is only apparent: an emancipation from the historical uses
of the French term and the development of new uses and methods with
regard to these historical uses.
In our view, this liminal choice, on the edge of two languages, presents
yet another advantage. Freeing the translation of “dispositif” from its his-
torical uses, “dispositive” accounts for the very diverse work of the authors
within their own practices. They cooperated at every stage, beyond even
the translation of texts, since Charles Musser and Thomas Elsaesser agreed
to subject the original versions of their articles to the global project of the
book’s translation, ensuring its overall coherence.
From a practical standpoint, and by way of recapitulation, we proceeded
as follows.
In keeping with the distinctions we wished to maintain or establish
between the different notions linked to “dispositifs,” the French dispositif
has been kept in English but italicized when referring to the Foucauldian
notion, itself distinct from the psychoanalytical apparatus of 1960s and
1970s film theory. Still, in many of Foucault’s texts involving the notion, the
English translation is “apparatus,” as some quotations in several chapters
make clear. We opted to preserve the integrity of these quotations, even
though their choice of terminology was at odds with ours. Conversely, even
though the word “apparatus” is frequently used in English in the sense of a
machine, a set of equipment designed for a particular function – especially
in the context of early cinema – we preferred “device” or “appliance” in these
cases, for the sake of clarity.
Because the other concern of the editors was to preserve the polysemy
of the French word “dispositif” while clearly signaling a shift away from
apparatus theory in film studies, we have accordingly used the English term
“dispositive,” whose legal meaning in English overlaps with one definition
of the French “dispositif.” In this volume, “dispositive” refers to simple or
complex mechanical arrangements, that is, as a synonym for “appliance” or
“device” in that sense; and to a spatial organization of elements, mechanical
or not, producing a specific position for an observer, user or spectator. This
concerns technical arrangements, scientific experiments and scenic setups
(exhibitions in museums or galleries, scenic arrangements in the theater or
scenic situations in literature, to name but a few).
14 FR ANÇOIS ALBER A AND MARIA TORTA JADA
“Dispositive” was also used to translate the editors’ own, more recent
development and specification of the notion. Finally, in passages of the
text where the authors transition from one inception of the term to another
(which occasionally corresponds to a change in the English word used as
an equivalent), the French “dispositif” appears as such, between quotation
marks. For further information, see “The Dispositive Does Not Exist!”
The translations that are not referenced in the English edition are the
translator’s own.
Foreword
François Albera and Maria Tortajada
The purpose of the present volume is to (re-)examine the question of viewing

and listening dispositives, from the emergence of the notion in the field of
film studies in the late 1960s to the more limited – technical and descriptive
– use that followed, as well as the parallel elaboration on the term by Michel
Foucault, on a completely different scale, in Discipline and Punish, up to more
recent developments in literature and art. The book also aims to confront ap-
proaches and perspectives in the very different context that is ours today: the
generalization of new technologies, the digital era and the appearance of new
theoretical developments around these phenomena, new models of knowledge
generally situated in the field of media (we are thinking of Jonathan Crary,
Friedrich Kittler and Lev Manovich, among others). The emergence of the
notion of “dispositif” in film studies was tied to a model of cinema and film
corresponding to the “classical” period of the medium, previously examined
with different tools by Christian Metz and the various semiological trends.
Theoreticians of the “dispositif” intended to move beyond these approaches
by focusing on spectators and their place in the cinematic event. Starting in
1978, however, the historiographic turn in film studies towards early cinema
brought a starkly different model of cinema and film to the fore, challenging
an important part of the historical and theoretical legacy that had dominated
the study of cinema for decades. The context of new technologies has shifted
the boundaries and spaces of “cinema” yet again. The (ongoing) research on
“early cinema” has probably done much to prepare researchers for the current
situation, which, as has often been stated, shares a number of characteristics
with that of the beginnings of cinema (heterogeneity, intermediality, attrac-
tion, incompletion, variability in reception, and so forth).
Traits of this “past” cinema resurfaced and could then be reconstructed
in light of the present (experimental cinema, then new media), in a sort
of “backward movement of the true.” At the same time, processes of re-
mediation, technological transfers or the translation of models from one
media to another (that of sound with respect to the image, for instance, or,
more recently, of the computer with regard to the editing table and new
modes of sharing) are remapping the field of study.
Within these diverse frameworks and environments, is an approach in
terms of “dispositifs” still relevant and effective? Does the obsolescence
of the original apparatus theory point to the need to move beyond any
16 François Albera and Maria Tortajada
apprehension of the cinema in these terms? In other words, is the notion

still elastic enough to remain pertinent in relation to its object(s), or should
we consider that it is linked to an epistemic situation, a historical state of
viewing and listening machines?
These questions provided some of the rationale for the international
conference organized at the Université de Lausanne, “Dispositifs de vi-
sion et d’audition: épistémologie et bilan.” Locally, the event took place
within the logic of a general line of research and teaching in the university’s
department of Film History and Aesthetics, with a possible prospective
program sketched out as early as 2002 with “L’Épistémè 1900,” delivered at
the seventh Domitor conference (“Cinéma des premiers temps: technologies
et dispositifs”).1 It is within this area, gradually developed and enriched, that
a number of projects were undertaken in the department, materializing in
three collective publications.2
At an international level, two conferences had preceded the one on
viewing and listening dispositives: the first in Louvain-la-Neuve in April
1998 (“Dispositifs et médiations des savoirs,” co-organized by the Université
Paris 8 - St-Denis - Vincennes, the FNRS in Belgium, the CNRS in France
and the European Commission), and the second in Marne-la-Vallée in
October 2006 (“Les Dispositifs,” with the ENS Louis Lumière, the Université
de Marne-la-Vallée and the LISAA).3 Both showed the success enjoyed by
1 The contribution appears in Le Cinéma, nouvelle technologie du XXe siècle/The Cinema, A

New Technology for the 20th Century, André Gaudreault, Catherine Russell and Pierre Veronneau,
eds. (Lausanne: Payot, 2004). Other interventions at the conference, which epitomized a “return”
to a functional, descriptive sense of “dispositifs” and to some degree a refusal to problematize
the notion, were published in Cinema & Cie 3 (2003), “Les technologies de représentation et le
discours sur le dispositif cinématographique des premiers temps,” and in CiNéMAS 14.1 (2003),
“Dispositif(s) du cinéma (des premiers temps).”
2 In order of publication: Cinema Beyond Film. Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, Fran-
çois Albera and Maria Tortajada, eds. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), with
contributions from the editors as well as Alain Boillat, Laurent Guido and Olivier Lugon; La
Télévision, du téléphonoscope à YouTube. Pour une archéologie de l’audiovision, Mireille Berton
and Ann-Katrin Weber, eds. (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2009), with contributions from the editors,
François Albera, Stefan Andriopoulos, Christina Bartz, Alain Boillat, Gilles Delavaud, Laurent
Guido, Kurd Lasswitz, Lynn Spiegel, Maria Tortajada, William Uricchio, Siegfried Zielinski and
others; Between Still and Moving Images, Laurent Guido and Olivier Lugon, eds. (Herts, U.K.:
John Libbey, 2012), with contributions from the editors as well as François Albera, Alain Boillat,
Mireille Berton, Christa Blümlinger, Wolfgang Brückle, Myriam Chermette, Clément Chéroux,
Michel Frizot, Tom Gunning, Maria Tortajada, Valérie Vignaux and others.
3 The Louvain conference resulted in a publication in the periodical Hermès. See Hermès 25, “Le
dispositif entre usage et concept” (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1999). Contributions from the Marne-
la-Vallée conference appeared in issue 4 of Cahier Louis-Lumière (2007), titled “Les dispositifs.”
Foreword 17
the notion, which for some had become a “meta-concept,” while for others
the “dispositif” had supplanted “structure” or was close to the Deleuzian
rhizome.4 A philosopher also asked the radical question of what a “dispositif”
was.5
The confrontation between the researchers attending the conference,
who came from different disciplines and “schools of thought,” gave rise to
exchanges that proved fruitful and convinced us of the renewed vitality
and fertility of a theory of “dispositifs.” Most of the papers presented at the
conference have been rewritten to form the substance of this book. A few
later contributions have been added; they were part of a cycle of lectures
around the issue of “dispositifs,” which started in 2011. Open to international
scholars, the cycle was also connected to the doctoral school and to ProDoc
programs financed by the FNS.
The studies included here have been divided into three parts: Programs,
Issues and Histories. The first part presents two types of programmatic
projects related to two institutions of higher education that collaborate with
each other while maintaining their distinctive characteristics: the depart-
ment of Film History and Aesthetics at the Université de Lausanne (François
Albera and Maria Tortajada, “The Dispositive Does Not Exist!”) and the
department of Visual Studies at the University of Amsterdam (Thomas
Elsaesser, “Between Knowing and Believing: The Cinematic Dispositive
after Cinema”).
The second part questions the notion of the dispositive by confronting
it with one or several objects: spectacles in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries (Patrick Désile), the stereopticon (Charles Musser), the praxino-
scope-theater (André Gaudreault); the theoretical corpus of a thinker such
as Bergson (Elie During) and a scientist like Marey (Maria Tortajada); or its
own theoretical elaboration (Omar Hachemi) and the relation it establishes
between two fields, for instance with the “dispositive effect” in film nar-
rative (Philippe Ortel).
The third part brings together studies that start from a concrete technical
object or set of objects, such as the crank in different viewing or listening
machines (Benoît Turquety) or the dispositives of early serpentine dance
films (Laurent Guido); from imaginary objects, telephony as imagined by
Robida (Alain Boillat) and Raymond Roussel’s machines as seen through
4 Bernard Vouilloux, “Critique des dispositifs,” Critique 718 (March 2007).

5 Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford: Stanford U. P., 2009). More recently,
the word has been used in the context of a restrictive definition of cinema: Raymond Bellour,
La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma - installations, expositions (Paris: POL, 2012).
18 François Albera and Maria Tortajada
the prism of Foucault’s analyses (Christophe Wall-Romana); and from an

institutional ensemble ranging from amateur cinema in the 1920s (François
Albera) to television (Gilles Delavaud) and reality television in French-
speaking Switzerland (Charlotte Bouchez), to installations in the space of
the museum (Viva Paci).
I.
Dispositives
Programs
The Dispositive Does Not Exist!
François Albera, Maria Tortajada
Five ways to approach the dispositive emerge from the texts that appear in
this volume; none is exclusive of the others, some are conjoined or articulat-
ed, some are separate. In French, the term ”dispositif” refers to a plurality of
meanings, from the simple mechanism of a device, instrument or machine,
to the epistemological construction liable to produce effects of power and
knowledge – the disciplinary dispositif or the dispositif of sexuality. From
its most concrete to its most abstract definition, the “dispositif” involves
the common signification of arrangement. Still, the different meanings of
the notion subject it – and its users – to a considerable conceptual stretch,
between empiricism and epistemology. We thus propose to examine these
meanings so as to explain our own “programmatic” proposition, which is
epistemological in nature.
Five Definitions of the Notion of “Dispositif”
The most common definition refers to “the way in which the organs of a
device are placed” (circa 1860), soon supplemented by another meaning, that
of sets of mechanical elements combined with a view to an effect, a result
(Littré, 1874). Until then, the word had only assumed its (original) meaning
in the judicial domain (as the part of a legislative text that settles a type of
case imperatively); and, more recently, in the field of military science (as a
set of measures, of means organized towards a strategic end).1
As it appeared in the technical field, the word thus pointed to a degree
of complexity, the relation of elements constitutive of a device, assembled
and arranged, and the pursuit of an effect. Within this usual definition, a
“dispositif” differs from a tool (pliers, be they universal), an instrument (the
dentist’s drill), a machine (a band saw) or even an appliance (the telephone),
in spite of the fact that it tends to substitute metonymically for this latter
1 Quite evidently, these levels are not hermetic, which from a methodological standpoint
represents one of the difficulties of our approach. Even the genealogy of the word may shed
light on later uses: the “military,” and more particularly the “strategic” dimension, is present
in Foucault’s appropriation of the notion; similarly, Giorgio Agamben has re-appropriated the
legal aspect of the notion.
22 François Albera, Maria Tortajada
object. Indeed, all of these examples are given “in one piece,” as a whole, in
a linear relation to their user (as an extension of the hand) or, in the case of
complex machines (even more so nowadays with computers), as what Bruno
Latour calls “black boxes.” This is not to say that they may not constitute a
“dispositif” or involve one or several internal “dispositifs” (the on/off switch
being one example); or that they may not become a part in a “dispositif”
we call external in senses we will specify further on. It all depends on the
perspective adopted, on the object produced by the scholar.
In early cinema, the term “dispositif” recurred quite frequently in re-
ported speech or in writings by the Lumière brothers themselves: patents,
descriptions of their invention, various narrations. Its characterization
as a combination of several mechanisms is evident in Auguste Lumière’s
evocations of his brother Louis’ invention. Louis, in his view, did not come
up with a device in one piece, a machine; rather, he reused some preexisting
systems, improved on others, and ended up combining Edison’s kinetoscope
and the system ensuring alternate immobilization and advance in sewing
machines.2 The system of intermittent stops allowing the projection of a
chronophotographic strip of film could thus be found within the appliance
called the “cinématographe.”3 Yet when the appliance – and its internal
systems – were in operation at the time of shooting or, conversely, in a
theatrical space in front of a screen and in the presence of spectators, it
instituted a dispositive connecting different agents: the cinematograph.
Two technical levels in the definition of ”dispositifs” thus emerge: 1. the
systems internal to the machine, a number of mechanisms operating with
2 Mechanisms are mentioned throughout the main patent (nº 245 032, dated February 13,
1895). On page 4, the sentence “it ensues from this disposition” indicates the positioning of
different elements as part of the mechanism. This term, “disposition,” is repeated in patent nº
323 667 for the continuous-run projector registered in 1902, in which the term “dispositif” also
appears: “[…] we claim as our own the invention […] of a dispositive designed to stabilize the
projection of each frame on the screen and, reciprocally, to form images of each point in space
on the same points of the mobile film, the said dispositive consisting in two flat mirrors forming
a right angle […].” In later texts, patents as well as catalogs, the term frequently appeared: “the
dispositives introduced in the latter in order to obtain negatives and print positives” (1904);
“We shall see how, thanks to the dispositives used in the frame, the cinematograph fitted with
claws can drive the film in one direction or the other […]. Another particularity of the appliance
[…] is the dispositive that makes it possible, simultaneously, to move the viewer in which the
operator follows the scene being photographed, and the frame bounding the image on the film”
(Patent nº 410 495, Appliance to make cinematographic views with a reversible frame, 1910,
signed Carpentier; our emphasis).
3 “I have devised a special dispositive of pins fitting into the perforations of the film…” See
Louis Lumière, Sciences et voyages [1921], quoted in Bernard Chardère, Le Roman des Lumière
(Paris: Gallimard, 1995) 284.
their own coherence; and 2. the machine itself, or the appliance, as an

assembly of various clusters of mechanisms, of different internal systems.
The machine is not the sum of these parts, but the assembly allowing the
mechanical and energetic connection of distinct internal systems. A third
meaning is elaborated out of the first two. However, it is no longer limited
to the operations of the appliance, the machine being considered or to the
resulting effect: here the dispositive relates them to their users, to other
appliances or machines, and defines a situation.
Describing the dispositive built by engineer John T. Isaacs for Leland
Stanford, which made possible a rather elaborate analysis of animal move-
ment, Muybridge explained that thirty cameras with electric shutters had
been built to take photographs of the horses and placed at about twelve
inches from one another. In the same breath, he proposed to capture all
imaginable attitudes of athletes, horses, oxen, dogs and other animals in
movement. Echoing this, Michel Frizot writes of Marey’s photographic
arrangement “as not simply a camera but as the whole experimental area
that Marey set up in the Bois de Boulogne,”4 part of an “experiment” meeting
a protocol: a dark shed, a black background, a subject dressed in white, a
track, a mobile cabin on a rail, electric cables transmitting synchronizing
signals and a rapidly rotating clock placed in the field of vision.
In short, there is the arrangement of the appliance and the heterogeneous
set of elements of which it becomes part, but there is also the individual for
whom or by whom the dispositive operates: the scientist, or whoever experi-
ments. This constitutes the third level in terms of technical arrangements,
and consequently our third definition of “dispositif”: the new disposition in
which the appliance or the machine as systems find their place, a disposi-
tion determined by a finality and a practice, and in which users, like the
machines, are themselves elements. This dispositive is external. Much like
the model of the machine as reconstructed by Gilbert Simondon, disposi-
tives are ceaselessly caught up in new assemblies, themselves referred to
as dispositives.
In a sense, the relation which extends “the way in which the organs of
a device are placed” to include complex, heterogeneous sets, is akin to a
machination. The term connotes artifice and cunning as well as trickery
(the conjuring table of magicians), but also refers to an ingenious disposi-
tion or mechanism in its original sense (machinatio). Similarly, the words
“machine” and “machiner” (“to arrange”) are used in French about a painting
4 Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (London: Könemann, 1998) 249.

or a narrative composed with a given effect in mind.5 Beyond the strictly

technical arrangement – or rather, in relation to it – other potential dimen-
sions of the notion unfold.
Retroactively, one may call dispositives the arrangements of mirrors
detailed by Jurgis Baltrusaïtis,6 and which led visitors to imagine themselves
as monsters; or even this situation of thwarted exhibitionism related by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau early in his Confessions:
One day, however, walking in the Contrà Nova pretty early in the morn-
ing, I saw, through a shop window, a young tradeswoman with such good
grace and appealing air that, despite my timidity with ladies, I entered
without hesitation. […] She was doing embroidery by a window, facing
the side of the room in front of the door. She could not see me come in,
nor could she hear me because of the noise of wagons in the street. Her
finery came close to coquetry. Her attitude was graceful, her slightly
lowered head let her white neck show; she wore her hair up elegantly
and had adorned it with flowers. Her whole figure was pervaded with a
charm which I had the time to consider, and which put me beside myself.
I threw myself on my knees at the entrance of the room, stretching out my
arms in a passionate movement, quite certain that she could not hear me,
doubting that she could see me: but by the fireplace stood a mirror which
betrayed me. Which effect this transport had on her I do not know; she
did not look at me; but, half-turning her head, with a mere movement of
the finger, she pointed at the mat at her feet. Startling, letting out a cry,
rushing forward to the spot she had marked for me were all but the same
thing to me: what is more difficult to believe, however, is that from then
on I did not dare to take further initiatives or say a single word or look at
her or even touch her to lean for one moment on her knees, even as I was
in such an uncomfortable position. I was struck dumb, I kept still, though
assuredly there was nothing quiet about me: everything in me spoke to
agitation, joy, gratefulness, ardent desires uncertain in their object and
5 When Apollinaire stated that one had “to mechanize poetry as the world has been mecha-
nized” (Selected Writings, New York, New Directions, 1971, p. 237), he was playing on the different
meanings assumed by the word by moving the artistic “machine” (“a composition in which the
painter introduces a number of objects whose felicitous combination requires genius,” according
to an eighteenth-century dictionary) onto the side of the industrial machine and technology:
the world being arranged or mechanized by railroads, the telegraph, electricity grids, etc. See
Claude-Henri Watelet and Pierre-Charles Levesque, Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture
et gravure, vol. 3, entry titled “Machine” (Paris: Prault, 1792) 355.
6 Jurgis Baltrusaïtis, Le Miroir, essai sur une légende scientifique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1978).
contained by the fright of displeasing the person about whom my young

heart could not be put at rest.7
The scene does not put viewing and listening machines into play, even as
it has a place in the “new regime of imagination” which, according to Max
Milner, “only the optical devices perfected during the eighteenth century
and transferred by Robertson and others from the domain of ‘amusing phys-
ics’ to that of spectacle made it possible to describe.”8 Still, the scene does
show the construction, the disposition to which a subject may be assigned in
a setup that involves seeing, a pre-technological one in this instance. All in
all, though indirectly technical, these examples fall within the third level of
our definition, which makes the functioning of the mechanical “dispositif”
(machine, appliance) more complex by including its user and its effect,
linking them together according to the relation to the mirror, for instance.9
Indeed, within literary representation, fiction often takes as its objects
dispositives organized around viewing or listening (the notable representa-
tives of this vein are Cyrano de Bergerac, Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Jules Verne,
and so forth). Besides the question of the seeing subject involved in these
mechanical or specular dispositives, a second aspect whereby the setup is
implied in literature – at the level of the very production of fiction – also
belongs in this third level of our definition. The book becomes a dispositive
like the exhibition and organizes the text on the model of an arrangement
including the reader in a “machine” not limited to the textual, as Structural-
ism did postulate. Paul Valéry already wrote of a dispositive as he looked at
the pages composed by Mallarmé for Un coup de dés; there the book became
a “brand new machine”10 put into play by the poet on the occasion of his
readings as part of a spectacular “ideographic” dispositive founded on the
voice, light and occlusion behind a curtain (“Dernière visite à Mallarmé”).11
When in turn Francis Ponge used the term “dispositif” about Lautréamont
in 1946, he was thinking of a genuine machine to transform text – that of
Lautréamont’s Poésies, which turned the statements of great authors inside
out – with extra-textual effects as a consequence (the library, literature as
an institution). Ponge parodied an advertisement for a mechanical device
7 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (1728; Paris: Gallimard, 1947) 71, 75.

8 Max Milner, La Fantasmagorie (Paris: PUF, 1982), 11.
9 This sense may also apply to other dispositives involving a spectator in relation to a rep-
resentation: scenic setups such as those presented by museum or gallery exhibitions or scenic
arrangements in theater.
10 Paul Valéry, “Le coup de dés,” Variétés II (Paris: Gallimard, 1930) 178.
11 Valéry, “Le coup de dés”: 189-90.
akin to collapsible beds or bookcases.12 Again, the book then became a

dispositive whose own “technique” made it comparable to arrangements
in our third level, that is, involving a user in an assembly defined by its
finality. This is probably where Bernard Vouilloux’s phrase proves the most
pertinent: the dispositive is a structure in movement.
The specific mention of whom the device operates for seems to us to
define a fourth use of the notion of “dispositif,” found in what has been called
“apparatus theory” in the United States. Jean-Louis Baudry put forward
two versions of it. His first theorization, “Effets idéologiques produits par
l’appareil de base,” published in issue 7/8 of Cinéthique (1970),13 did not in-
volve the apparatus, unlike his 1972 article in Communications. The machine
and the arrangement presupposing it are given as producing ideology. In this
context, the apparatus and its technical-ideological analysis are primarily
referred to the subject addressed by representation. In both cases, the notion
of apparatus rests on the theory of representation, with the basic apparatus
instituting a situation where the spectator is invited to vest belief in an
impression of reality. This impression is caused by the type of representation
projected on the screen, following the rules of monocular perspective.
The emphasis on the perspective developed during the Quattrocento and
its pictorial model (with Marcelin Pleynet and later Jean-Louis Comolli,
starting from the work of Pierre Francastel14) was to grow within studies on
painting as well, in particular with Louis Marin, whose concerns followed
from Benveniste’s research on questions of enunciation and his theory of
discourse.15
12 “Fit your personal library with the only device making it possible to scupper it and refloat it
at will. […] Open Lautréamont! And there you have literature turned inside out like an umbrella!
Close Lautréamont! And everything immediately falls back into place… To enjoy complete
intellectual comfort at home, try and adapt the MALDOROR/POEMS device to your library.”
See Francis Ponge, “Le dispositif Maldoror-Poésies,” reprinted in Méthodes (Paris: Gallimard,
1961) 210-11. Chance alone presided over the encounter, or the proximity, of this umbrella and
the Lumière brothers’ sewing machine above.
13 Translator’s note: in its English version, however, the term chosen to translate “appareil”
and “dispositif” was the same: “apparatus.” Baudry’s text was translated by Alan Williams and
published as “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” in 1974. See Film
Quarterly 28.2 (Winter 1974-1975): 39-47. His article titled “Le Dispositif” appeared as “The
Apparatus,” trans. Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst, Camera Obscura 1.11 (Fall 1976): 104-26.
14 See La Réalité figurative (Paris: Gonthier, 1965), La Figure et le lieu. L’ordre visuel du Quat-
trocento (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), as well as his courses at the Institut de filmologie, with which
he started collaborating in 1947.
15 “Placed at the point of view of the perspectival apparatus [“dispositif perspectif”], the
immobile spectator receives and may contemplate only one moment in the narrative which
the painter has staged. […] In classical history painting, the spectator is structurally included
As Baudry shifted from the basic apparatus [“appareil de base”] to the

apparatus [“dispositif”], his approach to the spectator entered the Freudian
and Lacanian metapsychological framework (the mirror stage for the child)
and evolved from the impression of reality to the real-effect, articulated by
Jean-Pierre Oudart. Cinema could no longer be reduced to its technological
dimension. Pursuing this line of thought, Christian Metz also offered a
critique of it, defining cinema as a symbolic apparatus in The Imaginary
Signifier. These approaches shared a heuristic finality: to emphasize the
place of the spectator in his status of presence-absence as regulated by the
theory of representation, which, with perspective as its epitome, was pre-
cisely determined by a technical apparatus. The definition of the centered
subject imposed by the theory could then spread through figurative as
well as narrative arts, where “techniques” were also involved – in relation
to speech and narration this time – founding the very use of the term
“dispositif” in this context.
The fifth meaning, elaborated by Foucault from Discipline and Punish
on,16 introduces the issue of subjection. Subjection substitutes for “subjectiv-
ity” to underline the central, organizing place given to the subject, which lies
at the center of approaches previously mentioned (Baudry, Marin, Metz). It
was initiated by Althusser in his article on Ideological State Apparatuses and
his concept of interpellation of individuals as subjects.17 In his course notes
for the Collège de France, Foucault writes: “The psychological subject [of
panopticism, discipline, and normalization] whose appearance is attested
at the time […] is but the other side of this process of subjection.”18 However,
in the perspectival apparatus which regulates any pictorial representation. He is included in

it as a point of view, and as we know the position of this point in its relation to the representa-
tive screen and to the vanishing point determines the whole construction of the represented
space. […] The perspective is the formal structure of representation, both as the production of
painted appearances and as their reception by the contemplating eye. It is the metaphor of the
apparatus of discourse in the iconic realm. […] From then on, the perspectival apparatus makes
possible the inscription of the iconic narrative, but the latter neutralizes its own condition of
inscription. The perspectival apparatus is posited as providing the narrative with its scene and
its setting, the space where the narrated event is given to see, but it is concealed by narrative
figuration. In the story, events seem to self-narrate in the sense that the narrator is no longer
present in the narrative.” Louis Marin, “La fonction du spectateur et le dispositif perspectif,” in
the entry “Représentation narrative,” Encyclopædia Universalis, CD-ROM (Paris: Encyclopaedia
Universalis, 2004).
16 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage, 1995).
17 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” [1970], in Cultural Theory and
Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey, 3rd ed. (Harlow, England: Pearson, 1994) 336-46.
18 Michel Foucault, Résumés des cours 1970-1982 (Paris: Julliard, 1989) 49-50.
objecting to the State and its institutions as agents, a central argument of

Althusser’s, and
instead of analyzing the apparatus exercising power (i.e., the localiz-

able, expansionist, repressive and legal institutions), Foucault analyzes
the mechanisms (dispositifs) that have sapped the strength of these
institutions and surreptitiously reorganized the functioning of power:
“minuscule” technical procedures acting on and with details, redistribut-
ing a discursive space in order to make it the means of a generalized
“discipline” (surveillance).19
A second phase of elaboration then situates the question of the institution

of the subject – ”subjectivation” – on the side of techniques of the self that
do have to do with governmentality, but unfold in the relation of oneself to
oneself and of oneself to others, and are a condition of the social functioning
of power.
As we already stated, the various approaches to and uses of the notion
of “dispositif” remain distinct yet merge, they may be mutually inclusive
or presuppose one another. They start with the smallest arrangement (1)
and extend to assemblages determined by situations of experimentation
(3), in the meantime also going through devices-machines or appliances (2)
to expand and include a representational problematization of apparatuses
(4) or the implication of issues of power (5). While these five levels vari-
ously refer to the technical dimension of the notion of “dispositif,” the first
three, more directly tied to mechanical-motor arrangements, are organ-
ized according to a common logic of “assemblage of assemblages.” The last
two develop a potential involved in the third definition, which leads to a
diversified thought on the subject in the “dispositif” – either all-powerful
and deceived, or subjected.
Propositions
In common discourse, “dispositif,” in its various meanings, refers to dated

historical objects – rejects, even. Still, if we are to move beyond them, we
19 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley, Los Angeles:
The University of California Press, 2011) xiv. Translator’s note: in the English edition quoted here,
the word “apparatus” is the translation for the French “appareils” (in the plural in the original
text).
cannot content ourselves with a “dispositif” limited to a “meta-concept” or

a “floating signifier,” a fashionable word used by every exhibition curator in
a manner as ill-defined as it is extensive. The definitions – Foucault’s own,
first and foremost – interest us on several levels as we attempt to elaborate
a working method to draw up the conditions of possibility for viewing and
listening dispositives.
For some time, the assumption was that a reversal of its polarities opened
the possibility of challenging the “coercive” dimensions of Foucault’s dis-
positif: with the advent of the digital age, “dispositifs” (computers, interfaces
and networks) had allegedly become the sites of interactivity and exchange.
Foucault was criticized for conceiving the dispositif as follows: “applying
to the body of the individual, and as a consequence his/her mind, [while
remaining] outside it; it produces subjectivity but is not produced by
subjectivity.”20 As it happens, the great originality of Discipline and Pun-
ish, as well as later works by Foucault, certainly lies in the place given to
freedom and autonomy in the social system of control and productivity.
In other words, Foucault shows that the emancipation of the subject is part
of his or her subjection. We reckon, with Giorgio Agamben, that our time
belongs in the episteme described by Foucault. Automatically associating
the issue of power with the notion of the “dispositif” becomes a problem,
however, from the moment when research on “dispositifs” ceases to aim
to outline the way power operates – which was Foucault’s project – or to
take up the demonstration already produced by Foucault himself. In a
way, we have to move away from Foucault to better shed light on a method
which he paradoxically makes it possible to design. Indeed, through his
analysis of processes of subjection, Foucault decisively furthered the notion
of the “dispositif”; beyond the question of the said coercion, the notion is
relevant to us in the analysis of viewing and listening dispositives. Reread-
ing Foucault from the standpoint of his historical position in the French
tradition of an epistemology of sciences, it is possible to lay the foundations
of a method that would allow us to work with the notion of viewing and
listening dispositives, a point to which we will return.
The interest of the notion of the dispositive and the importance of further
refining it also has to do with the reference to the field of techniques, appli-
ances, the possible reintegration of the technical history of cinema within
film history in a different mode than as an isolated narrative, a catalog,
a list of inventions and geniuses. Necessary though this catalog may be,
its limits (patents, for the most part) have given license to theoreticians,
20 André Berten, “Dispositif, médiation, créativité: petite généalogie,” Hermès 25 (1999): 35.
critics and estheticians to circumvent it and confine their approach to the

framework of representation or its sole social effects. The technical dimen-
sion, approached through the question of the dispositive, brings together
a) the spectator, the environment, the user; b) the machine, the appliance
or appliances; and c) the institution or institutions. These point to three
areas which film studies keeps separate: sociology and economy, technical
history and patents, and aesthetics. Yet these three areas interact at the level
of the production of images and sounds as much as their reception, even if
some analysts privilege one of the two poles.
In 1935 Lucien Febvre spelled out a program in Les Annales. Historians
of techniques such as Maurice Daumas and Bertrand Gilles were to refer to
this agenda in the 1960s and 1970s (as were Leroi-Gourhan and Haudricourt,
among others): 1) a technical history of technique (the study of processes,
sets of tools, technical activities); 2) a study of these sets of processes, tools,
activities of making as they are affected by an evolutive history in which
progress raises questions about their realization (theory and practice, sci-
ence and technical invention); 3) a study of the relations between technical
activity and other human activities (religion, art, politics) from which “it
may not be isolated”; in short, how technique is affected by general history
and how in turn it influences it – a discipline which only the convergence
and collaboration of scientists, technicians and historians can create.21
The study of cinema needs this technical history of techniques and the
construction of the network of discourses, practices and institutions relating
them to the representation that cinema is too often limited to (aesthetics).
For instance, linking the evolution of techniques of the moving image to
research on fixing a soap bubble or analyzing walking – which two scholars
at the Department of History and Philosophy of Sciences at the University of
Cambridge, Simon Schaffer and Andreas Mayer,22 have set out to do – makes
a number of elements visible: the web of research experiments in physics
and physiology, but also pictorial or fictional representations with optical
toys, stop-motion shooting, approaches to cinema through categories of
thought (“evanescence,” “ephemerality,” “fixation,” etc.) and social practices
(scientific popularization, techniques of the body…).
21 See Les Annales 36 (30 Nov. 1935): 531-35. This renewal started in part with authors like
Simondon, Dagognet, Ellul, Beaune and Latour, to name a few, but has not concerned film studies
in spite of some efforts – far too rare and tending towards vague extrapolations or, conversely,
empirical description.
22 Simon Schaffer, “Une science de l’éclat. Les bulles de savon et l’art de faire de la physique à
l’époque victorienne,” and Andreas Mayer, “Faire marcher les hommes et les images. Les artifices
du corps en mouvement” [2004] in Terrains 46 (2006), “Effets spéciaux et artifices.”
Finally, the domain of the techniques and technology of cinema involves

a large area, most often considered from the standpoint of the “futuristic,”
or “fantasy”: still, what has been tentatively named “projected cinema”23
interacts very seriously with the issues of technical invention and social
imaginary forming the “milieu” where these genres appeared. Often fanci-
ful, or pertaining to amusing popularization, these extrapolations devised
by literary authors or columnists, especially in the nineteenth century
(but also until very recently with science fiction), took inspiration from
existing or experimental technologies, which they “actualized” fictionally,
generalized, combined and multiplied (Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Verne, Robida
and so many others, down to Barjavel).
These texts systematically expanded the functions granted to existing
technical objects, just as they showed little respect for their assumed “speci-
ficity.” On the contrary, crossing characteristics, they turned these objects
into technical hybrids. These are precious indications for the technical
imagination or the conceptual and social frameworks (categories, ideolo-
gies) that may have been dominant at the moment when these techniques
were “imagined,” even as later specializations encouraged us to believe that
these techniques had been created in the restrictive, autonomous, specific
perimeter that has come to define them – or stands to define them.
In his work on technical objects, Gilbert Simondon refers to everything
that belongs to this ensemble of anticipation-simulation-invention under
what is probably an unfortunate expression, “psychology of invention” (for
he is thinking of a psychology “without subject,” “transductive”). These ele-
ments are brought together into a “genesis” and constitute “mental objects.”
Simondon’s thoughts on the definition of the technical object intersect
with Georges Canguilhem’s investigations on the history of sciences, which
emphasize the origin of a concept rather than its beginning – the origin
always owing to external causes, not to what would be a “logic of science.”
The concept of reflex thus appeared, not within scientific discourse as
if through an internal generation (of the Hegelian type), but under the
conditions of pathology and the clinic. Under which condition, Simondon
asks, may the technical object be so called? It is not as I contemplate it, nor
is it when it is simply being used, nor even when it is considered objectively
from the standpoint of its usage and functions or when it is considered
according to its physical structures: it is the knowledge of the process of
23 See François Albera, “Projected Cinema (A Hypothesis on the Cinema’s Imagination),”

in Cinema Beyond Film. Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, François Albera and Maria
Tortajada, eds. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009).
concretization of the technical object that constitutes it as such. In this

genesis, one finds imagination, the project, conception: Simondon calls this
ensemble an “imaging genesis” and sees a virtual dimension in it.
The interest of narrative fictions thus lies not so much in the fact that they
“foretell” or “prefigure” what is to come (after the model of the prophecy), as
in their participation in this genesis, probably more on the side of a syncretic,
hazy, profuse “creativity” in fact – whereas “invention” is discontinuous
and stretches out in time and in history. Besides, these fictions – insofar
as they borrow and experiment, on paper at least, starting from the state
of knowledge or ongoing projects – may shed light on some dimensions of
existing techniques omitted by a catalog-like history, which privileges an
enduring usage or collapses a range of possibilities under a dominant one.
These dimensions are twofold, at a minimum: they involve the potentialities
characteristic of the medium or the machine (from the moment when the
artisanal stage or the prototype gives way to generalization); and the social,
imaginary or pragmatic expectations faced with these potentialities and
tapping into them. “The dispositive does not exist,” then, in more ways
than one.
As the more strictly epistemological dimension of the question is exam-
ined, it appears that the dispositive remains to be constructed as a notion,
as an epistemic schema de-centered from its reality as an object. At stake
is the reconstitution of concepts associated with viewing and listening
dispositives at the moment of the emergence of cinema, in order to grasp
the changes in these dispositives, the transformations not captured ini-
tially and which open onto epistemological work. Concretely, starting from
primary sources – Etienne-Jules Marey, Henri Bergson and Alfred Jarry,
among others24 – this approach aims to give visibility to the conceptual
networks and the practices implicit in the definition of dispositives. The
dispositives of “cinema” – that is, the configurations that may be linked to
“cinema” out of a number of definitional traits and variables – are central.
Still, they cannot be thought of in isolation. What about the concepts of
movement, time, instant? What of the notions of repetition, instantaneous-
ness, decomposition and synthesis of movement? Of the idea of projection
or visual perception, or of the illusion of truth? Or even of mechanization
and automation with respect to the human body? How do these notions
play a part in the constitution and the transformation of dispositives? They
may be accounted for in several ways and, depending on the case, they may
involve very different concepts. As it happens, they are central to debates
24 On these figures, we refer the reader to our respective contributions in Cinema Beyond Film.
on dispositives, for these conceptual variations impose modif ications

with historical import on the conception of dispositives. The attention
of epistemological work bears on specific dispositives, whether attaching
to “cinema,” “photography,” “television,” and others, for their histories are
particularly interwoven. With the 1900 episteme, needless to say, research
requires huge collective work in which cinema does not enjoy preeminence.
Still, the demonstration requires that we stop and consider methodologi-
cal premises. There are many “dispositifs” around the world (objects) and
the most different texts from the late nineteenth century feature them
in abundance (discourses). We will here consider the “dispositive” as a
methodologically constructed object allowing the conceptual questioning
of an effective as well as discursive reality. Our epistemology of viewing
and listening dispositives, ever in the process of elaboration as it confronts
new sources, is Foucauldian in inspiration, but some problems in Foucault’s
thought may also be overcome through a rereading of his texts in the light
of Gaston Bachelard’s historical epistemology. Accordingly, as we put our
methodology into place, we will focus more precisely on the analysis of
these major propositions.
For An Epistemology of Dispositives: A Program
Viewing and listening dispositives may be defined as what allows spectators

to attend to a representation, from machines to machinery, from production
to monstration to reception, from techniques to practices to institutional or
symbolic constraints.25 The three terms of the dispositive are not enough,
though: to reconstruct the knowledge associated with dispositives, it is
necessary to go into the detail of their operations. Three levels may be
25 Viewing and listening dispositives involve three essential terms: the spectator, the represen-
tation and the machinery which, while it implies the viewing machine as technical object, also
refers to all the means implemented to give the representation to see and to hear. The means in
question may play a part at the very moment of reception by the spectator or in the making, the
production of the representation. The cinematographic machinery thus includes the screen and
the projection, the chemical process of photography, and even institutional, economic and social
arrangements. The definition allows for the widest range of practices, from the theater to the
scientific use of the microscope. See François Albera and Maria Tortajada, “The Episteme 1900,”
in Albera and Tortajada, Cinema Beyond Film. Thus phrased, the definition further specifies
what we have called the third level in the definition of dispositives. We intend to develop it by
apprehending the three terms (spectator, representation, machinery) within their network of
relations. In that sense, the notion of dispositive is supported by a method.
derived from the approach; they concern three types of notions calling for
explanation.
First, what we call the concrete elements of the dispositive. For instance,
when it comes to the machinery, it should be possible to think what the
notions of film frame, the run of film in the camera, the projector, the
instant photograph or projection are at a given historical moment. Second,
the abstract notions associated with the dispositive or with the concrete
elements constituting it: notions of series, repetition, periodicity should be
questioned in relation to the film frame, but also to the decomposition and
synthesis of movement, for example. So should instantaneity, which implies
a constituted dispositive, that of photography. These notions themselves
presuppose other concepts, which underlie them.
The third level is that of key notions or types-notions, abstract or concrete,
which at a given historical moment come to define a given dispositive:
they are then instituted as references. They convey a certain idea of cin-
ema or photography, the phonograph, television, the radio, and so forth.
The key notion consists in the crystallization of a specific definition of a
dispositive based on its quality or function. It appears primarily as what
is known and admitted about a given dispositive. Recurrent in discourses,
this crystallization is presented as self-evident most of the time, because
it is widely acknowledged, either in a discipline or a field, or sometimes
with a mainstream audience. Still, the type-notion has a history, which
is that of its “making”: as a consequence, its use should be historicized
and de-naturalized. A number of key notions may be isolated in cinema:
truthfulness, one of whose particular instances is the authenticity of the
film image, and which is tied to the idea of the indexicality of photography.26
The principle of automation and the mechanical character of the process
also come to mind. Still another example is the crystallization that as-
sociates cinema and imagination in a famous equation between cinema
and dream or hallucination. Epistemological work precisely consists in
making apparent what founds these notions. These concrete, abstract and
key notions should be reconstituted in their relation to a series of concepts
sampled from analyzed discourses. Schemas of dispositives may then be
constructed. To describe dispositives in this manner is already to borrow
26 François Brunet has written about the historical construction of photography as a figure
of accuracy. He uses the term “paradigm” to refer to what is called key notion, type-notion or
idea here, to be distinguished from the paradigm as a complex term, which for Thomas Kuhn
involves several definitions linked to an epistemological approach. See François Brunet, La
Naissance de l’idée de photographie (Paris: PUF, 2000) 281.
from Foucault, who analyzed his favorite objects, knowledge and power,
by reconstituting networks of relations.
Foucault’s Dispositifs
To successfully reconstitute networks of concepts associated with disposi-

tives, a requisite is the rigor of a concrete approach in reading sources.27
This is the first lesson of Foucault, perfectly expressed in his analysis of
Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.28 Foucault describes the architectural object
physically, materially, as he could the parts of a machine:
[…] at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower
is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring;
the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the
whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside,
corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside,
allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other.29
However, the physical-technical description is not enough. Most decisive

is the construction by Foucault of the architectural whole as a dispositif,
at once reconstructing the play of gazes and non-gazes, observed spaces
instituted as representations, whose global operation produces effects of
power:
It is enough, then, to assign a guard to the central tower and to lock

up a mad person, a sick person, a convict, a worker, or a schoolboy in
each cell. With the effect of backlighting, the sharp outlines of small
captive figures in peripheral cells may be glimpsed from the tower. These
cages are as many tiny theaters where each performer is alone, perfectly
individualized and constantly visible.30
27 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” [1971], in The Postmodern History Reader,
ed. Keith Jenkins (London: Routledge, 1997) 124-26.
28 Panopticon or The Inspection-House. The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the
Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring, Edinburgh, William Tait, 1838-1843. 11 vols. See
vol. 4, available at http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/1925 as of October 28, 2012. This is the source
Foucault refers to.
29 Foucault, Discipline and Punish 200.
30 Foucault, Discipline and Punish 200.
The source itself specifies the architectural conditions and the advantages
they entail.31 Foucault draws the principles and creates a system out of them.
Let us mention that power operates from the very fact that the prisoner is
the object of the gaze of the controlling agent located in the tower, but that
the prisoner is also a point of view on this center where she or he knows
that a gaze may be positioned. This bi-directionality of the gaze is what
guarantees the automaticity of the effect of power, whether or not there is
someone in the tower. What produces the effect of power is the dispositif,
not the effective presence of a guard.
The user-spectator is not placed in front of the dispositif; she or he literally
belongs in it. Each term is defined by the place it occupies in the dispositif
and its relations with other elements. When Foucault defines the positions
of the gaze in the Panopticon, he refers to the information provided in the
very source defining this specific dispositif. At this point he does not refer to
the legal codes in force at the time. If Foucault’s commentary is to serve as
a model in the elaboration of a method to analyze dispositives, then merely
reading contemporary theories on the subject or techniques of construction
of a given machine is clearly not enough to define the spectator in a specific
dispositive. The presuppositions associated with the spectator postulated in
these dispositives and in the very sources evoking these dispositives have
to be considered first.32 The Panopticon and the analytical method applied
to it offer an excellent example for the development of an epistemology of
viewing and listening dispositives.
Foucault himself refers to the Panopticon as a dispositif. The term, which
he started developing in the mid-1970s in Discipline and Punish and The Will
to Knowledge, allowed him to identify the disciplinary dispositif, a dispositif
of alliance and a dispositif of sexuality, all having the particularity of produc-
ing effects of power. What interested Foucault quite specifically at the time
was to show that power is not one but is instead derived from a network
of relations and may be traced through its effects. Still, the Panopticon is
not the equivalent of the large schemas producing effects of power: it is
not by itself the disciplinary dispositif, even as it is certainly emblematic of
31 Bentham, Panopticon or The Inspection-House, letters V and VI, http://oll.libertyfund.org/

title/1925.
32 Some dispositives are barely sketched out, either because the “machine” is merely mentioned
or the various elements appear as fragments. It is appropriate, then, to reconstitute the general
dispositive, if that is possible and if it is indeed the objective. Some dispositives are described
from the beginning as such [“en dispositif”]; Marey’s experiments, for example. Indeed, the
description of the scientific experiment implies the presentation of its complete dispositive.
The first “spectator” then becomes the scientist himself.
this dispositif in the demonstration, the forceful synthesis it offers of it. In

the end it remains a mere element, a part. The disciplinary dispositif is a
dispositif in the sense Foucault stated in this oft-cited passage:
[…] a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble, consisting of discourses, insti-

tutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative
measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic
propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the
elements of the apparatus.33
All in all, Foucault uses the term dispositif in two ways:

1. the dispositif as a case of viewing and listening dispositives in the sense
intended here; the Panopticon, for instance;
2. the dispositif – which we will call dispositif-episteme to avoid any confu-
sion34 – referring to the schemas of relations between heterogeneous
elements. These schemas – the disciplinary dispositif for example – may
include viewing and listening dispositives. It so happens that in Fou-
cault’s analysis, the particular case of vision and audition presented,
the “Panopticon,” operates within what is constructed as a disciplinary
dispositif. For all that, they are not one and the same. The Panopticon is
not by itself panopticism.
The combination of these two terms, dispositif-episteme, requires an ex-

planation. Each speaks to a different period in Foucault’s work: while the
episteme is central to The Archeology of Knowledge (1969), the dispositif
was developed in the mid-1970s. The two terms are intrinsically linked: the
dispositif and the episteme involve a network of relations between elements
structured by correspondences, and Foucault’s dispositifs taken in the strong
sense are epistemes of sorts.35 Foucault’s second lesson is to make a network
of relations the characteristic of the object to build: not a stagnant pool of
autonomous elements, but a dynamic network transformed by the addition
or disappearance of one of its components and by the relational disposition
in which elements intervene:
33 Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (London: Vintage, 1980) 194.
34 Gilles Deleuze opted for the term “diagram,” which he advanced in his Foucault, trans. Seán
Hand (London, New York: Continuum, 2006).
35 “What I call an apparatus [“dispositif”] is a much more general case of the episteme.”
Foucault, Power/Knowledge 197.
By episteme, we mean, in fact, the total set of relations that unite, at a

given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological
figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems […]. The episteme is
not a form of knowledge […] or type of rationality which, crossing the
boundaries of the most varied sciences, manifests the sovereign unity
of a subject, a spirit, or a period; it is the totality of relations that can be
discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyses
them at the level of discursive regularities.36
And Foucault characterizes large dispositifs through a series of dynamic

interrelations:
In short, between these elements, whether discursive or non-discursive,

there is a sort of interplay of shifts of position and modifications of func-
tion which can also vary very widely.37
Dispositif and episteme remain distinct, though, and Foucault explains in

what way. First, the episteme is a discursive dispositif, whereas dispositifs
such as the disciplinary dispositif are at once discursive and non-discursive.38
Second, the episteme outlines the constitution of a body of knowledge,
whereas the dispositif is entirely centered around power effects. And a
body of knowledge is developed in relation to power.
Assuming this to be the case, the relevance of research on the epistemol-
ogy of viewing and listening dispositives should be specified. This research
does not aim to reconstitute power games or disciplinary procedures. In
that respect, the notion of the dispositif of power – such as the disciplinary
dispositif or the dispositif of sexuality – may not serve as a model. Yet the
analysis of the Panopticon as a specific viewing and listening dispositive
should be maintained as a reference, though the analysis in question
constitutes the dispositive mainly in its effects of power.39 What is to be
done with this issue of power? Should it be imposed as an immediate given of
viewing and listening dispositives?
36 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Rupert Swyer (London: Vintage,
1982) 191.
37 Foucault, Power/Knowledge 195. See also how the dispositif of sexuality is conceived in terms
of a “cluster of relations” in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert
Hurley (1978; London: Vintage, 1990) 139-41.
38 Foucault, Power/Knowledge 197.
39 Even then, Foucault establishes a link between Barker’s panorama and the Panopticon
without further developing the idea (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 317, n. 4).
Besides, if the episteme is a discursive dispositif, what is in fact meant

by “discursive”? Should we understand that there is, on the one hand, the
episteme, the discursive, what is found in “texts,” and on the other hand
the “concrete of history,” machines, techniques, practices, institutions, the
heterogeneity of the dispositif ? This would amount to a reduction of the
discursive to “analyzed sources,” overlooking the fact that, if one is to know
the “concrete of history,” a passage through discourses is notably needed.
The discursive would then refer to the written word, at best to the total-
ity of oral, iconic or other discourses produced by a society. And it would
amount to ignoring the very special use Foucault made of the notion of
discourse, which refers to what is to be constructed out of discourses given
by sources, that is, the recurring statements that together constitute a body
of knowledge. The discursive is this very knowledge, which characterizes
the episteme. The question, then, is the following: should this knowledge be
conceived as detached from any tie with institutions, social practices, concrete
objects whose traces may still be found in museums?
To answer these two questions, on power and on the discursive, we turn
to Gaston Bachelard.
Bachelard: The Explanation of Concepts
Foucault devised his own method with reference to the French tradition of
the epistemology of sciences, represented by Bachelard and Canguilhem,
and defined as a historical epistemology. In The Archeology of Knowledge,
he outlined his own area of research in relation to this epistemology, and
prefacing the English edition of Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathologi-
cal, he described it as a philosophy of rationality, knowledge and concept,
referring once more to Bachelard. 40 Foucault clearly inscribes his work
in this tradition when he attempts to produce a form of rationality (or
positivity, as he calls it). What these thinkers share is the ambition to write
the history of the “formation of concepts.”41
Bachelard’s rationalism is not only an explicit reference to the epistemo-
logical history of sciences with regard to which Foucault could define his
40 Foucault opposes this philosophy to the philosophy of experience, meaning and the subject,
represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. See “Introduction by Michel
Foucault” [1978], in Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. Carolyn R.
Fawcett (Brooklyn: Zone, 1991) 7-24.
41 Michel Foucault, “Introduction by Michel Foucault,” in Canguilhem, The Normal and the
Pathological 9.
practice. In other respects, it could also appear as a structuring model for

the Foucauldian method, whose core would then be Bachelard’s definition of
the scientific concept. For Bachelard, the concept is different from the usual
meaning given to the term: it is a denomination and a definition, or, in other
words, “a noun pregnant with meaning.”42 To Bachelard, signification has
to be put aside if the epistemological explanation of a term is to be drawn.
The explanation is no longer the denomination of a notion: it becomes the
analysis of a fact put back in the context of its production and experimenta-
tion, thereby making it possible to overcome the epistemological obstacles
that interfere with it and exclude it from rationality. Only then are we
dealing with a concept:
The same word can at the same period in time have within it very many
different concepts. What misleads us here is the fact that the same word
both denotes and explains. What is denoted stays the same but the
explanation changes. 43
The explanation implies that the conditions of possibility for concepts

be emphasized, taking into account the context in which they are used,
the finality of the practice in which they are situated and the intention
guiding concrete experience. 44 The rejection of the empirical approach, of
“a phenomenology of the first take,” is thus justified as follows: “While the
empirical concept is a concept of classification, the rational concept is a
concept of interconnections, of absolutely reciprocal relations.”45 As with
Foucault later, the principle is indeed that of the relation. The concept is not
simply defined by its understanding and its extension, at least not insofar as
these terms point to a cumulative set of data, a sum, a classification at best.
The essential point in the structuring of the concept lies in the relations
actively forged between the “basic notions” or the “fundamental variables”
42 In his article on “reflex movement,” Canguilhem starts from the common definition of
the concept: “We know that we have encountered a concept because we have hit upon its
definition – a definition at once nominal and real.” See “The Concept of Reflex” [1964], in Georges
Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist: Selected Writings from Georges Canguilhem, ed. François De-
laporte, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Zone, 1994) 188.
43 Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, trans. Mary McAllester Jones
(Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2002) 28.
44 Summarizing Bachelard’s thought, Canguilhem writes: “The synthesis within which the
concept lies – that is, both the conceptual context and the intention presiding over experiments
or observations – this synthesis has to be reconstituted.” See “Gaston Bachelard,” Etudes d’histoire
et de philosophie des sciences (Paris, Vrin, 1990) 177.
45 Gaston Bachelard, Le Rationalisme appliqué (1949; Paris: PUF, 1994) 145.
of a phenomenon. 46 Correlations are also to determine the coherence of

a higher-level entity, “the body of concepts,” which founds a domain of
rationality, that is, what may also be called a scientific domain. The relation,
as it turns out, is a structural principle that may be generalized. It defines the
concept as well as “rationality.” The structural homology between various
levels of definition for scientific coherence in Bachelard may be traced in
Foucault’s archeology: it is blatant in the case of the episteme, which was
developed exactly this way, as well as for various elements of knowledge. 47
The principle of the relation extended to “positivity” and, later, to dispositifs
producing effects of power, disciplinary effects and effects of sexuality, to
mention but a few.
Bachelard’s def inition of the concept, centering on the correlation
of associated notions, may apply outside a strictly scientific coherence.
Foucault did perform this transfer, 48 but Bachelard had paved the way, if
only through an extra-scientific example allowing the scientific concept
to be understood. As a matter of fact, he took the example of a listening
dispositive, the telephone:
The telephone for instance is understood in very different ways by the

subscriber, the operator, the engineer, and the mathematician concerned
with the differential equations of the telephone current. 49
Though minimal, this effective example makes the second essential point
in the definition of the concept very concrete: the concept is intrinsically
linked to the practice defining it. In short, the telephone is about com-
municating through speech, or setting up a connection between lines, or
calculating equations. Depending on which option is considered, the idea
of the telephone may be completely different.
According to this model, the constitution of a body of knowledge associ-
ated with viewing and listening dispositives may be defined as unthinkable
46 Bachelard, Le Rationalisme appliqué 185, 188.

47 See for instance the “object” or “group of objects” in Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge
50-56.
48 There are several coherences of knowledge, which echo one another or sometimes con-
tradict one another. Some determine the conditions of possibility for sciences: this is what
epistemologists such as Bachelard or Canguilhem study. Those interesting Foucault directly
have to do, not with sciences, but with less strictly constituted spaces of knowledge, “domain[s]
of scientificity,” fields of relations by which a type of knowledge constitutes itself, defined by
objects of knowledge, types of enunciation, theoretical corpuses, relations between concepts
(this is the terminology used in The Archaeology of Knowledge).
49 Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind 28.
without linking these dispositives and a form of experience or practice.

What are the intentions motivating the use of a notion at a given historical
moment? Which other concepts are correlated to this notion within analyzed
discourses presenting dispositives? These are the two main questions in
the work of historical reconstitution of concepts. Studying their formation
will occasionally make it possible to identify conceptual transformations
or epistemological modifications.
Rereading Foucault out of Bachelard underlines how tied to practice
the concept is. The “discursive” in Foucault, understood as the domain
of knowledge, might then just as well be said to make sense only when
considering the aims of the users of concepts and the processes of applica-
tion of notions. The aims are to be found, not so much on the side of the
subjectivity of speech – though Bachelard writes of intentions – as on the
side of a pragmatics of discourse at the crossroads between the institutional
context making these discourses possible; the scientific, technical and
artistic projects framing them; the characteristics of the practice or ex-
perimentation they involve; and the ideological presuppositions underlying
them. At this level, one should accordingly move beyond the opposition
between episteme and dispositifs (dispositifs-epistemes), which Foucault
himself seems to introduce with his critique of the discursive. The discursive
itself may be understood in the confrontation with practices, known from
the sources describing them or from any other historical reconstitution.
The relation between the discursive and the non-discursive is a decisive
and complex one.50
50 Defining the two terms in relation to each other, Foucault says more specifically: “If you
like, I would define the episteme retrospectively as the strategic apparatus [“dispositif”] which
permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will
be acceptable within, I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it
is possible to say are true or false. The episteme is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the
separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised
as scientific” (Foucault, Power/Knowledge 197). Deleuze works most particularly through this
difference between the discursive and the non-discursive, the episteme and the dispositif,
knowledge and power, in short between The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish.
He articulates the distinction in a very illuminating manner: “What The Archaeology recognized
but still only designated negatively, as non-discursive environments, is given its positive form in
Discipline and Punish, a form that haunted the whole of Foucault’s work: the form of the visible,
as opposed to the form of whatever can be articulated.” He continues: “If knowledge consists of
linking the visible and the articulable, power is its presupposed cause; but, conversely, power
implies knowledge as the bifurcation or differentiation without which power would not become
an act” (Deleuze, Foucault 28, 33). However, the Deleuzian terminology, introducing the term
“visible” in comparison to the Foucauldian “statement,” risks masking the constant heterogeneity
of the two domains. This is the case for the example in which the Panopticon, given as a visible
The detour through Bachelard also shows that the notion of power should
be kept separate from the questioning of viewing and listening dispositives,
even if it means reintroducing it at a further stage. The Panopticon and
its analysis by Foucault may have been referred to as a model: yet effects
of power are indeed being constructed there. Foucault is often reread
and quoted in analyses that mechanically apply the notion of power to
viewing and listening dispositives, as though these were representatives
of dispositifs-epistemes. But if we turn to the analysis of Bentham’s text by
Foucault, it appears that the constitution of the idea of power is inscribed as an
aim in the source itself. When Foucault describes a dispositif to reconstruct
the notion of power, he teases out the practice and the project in which the
description of the dispositif is caught up. For Bentham, the Panopticon is a
prison indeed – not only an instrument of power but the means to rethink
the exercise of power from a utilitarian and economic standpoint. To be
sure, as his whole analysis shows, the disciplinary dispositif also aims to free
the individual from the direct, brutal power that obtains through chains
and through the whip (Foucault’s “Great Confinement”) what disciplinary
power obtains through a technique of incorporation by the subject of the
automatic effects of power. At stake in Discipline and Punish is this paradox:
to free the individual from a power, another way for power to operate is cre-
ated, insidious, indirect and apparently in the service of the greater freedom
of the subject. Nevertheless, it is a process of constraint, a remarkable model
of which Bentham explicitly constructs with the Panopticon.
Foucault may be said to apply Bachelard’s method to the letter.
Power is tied to this specific viewing dispositive, and it is even the reason
why it belongs to Foucault’s corpus. Yet any viewing and listening dispositive
is not at once inscribed in a practice and a finality that turn it into an
instrument or a relay of power. It is essential that this finality not be defined
mechanically for any viewing and listening dispositive. Rather, the finality
of each dispositive should be drawn from the context of its use as expounded
by the sources mentioning it. Effects of power may eventually prove to be
decisive in a given practice; but they are to be constructed epistemologically
at first.
arrangement, is from that standpoint opposed to criminal law, which is linked to the order of
the statement. Deleuze omits the fact that the Panopticon, before being a visible architectural
arrangement, is a discourse describing this arrangement and implying utterances of a discursive
order that make it possible to build this instance of the disciplinary dispositif. This being said,
on the question of practices, Deleuze’s formulation remains relevant: “There are only practices,
or positivities, which are constitutive of knowledge: the discursive practices of statements, or
the non-discursive practices of visibilities” (Deleuze, Foucault 59).
If the dispositive does not exist, it is because, in an epistemology of

viewing and listening dispositives, it is not an “object” to be found around
the corner on a path followed by the scholar, an object already made and
which may be grasped in its material concreteness. The dispositive is a
schema, a dynamic play of relations which articulates discourses and
practices with one another; a schema which is to be elaborated out of this
basis, this apparently modest work tool describing the dispositive in three
terms which, in each case, in every research project, have to be entirely
redefined and understood in their reciprocal relations: the spectator, the
machinery, the representation.
The dispositive does not exist, but its construction should be effected
(and desired).
Between Knowing and Believing
The Cinematic Dispositive after Cinema
Thomas Elsaesser
Introduction
The Imagined Futures research project, coordinated with two of my col-

leagues (Wanda Strauven at the University of Amsterdam, and Michael
Wedel at the University of Film and Television, Potsdam), concerns itself
with the conditions, dynamics and consequences of rapid media transfer
and transformation. “Media” in our case refers in principle to all imaging
techniques and sound technologies, but cinema has provided the conceptual
starting point and primary historical focus. While changes in basic technol-
ogy, public perception and artistic practice in sound and image media may
often evolve over long historical cycles, our main working assumption is that
there are also factors, not of steady and gradual process, but moments when
transfer occurs in discontinuous, unevenly distributed fashion, during much
shorter periods of time, and with mutually interdependent determinations.
Imagined Futures initially identified two such relatively abrupt periods of
transformation taking place across a broad spectrum of media technologies
and social developments: the period between the 1870s and 1900, and the
period between 1970 and 2000. The first witnessed the popularization of
photography, the emergence of cinema, the international, transatlantic
use of the telegraph and the domestic use of the telephone, the invention
of radio and of the theories as well as the basic technology of television.
The second period saw the consolidation of video as a popular storage
medium and avant-garde artistic practice, the rise of installation art and its
hybridization with cinema, the universal adoption of the personal computer,
the change from analogue to digital sound and image, the invention of the
mobile phone and the emergence of the Internet and the world wide web.
A key characteristic of such periods of rapid media change is the volatil-
ity, unpredictability and contradictory nature of the dynamics between
these technologies’ practical implications (such as industrial uses and the
resulting potential for economic profit), their perception by the popular
imagination (in the form of narratives of anxiety, of utopia, dystopia and
fantasy) and the mixed response (eager adoption or stiff resistance) from
artists, writers and intellectuals. These shifting configurations among dif-
46 Thomas Elsaesser
ferent agents offer a rich field of investigation for cultural analysis, posing
methodological challenges and requiring specific case studies.
As far as the earlier period is concerned, our research has identified a
number of iconic figures and their historical contexts: Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti and Italian Futurism (Marinetti and Marconi: speed; radio and
the wireless; cinema as the “destroyer” of art and of the museum; cinema,
war and aviation as major agents of modernization); 1 Oskar Messter and
the three S/M practices of early German cinema (the chief promoter of a
film industry in Germany since the 1910s, as well as the first systematic
proponent of what I have elsewhere called the three S/M practices of the
cinematic dispositive2 – science and medicine, surveillance and the
military, sensor and monitor – all of which play their part in the formation
of early German cinema, obliging us to recast what we consider to be its
particular identity);3 and Eadweard Muybridge versus Etienne-Jules Marey:
photography in motion versus the visualization of data, a project where we
compare Muybridge, who initially devoted himself to the art-historical
issue of how to represent movement in the still image, and Marey, who was
one of the first scientific photographers to capture, record, measure and
represent living phenomena and processes (i.e. biological, atmospheric,
geological) in real time, graphically as well as iconographically, with the
aid of the cinematic dispositive. 4
Finally, our overall project is driven by another consideration: we see nei-
ther the need nor the wisdom of making the history of the cinema begin in
1895 and end a hundred years later with the dominance of the digital image.
In other words, we do not endorse the much-discussed “death of cinema,”
which assumes the break between photographic and post-photographic
cinema to be fundamental. No more than in earlier times, when such breaks
1 See Wanda Strauven, Marinetti e il cinema: tra attrazione e sperimentazione (Udine: Cam-
panotto, 2006).
2 Thomas Elsaesser, “Digital Cinema and the Apparatus: Archaeologies, Epistemologies,
Ontologies,” in Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices, Marc Furstenau, Bruce
Bennett and Adrian Mackenzie, eds. (London: Palgrave, 2008) 226-40; and Wanda Strauven,
“S/M,” in Mind the Screen, J.Kooijman, P. Pisters and W. Strauven, eds. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2008) 276-87.
3 The German cinema of the silent period is usually identified with Expressionism and fantasy
subjects. For a revision of this perception, see Kino der Kaiserzeit, Thomas Elsaesser and Michael
Wedel, eds. (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2002); and Michael Wedel, Der deutsche Musikfilm
Archäologie eines Genres 1914 – 1945 (Munich: edition text + kritik, 2007).
4 Thomas Elsaesser, “Kontingenz und Handlungsmacht,” in Unmenge - Wie verteilt sich
Handlungsmacht? Ilka Becker, Michael Cuntz and Astrid Kusser, eds. (Munich: Fink, 2008)
157-90.
were posited (several such deaths of cinema have been foretold) – notably
with the coming of sound, the emergence of television or the invention of
the video-cassette – do we believe that a new technology introduced in one
specific area (of what is always a constellation of overlapping, mutually
amplifying but also interfering dispositives) is the cause of radical change
by itself. Insofar as such ruptures (in technology or cultural practice) do
occur, we believe that they are also welcome opportunities to revise one’s
habitual ways of thinking and to test one’s implicit assumptions.5
To give conceptual muscle and a body of empirical evidence to our
particular perspective, we are engaged in three kinds of “revisionism.” The
first we call “media-archaeology,” which entails a re-investigation into the
“origins” of the cinema and the cultural context of so-called pre-cinema,
while also pushing for a history of the discourses generated by the different
debates around the cinematic dispositive.
The second revisionism is of a more theoretical and conceptual kind.
Re-reading key thinkers on the cinema, such as André Bazin and Siegfried
Kracauer, but also Hugo Münsterberg, Béla Balázs and Rudolf Arnheim,
Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Epstein, we attempt to recover a more compre-
hensive view of the cinema – whether based on notions of Gesamtkunstwerk
or “anti-art,” on cinematic anthropomorphism or animation; whether com-
mitted to formalism and abstraction, or to an aesthetics genuinely belonging
in the ephemeral, the instant, the contingent and the multiple (elaborating
on Baudelaire’s “riot of details” as well as on Walter Benjamin’s “optical
unconscious”). In short, our second revisionism re-maps the semantic field
of relevant concepts as well as methods in our discipline. Evidently, we
can only conduct such a review in the light of the present, which is to say,
mindful of the media environment of the twenty-first century.6 Thus, the
reading of the “classics” is complemented by similarly “holistic” or crisis/
emergency-driven attempts at reading the cinema from within the digital
domain by contemporary scholars such as Friedrich Kittler, Lev Manovich,
David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Sean Cubitt, Mary Ann Doane, Jeffrey
Sconce, Garrett Stewart and others.
Classic texts, as we know, have to be re-read: they have to be put in
dialogue with contemporary practices and re-assessed in a wider conceptual
5 For an extended argument, see Thomas Elsaesser, “Early Film History and Multi-Media:
An Archaeology of Possible Futures?” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader,
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Tom Keenan, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2005) 13-26.
6 One of the results has been a new approach to (classical and modern) f ilm theory. See
Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (New
York: Routledge, 2010).
48 Thomas Elsaesser
network. This bi-focal perspective on the cultural mesh of cinema around

1900 and 2000 is what we are collectively proposing to elaborate. Hence
the suitably open title Imagined Futures, which includes the “history of
imagined futures in the past,” and the “rewriting of the past in light of the
future.” Even as we refrain from identifying “the future” with the “digital
era” as such, we think that the inclusion of sound and telephony or the
extension of the corpus to scientific and non-fictional films, for instance,
significantly enlarges our understanding of “what is cinema.” Likewise, our
special attention to how the cinema has affected the perception of time and
the experience of place and space will allow us to redefine the cinematic
dispositive without being either reductive or all-inclusive.
The third revisionism concerns the application, appropriation and
implementation of cinematic techniques, technologies and ways of see-
ing in fields other than the mainstream of film. While alternatives to the
narrative feature f ilm usually see themselves in terms of antagonism,
critique and resistance, our revisionism is less interested in addressing
the division between high culture and popular culture (the ideological-
polemical thrust of postmodernism) or the split between arts and hard
sciences (the “two cultures” of C. P. Snow). Instead we focus on breaking
down the division between an avant-garde at the margins or in opposition,
and the technological-industrial mainstream. What we are trying to explore
is how sound and image media and other information technologies have
contributed to or even spearheaded changes in the relation between an
artistic practice said to be hostile to any kind of application or transfer to the
realm of industry, commerce and functional use, and an industrial practice,
supposedly concerned merely with mass-production and maximizing profit.
Whether we call it “design and advertising,” “post-Fordism” or “research and
development,” the twenty-first century has seen a shift or even a reversal
in the balance of power between an entrepreneurial avant-garde and an
avant-garde entrepreneurism. The parallels between avant-garde art and
industrial application are often surprisingly evident and direct, just as
the marketing skills of artists and curators easily bear comparison with
those of industrial conglomerates and commercial companies. We would
be arguing – on the basis of the episteme 1900 – that the cinema needs to be
understood in its double role in this respect. It emerged at a time of crisis for
the self-understanding of the first industrial revolution, where the spectacle
of moving images was meant to mediate between technology, education
and entertainment. Such a division had not existed during the ascendancy
of the bourgeoisie earlier in the nineteenth century and may no longer exist
today. Indeed, one way of understanding the rapid rise of the cinema would
be to highlight the role it played as both symptom (of the division between
education about the world and entertainment extracted from the world)
and cure (in that it seemed to heal the breach between work and leisure),
a role also played by the large world fairs in London (1851), Chicago (1893),
Paris (1889, 1900) and St. Louis (1904), which sought to reconcile the split
between industry, technology, the public sphere and everyday life.
Thus, our third revisionism tries to track a trend that, from the 1970s
onwards, has seen these divisions between high-tech, entertainment and
information – but also between the avant-garde and the mainstream – as
increasingly blurred and merging, “returning” us to the period prior to the
1890s. Although we have not yet fully conceptualized the dynamics and
forces that are bringing style, design, advertising, technological break-
throughs, avant-garde and the mass market together, we note that the result
is infotainment, advertising-driven education, design following technology
and “theory” becoming design.
To the extent that we are concerned with often counter-intuitive as-
sociations, heterogeneous networks and non-convergent connections, we
are sympathetic to the idea of re-investigating the concept of “dispositif.” Its
capacity to think in terms of bricolage and assemblages, its renewed regard
for the conditions of reception (envisaging “agents” with different roles and
functions) and its interest in new pedigrees and genealogies all reaffirm
the concept’s value and uses. For instance, the proposal to draw upon gene-
alogies that can “distinguish between successive mechanical and military
paradigms and theatrical, libidinal models” 7 would seem to be quite close
to our aims as well. It is by attending to non-technological factors, drawing
connections between agents, sites and practices usually not associated with
each other, that the more recent term dispositive, central to this volume,
opens up valuable discursive space, by identifying common denominators
between and across media. However, “dispositif” – if merely translated as
cinematic apparatus in British or American English – is less useful to our
research, since it fails to account fully for what we think is the complexity
of the present situation. The same goes for the historical period preceding
“the cinema”: only if we think of “dispositif” as neither synonymous with
the technological apparatus nor analogous to the Freudian psychic Apparat,
and retain Jean Louis Baudry’s distinction between “appareil de base” and
“dispositif,” with the latter signifying different kinds of assemblages and
arrangements, can we adequately understand the nature of the interac-
7 François Albera and Maria Tortajada, call for papers, conference on “Viewing and Listening
Dispositives,” Université de Lausanne, Switzerland, May 29-31, 2008.
50 Thomas Elsaesser
tions, the degrees of antagonism and the kinds of interdependencies we

are tracking for the period around 1900.
The Dispositive Cinema: Conditions of Possibility
In what follows I want to stress one of the main lessons to retain from the
history of “apparatus theory,” the name by which the discussions around the
“dispositif cinéma” have come to be known in Anglo-American criticism.
Rather than repeating the well-known definitions8 and subsequent polem-
ics9 surrounding this particular ocular-centric arrangement of screen,
projector and spectator, we need a more comprehensive understanding of
the complex interactions that bring different media together into relations
of interdependence, competition and complementarity, as they appear
to us in the twenty-first century. Therefore it cannot be our purpose to
conf ine ourselves primarily to a given (audio-visual) technology and
construct around it a new “dispositif” without also elaborating a coher-
ent and historically sound model for grasping their mutually interacting
dynamics. Put differently: it is clearly desirable to have a better account of
what constitutes the character and historical specificity of the “dispositif
cinéma,” “dispositif photographie,” “dispositif vidéo,” “dispositif télévision,”
“dispositif téléphone.” At the same time, however – and mindful of the
phrase that “technology is the name for stuff that doesn’t yet work” – one
should remember that the study of a “dispositif,” theorized around a basic
technology, cannot by itself specify its cultural impact and consequences.
Rather, media technologies tend to be culturally most productive where,
besides their performativity, their disruptive and failure-prone dimensions
are also taken into consideration. Borrowing from systems theory, one
might argue with Niklas Luhmann that an “irritant” (Störfaktor) can act as
stabilizing or energizing element in a given system.10 Hence the attention
paid in Imagined Futures to dystopias, anxieties and panics as cultural
indicators of media change.
If we want to understand the place of cinema in the digital environment
today – as just such an irritant, stabilizing force and counter-practice –
8 Representative collections in English are The Cinematic Apparatus, Teresa de Lauretis and
Stephen Heath, eds. (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s, 1980) and Narrative, Apparatus,
Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia UP, 1986).
9 For a useful summary of the polemics, see Richard Allen, Projecting Illusion: Film Spectator-
ship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997).
10 Niklas Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990).
amidst the expanded field of the media interaction typical of the episteme
2000 (and retrospectively also making a good case for the episteme 1900),
then we need to study the constitutive parts of the classic “dispositifs”
in their separate developments, as well as identify their analogues or
functional equivalents across a range of media technologies and practices.
With this in mind, we have been undertaking separate studies of the “ar-
chaeology of the camera,” the “archaeology of the screen and frame,” the
“archaeology of projection and transparency,” the “archaeology of motion
and stillness,” the “archaeology of sound and color,” and so forth. Such stud-
ies are the methodological consequences of speaking of media “transfer”
or media “change” in the context of what I have termed a Medienverbund,
that is, a tactical alliance of media practices: not a “transfer” or “change”
of the properties of one medium into another, be it photographic, video
or digital, nor the assumption that these are historically successive modes
of production, be they hand-crafted, mechanical, electronic, replacing
each other in a trajectory of linear progress.11 Rather, what the idea of a
Medienverbund requires is the ability to bring to the debate a different level
of generality or abstraction, on the strength of which fresh comparisons
can be made and new genealogies generated. Lev Manovich has done this
in his book The Language of New Media (2001); Edward Branigan has tried
to do it in Projecting a Camera (2006), as has Sean Cubitt in The Cinema
Effect (2005). None of them use the word “dispositif,” but their efforts (just
as ours in Amsterdam, around the archaeologies of screen, projection,
camera, frame) are consonant with re-situating “apparatus theory,” still
valuable and an indispensable reference point, not least because it was the
first attempt at a comprehensive theoretical-philosophical articulation of
the cinema.
In the same spirit, the Imagined Futures project has as its working as-
sumption the notion that a viewing and listening dispositive is predicated
on several dimensions, working together: it implies a spatial extension, it
involves a temporal register and it has a subjective reference as historically
variable but conceptually indispensable elements. Our approach specifies
that a dispositive is a dispositive only when it entails a – material – medium
(most often a combination of technologies), an image (a representation,
including a sound representation) and a spectator (liable to be solicited,
11 Thomas Elsaesser, “Archives and Archaeologies: The Place of Non-Fiction Film in Contem-
porary Media,” in Films that Work: Cinematic Means and Industrial Ends, Vinzenz Hediger and
Patrick Vonderau, eds. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009) 19-34.
52 Thomas Elsaesser
subjectified, addressed or affectively and cognitively engaged).12 Such a

conception of the dispositive echoes, for instance, the definition proposed
by Hans Belting. Arguing from the perspective of a post-art history, Belting
advocates “a new approach to iconology” as part of his image-anthropology:
“[…] W.J.T. Mitchell [uses] the terms image, text, ideology. […] I also use a
triad of terms in which […] image remains but now is framed by the terms
medium and body.” Belting goes on to explain that images can only be
understood if one takes account of other, non-iconic determinants, and that
medium needs to be understood “in the sense of the agent by which images
are transmitted, while body means either the performing or the perceiving
body on which images depend no less than on their respective media.”13
These attempts at re-description across the humanities underline the
variable nature of what is to be understood by “image,” “medium” and “the
moving image” today. What film studies can contribute are conceptual
precisions and historical clarifications. For instance, in Belting’s definition,
the term “framed” seems to me a problematic metaphor in two respects: it
brings back the picture frame, and thus the picture, as opposed to the image;
and it is a static-geometrical term, when what is required is a term that can
encompass processual and time-based phenomena that are in flux. A similar
caveat applies to the term “dispositif”: it seems to imply a fixed assemblage
rather than a dynamic, ongoing process of re-alignment and interaction. On
the other hand, Belting’s definition of the body as both “performing” and
“perceiving” is helpful in that it is also clearly in line with major trends in
film studies, where “agency” is now applied to characters within the fiction,
to spectators/viewers/users, but also to objects and machines.14
This brings me to another general point: the debate about the cin-
ematic apparatus, with its emphasis on subject position as a consequence
of miscognition and disavowal, seems (negatively) predicated on a notion
of the cinema as ideally a source of secure knowledge about the world.
When theorists ask “how we know what we know” in the cinema – or,
to quote Christian Metz’s famous words, want “to understand how films
12 Each of these terms refers to a different theoretical paradigm: “subjectified” belongs to the
psychoanalytic terminology of miscognition or disavowal; “addressed” recalls Marxist cultural
studies, via interpellation and negotiation; while “affectively and cognitively engaged” comes
from studies of narrative comprehension and cognitivist film theory.
13 Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body. A New Approach to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31.2
(Winter 2005): 302-19, 302.
14 Discussions around “agency” seem to point to the influence of Bruno Latour, Reassembling
the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press,
2005).
are understood”15 – are they not committing themselves too exclusively

to an epistemological theory of film centered on “realism,” even as they
denounce its realism as an ideological effect? By extension, some of the
difficulties and deadlocks – not only of apparatus theory in the 1980s but
also of film theory at its present conjuncture (where cognitivists are ranged
on one side, Deleuzians and phenomenologists on the other, united only
in their rejection of psychoanalysis and semiotics) – might be due in part
to an insufficiently articulated debate as to the status of cinema between
“ontology” and “epistemology.” Cognitivism tends to assume a positive
relationship between representation, knowledge and truth, depending on
pre-formed expectations, evidence and ocular verification. By contrast,
psycho-semiotics subscribes to such an epistemology mainly in its negative
mode, critiquing films for failing to live up to this presumption of realism:
the very term “illusionism” requires a faith in “realism” as its foil, as does the
charge that film produces its “effects of the real” through fetishism. Feminist
theory equates scoptophilia with epistemophilia, attacking both, while
in the discourse of social constructivism and cultural studies, epistemic
pretensions of films capable of speaking the truth are no less firmly and
no less negatively implied (for instance, when accusing Hollywood of mis-
representations, stereotyping, etc.). A tendency towards cinephobia, in other
words, underpins a radical epistemic critique of cinema, largely ignoring
both the aesthetic value that “mere appearance” or the so-called “illusion
of presence” might have, and the possibility, put forward by Deleuze and
others, that in the cinema we do not so much gain knowledge about the
world, as we learn about ourselves being in the world (which would amount
to an “ontological” position).
Dispositive Mark 1: What Was Cinema
The problem, here, is perhaps a broader one, namely the need to reflect
once more quite fundamentally about what is cinema/what was cinema,
and to try and locate its place or purpose within human history in general
and the history of what is called “modernity” in particular. My sugges-
tion is that we should, for the sake of clarification, differentiate between
anthropological, philosophical and aesthetic theories of the cinema, if we
are to find a level of generality where dispositives are not defined solely
15 Christian Metz, “Problems of Denotation in the Fiction Film,” in Film Language, trans.
Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford UP, 1974) 145.
54 Thomas Elsaesser
by their basic technology. Evidently these are not mutually exclusive ap-
proaches. Anthropological theories, for instance, comprise a wide range of
views, including André Bazin’s ideas about the cinema as photographically
based, and of photography being related to the bodily imprint: hence his
references to mummies, the Turin shroud, plaster casts and other forms of
effigies. But it also encompasses Walter Benjamin’s ideas about cinema and
modernity, his influential concept of the optical unconscious and his notion
that cinema “trains” the senses, in order for us to cope with the shocks
and traumata of modern urban life. Also under a broadly anthropological
perspective, one can count the implications drawn from Foucault’s theories
of the disciplinary and self-monitoring effects of vision machines, notably
his theory of the Panopticon, which has been revived – around surveillance
– as a generalized paradigm of vision in the twenty-first century, replacing
both window and mirror as the “epistemes” of the twentieth century.
The epistemological theories already alluded to would fall under the more
generally philosophical approaches to the cinema. Film philosophy ranges
from phenomenological theories to cognitivist ones and also includes various
ontologies of the cinema (as attributed to Bazin, as proclaimed by Stanley
Cavell or as imputed to Gilles Deleuze), while the third general category
would be aesthetic theories of the cinema, whether these call themselves
“poetics” and are derived from Aristotelian theories of drama, or “formalist”
as influenced by Russian semiotics, whether they stem from “theatricality” as
first defined by Plato, or more specifically have to do with Romantic theories
of play, of appearance and presence, and concern themselves with the status
of the image in the arts or with the representation of movement and motion.16
In most theories of the cinema proposed over the past eighty years or so,
there is an overlap between epistemological and aesthetic categories, as in
the different theories of realism, or in the different ideological critiques,
where epistemological questions and anthropological concerns are not eas-
ily kept apart. Likewise, ontological theories tend to overlap with aesthetic
ones, as do phenomenological ones. But the advantage of making such
distinctions at all is that they encourage another look at existing theories
16 The publications alluded to here are André Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,”
What is Cinema? vol. I, ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) 9-16; Stanley
Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1971); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I. The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) and Cinema II. The Time Image,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989);
David Bordwell, Narration and the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985);
and Sam Weber, Theatricality as Medium (Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2004).
in light of present concerns, notably the media change we are concerned

with here. Past theories can be productively studied for how they formulate
the problems, even if one does not agree with their answers.
The question “what was cinema,” formulated across these distinctions
between anthropological, philosophical and aesthetic “regimes,” would
determine the agenda for our second type of revisionism, one that re-reads
the history of film theory. An example of how such a revision might work
involves André Bazin, one of the undisputed founders of our discipline.
Bazin has been chided as a misguided epistemologist of realism, when an-
other look at his writings suggests a) that he was the most inter-disciplinary
thinker imaginable; b) that his anthropological conception of cinema is
still pertinent, since it even allows for a “cinema after cinema”; and c) that
there are quite different ways of understanding what he meant by “realism.”
Re-reading Bazin in 2008, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, I could
find little that would indict him as a naïve realist, and much that showed
him to be a sophisticated advocate of illusionism – not only as a matter of
aesthetics, but also as a matter of belief and mutually negotiated rules of
the game – rather than as a dogmatic idealist.17
In short, the current state of theory leaves a number of unresolved issues,
which complicates a historically grounded and theoretically consistent ap-
proach to the “episteme 1900” and its contemporary analogue, the “episteme
2000.” The very idea of “episteme” evidently implies a broadly Foucauldian
approach: “the machine (its technology), its location and the place given
to the spectator/hearer form in this way a three-unit structure.”18 In such a
formulation, the dispositive is associated with power, “and especially with
the coercive, disciplinary or controlling power of libidinal assemblages.” On
the other hand, this idea of a contact space or contact zone between human
perceptual faculties and mechanical elements may lead one to opt, not for
“dispositive,” but instead for the term “interface,” understood as a boundary
across which different systems meet, act on, interfere or communicate with
one another.19
As indicated, ontological theories have also been revived in order to
overcome what is now seen as the historicity of the technology that formed
17 Thomas Elsaesser, “A Bazinian Half-Century,” Opening Bazin, ed. Dudley Andrew, with
Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) 3-12.
18 François Albera and Maria Tortajada, call for papers, conference on “Viewing and Listening
Dispositives.”
19 See for instance Lev Manovich, “Cinema as a Cultural Interface,” http://www.manovich.
net/TEXT/cinema-cultural.html (last accessed on February 4, 2013) and Seung-hoon Jeong,
Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory After New Media (New York: Routledge, 2013).
56 Thomas Elsaesser
the basis of the cinematic dispositive in its classical articulation: namely, the
photographic image, projection and the fixed spectator. Accommodating
its importance without being limited by the specificity of the dispositive,
such an ontological approach places greater emphasis on “belief” or “trust”
rather than on “knowledge” or “truth.” Such trust in the “image” (as a field
of forces and intensities, rather than a “representation” with a particular
“reference”) is secured either as an existential choice or as an interpersonal,
pragmatic value, and does not depend on a particular “essence” of cinema
or on photographic indexicality in explaining what binds the film spectator
to the world (of images).
Recent work in aesthetics has challenged the ocular-centric geometry of
the cinematic dispositive on several fronts, as part of yet another critique of
perspectival projection, with “infinity” as the implied vanishing point and
the “singular source” or solitary observer as the necessary point of view.20
Other objections concern the fact that the cinematic “cone of vision” privi-
leges space and stasis (“staging in depth”) over time and process; that it relies
too much on the bounded frame (off-screen/on-screen) or on the centrifugal
frame (in cinema) versus the centripetal (picture) frame (in painting); that it
assumes as a given the upright, frontal orientation of human vision and the
image, and that it tends to “freeze” the individual frame, thus reducing the
cinematic image to the still image, mechanically animated, rather than start
from the moving image, temporarily stilled in the photograph. The “new art
history,” in particular, turned to cinema as a vital element of visual culture in
the late 1980s.21 In the 1990s, however, overtly Marxist and/or psychoanalytic
epistemological critiques of apparatus theory began to give way to ideas
about vision and the observer that revived the multi-perspectival theories
of the different avant-gardes, while also acknowledging the influence of
video and installation art and the general opening up of museum culture
to include the moving image. In the process, the “archaeological” interest
in early cinema gained new traction and topical relevance: its dispositive –
once considered “primitive” because it focused more on performance and
less on narrative – could now be understood as a kind of “deconstruction”
of monocular perspective, as if a return to the origins of cinema would be
20 Among the many critiques of the “Albertian window” applied to the cinema, see Victor
Burgin, “Geometry and Abjection,” Public 1 (Winter 1988): 12-30; and Anne Friedberg, The Virtual
Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
21 Norman Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1988) 87-113.
a case of reculer pour mieux sauter, of stepping back for a new leap forward,
towards cinema and the moving image in the twenty-first century.
Dispositive Mark 2: Early Cinema
The turn/return to early cinema has proved fertile in many different ways.
Besides documenting the enormous variety of entertainment and scientific
uses of the Cinématographe in the urban environment of evolving modernity
(the anthropological aspect) and identifying a different aesthetics, whether
called a “primitive mode of representation” (Burch) or “the cinema of attrac-
tions” (Gunning and Gaudreault),22 early cinema studies also recovered an
epistemological dimension that tended to be lost in the negative epistemol-
ogy of the 1970s: the close alliance of chronophotography with the empirical
and observational sciences. As already noted, pioneers like Jules Janssen,
Etienne-Jules Marey and even the Lumière Brothers (who from 1902 onwards
devoted their best energies to experiments with color, with echographic
topology and with medical appliances for war veterans) have returned as
important figures in a genealogy of new media and expanded cinema. In
France, a belatedly recognized hero has emerged in Georges Demenÿ, who
dreamed up, explored and tested many applications of the moving image
for sports training, teaching lip-reading to the deaf and more generally for
educational, military and medical uses. In Britain, the multi-talent of R.W.
Paul is beginning to be recognized,23 and in Germany, it was Oskar Messter
who received special attention from scholars working on documentary and
non-fiction film, but also on more adventurous aspects of the dispositive
such as sound-image synchronization, color and 3-D projection.24 Messter
holds a special place in our project and his extensive oeuvre allowed me
to speak of the S/M practices of the apparatus, meaning: the scientific and
medical imaging dispositive (his work for hospitals touched upon by Lisa
22 See the essays by Burch, Gunning and Gaudreault in Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative,
ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 1990) and a new contextualization of these
positions in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2007).
23 See Ian Christie, sleeve notes, biography and filmography in R.W. Paul, The Collected Films
1895-1908 (London: BFI DVD Edition, 2006).
24 Oskar Messter, Erfinder und Geschäftsmann, ed. Martin Loiperdinger, KINtop 3, special issue
(Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1994).
58 Thomas Elsaesser
Cartwright),25 the surveillance and military dispositive (linking Messter

to Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema),26 the sensory-motor-schema dispositive
(showing him to be a contemporary of Henri Bergson), and the sensoring
and monitoring dispositive (pioneered, besides Marey, by Albert Londe and
documented, among others, by Siegfried Zielinski27).
In other words, by going back to early and pre-cinema, and duly noting
the non-entertainment uses of the cinematic apparatus, one can advance
the proposition that “the cinema has many histories, only some of which
belong to the movies.”28 Evidently, at least in part, it is the topicality of the
non- or para-entertainment uses at the turn of the twenty-first century that
has once more given prominence to these earlier applications of the moving
image and the cinematograph. While the historical and theoretical studies
of Virilio and Friedrich Kittler helped to make the connections between
war and cinema much more present in our minds, this new awareness was
helped by the daily news bulletins about smart bombs during the first
Iraq War, which in turn found their resonance in Harun Farocki’s work.
For three decades, his films and video installations have been examining
the different genealogies of what he calls “operational images” from the
late nineteenth century, when photography was used for measuring the
elevation of buildings, through gathering reconnaissance footage from
spotter planes during WWII, all the way to the use of surveillance cameras
in Californian prisons and the data-gathering sensors in Berlin supermar-
kets. Farocki’s investigations of hand, eye and machine are exemplary in
showing how the cinematic dispositive – especially in its observational,
monitoring and controlling functions – has become a pervasive presence
in our everyday lives, joining art and entertainment with the industrial and
bureaucratic uses of the moving image.29 In this sense, Farocki is returning
to Muybridge’s time-and-motion studies, to which his own researches into
social routines, stress tests and service-industry training exercises provide
a contemporary update.30
25 Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
26 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989).
27 Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisions: Cinema and Television as Entr’actes in History (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 1999).
28 Harun Farocki – Working on the Sight-Lines, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2004) 17.
29 Harun Farocki, Auge/Maschine (video-installation, 23 mn, 2000) http://www.farocki-film.
de/augem1.htm (last accessed on February 4, 2013).
30 See Harun Farocki, Reconnaître et poursuivre (Paris: Théâtre Typographique, 2002).
New media theorists, on the other hand, have benefited from another
look at Marey, whose work can now be re-appreciated as part of the archae-
ology of data-visualization and pattern recognition, which is beginning to
get close consideration not just in the analysis of surveillance footage, but
also among film scholars and theorists of the articulations of cinematic time
and the management of real-time data.31 Imagined Futures has a number of
projects that investigate time and temporality in relation to mainstream
cinema and installation art, as well as looking at the locative aspects of
film history and the archive.32 One of my own attempts at an epistemo-
anthropological analysis is an essay on so-called “Rube” films (or Uncle Josh
films), arguing that earlier views of the phenomenon might have missed a
crucial aspect, a double layer of reflexivity and agency. Uncle Josh films – in
which a simpleton mistakes the representation on the screen for physically
present objects and people and personally intervenes in the action, only to
destroy the spectacle – pose several questions to the modern viewer.33 Are
they intended, as is often claimed, to be didactic parables, teaching a rural
or immigrant audience how not to behave in the cinema, by putting up to
ridicule someone like themselves? Yet it is doubtful that there ever existed
such an audience, or a moment of “infancy” and simplicity in the history of
the movies, where such an ontological confusion with regard to objects and
persons might have occurred. To me, then, these films imply a meta-level of
self-reference, in order to explore, not the epistemic conundrum of reality
versus representation or truth versus fiction, but the anthropological one,
namely of how to “discipline” an audience through comedy and laughter.
Do the Rube films not teach their audience how not to use their bodies as
spectators by allowing them to enjoy their own superior form of spectator-
ship, even if that superiority is achieved at the price of self-censorship and
self-restraint? The audience laughs at a simpleton and village idiot, thereby
flattering itself with a self-image of urban sophistication. The punishment
meted out to Uncle Josh by the projectionist is both allegorized as the reverse
side of cinematic pleasure (watch out, “behind” the screen lies the figure of
the “master”) and internalized as self-control: in the cinema – as elsewhere
31 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2001).
32 Among the various projects of the Imagined Futures group, see especially Jennifer Steet-
skamp, “Specters of Lessing: The Time-Spaces of the Moving Image Installation,” doctoral diss.,
University of Amsterdam, 2012; Pepita Hesselberth, “Chronoscopy: Affective Encounters with
Cinematic Temporalities,” doctoral diss., University of Amsterdam, 2012.
33 Thomas Elsaesser, “Discipline through Diegesis: The Rube Film between ‘Attractions’ and
‘Narrative Integration,’ ” in Strauven, The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded 205-26.
60 Thomas Elsaesser
in the modern world of display of commodities, and the self-display of

bodies – the rule is “you may look, but don’t touch.”34
Adding a further twist, one can argue that the figure of the Rube has
returned, and re-appears in our contemporary media-world, this time as
the incarnation of the visitor/user, not in the cinema, but in the gallery
space and also on the net, in the latter case learning how to be an “avatar”
or to behave as a “fan,” a “nerd” or an “activist.”35 The same ambivalence
applies to the museum, where visitors no longer know how to respond
when confronted with, say, video installation art. Under the regime of
“relational aesthetics,”36 the visitor’s role is destabilized by works that
are like an enigmatic appliance or a gadget, but lacking the instruction
manual: they invite participation, or require a special mental act for their
comprehension or completion, while giving little or no overt clue about how
they “want to be understood.” The “epistemological” aspect seems like a lure
or tease, an invitation to a more ludic form of engagement, but on the other
hand, it implies a reflexive turn that is epistemic in intent. In fact, there is
now a general uncertainty about what role to play as spectators in the art
world, just as there is in the media world of television and video-games: are
we “witnesses” or “bystanders,” “players” or “users,” “observers” or “dupes”
(Rubes), inadvertently delivering “data” to machine archives? My “return
of the Rube” would thus be a specific or “situated” instance of the more
general (and generally productive) problematic category of “agency” which,
as André Gaudreault has pointed out, should be understood to comprise
both agitant and agité in early cinema.37
Yet this shift from the “old” Cartesian subject-object divisions to some-
thing closer to an actor-network theory does not altogether resolve the
question of the spectator’s emotional investments, so central to apparatus
theory, but also to any appreciation of the aesthetics of cinema. If scholars
are now more cautious about speaking of “mis-cognition” and “disavowal” as
the features typical of cinematic subjectivity, there are still good arguments
34 See Wanda Strauven, “Re-Disciplining the Audience: Godard’s Rube-Carabinier,” Cinephilia:

Movies, Love and Memory, Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, eds. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2005) 125-33; and Wanda Strauven, “Touch, Don’t Look,” I cinque sensi del
cinema/The Five Senses of Cinema, Alice Autelitano et al., eds. (Udine: Forum, 2005) 283-91.
35 Thomas Elsaesser, “Archaeologies of Interactivity: Early Cinema, Narrative and Spectator-
ship,” Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture, K. Kreimeier and A. Ligensa, eds. (Luton: John
Libbey, 2009) 9-21.
36 The term “relational aesthetics” was made famous by Nicolas Bourriaud. See his Relational
Aesthetics (1998; Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002).
37 See also the preface by François Albéra in Alain Boillat, Du Bonimenteur À La Voix-Over -
Voix-Attraction et Voix-Narration Au Cinéma (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2007).
for characterizing the cinema as a dispositif for subjectification. This is

not so much because of the particular spatial arrangement (projection),
but thanks to the cinema’s temporal dimension, marked by “delay” and
”interval” in the sense of re-inscribing duration into the cinematic experi-
ence (the time image, energy, modulation, in Deleuzian language; “entropy,”
“intermittence” in the language of cybernetics). This also makes it possible
to distinguish cinema from “real-time” electronic media on the basis of
“delay” and “deferral,” i.e. on the basis of a phenomenological distinction (if
we take these terms in their Derridean sense) rather than a technological
one (as the difference between photographic and electronic images). We
thus would have to add “time” to “agency” in order to build up a model of a
dispositive that does not privilege a particular technology and still proves
relevant to both photographic and non-photographic moving images.
Dispositive Mark 3: Installation Art and the Moving Image
Temporality and time economies, in particular, raise a further dimen-

sion in our consideration of the dispositive, which conveniently leads us
to re-investigate the aesthetic theories of the cinema, albeit in only one,
admittedly prominent, manifestation: that of the “entry” of the cinema and
the moving image onto the scene of contemporary art, where the cinema
now seems to have a permanent place, however ambiguous a place it may
appear in practice.
One of the most significant phenomena in the history of the “dispositive
cinema” is the way the moving image has taken over and has been taken
over by the museum and gallery spaces. From the mid-1990s onward, major
shows in London, Los Angeles, Paris, Oxford, New York, Vienna and other
cities aff irmed the museums’ intention to “represent” the cinema and
claim it as “art.”38 Despite the success of such exhibitions, matters are not
straightforward when the moving image enters the museum. Different
actor-agents, power relations and policy agendas, different competences,
egos and sensibilities, different elements of the complex puzzle that is the
contemporary art world and its commercial counterpart inevitably come
38 Some of the landmark exhibitions were “Spellbound” (Hayward Gallery, London, 1995), “Art
and Cinema since 1945: Hall of Mirrors” (Moca, Los Angeles, 1996), “Notorious – Alfred Hitchcock
and Contemporary Art” (Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1999), “Hitchcock et l’art: coïncidences
fatales” (Montreal/Paris, 2000/2001), “Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art,
1964 – 1977” (Whitney Museum, 2001), “X-Screen – Filmic Installations from the 1960s and 70s”
(MuMoK, Vienna, 2004).
62 Thomas Elsaesser
into play. However easy it might be to project a film inside a gallery with
just a few mobile walls and lots of dark fabric, the museum is no cinema and
the cinema no museum: mainly because of the different time economies
already alluded to, which oblige the viewer in the museum to “sample” a
film, rather than make it the occasion for “two hours at the movies.” Time
is thus one of the reasons why cinema and museum constitute two quite
distinct, and in the past often mutually exclusive, dispositives.
The fact that cinema and the gallery space are, both historically and philo-
sophically, two antagonistic visual arrangements and spatial dispositives is
usually expressed in the juxtaposition of “black box” and “white cube.” Each
space is culturally pre-determined, has its own historically conditioned but
deeply ingrained traditions, and follows particular architectonics, ordering
principles or “logics” which amount to distinct ontologies. As we saw, the
classical (or “black box”) cinematic dispositive requires a unique layout and
geometry, in the way that screen-space, auditorium space and projector
are aligned in relation to one another for the “cinema-effect” to occur. The
museum/gallery (or “white box”) is itself a specific dispositive. With its
white walls, its preference for “natural” light and its emphasis on smooth
surfaces, it organizes space in such a way that the objects visible to the
spectator are brought close and maintain their distance at the same time.
The placing and hanging of pictures subtly privileges the upright, forward
orientation of our gaze, directed at the formation of an “picture,” distinctly
framed and positioned at eye-level. Still paying tribute to the “open window”
of Renaissance perspective, the white wall into which the image space
is cut allows for generous margins and empty surfaces to surround each
picture, while the heavily gilded frames are a reminder of the fundamental
difference between the picture, what it contains, the look it retains and
the space that surrounds it. In the museum, there is never any off-screen
space, to speak in the language of cinema: the classical oil painting is wholly
contained – self-contained, indeed – within the frame, while cinema lives
from the tension between off-screen and on-screen, what the frame delimits
and what it creates a passage for. As I already pointed out, it was André
Bazin who famously distinguished the “centrifugal” cinema frame from
the “centripetal” painting frame.39
The difference between these vectors helps explain why the gallery and
the cinema are distinguished by the mode of attention they afford their
respective viewers. The kind of presence produced by standing in front of
39 André Bazin, “Painting and Cinema” [1959], What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray
(Berkeley: University of California Press 1967) 164-69.
a work of art in a museum or a gallery carries very strong indices of time

and place (of a “now” and a “here”), which in turn imply a special type
of viewing subject, highly aware of itself and its surroundings and thus
receptive to reflection, introspection and auto-reflection. Walter Benjamin
famously called this presence “aura” and was careful to specify its conditions
of possibility, along with the slippages the aura undergoes in the age of
mechanically reproducible images and the commodity form. Speculating on
the mode of presence typical of the cinema, Benjamin speaks of the desire to
touch and the simultaneous barring of this desire, generating the cycles of
disavowal and fetish-formation which psychoanalytic film theory famously
identified, albeit via a different route of analysis. Simplifying a little, one
could say that the museum produces a particular kind of presence (a “me,”
a “here” and a “now”), whereas the cinema produces a split self-presence of
multiple temporalities (a “me/not me” in an endlessly deferred “here/not
here” and “now/not now”): Roland Barthes, in his several essays devoted
to photography and the cinema, highlighted some of these differences in
terms of tense. 40
In their distinctive logics, the dispositives “cinema” and “museum” entail
a further set of differential coordinates, which come into play or conflict
when the moving image enters the museum: a fixed image and a mobile
spectator (museum) have to be aligned with a moving image and a fixed
spectator (cinema). From what has been said about the cinematic apparatus,
the combination of the moving image and the mobile spectator drastically
redefines, if not destroys the “cinema-effect,” while for the contemplative-
reflexive spectator of the picture gallery, the moving image is a distraction
and an irritation. Painting and sculpture are about the representation of
movement, not its instantiation. The encounter of cinema and museum thus
obliges even art history to rethink the place and role of the viewer in front
of an artwork, as well as examine the kinds of self-enclosure or “exposure”
afforded to the moving image not just by the physical display (the monitor
or screen), but also by the manner in which the look of the image frames
the viewer’s gaze in the gallery’s surroundings. 41 The new configuration of
cinema/museum also affects what Belting calls “the body,” i.e. the respective
degrees of embodiment of the “spectator” and the “visitor.” Compared to the
40 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography (1981) and Roland Barthes by
Roland Barthes (1977), trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010).
41 One may recall the famous scene in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, where Scotty watches – in the sense
of “spying on” – “Carlotta”/Judy looking at – in the sense of “contemplating” – the painting of
her “ancestor.”
64 Thomas Elsaesser
cinema’s originally disembodied look, the gallery’s default value is always

embodied perception, aware as we are of our surroundings and other bodies.
Also part of “the body” are the different relations of size, scale and detail in
the museum and on the cinema screen. A further disruption or transgres-
sion is implied by the entry of sound and sound-spaces into the museum,
traditionally a site of silence and stillness (in both senses of the word). In
other words, there are some fundamental antinomies between cinema and
museum that require serious consideration by both film scholars and art
historians.
Dispositive Mark 4: Encounter and Event
Yet the salient argument to make here is that these apparent incompat-
ibilities (and the many contradictory relations that obtain between the
respective dispositives) are precisely among the theoretically most fruitful
and in practice most productive factors about the fine arts and visual cul-
ture today, not only enabling but necessitating the new kinds of encounter
alluded to, as moving image and museum enter into sustained and no doubt
permanent contact and alliance with each other. For is it not the case that
these starkly distinct dispositives are themselves “on the move” and in flux,
each in its own way undergoing internal transformation, and for reasons
that at first glance do not seem to be interconnected or mutually dependent?
Take as one example the upright forward orientation, the prevalence of the
wall, the rectangle cut out like a window: modern art, at least since the
1950s, has subverted or ignored this arrangement with artists like Jackson
Pollock, Carl Andre, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys and many others. In very
different ways, these artists have made the floor, rather than the wall,
the site of display, not least because it challenges the canonical model of
bodily-perceptual orientation and thus creates a new “moment” of art: a
challenge only very gradually taken up by the cinema.
More drastic, but also more banal (because they are so often commented
upon) are the changes that the cinematic dispositive has undergone: tel-
evision long ago subverted it, merely by substituting the small screen for
the movie theater and phosphoric glow for projection, provoking in turn
different kinds of re-assertions of the power of the projected image, whether
through Cinemascope (in the 1950s) or the Dolby surround-sound design
(in the 1970s). Since then, screens have become both bigger and smaller,
but above all, they have become more “mobile”: in their proliferation as
monitors on every table top, in the home and at work, in their locations
(such as urban screens, electronic notice-boards, airplanes, motor-cars or

public transport) but also embedded in the hand-held devices we carry on
our bodies, such as music players or mobile phones. This means that the
opposition between “collective reception” in ranked and regimented seating
(cinema) and “individual absorption” in a state of solitary contemplation
(museum) is no longer valid, at least not in any absolute way. Meanwhile,
and notably for the blockbuster shows that international museums habitu-
ally organize, the throng of massed visitors makes the solitary study of
individual works a thing of the past or of another era, as more and more let
their eyes be guided by portable “audio-tours.”
The black box and the white cube are thus, strictly speaking, no longer
either an oppositional or a complementary pair: we are, as it were, in the
“grey room.” Their similarities and differences come into play at another
level of generality that exceeds both types of dispositive, generating new
sets of parameters and taxonomies. What, for instance, is the status of
projection, now that the moving image is mostly digital, and illumination
means something quite different? In what sense can we still speak of a light
cone and “scopic vision” (cinema) versus diffused light and “ambient vision”
(museum)? A cinephile may regard projection as the defining feature of
cinema and logically conclude that without projection, there is “no more
cinema.” Or one might decide that the litmus test, as it were, of “what is
cinema” lies with luminosity, achieved through transparency, and not with
illumination as a layering effect. In either case, one would have to seriously
revisit familiar genealogies: traditionally, a (tenuous) line of continuity
could be drawn from the light-sensitive silver salts of photography to the
electrons hitting the cathode ray tube, and from the vertical scan-lines of
a television set to the pixel-grid of the digital image – in the sense that in
each case, a surface is impacted by light, leaving the particular arrange-
ment of traces or the pattern of particles that we call an image. At the
same time, a radical break is posited between photographic index and
digital code. Yet arguably, at least as fundamental a break occurred in the
switch from luminosity through transparency (which still photography
and cinema have in common) to luminosity through refraction, opacity
and saturation. In this respect, the “opacity” of the digital pixel is closer to
the opacity of pigment in painting than either is to photography, leading
to the many – admittedly also deceiving – painterly metaphors used to
describe or advertise computer-generated image-processing software, or
66 Thomas Elsaesser
to the “slippages” between the media of photography and painting in the

work of an artist like Jeff Wall. 42
Contrasting the dispositive of installation art with that of the cinema on
the basis of these precise but diverse parameters presents several further
advantages: first of all, it de-emphasizes technological determinism (the
technological fix which I see as so problematic in the theories that posit a
radical break between photographic and digital cinema), allowing instead
for very different technologies and materials to achieve similar effects
and experiences. Secondly, it de-centers the “performing and perceiving”
subject (Belting), thus redirecting our thinking toward the relations that
exist in the realm of images – between humans and things, humans and
plants, humans and machines, machines and machines, all considered as
agents (the reverse side and complement of the famous anthropomorphism
discussed by the avant-garde under the heading of photogénie or celebrated
in the “science is fiction” films of Jean Painlevé and others).
Perhaps most crucially, however, an installation – especially one involv-
ing the moving image – has a particular relation to time and temporality, in
the sense that many such installations introduce a structural non-alignment
between their own temporality and that of the spectator’s time economy
of the gallery visit, producing (as suggested above) typical effects of “sub-
jectification”: the anxiety of missing the crucial moment, the potential
conflict between curiosity and boredom when confronted with a video,
signaling a duration ranging anywhere from three minutes to three hours.
In this non-alignment, the encounter of viewer and installation acts as
both a continuation and a critique of the cinematic dispositive, not only
in the way that installations can deviate from the frontal orientation and
Renaissance perspective already discussed, but also in the manner they
subvert the temporal regime of both the cinema (where I know in advance
that I commit a substantial portion of my time, and where narrative maps
the order of succession and closure) and the art gallery (where the amount of
time I choose to spend in front of a painting or sculpture is my own decision,
unstructured, and not in any way pre-given by the work).
The (video-)installation, by contrast, suspends me: I wait for the pro-
verbial shoe to drop, for the unique moment of rupture, I attach myself
to or fantasize para-narrative elements; I experience a configuration of
time-space, which puts me in a different relation to self-perception and
body-awareness – no longer the kairos or chronos of linear narrative, but
42 See, for instance, Sven Lütticken, “The Story of Art According to Jeff Wall,” in Sven Lütticken,
Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005) 69-82.
an un-pulsed time of “too much” and “not enough.” Elements that appear
to my eyes as contiguous in space may have to be read as successive in
time, or vice versa: their succession has to be retroactively reconstructed
as spatially distinct. In any case, there is no longer a “norm” by which to
measure the deviations, the extremes or the excesses, while any sense of
the work’s overall shape and extension necessarily escapes me, forcing a
radical reconsideration of the relation between fragment and totality so
crucial to Western aesthetics, but also to the cinema (“montage”/editing),
and challenging any notion of spatial capture or closure, even as the black
box mimics the darkened movie theater. Yet in some ways this anxiety of the
“too much/not enough” of installation art, turned into an aesthetic effect,
is reminiscent of one of the panic discourses in early cinema, when movie
theaters switched from short programs to full-length features, with doctors
warning about eyestrain, physiological damage and nervous disorders that
might result from watching a continuous action on screen for more than
a few minutes.
Conclusion: the Dispositive as Interface?
The detour via the museum and installation art has been necessary in
order to explain – including to myself – where I think the term “dispositif”
might be problematic, and where it offers scope for clarifying the situation
we find ourselves in, the episteme 2000, when compared to the episteme
1900. With the emphasis now on parameters such as temporality, dura-
tion, process, “relationality,” contact, mobility, event and encounter, the
traditional definitions (and translations) of “dispositif,” even without the
question of “technology,” become problematic because they are too fixed
spatially (beholden to Euclidian geometry) and too vague epistemologi-
cally (what is the status of film as semiotic object, if time intervenes and
bridges the binary pair absence/presence?). Furthermore, the “dispositif”
thus conceived still keeps the “subject” in a disciplinary-libidinal double
bind (the “subject effect” of fetishism and disavowal, as theorized by Lacan,
being replaced by the “subject effect” of power, knowledge, discourse, as
analyzed by Foucault).
What might nonetheless make it worth adopting the term dispositive is
its semantic flexibility and metaphoric openness (compared to “apparatus”).
If I am right in thinking that, besides being defined by “image,” “medium,”
and “body” (Belting) and “the machine, its location and the place given to
the spectator/hearer” (Albera/Tortajada), the cinema today should also be
68 Thomas Elsaesser
regarded as an “event and encounter, taking place” (my definition, intended

to both supersede and contain the idea of films as “works” and “texts”), a
term (or set of terms) is needed that can establish a viable conjunction
between the variables “agency,” “time,” “space”/“place.” Can dispositive
connote this, while still covering these other meanings?
In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich puts forward the term
“interface” to designate this meta-space, i.e. the different kinds of contact
zones, spatial relations or visual surfaces that cinema audiences have in
common with computer users and their interaction with the software,
but also for the kinds of encounters between object, space, duration and
beholder that I have sketched as “taking place” in the museum. Manovich
sees the cinema as an important set of references for the new media environ-
ment, what he calls “the cinema as cultural interface”:
despite frequent pronouncements that cinema is dead, it is actually on

its own way to becoming a general purpose cultural interface, a set of
techniques and tools which can be used to interact with any cultural data.
[…] “Cinema” [here] includes mobile camera, representation of space,
editing techniques, narrative conventions, activity of a spectator – in
short, different elements of cinematic perception, language and recep-
tion. Their presence is not limited to the twentieth-century institution
of fiction films, they can already be found in panoramas, magic lantern
slides, theatre and other nineteenth-century cultural forms. 43
Manovich’s eminently pragmatic approach tries to give some historical

depth as well as breadth of applicability to “interface.” Yet where “dispositif”
(as “apparatus”) seemed overly restrictive, “interface” looks unduly capa-
cious. If, like myself, one travels in the opposite direction and comes to
contemporary media practice from the study of cinema, one of the questions
that concern me is: under what circumstances or conditions (cultural-
historical, technological-industrial or aesthetic-formal) is it conceivable
that the moving image no longer requires as its main medium the particular
form of time/space/agency we know as “narrative” (perhaps the most “viable
conjunction” of these variables so far developed), while still managing to
establish a coherent “world,” which is to say, turn an “event” (a singular
time/space occurrence) into an “encounter” (addressing a spectator in his/
her here-and-now)? Is a time/space continuum possible that is differently
43 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001) 86. See also http://
www.manovich.net/TEXT/cinema-cultural.html (last accessed on February 4, 2013).
organized, yet still accommodates the “body” and gives the impression of
“virtual presence”? What forms of indexicality (material link, pointer) or
iconicity (mimesis, resemblance) are available, for combinations of sounds
and images to credibly mark a “here” and “now,” while also relating them
to a “me”?
In other words, I am looking for a term that captures this “here-now-me”
as the variable “grounding” of my cinematic experience. Whether I watch a
Hollywood blockbuster on my iPod or see a mere five minutes of Douglas
Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho in a gallery, I can call either a “cinematic” encounter
and event, not because of questions of LCD-screen vs. projection, digital
vs. photographic image, black box vs. white cube, film vs. video, optical vs.
haptic, fragment vs. totality; but because in each case, I can specify that
the relation of a “here,” a “now” and a “me” constituted a consistent spatio-
temporal world, whose “rules” I understand and whose effects I experience
as “presence,” under conditions of assent that I can call “belief” (which, of
course, includes the “suspension of disbelief” as well as the “as-if” belief
of the fictional contract). What is also clear, however, is that with such a
definition of “dispositif,” I am no longer in the realm of epistemological ques-
tions to put to the cinema. Rather, I am on the road to “(re-)ontologizing”
the cinema: experiencing it not as a way of knowing the world, or seeking
to attribute to it a specific meaning, but instead, living the cinema as a
particular way of being-in-the-world, and participating in its disclosure, its
unfolding, its becoming-present: with all the affects, cognitive dissonances
or bodily states that this might entail.
If this sounds unexpectedly Deleuzian, I feel bound to point out that
for me, such a def inition of the “dispositif” actually rests as much on
media-archaeological foundations as it does on philosophy, and that it
has its own genealogy and pedigree in early and pre-cinematic practice.
Suppose we went back to the laterna magica of Athanasius Kircher, as the
agreed ancestor of cinematic projection. Yet instead of tracing its mode of
representation via Renaissance perspective to the rigid geometry of the
cinematic apparatus, where do we arrive at, if we choose an alternative
route? What if, from the laterna magica, we derived in the first instance
Étienne-Gaspard Robert’s (or Robertson’s) phantasmagoria as the most
popular, but also conceptually most challenging precursor of cinema? We
might then find ourselves in a position to argue that a direct line runs from
phantasmagoria to Pepper’s Ghost and other spectral productions of pres-
ence in the nineteenth century to certain genres of cinema, mainly those
featuring special effects, with horror and fantasy, but not only: the lineage of
phantasmagoria also initiates a form of cinema that does not project itself as
70 Thomas Elsaesser
a window on the world, nor requires fixed boundaries of space like a frame.
Rather, it functions as an ambient form of spectacle and event, where no
clear spatial divisions between inside and outside pertain, and where there
are strong indices of presence, while its temporality reaches into past and
future (calling up the dead, soothsaying and predicting events yet to come),
while the senses are anchored and the body situated in a “here and now.”
As such, phantasmagoria would be the dispositive that also most closely
approximates the genealogical ancestor of what I described as installation
art above, one that does not depend on the frame or even on the upright
forward orientation, one that furthermore takes “sound” into account, but
also the one whose epistemological effects are, as it were, grounded in an
aesthetics of appearance as presence, rather than the other way round.
However, the modification I am proposing has not one, but two nodes
in the nineteenth century: besides that of the phantasmagoria, as it comes
down to us via Robertson’s adaptation of the magic lantern, this cinematic
dispositive also includes the work of Marey, notably insofar as he pioneered
the non-human, dare I say “spectral” visualization of data, both photograph-
ing and graphing statistical (mathematical, numeric), optical (visible to
the machine eye, but too fast or too slow for the human eye) and dynamic
phenomena (emanating from organisms and sentient beings). I can here
only hint at this aspect – which might involve reconsidering the Kantian
“sublime” as a crucial dimension or property of this dispositif. Still, as I said
at the beginning, Marey remains a key reference point for our project, due
to its inherently ontological scope. Although his efforts, experiments and
ambitions would normally be called “epistemological” (aimed at producing
new knowledge about the world), considered from the standpoint of making
all emanations of life manifest, Marey’s thinking also introduces a new
taxonomy of things, of what exists and what does not, of what is visible and
what is not, and of what is actual and what is virtual – linking him, with
Bergson, to Gilles Deleuze.
I come to my conclusion. My initial proposition has been that, in order
to understand what the episteme 1900 and the episteme 2000 have in
common, we need to overcome the division between photographic and
post-photographic cinema, and see it, not as a break, but as an occasion
for revising our previous notion of “what is cinema.” If for some thirty or
forty years, the answer to “what is cinema” has involved some version of
the dispositive cinema (such as “cinematic apparatus”), then the task inter
alia is to redefine this central concept. This is what my essay has attempted
to do: first I reviewed the canonical definition, as it has been specified
around the particular geometry of representation that Jean-Louis Baudry
was the first to identify with the parable of Plato’s cave, with Renaissance
perspective and with the Freudian psychic apparatus. Following references
to the various critiques of this formation, I proposed and discussed several
other possible articulations of the dispositive cinema, whose properties
were more institutional than technological, more time-based than geo-
metrical, more anthropological than ideological and more “ontologizing”
than epistemological. Starting out from early cinema, making a leisurely
detour via installation art and the museum and a brief one through digital
media and interface, I ended up by returning to pre-cinema: the double
and possibly improbable pedigree of Robertson’s phantasmagoria joined
to Marey’s chronophotography. The trajectory has provided me with a
set of parameters and priorities that in my opinion need to inform our
definition of the “dispositif,” for which notions of space, time and agency
(the “here-now-me”), as well as of “belief,” “appearance” and “presence” play
as great a role as the semiotics of absence and presence, the dynamics of
voyeurism and disavowal or the notion of “vision-knowledge-power” (voir,
savoir, pouvoir).
This “perspective correction”44 has led me to posit a further proposition
or rather, to formulate a challenge, namely that we may have to supplement
our traditional epistemological interest in the cinema (around “realism,”
the subject-object split, questions of ideology, illusionism, power) with a
tentatively ontological view (as well as a renewed aesthetic investigation) of
the cinema – here called, perhaps somewhat imprecisely, “cinema as event
and encounter, taking place.” Another way of highlighting the difference
of emphasis, again in a somewhat rough-and-ready fashion, would be to
suggest that whereas our Renaissance ocular-centric orientation has infinity
as its vanishing point (the all-seeing God of the Dollar Bill, or of Bishop
Berkeley’s esse est percipi: to be is to be seen) and the singular source as
its point of view, the orientation I am trying to identify has as its salient
feature, not Euclidean space, but ubiquity. I would define ubiquity as the
felt presence of pure space, whose temporality is neither chronos nor kairos,
but an “indefinite,” reversible time, and whose ocular counterpart would
be not be surveillance as sight, knowledge, power, but as the unlocalizable
experience of sight without an eye and as the human-machine equivalent of
Nicolas de Cusa’s God: “to be at the centre of the world and yet at every point
of its circumference,” i.e. the paradox (or mystery) of an un-located situated-
ness. Such ubiquity, in other words, produces its own forms of embodiment
44 I borrow the phrase “perspective correction” from Rod Stoneman, “Perspective Correction:
Early Film to the Avant-Garde,” Afterimage 8/9 (Spring 1981): 50-63.
72 Thomas Elsaesser
and agency in response to unrepresentability and to the unlocalizable

sense of presence. Ubiquity gives imagined vision and sight to non-sentient
objects, to machines, organisms or “things,” as these enter the realm of the
visible in seemingly contradictory forms: as effigies (imprints, moulds,
installations, photographs) and as apparitions (ghosts, revenants, zombies
and other post-mortem creatures). Together, the effigy (as index) and the
apparition (as presence) constitute elements of a new modality of evidence
and authenticity, sometimes called “the virtual,” but which I prefer to regard
as constitutive for all cinema.
The conclusion I would draw, then, is that such a post- or para-epistemo-
logical idea of cinema means accepting, not only the groundless ground of
cinematic “representation” and its dispositive in the way that Foucault, for
instance, deconstructed the Renaissance painterly dispositif in Velasquez’s
Las Meninas. It would require a further step of “renegotiating” belief, ap-
pearance and presence, in the full knowledge that such a “belief in the
cinema” inherits and accommodates both the hopes and the skepticism
of the epistemological view, rather than denying or transcending it. A
cinematic dispositive grounded in “belief” and “presence” is contradic-
tory and counter-intuitive, but it would see time, space and agency as
the (necessary) relational terms for any form of cinema, whose impure
and mixed, mechanical and spiritual, material and mental, semiotic and
mimetic “nature” alienates us from our bodies and senses, takes us away
from the “here-and-now” – in the very act of constituting possibly their most
historically potent and in all likelihood most permanent manifestations.
II.
Dispositives
Issues
“You Do Not Even Know Where You Are”
Dispositive and Dizziness
Patrick Désile
The countless efflorescences of more or less recent uses of the word

“dispositif” fall into areas as diverse as law, diplomacy, the art of warfare,
sociology, plastic arts, literary criticism, film theory (obviously), and many
others. Being careful not to venture in every direction, here I will limit my
own use of the term to two meanings: first, the standard usage of “a set of
elements arranged with a view to a specific goal,” to quote a definition from
Trésor de la langue française; 1 spectacular dispositives in this instance,
more specifically from the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth
century, a time that seems like the beginning of so many things, with so
many relations surfacing between them. Second, in a return of sorts to
Foucault – if I may put it that way – I will address the issue of whether or
not what I set out to describe may be considered a dispositif in his sense of
the term, that is, whether or not the concept of “dispositif,” which by every
indication remains current, may be instrumental in the intelligibility of
this ensemble, and under which conditions.
By spectacular, I do not mean “what pertains to the arts of spectacle or at
least, I do not only mean this.” Like the Latin word spectaculum, spectacle
involves both a general and a more specialized meaning here: first, that of
a “set of things that attract the look” and, as early as the thirteenth century
and especially from the Renaissance on, that of “entertainment presented to
the public.” According to the Dictionnaire de Trévoux, spectacle thus refers
to “an extraordinary object that attracts looks, arrests vision, and which
one considers with some emotion,”2 as well as “public performances […],
particularly theatrical performances.”3
A spectacular dispositive may accordingly be regarded as an arrangement
that draws, orients, guides and informs the look. It may be a theater, of
course – notably in the broad sense of this word in the eighteenth century4
1 “Dispositif,” Trésor de la langue française, vol. 7 (Paris: CNRS/Gallimard, 1979) 294.

2 Dictionnaire universel françois et latin, vulgairement appelé Dictionnaire de Trévoux, 7th
ed., vol. 7 (Paris, 1771) 825.
3 Dictionnaire de Trévoux 825.
4 “Theatre: elevated place where performances or spectacles are given.” Dictionnaire de
Trévoux, vol. 8 (Paris, 1771) 7.
76 Patrick Désile
– but it may also consist of a layout in a garden, a mirror such as the Claude
glass used by painters and walkers in the eighteenth century, or even a
prescriptive description. In fact, while my subject essentially has to do
with collective, established spectacles designed for an audience that has
expressly convened or gathered, I do not believe these can be dissociated
from the tight network of innumerable spectacles offered by the world.
In the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decade of
the nineteenth century, a number of spectacles thus appeared in Europe.
Limiting myself to the case of Paris, I will attempt to describe and trace
relations between several of these spectacles considered as novelties by
their contemporaries.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Paris was the city-world, “round
as a pumpkin,”5 an expanding city seized by the “frenzy of building,”6 in
Mercier’s words. It was a complicated city, rife with crooks and nooks, often
presented at the time as muddy, stinky, noisy and dark; that is, still poorly lit
and poorly known (the first accurate map of Paris by Verniquet appeared in
the last years of the century). It was an unstable city as well, with a changing,
unpredictable population. It was a violent city: fights were frequent, an
integral part of the spectacle of the streets. The blood of oxen slaughtered
in public flowed onto the pavement7 and people enjoyed watching a goose
hanged on a gallows being clubbed to death by men,8 or mastiffs tearing a
donkey to pieces in amphitheaters dedicated to animal fights.
In this dubious city, as we might call it, procedures of organization, regu-
lation and control were put into place: the population was monitored, more
or less, by commissioners-examiners who served as the “judges’ eyes,”9
by inspectors, and above all by “observers,”10 in other words, informers.
Moreover, maps were drawn up, street names were inscribed, gradually
houses were numbered, urban lighting was improved. Some of these initia-
tives gave rise to hostility, to the degree that some operations, such as house
numeration, had to be carried out at night.11
5 Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 1 (Amsterdam, 1782) 17.

6 Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 8 (Amsterdam, 1783) 190.
7 Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 1, 123, vol. 5 (1783) 28.
8 “Variétés,” Journal de Paris 6 Oct. 1785: 1150.
9 Nicolas de La Mare, Traité de la Police, vol. 1 (Paris: Jean and Pierre Cot, 1705) 200.
10 La Police de Paris en 1770, mémoire inédit composé par ordre de G. de Sartine (Paris, 1879) 70.
11 On eighteenth-century Paris, see Daniel Roche, The People of Paris. An Essay in Popular
Culture in the 18th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Arlette Farge, Vivre
dans la rue à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1979) and Effusion et tourment, le récit des
corps. Histoire du peuple au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007).
In this city seemingly attached to its unruliness, spectacles cropped up in

the 1770s and the 1780s, some of which at least appeared to propose models
of order or, at any rate, to raise the issue of order – the order of the world,
the order of society. For the sake of clarity, I roughly categorize these new
spectacles into three groups: spectacles that raised the issue of movement
and life, spectacles that raised the question of identity, and spectacles that
addressed the position of subjects in the world and their relation to truth.
In the 1780s, a new spectacle boasted its display of order and regulation:
the circus. It would only become known under this name in France twenty
years or so later. In a kind of anticipation, a correspondent wrote a letter
to the Journal de Paris in 1781 to denounce the “ferocious spectacle”12 of
animal fights, an “Algonquin tragedy,”13 and called for “the training of the
most intelligent animals” and their presentation in “a workshop, a circus.”14
“The people will flock to it,” he added.15
The following year, in 1782, Philip Astley set up his Manège anglais for
a month on the Rue du Faubourg du Temple, where he presented a horse-
riding and acrobatics show lauded for its boldness and precision. After a
brilliant military career, Astley had opened an equestrian establishment
in London in 1768. The place featured a ring; it accommodated spectacles
and served as a riding school.16 The association of the spectacular, the
military and the educational was a recurring trait of the circus throughout
the nineteenth century.
Other English riders had preceded Astley in Paris, but the exercises he
introduced were still considered as belonging to a “new genre of spectacle
in this Capital”17 and met with considerable success – so much so that in
1783 Astley opened a permanent establishment, an Amphithéâtre equipped
with a ring surrounded and overlooked by the audience. Owing to the
Revolution, Antonio Franconi moved into the place, founding a dynasty
that dominated the circus in Paris during the first half of the nineteenth
century at the helm of several successive establishments. These went by
the name of Cirque olympique after 1806.
12 “Variétés,” Journal de Paris 19 Apr. 1781: 441.

16 On the beginnings of the circus in London and Paris, see Caroline Hodak, “Du théâtre au
cirque: une entreprise si éminemment nationale. Commercialisation des loisirs, diffusion des
savoirs et théâtralisation de l’histoire en France et en Angleterre,” diss., EHESS, 2004.
17 “Manège Anglois,” Journal de Paris 1 Nov. 1783: 1257.
78 Patrick Désile
What did the spectacle of circus consist of during the first three or four
decades of its existence? It should at once be mentioned that the circus
was considered a theater in Paris, and that before long a stage was adjoined
to the ring. A part of the show involved a theatrical performance. I have
already touched on the military character of the circus: as a matter of fact,
the plays often reproduced episodes from wars, and under the Empire they
were sometimes directly inspired by the bulletins of the Grande Armée.
However, the circus was above all a pure equestrian spectacle whose main
purpose was to display the ascendancy of man over animal, the mastery
by man of the movements of the animal body – through free dressage
exercises with the ringmaster standing at the center of the ring, or haute
école exercises exhibiting the absolute submission of the horse to the rider.
The circus originated in the figure of the horse, which is central to it: the
daily companion of man, immensely useful socially, the horse is the animal
of movement, perfectly controllable for anyone with the proper skills, but
it may also prove stubborn as well as powerful and skittish, liable at any
moment to rear up, bolt, become uncontrollable again.
The presentation of wild animals that are further removed from man
may be an even better illustration of the project of dominating animal life
and channeling its instinctive movements: these animals were trained to
adopt behavior that was the opposite of that supposedly dictated by nature.
Thus the stag, a fearful animal par excellence, would remain impassive as
gunshots were fired close by;18 and the massive, frightening elephant would
delicately stroke the cheek of an infant, then play music and dance.19
Still, the intent was not just to show the control of man over beast, but
also the control of man over himself, the mastery he may acquire over his
own body and his fear when performing acrobatic exercises. The comics
themselves were riders and acrobats who amused mainly through the
incongruity of their physical prowess. Yet the bird-man could fall and the
performing animal become fierce again: the circus was the spectacle of
the – always precarious – mastery over movement and life.
Other spectacles contemporary with the emergence of the circus focused
on movement and its mastery, but quite differently: scientific or para-
scientific spectacles presenting phenomena tied to electricity, an object of
fascination in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Demonstrations
18 See Mme B**, née de V**, Les Animaux savants ou Exercices des chevaux de MM. Franconi,
du cerf Coco, du cerf Azor, de l’éléphant Baba, des serins hollandois, du singe militaire… (Paris:
Didot l’aîné, 1816) 47.
19 Mme B**, née de V**, Les Animaux savants 49-53.
were made in courses in experimental physics, which were really specta-

cles, as well as on the Boulevard du Temple. Thus “doctor” Comus, whose
real name was Nicolas Philippe Ledru (“a street charlatan,”20 according to
Diderot), presented a spectacle he claimed was scientific in the 1770s and
1780s. The show featured “electric experiences” and therapeutic sessions
through electricity, which soon became the main attraction. The Journal
de Paris regularly reported on them; in 1784, for instance, it expounded
Comus’s “theory,” a synthesis of sorts of ordinary discourses on electricity
tinged with mesmerism, but presented as completely idiosyncratic.
This Physicist rejects most existing [theories] and instead allows of a

universal fluid, the soul of the world and the principle of all movement.
[…] This fluid produces all electric phenomena; it occupies the space
and the interstices of all created bodies. The perfection of living beings
results from the equal distribution of this fluid in their constituent parts.
Its uneven distribution causes acute or chronic diseases in the animal
kingdom. Spread in the expanse of humors, it circulates with them; if it
meets with resistance through some kind of disturbance in the organiza-
tion, then the liquids, left to themselves and deprived of the movement
whose soul is this fluid, form engorgements.21
Armed with this theory, Comus treated patients, mainly epileptics and para-
lytics. Indeed, these cases presented the highest chances that a treatment
would prove effective, by his account and those of other demonstrators.22
The goal was in effect to reestablish through electricity the fluidity and
regularity of the universal movement there where it was being upset or
held up.
Upholding his thesis of “the Analogy of Electricity with the nervous
fluid,”23 Comus also operated on dead bodies, to which he restored a fleeting
appearance of life – this before Galvani’s works were published and the
experiences of galvanism in turn appeared in the program of spectacles
such as Robertson’s.
20 Denis Diderot, letter to Sophie Volland, 28 July 1762, Correspondance II, in Œuvres complètes,
vol. 19 (Paris: Garnier frères, 1875-1877) 83.
21 “Médecine,” Journal de Paris 22 Jan. 1784: 97.
22 Father Sans thus announced in 1784 that from then on he would treat “only two types of
diseases, Paralysis and Convulsions” in his Versailles “electric practice.” “Médecine,” Journal de
Paris 17 Nov. 1784: 1349-50.
23 “Physique,” Journal de Paris 9 May 1782: 514.
80 Patrick Désile
Movement is therefore at stake here once again: the movement of life

carried along by the universal movement, its pauses, its disorders, but also
its resumptions, factors of a possible régénération – then a new word, at least
in its general meaning,24 and a recurring theme over the period.
Still other spectacles raised the issue of movement, in a sense, but in a
very different manner: the “fleeting tableaux” or “paintings set in motion.”25
At a given moment in a dramatic action, all the characters would freeze
and imitate a famous painting: in 1761, for instance, in Carlin’s Les Noces
d’Arlequin, characters composed Greuze’s L’Accordée de village, the sen-
sation of the previous Salon. A fashionable salon entertainment as well,
fleeting tableaux may be compared to the “attitudes” of Lady Hamilton and
her epigones, which consisted in striking consecutive poses inspired from
Antiquity, notably figures on vases.26 These spectacles of frozen, sometimes
merely suspended movement, of immobilization more than immobility,
question representation and its ambiguities as much as movement and life.
Often, the spectacles that arguably raised the issue of identity also in-
volved the suspension of movement, and always had some form of relation
to death. For the first that I will evoke, the connection could not be more
obvious. Even as contemporaries often referred to it as a spectacle, it is
anything but frivolous: the guillotine is the spectacle of death par excellence.
In 1792 the never-ending spectacle of suffering and of life running out,
during which “the people looked at the dial of city hall and counted the
hours being struck,”27 gave way to the spectacle of sudden death. Striking
acts of torture may have been replaced by incarceration, but also by the
instantaneous suppression of lives.
An instant, as decisive as it may be, does not make a spectacle, which
explains why the ritual then instituted was preceded by a preliminary phase
and followed by a conclusive one, as Daniel Arasse once made evident.28
First, the condemned would follow the route from the jail to the scaffold
along which the crowd gathered, some breaking into a “guillotine song,”
others dancing, still others laughing. The condemned would then mount the
scaffold and the execution, the moment of death would come, a temporal
24 See Léonard Snetlage, Nouveau Dictionnaire français (Gottingen: Jean Chrêtien Dieterich,
1795) 183.
25 See Bernard Vouilloux, “Le tableau vivant, un genre ambigu,” 48-14, La Revue du musée
d’Orsay 11 (Fall 2000).
26 See Kirsten Gram Holmström, Monodrama, Attitudes, tableaux vivants. Studies on Some
Trends of Theatrical Fashion, 1770-1815 (Stockholm: Almqvist och Wiksell, 1967).
27 Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 3 (1782) 269.
28 Daniel Arasse, The Guillotine and the Terror (New York, London: Penguin, 1991).
point almost invisible. Yet this passage without duration from life to death
was unsettling on several accounts.
In the 1780s the Journal de Paris reported one case after another of ap-
parent deaths and resurrections, notably after asphyxiation or drowning.
The Encyclopédie describes death as a process slow enough that someone
might come round from it and, like the Journal de Paris, mentions cases of
premature inhumations. This was one of the time’s great anxieties, and
the figure of the individual buried alive, scraping the dark, narrow coffin
where she or he lay dying served as the antithesis to the individual of the
Enlightenment, yearning for clarity, transparency and circulation. There
was such a thing as an uncertain death, then, a death that could be cured:
a partial death. In 1801 Bichat put forward the notion that bodies had two
lives in them, animal and organic; while the former worked from without
and was voluntary, the latter operated from within and was permanent.
As it happened, “the organic life to a certain point may subsist, the animal
life being extinct.”29 Life and death, in the end, were not a matter of all or
nothing.
As a consequence, there were legitimate grounds for asking whether
the guillotined person was absolutely killed on the instant or whether the
severed head might still feel for some time, with the subject happening
to know the unknowable as a witness of his or her own death. There was
talk of heads continuing to speak or Charlotte Corday’s face blushing. The
spectacle of the guillotine was thus a singularly troubling one, as instant
death substituted for or overlapped with the process of ordinary death,
which was stretched in time.
Finally, the third phase of the spectacle, the headsman holding up the
severed head dripping with blood, was the subject of many engravings. The
spectacle of the guillotine was therefore not only the spectacle of death, but
also the spectacle of the head, separated from the body and bearing the most
individual traits. The spectacle of death as the end of the individual also
proved to be the spectacle of his/her identity, represented by his/her head.
Other, less dreadful spectacles may be viewed as spectacles of identity
without being completely extraneous to the theme of death. A play titled
L’Heureuse Pêche, whose manuscript is dated 1767, was presented as a “com-
edy for shadows with changing scenes.”30 In the preface, its anonymous
29 Xavier Bichat, Physiological Researches on Life and Death (Boston: Richardson and Lord,
1827) 175.
30 L’Heureuse Pêche, comédie pour les ombres à scènes changeantes (1767), Rondel RO théâtre
d’ombres, BnF (French national library).
82 Patrick Désile
author introduces the genre as “new in Paris”31; it consisted in having the

actors perform between a lighting source and a white screen and assumed
that the spectator “[would go] along with the illusion of seeing only Shad-
ows, acting, behaving, and pursuing interests just like men.”32 Indeed, the
simple operation – correlating shadow and man – was not immediately
self-evident. That was a new game, which rested on the representation of
people through what was not them, their absence, their shadow – a shadow
whose immateriality and ductility also made magical effects of deforma-
tion, apparition and disappearance possible in the theater.
These shadows with changing scenes offered a spectacle of identity, with
the uncertainties tied to it and the uncertainties of representation. Death
still loomed: shadows are a negation of the individual as much as they are its
trace, and in the eighteenth century the expression “the shadows” referred
more or less to the shadows of death.
The genre was short-lived – despite Grimm who, in a letter dated August
1770, called for “a complete theater of such plays”33 sooner than later. Ex-
periments with shadows developed in other directions. On the one hand,
a shadow theater called “ombres chinoises” and addressed at children ap-
peared. On the other hand, the interrogation on identity intensified with
the reviviscence of the myth of Rebutades, which questioned the origin of
representation; the vogue of silhouettes; and Lavater’s new physiognomy,
in which the precise and faithful shadow of the profile became a projection
of the most intimate part of the individual, a revelation in just a few lines
of the authentic self hidden away beneath the social mask.
In all these cases, attention was concentrated on the head, skull and face.
The dispositive presented by Lavater to delineate the profile of faces (and
make the individual transparent, in a way) was not without analogy to the
physiognotrace, which did away with the shadow and focused solely on
the lines of the profile. The physiognotrace was praised for the absence of
human intervention in the process of representation: in that respect, it was
the counterpart of the guillotine, whose quality as a machine guaranteed
neutrality. And in a sense, both were machines designed to produce sincere
portraits, whether the mask was removed by means of lines or by means of
31 L’Heureuse Pêche 3.
32 L’Heureuse Pêche 4.
33 Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, 1753-1773,
vol. 9 (Paris: Garnier frères, 1877) 110.
death.34 In fact, parallels may be drawn between physiognotrace portraits

and the portraits of guillotined individuals already mentioned.
These practices also call to mind those of ceroplastic techniques, which
were ancient but took a new turn at the end of the eighteenth century, as they
gave rise to a form of spectacle. Wax effigies, whether or not their realization
involved taking a cast (of the face, for instance), were meant to be not only
lifelike portraits, but also accurate reproductions. Since Julius von Schlosser,35
it has been a well-known fact that the wax portrait has a long tradition linked
to funeral practices of representing the deceased. According to Mercier, in the
1770s and the 1780s “kings, great writers, pretty women and famous thieves”36
could be admired in Curtius’s wax figure cabinet. Indeed, Curtius exhibited
portraits of remarkable individuals, including criminals, to everyone’s eye.
During the Revolution, his niece (or natural daughter), the future madame
Tussaud, constituted a series of portraits of guillotined individuals by taking
casts of the faces. In 1800 casts were also taken of the faces of the members (or
“chauffeurs”) of the Orgères gang after their execution. Collections of heads of
unconventional individuals were started. Other wax figure cabinets, leaving
aside the exterior aspect of the body, exhibited the inside; wax anatomical
models, a sort of counterpart to automatons, contributed to the emergence
of a new sense of the body as a mysterious place of life.
A last, blunt spectacle of identity, one that was also the spectacle of
death, was the Morgue, since it responded to the concern for identifying
individuals through the display of their corpse.37 The Morgue existed in the
Ancien Régime, but in the 1780s objections had been raised to its location,
a former underground prison whose small size and darkness did not allow
a distinct view of the dead. During the Revolution, projects were launched,
but the new Morgue did not open until 1804. Naked corpses were exhibited
to everyone behind a glass pane, with zenithal lighting. For the authorities,
the objective was clearly to put a name on a body and avoid abandoning
any individual to the obscurity of anonymity, even after death. Yet this was
also a spectacle, often referred to as such.
34 On physiognomy, the physiognotrace and transparency, see Antoine de Baecque, The Body
Politic. Corporeal Metaphors in Revolutionary France (1770-1800) (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1993).
35 Julius von Schlosser, History of Portraiture in Wax [1911], in Ephemeral Bodies. Wax Sculpture
and the Human Figure, ed. Roberta Panzanelli (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008).
36 Mercier, Tableau de Paris, vol. 3, 42.
37 On the Morgue, see Bruno Bertherat, “La Morgue à Paris au XIXe siècle (1804-1907). Les
Origines de l›Institut médico-légal ou Les métamorphoses de la machine,” diss., Université de
Paris 1, 2003.
84 Patrick Désile
Fig. 1. To restore through electricity the universal fluidity… (Abbé Sans, Guérison de la paralysie par
l’électricité, ou Cette expérience physique employée avec succès dans le traitement de cette maladie… ,
Paris, Cailleau, 1772).
I have said that other spectacles did in a sense raise the question of truth:
they did so by contrasting it with illusion. Towards the mid-eighteenth
century, conjurers became physicists. The Paysan de la Noort-Holland, and
more importantly Pinetti a little later, resurrected birds and made trees
blossom: palingenesis was one of the favorite themes of these demonstra-
tions. Physicists sometimes also showed automatons, which raised the
question of the secret of life as much as they illustrated the theme of the
mastery of movement.
Fig. 2. Enthusiasm at last, seeing everything, dominating everything… (Balloon ascending the Tuileries,
1784: To lovers of physic, Bibliothèque nationale de France).
In 1784 Decremps published La Magie blanche dévoilée:38 from then on, it

essentially became a matter of setting the record straight. Robertson, who
pretended to conjure up specters and bring the dead back to life, belonged
to this trend. Yet a new anxiety then appeared:
These ghosts created on demand, which can move, these false appear-
ances amuse the common herd and make the philosopher dream. What
is the specter of the mirror, or in the mirror? Does it exist, or not? What
a prodigious subtlety of colored rays! What an amazing intermediary
between the matter we feel and the spirit we cannot touch!39
Even though in both cases the point was to create an illusion, it may be
argued that the panorama contrasts with the phantasmagoria: both ap-
peared at about the same time in Paris, but while the former relied on a
perfect image of the real, tangible world, the latter invoked imaginings and
ghosts. The panorama pertained to new relations between the subject and
the perceived world, with the dominating subject assuming an omniscient
look. Aerostatic flights thus elicited enthusiastic and proud descriptions on
38 Henri Decremps, La Magie blanche dévoilée (Paris: Langlois, 1784-1785).

39 “Fantasmagorie,” in Louis Sébastien Mercier, Néologie, ou vocabulaire de mots nouveaux
(Paris: 1801) 259.
86 Patrick Désile
the part of aeronauts: “It seemed as though I held sway over everything,”40
Lallemand de Sainte-Croix declared after his September 1791 flight. How-
ever, what the subject dominated was but an autonomous world from which
she or he might just as well have been absent. Saint-Preux, describing the
“theater” of the Alps with rapture, ended up disappearing, dissolving in it:
“the spectacle has something indescribably magical, supernatural about it
that ravishes the spirit and the senses; you forget everything, even yourself,
and do not even know where you are.”41 The spectator of the panorama was,
in a certain way, both imperial and evanescent.
The circle of the panorama leads back to the circle of the circus. While
the gaze of the spectators converges towards the ring where, under the eyes
of the master, horses move around in an orderly manner, in the panorama,
the eyes of the – potentially lonely – spectator, who performs a circular
movement, scan the still representation of a section of the world.
The play with circles and the gaze are reminders of the prominent place
of the figure of the circle in the last decades of the eighteenth century; it
also points to the omnipresence of the figure of the eye, and the associations
between the circle and the eye in Bentham’s panopticism and in other
places are well-known. The circle is the perfect figure in that it is the most
simple, the least false, the most natural; a figure of equality and serenity,
of unimpeded circulation, of the universal movement of stars, of harmony.
“Everything is a circle in nature,”42 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux wrote, citing the
concentric circles made by stones falling into water, satellites, planets… As
for the eye, itself a globe, it stands at the centre of circles and spheres drawn
by the looks it casts. In revolutionary iconography, it was notably the eye
of radiating reason, but also that of surveillance. “I have a thousand eyes,
a thousand openings, a thousand telescopes,”43 the first issue of Rougyff ’s
journal read. Rougyff, an alias for Armand-Benoît-Joseph Guffroy, depicted
himself as a sentinel ever on the alert.
I suspend my description at this point without bringing it to a close. As suc-
cinct and incomplete as it may be, it should allow us to begin answering the
40 Lallemand de Sainte-Croix, Procès-verbal très intéressant du voyage aérien qui a eu lieu aux
Champs-Élysées le 18 septembre 1791, jour de la proclamation de la Constitution (Paris, 1791) 5.
41 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise. Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small
Town at the Foot of the Alps [1761], Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché, trans. and ed. (Lebanon, N. H.:
Dartmouth College Press, University Press of New England, 1997) 65.
42 Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de
la législation, vol. 1 (Paris: 1804) 223.
43 Rougyff, ou le Frank en vedette 1 (July 1793).
question of whether these spectacular dispositives, between which multiple

relations become apparent, form a dispositif in Michel Foucault’s sense.
A well-known definition from the interview “The Confession of the Flesh”
is an unavoidable reference here:
What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly het-
erogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural
forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific
statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in
short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the
apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be
established between these elements. 44
The almost automatic recurrence of a definition as though set in stone may

surprise, on several grounds. Still, there is good reason to believe that it retains
something of the moment and circumstances of its utterance. If any reminder
is necessary, the definition is a citation from an interview, and a particular
one at that, since Michel Foucault was confronted by psychoanalysts about
his singular, short, thought-provoking book, The Will to Knowledge, which
was certainly not likely to have appealed to them. In a way, the definition
was the prelude to a battle. Besides, this “firstly” is followed by a more rarely
quoted “secondly” (on the instability of the relations between the elements
of the dispositif), and “thirdly” (on the fact that a dispositif responds to an
“urgent need” and has “a dominant strategic function”). The long interview
allows Michel Foucault to clarify further the primary definition as well as
indicate the paths it opens and the questions it raises. And evidently, other
pieces of his work, The Will to Knowledge first and foremost, should also be
used in working towards a finer, more complete definition of the concept.
Assuming this to be the case, I am still going to rely on this now somewhat
canonical definition to try and answer the question of whether the set of
spectacles I have described may be considered as a dispositif. First, it undoubt-
edly meets the primary condition: it is obviously a heterogeneous whole.
The way these spectacles operate does suppose scientific discourses and
statements, as has already been glimpsed; it draws on philosophical, moral, or
philanthropic propositions, it is the subject of official reports, it is controlled
through regulatory decisions and supported by institutions, and for the most
part it assumes – sometimes essential – architectural arrangements.
44 “The Confession of the Flesh” (1977), in Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other
Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980) 194.
88 Patrick Désile
Nevertheless, this could be argued to be a sort of loose conglomeration

more than a dispositif. Indeed, does this whole have a “dominant strategic
function”? Something akin to a project may certainly be uncovered. These
new spectacles were not simply given: their public could not just come
across them, as they assumed a voluntary step and often the appropriation
of an explanatory discourse. In that sense, they may be called modern,
contributing as they did to educating spectators, altering their outlook on
the world, the body, themselves, and thereby also sharing in the constitution
of the modern spectator – of the modern subject, even.
In fact, the pedagogical and political concern was explicit in the dis-
course of promoters or commentators for most of the spectacles I have
evoked, even as they aimed to be recreational. I have mentioned that the
Cirque olympique presented itself as a model of order and went as far as to
propagandize for the Empire. Yet the regulatory project of the circus was
not incidental: it was foundational. One of the first books devoted to the
circus, Les Animaux savants, thus read:
If we have succeeded in imparting to children an idea of perseverance,

of the repeated efforts necessary to turn naturally distrustful and wild
creatures into affectionate and docile ones, we have gotten them to sense,
even approximately, both the price of their own education and the just
tribute they should pay to their schoolteachers throughout their life. 45
Farther on, the spectacle of riders jumping and juggling is said to “constitute
the best explanation of the Copernican system.”46 What is at stake here is
the order of society and the order of the world.
Similarly, as we have seen, demonstrations of electricity did not only
have therapeutic or orthopedic qualities: they also had symbolic power. The
neologism électriser (“to electrify”) entered political vocabulary47 and it is
worth remembering Benjamin Franklin’s immense fame in France, equal
to that of Voltaire or Rousseau. In a well-known formula variously ascribed
to Turgot and d’Alembert, “Eripuit coelo fulmen sceptrumque tirannis,” “he
seized lightning from the heavens and the scepter from tyrants,” an obvious
allusion to his dual role in science and politics.
Aerostatic spectacles also had an explicit political dimension. Lallemand de
Sainte-Croix, from whom I have already quoted a few words, took off to great
45 Mme B**, née de V**, Les Animaux savants V.

46 Mme B**, née de V**, Les Animaux savants 35.
47 Snetlage, Nouveau Dictionnaire français 78.
cheering from “a huge crowd”48 with the 1791 Constitution in hand, the very
day it was proclaimed. There, again, the event actualized a general project.
This project, characterized in a few words and in a necessarily incom-
plete, crude, and in fact provisional manner, could be said to consist in
giving the spectator the spectacle of himself or herself, his/her situation or
limitations. A free and sovereign subject, capable of surveying everything
with a dominating look, of telling truth from falsehood, of taming the forces
of nature, s/he also became an isolated individual from then on (“isoler
quelqu’un,” “to isolate someone,” or “s’isoler,” “to isolate oneself,” were new
expressions at the time49), held to human nature (s/he is neither a machine
nor an animal), assigned to an obscure body, susceptible to the order of the
world and participating in the great universal movement whose flow s/he
should not hamper, bounded on all sides, marked by his/her identity even
beyond death, and compelled by the countless gazes of others.
Such would be, in the first analysis, the project of the dispositif relative
to the spectacles I have begun to describe. Talking of a “strategy” does seem
relevant in this case, since what is involved is one of “the great anonymous,
almost unspoken strategies,”50 “for which it is no longer possible to identify
a person who conceived it.”51
The fact remains that a dispositif, as it appears notably in the examples
given by Michel Foucault, seems to present a rather strong unity. The point is,
at least initially, to obtain a given effect through given means – preventing the
mobility of workers through the implementation of a number of techniques,
for instance.52 And yet the ensemble I have described is fragmented, scattered;
the project assigned to it remains very general and does not preclude internal
tensions. It would of course be possible to identify several dispositifs in it, each
of which would then be easier to characterize and would have its own coher-
ence: the circus, the panorama, the guillotine or the Morgue thus admittedly
constitute full-fledged dispositifs, and one could investigate how they are
articulated and perhaps mesh with one another. However, this would clearly
leave many more isolated, more ordinary spectacles unexamined and would
amount to ignoring a complexity that appears only if researchers agree to
consider the vast numbers of spectacles and the vast numbers of their relations.
48 Lallemand de Sainte-Croix, Procès verbal très intéressant 4.

49 Snetlage, Nouveau Dictionnaire français 119.
50 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990) 95.
51 Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” Power/Knowledge 203.
90 Patrick Désile
As it happens, the very nature of this kind of network excludes restricting

it to the coherence of a strategy. It constitutes a necessarily open object
of inf inite complexity. Innumerable other elements could incorporate
themselves in the object I have set out to outline: theaters, celebrations,
pleasure gardens, to mention but recreational spectacles…
It would therefore be misleading to approach the dispositive as a kind of
closed system: while it probably shows some consistency, the dispositive is
a network, and notions of closure, circumscription and even unity would
be associated with it only at the risk of misinterpretation. Deleuzian defini-
tions of Foucault’s dispositif insist on this point:
But what is a dispositif ? In the first instance it is a tangle, a multilinear

ensemble. It is composed of lines, each having a different nature. And
the lines in the apparatus do not outline or surround systems which are
each homogeneous in their own right, object, subject, language, and so on,
but follow directions, trace balances which are always off balance, now
drawing together and then distancing themselves from one another.53
Bernard Vouilloux recently adopted the same perspective. Pointing out

that “not only is the dispositif a network, but dispositifs are themselves also
networked together,”54 he advanced that “the image accounting the best for
this network of networks […] is that of the rhizome.”55
The network I have set out to describe, if the absence of closure does not
disqualify it and if it may be said to be oriented by a strategy, may thus still
be considered as a dispositif.
Yet Michel Foucault insists on the fact that the dispositif assumes “a
coherent, rational strategy,”56 if an anonymous one. And while recreational
spectacles are the object of a restrictive institutional framework, while
their existence depends on authorizations and their genre may be prede-
termined, while they may be subject to censorship, while they are narrowly
53 Gilles Deleuze, “What Is a dispositif ?” in Michel Foucault Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Arm-
strong (New York: Routledge, 1991) 159. Available online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/44431489/
Deleuze-What-is-a-Dispositif as of February 9, 2011. Translator’s note: “which are homogeneous
in their own right” should be understood in the conditional (“supposedly homogeneous”). Also,
“…trace balances” is very likely a typographical error and should read as “…trace processes.”
Finally, while the translator of Deleuze’s text starts with the word dispositif and goes on to use
“apparatus,” both words do refer to the same word, “dispositif,” in French.
54 Bernard Vouilloux, “La critique des dispositifs,” Critique 718, “Pensée du style, style de
pensée” (March 2007): 165.
55 Vouilloux, “La critique des dispositifs”: 165.
monitored and heavily taxed, their content may not be said to result from
coherent, rational decisions, nor may their effects be taken as premeditated,
particularly with regard to the – mostly – spectacles of curiosity dealt with
here. And while institutions such as the guillotine or the Morgue were all
the more strictly controlled and the decisions involving them presented as
coherent and rational, it is obvious to everyone how obscure and uncertain
were both their operation as a spectacle and the craze they gave rise to.
Spectacles are not the hospital, the barracks, the school, the prison or
the factory, and while they count normalization as one of their effects, this
is not due to any coercion they might exercise directly over bodies. They
attract without forcing, they please and, at least for recreational spectacles,
they have to appeal if they are to survive. Contractors do not seek to bring
spectators into subjection but to allure them. In a way, spectators do make
the spectacle, grabbing the mirror held out to them, but their motivations,
like those of promoters, are largely irrational. If I sought to explain a project
earlier, it was not without some artifice, for all this remains not only implicit
but also mysterious. Spectators make the spectacle, and their steps lead
them not only towards what entertains or instructs, but towards what
troubles and disorients as well.
The circus was without a doubt a spectacle of order, but it was an inse-
cure order: it was also a spectacle of danger, of the danger of death, and it
showed the ascendancy of man over animal only by humanizing the animal
and blurring the limits of the species. The demonstrations of electricity
presented something about which almost nothing was known, save for the
fearsome power observed by all, and to which cripples and children were
still subjected. The spectacles of physicists claimed to bring out the truth
through the play of fascinating deceptions. And what to say of the sublime
spectacle of the guillotine, which gave rise to the impossible thought of a
being both alive and dead; or of the murky spectacle of the Morgue, which
brought wrecked, naked, nameless bodies back into a blunt light? Even the
clear spectacle of the panorama initially created confusion, a perceptual
indecision, and an almost physical malaise, as noted in 1800 in the report
of the Institut national des sciences et des arts: “The first impression upon
entering a Panorama is that of a vast but confused view, all of whose points
present themselves to the dazzled eye at once and in no order…”57
Does the necessity of allowing this obscure and ambiguous dimension
to play out still make it possible to speak of a dispositif in relation to the
57 Rapport fait à l’Institut national des sciences et des arts sur l’origine, les effets et les progrès
du panorama, 28 fructidor an VIII (15 Sept. 1800) 5.
92 Patrick Désile
Fig. 3. The EYE of reason, the EYE of surveillance (engraving, 1793-1795, de Vinck collection, Bibliothèque
nationale de France).
network of spectacles I have begun to describe here? There again, recent

reconsiderations of the concept, widening its definition, may help free any
thinking from contingent rigidities.
Further expanding the already large class of Foucauldian apparatuses,

I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the
capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure
the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.58
This very clean definition, which preserves the essential but prejudges as little
as possible, does seem to allow us to think of the ensemble I have described
as a dispositif – without obscuring its specific traits, but by considering it as
a proliferating network, never completed, shot through by enigmatic desires.
Still, a question remains.
The modern spectator issued from anxiety, doubt and uncertainty about
the world and the self. From dizziness – a physical dizziness brought by
heights, infinite space, indefinite perceptions; but a dizziness that may
just as well be called existential when so many limits have become inde-
terminate. Accordingly, how may the concept of dispositif do justice to such
dizziness, which has something inaugural, foundational even, to it and
which may in many respects still be our own?
58 Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) 14.
Marey and the Synthesis of Movement
The Reconstruction of a Concept
Maria Tortajada
“Cinema is the moving image”: the idea, which has become a common-
place, coalesced around 1900 as photography was being referred to as
the still image. The opposition between photography and cinema made
it possible throughout the twentieth century, and to this day, to assign
distinct tasks in the representation of reality to each of these emblem-
atic dispositives of modernity. Still, the association still/moving also
structured the cinematographic dispositive as such as early as the late
nineteenth century. Indeed, photography was not the other of cinema at
the time, but a means used by “cinema” in its chronophotographic stage to
reconstitute movement: the moving image was the result of a preliminary
decomposition of the movement of a moving object or body into a series
of instantaneous photographs. Chronophotography – most particularly in
its scientific inception, which Etienne-Jules Marey contributed through
his work – established the regularity of intervals between frames as the
condition of possibility for the synthesis of movement. This technical
characteristic revealed two visions of cinema throughout the twentieth
century: on the one hand, the insistence on the centrality of the f ilm
frame, scansion, decomposition; on the other hand, the idea of a cinema
wholly defined by the continuous flow of movement whose projection
produces the illusion or reconstitution. Roland Barthes, an advocate of
the f ilm frame, may in that respect be opposed to André Bazin, who
structured his “ontology of cinema” through the division between the
two media along the question of the reproduction of movement, precisely.
Gilles Deleuze also emphasized the continuous flow with what he called
the “movement-image,” that is, the expression of Bergsonian duration in
its capacity for change. While the apology of continuity was dominant in
the film production as well as the theorization of film of the second half
of the twentieth century, the idea of cinema still remained structured by
the new, underlying opposition between synthesis and decomposition
– irreducibly so, it seemed. The synthesized image was thus conceived
through the repression of the part played by the film frame in decomposi-
tion or the explanation of its own construction as image: either way, this
synthesized image was indebted to the film frame and was opposed to
94 Maria Tortajada
it. However, the discontinuity inherent in cinema was not always limited
to the series of film frames. Discontinuity may be thought of differently,
as Marey’s work related to chronophotography shows. This leads us to
reevaluate the status of the synthesis of movement at the turn of the
twentieth century.
Synthesis as a notion def ines cinema, but one should ask on which
conditions. Does reconstituted movement refer to the continuity and flow
produced by the illusion of movement, as most often heard these days in “the
idea of the cinematographic”? Or could synthesis be thought of differently?
This is what was at stake in Marey’s work at the exact moment when the
very possibility of cinema was forming technically and conceptually.
The Virtues of the Synthesis of Movement
Marey was both the historian of chronophotography and the scientist who
promoted it to the rank of a method for the decomposition and analysis of
movement. Marey’s images are famous; his chronophotographs document
different modes of human or animal locomotion: walking, running, leaping,
flapping wings or fins, and so forth. They present series of frames recorded
on a fixed plate or on a mobile strip of film. These images firmly anchor
Marey in the history of photography, but he also belongs in the history of
cinema.
Marey’s interest in the synthesis of movement is occasionally played
down on the grounds that he did not achieve the technical solution mak-
ing it possible to realize what he had imposed on a theoretical level: the
equidistance of frames, the condition of possibility for the reconstitu-
tion of movement. The solution chosen was Lumière’s, for it ensured the
regularity of the film’s run and the intermittent stop of frames in front
of the lens. Lumière opted for the claws to feed the perforated film and
the eccentric triangular cam, a piece that made it possible to transform
a continuous movement into a discontinuous one. This argumentation,
revolving as it does around technique alone, is perfectly suited for a
conventional, genealogical history of cinema justifying the date of the
“origin,” 1895.
While noting the technical peculiarities of Marey’s appliances, Laurent
Mannoni insists for his part on the importance of Marey’s “film work.”
Against the hegemony of the Lumières, he argues in favor of a rehabilitation
of the scientist as a “filmmaker” in the history of cinema. The importance
of the synthesis of movement is thus vindicated through the number of
films made as well as their aesthetic value.1 Since the beginning of this
century, the issue of the synthesis of movement has clearly been at stake
in the debate on “the invention of cinema,” in which symbolic values in
the constitution of a history of the medium play out. From the moment it
appeared as the defining element of cinema, “the moving image” has been
a privileged site for argumentation, either in the competitive game for the
title of “inventor of cinema,” or at the center of a reflection problematizing
the issue of a “single” birth to advocate a progressive and collective process
of technical invention – an idea conveyed through the emphasis of various
“pioneers” of technical innovation, for instance.2
Starting from an epistemological concern, Michel Frizot argues differ-
ently to dispute the classic narrative of the “birth” of cinema. This leads him
to play down the importance of the synthesis of movement in Marey’s work:
chronophotography is primarily a method for the analysis of movement
and does not have as its aim to produce a moving image.3 The synthesis,
Frizot explains, is a part of the scientific method and only a control proce-
dure: Marey analyzed movement by breaking it down before checking the
result by synthesizing it. The reversibility of appliances was a guarantee
for scientific validation. François Dagognet had previously defended the
same position. 4 Within this logic, synthesis is not a finality.5 Marey’s very
1 See Laurent Mannoni’s reference work, Etienne-Jules Marey. La mémoire de l’œil (Milan,
Paris: Mazzotta/La Cinémathèque française, 1999), as well as his The Great Art of Light and
Shadow. Archaeology of the Cinema (Exeter: The University of Exeter Press, 2000), ch. 13, and
“Marey cinéaste,” in E.-J. Marey. Actes du Colloque du centenaire, Dominique de Font-Réaulx,
Thierry Lefebvre and Laurent Mannoni, eds. (Paris: Arcadia, 2006) 15-36.
2 In that respect, the title of the exhibition catalog of the Musée Marey in Beaune is significant:
Marey, pionnier de la synthèse du mouvement (Beaune: Musée Marey, 1995). See more particularly
Virgilio Tosi’s contribution, “Etienne-Jules Marey and the Origins of Cinema,” 13-20. The debates
on “the invention” have been commented on several times. Again, I refer the reader to Laurent
Mannoni’s previously mentioned work, but also to Michel Frizot’s exhibition catalog, E.-J. Marey:
1830/1904. La photographie du mouvement (Paris: Centre national d’art et de culture Georges
Pompidou/Musée national d’art moderne, 1977) 87-90; and to Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The
Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 254-62.
3 Michel Frizot, Etienne-Jules Marey chronophotographe (Paris: Nathan/Delpire, 2001) 258.
4 Dagognet showed the originality of Marey’s approach, which is specific to the dispositive
founding his experiences: “a sensitive sensor, a transmitter whose inertia is negligible, an inscrip-
tion device adapted to sinuous writing, and a synthesizing device to be used for verification.
There was a leitmotif in Marey’s work taken from Marcellin Berthelot, the synthetic chemist:
we only have real knowledge of what we ourselves have reconstructed.” See François Dagognet,
Etienne-Jules Marey. A Passion for the Trace, trans. Robert Galeta, with Jeanine Herman (New
York: Zone Books, 1992) 56.
5 See Michel Frizot, “Les opérateurs physiques de Marey et la réversibilité cinématographique,”
in Arrêt sur image/fragmentation du temps, François Albera, Marta Braun and André Gaudreault,
96 Maria Tortajada
terms support this thesis since, well before chronophotography (in 1868),
he defined the two “powerful levers in the service of the human mind”:
“analysis, which is used for research, and synthesis, for the verification of
the results of the analysis or for exposing more simply a discovered truth.”6
Marey defines synthesis in more detail in the following chapter:
You already know that this is not a research method. You have seen that
a science that would tend to be founded on synthesis, starting from prin-
ciples established beforehand, would expose itself to much aberration.
Yet it is no longer the case when the analysis has completed its work and
has provided us with a great number of well-established facts. This is
when the role of synthesis begins. Synthesis is the opposite of analysis;
it reconstitutes what had been decomposed.7
The notion of verification should first be understood in relation to what

precedes it, the establishment of concrete facts. The value of synthesis
depends on the rejection of preconceived ideas devoid of analytical foun-
dations. In no way should it be concluded that synthesis is secondary to
analysis, for verification is also a validation. One only needs to follow Marey
as he looks at chemistry and points out that Marcellin Berthelot proved
“that, starting from inorganic elements detected by analysis in organized
substances, one could reproduce through synthesis a very large number of
substances found in vegetables.”8 The example of chemistry shows very
concretely that synthesis could become the aim. Marey concluded that it
was necessary to develop the amount of work devoted to the synthesis and
creation of what he called schemas, that is, “demonstration appliances”
eds. (Lausanne: Payot, 2002) 99-100. Concerning Marey, Frizot writes: “[…] synthesis is not one
of his objectives. On the other hand, synthesis is the practical consequence of a Mareysian
operator, the control over the method, and more precisely a reversible control that stipulates
that, to control the good progression of an analysis, the procedure must be reverted in order to
re-compose some parameters of the phenomenon out of the elements obtained in the analysis.
Marey calls this procedure ‘experimental synthesis’ and, further on, he writes that ‘visual
synthesis is only a control procedure’.” See also Frizot, Etienne-Jules Marey chronophotographe
110. Frizot reviews Marey’s practices from the standpoint of the issue of synthesis, including
the synthesis of movement.
6 Etienne-Jules Marey, Du mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie. Leçon faite au Collège de
France (Paris: Germer Baillère, 1868) 24. Michel Frizot quotes the passage.
7 Marey, Du mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie 40-41.
8 Marey, Du mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie 42. Berthelot writes: “From this we can
see that, while it is true to say that analysis provides chemistry with its starting point, it does
not mark its goal and its destination: chemistry is also the science of synthesis.” See Berthelot,
La Synthèse chimique (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1876) 2.
capable of proving a phenomenon.9 It comes as no surprise, then, that

Dagognet would also claim without hesitation that the phase of synthesis,
along with that of the sensitive capture of movement, is the most important
of Mareysian dispositives: “Marey indeed considered work on synthesis,
that is, artificial reproduction, to be as indispensable as that on analysis
and data collection.”10
Control, validation and demonstration necessarily define synthesis in the
method, but for all that, they do not invalidate the heuristic dimension of
the synthetic experiment. When Marey exposed various examples drawn
from physics and biology, it appeared that the “experimental synthesis,” as a
demonstration, had as its function not only to verify, but also to understand
what had not been understood, to grasp what the senses had not been
able to perceive.11 Marey advocated the use of these schemas, genuine
constructions meant to imitate, reproduce, simulate a physical or biologi-
cal phenomenon.12 Synthesis should thus not be understood in a narrow
sense: on the contrary, its importance within the scientific approach cannot
be overstated, as validation procedures are involved in the production of
knowledge.
Why, then, do positionings become more complicated when the synthesis
of movement is related to Marey’s place in film history? If Marey moved
away from synthesis at the moment when he was close to finding the techni-
cal solution, it is, in both Dagognet’s and Frizot’s view, precisely because he
rejected the imitation of natural vision, the illusion of movement produced
by animated views in popular spectacles. Marey preferred to concentrate on
the analysis of the decomposition of movement.13 Frizot’s and Dagognet’s
entire work make it possible to integrate the technical question within an
epistemological approach to Marey’s work. Their studies also show how
vain a teleological vision of the history of cinema may be, with nineteenth-
century viewing dispositives leading to the cinematograph following a cer-
tain, if disavowed, finality – the illusion of movement.14 Still, they directly
apply the argument of illusion, of an identical imitation of what our senses
perceive, to the logic of spectacle. This unified conception of spectacle, at a
moment when we are dealing with the history of cinema, makes it possible
9 Marey, Du mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie 65, 44.

10 Dagognet, Etienne-Jules Marey. A Passion for the Trace 54.
11 Marey, Du mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie 43-44.
12 Marey, Du mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie 44, 47-48.
13 “The fact is that he preferred analysis to synthesis; the latter rendered visible what had first
been made invisible.” Dagognet, Etienne-Jules Marey. A Passion for the Trace 156.
14 See Dagognet, Etienne-Jules Marey. A Passion for the Trace 139-41.
98 Maria Tortajada
to oppose the scientific position – allegedly defined by the preponderance

of analysis – and the projection of animated views, where illusion would
be the rule.15 In this context, the marginalization of synthesis dominates,
even if chronophotography has otherwise been acknowledged as a wholly
scientific method in Marey’s sense, one combining analysis and synthesis.
Everything happens as though the mimetic illusion belonged exclusively to
spectacle, as if spectacle was founded solely on illusion, or a certain kind of
illusion. Everything happens as though questions of representation never
reached the space of science.
Yet even as part of a first approach, one cannot help but note that turning
the illusion into the exclusive category of spectacle remains problematic. It
is certainly partial to consider that any spectacle only relies on the illusion
produced through the imitation of a real or imaginary phenomenon, as
phantasmagoria could for instance claim to do. Dispositives of representa-
tion and their aims are much more complex and multiple as to their effects
and contexts of use, whether scientific or belonging in the order of the
spectacular. Isn’t scientific synthesis itself defined through simulation?
Simulation requires an imitation of the analyzed model, reproducing exactly
the significant parameters of the experiment.
Rather than marginalize or relativize the synthesis of movement to
counter the teleological postulate of the history of cinema, I would like to
cast the issue in different terms and try to bring out what was playing out
in the defense or the rejection of synthesis by Marey. The argument laid out
above holds some truth, but it obscures a genuine problematization of the
notion of movement from an epistemological standpoint. To understand
what synthesis amounts to, it is necessary to clarify what is meant by illusion
of movement and examine how the issue of spectacle is in turn affected.
Initially, one can only agree with the argument justifying Marey’s rejec-
tion of synthesis through his own scientific approach, different from the
projection of animated views. Marey himself said so much around 1900,
either in the preface to Eugène Trutat’s La Photographie animée (1899) or in
the text accompanying the exhibition of chronophotographic instruments
he himself organized at the 1900 World Fair. In 1899 he even articulated
very clearly the opposition between scientific chronophotography and the
“charming illusions” of spectacles with “animated projections.”16 However,
15 It is also in this sense that Christian Pociello explains Marey’s position: if the scientist
“rejects projection,” “it is for scientific reasons.” See Christian Pociello, La Science en mouvements.
Etienne Marey et Georges Demenÿ (1870-1920) (Paris: PUF, 1999) 279.
16 “Préface,” in Eugène Trutat, La Photographie animée (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1899) V-VI.
in the text written for the exhibition, Marey includes the machines that
reconstitute movement in chronophotography and whose history he re-
counts: the Lumière cinematograph is put on a par with the instruments
invented and perfected by Marey not only to decompose movement, but
also to synthesize it.17 It should be pointed out that, as late as 1898, he was
still working to improve chronophotographs with projection. The synthesis
of movement is part of chronophotography, in which Marey, with his global
approach, appears as a central figure. His position is thus ambiguous, to say
the least, and that is precisely what needs to be clarified.
In examining how the notion of reconstituted movement developed,
Marey’s great texts on chronophotography prove particularly useful. 18
Indeed, they show how he inscribes his research in a finality, redefines
his priorities, specifies the operating concepts and highlights the results
that appear the most significant to him. In short, Marey introduces his
own approach with some analytical distance, emphasizing what seems
most important to him. And not only does it appear that, from the very
beginning, the synthesis of movement was an integral part of his work on
chronophotography, but also that Marey rarely explains the methodological
function of control linked to synthesis.19 This is intriguing, since Marey was
17 The “Cinématographe de MM. Lumière, 1895,” n°12, comes after “Projecteur chronopho-
tographique, 1893” (nº10) and the “Kinétoscope d’Edison, 1894” (nº11). The “Chronographe
analyseur et projecteur; Marey, 1898” appears as nº16. See Étienne-Jules Marey, “Exposition
d’instruments et d’images relatifs à l’histoire de la chronophotographie,” in Musée centennal de
la classe 12 (photographie) à l’Exposition universelle internationale de 1900 à Paris, Métrophotog-
raphie et chronophotographie (Saint-Cloud: Belin, undated) 20-22. An English translation of the
text appeared as “History of Chronophotography” in the Smithsonian Report for 1901 (Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1902) 326-28. Marey did not include any presentation of his
1896-97 analyzing-projecting chronophotograph, mentioned in Frizot, E.-J. Marey: 1830/1904. La
photographie du mouvement 68. It should be noted that, strangely enough, the text presenting the
exhibition does not have a nº13, as if there had been an “omission.” Number 13 does appear on the
reference illustration (fig. 1 in Marey, Musée centennal; fig. 9 in “History of Chronophotography”)
for strips presenting horse locomotion. Marey also mentions the previous use of the “electrically
operated” zoetrope for the synthesis of movement in his own research and his intention to
improve the results (that is, to shoot longer scenes). See Marey, “History of Chronophotography”
326.
18 Besides “Exposition d’instruments et d’images relatifs à l’histoire de la chronophotographie,”
translated as “History of Chronophotography,” already cited, these include Développement de
la méthode graphique par l’emploi de la photographie. Supplément à La Méthode graphique dans
les sciences expérimentales (Paris: Masson, 1885); Le Vol des oiseaux (Paris: Masson, 1890); Le
Mouvement (Paris: Masson, 1894; Nîmes: Jacqueline Chambon, 2002), which was published in
an English translation by Eric Pritchard as Movement (London: William Heinemann, 1895).
19 Concerning notation, let us still mention a passage from Movement about “the application
of the zootrope to the study of horses’ paces,” published in 1864 with drawn images: “This was
100 Maria Tortajada
very concerned about underlining the various aspects of his method and its
applications. It is therefore interesting to take another look at how his major
writings handle the synthesis of movement. In these texts, synthesis mainly
appears either as a means to present the results before several observers,
or as a heuristic process that makes it possible to ascertain some results.
It is in this sense that Marey systematically describes the various methods
for synthesis.
The Synthesis of Movement, Illusion and Increasing Knowledge
From the early stages of his chronophotographic work, Marey used devices
that synthesized movement, such as the phenakistiscope and the zoetrope.
These are founded on the principle of the persistence of vision and make
it possible to reconstitute movement out of still images, turning separate
images into the animated image of a continuous movement. So it goes
with Marey’s zoetrope, built for the observation of flight and in which the
scientist placed three-dimensional figures of the seagull or the pigeon (1887).
In 1885 Marey mentioned his use of the phenakistiscope to animate the
images obtained with the photographic gun. In a five-page note on the gun,
he exposed the finality of this reconstitution of movement:
Placing photographs of birds on a phenakistiscope, you get a fair repro-

duction of the appearance of the movements of the flight, but the images
corresponding to each revolution of the wing are still too few to allow for a
good analysis of its movements. Their number will therefore have to be
increased, for instance by doubling the speed of the movement of the
plate and shutters, which I was able to do with the same gun, and still
have enough light for the production of images of shapes […].20
At that point, Marey was contemplating improvements to capture move-

ment based on the f inality of his research: the analysis of movement.
Analysis thus also played a part in synthesis and was clearly associated
with what Marey was looking for: to be able to distinguish significant
the concrete demonstration of the sequence expressed by the chronographic charts.” See Marey,
Movement 308. In the text for the World Fair, he also wrote: “We sought to obtain through
Plateau’s method the reproduction of analyzed movements.” The formulation stresses prior
analysis. See Marey, “History of Chronophotography” 326.
20 Marey, Développement de la méthode graphique par l’emploi de la photographie 16.
changes in the position of the wing in reconstituted movement. To that

end, the number of images made had to be increased. Analysis and synthesis
were not dissociated in this instance.21 Marey stressed the importance and
usefulness of the instruments making it possible to observe slowed-down
movement.22 Thanks to the zoetrope, he wrote in Le Vol des oiseaux, he
had been able “to compare these two types of flight [the pigeon’s and the
seagull’s].” He then “noted that, behind some apparent dissemblances, they
presented deep analogies.”23 The study of flight continued in the observa-
tion of reconstituted movement:
The instrument, once set in motion, gave the perfect illusion of a series
of seagulls flying one after the other following a closed circle. The very
great advantage of three-dimensional figures is that they make it possible
to see the bird from every possible angle. Indeed, thanks to the circular
arrangement of the small figures, each appears to the observer from dif-
ferent successive angles. […] So that, depending on the part of the circuit
you focus on, you see the bird moving away, passing or approaching: with
these three aspects, you may study the movement of wings at will, slow it
down as you wish by slowing down the rotation of the zoetrope to a greater
or lesser extent.24
Slow motion, which was considered by Marey himself as a stopgap solution

by 1900, was still presented with enthusiasm at that point (1890). Four years
later, synthesis was highlighted in exactly the same way in Movement:
This method invented by Plateau seems likely to extend our knowledge as

regards all kinds of phenomena. But the future of the method is dependent
on the possible correction which can be effected in the distortion of
the images, and on the discovery of a satisfactory means of projecting
a number of moving figures on a screen, so as to be visible to a large
21 Along the same lines, the beginning of paragraph 111 in Le Vol des oiseaux, “Adaptation
des f igures en relief au zootrope,” comes to mind: “To take the most advantage from these
three-dimensional figures, relatively to the analysis of the movements of the flight, they had to
be examined with Plateau’s device […].” See Marey, Le Vol des oiseaux 180 (my emphasis).
22 Or speeded-up movement, in fact – the change in the speed of the reconstituted movement
remained essential. In 1894 Marey mentioned “a curious line of research” proposed by Ernst
Mack: “the stages of a man’s existence would pass in review before the gaze of the onlookers in
the form of a strange and marvellous metamorphosis.” See Marey, Movement 312, 313; and his
“Préface” to Trutat, La Photographie animée VIII.
23 See Marey, Le Vol des oiseaux 182.
24 See Marey, Le Vol des oiseaux 181-82 (my emphasis).
102 Maria Tortajada
audience. And, further, it will be necessary to augment the number of

successive photographs, so as to represent a performance of considerable
duration.25
Marey thus granted the synthesis of movement an important place, to the

extent that he presented it as a means to establish new scientific facts. The
question of the function of control, while probably unquestionable, was not
predominant. Marey concluded his great work on chronophotography with
the presentation of a chronophotographic projector of his own making (that
of 1893).26 From the standpoint of finality, Marey described it as belonging
to Plateau’s method, as an improvement on the phenakistiscope and the
zoetrope, situating it within the same logic despite essential technical
differences (the use of the reel and the strip of film). In short, the synthesis
of movement was relevant for the methos even in heuristic terms.
What of the illusion of movement? Unsurprisingly, Marey referred en-
thusiastically to the effect of the synthesis he presented. The description
he gives of his zoetrope for three-dimensional figures in Le Vol des oiseaux
is proof enough. The instrument, he writes, “gave the perfect illusion of a
series of seagulls flying” (see quotation and note 24). Marey uses the same
expression to introduce the phenakistiscope:
The persistence of impressions of light on the retina has as a result that

this object seems to perform continuous movements returning regularly
and periodically. […] Windows were cut out in the disc at suitable inter-
vals and the disc, set in motion in front of a mirror, produced the perfect
illusion of a bird flapping its wings.27
Every time Marey presented what he called “Plateau’s method,” he insisted

on the value of the result obtained: the illusion of movement, which he
defined as continuous. In 1894, the phenakistiscope was credited with giving
“the illusion of genuine movement,” and as for his zoetrope, Marey specified
25 Marey, Movement 313 (my emphasis).

26 “Du projecteur chronophotographique,” in Marey, Movement 317-18. The book ends with
a complete openness to the research on projecting appliances, after noting their technical
limitations and notably the lack of stability of projected images: “Having arrived at this point
in our researches, we learned that our mechanic had discovered an immediate solution of this
problem, and by quite a different method; we shall therefore desist from our present account
pending further investigation.” Marey, Movement 318.
27 Marey, Le Vol des oiseaux 164 (my emphasis).
that “the illusion was complete.”28 In 1900 Marey distanced himself from
the term “illusion.” The issue of synthesis was then addressed only in the
description of appliances. It was still introduced through the description
of Plateau’s method, but in not so many forms: synthesis then was liter-
ally “the reproduction of analyzed motions,” which is the strict scientific
formulation of control synthesis.29 The notion of illusion came into play,
but in the presentation of the Lumière Cinematograph and after Edison’s
Kinetoscope! In 1900, and in this context only, “presenting a perfect illusion”
was the objective.30 Still, Marey’s interest in the synthesis of movement prior
to 1900 cannot be questioned. Marey did not reject the illusion of movement
as unscientific then; he even presented it as an aim because he still saw it
in relation to slow motion. Slow motion made up for a deficient sense – a
constant finality in Marey’s scientific approach. In itself, the observation is
admittedly not new. But it should be emphasized that slow motion is associ-
ated with an affirmed practice of synthesis. Until 1894, Marey underscored
slow motion as one modality of the synthesis of movement, as a form of
synthesis, defined as the illusion of continuous movement, as the appearance
of movement, whatever the speed of the observed subject.
The Synthesis of Movement as Decomposition of Movement:

Phases
What the synthesis of movement meant for Marey is better understood

through the nature of the results it allowed him to achieve. Marey did
not simply want to know the movement of a mobile by establishing the
various instants of its path, represented by a series of film frames; nor did
he simply want to decompose the movement of the mobile into a discon-
tinuous trajectory. As a physiologist, he sought to explain how human
and animal locomotion functioned. In 1894, when he listed the specific
qualities of chronophotography compared to other methods such as the
graphic method, he wrote:
Chronophotography was useful when a general idea of the movement was

desired; it was also the only means by which the movements of an isolated
28 Marey, Movement 311.

29 Marey, “History of Chronophotography” 326.
104 Maria Tortajada
point could be expressed, when the movement was not accompanied by

the development of a certain amount of force.
He added:
[…] the true interest of chronophotography lies in the fact that it can
provide a complete picture of the bird in the various attitudes it assumes
during the act of taking a stroke with its wings.31
The place of measurement is essential in Marey’s practice: more often than

not, it is the measurement that is actually remembered, for the knowledge
of movement rested on a direct measure – on chronophotographs or on the
working drawings Marey made out of them – of the distance covered by a
mobile, of the time elapsed with respect to this distance, on the calculation
of the speeds, of muscular work, but also on a measure of the speeds of
cogwheels in machines used for experimentation. The measurement was
at once a result of the research and a decisive condition in the precision
of the chronophotographic experience. However, as a physiologist, Marey
was also interested in the moving body as a whole: the form of muscles, the
physical and visual transformation imposed by movement, the position of
a limb in relation to the previous one or to the rest of the body. Measure-
ment is certainly involved there, but not only. Besides measurement, a
physical characterization of movement is essential.32 Marey’s work involved
a whole practice of describing bodies in movement, which made it pos-
sible to establish a knowledge needed by physiological science. And this
aspect of his research happened to mobilize Marey when he analyzed still
chronophotographic images as well as when he experimented with the
synthesis of movement.
What Marey attentively observed in the synthesis and thanks to slow
motion was the phases of movements. This question, central for Marey,
went hand in hand with emphasizing slow motion. After presenting several
different zoetropes, he thus wrote:
31 Marey, Movement 232.

32 See the series of annotated drawings in sub-chapter §102, “Attitudes successives des ailes
et du corps de l’oiseau pendant un coup d’aile” (Marey, Le Vol des oiseaux 158-61). Here is an
eloquent excerpt: “Fig. 92. The joints of the wing are flexed and the large remiges reach out;
at the same time as they pivot and allow air between them. Fig. 93. The abduction of the wing
becomes more and more pronounced; the remiges are clearly apart from one another; the front
edge of the wing goes up.” Marey, Le Vol des oiseaux 160-61.
All these applications would be simply childish if they were limited to

the reproduction of phenomena which could be observed by the eye
in the case of living creatures. They would be attended, in fact, by all
the uncertainties and diff iculties which embarrass the observation
of the actual movement. […] But a combination of the zoetrope and
chronophotography has further possibilities, for it enables the observer to
follow movements, which would otherwise be impossible to examine, by
slowing down the motion to any desired rate. […] Under these conditions,
[…] the eye can follow […] all […] phases, whereas, in a living bird, only a
confused flutter of the wings can be distinguished.33
Marey’s whole chronophotographic research aimed to increase the number

of images in a series so as to be able “to know the greatest possible number
of phases in movement.”34 What characterizes the phase is the change in the
body’s position or in the position of the part of the body being examined.35
For instance, Marey would pinpoint the moment when the wing of the bird
went up or down. One of the levels in the knowledge of a movement forms
when the order of succession of its phases is established. For Marey the
phase was part of the concept of movement; the notion was a component in
the type of movements he primarily studied in animal locomotion: periodic
and repetitive movements. Phases could be read and studied directly in the
chronophotographic series, at the analytical stage. Yet Marey insisted on
the usefulness of observing phases in the movement reconstituted in slow
motion. He could then spot changes, look for breaks, in short, track down
discontinuity. It was not the discontinuity of film frames that interested
him, but the discontinuity in the synthesized image, in reconstituted
movement. For phases were what allowed the decomposition of the global,
apparently continuous movement of the mobile within synthesized move-
ment. What Marey noted in synthesis was not merely the good functioning
of the reversion of the phenomenon. Here again, something in the analysis of
movement entered the observation of the synthesized movement. In other
words, there was no control synthesis that did not replay the analysis; hence
the necessity of finding anew, and seeing, the decomposition of movement in
the synthesis of movement. The movement of synthesis affirmed as continuous
was then thought as a discontinuous continuity. The notion of movement
33 Marey, Le Mouvement 311-12 (my emphasis).

34 Marey, Développement de la méthode graphique par l’emploi de la photographie. Supplément
à La Méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales 31.
35 Marey, Le Vol des oiseaux 158.
106 Maria Tortajada
involved at that point then stands in radical opposition to another concept

of movement, understood as a continuous, indivisible flow that cannot
be decomposed. This Bergsonian definition of movement was decisive
in different domains of knowledge from the early twentieth century on,
in art history and the history of cinema, and remains pervasive to this
day. By contrast, Marey was looking for the discontinuity of phases within
reconstituted movement – an essential discontinuity, though one distinct
from the discontinuity of film frames.
This apprehension of movement as synthesized – that is, continuous, and
yet discontinuous, thought and perceived as such, and analyzed – informs
the status of vision implied in the synthesis of movement in Marey’s first
approach. Starting from the identification of phases and the decomposition
of synthesized movement, the observer’s learning process becomes possible:
The slowing down of movement makes the phenakistiscope so valuable,

as it allows the eye to follow with ease all the phases of an action that
would otherwise elude direct observation. Little by little, as the speed of
the disc’s rotation increases, the eye – familiarized with the movement it
has just observed – continues to make out its phases in spite of their shorter
duration. One’s sight thus becomes trained and soon some details which
used to escape attention are captured. I have noted this about myself,
with the horse’s gaits, man’s race and even the flight of some birds.36
Marey, most particularly in Le Vol des oiseaux, elaborated what may be

called a didactics of the look, that of the scientist as well as that of the lay
person.
1. The observer should learn to see reality, and this learning process involves
the use of viewing dispositives allowing the manipulation of movement
and learning by the same observer. This is the first thesis on vision. The
issue of didactics was especially important for Marey, on two accounts.
36 Marey, Le Vol des oiseaux 165-66 (my emphasis). The chapter on the synthesis of movement
begins with the training of the scholar’s eye and its function in scientific approaches. Chrono-
photography, according to Marey, presents series of attitudes in which “the object appears to be
motionless, and movements, which are successively executed, are associated in a series of images,
as if they were all being executed at the same moment. The images, therefore, appeal rather to
the imagination than to the senses. They teach us, it is true, to observe Nature more carefully,
and, perhaps, to seek in a moving animal for positions hitherto unnoticed. This education of
the eye may, however, be rendered still more complete if the impression of the movement be
conveyed to the eye under conditions to which it is accustomed.” Marey, Movement 304 (my
emphasis).
First, in the scientific method itself, the moment of synthesis was also
a moment dedicated to “demonstration”: the demonstration of a well-
founded analysis, but also the demonstration as an argument liable to
convince peers. Moreover, research and the acquisition of knowledge
were coupled: as can be seen, the first educative result of the scientific
method concerned the scientist himself, as he learned to decompose
movement by observing it in its synthesis. However, the transmission
of knowledge and scientific popularization were never overlooked by
Marey, who was a man of his century in that respect, as was notably
shown in his publications in the periodical La Nature or in the 1894
presentation of the synthesis of movement in relation to the issues of the
communication of results, of publication or of “public demonstration.”37
2. A second thesis on vision was implicit in the approach. With the study of
phases, it seems as though what was to be taught to one’s own perception
was the direct integration of the decomposition of movement. What was
to be learned was the movement of the real phenomenon as a whole,
structured in various moments from the outset, just as the ability to
recognize it in its discontinuity should be practiced: in short, a sort of
analytical apprehension of the world should be reached. To that end,
the observer should have first trained his look in front of a mobile’s
movement synthesized in slow motion. Yet in the 1890 text quoted here,
the exercise is clearly explained; it involves a learning that assumes to
gradually reestablish the synthesized movement at a speed closer and
closer to direct perception: “Little by little, as the speed of the disc’s
rotation increases, the eye – familiarized with the movement it has just
observed – continues to make out its phases in spite of their shorter
duration.”38 The observer is then ready to apply analytical vision to the
continuous movement of reality, which he will then perceive in its inher-
ent and structural discontinuity. This exercise shows how the synthesis
of movement, without slow motion, just as it is “normally” perceived, as
the outcome of the gradual acceleration of the run of images – and once
it has itself become analytical through the faculties of the observer – is
also part of the process and is not dismissed as irrelevant. It is, one might
say, tamed, re-appropriated, reread according to the decomposition of
movement.
37 See the sub-chapter “Reproduction, enlargement, and reduction of chronophotographs,”

in Marey, Movement 123.
38 See footnote 36, Le vol des oiseaux.
108 Maria Tortajada
One Expression, Two Concepts
But of course, Marey did not hold the same position in 1900:
Of late years, chronophotography has taken another direction – that of

the synthesis of motion. The analytic images are made to appear before
the spectators’ eyes in uniform sequence, so as to reproduce the appear-
ance of the motion itself.39
A few pages further, Marey adds:
Animated projections, interesting as they are, are of little advantage to

science, for they only show what we see better with our own eyes. At best,
they serve to slow a motion which is too quick for direct observation,
or to accelerate it if its extreme slowness causes us to miss some of its
features. 40
The synthesis of movement, though it was part of chronophotography, was

primarily associated with popular spectacle by 1900. Slow motion seemed
to have lost its importance and appeared as a detail. Synthesized movement
was not only discredited because it brought nothing more than the ordinary
vision of movement, but also because it was not as sharp. All the charac-
teristics that had made the synthesis of movement valuable were passed
over: a moment in the scientific approach, the validation stage continuing
the analysis, promoting demonstrative and didactic qualities. Reading
Marey, it seems as though the generalized social practice of the synthesis
of movement imposed the prominence of one use and notion of synthesis
over another. Marey appeared to react to this state of affairs by turning
away from the synthesis of movement to privilege geometric analysis and
working drawings. 41 Yet the reversal took place at the cost of a shift in the
concept of synthesis, as indeed two notions of the synthesis of movement,
associated with two distinct practices, were implied in Marey’s writing.
That in which the synthesis of movement was thought of in relation to the
decomposition of movement seemed to fade away, to the benefit of the other.

41 While the end of Movement opened onto the research on the synthesis of movement, the
1900 text came to a close with the working drawing of movement, that is, on the geometric
analysis plotted on paper and based on film frames, and it privileged the still plate. The change
in positioning is obvious.
I: Synthesis emphasized before 1900 and II: Synthesis of “animated views” in

considered as a stopgap option from 1899-1900
then on
Slow motion (speeded-up motion) “The appearance of movement itself”

Seeing more than in direct observation Seeing less
Learning to see Common perception
Phases “in movement”:
synthesized movement as discontinuous
Analysis of movement –
Manipulation of movement –
Scientific practice Non-scientific practice
The Two Syntheses of Movement according to Marey
It is therefore essential to underline the fact that, at a given historical mo-

ment, Marey conceived of synthesized movement as discontinuous and
considered it valuable. Synthesis was not automatically associated with
continuity and the flow of movement, which some were later to consider
as the privilege of cinema.
To understand the rejection of synthesis by Marey around 1900, it is
accordingly not enough to note simply that he was no longer interested in
synthesis. Rather, it should be emphasized that, when he spoke of synthesis
in 1900, he was referring to something else, a notion which was totally
useless in his method and which he associated to a practice that had become
generalized by then. What is original is the fact that, rejecting this com-
mon form of synthesis, he also minimized synthesis to ends of control and
decomposition, in which slow motion played a part – in the presentation
text for the World Fair, for example. Marey’s reversal may be explained
through the reformulation of the principles of his method, resulting in the
perception of validation synthesis as less valuable as a whole. This thesis,
which would imply a revolution in Marey’s approach, would have important
implications from the point of view of the history of sciences. At the mo-
ment, it appears ill-founded. A different explanation, more limited in range,
would amount to claiming that the synthesis of movement was no longer
part of the framework of the method as a synthesis for control, and was
disqualified as a result. I have not been able to find anything in Marey’s
writing that would confirm either version, though the presentation text for
the 1900 exhibition, centered on the working drawing and on the analytical
translation of film frames, would seem to point us to the latter direction.
The most obvious explanation, provided by Marey in person and repeated
in his wake, does not go into this type of consideration. Rather, it involves
a new distribution of roles between science and popular practice around
110 Maria Tortajada
the issue of synthesis. Should we simply come to the conclusion that Marey
could no longer resort to a scientific method he had developed himself, the
synthesis of movement, from the moment when synthesis was used “outside
the scientific institution”? Was the institutional division between science
and spectacle the main explanation for his reversal? This is questionable.
Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, the recourse to synthesized
movement was not limited to scientific circles. Marey’s first notion of syn-
thesis, in which synthesized movement itself was thought of as discontinu-
ous in the field of science, should be compared to contemporary practices
of play and spectacle in the nineteenth century, notably those involving
the phenaskistiscope and the zoetrope. The synthesis of movement then
flaunted the mechanics, the moment of composition and decomposition
of movement, the link between continuity and discontinuity, for the
enjoyment of spectators. The “analytical continuity” – the discontinuous
continuous – was part of the social context, in a way. Still, the circulation of
popular practices involving synthesis and the manipulation of movement
over the period did not dissuade Marey from enhancing the synthesis of
movement in his method. 42 Science and spectacle were not opposed in
the absolute when it came to the synthesis of movement, according to the
implicit reading Marey seemed to make in 1900 – though this opposition
may suit classical film history all too well in consolidating the idea of
the primacy of the Lumière cinematograph in the “birth” of cinema as a
spectacle, relegating Marey to the reserved space of science.
One explanation remains, however, and it goes beyond Marey himself,
even as the positioning of the scientist may have played a part in the context
and may now serve to shed light on it. The hypothesis in question is that
Marey’s reversal took into account a more global, diffuse change attested
in the generalization of the practice of “animated views.” The institutional
split affirmed by Marey – science vs. popular practice – may have drawn
on a decisive modification, the gradual transformation of the notion of
movement as it started to circulate in the social space. Marey’s rejection
of synthesis may indeed be interpreted as a sign of the transformation of
what was understood as movement, and more specifically as synthesized
movement, at the turn of the century. Marey no longer saw synthesized
movement as valuable because the said movement no longer appeared
as evidently as a decomposed, analytical movement. The beginning of a
change in epistemological status for the synthesis of movement seems
42 In Movement, Marey specified that “the original form of this instrument was a plaything” before
proceeding to explain the scientific interest of the phenakistiscope. See Marey, Movement 306.
to have occurred in the last years of the century. Or rather, synthesis as-
sumed two statuses at that point, which Marey’s work articulated. In this
hypothesis, the opposition between science and popular practice, which
Marey seems to suggest explains his positioning, was combined with a
process of transformation of the notion of synthesis, noted by him just as
he made it concrete through his new stance.
This transformation, which cancelled the analytical dimension of synthe-
sized movement, was the premise of a process leading to the generalization
of a definition of movement whose radical formulation Bergson provided
and which was to have a strong impact in the arts and the thought on film in
the twentieth century. Bergson saw movement as the continuous, indivisible
flow of the reality of the world, which was completely incompatible with
the notion of movement in Marey’s first use of synthesis. Applying the
Bergsonian definition of movement to the synthesized, projected image
would have meant a shift to another epistemological model of the synthesis
of movement, something done by neither Marey nor Bergson – who wrote
little on the synthesized image as such. 43 The epistemological passage in
question was realized in the writing of André Bazin or Gilles Deleuze, for
instance, with the impact of their discourses in the field of cinema, but it
undoubtedly took place well before them.
Two polar notions of the synthesis of movement should be introduced at
this stage: one that still dominated at the end of the nineteenth century, that
of “the animated image,” in which synthesized movement was thought of in
relation to the decomposition of that very movement and its analytical ap-
prehension (there lies the first enthusiastic use of the synthesis of movement
by Marey as well as playful and spectacular uses of the animated image);
the other, that of “the moving image,” involved movement as a continuous
flow, by definition opposed to any decomposition. This second notion fully
crystallized in the twentieth century, but its gradual historical construction
43 Elie During stresses the importance of movement in the machine at the moment of synthesis
when he analyzes the cinematographic dispositive: “the emphasis is on the artificial continuity
of the uniform run of film and on the idea of time it commands, rather than on the discontinuity
tied to the fragmentation of film frames and their ‘stroboscopic’ (intermittent) reproduction.”
See “Notes on the Bergsonian Cinematograph” in this volume, as well as the entry on Bergson
in Dictionnaire de la pensée du cinéma, Antoine de Baecque and Philippe Chevallier, eds. (Paris:
PUF, 2011). This approach to the Bergsonian text sheds light on an aspect often forgotten in
commentaries on the question of film in Bergson: the interest in the machine and in the process
of production of images in the constitution of his cinematographic model. While the movement
involved in the projecting machine is indeed essential, the projected image itself, the moving
image, which belongs in simulated movement, remains “off” the philosopher’s concrete analysis
of the dispositive.
112 Maria Tortajada
began in the late 1890s, notably following the variations of dispositives

linked to the “cinema.” It did not simply cancel out analytical synthesis. In
the early twentieth century, this synthesis still appeared in discourses on
cinema or in projection practices.
The projections of animated images by the first cinematographs and
chronophotographs until the early twentieth century belonged in this logic,
despite the distance taken by Marey. 44 It is remarkable, for instance, that
these appliances and spectacular practices were presented recurrently as
instruments that were to allow the study of movement, notably thanks to
slow motion, at the same time as they were objects of spectacle. Analyti-
cal synthesis was still part of the field of “cinema” in the early twentieth
century, as is attested in Georges Méliès’s description of the Cinematograph
in terms of phases and decomposition of movement.45 There was no outright
shift to a new paradigm, but a gradual transformation, a change of dominant
characteristic that affected not only the field of cinema and its history, but
Marey’s science as well.
When the practice of animated views – which was still fundamentally
marked by the analytical conception of synthesis, the thought of movement
in terms of phases, and the play with the manipulation and decomposition
of movement – no longer appeared to Marey as involving the discontinuous
essential to analysis, he came to reject the synthesis of movement. The cin-
ematographic paradigm coalesced around 1900, transforming the relation
to the idea of a synthesis of movement. It implied a double renouncement,
of a didactic model of the look and of a concept of movement that did not
separate the perception of a phenomenon undergoing a continuous move-
ment from its analytical decomposition. This paradigm was accompanied
by a sharp affirmation of the separation between science and spectacle, a
separation which presupposed the modification of the notion of synthesis.
A provocative formula is always striking: if the question of the synthesis
of movement is considered foundational for cinema, then the event, from an
44 A contemporary example is the resistance of projectionists to the adoption of the engine

and the resulting homogenization of movement, as the crank allowed variations that had to
do with its decomposition. See Benoît Turquety’s article in this volume, “Forms of Machines,
Forms of Movements.”
45 See Georges Méliès, “Cinematographic Views” (1907), trans. Stuart Liebman, in French Film
Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, vol. 1: 1907-1929, Richard Abel, ed. (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1988) 35-47. On a different level, Jean Epstein’s definition of photogénie
could also be mentioned, as it highlights both the analytical and the experimental approach of
the cinematographic art and the decomposition performed by the close-up. See Jean Epstein,
“Bonjour cinéma” (1921), in Ecrits sur le cinéma, 1921-1953, vol. 1: 1921-1947 (Paris: Seghers, 1974)
94-97. Yet this takes us to the order of editing, another type of discontinuity.
epistemological standpoint, is not the advent of the Lumière Cinematograph

as a technique or social fact. The event is the change – more diffuse, to
be sure – that affected discourses, notably Marey’s, which re-elaborated
the explanation of the method and accordingly the status of the notion of
synthesis of movement. This research still shows that, in the epistemological
approach to viewing and listening dispositives, technique, social practice,
the finality of research, and concepts are always tied together through the
mediation of discourses.
Notes on the Bergsonian
Cinematograph
Elie During
We know how Gilles Deleuze turned the commonplace inside out: Berg-
son, so it went, had “missed” cinema, contenting himself with a critique
of its dispositive – the mechanism of the projecting device called the
“cinematograph,” to be specif ic. Before the critique of the “cinemato-
graphic illusion,” developed for the most part in 1907 in Creative Evolution,1
there was indeed the doctrine of real movement, whose touchstone was
the pure perception of movement as an act or progression rather than
as a relation distributed in the spatial order. Movement unfolds in time,
not in space. This bold thesis, exposed in Matter and Memory, gave a
very singular conception of the plurality of rhythms of duration within
an evolving universe. That Bergson thereby offered precious resources
for thinking about cinema or the cinematographic experience was what
Deleuze attempted to show in the brilliant analyses of Time-Image and
Movement-Image. In so doing, he sanctioned another commonplace con-
veyed by critics and philosophers – namely, that cinema was, in essence,
a Bergsonian art. One can see how far back the idea goes by looking at
debates between Paul Souday, Marcel L’Herbier and Émile Vuillermoz in
the late 1910s, at later texts by Elie Faure, Jean Epstein and Béla Balázs, or
even at this pronouncement by a young Sartre in 1924: “Cinema provides
the formula for a Bergsonian art. It inaugurates mobility in aesthetics.”2
More fundamentally, the assessment points to the musical paradigm
that drives certain discourses on the flow of cinematographic images,
but also on the contrapuntal or symphonic composition involved in edit-
ing. Deleuze chose the second direction and shifted the emphasis to a
metaphysical ground, irreducible to any aesthetic of the flow. On the way,
however, the dispositive was lost: it was about cinema, or rather about
1 In fact, the cinematograph was mentioned for the first time in the 1902-1903 Collège de
France lectures devoted to “the history of the idea of time,” alongside other optical devices such
as the magic lantern.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, Écrits de jeunesse, Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, eds. (Paris: Gal-
limard, 1990) 389.
116 Elie During
images and ideas “in” cinema, but no longer at all – or barely – about the
cinematograph.3
Beyond Deleuze’s reappropriation, it may be useful, questioning Bergson’s
actual contribution to thinking on cinema, to go back to the point of view
that was originally his, starting with a few obvious elements. First, it was
never Bergson’s ambition to think through cinema, a medium that he did
not actually know very well, besides attending screenings like everyone else,
so to speak. 4 This comes as no surprise for a philosopher generally prone
to approach metaphysical inquiry on the side of contemporary sciences
rather than artistic creation. A simple consequence ensues, which should
be kept in mind as a kind of methodological safeguard. In the analogy
introduced in the fourth chapter of Creative Evolution, the cinematograph
is in the position of a comparing element, not that of an element being
compared. Accordingly, it does not make sense to wonder which dimensions
Bergson missed in real cinema, in the actual uses of its dispositive – if the
said dispositive may even be referred to in the singular and univocally
over the very first years of the twentieth century, which remains to be
established. Bergson may just as well be criticized for not writing a book
on f ilm! In truth, it is exactly the opposite: what Bergson did not note
regarding the actual situation of cinema should instead be ascribed to
the remarkable work of invention that presided over the development of
the cinematographic analogy.5 With this device, the philosopher availed
himself of a kind of precision optical tool, a speculative instrument liable
to raise certain questions anew – questions that had seemingly nothing
to do with the art of “animated views” soon to be known as “cinema.” To
have a clearer understanding of this and attempt to describe the specific
problem that motivated the resort to the analogy of the cinematograph,
it may be useful to start by setting things straight. This should allow us
to understand in which direction the analogy may operate and suggest
new paths for research.6 Indeed, as Bergson evoked the operation of the
3 On this paradoxical relay between Bergson and Deleuze, see Paul Douglass, “Bergson
and Cinema: Friends or Foes?” in The New Bergson, ed. J. Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2006), as well as my entries, “Bergson” and “Travelling,” in Dictionnaire de la
pensée du cinéma, Antoine de Baecque and Philippe Chevallier, eds. (Paris: PUF, 2012).
4 On this aspect, see Michel Georges-Michel’s testimony, En jardinant avec Bergson (Paris:
Albin Michel, 1926) 13-14. See also Les Grandes Époques de la peinture moderne, de Delacroix à
nos jours (New York: Brentano’s, 1945) 47-8.
5 The analysis is so precise and follows the development of the image so closely that the term
“analogy” seems fully justified in this instance. Analogy, then, rather than image or metaphor.
6 On the function of the image in the definition of problems, see the interview with Bergson
reprinted in Lydie Adolphe, La Dialectique des images (Paris: PUF, 1951) 4.
cinematograph, he sought to bring to light a mechanism that was much

more fundamental – in his view – than the one he was emphasizing in the
comparing element organizing the analogy. In fact, the cinematograph was
to allow the identification of the workings of an “inner cinematograph”
that spontaneously directed the thought of movement, down to its most
elaborate constructions. This thought was already at work in natural
perception: in that respect, equipped perception only effected a passage
at the edge of natural perception. Its full expression was achieved in the
representation of movement by physics.
From this standpoint, it becomes clearer that Bergson did not content
himself with an ingenious metaphor: it is barely an exaggeration to say
that he literally invented the cinematograph as we know it today. The
cinematograph he was dealing with was primarily a philosophical or, more
precisely, a conceptual object – not a cultural object to which philosophical
reflection would be applied from the outside, on the model of interpreta-
tion or analysis, but an ideal instrument, a catalyst for a thought which to
some extent could have tapped into starkly different domains to achieve
the same end. Neither concepts nor the tools of thought are found “ready
made”; they have to be tailored to suit particular purposes. In the end,
even an analogy has to reconstruct the fulcrums it relies on in reality.
And on closer examination, Bergson manifestly built an object out of this
“cinematograph,” an object which, on one decisive aspect, differs from
most of the devices for the projection of animated views that were in use
at the time he was writing.
This point generally went unnoticed: there is every indication that the
mechanism described in Creative Evolution is completely automatized,
with the hand magically absent. This is all the more surprising as, at the
time Bergson was writing Creative Evolution, devices for the projection of
animated views still involved operation by hand to a massive extent, with
operators skilled at turning the crank, slowing down and speeding up the
run of the film to enhance the action, intensify a given dramatic moment,
exhibit the details of a particular movement or condense an entire scene in
a flurry of images. Almost no projectors were fitted with an electric motor
in the projection sites that began to appear. In France, the “professional”
model produced by Pathé, which was the most widely used in the 1910s, still
required projectionists to turn the crank at a pace of 16 to 20 images per
second. By and large, this was actually still the case after the war, until the
advent of synchronous sound and the generalization of the electric motor
118 Elie During
imposed the constant speed of the famous 24 images per second.7 To be sure,
as early as 1901, Pathé catalogs advertised the merits of some automatized
devices for domestic use, equipped with a multiple-speed motor capable
of maintaining a regular run of images. Yet these were clearly meant to
relieve projectionists of a tiresome effort of attention rather than replace
them outright. Cinema overwhelmingly remained an art of the crank.8
One may certainly wonder about the part played by the high-precision
techniques of chronophotography or scientif ic cinematography in the
elaboration of the Bergsonian image. Bergson and Marey were colleagues
at the Collège de France, and this is not an insignificant fact.9 Other con-
temporary devices may have served as models – Edison’s kinetoscope in
particular, with its electric motor. But basically, what Bergson may or may
not have seen matters little. The cinematograph as he describes it is his own
invention and conforms to his method. The nodal point of the analogy, what
drives it from beginning to end, is the uniform character of the film run
made possible by the automatization of the device. Bergson did not even
need to evoke the presence of a motor explicitly to suggest uniform motion.
The decisive element was that the mechanism of the cinematograph only
had to be “set going.”10 Once the movement was launched, the hand no
longer had anything to do with it and the mind of the operator could attend
to something else, indifferent to the variety of real movements that the
machine, left to its own mechanism, reproduced on the screen by running
film frames before a beam of light.11
7 As a reference, let us mention Georges Sadoul’s Histoire générale du cinéma: “In 1920, the
largest French movie theaters still used hand-cranked projectors for film screenings. The rhythm
of the projection could thus be adjusted, and even devices equipped with an electric motor could
be slowed down and speeded up thanks to a rheostat.” See Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du
cinéma, vol. 5, L’Art muet, 1919-1929 (Paris: Denoël, 1975) 84.
8 See Benoît Turquety’s text, “Forms of Machines, Forms of Movement,” in this volume.
9 The ambivalence of Marey’s chronophotographic experiments makes them all the more
interesting from a Bergsonian perspective. See Georges Didi-Huberman, “L’image est le mou-
vant,” in Intermédialités 3 (Spring 2004): 11-30; Georges Didi-Huberman and Laurent Mannoni,
Mouvements de l’air: Étienne-Jules Marey, photographe des fluides (Paris: Gallimard/Réunion
des musées nationaux, 2004); Pasi Väliaho, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and
Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010); Maria Tortajada, “Évaluation,
mesure, mouvement: la philosophie contre la science et les concepts du cinéma (Bergson,
Marey),” in Revue européenne des sciences sociales XLVI.141 (2008): 95-111.
10 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: McMillan, 1911) 323
(online version available at http://archive.org/details/creativeevolutio00berguoft, last accessed
on February 18, 2013).
11 In that respect, a rather illuminating approach consists in situating the cinematograph
within the larger context of a kind of generalized cinema where, alongside the best-known
Thus, the emphasis was on the artificial continuity of the uniform run
and on the idea of time such continuity commanded, rather than on the
discontinuity linked to the fragmentation of film frames and their “stro-
boscopic” (intermittent) reproduction. I have already elaborated upon this
point in detail elsewhere,12 and will therefore limit the present argument
to the main insights which an attentive reading of the texts featuring a
cinematographic reference in the Bergsonian corpus may very simply yield.
But what is meant by the term “uniform,” to begin with? In the case
in point, the run of the celluloid filmstrip at a rigorously constant speed
proves rather secondary. As has already been pointed out, Bergson did not
explicitly mention a motor, though the description he gave of the device
clearly seemed to integrate the principle of the automatic run. What really
matters here is that the movement should be mechanical, that is, indifferent
or arbitrary. This intrinsic indetermination implies that arbitrary speeds
may be applied to it, that it may be speeded up or slowed down without
affecting in any way what is projected on the screen.13 In a sense, the device
represents a system isolated from the movements it is supposed to repro-
duce, a system that owes nothing to the variations in intensity accounting
for the singularity of these movements. The speed of the film’s run may
well be modified at will through a rheostat; for all that, the nature of the
projection will remain radically different from a hand-cranked projection.
Notwithstanding the variations resulting from tiredness, the natural lack of
precision of the gesture or economic pressures to cut screenings short, the
projectionist clearly speeded up or slowed down the run of the film strip
optical devices, one would find all sorts of “cinematic machines” developed in the field of artistic
techniques and methods, including literature. See Maria Tortajada, “Machines cinématiques et
dispositifs visuels. Cinéma et ‘pré-cinéma’ à l’œuvre chez Alfred Jarry,” 1895 40 (2003): 5-23; and
Jimena Canales, A Tenth of a Second (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2009).
12 See Elie During, “Vie et mort du cinématographe: de L’Évolution créatrice à Durée et Simul-
tanéité,” in Bergson, ed. C. Riquier (Paris: Cerf, 2012).
13 This holds, of course, only if one assumes the position of the screen, not as an exterior
spectator, but as an observer involved in the nexus of relations organizing concrete becomings.
The motif of a proportional increase of all speeds in the universe was an experience of thought
often discussed in Bergson’s time. Built on the model of geometric transformations by “similar-
ity,” it aimed to bring out the relative character of measured time to better emphasize – by
contrast – the absolute character of lived duration. Pushing this line of reasoning to its limit,
Bergson contemplated an infinite acceleration, where everything would be given at once: as he
observed, nothing would be fundamentally altered for the purpose of scientific analysis. See
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution 9-10, 357; Duration and Simultaneity, trans. Leon Jacobson
(Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999) 40-41; and La Pensée et le mouvant, published in English as
The Creative Mind. An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (1946; New York:
Citadel Press, 2002) 13.
120 Elie During
according to what took place in the projected scene or the action whose
unfolding he accompanied and scanned. On the other hand, it did not
matter whether or not the automatic device was set to the durations whose
artificial synthesis it presented; it uniformly subjected them to its own
duration, that of a mechanical system artificially isolated from universal
becoming and over which time could only glide, as Bergson wrote in the
first pages of An Introduction to Metaphysics. Indeed, this system conformed
to patterns of repetition in which duration was stripped of any efficiency.
This neutralized duration, it should be noted, also assumed the function of
a natural medium for the arbitrary cuts represented by the film frames.14
“Uniform,” then, connotes not so much the literal constancy or invariance
of speed as the homogeneity of a time indifferent to what takes place in it.
In short, what the cinematographic mechanism of thought performs – since
this is what mattered to Bergson, after all – is the extraction of a “single
representation of becoming in general”15 out of the variety of effective
becomings. “An infinite multiplicity of becomings variously colored, so to
speak, passes before our eyes: we manage so that we see only differences of
color, that is to say, differences of state, beneath which there is supposed to
flow, hidden from our view, a becoming always and everywhere the same,
invariably colorless.”16 In the analogy of the cinematograph, this becoming
“in general” (Bergson sometimes uses the expression “duration in general”
in the same – unfavorable – sense), this indefinite becoming that is not
the becoming of anything in particular (except precisely of an outside
mechanism, indifferent from the standpoint of images) corresponds to a
movement, “always the same, […] hidden in the apparatus.”17 The section
to which one should always return, because it provides the key to reading
Bergson’s montage, is the following: “The process then consists in extracting
from all the movements peculiar to all the figures an impersonal movement
abstract and simple, movement in general, so to speak: we put this into the
apparatus, and we reconstitute the individuality of each particular move-
14 See François Albera, “Pour une épistémographie du montage: le moment Marey,” in Arrêt
sur image, fragmentation du temps, François Albera, Marta Braun and André Gaudreault, eds.
(Lausanne: Éditions Payot, 2002) 40-41.
15 Bergson, Creative Evolution 324.
16 Bergson, Creative Evolution 321. Incidentally, this should stop us from identifying, without
further precision, Bergsonism to a sort of Heracliteanism celebrating the “flow” or “becom-
ing” in general (in contemporary literature, Heracliteanism takes the form of a defense of the
irreducible dimension of the abstract “passage” of time, which would have greatly amused
Bergson). Bergsonism is a philosophy of durations – of the coexistence of durations – and that
is a completely different matter.
ment by combining this nameless movement with the personal attitudes.

Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph.”18
Indeed, to what does the cinematograph owe its remarkable effective-
ness, if not to the fact that, subjecting the film strip to a global run of
instantaneous photographs, it recomposes and reproduces in one piece
the varied movements that make up the filmed subject, the content of
animated views? There lies the essence of its process. Transposed to the
level of the operations of thought, the cinematographic mechanism can be
defined by two complementary substitutions: 1) the substitution of a pure
mechanical movement, an analogon of “movement in general,” that is, a
universal equivalent for all concrete movements, for the infinitely diverse
movements of the real; 2) the substitution of an absolute time – a frame-
time meant to coordinate and link together all the temporal fibers into a
homogeneous form of representation, laying out relations of simultaneity far
and wide across space19 – for the web of proper durations, the multiplicity
of singular, differentiated becomings.
From the standpoint of the scientif ic representations of time – and
this is ultimately what Bergson’s analysis as a whole is directed at – the
promotion of cinematographic time amounts to a shift from a parameter-
time for local use, liable to follow change at least superficially, surveying
its nuances and inflections step by step, to a rather particular use of
dimension-time known as coordinate-time: a time capable of identifying
two arbitrary instants and providing a measure of their temporal gap,
but in a way that makes this measure indifferent to what occurs in the

19 The substitution evidently meets a principle of economy as well: in Creative Evolution,
before introducing the cinematograph, Bergson evoked another way of rendering extensive
becoming, one more faithful to the diversity of real movement and flows of duration, but also
much more painstaking. Positing the movement of a parade of soldiers, Bergson explained that
one could “cut out jointed figures representing the soldiers,” “give to each of them the movement
of marching, a movement varying from individual to individual,” and “throw the whole on the
screen.” (Bergson, Creative Evolution 321) This possibility corresponds to the local or dynamic
approach mentioned above. In the language of physics, we may say that each line in the flow
of movements can be described through a parameter of evolution homeomorphic to an open
interval of real numbers. This parameter finds a natural interpretation as the “proper time”
measured between events affecting a single portion of matter. Let us note that, in practice,
variations affecting the coordinates associated to a system of axes used to identify the different
moments in an evolution may always be expressed according to a parameter. This points to the
fact that, between the local and the global approaches, there is more of a duality of tendencies,
or a difference in orientation, than a systematic incompatibility. On these questions, see Peter
Kroes, Time: Its Structure and Role in Physical Theories (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985).
122 Elie During
interval itself.20 It was through the cinematograph that time became for
good a “fourth dimension of space,” in an operationally clear sense. Bergson
had announced this promotion of spatialized time as early as his Essai
sur les données immédiates de la conscience.21 Yet beyond the metaphors
assigned to suggest the “spatialization” of time, it is only with coordinate
time that the distribution of time over space is effected – and this implies
coordinating heterogeneous durations associated with movements that
can be brought together on one single plane of simultaneity, regardless of
their separation in space.
This frame-time, it should be noted, corresponds very precisely to the
scheme of four-dimensional space-time analyzed in chapter 6 of Dura-
tion and Simultaneity.22 In this sense, the cinematograph appears as the
technical allegory of the false movement by which we picture becoming
by animating instantaneous spatial configurations. Going even further,
one might say that the cinematograph provides the operating condition for
such an artificial recomposition of becoming – by giving an account of the
constitution of those instantaneous sections of becoming in which a class of
events or simultaneous states can be said to coexist in the same instant. The
sections are global: they define planes of simultaneity as vast in principle
as the universe itself. Still, the whole interest of the cinematograph lies in
its suggestion that, far from being self-sustained (who has ever “seen” the
scene represented on a film frame?), these ideal sections have no existence
independently of the milieu in which the succession of planes is ordered, no
reason to exist outside the “cinematography of the universe”23 as a whole.
This temporal milieu is made up of a foliation of states or configurations of
20 See Bergson, Creative Evolution 9, 23, 348, 355-58. What does it mean for time to be indifferent
to what occurs “in the interval”? The formula may seem imprecise. It is useful to view it in relation
to a specific mathematical concept Bergson did not necessarily have in mind, that of an exact
differential whose expression results solely from the datum of extremal terms. Relativity theory
thus distinguishes between the concept of “proper time,” always relative to the space-time path
connecting two successive events, and the concept of “coordinate time,” relative to a system of
reference – yet capable of providing, from that standpoint, a direct expression of the temporal
difference between two dates corresponding to two events, and of doing so independently
of the infinitely diverse movements which are liable to connect them “in the interval.” The
famous “twin paradox” associated with Langevin’s name only draws the conclusions from this
disjunction between two uses of time in physical theory. It amounts to the fact that “proper
time” cannot be expressed by an exact differential.
21 The essay appeared in English as Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (1910; Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 1995).
22 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity 103-4 ff. See During, “Vie et mort du cinématographe”
and Bergson et Einstein: la querelle du temps (Paris: PUF, 2012).
23 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity 108.
the universe. We call it “frame-time” – or “framed time” – because it cuts

only by framing, that is, by coordinating events or synchronizing clocks,
which in the end always comes down to establishing relations of distant
simultaneity. Our reading hypothesis may then be summed up simply:
frame-time is what the cinematograph aims at. What is at stake in this
particular figure of time is a principle of equivalence or commensurability
for all durations, rather than the familiar linear time-dimension which
serves – in Kant and others – as the homogeneous milieu of succession in
general, dotted with instants analogous to points.
Bergson probably happened to stress things differently in other contexts.
The cinematographic illusion would then be translated in two ways, depend-
ing on what was underlined: the run of the film strip, which implies a prior
winding of recorded and fixed views on the reel; or the fact of discontinuity
itself, expressed in the juxtaposition of instantaneous images and the imper-
ceptible fits and starts of a device that has the film strip jerk forward – we
may remember here that the original projector of the cinematograph was
occasionally compared to a sewing machine. In the first case, what is at
stake is the “ready made” nature conferred on becoming by spatialized time:
everything is virtually given and only has to unfold, like the film strip or
the reel featuring the successive phases of a development.24 The illusion
then consists in thinking that the succession “marks a deficit,” “a weakness
in our perception, which is forced by this weakness to divide up the film
image by image instead of grasping it in the aggregate.”25 In the second
case, the illusion takes the form of an inversion of the real genesis – in an
attempt to recompose what moves, out of immobile elements, 26 just as
instantaneous views give the illusory impression of a continuous move-
ment when projected at sufficient speed.27 It may seem at times that the
“cinematographical method”28 amounts to just that: the desperate attempt
to regain mobility from static snapshots. However, Bergson did not wait for
the revelation of the cinematograph to develop these motifs: they started
appearing in his philosophy with the 1889 Essai sur les données immédiates
de la conscience29 and were supported by a whole array of images, some of

25 Bergson, The Creative Mind 18.
26 Bergson, Creative Evolution 163, 325 ff.
27 See Henri Bergson, “Conférence de Madrid sur la personnalité,” in Écrits (Paris: PUF, 2010) 513.
29 Bergson, letter to Émile Borel, August 20, 1907, in Écrits 340. The passage deserves quoting
in its integrality: “In Time and Free Will [Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience],
I insisted on the necessity for intelligence to consider only moments in time, only states in
124 Elie During
which may in fact be more directly suggestive. The examples that come
to mind are those of the fan snapped open30 and the pearls strung into a
necklace connecting them.31 These are two ways of expressing the same
fundamental fact: we tend to think of the successive stages of becoming
as so many images placed side by side along the film strip, waiting to be
unrolled. But what is the use of the cinematographic analogy if the fan and
the necklace already convey the idea?
As we seek to find out which singular dimension the cinematographic
analogy brings with it when compared to this series of competing images,
the idea of mechanical movement inevitably resurfaces: undetermined
movement, movement without quality, capable through its very abstraction
of making the most heterogeneous durations commensurate, of making
them coexist in the form of the simultaneous.32 Hence, in the image of the
pearl necklace, the problem does not lie with the pearls, but with the string.
The simultaneous states assume a consistency only through the temporal
weft supporting them. Let us be quite clear about this: it is true that the
motif of the uniform movement concealed in the device is in fact inseparable
from the stroboscopic – or “kaleidoscopic” – condition figured in the series
of instantaneous images. In the famous passage of Creative Evolution which
serves as our guide here, the image of the kaleidoscope very quickly relays
that of the cinematograph: it points to its phenomeno-technical condition,
equivalent in that respect to the process of photographic recording on which
the cinematograph as a whole depends.33 But from Bergson’s standpoint,
becoming, only positions in movement, and then reconstitute mobility artificially, combining
immobilities with one another. I did not qualify this process as cinematographic at that point,
but the cinematograph had not yet been invented. Regardless, and whatever the name given to
it, this mechanism inherent in our intelligence is, in my view, the true cause of our tendency
to eliminate concrete duration from the real, to take into account only mathematical time, to
see only arrangements, derangements, and rearrangements of parts there where an undivided
and irreversible becoming exists. This just shows how I put to use the second remark, like the
first, to demonstrate the artificial character assumed by mechanistic schemas when they serve
to represent the evolution of consciousness and life.”
30 Bergson, The Creative Mind 20.
31 “Introduction to Metaphysics,” in Bergson, The Creative Mind 185.
32 I could mention by way of example a given shading in the gradual transition from green
to blue (qualitative change), a given step in the process of transformation of the flower into a
fruit, or the larva into a nymph (evolutive change), a given phase in an activity such as drinking,
eating, fighting (extensive change). See Bergson, Creative Evolution 320.
33 Hence the proximity of the whole issue to the discussion of Zeno’s paradoxes on move-
ment. On this tangle of questions, see Maria Tortajada, “Photography/Cinema: Complementary
Paradigms in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Between Still and Moving Images, Laurent Guido
and Olivier Lugon, eds. (Herts, UK: John Libbey, 2012) 33-46.
following the logic of the analogy, the cinematograph comes first with
respect to photography because it opens the transcendental plane where
the issue of the coexistence of durations may be formulated – albeit in a way
fraught with illusion. Some time later, in Duration and Simultaneity, Bergson
was to refer to the same issue as the “simultaneity of flows,” pointing to a
different path towards the extensive weaving of durations. Contrary to
what an analytical understanding of the matter may lead one to think, the
analysis of movement effected in the recording phase (section, capture,
immobilization) presupposes, and in that sense anticipates the mechanical
synthesis effected by projection – even though the latter actually comes
second in the technical evolution of the dispositive. The historical dissocia-
tion of the recording device and the projector, the resulting autonomization
of the moment of projection, mark a decisive step in the purely mechanical
rendering of movement. They also indicate that, where photographic shots
could still paint from life, cutting out, so to speak, from the subject – one
may recall that photographic impression already served as a template for
the operation of perception in Matter and Memory – the images fixed on
the cinematographic strip are just abstract units, two degrees removed
from the real and condemned to be imparted movement from the outside,
through a kind of artificial animation.34
This slightly paradoxical relation of presupposition between photography
and cinematography may be better understood if one remembers that
Bergson’s concern is not so much homogeneous and mathematical time,
the abstract dimension underlying the uses of time as a parameter. Nor is
it length-time (“temps-longueur”) or spatialized time in general. Rather,
Bergson is interested in the particular intellectual illusion on which the
scientific mind must rely to make the coordination of flows effective: it is
frame-time as distinct from fiber-time; it is universal time as distinct from
the plurality of interlocking local durations, with their particular rhythms
or degrees of tension. Thus, cinematographic motion logically comes prior
to the photographic image, just as frame-time is presupposed by the cutting
out of frames as abstract units of becoming. The nature of the question, the
order of reasons underlying the cinematographic analogy, suggest that we
give up the common-sense maxim that rules out synthesizing anything not
34 These observations should be tempered or complexified by André Gaudreault’s insightful

comments on the intrinsically serial character of the film frame. In ordinary circumstances,
one never deals with single frames in isolation. The moving image presents itself as a sui generis
unit. See André Gaudreault, “Du simple au multiple: le cinéma comme série de séries,” Cinémas:
revue d’études cinématographiques 13.1-2 (2002), especially 38-42. Still, keeping these points in
mind, the general line of my argument holds.
126 Elie During
previously reduced through analysis. It is only in retrospect that synthesis

seems to presuppose analysis. In the present case, the artificial synthesis
of movement (the false movement par excellence) comes first and the ele-
ments of the synthesis (the still frames as putative “fragments” of motion)
turn out to be artifacts of the very attempt to obtain movement through
recomposition in the first place.
No movement is to be produced out of the immobile: so goes the Berg-
sonian leitmotiv. But there would be no talk of illusion here if we were not
convinced of the contrary in practice – better still, if we did not ceaselessly do
the opposite.35 The theoretical illusion would not be so powerful if it could
not be substantiated by operations which prove to be effective and hinge
on reality in some sense. Whatever else may be said of the cinematographic
method, it does the trick. While the method may rest upon a fundamental
illusion, it is nonetheless a method. Its active component, as we saw earlier, is
the abstract movement encapsulated in the idea of frame-time. For if actual
movement is to be reconstructed out of still views sampled from it, there
is no other choice but to introduce movement surreptitiously somewhere
in order to get the process started:36
[I]f we had to do with photographs alone, however much we might look

at them, we should never see them animated: with immobility set beside
immobility, even endlessly, we could never make movement. In order that
the pictures may be animated, there must be movement somewhere. The
movement does indeed exist here; it is in the apparatus.37
Yet it is also necessary to check that the operation may indeed be general-
ized, and notably that it makes it possible to represent together a diversity of
movements in their parallel unfolding, following an order of simultaneities
that allows them to be brought together in their very dispersion. That is
what the cinematograph accomplishes, subjecting photographic sections to
the law of uniform run. In other words, it indexes them to a homogeneous
time that is not reducible to any of their proper durations or even to any of
35 Likewise, pure duration may not be measured, and yet we do measure something which
we call “time.”
36 Similarly, for us to measure anything beyond space, our measuring operations have to be
supported by some “real time” participating, in some sense, in the lived duration of a concrete
consciousness. This is a recurring theme in Duration and Simultaneity.
37 Bergson, Creative Evolution 322. See Henri Bergson, La Pensée et le mouvant (Paris: PUF,
2007) 7 fn. Author’s note: stunningly enough, all the footnotes appearing in the original French
edition have been omitted in the English translation.
their spatialized idealizations (timelines, local parameter-times), and allows

them to be held together and compared from the standpoint of measure-
ment. Zeno’s paradoxes would seem to us mere mathematical speculations,
they would lose much of their grip if they did not consistently rely on such a
global framing of the situation. It is because the local movements of Achilles
and the tortoise are first projected and seized in the framework of a global,
undifferentiated time that makes them commensurable that they may then
be treated as space, that their paths may be described as an indefinite series
of stages, and so forth.
As far as the chronophotographic method is concerned – and Marey’s
experiments arguably provided a host of models for devising the Bergsonian
“cinematograph” – it is essential to acknowledge that “in setting the tempo-
ral variable of the photographic shot, that is, frequency, Marey imposed the
fundamental temporal basis with respect to which the uniform movement
of the mobile or the variations of its speed may be measured.”38 However, in
the “cosmological” perspective that prevails in Creative Evolution, the main
function of this temporal basis is to ensure that a diversity of movements, of
durations singularized by specific rhythms, find something like a common
denominator that enables them to be treated in extension. Absolute time
and its uniform flow, introduced by Newton in the General Scholium of
his Principia, provided the metaphysical formula of a method commonly
adopted by classical mechanics: in the absence of direct access to absolute
space, an ideal clock and a privileged system of reference tied to fixed stars
made it possible – in principle at least – to frame the world and describe its
universal course. The Bergsonian cinematograph and its associated figura-
tive methods (the graphs and space-time diagrams discussed in Duration
and Simultaneity) prove instrumental in laying bare the mathematical and
conceptual assumptions that make this kind of representation of extensive
becoming possible in the first place.
Now the orientation of Bergson’s critique will not particularly surprise
those who are a little familiar with his philosophy: the problem with frame-
time is, very simply, that it does not last – it does not retain anything from
the hesitation and unpredictability inherent in real change. Yet again, it
does not last, not because it is constituted of immobilities, but more deeply
because it is not the time of anything in particular. An absolute movement
is necessarily an undetermined or “undefined” one, as Bergson puts it.39 If
it appears to be discontinuous, or if it may be arbitrarily decomposed ad
38 See Tortajada, “Évaluation, mesure, mouvement” 104.

128 Elie During
infinitum (which amounts to the same thing), it is in virtue of its being ab-
stract and unreal in proportion. Leibniz intended something similar when
he observed that the continuity or infinite divisibility of mathematical time
was a sure mark of its ideal character. But in Bergson’s case it is the very
form of the problem that leads to this abstraction: cinematographic time
appears as science’s answer to the question of knowing by which means a
diversity of durations associated to heterogeneous changes – whose local
movement is only the most superficial manifestation – may be represented
and thought about together. Following Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze identified
this issue of coexistence as central to Bergsonism and showed that cinema
could take it up, this time positively, provided that one focused on the
moving image projected onscreen rather than on the mechanical function-
ing of the device. For Bergson himself, the cinematograph appeared in its
mediating function, at once a foil, a negative image, an epistemological
obstacle in Bachelard’s sense, 40 and an instrument of conceptual precision
designed to bring attention to the fine differentiation between two senses
of time, in conformity to a duality of tendencies running through the heart
of the scientific view of the universe: global time (homogeneous, absolute,
generic) and local time (differentiated, relational, individual).
40 I elaborate upon this idea in During, “Vie et mort du cinématographe.”

The Stereopticon and Cinema
Media Form or Platform?
Charles Musser
Today, many academics working in the Humanities and Social Sciences are
pursuing a broad interest in media studies. At least at Yale University, where
we have created an interdisciplinary seminar in this area, what we mean by
media studies – our actual focuses and concerns – differ substantially. In the
English Department, for instance, Media Studies foregrounds the study of
the book and the move from the scroll or codex. In the more contemporary
context, Michael Warner and Jessica Pressman are clearly interested in the
way the digital media and the Internet are impacting the book and print
culture more generally. Part of this re-orientation de-centers poetry and
literature and embraces the study of low and quotidian forms of culture for
which aesthetic concerns are far from primary: the sermon, the newspaper,
the broadside or even the form (typically a document with spaces for the
writer to fill in information).1
History of Art has sometimes moved in similar directions, as Oliver
Grau and others have investigated the history of the image.2 However, as
Thomas Elsaesser suggests, the field has also explored the ways in which
new media forms have entered and often transformed artistic practices as
presented in the museum and art gallery through installation art. These
approaches are connected only in a highly attenuated way with notions
of “the media” in political science and sociology. The media refers to the
press: the newspaper, the telegraph, then radio, television and now the
Internet – in short, the mass media. In this conception of media studies,
film is barely acknowledged.3 When talking about the nineteenth- and
twentieth-century dissemination of the news, newsreels and film more
generally are typically never mentioned.
1 Lisa Gitelman, “A Brief History of _____,” Theory and Media Studies Colloquium sponsored
by the Yale English Department, 12 Nov. 2009.
2 Oliver Grau. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). See
also David Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007).
3 In Sociology at Yale, an active interest in Media Studies has been pursued by Ron Eyerman
and by Jeffrey C. Alexander, who recently published The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory
and the Democratic Struggle for Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
130 Charles Musser
Film Studies, which perhaps started to fill a gap between History of Art
and Literature/Language departments, expanded to embrace television
and then, in a peripheral way, radio. Walter Benjamin, with his essay “The
Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” soon became
a touchstone, which allows for a more fully developed media studies that
includes photography and the phonograph. And now, it has expanded
again to include digital media, the Internet and an array of screens – on
cell phones and in airline terminals. 4 Although there are divisions in Film
Studies at Yale, Francesco Casetti and Thomas Elsaesser are among those
pushing Film Studies in a Media Studies direction.5 There is, however, yet
another approach to media studies that comes out of Anthropology and
Performance Studies – disciplines that are themselves closely aligned in the
United States.6 In fact, Performance Studies has its antecedents in Theater
Studies; and the move from Film Studies to Media Studies in one discipline
is matched by the move from Theater Studies to Performance Studies in
the other. Here, the broad field of performance includes oratory, theater,
sports, religious and state rituals as well as parades, demonstrations and the
performance of self in everyday life. Although this has sometimes led to a
certain fetishism of “liveness,” it brings attention to forms of communication
and artistic production in which the “dispositif,” or apparatus, of technologi-
cal reproducibility is less central and even absent. At Yale this orientation
is well represented by Joe Roach and Paige McKinley.7 When dealing with
the nineteenth century (but other time periods as well), employing a broad
conception of media – one that does not assume technological reproduc-
ibility as a prerequisite – and placing the media form under investigation
within a broader media formation are crucial.
Media Studies brings with it a new set of terms, most of which are am-
biguous and fraught (as the different approaches to Media Studies itself
might predict). The term “apparatus” has had a quite narrow definition
in the world of media and film – referring to a specific machine such as a
4 William Boddy, “Any platform. Any media. Anywhere: Targeting Contemporary Television’s
Dispersed Audience,” presentation, Yale University, 26 Feb. 2009.
5 Francesco Casetti, “Filmic experience,” Screen, 50.1 (Spring 2009): 56-66. Others working
in this direction include John MacKay, J. D. Connor and Aaron Gerow.
6 NYU’s Theater Studies Department, under the leadership of Richard Schechner, was
transformed into Performance Studies in the 1990s with the addition of faculty members such
as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblet, who received her Ph.D. in Folklore, and Michael Taussig, who
received his Ph.D. in Anthropology.
7 Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York; Columbia Uni-
versity Press 1996); Paige McGinley, “Sound Travels: Performing Diaspora and the Imagined
American South,” diss., Brown University, 2007.
camera or a projector. In this respect, the motion picture system invented by

Edison was a system of apparatuses involving cameras, printers, developing
and drying systems for film, and projectors (even rewinds). In the 1970s
and 1980s film scholars often looked toward Jean-Louis Baudry and the
“apparatus theory,” which saw cinema as an ideological machine defined
by its mechanics of representation. This reductive approach, which seemed
a fine example of infantile leftism for those of us who were working in
social-issue documentary, borrowed something from Louis Althusser’s
analysis of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which include the edu-
cational system, the media (perhaps most specifically the mass media)
and so forth. In an era where it is felt to be intellectually more current
and perhaps politically safer to be a Foucauldian than a Marxist, François
Albera and Maria Tortajada follow Giorgio Agamben and his evocation of
Foucault to revitalize Baudry’s notion of apparatus, giving it new valences
and increased flexibility in relation to the kinds of media forms to which
such an approach can be applied (i.e., beyond the cinema apparatus). 8
In an era when media technologies are seemingly in constant flux, there
is value in approaches that do not assume stable media forms and media
specificities. Yet at what point do closely related dispositives (the term
chosen by Albera and Tortajada) constitute a de facto media form? Another
category, itself open to variable definitions, involves platforms. These are
points to which this essay will return.
One approach which many media scholars at Yale University and the
University of Lausanne share with Lisa Gitelman is an interest in the
changing media formations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries and in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.9 For
the early twenty-first century, the vast array of screens – differing in sizes,
technologies, locations and purposes – has become of central concern.10
The screen was an important cultural platform in the nineteenth century;
and while it has enjoyed considerable antiquarian interest, screen practices
in this earlier episteme have continued to be under-examined within con-
temporary academic discourse. Part of the problem may be that the screen’s
status is uncertain. At its base, screen practice involves a dispositive which
8 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009); Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, François Albera and
Maria Tortajada, eds. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010).
9 Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2008).
10 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006).
132 Charles Musser
includes 1) an image on a support material (glass, celluloid, video tape) 2)

projected by a lantern onto 3) a surface (“the screen”) and 4) a viewer who
realizes that s/he is watching an (audio-)visual representation and not real
life (i.e., magic). (Among other things, this description largely effaces both
image production and the showman/exhibitor.) Is the magic lantern – the
screen’s initial configuration – a minor, antiquated media form or is the
lantern better thought of as a platform? Furthermore, as screen practitioners
were rapidly expanding their cultural reach during the second half of the
nineteenth century, terminology as well as function changed and were
reordered. The magic lantern was largely relegated to the child’s playroom
as a toy. In this respect, new technologies that generated modes of screen
practice with nomenclature such as “stereopticon” or “optical lantern”
deserve closer scrutiny.
“Stereopticon,” a term that was widely utilized in the US in the second half
of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries, referred
to a particular melding of media with platform – that is, the stereopticon
was a state-of-the-art magic lantern that projected photographic slides.
To sketch its presence as well as its place in a changing media formation,
this study uses random word searches (RWSs) for “stereopticon” and a set
of related terms such as illustrated lecture, magic lantern, and stereoscope
(see table 1). Although RWSs of various newspapers produce some variation
in word usage, my efforts for this article are largely confined to The New
York Times for the US and, to offer some trans-Atlantic comparisons, The
Manchester Guardian and The Observer in the UK.
An RWS for the term “stereopticon” generated 295 hits in The New York
Times during the period from 1863 (when the term first appeared in the
newspaper) to 1879.11 An RWS of “magic lantern” yielded 100 hits in The New
York Times between 1851 (the year the newspaper began publication) and
1879, while a related term, “illustrated lecture,” produced 43 items between
1853 and 1879. One must emphasize that this search engine provides only
an approximation of usage and generally undercounts the occurrence of
such terms (though there are some terms that produce massive overcounts).
If the word “illustrated” appears on two lines with a hyphen, it will not
show up. Moreover, printing imperfections mean words cannot be read by
the machines. I have stumbled upon quite a few such examples from the
11 By way of comparison, an RWS of “stereopticon” in The New York Tribune generated only 24
items in the same period. For whatever reason, The New York Times covered photography and
other cultural activities more than the Tribune in the nineteenth century – as a comparative
search for news items mentioning Eadweard Muybridge makes clear.
pre-1880 period, which would add significantly to these totals, but have
not figured them into this article’s calculations. Some word variants also
conceal the degree of usage. For instance, John L. Stoddard, perhaps the
premier illustrated lecturer in the US in the 1880s and early 1890s, used
the term “stereoptic views,” not “stereopticon views.”12 This suggests that
“stereopticon” was such a popular term that it could support affectionate
contractions – as “moving pictures” supported and generated the term
“movies.”
Although the terms “stereopticon” and “illustrated lecture” did not
appear in the same New York Times article or advertisement before 1880,
“stereopticon” and “lecture” appeared together 90 times (just over 30% of
the time when “stereopticon” appeared). This may well have been because
the term “stereopticon,” when employed with the term “lecture,” meant
“illustrated lecture” and the latter coupling would have offered unnecessary
redundancies. In contrast, “magic lantern” and “lecture” appeared together
nine times and typically were not directly linked. Thus John MacMullen
ran a school in which he gave “Familiar Lectures on History and Geography,
every Tuesday and Thursday” and “Magic Lantern and Microscopic Exhibi-
tions every Friday.”13
The English and the Americans may seem to speak the same language,
but our linguistic differences are underscored in this study. RWSs in The
Manchester Guardian and The Observer indicate that the term “stereopticon”
was not used in the UK. It did not appear in these papers until 1903 and only
then in dispatches from the US. Rather, the term “magic lantern” retained
its prominence, being used in these British publications 758 times between
1826 and 1879. Although the term “illustrated lecture” appeared in the Brit-
ish periodicals 42 times, the terms “illustrated lecture” and “magic lantern”
did not appear in the same item before 1880. In contrast, somewhat simpli-
fied searches found that the terms “magic lantern” and “lecture” appeared
together in 41 items, while the terms “lantern” and “lecture” generated 139
hits.
Subsequent RWSs have been broken down by decade: in the 1880s the
term “stereopticon” generated 297 hits in The New York Times, “illustrated
lecture” produced 890 hits, and the two were cited together a modest ten
12 “Amusements,” New York Times 20 Mar. 1881: 11. A search for the term “stereoptic” also
generated some uses of the term “stereopticon” which suffered printing imperfections.
13 Advertisement, New York Times 18 Dec. 1858: 3. Or, they might be used in reports from Europe
where the term Stereopticon was not employed. See “The Voltaire Centenary,” New York Times
16 June 1878: 4.
134 Charles Musser
times. Consistent with previous usage, the term “lecture” was linked with
“stereopticon” much more frequently – 122 times (about 40% of the time
that “stereopticon” appeared). The stereopticon was being used heavily for
lectures and these might involve wording such as “The Rev Dr. Eccleston
Will deliver his new lecture on ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL illustrated with 50
stereopticon views.”14 The term magic lantern appeared 58 times but once
again it never appeared in conjunction with the term “illustrated lecture.”
Indeed, “magic lantern” only generated six hits in conjunction with the term
“lecture” in the 1880s, as the magic lantern was more and more associated
with non-lecture uses.
As the accompanying table shows, the American newspaper used the
term “stereopticon” with increased frequency in the 1890s (generating 526
hits) and perhaps stabilized in the following decade with 405 citations
before its use began to decline. By the 1930s, the media formation in the
US had undergone profound transformations, including but hardly limited
to the arrival of sync sound motion pictures and the emergence of new
terms such as “documentary” in the late 1920s.15 The term “slide projec-
tor” began to appear in The New York Times at the same time – generating
three references in 1926-7. This included an advertisement for a “film slide
projector” accompanied by a letter from Douglas Fairbanks declaring “I
think the idea of using films in place of glass slides is an excellent one.”16
Writing to the Times, one educational film professional referred to “the
stereopticon slide projector.”17 Four more references appear between 1935
and 1939, including an article referring to the use of “lantern slide projec-
tors” – rather than stereopticons.18 Such usage suggests that writers were
becoming less comfortable with the term “stereopticon,” perhaps because
its nineteenth-century connotations did not adequately characterize the
specific configurations of the contemporaneous lantern dispositive. In 1940,
Macy’s ran advertisements selling the Keystone 35mm slide projector, and
14 “Amusements,” New York Times 19 Jan. 1880: 7.

15 The term “documentary” or “documentary films” seems to have been imported to the US
from French-speaking parts of Europe. In “Vatican Repudiates Attack on Our Movies,” the
Catholic Church applauded “instructive documentary films” being made in Belgium. New York
Times 29 July 1927: 17.
16 Advertisement, New York Times 2 May 1926: SM23.
17 “Educational Motion Pictures,” New York Times 14 Nov. 1926: X16.
18 “Our Parks as Teachers,” New York Times 26 May 1935: X25. Classified ads for “lantern slide
projectors” can be found in The Chicago Tribune and other newspapers by 1919. Photographic
journals occasionally provide advertisements, such as one for the Ingento Stereopticon, which is
described as “the most perfect and complete lantern-slide projector on the market.” Advertise-
ment, Photo Era 1 Feb. 1913: 2.
from this point onward, the term “slide projector” appeared more regularly
with 127 mentions in The New York Times during the 1940s and 676 during
the 1950s.19 The term “slide show” appeared two or three times a decade
from the 1890s to the 1940s, suggesting its use as a chance description; but it
became popularized in the 1950s, and was used with considerable frequency
from the 1970s to the 1990s. Such shifts in technology and nomenclature
contributed to the rapid decline in the usage of “stereopticon,” its employ-
ment only continuing after World War II in a few residual categories.
Although discourse between the American Civil War (1860s) and World
War II clearly recognized that the stereopticon involved the same basic kind
of projecting device as the magic lantern and was one of its descendents,
it also made clear that the two possessed distinct characteristics. One
reporter, writing in 1869, explained:
The common magic-lantern is usually made of tin, has an oil-lamp inside,

and is provided with a chimney to carry off the smoke. One of the two
large lenses, ground to a curve of short radius and called bulls’ eyes, are
[sic.] placed in front of the lamp, and beyond this is a common colored
picture on glass. Then comes one or two more smaller lenses, throwing
an image of this picture on the wall, and, as well, too, the equally diffused
light of the lamp. […]
The so-called stereopticon is virtually the same thing, only instead of
a comparatively weak, feeble lamp-flame, the powerful hydro-oxygen
lime-light is used; in place of the common lenses, the perfected achro-
matic lenses as used for photographic portraiture; and finally instead
of a common glass picture, a photographic glass slide like those used
for the stereoscope. The stronger the light, the more perfect the lenses
and the microscopic finish of the picture, the greater is the degree of
the magnifying power that may be employed. In this case it is of course
much greater than is possible when the common magic lantern is used.20
The two terms were rarely confused. “Stereopticon” was the new, dynamic
and modern term that was explicitly connected to photography. The magic
lantern was pre-photographic and associated with painting and somewhat
related representation techniques (such as lithography). For instance, in 1886
a New York Times critic complained of “the injudicious use of the magic lan-
19 Advertisement, New York Times, 25 Dec. 1940: 9.

20 “The Magic-Lantern,” The Manufacturer and Builder: A Practical Journal of Industrial Progress
1 July 1869: 199.
136 Charles Musser
tern for purposes of projecting pictures of flying Walkyries on the clouds” in

the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Wagner’s Die Walküre.21 Sometimes
“magic lantern” was used generically, as the underlying term, but it was
more generally associated with children’s tales as well as representations
of ghosts and the supernatural – tied in some ways to the phantasmagoria
performances that became popular in the 1790s.22
What were the comparable dynamics in the UK? First, changes in termi-
nology were more gradual, with some shifts beginning before photography
was projected by the lantern circa 1850. For the 1880s, the two British pe-
riodicals generated 212 mentions of “magic lantern,” while “magic lantern”
and “lecture” appeared together twenty times and “lantern” with “lecture”
88 times. As this might suggest, the term “magic” was sometimes dropped
and “lantern” began to be modified by other terms. In an advertisement
from 1825, an optician was offering to give instructive lectures on astronomy
using a “Phantasmagoria Lantern.”23 In 1852, a Mr. Turner was using Vincent
Beechey’s trinoptric lantern.24 In 1855, the Institutional Association for
Lancashire and Cheshire had bought an oxy-hydrogen lantern.25 Indeed,
lecturers often boasted of using an “oxy-hydrogen lantern,” which conveyed
a type of projector with a stronger light source than the average magic lan-
tern.26 Somewhat later Herbert Birch offered a lecture, Rambles in Greece,
which was “illustrated by Photographs shown by lime-light lantern.”27
In this promotion and organization of the dispositive, the British placed
emphasis on the lantern as a platform for projecting images of various
kinds – photographs, in Birch’s case. In specifying the kind of lantern to be
used, the British sought to indicate one of the key variables of the evening’s
presentation.28 In the US, the term Stereopticon suggested a more radical
21 “Metropolitan Opera House,” New York Times 6 Mar. 1886: 5.

22 See Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990; Berkeley,
Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1994).
23 Advertisement, The Observer 27 Mar. 1825: 3.
24 “Local and Provincial,” The Manchester Guardian 21 Jan. 1852: 5.
25 “Institutional Association for Lancashire and Cheshire,” The Manchester Guardian 17 Nov.
1855: 5.
26 “Marylebone Institution,” The Observer 26 April 1863; “Lecture on Mount Sinai,” The Man-
chester Guardian 18 Dec. 1874: 6.
27 “Rambles in Greece,” The Manchester Guardian 25 Oct. 1881: 1.
28 A partial and minor exception was the term “optical lantern,” which enjoyed a vogue at the
turn of the century with 49 hits in the 1890s and 24 in the following decade. “Optical” referred, I
believe, not only to the optics of the lantern itself but referenced the optics of the photographic
process as well. The term was first mentioned in these periodicals in 1881 when the Manchester
Photographic Society offered “a display of views by the aid of the optical lantern.” “Manchester
Photographic Exhibition,” The Manchester Guardian 28 Nov. 1881: 8.
reorganization of production, and the embrace of something akin to a new

media form.29
The Stereopticon: Early History
The early history of the stereopticon – its formation as a dispositive – was

closely linked with the stereoscope with which it was occasionally confused.
The latter was a popular instrument for viewing photographic images that
owed its immense popularity to the illusion of depth that was created
when the spectator looked at two pictures of an object, each taken from a
slightly different perspective.30 As Jonathan Crary makes clear, this view-
ing mechanism, invented in England by Charles Wheatstone in 1838, was
developed completely independent of photography.31 Nevertheless, The
Manchester Guardian mentioned the stereoscope only once in passing in
1838 (The Observer not at all) and not again until it became popular when Sir
William Brewster developed an inexpensive viewer in 1850.32 By this time,
the stereoscope was linked to photography: it was one of several platforms
that could be used for its exhibition and dissemination. (Moreover, stereo-
graphs or stereoscopic photographs were certainly considered a special kind
of photography.) London-based photographer Antoine Claudet was the first
to advertise views for the stereoscope in The Observer of 1851. Selling his
“stereoscopic daguerotype [sic] views” of the London Crystal Palace Exhibi-
tion, he also offered to take “stereoscope portraits from life”: “Uncoloured
they are no longer pictures, but real statues, and when coloured they appear
life itself. The illusion of solidity is startling and persons looking at these
new productions, the result of Professor Wheatstone’s beautiful discovery
of binocular vision, cannot but think that they have before their eyes real
tangible models.”33 RWSs of “stereoscope” in The Manchester Guardian
and Observer produce 256 items between 1851 and 1859, 369 items in the
1860s, but only 39 in the 1870s and 36 items in the 1880s. The stereoscope’s
29 Valentine Robert has indicated that in France, the term “projections lumineuses” emerged
as an alternative to “lanterne magique,” to cover the use of the lantern with photographs and
illustrated lectures. E-mail to the author, 18 May 2011.
30 John Jones, Wonders of the Stereoscope (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1976).
31 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990) 9, 118.
32 “British Association for the Advancement of Science,” The Manchester Guardian 29 Aug.
1838: 1.
33 “Public Announcements,” The Observer 16 Nov. 1851: 1. See also “Public Announcements,”
The Observer 23 Nov. 1851: 1.
138 Charles Musser
fluctuating popularity in the US is suggested by an RWS of the term in

The New York Times: 99 items between 1852 and 1859, 75 items in the 1860s
(versus 89 for stereopticon), 54 in the 1870s (versus 206 for the stereopticon)
but 152 in the 1880s, followed by a big drop in subsequent decades. Although
the term “stereopticon” appeared more often than “stereoscope” in The New
York Times from the 1860s onward, a shift did not occur in many other US
newspapers until the 1880s.34
The development of photography did not give lanternists initial access to
projected photographic images: this had to wait for the development of the
albumen and collodion processes in the late 1840s. These new photographic
techniques enabled a photographic image to be transferred to a glass surface
while earlier processes (Daguerrotypes and Talbotypes) had used either a
silver-plated copper surface or paper as a base. When John A. Whipple and
William B. Jones of Boston patented an albumen process (using egg whites
as an adhering agent) in June 1850, they had apparently been using it for
several years.35 The Langenheim Brothers, William and Frederick, had also
been working with the albumen process and played an important role in
the introduction of photographic lantern slides.36
During the 1840s, the Langenheims facilitated the introduction of several
new photographic processes into the US. Interested in the process of paper
photography developed by William Henry Fox Talbot, they became its
exclusive agents in the US. While licensing the Talbotype process was not
commercially rewarding, the venture encouraged them to adopt and to im-
prove the albumen process. Employing glass as a support for the emulsion,
the Langenheims began making photographic lantern slides. In introducing
these new slides the brothers claimed:
The new magic-lantern pictures on glass, being produced by the ac-

tion of light alone on a prepared glass plate, by means of the camera
obscura, must throw the old style of magic lantern slides into the shade,
34 The Baltimore Sun provides one example. An RWS of the terms stereoscope/stereopticon
yields: for 1852-1959: 75/0; 1860-1869: 285/42; 1870-1879: 293/33; 1880-1889: 9/74; and 1890-1899:
29/255. The overwhelming number of citations for the stereoscope were advertisements for
consumer purchase.
35 Patent no. 7,458, Improvement in Producing Photographic Pictures upon Transparent Media,
issued 25 June 1850.
36 Louis Walton Sipley, “The Magic Lantern,” Pennsylvania Arts and Sciences 4 (Dec. 1939): 39-
43+; Louis Walton Sipley, “W and F. Langenheim-Photographers,” Pennsylvania Arts and Sciences
(193?), 25-31. The crucial work on the magic lantern in the United States remains Xenophon
Theodore Barber, Evening of Wonders: A History of the Magic Lantern Show in America, diss.,
New York University, 1993.
and supersede them at once, on account of the greater accuracy of the

smallest detail which are drawn and fixed on glass from nature, by the
camera obscura, with a fidelity truly astonishing. By magnifying these
new slides through the magic lantern, the representation is nature itself
again, omitting all defects and incorrectness in the drawing which can
never be avoided in painting a picture on the small scale required for
the old slides.37
By 1851 they were exhibiting slides at London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition,

where these Hyalotypes received extensive praise.38 Views were of buildings
and landmarks in Philadelphia (United States Custom House, Penitentiary
of Pennsylvania), Washington (Smithsonian, the Capitol), and New York
(Croton Aqueduct) as well as portraits of well-known Americans. Their
early positive pictures on glass slides were mounted in rectangular wooden
frames that were 35/8 x 67/8 inches with a 23/4 inch or 3 inch circular opening
for the image. Many were hand colored and they cost $4 to $5 a piece.
The Langenheims thus saw their introduction of photograph slides as an
extension of existing magic lantern practices.
The progress made in photographic processes moved back and forth
between Europe and the US as the Langenheims’ innovations were adapted
to the stereoscope. The move from daguerreotypes to more modern pho-
tographic images for the stereoscope was not straightforward. Writing for
the Philadelphia Photographer, M.A. Root reported that
Mr. Niepce’s process of making negative pictures by using albumen in

combination with iodide of potassium, was published in the early part
of 1848. In this, his process, he states distinctly that the positive pictures
are always best taken on paper.
Mr. Langenheim informs me that he, “by modifying Niepce’s process,

obtained the first positive pictures on glass to be viewed by transmitted
light, in 1848.” And “in 1849” he says, “I exhibited for the first time such
positive glass pictures by means of the magic lantern in the Merchants’
Exchange at Philadelphia.
While in Paris, in 1853, I was introduced to the celebrated optician
Dubosque-Soleil, to whom I showed some of my magic lantern pictures,
made by me in Philadelphia. He was delighted with them, and asked my
37 The Langenheims, quoted in The Art-Journal (London) Apr. 1851: 106.

38 See “The King of Arms,” The Observer 4 May 1851: 3.
140 Charles Musser
permission to show them in a scientific magic lantern exhibition, which

he had to give in one of the public institutions, and during this exhibition
he showed these pictures, stating to the audience that they were the first
pictures of the kind ever shown in Paris.
In conversation, Mr. Dubosque told me that when he was engaged in 1851,

to arrange the display of his articles for the “World’s Fair” in London, he
saw my photo magic lantern pictures, the first he had ever seen, and
thinking that such photo-positive pictures on glass might be used to
supersede the daguerreotype pictures, until then manufactured for him
by Mr. Ferrier; he had at once written to Mr. Ferrier, to come over to
London to examine my transparent positive pictures taken on glass,
and that since then they had tried and made such transparent positive
pictures on glass for the stereoscope.”39
Photographers in France and England soon enjoyed a booming business

in making glass slides for the stereoscope, but this innovation happened
somewhat later in the US. It was again the Langenheims who responded
to European developments by making the first stereoscopic glass slides in
the US during the summer of 1854. 40 Nevertheless, in the latter part of 1858
the production and sale of stereoscopic glass slides was still getting started
in New York City, with landscapes on paper selling from $6 to $9 per dozen
and landscapes on glass from $15 to $30. 41
Antoine Claudet tried to project individual halves of a stereoscopic slide
and retain or re-create a 3-D effect in 1857. 42 The resulting achievement,
which he called the Stereomonoscope, received significant attention in the
press and among scientific journals. The Chicago Press and Tribune reported:
M. Claudet, the veteran photographer, has accomplished a particularly

[impressive] result in his art, enabling him to produce the stereoscopic
illusion by the agency of a single picture. In the centre of a large black
screen, there is a space filled with a square of ground glass, upon which,
by some light managed behind the screen, is thrown a magnif ied
photographic image representing a landscape, a portrait, or any other
39 M. A. Root, “The Magic Lantern. Its History and Uses for Educational and Other Purposes,”
The Philadelphia Photographer 1 Dec. 1874: 11.
40 Frederick Langenheim to H. H. Snelling, 19 Sept. 1854, in “Personal and Fine Art Intelligence,”
Photographic and Fine Arts Journal 1 Oct. 1854: 319.
41 “The Stereoscope,” New York Tribune 9 Nov. 1858: 3.
42 “Photographic Inventions,” Scientific American 25 May 1861: 326.
object. When the observer looks naturally at the object or picture, with
the two eyes, without help of any optical instrument, an extraordinary
phenomenon takes place – the picture is seen in perfect relief, as when
two different pictures are looked at through a stereoscope. […] By this
remarkable discover [sic], M. Claudet has solved a problem which has
always been considered an impossibility by scientif ic men – for the
stereomonoscope, by its very name, must sound like a paradox to the ears
of those who are versed in the knowledge of the principles of binocular
vision, until they have had the opportunity of repeating the experiments
by which M. Claudet has found a new fact which they had not noticed
or explained before. 43
In fact, although projecting a single photographic image did not produce

a 3-D effect, viewers did experience a visceral sense of depth that was
much stronger than if a photograph was merely viewed on paper or a metal
surface. Claudet believed (wrongly) that projecting a photographic image
onto a ground glass was the key to retaining a three-dimensional sense of
depth.
Chemist John Fallon of Lawrence, Massachusetts, apparently acquired
one of Claudet’s lanterns and, after refiguring and discarding elements,
offered what was referred to as an “improved stereopticon,” which he
exhibited in the 1860s. According to one press report,
Although the stereopticon was exhibited for a time in the Polytechnic

Institute, and in the Hall of Illustration, Regent’s Park, London, yet it
did not advance beyond the first discovery. J. Fallon, Esq., of Lawrence
Mass, the chemist of the Pacific Mills, who has devoted thirty years to
photology, imported from England one of these instruments for his own
family. But under his hands it was developed into something so perfect
that his friends desired that others might have the pleasure which he
enjoyed. He has sent it forth on a charitable mission, and for churches,
Sabbath schools, and sanitary commissions its charities can be counted
by thousands. In Massachusetts, such men as Prof. Agassiz, Longfellow,
Hillard, Holmes, Rev. Dr. Park, and many other leading representative
men “assisted” with delight at many of the exhibitions, and the first two
aided in delineating the scenes. 44
43 “New Inventions,” Chicago Press and Tribune 14 May 1859: 3.

44 “An Optical Wonder,” Louisville Daily Journal 29 Apr. 1863: 1. The same basic review was also
reprinted in The Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 48 (May 1863): 430.
142 Charles Musser
By January 1861, announcements for the Stereopticon were appearing in

such American periodicals as the Saturday Evening Post, which remarked
that “[I]t produces in a wonderful degree the impression that you are gazing
upon the real scenes and objects represented.”45 Arthur’s Home Magazine
hailed this “triumph of science and art combined” and declared, “No picture
or dioramic view is comparable with the ‘Stereopticon’ in giving a just
idea of scenery or architecture. You seem to stand in the very place that is
represented, and to see everything just as it exists, in all its true portions.”46
After being exhibited in the Boston area and in nontheatrical venues,
Fallon’s Stereopticon opened at Toro Hall in Hartford, Connecticut, on
December 23, 1862, where the effects were declared to be “brilliant and
startling, and the representations singularly truthful.”47 It then moved
to Hartford’s larger and more prestigious Allyn Hall for a week in mid-
January. 48 Exhibitor J. Leyland supervised the Brooklyn, New York, debut
of this “scientific wonder of the age” at the Atheneum on April 14, 1863.
Although audiences were embarrassingly small at first, the city’s leading
citizens (including Mayor M. B. Kablefleisch and Charles J. Sprague) urged
Fallon and Leyland to remain “so that all may enjoy its beauties and profit by
its instructions.”49 It ultimately ran almost continuously for six weeks with
a 25¢ admission fee. The evening debut consisted of “a choice selection of
landscapes, architectural views and sculptures gathered from travels in the
most illustrious parts of Europe, Asia and our own country.”50 The mistaken
belief that “half of a stereoscopic view could be made to present a solid
(i.e., stereoscopic) effect” persisted.51 The New York Journal of Commerce
commented that the Stereopticon
has been developed in something so brilliant and beautiful that the

pictures produced are as much beyond the ordinary photograph as that,
in fidelity and beauty, is beyond the old fashioned engraving. In short,
45 “The Stereopticon,” Saturday Evening Post 5 Jan. 1861: 2.

46 “The Stereopticon,” Arthur’s Home Magazine April 1861: 17. Whether all these stereopticons
can be attributed to Fallon is unclear: a stereopticon was shown at Temperance Temple in
Baltimore on February 4, 1862, but it was quite possibly a renamed magic lantern and not Fallon’s.
“Temperance Temple,” Baltimore Sun 4 Feb. 1862: 2.
47 “Amusements,” Hartford Courant 18 Dec. 1862: 2.
48 Advertisement, Hartford Courant 12 Jan. 1863: 3; “The Stereopticon,” Hartford Courant 14
Jan. 1863: 2.
49 Mayor M. B. Kablefleisch et al. to John Fallon, 25 Apr. 1863, reprinted in Brooklyn Eagle 4 May
1863: 17.
50 “The Stereopticon at the Atheneum,” Brooklyn Eagle 15 Apr. 1863: 3.
51 The New York Journal of Commerce as quoted in Louisville Daily Journal 29 Apr. 1863: 1.
the delight which one person has in looking through the stereoscope, a
thousand persons can have at once – so that there is sympathetic and
social pleasure. The Stereopticon, as it is called, takes the ordinary glass
stereoscopic view, and by fine lenses and the most intense of artificial
lights, throws and magnifies the miniature view upon a canvas to such
an extent that every one in a building as vast as the Academy of Music
can see with distinctness each scene. There is no straining of the vision;
there is no wearying of the eye as in the stereoscope, but one merely
sits and gazes upon the sublime scenery of the Alps, the renowned old
abbeys, the busy streets of London, Paris[,] Naples, and Grand Cairo;
the grand, awe-striking remains of Egypt, and the solemn instructive
scenes of Palestine. In the same manner and with the same ease that
we look upon a real landscape from the deck of a Hudson River steamer.
The distant and the rare are brought to us – or rather like a magic mat
of the Arabian tale we are borne on swift and brilliant wings to the ends
of the earth. The treasures of statuary art from the Louvre, the Vatican
and the Museo Borbonico are ours. Nothing seems so dream-like as the
Apollo Belvedere, the Venus de Medici, and the chefs d’oeuvre of the
great Thorwalden, which appear upon the scene in all their roundness
and beauty.52
Another reviewer echoed many of the same sentiments, remarking that “you
can imagine yourself borne away on the enchanted carpet of the Arabian
tale, and brought where you can look down upon the veritable Paris, and
Rome, and Egypt.”53 Leyland soon made almost daily program changes,
devoting each illustrated lecture to a specific country or region: Great
Britain, France, Switzerland and the Rhine, and Italy.54 For another popular
program, the “wall photographer” exhibited photographs of statuary. These
evening shows – with Wednesday and Saturday matinees at a reduced
fee – were “attended by the learned and scientific portion of society as
well as others.”55
A combination of factors contributed to the sense that the stereopticon
was a new and important media form. The powerful illusory effect of the
stereopticon was similar to the experience that spectators would have with
the first projected films – the sense of being transported to a different
52 The New York Journal of Commerce as quoted in Louisville Daily Journal 29 Apr. 1863: 1.
53 “Modern Miracles,” Brooklyn Eagle 15 Apr. 1863: 3.
54 Brooklyn Eagle 29 Apr. 1863: 1 and 15 May 1863: 1.
55 “The Stereopticon,” Brooklyn Eagle 7 May 1863: 3.
144 Charles Musser
place (and time). Commentators were impressed by the realism and the
immediacy of the image – with the sense of “being there.” These “wonderful
exhibitions” produced “brilliant and startling” effects as well as represen-
tations that were “singularly truthful.” “The Old World and the New, are
brought in all their beauty and grandeur to our very doors.”56 Francesco
Casetti has argued that a key aspect of media involves principles of reloca-
tion.57 And certainly this was an unprecedented aspect of the stereopticon.
Public spaces, sculpture and so forth were relocated onto the screen as
if from life. Statuary was particularly notable because the stereopticon
emphasized three-dimensionality and both were static in nature. The use
of a newly powerful projector and light source sharpened the image and its
distinctiveness, adding to a sense of a new media dispositive.
Why then did the stereopticon fail to be recognized as a new media
form over time? One way to address this question is by comparing its dis-
positive to that of motion pictures or the cinema itself. Put another way,
the stereopticon did not involve a sufficiently distinctive practice. Those
who made photographic slides for the stereopticon, artists such as the
Langenheims, were photographers. The making of stereopticon slides was
directly connected to the making of images for the stereoscope. A glass slide
for the stereoscope could be cut in half and turned into two stereopticon
slides. So the production of stereopticon slides was part of a larger practice.
And it was easy for these images to be used in other media forms. We have
significant records of nineteenth-century illustrated lectures because many
of them were relocated – reproduced – in heavily illustrated books. In
contrast, from the beginning, motion picture production was distinct. There
is also the issue of projection technology – of the stereopticon itself, which
was not as distinct as its enthusiasts would have it. The stereopticon was
a lantern that could easily project non-photographic slides – slides made
with lithography, those that were painted or hand-drawn or even slides
of things in nature placed between two pieces of glass (the wing of a fly, a
flower, etc.). It could be readily adapted to show a kaleidoscope or a narrow
aquarium. More generally, from the point of view of exhibition and also
reception, stereopticon presentations fell under the larger category of the
illustrated lecture and the illustrated lecture was part of a larger category
of lectures in general. That is, stereopticon presentations brought together
56 “Touro Hall,” Hartford Courant 24 Dec. 1862: 2.

57 Francesco Casetti, “Elsewhere. The relocation of art,” in Valencia09/Confines (Valencia:
INVAM, 2009) 348-51.
a number of different, overlapping practices, but these never formed their

own distinctive field.
This returns us also to the importance of examining a phenomenon such
as stereopticon exhibitions within a larger media formation. On one hand,
there is the field of photography, which is a distinct media form, and on the
other there is the lantern projector, which is a distinct platform. However,
the process and the sites of exhibition were connected to the lecture in
general. Moreover, the lecturer was a performer and presented as the central
“author” of the exhibition, whether or not he or she was responsible for
taking the photographs and making the slides. These photographs were said
to illustrate the lecture, making them subservient in principle if perhaps
not always in practice to the oratory of the lecturer.
It is important to recognize that the lecture was one of the dominant me-
dia forms of the nineteenth century and had its own conventions, practices
and economic infrastructure. (See, for instance, reports on Major Pond’s
own illustrated lecture on representing the stars of the lecture circuit.58)
Media scholars, concerned with the emerging dispositives of modernity – of
technological reproducibility – fail to appreciate its importance. And yet,
one category of illustrated lecture that should interest them is the scientific
or technological demonstration. In fact, the first uses of the term “illustrated
lecture” that appeared in The New York Times were of this general type: for
instance, Dr. Robert A. Fisher gave an illustrated lecture on “Gunpowder,
Cannon and Projectiles” for which he used diagrams, models, shells and
chemical experiments.59 The lecture, moreover, was only one genre of ora-
tory in the nineteenth-century public sphere, which would also include the
sermon and the political speech.
The stereopticon, with its illustrated lecture, participated in a range of
media formations that varied with genre and shifted over time – all aligned
with the discourse of sobriety that has been discussed by Bill Nichols in a
somewhat later context.60 Beyond oratory itself, it was increasingly con-
nected to various forms of print culture – books, magazines, newspapers
and a range of ephemera (circulars, broadsides and so forth). Photography
– with the stereoscope and accompanying stereographs for home use – was
also of some note. Undoubtedly the best-known and most popular genre
during the nineteenth century was the travel lecture with its books and
58 “Major Pond’s Memories,” New York Times 18 Jan. 1896: 5.

59 “Lecture at Plymouth Church,” New York Times 11 Jan. 1862: 3.
60 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991).
146 Charles Musser
increasing ties to the emergent tourist industry. Other illustrated lectures

were religious in nature: as Professor J. Leonard Corning of the Chautauqua
University remarked, every pastor should have a stereopticon “to illus-
trate Bible scenes.”61 Such stereopticon lectures were more connected to
the sermon and a still vibrant church-based Protestant culture that was
opposed to theater and other forms of amusement. Yet a third genre of
illustrated lecture was a form of political speech and embedded in the
world of politics and newspapers. One prominent instance of this involved
President Benjamin Harrison’s 1892 presidential campaign. This was the
last US presidential election before cinema appeared and contributed to
the ongoing reconfiguration of the media landscape.
The Stereopticon and the 1892 Presidential Election
The stereopticon in general, and its use for the illustrated lecture in par-
ticular, played an active if previously unexamined role in the 1892 political
campaign in which the “Bourbon Democrat” and former President Grover
Cleveland was running against President Benjamin Harrison, a Republican.
As it turned out, the key battle ground states for electoral victory were New
York and, to a lesser extent, Illinois. The candidate who won New York had
won the presidency in previous elections – and would do so again in 1892.
Campaign activities in New York and its surroundings thus possessed a
relevance and urgency that make them an appropriate focus of study.
The magic lantern or stereopticon was employed for campaign purposes
in unequal ways.62 Republicans used it extensively to give illustrated lec-
tures that focused on a key feature of their party’s platform: tariffs and the
value of protectionism. These illustrated lectures functioned as an extension
of political oratory, but added a visual dimension that could bolster their
rhetorical effectiveness.
A number of different lecturers operated in the Northeastern states,
most of whom were coordinated through a central Speakers’ Bureau. By
mid-October Judge John L. Wheeler of New Jersey had been giving his il-
lustrated lecture on the tariff question for eleven weeks and had “nightly
61 “C.L.S.C. Round-Table,” The Chautauquan (May 1882): 489.

62 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Democrats, Republicans and the city’s
newspapers used the stereopticon to project information about the vote on election night so
that gathering crowds could follow the returns. See, for instance, “Many Thousands Read the
Signals,” New York Herald 9 Nov. 1892: 7.
spoken to an audience which filled the houses to overflowing.”63 The New

York Tribune, a Republican newspaper, devoted the most coverage to Elijah
R. Kennedy, a well-known insurance broker and locally prominent Brooklyn
Republican.64 According to the Tribune,
One of the most brilliant engagements of the brilliant campaign which is

being fought to restore New Jersey to Republican rule took place at South
Orange last night. Major Elijah R. Kennedy, of New York, was in command
of the Republican forces. […] It was in the nature of an artillery duel, and
Major Kennedy fired solid shot from a double-barreled stereopticon into
the ranks of the Democracy, and followed that up with a rattling volley
of statistics and arguments.65
Kennedy began with a lengthy speech in which he asserted, “The United

States has applied Protection more thoroughly than has any other nation,
and has been more highly prospered.” Then,
At this point the hall was darkened and the pictorial illustrations of
Mr. Kennedy’s argument began. To show the less fortunate condition of
people in other countries, views were given which had been taken by Mr.
Kennedy with his own Kodak, showing women yoked in harness with
cows and dogs, to do the work of horses and oxen; also women carrying
enormous burdens through the streets of the most brilliant capitals of
Europe, acting as load-carriers in Vienna, and doing all the street-cleaning
in Munich. […] Then a portrait of Bismarck was shown, followed by a view
of Bismarck’s statement that “the prosperity of America is mainly due to
its system of protective laws.”
Kennedy went on to use images as evidence to refute the Democratic Party’s

disparagement of tariffs as effective in stimulating local industries, with
tin plate manufacture being his prime example. As the brief quotes I have
offered here suggest, Kennedy’s lecture was very extensively covered – I
almost want to say “relocated” – by the reliably Republican New York Trib-
une into newspaper form. Indeed, newspapers routinely reported on and
63 “Good Work Through the State: Judge Wheeler Uses the Stereopticon Effectively at Mid-
dletown,” New York Tribune 16 Oct. 1892: 2.
64 “A New Brooklyn Park Commissioner,” New York Tribune 31 Jan. 1888: 1. Kennedy was a
member of the insurance brokers’ firm of Weed and Kennedy.
65 “Protection Illustrated,” New York Tribune 25 Oct. 1892: 3. This rare, detailed description of
an early campaign documentary-like program deserves extensive quotation.
148 Charles Musser
reprinted campaign speeches, as print and oratory culture worked hand in

hand. Complementing the oratory was political pageantry – parades and
so forth – also prominently covered in newspapers that shared the same
political orientation.
The enthusiasm of Kennedy’s assertions was questioned by the pro-
Cleveland New York Times, which cited a “letter to the editor” that Kennedy
had written to the Tribune in 1890. In it, Kennedy was quite critical of the
McKinley tariff, particularly as it might impact on Republican chances in
the 1892 presidential election. Minnesota and other western states strongly
opposed it.66 Kennedy’s earlier concerns proved well founded, for Cleveland
won New York State and gained a second, nonconsecutive term as president.
The many illustrated lectures on the tariff were part of an unsuccessful
media campaign that contributed to a Republican defeat.
Motion Pictures or Cinema: What is a Media Form?
The beginnings of cinema remains a fraught subject – not because we are

still concerned with a nationalist rivalry over “firsts,” but precisely because
it has affected our conceptions of the media form and the terminology
that goes with it. In the US, commercial motion pictures projected in a
theatrical setting – what has become known as the cinema – effectively
began on April 23, 1896, with the debut of Edison’s Vitascope at Koster &
Bial’s Music Hall in New York City. In Europe its beginnings are traditionally
associated with the Lumière Cinématographe opening at the Salon Indien of
the Grand Café on December 28, 1895. Of course, the introduction of modern
motion pictures began somewhat earlier – perhaps with the demonstration
of Edison’s Kinetoscope at the Brooklyn Institute on May 10, 1893, or the
opening of a kinetoscope parlor in New York City on April 14th, 1894 – events
and a practice that had much more visibility in the US. The issue of such
beginnings can be complicated further by definitions of “motion pictures”
or modern motion pictures. If Edison’s motion pictures, with the peep-hole
kinetoscope, offered an initial system of inventions that constituted a nas-
cent media form, it became something more than a passing technological
novelty (such as Reynaud’s Praxinoscope) when motion pictures were yoked
to the lantern platform and projection. When placed in a theater, projected
motion pictures eventually became known as the “cinema” (though in the
66 “For the Stereopticon,” New York Times 28 Oct. 1892: 4. The New York Times editorial was
referring to a letter published as “Party Policy and the People,” New York Tribune: 9 Aug. 1890: 7.
US this was only one of many commonly employed terms, including moving
pictures, movies, motion pictures and film). In this respect, the stereopticon
and the cinema involved the incorporation of innovations in photography
within (or onto) the lantern platform. Here again we may encounter an
interesting difference between French and American perspectives. The
French have tended to see “cinema” as a media form, while Americans have
tended to have more ambiguous and even contradictory notions, ones that
even depend on imprecision. The ubiquitous use of the term “movies” is one
sign of this. We might conceptualize at least one strand of American usage
as imagining motion pictures (or film) as a media form, with projection via
the lantern as one platform (undoubtedly the dominant one) and cinema –
projected motion pictures in a theatrical setting – as a further subcategory
(again dominant between roughly 1906 and the late 1940s).
If the stereopticon was never fully recognized as a media form, then
why, how and when did motion pictures or the cinema gain recognition?
One reason is that motion picture production and exhibition required their
own unique technologies, including motion picture cameras, printers and
projection equipment. All these required their own special knowledge.
Motion picture practices were not merely at the intersection of various
other established practices, they constituted their own practice from the
outset. As is often the case with so-called chicken and egg questions, it
is impossible to determine which came f irst. As the system of motion
picture production and exhibition was invented, motion picture practices
constituted themselves. In this respect, I disagree with André Gaudreault:
cinema, or at least motion pictures as a field, did exist from the outset. And
not only because it was a distinct techne: motion pictures transformed
many different fields of endeavor – photography, theater, sports, politics,
news and the newspaper, advertising, the arts and eventually religion and
medicine. Moreover, it transformed social mores and our daily lives, often
in an explicit and aggressive manner. Even during its initial introduc-
tion, cinema created a series of disruptions that anticipated these later
transformations.
Although cinema’s biggest immediate impact was on screen practices, the
stereopticon hardly disappeared over night, but in fact continued to expand.
How to best conceptualize and name this new practice and emergent media
form was not immediately evident. In the US, where Edison’s peep-hole
kinetoscope had enjoyed extensive media coverage, many saw projected
motion pictures as an adaptation of Edison’s motion picture system to the
lantern. Scientific American thus labeled its front-page article on various
early projecting machines as “The Kinetoscope Stereopticon”:
150 Charles Musser
Ever since the kinetoscope was brought to public attention and proved to
be so popular, inventors have been striving to perfect the apparatus for
successfully projecting these miniature images upon a screen by means of
a stereopticon producing the same effect of motion as in the kinetoscope.
[…] [T]he problem in the kinetoscope stereopticon was to successfully
magnify these little images several times and secure sufficient illumina-
tion on the screen to make them appear distinct and clear.67
If cinematography was a special form of photography, then cinema was a

special form of the stereopticon. At least, this is the apparent logic behind
the Scientific American article. The breakthrough of projected motion
pictures generated greater discontinuities than this logic could sustain,
and the term was otherwise avoided. In fact, motion pictures could not
simply be shown on the stereopticon: they needed a special device and
transport system to be placed in front of the lantern. In this respect, the
reluctance to apply the term “stereopticon” to the lantern when non-
photographic slides were shown may have reinforced the sense that it
was not appropriate to apply it to a device that projected motion pictures.
When the Scientific American article was otherwise reprinted in American
Amateur Photographer, the term “kinetoscope stereopticon” was changed
to “kinetoscope lantern.”68 In the US, a wide variety of names were given
to specific projectors and exhibition services – Vitascope, Phantoscope,
Biograph, Cinématographe, Kineopticon and so forth. Forced to offer a
general term for the new device, commentators in the 1890s might call it
a “screen machine” or simply a “projecting machine.”69 The prevalent term
became “moving picture machine,” a term that was in use by the end of
1896, when the Western Phonograph Company placed a small classified
advertisement proclaiming that the reader could “make money fast and
easy exhibiting new moving picture machine, same as the Vitascope.”70
The term first appeared in The New York Times at the end of 1897, again
in classified ads. Its first use in an article was in February 1899. An RWS
of The New York Times identif ied thirteen appearances of the term in
the 1890s, 116 in the 1900s, 220 in the 1910s, 102 in the 1920s and 107 in
the 1930s. By the 1930s its continued use was largely due to news items
67 “The Kinetoscope Stereopticon,” Scientific American 31 Oct. 1896: 325.

68 “The Kinetoscope Lantern,” American Amateur Photographer 1 Dec. 1896: 535.
69 Smith Clayton, “Photographs That Live and Move,” Atlanta Constitution 20 Dec. 1896: 21;
“E.B. Dunn’s Invention,” New York Times 1 Sept. 1899: 12.
70 “Business Chances,” Chicago Tribune 1 Jan. 1897: 11.
about the projectionists’ union known as the Moving Picture Machine

Operators of the United States and Canada.71 The shift from “machine”
to “projector” began in the late 1910s with moving picture projector: 1910-
1919: three hits, 1920-1929: eleven hits, 1930-1939: fourteen hits, 1940-1949:
seventeen hits, and 1950-1959: six hits; motion picture projector: 1910-1919:
eight, 1920-1929: 60, 1930-1939: 67, 1940-1949: 110, and 1950-1959: 75; or film
projector: 1910-1919: thirteen; 1920-1929: 109, 1930-1939: 225; 1940-1949: 436;
and 1950-1959: 541. The terminological shift from “machine” to “projector”
began in the late 1910s as the Classical Hollywood Cinema was being
established.72
There are a number of films and programs produced during cinema’s
novelty period in which the cinema’s disruptions of established cultural
practices are noteworthy. With The John C. Rice-May Irwin Kiss, the
cinematic tail wagged the theatrical dog as Rice upstaged his osculatory
partner and Irwin had him fired. Nevertheless, the 20-second film turned
the middle-aged actor into a kissing star and did much to make kissing
an accepted public display of romantic affection. Two evening-length
programs in 1897 – The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight and The Horitz
Passion Play (followed by The Passion Play of Oberammergau early
in 1898) – had profound impacts on the sport of boxing and on religion.
The Biograph Company’s official debut program in October 1896, which
was also a major Republican campaign rally, had a substantive political
impact. Rather than a chance experiment, this event was a continuation
of – and thus a response to and departure from – earlier uses of the lantern
platform by the Republican Party, notably the use of the illustrated lecture
in 1892.
Cinema and the 1896 Presidential Election
Given that commercial projected motion pictures were only a few

months old, it is perhaps surprising that they played a prominent if
circumscribed role in the 1896 presidential election between Republican
William McKinley and Democrat William Jennings Bryan. However,
71 See, for instance, “Film Deliveries Go On,” New York Times 30 Mar. 1939: 26.
72 This move from “machine” to “projector” preceded somewhat the consolidation around the
term “film projector,” which coincided with the emerging popularity of the term “slide projector”
in the 1940s and 1950s: thus citations in The New York Times for “slide projector” were: 1920-1929:
3; 1930-1939: 4; 1940-1949: 127; and 1950-1959: 580.
152 Charles Musser
because New York City was the center of the nascent film industry and
pivotal in terms of the election, this conjunction facilitated a dynamic
engagement. Certainly Republicans remained interested in exploring
innovative ways to use the lantern platform in their campaign. Bryan was
a renowned orator and one reason William McKinley conducted a front
porch campaign from his home in Canton, Ohio, was to avoid a head-to-
head comparison of their rhetorical talents. It was no coincidence that
the Republican candidate’s brother, Abner McKinley, was an investor in
the most ambitious of the new motion picture enterprises: the American
Mutoscope Company.
The Biograph had its “official” premiere on Monday evening, October 12,
at Hammerstein’s Olympia Music Hall on Broadway between 44th and 45th
streets, New York City, as McKinley at Home was shown for the first time.
But it was also going to be a political rally and that morning, The New York
Herald initiated the feedback loop between event and newspaper coverage
by running four line drawings “From Instantaneous Photographs Taken for
the Biograph. To Be Exhibited at the Olympia Theatre, Under the Auspices
of the Republican National Committee.” These images were said to illustrate
“Incidents in Major McKinley’s Life in Canton, Ohio.”73
While Biograph’s program of films at the Olympia consisted of a number
of “attractions” – and so seemingly conforms to Tom Gunning’s “cinema of
attractions” paradigm – it is hard not to feel that such a label conceals as
much if not more than it reveals. The filmmakers’ careful organization of
one-shot films produced a highly effective political rhetoric. Biograph’s
showmen not only constructed this film program around principles of
variety, but more importantly those of associational and contrast editing.
The final program has as much affinity to Eisenstein’s concept of “montage
of attractions” as it does to “cinema of attractions”: Eisenstein saw montage
of attractions as a new editing form “in which arbitrarily chosen images,
independent from the action, would be presented not in chronological
sequence but in whatever way would create the maximum psychological
impact.”74 As an exhibition service, Biograph programmed, sequenced
and edited these one-shot films. And they did so to powerful, calculated
effect–-including a test audience.
The program’s focus was on the McKinley films. The New York Tribune
reported that
73 New York Herald 12 Oct. 1896: 4.

74 “Sergei Eisenstein,” Russian Archives on Line, http://www.russianarchives.com/gallery/
old/eisen.html.
The biggest part of the enthusiasm began when a view of a McKinley

and Hobart parade in Canton was shown. The cheering was incessant
as long as the line was passing across the screen, and it grew much
greater when the title of the next picture appeared: “Major McKinley
at Home.” Major McKinley was seen to come down the steps of his
house with his secretary. The secretary handed him a paper which
he opened and read. Then he took off his hat and advanced to meet a
visiting delegation.75
Showing a film of the Empire State Express train was a brilliant conclu-
sion. It might be seen as Biograph’s version of the advancing brow of the
battleship, which concluded Sergei Eisenstein’s Potemkin. The Empire
State Express is moving full speed ahead for McKinley. Or, like the express
train, the Republican candidate was an unstoppable force. And yet – here
American film programs were already ambiguous and open to multiple,
often mutually inclusive interpretation – the train was also like the Bio-
graph motion picture system: an impressive technological marvel that was
hailed for the absence of flicker and “jump” noticeable in its competitors.
The repetition of The Empire State Express moved the program beyond
McKinley (without, however, leaving him behind) to reassert and equate
the power of American technology and industry with the Biograph motion
picture system – even as the superior technology was linked to the “Sound
Money” politics of the Republicans.
The fortunes of Biograph’s high-quality exhibitions and the business-
man’s candidate were linked. “No good Republican or upholder of sound
money doctrine can afford to miss the lifelike representation of their cham-
pion on the lawn of his home at Canton,” declared the Mail and Express.76
Theatergoers who had been distracted by politics were brought back into
the vaudeville house as paying customers to glimpse their candidate “in
the flesh.” McKinley’s front porch served as a modest counterpart to the
Olympia’s stage, which it seemed to momentarily replace. McKinley’s virtual
self served as a surrogate for his absent self. His absent presence could
miraculously appear on stage (on screen) at the front of the theater, acting
as a relay between the man in Canton and the spectators in the theater.
This was an astute and original way to promote both McKinley and the
Biograph exhibition service.
75 “A Moving Picture of M’Kinley,” New York Tribune 13 Oct. 1896: 7.

76 “Vaudeville,” New York Mail and Express 17 Oct. 1896: 13.
154 Charles Musser
The Biograph’s debut at the Olympia Music Hall seemingly was a mixture
of careful planning and last-minute improvisation. A reliably Republican
newspaper only revealed Biograph’s coup on the very afternoon of the
event. McKinley, who was rooted in Canton, Ohio, was to make an almost
miraculous visit to New York City and be greeted by his in-the-flesh vice-
presidential running mate Garret Hobart. Moreover, the candidate’s beloved
homestead would travel with him. Hobart may not have attended in the end,
but many prominent Republicans were there. Some were associated with
New York Senator Thomas C. Platt, who had opposed McKinley’s nomina-
tion, which suggests that the event served as a public display of party unity.
Other patrons were associated with the New York Central Railroad – and
Empire State Express was certainly a film they had sponsored. These
people were more directly connected to this Republican event than one
might assume, since several of the prominent Republicans were also railroad
executives. The event thus brought together powerful business and political
representatives, who were often one and the same. To follow McKinley with
an image of the onrushing Empire State Express was certainly fraught with
meaning.
The Biograph left Hammerstein’s theater unexpectedly after a two-week
run (October 12-24) and promptly reopened at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall
on October 26–-again with little advance notice.77 As Election Day ap-
proached, political demonstrations reached a fevered pitch – inside as well
as outside the theater. McKinley’s silent, virtual self was once again one
of the candidate’s most effective surrogates and turned an evening at the
theater into a campaign rally.
If we consider the Biograph presentation in terms of the lantern platform,
the screening revived the sense of immediate presence that audiences
experienced when first witnessing the stereopticon. At the same time, the
program did not make use of a lecturer – something that was not always
the case with other film screenings in 1896-1897. In this and other ways,
the program broke from earlier Republican uses of projected images. Nev-
ertheless, it would be a mistake to isolate these changes within a narrow
genealogy of screen practice, something of which I have been guilty in
the past.
77 This offers a modest correction to The Emergence of Cinema, in which I mistakenly indicate
the Biograph reopened at Koster & Bial’s a week later, on November 2. Koster & Bial’s advertise-
ments and publicity notices running in the Sunday newspapers of October 25 failed to mention
that the Biograph would be on its bill in the coming week. It was obviously a last-minute addition.
An Assessment
The new, 1896 media formation was transformative rather than additive.
One way to assess this is to consider the changed relationship between
political and theatrical cultures. Cinema moved political theater into New
York’s entertainment venues – a place where politicians had rarely gone
in previous elections. It was not only that McKinley’s virtual self made
appearances in these theaters – on the same programs as risqué dancing
girls, breaking down some of the distinctions between the platform of
political oratory and the realm of amusement. The dynamic between the
press and political culture was transformed as well, expanded to include
the theater in ways that would prove potent. Those who saw McKinley and
his front porch in the music halls might then read newspapers about him
and the delegations that came to express their homage.
One lengthy report in the New York Sun suggested McKinley was a humble
man, adored by citizens who made the pilgrimage to Canton. It is they who
provided the dynamism while he offered stability. These news items avoided
the specifics of policy and party, carrying such headlines as “M’Kinley
Preaches Hope. He Says He Has no Part in the Doctrine of Hate.” Predictably,
he embraced patriotism: “Stand up for America, and America will stand up
for you,” he told the Republication Press Association of West Virginia.78 The
mute motion picture of McKinley, its virtual but disembodied presence
had a vision-like quality that made him seem momentarily transcendent.
Properly contextualized – which was Biograph’s achievement – it provided
an effective icon which endowed the candidate with a new sincerity and
power.
More generally, the politicized feedback loop between vaudeville
screenings and the press, which McKinley at Home helped to establish,
had powerful consequences around events leading up to the Spanish-
American War.79 Newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst – who
78 “William McKinley,” http://www.allthingswilliam.com/presidents/mckinley.html.

79 Elsewhere, I have analyzed the opening night Vitascope program at Koster & Bial’s (23 April
1896) and argued that this was not, in fact, a miscellaneous collection of views but offered a
metaphorical narrative that had a clear, heavily nationalistic meaning. See Musser, “1896-1897:
Movies and the Beginnings of Cinema” in American Cinema 1890-1909: Themes and Variations,
ed. André Gaudreault (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009) 52-54; “Introducing
Cinema to the American Public: The Vitascope in the United States, 1896-1897,” Moviegoing
in America, ed. Gregory Waller (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 2002) 13-27; and “At the
Beginning: Motion Picture Production, Representation and Ideology at the Edison and Lumière
Companies,” Silent Cinema Reader, ed. Lee Grieveson (London: Routledge, 2003) 25-56.
156 Charles Musser
showed films on election night at his headquarters – supported Bryan, but

must have been aware of the Biograph’s potent rhetoric and its impact on
audiences. When seeking a similar kind of result, he funded the taking of
“war films” in the winter and spring of 1898. These pictures of the sunken
battleship “Maine” and the like were shown in New York’s vaudeville
theaters, which served as a space where citizens could express the pro-
war sentiments that were being fostered by the jingoistic press. These
newspapers in turn covered these “spontaneous” and patriotic displays as
evidence of the American desire for intervention, thus helping to impel the
US to war with Spain in April 1898. In short, film was rapidly integrated
into a media system in circumscribed but powerful ways. Pro-McKinley
and pro-imperialist forces had control of this new media form and used
it very effectively. To do this, one might add, exhibitors structured their
programs of short one-shot films in ways that made effective use of their
control of editorial method – the construction of narrative, the use of
contrast for inflammatory purposes, the careful juxtaposition of image
and word.
The politically oriented feedback loop between audio-visual projec-
tions and the press had already been well established for campaign
purposes in 1892 and was one element of continuity between these two
distinct but historically related formations. The shift from long-form
screen programs involving the projection of slides (non-moving images)
in 1892 to the projection of a selection of short, one-shot moving images
was part of this far-reaching transformation. The illustrated lectures
focused on a central political issue, emphasizing policy and programs,
not personality. In contrast, the short film of McKinley was silent as to
specif ic programmatic content but featured a personality and showed
the essence of his campaign style. In this respect, it might be considered
a “pregnant instance,” along the lines discussed by Maria Tortajada. 80
McKinley at Home offered a brief moment that captured the dominant
or representative essence of the candidate’s campaign. McKinley was
always at home (just as his rival William Jennings Bryan was seemingly
always campaigning from the train). The film could serve as a cipher that
audiences could fill with their own associations. Sound Money Democrats
who supported McKinley despite their traditional party allegiances
were able to embrace a personality rather than a set of developed policy
80 M. Tortajada, “Le statut du photogramme et l’instant prégnant au moment de l’émergence

du cinéma,” XVIth International Film Studies Conference - Permanent Seminar on History of
Film Theories, “In The Very Beginning, At The Very End,” Udine, 24 March 2009.
agendas addressing the tariff and other issues for which they continued
to have serious reservations. The move from political oratory to political
pageantry and the embrace of the bicycle, the first use of the telephone
for news gathering on election eve, and even the initial adoption of the
phonograph by the McKinley campaign contributed to a notable transfor-
mation of prior media practices in 1896. The move away from discourses
of sobriety and long forms is one dimension of this reformulated usage
of media forms.
When Did Cinema Become Cinema?
When did cinema become cinema? Certainly, motion picture practices

were changing rapidly from 1894 (pre-cinema) up until about 1920 – and
then beyond. This makes me instinctively resistant to the notion that
cinema did not become institutionalized until about 1910, as André Gau
dreault proposes with his “second birth of cinema.” Why 1910? Cinema
had become a form of mass communication and of mass entertainment
and culture in 1908 with the introduction of the regular release schedule
and an emergent mode of representation that was more accessible and
consistent in meaning (through the use of intertitles and a strong linear
form of narrative organization).81 In 1905-06, the nickelodeons provided
the motion picture industry with its own specially designated exhibition
sites. To have specialized motion picture houses or cinemas but no cinema
seems odd. However, if I were to answer this question in a way that was not
redundant or dismissive – that is, with the answer 1895-96 – I would look
to a series of interconnected changes in the dispositive that occurred from
mid- to late 1903. These would include the introduction of the three-blade
shutter on motion picture machines, which sharply reduced the flicker
effect and made spectatorship much more pleasurable. Before this mo-
ment, the cutting back and forth from slides to film was not only common
but desirable. As we saw, even in October 1896, Biograph was alternating
between titles slides and motion picture films. Title slides provided the
spectators’ eyes with a rest; and since motion picture film was expensive,
it also reduced the costs of materials. What this meant was that until 1903,
exhibitors who showed f ilms were also showing slides. The projecting
machines were typically combination stereopticons and moving picture
81 See Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing
Company (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 372.
158 Charles Musser
machines, in which the operator would swivel his media carriage back
and forth as he alternated between the two. Moreover, this meant that
post-production was physically occurring in the course of exhibition.
Even as the three-blade shutter was introduced in the US, the Edison
company began to sell its longer films – Uncle Tom’s Cabin (July 1903)
was the first – with head titles and intertitles. Post-production became
centralized inside the production company – a process that had begun
somewhat earlier but had been impeded by these established exhibition
procedures.
Once the projectionist was simply showing a reel of film, distributors
could rent said reels rather than a service (which included operator,
projector, slides and films). Again, this occurred in the later part of 1903.
It was also at this moment that narrative fiction began to dominate in
vaudeville and elsewhere. There were multiple reasons for this shift to
story films, but certainly reduced flicker facilitated the kinds of pleasures
one associates with fantasy and f iction. The moving picture houses
that soon followed could then be given names such as Bijou Dream and
Dreamland. This shift also meant that lanterns were redesigned just to
show films: they became motion picture machines. Although perhaps
not the only moment when “cinema” became “cinema,” the year 1903 was
a decisive moment – as projectionists in vaudeville houses only showed
films as part of the program. An equivalent moment never occurred with
the stereopticon. Exhibitors using the stereopticon could always show
non-photographic images as well as photographic lantern slides. In this
respect, although devotees of the stereopticon may have wanted it to
achieve a status as a media form, it remained in the end the intersection
of several media forms with the lantern platform, a particular kind of
screen practice. In contrast, motion picture technologies and practices
were separate and distinct from the outset but achieved a solidity and
coherence in the early 1900s, perhaps most dramatically between 1903 and
1908. Finally – and this is a topic for further research – the stereopticon,
unlike cinema, was never presented as a distinct art form. It remained
based in the discourse of sobriety, which has often been opposed to art.
As historians of media and culture, we should be sensitive to the ways in
which the dominant component of this new media form (“the cinema”)
was constituted as an art form – to the exclusion of ephemera (shorts,
trailers, newsreels, etc.), which for many years were not considered
worthy of serious study or even preservation. In fact, in the American
context, “cinema” was perhaps a term that defined a media form as an
art form.
Table 1: Random Word Searches of Key Terms in Audio-Visual Media.

Figures are for number of articles cited.
For the New York Times and (combined in parentheses) the London
Observer and Manchester Guardian.
Years Stereopticon/magic Illustrated lecture Both terms—with

lantern “lecture” only
1863/1851 (1826) to 295(0)/100 (758) 43(42) 0/0–90/9 (0/41-[139])

1879*
1880-1889 297(0)/58 (212) 890 (13) 10/0–– 122/6
(0/20-[88])
1890-1899 526 (0)/98 (112) 746 (53) 24/0—326/15
(0/21-[333]
1900-1909 405 (2)/113 (111) 341 (96) 16/0 ––192/5 (1/10-
[539])
1910-1919 313(1)/42 (87) 535 (116) 9/0––161/6
(0/5-[509])
1920-1929 207(1)/57 (69) 406 (72) 1/0––66/1 (0/7-[773])
1930-1939 114(0)/49 (76) 798(119) 1/0––33/2 (0/13-

[846])
1940-1949 61 (0)/31 (33) 354 (41) 1/0––10/2 (0/2- [284]
1950-1959 42 (0)/72 (42) 255 (173) 1/0––3/0 (0/2-[135])
1960-1969 20(0)/170 (60) 268 (93) 0/0––3/2 (0/11-[73])
1970-1979 39(2)/82 241 (134) 0/0––1/1 (0/2-[47])
* The New York Times start publishing in 1851, but the first mention of the term “Stereopticon”
was in 1863. The Observer was first published in 1791 and the Manchester Guardian in 1821.
Table 2: Random Word Searches of Key Terms in Audio-Visual Media. Figures are
for the number of articles cited in the New York Times.
Years Stere- Stereo- Slide Docu- Moving Motion Movie &

opticon scope show mentary pictures pictures & film
& motion & theater (theater)/mo-
pictures tion pictures
1863/1854 295 228 - 0 0

to 1879
1880-1889 297 152 0 _ 2 0 0
1890-1899 526 18 3 _ 118 23/33 0
1900-1909 405 19 2 _ 742 143/206 10

160 Charles Musser
Years Stere- Stereo- Slide Docu- Moving Motion Movie &

opticon scope show mentary pictures pictures & film
& motion & theater (theater)/mo-
pictures tion pictures
1910-1919 313 15 2 _ 2501 2,022/5,663 222
1920-1929 207 24 3 31 2133 6,132/20,100 395
1930-1939 114 40 2 163 1044 5,893/22,042 430
1940-1949 61 117 2 659 466 5,793/20,122 501
1950-1959 42 44 90 646 188 4,332/19,644 816
1960-1969 20 38 151 477 53 3,712/17,204 731
1970-1979 39 15 658 1074 39 1,392/10,248 745
1980-1989 50 1157 668 130 2,159/9,240 642

On Some Limitations of the Definition
of the Dispositive “Cinema”1
André Gaudreault
If we were Artists
We would not say the cinema
We would say the cine
But if we were old professors

from the provinces
We would say neither cinema nor cine
But cinematograph
Guillaume Apollinaire, excerpt from “Avant le cinéma,” 19172
At the conference at which this paper was presented, two participants made
a reference to Guillaume Apollinaire without consulting each other before-
hand. François Albera first pointed out that, according to the author of “The
New Spirit and the Poets,” poets wanted to be able some day “to mechanize
poetry as the world has been mechanized.”3 For my part, I projected an
excerpt of the poem used here as an epigraph and straightforwardly titled
“Before the Cinema.” No intention or planning, no machination should be
read into this coincidence, which is first and foremost the result of chance.
1 This text was written as part of the research work of the GRAFICS (Groupe de recherches sur
l’avènement et la formation des institutions cinématographique et scénique) at the Université
de Montréal. The GRAFICS receives funding from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council and the Fonds québécois pour la recherche sur la société et la culture. The
GRAFICS belongs to the Centre de recherche sur l’intermédialité (CRI). The author wishes to
thank Jean-Marc Lamotte and the Institut Lumière for the photograph of the Lumière device
(fig. 1).
2 Guillaume Apollinaire, Oeuvres poétiques, Marcel Adéma and Michel Décaudin, eds. (Paris:
Gallimard, NRF/Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, 1965) 362.
3 Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, ed. Roger Shattuck (New York: New Directions
Publishing Corporation, 1971) 227-37, 237. Apollinaire’s text comes from a lecture given in
November 1917, the very year when the poem “Avant le cinéma” was published (a few months
earlier, in April to be specific). In his talk, Albera referred to “The New Spirit and the Poets”
within a larger argument on the prevalence of the model of the machine in the arts at the end
of the nineteenth century, a time when the “machine ‘cinema’” was the driving force displacing
the old categories of creation (see his contribution in this volume).
162 André Gaudreault
Still, the coincidence has a certain necessity to it. Indeed, the cinema holds
an essential place in the work of the French poet, as Francis Ramirez has
shown in a particularly inspired article on the question:
Cinema long behaved like an illegitimate child, looking for fathers, find-
ing godfathers. Among them, Guillaume Apollinaire. At a time when
dominant artists, particularly in France, showed contempt for cinema,
the poet adopted it and emphatically greeted the art of movement in
what he called “the new spirit.” 4
In his poem (the one ending with the famous “My glass broke like a burst of
laughter”), Apollinaire lists the variety of terms used during the period to
refer to the cinema. In 1917, the vulgum pecus would have said “the cinema”
whereas artists (the particular kind that are actors and actresses) would
have preferred “the cine,” and “old professors from the provinces,” “the
cinematograph.” For the record, here is the complete poem:
And tonight we will go

To the cinema
Artists who are they then

They are no longer the ones who cultivate the Fine Arts
They are not the ones who take care of Art
Poetic Art or music as well
The Artists are actors and actresses
If we were Artists
We would not say the cinema
We would say the cine
But if we were old professors from

the provinces
We would say neither cine nor cinema
But cinematograph
So my goodness do we need to have taste
4 Francis Ramirez, “Apollinaire et le désir de cinéma,” Cahiers de l’Association internationale

des études françaises 47.1 (1995) 371. Available at http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/
prescript/article/caief_0571-5865_1995_num_47_1_1883, last accessed on September 28, 2012.
My glass is full of a wine that shimmers like a

flame
Listen to the slow song of a boatman
Telling of seven women he saw in the moonlight
Twisting their long green hair hanging to their feet
Stand up sing higher while dancing in a ring

So that I no longer hear the boatman singing
And place by me all the blond maidens
With their fixed stare their braids folded back
The Rhine the Rhine is drunk where the vineyards are mirrored
All the gold of the nights falls shimmering reflected in it
The voice is still singing, rattling itself to death
These fairies with green hair incanting the summer
My glass broke like a burst of laughter5
This question of which term to privilege when referring to (and naming) the
new “medium” was topical in the second decade of the twentieth century.
Indeed, the year Apollinaire published his poem, Louis Delluc wrote a rather
enlightened opinion along the same lines: “We are in want of words, I mean
brief and precise words […] to replace cinématographe, which is heavy,
endless, ugly, and does not apply very well to what it is meant to refer to.”6
For the extoller of photogénie, the word cinématographe thus started
to sound stale. What the supposed inventor of the word cinéaste sensed
in 1917 was basically that the word had simply become outdated when it
came to designating film activity as a whole. It is as though Delluc had a
clear intuition that the situation had changed and that a new paradigm
had emerged; as though he had a vague impression that, as the process of
institutionalization of cinema irreducibly moved forward, the old term was
increasingly at odds with the course of events, the state of things.
The issue of naming the new media was obviously not just a French affair
at the time. Comparable questioning was taking place in the United States,
one example being the well-known hesitation in the 1910s between mov-
5 Apollinaire, Oeuvres poétiques 362.

6 Louis Delluc, Le Film 12 Nov. 1917, in Jean Giraud, Le lexique français du cinéma. Des origines
à 1930 (Paris: CNRS, 1958), entry on “cinématographe,” 90. This was also the month when Apol-
linaire gave his talk on “The New Spirit.”
ing pictures and motion pictures, as reported by William Paul.7 Similarly,

the attempt to introduce “photoplay” proved short-lived. Though it has
registered in our memories through one of the first theoretical works on
the cinema published by Hugo Münsterberg in 1916,8 the term has long
become obsolete.
One thing for certain is that the choice between two words in French
(cinématographe and cinéma) to refer to the same historical object9 causes
much confusion, as will be demonstrated here once again. In fact, we will
see that, as Guy Béart’s song goes, “the poet spoke the truth…” Indeed,
Apollinaire’s poem contains the key word in the main proposition I am to
make toward the end of my argument. Thinking ahead to the conclusion, I
thus chose to title the present text “On Some Limitations of the Definition
of the Dispositive ‘Cinema’,” not “On Some Limitations of the Definition of
the Cinematographic Dispositive.”
Apparatus theory has been through difficult times lately – at least,
that is what Nicolas Dulac and I put forward on the occasion of a recent
conference.10 It has been criticized on two counts: first, its lack of historical
7 William Paul, “Uncanny Theater. The Twin Inheritances of the Movies,” Paradoxa 3.3-4
(1997): 321-47. On this question, see also André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “En guise
d’ouverture sur la problématique cinéma/bande dessinée,” Cinema e fumetto. Cinema and Comics,
Leonardo Quaresima, Laura Ester Stangalli and Federico Zecca, eds. (Udine: Forum, 2009) 23-29.
8 Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay: A Psychological Study was first published by D. Appleton
and Company (New York/London, 1916). Most people working in the field of film studies know it
under the title of a new edition that appeared in the early 1970s, The Film: A Psychological Study
(New York: Dover, 1970), which omitted “photoplay” and replaced it with “film.” The latest life of
the work in question (in a recent, new publication) marked the return of the word “photoplay,”
though the title contains the word “film” so that the “customer” knows what the book deals with:
Hugo Münsterberg on Film. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan
Langdale (London: Routledge, 2002). In a review of the book, Ann M. Gibb wrote, “Are movies
art, or entertainment? Does watching violent films encourage violent behavior in teenagers?
Should movies be censored? A new book, above, by art historian Allan Langdale, collects all the
writings on film by Hugo Münsterberg, an early film theorist. These questions are being debated
today, but they were also posed nearly 100 years ago by Hugo Münsterberg, a German psychologist
who came to America and fell under the enchantment of the new medium called the ‘photoplay’”
(my emphasis). See Ann M. Gibb, “Book shows that debates over the role of films are nothing
new,” UC Santa Cruz Currents Online 3 June 2002 http://www.ucsc.edu/currents/01-02/06-03/
film.html, last accessed on September 28, 2012.
9 In actuality, it is not always the same historical object which is being referred to, even when
only one term is available, since words never completely correspond to things and there never
is a total adequation between reality and language (but that is a whole other story…).
10 International conference “Les dispositifs,” Université de Marne-la-Vallée and École nationale
supérieure Louis-Lumière, France, 2006. See N. Dulac and A. Gaudreault, “Dispositifs optiques
et attraction,” Cahier Louis-Lumière (Les dispositifs) 4 (June 2007): 91-108.
foundations; second, its inadequate picture of film reception. In its classical

version at least, the theory has been described as lacking a proper historical
grounding, as it rests on a theoretical construction that completely overlooks
the diversity of practices and technologies developed in cinema since the
“dispositif” was perfected. Besides, its assumption of a monolithic audience
has been blamed for its inadequate account of film reception.
Jumping the gun on some aspects of the apparatus, theoreticians ended
up crossing paths with historians (notably historians of early cinema) and
other theoreticians (notably those working from a cognitivist or feminist
perspective), who soon pointed out the inadequacies of some of their hy-
potheses. More and more historians are opting for a pragmatic-historical
approach to the “dispositif” nowadays,11 thus conceiving new analytical
models anchored in the diachronic flow of the historical continuum. It has
been shown that many spectatorial practices went against the model as-
sumed by apparatus theory, and that the film “dispositif” did not constitute
a unitary, inert entity cast in stone any more than did the spectator.
Besides, recent research and discussions have brought to light many
practices that help us better understand the relation between spectator,
“dispositif” and representation. The more the film “dispositif” loses its
apparent uniqueness, the more the strictly ideological or technological
explanation loses ground, revealing the complexity of the basic “dispositif ”
– if I may call it that.
Accordingly, there have been conferences on the notion of the “dispositif”
before the one whose proceedings appear in this book, just as there will
obviously be many others on the same theme over the next few years.
Indeed, this notion lies at the center of the preoccupations of many dynamic
research groups, whether in Switzerland, in the Netherlands, in France or
in Quebec. Admittedly, since the turn of the century – not so long ago – the
“dispositif” has made a much noted comeback on the intellectual scene that
takes the cinema and moving images as its object.12
11 See Frank Kessler, “La cinématographie comme dispositif [du] spectaculaire,” Cinémas 14.1
(Fall 2003): 21-34.
12 I would like to allow myself a short digression here, a “futurological” one, if you will. You
probably noted the care with which I choose my words when I write of the intellectual work
“that takes the cinema and moving images as its object.” Given the new context in which we
are currently immersed, with the proliferation of digital technologies and the dissemination/
multiplication of screens and media, I am convinced that this tendency toward caution in the
choice of words, which articulates the particular (cinema) with the more general (moving
images), will be more and more frequent – this until the day when the particular term “cinema”
is abandoned and only the generic term “moving images” remains. Already, the multiplication of
expressions such as “images mouvantes,” “images en mouvement,” or “image animée” in French
The revival of the notion in advanced thinking on cinema (and moving

images…) is itself not extraneous to the turbulence brought about by the
advent of digital technologies, which have redrawn the maps once used with
a bit of intuition to navigate the – then smaller – world of mere filming.
It comes with its share of joy and sorrow – the latter somewhat linked to
the semantic inflation produced by the notion of “dispositif.” Judging by
the literature of the past few years, the concept may seem to thicken and
the notion to lose its clarity gradually, as if everyone, myself included, had
passed the word round to put their own twist on the notion. Scholars,
however, are not necessarily responsible for this inflationary trend: the term
itself is an invitation to all kinds of derivatives (and just as many tangents…).
“Dispositif” as a term has therefore become definitely polysemic, which
in itself is not necessarily a problem. This short text I put together shows
the extent to which the word lends itself to multiple meanings and levels
of meaning:13
Probably drawing on the social and industrial infrastructure that was

the Lumière company at the end of the nineteenth century in France,
the Lumière brothers were able to find the means to develop their Cin-
ematograph, a technical dispositive for which they filed an application
in February 1895 as part of the legal framework designed for patents. The
Cinematograph went down in history as the origin of the film dispositive.
It should be mentioned, however, that the real invention of the Lumière
brothers is limited to the sole small mechanical device known as the
triangular eccentric cam, which made it possible to take photographs
intermittently. Besides, it should pointed out that the ingenious shooting
dispositive of the Cinematograph was also designed for use as a projection
dispositive in public screenings whose dispositive was blatantly and spec-
tacularly reminiscent of the dispositive imagined by Plato in his famous
allegory of the cave. In addition, these shows marked the beginning of a
cultural series whose theoretical understanding was to culminate in the
has become perceptible in written discourse over the past few years. From my point of view, it
is a clear symptom of the search for suitability between language and the new extra-linguistic
reality. The situation is slightly different in English, of course, as the use side by side of two
“clausulas,” both bearing on “pictures” which are “moving,” could amount to tautology. In
English, I noted a tendency to use expressions such as “moving image studies” or “scholars of
the moving image,” with the aim to avoid limiting discourse to cinema alone and excluding
other instances of images in movement.
13 Translator’s note: the italics in the indented self-quotation that follows, found in the original
source, refer to instances when the author uses the word “dispositif” in French.
Fig. 1. The Lumière brothers’ famous eccentric cam (on the left, the sliding frame that bears the claws,
and whose two alternative conveyance movements are performed by the triangular eccentric cam
placed at its center; on the right, the drum which, once assembled on the same axis as the eccentric
cam’s and interdependent with it, makes it possible – thanks to the ramps positioned on its rim – to
command the alternating coming and going of the claws in the sprocket holes of the film). Photograph:
Jean-Marc Lamotte (Institut Lumière).
1970s with the advent of a rather convoluted theoretical system known as

apparatus theory – but not until the basic apparatus had undergone a few
important modifications, including the addition of a sound apparatus.
As this shows, “dispositif” refers to a number of different notions. Accord-

ingly, we are quite justified in making a number of distinctions, as Jean-
Pierre Sirois-Trahan has already suggested with his material dispositive,
mental dispositive, production dispositive, reception dispositive and distri-
bution dispositive.14 As difficult as the task may prove, I believe that we
should build a theoretical model for each definition of the word “dispositif,”
which branches off into technological, discursive, material, psychological,
ideological and linguistic directions, to name but a few.
Some day, we should also come to distinguish sharply and rigorously
between “dispositive,” “apparatus,” “device,” “process,” and other thingies.
14 Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, “Dispositif(s) et réception,” Cinémas 14.2-3 (Fall 2003): 149-76.

This is far from simple, since the boundaries between each of these terms do
not always appear clearly when the moment comes to designate the object of
our thought. This may also be observed in English, as “apparatus,” also used
to translate “dispositif,” is a rather vague equivalent for the word, which also
translates as “device,” for instance. Some, like Frank Kessler,15 purely and
simply propose that the French word “dispositif” be maintained in English.
A “dispositif” may thus be a concrete thing, but it may also be abstract.
It may be a big or large thing, just as it may be a very small one. I asked
researcher Jean-Marc Lamotte, who is in charge of collections at the Institut
Lumière in Lyons, for further information on the “thingy that made all the
difference in the Cinématographe.”16 Here is what he answered:
In fact, the “Lumière claw system” constitutes a complete device [“dis-

positif”]: indeed, it includes the eccentric cam (whether it is round
or triangular basically does not make any difference). The cam is the
mechanical piece that transforms the rotation of the crank into an
alternating movement which it then transmits to a frame bearing the
driving claws. The frame thus goes up and down. Yet the drum with the
two ramps, which is interdependent with the cam, is just as essential: it
controls the coming and going of the claws in the sprocket holes, thereby
allowing the frame bearing the claws to come back up empty, leaving the
film still even so briefly – the very principle of the intermittent advance
of film.17
This specialist of the Lumière Cinematograph, who considers what I call

the Lumière thingy (the eccentric cam) to be more than a mere thingy,
thus used the word “dispositif” in an unbiased way. Lamotte even added:
This is all to say that we (in fact, almost everybody when speaking from
memory) slightly simplify when we speak only of the cam, when in
fact the Lumière system is a whole, a dispositive by which a continuous
movement of rotation (the axis bearing the cam, the drum and the shut-
ter) is turned into two alternating conveyance movements: a vertical
movement, controlled by the cam mounted on the rotating camshaft
15 Frank Kessler, “La cinématographie comme dispositif [du] spectaculaire,” Cinémas 14.1 (Fall
2003): 21-34.
16 I did write “bidule” (“thingy”) in my query to Jean-Marc Lamotte. At no point did I mention
the word “dispositif.”
17 E-mail to the author, 25 May 2008 (my emphasis).
and transmitted to a frame bearing mobile claws; a horizontal movement

controlled by two ramps on the rim of the drum also mounted on the
rotating camshaft, and transmitted to the claws […].18
This manifestly belongs to the category of technical dispositive, one degree

above my somewhat unreliable “category” of the “thingy” – a technical
dispositive that was to make it possible for the Lumière Cinematograph
to shoot intermittently. This intermittence allows for the taking of shots
that may be projected later by the Cinematograph, once it is turned into
a technical screening dispositive within the material and social disposi-
tive of the screening room, which implies the “co-presence” in the same
space of a projector, a projectionist, a screen, a film and spectators. All of
these essential conditions were in turn to make it possible for French film
theoreticians to found the so-called, metaphorical “apparatus theory” after
the dispositive had been in social use for eighty years.
These various manifestations and materializations of the notion of “dis-
positif” take us from the world of the extremely technical to the more simple
technical world, then to the social world and finally to the world of ideas.
It is also a shift from the smallest to the much larger, the immeasurable
even; from the concrete to the abstract; and, last of all, from the empirical
to the speculative. It takes place by simply moving the same term, the same
lexical unit from one sphere to another, along the same chain, each time
conferring an additional meaning, if not a new spirit, on it.
By the way, what is so special about the first element in this chain, the
smallest and apparently the most insignificant of all, and yet the first cause
in what I propose to call the “chain of the ‘dispositif’”? This more-than-
a-thingy, these mere pieces of metal assembled and arranged in quite a
specific way, forming a dispositive, and which inadvertently made it possible
to produce gains as algorithmic as they are exponential and unexpected?
It undoubtedly has to be a little marvel, a marvelous device to arouse – or
rather, to unleash – as many passions (this cam may have been called “ec-
centric” for a reason…). It must be a little marvel indeed, and yet it remains
the place par excellence of the contradiction specific to the cinematographic,
as I will attempt to demonstrate.
The Lumière brothers thus owe this cam their reputation in history as
the inventors of the cinema. Not shying away from grand statements, let
us also reckon here that this first-rate recognition should similarly make
them the designers – rather unconsciously and unintentionally – of the film
18 E-mail to the author, May 25, 2008.

apparatus in the sense given to the expression by French film theory. They
would certainly never have dared to claim as much, since they invented
neither the film apparatus described by Baudry nor the dispositive cinema.
Indeed, as I have been professing for a while, the Lumière brothers have
been abusively considered the inventors of cinema.19 Basically and quite
simply, the Lumière brothers only came up with a machine to shoot views
– extraordinary and brilliantly designed, to be sure, but a machine all the
same.
One thing is certain, we should acknowledge that the dispositive-thingy
of the Lumière brothers proved priceless for them. 20 Just as certainly, it
earned them their share of attacks. Over the past few years, many have
raised questions about the brothers’ primacy in the race to the so-called
invention of cinema. Some have even argued that what I identify as the
dispositive-thingy, the eccentric cam – whose invention dates back to
late 1894 – should in no way be considered an essential requirement for
a projection dispositive to become established as such. To those holding
this position, the dispositive-thingy is in the end a phony device, no more,
no less…
Still others consider the dispositive-thingy to be rather small to elicit
so much praise, given all the preexisting technologies used alongside it in
the Lumière device. Michel Frizot claims, for instance: “Still, [the] rather
complex description [of the Cinématographe] reveals but little invention
on the part of the Lumière brothers, as most of the processes comprising
it existed beforehand.”21
Those who made the year 1995 the terminal point of the first century of
cinema generally hold in very high esteem the device-thingy in question,
since it is really what made it possible to identify the starting point of the
“series” whose centenary was being celebrated. For some, as is well-known,
the “foundational” event is the invention of the Lumière device and the
registration of the patent on February 13, 1895, in the wake of the develop-
ment of the dispositive-thingy. On these grounds, speaking of “the century
of cinema” without elaborating further amounted to dispensing with the
demonstration that would justify the equivalence between cinematograph
19 I refer the reader interested in further developments on my position on this issue to my

Film and Attraction. From Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Champaign, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 2008).
20 That this machine made it possible for them to produce films with undeniable intrinsic
qualities is another story altogether.
21 Michel Frizot, “Qu’est-ce qu’une invention? (le cinéma). La technique et ses possibles,” Trafic
50 (summer 2004), P.O.L., Paris, 2004: 319.
– the Lumière cinematograph, to boot – and cinema (and between cinema

and cinematograph).
For others, the starting point would tend to be the famous Premier Paying
Public Projection (PPPP) on December 28, 1895, at the Grand Café in Paris
(since this took place during the same calendar year, 1895, it does not affect
the terminal point, 1995). The question we may ask, then, is the following:
is this PPPP really the very Premier PPP? Indeed, the “premier” nature of the
event has frequently been contested, particularly of late, since a number
of new facts have been dug out since classical historians of cinema last
closed the matter. Recent, well-documented research does show evidence
that the paying public projection of December 28, 1895, unquestionably
and indisputably had precedents. I will mention only the three most im-
portant cases here, those of Latham’s Panoptikon (United States), Armat
and Jenkins’s Phantoscope (United States), and the Skladanowsky brothers’
Bioskop (Germany):
– On May 20, 1895, the Latham family (father Woodville and his sons Otway
and Grey) used their Panoptikon (also known as Eidoloscope, sometimes
spelled Pantoptikon or Panopticon) to project the film of a boxing match
(between Young Griffo and Charles Barnett) to a paying audience on
Broadway, New York City. This paying projection apparently took place
repeatedly over several months. The Lathams also showed their film
from time to time in several towns in the United States.
– In late September 1895, C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat also showed
films to a paying audience thanks to their Phantoscope at the Cotton
States Exhibition in Atlanta, Georgia. Armat was to sell the rights to his
Phantoscope to Edison after making several alterations to it (Edison
presented the device under a different name, Vitascope, and under his
own name as he launched his own film screenings on April 23, 1896, four
months after the Salon Indien projection at the Grand Café).
– On November 1, 1895, a program of eight films was presented to a paying
audience at the Wintergarten, a Berlin variety hall, by brothers Emil and
Max Skladanowsky (cinema seems to have been a matter of siblings then),
thanks to their Bioskop (sometimes spelled Bioskope, Bioscope or Bioscop).22
22 The reader interested in this question may refer to André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning,
“Introduction: American Cinema Emerges (1890-1909),” in American Cinema, 1890-1909. Themes
and Variations, ed. André Gaudreault (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009) 1-21;
and to Deac Rossel, Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1998).
Each of the devices that made these paying public projections possible
involved particular characteristics distinguishing them from one another
as well as from the Lumière Cinematograph (and of course, none was quite
as well designed as the latter):
1) The Latham family’s Panoptikon did not feature any mechanism for
the intermittent advance of the film, or any other system to make up
for its absence. Accordingly, the screening of each image had to be as
brief as possible to avoid any blur, which in turn required a larger film
surface, given the need to beam light more strongly on images. In fact,
the Panoptikon was not as efficient as hoped for, if we are to believe the
report of a journalist present at one of the demonstrations: “There is
considerable room for improvement and many drawbacks have yet to
be overcome.”23
2) As to Jenkins and Armat’s Phantoscope, which was equipped with an
intermittent mechanism, it gave much more satisfying results than the
Lathams’ Panoptikon. This quite evidently explains its fortune with
Edison the following year under a borrowed name (Vitascope).
3) Finally, the Skladanowsky brothers’ Bioskop, founded on a rather complex
projection system, did not enjoy much success. Everything came in pairs
in the German dispositive: light sources, driving mechanisms, films
(two prints of the same film, actually), lenses. The main concern was to
synchronize the two prints perfectly, since each of them was alternately
masked by a central shutter. Appearing on the screen in alternation,
then, were an image from print A and an image from print B. In a sense,
the systematic alternation between the two emulated the intermittent
movement lacking in the Bioskop. Due to the extreme complexity of its
dispositive, not offset with any other advantage over the systems using
the intermittent advance of a single film, the machine was short-lived
and did not have much of a legacy.
In this obstacle race to determine where priority lies in the invention of

the dispositive, historians should first ask themselves what matters first
and foremost. At bottom, the issue is whether public projection should
be the decisive criterion (and whether it should be a paying show), or the
mere invention of the device is enough. Serious historians may also wonder
whether the search “for the One, Definite and Definitive invention,” to
23 Article in Photographic Times, quoted by Stephen Herbert at http://www.victorian-cinema.

net/latham.htm (last accessed on September 28, 2012).
quote Michel Frizot again,24 is a game worth the trouble – or an incredibly

vain exercise, in the end.
In any case, if projection alone – to a limited public and at no charge – was
deemed legitimate as the decisive criterion, a strong case could be made
for the precedence of the Lumière brothers due to their first semi-private
(hence semi-public!) screening on March 22, 1895, two months before the
Lathams’ own projection.25 However, this in turn raises a series of ques-
tions, to which I will return.
Besides, in the name of which principle should the projection of moving
images (private or public, paying or not) be considered the necessary starting
point – and the inaugural moment – of what is called “cinema”? Is a simple
viewing (private or public, paying or not) not enough? This is an essential
question. The notion of a starting point is a key idea running throughout
the twentieth century and gaining ground into souls and consciousnesses,
so much so that many specialists now take it for granted. In his Histoire
du visuel, Laurent Gervereau writes for instance that “[…] cinema, whose
characteristic is indeed the public projection in the theater as inaugurated
by the Lumière brothers (not the individual viewing in a cabinet launched
by Edison), expanded considerably from the First World War on.”26
Furthermore, why should this first projection be both public and paying
to be considered as the first cause in the “cinema” series, as some claim?
Should we understand that, if the famous (or supposed) PPPP of the Grand
Café had taken place on January 1, 1896, we should then have celebrated its
centenary in 1996? That is apparently the assumption. But then, which status
should we grant the very first projection of the clever dispositive that is Émile
Reynaud’s Théâtre optique, a projection of moving images that took place on
October 28, 1892, over three years before the invention of the Cinématographe
24 Michel Frizot, “Qu’est-ce qu’une invention?”: 319.

25 It took the Lumière brothers quite some time (nine months!) before their f irst paying
projection, simply because they wanted to be ready to face potential demand on the day when
their invention would be made available to the general public. Before the public, paying show
on December 28, 1895, they set up about ten screenings to demonstrate the “capacities” of
the dispositive in front of non-paying, hand-picked audiences: photographers, industrialists,
scientists, journalists, etc. – an audience who could appreciate what they were seeing and
accordingly praise it in some popular scientific periodicals. The Lumière brothers also had
to be able to launch their invention on a large scale and master the whole supply chain (film,
dispositives, operating network, etc.). In other words, they were nosed out – temporally, not
qualitatively speaking – by their many, less patient and less perfectionist competitors because
they held themselves up for strictly commercial reasons.
26 Laurent Gervereau, Histoire du visuel au XXe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2003) 34-35 (my emphasis).
Lumière? What should these projections inaugurate? Should they serve as

the starting point of the cultural series of “light projections with movement”?
The October 28, 1892 screening was in a way a genuine PPPP (premier
paying public projection). In truth, though, it was a PPPDI (public paying
projection of drawn images) rather than a PPPPI (public paying projection of
photographic images), like the Lumière brothers’. Indeed, Reynaud’s disposi-
tive projected, not photographic images, but drawn material. This explains
why teleological historians have ostracized Reynaud, all the more since
he committed a “capital sin.” Indeed, for his praxinoscope and its various
avatars, Reynaud “dared” to opt for a “regressive” direction, rejecting the
system of slit shutters of the Zoetrope and Phenakistiscope (the principle of
the shutter being rightly or wrongly considered as one of the fundamental
bases of cinema). Reynaud instead privileged a system of mirrors placed
around a polygonal crown, a process deemed anti-cinematographic by
traditional historians of cinema, who forget that it was fashionable for
quite a long time in these very cinematographic editing benches, including
Steenbeck machines…
Not ci-ne-ma-to-gra-phic, the polygon of mirrors? Not literally so, evidently,
since it was invented before the word ci-ne-ma-to-graph became prevalent…
Is the fact that Reynaud did not use photographic images enough
to count him out so summarily? Shouldn’t the recent advent of digital
technologies make us aware that, as far as cinema is concerned (assuming
we find ourselves over and over again in that paradigm), photographic
technology is not always there? If DVD viewing (no projection whatsoever)
and computer-generated f ilms (no photographic trace whatsoever) are
included within the contemporary sphere of cinema, how not to grant a
retrospective certificate of “authenticity” and primacy to Reynaud’s Théâtre
optique? It lacks photographic credentials, to be sure, yet it is founded on
an orthodox projection “dispositif” that would enthrall Baudry. This is all
the more true if one takes into account the early mise en abyme of the film
spectator in the film titled Autour d’une cabine: it features a Peeping
Tom who, through a keyhole and without the slightest shame, eyes up a
lady taking her clothes off.
Considering how historians have treated Reynaud and his invention,
the publication of a book as anti-establishment and disputable as Bernard
Lonjon’s scathing attack comes as no surprise. In his recent Émile Reynaud.
Le véritable inventeur du cinéma,27 the author goes as far as to dub the city
27 Bernard Lonjon, Émile Reynaud. Le véritable inventeur du cinéma (Polignac: Éditions du

Roure, 2007).
of Le Puy-en-Velay, which Reynaud used as a base, “the mother city of the

cinematograph” (word for word, with cinematograph taking a lower-case
“c,” of course!). This would be as early as June 1875… The invention of the
cinema in 1875 in Le Puy-en-Velay: the mind boggles.
While this type of assertion certainly verges on the ultimate degree of
hyperbole, historians of cinema have been so lax that this type of backfiring
serves them right; they have little choice but to take stock of it. Lonjon’s
foregone conclusion even represents, I should say, a return of the repressed:
since Reynaud’s Théâtre optique did not have the place it deserved in his-
tories of cinema, an advocate of Reynaud’s was almost bound to go in the
same direction as Lonjon’s some day. Historical and theoretical thinking has
never taken Reynaud’s dispositive into account; this dispositive, it should
be said, inaugurates something in the order of the “animated film,” yet
no one knows exactly how to affiliate the latter to the former. Be that as
it may, Reynaud did well and truly carry out paying public projections of
moving images (assembled on a perforated film strip, to boot) 38 months
before December 28, 1895. That took some doing…
Let us return for a few moments to the Lumières and examine the text
of the commemorative plaque affixed to the exterior walls of the Grand
Café in 1926: “On December 28, 1895, this was the site of the first public
projections of animated photography with the Cinematograph a device
invented by the Lumière brothers.”28 (fig. 2) We know well what the plaque
wants (and is meant) to commemorate: a genuine first (plaques are rarely af-
fixed to celebrate “second times”). The “first public projections of animated
photography” in the entire history of humankind thus reportedly took place at
the Grand Café on December 28, 1895. Which, as is now well-known, is fun-
damentally inaccurate. Still, looking at it a bit closer, another signification
may be read into the text of the plaque – a signification which, in my eyes
at least, would prove its author one hundred percent right. What the plaque
may mean is that what took place on December 28, 1895, in the place where
it is affixed, is not “the first public projections of animated photography” in
the entire history of humankind but “the first public projections of animated
photography” ever to have been done with-the-Cinématographe-Lumière. This
admittedly verges on truism! Yet this is what the text of the plaque spells
28 1925 is often reported as the date for the unveiling of the plaque, but the event did in fact
take place in 1926 (on March 17), a date confirmed in the March 18, 1926, issue of the periodical
Comœdia. See also the account of the ceremony in issue 520 of L’Écran, the journal of the French
federation of film theater owners, dated March 20, 1926. I wish to thank Jean-Marc Lamotte for
providing me with these details.
Fig. 2. Commemorative plaque affixed in 1926 on the façade of the building that housed the Salon
Indien of the Grand Café (14, boulevard des Capucines in Paris).
out (for lack of commas): “first public projections of animated photography

with the Cinematograph…”29
This second interpretation is as implacable as it is tautological, but any
attempt to understand the role of the Lumière brothers in the invention of
the cinema leads to frequent brushes with tautology. Thus understood, the
text of the plaque remains forever indisputable: it was indeed on December
28, 1895, that the Cinématographe Lumière was used for the first time before
a paying audience.
Why such a recurrence of tautological thoughts in the case of the Lu-
mières? I think it may be explained as follows: this strong tendency may
result from the confusion felt by everyone about the invention of cinema,
but also from the dominance of the Lumière brothers’ device over all its
29 It should be noted that, contrary to expectation and – dare I say – without much regard
for the rules of punctuation, the text does not include any commas at all. One comma at least
would be indisputably called for – on the penultimate line, between the word “cinématographe”
and the word “appareil.” As can be observed, the text is printed exclusively in capital letters – a
frequent occurrence with this kind of exercise, in which a new line may in some cases give the
text its rhythm and substitute for possible commas. The rule of the new line as a substitute for
the comma does not hold throughout the text, however, since the shifts from line 2 to line 3 and
from line 3 to line 4 do not involve the replacement of any comma whatsoever. That is not the
case with the shift from line 4 to line 5, though: there may be a comma between “de photographie
animée” and “à l’aide du Cinématographe,” just as there may be none at all, depending on what
is meant. If a comma is introduced, the second signification I suggest does not hold water…
Could it be that the comma possibly missing here amounts to an acte manqué?
main competitors. The word “cinematograph” became established in such

a way that, instead of strictly referring to what it was initially meant to
designate (a shooting device, a machine among others), it met with a clearly
“synecdochic” fate and ended up referring to the spectacle of the projection
of moving images itself – regardless of the device used – and by extension to
the whole industry of production of moving images. In the early twentieth
century, the word “cinematograph” covered a vast number of semantic
fields, which is no longer the case at all these days. Indeed, a century later,
we are back to square one, since in the early twenty-first century the word
“cinematograph” may no longer designate anything else than the device
of the Lumière brothers, as it did in 1895. This is in fact what all common
dictionaries teach us. Nowadays, as has been the case for several decades,
the word “cinema” assumes the multiple uses formerly assigned to the word
“cinematograph.” According to the Le Robert dictionary, the word “cinema”
covers five meanings and may simultaneously designate:
1) the “technology that allows the photographic recording and projecting
of moving images”;
2) the “art of composing and making films” and, by extension, the “industry
of cinematographic spectacles”;
3) the cinematographic projection;
4) “affected demonstrations, for instance in order to see a whim gratified,”
as attested in the expression “Arrête ton cinéma!”;
5) the “theatrical space where cinematographic films are projected.”30
With the entry word “cinématographe,” the same edition of Le Nouveau Petit
Robert refers the reader to the Lumière-designed device while mentioning a
late occurrence of the word with a famous and not too dated author referring
to the art of film:
Dispositive invented by the Lumière brothers, which can reproduce

movement through a succession of photographs.
O. Cinema. “The cinematograph is an art.” (Cocteau)
“O.” (“Vx” in French) stands for “old,” or “vieux”: “word, meaning or use in
the old language, incomprehensible or little comprehensible nowadays and
never used, except as a stylistic effect: archaism.”
30 “Cinéma,” Le Nouveau Petit Robert de la langue française, electronic edition (Paris: Le Robert,
2007).
It now seems rather obvious that many contrarieties (and contradictions)

may be avoided in this whole story of the so-called “invention” of cinema
if we stuck to the facts, and only the facts. What exactly did the Lumière
brothers invent? Unanimous answer: the Cinématographe. Better still: the
Cinématographe Lumière (tautology, when you have us in your grip)! Who
invented cinema? Answer: the cinema cannot be invented (there is no
patent to be registered): it becomes established, gradually and collectively…
In other words, let us not mix up cinematograph and cinema any longer.
The fusion of the two entities creates some confusion and causes unfor-
tunate misunderstandings. It is in fact to avoid any such ambiguity that
I indicated early on that this text had been rather pertinently titled “On
Some Limitations of the Definition of the Dispositive ‘Cinema’ ” and not “On
Some Limitations of the Definition of the Cinematographic Dispositive.”
Had I written “cinematographic dispositive,” I would have risked sowing
some confusion: within the framework of my reflection, readers may have
wondered whether I meant by this expression the “dispositive of cinema”
or the “dispositive of the cinematograph” – since “cinematographic” may
indeed mean one or the other, as most will easily acknowledge.
I sometimes wonder whether, in order to dispel all the confusion that
characterizes the matter, we should not use the epithet “cinematic” or even
return to the former, and so charming term used by Dulac, L’Herbier and
company, “cinegraphic.” Not that I entertain any illusions: this is a losing
battle. I hardly see myself suggesting to my colleagues in the Département
d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématographiques of the Université de
Montréal, to which I am attached, that the name of the unit be changed to
“Département d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinématiques” or “Département
d’histoire de l’art et d’études cinégraphiques”…
Still, this would bring a little poetry in the world and would reconcile
us with Apollinaire, for whom it was imperative “to mechanize poetry as
the world has been mechanized.” We only need to reverse his formula to
suggest that nowadays, we should poeticize the machine just as the cinema
poeticized the world…
The Moment of the “Dispositif”
Omar Hachemi
If the “dispositif” constitutes a “moment,” it is not so much in accord-

ance with its theoretical unity as with its scattered persistence in film
theory. This persistence of the word necessarily brings up the question of
its provenance: of which theoretical formation is this notion the standard?
The word appeared in the 1970s at the intersection of key concepts – the
unconscious, ideology, the signifier – which found the topological model of
their functioning in cinematographic technique. Through the primacy given
to arrangements, the notion of the “dispositif” fostered a spatial distribution
of concepts: the topology of the “scenographic cube” revealed by monocular
perspective, the cave-like space of the dark theater, the “other scene” of
technique, and so forth. Between concepts and their spatialization, from
the imaginary scene to the real scene, analogical relations and semantic
slippages developed, altering the outlines of the notion.
At this point, it is difficult to deny that the moment of the apparatus1
in 1970 has become a theoretical commonplace. Within the already well-
charted field of film theory, Jean-Louis Baudry is an important landmark.
Regularly cited to didactic ends to evoke the model of “filmic continuity”
from the angle of its deconstruction, Baudry is now part of the doxa. What
is remembered from his brief foray in the field of cinema is the conception
of a cinematographic technique that, far from being neutral, was held to
subject the spectator to the order of fiction. The mention of his name leads
by association to the image of a passive spectator plunged in the darkness
that characterizes movie theaters. Baudry’s work presumably shows us
the way followed by a film industry mastering the art of illusionism and
constantly seeking artifices susceptible to immerse the spectator completely
in the world of fiction.
1 In an article devoted to the way the concept of apparatus came into being, Guido Kirsten
situates the emergence of this “theoretical paradigm” between 1969 and 1972 and traces it back
to two sources: on the one hand, reflection on the perspective within the “optical system” (a
reference to Pierre Francastel); on the other hand, Althusser’s theory of ideologies. I find the
chronology as well as these references perfectly relevant, but here I will privilege the psycho-
analytic reference, which Kirsten does not deal with in much depth. See Guido Kirsten, “Genèse
d’un concept et ses avatars. La naissance de la théorie du dispositif cinématographique,” Cahier
Louis-Lumière 4, “Les Dispositifs” (June 2007).
180 Omar Hachemi
Still, few theoreticians claim to adhere to this model nowadays. Baudry

is often quoted, but primarily because he is a good object for critique. In the
issue of Cahiers Louis-Lumière devoted to “dispositifs,” for instance, André
Gaudreault and Nicolas Dulac evoke the Baudry/Metz model, but in order
to distance themselves from it. In the very gap that separates them from
this theory, they define the notion of a “dispositif” conceived in the plural.2
I am therefore tempted to suggest (in Bachelardian terms) that the obvious
fortune of the notion may be measured in terms of the successive critiques
backing away from the “primary image” constituted by the Baudry model.
It is always constructive to examine the way in which a field of research
(the field of cinema, in this case) coordinates by individuating its figures,
its “great models,” through a process of abstraction that favors their use.
These modelizations are evidently needed, for without them we would be
condemned to silence by the absurd task of describing how each concept
advanced on the checkerboard of theory came into being. It would become
impossible to move pawns. The role of epistemology, however, is to study
the formation of these models and the strategies they fulfill. I thus propose
to open this “black box”3 labeled “Baudry,” accordingly setting the “Baudry
model” against the texts and their ramifications.
Apparatus/Basic Apparatus4
“Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” published in

1970 in Cinéthique, is commonly considered as the foundational moment for
the concept of apparatus in the field of film studies (and even in sociology,
apparently5). That this was the first occurrence of the word does not imply
2 André Gaudreault and Nicolas Dulac, “Dispositifs optiques et attraction,” Cahiers Louis
Lumière 4: 92.
3 Bruno Latour put forward the concept of the “black box” to refer to the way in which, within
science and its operations, some units get used once developed without their mechanism being
called into question afterwards. See Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge: Harvard U.P.,
1988).
4 Translator’s note: in the film theory of the 1970s, widely translated in English, “dispositif”
and “appareil de base” were translated as “apparatus” and “basic apparatus.” Here as elsewhere
(with apparatus theory), and for reasons of historical continuity and overall comprehension
for the reader, we have opted to maintain these terms even as our own choices of terminology
for this volume differ substantially. See the “Editors’ and translator’s note” at the beginning of
this book.
5 In an article on the evolution of the notion of the “dispositif” in the f ield of sociology,
Jean-Samuel Beuscart and Ashveen Peerbaye observe, on the basis of a statistical study, that
that it corresponded to a new concept. The pitfall of nominalism should

be avoided, which is why I will privilege the question of strategy over that
of origin. The questioning opening my analysis starts from the premise
that, far from arbitrary, the advent of a concept always takes place as a
response to a problem. This necessity, taken to be part of the incipiency
of any concept, will guide my analysis: to which problem did the concept
of apparatus respond in the early 1970s in the field of film theory? Which
conceptual lack did it come to offset?6
In his article, Baudry extended the reflection initiated in Cinéthique
to cinematographic technique as a whole. His aim, true in that respect to
the materialist project of the periodical, was to take apart the ideology
determined by the machinery allowing films to be made. The notion of
basic apparatus proposed in the first part of the text accordingly has as
its function to establish “the place of the instrumental base in the set of
operations which combine in the production of a film.”7 This new notion
was to allow and extend a reflection which in the first issues of Cinéthique
had focused on the camera alone. Baudry took up the idea according to
which the camera, insofar as it reproduced the monocular perspective
of the Quattrocento, “specifie[d] in return the position of the subject.”8
With one difference, though: the camera was now part of the synthetic
category basic apparatus, along with editing (which produces continuity out
“dispositifs” are “everywhere on the different f ields of social sciences.” The two authors do
mention Baudry’s article when tracing back the notion to its origins. See Jean-Samuel Beuscart
and Ashveen Peerbaye, “Histoires de dispositifs,” Terrains et travaux 11 (2006): 3-15.
6 Derrida formulated a similar question about the notion of structure: “To know why one says
‘structure’ is to know why one no longer wishes to say eidos, ‘essence,’ form, Gestalt, ‘ensemble,’
‘composition’ […]. One must understand not only why each of these words showed itself to be
insufficient but also why the notion of structure continues to borrow some implicit signification
from them and to be inhabited by them.” Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification” [1963], in
Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978) n301.
7 Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” [1970] in
Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986) 286-98.
8 Baudry, “Ideological Effects”: 289. These thoughts, which imply that the homogeneous space
configured by monocular perspective assign the spectator a central position corresponding to
the modern conception of the subject, partly come from Pierre Francastel’s work on painting
(Peinture et société: naissance et destruction d’un espace plastique de la Renaissance au cubisme,
1951; La Figure et le lieu. L’ordre visuel du Quattrocento, 1967), as well as from Jurgis Baltrusaïtis
on perspective distortion (Anamorphoses ou Thaumaturgus Opticus, 1955) or Jean-Louis Schefer
(Scénographie d’un tableau, 1969). In France, these thinkers expanded on the work of Erwin
Panofsky on perspective, itself in a relation of continuity with Ernst Cassirer’s neo-Kantian
philosophy of symbolic forms.
182 Omar Hachemi
of fragments) and projection (which subjects the spectator to the specular

order). According to Baudry, these three poles (shooting, editing, projection)
contribute to the “subject-effect” in that they conceal their operation to
enhance filmic continuity. The analogy with the Lacanian unconscious
comes into play at this level, though it also runs throughout the article: as
we shall see, this analogy gives Baudry’s theory a paradoxical inflection.
After noting that discontinuity, inherent to the fragmentary nature of
cinema, is denied by the work of editing, Baudry evokes the “disturbing
effects” which follow without fail from “breakdowns in the recreation
of movement” (during screening). In his view, the consequence of these
breakdowns is that “the spectator is brought abruptly back to discontinuity
– that is, to the body, to the technical apparatus which he had forgotten.”
The analogy with the slips of the tongue, which manifest the unconscious
on the surface of language through breaks, opens immediately afterwards:
We might not be far from seeing what is in play on this material basis if
we recall that the “language” of the unconscious, as it is found in dreams,
slips of the tongue, or hysterical symptoms, manifests itself as continuity
destroyed, broken, and as the unexpected surging forth of a marked
difference.9
The term “language,” between quotation marks in the text, follows from
the slogan that summarizes the Lacanian conception of the unconscious:
“The unconscious is structured as a language.”10 This analogy with the
Lacanian unconscious situates the basic apparatus at the exact position of
9 Baudry, “Ideological Effects”: 291.

10 Lacan’s contribution with regard to the unconscious was largely conditioned by structural
linguistics. According to Lacanian theory, the unconscious is not a hidden entity: it is a matter
of surface. It does not elude the attention of the subject by hiding in some depths so much as by
being present in a dazzling proximity. The unconscious is structured like a language insofar
as it fits within the category of the signifier which, in language, does not seem to be at the
forefront: the signifier is repressed, the signified played up. To illustrate this proximity of the
signifier, Lacan takes his example from The Purloined Letter, a letter concealed all the better by
its thief as it is left in plain view. The example leads Lacan to refer to Heidegger and conclude
that nothing hides more than what unveils. In other words, the subject is built on not knowing
what constitutes it. Lacan interestingly translates the Freudian notion of “unconscious” (das
Unbewusst) as “une-bévue” [“a blunder”], a play on the signifier that initially seems to take place
to the detriment of meaning. Yet “une-bévue,” insisting as it does on the unpredictable aspect of
the slip of the tongue (as of a blunder), stresses the unconscious only in that it is manifest. Against
the “Romantic” conception of the unconscious, Lacan conceptualizes a depthless unconscious,
according to Serge Cottet. See Serge Cottet, “Je pense où je ne suis pas, je suis où je ne pense
pas,” Lacan (Paris: Bordas, 1987) 13.
the signifier insofar as, in Lacanian theory, the latter is the vector of the
unconscious on the surface of language. Far from marginal, this analogy
between the basic apparatus and the unconscious comes at the close of
Baudry’s article. After identifying the appearance of the instrument “in flesh
and blood” in film with the “return of the repressed,” Baudry concludes that
“to this unconscious would be attached the mode of production of film, the
process of work in its multiple determinations […].”11
In fact, the basic apparatus – whose primary function was to extend
the reflection opened by Cinéthique and once focused on the camera
alone to include cinematographic technique as a whole – squares with the
category of the signifier under the effect of the analogy with the Lacanian
unconscious. Namely, the “basic apparatus” interests Baudry only from
the angle of its visible manifestations within the finished product. This
reduction of technique to the Lacanian concept of signifier has theoretical
implications, one of which being that the distinction previously established
between apparatus and basic apparatus loses its relevance. Indeed, as the
article progresses, the moment of projection (apparatus) completely rules
out the genesis of the film (basic apparatus). Baudry was in fact to discard
the second notion and stick to the apparatus in the article he later published
in Communications.12
Suture, The Zero Signifier
In 1969, one year prior to Baudry’s article, Jean-Pierre Oudart imported

the concept of suture from psychoanalytic theory into the field of film
studies.13 This concept is akin to that of apparatus in that it posits the
spectator as the result of a subjection produced by representation and
11 Baudry, “Ideological Effects”: 296.

12 Before doing away with the notion of basic apparatus, Baudry redefined it as follows: “In a
general way, we distinguish the basic cinematographic apparatus, which concerns the ensemble
of the equipment and operations necessary to the production of a film and its projection, from
the apparatus, discussed in this article, which solely concerns projection and which includes
the subject to whom the projection is addressed.” See Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus:
Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema” [1975], in Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986) 317.
13 The article was published in two parts in Cahiers du cinéma 211 (first part) and 212 (second
part), April and May 1969. An English translation of the two parts appeared as “Cinema and
Suture” in Cahiers du cinéma 1969-1972. The Politics of Representation, ed. Nick Browne (Cam-
bridge: Harvard U.P., 1989) 45-57.
184 Omar Hachemi
its techniques. Oudart’s article, by relating to Jacques-Alain Miller’s text

(also titled “Suture”),14 refers to the Lacanian axiom of the subject spelled
out in Écrits (1966): “a signifier is what represents the subject to another
signifier.”15 For Oudart the signifier is fundamentally plural, an element in
a series that involves several, and whose subject constitutes the central link
as a result of suture. At the center of representation, the subject occupies the
position of an empty square according to which signifiers are distributed
and configured. This “place of the absent” is reified in cinema by what
Oudart calls “the fourth side”: with the field limited by framing – the scenic
space of cinema – identified with a cube, the screen facing the spectator
becomes a (fourth) side.16 The other side of framing and depth of field is the
place of the spectator whose gaze is inscribed negatively, through this sym-
metry, at the center of representation. As a consequence, the subject is none
other than the lack inscribed in representation, “the place of the absent.” For
Oudart this lack is the condition of possibility for classical representation,
whose construction rests on a solar conception of the subject: “At a certain
moment of the reading all the objects of the filmic field combine together
to form the signifier of its absence.”17 Suture is this articulation between
images, between shots, in that it operates through the subject, an empty
square needed for meaning to circulate. It is accordingly the adaptation for
cinema of the Lacanian logic of the subject: the subject exists only in the
suture it performs between signifiers.
“Cinema and Suture” may be traced back to Francastel’s work on monocu-
lar perspective as much as to Foucault’s analysis of Velasquez’s painting
Las Meninas or Lacan’s own analysis of Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Both
14 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signif ier)” [1966], Screen 18
(1977-1978).
15 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits. The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York:
Norton & Company, 2005) 694. This axiom is at the root of the theory of “intersignifierness”
[“intersignifiance”], which replaces the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity.
16 Oudart, “Cinema and Suture” 46. It seems as though this topology of the cube was borrowed
from Pierre Francastel, who used a similar schematization to evoke painting founded on the
perspectival code of the Renaissance: “Founded on a thoughtful knowledge of Euclid’s laws – the
codification of the rules for ‘normal’ operating vision in humankind – the method, from that
point on, had images inscribed within Alberti’s window as within a cube open on one side. The
laws of physics and optics of our world govern within this representational cube, this kind of
miniature world.” See Pierre Francastel, Peinture et société (Lyons: Audin, 1951) 40. As to Panofsky,
he put forward the concept of “space box” (Raumkasten) to refer to the phenomenon by which the
materiality of the painting became secondary by comparison with its representation of volume.
See Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as a Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (Cambridge:
Zone Books, 1996) 39.
17 Oudart, “Cinema and Suture”: 46.
Foucault and Lacan problematize the issue of the spectator as defined in

relation to pictorial representation. Lacan shows that the anamorphosis of
the skull situated at the feet of the ambassadors, once perceived from the
angle out of which it is set out, exposes the artifice specific to perspective,
reflecting “the subject as annihilated”18 to the looking subject. The sudden
appearance of the skull, or signifier (phallus), betrays the failure of represen-
tation as a trap: “[…] we are literally called into the picture, and represented
here as caught.”19 Lacan concludes that any painting constitutes “a trap for
the gaze,”20 as “the subject […] is caught, manipulated, captured in the field
of vision.”21 As for anamorphosis, it reveals the artifice. The anamorphosis
of the skull, catching as it does the oblique gaze, also liberates it from the
trap instituted by frontal perspective. For his part, Foucault shows that the
mirror play at the center of Velasquez’s painting organizes representation
around an inaccessible place – outside the painting but “prescribed by all
the lines of its composition.”22 The representation as a whole presumably
converges towards the point where the gaze of the spectator, that of the
painter and that of the model (the sovereigns) overlap:
These three “observing” functions come together in a point exterior to

the picture: that is, an ideal point in relation to what is represented, but
a perfectly real one too, since it is also the starting-point that makes the
representation possible.23
Foucault considers Las Meninas as “the representation […] of Classical

representation”: the staging of pictorial gesture in response to the posture
of the model. With this specular method, the canvas imperiously indicates
the “essential void” that constitutes it, “the necessary disappearance of
that which is its foundation.” This void is none other than the place of the
18 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998) 88. The text was established on the basis of the
seminar of February 26, 1964.
19 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts 92.
22 Michel Foucault, “Las Meninas” [1966], in The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human
Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002) 15. On what this analysis of Las Meninas owes to Panofsky’s
theory, see Lucien Vinciguerra, “Comment inverser exactement les Ménines: Michel Foucault
et la peinture à la fin des années 1960, des formes symboliques aux dispositifs,” in Le Moment
philosophique des années 1960 en France, ed. Patrice Maniglier (Paris: PUF, 2011).
23 Foucault, “Las Meninas” 16.
186 Omar Hachemi
subject, the opening of the painting to “what is intimately foreign to it.”24

Foucault’s analysis, like Lacan’s, integrates the subject in the painting in
the negative form of a blind spot that makes representation possible. This
conception is central to Oudart’s article.25
“Cinema and Suture” thus appears to be part of this first moment in
apparatus theory insofar as it configures critical thought around monocular
perspective, on the one hand, and the concept of the signifier, on the other.
Rereading Baudry’s text in the continuity of “Cinema and Suture” proves
all the more worthwhile as it – unsuccessfully – attempts to move away
from it, precisely, by rejecting the notion of the signifier. Baudry’s refusal
of the concept comes after his project of systemizing technique (hence the
notion of basic apparatus). However, the theoretical approach contradicts
the project immediately after it has been formulated: since technique is
apprehended only from the angle of the spectator, Baudry’s position does in
fact come close to Oudart’s symptom-based approach. With one difference:
in “Cinema and Suture,” because of its autonomy from the Althusserian
concept of ideology, the concept of signifier involves a dynamic function
which Baudry was not to maintain.26
Photology: The Hegemony of the Eye
In an article co-authored with Oudart, “Travail, lecture, jouissance,” Serge

Daney deals with “the ideology of the visible” which dominates Western
culture and its metaphysical tradition. In his view, the ideological function
of cinematographic technique may be traced back to a period preceding
24 Foucault, “Las Meninas” 17-18.

25 In his text on Structuralism, Gilles Deleuze insists on the central part played by the “empty
square,” choosing the example of Foucault’s commentary on Las Meninas and Miller’s “Suture”
to illustrate the decisive function of this empty square (which he also calls object=x) in the
structural approach. This “eminently symbolic” object, of which Deleuze writes that it is “missing
from its place,” “always displaced in relation to itself,” is what gives the structure its openness.
Gilles Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” [1967], trans. Melissa McMahon and
Charles J. Stivale, in Charles J. Stivale, The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari. Intersections
and Animations (New York: The Guilford Press, 1998) 251-82.
26 In an article titled “L’Effet de réel,” in the continuity of the premises of “Cinema and Suture,”
Oudart brings up Foucault’s analysis of Las Meninas, making the main assumptions of the text
his own. Oudart notably puts forward the notion of scenic apparatus to mark the implication of
the spectator in the space of representation. See Jean-Pierre Oudart, “The Reality Effect” [1971],
trans. Annwyl Williams, in Cahiers du cinéma 1969-1972. The Politics of Representation, ed. Nick
Browne (Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1989) 189-202.
the perspective of the Quattrocento, in the “hegemony of the eye” that

characterizes Western culture, a culture which places “quite [a] blind trust
in the visible.”27 Daney uses the term “photology” in reference to Derrida
to designate the supremacy of the visible of which cinema is a part. Indeed,
cinema is a matter of gaze: “I see, therefore I am aware” may well be the
very logic of cinema, according to Daney, who adds that “the logic of sight
and oversight” may come to an end that can already be “discern[ed].” The
end in question may be disclosed by the advertising film, which makes the
equation “real = visible” its ultimate slogan.28
If Daney, referring to Derrida’s article “Force and Signification,” evokes
the “photology” that dominates Western metaphysics and criticizes the role
played by cinema in this idealism, he leaves aside the fact that this argu-
ment, in Derrida’s article, is part of a critique addressed at Structuralism.29
For Derrida, the structural method proceeds from a synchronic reduction of
the studied object – a reduction of “force” to “form” which presupposes a tele-
ological approach. Dealing with cinema, Daney reclaims Derrida’s argument
of photology against Structuralism: “The cinema is therefore connected to
the Western metaphysical tradition, a tradition of seeing and sight for which
it fulfills the photological vocation.”30 Daney’s position is very close to those
of Cinéthique in this instance: through its photological vocation, cinema
neutralizes duration and force (work, film genesis) to privilege “the illusion
of simultaneity and form” (the film as finished product) – this inasmuch as
“light effaces its traces; invisible itself, it renders visible.”31
In the first part of his series of articles “Technique and Ideology,”32 Jean-
Louis Comolli points out – on the argument of photology advanced by Daney
27 Serge Daney and Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Work, Reading, Pleasure” [1970], trans. Diana Matias,
in Cahiers du cinéma 1969-1972. The Politics of Representation, ed. Nick Browne (Cambridge:
Harvard U.P., 1989) 116. The first part, “On Salador,” on which I concentrate here, is by Serge
Daney.
28 Daney and Oudart, “Work, Reading, Pleasure”: 116, 117.
29 On photology, see Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification” 27. The article as a whole turns
on Jean Rousset’s text “Form and Signification,” which Derrida considers a perfect example of
the Structuralism he sets about to critique.
30 Daney and Oudart, “Work, Reading, Pleasure”: 116.
31 This quotation, unreferenced in Daney’s text, comes from Maurice Blanchot’s Infinite
Conversation [1969]: “Light effaces its traces: invisible, it renders visible; it guarantees direct
knowledge and ensures full presence, all the while holding itself back in that which is indirect
and suppressing itself as presence.” Maurice Blanchot, Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson
(Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 163.
32 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field,” parts 1
and 2 [1971], trans. Diana Matias, in Cahiers du cinéma 1969-1972. The Politics of Representation,
ed. Nick Browne (Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1989) 213-47.
188 Omar Hachemi
on cinema – the paradox that undermines all theories founded on the

equivalence between technique and ideology, namely, that these theories
are based on modalities which they condemn. In that sense, Daney’s article
is symptomatic of the “theoretical paradox” already at work in Cinéthique,
and the ideology of the visible is repeated by the gesture that claims to
deconstruct it:
[…] the reduction of the hidden part of technique to its visible part carries
the risk of reasserting the domination of the visible, i.e. the ideology of
the visible (and what it implies: the masking and effacement of work).33
Concentrating on the “photology” that dominates cinema, Daney thus ends

up screening all the better the ideology of the visible that undermines film
theory. In other words, photology does not only concern film production
and its techniques: it also dominates the theory that reduces the hidden part
of cinema to what is visible of it. The photology diagnosed about cinema
lies at the center of the theoretical tool that makes the diagnosis possible
in the first place.
This first part of my analysis, devoted to Baudry, calls for a few observa-
tions. First, the “photology” that hovers over the theory of the apparatus is
also a symptom of its unspoken dependence on the concept of the signifier
which – after a deep transformation – has been exported towards psychoa-
nalysis and cinema. Starting from this assessment, I looked for antecedents,
one of which was “Cinema and Suture,” with its massive (and explicit) reli-
ance on this concept. By contrast, save for a few passing allusions, it turned
out that the notion of signifier was cleverly circumvented at Cinéthique.34
Still, it seemed to me that, while the word was being avoided, the concept
remained rather active: the basic apparatus, endorsing as it did the struc-
tural category of the signifier, seemed a perfect instance of the hegemony
of the “Structuralist” paradigm in the early 1970s. The conclusion of these
observations may be stated as follows: the “theoretical paradox” noted by
Comolli at the center of the technique/ideology equivalence resulted from
the attempt to cut loose from concepts of signifier and structure while
remaining within the field of their conceptual system. The invention of
33 Comolli, “Technique and Ideology”: 218.

34 Baudry, criticizing the absence of a study devoted to the analysis of ideological determina-
tions of cinematographic technique, notes the exclusive interest of theory in the “field of the
signified.” In this passage, the basic apparatus, opposed to the “field of the signified,” is clearly
identified with the signifier. See Baudry, “Ideological Effects”: 287.
the new lexicon, then, would have had as its aim to hide a conceptual lack
with regard to cinematographic technique, since the lack in question could
not seem to be filled.
I could go even further and venture that the “theoretical paradox” pointed
out by Comolli at the center of the theory of the apparatus was identical to
that noted by Derrida in his “Force and Signification,” with one difference:
Derrida puts the paradox down to the structural method, whereas Comolli
remains more cautious on that account. Derrida spells out the paradox as
follows:
[…] light is menaced from within by that which also metaphysically

menaces every structuralism: the possibility of concealing meaning
through the very act of uncovering it. To comprehend the structure of a
becoming, the form of a force, is to lose meaning by finding it.35
The equation set down by Comolli – which, referring to Derrida’s text,

identified form to the finished product (the film) and force to the produc-
tion process (work, technique) – has as its result that film theory becomes
captive to the paradox uncovered by Derrida within Structuralism. Indeed,
doesn’t film theory try to understand force in relation to form, the genesis
of the film out of the structure of the finished product? Baudry is accord-
ingly confronted with a dizzying paradox when, referring to Vertov, he
emphasizes the appearance of the camera “in flesh and blood”36 within the
film. That is, the exposure of the camera, far from producing the expected
demystifying effect, conceals the camera actually filming all the better
(meaning is concealed “through the very act of uncovering it”). Rather
than breaking the illusion of reality, the method further amplifies it.37
From Symptomal Reading to Archaeological Approach
When Comolli points out “the reduction of the hidden part of technique
to its visible part”38 central to the theory developed by Cinéthique, he puts
35 Derrida, “Force and Signification” 26.

36 Baudry, “Ideological Effects” 296.
37 Incidentally, “Cinema and Suture,” which fully acknowledges the concept of signifier, openly
deals with this paradox considered as the blind spot, the empty core any representation needs.
38 Comolli, “Technique and Ideology” 218.
190 Omar Hachemi
his finger on the teleology inherent in that approach.39 This criticism of

teleology becomes more pronounced in the second part of “Technique and
Ideology,” when Comolli’s historiographic thought touches on theoretical
discourses on deep focus. He then de-centers the argument developed by
Cinéthique on the Quattrocento perspective, noting that, far from being
essentially cinematographic, this perspectivist code has to do with deep
focus, and therefore the choice of lenses. Comolli goes in detail over the
technical setting that allows an optimal reproduction of the perspectivist
code of the Renaissance (wide angle, small diaphragm aperture) and dwells
on the normative function of any theory (notably Marcelin Pleynet’s) that
tends to essentialize one use and exclude all others. Indeed, in the theory
of Cinéthique, a break in the perspectivist code – inasmuch as it has the
effect of also breaking the illusion of reality and reminding spectators of
their condition – is apprehended as a slip revealing the materialist es-
sence of cinema. Once again, the parallel with “Force and Signification”
is obvious. According to Derrida, a rigorous structural method ought “to
refuse to relegate everything that is not comprehensible as an ideal type to
the status of aberrational accident.”40 Even though Cinéthique considered
these accidents to be as many breaks in the cinematographic telos, as many
salutary blunders shattering the ideological screen of technique, they
were still taken to be breaks in a structuring process, as far as method was
concerned. Baudry thus mentions the unfulfilled continuity that defines
the return of the repressed (the disclosure of the equipment). For Comolli
as for Derrida, effects of rupture thwarting the structure are still part of
another structuring process which also calls for analysis: “The pathological
itself is not the simple absence of structure. It is organized.”41 Similarly,
39 The critique of teleology is central to Derrida’s text: “Whether biology, linguistics, or

literature is in question, how can an organized totality be perceived without reference to its
end, or without presuming to know its end, at least?” See Derrida, “Force and Signification”
30. Likewise, according to Comolli, “cinema’s historical scene” is apprehended “from its scene
in the present.” See Jean-Louis Comolli, “Technique and Ideology,” parts 3 and 4, in Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986) 421-43, 426.
40 Derrida, “Force and Signification” 26.
41 Derrida, “Force and Signification” 26. This argument is at the center of Derrida’s critique of
Foucault’s thesis on madness. Derrida reproaches Foucault with relegating madness – considered
as “silence,” “absence of a work” – outside any structuring process. See “Cogito and the History
of Madness” [1963], in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978). Foucault answered
Derrida’s critique in a text titled “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” published as an appendix to
the second edition of History of Madness by Gallimard in 1972. See Michel Foucault, History of
Madness (London: Routledge, 2006) 550-74.
on a historiographic level, Comolli refuses to conceptualize the history

of (pre)cinema in a linear manner. He borrows the concept of differential
historical temporality from Althusser, a concept which advocates a perspec-
tive taking multiple determinations into account, against “the model of
a continuous and homogeneous time.”42 “Cinema” thus finds itself at the
crossroads between several histories: optics, photography, mechanics, the
arts of spectacle. The entity “cinema” is disseminated in multiple histories
governed by distinct temporalities; and these temporalities are irreducible
to a homogeneous process aimed at the fulfillment of its own essence. 43
Even though the notion of apparatus was not systematically repeated
by Comolli, it was used occasionally from the third part of “Technique and
Ideology” on, as well as in other issues of Cahiers du cinéma. The object of
variations, its plurality made possible the deconstruction of the myth of
origins at work in the history of cinema: “technical devices,” for instance,
cannot be dissociated from “signifying practices” of which they are the
causes as well as the effects; and these devices depend on their environ-
ment. 44 Invoked by Bonitzer to stress the importance of “the place as scenic
apparatus” in his analysis of The Ceremony, 45 the notion is otherwise
used to designate the structure of narrative hollowed out in its center by “a
hole eating it away and engendering it.” In this “wedding without a bride,”
the “impressive ceremonial deployment, the fixed gestures of the ritual”46
thus have no other function than referring to the central absence of the
bride – also “the empty square,” “the dummy hand” [“la place du mort”] at
the center of the film, which “articulates a circulation of genealogical and
sexual conjectures.”47 As for Oudart, he uses the notion in his article “L’Effet
42 See Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital [1968], trans. Ben Brewster
(London, New York: Verso, 2009) 110.
43 According to André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, Comolli’s arguments contributed to
establishing the bases for the “new film history” with which they associate themselves. See
André Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, “Le cinéma des premiers temps: un défi à l’histoire du
cinéma?” in Histoire du cinéma, nouvelles approches (Paris: Colloque de Cerisy-Publications de
la Sorbonne, 1989) 53.
44 Jean-Louis Comolli, “Technique and Ideology,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology 429, 425.
45 Nagisa Ōshima, The Ceremony (Japan, 1971).
46 Pascal Bonitzer, “A propos de ‘La Cérémonie,’ ” Cahiers du cinéma 231 (Aug.-Sept. 1971): 6-7.
47 Bonitzer, “A propos de ‘La Cérémonie’ ”: 11. Deleuze emphasizes the central function of
this “empty square” in structuralism: “Lacan invokes the dummy hand in bridge, and in the
admirable opening pages of The Order of Things, where he describes a painting by Velasquez,
Foucault invokes the place of the king, in relation to which everything is displaced and slides,
God, then man, without ever filling it. No structuralism is possible without this degree zero.” See
Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” 275. Lacan does indeed refer to the “dummy
hand” in bridge, but in a very allusive manner. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits 492-3.
192 Omar Hachemi
de réel” as well as in the series titled “Notes for a theory of representation”48

which continues it. The notion of apparatus, prompting a reflection on
space, allows Oudart to broach the question of representation through the
topology of the stage, at the intersection of theater, painting and cinema.
Incidentally, in this as in previous cases, the notion is not the object of any
definition: it makes sense immanently, according to its use.
The “Dispositif”: A Concept Missing from Its Place?
If the current use of the notion of “dispositif,”49 in its multiple variations,

owes anything to Baudry’s theory, it may be primarily the extent to which
the latter revealed the conceptual blur involved in the notion, as soon as
it was imported in the field of cinema. The moment of the “dispositif” was
the place of an intense debate where heterogeneous types of knowledge
met around a common issue. In Baudry, this issue resonates in the form of
a paradox revealing the absence of a suitable theoretical tool for a genuine
materialist approach to cinema. In short, the project of conceptualization
aimed at the cinematographic technique did not only make use of the – then
new – notion of apparatus, but also – in response to the problems brought
up by the notion – a new historiographic perspective capable of thinking
about technique from the angle of its genesis.
The notion of apparatus was initially put forward by Baudry to refer to
technique and its ideological effects on the spectator. It then came with
the notion of basic apparatus which, according to his description, involved
film technique as a whole and therefore encompassed the apparatus –
which designated only the moment of projection and its arrangement.
The organization of these two notions seems functional, except that the
psychoanalytic reference causes a gradual reversal to occur in the text:
cinematographic technique, insofar as it is comparable to the unconscious,
interests Baudry only from the standpoint of its visible manifestations in the
film. And these manifestations are assumed to produce the same effect as
the return of the repressed in the psychoanalytic cure… Eventually, since
technique is apprehended only from the limited angle of the spectator,
48 Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Notes for a Theory of Representation” [1971], trans. Annwyl Williams,
in Cahiers du cinéma 1969-1972. The Politics of Representation, ed. Nick Browne (Cambridge:
Harvard U.P., 1989) 203-12.
49 Translator’s note: this current use is translated as “dispositive” in this volume. See the
“Editors’ and translator’s note.”
the apparatus supplants the basic apparatus and paradoxically ends up

including what was to include it.
The paradox was to be cleared up only later through a historiographic
reflection led by Comolli, which opened onto a conception of technique
immanent to its genesis, that is, irreducible to its visible traces within the
film. The notion of signifier lends itself well to psychoanalytic praxis – the
unconscious of the psychoanalyzed being inseparable from the “fluctuating”
attention of the psychoanalyst, attuned to “blunders” appearing on the
surface of language (leading Lacan to state that the unconscious did not
exist outside the cure). Yet cinema itself undeniably exists independently
from the spectator’s gaze. This existence is none other than the genesis
of the film, precisely that which Comolli’s perspective incorporates. In
fact, de-centering film studies is necessary, whether the work to be done
is a rigorous reflection on technique and work ahead of the film or the
development of “a materialist history of film.”50 The teleological perspective
that reduces force to form and sees the essence of cinema in the film proves
untenable. Its deconstruction by Comolli has as its result two postulates, one
on the scale of history, the other on the scale of the film. First, film history
may not be reduced to the films punctuating it; second, film production
(technique and its use) may not be apprehended from the sole standpoint
of the completed film.
All in all, in the early 1970s, the “dispositif” was singularly missing from
its place. Though the word was advanced by Baudry as part of a tangled
logic, the concept came into being only as Comolli cleared up the paradox
that made it inconsistent. However, once the concept was freed from the
contradictions that weakened it, it was the word that was missing… Indeed,
though frequently used issue after issue in Cahiers du cinéma, the notion of
“dispositif” does not come with a definition: its meaning is subordinated
to its use.
50 Comolli, “Technique and Ideology”: 422.

The “Dispositive Effect” in Film
Narrative
Philippe Ortel
Like the idea of structure, the notion of the “dispositif” does not pertain to a
single level of analysis: it applies to specific objects, such as the mechanism
of a watch, but also to large ensembles, as in Foucault’s work, where it came
to substitute for the episteme in the late 1970s. By contrast to the episteme,
focused too narrowly on the utterances produced by a society, Foucault’s
dispositif refers more widely to the totality of discourses, social practices,
technical inventions, architectural creations instituting, at a given time, the
partition between the true and the false in the domain of knowledge, the
legitimate and the illegitimate in the sphere of power.1 There now seems to
be general agreement on the term “arrangement,” used liberally to describe
“dispositifs,” insofar as it conveys both their constitutive heterogeneity
and their power of organization.2 For Bernard Vouilloux, for instance, a
“dispositif” is an “arrangement that actualizes and integrates elements with
an objective in sight,”3 which may apply to an administrative measure,
a military strategy, or a pedagogical practice; but also in a very different
context, as far as Foucault’s model is concerned, since the heterogeneous fac-
tors instituting knowledges and powers (this would be the arrangement) are
shot through by individual or collective, conscious or unconscious strategies
leading to the promotion of enunciable discourses and legitimized powers.
1 On this definition of the dispositif, see the interview given by Foucault to periodical Ornicar
in 1977, “Le jeu de Michel Foucault,” translated in English as “The Confession of the Flesh”
and published in Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon
(Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980). Foucault developed the notion of the dispositif starting
with Discipline and Punish (1975), then with the first part of The History of Sexuality (1976). On
the subject, see Bernard Vouilloux, “La critique des dispositifs,” in Discours, image, dispositif,
ed. Philippe Ortel (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008) 16-31, as well as Alain Brossat’s clarification, “La
notion de dispositif chez Michel Foucault,” in Miroirs, appareils et autres dispositifs, ed. Soko
Phay-Vakalis (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008) 199-207. Brossat insists on the two scales of the dispositif
in Foucault’s thought, the network and the identified mechanism that enters this network (“large
dispositifs entail increasing the effect of a whole series of specific micro-dispositifs,” 205). For
example, social security could be considered as a part within a larger “security dispositif.”
2 See issue 25 of periodical Hermès (1999), which has come to serve as a point of reference, “Le
dispositif entre usage et concept,” ed. Geneviève Jacquinot-Delaunay and Laurence Monnoyer.
3 Vouilloux, “La critique des dispositifs”: 24.
196 Philippe Ortel
When, as part of more limited “dispositifs,” a technical arrangement – or

any reality endowed with the same function4 – regulates relations between
subjects,5 two other dimensions come into play: a pragmatic dimension,
obvious in the case of communication tools since they mediate our ex-
changes, but also a symbolic dimension, in the current sense of “values,” for a
“dispositif” would hold no meaning or legitimacy without the semantic and
axiological values pervading it. The movie theater considered as a media
pragmatically regulates the relation of filmmakers to their audience and
serves as a vehicle for “some” symbolic content insofar as a film generally
produces a direct or indirect discourse on the world: if it did not, the public
would likely spurn it sooner than later. Likewise, taken as a social ritual,
the same show regulates the relation of the crowd with itself and marks
– between other values immanent in the invention – the emergence of a
democratic mass culture whose constitution was noted by Louis Delluc
as early as 1920: “Cinema is more theatrical than theater insofar as it talks
to the whole world. Its audience is made up of the crowd, of all crowds.”6
These three components – technical (which will be referred to as I),
pragmatic (II), and symbolic (III) – come up in a number of disciplines,
but in a sometimes partial or implicit manner. To turn them into a unified
model may allow us to better analyze certain social practices and the way
representation functions, as we will see. Regarding cinema, analyses by
Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz have shown in different words to
what extent the material conditions for viewing a film (I) regulated the way
in which the film’s message was received (II) and deciphered (III). Metz
notably insisted on the fact that secondary processes in the understand-
ing of film originated in a dreaming state, itself the result of the relative
immobility of spectators and their immersion in darkness.7 On a more
limited scale, studies from the same period also showed how the optics of
the camera (I) reproduced the classical perspective, as in photography, and
through it a certain relation of the subject to the world characterized by a
4 To give the model some plasticity, I am expanding it here to include any agency with a
visible conditioning power.
5 On this interaction, see Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009).
6 Louis Delluc, “La foule au cinéma” (1920), in Le Cinéma. Naissance d’un art, texts selected
by Daniel Banda and José Moure (Paris: Flammarion, 2008) 506.
7 For the fourth part of The Imaginary Signifier (1977), he assigns himself the task of analyzing
the “primary operations floating on the surface of the ‘secondarised’ chain of filmic discourse.”
Christian Metz, “Film and Dream: Degrees of Secondarisation,” The Imaginary Signifier. Psy-
choanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986) 125.
central, omnipotent position (II) pervaded by a genuine ideological system

(III). For Baudry the classical perspective, by making spectators the sole
visual origin of the visible world, reinforced them in their prerogatives as
subjects,8 and with no de-centering to speak of, except in the case of radi-
cal aesthetic choices by a few filmmakers looking to prevent the primary
identification of the eye to the camera. These thoughts have since been
reformulated and further examined in publications such as the issue of
Cahier Louis Lumière on “Les Dispositifs,” which takes into account new
technologies around cinema, or the periodical Cinémas in an issue devoted
to early cinema.9
It may be interesting, however, to return to the way in which the notion
has been applied to the fictional form and content of the films themselves,
that is, to their poetics. Some compositional modes, such as the choral
form, which are meeting with success at the moment (41 feature films
were listed in this category on the site Allociné.com as of March 2009) or,
on a more thematic level, films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window
(1954) or Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal (2004), show that some works
put forward formal or material arrangements, with their action depending
on these.10 Far from being mere settings, places like windows or airports,
which regulate human activities, may impose their own logic on the
narrative – to the point of thwarting traditional narrative processes,
sometimes completely. Besides, the fact that many filmmakers (Victor
Erice, Abbas Kiarostami, Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda…) indulge in the
practice of art installations in parallel to their activity in cinema shows
well enough the attraction which the “dispositif” as a form exerts on them.
Consequently, this form may not be limited to the technological conditions
of production and reception of films alone, since it plays a part in their
very development. I will therefore try and fashion a common model for all
these phenomena, proposing an aesthetic continuation of the apparatus
theory of the 1970s.
8 Jean-Louis Baudry, L’Effet-cinéma (Paris: Editions Albatros, 1978). For a synthesis of what
was sometimes called “apparatus theory” in the 1970s, see Guido Kirsten’s thorough analysis
“Genèse d’un concept et ses avatars. La naissance de la théorie du dispositif cinématographique,”
Cahier Louis Lumière 4, “Les dispositifs” (July 2007): 8-16.
9 “Dispositif(s) du cinéma (des premiers temps)” Cinémas 14.1 (Fall 2003).
10 On this type of approach, see for instance François Albera, “La position du voyeur couché:
Hitchcock avec Klossowski,” Cinémathèque 13 (Spring 1998): 91-100; and Maria Tortajada,
“Dispositifs de vision et modèles de pouvoir: ‘Devant la loi’ de F. Kafka,” Revue européenne des
sciences sociales 44.133 (2006): 37-52.
198 Philippe Ortel
Tensions in Representation
Narrative theories are still strongly marked by the linguistic model, at least in
France. Like discourse, which unfolds in a linear manner, carefully articulat-
ing the befores and the afters (“First…”, “then…”), causes and effects (but also
the means and the end, the conditions and their result, and so on), narrative
is approached from the standpoint of the logical and chronological model of
argumentation. This holds all the more true as a novel or a film often pro-
duces a discourse on the world through the indirect path of fiction. Without
denying the sway of the logical-discursive process (or its deconstruction),
the point in this instance is to de-center our point of view on representation,
narrative or not, examining the share of the dispositive in it prior to teasing
out any implicit discourse. This amounts to locating our three components –
technical, pragmatic and symbolic – on multiple levels in the representation
and examining how they are arranged together. Whereas the discursive
approach treats the film as a succession producing semantic and axiological
values, the “dispositive approach” ties up this symbolic level with the two
others and looks at the interplay occasionally appearing between the three.
The choral form provides a good example of poetic dispositive and, as I
have pointed out previously, a rather successful one at the moment. Techni-
cally, it is a type of composition (I) – in this particular case, an arrangement
of filmed traces fitted into one another at the editing stage. Like any enun-
ciation, this type of composition regulates the relations between author and
spectators, since the latter often perceive the expressive intention (II) that
also conveys values (III), which change from an artist, a film or a period to
another, but still result from this very choral form. Needless to say, for the
effect to take place the process should evidently not be a way to narrate
like any other. For the choral form to produce a marked dispositive effect,
a tension should occur between this scriptural arrangement (I) and the
two other levels in the dispositive of representation: on the pragmatic level,
the traditional narrative pact according to which the story should be told
to the spectator in a chronological and logical order; and, on the symbolic
level, the fact that the film should mark positively or negatively the events
narrated. Indeed, my hypothesis is that a dispositive becomes banal in the
absence of an internal disturbance, sometimes even ceasing to be perceived
as a dispositive because, despite its own form, it only conveys fictional
contents. While many films draw average effects from the interdependence
of these three levels, others found this effect on a crisis and have a stronger
impact on spectators. This is the case of Gus Van Sant’s 2003 Elephant,
which deals with the 1999 Columbine high school killing. More forcefully
than in other films, the choral form impedes the sequence of events as
spectators expect them to be represented, since the construction keeps
returning to the hours preceding the slaughter rather than furthering the
action. It is not until the last fifteen minutes (out of a total of 75 minutes)
that the tragedy takes place before our eyes. Given the fact that the work
is inspired from a tragic news story generally known by the audience, the
tension between the choral composition and the spectators’ expectation
proves all the more intense. A discrepancy then arises between the writing
(I) and the set of values (III) the film is supposed to convey: filming from
behind the high school students who are to be subjected to the violence of
their peers, juxtaposing the sequences devoted to each of their movements
in the high school or nearby, the filmmaker imposes a horizontal perception
of the facts which not only suppresses causal relations between sequences
(since the drift towards the tragedy occurs out of the parallel schedules of
the students), but also has the effect of giving victims and killers the same
status, as all are filmed in the same way. This horizontality produces a form
of symbolic depression, underscored by other components of the film, such
as the choice of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on the soundtrack. Performed
by one of the two killers, its insistent recurrence conjures up the nocturnal
side of a world that may have been thought of as without shadows or, on a
fictional level, the absence of responsible or understanding adults capable
of standing for a just social order.
It is tempting, as a consequence, to distinguish between two types of
narrative: the ‘narrativized’ plot, dominated by the traditional logical
and discursive order, and the plot ‘with dispositive’, in which the techni-
cal, pragmatic and symbolic components of representation are no longer
welded to one another but separate, as though laid flat, no matter the level
of analysis considered. Still, insofar as the dispositive effect may operate
at any time, including in the most classically narrative film, it would make
more sense, strictly speaking, to move the slide and place it within the
narrative itself, thus distinguishing two different narrative modes: transitive
narration, which is subject to the traditional logical and discursive order,
and intransitive narration, which occurs any time an arrangement disturbs
a sequence and brings succession back within the domain of contiguity.
The Poetics of Dispositives
Accordingly, there is no such thing as ‘plots that narrate’, on the one hand,
and plots with dispositives on the other (with choral films, for instance).
200 Philippe Ortel
Rather, there exists a tendency towards dispositives within any narrative,

filmic or literary, more or less marked depending on the author, the aesthetic,
or the period considered, and liable to affect all levels. This does not mean,
however, that differences in the ways these two narrative modes operate
should be underestimated. When a filmmaker uses the dispositive effect as
a narrative principle, she or he makes the analytical categories developed by
classic narratology since the 1960s almost ineffective: indeed, these are best
suited for transitive narration founded on the direct succession of befores
and afters, causes and effects. The wanderings of teenagers in the high
school of Elephant do not concur to build any genuine plot, for example.
No real helper or opponent from the classical actantial model are to be
found in the film; no necessary stages for initiatory purposes either, with an
acquisition of competence, a qualifying test, a decisive test and a glorifying
test; finally, it is difficult to speak of the choral form in terms of narrative
speed, as though tension simply arose from a gap between story time and
plot time (with its scenes, pauses, ellipses and summaries, to borrow from
Gérard Genette’s categories for literary narratives, partly reused by film
criticism11). The heuristic value of these tools proves limited, for in the film
the trap reality sets for the characters becomes the object of an approach
that is more topological than discursive on the part of the filmmaker: follow-
ing the high school students, the camera goes through the future or potential
places of the killing (library, cafeteria, kitchen, classrooms, hallways),
weaving a web between positions that partly does away with chronology
and logic. The rhizome-like construction of some sequences, in which the
camera abruptly changes course to follow another high school student
met in the hallway, emphasizes this topological method of composition,
creating spatial points of intersection. Occasionally, the intersection is also
temporal: following a student, the camera may show – from his or her point
of view – a scene seen earlier in the film by the protagonists she or he runs
into, and who were then the main focus. The de-centering thus produced is
due to the fact that each movement filmed from the back forms a subjective
chronological line, distinct from the time lived by other characters, even as
the moment they share by crossing one another’s paths is really the same.
11 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1983) 86-112. These categories were devised for literary texts and deal with the relations between
the way of narrating (the plot) and the story to tell. They may still be useful in cinema, except
precisely when the plot is no longer the central element: do the comings and goings of the high
school students constitute pauses or scenes with respect to the story to be told? Put in these
terms, the question is not truly relevant when the transitive narrative ceases to be the dominant
norm.
In this specific case, the disjunction occurs within time itself, between
two ways of living the same moment, as if teenagers circulated in parallel
worlds that could connect only objectively. The dispositive effect then
issues from the caesura introduced at the very heart of temporality, since
this temporality, previously unique, linear and unified, breaks down into
multiple, simultaneous, and juxtaposed temporalities.12
Not only does the topological composition of the film keep taking the
plot back to its starting point, but the motivations prompting the characters
to act remain undetermined, whereas in a classical narrative the causal
sequence of actions calls for psychological or sociological explanations as
guarantees for plausibility. Besides the labyrinth,13 a well-known topological
model structures Elephant: the map. Taking us from one point to another,
reducing the story to a series of short trips leading each character from a
random moment of his or her life to the fateful moment, the filmmaker
draws up the map of a news story based on the dual dimension of space and
time. The DVD of the film explicitly refers to this, providing the map of the
high school and the paths taken by the students. Yet this cartography hap-
pens to draw its power of fascination from the fact that, reducing the story
to a network of spatial, but also temporal points, it shows the events without
giving us any insight in the motivations of the protagonists of the tragedy.
In so doing, it stresses – among other things – the unfathomable nature of
chance, since the distribution of students between victims and survivors
hangs on whether or not their paths cross the murderers’. Crossroads and
intersections circumscribe this incomprehensibility 14 without explaining
12 Identifying our three agencies – technical, pragmatic and symbolic – whenever a caesura
is observed may prove rather tedious. In an example such as this one, it is enough to show how
the traditional sequence of time has become a spatialized arrangement of parallel individual
temporalities, and how contiguity increasingly competes with succession.
13 As Alexandre Tylski has shown, also evoking the model of the zoo because of the title, the
bull appearing on John’s t-shirt is a direct allusion to the Minotaur of mythology (John is the
blond teenager who serves as a thread throughout the narrative). See Alexandre Tylski, “Gus
Van Sant et le Minotaure,” Aug. 2003, Cadrage.net, http://www.cadrage.net/films/elephant/
elephant.html [last accessed on Apr. 28, 2011].
14 This is Stéphane Lojkine’s expression. Lojkine writes: “What has to be reduced is the uncir-
cumscribed. The structural stake of this kind of modelization consists in exiting narration as
the basic structure in the novel to consider setting up dispositives whose function is to identify,
to circumscribe the unforeseeable in the real, the rustle of circumstances.” See “Représenter
Julie: le rideau, le voile, l’écran,” in L’Ecran de la représentation. Théorie littéraire. Littérature et
peinture du 16e au 20e siècle, ed. Stéphane Lojkine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001) 37. Stéphane Lojkine
has since developed this point and now talks of a “narrative dispositive.” See http://galatea.
univ-tlse2.fr/pictura/UtpicturaServeur/Dispositifs/SeminaireED2009.php [last accessed on
Apr. 28, 2011].
202 Philippe Ortel
it, which is also one of the functions of dispositives in representation, in

contrast with the order of reasons in the classical transitive narrative.
The transitivity on which the spectators’ expectation rests on a pragmatic
level may be contested in many other ways than the choice of a choral form:
besides the work on editing, the filmmaker may for instance cultivate still
framing, to the point of creating a conflict with the ordinary unfolding
of the story as expected by spectators. In From the Other Side (2003),
Chantal Akerman’s prolonged shots of the wall and the desert separating
Mexico from the United States partition time off. A tension arises between
them and the stories of emigration that, because of the classical narrative
contract, are expected in the form of images or through the testimonies of
individuals met by the filmmaker. This partition formally expresses the
objectively dispositive-related nature of a space that the American govern-
ment has turned into an instrument of control (I) for migration flows (II).15
As was suggested earlier, the pressure exerted on the traditional narrative
pact may also come from the filmic utterance, that is, from objects featured
in the fiction and to which a preponderant place is granted. For this to be
possible, they should be able to force their own logic upon narration, that is,
their own internal dispositive, with our three components. The objects in
question can then carve their own fictional space at the center of the film,
a fictional space which sometimes becomes that of the film as a whole. In
The Terminal, for instance, Spielberg contains the story and its hero in a
place, all of whose possibilities he exploits. The classical transitive narrative
has a place in it, but there are cases in which the dispositive-like logic of the
place, or the object at the heart of the film, impede the traditional narrative
to the point of completely neutralizing it.
So it goes for what is commonly referred to as a ‘scene’: it only takes the
filmmaker to dwell on its internal components to the detriment of the
featured event and its repercussions for spectators to feel deprived of the
information narrative logic had led them to expect. Another logic then takes
precedence, that presiding over the operations of the “stage dispositive,”
as any scene involves an internal space (I), actors and possibly spectators
interacting (II) as well as social or moral values in the name of which the
scene takes place (III). In a scene of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut,
Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack) reveals to Doctor Hartford (Tom Cruise)
that he was present at the very private evening party into which Hartford
15 This dispositive-related dimension may be found in a part of the video installation derived
from her film by the filmmaker and titled “From the other side,” which is also the English title
of the film.
intruded. The ritual of conversation with its glasses of whisky, the stations
near the pool tables which are not to be used, the armchairs in which one
sits down and from which one stands up again, comings and goings: all of
this, mixed with silences, creates prevarication and hesitation which slow
down the flow of confessions and revelations and thwart the expectation
among spectators that Ziegler will get more quickly to what he knows. Far
from revealing emptiness, this expectation forces the audience to grapple
with bodies, a setting, and social etiquette deeply contradictory to the
transgressive episode whose protagonists have such a hard time talking
about, and whose evocation is still necessary for the story to proceed. The
dispositive effect resulting from the conflict between theatrical form and
narrative dynamic also reveals its figurative value here, mimicking as it
does the act of unmasking. Indeed, the social ritual of conversation plays
the same role as the mask Doctor Hartford was asked to remove during the
famous evening when his presence was found out. In both cases a veil is
lifted, so that the hero of the story is unmasked twice: by the brotherhood
on the very evening of his intrusion, by his interlocutor by the pool table.
In this case, the aesthetic value of the dispositive comes from the fact that,
formally figuring the mechanism of unmasking, it implies spectators quite
intimately in the workings of the process. At first a mere theme treated in
the fiction, the mimicked process – unmasking, in this instance – becomes
an experience to be lived by the audience.
What holds true for a social ritual is also valid with a mere prop: instead
of blending into the movement of the narrative, its use may take over and
condition human relationships within the story rather than simply regulate
them – and accordingly disturb, once again, the expectation of spectators
at the upper levels of narrative structure and filmic communication. The
revolving door of the palace in Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924), in front of
which the tragedy of the film plays out, occupies this higher position as the
prop becomes a narrative operator. Sacked from his prestigious position as
a doorman because of his age, the character played by Emil Jannings will
do everything he can to keep his shiny livery and his job at the entrance
of the hotel. The revolving door thus not only conditions his action and his
relations with his environment, but also introduces a kind of stagnation (one
always returns to the door). This stagnation is emblematic of the dead-end
that aging represents for the main protagonist, as well as the more positive
capacity of humankind to resist the ineluctable.
In a film such as Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002), the effect is even more
powerful, since the ten dialogues to which the title refers (a nice enunciative
dispositive) take place in a car (a dispositive in the form of an utterance).
204 Philippe Ortel
The driver, a modern young Iranian woman, has successive conversations

with her son (who criticizes her for divorcing and re-marrying), a friend,
a sanctimonious old woman, a prostitute who claims she enjoys her, and
so forth. In this context, the car is far more than a theme. In 10 on Ten, a
documentary on the film, Kiarostami describes things as follows:
Ten gave me the opportunity to use a fixed camera in a moving space

– like this car, my favorite space. Two very comfortable seats, a very
friendly conversation between two people who do not face each other
but sit side by side and move. This sitting position side by side, it seems
to me, makes the two participants comfortable and creates peaceful
conditions for a conversation to begin. If necessary, they can of course
look at each other. In other words, in this position, we are together. Better
still: each one is at once with himself or herself and with the other… and
with himself or herself again. This type of dialogue allows us not to face
our interlocutor, to look straight ahead. We can look at him or her when
we expect a response or a reaction. Its presence also gives the camera a
particular place. It is absent, fixed and in motion at the same time. This
form of dialogue, as I have just said, presents the advantage of creating
a feeling of safety between two individuals.16
The three components of our def inition appear here in an exemplary

fashion: the physical arrangement of the seats placing the driver and her
passenger side by side (I) fosters dialogue (II) by giving the participants
the sense of safety necessary for the expression of their points of view on
life (III). Put differently, the technical arrangement of the seats regulates
human relations and conveys values. These values, it should be noted, run
through the entire dispositive: indeed, the heroine’s taste for independence
is expressed by the very fact she drives, also extending to her gestures, the
elegance of her clothes (an elegant light headscarf replaces the traditional
chador) and, quite obviously, the words she speaks. Because it serves as a
complete dispositive, the car (like the scene from Eyes Wide Shut on a
smaller scale) imposes its own operation on the film, notably on its narrative
form and its enunciative mode. The filmmaker only has to divide the work
in ten dialogues (Ten), setting aside the linear dimension of the story and
anticipating the habits of spectators better to confound them.
16 Abbas Kiarostami, dir., 10 on ten, 2002, DVD, MK2 éditions, 2004, chapter 5/11, 25’57’’.
Translator’s note: this is the translation of a transcription of Mojdeh Famili’s oral translation
in French.
What is called “poetics of dispositives” here falls into two processes:

first, the poetic choices in the strict sense of the filmmaker’s perspective,
that is, all the means used in the development of the film (editing, mise en
scène, manner of filming), without which the scene or the key prop would
not expend their intrinsic powers as dispositives; second, the powers of
these same objects to serve as dispositives, insofar as filmmakers are able
to identify them and rely on them to play down the arbitrary dimension
of their creation. I would therefore argue in favor of an expanded poetics
here, one that would not be reduced to a stock of pre-established forms (a
film rhetoric), but would result from the combination of a know-how and
pre-cinematographic realities, in a way – forms which, like the filmmaker,
could through their own technical means (I) regulate human interactions
(II) and crystallize values (III).
Between filmic enunciation and the filmed object as the mere theme of
the fiction, an intermediary space thus appears. It is a meta-fictional space,
since it comprises objects or situations capable of generating a sizable share
of the material that constitutes the film, like the high school of Elephant or
the car in Ten. By having the characters engage in talking, the car becomes
an “enunciating” force in the very heart of the fiction, relaying as it does
filmic enunciation by framing, as would a camera, the characters enclosed
within its material boundaries and encouraging them to speak. The disposi-
tive, then, is the theme (social ritual, vehicle, building…) become form. To
be sure, Kiarostami’s statement shows quite well that, without work on the
manner of filming,17 the car in Ten would be reduced to its ordinary social
use and function only partially as a dispositive. By limiting the orientation
of the digital camera to two positions, one towards the driver, the other
towards the passenger, the f ilmmaker considerably reinforces the role
played by the cramped compartment and the juxtaposition of seats in the
progress of the dialogue:
In Ten, based on the subject, I tried to restrict the setting as much as pos-
sible. At the beginning, however, I did not plan to limit the dispositive to
two angles and two lenses. After viewing the first sequence, I understood
that any change in angle and focal length just for the sake of variation
would be harmful to the order or the structure of the film, which for me
17 I want to thank François Albéra for bringing to my attention the importance of the way an
object is filmed in enhancing its potentialities to serve as a dispositive. His comment and the
discussion in which it occurred are available online on the website of the University of Lausanne:
http://www.unil.ch/cin/page56362.html.
206 Philippe Ortel
is more important than the subject or the story. For this reason, I put the
camera back in its initial place and remained faithful to the stifling and
tense feeling generated by a room of two meters by two. The choice of
a closed space had been made in keeping with the particularly painful
situation in which the characters found themselves.18
Still, the mise en scène reinforces or reveals in the object (the car) generative
or organizational properties that are peculiar to it, even if daily life manifests
these properties in a more diffuse manner. Automobiles are, for example,
privileged places for confiding in someone, as one of his friends once told the
filmmaker: her most important conversations with her husband generally
took place in the car. Kiarostami also declared that he wanted to show
how the confined, moving space of the car fostered introspection among
passengers as they talked to each other: speech often occurred only after
deep absorption into oneself. “Dispositive films” thus play an analytical role,
breaking down the apparent homogeneity of phenomena (a mere ride in a
car) to reveal the hidden articulation of their various technical, pragmatic
and symbolic components – which, conversely, may not be reduced to the
mise en scène but are still revealed by it. These films also show the link
between all these components and the incomprehensible reality they are
meant to channel, the interiority of the characters in Ten, for instance.19
In a more traditional narrative, high school, doors, and cars generally are
realities among others. They are part of the setting without being the matrix
of the fictional content conveyed by the work.
Caesura and Variable
More precisely, where does the mutual dependence of our three levels in
dispositives in fiction (or in utterances), such as those just analyzed, come
from? The dispositive effect is possible only if each level involves a variable,
that is to say, a principle liable to create variations in the other two, thus
opening up the field of possibilities. The arrangement of seats in Ten, for
instance, though physically fixed, makes a vast number of combinations
18 Kiarostami, 10 on ten, chapter 5/11, 29’28’’.

19 On the links between the real and the incomprehensible in Kiarostami’s work, see Philippe
Ragel, “Est-ce que l’on sait où l’on va,” in Abbas Kiarostami. Le Cinéma à l’épreuve du réel (Toulouse:
Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, Yellow Now-Côté cinéma, 2008) 7-18. On the relations between
dispositives and the incomprehensible, see L’Incompréhensible. Littérature, réel, visuel, ed.
Marie-Thérèse Mathet (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003).
possible on the pragmatic level. The variable here lies in the reciprocity of
the exchange, which such a layout makes optional, but also susceptible of
gradation. Words may remain as parallel as the seats, which does happen
when each of the two characters, within the conversation itself, does in
fact engage in a monologue. Indeed, Kiarostami had initially thought about
centering the film around a psychoanalyst who had to see her clients in
her car after a complaint to authorities had forced her to close her practice.
The author eventually abandoned this idea for the script, precisely to avoid
reducing his film to monologues by patients. Yet words may also intersect
whenever a balanced dialogue takes place between the two participants,
as is the case in the discussion between the driver and the prostitute. At
other times, the driver has the upper hand in the exchange, as when she
gives a telling-off to a friend depressed by a break-up. At the crossroads
between the material world and human relations, the variable turns the
dispositive into a creative object: the structure of the places, with their
technical constraints, reveals the circumstances of a rich and diverse reality.
So it goes at a higher level, with the exchange between protagonists (II)
and the values this exchange conveys (III). The intonation of the voice does,
for example, involve a variable, the tone used, from which all axiological
marks may be expressed: approval, disapproval, detachment – again, with
all the imaginable degrees in between. Through the variation of tones and
attitudes, the fascinating instability of human relations is given for us to
see in the course of the same conversation, something that a writer like
Nathalie Sarraute turned into a theme in France in the 1950s under the
name “tropisms.”
To Interpret and To Look
Now, what is the difference between transitive narratives and “narratives

with dispositive” for the spectators of the film? The effect of suspense cre-
ated by traditional narration, closely linked to its temporal, linear nature,
projects spectators forward, leading them to anticipate events, whereas
the dispositive settles them and immerses them in a given situation, as
could a ritual. A few years after Ten, Jacques Rivette’s The Duchess of
Langeais (2007), an adaptation from Balzac, was released. There are few
dispositives in this film – which tells the love war waged in Paris by the
Duchess of Langeais (Jeanne Balibar) against the Marquis of Montriveau
(Guillaume Depardieu) – but quite a lot of events. Through the subtlety
of the dialogue and the acting, the least modulation of the voice, the least
208 Philippe Ortel
movement in space, the least shift in conversation matters, driving specta-

tors to look ahead and anticipate the methods by which the Duchess will
succeed, come the next moment, in resisting Montriveau without desisting
from her seduction of him. Few apparent dispositives, then, if only because
the places, instead of conditioning the action as in the car in Ten, simply
serve as a setting: during the scene of the encounter, the living room of
the Countess of Sérizy is soon left behind for a more intimate room. The
camera takes us from one space to the next with a fluidity that is not very
favorable to matricial relations between bodies and settings. The disposi-
tive, if one had to be found, would rather lie at the enunciative level with
the presence of intertitles at each important step of the narrative. Placing
spectators at the intersection of the story to read and the filmed story,
and therefore of literature and cinema, these intertitles and the effects of
citation they produce give the audience a ‘binocular’ vision of the story,
adding depth to it like a stereoscope. It is a temporal depth, to be specific,
for these titles mediate the pleasure experienced in following the film
through the slightly regressive feeling of moving back towards a now distant
book culture20 or, more intimately, towards our adolescent reading. In both
cases, the pleasures brought by The Duchess of Langeais are those of a
“graphosphere”21 which is moving away from us, yet draws its very charm
from this increasing distance.
Besides a permanent mental anticipation, traditional narration requires a
work of interpretation from the public. Narrativity and hermeneutic activity
are consubstantial insofar as, before claiming the status of symbol, meaning
merges with the very movement of the narrative. Where does M go at night
in Fritz Lang’s M (1931)? What does he do to the little girls whose paths he
crosses? What is his degree of responsibility when the inner voice driving
him to commit crimes makes itself heard? What did the filmmaker seek
to show of the social and ideological malaise in the Germany of the 1930s?
The different levels of interpretation created by the film, from the mere
movement in space to the deep motivations of characters to the values of
an era correspond to the three material, pragmatic and symbolic levels,
but instead of being put in mutual tension as in the dispositive effect, they
merge together here, simply forming the mesh of a transitive narrative.
Yet this hermeneutic activity happens to be postponed when the logic of
the dispositive dominates in a narrative. Nobody truly cares about where
20 At least as a dominant cultural form.

21 I borrow the term from Régis Debray, who uses it in many of his works. See for instance his
Transmitting Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
the car in Ten is headed in the many trips it takes and whether or not the
young boy incensed at his mother will some day make peace with her.
Indeed, before probing the meaning of things, the “film with dispositive”
gives us their existence to see. In the absence of a structured chronological
narrative, we do not seek to anticipate or interpret but instead live the
performance of actors in the present. The meaning of words uttered and the
values asserted or suggested are themselves given to see: the hermeneutic
activity, if it never really disappears on the side of spectators, accompanies
the film but does not ultimately constitute its end. In the last dialogue of
Ten, the relation between the mother and her young son has not evolved:
to mark his disapproval, the child asks again to spend the evening at his
grandmother’s rather than with his mother. The filmmaker shows us the
tension between the two protagonists, not to bring it to a resolution as
would a transitive narrative, but to keep emphasizing it.
Accordingly, the dispositive invites a vertical rather than horizontal
reception of the work: in Ten, as I already pointed out, we are invited to
sense, under the appearance of perceptible phenomena, the interior world in
whose depths the hypnotic rhythm of the vehicle puts each character, and to
which the dispositive of a car conversation alone may here give access. This
is due to the impossibility for the filmmaker to represent the world of affects
directly. The consequences for the philosophy of the narrative as developed
by Paul Ricoeur have deep ramifications in this instance, for where Ricœur
shows the hermeneutic role of the transitive narrative (which makes time
human by configuring it and endowing it with signification22), the “filmic
narrative with dispositive” differs in its sensorial and existential function.
Framing the performance of actors within a given situation, it chiefly aims
to show what is. Moreover, whereas traditional narratives readily capture
our attention through the mise en scène of enigmas, events whose meaning
calls for elucidation, the dispositive, as we saw with chance and violence
in Elephant, reveals the incomprehensible, that which by definition will
never fully make sense.23
22 “Time and Narrative: Threefold Mimesis,” in Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, vol. I (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1984) 52-90.
23 On the novel, Marie-Thérèse Mathet notes: “Contrary to the secret and the enigma, the incom-
prehensible lurks in the heart of the story. It is not reliant on narrative strategies or modes, which
it transcends, even as it uses them.” “Incompréhensible et structure narrative,” L’Incompréhensible.
Littérature, réel, visuel, ed. Marie-Thérèse Mathet (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003) 194.
210 Philippe Ortel
Transitivity and Dispositive: Two Co-Extensive Modes of

Narrative
It is not rare, however, for a film to simultaneously lend itself to both types
of reading, one founded on anticipation and interpretation, the other sensi-
tive to dispositive effects. This is the case when a sequence of actions also
constitutes an almost autonomous performance with respect to the rest of
the story. In the most famous scene of Safety Last (1923), Harold Lloyd’s
vertical journey on the façade of a Los Angeles skyscraper initially follows
the linear and chronological order of the classical narrative, since it raises
the traditional question of the outcome of the chase: will the hero make it
to the last floor, the condition for him to receive the bonus from the store
whose publicity he ensures through his feat as he stands in for his friend Bill,
inconveniently chased by a policeman? However, the sequence emphasizes
the space of the façade to such an extent that the principle of variation
specific to some dispositives doubles and absorbs the principle of evolution
that characterizes transitive narration. As time elapses, we no longer only
project ourselves in thought towards the outcome of the amazing effort,
but we also remain fascinated by the relations emerging between the hero
and the building. Instead of blending into each other, the space (I) and the
action, which here is the interaction (II) between the main protagonist and
his immediate environment, are at odds. The façade is not a mere setting,
nor even an actant of the “opponent” type within an actantial model: it is,
rather, the matrix of potential interactions, the most spectacular of which
features Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock. The narrative sequence,
while still anchored in a chronology, thus also poetically opens up the field
of possibilities: the paradigmatic axis of all the acrobatic feats this type of
situation is liable to produce gradually emerges in the minds of spectators
outside the chronology. As to the symbolic dimension, it feeds into our
fascination by casting light on the disproportion instituted in twentieth-
century cities between their residents and buildings no longer on their scale.
Transitive narration and intransitivity are also coextensive whenever
a f ilm is seen again. Once the outcome and the steps leading to it are
known, the perspective on the work becomes more tabular, as it would
in a critical analysis. The retrospective look makes the different stages
of the narrative simultaneous and, rather than considering them in their
succession, establishes a comparative relation between them that mediates
the passage from one to the other through the memory we have of the film
as a whole. Juxtaposed in the minds of spectators, then, are the transitive
filmic narration and an agency larger than the narrative – the ideal space
of creation, where the parts of the work lie side by side rather than follow
each other because a global intuition of what she or he does is assumed
on the author’s part. Upon viewing The Duchess of Langeais a second
time, the role played by hangings is more noticeable, whether it is over
the gate separating the choir from the public area in the convent where
Montriveau meets the Duchess long after the Parisian years, or in Paris at the
heroine’s apartment. The monastic effect produced by these windows blind
to the outside world announces the Duchess’s future religious calling while
expressing her feeling of oppression at a passion of which she refuses to be
captive. These various screens may themselves be associated with the many
shawls, veils, and dresses the Duchess makes use of to seduce Montriveau
while keeping him at bay. To trained observers, the return of the same
places or props situates the latter at the intersection of two logics: within a
transitive narration, they serve as temporal marks, highlighting what has
changed from one instance to the next. An example is the living room where
the encounter took place, and which will also be the place of the break-up.
In the ideal space of creation, however, the return of places or props is the
source of poetic variations separate from spatial and temporal coordinates.
Superimposed, the different sofas on which the Duchess lounges may thus
retrospectively turn out to be as many traps whose effects vary according to
circumstances. The matrices of potential interactions, these props – when
considered retrospectively – function as dispositives.
Our two logics should therefore be organized into a hierarchy: either one
constitutes a dominant element depending on the author, the period or the
aesthetic involved; or on whether the film is seen for the first time or is the
object of subsequent viewings.
Inventing Dispositives
There remains the case of when the film single-handedly invents disposi-
tives without equivalent in social life. These then owe their existence solely
to the conjunction of a way of filming and realities to which the filmmaker
assigns a new, mysterious function destined to fade with the last images of
the film. Abbas Kiarostami magnificently achieves such magic in some of
the five sequences from Five (2004), a set of short films which prove closer
to video art than to traditional cinema. In the fourth sequence, the most
playful of all, some ducks are shown waddling in a row at different paces
on the seashore, first in one direction, then in the other. At once comic and
poetic, the performance arises from the conjunction of our three factors.
212 Philippe Ortel
Materially speaking, the horizon, the line of the water and the strip of sand,
shot frontally, outline the path taken by the feathered creatures (I). This
outline appears to condition the parade effect (II) that makes their passing
so comical, based on several variables lying at the intersection of material
reality and the intentionality that may be attributed to the protagonists
of the film. The speed of the web-footed birds, their number, the distance
between them, or the orientation of their stride – mostly rectilinear, at times
astray – thus all vary. In turn, starting from the principle of regularity, their
behavior opens onto multiple variations on the superior level of values (III):
alienation of the individual from the group, or on the contrary manifestation
of independence in the case of a deviation from standard demeanor, for the
message of this little film is subtly political. Lines of horizon and seafront
(I), alignment of animals (II) and lines of conduct (III) thus overlap in
a unified whole that has no referent in real life, since no specific ritual
corresponds to it. For this very reason though, this whole opens the minds
of spectators to the pleasure “without concept” (Kant) of analogies: these
ducks, who are as moving as they are laughable, walking over a backdrop
of infinity towards some mysterious destination before eventually turning
back chaotically and precipitately, are also a comical and poignant image
of human destiny, with its advances and its reversals, its arrogance and
its doubts, in a mix of the grotesque and the sublime resulting from the
unexpected encounter between the very limited world of animals and the
boundless space of the sea. If he does not narrate anything, Kiarostami
still rediscovers one of the traditional underpinnings of fables: speaking
of humans through animals, without even having to endow them with the
ability to speak, in this particular case.
Why is our time so sensitive to this dispositive effect, which may be found
at other moments in the history of cinema, but less intensely than today?
Probably because we are living in a time when mediations are shown and
the distinctive feature of a “dispositive aesthetic” is to have the components
of representation mediate one another, precisely, rather than merge them
into the movement of a transitive narrative. To be sure, this mediation
proceeds without any genuine tension, for social life always harmonizes
its means according to an end that is beyond them; yet this mediation
involves an omnipresence and a visibility never seen before. The politician
calling on a mediator to bring some conflict to a resolution explicitly puts
the symbolic sphere of power in a situation of dependence on a pragmatic
mediation. Whoever communicates through the Internet makes the same
pragmatic relation depend on a technical mediation whose constraints she
or he knows perfectly well. What society does on a large scale, mimesis does
on a small scale, with its own means. The dispositive effect, which plays a
critical and poetic role with great filmmakers, is therefore not immune to
a certain conformism, in the literal sense of the word: it also conforms to
what society invents and shares the dynamism as well as the limitations of
this partly unconscious collective invention. It comes as no surprise, then,
that mainstream films are taking it over: the choral form is a good example,
as in the very typical Hollywood product Vantage Point (2008), which tells
the story of an assassination attempt on the President of the United States;
or in 11:14 (2003), a little thriller skillfully going round in circles by showing
the same spatio-temporal framework from the point of view of several
characters – this until the character seen at the beginning, apparently
exterior to the story, turns out to be its keystone in the last sequence.
In Vantage Point, which begins in a mobile television studio meant to
cover the President’s speech, the choral form perfectly follows, thanks to
its circularity, the 360-degree perception our society of control produces
of itself at this point. It simply expands to time itself the principle of an
all-seeing power performed by surveillance cameras in space, as it has us
relive the event several times. As to 11:14, though it uses the same method
as Elephant to show youths confronted with transgression and death, it
obviously has nothing to do with Gus Van Sant’s film. While Elephant
analyzes, suspends interpretation, lets loose the sequence of causes and
effects, the other film, on the contrary, synthesizes several chains of events
through the choral form to celebrate the magic of coincidences and create
spectacle.
The dispositive effect is thus not a guarantee of originality or depth, for
it is obviously not the method that makes the work, but the way in which
artists position themselves with respect to what they show us, in a position
so singular each time that no critical model could hope to account for it
entirely.
III.
Dispositives
Histories
The Social Imaginary of Telephony
Fictional Dispositives in Albert Robida’s Le Vingtième Siècle
and the Archeology of “Talking Cinema”1
Alain Boillat
What I propose to do here, within a perspective involving both epistemology

and the archaeology of media, is to approach “talking cinema” through
the examination of discourses produced in the last two decades of the
nineteenth century, that is, almost fifty years prior to the generalization
of talkies and the institutionalization of practices related to sound in the
domain of cinema.2 Beyond this specific medium, I will examine the series
of machines of audiovisual representation, one of whose many actualiza-
tions was “talking cinema” (which is why quotation marks are fitting here,
with regard to “cinema” as well as “talking”). Among the many inventions
from which various experimentations with “talking cinema” may be said
to derive, I will emphasize the technique of telephony. Indeed, its study
presents the advantage of encompassing a number of auditive or audiovisual
dispositives that are often much more difficult to reduce to their place in
the genealogy of (institutionalized) cinema than viewing dispositives. On
a methodological level, de-centering the point of view is precisely what
appears productive to me, as the discussion of the place given to the voice
within various audio(visual) dispositives constitutes the theoretical horizon
of my observations.3
1 Translator’s note: the French expression “cinéma parlant” (literally, “talking cinema”) is
usually translated as “sound cinema” in English, but given the focus of this chapter and the
existence of the term “talkies” in English, it is translated as “talking cinema” here.
2 The attention given to “talkies before (the institutionalization of) talkies” should be placed
in the context of recent research on “the archaeology” of the pairing between moving images
and synchronized sound. On this point, see Edouard Arnoldy, Pour une histoire culturelle du
cinéma. Au-devant de “scènes filmées”, de “films chantants et parlants” et de comédies musicales
(Liège: Céfal, 2004) as well as the contributions published in Le Muet a la parole. Cinéma et
performance à l’aube du XXe siècle, Giusy Pisano and Valérie Pozner, eds. (Paris: AFRHC, 2005).
3 This reflection, one dimension of which is being considered here, started in other places, in
particular in Du bonimenteur à la voix-over. Voix-attraction et voix-narration au cinéma (Laus-
anne: Antipodes, 2007); and in “The lecturer, the image, the machine and the audio-spectator.
The voice as a component part of audio-visual dispositives” and “On the particular status of the
human voice. Tomorrow’s Eve and the cultural series of talking machines,” both published in
Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemology in the Modern Era (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2010), 215-31 and 233-51, respectively.
218 Alain Boillat
It seems rather improbable that the telephone, considered today as

belonging in the sphere of telecommunications, and whose invention is
usually credited to Alexander Graham Bell (who registered a patent for it
in February 18764), would cross paths with the series of moving images,
even when these come with recorded sounds. Some differences touching
on the relations established between representation and addressee of the
vocal (or audiovisual) message would at the very least cast doubts on the
possibility. These differences may be spelled out thanks to the following,
necessarily basic classification, whose oppositional pairs should not be
seen as hermetically separate, at least if the hybridity of phenomena tied
to the emergence and constitution of the media in question is to be taken
into account:5
Telephone Cinematograph
Listeners-Users Spectators
Domestic space, individual use Public space, collective participation
Simultaneous interactive communication Unidirectional, deferred transmission
Reversibility of the poles of communication: Reversibility of the Lumière appliance:
listener/speaker recording/projection6
When considering these different features and the traditional and

monolithic conception of the two media they assume, the unidirectional
communication with a collective audience (projection) implied in the film
show proves very different from the dominant use of the telephone, which
consists in an interactive communication carried out by a user in a private
space. However, just as the “cinema” met with very heterogeneous condi-
tions of exhibition,6 the telephone – especially when combined with other
4 Elisha Gray or Antonio Meucci have also been credited with the invention, and this disputed
paternity is indicative of the more general relation between research on the electric distance
transmission of a voice and the spirit of an era, when similar experiments were being carried
out concurrently.
5 On this account, I could make the following observation my own: “Classifications, it seems to
us, appear tenuous when their aim is to define media out of univocal functions, at all costs, even
if it means overshadowing both their hybrid nature and their uses, and precluding thinking on
their intersections, their geneses, and their developments.” François Albera and Maria Tortajada,
“Prolégomènes à une critique des ‘télé-dispositifs’,” in La Télévision, du téléphonoscope à YouTube.
Pour une archéologie de l’audiovision, Mireille Berton and Anne-Katrin Weber, eds. (Lausanne:
Antipodes, 2009) 39.
6 All the more so when considering, as Rick Altman does, the changeable character of experi-
ments with sonorization. See Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York, London:
Routledge, 1992).
devices – gave rise to a wide variety of distinct uses and dispositives which
may not be reduced solely to the parameters mentioned above. A convincing
example could be the first Kinetophone, commercialized by Edison in 1895,
which resulted from a combination of the Phonograph and the Kinetoscope
previously exploited in the same parlors7 (if in a totally independent man-
ner: customers would listen to music on one side, watch animated views
on the other). These places of mass entertainment thus housed separately
two techniques meant for specific uses, and which were later combined in
a single system thanks to the synchronization of the Phonograph’s cylinder
and the film running in the Kinetoscope. Like the telephone booth, then,
the Kinetophone required the user to handle an audio receiver in a public
space. This type of convergence highlights the importance of diachronic
variations affecting different cultural series in which a given technology
may find a place (successively or simultaneously).8
Thinking About the Way Uses Were Thought Up
Telephony had various applications in its history, and according to the

situation, these brought about distinct dispositives.9 Inscribed in the
spectacular context of the presentation of a technical “attraction,” Bell
and Watson’s historic call between New York and Malden on October 9,
1876, chronicled in the March 17, 1877 issue of La Nature, epitomizes the
diversity of uses for the telephone, which were to lead to specific dispositives
later. Indeed, besides the individual conversation, the following contents
succeeded one another as part of the same demonstration:10 information
on the stock exchange, already one of the main uses of the telegraph 11 (in
fact, the piece in La Nature refers to the telephone as a “talking telegraph”);
7 See the illustration reproduced in Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. 1 (Paris:
Denoël, 1946) 268.
8 The notion of “cultural series” is borrowed from André Gaudreault, and notably his “Les
vues cinématographiques selon Georges Méliès, ou: comment Mitry et Sadoul avaient peut-être
raison d’avoir tort (même si c’est surtout Deslandes qu’il faut lire et relire)…,” in Georges Méliès,
l’illusionniste fin de siècle? Jacques Malthête and Michel Marie, eds. (Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997).
9 “Dispositive” here refers to a set of interactions between the poles of machinery, representa-
tion and spectator. On this conception, see Maria Tortajada and François Albera, “L’Epistémè
‘1900’,” in Le Cinématographe, nouvelle technologie du XXe siècle, André Gaudreault, Catherine
Russell and Pierre Véronneau, eds. (Lausanne: Payot, 2004).
10 “Le télégraphe parlant,” La Nature 198 (17 Mar. 1877): 251.
11 For a narrative use of this kind of application, see Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de Monte-
Christo (vol. II, chapters LX to LXVI).
220 Alain Boillat
the reading of daily newspapers, prefiguring news reports on the radio and
on television; questions addressed to the interlocutor by dumbfounded
observers, evoking the context of conjuring or séances (surprisingly, one
person did in fact ask the interlocutor to predict the future!); finally, the
transmission of music, “as if we had been in a concert hall.” This precision by
the writer echoes the function Philippe Reiss (Germany) had foreseen for the
telephone, and which was assumed by photographic technique, precisely.
In his praise of talking pictures, a form of filmed speech that introduced
the series of the first Vitaphone Shorts, William Hays also considered that
the primary function of sound cinema lay in a wider access to classical
music.12 These different media had clearly been devised for similar uses,
even as other directions more specific to each of them later developed.
The diversity of uses considered for the telephone in the 1870s and
the 1880s points to an intermedial phase in Rick Altman’s definition of
the term, that is, as a temporary “crisis of mediality” later resolved in
the autonomy gained by the media. Altman significantly brings up this
situation of intermediality in relation to the period when sound cinema
became widespread, which he distinguishes from the two previous decades,
more stable in that respect: “From the 1910s on, cinema appeared as such
in the great book of media, next to the telephone, the phonograph, and
the radio.”13 The mention of the telephone is interesting since there was
no clear-cut separation between the uses of telephony and those of the
cinematographic spectacle over the period 1895-1910. Indeed, as Patrice
Carré has underlined, the applications of this invention remained to be
12 On Hays’s oral performance in this film projected on August 6, 1926 in New York, see Alain
Boillat, Du bonimenteur à la voix-over 296-98. A transcription of the speech may be found in
The Dawn of Sound, ed. Mary-Lea Bandy (New York: Museum for Modern Art, 1989) 17. Here I
am referring more particularly to the following passage: “In the presentation of these pictures,
music plays an invaluable part. The motion picture is a most potent factor in the development
of a national appreciation of good music. That service will now be extended as the Vitaphone
shall carry symphony orchestras to the townhalls of the hamlets.” The films following this
introduction did in fact include only instrumental performances or opera singers. The choice
matched the substance of Hays’s address, since the president of the MPPDA never touched on
the talking cinema he was then “actualizing” through his recorded speech, only evoking the
possibility of reproducing the performance of great music. On the Vitaphone Shorts, see Edouard
Arnoldy, Pour une histoire culturelle du cinéma 63-73. As to Albert Robida, he pointed out in
his fiction Le Vingtième Siècle: “The spectator is not just one in a restricted Paris or Brussels
audience; all viewers, even in the comfort of their own home, are part of the great international
public.” See Albert Robida, The Twentieth Century (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
2004) 54.
13 Rick Altman, “Technologie et textualité de l’intermédialité,” Sociétés & représentations 9
(2000): 12.
defined, and as Ithiel de Sola Pool has shown, countless predictions were
made in the nineteenth century about telephony and the possible changes
it would involve for society 14 – many largely determined by the social space
of reception: “In the late nineteenth century, it was still unclear to what use
the telephone should be put. An auxiliary to the telegraph, a complement
to the phonograph? Consumers were to make the decision.”15
The combination of the telephone and the phonograph may seem
unusual if these technologies are considered only from the standpoint of
their autonomy as media: indeed, the telephone has been limited to direct
communication, while the phonograph was intended for keeping a record
of sounds. Still, this conception of an interaction between devices, which
was in fact recurrent at the time, reveals the lack of a strict division between
functions that later tended to be classified in distinct or even opposite
paradigms. According to James Lastra, the two major criteria governing
the reception of technologies since the nineteenth century and feeding
the social imaginary they generate (and which in return generates them)
have been inscription – the record of an (audio)visual manifestation on a
medium – and simulation (in the sense of the production of a representa-
tion that serves as a simulacrum).16 Properly speaking, the telephone does
not involve either in the dominant uses of it that became established in
the early twentieth century, since it mainly belonged in a third paradigm,
communication.17 However, to demonstrate the extent to which categories
allowing us to think about a technology at a given moment of its history have
an effect on the uses of that same technology, James Lastra brings up the
example of telephony,18 precisely, and more specifically, two ways in which
it was apprehended. On the one hand, the telephone was considered as an
extension of the ear, as a device mostly devoted to listening to a concert or
actualités in a program (a use similar to that of the recording of sounds, put
14 Ithiel de Sola Pool, Forecasting the Telephone: A Retrospective Technology Assessment

(Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1983).
15 Patrice Carré, Le Téléphone. Le Monde à portée de voix (Paris: Gallimard, 1993) 33. On the
use of the phonograph as a component in the telephonic system, see de Sola Pool, Forecasting
the Telephone 31-35.
16 James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema. Perception, Representation,
Modernity (New York, Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2000).
17 On the pair simulation/communication, see my article “Faire pour la vue ce que le téléphone
fait pour l’ouïe. Rencontres entre l’image et la voix dans quelques anticipations de la télévision,”
in La Télévision, du téléphonoscope à Youtube, Berton and Weber, eds., 80, 88-90.
18 Lastra borrows this example from Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New (Oxford,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) 222-31.
222 Alain Boillat
in the service of entertainment in the form of a show).19 On the other hand,

it was viewed as an interpersonal means of communication substituting
for the physical co-presence of two interlocutors, which means that it was
inscribed in the paradigm of the simulation of the human.20 Lastra’s com-
ment points to the need to take into consideration what Patrice Flichy, a
sociologist of technologies of communication, calls the frame of reference
of a technological innovation:
At the roots of a socio-technical context we find a whole series of im-

agined technological possibilities which seem to warrant investigation,
not as the initial matrix of a new technology, but rather as one of the
resources mobilized by the actors to construct a frame of reference.21
In the phase when uses specific to a media become defined, a whole set
of conditions of possibility is thus determined by what Flichy considers
– within a perspective akin to epistemology, though he does not openly
claim this influence – as an ensemble of “technical imaginaries.” One of the
privileged sites of this type of discursive formations happens to be novelistic
fiction, which can afford to integrate hypothetical devices and uses in the
counter-factual world it proposes. One of the objects of study recommended
by Flichy lies in what François Albera has tentatively called “projected
cinema”22 – the projection, in the form of technical extrapolations in literary
(or para-literary) texts of a cinema to come, or more largely, as I suggest
here, of a dispositive featuring a machinery as one of its components. As
such, one of the works by French novelist and draftsman Albert Robida,
The Twentieth Century (1883), constitutes a good object to approach the
“frames of reference” prevalent at the time telephony appeared, and which
shaped discourses and practices. Admittedly, the reference to this work
has become a topos in discourses on the archaeology of media because it
19 One could say that the aspects mentioned by Lastra are tied to a more general conception
of technology as a prosthetic development of the human. This conception already held true for
the telegraph, as the following citation (dated 1860) illustrates: “[You only need] to repeat this
movement in Strasbourg, absolutely as though the hand of the person located in Paris could
stretch as far as Strasbourg to set in motion directly the sounder of the receiver.” Le Magasin
pittoresque (1860), quoted in Carré, Télégraphes. Innovations techniques et société au 19e siècle 41.
20 Lastra, Sound Technology and The American Cinema 21.
21 Patrice Flichy, Understanding Technological Innovation: A Socio-Technical Approach (Glos,
U.K., Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007) 120.
22 François Albera, “Le cinéma ‘projeté’ et les périodisations de l’histoire technique du cinéma,”
in Le Età del Cinema/The Ages of Cinema, Enrico Biasin, Roy Menerani and Federico Zecca, eds.
(Udine: DAMS Gorizia, 2008) 393-400.
features an imaginary device, the telephonoscope, which in the novel makes

it possible to add the image of the interlocutor in telephone conversations
(a function later actualized with the videophone or videoconferences over
the Internet through software like Skype). Still, commentators most often
content themselves with the mention of the novel in passing, even though
it would deserve a more careful examination. Accordingly, it will serve as
the focus for my case study and the thread in my argument.
A Reticular Conception
In Robida’s fantasy, the telephonoscope – like the Internet today – is clearly

designed as an extension of the telephone, whose network it inherits23 (the
telephone was still rare in France in 1883, when The Twentieth Century was
published24). As Patrice Carré has shown in several texts and books (notably
on Robida’s fictions), the generalization of the telegraph and later of the
telephone contributed to familiarize users with a new way of approaching
interpersonal communication based on the concept of “network,” from that
point on. Alternating shots on the frightened telegraphist wiring a distress
signal with images of the engine driver coming to her rescue at full speed,
D. W. Griffith’s 1911 The Lonedale Operator relates the two main factors
of a renewed apprehension of speed, whether resulting from the physical
movement of a mobile on the railroad network or from the communication
of information through the telegraphic network.25 In The Culture of Time
and Space, Stephen Kern has shown how these technological inventions
produced a new apprehension of time, notably in terms of capturing the
23 “Subscribers ordering the new service could have the apparatus adapted to their telephones
for an extra monthly fee.” Robida, The Twentieth Century 51.
24 According to Joseph Libois, the f irst devices appeared in France in 1881 and numbered
no more than 3,500 units for the whole country in 1883. See Libois, Genèse et croissance des
télécommunications (Paris: Masson, 1983). The statistical table is reprinted in Perriault, La
Logique de l’usage 174.
25 A comparative study remains to be done on discourses on telephonic audition and visual
stimuli experienced in train travel in the first years of the twentieth century. On train travel,
see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the
Nineteenth Century (1977; Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986); Livio Belloï,
Regard retourné. Aspect du cinéma des premiers temps (Québec/Paris: Nota Bene/Méridiens
Klincksieck, 2001); Mireille Berton, “Train, cinéma, modernité: entre hystérie et hypnose,”
Décadrages 6: 8-21.
224 Alain Boillat
present moment in a world taken over by speed and simultaneity.26 It is

not by chance, then, that the first invention characters marvel at in The
Twentieth Century is that of a means of transportation run by electricity and
called “the tube,” which supplants the railroad after the railroad itself has
supplanted the stagecoach.27 Robida’s description of the urban landscape
has the city governed by a generalized organization in networks: telephone
wires “crisscross[ed] in all directions, at all levels, in front of houses, over
rooftops, creating a dense network of patterns over both buildings and
sky,” while objects are transported thanks to an underground tube that
“silently collects and distributes all sorts of packages, boxes, bundles,
merchandise, and various items, through thousands of arteries buried
beneath the streets.”28
A possible hypothesis is that, in the minds of late nineteenth-century
users, the reticular conception of telephony was modeled after more rudi-
mentary, tangible systems such as running water29 and central heating,
these other factors of domestic comfort in an urban setting whose function-
ing relied on the interconnection of different places (through pipes, in this
instance). Some expressions appearing in the novelist’s prose do in fact show
that he conceived telephony similarly to these techniques. The musical
pieces to which telephonoscope subscribers listen at home are “kept in tubes
until the stage’s prompter turns on the valve in his box,”30 and incidents
occur when the mouthpiece has not quite been shut off. Incidentally, in 1878
Henri Giffard, a friend of Robida’s and the author of publications illustrated
by him, imagined a futuristic application of telephony which he explicitly
compared to the system of the stove:
We like to think that in the year 2000 the telephone will have the mag-
nitude of the much more simple invention that is the stove. This is the
most humble example that may be used. Let’s say that the large-size
generating telephone is in the Théâtre français for instance, near the
footlights. Through a hundred or a hundred and twenty wires it conveys
everything being uttered at the theater to a hundred or a hundred and
twenty telephone mouthpieces laid out in apartments like our current
26 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1983).
27 Robida, The Twentieth Century 3-14.
28 Robida, The Twentieth Century 48, 50.
29 Due to the need for refueling points for steam engines, the development of running water
was partly tied to that of the railroad.
30 Robida, The Twentieth Century 55n (my emphasis).
hot-air vents. In these private apartments, the telephone’s mouthpiece is

placed near a piece of furniture, not far from the mantelpiece.31
Giffard exposes a specific frame of reference here: the intention is not to

develop the practice of a “point to point” conversation, but to connect an
emitting exchange to a number of addressees. Interpersonal communica-
tion is thus not dissociated from a multidirectional emission out of a center,
as both uses are performed through a similar system.
Besides, even in a more complex inception – as with the addition of
the moving image by Robida – telephony gives rise to a dispositive that
becomes integrated in the furniture and the domestic sphere, like the
radio and the television set later, when manufacturers tried to bring much
care to the design so these devices could constitute elements of interior
decoration. This is why, even though it is not explicitly correlated with the
telephonoscope, the episode narrated in The Twentieth Century, in which
the apartment of a subscriber to the food company is flooded after a pipe
dysfunction, represents a “concrete,” literal variation of the representa-
tion of the telephone network: subscribers receive their food as they do
their information, from a distance (Fig. 1). Distance communication as
contemplated by Robida was therefore much less interactive than it was to
become over the twentieth century: like Giffard in his treatise, Robida saw
it as guided by the unidirectional principle of a tool for home delivery. The
absence of emphasis on the properly conversational dimension, obvious
in the novel as a whole, tends to establish a parallel between the use of the
telephone and spectacular practices. However, the domestic dimension of
telephony represents a considerable difference from the uses of cinema,
which was meant for a collective audience (if one excludes non-professional
projection devices sold to private individuals, whose use was close to that
of the magic lantern and more generally of optical toys).
Telephony as Intrusion into the Domestic Space
When Robida imagines the telephone as a means of transmission for news

or actualités, its informational function is presented as an intrusion into the
private sphere of one of the heroines, Hélène, who discovers the invention
at the same time as the reader. On the first night she spends in the house
31 Henri Giffard, Le Téléphone expliqué à tout le monde (1878), quoted in Alec Mellor, La
Fabuleuse Aventure du téléphone (Paris: Montparnasse, 1975) 12.
226 Alain Boillat
Fig.1. Albert Robida, Le Vingtième siècle (1883).
of her guardian, the young woman is woken by ringing. Frightened, she

looks for the source of the bothersome sounds and understands that these
come from a telephone receiver hidden under her pillow (Fig. 2). Later on,
Hélène will constantly be woken by the unrequested news reaching her
through telephone transmission. The novelist takes advantage of the sup-
posed incompetence of the novice user to explain the various functions of
the device to the contemporary reader. Despite his repeated expressions of
admiration for the various applications of the telephone, in these particular
instances Robida stresses the intrusive dimension of the sudden appearance
of the Other in the private sphere.
The representation of telephony in these pages of Robida’s novel involves
a technophobic dimension that may be considered as recurrent throughout
the twentieth century in narratives whose structure is based on scenes of
phone conversations,32 particularly in film. I am therefore taking the liberty
32 This type of verbal interaction starts with the phone call, which linguist Catherine Kerbrat-
Orecchioni does not hesitate to characterize as a “territorial violation” and a “sound assault.”
See C. Kerbrat-Orecchioni, “Théorie des faces et analyse conversationnelle,” in Le Parler frais
d’Erving Goffman, ed. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (Paris: Minuit, 1989) 158.
Fig. 2. Albert Robida, Le Vingtième siècle (detail).
of a detour through later figurations, which in my view epitomize some

constants in the imaginary associated with the uses of the technology in
question. When telephony elicits doubts, two major trends may be noted:
either the technological mediation interferes with an affective relationship,
in a comedic mode with Sacha Guitry’s light comedy (1916) and film (1936)
Faisons un rêve, in a dramatic mode with Cocteau’s La Voix humaine (1930)
and its film and television adaptations;33 or it becomes the vehicle for an
assault verging on rape on a female character, as in horror thrillers of the
slasher type in which, from Fred Walton’s 1979 When A Stranger Calls
through Simon West’s 2006 remake to Wes Craven’s Scream trilogy (1996-
2000), a baby-sitter is verbally assaulted over the phone (or horrified by the
phone ringing repeatedly), before a physical assault takes place. Filmmaker
Wes Craven has in fact used the telephonic threat in an obsessive manner,
for instance with the sudden appearance of a phallic tongue (Fig. 3a-3c) in
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994),34 in which the telephone is later
33 These are Amore (Roberto Rossellini, 1948) and The Human Voice (Ted Kotcheff, 1966). I
would like to mention a few sentences in this one-act monolog by Cocteau, in which the condi-
tional is the last protection in the face of despair and where the life of the female protagonist,
brokenhearted by a separation, hangs by a thread, the wire of the telephone and the last contact
with her lover: “If you did not love me and were shrewd, the phone would become a frightening
weapon. A weapon that leaves no trace, a silent weapon…” Farther on: “This phone call became
like a real blow you were dealing me and I fell; or a neck, a neck being strangled, or […] I was
connected to you through a breathing device and I implored you not to cut it off […].” Jean
Cocteau, La Voix humaine, in Romans, poésies, œuvres diverses (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1995)
1104, 1108. Translator’s note: the original French text plays on words and their homophony in a
way that gets lost in English: “coup de fil” means “phone call,” “coup” means “blow,” while “cou”
is “neck.”
34 In a way, this is a literal application of Avital Ronell’s remarks on the schizophrenic dimen-
sion of the “tongue” in the Heideggerian sense, where it becomes one and the same with this
228 Alain Boillat
Fig. 3a-3c. Wes Craven’s Nightmare (Wes Craven, 1994) © New Line Cinema.
relayed by the television set as the vehicle for a passage from the real world
to the world of nightmares. In that respect, it should be noted that Robida
also has the young woman woken from a deep sleep by the device hidden
under her pillow. After being frightened by a flood of tragic wire stories,
Hélène “started to wonder whether she was dreaming or awake.”35 Tom
other human prosthesis that is the telephone. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book. Technology,
Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln, NE, London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991) 168.
35 Robida, The Twentieth Century 28. The dream provides access to a beyond – the baleful
creature created by Wes Craven is in fact dead in the “real” world – which makes a sequence
Gunning has shown that the positive representation of technology in D.W.

Griffith’s 1909 Lonely Villa,36 a famous instance of last-minute rescue
made possible by a telephone communication, is haunted by a technophobic
subtext, like many other films of the period. A contemporary French Grand
Guignol play, De Lorde’s Au téléphone (1902, adapted for film by Pathé in
1906 under the title Terrible angoisse),37 actualizes this subtext: in the
play the patriarch, far from restoring order as he does in Griffith’s film,
is unable to prevent the assassination of his family and hears their cries
over the telephone receiver. Even if, in the social imaginary, the telephone
is associated with the comfort resulting from technological progress, it
involves a threatening component and, for fiction writers, dramatic poten-
tial. As Claude S. Fischer points out, telephony has been considered in an
ambivalent manner by sociologists, some associating it with a situation of
alertness and tension, others taking it as essential to a feeling of safety.38
In that respect, the film Lonely Villa belongs in a reassuring discourse
characteristic of promotional campaigns for the telephone set in the United
States. The phone was, for instance, presented as a means of making homes
located in rural areas safer, as illustrated in an advertisement for the Illinois
Telephone Association in the 1930s (Fig. 4).39 However, fiction writers gener-
ally appear to have exacerbated, if not the harmful, at least the dangerous
effects of the phone on the psyche.
In The Twentieth Century, young Hélène struggles with an anthropo-
morphic telephone and attempts (in vain) to section the rubber pipe of
the device with a pair of scissors. 40 In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 Dial M for
Murder, a similar situation echoes this passage in Robida’s novel, evoking
castration. In the film, the woman assaulted at home manages to wriggle out
of her assailant’s grip as the man, hired by her husband, tries to strangle her
with the telephone wire. She stabs him in the back with a pair of scissors,
killing him. Still, with Hitchcock this turnaround in the situation is meant
to surprise and plays with a horizon of expectation defined by the domi-
such as this one evoke the spiritualist imaginary of the electric transmission of a voice, further
reinforced with the generalization of wireless telephony. On this aspect, see Jeffrey Sconce,
Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2000).
36 Tom Gunning, “Heard over the phone: The Lonely Villa and the De Lorde tradition of the
terrors of technology,” Screen 32.2 (1991): 184-96.
37 André De Lorde and Charles Foley, Au téléphone (1902; Paris: Librairie Molière, 1909).
38 Claude S. Fischer, America Calling. A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1992) 25.
39 Quoted in Fischer, America Calling 165.
40 Robida, The Twentieth Century 31.
230 Alain Boillat
nant archetype of the phallic aggression carried out with a technological

instrument (in the film, its mechanical dimension is underlined through
shots of an automated telephone exchange). With Robida, as in some Hol-
lywood films, the telephone does constitute an interference, a violation of
the private sphere. The same holds at a later stage of The Twentieth Century,
when Mr. Ponto takes the liberty of checking through the telephonoscope
that his son Philippe is indeed in his bedroom and not at the opera, where
he thought he had spotted him on his screen. Since audiovision based on the
telephonic model is reversible, communication may also turn into distance
surveillance unbeknownst to the user; but for Robida, this constitutes a
marginal use and it is presented as deviant. I should still point out that the
novelist takes care to mention that this involves human errors (the maid
responsible for cleaning up Hélène’s room forgot to turn off the telephone
completely, just as Philippe omitted to deactivate his telephonoscope),
which lessens the impression of technophobia detected thus far.
This kind of situation, characterized by the voyeurism41 of a protagonist
(or the pleasure of eavesdropping), emphasizes the degree to which desire
was an integral part of the telephonic imaginary of the late nineteenth
century – no less than in the twentieth century, when McLuhan noted that
“no more unexpected social result of the telephone has been observed than
its elimination of the red-light district and its creation of the call-girl.”42
Robida kept this function under control, seeing the telephone as an effective
means to maintain the moral order by shielding young women from the
ardor of their suitors. 43 By contrast, Le Téléphone (1889), a saucy story by
Marc de Montifaud (a pseudonym for Marie-Aurélie Chartroule), openly
links the telephone conversation with the sexual act – and the appliance
with the phallus – as it tells the tale of a naive young woman warned by
her aunt against the dangers to virtue represented by “modern inventions”
(and particularly the telephone, “which could be used for reprehensible
conversations”). 44 In the same breath she refuses to own a telephone set
and to be possessed by the man she recently married; her husband has to
41 In another passage in the story, Mr. Ponto tells how, because of the mistake of a clerk at the
central office, he was able to catch a young woman as she was getting out of bed. Robida, The
Twentieth Century 66.
42 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1968; Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1994) 266.
43 In the French edition, the caption to plate nº31 (a full-page color drawing) reads, “Morality,
tranquillity, felicity. – Telephone courtship.”
44 Marc de Montifaud, “Le Téléphone,” Nouvelles drolatiques (Paris: B. Simon et Cie, 1889) 933.
Fig. 4. Advertisement, 1930s (Illinois Telephone Association).
resort to the metaphor of the telephone to achieve his ends. 45 The telephone
is associated with private secrets and intimate interpersonal conversation
– this relation of desire between two disembodied voices runs through
Duras’s Navire Night (1979) – and therefore pertains to an imaginary quite
removed from the cinematographic spectacle, destined for a large audience
gathered in the same space. 46 While some developments of the telephone
45 To his wife, who fears she may have “to learn how to use [it] the hard way,” the husband
answers, “No, your role could perfectly consist in listening to me; I will… speak to you first; you
will then answer me using the same method; and you will see, we will get along as though we
had done it our entire life.” De Montifaud, “Le téléphone,” Nouvelles drolatiques 959.
46 McLuhan stressed – failing to take into account the context of the period, def ined as
“strange,” as though institutional uses were self-evident – how telephony was oriented toward
other uses than those contemplated at the end of the nineteenth century because of the relation
of intimacy it establishes with the user: “Curiously, the newspaper of that time saw the telephone
as a rival to the press as a P.A. system, such as radio was in fact to be fifty years later. But the
232 Alain Boillat
were specifically tied to the commerce of eroticism (the sex chat lines with
the Minitel and the computer-telephone integration, for instance), a better
equivalent of this private use would be the home consumption of films.
Jacques Perriault indicates that in 1980, 75% of the VHS tapes sold in France
were pornographic. This type of production decisively contributed to the
creation of a video market, which quickly became diversified afterwards. 47
Films such as Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1982), Next of Kin (Atom
Egoyan, 1984), Sex, Lies and Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989), or
more recently Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997), have problematized
this resolutely intimate aspect of the VCR, comparable in that respect to
the telephone.
Audition and Audiovision of Theatrical Spectacles
The visual dimension of the telephonoscope, a device primarily considered

as a provider of audiovisual spectacles in The Twentieth Century, may appear
to occupy a prime, central place for the novelist, since the extrapolation with
respect to the system of telephony lies there. However, even as the “audio-
visualization” of the speaker by the media is emphasized by Robida as the
height of technological advances of the coming century, the transmission
of speech constitutes the main function of his telephonoscope, as the first
mention of the system in the book suggests: the author indicates that the
character of Mr. Pronto, “sacrificing the one or two acts of French, German,
or Italian opera on the telephonoscope […] dozed off in his armchair […].”48
The vision which this device, still unknown to the reader, gives access to
is not mentioned explicitly, so that at this stage it may be taken to be an
equivalent of the Théâtrophone, an invention that undoubtedly served as a
model to the novelist. Presented by Clément Ader at the 1881 World Fair, two
years before the novel was published, this system strongly contributed to
legitimizing the applications of telephonic technology in the late nineteenth
century by offering a specific use: the transmission of the sounds of stage
performances to the home. The frame of reference of telephony was thus
telephone, intimate and personal, is the most removed of any medium from the P.A. form. Thus
wire-tapping seems even more odious than the reading of other people’s letters.” McLuhan,
Understanding Media 269.
47 Perriault, La Logique de l’usage 167.
48 Robida, The Twentieth Century 11. Translator’s note: the word “audition,” emphasized by the
author in Robida’s original text in French, is omitted in the English translation.
associated – like that of the cinematograph – to the sphere of entertainment,

spectacle and the recording of artistic practices.
The precedence given by Robida to audition is not only the consequence of
a genealogical perspective that would have the invention of sound transmis-
sion come before “television.” The fact that most commentators have tended
to neglect the dimension of sound in the telephonoscope certainly has to
do with the presence of illustrations by the author of The Twentieth Century
in which the visual representation provided by the “crystal screens” of the
device is emphasized. Still, staying clear of teleologism requires a departure
from the preconception that as an invention, audiovisual communica-
tion (or representation) should unavoidably come after strictly visual and
auditory technologies and be more complex than these, owing to the mere
fact that it combines both dimensions. The rendering or the transmission
of speech may indeed very well constitute the main use assigned to some
machines at a given moment in the history of the technologies in question.
In an article on La Guerre au vingtième siècle in the periodical devoted to
Robida, Le Téléphonoscope, André Lange phrased the issue as follows:
The absence of the “telephonoscope” in La Guerre au vingtième siècle

(1887) may surprise, as it had previously appeared in The Twentieth
Century, published in 1883. Two inventions from The Twentieth Century
are still present here, the “telephonic gazette” and the “telephonograph.”
But no telephonoscope to be found…49
Lange’s surprise at the absence of the telephonoscope in La Guerre au

vingtième siècle stems from the assumption that this later novel should
feature an invention deemed more advanced than the “telephonic gazette.”
Yet if the telephonoscope is taken as one possible development of telephonic
technique, Robida could understandably limit himself to strictly auditory
technologies of communication four years later, with the image an optional
component50 mainly considered in relation to the home transmission of
theatrical performances in The Twentieth Century.
Outside the period outlined by the epistemological undertaking proper,
the frame of reference of Robida’s novel and that of the first decade of the
twentieth century may also be compared. The primacy of the dimension of
sound then appears to become less marked in futuristic texts, in which an
49 André Lange, “En attendant la guerre des ondes, les technologies de communication dans
les anticipations militaires d’Albert Robida,” Le Téléphonoscope 11 (May 2004): 8-10.
50 See my study “Faire pour la vue ce que le téléphone fait pour l’ouïe,” more particularly 84-88.
234 Alain Boillat
imaginary more strongly influenced by the model of “television” emerges.

In that respect, a significant lexical change may be noted in La Guerre
infernale by Pierre Giffard, a novelist who was also the author of popular
scientific works. In this novel, published in 1908 and illustrated by Albert
Robida, the appliance corresponding to the telephonoscope of The Twentieth
Century is called the “telephotograph,” a term whose Greek etymology
does not refer to sounds at all. One hypothesis is that the generalization
of moving images with the cinematograph contributed to shift the frame
of reference for extrapolations of telephony toward a more visual model,
which until then dominated only in representations associated with the
exteriorization of mental images51 or the visualization of ghosts, especially
in the vogue of spiritualism.52
To deal with the different frames of reference of these technologies,
I propose three main lines, often interdependent, but distinguished to
analytical ends here: communication, inscription, and simulation.53 While
the subjects transmitted through the telephonoscope are diverse in Robida’s
novel (the attack of the Tuaregs filmed by a reporter is often cited as a
forerunner of television news, for example), the frame of reference in which
the novelist conceives this technology pertains to both communication
and simulation. The latter comes “first,” if only because of the order and
the number of times applications of the telephonoscope come up in the
narrative. The Théâtrophone, which inspired Robida with the dominant use
of the telephonoscope, does not so much fall within the paradigm of what
51 See the short story L’Encéphaloscope (Der Gehirnspiegel, 1900) by Kurd Lasswitz, trans.
Stefania Maffei, in La Télévision, du téléphonoscope à Youtube 99-106.
52 On the subject, see Henri Azam’s essay “Télégraphie sans fil et médiumnité,” published
monthly between March 1925 and December 1926 as a series of articles in La Revue spirite, and
whose first text was presented by the editors as follows: “With the breakthroughs of science in
the domain of radio-telegraphy, heeding the scientists specializing in this area becomes highly
interesting, as does – when they are also spiritualists – the study of the parallelism, the analogy of
physical and psychical worlds.” La Revue spirite. Journal d’études psychologiques et de spiritualisme
expérimental, Paris (Feb. 1925): 66 (my emphasis). Allan Kardec, the founder of La Revue spirite
in 1858, explained what the relation with the invisible world of spirits consisted in, comparing
it with what the transatlantic electric wire could have taught Europeans about Amerindian
peoples before the discovery of America. See Allan Kardec, Qu’est-ce que le spiritisme? Introduc-
tion à la connaissance du monde invisible par les manifestations des esprits (1859; Paris: Editions
Vermet, 2005) 51. On the relations between spiritualism and telephony, see my study of Villiers
de l’Isle-Adam’s novel Tomorrow’s Eve, “On the particular status of the human voice. Tomorrow’s
Eve and the cultural series of talking machines,” Cinema Beyond Film 240-42, and more generally
Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television.
53 These appear in increasing order of potential intersections with related systems of talking
cinema.
was later to be called “telecommunications” as within that of simulation,

audition being associated with a “virtual” image (actualized in Robida’s
fiction). Giusy Pisano notes that with the Théâtrophone, the principle of
two transmitters (one for each ear) made possible a lateralization of sounds,
prefiguring stereophony, thanks to the variations in sound intensity brought
about by the distribution left/right and which activated a mental representa-
tion of the space and the movements of performers on stage for the listener.
This partial acoustic reproduction of the original space underscores the
representational dimension of this type of system.
The nodal presence of this cultural referent – the first telephonic message
is the account of a show at the Comédie-Française – is not surprising if
one recalls the intense theatrical activity in Paris in the 1870s and 1880s
as well as Robida’s implication in that area. Indeed, one of his favorite
subjects as a caricaturist (for Le Journal amusant, La Vie parisienne and
later La Caricature)54 was the chronicle of Parisian stage life at the time.
In that respect, it seems important to me to take into account the type of
spectacles Robida refers to in The Twentieth Century, where descriptions
are often satirical. The futuristic character of the telephonoscope does not
lie only in the dispositive it mobilizes, but also in the very nature of the
transmitted spectacle. A correlation may in fact be established between
these two aspects around the notion of “attraction” as defined by theoreti-
cians of early cinema:55 a “technological attraction,” to be sure, because of
the enthusiasm shown by the narrator and characters for the wonders of
the telephonoscope (it is a “novelty period”56 only for the focal character
of the narrative, as other characters are used to handling the system);
but a “stage attraction” as well, since Robida takes care to mention that
“modern” directors would add attractions to classical plays, and Antonio
Salieri’s 1786 Les Horaces becomes, for instance, a “tragedy in five acts and
five attractions.” Each of the thrilling interludes is meant to arouse the
attention of an audience bored by “old plays” – Robida constantly points
out the lack of interest in literary culture on the part of a society prizing
speed and sciences. An interlude consists, for instance, in a ballet, a tableau
54 See Sandrine Doré, “Albert Robida, critique en image de l’actualité théâtrale des années
1870-1880,” in Albert Robida, du passé au futur, ed. Daniel Compère (Paris: Belles-Lettres, 2006).
55 See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions. Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-
Garde,” Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986): 63-70.
56 The term was proposed by Tom Gunning to refer to a first phase in the use of the cinemato-
graphic dispositive. See Tom Gunning, “The Scene of Speaking: Two Decades of Discovering the
Film Lecturer,” Iris 27 (1999): 67-79.
236 Alain Boillat
vivant or an “equestrian and pedestrian dramatic pantomime,”57 which

the public of the future, as the author calls it with irony, honors as the
height of theatrical art. The heroine attends “a circus pantomime with
a great entrance of clowns”58 from her place and the telephonic account
surprising her in the middle of the night has as its subject the premiere
of a play featuring a “lion-tamer”59 at the Comédie-Française. The novelist
emphasizes the changeable and heterogeneous dimension of programming
in theaters, which constantly have to renew their “attractions”: “Theater
halls are no longer exclusively devoted to one genre like they used to be; they
must offer variety to keep audiences interested. […] It [a theater] must then
transform itself, switch genres, renew its personnel, and find new attractions
to stay afloat financially.”60 In the novel, no explicit connection is made
between this new type of play and distance audiovision, but both involve
the representation of a mass spectacle, as some subheadings indicate in
the fifth chapter. Transmitted by the telephonoscope, the plays imagined
by Robida therefore present some similarities with most of the subjects
chosen by the pioneers of talking cinema and subsequently over the first
years of the talkies, at the time of the so-called “talking and singing” films.61
Communication Within the “Machinery”
A singular manifestation of Robida’s reticular conception appears in The

Twentieth Century when the novelist explains the resort to orchestras for
the audiovisual transmission of theatrical plays:
[…] other theaters have worked out an agreement whereby they share

a common orchestra, located in a special room designed according to
scientific principles and linked to all theaters through telephonic wires.
Each evening, the central orchestra plays four pieces transmitted through
the cables to subscribing venues.62
The telephone link not only makes it possible to connect subscribers to the
place of the show: it also connects two institutions internal to the produc-

60 Robida, The Twentieth Century 195 (my emphasis).
61 See my Du bonimenteur à la voix-over, chapter V.
62 Robida, The Twentieth Century n55.
Fig. 5. Advertisement from the company Pathé frères.
tion space of the audiovisual representation, the different theater halls

and the “auditorium” where the orchestra is located. This was one of the
major preoccupations of the pioneers of sound cinema, as they sought to
establish the synchronization between the visual and auditory components
associated with separate spaces. In the early 1920s these attempts led to
the use of systems such as Charles Delacommunes’s Ciné-Pupitre,63 but
even in spoken early cinema, lecturers for magic lantern shows64 or for the
cinematograph needed to be connected to the projectionist, sometimes even
using semi-mechanical systems.65 The explanation provided by Robida in
this passage restricted to the margins of the narrative – a footnote – may
well support Giusy Pisano’s hypothesis on the Théâtrophone, namely that
this system “must have encouraged […] the pioneers of synchronism, who
63 See Laurent Guido, L’Âge du rythme (Lausanne: Payot, 2007) 404-408; and Boillat, Du
bonimenteur à la voix-over 92, n162.
64 A 1909 column on a specific projection system thus highlighted the interest of “bringing
the lecturer and the lantern projectionist closer” and “the ease for them to communicate during
the performance.” “Projections dactylographiques,” in Ciné-Journal 37 (29 Apr. - 5 May 1909).
65 “In front of the lecturer was a row of small knobs and a mysterious and silent dialogue existed
between the booth and him, a dialogue punctuated with red, white, green or blue lights. These
meant, ‘Show a still view, start the film.’ Or they indicated that the orchestra should stop, start
again, change the score.” See Rodolphe-Maurice Arlaud, Cinéma Bouffe (Paris: Editions Jacques
Melot, 1945) 79 (my emphasis).
238 Alain Boillat
saw in its success the possibility of combining the cinematograph and the
phonograph through a telephone wire.”66
In these experiences of projection of moving images with sound, trans-
mission does not occur between the representation and the audience – that
axis is still governed by the paradigm of simulation (of a diegetic world) – but
rather between two agents in the space of production of the representation.
This type of system was available at Pathé when the company commercial-
ized its Ciné-Phono around 1906: interestingly, one of the advertising posters
for this kind of spectacle (Fig. 5)67 features an egg-shaped projected image
(as in Robida’s illustrations of the telephonoscope, but in this instance
most certainly to refer to the firm’s logo, a medallion featuring a rooster).
The projection seems to result from a beam of light issuing from the pho-
nograph’s horn, as though sound came first (and in fact, the slogan puts
“to hear” before “to see”). The distinction proposed by François Albera
and André Gaudreault between the bonimenteur and the conférencier in
early cinema,68 displaced onto this context, suggests an interpretation of
this image as a phonographic audition accompanied with images rather
than a cinematographic projection with sound. Another contemporary
illustration, reproduced without commentary in Giusy Pisano’s book, fea-
tures the Pathé device designed for the projection of “cine-phonographic
scenes” (Fig. 6).69 It clearly shows that this system of live synchronization,
akin to the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre presented by Clément-Maurice in 1900,
allowed a connection to the projection booth and the phonograph located
in the spectatorial space, thanks to a telephone receiver. The projectionist
set the projection speed to the sounds produced by the cylinder of the
phonograph. This representation of a film show in a 1905 Pathé catalog is
unusual in that it does not seem to be a public projection site but a screening
for a limited number of spectators. This is suggested by the paintings and
the chandelier, which, like the dress and the posture of spectators, point
to a bourgeois home or the privacy of a curio cabinet, and contrast quite
a lot with the commercial presence of the cinematograph in fairs. Since
amplification constituted a major problem for sound cinema at the time, it
is not surprising that the show would be imagined in a relatively cramped
space. An operator stands in each of the spaces; the person in charge of the
66 Giusy Pisano, Une archéologie du cinéma sonore (Paris: CNRS, 2004) 159.
67 The poster is reprinted in Jacques Kermabon, Pathé, premier Empire du cinéma (Paris: Centre
Pompidou, 1994) 22.
68 See François Albera, André Gaudreault, “Apparition, disparition et escamotage du ‘boni-
menteur’ dans l’historiographie française du cinéma,” Le Muet a la parole 169-70.
69 Giusy Pisano, Une archéologie du cinéma sonore 267.
Fig. 6. Excerpt from the Pathé catalog, 1905.
phonograph becomes idle after the machine starts but may conceivably
intervene as a lecturer, or bonimenteur, in the absence of a phonographic
recording. A partition separates the place where the projectionist stands
from the space of reception, probably so that the noise of the projector does
not drown out the sounds emitted by the phonograph.70 Here the telephone
is reduced to a unidirectional transmission not addressed at the spectators
of the audiovisual representation, but used instead backstage to coordinate
the two sides of the machinery. This is to be distinguished from a system
such as the Phonorama (invented by Berthon, Dussaud and Jaubert in 1898),
which had spectators place a telephone receiver on one of their ears to be
able to listen to the sound accompanying the projected image and literally
integrated telephony into the cinematographic spectacle. Finally, on the
subject of these “Scènes Ciné-Phonographiques,” I should note that one of
the films commercialized by Pathé and mentioned by Giusy Pisano takes
on a particular signification, compared with the techniques involved in this
system. Titled Au téléphone and made in 1904, it showed and allowed one
to hear a monologue by music-hall artist Félix Galipaux. In this instance, as
70 Martin Barnier has noted that projection booths were common in early cinema and
that mechanical noise could have become a nuisance only as motorized projectors became
widespread during the First World War, not at the time when the projectionist turned a crank,
as is the case here. See Martin Barnier, Bruits, cris, musiques de films. Les projections avant 1914
(Rennes: PUR, 2010) 144-45. The issue of projector noise repeatedly comes up in discourses on
“silent” cinema: see Boillat, Du bonimenteur à la voix-over 130-48.
240 Alain Boillat
in filmic examples punctuating this discussion, what is represented echoes

the machinery needed for the very production of the representation.
The Paradigm of Inscription: Telephony and Phonography
In Robida’s futuristic story, oral transmission over the telephone replaces

writing, and more generally all mediums used to record speech, forestall-
ing Paul Zumthor’s comment in the era of sound media that “primitive
orality is making a strong comeback,” or rather, that “its continuity […] is
suddenly resurfacing after centuries of predominance of modes of written
communication.”71 Robida’s technological extrapolations attest to a will to
depict, in a dystopian mode, the total conversion of writing to oral modes of
expression. Letters are no longer written in The Twentieth Century: instead,
oral messages are recorded on the cylinder of a phonograph. Newspapers
editors do jot down their text on paper, but they transmit it orally only, as
“the articles sound spicier when read by their own authors. Through varied
inflexions and skillful intonations, they can add dimension to innuendos
and thus imply to subscribers what is not quite spelled out.”72 Given the
primacy of orality, whose immediacy contributes to play down the medium,
it comes as no surprise that here and there Robida’s illustrations include
balloons that were to become widespread some fifteen years later in comic
strips. Thierry Smolderen has demonstrated how radically different they
were from their predecessors (“phylacteries”) in that they resulted from a
new conception of speech as a sound phenomenon, a movement of air.73
Like the phonograph, which appeared two years before it, the telephone con-
stituted the site of an exacerbation of speech as an acoustic phenomenon.
One might think that phonography, unlike the telephone, is not associ-
ated with the notion of simultaneity, but in fact the distinction between
71 Paul Zumthor, “Le geste et la voix,” Hors-cadre 3 (1985) 73.

73 The sequence of images by draughtsman R. F. Outcault, The Yellow Kid and His New Pho-
nograph (New York Journal, 25 Oct. 1896), which in Smolderen’s view marked a paradigmatic
shift, uses precisely this phonographic technique – even if counterfeited, displaced onto a living
being, since a parrot is hiding in the body of the appliance. The first four “vignettes,” which are
not framed with a line, belong in the paradigm of writing (the text uttered by the character of
the “Yellow Kid” appears on his nightshirt), whereas the last one, in which the child’s surprise
is expressed in a balloon, marks the passage towards what Smolderen calls “the phonographic
paradigm of the speech balloon.” See Thierry Smolderen, “Of labels, loops, and bubbles. Solving
the historical puzzle of the speech balloon,” Comic Art 8 (Summer 2006). From the same author,
see also Naissances de la bande dessinée (Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2009) 119-27.
inscription and communication was not clear-cut at the time. Significantly,

combining the telephone with the phonograph was often contemplated, as
early as Edison, who noted in his memoirs (1878):
At the moment, the telephone necessarily has a limited role because

exchanged messages, not being recorded, are reduced to a mere con-
versation which does not present the needed guarantees. […] With the
telephone combined with the phonograph, things would be different for
preliminary discussions would be recorded and the textual reproduction
of everything agreed upon would be available.74
Since the usefulness of the “mere conversation” had not yet been acknowl-
edged, Edison thought of an association with the phonograph with a view
to a professional use of telephony, in particular in the domain of finance,
where the new device could play a role similar to that of the telegraph.
Robida himself imagined some combinations of these two techniques.
Despite the term used, his “telephonograph” has no relation to the recording
of sound, since the phonograph is limited to the function of a megaphone:
sound amplification simply allows the interlocutor to do without a pipe
connected to the device. It is a sort of “hands-free” system, as the expres-
sion goes today with respect to cellular phone capabilities (it is one of the
profiles for the Bluetooth standard). In other places, the novelist turns the
phonograph into a means of communication: for instance, after a shipwreck,
the captain throws six phonographs out to sea, with a distress message re-
corded on each of them.75 The phonographic recording thus mitigates spatial
distance, compensating it with a delayed transmission. In this case, the
recording of voices is subject to an objective, communicating information,
and thus appears in devices akin to voice mail or the Dictaphone. Robida
is rather critical of this semblance of communication, for several times he
emphasizes the lack experienced due to the absence of an interlocutor in
the flesh and the possibly deceptive simulation produced by techniques
74 Cited in French translation in Théodore Du Moncel, Le Téléphone, le microphone et le pho-

nographe (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1879) 302-3. Translator’s note: the quotation given here is a
translation from this French source, not from the original text where it could not be found. See
Frederick J. Garbit, The Phonograph and Its Inventor, Thomas Alvah Edison. Being a Description
of the Invention and A Memoir of Its Inventor (Boston: Gunn, Bliss, and Co., 1878), available at
http://archive.org/stream/phonographandit00garbgoog#page/n1/mode/2up, last accessed on
July 23, 2012.
242 Alain Boillat
of inscription and transmission of sounds.76 Indeed, phonography and

telephony, despite the immediacy they institute with sound occurrences,
whether fixed or transmitted, give rise to representations:77 the interlocu-
tor is fundamentally absent for the addressee of the message when it is
delivered, either because the expression took place beforehand or is taking
place from elsewhere. As Jacques Perriault emphasizes, “It is not the voice
that is being heard over the phone but a more or less faithful reconstitution,
without the gestures accompanying it, moreover.”78 Even if the telephone
does not provide the image of gestures, it aims to create a simulacrum of
presence by reproducing, on the side of reception, the variations of sound
waves produced on the side of emission. This question leads us directly to
the third paradigm, which will be considered succinctly,79 that of simulation
(of a human presence).
Simulation: The False Presence of the Other
The author of The Twentieth Century underlines the deterioration of

interpersonal relations in a technological society where “close” relatives
are contacted only “from a distance” – what Freud later stigmatized in
Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). At the beginning of the novel, Robida
thus cynically describes the attitude of parents for whom “telephono-
graphic” messages have as their function to substitute for their actual
presence by their children’s side. When they come back home to Paris
after eight years in a provincial high school, Barbe and Barnabette are
76 Robida admittedly evokes the positive effects of the telephonoscope, since he mentions that
the device makes it possible to suppress absence. Nevertheless, that is an incidental comment by
a candid Hélène, which the narrative tends to contradict through the multiplication of negative
effects linked to the use of telecommunications. In fact, when Hélène brings up the fact that
“the telephonoscope reunites faraway loved ones,” the more experienced Mr. Ponto replies,
“Almost.” Robida, The Twentieth Century 65.
77 The representational nature of sound is rarely taken into account in media theories, probably
due to its less manifest character (except in the case of technical problems, which reveal it, pre-
cisely), and in any case less than the representational nature of the image, two-dimensional even
when monochrome. On the subject, see Alan Williams, “Is Sound Recording Like a Language?”
Yale French Studies 60 (1980); and Boillat, Du Bonimenteur à la voix-over 396-420.
79 For a more in-depth examination of this question, I refer the reader to my comments on the
“Android” in the novel Tomorrow’s Eve, “L’Eve future et la série culturelle des ‘machines parlantes.’
Le statut singulier de la voix humaine au sein d’un dispositif audiovisuel,” in Cinémas 17.1 (Fall
2006): 10-34; as for the links between “tele-vision” and “talking portraits,” see Boillat, “Faire pour
la vue ce que le téléphone fait pour l’ouïe”: 78-84.
not “welcomed with open arms and anxious hearts by their father and
mother,”80 as imagined by Hélène, the orphan accompanying them. On the
contrary, they are “surprised that neither their father nor their mother was
there to greet them”81 and learn coldly from a concierge speaking through
a telephonograph that their parents are not home yet. The father, who is
busy at the stock exchange, joins them later; to find out where his wife
is, he asks a servant to bring him “Mrs. Ponto’s phono.” The “dialogue”
between the young women and the recorded voice of their mother unfolds
as follows:
– Remember to change the flowers in the living room, said the telepho-
nograph.
– That’s Mama’s voice, exclaimed Barnabette, always the same.
– Go to the Trocadero for their samples of Régence satin and their noodles
from Colmar… Change the water in the aquarium… I’ll be back around
eleven…
– A h! exclaimed Barbe and Barnabette.
– … I am having lunch at the English Café with a few political lady friends.
The telephonograph stopped.
– That’s all? asked Barnabette. Nothing for us?82
The first sentence, whose grammatical subject is the machine, not the indi-
vidual uttering the words, produces a dehumanization that reinforces the
feeling of an absence of the mother, busy with other tasks. In a society that
has seen the emancipation of women, the wife of the rich banker, depicted
with a degree of misogyny by Robida, is very active politically. The dashes
signal that characters speak in turns, even though no genuine conversa-
tion is initiated, since the mother’s recorded speech does not allow for any
interaction. In fact, the lines of the young women act as commentaries,
allowing the novelist to signify their disappointment. While Barnabette
does find some pleasure in the recognition of her mother’s voice, which
brings a human dimension – the inalienable features of the voice’s texture
make it possible to reconstruct the presence of the speaker in part – she is
dumbfounded that no declaration is addressed to her, excluding her defini-

244 Alain Boillat
tively from any relation of communication.83 Communication technologies

involving sound alone are the only ones that fail to make distance irrelevant
between beings84 – unlike the telephonoscope, whose visual component
ensures a gain in presence.85 Robida even specifies that with this device,
“the illusion is complete, absolute.”86 Sound plays a part in the creation
of this “telephonoscopic” representation of a stage performance, however,
since the novelist also imagines a “chamber theater” in which actors play
merely by having their voices heard over the telephone.87 Indeed, telephony
and phonography both result from a set of anthropocentric and demiurgic
attempts to reproduce the human through “speaking machines”: as Jacques
Perriault has noted, “what communication machines have to offer [is] the
circulation of simulacra, or ‘effigies,’ when it comes to individuals.”88 The
disembodied voices that reach us through the telephone receiver are often
vested with a power of presentification. Presence requires the present of
simultaneity, which is why phonography, postponing as it does the transmis-
sion of the message, partly fails to meet the compensatory role assigned to
“regulatory machines,” to borrow Jacques Perriault’s term.89 In the De Lorde
play previously mentioned, the husband goes as far as to forget the distance
separating him from his wife – until dramatic facts remind him of it, before a
definitive, deadly separation. Indeed, audition over the telephone makes his
interlocutor as present to him as is possible: “Do you not think it so admirable:
you are close to me… I can sense the least inflections of your voice… of your
gestures… I can almost see you… Yes, I can see you, my love… My dear love…
(He kisses her over the phone.).”90 With the mental image produced by the
recognition of the voice, this passage is reminiscent of Robida’s characters
and their outpourings over the telephonoscope (Fig. 7). Each scientific or
83 I want to point out that epistolary correspondence in The Twentieth Century also goes
through the phonograph, following a use that Du Moncel had contemplated. See Du Moncel,
Le Téléphone, le microphone et le phonographe 299-300.
84 The phonograph also provides quite a pathetic trace of the unfaithful Mr. Montgiscard to
his spouse-to-be, who in his absence has the device repeat the pledges of love he has recorded
with it. Robida, The Twentieth Century 217.
85 As to the phone conversation, it turns out to be a deception in the case of Jules Montgiscard’s
proposal, as if the absence of the interlocutor’s image enabled him to conceal his dishonesty.
Robida, The Twentieth Century 213-16.
89 “The project of realization [of an invention] is linked to the perception of an imbalance […]
[which] may be a lack of information, absence, loneliness, war, disability or handicap.” Perriault,
La Logique de l’usage 62.
90 De Lorde and Foley, Au téléphone 30.
Fig. 7. Albert Robida, Le Vingtième siècle.
theoretical discourse, each discourse of imagination negotiates in its own

way the ambivalent status of the presence-absence of the interlocutor on the
telephone: to mention but a few examples, which should be put in a specific
context of discursive production, it seems that many texts like the passage
from De Lorde give the voice a very strong power of presence, but they coexist
with the field of media theory, where Marshall McLuhan asserts that the user
of the telephone is unable to effect an act of visualization91 and Jean-François
Lyotard stigmatizes the disembodiment telecommunications entail.92
It does not come as a surprise, then, that cinema frequently seized on
the motif of the telephone,93 as early as the “silent” era or, as it is called in
French, the “mute” era – a period in which cinema called for virtual speech,94
91 McLuhan, Understanding Media 267-68.

92 Jean-François Lyotard, “Something Like: ‘Communication… without Communication’,” in
The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford:
Stanford U.P., 1991).
93 See Ned Schantz, “Telephonic Film,” Film Quarterly 56.4 (2003) 23-35.
94 See Rick Altman’s theses, “Quelques idées reçues sur le son du cinéma muet qu’on ne saurait
plus tenir,” Le Muet a la parole 81-99, some of which notably apply to films representing a phone
conversation.
246 Alain Boillat
or speech actualized by the lecturer during the screening,95 in fact. Cinema

then took advantage of its “ability to involve all of them [technical media]
by representing or using them within itself,”96 according to François Albera,
thereby producing a discourse on these media: for Tom Gunning, “[i]f the
telephone had not existed, film would have had to invent it.”97 In return,
the figuration of the telephonic medium and its uses, related to the removal
of any spatial limit and the institution of simultaneity, was not without
effect on film language and film narration,98 particularly with regard to the
practice of crosscutting.99 A recent example could be 24 (Robert Cochran,
Joel Surnow and Howard Gordon, 2001-2010), one of the most famous televi-
sion series of the decade: its narrative premises depend on the generalization
of cellular telephony, which appears in various applications throughout the
episodes (distance conversation, teleconference, geolocation, microphone,
remote control, etc.). Indeed, some choices, both formal (multiplication of
split screens) and narrative (supposed equivalence between time of the
plot and time of the story), are founded on the omnipresence of cellular
phones in the diegesis.
In fact, the interest of the present study in the links between moving
images and telephony in the late nineteenth century is inevitably informed
by the contemporary context. As Maurizio Ferraris has shown with regard
to mobile telephony,100 we find ourselves again in a hybrid era, between
orality and record, an era of intermediality characterized by a permeability
of practices in telecommunications and recording technologies. This is why
95 See Martin Sopocy’s comments on James Williamson’s Are You Here: Martin Sopocy, “Un
cinéma avec narrateur. Les premiers films narratifs de James A. Williamson,” Les Cahiers de la
Cinémathèque 29 (Perpignan, 1979): 108-25.
96 François Albera, “Le cinéma ‘projeté’ et les périodisations de l’histoire technique du cinéma,”
Cinema Beyond Film 393. In a note, the author brings up the example of the “role of the telephone
in film narrative.”
97 Tom Gunning, “Fritz Lang Calling: The Telephone and the Circuits of Modernity,” in Al-
legories of Communication. Intermedial concerns from cinema to digital, John Fullerton and Jan
Olsson, eds. (Rome: John Libbey, 2004) 23.
98 See Eileen Bowser, “Le coup de téléphone dans les primitifs du cinéma,” in Les Premiers
Ans du cinéma français, ed. Pierre Guibbert (Perpignan: Institut Jean Vigo, 1985); Jan Olsson,
“Calling the Shots: Communication, Transportation and Motion Picture Technologies in the
Teens,” in Le Cinématographe 273-81; by the same author, on the technique of the split screen,
see “Framing Silent Calls: Coming to Cinematographic Terms with Telephony,” in Allegories of
Communication 157-92.
99 See Philippe Gauthier, Le Montage alterné avant Griffith. Le cas Pathé (Paris: L’Harmattan,
2008) 113-15.
100 Maurizio Ferraris, T’es où? Ontologie du téléphone mobile (2005; Paris: Albin Michel, 2006),
part I.
Fig. 8. The movie theater comes with the telephone. ®Etienne Lavallée.
I have occasionally given myself license, in a perspective inspired at times

by Friedrich Kittler,101 not to limit this research to discourses from the late
nineteenth century. I also wanted, on the sidelines of this archaeological
enterprise, to use its frame of reference to weave together connections
between several distinct periods. The aim was to propose a comparative
study that could widen the scope of observations on an archaeology of sound
cinema and start a reflection on their fruitfulness in the form of ways into
a few specific aspects. Nowadays cellular technology is not used only for
communication, but also to look up a schedule or a list of contacts, to write
messages, to go on the Internet, to take pictures or shoot videos, to view
these images, etc. The improbable machine created by Canadian computer
graphics artist Etienne Lavallée, which appears on the cover of the 2001
edition of Understanding Media in the “Bibliothèque québécoise” (Fig. 8),
thus says something of the reversal that seems to have occurred. In this
hybrid machine, the movie theater is included in the form of a black-and-
white image in a circular screen replacing the dial of an old telephone, as if
to remind us that, on an epistemological level, (talking) “cinema” is perhaps
not (or no longer) necessarily the entity encompassing other media, even
if its centrality as a dispositive remains a measuring stick when thinking
about them.
101 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford U.P., 1999).
Between Paradoxical Spectacles and
Technical Dispositives
Looking Again at the (Serpentine) Dances of Early Cinema
Laurent Guido
When trying to grasp the complex relationships between dance and moving
images, during the emergence of the cinematic medium, one can hardly
avoid noticing the necessity of investigate, once again, the films dedicated
to the famous number of “serpentine” dance developed and started in 1892
by music-hall performer Loïe Fuller. The phenomenal craze created by
this original stage spectacle ended up imposing it as one of the motifs
characterizing artistic expression at the turn of the twentieth century.
Countless variations have attested to this, at least until the First World War,
in areas as diverse as sculpture, painting, architecture, furniture, or even
poetry and literature. Over the period, the serpentine dance continuously
exerted its influence over the most innovative aesthetic currents, from
the heirs of Symbolism through the Futurists to decorative trends typical
of Art Nouveau. Seeking to explain this stunning success, several studies
have shown how Fuller’s performances were made possible by important
epistemological changes following the emergence of a large ensemble of
scientific and technical dispositives.1 On the one hand, the serpentine
dance, like other spectacles designed by Fuller, featured a stylized apprehen-
sion of a form of mobility constantly tending toward abstraction, on the
model of new rationalized perceptions of the human body. On the other
hand, the same Fullerian shows expressed a symbiosis, unknown until
then, between artistic and technological dimensions of art and technology.
Indeed, through their incorporation of projections of artificial light with
multiple changing colors, of pyrotechnical effects, of complex mechanisms
1 On these questions, see Elizabeth Coffman, “Women in Motion: Loie Fuller and the ‘Inter-
penetration’ of Art and Science,” Camera Obscura, 17.1 (2002): 73-105; Rhonda Garelick, Electric
Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007);
Gabriele Brandstetter and Brygida Maria Ochaim, Loïe Fuller: Tanz, Licht-Spiel, Art Nouveau
(Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1989); Giovanni Lista, Loïe Fuller. Danseuse de l’Art Nouveau
(Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2002), and Loïe Fuller. Danseuse de la Belle Epoque (Paris:
Hermann Editeurs des Sciences et des Arts, 2006), an expanded version of the first edition (Paris:
Somogy/Stock, 1994).
250 L aurent Guido
or even of the combinations of a mobile magic lantern, they tapped into

the most spectacular signs of a modern expressivity firmly anchored in
the new world of electricity, machines and industrialization. This is how
the famous quotation from Stéphane Mallarmé should be understood: in a
text he reprinted in his Divagations (1897), he writes of Fuller’s show as the
representation of an “inebriation by art” and “simultaneously, an industrial
accomplishment.”2
This remarkable articulation between the dimensions of aesthetic emo-
tion and scientific technicality has largely been acknowledged over the past
twenty years, not only within cultural studies, but also on the occasion of
large exhibitions devoted to the history of visual arts. Whether in regard to
abstraction (Musée d’Orsay, 2004) or visual movement (Centre Pompidou,
2007), the serpentine dance has frequently been taken to epitomize, in
an instantaneous and startling manner, the new rhythmic and geometric
conceptions of mobility that appeared at the dawn of the twentieth century.
To illustrate this motif in the most representative way possible, the same
series of short films with “imitators” (a sanctioned term in Fuller’s histori-
ography) has generally been mobilized, most of them made between 1894
and 1908. This list of short films has definitely settled in the contemporary
imagination, not only through the rooms of museums where they are shown,
but also in the form of videos uploaded on the web. Many appropriations of
this motif may thus be found on YouTube with more or less inspired video
remixes that are hardly ever referenced correctly.
Despite its widespread distribution, this body of films does not seem to
have ever been considered for itself, but rather as an illustration by default,
seen as unfortunate by specialists of Loïe Fuller. Elisabeth Coffman, for
instance, insists on pointing out the gap between these various film record-
ings and Fuller’s scenic performances: “Dozens of films of this same sort
were made over the next twenty years – most following a predictable set of
expectations about costume, mise-en-scène, and bodily movement – but
nothing like Fuller’s Fire Dance.”3 Fuller’s imitators clearly never enjoyed
means similar to those put at the disposal of the famous American, who
mobilized up to a hundred technicians and was assigned an entire building
for the 1900 World Fair. As Giovanni Lista, one of Fuller’s better experts, also
notes, “[Fuller] alone was able to move beyond the ‘dance of the veil’ to reach
an art of immateriality focusing on movement, plastic form and the color of
2 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crayonné au théâtre,” Divagations (1897), in Œuvres complètes, vol. II

(Paris: Gallimard, 2003) 174.
3 Coffman, “Women in Motion”: 86.
light. Indeed, none of these short films illustrates what contemporary texts
and iconography convey about Loïe Fuller’s work […].”4 To account for the
lack – in the current state of research – of any film recording of the creator
of the serpentine (by contrast, several photographs have come down to
us), Lista raises the issue of the limits of representation on film at the time,
compared with the richness and complexity of the grand spectacle offered
by Fuller: “Contemporary filmmakers could only acknowledge the technical
impossibility of filming the highly sophisticated Fullerian version of the
serpentine dance. For Loïe Fuller as well, cinema could only constitute a
substantial reduction of the magic of her spectacles.”5
While thoroughly describing most of these films, Lista minimizes their
specific potential.6 Nevertheless, he makes a point of qualifying his posi-
tion: “Loïe Fuller’s experimental project had moved completely beyond the
boundaries of cinema, in spite of the deep and secret similarities between
the two approaches.”7 If the medium of the cinematograph could not quite
match the innovative potential of the serpentine, it still involved underlying
relations with Fuller’s aesthetic, implicit but truly significant – or so the
argument goes. This idea, largely accepted within Fullerian historiography,
is founded on a common displacement according to which “similarities”
between cinema and Loïe Fuller’s spectacles should be grasped in the
artistic potential of either form of expression rather than in their shared
real conditions of 1900 – a teleological, or at the very least essentialist, devia-
tion. It has therefore been possible to identify experimentations exploring
abstract forms in movement, more or less modeled on the perspectives
opened up by Fuller’s spectacles of light, from the mid-1910s on and in the
following decade, mainly in avant-garde circles (Ginna’s and Corra’s Futurist
cinema, and later German filmmakers such as Walter Ruttmann and Hans
Richter working in abstract animation). Fuller has also been claimed as
a source of inspiration by various French avant-garde filmmakers, later
collectively labeled “Impressionists”: Louis Delluc, Marcel L’Herbier and
more particularly Germaine Dulac.8
4 Lista, Loïe Fuller. Danseuse de la Belle Epoque 370.

5 Lista, Loïe Fuller. Danseuse de l’Art Nouveau 74.
6 Though he appreciates the “closer vision” (“vision rapprochée”) provided by some of these
f ilms, Lista regrets their general “lack of cinematic style” (“aucun effet d’écriture cinéma-
tographique”). Lista, Loïe Fuller. Danseuse de l’Art Nouveau 365, 357 respectively.
7 Lista, Loïe Fuller. Danseuse de l’Art Nouveau 375.
8 See my book L’Age du rythme. Cinéma, musicalité et culture du corps dans les théories fran-
çaises, 1910-1930 (Lausanne: Payot, 2007), chapter 7.6 (“Vers un art de la ‘fulgurance électrique’:
le cas Loïe Fuller”).
252 L aurent Guido
Among the studies pointing out this lineage, the work of Tom Gunning
stands out with its attempt to bring out the more immediately contextual
relations between the Fuller phenomenon and the emergence of cinema.
According to Gunning, both seem to be part of a general questioning of
some scales of values, not only between the dimensions of art and science,
but also between a high-brow culture and popular culture.9 Still, Gun-
ning himself devotes just a few lines to the films concretely showing the
serpentine dance in action. Despite the constantly repeated claim of an
underlying connection between Fuller and cinema, early films of serpentine
dances have mostly been considered incidentally and in isolation. They
have not yet been approached as belonging in the specific dispositives
they involve, whether from the standpoint of their form or the multiple
conceptual frameworks in which they may be situated.
This is the gap I would like to help to fill through a shift in the object of
my research, from the individual figure of Loïe Fuller to the many cinemato-
graphic appropriations of her serpentine dance. The fact that the films in
question feature imitators, that is, artists whose activity largely operates
in a secondary relation of appropriation, makes a greater distance all the
more necessary toward the highly legitimized framework surrounding the
serpentine dance. This greater distance allows a better understanding of a
whole array of phenomena based on re-use, imitation, copying and varia-
tion. These connected principles all seem to characterize the mass culture
emerging and rapidly becoming institutional at the turn of the twentieth
century. As we shall see, the motif of the serpentine dance circulated not
only in the main film studios (Edison, Biograph, Lumière, Pathé, Gaumont
and Méliès), but also and simultaneously in the so-called “popular” forms of
spectacle available in music halls, theaters or circuses. Cinema initially grew
in a context of fairground attractions or variety shows, as an 1896 news item
from the spectacles page of daily newspaper Le Gaulois indicates. A new
conjuring number titled “The Flying Woman” is announced at the Alcazar
theater, an attraction which, in the eyes of the reporter, “goes beyond the
surprises of the famous serpentine dance and the cinematograph in terms of
novelty and originality.” The two media appear side by side, but they are also
explicitly placed on the same level, like two equal occurrences within the
same paradigm, that of attractions. In the very early period of the emergence
of this paradigm, generally referred to as novelty by historians, cinema
9 Tom Gunning, “Loïe Fuller and the Art of Motion,” La decima musa il cinema e le altri arti/
The Tenth Muse cinema and other arts, Leonardo Quaresima and Laura Vichi, eds. (Udine: Forum,
2000) 25-53.
and the serpentine dance may indeed have been apprehended jointly, as
two forms of spectacle doomed to be replaced with even more impressive
propositions (such as “The Flying Woman”), at least in the opinion of some.
One of the aims of this study is to demonstrate that experimentation
with specific technical processes in early cinema paradoxically rested on
this kind of intermediality, that is, a constant relation to forms of expres-
sion situated outside the area of the cinematograph proper. This is not
simply to point out the existence of different systems for the mechanical
recording of movement that preceded and accompanied the emergence of
the cinematograph (the films produced for some devices projecting chrono-
photographic views, for the phonoscope, for the Edison kinetoscope, for the
Bioskop of the Skladanowsky brothers, etc.). Most importantly, I would like
to show how spectacles of moving images were then fully part of a genuine
“theatrical culture,” in Charles Musser’s words,10 that is, a common culture of
spectacle concerning film as well as performing arts like theater and dance.
As a consequence, focusing on films of serpentine dances means not only
examining per se the few extant prints and assessing them in relation to
production documents, but also comparing films with discourses of their
time. In the absence of a specialized film press, these may be teased out
in scientific publications or print sources related to music hall or theater
circles.
This study accordingly falls within the scope of the research program
proposed by François Albera and Maria Tortajada in the chapter open-
ing this volume. Indeed, the films devoted to the serpentine dance are
considered from the standpoint of dispositives they elicit in cinema,
taking into account not only a series of technical processes, but also “the
construction of the network of discourses, practices, institutions relating
them to representation.”11 The constant attention given to dances in early
cinema, far from being explained away through the emphasis on a single
conceptual framework, refers to complex set of relations that need to be
apprehended at the crossroads of several dispositives. These certainly relate
to aesthetics, yet they are also rooted in the domains of science, technique,
social utilitarianism and – first and foremost – the spectacular.
10 Charles Musser, “Towards A History of Theatrical Culture: Imagining An Integrated History

of Stage and Screen,” Screen Culture: History and Textuality, ed. John Fullerton (London: John
Libbey, 2004) 3-19.
11 See François Albera and Maria Tortajada, “The Dispositive Does Not Exist!”
254 L aurent Guido
The corpus of serpentine dance films shot between 1894 and 1908 may be
divided into two distinct, successive groups.12 I will deal only with the more
important one here, around a dozen of moving views where the solitary
physical performance represents the only recognizable visual element.13 As
for the second group, which is more limited and much less known in spite
of its immediate attractiveness, it mostly involves films divided in several
tableaux where dance is one of several parameters (diegetic spectators, more
complex sets, the resort to tricks…) that depend on narrative or spectacular
motivations. These few films, some directed by Georges Méliès or Segundo
de Chomon,14 which I have discussed in another study,15 most often depict
situations of metamorphoses and doubles with a self-reflexive dimension.
Though they resort to a number of “tricks” characteristic of the genre, such
as stopping the camera to make a character appear or disappear, these
films also refer to numbers previously presented on stage. Méliès’s 1899
The Pillar of Fire (Star Film, nº188) thus features a serpentine dance,
echoing a show by Loïe Fuller herself, music hall spectacles offered by some
of her first-rate imitators, and aspects of a magic number once presented
at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin. According to the regime of spontaneous
intermediality theorized by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion,16 which
defines early cinema prior to the institutional turn around 1908, this idea
of adaptation for the screen of a similar stage number was best expressed
in the first few films devoted to the recording of serpentine dances. The
primary dispositive of the stage never completely vanishes even as it is
reconfigured in the secondary form of the screen.
This idea did lead to the recording of Annabelle Whitford Moore’s par-
ticularly cheerful and youthful performances at Edison’s Black Maria studio
in August 1894 (Annabelle Butterfly Dance, Annabelle Serpentine
12 Giovanni Lista makes a distinction between “two kinds of images” (“deux genres d’images”):
“muscular prowesses of female dancers” (“exploits musculaires de danseuses”) and “phantas-
magorias” (“fantasmagories”). Lista, Loïe Fuller. Danseuse de la Belle Epoque 357.
13 See the precious filmography provided by Giovanni Lista in Loïe Fuller. Danseuse de la Belle
Epoque 616-36. It comprises more than 80 entries from before 1910.
14 Notably the outstanding Création de la serpentine (Chomon, 1908), which is closer,
in Lista’s opinion, to Fuller’s art thanks to its use of concealing, multiplication or abstraction
effects. Lista, Loïe Fuller. Danseuse de la Belle Epoque 367-369).
15 See the proceedings of the conference Méliès: carrefour des attractions (Cerisy, France, July
25 - August 1, 2011), forthcoming.
16 André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “Un média naît toujours deux fois,” Sociétés &
représentations, vol. 9 (Paris: CREDHESS, 2000) 21-36.
Dance, Annabelle Sun Dance).17 (Fig.1) The modes of representation

characterizing these films are quite elementary, but show great concern for
legibility and closure: a long shot makes it possible to show the whole body
within the frame; a single take records the choreography in its continuity;
17 These films bear the numbers 48 to 50 in the reference filmography, Charles Musser, Edison
Motion Pictures, 1890-1900 An Annotated Filmography (Pordenone: Le Giornate Del Cinema Muto/
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997) 111-12. New versions of the three dances were shot with
Annabelle in February 1895, and again in the summer of the same year. On these, see Musser,
Edison Motion Pictures 173, 188-89.
256 L aurent Guido
a set reduced to a few lateral markers focuses the whole attention on the
performance of the body; finally, the profilmic subject is placed in a direct
and frontal position with respect to the camera. Even if these unipunctual
films, most of them lasting under a minute, are rather similar in their com-
position, it is possible to observe variations in angle, layout, set, tints, and so
forth, between films. Indeed, the absence of editing (in the sense of joining
several shots) does not necessarily entail stylistic and figurative deficiency.
The argument that dance films of early cinema are but passive recordings
of a profilmic reality entirely predefined, dear to some theoreticians who
came after the advent of editing,18 does not withstand an internal analysis of
the films. While it may seem evident in the case of recordings of serpentine
dances or other music hall numbers – typical early subjects for Edison’s ki-
netoscope, as we will see later – the assessment also holds for the first views
recorded “from life” by Lumière cameramen (Bal espagnol dans la rue by
Gabriel Veyre, Mexico City, August 6, 1896; Los Aïnos à Ueso by Constant
Girel in October 1897; Cynghalais: danse des couteaux by Alexandre
Promio, Paris, September 1897…). An astounding dance of contortions by
Ashantis filmed in 1897 on the occasion of an ethnographic exhibition in
Lyons thus belongs in the same spectacular logic, organized according to a
Western eye, as the Sioux dances of the Edison catalog featuring elements
from Buffalo Bill’s touring show.19 In Danse du sabre (Lumière, nº 441),
two Africans fight in front of their fellow men gathered around them in a
scene staged in depth. The audience commands one of the dancers to turn
his face towards the camera and alternately brandish his weapon in the
same way, that is, towards these Western spectators for whom the show
has been designed and staged. Similarly, the Danse tyrolienne (Lumière,
nº 31, September 1896) shot by Constant Girel in Germany20 does relate
to a model that was to remain untouched for the countless dance films21
produced by major film companies until their institutionalization around
1908: a unipunctual view in long shot partly reusing the frontal proscenium
18 Lev Kuleshov, for instance, was to devalue the single take for choreographic gestures in his
experiment on “created dance,” privileging instead a “dance of images” closer to the specific
demands of the medium of film, in his opinion. See Lev Kuleshov, “The Banner of Cinema” [1920],
in Lev Kuleshov. Fifty Years in Films. Selected Works (Moscow: Raduga, 1987).
19 Musser, Edison Motion Pictures 125-29.
20 Denise Böhm-Girel, “Constant Girel, Lumière-Operateur in Deutschland (1896),” KINtop,
vol. 5 (1996): 170-76.
21 See Laure Gaudenzi, “Une filmographie thématique: la danse au cinéma de 1894 à 1906,”
in Les vingt premières années du cinéma français, Jean A. Gili, Michèle Lagny, Michel Marie,
Vincent Pinel, eds. (Paris: AFRHC/Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1996) 361-64.
of the scenic dispositive and aiming to address the audience directly. This
mode of recording the body in movement is not specific to these films: more
fundamentally, it is part of a direct lineage in ways of filming systematized
earlier by chronophotographers.
The connection to chronophotography appears in a series of images
made by Georges Demenÿ in 1893 and devoted to a ballerina from the
Paris Opera doing an entrechat22 and presenting exactly the same visual
characteristics. A closer look at the determinations shaping these films
brings a gradual awareness of the particular articulation between different
factors playing out in those same years. Beyond their scientific aspect (the
physiological research carried out by Demenÿ at the Station physiologique
in Paris with Etienne-Jules Marey23), these images refer to aesthetic factors.
One of the pioneers of the rational study of gesture, Georges Demenÿ was
not solely motivated by utilitarian and social perspectives. His artistic
convictions also ran deep: he was of the opinion that “both the minds of
the artist and the physiologist, starting from different points, should meet
before nature” and praised “rhythm” and “harmony” as ways to identify
the “perfect effort” as well as conditions for the “beauty of movement.” His
discourse matches that of various hygienist and body culture movements
at the turn of the twentieth century (hébertisme in France, Lebensreform
in Germany). Concerned with uncluttered representations (“the line and
the plane should prevail over teeming details”), Demenÿ pleaded for a
regeneration of bodies through a conformity to the physical canons of
ancient statuary, the key of a new “simplicity of gesture.”24 His theoretical
writings on gymnastics and body movements were thus explicitly part of an
emerging Neo-Antique rhythmic movement that was to mark a deep reform
of bodily expression some ten years later, favoring the appearance of modern
dance and various systems of musical-gestural expression (with Isadora
Duncan, Ruth Saint Denis, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Rudolf Laban and, more
22 See Laurent Mannoni, Marc de Ferrière and Paul Demenÿ, Georges Demenÿ, Pionnier du
cinéma (Douai: Cinémathèque française/Pagine/Université de Lille 3, 1997) 74.
23 On the utilitarian mission assigned to the Station through subsidies it received from the State
(the study of walking, running or jumping to improve the performances of soldiers or workers),
see Laurent Mannoni, Etienne-Jules Marey: la mémoire de l’œil (Paris/Milano: Cinémathèque
française/Mazzotta, 1999) 191.
24 Georges Demenÿ, L’éducation de l’effort. Psychologie - physiologie (Paris: F. Alcan, 1914) 129-32.
The scientist also states that “Humankind regains control of itself and comes back to itself as
it admires ancient masterpieces.” See Georges Demenÿ, Les bases scientifiques de l’éducation
physique (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1920) 160.
258 L aurent Guido
generally, the movement labeled New Kinaesthetic25 by American cultural

historian Hillel Schwartz. The reference to Antiquity is as straightforward
as possible in the images of the ballerina made by Demenÿ in 1893, since
these photographs are part of a series shot at the Station physiologique for
a specialist of ancient dance, Maurice Emmanuel, and were reproduced
in the form of photographic plates as well as analytical drawings in the
1896 published version of his dissertation.26 Through chronophotography,
Emmanuel sought to check the validity of the dance steps he had inferred
from the analysis of ancient bas-reliefs or figurative monuments.
In his evocation of the symbiotic relation between art and industrial
accomplishment produced by Loïe Fuller’s spectacles, Stéphane Mallarmé
himself had associated the serpentine dance to a paradoxical Antiquity. In
the first version of his commentary, published in the English newspaper The
National Observer in 1893 but not reprinted in its entirety in Divagations, he
made a rather original observation: “That this prodigy springs from America
does not surprise, and it is Greek. Classical insofar as modern, quite.”27 As
it turns out, for the poet, the figure of Fuller then does not only express the
interpenetration of art and science on the eve of the twentieth century, but
also the sudden appearance of archaic structures in the very heart of mo-
dernity, an aspect also perceptible within the work of chronophotographers.
This articulation between innovation and archaism has nothing original
to it; on the contrary. It appears as one of the emblematic aspects shared by
the various conceptions of the body around 1900 and refers to the general
position of an era in which the most groundbreaking dimensions of the
modernization and increasingly technical nature of social life are cease-
lessly perceived as opportunities to make traditional issues resurface. This
is not only a reassuring attempt to cover over the newest characteristics of
new media with familiar concepts – as if to absorb the traumatic shock of
industrialization and urbanization – but also a mythology imparting form
to the very field of technical research and inventions.
Beyond their scientific, aesthetic and cultural determinations, a spec-
tacular dimension more openly linked to commercial pursuits also appears
in this research and these inventions. In 1893, the visit of Opera ballerinas
25 Hillel Schwartz, “Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century,” Incorporations
(New York: Zone, 1992) 71-127.
26 Maurice Emmanuel, The Antique Greek Dance, After Sculptured and Painted Figures (Charles-
ton, SC: Forgotten Books, 2012).
27 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Considérations sur l’art du ballet et la Loïe Fuller,” The National
Observer 13 May 1896, in Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes 314.
at the Station physiologique, considered by Marey himself with aloofness,28

took place in the context of a decisive step for Georges Demenÿ. With the
foundation of the Société du phonoscope and a commercial and spectacular
ambition he acknowledged openly, Demenÿ was moving towards a split from
physiology strictly speaking. One manifestation of this approach was the
choice of scenes involving music hall artists, recorded in 1894 in his own
laboratory with a more palpable intention to entice.29 Besides the creation of
eye-catching views featuring French cancan dancers, Demenÿ also tapped
into the exhibitionist potential of the moving image of the ballerina. (Fig.
2) When he reused the “scientific” images of the entrechat from the series
made by Maurice Emmanuel and placed them on a phonoscopic disc, his
motivations indirectly echoed Eadweard Muybridge’s when reusing an old
photograph, Pirouette, to attach it to a slide30 or using it to make a plate for
28 The scheduled presence of dancers at the Station only elicited the comment by Marey that
they may bring “some gaiety” to the place. Letter dated Dec. 6, 1892, in Lettres d’Etienne-Jules
Marey à Georges Demenÿ 1880-1894, Thierry Lefebvre, Jacques Malthête, Laurent Mannoni, eds.
(Paris: AFRHC, 1999) 422. A session took place in July the following year. Letter dated July 14,
1893, in Lettres d’Etienne-Jules Marey à Georges Demenÿ 442.
29 Mannoni, de Ferrière and Demenÿ, Georges Demenÿ, Pionnier du cinéma 72-76.
30 Paul Hill, Eadweard Muybridge (London: Phaidon, 2001) 118-19.
260 L aurent Guido
his Zoopraxiscope (nº34: Grecian Dancing Girls) in the form of a drawing.

(Fig. 3) Similar images, moved from one context to another, assumed other
significations, other statuses and other values. This key principle of the
period is also present in the work of another, German chronophotographer,
Ottomar Anschütz, whose Schnellseher (or Elektrotachyskop), was mass-
produced in an automatic version over the years 1892-1895 and circulated
in scientific conferences as well as novelty shows or World Fairs (Chicago
in 1893, for instance). For these demonstrations, Anschütz drew about sixty
images from his available stock of chronophotographic studies: soldiers,
animals (horses, dogs, camels, elephants…), athletes, acrobats and, of
course, dancers swirling their skirts.31
An advertisement for the presentation of the Schnellseher at the Crystal
Palace in London in April 1893 emphasizes the scope of an entertainment
form then listed under “Permanent Attractions”: “The Electrical Wonder
combining the latest development in instantaneous photography with electri-
cal automatic action. Skirt dancing, Gymnastics, Boxing, Steeple-Chasing,
Flat-Racing, Haute-Ecole Stepping Horses, Military Riding, Leaping Dogs,
Camels, Elephants in motion, Indians on the war path, etc.” While the word
“attraction” refers to the program as a whole here, that is, to the techni-
cal process itself, the position at the top of the list of dancers showing
their legs as well as sporting feats indicates the predominance of physical
performances already organized in numbers.
The characteristics of these chronophotographic images, which show the
continuity affecting the series of moving images at the turn of the twentieth
century, may also be noted in the first films shot by William Laurie Dickson
with the stars of music halls, fairgrounds and variety shows for the Edison
kinetoscope. The serpentine dance of Annabelle Whitford appears next to
German body-builder Eugen Sandow and dancer Carmencita, as well as
boxing champions.32 The kinetoscope, which enjoyed significant coverage
and publicity in the media from the very moment it was launched in the
United States, was presented in London in October 1894, in Paris the follow-
31 Announcement by Anschütz published in Photographische Nachrichten 49 (1890): 758. See

also the proceedings of the Berlin Photography Society meeting on 18 Jan. 1890, in Photographis-
che Nachrichten (1889): 67-69, quoted by Friedrich Von Zglinicki, Der Weg des Films (Hildesheim/
New York: Olms Presse, 1979) 188; and Deac Rossell, Ottomar Anschütz and his Electrical Wonder
(London: The Projection Box, 1997).
32 Charles Musser’s reference book on the subject, Edison Motion Pictures, lists over fifty films
featuring various dances.
ing month, then in Berlin in March 1895.33 A French publicity leaflet from
the company The World’s Phonograph Co., based in Amsterdam, points
out “the great variety of scenes” immortalized by the kinetoscope and the
fact that “the most famous artists and actors in the world are continuously
photographed to that end: dancers, fighters, boxers, etc.” Before the advent
of more imposing and more legitimate productions from the theater and the
opera, the number of short forms issuing from the music hall surged among
the films made at the Black Maria and later marked the first projections in
the United States. The inaugural show of the Vitascope at the Koster and
Bials music hall in New York City, given by Thomas Armat on April 23, 1896,
thus included – besides vaudeville and burlesque boxing routines – a Skirt
Dance and an Umbrella Dance, as well as a Butterfly Dance.34 The at-
tention of the press focused on these choreographic numbers. The New York
Daily News reported that the show started with a “lively air” played by the
orchestra before “there flashed upon the screen the life-size figures of two
33 In Berlin it was frequently compared with the chronophotographic work of Anschütz. See
Von Zglinicki, Der Weg des Films 206-7.
34 Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen To 1907 (1990; Berkeley, Los Angeles:
The University of California Press, 1994) 122-24.
262 L aurent Guido
dancing girls who tripped and pirouetted and whirled an umbrella before
them.”35 This striking image was in fact the one that Raff & Gammon, the
company running the Vitascope, had chosen for its letterhead. The drawing
represents a packed orchestra with spectators riveted by a stage where the
projected moving image of a ballerina is shown, its size comparable to the
host of the show standing by the screen.
All public exhibitions of chronophotographic films and later of short films
evidently involved a spectacular aspect, whether they showed mechanisms
invisible to the naked eye through the presentation of a gesture broken down
in phases or produced the illusion of movement through the animation of
the same views by optical machines. This spectacular aspect depended on
both the fascination aroused by a technological novelty capable of bring-
ing a new type of images to the public and the sporting, choreographic or
acrobatic performance recorded by the camera, staged and framed through
a dispositive based on a frontal proscenium. The “attractional” value of the
subject was added to that of the process of animation itself, which literally
had “images dance.”36 In his reflection on the modes of filmic attraction in
early cinema, Frank Kessler expressed this idea very precisely.37 To account
for the way in which this kind of ambivalence runs through the films of
serpentine dances, and more specifically Edison films, it should be pointed
out that like most views devoted to the motif, they involve a privileged
relation between the attraction of the technical dispositive itself and the
attraction constituted by the unfolding performance, framed by the camera.
Two aspects, color and circularity, attest more keenly to this.
Indeed, Annabelle’s performances for Edison have come down to us in
hand-colored versions, like many serpentine dance films, which are some
of the first films in color in history. The fact that this particular motif
35 “Amusements,” New York Daily News, 24 April 1896. Quoted by Charles Musser, Before the
Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley, Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1991) 62.
36 The expression was to enjoy much currency in discourses on moving images. Edison already
used it to emphasize the playful dimension of the kinetoscope: “a silly little device for making
pictures that would dance.” Quoted by Joseph H. North, The Early Development of Motion Pictures
1887-1909, diss., Cornell University, 1949 (New York: Arno Press, 1973) 13. Within the film avant-
gardes of the 1920s, dance took the value of ideal metaphor for montage. See chapter 7 (“Du corps
rythmé au modèle chorégraphique”) in my book L’Age du rythme.
37 Frank Kessler formulated the division, between “cinematography as a spectacular dispositive,
within which the ability of the machine to capture and reproduce movement predominates;
and cinematography as a dispositive of spectacle, where the filmed spectacle itself constitutes
the main attraction.” See Kessler, “La cinématographie comme dispositif (du) spectaculaire,”
Cinémas 14 (Fall 2003): 21.
was immediately included in the genres selected for coloring – and as a

consequence, sold at a higher price – reveals the premium then put on it.
What is more, this technique undeniably used the medium’s own potential,
since tints were applied with a brush on each of the several hundred frames
that made up the films – as many still images which produced the illusion
of movement once projected at a high speed. Still, the addition of color
should not be reduced to a quest for specificity, that is, to a will to play
with the illusionistic, almost magical properties of the cinematographic
dispositive. Far removed from such concerns, this technical innovation also
aimed to render an essential feature of the serpentine dances as they were
really performed on stage at the time: the projection of colored lights on the
fabrics brought to life by the arms of the dancers and their swirling dresses.
Color similarly played a part in a number of variations then referred to as
“kaleidoscopic dance,” “magic coat” or “magical clothing.”38
These dances, which combined corporeal movements and projections
of colored lights, relied on equipment akin to that of magicians. A 1901
advertisement for the De Vere store (one of the most important specialized
businesses in Europe), addressed at spectacles founded on tricks and pyro-
technical conjuring, praised certain equipment for physics and technique.
The ad publicized, for instance, “oxyhydrogen and electrical devices for
projections, serpentine dances and fire dances” for which “gelatins of all
colors” as well as “painted glass for kaleidoscopic dances” were also pro-
posed.39 Among the prestigious patrons that De Vere boasted of supplying
were Loïe Fuller and Valentine Petit, both given the same importance in
the ad. Petit’s kaleidoscopic dance number then toured throughout Europe.
A few years before, she had performed in Berlin’s main music hall, the
Wintergarten, as part of a groundbreaking program, since on that same
evening the Skladanowsky brothers’ Bioskop had been introduced (one of
the first public projections of moving photographic images, on November 1,
1895, in a show otherwise exclusively composed of variety numbers, includ-
ing… a serpentine dance). The collusion between para-cinematographic
spectacles and kaleidoscopic dances owes little to chance, since both
forms of expression often cohabited in the world of fairgrounds. A famous
poster for a fair, the Théâtre Salon des Visions d’Art (1899), thus featured a
mechanical system for the reproduction of moving images, “Professor Potel’s
Gioscope (moving photography)” next to a kaleidoscopic dancer (“Miss
38 See Jacques Deslandes and Jacques Richard, Histoire comparée du cinéma, vol. 2 (Tournai:
Casterman, 1968) 90.
39 L’Industriel forain 596 (January 6-12, 1901).
264 L aurent Guido
Darling Chromo in Her Marvelous Multicolor Transformations / Innovation

in the Application of Projections with Electricity and Light”). 40 (Fig. 4) In
1904, another fairground poster similarly praised the qualities of a Palais
de l’Art Nouveau dedicated to new electric shows, once again juxtaposing
“cinematographic scenes” with the “light projections of the magic coat and
of the serpentine dance,” pointing out that they “show us the harmonies of
color along with its splendors.”
Pointing once again to the indissoluble relation between the attraction
of the performance reproduced on the screen and that arising from the
medium itself, the bond between dance and color marked many films in
early cinema. 41 However, the application of multicolor tints on serpentine
dance films does not only stem from an intention to transpose effects
already produced on stage. In those same years, it may also have referred to
other technical dispositives based on the animation of still images. Danse
serpentine de Loie Fuller, published around 1894, thus appears among
the subjects intended for the folioscope, also known as the kinéographe
or flip book, whose movement consists in quickly flipping the pages of a
booklet in which a series of images have been assembled. This happened to
be a booklet whose 90 numbered photographs were colored in nine different
40 L’Industriel forain 596 (January 6-12, 1901): 144-45.

41 This is, for instance, the case in spectaculars or with The Great Train Robbery (Edison, 1903),
where the movements of the dancers’ skirts assumed the value of an attraction comparable to
that of explosions, which were also colored. See Tom Gunning, “Colorful Metaphors: the Attrac-
tion of Color in Early Silent Cinema,” in Il colore nel cinema, Monica Dall’Asta and Guglielmo
Pescatore, eds. (Bologna: Libraria Universitaria, 1995) 249-55.
tints. Some businesses, which then commercialized this type of process at

the same time as they were involved in the commerce of film views, were
able to use their subjects for one or the other medium (flip book on the one
hand, film for projection on the other). This was precisely the case for the
Skladanowsky brothers with their Serpentintanz (the recording of a Miss
Ancion), shown during Bioskop programs. 42 Since no color print of the film
is available today, the only source indicating that this serpentine dance was
indeed colored is a memory of Max Skladanowsky: “The effect of speed of the
dance was further accentuated by the light reflections of painted colors.”43
This reference to the flip book leads us to take into consideration one of
the traditions extended by cinema, which coexisted with it, that of optical
toys founded on the illusion of movement. The motif of dance was always
central to these. When magician Ludwig Döbler inserted the image of a
“parading dancer” in his projections of moving drawings at the Vienna
Josephstadt Theatre in 1847, 44 he was only continuing a rather widespread
practice. The use of choreographic figures was quite frequent in the lists
of subjects for a number of optical toys and systems for the reproduction
of movement out of still images such as the zoetrope45 and, most of all, the
phenaskistiscope and its variations (the Phantascope used by Döbler or
the English Fantascope, which offered a couple of waltzers in the 1830s). 46
On his first disc for the phenakistiscope (1832), one of the main designers
of this device, Joseph Plateau, had in fact placed a dancer pirouetting, an
example the researcher had chosen to explain in detail in his scientific
correspondence.47 For those projecting moving photographs, the motifs used
(a couple waltzing and the pirouette of a Japanese acrobat for American
42 This film was shot a little later than other subjects for the Bioskop, which for the most part
were recorded in the summer of 1895 with natural light and in front of a white backdrop. See
Von Zglinicki, Der Weg des Films 242; and Joachim Castan, Max Skladanowsky oder der Beginn
einer deustchen Filmgeschichte (Stuttgart: Füsslin Verlag, 1995) 43-45, 57. With the original lost,
the film was reconstructed by computer in 1994-1995 from a contact sheet representing phases
of the action. The image is featured in C. W. Ceram, Archaeology of the Cinema (San Diego:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965) and in von Zglinicki’s Der Weg des Films, among other titles.
43 Quoted in Castan, Max Skladanowsky oder der Beginn einer deustchen Filmgeschichte 218.
Translator’s note: this is a translation from the author’s own French translation of the German
source.
44 Deac Rossell, “The Public Exhibition of Moving Pictures before 1896,” KINtop 14/15 (2006):
159-95, 168, 178-79.
45 An undated advertisement for The Zoetrope Wheel of Life presented a gymnast and an acrobat
among available subjects. See Deslandes, Histoire comparée du cinéma (vol. 1) 39.
46 Deslandes, Histoire comparée du cinéma 38.
47 See Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow. Archaeology of the Cinema, trans.
Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001).
266 L aurent Guido
Henry R. Heyl’s Phasmatrope in 1870, 48 children waltzing for Jean Aimé Le

Roy’s high-speed slides, made in 187649) remained resolutely within the
realm of the typical catalog for phenakistiscope discs. The same repertoire
was later exploited by Emile Reynaud, whose first single subjects for the
phenakistiscope around 1877 comprised a tightrope walker, a trapeze artist
and a juggler,50 and even by Eadweard Muybridge in some of his drawings
for the zoopraxiscope (including a couple of waltzers, an image drawn from
plate 197 in Animal Locomotion).
This permanence of the choreographic element in shows presenting
moving images certainly owes something to the aesthetic qualities spe-
cific to the graceful stylization of the rhythmic gesture, but it may also
be explained through its practical, condensed and universal character.
The power of seduction emanating from the dancing body generally rests
on the development of a repetitive scansion based on brief, elementary
movements. Drawing one of its most spellbinding effects from this iterative
dimension, dance has naturally proved to be one of the privileged subjects
of spectacular processes founded on the reiteration or looping of a single
action for several seconds. Whether aiming for aesthetic contemplation or
sheer visual enjoyment, this spectacularity is not the only value assigned to
moving images, which from the beginning were also marked by essentially
pedagogical or scientific determinations. As already noted, this frequent
articulation between the “pleasure of the eyes” and “teaching”51 was more
pronounced among chronophotographers working in the wake of Eadweard
Muybridge in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century.
The reference to optical toys introduces the issue of circularity or, rather,
that of looping images, which is one of their main characteristics. In the
first shows where moving images were projected, the practice of repeating
the film was frequent. The music hall numbers filmed and shown in the
screenings of the Skladanowsky brothers are known to have been repeated
several times each. Likewise, an 1896 brochure for the Vitacope process
(Edison) asserts that the same subject could well be shown “for ten or fifteen
48 Deslandes, Histoire comparée du cinéma 77.

49 Von Zglinicki, Der Weg des Films 213-14.
50 See Gérard Talon, Emile Reynaud (Paris: Avant-Scène du Cinéma, 1972) 491, 497; and Des-
landes, Histoire comparée du cinéma 47.
51 I borrow these terms from Henry Du Mont, the author of a project to animate successive
photographs featuring the “movements of a dancer, one or several soldiers, a machine, etc., either
for the pleasure of the eyes or teaching.” See Bulletin de la Société Française de Photographie
(1862) 35-36. Quoted by Deslandes, Histoire comparée du cinéma 79-80. See also Mannoni, The
Great Art of Light and Shadow. Archaeology of the Cinema.
minutes if desired, although four or five minutes is better.”52 This repeti-

tion of gesture does refer to the will to “see better” already central to the
approach of physiologists concerned with the discovery of the most subtle
phases of a movement53 through its chronophotographic decomposition,
and often its verification by machines making its synthesis possible. This
act of viewing a “looped” action was at the heart of the dispositive of the
phonoscope devised by Demenÿ, that is, “an appliance making it possible
to see the phases of a closed movement periodically and slow it down as
one wishes.”54
Most of the first films of serpentine dance, like optical toys and some
dispositives used by chronophotographers, also conf igured the bodily
performance so that looping it would appear as fluid as possible. The action
thus seemed to unfold continuously thanks to different strategies: absence
of pronounced shifts in position (one of the salient aspects of the serpen-
tine dance is precisely the development of a sense of excess dynamism
out of the sole extension of the arms, without the lower half of the body
deviating from its static position) or of a genuine closure or conclusion (as
would happen with an entry and/or an exit from the frame). Other, more
technical parameters may have been used to that same end. A Lumière film
produced in 1897, Danse serpentine (nº 765) (Fig. 5)55 involves, for instance,
a surprising particularity. The film is made up of two prints of the same
shot edited together, which is rare within the corpus of single-shot early
views – even as these widely used effects of “single-frame editing,” such
as intentional jump cuts during shooting or stopping the camera for trick
effects.56 The moment of return to the beginning of the action already shown
is not directly perceptible, even to the trained eye. Two factors explain this:
first, the body of the dancer is close to the starting point, which masks the
“cut” taking us back to the beginning of the film; second, other colors were
applied to the second print of the shot, which fosters the impression of an
ongoing action with new gestures. The more varied series of movements
52 Musser, Before the Nickelodeon 63.

53 Guido, L’Age du rythme 297-98.
54 Demenÿ, Les Bases scientifiques de l’éducation physique 274-75.
55 This appears as n°31 in G. Lista’s filmography (Lista, Loïe Fuller. Danseuse de la Belle Epoque
618-19). It was first an Italian film (the dancer being Teresina Negri). Featured in the Lumière
catalogs since the end of 1897, it was finally integrated in 1905 as Lumière n° 765.
56 André Gaudreault, for instance, proposes that this characteristic, one of a kind in its corpus,
was most likely considered “to add duration to the gyrating, and literally attractional movement
of the dancer.” See Gaudreault, “Fragmentation et segmentation dans les “vues animées,” in Arrêt
sur image, fragmentation du temps, François Albera, Marta Braun and André Gaudreault, eds.
(Lausanne: Payot, 2002) 238.
268 L aurent Guido
performed in this film comparatively with other variations considered

thus far partly justifies this kind of operation. Indeed, this slightly more
complex choreographic sequence is evidently more difficult to memorize
and, as a consequence, can withstand a repetition directly included in the
final print. Joining two prints of the same film end to end to constitute a
single catalog title thus plays on an effect of looping, but with a view to
lengthening the action, in a way. Here the objective was the reiteration of
the same, but also the production of a novelty through the addition of new
colors and the possibility of perceiving in a new way images already shown.
Taking these determining factors into account makes it possible, there-
fore, to understand better – as François Albera and Maria Tortajada point
out – that the defining aspects generally referred to under the term “cinema”
may not be grasped in isolation, but rather that they belong in clusters of
more or less abstract “configurations” attached to the cinematographic
medium. This study has notably shown that the detailed examination of
material objects, technical processes and sources related to serpentine
dance films led to fundamental issues, whether these bring up “concepts
of movement, time, instant” or “notions of repetition, instantaneousness,
decomposition, and synthesis of movement.”57
In early cinema, the motif of the serpentine dance accordingly carries
a rich set of ambivalent appropriations, including through technical work
on two key parameters, color and circularity. In fact, the serpentine dance
always remained tied to other aspects involving technological develop-
ment: with Edison58 or Oskar Messter,59 the Fullerian motif was integrated
at once into mechanical processes of audiovisual synchronism launched
by each of these important producers. Still, the films considered in this
study should not be assessed in terms of their technical nature alone: as I
also indicated, the modalities of the representation of the space where the
number recorded by the film camera takes place should always be taken
into account. If Lumière’s Danse serpentine strongly resembles those
previously produced by Edison or Skladanowsky, it differs from them due to
the much more asserted presence of the stage itself. Indeed, the movement
of the dancer’s body to the right of the frame leads to the creation of a much
57 See in this volume Albera and Tortajada, “The Dispositive Does Not Exist!”
58 L’Industriel Forain (dated 13 Oct. 1895) points out the “marvelous effects” of the Edison
kinetophone, and more specif ically of the “ballet lady dancing the serpentine. None of her
graceful movements went unnoticed and the orchestra’s music could be heard very clearly.”
59 An advertisement for Messter’s Kinematographisch-phonographische Vorführungen in
Berlin in 1896 opens with a “SerpentinTanz.” Reproduced in Von Zglinicki, Der Weg des Films
[Bildband, n. p.].
more concrete spatiality than the extreme minimalism and the ghostly,
almost de-realizing character of the Edison films. In this Lumière view, it
is the scenic dispositive that is being explicitly imported in the cinema, in a
straightforward affirmation of theatricality. This still timid manifestation
of a closure may be found more clearly in other, later films. The serpentine
dance of Lina Esbrard (1902), produced by Gaumont and attributed to Alice
Guy, thus opens with the lateral entrance of the artists and concludes with
an insistence on her exit, as she greets and blows kisses to the audience.60
60 On the subject, see my analysis of the Danse Tyrolienne produced by Lumière in 1896: “ ‘Auf
die Bühne gezaubert, dass man erstaunt’: cinéma, danse et music-hall au tournant du 20e siècle,”
270 L aurent Guido
(Fig. 6) The logic of circularity noted about other titles, whether in the
construction of the films or in their public uses, is not present here: the ritual
of the number is respected in its adaptation for the screen. This concern is
a response to a dominant logic of the time, as films took place in programs
resolutely organized on the model of music hall shows, that is, in the form
of a sequence of numbers that by and large remained autonomous, even
as they were distributed in a larger structure that took into account their
respective atmospheres and dynamics.
This close relationship with the world of so-called “popular” stages
(circus, music hall, mime shows, etc.) brings many research prospects to
the study of early cinema, most uncharted at this point. One example could
be the more unconventional recordings of parodies of and variations on
the serpentine dance performed by comics or even quick-change artists
(Little Tich, Fregoli). Among the many oddities directly borrowing from
the world of the stage, a Danse serpentine dans la cage aux lions (1900)
explicitly refers to a famous number mentioned in contemporary accounts
and announcements. (Fig. 7)
in Moving Pictures, Moving Bodies: Dance in German and Austrian Film 1895-1933, Michael Cowan
and Barbara Hale, eds., Seminar 46.3 (Toronto) Sept. 2010: 220.
In that respect, the many appropriations of the serpentine dance at the

time seem limitless. A close examination of the specialized press reveals
the recurrence of variations: the number, it turns out, was performed on
a tight rope, on horseback or even by performing dogs (as a Lumière film,
nº987, shows). A poster for the summer Alcazar of 1896 even publicizes
an astounding crossover, the “serpentine dance of fire dogs.” (Fig.8) This
constitutes an implacable demonstration of the “interference of series,” a
generating principle for the comical theorized by Henri Bergson61 in the
61 Henri Bergson, Laughter. An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesely Brereton
and Fred Rothwell (1899; Rockville, MD: Arc Manor, 2008) 46-52.
272 L aurent Guido
same years. In fact, the concept seems ideal, not so much to describe the
mechanisms at play in the production of laughter (were these films even
supposed to elicit laughter in the first place?) as to outline a larger situation
of de-hierarchization and of a crisis of ideas. This ambivalent juxtaposition
of opposites does indeed comprise the various conceptual pairs we have
continually come across in the present study: art and science, highbrow
culture and popular culture, archaism and modernity, the visible and the
invisible, the material and the immaterial, original and copy, specificity
and intermediality, and even human and animal. The serpentine dance, im-
mediately identifiable and effective, thus appears as the symbol of all these
interfering series, of these indistinct boundaries characterizing the turn of
the twentieth century. The explanation of its success and its durability as a
reference motif embracing the complexity of a period probably lies there.
More generally, the various cases studied here reveal that the “interme-
dial” connection between dance and cinema, which started out in the late
nineteenth century, cannot be apprehended only through the traditional
paradigms of recording, continuity or overtaking, which have for a long
time dominated reflections on stage/screen relations. A number of other
parameters should also be taken into account. The first are the obvious
constraints imposed by the chronophotographic and cinematographic
dispositives on filmed performances, which from the start had to adapt

to specific shooting conditions such as framing boundaries or the fixed
duration of filmstrips. The new modes of corporeal expressivity appearing
between 1880 and 1930 also deserve consideration. Besides the serpentine,
gymnastics, modern dance, Ausdruckstanz, and eurhythmics (to mention
but a few) were part of the same epistemological turn as the cinematic
medium – a turn towards a vast redefinition of movement, related to a novel
techno-scientific context. Lastly, the fascinating ambivalence provoked by
supposedly “specific” devices (color, tricks…) used in early films dedicated
to dance originated quite paradoxically in the wish to imitate the stage,
to find cinematic equivalents of effects which were carried out on stage
through typically theatrical means. Thus the idea of making a serpentine
dancer appear or disappear during magical numbers might have served as
an inspiration for filmmakers using cinematic tricks. Likewise, the will to
emulate the color variations of kaleidoscopic shows of the time led others
to rely on one of the basic principles of cinema (the animation of still im-
ages), in order to add color on each photogram, going as far as artificially
extending a performance by aggregating two prints of the same film.62
This peculiar dynamics, a constant back and forth between two media
deeply affected by reciprocal and non-hierarchical influences, has been
central to the fascinating relations between dance and cinema for more
than a century.
62 The same ambivalent process occurs in slapstick (see studies by Henry Jenkins or Robert
Knopf on Buster Keaton) as well as in Hollywood musicals. Some technical, supposedly “specific”
innovations (in framing, editing or space design) often resulted from the wish to find cinematic
equivalents for ambitious effects achieved in Broadway. For instance, far from “avant-garde”
concerns, the main goal of choreographer Busby Berkeley was arguably to transpose on screen
the geometrical evolutions of Ziegfeld Girls placed on risers or mobile sets.
Forms of Machines, Forms of
Movement
Benoît Turquety
for Hadrien
Fac-similes
In a documentary produced in 1996-1997, American filmmaker Stan Bra-

khage, who spent much of his life painting and scratching film, stated that
One of the major things in film is that you have 24 beats in a second, or
16 beats or whatever speed the projector is running at. It is a medium
that has a base beat, that is intrinsically baroque. And aesthetically
speaking, it’s just appalling to me to try to watch, for example, as I did,
Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin on video: it dulls all the rhythm of the
editing. Because video looks, in comparison to the sharp, hard clarities
of snapping individual frames, and what that produces at the cut, video
looks like a pudding, that’s virtually uncuttable, like a jello. It’s all ashake
with itself. And furthermore, as a colorist, it doesn’t interest me, because
it is whatever color anyone sets their receptor to. It has no fixed color.1
Each optical machine produces a specific mode of perception. Canadian

filmmaker Norman McLaren also devoted an essential part of his work to
research on the material of film itself, making films with or without camera
through all kinds of methods, drawing, painting, scratching film, develop-
ing a reflection on what a film frame is and what happens in the interval
between two images. Yet today his work is distributed by the National Film
Board of Canada only in digital format, and such prestigious institutions as
the Centre Pompidou in Paris project it that way – even as the compression
of digital files required by their transfer on DVD pretty much abolishes the
fundamental cell that is the single frame.
1 Brakhage on Brakhage, dir. Colin Still, 1996-1997, in By Brakhage: An Anthology, DVD set,
Criterion, 2003.
276 Benoît Turquety
Beyond these singular cases, the discontinuation of film as a medium

to the benefit of digital media raises a number of issues at the moment. As
it happens, these issues – originating in equal parts in audiences, critics
and professionals dealing with a transformation of their tools, methods
and general professional structures – start from a common premise: “one
can barely tell the difference” between film and digital. The stakes of the
transition between formats are mostly economic, occasionally practical,
sometimes tied to sporadic differences in rendering, but in the end these
are just moving photographic images – or so the assumption goes. Still,
differences are crucial because the modes of production of these moving
images lead to singular modes of perception, at a level rarely explored by
analysis. The transition between media should be thought in the context
of the “facsimile” as developed by Erwin Panofsky in a 1930 text:
[…] I wish and I hope that we will learn to improve and will continue to
make “better” facsimile reproductions. It is because of these advances,
and not despite them, that we will be increasingly adept at distinguishing
the original from its facsimile reproduction. Furthermore, it is because
of these advances, and not despite them, that we will increasingly regard
facsimile reproductions with benefit and, even, enjoyment.2
The film watched in video is a facsimile of the original, a certain amount

of “information” or characteristics of which it conveys, while some others
disappear or undergo transformation. At any rate, it may not be defined as
anything but a facsimile.3 Still, as Panofsky also points out, 4 the nature
and the scope of transformations remain to be evaluated for each work
according to the degree of dependence of form on the material that embod-
ies it. If we are to grasp what is at stake in this shift to digital, we need to
understand and identify with accuracy the specificities of each machine and
the viewing conditions it produces, and more generally expand this research
to the history of dispositives of moving or of animated images – if these two
notions do in fact refer to the same thing. This necessity was already spelled
out by Jonathan Crary in his Techniques of the Observer (1990):
2 Erwin Panofsky, “Original und Faksimilereproduktion,” Der Kreis. Zeitschrift für künstler-
ische Kultur (Spring 1930), available in English as “Original and Facsimile Reproduction,” trans.
Timothy Grundy, in Res. Anthropology and Aesthetics 57-58 (Spring-Autumn 2011): 337.
3 On this question and some of its implications for film studies, see the “Statement on the
Use of Video in the Classroom” issued by the Society for Cinema Studies Task Force on Film
Integrity, chaired by John Belton, Cinema Journal 30.4 (Summer 1991): 3-6.
4 Panofsky, “Original und Faksimilereproduktion”: 337-38.
[…] there is a tendency to conflate all optical devices in the nineteenth

century as equally implicated in a vague collective drive to higher and
higher standards of verisimilitude. Such an approach often ignores the
conceptual and historical singularities of each device.5
Indeed, each machine involves in its very form a certain conception of its
task, its ends and the means to achieve them, and in return, these means
have consequences on the nature of the result. Each machine is thus poten-
tially rich in theoretical lessons, be it through visual experience or through
an epistemological reflection on the historical conditions of its conception.
Taking into account the technical level, machines and practices, from the
camera to the script, from flatbed editing machines to the architecture of
movie theaters, is rather rare in film theory (except in archival literature,
for some aspects6) and raises specific methodological problems. The tech-
nological analysis of machines should be confronted with their production,
with the discourses around them and with their concrete uses, whether
dominant or marginal. When it comes to the evolution of technical objects
themselves, it should also relate the respective logics of conception, usage
and industrialization.
The Form of a Machine: A Surprising Zoetrope
The clinical study of a singular case, based on some important technical

aspects in the representation of moving images shared by nineteenth-
century optical toys and the first cinematographic machines, will help
shed light on a few issues.
Charles Francis Jenkins was one of the first important “pioneers” in the
technologies of cinema and television. With Thomas Armat, he notably
invented a projector, the Phantoscope, which was presented to the public in
September 1895. In 1916, he was also the founder of one of the most impor-
5 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). Crary unfortunately does not apply this principle with
much precision, contenting himself with a general scheme of the camera obscura without
distinguishing its various historical concretizations. Also, when it comes to the nineteenth
century, he only particularizes the stereoscope, the kaleidoscope and devices for the analysis
and the synthesis of movement, merged into a third category.
6 Among these, I will mention the evolution of mediums (nitrate film, acetate cellulose film),
the chemistry of coloring processes or “natural” colors, projection speeds, aspect ratios, etc. See
for instance Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent Cinema: An Introduction (London: BFI, 2000).
tant professional institutions of technicians, in film and later in television,

the Society of Motion Picture Engineers.7 The organization immediately
published a periodical,8 for which Jenkins himself wrote one of the earli-
est historical pieces in October 1920, “History of the Motion Picture.” The
contribution begins with what was already becoming common practice:
going back to the dawn of time to search for a lost origin of cinema and trace
it in more or less relevant and even improbable phenomena. According to
Jenkins, the “first motion picture mechanism we have any record of”9 was
the Zoetrope, whose origin he dated back to Lucretius. He briefly describes
the optical toy that “you all doubtless well know,” presenting an illustration
without commenting on it.10 However, the interest of the illustration (Fig. 1)
is that the machine it features is not at all a “common specimen” of the
Zoetrope, to use the language of taxonomists.
The Zoetrope is an optical toy invented independently in 1834 by William
George Horner (Great Britain) and Simon von Stampfer (Austria), both
mathematicians (that fact alone deserves a closer look). For reasons that
remain to be identified, it was commercialized only in 1867. The Zoetrope
comprises a cylinder with slits cut at regular intervals, which can rotate
around its axis; within the cylinder, a sequence of images placed between
the slits present a series of patterns describing a given subject in movement.
When the cylinder is spun and the viewer looks through the slits, the images
in the series appear to move.
Yet the Zoetrope presented in Jenkins’s article involves two unusual
characteristics.
First, its cylinder is oriented vertically, which was extremely rare. In
principle, the cylinder in a Zoetrope is horizontal, primarily because
the strips of images have to be easy to change and should fit the edges
of the cylinder perfectly. In a spinning vertical cylinder, the strips risk
falling off or have to be fastened carefully, which complicates the opera-
tion with no apparent benefit. Second, one might add that there is a logic
7 Today the organization is called the SMPTE, or Society of Motion Picture and Television
Engineers.
8 First titled Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, it later became the Journal
of the SMPE, then the Journal of the SMPTE.
9 Charles Francis Jenkins, “History of the Motion Picture,” Transactions of the Society of Motion
Picture Engineers (Oct. 1920), in A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television: An
Anthology from the Pages of The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers,
ed. Raymond Fielding (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967) 1.
10 Jenkins, “History of the Motion Picture,” in Fielding, A Technological History of Motion
Pictures and Television 1.
Fig. 1. “The Zoetrope,” in Charles Francis Jenkins, “History of the Motion Picture,” Transactions of the
SMPE, (October 1920): 37.
to the horizontal cylinder tied to the fact that most of the movements
presented – typically, the gallop of a horse – are horizontal. This is in no
way a technical constraint (horizontal movement can be represented on a
strip running vertically), but rather a matter of conceptual coherence. The
possibility of placing the cylinder vertically appeared in one model only, a
late variant developed by Ottomar Anschütz from Germany around 1890
under the name of Tachyscope or Schnellseher (Fig. 2) and featuring a series
of phototypes (Anschütz had come to these matters through an initial
interest in chronophotography). The cylinder could be placed horizontally
or vertically, depending on the band to be viewed. The copy preserved at
the Cinémathèque française comes with a box of ten strips, two of which
only run vertically.11 This choice has to do with the fact that some subjects
required a wider rather than a taller frame: the strip taken vertically thus
made it possible to arrange more images. It was also the result of an insight
described in Anschütz’s December 1891 German patent:
The vertical position of the cylinder results in a peculiar arrangement of

images, which proves important in the representation of discontinuous
and non-periodical processes, among other examples (a horse jumping
over a fence, etc.). In this case, the constant vision of several animated
11 Collection of machines, inv. AP-95-1202 (Schnellseher) and inv. AP-94-0985 (box of strips).
See Laurent Mannoni, Le Mouvement continué. Catalogue illustré de la collection des appareils
de la Cinémathèque française (Milan: Mazzotta, 1996) 270-71.
Fig. 2. Tachyscope, or Schnellseher, Ottomar Anschütz, after 1890, collection of the Cinémathèque
française (vertical layout).
images at different stages of the movement, as happens with common

stroboscopic devices, often proves a distraction for the eye. It is much
preferable to see the object move across the field of vision at its natural
speed, and this can be done in the most simple way by positioning the
cylinder vertically. In this way, images representing a single, differenti-
ated action are no longer found side by side, but one on top of the other.12
Mentioning the flaws noted in the use of “usual” devices and describing
the solution brought to them are common developments in the rhetoric of
12 Ottomar Anschütz, German patent n° 60285, 19 Dec. 1891. Translator’s note: this an English
translation of the author’s own translation from the German to the French.
patents. Anschütz articulates a technical thought on the form to be given to

the machine with a series of observations that belong in the psychology of
perception. Like the Phenakistiscope, to which I will return, the Zoetrope
presents several animated images to the spectator at the same time. This
effect is typically considered a fundamental given of the device, especially
for the Phenakistiscope, and as an even more admirable aspect of the device
in question. In “Morale du joujou,” Baudelaire thus wrote:
The speed of rotation transforms the twenty openings into a single circu-
lar opening through which you watch twenty dancing figures reflected in
the glass – all exactly the same and executing the same movements with
a fantastic precision. Each little figure has availed itself of the nineteen
others.13
The cylindrical form of the Zoetrope transforms this effect to some de-
gree, since the perspective of the viewer results in singling out a limited
number of animated figures, one of which is central, others more lateral,
being distorted by the drum. Anschütz was to confirm this evolution and
reinforce it, in relation to a more general observation: some types of move-
ments, “discontinuous and non-periodical processes,” have as their central
characteristic not to repeat themselves. It is thus disturbing – visually if
you will, but the criterion is cognitive – to see them occur several times
simultaneously. Placing these parasitic images vertically rather than before
and after horizontally thus represents a gain in comfort and solves the
problem. Indeed, for Anschütz, the machine does not have as its goal to
animate images, but to observe one animated image and one only, which
is a rather original conception. Besides, the criterion of non-continuity and
non-periodicity, which is the base for the importance of the uniqueness
of the image as spectacle, is in the end nothing else than a criterion of
narrativity: for the German inventor, when the animated image becomes
the source for a narrative (something unique occurs and breaks circularity),
it becomes imperative for that image to be the only spectacle and the device
has to be modified accordingly. Ultimately, the form of the movement to
be depicted commands the form of the machine.
The Tachyscope, it should be noted, did not have a crank; and the crank
happens to be the other characteristic distinguishing the machine featured
13 Charles Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys,” original French text first published in Le Monde
littéraire (17 Apr. 1853), English trans. Jonathan Mayne (1970), in The Painter of Modern Life and
Other Essays (London: Phaidon, 1995) 202.
in the illustration of Jenkins’s article from the zootropus vulgaris. Zoetropes

with cranks were extremely rare; most of them seem to have been moved
directly by hand. When they happened to have cranks, these did not have
that shape at all: they were smaller, placed differently, etc.
Two questions arise here:
– First, why did so few Zoetropes use a crank? And why a certain form of
crank rather than another? I will return to this aspect.
– Second, why did Jenkins’s article represent the Zoetrope in this odd form,
one which I believe may not even have actually existed?
In fact, the drawing is entirely teleological; what it represents is not really

a Zoetrope but a “pre-camera” or a “pre-projector,” just as some talk of
“pre-cinema.” Until the 1920s, a typical film camera or projector featured
a crank configured similarly, with the film strip running vertically. This
warrants a few observations.
First, in history, teleology may sometimes be found in unexpected places.
Then, in 1920, the members of the prestigious Society of Motion Picture
Engineers already seemed to have forgotten – contrary to what Jenkins
wrote – what kind of machine the Zoetrope actually was, or already seemed
to see it only as a prefiguration of cinema, seen through its prism, overlook-
ing it as an autonomous machine. Finally, in the very form of the machine
drawn for the article, the fusion between Zoetrope and projector articulates
a system of analogies common in the historiography of cinema as a whole.
The Disc and the Strip
One of them is epitomized by Georges Sadoul in the first volume of his 1946
Histoire générale du cinéma:
The Zoetrope is a new form of Plateau’s slit disc […]. The strip of images
is its most remarkable aspect, for this long piece of flexible Bristol board
pref igures f ilm. The idea of indef initely lengthening it certainly led
Reynaud, and perhaps Marey and Edison, to conceiving modern film.14
The crucial historiographic idea here is the emphasis on an evolution:

the Zoetrope was preceded by the Phenakistiscope, a device invented
14 Georges Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. 1, L’Invention du cinéma. 1832-1897 (Paris:
Denoël, 1946) 21-22.
independently in 1832 by Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau and Simon von

Stampfer. This toy – which for Sadoul literally made history, since its inven-
tion provided the starting point for his Histoire générale du cinéma – took
the form of a disc. The disc was dark on one side; on the outer edge of the
other, it featured a series of images representing the different stages of
a decomposed movement alternating with a series of slits. With the eye
placed on the dark side, looking through the slits at the images reflected
in a mirror, the figures could be seen coming to life.
The principle is therefore the same – alternation between shutter and
images through a system of regular slits allowing to produce the illusion of
movement – but the medium changes from a disc to a strip: for Sadoul, this
is the decisive point for what was to come, “modern film.” These two toys did
involve a few substantial differences, the main being that with the Zoetrope
several spectators could see the phenomenon simultaneously, which was
not the case with the Phenakistiscope. Yet this traditional history of optical
toys, which sees progress running from the form of the disc to the form of
the strip, then to film, calls for more complexity.
Indeed, the form of the disc did not disappear with the advent of the
Zoetrope, as though the latter had made it manifestly “primitive”: it long
remained an alternative to the strip, as the list of a few devices relying
on the principle of the disc shows: the Electrotachyscope, also invented
by Anschütz, in the 1880s and 1890s; the Phonoscope, by Étienne-Jules
Marey’s assistant Georges Demenÿ in 1892 (commercialized under the name
Bioscope by Gaumont in November 1895); Leonard Ulrich Kamm’s Kam-
matograph, on the market from 1898 to 1900; or the Spirograph, invented by
Theodore Brown in 1907 and exploited by Charles Urban around the early
1920s with a catalog worth several hundred titles… Finally, another, more
recent medium should be mentioned: the DVD. Of course, it does not carry
images in the same way as the previous examples (i.e., analogically), but
its place in the series is still justified by ergonomic and industrial consid-
erations. The disc as a medium is neither too fragile nor too cumbersome,
relatively cheap to manufacture, and most of all easy to handle for the
user – a decisive criterion for non-professionals, even more relevant in the
case of mainstream users.
It should also be remembered that for Marcel Duchamp, thinking on
(from, around, with) cinema, epitomized in his 1926 masterpiece Anemic
Cinema, was part of a larger investigation around machinations of vision,
the questioning of a tradition of monocular perspective, as well as discs
and wheels of all kinds.
I will not further develop this issue of the disc/strip alternative here. Let
us just recall that it also structured the sound industry (including in movie
theaters) and the music industry, the industry of computer and digital
mediums, and that this alternative also carried economic, industrial,
mechanical and aesthetic options. Still, the topos of the shift from disc to
strip is one of the key points most strongly structuring the historiography
of “pre-cinema,” and will have to be revisited.
With or Without Cranks
At any rate, neither the Phenakistiscope nor the Zoetrope involved cranks,
for the most part. We should dwell on this question of the crank a little
more at this point, as it is more central than it may first seem. Some view-
ing dispositives contemporary with the two already cited did have these
appendices: with the slides for “views set in motion,” which spread from
the mid-nineteenth century on, for instance, the crank made it possible to
produce colored, abstract rosaces or to animate a specific part of a projected
image. A remarkable example of optical machine using a crank was John
Arthur Roebuck Rudge’s magic lantern, manufactured around 1882, in
which the crank drove the change of view, along with a shutter system,
and through a triangular cam – supposedly a specific contribution of the
Lumière brothers’ own machine. Interestingly, when Will Day had a copy of
this lantern made in 1922 (now held in the collections of the Cinémathèque
française), the only license he took with the original was to move the crank
from its initial position before the lens to a lateral position, probably more
convenient in his view, and once again similar to that on a film projector.
Another fascinating machine comes to mind, even as it has been largely
neglected by history, the Anorthoscope, the first optical device invented by
Joseph Plateau before the Phenakistiscope. Through the combined move-
ment of a black disc with slits rotating in one direction, and behind it, a disc
with an anamorphic image rotating in the other direction, the device shows
a corrected image when looked at against the light. It is fundamentally
a crank-based machine, since the two discs have to be driven together
and at correlative speeds. Fascinatingly, in his instructions for using the
machine, Plateau did in fact recommend that the person turning the crank
and the person observing the phenomenon not be one and the same.15
15 See Joseph Plateau 1801-1883. Leven tussen Kunst en Wetenschap, Vivre entre l’art et la science,
Living between Art and Science, ed. Maurice Dorikens (Gent, Provincie Oost-Vlaaanderen, 2001).
Looking at something being difficult work, two things could not be done
seriously at once. Besides, Plateau was not just interested in optics, but
also in the statics of liquids. In that field, he carried out an experiment
that bears his name, founded on a machine that he had built and which
was operated by a rotating crankshaft. Depending on the speed imparted
by the experimenter/spectator, the form of the oil sphere in suspension in
the water solution was transformed…16 The attention given to the crank as
such re-establishes “Plateau’s machine” among nineteenth-century viewing
dispositives – a place it deserves considering that it was also relatively
widespread, notably in schools, until the first quarter of the twentieth
century. That the experiment was appreciated certainly had to do with its
visual dimension – or should we say to its dimension of attraction? At any
rate, the machine is completely absent from the entire historiography of
these dispositives, massively written from the standpoint of “pre-cinema.”
And indeed, the form of the movement performed in this instance through
these spheres in suspension radically differs from the medium to come:
no two-dimensional images, no analytical sequence of decomposition/
recomposition, etc. This is what actually makes it interesting today within
the perspective of an archaeological reconsideration of these machines
outside any teleological linearity.
In fact, there had been crank-operated optical machines for a long time
already, since some could be found in the first, 1646 edition of the famous
Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae by Father Athanasius Kircher: the “metamor-
phosis machine,” for instance, in which the crank drove a series of images
laid out on a cylinder running vertically (even though with Kircher, one
can never be certain that the machines he described actually existed and
that their effects conformed to the descriptions given…).
So, if almost no Phenakistiscope or Zoetrope had a crank, the crank must
have been dispensable on these machines. Interestingly, there were not even
“de luxe models” of these toys that would have used a crank, unlike what
was to happen for the Praxinoscope a few years later.
A New Form: The Praxinoscope
The Praxinoscope (Fig. 3) was invented by Émile Reynaud and patented

in 1877, more than forty years after the Phenakistiscope and the Zoetrope,
which were invented almost at the same time, and more than ten years
16 Dorikens, Joseph Plateau 100 sqq.

Fig. 3. Crank-operated Praxinoscope, La Nature 296 (February 1, 1879): 133.
after the Zoetrope was commercialized. The Praxinoscope has almost been
confused with the Zoetrope by traditional historiography and presented
as a relatively minor improvement on it. In truth, it seemed to be based
on the same principles: a (horizontal!) cylinder and a series of drawings
around it representing a decomposed movement, with the rotation of the
cylinder showing spectators the image in movement. Yet the principle
of the alternation of images was different: instead of slits, the machine
presented a central block comprising a prism of mirrors with as many sides
as there were drawings on the strip. The passage from one side to another
instantaneously replaced the reflection of an image with that of another
one in the same place, making the illusion possible. The idea was quite
clever and accordingly constituted an important step.
Indeed, it solved an internal antagonism inherent in the Zoetrope and
which also concerns the Phenakistiscope. An image continuously moving
normally appears blurry and streaked. To appear sharp, it should be per-
ceived as immobile by the eye. In that respect, the principle of rotation with
slits causes a problem: the finer the slits, the more briefly the image appears
to the eye (almost instantaneously in fact), and the more it is perceived as
almost immobile and thus sharp, without streaks – a necessary condition
in the reproduction of movement. But the more briefly the image appears
to the eye, the less time the eye has to distinguish its outlines precisely
and the less luminous the image is. In a way, the better the movement
is seen, the worse the image is seen. This fundamental problem for the
Zoetrope is repeated at another level: the faster the cylinder rotates, the
briefer the perception of each image will be. As a consequence, the rendering
of movement and luminosity, animation and the precision of outlines, find
themselves in contradiction. Marey was in fact one of the few to describe

this contradiction in his 1894 book Le Mouvement.17
Since the Praxinoscope did not require a shutter, the moving image
produced was much more luminous and solved this contradiction to a
large degree, even if minor flaws remained: the image was still slightly
shorter due to a cylindrical anamorphosis, which Marey disliked, 18 and it
underwent a slight lateral oscillation caused by the rotation of mirrors.19
Still, the spectator could see a more luminous and sharper moving image
more comfortably, and the speed of that image could be adjusted without
consequences for the very visibility of the motif. This made it possible
to improve the driving system of the machine so that the spectator
could fully enjoy the spectacle – or, if you will, so that the handler could
gradually become a spectator… While most Praxinoscopes remained
hand-operated machines, some featuring a crank 20 or even an electric
engine could nonetheless be found. The advertising posters designed
by Reynaud did in fact mention that these engines allowed a two-way
rotation (though obviously the strips were meant to be seen in a specific
way) as well as speed variation 21 – in the latter case, the operation did not
seem so simple.
This new luminosity was also to simplify the projection of images with
the projecting Praxinoscope imagined by Reynaud as early as 1877 in
the original patent, 22 and whose illustration in the journal La Nature23
in 1882 (Fig. 4) proves very interesting: the screen is drawn, showing an
image where moving characters and still setting have a different status, a
distinctive aspect of the dispositive. The device is also shown, as well as
17 See Étienne-Jules Marey, Le Mouvement (Paris: G. Masson, 1894), notably p. 308: “as the
sharpness of movements may be obtained only through the extreme brevity of instants in
which each image is disclosed, the quantity of light emitted is accordingly too low to provide
clear enlarged projections, even with a powerful source of light.” Marey returns to this problem
several times in the final chapter of the book on the “Synthesis of Movements Analyzed by
Chronophotography.”
18 Marey, Le Mouvement 303.
19 Indeed, before the passage from a mirror to the next replaces an image with the next one,
the rotation of the prism causes a slight rotation effect for each image.
20 This is the case of the copy preserved by the Cinémathèque française under the classification
mark AP-95-1720.
21 See Georg Füsslin, Optisches Spielzeug (Stuttgart: Füsslin Verlag, 1993) 92.
22 See the “Dessins annexés à la description d’une invention faite par E. Reynaud, professeur
de sciences, au Puy, 30 août 1877,” a document f iled with the patent application, in Jacques
Deslandes, Histoire comparée du cinéma, vol. 1, De la cinématique au cinématographe, 1826-1896
(Tournai: Casterman, 1966) 303 sqq.
23 Reproduced in Deslandes, Histoire comparée du cinéma 51.
Fig. 4. Projecting Praxinoscope, La Nature 492 (November 4, 1882): 35.
a simple, fine hand elegantly turning a small crank near the edge of the
frame; the bodies of the handler and spectator(s) are not represented in
the image.
Other variants for the driving mechanism appeared in imitations of these
objects, notably those made by Ernst Planck from Germany, sold around 1898
(which suggests that, two years after the success of the Cinématographe,
the Praxinoscope could still prove attractive to a counterfeiter). Copies of
what was called the Kinematofor remain – some with a crank, others with
a steam engine or even a hot-air engine!24
The issue of luminosity was to play a decisive role in the first machines
involving a moving photographic image: the dialectic was repeated in
exactly the same way between Edison’s Kinetoscope and the Lumière
Cinématographe. The principle of the Kinetoscope was in fact similar to
that of the Zoetrope: a strip moving continuously in front of which was a
shutter with a very narrow slit (each image was seen for about 1/6000 sec.).
As with the Zoetrope, the resulting moving image was too dark to allow
projection. The Cinématographe solved this tension by adopting the inter-
mittent movement of film for projection as well as for “the production of
the negatives,” as the Lumières put it. The image remained still a lot longer
24 See Füsslin, Optisches Spielzeug 94 sqq.

before the lamp (roughly 1/25 sec.), which produced more than enough light
for the projection.
Interestingly, the Kinetoscope is not a crank-operated machine, which
is the case for the Cinématographe.
Cranks, Movement, Spectacle
For the time being, however, let us return to Praxinoscopes. A majority

of them did not come equipped with cranks, although a greater propor-
tion of them did so than Zoetropes (even in the case of the Praxinoscopes
produced by Émile Reynaud, which attests to a conceptual coherence on
the part of the inventor). However, taking a closer look at these cranks as
they appear and questioning their form (placement, size…) seems neces-
sary. The cranks are placed under the cylinder, where they are the least in
the way – the least visible, too (which is not insignificant). Also, with the
“classical” Praxinoscope as well as the projecting machine, cranks are small
and have a limited rotation diameter. Why do they have that shape? What,
in the conception of a machine, may determine the addition of a crank and
the choice of a form over another?
Cranks can fulfill several possible functions, sometimes simultaneously
and, depending on the function, they can assume different forms. They
prove necessary when there is a need for driving several elements at the
same time, as in the Anorthoscope, or elements that can be heavy, as with
Rudge’s lantern. The same holds true when elements out of hand’s reach
have to be driven, as is the case again with some lanterns or with animated
slides; when a very fast movement has to be produced, as in Newton’s appli-
ances for experiments on colors, which require a very quick rotation for the
disc with colored areas to produce its effect and are thus equipped with a
crank driving a belt; or when movement is to be controlled.
Small cranks do not allow an acceleration of the movement, be it through
pulley differential or through a faster action of the arm or wrist. Turning
such a small crank so quickly without causing the Praxinoscope to collapse
must be very difficult. The point of using a crank is to control movement,
rather, or even to slow it down, to make it possible to modulate rhythm,
change directions, etc., within certain limits. The concrete form of the crank
conditions a type of hand movement, which in turn points to a “good pace”
for the movement to be produced, the scene to be represented – a “natural”
speed, that of the drawn subject, whose own movement is broken down
according to the motif.
The presence of a crank does in fact completely transform the relation

to the machine. Without it, the handler/spectator, once the disc or the strip
has been set up, will start or restart the machine and possibly stop it.25
Between these punctual interventions, he is busy observing it. However,
he cannot physically give a constant speed to the machine: rotation occurs
only according to the inertia of the medium and therefore follows a “natural”
slope, gradually slowing down… Only the presence of a crank permits real
control over the rotation speed, if one that is relative in terms of precision.
The counterpart is that the operator/spectator has to turn the crank for
the whole show (or later, for the whole period of shooting with a camera).
The form of the movement he sees is then no longer that of a slowing down
characteristic of the machine, but the form of his own gesture: he can do
his utmost to correct it until a perfect regularity is attained, or he can
playfully alter it to observe the effects on the moving image or on fellow
spectators. Indeed, while the Praxinoscope as a dispositive involves several
spectators, one of them still has a particular status: the spectator operating
the machine. The role is even more specific when a crank has to be turned…
Whether a crank is added to the machine or not thus effects a series of
transformations in what is given to see and in the position of the spectator(s).
A Zoetrope, a Praxinoscope without a crank are not so much machines
presenting spectacles of moving images as they are machines setting images
in motion. Starting and restarting the cylinder before slowly returning to
immobility means that the cylinder always organizes the very animation of
images and makes the machine operate like a comparative toy, between the
series of still images to which it always returns and the ephemeral “moving
tableau”: transition is the point of the game.
As to the machines equipped with a crank, they present a spectacle with
a given duration, determined by the handler, where not only the setting in
motion, but also the prettiness of the scene, the subtlety of the drawing and
the perfection of the execution can be admired.
On this point, in fact, the form of machines institutes yet another dif-
ference between Zoetrope and Praxinoscope. In the latter, the block of the
central prism masks the strip as soon as it is placed in the cylinder: the
image can then only be seen reflected in the mirrors. In the Zoetrope, by
25 Very interestingly, Werner Nekes, demonstrating the Praxinoscope in Was geschah wirklich
zwischen den Bildern? ([Federal Republic of] Germany, 1986), the first film in his series Media
Magica, shows not only the strips coming to life, but also the whole assembly of the toy – opening
the box, placing the candle and, after a few other steps have been performed, the moment
when moving images finally appear. This whole operation of assembling the machine should
be considered as part of the dispositive.
contrast, the strip can still be seen even when the cylinder rotates, until
the eye is placed exactly at the level of a slit. The form of the Zoetrope
therefore involves a comparative vertical movement (of the eye or the hand)
between seeing the streak of the strip and seeing the moving image through
a slit. In fact, another detail should be pointed out here, since an important
difference between models of Zoetrope bears on this: Zoetropes with a
low cylinder emphasize this comparative effect, while those with a higher
cylinder tend to mask the strip to privilege a more important “effective”
angle of vision. This vertical comparative movement is incompatible with
the very form of the Praxinoscope.
Anschütz – again – was to take advantage of this vertical movement
of the spectator’s eye in an interesting model of his Tachyscope, whose
cylinder featured three series of slits at different levels and slightly different
intervals. In this way, if the strip represented a galloping horse, for instance,
the viewer could see the animal move forward through the top row of slits,
run without moving forward through the middle row of slits, and move
backward through the bottom row… The model is also one of the very few
Zoetropes with a crank and has another exceptional characteristic: it was
owned by Étienne-Jules Marey.26
The whole issue of the relation between still and moving image is thus
embodied in the choices made in the conception of the machines, the
question of the presence of the elementary image in the moving image.
This is also why filmmaker and artist Robert Breer, who early on became
interested in the status of the film frame27 in his own films, ended up
making Mutoscopes28 from the 1950s on, sometimes with the assistance of
Jean Tinguely… Essentially, the Mutoscope was an instrument with a crank
thanks to which the spectator, fascinated but always physically active, could
view the very composition given by the form of the gesture to animated
movement. Indeed, while Gaumont initially commercialized its version of
the Mutoscope in 1900 (one with a spring-loaded mechanism based on the
Kinora patent registered by the Lumière brothers in 1896), the company
soon opted for a crank-driven version…29
26 Cinémathèque française, collection of machines, inv. AP-95-1733. See Mannoni, Le Mouve-

ment continué 270.
27 Most notably in 1956-57 with what probably remains his most famous film, Récréation (16
mm, color, 2 mn, commentary by Noel Burch).
28 See Robert Breer: Films, Floats & Panoramas, Brigitte Liabeuf and Nathalie Roux, eds.
(Montreuil: Éd. de l’œil, 2006) 48-49.
29 Gaumont produced “Kinoras à main,” hand-held and crank-driven, until 1910 (the George
Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., owns a copy dated the same year by the G. E. House).
Fig. 5. Notice sur le Cinématographe Auguste et Louis Lumière (Lyon: Société anonyme des plaques et
papiers photographiques A. Lumière et ses fils, 1897) 19.
Other artists were to produce their own versions of these optical ma-
chines, starting from very different principles and sometimes devising
rather original driving solutions: the Mini Rotary Psycho Opticon, created
in 2008 by Canadian artist Rodney Graham, gets its power from pedaling!30
As to motor-driven systems, they involve yet a different balance: on the
one hand, with the possibility of a given duration at constant speed, they are
comparable to crank-driven systems; on the other hand, the intervention
of the handler remains punctual as the machine gets started and turned
off, making their use quite similar to that of machines operated by hand…
The Cinématographe, Art of the Crank
The issue of driving mechanisms remained central after 1895 and consti-
tuted a common problem for all the optical machines involving movement,
from optical toys to the cameras, projectors and flatbeds in a cinema on
its way to cultural institutionalization and industrial rationalization. As
I have already pointed out, the issue also represents one notable differ-
ence between Edison’s machines, with their electrical engines, and the
crank-operated Lumière Cinématographe (Fig.5). This should be related
to differences in exhibition modes and target audiences: the Kinetoscope
presented a spectacle while the Cinématographe was initially designed
30 This bicycle drives a series of abstract discs whose mechanism is reminiscent of Marey’s odo-
graph. It was presented during the exhibition HF/RG [Harun Farocki/Rodney Graham], curated
by Chantal Pontbriand, at the Jeu de Paume (Paris), April 7-June 7, 2009. It was unfortunately
forbidden to operate the machine on that occasion…
for the amateur photographer, unfazed by the crank and even likely to
appreciate the subtleties involved in handling it.
Machines manufactured by competitors generally favored the crank-
driven mechanism, and much effort went into finding the most suitable
place and shape. German inventor Max Skladanowsky set the crank for his
Bioskop at the front, under the shutter, which put the operator in the posi-
tion of looking after the machine rather than at the screen. Louis Lumière
positioned the crank of the Cinématographe at the back, slightly to the left
of the device. This choice may first appear as rather inconvenient, but the
machine has to be considered as a whole: the camera did not have a view-
finder and framing (like focusing) was set before shooting, with the camera
open, looking through the printing gate. The film was then positioned, the
camera closed back, and the operator stood while “cinematographing,”
looking directly at the subject. With this type of crank, the body was at a
good distance from the camera: the cameraman was not “glued” to it. As far
as I know, only the professional Pathé camera had its crank positioned at the
back afterwards. Popular from 1908 on and into the 1920s, it was adopted
by Billy Bitzer, D. W. Griffith’s famous cameraman.
Englishmen Robert William Paul and Birt Acres placed their own crank
on the side, a choice that later became the most common, and to the right,
which allowed the body of the cameraman to come much closer to the ma-
chine, particularly after viewfinders appeared. In the end, it would hardly
be an exaggeration to say that the history of cameras largely consisted
in gradually “merging” the machine and the body of the cameraman…
whereas the history of projectors and the disappearance of cranks from
projecting booths, by contrast, were about allowing projectionists to move
away from their machines, or exhibitors to have only one projectionist for
several machines.
Of course, other options for the placement of the crank were sometimes
adopted – under the machinery, for instance, and manipulated by three
people in the case of Raoul Grimoin-Samson’s panoramic Cineorama, in
which ten cameras were driven simultaneously to cover a total field of 360
degrees.
Here as elsewhere, Étienne-Jules Marey appears to have been the ex-
ception: he did not like crank-driven mechanisms very much, privileging
spring-loaded engines, weight engines or electrical engines, which ensured
more precision and made possible a wider range of speeds and prompter
starts. His machines sometimes had cranks, but these were meant to wind
up the mechanism, not to drive it directly (Fig. 6).
Fig. 6. Dark room on wheels with cameras inside, Étienne-Jules Marey, La Nature 535 (September 1,
1883) 229.
The driving system which was adopted sometimes brought about sur-
prises: it so happened that the mechanism of the Lumière Cinématographe
was one of the few to work backwards. This fact every operator, Louis
Lumière being perhaps the first, was to discover as an unplanned oddity
in the machine allowing for rather amusing games – a demolished wall
rebuilding itself as if by magic, for instance.31 The form of his machine thus
led Lumière to leave behind the “paradigm of capture-rendering”32 that had
apparently been the framework for his thinking until then.
The position and proportion of the crank ended up stabilizing. It re-
mained the preferred mode for driving cameras and projectors for the entire
so-called “silent” era until the late 1920s. A lot of questions obviously came
up as to how it should be handled, emphasizing the tension inherent in
31 Démolition d’un mur is one of the views Louis Lumière credited himself in the catalog he
gave Georges Sadoul in 1946. The destruction of a wall in the Lumière factory may be seen in the
film, two versions of which are known today, dated early 1896 and numbered 690 and 691 in the
catalog published by Michelle Aubert and Jean-Claude Seguin, where several quoted accounts
confirm that they were frequently projected forward, then backward. See Michelle Aubert and
Jean-Claude Seguin, La Production cinématographique des frères Lumière (Paris: Mémoires de
cinéma, 1996) 215-16.
32 On this paradigm, see André Gaudreault, Cinéma et attraction. Pour une nouvelle histoire
du cinématographe (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2008) 102 sqq.
cinema between the theoretical reversibility camera-projector and the

actual asymmetry orienting each practice and each machine differently – a
tension already very strong with Marey.33 Manuals and directions for movie
cameras insisted on the difficult and unfairly derided art of the crank, the
absolute need for regularity, whether a turtle or a horse race, a funeral or a
ball were being filmed. The art was all the more tricky as camera tripods
were soon to allow panoramic and tilting movements thanks to… two ad-
ditional cranks. A cameraman thus needed three hands, which created a few
problems solved here and there through a more or less cumbersome human
or electric assistance… This art of the crank demanded, for instance, that
the machine be occasionally weighted so as to add stability to it, an aspect
already considered in the directions for the Lumière Cinématographe in
1897: the crank had to be turned, “making sure to hold the appliance firmly
with the left hand, pressing on the stand to avoid vibrations.”34 In this one
case, the legendary lightness of the Lumière machine backfired…
Manuals for projectionists also highlighted regularity for the “natural-
ness” of the movement, but kept the door open to speed variations, some-
times even suggesting them to “expressive” ends. The degree of subversion
of Dziga Vertov’s 1923 statement can be grasped only when this distinction
between shooting and projecting is maintained:
Until now many a cameraman has been criticized for having filmed a
running horse moving with unnatural slowness on the screen (rapid
cranking of the camera) – or for the opposite, a tractor plowing a field
too swiftly (slow cranking of the camera), and the like.
These are chance occurrences, of course, but we are preparing a system, a
deliberate system of such occurrences, a system of seeming irregularities
to investigate and organize phenomena.35
In this textual “montage,” Vertov amusingly combines the Muybridgian

topos of the galloping horse with the agricultural mechanization so crucial
for the USSR – through the action of his crank, he reverses the traditional
association of speed with the horse and slowness with the tractor, giving a
more politically “progressive” version of it. If the film industry on its way to
33 See Marey, Le Mouvement 309.

34 Notice sur le Cinématographe Auguste et Louis Lumière (Lyons: Société anonyme des plaques
et papiers photographiques A. Lumière et ses fils, 1897) 19.
35 “The Council of Three” (1923), in Kino-Eye. The Writings of Dziga Vertov, Annette Michelson,
ed., trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984) 15-16.
institutionalization banned these speed variations during shooting, it was

also because it was impossible to correct them: no speed variation during
projection – or in the laboratory – could produce a “natural” movement if
the shooting speed had been too high. This kind of power, with the explosive
political potential expressed by Vertov here, could not possibly be granted
to cameramen.
The crank allowed even more than speed variations: it did not require
any settings to be chosen beforehand, nor did it involve a “default” pace. It
also made the machine reactive and autonomous, independently of avail-
able electricity outlets. The electrical motor became generalized when the
advent of synchronized sound imposed a constant, automatic pace of 24
images/sec. This resistance of cameramen to electrification had to do with
the “margin of indeterminacy” which, according to Gilbert Simondon, gave
a machine its real value, as opposed to automatism:
Idolators of the machine generally assume that the degree of perfection

of a machine is directly proportional to the degree of automatism. […]
Now, in fact, automatism is a fairly low degree of technical perfection. In
order to make a machine automatic, it is necessary to sacrifice many of
its functional possibilities and many of its possible uses. Automatism […]
has an economic or social, rather than a technical, significance.36
The Presence of Machines
Observing machines in detail, taking into account their uses, the discourses
concerning them, but also their forms, does not necessarily lead to stress the
continuity of an abstract principle – the production of an illusion of move-
ment out of a series of still images – over time. Rather, it means identifying
as precisely as possible the conditions of perception produced specifically
by each machine, and discovering discontinuities between concrete viewing
situations, between forms of movement which these machines make visible.
From Phenakistiscopes to Zoetropes, from Zoetropes to Praxinoscopes,
from models using a crank to models dispensing with it, featuring an electric
engine or a spring-loaded engine, a wide or narrow cylinder, the diversity
of machines materializes divergences in the conception of what it is to see
36 Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects [1958], trans. Ninian Mel-
lamphy (University of Western Ontario, June 1980) 3-4, available at http://english.duke.edu/
uploads/assets/Simondon_MEOT_part_1.pdf, last accessed on July 11, 2012.
a moving image. These divergences should not be brought to a resolution

or even too linearized if the protean wealth of the medium(s) examined
is to be grasped, and the theoretical, historiographic and epistemological
consequences are to be assessed. This dismissal of linearization should
lead us to take into account marginal processes and practices as well as
dominant ones, Anschütz (to whom this contribution is a homage of sorts, in
the end) as well as Lumière, because their existence, like their marginality
with respect to the industry, may give us a better understanding of the
history of the medium – machines, perception, art.
However, research on machines also involves another, parallel level.
American poet Williams Carlos Williams wrote in 1944:
To make two bold statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a ma-

chine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When
I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can
be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant. […] As in all
machines its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a
literary character. In a poem this movement is distinguished in each case
by the character of the speech from which it arises.37
In 1944 these paragraphs summed up the contribution of the most radical

side of American poetic modernity, in a way. To approach a work of art as a
machine has rather important implications for its analysis, for considering
the place of its reader or spectator, and quite simply for understanding what
is at stake for us in the experience of its form.
37 W. C. Williams, “‘Author’s Introduction’ to The Wedge” (1944), in Selected Essays of William

Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1954) 256.
The Amateur-Dispositive
François Albera
The issue of the “amateur” or “amateurs” is more topical than ever these days,
because of the easier access to equipment produced by new technologies, its
miniaturization and availability, with mass industrial production making it
affordable for a large majority of people. The phenomenon has been widely
taken into account in the field of photography studies, where it always went
hand in hand with the other – learned, expert, professional – tradition,
from Foto-Auge in 1929 to the exhibition “Tous photographes” (Lausanne,
2007) or “From here on” (Arles, 2011). However, the same phenomenon is
now assuming a whole other dimension, in particular with sociologists.1
Despite the economic and social importance of cinema, this question –
which runs through the history and the “prehistory” of the medium – has
not been given a significant place so far in different discourses, whether
critical or academic. It should probably be rephrased in terms of private uses
or even “techniques of the self” to find a field of study that would liberate
it from the narrow range of its “object.”
Only in “utopian” literature – to which I would rather refer as “literature of
extrapolation” – has this issue been apprehended within a larger framework,
where “cinema” is considered not only as an art, but also as a medium.2
As a consequence, it may prove an “ideal” object when it comes to fully
developing the question of the “dispositif” – from the most humble me-
chanical device, the machine used for shooting with its accessories, the
1 See Patrice Flichy, Le Sacre de l’amateur. Sociologie des passions ordinaires à l’ère numérique
(Paris: La République des Idées/Éditions du Seuil, 2010).
2 The various audiovisual utopias (Jules Verne or Albert Robida, for instance) have in common
the availability of each “mechanical” means of communication, recording or representation, their
adaptation for the home, be it in the form of a domestic access to spectacles (war in Africa for
information, ballets and theater for entertainment), personal communication (dialoguing across
distances with another individual), announcements or public mobilization, or the control over
one’s body. With respect for the latter, for instance, all inhabitants in Verne’s The Floating Island
are equipped with Marey’s experimental machines: “Every inhabitant knew his constitution
exactly, his muscular force measured by the dynamometer, his pulmonary capacity measured
by the spirometer, his power of cardial contraction measured by the sphygmometer, his degree
of vital force measured by the magnetometer.” This availability, which implies miniaturization,
simplification and large-scale production, rests on a process which, starting from the collective
(the public) and a dedicated space (the theater), proceeds to the individual and to private space,
which are also obviously part of a social space. All prospective fictions follow this progression.
See Jules Verne, The Floating Island (Rockville, Maryland: Wildside Press, 2009) 57-58.
300 François Albera
projector, the way they operate, to a social dimension, with the role, usage,
and place of this machinery in family life, the intimacy of subjects, their
imaginary, and finally at the level of the general organization of viewing and
listening machines in society. It lies at the intersection between the general
norm, indexed on technical knowledge and the rules of representation, and
individual autonomy from this norm, which may still be verified in it and
feeds on it – neither one really preceding the other, each presupposed in the
other. The “paying public projection,” which was chosen as the beginning
of “the history of cinema,” summons a crowd, all the crowds in the world,
simultaneously if possible, by assigning them the place of the spectator:
this is a well-known narrative. But this axis, along which a whole series of
“moments” deemed relevant by historians line up – institutionalization,
theaters, the advent of narration, the recognition of film as art, and today, for
some, the entrance into the museum and the gallery, among other examples
– is “doubled” with another axis in which image and sound machines are
domestic, private, family-oriented, individual objects (optical toys, cameras,
gramophones, telephones, television, smartphones…). “Doubled” is the right
word, for all the appliances and dispositives mentioned in the second group
presuppose that the individual or the limited group using them belong to
collectivities, to a crowd. Symmetrically, these crowds do not merge their
constituents into a whole that would subsume them; on the contrary, they
require them to remain individuals. Boris Eikhenbaum already noted that
the film spectator was alone; unlike the spectator at the theater, he did
not blend in a collective entity. In short, audio and visual spectacles since
the nineteenth century (the diorama, the panorama, the Praxinoscope-
theater and the cinematograph), if they aimed at a mass audience, still
individualized the spectator in the theater, who as a consequence was not
different from his complement, the private user. The two are moments of
the same individual, two modes of subjectification.3 The economy of these
appliances aims at both: technological changes produce these individual
3 “Even the very concept of ‘mass art’ in connection with cinema needs a whole series of
qualifications. […] [I]f we force ourselves to think it over calmly then the mass art of cinema
is not a qualitative concept but a quantitative one which is not connected with the essence of
cinema. […] [C]inema does not in itself in any way require the presence of the mass, even if
theatre does. Anyone with a projector can watch a film at home and therefore be one of the mass
of cinema spectators even without entering a cinema. Apart from that we do not, in essence, feel
ourselves to be members of a mass at all, or participants in a mass spectacle, when we are sitting
in a cinema; on the contrary – conditions at a film-show induce the spectator to feel as if he were
in total isolation.” Boris Eikhenbaum, “Problems of Cine-Stylistics,” trans. Richard Sherwood,
in Boris Eikhenbaum, The Poetics of Cinema, ed. Richard Taylor (Oxford: RPT Publications/The
University of Essex, 1982) 10.
uses and the corresponding market while developing the spectacular and
collective dimension of film (Scope, 3-D, stereo sound). That the “theatrical
release” is now seen mainly in the private space (television, DVD) or on an
individual player (laptop, smartphone…) that may also be used in public
space (in the street or on the train…) shows this reversibility of places and
porosity of “boundaries.”4 Within this approach, the notion of “amateur” is
obviously “off,” and even out of date. The phenomenon exceeds the distinc-
tion between the professional and the dilettante from which it proceeds.
Still, the amateur is a “fact” and some of the questions mentioned thus far
may start being answered on that basis.
The Amateur-Dispositive
The film amateur, or cinema lover, is commonly defined either as a spectator

or as a non-professional practitioner: she or he consumes film or produces it.
Yet again, these aspects are not mutually exclusive: the private spectator is
requested as a projectionist for the Pathé Kok, a manipulator for the kinora,
just as she or he was for the phenakistiscope or zootrope, the gramophone
or the theatrophone. This is even more the case with the computer, with
downloading, “piracy,” viewing, video extraction, copying, and so forth.
Some technical skills are even needed for the maintenance of the equip-
ment and its proper operation; electronics has further emphasized the
phenomenon by which the user has to upgrade or repair the machine,
possibly by talking to a specialist over the phone.
As to amateur filmmakers, they are also spectators of course – of their
own films, to begin with.
Here the amateur-dispositive refers to the social dispositive which
integrates amateur filmmaker and industrial production equipment in a
configuration that makes it possible to articulate the different definitions
of the “dispositif”: a) the technical definition, in the restricted sense of
the combination of parts into an appliance as described in the patent;5
4 Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy refer to this phenomenon under the term “global screen.”
See L’Ecran global. Du cinéma au smartphone (2007; Paris: Seuil, 2011).
5 Auguste Lumière, narrating the invention of the cinematograph by his brother, spoke of
“dispositif” to refer to the decisive “detail” that made possible the development of the appliance:
“One morning, as I came to his bedside to see how he was doing, he told me that during his
insomnia he had kept turning the problem over and thought he had found a rational solution.
The idea was to resort to a dispositive gripping the film at rest, carrying it in a speeded-up, then
a slowed-down movement, until it came to rest again – at which time the projection had to take
b) that by which a modus operandi comes with the appliance and has to
be implemented by the amateur following the instructions for use; c) the
cinematographic dispositive proper, which determines the relations of the
director or spectator to the machine and to the representation (aimed at
or perceived), and with which the amateur complies;6 and finally, d) the
social dispositive, which the cinematographic dispositive is a part of and
belongs to. In this case, the social dispositive is particularly easy to identify:
in the set of prescriptive discourses – technical (a) as well as normative
(b), referring to groups of values which are not only technical or even just
aesthetic – and in the procedures subjecting the amateur to the whole.
What surfaces here is the articulation characterizing “liberal” societies
according to Foucault, in which the autonomy, the individual freedom and
subjection play a part in the good integration and the good functioning
of the socio-economic system (liberal capitalism and the productivity it
seeks).7 It appears all the more clearly as the individual addressed by
this ensemble of discursive utterances and practices to implement is an
“amateur” combining unselfishness and chosen attraction, but also possibly
fickleness and even negligence.8
Indeed, the amateur is required to be free and sovereign, unlike the
professional, who has to abide by strict rules designed according to desired
effects established by other people (she or he only carries things out) and
place. This cyclical operation had to be repeated fifteen times per second. […] I immediately
understood that this dispositive was to perform the desired effect and left the problem to my
brother, who had just found the solution in one night.” See Auguste Lumière, Mes travaux et
mes jours, 1953, quoted in Bernard Chardère, Le Roman des Lumière (Paris: Gallimard, 1995)
286 (my emphasis).
6 As Louis Lumière explained: “I built an appliance of this kind [the kinetoscope] and, after
many attempts, I managed to implement a dispositive which allowed the image to stay still for
1/25 of a second and made possible the projection of these images on a screen – and in front
of several people. My dispositive was the cinematograph.” See Louis Lumière, interview by
Régis-Leroi, Minerva 31 Dec. 1935, quoted by Chardère, Le Roman des Lumière 284. Lumière moves
from the mechanical system in the appliance (the film stopping in front of the shutter) to the
dispositive of the appliance as a whole, to the screen and to the spectator (the cinematograph).
7 “The psychological subject [of panopticism, discipline and normalization] whose appear-
ance is attested at the time […] is but the other side of this process of subjection.” See Michel
Foucault, Résumés des cours 1970-1982 (Paris: Julliard, 1989) 49-50.
8 The 8th edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie (1932-1935) defined the amateur as follows:
“Someone who is fond of something, has a taste for it […]. It [the term] refers absolutely to
individuals who like the fine arts without practicing them or having them as their profession.
He is not an artist, he is an amateur. This is the talent of an amateur, the work of an amateur. It
is also used to refer to those who, having to do something, go about it carelessly. He studies
amateur[ishly]. Finally, it applies to those who practice sports without earning any financial
profit for it.”
profitability in every sense of the word. This injunction to be free is con-

substantial with the figure of the amateur, who is at once heavily criticized
and praised for the free will she or he shows. A caricature of the father of
the photography “for everyone,” George Eastman, shows him passing by
the bank where he was an employee, pursuing his hobby, weighed down
by the cumbersome equipment needed to shoot a mere “instantaneous”
photograph.9 Beyond this “material” aspect, which was very important in
the discourse on the popularization of and access to the photographic –
and to some extent, cinematographic – medium, the amateur was always
called on to play a part where she or he “counterbalanced” or stimulated
professional practice.
To reconcile the two contradictory sides of this injunction, institutional
discourses – the manufacturers’ instruction manual and related literature
(publicity, magazine articles) – engaged in the naturalization of technical
procedures. These could not be declined, since they were self-evident and
were the only ones possible. The conceptual framework of this operation of
naturalization mobilized “values” – aesthetic, involving “good taste,” uses,
“good form,” and so forth – which limited possible practices in the name
of this proper operation.
As a consequence, since the amateur was supposedly released from a
number of economic (or commercial) constraints and did not work towards
the creation of a “product” for a market, she or he always already encap-
sulated a number of traits – in the negative, one might say. Some of these
traits are to be found in contemporary artistic practices, as these integrate
image and sound appliances without agreeing to the respect of the norms in
question, but this time with the prospect of renewing the “supply” on the art
market. That is the case with the discourse on the so-called “emancipatory”
arrangements of installations, which succeeded their “deconstruction,” itself
tapping into apparatus theory (see Dan Graham in particular).10 Indeed, as
Roger Odin has shown, amateur cinema requires interactivity and proposes
unfinished, ductile productions allowing oral interventions, interruptions,
flashbacks, freeze frames on demand, and so forth. He compares these
9 Reproduced in Friedrich von Zglinicki, Der Weg des Films (Berlin: Rembrandt, 1956) 159.
10 Beyond the often unstructured comments in the discourses of art critics, curators, or artists,
Olivier Quintyn has been developing a theory that seeks to articulate textual dispositive and
social dispositive by relying on Lévi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage. His main concern is collage as
a dispositive always founded on disjunction and generating possible epistemo-critical tactics.
See Olivier Quintyn, Dispositifs/Dislocations (Paris: Al Dante, 2007).
characteristics to those of experimental cinema; today they are related to

new media (cell phones, computers, digital cameras, etc.).11
More generally, De Certeau’s hypotheses on “the arts of practice” outline
what he calls an “alternative,” “the network of an antidiscipline” allowing the
deployment of the “dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups
or individuals already caught in the nets of ‘discipline’.”12
Still, these uses, either private or collective, outside what could be “the”
standard cinematographic dispositive (the tiered theater, the seat where
the spectator is immobilized, darkness, the screen and the projection by
an invisible, silent machine13), were considered immediately after com-
munication, recording, and diffusion devices appeared: from the standpoint
of hybridization on the one hand, from that of individual appropriation on
the other. The ongoing development of media and intermedia studies has
retrospectively shed light on these intersections and exchanges between
different media (telephone, gramophone, kinetoscope, photography, radio,
etc.). By contrast, “theory” has relentlessly turned the respective properties
of these media into as many distinctive, autonomized traits in order to
found them as arts14 – a quest for specificity that has played out again
recently with video or other media, through cell phone film festivals, for
example.
The turn which took place in France in 1961-1962, with the end of the
Institut de Filmologie and the emergence of the Centre d’études de com-
munication de masse, was significant in that respect: the driving principle
behind Cohen-Séat’s undertaking was to take into account the dimension of
11 It is partly with a view to renewing artistic practices that exhibitions in museums or related
institutions (festivals) open themselves to amateurs or celebrate their “consecration,” actually
paving the way for their “canonization,” to use Shklovsky’s terminology. Despite its undoubtedly
unfinished nature, the Soviet effort of “de-professionalization” – in photography, literature, and
cinema, notably – started from different premises, since its aim was to transform everyday life.
See Maria Zalambani, L’arte nella produzione. Avantguardia e rivoluzione nella Russia sovietica
degli anni Venti (Ravenna: Longo Angelo, 1998).
12 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles: The University of
California Press, 1984) xiv-xv.
13 “The theater, a centrifugal art, an art of expansion, an open-air art, is marked by contagion.
But the cinema will always require this dark, closed space where spectators withdraw into
themselves and concentrate; an inner art, in which everything comes together and condenses;
the screen soon seems to be set up in the very center of the mind; there I contemplate the universe
in the innermost part of myself.” See Jacques Rivette, “Les malheurs d’Orphée,” La Gazette du
cinéma 5 (Nov. 1950): 2.
14 See François Albera and Maria Tortajada, “Prolégomènes à une critique des télé-dispositifs,”
in La Télévision, du téléphonoscope à YouTube. Pour une archéologie de l’audiovision, Mireille
Berton and Ann-Katrin Weber, eds. (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2009).
cinema as a media. It involved a split in cinema considered as an art with the

division film/cinema, which Metz was to use to further autonomize and to
identify a core even more essential to his object in Language and Cinema.15
However, it left cinema in a central position – not as a “model,”16 as Lev
Manovich advocates nowadays, but as an object.17 The audiovisual field
was thus considered as a whole with much “delay” (Adorno and Horkheimer
had defined television as the assembly of radio and cinema in the 1940s,
and Gunther Anders had further outlined it shortly afterwards 18). This
notably affected apparatus theory as it was consolidated from 1969 to 1978
with Jean-Louis Baudry, among others, fixated as it was on a “state” of
cinema as an autonomous medium – which at the time was no longer the
only one and was not even dominant, if it had ever been.19 Still, this “split”
in cinema may be verified in a less elitist press that took it into account, as
with a 1961 issue of Magnum devoted to television.20 The new medium and
media is compared with previous spectacles (the engraving of a Robertson
phantasmagoria and a television studio, “Wunderlampe und Elektronauge,”
magic lantern and electronic eye) or with “anticipations.” Countless refer-
ences to Robida’s drawings, excerpted from his Le Vingtième Siècle, appear
15 See Christian Metz, Language and Cinema, chapters 1 [“Within the Cinema: The Filmic
Fact”] and 2 [“Within the Filmic Fact: The Cinema”] (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1974).
16 “The theory and history of cinema serve as the key conceptual lens through which I look at
new media.” See Lev Manovich, The Language of the New Media (Cambridge, MA/London: The
MIT Press, 2001) 8-9.
17 Barthes noted this in his account of the first international conference on visual information
that took place in Milan (July 9-12, 1961), published in the first issue of Communications the
same year. He denounced “the imperialism of cinema over other means of visual information,” a
domination “doubtless justified ‘historically’” but which “cannot be justified epistemologically.”
See Roland Barthes, Communications 1 (1961): 223-24. The quotation appears in François Albera
and Maria Tortajada, “Introduction to an Epistemology of Viewing and Listening Dispositives,”
in Cinema Beyond Film. Media Epistemology in the Modern Era, François Albera and Maria
Tortajada, eds., trans. Lance Hewsom (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U.P., 2010) 22 fn.
18 Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung [1944], published in English as
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Palo Alto: Stanford U.P., 2007); Gunther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit
des Menschen 1. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution [1956-1980],
published in French as De l’obsolescence de l’homme (Paris: Ivrea-Encyclopédie des nuisances,
2001; Fario, 2011). The idea of combination is inherent in technical invention and its explanation.
In his scientif ic column in Le Gaulois (1 Jan. 1896), E. Hospitaber, an engineer in “Arts and
Manufactures,” introduced the kinetoscope and the cinematograph as well as the animated
panorama, a “fortunate combination” of cinema and colonel Moëssant’s photographic panorama.
19 Indeed, this stripped-down model was founded on the diachronic as well as synchronic
repression of cinema’s entire intermedia dimension and of all the diversified forms of its uses
and functions (didactics, surveillance, mixed entertainment, documentation and archive, etc.).
20 See “Faktum Fernsehen” [“the television factor”], Magnum 34 [Cologne] Feb. 1961.
in the magazine (pages 7, 22, 23, 26).21 Television as a new dispositive is

thus considered within a history predating the advent of cinema.22 The
emphasis is on the place of spectators (the domestic space) on the one hand,
and on the conditions of production (studio, equipment) on the other, rather
than on images “in themselves” as in the aesthetic approach to cinema.
Regarding television, this emphasis attests to the consciousness of a mixed
use and of the dimension of social dispositive that had gradually been
overshadowed – or played down, at the very least – in the case of cinema.
Le Gaulois and the Easter Egg
Barely two years after the f irst public screenings, the first page of the
Easter issue of Le Gaulois (a newspaper where Raymond Roussel penned
the Sunday serials) featured the drawing of a huge egg that supposedly
contained twelve surprises to be given out after a draw from the newspaper’s
subscribers.23 The prizes were a house that could be dismantled, a steam-
powered tricycle, a bike, a Larousse dictionary in 17 volumes, an outdoor
gymnastics equipment and – ranked fifth on the list – a cinematograph.
“Everybody can do photography; the use of the cinematograph can be
learned quickly,” according to the newspaper. To this effect, the Lumière
appliance was chosen for its practical aspect (it could record, develop and
project). From today’s perspective, handling the cinematograph does not
seem as practical as the newspaper claimed, far from it: the appliance did
not have a viewer, it was operated with a crank, thereby requiring the use
of a tripod and a projective approach to the edges of the frame. In spite of
these aspects and the briefness of the films, Le Gaulois listed a series of
subjects that could be shot by “the amateur” (though the term was actually
never used in the text): a comic scene, an interesting movement, a ball, an air
show, a scene involving sea swimming, a comic scene at the castle, hunting
scenes (blowing the horn at the hunt to signal that the kill is near or that
21 As early as 1972, the Kassel Documenta (on the theme “today seen from yesterday”) devoted
a room to Robida, whose reference was to become central with the advent of intermediality. See
Jurgen Müller and William Uricchio, among other scholars, and Alain Boillat in this volume.
22 William Uricchio proposed to substitute the narrative of the advent of television (starting
from the camera obscura), founded on live broadcasting, for that of the advent of cinema (with
its antecedents and various manifestations), defined by recording, storage, and reproduction.
Yet this would still consist in distinguishing between media on the basis of the restrictive
specialization of their uses.
23 Supplement to Le Gaulois 17 April 1897: 1.
a hunted animal is hitting the water, a quarry), a wedding at the village,

the monument of a railway station, a pilgrimage, and so forth. “Is there
anything the cinematograph cannot reproduce?” It was at once credited
with a) several functions – keeping memories, staging, documenting; b) a
sort of immediacy – “in the evening, the developed images will be shown on
the screen with the animation of reality;” and c) adjustability, as “there are
many ways to add to [filmed, visual] reality through sound, song, or music.”
This offer is proof of the availability of the appliance on the market, even
as it took some time for the Lumières to develop their invention, initially
reluctant to commercialize it so as to maintain their monopoly over its
exploitation. After the kinora, which made it possible to visualize a series
of 600 prints attached to a rotating cylinder thanks to a single lens (1896,
manufactured and commercialized by Gaumont from 1900 on), the so-
called “family” or “home” projectors became increasingly available in the
1900s (the Kinemathome, etc.), as did toys (the cinematograph of families,
a version of the Phototachygraphe). In 1907, after a short-lived attempt by
Gaumont-Demenÿ, the “‘Kino’ amateur cinematograph” was made available
commercially, and in 1912 the Pathé company, an industrial and commercial
“empire” founded on the phonograph and cinema, further developed the
idea of a “cinema at home” with the Pathé Kok, a projector fitted with a
dynamo which allowed a well-off clientele to view a collection of movies
published in reduced format (28 mm) on nonflammable film in their own
salon. The Kok camera followed shortly thereafter, again with the amateur
as a target. However, the cost of film and laboratory processing meant that
the appliance was not easily affordable.
The Pathé-Baby
Ten years later, after the division of his “empire” (phonographs and
phonographic equipment on one side, Pathé Consortium Cinéma for the
distribution and exhibition on another and Pathé Cinéma for the production
of film as well as the manufacture of appliances for shooting and project-
ing), Charles Pathé had not given up on catering to the greatest number
of customers, as the gramophone had shown how lucrative this activity
could be. For Christmas 1922, he launched the “Pathé-Baby,” an appliance
designed for the projection at home of small-format films (9.5 mm). It met
with considerable success. The March 1924 issue of L’Informateur photo
stated that, “if we still lived in the time of fairy tales, all of us, adults and
children, should place the Pathé-Baby in the realm of dreams.” The projector
was apprehended both as a tool for scientific popularization and as acces-

sible to children due to the simplicity of its use.
As with the Pathé-Kok, an amateur appliance for shooting films became
available shortly afterwards. Developed by manufacturer Pierre-Victor
Coutinsouza, it was in turn praised in L’Informateur photo: the camera
could be used “without notions about photography, for little money, in
simple and practical ways.” The appliance was small, compact and light,
it could be easily loaded and in plain daylight thanks to its case system;
while it only had one – nonreflex – viewfinder, its “extra-luminous” lens
did not require focusing from 5 feet to infinity, and it cost less than its
predecessors (385 francs).
Amateur cinema took off in France in the wake of the Pathé-Baby. The
phenomenon, which enabled the “newcomer” of cinema to challenge the
domination of the other arts, took place within the artistic field itself:
either within the perspective of the destruction of established aesthetic
values (as with the avant-gardes) or with the modernist prospect of a new
foundation for a “new spirit.” Interest in these new techniques, these new
mediums, these new addressees was from then on combined with the inter-
est for “non professional” appropriations liable to shake up the “canons.”
This movement towards amateurs was observed even more in the USSR
(at first a part of the Proletkult’s sphere of influence, it soon won over the
literary, photographic and cinematographic avant-garde around the LEF,
which advocated factualism and the “deprofessionalization” of art 24) than
in Germany (be it on the side of the Bauhaus and modernist movements or
on the side of socio-political movements such as trade unions and far-left
parties).
In France, Cinéa-Ciné pour tous, a cinephilic periodical, regularly pub-
lished articles on the phenomenon, hoping that a renewal in themes and
styles would originate in these amateurs with no artistic certainties learned
in the fine arts, literature or theater. In 1927 Pierre Henry asserted that with
the Pathé-Baby, “the amateur photographer now [had] its equivalent in the
cinematograph”: on the one hand, “what was done until now with a Kodak
and the photo album [was] going to become far more lively and striking
with the moving image,”25 while on the other hand,
24 See Aya Kawamura, “La création collective dans le documentaire soviétique: photographie,
cinéma et ‘correspondants-ouvriers’,” 1895. Revue d’histoire du cinéma 63 (Spring 2011).
25 Pierre Henry, “Le cinéma d’amateur,” Cinéa-Ciné pour tous 85 (15 May 1927): 26-27.
amateur cinegraphy opens the way to future performers curious about

photogeny, future operators, future directors, artists who, tomorrow
perhaps, will give new impetus to this art still looking for its way. Is it
not evident that the great filmmakers of tomorrow will not be crossovers
from literature, the stage or so many other careers, but truly amateur
filmmakers…26
Yet beyond families and individual amateurs, schools and Catholic youth
clubs became the major players in this medium. The phenomenon resulted
in a genuine parallel distribution network for Pathé. The company became
aware of a very tangible reality: in the France of the 1920s and 1930s, rural
space was completely ignored by film distributors, who mostly relied on
theaters located in cities. Enthusiasm for light equipment, small formats
and amateur appliances in the countryside thus led to the Pathé-rural, a
distribution system for the 16 mm Pathé catalog.27
As can be seen, amateur practice, while it could prove true assertions
such as Roh’s, extolling outsiders in the renewal of professional photography,
was simultaneously regulated in two ways: first, by instructions for use and
their prescriptions (internal norm), which influences aesthetic choices;
second, by mediating social institutions, which dispense knowledge or
doctrines (external norm) that influence the choice of subjects and uses.
The first of these norms will be examined here.
26 Pierre Henry, “Le cinéma d’amateur,” Cinéa-Ciné pour tous 86 (1 June 1927): 14-15. These last
words, which Louis Delluc had had about amateur scripts a few years earlier, echo Franz Roh’s:
“The Werkbund exhibition [“Film und Foto,” Stuttgart, 1929], the most important event of these
last few years in the visual field, presented almost no productions by professional photographers,
so often petrified in conventional mannerism. Here we have more evidence of the fact that
outsiders free of any prevention are precisely often those who achieve the necessary progress
and rejuvenation in the most diverse domains of life, art, or science. And this new flowering
of the photographic art also belongs… [in] the unknown history of the general productivity of
amateurs.” See “Mechanism and Expression,” in Foto-Auge, 76 Fotos der Zeit, Jan Tschichold and
Franz Roh, eds. (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Dr. Fritz Wedekind & Co., 1929). Translator’s
note: this translation from the French is my own. An English translation of the full text may
be found in Germany. The New Photography, 1927-1933. Documents and Essays, ed. David Mellor
(Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978).
27 This has to be added to the several thousand small-format f ilms circulated in families
by Pathé. Both phenomena show to what extent an important share of the cinematographic
phenomenon is not considered in commentaries concentrating on the period.
The Internal Constraint
Several levels in prescriptive, evaluative, promotional and critical discourse

thus define and outline the conditions for an amateur practice of cinema
(in this case, the “Pathé-Baby”). They partly overlap with and sometimes
contradict one another.
The discourse of the patent would be situated on the first level. In this
case, we will take the instance of a description of the appliance commonly
referred to as “Motocaméra Pathé Baby,” which will come up again in our
argument, and which in the patent is called “advanced cinematographic
appliance for shooting.”28 According to the final summary, the invention
concerns improvements in the “mechanism driving the film, [the] system
controlling the shutter, [the] regulating brake, [the] command spring, [the]
channel and [the] on/off system” (p. 3). Before the technical description
proper and its explanatory figures, the text states that “the object of the
present invention is to realize a cinematographic shooting appliance that
would not be too unwieldy, would not weigh much and would be easy to
operate.”
The main characteristic of the model is that it comes with a mainspring
allowing the film to be driven and replacing the hand-driven crank of the
previous model. Given the particular use made of this spring in the barrel
where it is set (an involute circle with a radius increasing over one half of
its length and the form of a decreasing involute over the other half), it has
less power than a regular spring when completely wound up, but more
power when partly unwound. As a consequence, it ensures uniform driving
throughout operation.
The shift from the crank to the mainspring, then to the electric motor
later, was not linear,29 despite the use of the term “improvements” and,
far from presenting only “advantages,” it also involved limitations in the
possibilities once offered by the crank. Uniform driving did not totally
preclude a whole range of other recording speeds for the film (slow motion/
speeded-up motion) or experimentation with this parameter in relation
to posing time (and accordingly to lighting matters). In this particular
28 We are referring to patent n° 608.815 here. It was registered by the company Pathé Cinéma
on December 30, 1925 and issued on April 30, 1926 (its publication occurred on August 3) by the
services of industrial property attached to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry of the French
Republic (a registration request was also filed in England in February 1925). The document
was signed (through a power of attorney) by Lavoix, Mosès, and Gehet. It was consulted at the
département des Appareils (Cinémathèque française).
29 See Benoît Turquety’s contribution in this volume.
instance, however, it still made these “cases” somewhat exceptional and

indeed limited them, as appears in the “instructions” below.
At this level of the manufacturer’s discourse, the user for whom the ap-
pliance had been designed or the kinds of possible uses are not mentioned.
Only aspects such as handiness and easy operation come up.
With the “instructions” appearing in the user’s booklet for the Moto-
camera (a second level of discourse), the amateur arrives on the scene and
is assigned a number of gestures, attitudes and objectives.
Addressing the user directly (“you”), the manual begins with an outline
of the place occupied by the appliance in everyday life for everyone (“we”)
and the anthropological consequences this implies:
How can the pleasure of animated photography be conveyed, when it

represents those we love the most? It is time being half-defeated, our own
life running in front of us, it is, at last, the past kept alive.
It should be noted that the statement is close to the dominant discourse

that greeted the Cinematograph, notably with the well-known articles
published in the press after the first screenings.
Accessibility for the amateur, the novice being targeted is then extolled:
This joy is available to all today, PATHE-BABY gives it to you, the

MOTOCAMERA brings it within your reach without requiring special
knowledge about photography, and at little cost, through simple and
practical means.
Third, this accessibility is associated to technical characteristics and to

improvements brought to the appliance in terms of simplification and au-
tomatism: “No set-up, not even a crank to rotate, no more unwieldy tripod.”
The elements brought up here thus are the same as the “advantages” evoked
in the patent, but “in situation,” in the very practice of the user.
Finally, the instructions set things into motion, prompting the user
to take action: “Take the trouble to read the following lines and already
the MOTOCAMERA will be ready to shoot, fixing the pleasure of the first
success for you.”
The instructions, advice, and recommendation that follow the short
description of the appliance and its handling (loading and unloading the
film casings, shooting, etc.: the do’s and don’ts) then define a series of rather
circumscribed precepts that combine technical arrangements, uses and
effects of an aesthetic nature to be sought (or obtained):
So as to avoid that the photographed subject exits the frame, we strongly

recommend that the area where one or several characters will move about
be drawn with chalk on the ground; and that heads always be maintained
in the frame, unlike feet and legs, which may be cut off by the lower part
of the frame.
For portraits shot at very close range (within 5 ft), keep the chin of the
cinematographed person at the level of the base of the viewer’s window,
that is, slightly tilt up the camera and use the supplementary lens in
that case.
The more distant the subjects, the easier it is for them to move laterally
without moving outside the frame, but it is nonetheless advisable to
identify the edges thanks to objects placed nearby.
[…] We even recommend that beginners shoot their first views with one
or more seated characters, in front of a table for instance, to simply make
an animated portrait.
A face photographed at a range of 2.5 ft or 3 ft will fill up the whole frame,
with the slightest changes in expression being perceptible, whereas the
pace, the gait, the gestures will be faithfully rendered in the case of
characters shot full-length. It should in fact be noted that movements
across the frame (lateral) are much less apparent than movements in
depth. Also, the foreground is much more expressive than subjects from
a distance and it is the art of the “filmmaker’s mise en scène” to alternate
properly between the two. To shoot panoramic views, the user will attempt
to move the Motocaméra in a smooth and regular movement. When too
swift, a movement makes all images completely blurry and produces
horizontal “streaks.”
In the course of making a film, for the shooting of still objects such as
statues, monuments, landscapes featuring no movement, etc., a second
take will be enough and will provide a dozen images, the best of which
will be immobilized thanks to a notch during screening.30
Some recommendations or remarks directly refer to technical capabilities

of the appliance not mentioned in the patent. It is thus indicated that, in the
cases when the subject “does not move much,” or for “animated portraits,”
it is possible to shoot a little more slowly to increase posing time. Indeed,
one of the “pernicious” effects of motorization is to make the play with the
relation speed/posing time less apparent.
30 My emphasis.
The speed produced by the mechanism (2 rotations per second) cor-

responds to the standard pace, but it may be safely reduced to 90 rotations
per minute without producing excessively jerky movements by pressing
the knurled knob above the power lever to increase posing time in winter
weather or for indoor views (with seated character), views in the woods,
or even in fair weather if subjects move about slowly.
Others are tied to a process posterior to shooting, that of development,

which retroactively implies constraints during the shooting:
It is recommended that several scenes be shot as part of the same film to

avoid “overlong” passages, but subjects should then all be lit in the same
way, for films are developed as a whole and any differences in lighting
in the same film cannot be corrected during development.
A “technical” problem thus determines choices of an aesthetic nature as

well as choices involving subjects. These different levels come up together
again later:
2° It is not necessary to shoot with the sun behind you, on the contrary:
depth and the beauty of the result are emphasized with the sun on the side.
3° Do not shoot scenes with starkly different lights on the same film, as
it is impossible to develop a film other than as a whole.
These “limitations” either lead to the development of new accessories or

the opening of new practices for the amateur: “in these exceptional cases
where amateurs would like to perform this work on their own, we have
designed adapted, portable developing equipment which will be provided
with detailed instructions.”
As we have seen, the terms “photographer” and “photography” (“without
requiring special knowledge about photography”) appear several times. In
this specific sub-sector of cinema that is amateur cinema, the reference
to the amateur photographer was indeed imperative, for it represented an
antecedent offering the example of a social and commercial success. The
comparison was particularly apt when it came to the work on development,
with which amateur photographers had been familiar since the nineteenth
century.
As to accessories, the posograph or the various posometers put on the
market made it possible to calculate the exposure needed according to the
available light thanks to very precise tables, but also along very normalized
notions of the types of possible “views.”
The posograph is a small calculation table designed to determine expo-
sure time and the speed at which the crank should be turned: on one side,
the information on the weather, the place, the nature of the contemplated
subject are “entered,” and on the other the number to select on the setting
ring then appears. This device reviews all possible situations in detail and
was a convenient way to calculate this parameter until the photo-electric
cell appeared.
Journalistic Discourse, Expert Discourse
These two types of discourse originating from the manufacturer (the pat-
ent and the explanatory leaflet, to which the promotional discourse of
advertising could be added; see fig. 7) were both confirmed and amplified
in critical or journalistic discourse as well as in popular books paraphrasing
them. Occasionally, these discourses also contested them: for instance, after
periodical Cinéa twice evoked amateur cinema, the industry’s organ La
Cinématographie française opened its pages to A. P. Richard, a technician
who tempered this enthusiasm: “Amateur cinema gave rise to enormous
hopes, but it seems that at the moment it is going through a slight crisis
which hinders its evolution.”
Besides the price of film stock, which made it “impossible to contemplate
an intense popularization of amateur cinematography,” technical difficul-
ties awaited the amateur, and these did not appear in the directions for use:
“Clever salesmen thought it was enough to turn a crank in any conditions
and in any way whatsoever,” Richard objected. “This unfortunate mistake
only produced disappointing results. It’s high time every camera buyer was
provided with a reliable guide with information on the do’s and the don’ts,”
a vade mecum that would feature “something else than sales patter.”31
The “sales patter” targeted by Richard is the promotional discourse of
advertising (“the moving image accessible to all,” “shooting a film with the
Caméra-Pathé is as simple as taking a random picture with the most simple
of standard photographic cameras”32), which points to all the instruc-
31 A. P. Richard, “L’opinion d’un technicien,” Cinéa-Ciné pour tous 1 Sept. 1927: 24-25, reprinted
from La Cinématographie française.
32 These formulas appear in advertisements for the Pathé-Baby (undated, département des
Machines, collection of the Cinémathèque française).
tions we have already examined. These set norms that facilitated the task
of amateur operators, but also led them to conform to a certain type of
representation derived from pictorial and photographic representation, to
an ideal of stability and duration of the image, to a measure of contrasts
and distances. In that respect, an aesthetic may be inferred from the advice
and the steps to follow provided by the expert-technician as well as the
manufacturer.33
The “dictatorship of posing time” which Richard laments was thus dealt
with by Pathé through explanatory tables appearing in the instructions and
with the posograph; these were supported by a reference to artistic genres.
A Classic Example: Edvard Munch and the Pathé-Baby
In 1927, painter Edvard Munch acquired a camera and a Pathé-Baby projec-

tor in Paris. Over the summer, he shot four 9.5 mm films in Dresden, Oslo
and Aker, for a total of 10 meters or so lasting just a few minutes. Munch had
been a film lover as a spectator and had close ties to Halfdan Nobel Roede, a
producer, distributor, and exhibitor, back in the 1910s. Roede had exhibited
his paintings in one of his theaters.34 Munch had also had an interest in
photography, practicing and studying it, helping his sister Inger to master
it, using it himself. How was he to deal with “animated photography”?
The Pathé-Baby camera which he purchased was the second model of the
brand; it had been created in 1925-1926 and was equipped with an auxiliary
driving mechanism using a spring – the Motocaméra already examined.35
Slightly heavier than the previous one, this model still did not involve an
optical viewer; it simply featured a frame placed at the front of the camera
with a small hole at its center – a hole that had to be aligned with the one
33 This kind of demand, which runs against promotional discourse, may be found throughout
the history of amateur cinema. Here is one example: “Do not think there are other, apparently
more simple ways, even for a beginner, even equipped with the most automated appliances.
The satisfaction you will experience in cinema will be proportional to the care, the attention,
the efforts even, which you will bring to your pastime.”
34 See Ingebjørg Ydstie, “Les galeries d’art cinématographiques d’Edvard Munch et Halfdan
Nobel Roede,” catalog for the exhibition “Munch. L’Œil moderne,” Centre Pompidou, Sept. 22,
2011 - Jan. 9, 2012.
35 Pathé later commercialized a third model of Motocaméra with the motor integrated to the
case, whose elements had been made more compact. A single rewinding was enough to unwind
a whole roll of film. “As a consequence, the appliance is always ready for use.”
near the operator’s eye (the eyepiece) when aiming the camera after placing
it against the cheek, “taking care to hold it in a vertical position.”36
The subjects Munch dealt with seemed to meet the “program” defined
for amateurs in the leaflets. His films include the urban views, automobile
traffic, tramways, carts and passers-by of the Lumière cinematograph,
as well as landscapes, houses, portraits of close relatives, a playlet, and a
self-portrait – but the results are different.
Was it a deliberate gesture of “transgression” of imposed norms on
Munch’s part? An “artistic” gesture similar to Man Ray’s when he delib-
erately handled the camera without conforming to accepted norms while
shooting Return to Reason – throwing the camera up in the air after turning
it on, for instance, exposing film directly on the model of the photogram
in photography and so forth, seeking out randomness and chance effects?
Or should these differences be imputed to the clumsiness of the begin-
ner, who did not master the machine? It is impossible to say, just as it is
probably pointless to try and determine it one way or the other. Indeed,
these sketches, these trials by Munch, shown end to end by the laboratory
that developed the films, attest to the ambiguity of the relations between
amateurs and innovators extolled by Roh and Henry. What does appear
in these “failures” (over- or underexposure, ghost images, blurs, blacks,
proximity making it impossible to identify the object, very swift movements,
etc.) is what characterizes the machine.
As we have seen, instructions made a type of relation explicit in the
handling of the appliance, defining a bodily discipline of the user: “place
the Motocaméra against the cheek as indicated in figure 5, taking care
to hold it in a vertical position”; “with the right index finger, pull back the
start-up lever to trigger rolling immediately. From that moment on, the
camera should no longer move…”; “at any rate, avoid movements that would
be too quick…”
Munch’s films do not show an observance of “technical” recommen-
dations, as the f ilming mode is primarily gestural, against prescribed
immobility. Following moving objects or panning on urban buildings or
spaces, he did not respect norms, be they about stability, focus, distance
or light. Each shot, often brief, involves an abrupt, sometimes back-and-
forth movement akin to the “tricks” of the kaleidoscope, this paradoxical
viewer which, far from allowing “to see better” like its model, the telescope,
opens onto imagination, as Baudelaire pointed out. To the reproduction
of things in their likeness, to this embalming of passing time, to all these
36 Pathé, Motocaméra, instructions for use.

functions related to memory, archiving, entertainment and wonderment,

what ultimately makes these analogical and familiar representations pos-
sible is added: the deceiving mechanism (everything is founded on some
form of illusion – movement, depth, color, scale, sound), but above all the
homology of this mechanism with the very mechanism of perception, and
even more, of the psyche.
Cinema, capturing through the discontinuity of its thousands of pho-
tographs the appearance of exterior movement, of “life,” of streets, places,
and trains, of smoke and waves, was apprehended by psychologists and
philosophers of knowledge and the psyche as the model of inner life at
the dawn of the twentieth century. Or, to be more specific, of an inner life
restructured by a hectic modern life on the mode of discontinuity, precisely:
fits and starts, caesuras, about-turns, simultaneity, fragmentation. The
screen rendered the visible world in the form of psychism, day dream,
recollection. Félix Le Dantec wrote: “what you call your life is a series of suc-
cessive momentary lives, analogous to the images of a cinematograph…”37
The year before, Jules Claretie had been struck by his first experience of
the cinematograph at the Grand Café, its reality at once truthful and ghostly,
but also its fits and starts.38 In one of his exemplary Parisian columns of
1897, he depicted a situation where the “modern brain” is threatened by
the “jerky movements” not only physical (the railroad) but also linked to
the discontinuity of “this hectic cinematograph which modern life has
become,” a “succession of electrical currents” where “characters appear
and disappear.”39
Turning his back on the “mastery” advocated in the instruction leaflets
prescribing this discipline of the body as a condition for effective, satisfy-
ing – “profitable” – filming, Munch did not so much free himself from
these as he subjected himself to the appliance and its arbitrariness. 40 If
37 Félix Le Dantec, Le Conflit. Entretiens philosophiques (Paris: Armand Colin, 1901) 166.
38 Jules Claretie, La Vie à Paris, 1896 (Paris: Fasquelle, 1897) 58-60.
39 Jules Claretie, “Trop d’émotions! – Le cerveau moderne,” La Vie à Paris, 1896, chap. XXXVI,
416-17.
40 And as he subjected himself to the signifying effects spectators could not fail to produce,
as the skills they had acquired through the viewing of standard films allowed them to decode
any “straying away” from the norm. Due to this very set of body movements undoing the rep-
resentative order, of this overexposure “burning” the image or this underexposure shrouding
it in darkness, of this excessively “hasty” movement blurring it, associations surface across
films. Within the frame, a relation is thus instituted between an inscription (“Marie”) and the
coming and going of a woman, “a passer-by,” its continuation in the following image, shot from
a window; or this scathing framing of King Albert of Saxony, reduced to his spurs, the hooves
and the bellyband of his bronze horse on a square.
the prescribed image met norms and conventional characteristics fixed by

pictorial tradition (the portrait, the self-portrait, the landscape, the genre
scene, etc.), its “transgression” revealed the crisis of a subject destined for
the unintentional, the slip, the random effects of an appliance.
Two Versions of the Television
Dispositive
Gilles Delavaud
The new gadget seems magical and mysterious. It arouses curiosity: How
does it work? What does it do to us? To be sure, when the television sets
will have appeared on the birthday tables and under the Christmas trees,
curiosity will abate. Mystery asks for explanation only as long as it is new.
Let us take advantage of the propitious moment.
Rudolf Arnheim, “A Forecast of Television,”1 1935
Many debates on the identity of television as a medium and as an art ac-

companied its expansion in the United States in the late 1940s and in France
in the early 1950s. In 1948, Jack Gould mentioned the fact that television
found inspiration in preexisting arts to argue that, precisely because it
combined “[…] the close-up of the motion picture, the spontaneity of the
living stage and the instantaneousness of radio” and was “the fusion of
these three elements,” it was absolutely unique. 2 Reviewing the 1949
season, Flora R. Schreiber was even more assertive: “I am seeking an idiom
that belongs peculiarly and uniquely to television. I am not interested in a
program that is illustrated radio, or miniature movies, or a photographed
stage play.”3 In 1950, anxious about the influence of the Hollywood model
in the direction of some shows, Gilbert Seldes warned that in the long term,
as the evolution of cinema and the radio showed, a medium could succeed
only “by using its particular techniques, by doing what it can do better than
any other medium can.”4
In France, the first studies devoted to the new medium appeared in La
Revue du cinéma. In 1947, in an article titled “Problèmes de la télévision,” Jean
Thévenot endeavored to offer a detailed response to two questions: “What
1 Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (1957; Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1997) 188.
2 Jack Gould, “Matter of Form, Television Must Develop Own Techniques If It Is To Have
Artistic Vitality,” in Watching Television Come of Age. The New York Times Reviews by Jack Gould,
ed. Lewis L. Gould (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001) 36.
3 Flora R. Schreiber, “Television: A New Idiom,” Hollywood Quarterly (Winter 1949): 191.
4 Gilbert Seldes, “The Twist. Can Hollywood Take over Television,” The Atlantic Monthly, 186.4
(Oct. 1950): 51.
320 Gilles Delavaud
kind of programming will be available on this Television whose advent is

no longer in doubt?” “To what aesthetic will they belong? That of cinema?
Or one based on principles and rules that will be its own? If so, what would
these be?”5 Two years later, the second question was central to an article
by George Freedland, “Télécinéma. Essai sur la syntaxe de la télévision,”
presented by its author as a “first essay on a new material.”6 From 1952 on,
André Bazin made Thévenot’s and Freedland’s questioning his own as he
assigned himself the critical task of “inquiring quite modestly,” program
after program, into what suited the small screen.7 Each of his articles
provided him with the opportunity to wonder what television could do.
A similar conception of television emerges from the different discourses
on its possibilities and powers and the examination of programs deemed
adequate by both the professionals of the new medium and its most atten-
tive observers: television was understood at once as a dispositive for remote
viewing and as a dispositive of observation.
1. Television as a Dispositive for Remote Viewing: The

Television Viewer as Observer
Television Proper
In his article in La Revue du cinéma, George Freedland, using the American

experience as evidence, distinguishes between two modes of remote view-
ing: television proper (or tele-vision) and the telecinema.
To illustrate the expressive possibilities of television proper, that is, the
“remote viewing of current events,”8 Freedland gives the example of the
major political and media event that was the broadcast of the Republican
convention in Philadelphia in June 1948.9 Conscious of addressing a reader-
ship of cinephiles not familiar with the new medium, he describes the
5 Jean Thévenot, “Problèmes de la télévision,” La Revue du cinéma 8 (Fall 1947): 59.

6 George Freedland, “Télécinéma. Essai sur la syntaxe de la télévision,” La Revue du cinéma
19-20 (Fall 1949): 122.
7 André Bazin, “Le commissaire Belin doit-il faire les pieds au mur?” Radio-Cinéma-Télévision,
4 Jan. 1953: 2. On the way Bazin approached television, see my article “André Bazin, critique de
télévision,” in L’Œil critique. Le journaliste critique de télévision, Jérôme Bourdon and Jean-Michel
Frodon, eds. (Brussels: Ina/De Boeck, 2003) 47-56.
8 Freedland, “Télécinéma”: 124.
9 The event was broadcast on the East Coast. On that occasion, NBC, CBS, ABC, and DuMont
pooled their technical means.
T wo Versions of the Television Dispositive 321
crucial moment when the television viewer learned that Thomas Dewey
had been chosen to face the Democratic candidate10 in the presidential
elections of the fall:
On their sets the spectators could see in succession – and therefore,

according to the rules of film editing, simultaneously:
– Dewey the candidate nervously pacing up and down his hotel room;
– the convention discussing the candidacies;
– the crowd waiting impatiently in the street;
– Dewey in his room, staring at the telephone;
– the convention announcing the result of the unanimous vote;
– Dewey rushing to the phone as it rings;
– the delegates at the other end of the line, informing him of his victory;
– Dewey putting the phone down, walking to the door;
– the crowd in the convention hall, applauding the results;
– Dewey’s car leaving, escorted by motorized police;
– the hall filled with delegates;
– the tribune where the committee prepare to welcome the winner; etc.
As we have shown, four shooting appliances were placed in the most
important locations: A, Dewey’s room; B, the street in front of his hotel;
C, the convention hall; D, the speaker’s platform in close shot.11
If, as Freedland points out, the director “edits in a spontaneous and continu-
ously improvised manner, following the syntax of parallel editing given
currency by Griffith,”12 it would be erroneous to conclude that the new
means of expression simply mimics cinema. The sequence of actions was
probably dictated by the strong influence of a cinematographic code whose
narrative and dramatic effectiveness had proved itself, and by the concern
not to challenge the spectators’ perceptive habits. Still, this description
should first and foremost be heeded for another essential characteristic of
the program. Besides the fact that the broadcast made it possible to follow
the event as it unfolded, the important aspect was that, as Freedland puts
it, one could “observe it better and with more details from a remote position
than on the very sites where it was taking place.”13
10 Harry Truman was chosen by the Democratic convention a few months later, also in
Philadelphia.
322 Gilles Delavaud
Freedland adds that spectators could see “successively, and therefore

simultaneously.” Contrary to the effect which film editing aims at, the
succession and alternation of points of view – A, B, C, D – are not meant
here to signify the simultaneity of actions. This simultaneity is a given:
while cinema organizes succession so as to signify simultaneity, here the
aim is to order simultaneity into a succession. Unlike the director of the
broadcast, spectators do not have the benefit of several screens side by side
corresponding to the different cameras positioned in different places; as a
consequence, they do not have access to simultaneity as such and have to
reconstruct it, in a way, thanks to the mediation of the director.
The most gripping demonstration of simultaneous tele-vision was given
to the American public by CBS on November 18, 1951, on the occasion of the
launch of the famous news program See It Now, co-produced by Edward R.
Murrow and Fred W. Friendly.14 In the opening sequence, before a number
of filmed reports were shown, Edward R. Murrow addressed television
viewers, explaining that he would host this new weekly program from the
very control room of the New York studio where he happened to be, in the
middle of machines seen around him. He then turned round to face two
monitors, and for almost four minutes viewers were left hanging on his
every word:
MURROW (turned back, his head looking up at the two monitors). We

are, as newcomers to this medium, rather impressed by the whole thing;
impressed, for example, that I can turn to Don Hewitt here (leaning over
to the director sitting on his left) and say: Don, will you push a button and
bring in the Atlantic coast? (An expanse of water immediately appears
on the right-hand monitor.)
REPORTER (voice). This is camera one at a point of vantage on Governor’s
Island. We are looking down into New York Bay on the Atlantic. (The
camera closes in: the Statue of Liberty may now be distinguished.)
MURROW. There you have the East Coast of the United States… Now, on
monitor two, may we have the Pacific Coast, please? (A very blurry image
appears on the left-hand monitor.)
14 Produced by Edward M. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly, directed by Don Hewitt, See It Now
was the first live program taking advantage of the transcontinental coaxial cable connecting
the East Coast and the West Coast after AT&T put it into service. In his Good Night, and Good
Luck (2005), a film devoted to the figure of Edward R. Murrow, George Clooney, who played
the part of Fred W. Friendly, faithfully reconstructed the conditions in which the show was
produced.
REPORTER (voice). Hello, New York. This is the Golden Gate, the waters
of San Francisco Bay leading on to the Pacific Ocean. It’s rather hazy
out here, Mr Murrow. (The camera closes in on the blurry image on the
left-hand monitor.)
MURROW. That’s fine, San Francisco. May we have the San Francisco
Bay bridge, please?
REPORTER (voice). O.K. (The camera tilts up to reveal the suspension
bridge.)
MURROW. Now, San Francisco, could you use what you call, I think, a
Zoomar lens and close in on the bridge a little?
REPORTER (voice). Gotcha! (The camera zooms in until it gets to a close
view of the left pylon.)
MURROW. Ah, that’s fine, thank you, San Francisco. Just stand by for a
moment, will you? Hello, New York?
REPORTER (voice). Yes.
MURROW. May we have the Brooklyn Bridge, please?
REPORTER (voice). Coming right up, Mr Murrow. (A very long panning
movement to the right follows.) There she is. (The panning shot ends with
a slight zoom-in on the right pylon.)
MURROW. Brooklyn Bridge. Thank you very much, Eddy Scott. Hold it,
please, will you? Now, San Francisco, will you pan over Alcatraz for us,
please?
REPORTER (voice). Yes, sir… (The camera pans away from the Golden
Gate Bridge, to the left, slowly scanning the coast, then the surface of
the water to Alcatraz Island.) There it is. (A boat siren may be heard.)
MURROW. Can you move in on Alcatraz a little? (slow zoom-in) That’s
fine. Excellent. Hold it, please… Now back on monitor one. New York,
may we have the New York skyline, please, Eddie Scott? […] (The camera
pans away from the Brooklyn Bridge, to the left, revealing the Manhattan
skyline.) Now, New York, can you swing us out toward the Narrows, where
you look right out at the ocean?
REPORTER (voice). We’ll try, Ed… There, we’re going down beyond, by
Staten Island. Ah, there are the Narrows, right down that way. There’s
where the big ships sail out to Europe and all the ports of the world.
MURROW. Good. Thank you very much… Now, San Francisco, can you go
out to the Golden Gate Bridge and look straight out to the ocean there?
REPORTER (voice). All right… (The camera slowly pans from the build-
ings on the hill to the harbor; the city is in the foreground, the ocean in
the distance.) There it is.
324 Gilles Delavaud
MURROW (turned back, facing the two monitors). Thank you very much
indeed, gentlemen. We, for our part, are considerably impressed by the
first time man has been able to sit at home and look at two oceans at the
same time. […]
The fact that direct, “immediate” television does not go without mediation
or selection, and that the selection can be performed only out of a limited
number of points of view (four in the report on the Republican convention,
two in the opening sequence of See It Now) only stresses the singular status
of television viewers. In their private space, in front of a single “monitor,”
they are fundamentally observers. As such, they enjoy a double ubiquitous-
ness: occupying successively/simultaneously the different points of view
determined by the positions of the cameras on the scenes of the action,
they still remain the remote witnesses to whom images are individually
addressed as they face their reception screen.
Spectators of fiction are no less observers than spectators of news events
in front of the small screen. The direction of a live drama also falls within
reporting. To borrow from Freedland’s terminology, it consists of the remote
viewing of an event – not journalistic but artistic, and in this case televisual,
since this kind of event (the staging in the studio of a text written and
performed by actors who previously rehearsed it) only takes place to be
broadcast, in contrast to the Republican convention, for example.
On French television, the broadcast in 1954 of the drama Sixième étage,
directed by Marcel Bluwal, may be considered as a model televisual event.15
Sixième étage is a play by Alfred Gehri, which, through a sentimental plot,
depicts the lives of the tenants on the top floor of a building of furnished
apartments in a popular Parisian neighborhood. The main set involves a
corridor on which eight doors open, four on one side, four on the other. At
one end of the hallway is the staircase, at the other a window opening on
the street. While occupants come in and out of their rooms or apartments,
run into one another in the hallway, visit one another, the spectator has
“access” only to two private spaces, a room on one side and an apartment
on the other, leaving the six remaining living spaces off-screen.
The choice of this stage work by a director reflecting on the technical
potential of his instrument (the live television studio) and eager to explore
its aesthetic possibilities is easily understandable: rather than its intrinsic
qualities, the fact is that an action unfolding simultaneously in several
contiguous spaces lent itself perfectly to a direction devised in terms of
15 The program was broadcast on May 15, 1954.

transmission. Two cameras operated in the hallway and could follow the
comings and goings of this or that character to one of the doors. Then,
either the character stepping into a room closed the door behind them and
temporarily disappeared from view; or, at the moment she or he stepped
into the room, a third camera already there showed him or her coming in
from inside the room. As with the broadcast of the Republican convention
described by Freedland, cameras ceaselessly took turns to build an orderly,
continuous visual unfolding akin to that customary in cinema, on the basis
of a given space and an imposed time (“real” time). While viewers are not
unsettled (visual continuity follows the codes of the continuity style, with
all takes impeccably linking up), something nevertheless becomes obvious
to them: on the one hand, all cameras operate simultaneously, in parallel,
so as to “cover” the ongoing action as well as possible; on the other hand,
the passage from a space to another one (from a take to the next) does not
involve a cut but a commutation. Put differently, all these characters moving
about under the spectators’ eyes, exiting the frame of a camera to enter the
frame of another one, create an increasing sense of surveillance.
Remote Viewing and Telecinema
In contrast with television proper (or tele-vision), George Freedland refers

to any program recorded on film prior to broadcasting as telecinema (or
telefilm). He devotes most of his article in La Revue du cinéma to this
second form of television. His primary concern is to show in what ways
the conditions of reception of televised spectacles differ from those of
cinematographic spectacles, and to raise the issue of how the conditions
of programming and reception by directors of telefilms may eventually lead
to a perceptible transformation of the language of film.
The close examination of the material and psychological conditions of
the reception of television provides Freedland with the chance to raise a
series of questions – most of them related to the delicate problem of the
control of a non-captive audience – and consider the responses that in his
opinion would be appropriate. After explaining why and how film language
should evolve – in terms of continuity, mise en scène, the direction of actors,
editing – he comes to the conclusion that film, as conceived for television,
will have a pace both slower and more fluid, and that everything in the
direction will have to contribute “in the most direct manner” to guiding the
spectator’s attention.16 He then proceeds to give more specific examples:

326 Gilles Delavaud
A simplification of syntax will ensue from this, and it will reduce the
telecinematographic style to the simple work of the human eye, which
looks at what goes on around it through “tracking shots” when the indi-
vidual moves, suddenly interrupted by more or less bumpy still shots or
panning shots, with a constant subjective continuity. Television will thus
truly be what its name indicates, “remote viewing.”17
What should be understood here by “remote viewing,” with respect not to

tele-vision but to televised cinema? A footnote about the expression “subjec-
tive continuity” provides a hint. Freedland briefly refers to two recent films
which, he suggests, may constitute a kind of model for the foreseeable
evolution of film language and its necessary renewal: Robert Montgomery’s
1947 Lady in the Lake and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 Rope.
The latter, Freedland writes, “shot by Alfred Hitchcock in the studio in
twelve days after long weeks of rehearsals, comprises nine reels and… nine
shots, that is, nine tracking shots of 1000 feet each.”18 It makes sense that the
film, contemporary with the first television programs, caught the attention
of the pioneers of the new medium through its “constant continuity,” and
in Hitchcock’s own admission, this was in fact one of the points. In 1950,
arriving from Great Britain where he had just shot Stage Fright, Hitchcock
was interviewed aboard the Queen Mary in the port of New York by Jack
Mangan for his program Ship’s Reporter:19
MANGAN (on the ship’s deck next to Hitchcock, holding out a micro-

phone). It’s an old friend, Alfred Hitchcock, the famous motion picture
director. Hello Mr Hitchcock.
HITCHCOCK. How are you?
MANGAN. I just read in the columns recently an article about you in
which they said: Gee, we hope that Alfred Hitchcock comes to television
because he can bring so much suspense and so much [sic] new, shall we
say, trick production methods.
HITCHCOCK. Well, I have actually tried a bit of television in a movie,
you know.
MANGAN. Not on television itself?

19 The program, featured on the New York channel WJZ (an ABC affiliate), involved interview-
ing celebrities arriving in the United States and filmed aboard the Queen Mary. The episode
mentioned here also included an interview of Jane Wyman, who had worked under Hitchcock’s
direction in Stage Fright. Archives of the Paley Center for Media, New York, n.d.
HITCHCOCK. No, no, but I made a movie called Rope, you know, which
was shot with one camera all the way through without any cutting. And
that in a sense was a kind of preview of television technique. […] That’s
what I tried to do in this Rope picture, to give some preview of what would
happen on television in the future […].
Film critics and theoreticians have often compared Rope and Lady in the
Lake because of the radical choices of very long sequence shots in both
cases (24 shots in the former and – exactly – eleven in the latter 20). Yet
what Freedland stresses is their common “attempt at a subjective narration.”
However, while the mise en scène of Lady in the Lake is indeed based on
the systematic use of the point-of-view shot, with everything seen through
the eyes of the protagonist (and told in first-person voice-over), the principle
guiding the direction of Rope is, by contrast, that of a recording that may
be described as objective insofar as the action represented is given to see
in itself, in a way, as if there were no narrator. Accordingly, why write of a
subjective narration? Probably because in Rope as in Lady in the Lake,
though differently, the fluidity of continuous takes and the permanent
mobility of the camera give the impression of dealing with the point of view
of a “subject” ever alert, seized in the very act of seeing. As it happens, this
subject is the spectator. Even as what she or he sees may also be seen by
one of the characters, what the spectator sees does not fade to the benefit
of what one character sees, any more than what a character sees substitutes
for what the spectator sees: at every instant, it is the spectator who sees.21
From a camera movement to the next, shooting proceeds. Until the
last minutes, the camera seems to “follow” the action, never to precede it:
its performance must remain unobtrusive. This choice of continuity and
camera mobility meets a strategy of intensification of seeing, hence the
insistence, in critical discourse, on “the camera” – a term that may be taken
as a synonym for “spectator”:
The camera never comes to rest, never skips from one character to
another. It wanders slowly, slowly, to the very rhythm of the action. […]
This calculated slowness, this meticulous attention, this commitment not
20 On the découpage of Rope, see David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge,
2008) 32-43.
21 Rope still includes four cuts to a character looking, cuts that correspond to reel changes
during the projection. See Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema 33-36.
328 Gilles Delavaud
to miss anything that may be said between the performers, everything

creates an extraordinary presence.22
At once close and remote, spectators are the inevitable witnesses of the
inexorable progress of the action and the behavior of the characters, who
are never out of sight. They can watch out for the least reaction (are the two
criminals going to give themselves away, and will their hosts understand
that they are being manipulated?). At the same time, they do not see
everything: deprived of a feeling of ubiquity usually brought by editing,
their field of vision constantly remains in check, relative to the position
occupied in space, constrained by the uniqueness of a point of view that
appears embodied.
What the spectators of Lady in the Lake or Rope experience is thus
not so much attending a spectacle as seeing in action. This explains the
comparison with the “simple work of the human eye,” which is by definition
characterized by a “constant subjective continuity.” Confronted with these
two films, I am aware, in either case, of experiencing an “I see.” The look
of the camera both precedes and extends my own look (which “looks at
what goes on around it through ‘tracking shots’”). The expression “remote
viewing,” used by Freedland about telecinema, refers to this mediation.
2. Television as an Observation Dispositive: Close Viewing

and Distanced Look
The Taste for Faces
The mediation of the (tele-vision or telecinema) camera did not only make
it possible to see far away, but also to see close by, and even very close by.
The consistency and recurrence of a metaphor in the discourse of televi-
sion professionals in the 1940s and 1950s can only impress: television cameras
are tirelessly compared to microscopes, radiography (X-rays) or scalpels. No
matter the variants, whether understood literally, physiologically or in a
psychological sense, the metaphor tells us clearly that the specificity of
television, and consequently its calling, lies with its power of penetration
22 A. F., “La Corde,” rev. of Rope, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Le Monde 1 Mar. 1950: 9.
to ends of observation.23 American producer Edward Barry Roberts said as

much in 1952:
More than prose, more than the stage, more than motion pictures – oh,
so much more than radio – television, with its immediacy, gets to the
heart of the matter, to the essence of the character, to the depicting of
the human being who is there, as if under a microscope, for our private
contemplation, for our approval, our rejection, our love, our hate, our
bond of brotherhood recognized.24
The head of programming of French television in the 1950s, Jean d’Arcy,

spoke in similar terms of the famous literary show Lectures pour tous (1953),
which he had initiated:
Under the scalpel of television, one could see the personality of inter-
viewed authors reveal itself in an extraordinary way. I am convinced that
nobody truly remembered what the poor authors had said during their
introspection, yet we had become deeply familiar with their personality,
their heart, their soul, their brain. Hence the success of the program.25
The producer of the show, Pierre Dumayet, summed up the reason for the
success of Lectures pour tous in one word: television viewers were “face
readers.”26
All critics shared this idea, conscious that television both developed and
satisfied what François Mauriac called the “taste for faces” in his L’Express
column: “the taste for seeing them close by, for sight-reading them like
scores.”27 When Mauriac left the weekly newsmagazine in 1962, his suc-
cessor Morvan Lebesque revealingly felt the need to start anew from the
same acknowledgment:
23 I set out this idea in a previous text, “Le dispositif télévision. Discours critique et création
dans les années 1940 et 1950,” in La Télévision du Téléphonoscope à YouTube. Pour une archéologie
de l’audiovision, Mireille Berton and Anne-Katrin Weber, eds. (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2009). I
am developing it and expanding it here, using other examples.
24 Edward Barry Roberts, quoted by William Boddy, Fifties Television. The Industry and Its
Critics (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990) 81.
25 Jean d’Arcy parle, thoughts collected and edited by François Cazenave (Paris: INA/La
Documentation française, 1984) 160.
26 Pierre Dumayet, Autobiographie d’un lecteur (2000; Paris: LGF/Livre de poche, 2001) 102.
27 “La chronique de François Mauriac,” L’Express 21 Apr. 1960: 30. Reprinted in François
Mauriac, “On n’est jamais sûr de rien avec la télévision”. Chroniques 1959-1964, ed. Jean Touzot,
with the collaboration of Merryl Moneghetti (Paris: Bartillat, 2008) 105.
330 Gilles Delavaud
To claim that television has no competitor when it comes to revealing

amounts to the most banal of commonplaces. Still, I would like to devote
my first column to this commonplace. In life, in the street, anyone can
wear a mask. On television, your soul is all over your features […].28
Where did television hold this power to reveal? Pierre Dumayet answered
from his own turf – the situation of an interview, in which the interviewee
was completely exposed:
Completely exposed, that is, exposed at the moment when he ponders

what he is going to say, exposed in the intimacy of his silence, exposed
with his glasses, his tie, the pimple on his nose, his hair. […] When you
are completely exposed, the result is unpredictable. The interviewee
cannot plan his facial expressions, the impatient motion of his hands,
the way he crosses his legs, the word he is going to forget. And it is rare,
outside of television, to be exposed completely for ten minutes in a row.29
For the same reason – “the television camera reveals humans like no other
instrument”30 – André Bazin took an interest in all kinds of programs,
game shows for instance. Subjected to the test of the game, pressed with
questions, candidates still reveal to us, in spite of themselves, their strength
of character as well as their weaknesses.31 And when a candidate wins
the opportunity of playing on for several weeks in a row, this revelation
“becomes deeper and richer […] to the point of sometimes giving us the
feeling of an intimate discovery.”32 The same goes for politicians in an
electoral period: television viewers are not only sensitive to their arguments,
but they also assess the way in which these politicians try to convince them.
Without denying that “the powers of conviction of television may be used to
negative ends,” Bazin still thinks that the medium provides a kind of resist-
ance to being used as a means of propaganda: if, with television viewers
watching, politicians cannot help but reveal something about themselves,
then television “is in essence a technique of sincerity.”33
28 Morvan Lebesque, L’Express 1 Feb. 1962.

29 Pierre Dumayet, “L’interview télévisuelle,” Communications 7 (1966): 53.
30 André Bazin, “L’avenir esthétique de la télévision,” Réforme 17 Sept. 1955: 7.
31 André Bazin, “Le jeu et la règle,” Radio-Cinéma-Télévision, 9 Mar. 1958: 7.
32 André Bazin, “Psychologie du Gros lot,” Radio-Cinéma-Télévision 12 Oct. 1958: 9.
33 André Bazin, “Télévision, sincérité, liberté,” Radio-Cinéma-Télévision 5 Oct. 1958: 7. The
article is devoted to the campaign for the referendum on the constitution of the Fifth Republic.
Some directors were to actively exploit all the advantages inherent in

this vision of television, which emphasized technical mediation, that is,
the indelible presence of the camera.
The Art of Being Sincere
In 1956, coming from cinema, Pierre Cardinal was given the responsibility
of producing a documentary series featuring portraits of comedians in the
form of interviews.34 He had enough confidence in “the surprising power
of television to reveal”35 to let go of the convention of the interview, keep
to the background, and leave the comedians to themselves, alone in front
of the camera. The program, titled Gros plan [“Close-up”], was prepared
methodically: a text was written by the comedian, worked on again in
collaboration with the director, then, at the time of the shooting at the
home of the comedian, delivered informally to television viewers in a semi-
improvised mode.36 Each comedian, while talking about himself or herself,
evoking his or her career, work and encounters, was led not only to expose
himself or herself, but also to engage in an exercise in sincerity. This was one
of the lessons of the series: how each subject accepted – or not – the risk
of speaking genuinely through the fiction of a direct address (the program
was filmed prior to broadcast). At the beginning of the episode devoted to
him, Jean Marais thus points out the strange situation in which he happens
to be and how this “conversation” with television viewers puts him in an
awkward position:
I am at your place at this moment and [yet] I am not. You may be having
dinner and you are not inviting me. You are sitting and you are leaving
me standing… And as I speak, you may even be criticizing me and talking
about me as if I were not here. Is it not a false situation?37
In a more serious tone, smiling mildly to the camera but visibly unsettled,
Maria Casarès starts speaking:
34 As a f ilmmaker, Pierre Cardinal had directed Au cœur de la Casbah (1951) and Fan-
taisie d’un jour (1954). He had also taught at the IDHEC (Institut des hautes études cinéma-
tographiques).
35 Télé-Revue 351 (24 Sept. 1961): 15.
36 For an analysis of the series Gros Plan, see Gilles Delavaud, L’Art de la télévision (Brussels:
Ina/De Boeck, 2005) 164-70.
37 Gros Plan, program broadcast on March 21, 1959.
332 Gilles Delavaud
You see, I do not like to soliloquize. As for thinking, I would rather not
do it aloud. But I know you are there. Oh yes I do! It even takes my breath
away. Yet I also know that, while you can see me, look at me, hear me,
you still cannot interrupt me or even express through reactions or an
eloquent silence your rejection or your approval… It makes me feel ter-
ribly uncomfortable and hinders my ability to talk to you.38
The comedian then explains what the infinitely painful experience of

cinema represents for her, preferring the theater as she does. As she speaks,
looking television viewers in the eye, her words sound like an implicit com-
mentary on the experience she is living through, here and now, as well as
an invitation to reflect on the violence of the television apparatus, of which
television viewers are a part:
Nothing, no one to address directly, no presence to help you but, on the

contrary, in front of you, the implacable eye of the camera with its terrible
probes and monstrous magnifications, which searches you to the soul.
At the beginning of his self-portrait, Paul Meurisse addresses television

viewers as if performing his own self, “deadpan and sententious,” in the
words of a critic39:
Because of the roles I have played on screen for quite a few years, because
of films for which I have been honored to be used, some kind of mystery
hovers around my person. I have not sought it, but you have to admit that
mystery is addictive: you get caught in it, you start taking pleasure in it,
and soon you have become a captive of your persona.
Then, a few days ago, the eminent producer of this program, our distin-
guished friend Pierre Cardinal, came to see me and told me: “I beg you,
maestro, lift the veil on the mystery that surrounds you.” I accepted, I
understood that such was my duty, and I decided to reveal everything
to you, to reveal myself completely in front of you. 40
A double truth emerges from these few examples: sincerity is a test, sincerity
is a game.
38 Gros Plan, program broadcast on February 8, 1958.

39 Gilbert Salachas, “Gros plan sur Paul Meurisse,” Radio-Cinéma-Télévision 12 Oct. 1958: 9.
40 Gros Plan, program broadcast on October 4, 1958.
Following these two lines and furthering his portraits of comedians,

Pierre Cardinal then directed his first fictional piece for television, Gros
plan sur la célébrité (RTF, 1961), after a short story by André Maurois. An
epistolary narrative, it consisted of an exchange of letters between a famous
writer and his two successive wives. After the death of the writer, both
women publish their memoir. An American film producer buys the rights to
adapt the two competing accounts but, for moral reasons, asks the two rivals
for their characters to be condensed in a single one. In Pierre Cardinal’s
mise en scène, the three characters of the short story are played by Pierre
Dux, Renée Devillers and Blanchette Brunoy, filmed in their respective
homes. They succeed one another in close-up on the screen, looking to the
camera as they read the text of a letter. However, as the three characters
are gradually revealed, from confidences to confessions, from insinuations
to disclosures, television viewers – as readers of faces – progressively come
to question a sincerity that appears too ostensible.
Observation and Cruelty
In the late 1960s Pierre Schaeffer, referring to programs that notably aimed to
denounce the myth of an “authentic” voice, coined the expression “research
dispositive.” In many respects, this may be seen as a form of radicalization
of the conception of television commonly understood as an observation
dispositive in the 1950s.
The series Vocations (ORTF, national French public radio and television,
1969), created by Jean Frappat within the Service de la recherche headed by
Schaeffer, epitomized this approach. 41 Personalities interviewed by Pierre
Dumayet were invited to talk about their profession and analyze the birth of
their vocation. In the empty studio, with dimmed lights, the interviewer and
the interviewee (an actress, a psychiatrist, a lawyer, a philosopher, a priest,
a writer…) first had an informal conversation to prepare the interview. The
guests evoked some of the themes they wished to develop, provided one or
more facts they wanted to comment on. This first sequence was recorded
without their knowing. The studio would then light up, cameramen would
position themselves behind the cameras, and the interview proper would
begin. Finally, the interviewer would admit to interviewees that they had
been “tricked,” offering to watch and compare the recording of the prepara-
tory interview and the interview that followed to have them observe the
difference in behavior depending on whether they were aware of being on
41 Program broadcast from February 2, 1969 on.

334 Gilles Delavaud
the record or not, that is, whether they tried or not to control their own
image.
Discussing the series from the experimental approach that was his, Pierre
Schaeffer defined the dispositive as follows:
The dispositive may be compared to the trap set for the human animal
to be captured and observed. Television professionals have sometimes
invented dispositives with no other aim than spectacle in mind. La
Caméra invisible provides us with the best example of this and, despite
all the precautions taken, one of the most cruel. 42
The use of the hidden camera to observe ordinary people without their
knowing appeared with television itself. In the first installment of the series
Candid Camera (NBC, 1949), 43 one of the sequences took place in a New
York department store. Three female customers came one after the other
to return the hat they had bought and ask for a refund. Confronted with
the refusal of the employee (none other than the host of the show), they
found themselves pressured into a lengthy explanation and a justification.
The “spectacle” given to television viewers appeared in a simplified form:
three close-ups of several minutes each, three faces in tight shots seething
with increasingly sharp and embarrassed reactions. 44
Less “candid” (and more sly) was the spectacle proposed almost thirty
years later by Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s documentary
series France Tour Détour Deux Enfants (INA, 1977-1978). Television, which
the authors proposed in some way to reinvent, 45 was explicitly presented
as an observation dispositive in the series. In several of the interviews
that constitute the core of most episodes, the two children (alternatively a
little boy and a little girl, both nine years old) were observed a first time,
not by a hidden camera, but by an invisible director questioning them
from a distance, through a monitor. Alone in front of the camera, deprived
of the presence and the look of their interviewer, unprotected, they were
“completely exposed,” sometimes for more than fifteen minutes. They were
then observed a second time by the two hosts in the studio who, facing
another monitor, commented on their behavior. As Godard put it, “We
42 Pierre Schaeffer, Machines à communiquer 2. Pouvoir et communication (Paris: Seuil, 1972) 158.
43 Imported in 1948 from the radio, produced and hosted by Allen Funt, the program was first
broadcast on ABC under the title Candid Microphone, changing to Candid Camera as it moved
to NBC in 1949.
44 Program broadcast on May 29, 1949.
45 By modestly doing what they called “de la télévision de quartier,” or “neighborhood television.”
would place them in a situation where everyone had to make a decision

so his/her capacity for decision could be seen, without too much time to
think. Television makes this possible…”46 Television makes even more pos-
sible, though. Its power of “penetration” does not only bear on the subject
observed in situation (tight shots, uninterrupted takes, a questioning
sometimes deemed intrusive47) but also – and here is perhaps the greatest
violence – on the recorded image of his or her body in movement, which
the scalpel-television makes it possible to slow down, break down, freeze:
in a word, to observe anew. 48
The Unobtrusive Observer
Approached as an observation dispositive, television provides authors and

directors with a new field for experimentation. The challenge presented
to them may be phrased as follows: how to articulate observation and
narration, mise en scène (that is, calculating the place of spectators) and
conducting the plot.
In the American television of the 1940s and 1950s, Fred Coe was probably
the most talented and inventive producer. In June 1946, six months prior to
the release of Robert Montgomery’s famous Lady in the Lake, he directed
“First Person Singular,” the first episode in the series Lights Out! (NBC),
integrally in point-of-view shots. In 1949, for the same series, he produced
“Long Distance,”49 a kind of televisual equivalent to Griffith films featuring
a phone call with a “last-minute rescue”: in New York, a woman desperately
seeks to save her imprisoned husband, who has been sentenced to death
and is about to be executed. Yet instead of the parallel editing perfected
by Griffith, the phone conversation is represented visually through a split
screen, reviving a method used in films in the early 1900s:
46 Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard, ed. Alain Bergala (Paris: Editions de l’Etoile/Cahiers
du cinéma, 1985) 407 (my emphasis).
47 Godard and Miéville admitted to the restrictive dimension of interviews through the
commentary of the two studio hosts, in particular the pressure exerted on the little girl: “It
must have been difficult for her […], it is our fault.”
48 On the series, and more specifically on the mise en scène of interviews and the relation to
spectators implied by Godard’s conception of television as an observation dispositive, see my
article “La place du spectateur,” Godard et le métier d’artiste. Actes du colloque de Cerisy (1998),
Gilles Delavaud, Jean-Pierre Esquenazi and Marie-Françoise Grange, eds. (Paris: L’Harmattan,
2001) 121-38.
49 “Long Distance,” Lights Out!, season 2, episode 3, prod. Fred Coe, dir. Kingman T. Moore,
perf. Jan Miner, NBC, August 2, 1949.
336 Gilles Delavaud
The first image is an extreme close-up of a phone. A backward tracking

shot reveals the hand holding the handset, then the face of the woman,
Mrs Jacks, who is prey to a great agitation.
Mrs Jacks is shown frontally, sitting at a table, and occupies the left side
of the frame. Behind her, a few books and a small clock marking 9 o’clock
may be seen on shelves. Mrs Jacks informs the director of the prison that
she has just found a letter clearing her husband. She begs him to halt the
execution, which is set to take place… half an hour later.
At the very moment when the director of the prison picks up the call, he
appears from the side, sitting at his desk, in the right side of the frame.
He explains to her that it is too late and that only the judge may stop the
execution at that point.
Mrs Jacks hangs up; the image of the director disappears.
Mrs Jacks flips feverishly through the phone book, then dials the judge’s
number. A ring may be heard.
The judge’s wife picks up the phone, appearing in turn in the right half of
the frame, from the side, standing. She tells Mrs Jacks that the judge is in
San Francisco and gives her the phone number of his hotel.
Mrs Jacks hangs up, the judge’s wife disappears.
Mrs Jacks dials a number. A switchboard operator appears from behind

in the right part of the frame. Mrs Jacks asks for the San Francisco hotel
where the judge is staying. The operator has her repeat the name and
address of the hotel, asks her to spell out the judge’s name and spells it out
herself, then asks her to wait… The routine calm of the operator stands
in sharp contrast with the nervousness tinged with anger of Mrs Jacks
who, exasperated with the wait, requires to talk to the chief operator.
In the right part of the frame, the chief operator, seen face on, appears
in the place of the first operator. Mrs Jacks has to reiterate her request
and spells out the judge’s name again. The chief operator encounters
some difficulties in setting up the connection with San Francisco… Stark
contrast between the professional calm of the operator and Mrs Jacks’s
growing anxiety…
Eventually, the image of the San Francisco operator appears in the left
part of the frame, replacing the image of Mrs Jacks.
For a moment, Mrs Jacks can no longer be seen, but she is still there,
intervening in the exchange between the two operators.
Mrs Jacks reappears on the left side of the frame. The operator asks her to
hang up and wait to be called back; her image then disappears. Anxious
wait for Mrs Jacks, who now appears alone in the frame… Behind her, the
face of the small clock marks 9:10.
At this stage in the story, ten minutes into the episode, there are twenty
more minutes until the execution takes place – and the program ends. The
protagonist will still meet many obstacles before she manages to reach the
judge… in the last minute.
For the first time on American television, an entire fiction was made
using the technique of the split-screen.50 On the screen, the alternation
and the swift succession of images went hand in hand with an absolute
continuity. Throughout the program, the tremulous face of the heroine
was visible to the viewers, except in a few rare moments when her image
on the left side of the screen was briefly “covered over” by that of a differ-
ent character. The greatest physical and emotional proximity combined
with both the geographic distance (the characters appearing in the right
half of the frame) and the distanciation imposed by the very process of
the split-screen (with its juxtaposition of two images). Spectators, placed
once and for all in front of a woman involved in a desperate struggle, were
maintained for an extended time in a relation of exteriority to the screen,
their attention wavering between adherence to the drama lived by the
character and detached observation of the performance of the actress.
In 1953, returning to the principle of point-of-view shooting with which
he had experimented from 1946 on, Fred Coe co-produced the series First
Person with director Arthur Penn for NBC.51 In all episodes, the action was
seen through the eyes of a character-narrator, out of frame but always
50 The New York Times critic then wrote: “By this method, used to show simultaneous action at
separated points, two different pictures are transmitted at the same time, each taking one-half
of the television screen.” Val Adams, “NBC Offers Two Series of Drama Shows, ‘Academy Theatre’
and ‘Lights Out’,” New York Times 7 Aug. 1949: X7.
51 Six out of the eight episodes were directed by Penn.
338 Gilles Delavaud
present in the scene, and whose interior monologue allowed the viewers
to share in observations and thoughts.
As the title of the episode “I’d Rather Be a Squirrel”52 indicates, its nar-
rator is a squirrel. Its first sentence defines the position of viewers: “The
nice thing about being a squirrel is that you can run up a tree anytime you
want to and get a sense of detachment.” When the squirrel moves down a
branch and approaches the nearby house, we observe “through its eyes”
the daily life of a couple through an open window. The man sympathizes
with the squirrel, gives the animal some nuts, talks to it, expresses yearn-
ing for a similar life. Because he does not share his wife’s taste for parties
and disdains the material comfort she aspires to (she wants to purchase
a television set), he eventually moves to the tree to isolate himself, read
Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods, and meditate. From his observation
post, he can in turn watch his wife’s guests come and go in his own house.
In “Tears of My Sister,”53 Cecilia, the narrator, is a young teenager worried
about the fact that her sister Bessie, who is about to marry a rich, older man,
cries at night. Her mother tells her that she will understand later that Bessie
cries out of happiness. Cecilia, who ignores that her older sister secretly loves
another man, always observes her, scrutinizes her face, interprets her least
expression, questions her, desperately trying to understand a behavior that
remains enigmatic to her. The camera occupies the place of Cecilia, who
remains invisible, at once amazingly watchful and effaced.
In “Crip,”54 Alan, the narrator, is a seventeen-year old disabled boy who,
as a consequence of an accident he had as an infant, can neither walk nor
speak. Since he cannot speak, his mother keeps treating him like a child.
From his wheelchair, he observes – through the front door – the house which
workers are renovating on the same street; and later, at night, through the
lit-up windows, the family who have just moved in. His young neighbor Jane
visits him and makes out his sensibility and his intelligence. She confides
in him and thanks to her, escaping the grip of his mother, he utters his first
words. Through Alan’s eyes, we see his mother and Jane, together or in turn,
leaning over him and talking to him, confined to his wheelchair as he is.
Even though the technique of point-of-view shooting may be deemed
contradictory with the classic film dispositive, its use in First Person proves
particularly relevant. Indeed, the point is not to reinforce, let alone impose,
52 “I’d Rather Be a Squirrel,” First Person, writ. Harry Muheim, dir. Bob Costello, NBC, July 10,
1957.
53 “Tears of My Sister,” First Person, writ. Horton Foote, dir. Arthur Penn, NBC, August 14, 1953.
54 “Crip,” First Person, writ. Stewart Stern, dir. Bob Costello, NBC, August 21, 1953.
the identification of viewers to characters, to ensure that spectators put

themselves “in the place” of characters: it is, on the contrary, to put charac-
ters in the place of spectators, so to speak, to conceive them as background
observers and thus build the fiction of a model tele-spectator.
To the nagging question of the control of viewers which, in early televi-
sion, preoccupied the authors of fiction as well as directors (how to keep a
non-captive audience, how to elicit their participation, how to involve them
in what is represented), the episode “Long Distance” in the series Lights Out!
and the various episodes of First Person bring a similar answer: betting, not
on identification and immersion, but on the concentration of attention and
observation. This assumes, each time, the invention of an adequate mise
en scène which, while varying considerably from one series to the next and
even from one episode to the other, relies on a few elementary principles
that represent as many breaks from the mode of representation of classical
cinema and the perceptual habits attaching to it:
– a strictly oriented, polarized space – the poles of action and observation
may not be interchanged, and no reverse shot is possible;
– an axial mise en scène organized along an axis perpendicular to the
screen, either in depth or projected in the direction of the spectator,55
with no lateral exits from the frame possible;
– an audiovisual continuity characterized by very long takes, with switches
from one camera to the other masked by cuts on the same side of the axis
of action; and by an insistent interior voice that supports visual continu-
ity by accompanying it with an uninterrupted stream of consciousness;
– an outright frontality: in the episode “Long Distance,” for example, spec-
tators are clearly placed in front of the image; in the series First Person,
they are situated on the threshold of the image, on the edge of the frame,
in this fore-frame where the space of the fiction and the space of reception
partially overlap, encroach upon each other and, at one point (the point
of view), are superimposed and coincide.
Not only does a mise en scène ordered in this way assign a determined place
to spectators, but it also constitutes them as experimental subjects in their
55 In First Person, such projections arise with characters looking to the camera and regularly
approaching the lens, to the point where they appear in extreme close-up. In another series,
Cameo Theatre (NBC, 1950), producer and director Albert McCleery did away with the set and
had the performers act in front of a black background so as to give the impression that they
stood out against the screen.
340 Gilles Delavaud
own perceptual activity: they know that what is given for them to see is
given as (already) looked at.
The different examples considered, whether involving live or filmed
programs, reality of fiction, shed light on the way in which television was
apprehended in the early phase of institutionalization, first and foremost
by those who “made” it. Understood as a viewing (and listening) dispositive,
it did not exactly belong to spectacle as a category. Writers and directors,
trained in theater (in the United States) or in cinema (in France), invented
a mode of representation which, far from being a simple mix of one or
the other, escaped the logic – and the aesthetic – of either. On the one
hand, the dispositive for “remote viewing” cancelled distances, turning the
spectator in a privileged observer; on the other hand, it made a close vision
possible while allowing the observer to maintain a distanced look even in
the greatest proximity.
The author wishes to thank the Inathèque de France (Paris) and the Paley
Center for Media (New York).
Reality Television as Dispositive: The
Case of French-Speaking Switzerland
Charlotte Bouchez
While scholars are sometimes confronted with the ignorance of their

interlocutors about their field of research, anyone who has ambitions to
work on “reality TV” is in exactly the opposite situation. The mere mention
of the term conjures up an impression of self-evidence, as reality television
does not immediately appear to be complex subject matter. Still, a simple
look at the phenomenon already reveals a variety of objects. Starting from
a study carried out on reality television in French-speaking Switzerland,1
this study questions how the term “reality television programming” has
come to make sense within social exchange and examines the nature of
this kind of generic category.
If reality television does indeed exist, it does so within discourses ar-
ticulating a definition of it so that their enunciators may enact strategies
of social and institutional positioning. I want to take a closer look at the
conceptual tools available for the scholar to describe this kind of object,
following an approach inspired by the model of the dispositive developed by
François Albera and Maria Tortajada.2 I will then proceed to present the
most important aspects brought out in the study, which make it necessary to
rethink the hypothesis of a single definition and emphasize the specificities
of reception in French-speaking Switzerland.
From Ontological Questions to the Model of the Dispositive
My point of departure consisted in identifying what the term “reality

television” referred to in discourses published in the general Francophone
1 The research concerned the totality of programs produced by regional channel TSR (Télévi-
sion Suisse Romande) and branded as “reality TV” in the Francophone Swiss press: Génération
01 (2001), Le Mayen 1903 (2003), Y’a pas pire conducteur en Suisse romande (2004), Super Seniors
(2005), L’Etude (2006), Dîner à la ferme (2008 and 2009).
2 François Albera, Maria Tortajada, “Epistémè 1900,” in Le Cinématographe, nouvelle technolo-
gie du XXe siècle, André Gaudreault, Catherine Russell and Pierre Véronneau, eds. (Lausanne:
Payot, 2004) 45-62.
342 Charlotte Bouchez
Swiss press.3 I followed Dominique Boullier’s approach, starting from the

premise that the reception of a cultural product can be examined only
through discourses produced on it. 4 Beyond the pragmatic aspect of this
initial stage in the research project, the particular status of discourses in
reception processes should be assessed and integrated in a description
of reality television that takes account of the very equivocal character of
the referent. Indeed, while it often comes up in common conversation or
the press, the term “reality TV” refers to many concrete realities as well as
several uses and meanings related to the discursive situation of which it
is a part.
Trying to understand what a reality television program entails thus
involves paying attention to the program broadcast on terrestrial television
networks, its Internet version – and even to satellite channels in some
instances – while analyzing peculiarities in the reception modes involved
in these mediums. The analysis of programs themselves may bear on the
technical shooting setup as well on the distribution of content, approached
in terms of writing and execution; but it may also involve looking at the
modes of their diffusion, their frequency, their place in the daily schedule,
and their promotion. My assumption is that it is also necessary to take into
account the conception of programs at the production stage, to analyze
3 This was based on a corpus of articles from the general-interest Francophone Swiss daily
newspapers (24 heures, Le Temps, Le Matin, La Tribune de Genève, Le Nouvelliste, L’Express), the
week-end listings supplements and two magazines dealing with social issues (L’Hebdo and
L’Illustré). Articles were selected thanks to the search and indexation engine Swissdox, by
grouping sources that featured one or several of the following terms: “real TV,” “téléréalité,” “Big
Brother,” and “Loft Story” over a period running from 1996 to 2008. Translator’s note: all articles
referred to in the study were originally published in French, but their titles, which provide
information central to the author’s argument, have been translated in English here.
4 Introducing his field study on the role of conversations about television in the construction
of a local public opinion, Boullier writes: “A diff icult and radical reassessment then looms:
reception exists socially only in the form of discourses, and research on reception itself does
not proceed differently.” See Dominique Boullier, “La fabrique de l’opinion publique dans les
conversations télé,” Réseaux 126 (2004): 126. Indeed, field studies, conversations, newspaper
articles or television and radio reports and programs on reality television constitute many
socially determined situations in which discourses are produced on this object. While only print
articles are considered here, these situations as a whole give discourses a common finality: to
express, preserve or produce the social interaction deemed adequate by its protagonists – an
interaction elaborated through the mastery of social codes that allow protagonists to relate in
an appropriate manner some of the notions associated with the referent “reality TV.” More is
thus at stake in the study of discourses than the sole study of reception – in the restricted sense
of the recipient(s) of the program – since what is taken into consideration, more generally, is
both the way the object of study is socially integrated and the specific role discourses play in
these processes.
Reality Television as Dispositive: The Case of French-Speaking Switzerland 343
working documents and to interview people involved at that point. Finally,

discourses published on “reality TV” or programs, whether on forums or
in the general-interest and specialized press, should also be included in
the analysis.
The way Albera and Tortajada approach cinema in “L’Epistémè 1900”
makes it possible to articulate these different aspects together. In their view,
the notion of the dispositive, as an “arrangement assigning a place to these
protagonists,”5 makes it possible to distinguish between a) the machinery,
or the set of elements resulting in representation; b) representation, or what
is seen and heard by the spectator; and c) reception.6 Modeling through a
dispositive, while it presents an initial advantage, formalizing the most
comprehensive description possible, also brings attention to what allows
its constitutive elements to coexist in a whole. In other words, it makes it
possible to outline the relations developing between the machinery (which
has to do with production) and the completed representation (the program),
but also between the program and its reception, or between a particular pro-
gram and other cultural productions present in its field of diffusion. From
this standpoint, the dispositive of a reality television program thus refers to
the system of relations being established between concrete elements and
immaterial elements (concepts), especially the strategies of protagonists
relative to objects as well as toward one another, which contribute to the
5 Albera and Tortajada, “L’Epistémè 1900”: 46. To avoid reading a causal logic in the sentence
(the dispositive as an “arrangement assigning a place to these protagonists”), I want to emphasize
the term “protagonists,” which refers to participants involved before the creation of the program
as well as from the moment it is distributed. This avoids privileging a modeling that would
approach the program as vectorized in a one-dimensional manner – from production through
representation to reception – to instead acknowledge the fact that producers position themselves
and are positioned by the dispositive. This leads to consider the dispositive as comprising the
program without being limited to it.
6 That the configuration of reality TV programs imposes a given attitude on the spectator is a
widespread idea in discourses thematizing the moral danger supposedly represented by a type
of program designed to place the audience in a voyeuristic position. A number of works take this
approach into consideration from a critical standpoint, including Olivier Aïm, “Une télévision
sous surveillance. Enjeux du panoptisme dans les ‘dispositifs’ de télé-réalité,” Communication et
langages 141 (2004): 49-59. This primary meaning of the notion of dispositive as what arranges
(“dispose,” in French) should be expanded as a concept to encompass the conditions for a given
dispositive to emerge and become concrete. On this specific point, taking up the perspective
outlined in “The Epistémè 1900” for cinema provides an opportunity to reckon with what exists
around the program and allows its reception, without limiting the explanation of its operation
to the description of its internal system (which is referred to as representation in this model).
situation of the program’s reception.7 As a consequence, the program is

approached as the intersection between several meaning-making strategies
defined by these protagonists who, at every stage or level (production,
shooting, diffusion and reception), determine and justify their actions
according to what they think they know about the other levels involved,
but also their perception of the situation in which they operate.
At the level of machinery, for instance, the program is conceived on
the basis of the producers’ perception of the field of television production,
and more particularly its economic structure. 8 The formats9 of reality
TV are designed to meet as closely as possible the conditions of diffusion
brought about by the deregulation of media markets in the late 1980s as
well as social and cultural evolutions related to globalization. Reality TV,
whether considered a type of commercial product or a televisual genre,10
thus seems to epitomize televisual production in an age of transforma-
tion for Western societies.11 A decisive contribution of cultural studies
7 My argument is that the dispositive is polarized toward reception. However, this perspective
does not exclude cases where a dispositive is not actualized and remains in the state of a project.
Quite the opposite: given the way the production of this type of program works (what is sold
to television channels is a format, that is, a description of the program), it is also interesting to
analyze this mode of existence for a program – even as the format itself is structured precisely
with a view to reception.
8 For an overview of the structural changes in a globalized televisual economy, see Chris
Barker, Television, Globalization and Cultural Identities (1999; London: Open University Press,
2003) and Contemporary World Television, Sinclair John and Greame Turner, eds. (London: British
Film Institute, 2004).
9 In the glossary appearing at the end of their article, Guy Lochard and Guillaume Soulez
propose the following definition of the word format: “a set of parameters for a program, described
from a technical or economic standpoint (selection of candidates, process of elimination, living
rules for the candidates, diffusion and commercialization).” See “Une mondialisation inachevée:
limites, non-frontières de la télé-réalité. Essai de synthèse,” Médiamorphoses, special issue (Mar.
2003): 167.
10 François Jost has worked extensively on this issue of reality TV as a genre, showing that
these programs come within the tradition of other televisual genres from which they borrow
formal elements and use them as markers or indicators to guide interpretation. For Jost, the
particularity of reality television programs lies in their mobilization of elements traceable to
different genres, which as a consequence opens them to variable readings. See François Jost,
La Télévision du quotidien: entre réalité et fiction (2001; Brussels: De Boeck Université, 2003); Le
Culte du banal: de Duchamp à la télé-réalité (Paris: CNRS, 2007); and L’Empire du Loft (la suite)
(Paris: La Dispute, 2007).
11 Much research rests on an interpretation of reality television programs as particularly
representative of the cultural orientations of Western societies. According to Olivier Aïm,
“From reality TV to television series, exhibition and the mise en scène of the self, which go with
modern injunctions to visibility, transparency, free, unfettered speech, are the true distinctive
signs and the technical-economic foundation stone of an aestheticized operation of symbolic
approaches, developed in the wake of Arjun Appadurai’s work on media

globalization,12 has been to highlight the relations between the percep-
tion of a globalized world and the rising demand that regional identities
be taken into account. This parallels the tension between an increased
standardization of cultural products meant to improve their circulation
and an opposite logic of adaptation and singularization to ensure that they
take hold in their areas of diffusion. Reality television programs are built on
this logic: for producers, the challenge is to anchor a program in reception
contexts specific to the different cultural spaces in which it circulates.13
Considering how the sales of reality television programs take place at
an international level, French-speaking Switzerland constitutes a rather
original case, since the totality of reality TV programs distributed by re-
gional Francophone channel TSR was designed in-house: none of these
is a variation on or the adaptation of a preexisting format. However, the
tension between innovation and integration within the lineage of a standard
model clearly appears through their reception in the press. As I will argue,
this articulation is akin to that playing out between the global and the
local – with the global referring to the space where standard reality TV
productions originate and the local pointing to the TSR’s own supply.
Dispositive / Discourse / Reception
For the spectator, the reception of a program implies processes of re-

inscription in the continuity of previous cultural productions present
in the cultural space where it is diffused. Otherwise, it may not even be
expropriation.” See Olivier Aïm, “La culture populaire aux prises avec ses circuits: le cas de la
télévision,” Mouvements 57 (Jan.-Mar. 2009): 22.
12 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
13 The way formats of reality TV function led to a comparative study of the different versions
of Big Brother, published in a special issue of Médiamorphoses, “La Téléréalité, un débat mondial.
Les métamorphoses de Big Brother.” Médiamorphoses, special issue 3 (June 2003). Other publica-
tions adopting a comparable perspective include Les Temps télévisuels: “Big Brother”, ed. François
Jost (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004); Elodie Kredens, “La téléréalité, entre adaptabilité des formats et
particularités nationales,” proceedings of the ICIC conference (Paris, 2006), available at http://
www.observatoire-omic.org/colloque-icic/omic_icic_atelier22.php [last accessed on July 28,
2012]; Frau-Meigs Divina, “Big Brother et la téléréalité en Europe, fragments d’une théorie de
l’acculturation par les médias,” in “Image(s) et Société,” Les Cahiers du Circav, Michel Chadelier
and Isabelle Roussel-Gillet, eds. (Lille: CIRCAV, 2004): 15-24.
identif ied by its potential viewers.14 Indeed, programs are not born ex
nihilo: their producers as well as people receiving them situate them in
the lineage of other objects, other dispositives,15 whether televisual – as
with the relation between Loft Story (France, M6, 2001) and a sitcom like
Friends16 – or coming from other areas – as with the connections between
Big Brother and Biosphere II, a scientific experiment that reportedly inspired
it,17 or between the recording apparatus of Big Brother and its relation to
electronic surveillance.18 While these relations are present in the program,
14 One of the few systematic investigations carried out on the reception of reality TV in
Great Britain has shown that these programs are clearly perceived by their spectators from a
perspective that makes it possible to situate them in relation to other television productions.
See Annette Hill, Restyling Factual TV. Audiences and News, Documentary and Reality Genres
(London: Routledge, 2007). However, because the individuals interviewed for the research
discussed reality TV on the basis of a list of programs, it is impossible to determine whether or
not the programs in question would spontaneously have been placed in that category, or even
if the program is the most relevant unit to qualify reality TV (a criterion such as “the fact of
being filmed uninterruptedly” may be more decisive, and in that case webcams would have to
be included in the research).
15 This hypothesis may be put into perspective with some aspects of the notion of epistemic
scheme developed by Albera and Tortajada for the cinematographic dispositive. Reality television
would then be considered as “belonging [itself] in a network, a larger epistemic configuration,”
a definition “in inclusion” where the dispositive of reality television would be related to other
objects, concepts and practices which have existed before it, and which it would involve in a
new configuration. “As a scheme, it would then produce a use for a model, not only within the
restricted field of visual dispositives, but also beyond,” in the areas of telecommunications,
the theater, political life, etc., which would form an “expansive” definition of it. See Albera and
Tortajada, “L’Epistémè 1900”: 49.
16 In his book on Loft Story Olivier Razac gives a very detailed analysis of similarities between
the two programs with regard to sets and the “stereotyping” of characters, showing that Loft Story
borrows elements that already belong in a specific televisual tradition and can thereby be more
easily apprehended by audiences. Olivier Razac, L’Écran et le zoo: Spectacles et domestication,
des expositions coloniales à Loft Story (Paris: Denoël, 2002).
17 Sylvie Kerviel, “Aux origines de Loft Story,” Médiamorphoses, special issue 3: 10-12. While
this lineage with the Biosphère experiment has been established in a few sources, it is hardly
mobilized in this corpus as a whole – unlike the comparison of participants in these programs
to “laboratory rats” or the description of programs as “experiments,” frequent in these articles.
18 Many publications in scientific literature take as their subject the analogy between reality
television and electronic surveillance, and more largely between reality television and Bentham’s
panopticon as a dispositive. See Ctrl [space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother,
Thomas Levin, Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel, eds. (London: Routledge, 2002). According to
Pascal Froissart, “No matter the language or culture, the ‘panoptic’ dispositive predominates
[…]. This was to be expected: the surveillance apparatus is a constant in the game, to the point
of becoming a genuine rhetorical ploy in it. Unlike traditional audiovisual production, in which
the dispositive tries to play down its technical dimension, cameras here are shown, exposed
(and most of the time, they look down, as in a surveillance apparatus, precisely). One can say
with confidence that they serve as an identity marker, and even as a visual epitome.” Pascal
“engraphed”19 in it, they also result from discourses framing the program,
which make it possible for these associations serving as landmarks or guides
for reception to be reinforced and legitimized.
What allows us to define a given program as “reality TV” is thus not
necessarily indicated by the program itself, but also by discourses, “official”
or “private,” which through a set of descriptive as well as normative elements
contribute to elaborate a reception framework. What is to be understood is
how spectators localize what they see in a history/memory which they can
share in part with others,20 with the press acting as an available resource
to build this territorialized cultural sense of belonging.
For the scholar, these discourses are so many elements providing indica-
tions on the cultural imaginary with which reality television is associated,
and to the development of which it contributes.21
The Construction of “Reality TV” as a Genre in French-Speaking

Switzerland
The examination of print articles in the corpus also points to the need for
a diachronic perspective: the gradual construction of a generic category,
“reality TV,” in French-speaking Switzerland may thus be shown in detail,
Froissart, “Archivages du panoptisme, la téléréalité sur internet, Médiamorphoses, special

issue 3: 15.
19 I borrow the term from Eric Macé, Les Imaginaires médiatiques, une sociologie postcritique
des médias (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2006). The author uses “engrammé” to refer to processes
by which a cultural product is marked with significations tied to the social imaginary of the
community in which it is diffused.
20 The feeling or the belief for the spectator to take part in collective life through the shared
consumption of television programs seems to constitute a motivation, a gratification which
should be taken into account to understand the “enthusiasm” for reality television.
21 The status of the general-interest press and of television in its strictly informative activity
makes them privileged sites to analyze what belongs in an imaginary, that is, a set of beliefs and
knowledge on a world believed to be shared – and in this perspective, reality television is only
one object out of which these operations form. Indeed, print media function as intermediaries
between producers and distributors of programs and their potential spectators. This position
translates into the circulation of discourses and may be noted in a critical approach, as discourses
in the press often repeat those of producers verbatim, perhaps insufficiently taking into account
the change of discursive register (from promotion to information) involved in the shift from
production to journalism. On this point, see Pierre Bourdieu, Langage et pouvoir symbolique
(Paris: Seuil, 1982); Cornelius Castoriadis, L’Institution imaginaire de la société (Paris: Seuil,
1975); and Patrick Charaudeau, Les Médias et l’information. L’impossible transparence du discours
(Brussels: De Boeck, 2005).
with its use by the main cultural players (the press and regional television)
as a medium to position themselves.
My analysis of the French-speaking corpus in Switzerland validates the
thesis that the perception of the global as a horizon of reference necessarily
comes with a symmetrical reinforcement of a position anchored in the
local. The integration of reality television in a local cultural imaginary
takes place in three main stages: the relation of programs with social
practices outside reality television, but which rest on a crystallization
of logics of social control; the characterization of a standard for reality
television (epitomized by Loft Story) concomitant with the emergence of
discourses constructing Francophone Swiss cultural identity as a reaction
to this production and the social excesses it represents; and the progressive
construction of a French-speaking Swiss standard for reality television
that respects the dual identity characterizing the channel producing the
programs in question (the status of a public service and the fact that it is
anchored in French-speaking Switzerland).
I should mention that, while it is possible to outline three main periods in
the reception of reality television in French-speaking Switzerland, these still
overlap to some degree. Discourses that articulate comparisons between
reality television and other dispositives more likely to be associated with it
(whether these are dispositives of social control or spectacular dispositives
like the theater) are frequent over the entirety of the period examined.
However, the stabilization of a standard for the genre mostly took place on
the occasion of the diffusion of Loft Story in France (April 2001), a period
when the first occurrences of the term “reality TV” appear in the sources
consulted. The notional content of the term, which was used mainly from
that moment on, had been elaborated over the previous years: the semantic
field of reality television thus partly overlapped with that of “real TV,” “real-
ity shows,” and concepts associated with the term “Big Brother.”
When the program Big Brother was launched in the Netherlands in 1998,
the term was already present in discourses to refer to some changes affecting
social practices, notably the increasing resort to electronic surveillance and
an intensification of modalities of control management applying to private
businesses as well as the state. The term “Big Brother” gradually became
pivotal in the semantic relation established between the program and
these practices,22 in particular for what was connected with the regime of
22 In that respect, the title of the first article on the Dutch program which appeared in Le
Temps is telling: “Nine people spied on day and night: a Dutch television channel reinvents Big
Brother,” Le Temps 22 Sept. 1999: 12.
looking implied by the program, in which spectators “spied on” participants

through the cameras.23 The emphasis on this voyeuristic position founded
the relation between televisual entertainment and the social manifestations
of “Big Brother.” The first reality television programs were thus related to
one another over a backdrop of representations and practices associated
with new technologies of communication and surveillance, whether these
were considered as instruments of social control or emancipation, but also
with the increase in cultural productions conferring a form of star-value
on the anonymous.24
However, this perception of reality television amounted to criticism from
the outside, since in the early years such production did not concern the
French-speaking cultural space in Switzerland. The diffusion of Loft Story
in France was to provoke more committed reactions among Francophone
Swiss cultural and intellectual players, with an inflation in discourse
manifested in the extensive discussion of the program. Indeed, Loft Story
gave rise to important press coverage, quantitatively and qualitatively.25
Despite this profusion, what stands out is the regular repetition of the
same type of statement in most sources to describe the new program,
23 “The nine “happy few” (there were 3,000 applicants in the Netherlands) will be spied on 24/7
by 24 cameras, including several infrared cameras operating at night, as well as 59 microphones.
No chance to elude the watchful eye of the camera: no blind spot, even in the shower.” “Nine
people spied on […],” Le Temps 22 Sept. 1999: 12 (my emphasis). An article on the Spanish version
of the program similarly refers to it as “this program celebrating voyeurism.” “In turn, Spain is
swept along by the ‘Big Brother’ effect,” Le Temps 9 May 2000: 21.
24 Without claiming to be exhaustive, I want to mention the following sources: “How the
media can lead to fascism,” La Tribune de Genève, 10 Nov. 1997: 2; “Wiretapping. Banks and
Far-Reaching Ears,” Le Matin 13 Jan. 1998: 12; “Surveillance: Thinking of Big Brother,” Le Matin
5 July 1998: 10; “From Vennes to Ecublens, Let’s Drive Smoothly: Big Brother Is Going to Take
Care of Us,” 24 heures 17 June 1998: 12; “Big Brother Opens the Mail. These E-mails That Give You
Away,” La Tribune de Genève 18 Nov. 1998: 22; “Eyes upon the Users,” La Tribune de Genève 4 Dec.
1998: 5 (the article deals with the installation of video cameras on Swiss trains); “Big Brother at
the Stewards’,” La Tribune de Genève 16 Dec. 1999: 26; “Buses in Annemasse Get Equipped, ‘Loft
Story’-Style,” La Tribune de Genève 4 July 2001: 28.
25 Le Matin, for instance, devoted 23 articles to Loft Story during the period of its diffusion,
from April 26 to July 6, 2001. In that respect, newspaper headlines – which function not only as
visual attractions, but also as ways to signal a phenomenon which readers/television viewers
should know about to express their belonging in the community – are one discursive element of
note. Loft Story was thus the subject of ten newspaper headlines, all mediums included. Sources
also show a kind of (sometimes indirect) injunction to the reader to take part in, or at least to
be aware of the existence of, reality television programs. An article published in Le Temps, for
instance, defined Big Brother as a “social phenomenon,” thereby also contributing to bestow
that status on the program. “In turn, Spain is swept along […],” Le Temps 9 May 2000: 21.
especially from the standpoint of its technical apparatus. 26 Adopting a

form of technological determinism, these sources systematically highlight
the number of cameras used to monitor participants, endorsing the premise
that the supposed transparency of the recording allows an augmented
realism, and that the number of cameras guarantees a kind of total capture
matched afterwards by the so-called uninterrupted diffusion of the taped
content. Seen as a guarantee of realism, the apparatus is also denounced as
morally problematic, for participants as well as producing institutions and
television viewers. Reality television comes across as anxiety-provoking,
the sign of a cultural evolution that leads to a form of social exclusion:
individuals risk becoming alienated in a system where they are worth only
as much as their competitive abilities; they risk losing their identity due to
media overexposure; and these programs are taken as the sign of an aging,
fin de siècle civilization, depending for its entertainment on humiliation,
the celebration of boredom and unrestrained voyeurism.27 Over the same
period, “reality television” as a referent becomes more stable, referring to a
clearly identified televisual production, one just as clearly condemned by
its legitimized commentators.28
26 As the program was being launched, most sources on Loft Story started with a brief formula
reiterating its main characteristics. An excerpt from an article published in 24 heures thus reads:
“The principle is well-known: five women and five men are locked inside an apartment for 10
weeks, without newspapers, radio, television or telephone. In short, without contact with the
outside world but under the permanent watch of 26 cameras (including three infrared cameras)
and of the public in charge of eliminating them week after week.” “Truth can be stranger than
affliction,” 24 heures 28-29 Apr. 2001: 34. Another piece explains: “Cameras are planted all around
the loft (except in the toilets), no fewer than 26 of them, including three infrared cameras, as
well as 50 mikes (11 clip-ons, one per participant), with 134 people mobilized 24/7 to run the
technology!” “French ‘Big Brother,’ ” Le Matin 26 Apr. 2001: 16.
27 Some articles draw a comparison between reality TV programs and circus games in ancient
Rome, pointing out the decadent character of the latter and, by analogy, of contemporary
productions.
28 By way of example, this article was published in 24 heures the day before the first episode of
Loft Story aired: “Loft Story represents the first version of this reality TV that has been invading
small screens all over the world for the past two years (see Big Brother). M6 is the first major
Francophone channel that dares to step into ‘keyhole television,’ that genre that turns us into
voyeurs.” “No to ‘keyhole television’ and to ‘trash programming,’” 24 heures, 24 Apr. 2001: 18.
I emphasize the use of the deictic (“this reality TV”), as it expresses the idea that the reader
already has some kind of knowledge on the type of program Loft Story belongs to. The journal-
ist’s statement also conveys the idea that the program is designed to place spectators (writer
included) in a voyeuristic position (“that genre that turns us into voyeurs”).
The TSR’s Reaction to French Programming: Cultural Issues and

Institutional Positioning
Loft Story thus represented an opportunity to produce a body of knowledge

in the press. It served as a standard of sorts for reality television, a standard
taken to apply to world production as a whole. However, even as reality
television was clearly presented as a type of transnational program, the
origin of the programs was systematically brought up.29 In the case of Loft
Story, the origin of the program even became a central issue in discourses:
the border between France and Switzerland, nonexistent when it comes to
televisual diffusion, was metaphorically redrawn to correspond with the
outlines of a cultural space of resistance. In discourses, the TSR symbolized
this locally determined identity, with its institutional positioning expressed
through a form of division in the definition of reality television (“there is
French reality TV, then there is the reality TV we produce”). This made it
possible to construct the channel as the embodiment of a certain cultural
identity threatened by the “invasion” of reality television as it existed on a
global level.30 The (few) statements made by the representatives of the TSR
on French reality television between 1998 and 2001 express a categorical
dismissal of this type of program on the grounds that it would be incompat-
ible with the institutional status of the channel.31 Positioning itself in
29 In his book on the history of public-sector television in Europe, Jérôme Bourdon deals with
this theme of the reception of reality television: “For channels, whether public or private in this
instance, it has been a frequent habit to define reality TV in national terms (even though the
genre quickly became global). This rhetoric of the national has functioned in both directions: to
reject the genre as ‘foreign,’ unsuitable in ‘our culture,’ or conversely, to stress the inferiority of
‘our television,’ engaged in reality TV where foreign televisions ‘resist’ better.” Jérôme Bourdon,
Du service public à la télé-réalité. Une histoire culturelle des télévisions européennes 1950-2010
(Paris: INA Editions, 2011) 200.
30 It should be noted, at the risk of exaggerating this factor of the competition from French
programs, that the period coincided with the arrival of Gilles Marchand at the helm of the
channel. The “event,” marked by a press conference, was covered in several articles that noted
the director’s will to assert the French-speaking Swiss identity of the TSR, as the following
excerpt shows: “[Gilles Marchand] stated how strongly he valued this relation of trust with
French-speaking television viewers, an ‘added value’ linked to an identity on which the TSR was
planning to rely in its ‘struggle against the competition of French channels, among others.’ This
regional localization should be found ‘in all programming.’ Not to worry: the cultural, political,
economic and linguistic identity Gilles Marchand advocates is ‘modern, tolerant, open on the
world, rife with projects.’” La Tribune de Genève 10 Aug. 2000: 18.
31 “[Gilles Marchand] has not changed his opinion and is sticking to his claim that the French-
speaking channel will not diffuse that kind of ‘real TV.’ To face the tough competition of French
channels, the TSR plans to keep trying to establish a long-term relationship with its audience.
Gilles Marchand underlined that it was going to highlight regional programming increasingly
ethical terms, the TSR combined this identity of “public service” with its
localization in French-speaking Swiss culture, whose values its programs
purportedly reflected.32
However, this stance evolved in 2001 with the airing of Génération 01,
the first reality TV program produced by the channel.33 This provided the
TSR with an opportunity to defend a middle-of-the-road position, between
censuring the methods of reality television and adopting them. Indeed,
the program involved fundamental differences compared to what was
supposedly the standard of the genre.34 Only through discourses could
these differences be made to signify and be inscribed in an argument
presenting them as deliberate choices to “bend” the standard to the norms
of public-sector television. Functioning as the “signs” of the specificities
of public-sector television, these characteristics were also integrated at
a second level, in a discursive logic that made it possible to define and
proclaim an identity specific to the TSR as an institution: its status, not
only as a public-sector channel, but also as a channel for French-speaking
Switzerland.
In most sources, Génération 01 was accordingly described using a list of
similarities to and differences from Loft Story, which situated it within a
logic of continuity and distinction by comparison to reality television on
private commercial channels. These sources indirectly provide informa-
tion on the norm of reference holding sway in the press at the time. Their
analysis points to some invariants in the presentation of the programs: the
confinement of participants in a closed place, the uninterrupted recording
of their behavior, the organization of their living quarters according to the
modalities of recording, the daily diffusion of events having taken place
that day, the Internet version of the program, the audience’s vote to pick
so as to convey the cultural diversity of Francophone Switzerland.” “The TSR’s Overall Ratings
Declining. Loft Story Is Here,” La Tribune de Genève 27 July 2001: 91.
32 Among the strategies supposed to help construct this identity for the TSR, a form of an-
thropomorphic tendency may be noted in these sources, with moral positions as well as affects
being attributed to the channel. This aspect of discourses does not concern the TSR alone,
however, as expressions tending to construct television channels as unified agents, endowed
with intentionality and moral consciousness, are after all quite common in everyday speech.
33 I will privilege the reception of the program in the press here. For a thorough description
of Génération 01, see Gaëten Clavien’s detailed article, “La réplique du service public en Suisse
romande,” Médiamorphoses (June 2003): 109-15.
34 Génération 01 did not offer non-stop diffusion and the program aired once the shooting
was over. Though designed as a game show, the program did not feature internal elimination
between participants but a system of votes by television viewers, who elected the winner at the
close of the one-to-last episode.
the winner in the final. The TSR’s head of programming still insisted on a
point that was to allow the channel to take a moral stance: the rejection of
a principle of elimination of participants.
However, journalists at La Tribune de Genève soon revealed that Généra-
tion 01 was a fake, entirely scripted and performed by actors, designed to
stir a “debate” on reality television. The last scheduled episode began like
the final of the contest but, once the real nature of the program had been
disclosed, it continued as a debate between the representatives of several
European public-sector channels (France 2, RAI) as well as a sociologist
and a psychologist. The conclusion of this exchange between legitimized
participants was the affirmation that reality television programs were not
appropriate on television channels with a public service mandate. This
allowed the TSR to position itself against private channels but with other
public-sector channels reacting similarly in their own area of diffusion.
For the TSR, Génération 01 was thus clearly an opportunity to brand
itself as a company characterized by its identity as a public service provider
radically different from its French private competitors. This positioning
was to evolve in 2003, when the TSR aired Mayen 1903, a reality television
program whose presentation in the press offered an opportunity to build an
identity no longer defined in relation to alterity, but in and of itself, with the
program functioning as a medium to flaunt positive cultural specificities.
Mayen 1903: The First Attempt at a TSR “Homemade” Reality

Television
Following a logic similar to that of Génération 01, Mayen 1903 was introduced in
the press as an adaptation of the formal characteristics of reality television to
the institutional missions of public-sector television. The program, which was
supposed to foster reflection on the heritage of French-speaking Switzerland,
was defined in discourses through its sociological and historical purpose35:
The issue is twofold: historical, since the point is to reconstitute the living
environment and conditions of 1903; and sociological, because it will give
a family the chance to experience a life close to nature.36
35 This pedagogical ambition was reinforced by the collaboration of sociologist Bernard

Crettaz in the design of the program, which the sources presented as a scientific guarantee for
the legitimacy of Mayen 03.
36 “They Are Going to Live As People Did in 1903,” Le Matin 12 July 2003: 16.
Besides this characterization of the program as part of a pedagogical ap-

proach, a predominant place was given to the figure of Béatrice Barton,
the producer and designer of the program. Most sources directly credited
Mayen 03 to her (“her concept,” “Béatrice Barton’s new program”), with a
frequent emphasis on the connection between her personal history and
her choices in terms of program design. Serving as a privileged enunciator
for the intentions of the TSR, she was presented in the press as a sensitive
personality, a quality often mentioned as a guarantee for the standard of
programs developed by her. This becomes apparent when the choice of a
shooting location is motivated by the fact that the producer “fell in love”
with it,37 or in the interviews of some participants justifying their decision
to take part in the TSR’s program because of their trust in Béatrice Barton.
Such insistence on the sensitivity and personal involvement of the producer
in her work also contributed to the personalization of the TSR as a company
defined by the coherence of its programming, its ethical dimension and its
privileged ties with the French-speaking Swiss audience.
The tension between an inscription of Mayen 03 in the continuity of
reality television programs produced by private French channels up to that
point and a divergence from these was clearly a theme in discourses exam-
ined. Doing away with some characteristics, while making the positioning
of the program as reality television more problematic, was thus justified as
the result of an adaptation of the genre to the channel’s moral imperatives.
An article published in Le Temps, for example, began with a description in
the negative – namely, what the program was not – then proceeded with a
characterization in line with the cultural orientation of the TSR:
This is not a game: there is no elimination, no competition, not even

spectacular accomplishments. It is not a “Loft” in the altitudes either.
Participants are not completely cut off from the world, cameras do not
track them down 24/7, but they have to work hard to support themselves.
This is Swiss-style reality television, that is, a television that respects
participants and relies on a pedagogical project combining entertainment
and learning.38
The wish to offer innovative programming while claiming to do so within

the framework of reality television as a genre was also obvious in the crea-
tion of an ad hoc designation for the program. The TSR’s press release (and
37 “I looked for this Mayen all winter long!” Le Matin 12 July 2003: 21.
38 “Reality TV: French-speaking Switzerland takes the plunge,” Le Temps 10 Sept. 2003: 12.
most sources) introduced it as a “documentary series” or a “sociological

serial.” In the quote that follows, the new term chosen brings together the
two televisual genres at whose intersection the program is situated, and
which it is supposed to unite:
I would say that we are making a doc-serial [“feuilleton-docu”]. Doc,

because the goal is to revisit history, to turn a memory into words and
describe what the existence of Valais peasants was like a century ago.
Serial, because we are using the tricks of fiction, for example with the
cast embodying characters whom the audience can identify with.39
The TSR’s Version of Reality Television: Stabilization of a Formula

and Variations on It
Articles sometimes feature two contradictory discourses, as the focus

shifts back and forth between the journalist as enunciator and the channel.
Still, these discourses never stop paralleling each other over the whole
period examined. Even though discourses originating in the TSR seem
to have as their purpose to assert a specificity of the channel’s programs
and an important break away from the standards and practices of reality
television on a global scale (including French productions), the discourse
of journalists – while relaying this position – also maintains a second net-
work of inscription, in which the programs are presented within a stronger
continuity with these standards. This aspect shows in the adoption of a
double terminology to qualify the TSR’s programs. While most articles
use the terms proposed by the channel, pointing to the singularity of its
programs compared to standard productions, they also express their lineage
with French productions. Some articles devoted to Mayen 1903 refer to the
program as an “Alpine Loft” and Super Seniors is sometimes called the “Star
Ac’ of Seniors.”40 Situating the program in a logic of succession diverging
from that proposed by the TSR, journalistic enunciation also produces a
positioning of its own in relation to other news media, television and the
readers/viewers it addresses.
39 “Le Valais en 1900,” La Tribune de Genève 9 Aug. 2003: 26.

40 “The TSR Launches a Rural Loft,” Le Matin 9 July 2003: 10. The term is also used in “Béatrice
Barton, reine de l’information-divertissement,” Le Matin 20 June 2003: 18; and in “Reality TV:
Now, the Seniors,” Le Temps 10 May 2005: 12. Translator’s note: Star Ac’ refers to Star Academy, a
mix of pop music talent contest and reality television, which in France aired on private channel
TF1 for eight seasons (2001-2008).
A tendency, reinforced by the launch of Super Seniors, may in fact be

noted: French-speaking Swiss reality television became commonplace
as one of the versions of the genre, even as “TSR reality television” as a
category was simultaneously undergoing a gradual stabilization. 41 This
re-inscription of the TSR’s programming in the televisual choice available
(or at least assumed to be well-known) in the French-speaking area of
Switzerland also played a part in the relation between newspapers and
their readership. Affirming the position of a – potentially critical – viewer
toward the TSR, journalistic enunciation sided with those watching not
only the Francophone channel, but television as a whole (“we watch the
same channel, but also French channels”): French-speaking Swiss readers
and television viewers.
The TSR’s production was underlined as a form of sub-genre, “public-
sector reality television.” Thus it corresponded to an evolution noted in the
programs themselves, which appeared as variations on the same standard,
formally as well as in their concept or progression.
Several elements contributed to this logic of variation. Already mentioned
is the fact that all these programs were designed and produced by the same
person, Béatrice Barton. Her “presence” in the press was a factor in the
affective reception of programs, whose moral coherence was guaranteed by
this almost tutelary figure. Béatrice Barton would appear more and more in
the programs, in the image as well as through the voice-over commentary
characterizing most of them. The “concept” for the programs also lent itself
to an apprehension in terms of classification: the pedagogical or sociologi-
cal dimension of programs was systematically stressed in discourses and
amounted to a trademark for the channel. This could involve documenting
the lifestyle of Valais people in the early twentieth century (Le Mayen 1903),
heightening public awareness of road safety issues (Y’a pas pire conducteur
en Suisse romande), showing a positive image of dynamic senior citizens
(Super Seniors), analyzing how young workers enter the job market (L’Etude)
41 A special report on reality television in a French-speaking Swiss weekly is telling in that

regard, “Reality TV: The Reasons Behind An Unbelievable Success,” L’Hebdo 15 Sept. 2005: 16-24.
In what is presented as an assessment of reality television, the TSR’s programs are set apart from
others and mentioned in an insert, but they are integrated in the mosaic of screens appearing
on the first page of the report. The local identity of the magazine is obvious, since the survey
mostly comprises profiles of the Francophone Swiss who took part in French reality shows.
The focus on participants, whether in French or Swiss programs, is constant in the sources and
evokes a parallel with the evolution of print media towards celebrity coverage. Some scholars
have shown that this trend may be concomitant with the emergence of reality television. See
for instance Valérie Gorin, “Le cas de l’information-people en Suisse romande: spécificités d’un
microcosme régional,” Communication 27.1 (2009): 84-104.
or providing information on the lifestyle of farmers in French-speaking

Switzerland (Dîner à la ferme). The cantonal origin of participants, which
was a selection criterion, was also one notable factor of continuity: Le Mayen
1903 featured just one family, whose origin in the Jura, a valid criterion
for the TSR, 42 often comes up in the sources; 43 other programs always
included seven participants, or one for each of the French-speaking cantons
of Switzerland, and cantonal identities and their peculiarities increasingly
became a theme of the programs themselves. 44 Important similarities
between programs may also be noted on an iconographic level as well as
with credit sequences, the graphic design of the programs’ written content
or the interfaces of dedicated Internet websites.
The formula of a “TSR-made reality television” gradually stabilized,
as each new program was inscribed in a sort of continuity with previous
ones and became another exemplar of the genre that might be called
“public-service reality television.” The tautological relation to identity,
which founded the channel’s relation to its audience in the discourse of its
director, was confirmed. 45 The strategy did seem to ensure success, since
Le Mayen 1903 and Dîner à la ferme brought the TSR its best ratings in the
years of their diffusion. If the genre of reality television was defined in
relation to a standardized program model (symbolized by Loft Story) at the
beginning of the period examined (2000-2002), the following years saw the
emergence of formats moving away from that model, but whose reception
gradually moved back to that of the genre of reality television, widening
its definition as a result.
The study of reality television in French-speaking Switzerland thus
stresses the need to broaden the analysis beyond the programs strictly
speaking (the appropriate focus for an internal analysis) and take into
42 From the standpoint of stereotyping identities, the TSR used an interesting argument to
justify its choice of a Jura family: “This living laboratory would be run by a family from outside
the Valais so as to avoid the cult of one’s own home and the nostalgia of the Vieux-Pays.” Béatrice
Barton, Le Mayen 1903 (Lausanne: TSR/Editions Favre, 2003) 5.
43 The fact that the family came from the Jura actually led to reactions by television viewers
in the press, with some criticizing the choice as undermining the authenticity of the program.
44 In Super Seniors, every Sunday represented the opportunity for a participant to organize
a day-long “field trip” in his or her canton. In Dîner à la ferme, farmers put together the meal to
which other participants were invited and systematically highlighted the specialties of their
land. The website did in fact feature a page listing the addresses of producers mentioned in the
program and suggested tourist activities.
45 “What works on the TSR, first and foremost, is programs for the Swiss, designed by the Swiss,
and made in Switzerland,” according to Raymond Vouillamoz, quoted in “La der de Raymond
Vouillamoz,” 24 heures 20 Aug. 2003: 10.
consideration the discourses and representations associated with them. The

approach through dispositives offers a better account of the conditions and
issues governing the emergence and the perpetuation of reality television,
a generic category whose problematic character has been demonstrated
here. The interpretive latitude allowing journalists as well as producers
and readers to defend different approaches of the same object shows how
equivocal it is.
However, through a permanent operation of re-inscription performed
by journalists and producers, programs are also situated in a lineage, a
(dis)continuity with other objects or phenomena forming a network of
significations within which these programs may be apprehended. As a
genre, reality television, which results from a gradual construction and is
partly determined by issues related to the various players in the dispositive,
cannot be thought of as a unified category, but rather as a referent out of
which these players make decisions about their activities and justify them.
Considered as a set of resources for viewers, print discourses inform to
some degree the framework for the interpretive autonomy of that referent,
tingeing it with some determinism.
The systematic nature of these processes of inscription leads us to con-
sider them as one characteristic of genre, which is supported by the logic
of standardization-repetition/localization-divergence that constitutes its
main articulation. The importance of claims to cultural specificity which,
as I have shown, was one of the main stakes in discourses, reinforces the
hypothesis that has reality television epitomize social logics at work in the
context of a globalization of trade – whose functioning the genre partly
reveals, in particular when it comes to the relation of individuals and com-
munities to television as a media.
Dispositive and Cinepoetry, around
Foucault’s Death and the Labyrinth
Christophe Wall-Romana
In a farcical piece titled “The Maldoror-Poems Dispositive,” Francis Ponge

mockingly invites us to draw a use value from Lautréamont:
Open Lautréamont! And there you have literature turned inside out like
an umbrella!
Close Lautréamont! And everything immediately falls back into place…
To enjoy complete intellectual comfort at home, try and adapt the MAL-
DOROR/POEMS dispositive to your library.1
This 1946 text implicitly refers to the famous umbrella of The Songs of
Maldoror, which reads: “as beautiful as the random encounter between an
umbrella and a sewing machine upon a dissecting table.”2 Yet Ponge, dis-
missing the fantastic element, extracts a domestic technique, a procedure of
mechanical standardization from the metaphor that served as a talisman for
Surrealism. Since a similar procedure informed Ducasse’s Poems, precisely,
composed as they were through the systematic recasting of classical max-
ims by Pascal or Vauvenargues, the Maldoror-Poems dispositive likewise
conceals a theoretical argument under its advertising patter: namely, that
the poetry of Surrealism and its metaphorical fantasticality had come to an
end by 1946, opening the way for the age of the “dispositive” in the postwar
period. That culture had become a matter of home furnishing, and literature
a matter of umbrellas, suggests that the intersection of the discursive and
the non-discursive, designated by the dispositif according to Foucault,
should be thought of in parodic mode. Indeed, starting in the 1950s, the
material rhetoric of Ponge’s objeu,3 and later the naturalism of language in
1 Francis Ponge, “Le dispositif Maldoror-Poésies,” in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard,
1999) 634-35.
2 Le Comte de Lautréamont, The Songs of Maldoror, trans. R. J. Dent (Washington, D.C.: Solar
Books, 2011).
3 Translator’s note: “objeu” is obviously a portmanteau word in French, combining “objet”
and “jeu” (“game,” or “play”) in a new, hybrid form. The second reference is to Francis Ponge’s
La fabrique du pré (1971).
360 Christophe Wall-Romana
the fabrique [“manufacture”] of Ponge’s poem Le pré, inaugurated a genuine

poetics of the “dispositif” in the poet’s work. 4
This essay has its departure point in modern poetry, more specifically in
the invention of experience by the poetic text. I will try and argue for the
hypothesis that the genesis of the notion of the dispositive – with Foucault,
but not only – as a network of relations between the discursive and the
non-discursive, rested on a new understanding of the textual and the poetic
tied to the emergence of cinema. More concisely, the condition of possibility
for thinking the dispositive is the interweaving of cinema and poetic texts
(cinepoetry). While I am not so concerned with the critical effectiveness
of the notion of the dispositive of audio-vision, I do not mean to suggest
that the dispositive is merely an effect of the text. On the contrary, the
issue is to think about the extent to which exchanges between writing and
systems of audio-vision have contributed to cinema as a dispositive and to
the conceptual genesis of the dispositif in Foucault.
Let us take the example of the phantasmagoria: Laurent Mannoni and
Tom Gunning recently re-inscribed it in the immediate lineage of the basic
apparatus (in the sense of technical and technological film equipment) and
the apparatus (in the sense of an immaterial arrangement producing a point
of view) of cinema. Both scholars documented the spread of techniques used
by Robertson: magic lanterns on wheels with a sliding lens, rear projection
in the dark, superimposition of images, harmonica and sound effects, and
so forth.5 Max Milner has pointed out the importance of English Gothic
literature in the genesis of what may be called the pre-apparatus “phan-
tasmagoria,” and in particular of Edward Young’s famous Night Thoughts.6
Milner has also demonstrated that, while phantasmagoria disappeared
from the annals of spectacle in the 1820s, it was transfigured into a new
4 Christophe Hanna defines “the textual apparatus” in Ponge as “…an arrangement of textual
elements of various forms and natures, sampled from a source-context and situated in a target-
context.” Poésie action directe (Paris: Al Dante, 2003) 91.
5 Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans.
Richard Crangle (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001); Tom Gunning, “Phantasmagoria
and the Manufacturing of Illusions and Wonder: Towards a Cultural Optics of the Cinematic
Apparatus,” in The Cinema, A New Technology for the 20th Century, André Gaudreault, Catherine
Russell and Pierre Véronneau, eds. (Lausanne: Payot, 2004) 31-44. Apparatus = projection +
spectator; basic apparatus = camera + editing + apparatus. These two terms tend to blend into
the equation apparatus = camera + editing + projection + spectator. See Jean-Louis Baudry,
L’effet cinéma (Paris: L’Albatros, 1978) 31, n. 1.
6 Max Milner, L’envers du visible. Essai sur l’ombre (Paris: Le Seuil, 2005) 400-1.
Dispositive and Cinepoetry, around Foucault’s Death and the L abyrinth 361
scenographic imaginary in Romantic and fantastic literature.7 Michel Vieg-

nes’ study of the importance of the fantastic in nineteenth-century French
poetry confirms Milner’s findings. The study describes the components
in the production of a fantastic situation, from graveyards and ruins to
hallucinations indoors or in an urban setting to the part played by darkness
and ghosts to a general poetics of the spectral appearance of voice and
sight/vision. Without referring to Milner at all, Viegnes still goes through all
the main aspects of phantasmagoria as a technical horizon, as though the
Gothic was remediated by phantasmagoria and turned into the fantastic.
Finally, Philippe Hamon and Philippe Ortel have shown evidence for the
contribution of material images to literature throughout the nineteenth
century – through the multiple intrusion in the organization of the text
(and not simply its theme) of images and situations of observation (Hamon)
and of photography in all its technical aspects and models (Ortel).8 If the
notion of the “post-phantasmagoria, pre-cinema” dispositive holds, all its
fundamental aspects should also be acknowledged as interwoven with the
imaginary of the modern literary text.
The central section of The Painter of Modern Life, “The Artist, Man of
the World, Man of the Crowd, and Child,” provides an illustration. Baude-
laire brings up Constantin Guys’s watercolor as a pretext for an aesthetic
manifesto of the modern based on a global perception (“spiritual citizen of
the universe”9), childlike (“childhood recovered at will”10) and popular.
Baudelaire’s text also happens to involve two intriguing deviations. Reso-
lutely theoretical, this section veers a first time in its penultimate paragraph
when it turns into a report from life, in an omniscient mode, and presents
the painter gleaning the visual impressions to be synthesized in the work:
“When Monsieur G. wakes up and opens his eyes […] watches […] marvels
at […] delights in […] and in an instant Monsieur G. will already have seen
[…].”11 The paragraph ends with a QED: “And in a few moments the resulting
7 Max Milner, La fantasmagorie. Essai sur l’optique fantastique (Paris: PUF, 1982). See also
Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media in the Twenty-First
Century (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2006).
8 Michel Viegnes, L’envoûtante étrangeté. Le fantastique dans la poésie française (1820-1924)
(Grenoble: PUG, 2006); Philippe Hamon, Imageries, littérature et image au XIXe siècle (Paris: José
Corti, 2001); Philippe Ortel, La littérature à l’ère de la photographie, enquête sur une révolution
invisible (Nice: Jacqueline Chambon, 2002).
9 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan
Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964): 7.
10 Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life 8.
‘poem’ will be virtually composed.”12 Yet a double ambiguity arises here:

does the watercolor suddenly change into a poem, or should we understand
“poem” as a metaphor?13 And is the image/poem effectively composed, or
does it remain in a virtual state? At first glance, the following paragraph
seems to leave these questions unresolved:
But now it is evening. It is that strange, equivocal hour when the curtains
of heaven are drawn and cities light up. The gas-light makes a stain upon
the crimson of the sunset. Honest men and rogues, sane men and mad,
are all saying to themselves, ‘The end of another day!’14
Still, reading these lines, one cannot help but think that this might be
the beginning of a poem, as they are strongly reminiscent of the tone of
prose poems in Le Spleen de Paris – a title first used by Baudelaire a few
months after the publication of The Painter of Modern Life in November and
December 1863. Isn’t this “the poem” promised “virtually” in the preced-
ing paragraph, and which becomes reality almost unbeknownst to us?
Baudelaire goes on, describing how Guys sets about his work:
So now, at a time when others are asleep, Monsieur G. is bending over his
table, darting on to a sheet of paper the same glance that a moment ago
he was directing towards external things, skirmishing with his pencil,
his pen, his brush […]. And the external world is reborn upon his paper,
natural and more than natural, beautiful and more than beautiful,
strange and endowed with an impulsive life like the soul of its creator.
The phantasmagoria has been distilled from nature.15
Dimming the light of day, the dusk put an end to the collection of daytime
images, and “virtually” is then understood as the fact that Guys still had to
synthesize in a single work, in the darkened room and in the camera obscura
of his soul, all the sketches drawn from life. It is evident, however, that the
individual skirmishing with his pencil and his pen on paper is none other
than Baudelaire, just as he alludes to “ma fantasque escrime,” “my fanciful
skirmishing,” in his poem “The Sun.” When Baudelaire compares the image/

13 Translator’s note: in English, Jonathan Mayne answered this question by bracketing the
word “poem” with single quotation marks in his translation.
poem to “the soul of its creator,” then, we are entitled to think that this is no
longer, or no longer exactly, about Guys, but about the author of the poem just
read: Baudelaire himself. Baudelaire thus uses the term “phantasmagoria”
because he simultaneously has to maintain the reality effect of visual
reportage, acknowledge the virtual character of the painting-poem, and
explain, in the final sentence which glosses over his conclusion, that the
painting-poem is organized almost automatically, in the duration of the
memory of a ghost entity – the child:
All the raw materials with which the memory has loaded itself are put
in order, [ar]ranged and harmonized, and undergo that forced idealiza-
tion which is the result of a childlike perceptiveness – that is to say, a
perceptiveness acute and magical by reason of its innocence!16
Phantasmagoria returns, not as a figure, a vague term associated with

hallucination and non-knowledge, but as the denotation of a cognitive and
perceptual process of focalization of images, mobile and multiple, directed
by an agency both past and surviving, the memory-childhood.
One may then suggest that a pre-cinema dispositive is at work in the term
“phantasmagoria,” which Baudelaire unfolds more than metaphorically, in
that the term signals and accompanies a specific optical technique – an
imaginary synthesis of multiple images arranged sequentially on an axis of
duration – invoked as the origin of both a visual work and the virtual poem
analyzing it. Thus understood, the term “pre-cinema” means not only the
wide technical base of devices and arrangements within which the histori-
cal cinema Marey-Edison-Lumière was to emerge, but also an imaginary
scheme for a sequential synthesis of images that parallels contemporary
equipment and anticipates the general direction historical cinema was to
follow towards the end of the 1880s.
Poet Charles Cros17 illustrates in detail this imaginary pre-cinema in a
tale published in 1872 and titled “An Interastral Drama.” In the tale, a young
man by the name of Glaux, whose father, an astronomer, is in contact with
an astronomer from the planet Venus, falls in love with the latter’s daughter
through their respective fathers’ telescopes:

17 On Cros as a writer and photographic inventor, see Philippe Ortel, La littérature à l’ère de
la photographie 69-74.
They thought they would overcome the distance that separated them
by exchanging the most comprehensive traces of their persons. They
sent each other their photographs in series large enough for relief and
movement to be reproduced.
Glaux […] would lock himself up in a room and reproduce the moving
image of his beloved upon smoke or dust, an impalpable image made of
light alone.18
The scene is certainly phantasmagorical (a dark room, smoke as a three-

dimensional screen, an unattainable but surviving agency), but the imagi-
nary technique it displays foretells both chronophotography, analytical in
nature, which Muybridge developed only in 1877-1878, and his synthesis
of moving images thanks to praxinoscopes and zooscopes around 1879.
The haptic dimension of the desire to touch-see (“traces of their persons,”
“relief,” “impalpable”) should also be noted, as it accompanies the advent
of new technologies of moving images, be they cinema or the immersive
simulation of virtual reality. In September 1873, Cros presented his “Project
to Communicate with the Inhabitants of Venus” before the French Academy
of Sciences. Astronomer Jules Janssen was probably in attendance; the fol-
lowing year Janssen developed his photographic revolver in preparation for
the transit of Venus in 1874 precisely so as to take “photographs in series.”19
As is well-known, Muybridge was to take inspiration from this device, in
turn inspiring Marey, whose findings Edison learned of. The text by Cros
is remarkable in that it attests to an imaginary of chronophotographic
synthesis preceding even the first phase of the analytical dispositive of
chronophotography.
In laying out their research program on the “1900 episteme,” François
Albera and Maria Tortajada posit a Foucauldian epistemological scheme
that both underpins and expands the discourses and actualizations of the
cinematographic “dispositif.” In their view, this scheme includes “literary
discourses that produce variations of the dispositive within an imaginary
world (Verne, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Jarry, Apollinaire, Roussel).”20 My
research on what I refer to as “cinepoetry,” a practice which grafts a range
18 See also a recent translation in The Supreme Progress, ed. Brian Stableford (Hollywood
Comics, 2011).
19 See Monique Sicard, “Passage de Vénus: le revolver photographique de Jules Janssen,” Études
photographiques 4 (May 1998): 53. http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/index157.html. Last
accessed on Dec. 16, 2012.
20 François Albera and Maria Tortajada, “The 1900 Episteme,” trans. Lance Hewson, in Cinema
Beyond Film, François Albera and Maria Tortajada, eds. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U. P., 2010) 31.
of imaginary cinematographic dispositives onto the poetic text and has

continued from the 1890s to the present, confirms and illustrates – in
a limited way, admittedly – the validity of this program.21 Still, in the
present essay I would like to try and think through the significance of the
Foucauldian “epistemological scheme” and dispositif. First, the scheme
does imply the efficiency of a discursive matrix, coming before literary
practices. Texts would be variants of this matrix, in whose formation they
would accordingly not directly take part. The issue, as the example of Cros
shows, is not to opt for a critical approach that would turn the literary
into a reflection, and the technical imagination into a theme, but rather
to choose a model of co-evolution and co-imbrication of literature and
cinematographic schemes. Milner, for instance, proposes – with much
relevance, in my view – that a new order of imagination took over with the
emergence of Phantasmagoria: from the Aristotelian imaginatio as mimesis,
and from the Romantic imagination as over-creative:
This new form of imagination could be described only by the optical

dispositives perfected during the eighteenth century and transferred by
Robertson, among others, from the domain of “amusing physics” to the
domain of spectacle […].22
This interweaving of the quasi-dispositive Phantasmagoria and the poetic

imagination was encapsulated in Baudelaire’s own term “phantasmagoria.”
This is not a mere metaphor but a functional process which rearranges the
text by engendering a prose poem in the middle of an essay – a prose poem
given as the virtual equivalent to the phantasmagoric synthesis of multiple
sketches into a single drawing in Guys’s work.
As to the concept or complex of the dispositif itself, as Foucault gradually
developed it in relation to his analyses of the panopticon, of power/knowl-
edge and of sexuality, I would like to go back over one of its genealogical axes,
which goes through the imaginary cinema “in” literature, precisely, thereby
calling into question any absolute precedence given to the cinematographic
dispositif (in Foucault’s sense of the word) over its later literary variants.
Let us mention immediately that the program of the “1900 épistémè” is not
at issue here, since it proposes an analytical framework wide and precise
enough to avoid arguments in which causalities and modes of emergence
21 Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry, 1890-2008

(Fordham, NY: Fordham U. P., 2012).
22 Max Milner, La fantasmagorie. Essai sur l’optique fantastique 23.
remain narrow or monolithic. Let us also point out that the dispositif is
defined by Foucault as “the system of relations that can be established”
within “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble” that involves “the said as
much as the unsaid,” mainly consisting of “discourses, institutions, archi-
tectural forms.”23 A dispositif produces more or less predictable strategic
effects, such as the constitution of a delinquent environment handled by
the prison apparatus in the nineteenth century and which later appears
as such in political discourse. Foucault also explains that the dispositif
compensates for the episteme, which remains “a specifically discursive
apparatus, whereas the apparatus in its general form is both discursive
and non-discursive.”24 My analysis of the genealogy of Foucault’s idea of
dispositif involves this specific point, for the idea implies a clear, preliminary
distinction between the discursive and the non-discursive.
Foucault’s project to set up the literary text as pure discourse and pure
language – that is, to dispose of its other, the non-discursive, even if that
means recombining the two later in dispositifs – may be traced to his
admirable study on Raymond Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth (1963). It
seems to me, however, that Roussel’s texts resist; and at the same time that
Foucault himself acknowledges in fine that, to a certain extent, these texts
display non-discursive elements – and as such work like the lineaments of
a dispositif. The book on Raymond Roussel is at once presented by Foucault
as akin to a hapax. His only work of literary criticism, and what is more,
eponymous with an author (at least in French), the book came out in May
1963, just a few days after Birth of the Clinic (Foucault wanted them to be
released on the same day). Foucault curiously insists on the fact that “it
doesn’t have a place in the sequence of my books,”25 as though it could have
been written at any time, independently from his own theoretical evolution.
Still, the two books overlap, since Birth of the Clinic, the first attempt to
conceive a dispositif of power/knowledge (without naming it that way), is
“about space, about language and about death; it is about the act of seeing,
the gaze,”26 whereas in Death and the Labyrinth Foucault refers writing to
the formula, “things, words, vision and death, the sun and language make
23 Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writings, 1972-1977, trans. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980): 194.
24 Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh” 197.
25 Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles
Ruas (London, New York: Continuum, 2004):187.
26 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M.
Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1994): ix.
a unique form […].”27 In both books, language alone has all the powers for
Foucault, for “[…] without names to identify them, things would remain in
darkness […],”28 another way to hint at “[…] the secretly linguistic structure
of the datum […].”29 In any case, these two statements, taken from each of
the books, seem perfectly interchangeable.
Foucault maintained that it was by chance that he had come across a
first edition of La Vue, a two-thousand-line poem published in 1902, in the
bookshop of publisher José Corti, and that he had never heard of Roussel
before. His book was reportedly written very quickly, in just a few weeks. All
this stresses the intended exteriority of the study, as though it lay outside the
great epistemological work, while suggesting that this is not the case at all.
The reading of Roussel’s writings by Foucault, who on this occasion would
give free rein to his most literary prose, comes down to a great intuition
or central thesis. Roussel’s secret, his famous metagram, by which letters
are substituted for one another, an open secret unveiled in How I Wrote
Certain of My Books, discloses but one thing: Roussel’s writing reveals the
profusion of language in the absence of a subject or function of author. It
is a literature of bare language, mechanically bare and without reference
to the real world, at once the totality of meaning and the nothing of death.
With Roussel’s suicide as a premise and perhaps haunted by it, Foucault
already draws up, if dimly, the logic of the end of man presented in The
Order of Things. Still, if Foucault manages, following a rather traditional
exegetic approach, to interpret all great novels and novellas relying on a
“process,” as he calls the Rousselian “machinery of language,”30 a form of
autopoiesis,31 he comes up against La Vue, which at first glance seems to
be the exception to this logic.
In La Vue, a narrator describes – in hyperrealistic manner, one might
say – the microphotograph of a panoramic beach scene inserted behind a
magnifying lens set in the body of a penholder invented by René Dagron.
A camera-pen of sorts before the camera-pen of Alexandre Astruc, the
microphotographic scene unfolds like the small Chinese paper dipped in a
bowl of water in Proust and, through this enlargement, gradually, hundreds
of lines, a monstrous change in scale, a demiurgic zoom give the landscape
the proportion, not only of a photographic panorama on a human scale, but
27 Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth 168.

29 Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic 199.
31 On the concept of autopoiesis, see Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis
and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (New York: Springer, 1991).
also of an immersive environment that surrounds the observer. The problem

for Foucault is twofold: how to minimize this optical mise en scène, with its
reality effect both corporeal and mediated, and how to show that the hyper-
realism of La Vue does not constitute an exception to the disintegration
of language carried out by Roussel in Locus Solus and New Impressions of
Africa. Foucault meticulously deconstructs the optical situation elaborated
in La Vue to demonstrate that Roussel’s hyperrealism is only sheer illusion:
the real and the living shrivel to a thin layer, the immobilization of the
visible, “a descriptive epidermis” which finds itself “completely frozen at the
heart of its apparent animation.”32 The drive behind the illusion, accord-
ing to Foucault, amounts to the organization of La Vue around verbs, the
verb “to be” in particular, whereas later texts undermined the ontological
operators that verbs are (as they always conceal the verb “to be”), to give in
to a purer form of repetition. The language of being has not yet given way
to the autopoetic productivity of impersonal language.
The demonstration, however, has the disadvantage of minimizing the
literary (and plausibly, affective) importance of La Vue for Foucault. He
accordingly proceeds to devote himself to the transmutation that forms
the core of his book: he transforms the optical mise en scène of La Vue into
the very figure of the metagrammatic process of later books:
How I Wrote Certain of My Books can be likened to the lens of La Vue: a

minuscule surface that must be penetrated by looking through it in order
to make visible a whole dimension disproportionate to it, and yet which
can neither be fixed, nor examined, nor preserved without it.33
Foucault repeats this metaphorization of the lens several times and even
gives the title “The Empty Lens” to the decisive chapter on Solus Locus and
New Impressions of Africa, which confirms the definitive break with the
ontology of La Vue.34 Foucault is thus able to dismiss an embarrassing ge-
netic problem, namely that New Impressions of Africa was precisely thought
of by Roussel as “[…] a follow up to my poem La Vue.”35 The stakes are also
high when it comes to the genealogy of the dispositif. By transforming the
ocular-textual dispositive of La Vue into a figure or pre-figure of the process,
32 Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth 139, 138.

34 Foucault is not much of a Hegelian, but there is an illustration of the Aufhebung, the Der-
ridian relève.
35 Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth 126. Foucault cites Roussel in this passage.
Foucault aimed to rid the textual of what he later called the non-discursive,
that is, in this instance, a panoptic architectural arrangement which, though
imaginary, distributes and regulates the sensible of the text from the inside,
as it were. This desire to isolate a pure literary discourse in a borderline text
thus assumes an eminently paradoxical character, since it foresees and in
a way circumscribes the outline of the non-discursive to come.
Still, it remains to be seen whether the originality of La Vue lies precisely
in this mix within the very text of the discursive and what exceeds it, that
is, of poetry and the cinema dispositive. This is where Foucault’s book, once
again, is engaged in a tacit debate with itself, a debate which suggests that
it is precisely against this possibility of the cinema as media and immersive
experience that the rise of the camera-pen to the status of a figure occurs.
Research on Roussel leaves no doubt as to the omnipresence of cinema in
his work.36 On the other hand, as is well-known, it is by pushing to the
extreme the instantaneity of photography – below the threshold of 1/20 of
a second – that the synthesis of chronophotographic prints may produce
the phi effect of cinema. Hence the paradox of photographic instantaneity
in La Vue, since describing the beach scene amounts to minutely mak-
ing visible the suspension of any natural, human and animal animation,
stumbling against each arrested movement, narrating the immediate past
and future of every gesture, in short, painting the kinetic and cinematic
picture from which the snapshot was suddenly snatched to be frozen. Let
us note that it is in large part the extreme length of the poem which re-
introduces duration in the photographic panorama: though anti-lyrical and
non-figural, the language of the poem ceaselessly leads back to movement
as the description progresses. From 1902 on, however, any photograph
could also be said to convey the potential shadow of cinema. Indeed, after
the emergence of cinema in its phase as “attractions,” that is, focusing the
attention of spectators on the very monstration of a film – not least by
launching a projection from a still image gradually set in motion by the
operator turning the crank – a potential of “becoming-film” was attached
to any instantaneous photograph. In fact, in 1902, a film was not yet called
a film, but a “moving view” or simply a “view,” and the title of the poem may
well refer to this expressly.
36 Michel Rebourg, “Entre graphe et scope: Roussel au cinéma,” Europe 714 (Oct. 1988): 131-38;
Kenji Kitayama, “Raymond Roussel et le cinéma des origines,” in Raymond Roussel 1, Anne-Marie
Amiot and Christelle Reggiani, eds. (Paris: Lettres modernes Minard, 2001): 157-81; Masachika
Tani, “La tentation du ralenti, l’image comme laboratoire de la mémoire roussellienne,” in
Raymond Roussel 2, Anne-Marie Amiot and Christelle Reggiani, eds. (Paris: Lettres modernes
Minard, 2002): 47-60.
Foucault engages in several joint operations to demonstrate that the view

is “a universe without perspective […] without consideration of reciprocal
proportion,”37 where everything is organized according to “surface effects,
not effects of depth.”38 He thus sets aside all effects of cinematographic ani-
mation and volume, such as magnification, slow motion, superimposition
of shots found in the cinema of the time, in films like Georges Méliès’s 1902
The Man with the Rubber Head or Richardson’s 1901 The Big Swallow.
Besides, and more directly, Foucault rejects the possibility that an optical
and technical mediation might operate within and on the text: “Although
access to it is through a glass lens […] it’s not to stress the interception of an
apparatus between the eye and what it sees,”39 that is, there is no camera
effect, no glass eye as evoked by Jean Epstein. Still, and almost unwillingly,
Foucault describes the sensible architectonics of the text in terms that
today inevitably bring to mind the so-called pre-cinematographic period:
This spectacle has an equivocal motion (half inspection, half parade)

where everything appears still, both eyes and landscape, but where
without guidelines, or design, or motor, they never stop moving, each in
relation to the other. 40
The mobile panoramas of the 1900 World Fair come to mind: the maréorama
on a Mediterranean liner, the cinéorama with several film projectors repro-
ducing an ascent in an aerostat or Pyasetsky’s simple unfolding panorama
of a journey on the Trans-Siberian railway. 41 One may wonder whether
Foucault knew of these precedents and had them in mind. An answer in the
negative would indicate how sharp his reading is, since they almost con-
tradict his argument. However, Foucault makes no mention of two capital
dimensions of Roussel’s poem: the play of gazes and the meta-commentary
of the poem on itself, which are connected, in my view. Here is an excerpt
devoted to a boy throwing a stick to his dog:
On the beach, a child stands by the edge; he throws

With speed, almost with violence
A bad piece of wood, coming from who knows where;

41 See Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997).
A dog whom pleasure and wait drive crazy,

Ahead of his toy, darts off
Towards the sea; in fact the piece of wood leaves
The right hand of the child at that very moment;
It is a thin fragment of board with a split
At one end; closing up tightly, the split
Forms a curve, following a slight slope,
But without stretching over much length. 42
We are thus in an absolute immobility, but on the verge of the motion, as if

on the reverse side of duration. Let’s note that the scene is described through
enlargement, since it zooms in from a long shot to a medium long shot to
an extreme close-up on the split on the piece of wood. Simultaneously, a
shift occurs from a simple ekphrasis to a description that takes the form
of a commentary on itself, as “without stretching over much length” is
exactly the opposite of the poem and its extreme length (69 pages!) or of the
passage on the stick leaving the boy’s hand (85 lines). The word “décrivant”
(“following”43), in “following a slight slope,” serves as a kind of pivot, since it
points to both the descriptive poem and a ballistic movement – the trajec-
tory of the stick, even if we will never “see” it – inscribing these two spectral
movements in the grain of the piece of wood itself. Roussel comes back to
this image of the stick leaving the boy’s hand three times, as in a sort of
crosscutting stressing the imminent yet impossible throw of the object.
More than 1,500 lines later, after surveying the scene, the poem presents a
group of vacationers fascinated by the sight of the same boy throwing his
stick to the dog, one more time, we might say, since it is after all a game
of repetition: “The four spectators, frozen, seem to be waiting/From the
edge of the jetty, above, for the outcome/Of its [the dog’s] next dive” (lines
2038-2040). This freezing, the temporalization of the moment, obviously
brings back to mind another jetty, Chris Marker’s La Jetée (the film was
released in 1962 as Foucault was writing his book). The same fascination,
the same astonished look freezes the observers: “[…] the great sincerity/Of
the interest keeping them in place is betrayed/In the gazes of all three of
them” (lines 2028-2030). The passage, it should be noted, mentions three
spectators even as the other cited excerpt, which follows it a few lines
further down, indicates four. Foucault states that the poem, pure language,
42 Raymond Roussel, Oeuvres, vol. 4 (Paris: Éditions Pauvert/Fayard, 1998) 37.

43 Translator’s note: in French the verb “décrire” means both “to describe” and “to follow” (a
trajectory, for instance).
displays a “visibility separate from being seen.”44 It would seem, rather,

that in this excess spectator, Roussel would reserve a place for readers/
spectators so as to attract them and move them within the immersive,
quasi-cinematographic space of the poem. Besides, an eyeline match is
involved in the passage, since the observers are described first, before the
observed scene is, separately, off the preceding frame. This eyeline match,
still unknown in the cinema in 1902, thus designates a dispositive insofar
as it brings together three types of “graphic methods,” to use Étienne-Jules
Marey’s expression: photography, cinematography and stylography. Rous-
sel insists on this, describing another child using binoculars to invite the
readers themselves explicitly to match this child’s visual target through an
imaginary dispositive:
Following through the air, in thought,

The fictitious straight line, supposedly
Described by its visual ray
One gets through a continuous path
To the opposite end; the view is blocked
Very far on the right, by a long jetty. 45
Not only are we back to the jetty, from which the characters, now including
us, look at the boy who is and is not throwing his stick; the match is also
established with “the fictitious straight line […] described,” which once more
evokes the long poem, its long jetty of a text in verse. The dispositive thus
consists in this eyeline match, which connects to the meta-commentary
of the poem on itself through a new type of textual apprehension that may
be called cinepoetics. What is more, line 1461 cites the title of the poem,
“the view,” suggesting that it is a film since it is “blocked,” or frozen. By
flattening the language of the poem in a visible without depth, it does seem
as though Foucault overlooked its dimension of cinepoetic dispositive so
as to better conclude:
It is the pen of La Vue, and none other, that will write the works using the
process, because it is the process, or to say it more precisely, its rebus: a
machine to show the reproduction of things, inserted within an instru-
ment for language. 46

45 Raymond Roussel, lines 1457-1462, Oeuvres 71.
And especially not the other way round: the language which cinema, the
“machine to show the reproduction of things,” would open on a new order
of meaning and sensibility. Answering a critical article on Discipline and
Punish in 1980, and speaking of Bentham’s panopticon, Foucault insisted
on the fact that “the automaticity of power, the mechanical character of
dispositifs that embody it is absolutely not the thesis of the book.” He added
that what was “automatic” was “precisely the machines planned, thought
out, imagined, dreamed perhaps, by people who by contrast did have a quite
specific identity.”47 It seems that Foucault, as early as his Death and the
Labyrinth, was anxious to neutralize the prosthetic, autonomous character
of the machinery involved in a dispositive, in order to focus on the way his
“language machines” operated.
I outline Foucault’s notion of dispositif in relation to poetry and its new
cinepoetic imaginary to make the argument that to reject poetry and liter-
ary criticism in a secondary, refracted sphere would amount to truncating
any thinking on the dispositive in order to give a prime position to the
epistemological framework and posit viewing and listening dispositives
as the privileged schemes of this framework. The (relative) neglect of the
cinepoetic in Death and the Labyrinth served as a point of departure for
Foucault in a new articulation of language, the visible and the living thanks
to which he was to move away from a systemic Structuralism, towards a
post-Structuralism of discursive formations and dispositifs. Certainly, the
theoretical slippage out of Structuralism and the slippage out of the system-
language seemed to go hand in hand with the emergence, the necessity of
the notion of dispositif.
In the introduction to a recent text by Olivier Quintyn, poetry theoreti-
cian Christophe Hanna proposed a double genealogy of the “dispositif,”
starting from Foucault on the one hand, from Lévi-Strauss on the other,
with the notion of bricolage. In his text, Hanna affixes a micropolitical
and poetic “dispositif” for recycling, de-linking and re-assembling to the
macropolitical dispositif of constraint and dictation present in Foucault. 48
As it happens, these two complementary poles are present in the genealogy
of the “dispositif” going back to the critical transformation of the notion
of text separating post-Structuralism from Structuralism. This is, for
instance, where Jean-François Lyotard’s Des dispositifs pulsionnels (1973)
may be situated, as the work extends towards the affect the “reversal” it
47 Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard - Quarto, 2001) 836-37.
48 Christophe Hanna, “Des collages comme tactiques critiques,” in Dispositifs/Dislocations,
ed. Olivier Quintyn (Marseille: Al Dante, 2007) 13-14.
saw at work between discourse and the materialism of the visible and the
corporeal in Discourse, Figure (1971), which openly broke with Structuralism.
It thus seemed that the line was thin between this stance and Jean-Louis
Baudry’s article, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the
Impression of Reality in the Cinema,” which revolutionized film studies
in 1975 and defined cinema as a paradigmatically technical, psychological
and ideological apparatus. 49
Still, this is perhaps going too fast, leaving aside the Nouveau Roman, in
particular Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur (1955), whose original title was to be
La Vue – as a tribute to Roussel, precisely – and whose influence Foucault
acknowledged several times. It is also often forgotten that Jean-Louis Ba-
udry is a novelist and literary critic. In 1964 for instance, under Foucault’s
direction and along with Claude Ollier, Jean-Pierre Faye, Philippe Sollers,
Marcelin Pleynet and a few others, he took part in a debate in Cerisy on
the issue of realism in the Nouveau Roman and in poetry, a debate that
seemed pervaded by the still vague realization that this new realism had
to do with a re-mediation through film. By Foucault’s own admission in
“The Language of Space,”50 published shortly after the event, the Nouveau
Roman represented a new type of text permeated by the film apparatus. He
thus detected a mobile gaze, a camera’s gaze in Claude Ollier’s Été indien,
for “some of these movements are extended, they reverberate, they are
displaced or frozen by photographs, still views, film fragments.”51 We should
in fact wonder what these “still views” refer to, as they are reminiscent of the
title of Roussel’s poem and strangely come in between photo and cinema.
Foucault continues:
For this gaze is not neutral; it seems to leave things where they are; in
fact, it “samples” them, virtually detaching them from themselves in
their thickness, in order to make them enter in the composition of a
film that does not exist and whose scenario itself is not chosen. These
“views,” undecided but “optioned,” between the things they no longer
49 Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), and Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Galilée,
1994); Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression
of Reality in Cinema,” trans. Jean Andrews and Bernard Augst, Camera Obscura 1 (Fall 1976),
reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo Braudy, eds.
(Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1992).
50 Michel Foucault, “Le langage de l’espace,” Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 338-406.
51 Foucault, “Le langage de l’espace,” Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 410.
are and the film that is not yet, form the framework of the book, along
with language.52
Even as the work of the camera is called “prise de vues” (“taking of views”)
in French, the trade term would be “rushes” rather than “views”: one may
wonder whether Foucault, analyzing Ollier’s writing in the very terms of the
imaginary cinepoetics he had denied Roussel, is not acknowledging – after
the fact – that Roussel’s “view” already detached things from the thin layer
of the visible left or traced by language alone, to imagine this “virtual” and
this “not yet” as a filmic non-discourse, which would then compose “with
language” to form a proto-dispositif.
The early 1960s were to be marked by the publication of two important
works in the history of the place of the film dispositives in writing, Robbe-
Grillet’s “cine-novel,” Last Year in Marienbad (1961), and the published
and revised script of Hiroshima Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras, both
novelizations of films by Alain Resnais. This did not represent a major
innovation, however, as novelization was an old genre dating back to the
1910s and a f ilmmaker such as Jean Cocteau had authored a beautiful
novelization of Blood of a Poet in 1947.53 Moreover, the publication of a
script with a theoretical bent in the postwar period came from Lettrism,
as Maurice Lemaître novelized Has the Film Already Started? in 1952,
with a preface by Isidore Isou every bit as theoretical.54 The difference is
that Resnais’s novelizations were released by major publishers and reached
a wide audience. Accordingly, experiences of intermedial grafts of the film
“dispositif” on literature thus became a sign of the period; this, in my view,
led thinkers such as Baudry and later Foucault to expand the notion – as
“apparatus” and as dispositif, respectively.
Derrida should be credited with formulating this extension, or rather, dis-
semination of the “dispositif,” as well as complicating its putative historicity.
In “The Double Session” (1969), reprinted as part of Dissemination (1973),
Derrida engages in a complex and multivalent meditation centered on the
notion of the “dispositif” as a junction between the text and its outside.
Derrida questions the place and status of the preface with respect to the
text (in Hegel and Novalis), while prefacing his own cross-reading of the
52 Foucault, “Le langage de l’espace,” Dits et écrits, vol. 2, 410.

53 Jean Cocteau, Two Screenplays: Blood of a Poet and The Testament of Orpheus (London:
Marion Boyars, 2000).
54 Maurice Lemaître, Le film est déjà commencé? séance de cinéma (Paris: Éditions André
Bonne, 1952).
works of Mallarmé and Philippe Sollers. To Derrida, the issue is also to dispel
the misunderstanding on the “outside of the text,” absurdly interpreted
as a denial of reality by his critics, as he writes for instance that “the text
affirms the outside […]” insofar as it refuses to be an “inside” tamed by
referential reduction and the ontological discrediting of literature. At issue
is the opening of the text to the outside of the text, but within the text, to
find “a different placement of the effects of opening and closing”55 between
the text and the outside. Derrida thus defends a view of the literary text
as a “dispositif” intervening between the text and the outside of the text,
contrary to thematic criticism for instance, in which any power to draw
the line between text and outside is reserved for the (outside) world of the
critic. In a sense, it is this new ontological status of the actantial text which
Derrida summarizes in his preface with the formula “the apparatus explains
itself.”56 More specifically, it is a self-quotation of his own commentary on
Sollers’s Nombres:
This apparatus explains itself. Its self-explanatoriness does not imply,

however, that one can explain it, that it can be comprehended by an
outside observer: rather, it itself explains itself and already comprehends
any observer whatever.57
This interaction or inter-inclusion thus brings together “the defining con-

stants of viewing and listening dispositives – the spectator, the machinery
and the representation,” as Albera and Tortajada write.58 These components
turn the text into a dispositive explained in Derrida, and which approaches
both Roussel’s more implicit dispositive and the virtual dispositif identified
by Foucault in Ollier.
The works of Mallarmé and Sollers for which Derrida shows more par-
ticular interest have to do with a spectacle, or better still, with a protocol
that involves turning the text into a spectacle – this being performed by the
text itself. Yet for Derrida this spectacle exceeds the model of the theater
to appear closer to the film dispositive – with a cinema inter-grafted with
writing, the materiality of the book and the polysemy of the text. Thus
the “outside of the book” of the preface becomes, in “the double session,”
55 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London, New York: Continuum,
2004) 28. The emphasis is Jacques Derrida’s.
56 Derrida, Dissemination 38.
58 Albera and Tortajada, “The 1900 Episteme” 35.
the fourth side of the theatrical cube, as well as the veil, the hymen, the
projection of images and finally the screen, a word which bridges between
Mallarmé and Sollers. This leads Derrida to refer to a text by Mallarmé
on dance as “cinematographic acrobatics”59 and note Mallarmé’s 1897
statement on cinema, a statement overlooked by the entire Mallarmean
criticism. Without even being aware of the scope of the far-ranging medita-
tion around cinema as a dispositive in which Mallarmé engaged in his last
poetics,60 Derrida thus posited the film dispositive as the interface, internal
to the text and enabling it to negotiate its own relations with its outside.
My point here is not to explain Derrida’s dispositive-book further. I
simply want to suggest that his own notion of the dispositive allows him to
recognize in the cross-poetics of Mallarmé and Sollers what Foucault came
close to acknowledging in Roussel’s poetics: the interweaving of poetry and
techniques specific to the film dispositif as such – and consequently of the
discursive and the non-discursive. By way of conclusion, I would say, on the
one hand, that the interwoven cinepoetics in Roussel and its paradoxical
reading by Foucault fully belong in the genealogy and historicity of the
“dispositif”; and on the other hand, that this genealogy and historicity also
involves, with Cros and Baudelaire, a mode of epistemic inclusion of the
film dispositive inscribed in the archeology of “pre-cinema,” but which does
not solve the telic difficulties that the term keeps raising.

60 See Christophe Wall-Romana, “Mallarmé’s Cinepoetics: The Poem Uncoiled by the Ciné-
matographe,” PMLA 120.1 (Jan. 2005): 128-47.
Archaeology and Spectacle
Old Dispositives and New Objects for Surprised Spectators
Stopping by the Museum1
Viva Paci
To examine the notion of the dispositive and identify its place in contem-
porary practices at the intersection of two institutions, Cinema and the
Museum, this text proposes a progression through a few individual cases,
with the outlines of a study. This may appear as lacking in discipline with
regard to the call for papers for the conference “Dispositifs de vision et
d’audition” (Université de Lausanne, May 29-31, 2008), which was the first
step in the present work. The call underlined how the study of a series
of isolated cases would risk “perpetuating the ambiguity of encounters
in which epistemological questioning remains peripheral to descriptive,
factual presentations that do not allow us to get the measure of this new
configuration of knowledge involving our objects.” For my part, I see case
studies as a rather necessary approach when it comes to analyzing contem-
porary trends and more particularly the rich, booming trend of the cinema
“going to the museum.” A second step consists in analyzing how the bounds
of the cinematographic institution may more generally be exceeded; this
text constitutes an initial benchmark in this research program.
1 The talk presented in Lausanne in 2008 is part of a research project, “Entre attractions et
musée: cinéma, exposition et nouvelles technologies,” which was made possible by a two-year
post-doctoral fellowship (Aug. 2008-Aug. 2010) from the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur
la société et la culture (FQRSC). My research project is affiliated with the Department of Art
History and Communication Studies at McGill University, and more specifically with William
Straw’s work. This talk was also part of the research carried out at the GRAFICS (Université de
Montréal). I wish to thank Ernie Gehr, Ron Magliozzi (Film Study Center, Department of Film
and Media, MoMA) and Alberto Zotti (Università di Padova, Museo del precinema, Collezione
Minici Zotti), for the iconographic material necessary in the preparation of this article; and
Haidee Wasson and Martin Lefebvre (Concordia University) for their comments.
380 Viva Paci
Attraction (as Prism or as Shutter)
A theoretical category,2 that of attraction – which was central to my doctoral

dissertation3 – provides a viable point of entry to examine the new media
configurations exceeding the institution of film and putting into play the
now unalienable relations between cinema and digital technologies (includ-
ing in the specific context of the exhibition). I developed the category out
of Eisenstein’s canonical texts and the debates on the new historiography
on early cinema, but also from a set of other writings, Shklovsky’s writings
on poetic language and literary theories of description, the writings of
the school of photogeny or the debates on distanciation in the theater.
“Attraction” allowed me to examine things in great detail and to think
of cinema from a standpoint distinct from its capacity for storytelling. I
studied its original qualities as a seeing machine, one that generated a new,
fragmentary, astounding way of seeing – and as a result engendered a true
epiphany of the world: a machine producing vision and making it possible to
look at things, but also as a machine to see, which early on (as well as today,
but in a different way) was the thing to see. Indeed, the cinematograph itself,
a machine to tame reality, domitor,4 was one of the many attractions of a late
century and its legacy of amazing artifacts and innovative machines… The
qualities of seeing machine and machine to see are the original qualities of
cinema, which looks at things and shows them. Besides bringing attention
on its own machinery, it exposes its technique; makes cuts into space and
extols fragments of it; stops time, captures it and faithfully reproduces it
for the spectator of the film as pure presence; transforms a continuous
flow into bits of present, ephemeral yet repeatable; stretches out the time
of seeing and magnifies some aspects and qualities of reality in the eyes of
the spectator, thereby singling them out; addresses spectators by assaulting
their senses, meanwhile ordering, governing, arranging (“disposant,” in
French); finally, to echo some definitions of the apparatus, from Jean-Louis
2 In this instance, “category” refers both to a fundamental concept of understanding and the
common meaning of “class” (the expression “cinema of attractions” proposes a true class, albeit
one with irregular outlines, which I will be specifying throughout this research).
3 Viva Paci, “De l’attraction au cinéma,” diss., Université de Montréal, 2007.
4 It is a well-known fact today that one of the names proposed by Antoine Lumière for the new
appliance that was to be the Cinématographe was “domitor” (the “triumphant victor,” in Latin):
taming, and therefore subjecting and ordering a real that had remained wild and uncontrollable
until the advent of this regulative device. See Philippe Dujardin, “Domitor ou l’invention du
quidam,” in L’Aventure du cinématographe, proceedings of the World Conference on Lumière
(Lyons: Aléas, 1999): 265-77.
Baudry5 to Jean-François Lyotard,6 cinema projects the fantasies of the

audience onto a screen.
In my reading, the dispositive of cinema, by its “nature,” works as an
attraction – an attraction which may well live on and not be exhausted
past its f irst decades and common narrative forms (even if, for the new
historiography, the model of a cinema of attractions was primarily
the model best suited to account for the f irst years of cinema). Some
practices related to cinema, some moments in its history, some genres
are certainly more likely to reveal this genuine attractional “nature” of
the dispositive.
What is taking place these days with the increasingly important place of
the cinema in the museum, following the thread that connects cinema and
attraction, is a phenomenon which, precisely, maintains a strong connection
between cinema and attraction. My thinking on “cinema, exhibition, and
museum”7 is thus positioned in a different lineage than that founded on
classifications and on very contemporaneous discourses on the relations
cinema/museum, often pervaded by the hierarchies of the contemporary
art world.8 These discourses mainly emphasize a definition of the “new”
related to the new technologies allegedly creating immersive environments.
Instead, the relation ought to be thought of in terms of archaeology: each
new technology, in its own time, shares something with other contemporary
5 Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of

Reality in Cinema” [1975], in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip
Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 299-318.
6 Jean-François Lyotard, “Acinema,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Theory Reader,
ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 349-59. On Lyotard, cinema and
apparatus, see Aut Aut 338, Antonio Costa and Raoul Kirchmayr, eds., “L’acinema di Lyotard”
(Apr.-June 2008).
7 Considering the growing contribution of cinema and filmmakers to the museum – a con-
tribution sought by museums all over the world, for various reasons – it seems more and more
pressing to question this relation as broadly as possible, a task so far partly taken up by a few
scholars who have occasionally examined some of the boundaries between the two modes of
expression and the two worlds that are cinema and the museum. See, for instance, Dominique
Païni, Le Temps exposé. Le cinéma de la salle au musée (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2002); Giuliana
Bruno, Public Intimacy. Architecture and Visual Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007); Fluid
Screens, Expanded Cinema, Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord, eds. (Toronto: U of Toronto
Press, 2007); Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive
View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
8 See “Cinéma et art contemporain,” ed. Philippe Dubois, Cinéma & Cie 8 (Fall 2006); and
“Cinéma et art contemporain II,” ed. Philippe Dubois, Cinéma & Cie 10 (2008).
382 Viva Paci
technologies, and each new technology should be thought of in its own

present historicity.9
A few examples of exhibitions of film and on film shed light on the
phenomenon: “Projections. Les transports de l’image” (Le Fresnoy, 1998);
“Future Cinema. The Cinematic Imaginary after Film” (Zentrum für
Kunst und Medientechnologie, ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2002-2003); “X-Screen.
Film Installations and Actions of the 1960s and 1970s” (Museum Moderner
Kunst, MUMOK, Vienna, 2003-2004); “Cinema Like Never Before” (Generali
Foundation, Vienna, 2006); “Beyond Cinema: the Art of Projection. Films,
Videos and Installations from 1963 to 2005” (Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin,
2006-2007); “Visual Tactics” (Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, 2008-
2009).10
A summary consideration of this list of exhibitions and their main
features suggests that they involve different forms of exhibiting novelties.
These novelties put three temporalities into play simultaneously. Each
of the exhibited dispositives is related to other, past dispositives; each
attests to the technological present that made its manufacturing possible;
and at the same time, each seems to want to prefigure future technical
possibilities.
The technological bric-a-brac related to cinema, when exhibited in
the context of a museum, is often staged as experimentation on the
future possibilities of cinema. However, in my reading, it appears as the
content of a display cabinet of yesteryear where finds from the past are
exhibited, a link to the past of cinema. This cinema going to the museum,
for reasons and in ways I will start mapping out here, repeats the original
characteristics of the dispositive, when everything was founded on the
attraction.
9 See Haidee Wasson, “New and Now: A Plea for Historiography and Technology,” Reconstruc-
tion 4.1, “Technology & Historiography, or, The Science Fiction of Everyday Life” (Spring 2004);
and Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, “What’s New About New Media,” in New Media
1740-1915, Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree, eds. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003)
XI-XXII.
10 Incidentally, the museal institutions that organized these exhibitions are different in
nature: contemporary art museums, centers specializing in current art, private galleries. The
presence of cinema in all these usual spheres of contemporary art stresses the now inseparable
associations between the two worlds of cinema and art exhibitions, regardless of the judgments
placed on these associations.
Passages (from Cinema to the Museum)
Besides these collective and highly technological exhibitions, a range of

modalities exists for “exhibited cinema.”11
A first modality involves contemporary directors (Marker, Varda, Kia-
rostami, Erice, Godard, Greenaway, and so forth) moving into the museum
or the gallery as an extension of their practice as filmmakers, sometimes
exhibiting re-mediations or fragments of their film work. Another modality
consists in the mise en scène of cinema in the museum (with the exhibitions
on Hitchcock, Cocteau, Disney, Warhol, and so forth). A third modality
would include the use of film images by visual artists (Pierre Huyghe,
Pipilotti Rist, Douglas Gordon, Matthew Barney).
In spite of their diversity, these phenomena may be compared to one
another in the way they emphasize the centrality of the cinematographic
dispositive in the exhibited work, its status as a disclosed element, the center
of attention and an object of the look (here “dispositive” is also considered
in its complex interweaving of recording, projection and reception, and
consequently of an imaginary dimension…). In all three typologies of the
presence of cinema in the museum, it is possible to outline a phenomenon
of “reuse of cinema” in various forms, and in particular of the cinema as
novelty. Through the remodeling of the dispositive, the cinema is thus
reduced to “a new invention,” even a hundred years after its invention, and
presented as an attraction. This phenomenon is particularly evident and
self-conscious in exhibitions such as the ones I have previously mentioned
(“Projections. Les transports de l’image,” “Future Cinema. The Cinematic
Imaginary after Film,” “X-Screen. Film Installations and Actions of the
1960s and 1970s,” “Cinema Like Never Before,” “Beyond Cinema: the Art of
Projection. Films, Videos and Installations from 1963 to 2005,” and “Visual
Tactics”), as well as in a significant number of other exhibitions over the
past ten years.
These collective, spectacular, and highly technological exhibitions seem
to draw from the memory of World Fairs: with their small-scale production,
exhibited objects, even though they evoke possible practices, are often (if
not always) on the side of the prototype, of dispositives not designed for
11 On “exhibited cinema” (in the sense of a museum exhibition), see François Albera, “Ar-
chéologie de l’intermédialité: SME/CD-ROM, l’apesanteur,” in Cinémas 10.2-3, “Intermédialité et
cinéma” (2000): 27-38; Projections. Les transports de l’image, ed. Dominique Païni (Paris: Hazan/
Le Fresnoy, 1997); Dominique Païni, Le Temps exposé. Le cinéma de la salle au musée (Paris:
Cahiers du cinéma, 2002); Philippe Dubois, La Question vidéo. Entre cinéma et art contemporain
(Brussels: De Boeck Université, 2007).
384 Viva Paci
industrial mass-production. These exhibitions thus propose a new, more

ample spatialization of the nineteenth-century curio cabinet: they are
presented as contexts where the conditions of an emphasis on cinema as a
“machine to see,” and therefore as an attraction, play out.
The principle of the exhibition commands the very idea, first, of the
cinematograph, later, of cinema. On the one hand, exhibiting the writing
of movement on a two-dimensional surface was quite simply what con-
stituted attraction. On the other hand, originally, the machine to project
images was often exhibited as an attraction. Then, the movie theater (once
it became institutional, with the institution imposing a discipline on the
spectators) was the place where the film itself was exhibited. These days,
now that it has moved outside the screening space and f inds itself in
various exhibition spaces – or on mediums for individual viewing, which
is not unrelated to what interests me here – cinema no longer addresses
spectators univocally. Instead, spectators are each time asked to adopt
a new posture: moving, looking through complex dispositives to see the
image, using one’s own body to activate the image, or being confronted
with the microscopic or macroscopic dimensions of the moving image.
Spectators, who often become visitors, no longer have to be absorbed in
the story of a film, yet they are captivated and even assaulted by frag-
ments of spectacle, surprised by what is exhibited before their eyes and
the sophistication of technology. Faced with technique, these visitors are
much more in a position of contemplation (technique becomes apparent,
in a manner not unlike the process of singularization articulated by
Shklovsky, and produces distance) than in one of immersion, as techno-
pop discourses on the relations between arts and technologies tend to
suggest.
The works presented in the aforementioned exhibitions were introduced
through a deliberately conspicuous use of the technology on which they
were built. These technologies, presented in a majority of cases as the
“future of cinema,” did in fact quite explicitly refer to its origins.
Origins (in a Dispositive)
The pivotal idea in my reading of the notion of the dispositive, one that
is to give it specificity, is that the origins of cinema have been revived by
works that are apparently inscribed in a representation of the future. A
dispositive, which is more than a machine, also holds an imaginary; and
the archaeology of cinema does indeed belong in the imaginary of cinema.
André Gaudreault has argued that the cinematograph as a dispositive has a

lot to do with other dispositives, and that the resulting ensemble has little
to do with the CINEMA of the institution that followed the years of the
cinematograph. While I find this reading quite appealing, I still want to
emphasize that, even after cinema consolidated as an institution, CINEMA
never stopped looking back and holding fast to a past, the attraction, for all
kinds of reasons (historical, technological, fetishistic, and in my view, onto-
logical). The attraction thus became its past, a rather pre-cinematographic
past even, sometimes quite different from the paying public projection of
photographic elements… I would add that no teleology is to be found in
this proposition; on the contrary, it involves reflecting on anachronism
and the return of history.
Since the scenography of dispositives calls up memory and fantasies, I
want to discuss two examples to better identify the phenomena and symp-
toms of this return to origins. They involve two exhibitions presented at the
Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York by its Department of Film and
Media. The MOMA, evidently a museum institution, also has a long history
of accommodating cinema in the museum: its Film Library was founded in
1934, two years before the Cinémathèque française.12 Presented almost at
the same time, these two exhibitions on cinema, “Artscape and Zoetrope”
(Pixar, MOMA, 2005) and “Ernie Gehr’s Panoramas of the Moving Image”
(Ernie Gehr, MOMA, 2006) come from two very distinct “film institutions,”13
commercial animation film and experimental cinema.
Simply examining the keywords in the titles, zoetrope and panorama,
suggests which imaginary is evoked by the two exhibitions. In the relation
to the spectator, these put back in play the original conditions of cinema as a
“machine to see,” using the technology that supports them in a deliberately
ostentatious manner. Interestingly, these technologies, while shown as part
of cinema (from two different domains, both equally cinematographic,
experimental film and animation), are actually revived from an archaeology
called pre-cinema. Again, this aspect complements my proposition as to the
definition of a dispositive: the dispositive involves more than a machine, for
12 See Heidee Wasson, Museum Movies. The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema
(Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005); and Ronald S. Magliozzi, “Film
Archiving as a Profession: An Interview with Eileen Bowser,” The Moving Image 3.1 (Spring 2003):
132-46.
13 The expression is borrowed from Roger Odin, who has proposed that the different kinds of
film production be approached in terms of “institutions.” See Roger Odin, “Sémio-pragmatique
du cinéma et de l’audiovisuel: modes et institutions,” in Toward a Pragmatics of the Audiovisual,
ed. Jürgen E. Müller (Münster: Nodus, 1994): 33-47.
386 Viva Paci
the arrangement with a view to an effect and the assurance of a controlled

and orderly operation could just as well be performed by a machine. The
exhibitions I have examined, and which have helped me outline this idea of
the dispositive, show how dispositives deploy a whole arsenal of references
to the past, archaeological evocations, diachronic relations between past
and future. They present machines that incidentally “fantasize” original
dispositives. Indeed, the dispositive – besides enjoying the prerogatives of
a machine – also meets the need to give an imaginary a new lease of life
and to produce ideas (this follows in the same direction as that opened
by Jean-François Lyotard’s thought on dispositifs pulsionnels, or affective
systems).
“Artscape and Zoetrope” (Pixar, MOMA, 2005)
“Artscape” and “Zoetrope” are two original works conceived by Pixar Studios
to be shown in a large exhibition on the art of digital animation at the
MoMA (also promoted by the same studios), “Pixar: 20 years of animation.”
Seeing the event as the last word in merchandising would not be far
from the truth. After all, Pixar has been part of a discourse on the future
of images and has positioned itself at the cutting edge in the creation of
computer-generated images since the 1980s (not to mention the market
of tie-in products, from video games to toothbrushes…). However, on the
occasion of the exhibition, the representation of the company and museum
policy had Pixar’s brand of animation inscribed in an old tradition and
turned toward the past. Pixar was thus working towards its legitimization,
associating itself with the horizon of the craftsman-creator, the Bazinian
“do-it-yourself man” of the origins of cinema,14 to carve out a place for itself
in the space of the museum. The studio also went quite far back in a history
that had to do with the dispositive of cinema, its memory and its imaginary.
Any caesura between the strips of an 1833 zoetrope or the discs of an 1879
zoopraxinoscope, exhibited in any museum nowadays, and Pixar’s “cels,”
thus disappeared… While, on the one hand, optical toys are to be related
to animation, in a lineage which actually skips cinema and its projection of
14 In “The Myth of Total Cinema,” Bazin refers to the “inventors” of cinema as “monomani-

acs […] do-it-yourself men.” See André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley,
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004): 17.
moving photographic images,15 on the other hand, cinema, in this instance,

clearly asks for ancestors when stopping by the museum…
The two works call for a brief description. A widescreen projection and
a panorama of sorts, “Artscape,” created by Andrew Jimenez (image) and
Gary Rydstrom (sound), presents a few forms central to the first images
of the cinematograph. The famous first accounts of the Lumière views
reported that what astounded and created emotion was – among other
things – the movement of the leaves in the trees. In the 3D panorama of
“Artscape,” nature is evidently not what appears and is celebrated; rather,
technology itself is shown, underlined, extolled even for its ability to pro-
duce a random movement. “Artscape” is indeed a new type of panorama
in which movement is part of what is represented: a transformation of the
relations between the various illustrations of this panorama occurs through
a transformation of the “pictorial” image into the colored fragments of a
kaleidoscope. A spate of images occupies the space of the projection and
recombines in a new panorama.
“Zoetrope” is a carrousel comprising three-dimensional figurines (char-
acters from Toy Story). Through rotation and the addition of a strobe
lighting serving as the equivalent of a zoetrope slit, the carrousel creates
a perfect impression of fluid and continuous movement 16 as it plays with
persistence of vision and the phi effect.17 The polygonal glass booth in
which the carrousel is placed evokes the form of the polygonal mirrors
inside the praxinoscope.
15 In his talk at the Lausanne conference in 2008, Michel Frizot argued along the same lines,
pointing out that it was possible to draw a straight line from chronophotography to 3D images.
16 For video recordings of the animated work, see private videos such as the one available
here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=OrIgwSxZDcc&feature=related [last accessed on August
12, 2012].
17 A visual artist who had already worked on the same imaginary is Gregory Barsamian
(http://www.gregorybarsamian.com/). An heir to the zoetrope and an explorer of the phi ef-
fect, Barsamian made three-dimensional animated models with plaster figurines of angels,
helicopters and other objects in Putti (1993). Animation and continuity were produced for the
spectator thanks to the phi effect; 13 sculptures per second rotated above spectators in a dimly
lit space, with strobe lighting filling in the gaps between one image and the next to give the
impression of a continuous motion turning the little angels into helicopters. There, as in cinema,
sculpture became an art of time taking shape through rhythm. See my text, “Cinematographic
Traces,” in Images from the Future: Lost and Found in the Images du Futur collection (2004),
available at http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=690 [both sites
were last accessed on August 12, 2012].
388 Viva Paci
“Ernie Gehr’s Panoramas of the Moving Image” (MOMA, 2006)
The name of experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr is a reminder of the

relation between experimental cinema and the origins of cinema, already
pointed out several times. The fondness of filmmakers of the 1960s American
avant-garde for views in early cinema should certainly be partly understood
as a break away from Hollywood’s industrial codification. But it is mostly
these filmmakers’ interest in the original qualities of the dispositive that
oriented underground film towards the Cinématographe.
One of the careful observers of this return to early images and the advent
of cinema, Tom Gunning, gave a lecture at the Whitney Museum some thirty
years ago and proposed a scientific metaphor to define this familiarity be-
tween early cinema and American avant-garde film (and more particularly
Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, and Hollis Frampton). He ironically suggested that
the phenomenon should be named pseudomorphism. Indeed, in science,
a mineral is defined as pseudomorphic when its appearance is identical
to that of another mineral even if its molecular structure is completely
different…18 In other words, experimental cinema, as seen through the
lens of the “cinema of monstrative attractions,” to borrow Gaudreault and
Gunning’s term, reveals aspects which would otherwise remain concealed.
The contributions of theoreticians-historians such as Paul Adams Sitney
or Bart Testa should also be mentioned for their comparative approach
between early cinema and experimental film.
Likewise, some curators have speculated on this parallel. On the occa-
sion of a 2005 retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives in New York,
Bruce Posner did, for instance, present early films and avant-garde films
side by side, so to speak – not to outline a hierarchy or an evolution, but to
emphasize their similarities.19
18 Tom Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: To Space in Early Film and Its Relation
to American Avant-Garde Film,” in Film Before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (Berkeley, Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1983): 356. Gunning also said that he had come to compare the
American avant-garde and early cinema because many of the experimental filmmakers he
was looking at included fragments of early films in their own work (again, Ken Jacobs, Ernie
Gehr, Hollis Frampton). He added that his own encounter with the underground also gave him
a different outlook on early films.
19 A seven-DVD set came out of the Anthology’s 2005 retrospective, as well as a publication
by the same title: Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941, ed. Bruce Posner
(New York: Anthology Film Archives, 2005).
Creators themselves have this proximity as a motivation and look for

it in some cases. Jonas Mekas is fond of the Lumière views,20 for instance,
and once dedicated Walden (1969) to Lumière: the six-reel film comprises
shots joined end to end – in short, views, often unipunctual and edited
in vivo, in the camera itself. Mekas is a filmmaker-cameraman, almost
manually so, someone filming as in the time period of the Lumière brothers,
not in the manner established by the industry later. The relations to early
cinema generally revolve around the re-appropriation by underground
filmmakers of an imaginary of cinema in which adventures of perception
predominate, to borrow Stan Brakhage’s expression,21 and where the very
act of seeing is emphasized. Indeed, another trend of the underground,
called structural film,22 also maintains close ties with the state of early
cinema, a state strongly related to its dispositive. These films were made
with a number of dispositive-related effects: camera on tripod, a looped
series of film frames, flicker, re-recording of images projected on a screen
and re-photographing with an optical printer.
Ernie Gehr’s films do belong in this category and the films he made in
direct relation to early films, from Lumière through Méliès to the urban
views of the Biograph/Mutoscope, include The Astronomer’s Dream
(2004), Essex Street Market (2004), Workers Leaving the Factory
(After Lumière) (2004),23 Cotton Candy (2002), Side/Walk/Shuttle
(1991), Eureka (1974).
Duration, but more particularly the point of view and the construction of
space, are areas of research for Gehr,24 just as they were decisive sites in the
20 Scott McDonald notes this in Avant-Garde Film. Motion Studies as he points out Mekas’s
interest for the imaginary field opened by home movies, notably the films featuring the Lumière
family, addressing a private sphere but whose use is both private and public. Views by Lumière
and Mekas are the views of do-it-yourself men. See Scott McDonald, Avant-Garde Film. Motion
Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 11.
21 “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compo-
sitional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know
each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.” Stan Brakhage, Metaphors
on Vision (1963; New York: Film Culture, 1976): unpaginated. In short, this is cinema in which
the act of seeing is underlined by the emphasis on a “machine to see,” films before which the
spectator is confronted directly to the disclosure of the mechanical look that produced the film.
22 In Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000, Paul Adams Sitney def ines the
formal characteristics of the structural film.
23 This seminal view of the Lumière brothers repeatedly left its mark on the imaginary of
experimental cinema. See for instance Harun Farocki’s film Workers Leaving the Factory
(1995) and his video installation Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades (2006).
24 On Gehr’s work, see Films of Ernie Gehr (San Francisco Cinematheque, 1993), with texts by
Tom Gunning, Daniel Eisenberg, Susan Thackrey, Robert Becklen and program notes by Ernie
390 Viva Paci
elaboration of early cinema. Side/Walk/Shuttle is a perfect example and

may be considered as the experimental reuse of Panorama of Flatiron
Building (1903), produced by The American Mutoscope and Biograph
Company, evoked by Tom Gunning.25
What happens when, in order to celebrate a filmmaker, a museum such
as the MoMA invites the filmmaker in question to present his work? Ernie
Gehr arrived at the MoMA with his collections of “fragments of disposi-
tives” from the nineteenth century, like a trail of bread crumbs followed
by cinema to go back in its history, to the origins, and get exhibited. The
central element of the exhibition was the digital projection – five horizontal
projections on the same screen – of details from magic lantern plates (simple
or double, and moving) with a digital reproduction of the old mechanical
movement which the projection of multiple plates with the magic lantern
could produce. Next to this multi-screen projection, another – flat – screen
showed two chromatrope effects set up in parallel. Besides these projections
and the transmission of a given movement by optical toys, a series of glass
display cases presented zoetrope and praxinoscope strips as well as phen-
akistoscope discs. This old mode of specimen presentation, coming after
taxidermy, is reminiscent of a certain “mummy complex” which cinema,
according to Bazin, could not dispense with… I am comparing the exhibition
mode of these bits of dispositive with taxidermy simply because the modern
museum practice of taxidermy26 consists in freezing life, as though caught
in the midst of a movement,27 to exhibit it and prolong it. Likewise, when
André Bazin wrote of cinema as “change mummified” in “The Ontology of
the Photographic Image,” he associated these same qualities: preserving
life in its most vivid actions to exhibit it by showing it.
“Ernie Gehr’s Panoramas of the Moving Image” was an exhibition where
cinema showed and staged its dispositive, with all the imaginary and the
memory mobilized by it. Even if the exhibition was originally meant to
celebrate cinema in the museum through the work of a filmmaker (as was
Gehr; and Bart Testa, Back and Forth. Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde, already mentioned.
25 Again, I refer the reader to Tom Gunning, “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: To Space in
Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film.”
26 I presented a paper on the subject, “Taxidermie: réflexions sur cinéma et musée,” at the
Eleventh International Conference of the Research Center on Intermediality (CRI), “Muséalité
et intermédialité: nouveaux paradigmes des musées,” Oct. 28-31, 2009, Society for Arts and
Technology (SAT), Montreal.
27 See Carl Akeley’s dioramas of natural habitats in the late twentieth century. See also Mark
Alvey, “The Cinema as Taxidermy: Carl Akeley and the Preservative Obsession,” Journal of Film
and Media 48.1 (2007): 23-45.
the exhibition on the production of an animation studio), the objects of

pre-cinema exhibited, optical toys, are not really related to the institu-
tion of film. They did not involve a paying public projection of moving
photographic images. What is more, optical toys were a form of bourgeois
pastime, whereas cinema was a popular spectacle. Still, for us today, these
materials of pre-cinema belong to the memory and imaginary of cinema.
For both the Pixar and the Ernie Gehr exhibitions, and for various rea-
sons, the issue was to show elements of the dispositive of cinema. For Pixar,
the connection with cinema – through its imaginary, where optical toys
have a place – provided a point of entry into “highbrow” culture (cinema and
its history, now able to enter the museum), while establishing a link with
craftsmanship to stress how even computer-generated animation films are
the product of human genius. For Ernie Gehr’s exhibition, again, the idea of
exhibiting the cinema within the museum turned into the monstration of
its dispositive. In this dispositive of the origins, the experimental filmmaker
also seemed to find the very roots of his work, where the decomposition of
movement and the reconstruction of an effect occupy a place as central as
it was in his structural cinema.
My aim in this article has been to observe and study the directions fol-
lowed by cinema when “going to the museum.” The phenomenon is also,
more generally, contemporary with the fact that film is stretching beyond
the limits of the institution of cinema. The theme involves many territories
besides the museum. It is possible, in my view, to question the role and
the place of spectacle, of some new hybrid objects, between media and
mediums, used in the distribution of moving images – from cell phones to
mp3 players that make it possible to store and to view these moving images.
In a long history of spectacular uses of technical objects, formal lineages
could then emerge.
When exhibited outside the boundaries of its institution, at the museum
for instance, and even in the case of futuristic dreams made palpable by
exhibitions such as Future Cinema or Cinema Like Never Before, cinema
stages dispositives that date back to its origins. Drawing from the imaginary
of what has been called pre-cinema, it re-presents itself as a dispositive
issuing from these origins and acknowledges itself in this projection toward
the past which – at the same time – seems to hold promises for its future.
About the Authors
François Albera is Professor of Film History and Aesthetics at the Université

de Lausanne (Switzerland) and project director at the FNS (Swiss National
Science Foundation). A member of the AFRHC (Association française de
recherche en histoire du cinéma), he is the editor of 1895 Revue d’histoire
du cinéma. His publications include L’Avant-garde au cinéma (2005) and
Glass House d’Eisenstein. Du projet de film au film comme projet (2009). He
has also served as editor or co-editor of Les Formalistes russes et le cinéma
(1995, 2009), Arrêt sur image, fragmentation du temps (2002), La Filmologie
de nouveau (2009), Cinema Beyond Film. Media Epistemology in the Modern
Era (2010), Ciné-dispositifs: spectacle, cinéma, télévision, littérature (2011),
and Modernidad e vanguardia do cinema (2012).
Alain Boillat is Professor in the Department of Film History and Aesthet-

ics at the Université de Lausanne. He is also the chair of Réseau Cinéma
CH. His research mainly focuses on the history of film theories, narration
and scriptwriting practices in cinema and comics, and on the question of
orality and intermediality in audiovisual dispositives. He is the author of
Du bonimenteur à la voix-over. Voix-attraction et voix-narration au cinéma
(Antipodes, 2007) and has recently co-edited two collections of essays, Les
Cases à l’écran. Cinéma et bande dessinée en dialogue (Georg, 2010) and Jésus
en représentations. De la Belle Epoque à la post-modernité (Infolio, 2011).
Charlotte Bouchez is a doctoral candidate at the Université de Lausanne,

in the doctoral school “Cinéma et dispositifs audiovisuels: discours et
pratiques” (a ProDoc project of the FNS, the Swiss National Science Foun-
dation). The subject of her thesis is “The imaginary of ‘reality TV’ in the
footsteps of cinema? Between a local model, the French-speaking world
and standardization.”
Gilles Delavaud is Professor at the Université Paris 8 - Vincennes - St-Denis.

His publications include L’Art de la télévision. Histoire et esthétique de la
dramatique télévisée (1950-1965) (INA/De Boeck, 2005); “Penser la télévi-
sion avec le cinéma,” Cinémas 17.2-3 (Spring 2007); “Le dispositif télévision.
Discours critique et création dans les années 1940 et 1950,” in La Télévision
du téléphonoscope à YouTube, M. Berton and A.-K. Weber, eds. (Lausanne:
Antipodes, 2009); and “Les débuts télévisuels d’Alfred Hitchcock,” in
Cinéma et audiovisuel se réfléchissent (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012); “L’écran
394 About the Authors
expérimental d’Alfred Hitchcock”, Ecrans 1 (2013); “La télévision selon Alfred

Hitchcock. Une esthétique de l’émergence”, CiNéMAS 23.2-3 (Spring 2013).
He has edited or co-edited Télévision: le moment expérimental. De l’invention
à l’institution (1935-1955) (Rennes: INA/Apogée, 2011) and Permanence de la
télévision (Apogée, 2011).
Patrick Désile holds a doctoral degree in Art and the Sciences of Art from
the Université Paris 1 – Panthéon - Sorbonne. He is an associate researcher
at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (UMR - ARIAS, Atelier
de recherche sur l›intermédialité et les arts du spectacle, France). A member
of the AFRHC (Association française de recherche en histoire du cinéma),
he is the author of Généalogie de la lumière (2000) as well as several studies
on spectacles in the nineteenth century.
Elie During is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Université de Paris

Ouest – Nanterre and teaches a seminar at the École Nationale Supérieure
des Beaux-arts in Paris. His research on the forms of space-time involves
several areas: aesthetics, metaphysics, philosophy of sciences and technique.
His publications include Faux raccords: la coexistence des images (Actes
Sud, 2010) and Bergson et Einstein: la querelle du temps (PUF, forthcom-
ing). He has worked on the critical edition of Bergson’s works published by
Presses Universitaires de France (Durée et Simultanéité, 2009; Le souvenir
du présent et la fausse reconnaissance, 2012) and co-edited two collections
of essays on contemporary art, In actu: de l’expérimental dans l’art (Presses
du réel, 2009) and À quoi pense l’art contemporain? (special issue of Critique,
August-September 2010).
Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Media and

Culture of the University of Amsterdam. From 2006 to 2012, he was a visiting
professor at Yale University; since 2013, he has been a visiting professor at
Columbia University. He has authored, edited and co-edited some twenty
volumes, several of which have been translated into German, French, Ital-
ian, Polish, Hungarian, Hebrew, Korean and Chinese. Among his recent
books as author are: Terror und Trauma (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007); Film Theory:
An Introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010, with Malte
Hagener) and The Persistence of Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2012).
André Gaudreault is Professor in the Department of Art History and

Film Studies at the Université de Montréal, where he chairs the GRAFICS
(Groupe de recherche sur l’avènement et la formation des institutions
cinématographique et scénique). Gaudreault has been Visiting Professor

at several universities (Bologna, Buenos-Aires, Paris, São Paulo, Lausanne,
Rennes and Santiago de Compostela) and has published works in film nar-
ratology (From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature
and Cinema, 2009) and film history (American Cinema, 1890-1909, as editor,
2009; Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, 2011; and The
Blackwell Companion to Early Cinema, as co-editor, 2012). He also serves as
the director of scholarly review CiNéMAS.
Laurent Guido is a film historian. He is Professor at the Université de

Lille - Nord de France. He has also taught in Montreal (UdeM), Nanterre
(Paris X), Brussels (ULB) and Lausanne (UNIL). His work addresses the
relations between cinema, music and dance, focusing on the rhythmical
representations of bodily movement in modern mass culture and media.
His most recent books and edited volumes include L’Âge du rythme (Payot,
2007; L’Âge d’homme, 2014); Aux sources du burlesque (AFRHC/Giornate
del Cinema muto, 2010, co-edited with Laurent Le Forestier); Rythmer/
Rhythmize (Intermédialités 18, Fall 2010, co-edited with Michael Cowan),
Between Still and Moving Images (John Libbey/Indiana University Press,
2012, co-edited with Olivier Lugon). He is currently completing a book on
Richard Wagner’s influence on film theory and history, and research about
dance in early cinema.
Omar Hachemi is a doctoral candidate at the Université de Lausanne, in the

doctoral school “Cinéma et dispositifs audiovisuels: discours et pratiques”
(a ProDoc project of the FNS, the Swiss National Science Foundation). The
subject of his thesis is “The ‘dispositif,’ from the structure to the rhizome.
Presuppositions of a notion, diachrony of a question.”
Charles Musser is Professor of Film Studies and American Studies, and Act-
ing Chair of the Theater Studies Program at Yale University. His debut book,
The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Scribners, 1990),
received the Jay Leyda Prize, the Theater Library Award and the Katherine
Singer Kovacs Prize. Others include Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An
Annotated Filmography (Cineteca del Friuli, 1997) and (edited with Pearl
Bowser and Jane Gaines) Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African American
Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era (Indiana University Press,
2001). His films include Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin
S. Porter (1982) and Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch (2012).
396 About the Authors
Philippe Ortel is Associate Professor at the Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail

(France) and a member of the research group “Lettres, langages et arts”
(LLA CREATIS). He is the author of La Littérature à l’ère de la photographie
(2002) and the editor of Discours, image, dispositif (2008). He also took part
in the collective reflection in the research group “La scène,” whose work has
appeared in four volumes of essays: La Scène, L’Ecran de la représentation,
L’Incompréhensible and Littérature et brutalité.
Maria Tortajada is Professor of Film Aesthetics and History at the Université

de Lausanne. She headed the project CUS Réseau Cinéma CH 2006-2013
and currently serves as project director at the FNS (Swiss National Science
Foundation) as well as on the film database project “Cinémémoire.ch. Une
histoire orale du cinéma suisse. La production en Suisse romande à l’époque
du ‘nouveau cinéma.’” She is the author of Le Spectateur séduit. Le libertinage
dans le cinéma d’Eric Rohmer et sa fonction dans une théorie de la représenta-
tion filmique (1999) and several studies on the epistemology of viewing
and listening dispositives in periodicals and collections of essays. She has
co-edited Cinéma suisse: nouvelles approches (2000), Histoire du cinéma
suisse, 1966-2000, vol. 1-2 (2007), Cinema Beyond Film. Media Epistemology
in the Modern Era (2010) and Ciné-dispositifs: spectacle, cinéma, télévision,
littérature (2011).
Viva Paci is Professor of Film Studies at the École des médias (Université du
Québec à Montréal), where she also serves as the director of the MA program
“Cinéma et images en mouvement.” She is a member of the Centre for Re-
search on Intermediality (CRI) and the Groupe de recherche sur l’avènement
et la formation du spectacle cinématographique et scénique (GRAFICS).
Paci is the author of Il Cinema di Chris Marker (2005) and co-author (with
Ronald de Rooy and Beniamino Mirisola) of Romanzi di deformazione:
1988-2010 (2010). She is the editor (with André Habib) of Chris Marker et
l’imprimerie du regard (2008) and has co-edited an anthology on the street
in contemporary European cinema with Michael Cowan and Alanna Thain
(CiNéMAS 21.1, 2010). Her recent books are La comédie musicale et la double
vie du cinéma (2011) and La machine à voir. À propos de cinéma, attraction,
exhibition (2012).
Benoît Turquety is a Senior Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of

Film History and Aesthetics at the Université de Lausanne (Switzerland).
A member of the AFRHC, he specializes in the history of techniques. His
publications include Danièle Huillet et Jean-Marie Straub, “objectivistes” en
cinéma (2009), Inventer le cinema. Epistémologie: problèmes, machines (2014)

and several studies on the relations between cinema and poetry, the notion
of objectivity and the work of a number of filmmakers in periodicals and
collections of essays.
Christophe Wall-Romana is Associate Professor in the Department of

French and Italian at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (United
States), where he teaches courses and seminars on French poetry, modern
literature, silent cinema and philosophy. He is the author of Cinepoetry,
Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry (2013), which deals with the forms of
French-language poetry that incorporate in an intermedial manner one or
several aspects of the dispositive of cinema; and a monograph on filmmaker
and theorist Jean Epstein (2013). He is also working on several books, one
on astronomy, cinema and affect, another on the renewed relation between
modern poetry and philosophy.
Index of Titles
Index of titles (films, pictures, journals, exhibitions, theater and ballet, novels,
poems, books-source – except references being only in footnotes)
24 Hour Psycho (Gordon) 69 Cynghalais: danse aux couteaux

(Lumière) 256
Accordée du village (L’) (Greuze) 80
Ambassadors (The) (Holbein) 184 Danse du sabre (Lumière) 256
American Amateur Photographer, 150 Danse serpentine (Lumière) 267-269
Amphithéâtre (Astley) 77 Danse serpentine dans la cage aux lions 271
Anemic Cinema (Duchamp) 283 Danse serpentine de Loie Fuller 264
Animal Locomotion (Muybridge) 266 Danse tyrolienne (Lumière) 256
Animaux savants (Les) (Mme B**) 88 Death and the Labyrinth (Foucault) 366, 373
Annabelle Butterfly Dance (Edison) 254 Des dispositifs pulsionnels (Lyotard) 373, 386
Annabelle Serpentine Dance (Edison) 254 Dial M For Murder (Hitchcock) 229
Annabelle Sun Dance (Edison) 255 Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture et
Annales (Les) 30 gravure (Watelet, Levesque) 24
Archaelogy of Knowledge (Foucault) 37-38, Dictionnaire de Trévoux 75
41-42 Dîner à la ferme (RTS) 356-358)
Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (Kircher) 286 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 16, 35, 36, 43
Arthur’s Home Magazine 142 Discourse, Figure (Lyotard) 374
Artscape and Zoetrope (MoMA) 385 Dissemination (Derrida) 375
Astronomer’s Dream (Gehr) 389 Divagations (Mallarmé) 250, 258
Au téléphone (Lorde) 229, 239 Duchess of Langeais (The) (Rivette) 207-
Avant le cinéma (Apollinaire) 161 208, 211
Duration and Simultaneity (Bergson) 122, 125
Bal espagnol dans la rue (Lumière) 256
Beyond Cinema : the Art of Projection. Films, Ecrits (Lacan) 184
Videos and Installations from 1963 to 2005 Elephant (Sant) 198, 200-201, 205, 209, 213
(Hamburger Bahnof) 382 Emile Reynaud. Le véritable inventeur du
Big Brother 346 cinéma (Lonjon) 174
Big Swallow (The) (Richardson) 370 Ernie Gehr’s Panoramas of the Moving Image
Biosphere II 346 (MoMA) 385
Birth of the Clinic (Foucault) 366 Essai sur les données immédiates de la
Butterfly Dance (Armat) 261 conscience (Bergson) 122-123
Essex Street Market (Gehr) 389
Cahiers du cinéma 191, 193 Été indien (Ollier) 374
Cahiers Louis-Lumière 180, 197 Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences
Candid Camera (NBC) 334 (Bachelard) 40
Ceremony (The) (Oshima) 191 Fantasmagorie (La) (Milner) 25
Chicago Press and Tribune (The) 140 Eureka (Gehr) 389
Cinéa-ciné pour tous 308, 314 Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick) 203-204
Cinema Effect (The) (Cubitt) 51
Cinéma et suture (Oudart) 184-186, 188 Faisons un rêve (Guitry) 227
Cinémas 197 Fire Dance (Fuller) 250
Cinématographie française (La) 314 First Person (Penn) 337-339
Cinéthique 26, 180-181, 183, 187-190 Five (Kiarostami) 211
Cirque olympique (Franconi) 77, 88 Force et signification (Derrida) 187-189
Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud) 242 Forecast of Television (A) (Arnheim) 319
Communications 26, 183 Formation of the Scientific Mind (Ba-
Confessions (Rousseau) 24-25 chelard) 40-41
Cotton Candy (Gehr) 389 France Tour Détour Deux Enfants (Godard-
Creative Evolution (Bergson) 115-117, 124 Miéville) 334
Culture of Time and Space (Kern) 223 From The Other Side (Akerman) 202
400 Index of Titles
Future Cinema. The Cinematic Imaginary after Mouvement (Le) (Marey) 287

Film (ZKM) 282 Movement (Marey) 102-103
Gaulois (Le) 252, 306 Naissance de l’idée de photographie (Brunet) 34

Génération 01 (TSR) 352 National Observer (The) 258
Grecian Dancing Girl (Muybridge) 260 Nature (La) 107, 219, 287
Gros plan (Cardinal) 331 Navire Night (Duras) 231
Gros plan sur la célébrité (Cardinal) 333 New Impressions of Africa (Roussel) 368
Guerre au vingtième siècle (La) (Robida) 233 New York Daily News (The) 261
Guerre infernale (La) (Giffard) 234 New York Herald (The) 152
New York Journal of Commerce 142
Has the Film Already Started? (Lemaî- New York Sun (The) 155
tre) 375 New York Times (The) 132-134, 145, 148, 150, 159
Hermès 29 New York Tribune (The) 147, 152
Heureuse Pêche (L’) 81 Next of Kin (Egoyan) 232
Hiroshima Mon Amour (Resnais) 375 Night Thoughts (Young) 360
Histoire générale du cinéma (Sadoul) 282-283 Noces d’Arlequin (Les) (Carlin) 80
History of the Motion Picture (Jenkins) 278 Nombres (Sollers) 376
Horaces (Les) (Salieri) 235 Normal and the Pathological (The) (Canguil-
How I Wrote Certain of My Books (Roussel) 367 hem) 39
Notes for a theory of representation (Oudart) 192
Ideology and Ideological Apparatuses
(Althusser) 27, 131 Observer (The) 132-134
Informateur photo (L’) 307 Order of Things (The) (Foucault) 367
Interastral Drama (An) (Cros) 363
Introduction to Metaphysics (An) (Bergson) 120 Painter of Modern Life (The) (Baudelaire) 361-
362
Jetée (La) (Marker) 371 Panopticon or the Inspection-House
Journal amusant (Le) 235 (Bentham) 35-36
Journal de Paris 77, 79, 81 Panorama of Flatiron Building (Mutoscope-
Biograph) 390
Lady in the Lake (Montgomery) 326-328, 335 Philadelphia Photographer (The) 139
Language and Cinema (Metz) 305 Photographie animée (La) (Trutat) 98
Language of New Media (Manovich) 51, 68 Pillar of Fire (The) (Méliès) 254
Last Laugh (The) (Murnau) 202 Pirouette (Muybridge) 259
Last Year in Marienbad (Resnais) 375 Poems (Ducasse) 359
Lectures pour tous (Dumayet) 329 Poésies (Lautréamont) 25
Light Out ! (Coe) 335, 339 Practice of Every Life (The) (Certeau) 28
Loft Story (M6) 346, 348-349, 351, 358 Projections. Les transports de l’image
London Observer (The) 159 (Fresnoy) 382-383
Lonedale Operator (The) (Griffith) 223 Principia (Newton) 127
Lonely Villa (Griffith) 229
Los Aïnos à Ueso (Lumière) 256 Rationalisme appliqué (Le) (Bachelard) 40
Lost Highway (Lynch) 232 Reading Capital (Althusser-Balibar) 191
Rear Window (Hitchcock) 197
M (Lang) 208 Return to Reason (Man Ray) 316
Magie blanche dévoilée (La) (Decremps) 85 Revue du Cinéma (La) 319-320, 325
Magnum 305 Rope (The) (Hitchcock) 326-328
Mail and Express (The) 153 Rougyff (Guffroy) 86
Maldoror-Poems Dispositive (The) (Ponge) 359
Manchester Guardian (The) 132-134, 159 Safety Last (Lloyd) 210
Manège anglais (Astley) 77 Saturday Evening Post 142
Man With the Rubber Head (Méliès) 370 Sciences et voyages (Lumière) 22
Matter and Memory (Bergson) 115, 125 Scientific American 149-150
Mayen (TSR), 1903 353-358 Scream (Craven) 227
Meniñas (Las) (Velasquez) 72, 184-185 Serpentintanz (Skladanowsky) 264
Miroir (Le) (Baltrusaïtis) 24 Sex, Lies and Videotapes (Soderbergh) 232
Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven) 198 Ship’s Reporter 326
Morale du joujou (Baudelaire) 281 Side/Walk/Shuttle (Gehr) 389
Index of Titles 401
Signifiant imaginaire (Le) (Metz) 27 Vantage Point (Travis) 213

Sixième étage (Bluwal) 324 Videodrome (Cronenberg) 232
Skirt Dance (Armat) 261 Vie parisienne (La) 235
Songs of Maldoror (The) (Lautréamont) 359 Vingtième Siècle (Le) (Robida) 305
Spleen de Paris (Le) (Baudelaire) 362 Visual Tactics (Museum für Gegenwart-
Super Seniors (TSR) 341, 355-356 skunst) 382
Vocations (Frappat) 333
Technique et idéologie (Comolli) 187-191 Voix humaine (La) (Cocteau) 227
Techniques of the Observer (Crary) 276 Vol des oiseaux (Le) (Marey) 101, 106
Téléphone (Le) (Montifaud) 230 Voyeur (The) (Robbe-Grillet) 374
Téléphonoscope (Le) 233 Vue (La) (Roussel) 367-377
Temps (Le) 354
Ten (Kiarostami) 203-208 Walden (Mekas) 389
Terminal (The) (Spielberg) 197 Walden (Thoreau) 338
Terrains 30 War and cinema (Virilio) 58
Terrible angoisse (Pathé) 229 Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (West) 227
Time-Image and Movement-Image (Deleuze) 115 When A Stranger Calls (Craven) 227
Toy Story (Pixar) 387 Will of Knowledge (The) (Foucault) 36, 87
Travail, lecture, jouissance (Daney) 186-188 Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Trésor de la langue française 75 Reproductibility (The) (Benjamin) 130
Tribune de Genève (La) 353 Workers Leaving the Factory (After
Twentieth Century (Robida) 222-247 Lumière) (Gehr) 389
Umbrella Dance (Armat) 261 X-Screen. Films Installations and Actions of the

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Edison) 158 1960s and 1970s (MUMOK) 382
Un Coup de dés (Mallarmé) 25
Understanding Media (McLuhan) 247
Index of Names
Except names being only in footnotes
Acres, Birt 293 Bichat, Marie François Xavier 81

Adorno, Theodor W. 305 Birch, Herbert 136
Agamben, Giorgio 17, 21, 29, 92, 131, 196 Bitzer, Billy 293
Akerman, Chantal 197, 202 Bluwal, Marcel 324
Albera, François 16-17, 31, 33, 49, 55, 60, 67, 95, Bolter, David 47
120, 131, 161, 197, 205, 218-219, 222, 238, 246, Bonitzer, Pascal 191
253, 267-268, 304, 305, 342-343, 346, 364, Boullier, Dominique 342
376, 383 Brakhage, Stan 275, 389
Althusser, Louis 27, 28, 131, 179, 186, 191 Branigan, Edward 51
Altman, Rick 218, 220, 245 Brewster, William 137
Anders, Gunther 305 Brunet, François 34
Andre, Carl 64 Brunoy, Blanchette 333
Annabelle 254 Bryan, William Jennings 151, 156
Anschütz, Ottomar 260-261, 279, 280-281, 283, Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody) 256
291, 297
Apollinaire, Guillaume 24, 161-164, 178, 364 Canguilhem, Georges 31, 39-41
Appadurai, Arjun 345 Cardinal, Pierre 331-333
Arasse, Daniel 80 Carlin, Carlo Antonio Bertinazzi 80
Arcy, Jean d’ 329 Carré, Patrice 220-223
Armat, Thomas 171-172, 261, 277 Cartwright, Lisa 58
Arnheim, Rudolf 47, 319 Casarès, Maria 331
Astley, Philip 77 Casetti, Francesco 130, 144
Astruc, Alexandre 367 Cavell, Stanley 54
Certeau, Michel de 28, 304
Bachelard, Gaston 33, 39-43, 128, 182 Chartroule, Marie-Aurélie see Montifaud
Balázs, Béla 47, 115 Chomon, Segundo de 254
Baltrusaïtis, Jurgis 24, 181 Claretie, Jules 317
Balzac, Honoré de 208 Claudet, Antoine 137, 140-141
Barney, Matthew 383 Clément-Maurice 238
Barthes, Roland 63, 93, 305 Cochran, Robert 246
Barton, Béatrice 354-357 Cocteau, Jean 177, 227, 375, 383
Baudelaire, Charles 47, 281, 316, 361-363, 365, 377 Coe, Fred 335, 337
Baudry, Jean-Louis 26-27, 49, 70, 131, 170, 174, Coffman, Elizabeth 249-250
179, 180-183, 186, 188-193, 196-197, 305, 360, Cohen-Séat, Gilbert 304
374-375, 381 Comolli, Jean-Louis 26, 187-191, 193
Bazin, André 47, 54-55, 62, 93, 111, 320, 330, Comus (Doctor) 79
386, 390 Corra, Bruno 251
Béard, Guy 164 Corday, Charlotte 81
Beechey, Vincent 136 Corning, Leonard 146
Beethoven, Ludwig von 199 Corti, José 361, 367
Belting, Hans 52, 63, 66-67 Coutinsouza, Pierre-Victor 308
Bell, Alexander Graham 218-219 Craven, Wes 227-228
Benjamin, Walter 47, 54, 63, 130 Crary, Jonathan 15, 137, 276-277
Bentham, Jeremy 35-7, 43, 86, 346, 373 Cronenberg, David 232
Benveniste, Emile 26 Cros, Charles 363-365, 377
Bergson, Henri 17, 32, 58, 70, 93, 106, 111, 115-128, Cubitt, Sean 47, 51
271, 394 Cusa, Nicolas de 72
Berkeley, Busby 273 Cyrano de Bergerac (Savinien) 25
Berkeley, George 71
Berthelot, Marcellin 95-96 Dagognet, François 30, 95, 97
Beuys, Joseph 64 Dagron, René 367
404 Index of Names
Daney, Serge 186-188 Galipaux, Félix 239

Daumas, Maurice 30 Galvani, Luigi 79
Day (Will) 284 Gaudreault, André 16-17, 57, 60, 95, 120, 125,
Debutade 82 149, 155, 157, 164, 171, 180, 191, 220, 238, 254,
Decremps, Henri 85 267, 294, 341, 360, 385, 388
Deleuze, Gilles 37, 42-43, 53-54, 70, 90, 93, 111, Gaumont, Léon 252, 269, 283, 291, 307
115-116, 128, 186, 191 Gehr, Ernie 379, 385, 388-391
Delluc, Louis 163, 196, 251, 309 Gehri, Alfred 324
Demenÿ, Georges 57, 98, 257-259, 267, 283, 307 Genette, Gérard 200
Derrida, Jacques 181, 187, 189-190, 375-377 Gervereau, Laurent 173
Devillers, Renée 333 Giffard, Henri 224-225, 234
Dewey, Thomas 321 Gilles, Bertrand 30
Disney, Walt 383 Ginna, Arnoldo 251
Doane, Mary Ann 47, 59 Girel, Constant 256
Ducasse, Isodore see Lautréamont Gitelman, Lisa 129, 131
Duchamp, Marcel 283, 344 Godard, Jean-Luc 60, 334-335, 383
Dulac, Germaine 178, 251 Gordon, Douglas 383
Dulac, Nicolas 164, 180 Gordon, Howard 246
Dumayet, Pierre 329-330, 333 Gould, Jack 319
Duncan, Isadora 257 Graham, Dan 303
Duras, Marguerite 231, 375 Graham, Rodney 292
Dux, Pierre 333 Greenaway, Peter 383
Greuze, Jean-Baptiste 80
Eastman, George 303 Griffith, David (Wark) 223, 229, 246, 293, 321,
Edison, Thomas 99, 103, 118, 131, 148-149, 155, 335, 388
158, 171-173, 219, 241, 252-256, 260, 262-263, Grimm, Friedrich Melchior 82
266, 268-269, 282, 288, 292, 363-364 Grimoin-Samson, Raoul 293
Egoyan, Atom 232 Grusin, Richard 47
Eikhenbaum, Boris 300 Guffroy, Armand-Benoît-Joseph see Rougyff
Eisenstein, Sergei 47, 152-153, 275, 380 Guitry, Sacha 227
Elsaesser, Thomas 13, 17, 46-47, 51, 55, 57-60, 130 Gunning, Tom 16, 57, 152, 171, 191, 229, 235, 246,
Emmanuel, Maurice 258-259 252, 264, 360, 388-390
Epstein, Jean 47, 112, 115, 370, 397 Guy, Alice 269
Erice, Victor 197, 383 Guys, Constantin 361-363
Esbrard, Lina 269
Hamon, Philippe 361
Fallon, John 141-142 Hanna, Christophe 360, 373
Farocki, Harun 58, 292, 389 Harrison, Benjamin 146
Faye, Jean-Pierre 374 Haudricourt, André-Georges 30
Febvre, Lucien 30 Hays, William 220
Ferraris, Maurizio 246 Hearst, William Randolph 155
Fischer, Claude S. 229 Henry, Pierre 308-309, 316
Fisher, Robert A. 145 Heyl, Henry R. 266
Flichy, Patrice 222, 299 Hitchcock, Alfred 61, 63, 197, 229, 326-328, 383
Foucault, Michel 11-13, 15, 18, 21, 27-29, 33, 35, Horkheimer, Max 305
36-43, 54, 72, 75, 87, 89-90, 131, 184-186, Horner, George 278
190-191, 195, 302, 359, 360, 365-377. Huygue, Pierre 383
Frampton, Hollis 388
Francastel, Pierre 26, 179, 181, 184 Kamm, Leonard Ulrich 283
Franconi, Antonio 77-78 Kant, Immanuel 70, 123, 212
Franklin, Benjamin 88 Kennedy, Elijah R. 147-148
Frappat, Jean 333 Kern, Stephen 223-224
Freedland, George 320-322, 324-328 Kessler, Frank 165, 168, 262
Fregoli, Leopoldo 270 Kiarostami, Abbas 197, , 203-207, 211-212, 383
Freud, Sigmund 27, 49, 71, 182, 242 Kircher, Athanasius 69, 285
Friendly, Fred W. 322 Kittler, Friedrich 15, 47, 54, 58, 247
Frizot, Michel 170, 173 Kracauer, Siegfried 47
Fuller, Loïe 249-254, 258, 263-264, 267-268 Kubrick, Stanley 202
Index of Names 405
Isaacs, John T. 23 Marion, Philippe 164, 254

Mauriac, François 329
Jacobs, Ken 388 Maurois, André 333
Janssen, Jules 57, 364 Mayer, Andreas 30
Jaques-Dalcroze, Emile 258 McKinley, Paige 130, 148
Jarry, Alfred 32, 119, 364 McKinley, William 151-157
Jenkins, Charles Francis 171-172 McLaren, Norman 275
Jimenez, Andrew 387 McLuhan, Marshall 230-232, 245
Jones, William B. 138 Mekas, Jonas 389
Méliès, Georges 112, 219, 252, 254, 370, 389
Laban, Rudolph 257 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien 76, 80, 83, 85
Lacan, Jacques 27, 67,182-186, 191, 193 Messter, Oskar 46, 57-58, 268
Lamotte, Jean-Marc 162, 167, 168, 175 Metz, Christian 15, 27, 53, 180, 196, 305
Lang, Fritz 208, 246 Meurisse, Paul 332
Lange, André 233 Miéville, Anne-Marie 334-335
Langenheim, Brothers (Frederick and Miller, Jacques-Alain 183-186
William) 138-140, 144 Milner, Max 25, 360-361, 365
Lastra, James 221-222 Mitchell, W.J.T. 52
Montgomery, Robert 326, 335
Latham, Woodville 171-173 Montifaud, Marc de 230
Latour, Bruno 22, 30, 52, 180 Moore, Annabelle Whitford 254
Lautréamont, Isodore Ducasse 25-26, 359 Munch, Edvard 315-317
Lavallée, Etienne 247 Münsterberg, Hugo 47, 164
Lavater, Johann Kaspar 82 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 203
Lebesque, Morvan 329-330 Murrow, Edward R. 322-324
Le Dantec, Félix 317 Muybridge, Edweard 23, 46, 58, 132, 259, 266, 364
Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 86
Ledru, Nicolas Philippe see Comus Nekes, Werner 290
Leroi-Gourhan, André 30 Niepce, Nicéphore 139
Le Roy, Jean Aimé 266
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 303, 373 Ollier, Claude 374-376
Leyland, J. 142 Ortel, Philippe 361, 363
L’Herbier, Marcel 115, 178, 251 Oudart, Jean-Pierre 27, 183-184, 186-187, 191-192
Little Tich (Harry Relph) 270
Littré, Emile 21 Painlevé, Jean 66
Lloyd, Harold 210 Panofsky, Erwin 181, 184-185, 276
Londe, Albert 58 Pathé, Charles 117-118, 229, 237-239, 246, 252,
Lonjon, Bernard 174-175 293, 301, 307-311, 314-316
Lorde, André de 229, 244-245 Paul, R. William 57, 164, 293
Lucretius, Titus Carus 278 Penn, Arthur 337
Luhmann, Niklas 50 Perriault, Jacques 223, 232, 242, 244
Lumière, Brothers (Antoine and Louis) 94, 99, Petit, Valentine 263
103, 110, 113, 148, 155, 161, 166-177 Pisano, Giusy 217, 235, 237-239
Lynch, David 232 Planck, Ernst 288
Lyotard, Jean-François 245, 373-374, 381, 386 Plateau, Joseph 100-103, 265, 282-285
Plato 54, 71, 166
Mallarmé, Stéphane 25, 250, 258, 376-377 Pleynet, Marcelin 26, 190, 374
Mangan, Jack 326 Pollock, Jackson 64
Mannoni, Laurent 94-95, 118, 257, 259, 265-266, Pond, Major 145
279, 291, 360 Ponge, Francis 25-26, 359-360
Manovich, Lev 15, 47, 51, 55, 68, 305 Posner, Bruce 388
Man Ray (Emmanuel Rudzitsky) 316 Pressman, Jessica 129
Marais, Jean 331 Proust, Marcel 367
Marconi, Guglielmo 46 Pyasetsky 370
Marker, Chris 371, 383
Marey, Jules-Etienne 17, 23, 32, 36, 46, 57-59, Quintyn, Olivier 303, 373
70-71, 93-113
Marin, Louis 26-27 Ramirez, Francis 162
Marinetti, Tomaso 46 Resnais, Alain 375
406 Index of Names
Reynaud, Emile 148, 173-175, 266, 282, 285, Souday, Paul 115

287, 289 Spielberg, Steven 197, 202
Richard, A. P. 314-315 Stampfer, Simon von 278, 283
Richter, Hans 251 Stewart, Garrett 47
Ricœur, Paul 209 Stoddard, John L. 133
Rist, Pipilotti 383 Surnow, Joel 246
Rivette, Jacques 207, 304
Roach, Joseph 130 Talbot, William Henry 138
Robbe-Grillet, Alain 374-375 Thévenot, Jean 319-320
Robert, Etienne-Gaspard 69 Thoreau, Henry-David 338
Roberts, Edward Barry 329 Tinguely, Jean 291
Robertson, Etienne 25, 305, 360, 365 Tortajada, Maria 16-17, 31, 33, 49, 55, 67, 118, 124,
Robida, Albert 31, 217-245 127, 131, 156, 218-219, 253, 268, 304-305, 341,
Roede, Halfdan Nobel 315 343, 346, 364, 376
Roh, Franz 309 Trahan, Pierre-Sirois 167
Root, M.A. 139-140 Trutat, Eugène 98, 101
Rougyff 86
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 24-25, 86, 88 Valéry, Paul 25,
Roussel, Raymond 306, 364, 366-377 Varda, Agnès 197, 383
Rudge, Arthur Roebuck 284, 289 Velasquez, Diego 72, 184-185, 191
Ruttmann, Walter 251 Verne, Jules 25, 31, 299, 364
Rydstrom, Gary 387 Verniquet, Edme 76
Vertov, Dziga 189, 295
Sadoul, Georges 118, 219, 282-283, 294 Viegne, Michel 361
Saint Denis, Ruth 257 Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Jean-Marie-Mathias-
Sainte-Croix, Lallemand de 86, 88-89 Philippe-Auguste de 31, 234, 364
Salieri, Antonio 235 Virilio, Paul 58
Sandow, Eugen 260 Vouilloux, Bernard 17, 26, 80, 90, 195
Sant, Gus Van 198, 201, 213 Vuillermoz, Emile 115
Sartre, Jean-Paul 39, 115
Schaffer, Simon 30 Wagner, Richard 136
Schaeffer, Pierre 333-334 Wahrol, Andy 64
Schlosser, Julius von 83 Walton, Fred 227
Schreiber, Flora R. 319 Warner, Michael 129
Schwartz, Hillel 258 Watson 219
Sconce, Jeffrey 47, 229, 234 West, Simon 227
Seldes, Gilbert 319 Wheatstone, Charles 137
Shklovsky, Victor 304, 380, 384 Wheeler, John L. 146-147
Simondon, Gilbert 23, 31-32, 296 Whipple, John A. 138
Sitney, P. Adams 388-389 Williams, Williams Carlos 297
Skladanowsky, Brothers (Emil and Max) 171-
172, 253, 263, 265, 268, 293 Young, Edward 360
Smolderen, Thierry 240
Snow, C.P. 48 Zeno 124, 127
Soderbergh, Steven 232 Zielinski, Siegfried 16, 58
Sollers, Philippe 374, 376-377 Zumthor, Paul 240
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Cine-Dispositives - Essays in Epistemology Across Media - Maria Tortajada & Francois Albera

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FILM

Edited by François Albera and Maria Tortajada

Amsterdam University Press

Translations by Franck Le Gac.

Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam

isbn 978 90 8964 666 8

© F. Albera, M. Tortajada / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2015

Questioning the Word “Dispositif” 11

The Dispositive Does Not Exist! 21

Between Knowing and Believing 45

II. Dispositives: Issues

“You Do Not Even Know Where You Are” 75

Marey and the Synthesis of Movement 93

Notes on the Bergsonian Cinematograph 115

The Stereopticon and Cinema 129

The Moment of the “Dispositif” 179

The “Dispositive Effect” in Film Narrative 195

III. Dispositives: Histories

The Social Imaginary of Telephony 217

Between Paradoxical Spectacles and Technical Dispositives 249

Forms of Machines, Forms of Movement 275

The Amateur-Dispositive 299

Two Versions of the Television Dispositive 319

Reality Television as Dispositive: The Case of French-Speaking

Dispositive and Cinepoetry, around Foucault’s Death and the

About the Authors 393

Index of Titles 399

Index of Names 403

François Albera and Maria Tortajada (editors); Franck Le Gac

between several formulations, forcing those who confront it to reposition

The purpose of the present volume is to (re-)examine the question of viewing

apprehension of the cinema in these terms? In other words, is the notion

1 The contribution appears in Le Cinéma, nouvelle technologie du XXe siècle/The Cinema, A

4 Bernard Vouilloux, “Critique des dispositifs,” Critique 718 (March 2007).

the prism of Foucault’s analyses (Christophe Wall-Romana); and from an

Five Definitions of the Notion of “Dispositif”

their own coherence; and 2. the machine itself, or the appliance, as an

4 Michel Frizot, A New History of Photography (London: Könemann, 1998) 249.

or a narrative composed with a given effect in mind.5 Beyond the strictly

contained by the fright of displeasing the person about whom my young

7 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (1728; Paris: Gallimard, 1947) 71, 75.

akin to collapsible beds or bookcases.12 Again, the book then became a

As Baudry shifted from the basic apparatus [“appareil de base”] to the

in the perspectival apparatus which regulates any pictorial representation. He is included in

objecting to the State and its institutions as agents, a central argument of

instead of analyzing the apparatus exercising power (i.e., the localiz-

A second phase of elaboration then situates the question of the institution

In common discourse, “dispositif,” in its various meanings, refers to dated

cannot content ourselves with a “dispositif” limited to a “meta-concept” or

critics and estheticians to circumvent it and confine their approach to the

Finally, the domain of the techniques and technology of cinema involves

23 See François Albera, “Projected Cinema (A Hypothesis on the Cinema’s Imagination),”

concretization of the technical object that constitutes it as such. In this

on dispositives, for these conceptual variations impose modif ications

For An Epistemology of Dispositives: A Program

Viewing and listening dispositives may be defined as what allows spectators

To successfully reconstitute networks of concepts associated with disposi-

However, the physical-technical description is not enough. Most decisive

It is enough, then, to assign a guard to the central tower and to lock

31 Bentham, Panopticon or The Inspection-House, letters V and VI, http://oll.libertyfund.org/

this dispositif in the demonstration, the forceful synthesis it offers of it. In

[…] a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble, consisting of discourses, insti-

All in all, Foucault uses the term dispositif in two ways:

Questioning the Word “Dispositif” 11

The Dispositive Does Not Exist! 21

Between Knowing and Believing 45

“You Do Not Even Know Where You Are” 75

Marey and the Synthesis of Movement 93

Notes on the Bergsonian Cinematograph 115

The Stereopticon and Cinema 129

The Moment of the “Dispositif” 179

The “Dispositive Effect” in Film Narrative 195

The Social Imaginary of Telephony 217

Between Paradoxical Spectacles and Technical Dispositives 249

Forms of Machines, Forms of Movement 275

The Amateur-Dispositive 299

Two Versions of the Television Dispositive 319

About the Authors 393

Index of Titles 399

Index of Names 403

45 Mme B, née de V, Les Animaux savants V.