Between the Images (Documents

by Raymond Bellour, Lionel Bovier (Editor)

First published in French in 1990, Between-the-Images unites 20 illustrated essays written between 1981 and 1989 by Raymond Bellour (born 1939), one of the world's most prominent film theorists. Bellour writes in his foreword to this English “ Between-the-Images , which was innovative yesterday, is now a kind of archeological corpus. That is one of its virtues. It recalls how the landscape of the moving image was constituted and historicizes the first creative passages between film, video and photography.” Considering the works and strategies of artists and filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman, Jean Eustache, Jean-Luc Godard, Thierry Kuntzel, Chris Marker and Bill Viola, Bellour shows how film looks at painting and how language inspires images. At once poetic and concisely argued, and accompanied by numerous film stills, Bellour's now-classic essays are invaluable and still relevant today.

Genres: Film

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2011

About the author

Raymond Bellour (born 1939 in Lyon) is a French scholar, and writer. Best known to Anglophone readers for his publications on film analysis, his work is dispersed across a wide range of articles and books, few of which are available in English, in which he addresses a broad spectrum of topics in the areas of cinema, literature and moving-image art. He is currently Director of Research, Emeritus, at the CNRS, the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, which he entered in 1964 In the course of his career he has taught at the Université de Paris I, at IDHEC (now "la Fémis"), the Université de Paris III, the Centre américain d'études cinématographiques, later renamed the Centre parisien d'études critiques, and in a range of international institutions as a guest lecturer

Reviews

[Holly Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raymond Bellour is a professor at the Centre Universitaire Américan de Cinéma in Paris and director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He has been a leading theorist of moving images, focusing specifically on the evolution of media across the last 40 years. In this book, he is interested in the transformation of cinema as it intersects with TV, theater, museums, galleries and computers, as it moves from theaters to museums and galleries, and as it undergoes "an unprecedented expansion of intermediate operations." Bellour is fascinated by the resultant "confusion" and "impurity," and much of his work has explored the efforts of artists who share his fascination with this movement between forms - cinema, video, language, painting - and between images, the still and the moving image, the freeze-frame and the blurred image. This book is beautifully written, and pays attention to specific artworks while also offering a sense of the broader context of art-oriented film and video.