A NEW ART

Raymond Bellour's work on video art, while a product of his own preoccupations, emerges within more general speculations about spectatorship before 1990, including such notions as “suture,” and Brechtian “distanciation,” or “alienation,” that marked film scholarship as it was widely discussed in France, in Britain, and to some degree in the United States, primarily among what were known in English for a variety of reasons as the “Screen” theorists, including their association with the journal Screen. Bellour, together with Thierry Kuntzel conceived of this new medium (or rather media as it turned out) as having the potential to transform the viewer's relationship to the moving image. In this regard, he introduced the concept of “le spectateur pensif,” or “pensive spectator,” recalling for many film theorists Bertolt Brecht's notion of an active, as opposed to passive, spectator. In Bellour's case, however, the pensive spectator, originating in cinema, but encouraged by new multi-media art installation (as distinct from Brecht's spectator), is not an entirely rational spectator, nor one who is completely sutured into the narrative as many scholars, in particular those associated with the journal Screen in the 1970s, deemed was the case with the spectator of classical cinema.

Thierry Kuntzel's influence on Bellour was fundamental at this juncture. Kuntzel (1948–2007), a film theorist turned video and then multi-media artist, used the possibilities of the new technologies with which he was presented to explore the ontological nature of the image. For Bellour, these same possibilities gave rise to new sets of relations between images and movement, as well as new relations among images from different media, including images arising out of traditional art forms, such as painting. He saw the nature of the image as thus being further transformed along the lines first observed by Walter Benjamin and then John Berger with regard to photography and the cinema. Photography was not only a new mechanical technique of representation, but changed forever the social and cultural understanding of the nature and function of an image through its capacity to reproduce the “same” image endlessly. Bellour argues for the need to see similarly sig-nificant, if not all-embracing, changes at the end of the twentieth century, postulating, among other things, that new technologies enable the use of images, especially moving images, as a kind of “writing.”