Introduction: Cinema/Television/Video or Cain vs. Abel Revisited

Throughout this panorama of different strategies against the dominant cinematic apparatus, it has not been so much a matter of destroying cinema as, to paraphrase Marker, making it tremble or stutter, in accordance with Gilles Deleuze's characterization of minor art as that which, more than being a stuttering within a given language, makes language itself stutter. However, in many cases, this pushed ecologies of audiovisual production, circulation, and consumption into proximity with video and television. In some cases, such as Le gai savoir or the work of Farocki, this was through experimentation with a counter-cinema proposed as a form of television, even if this work was done on film and was largely rejected by the television networks for which it was conducted. In other cases, video was fundamental, whether in terms of a repurposed video archive, especially in the work of de Antonio; or Marker's more heterogeneous audiovisual archive in Grin without a Cat; or, in the case of Grifi's Anna, a hybrid ‘video film’ based on hours of video footage. Even in the case of as cinematic a personality as Fassbinder, much of his work including The Niklashausen Journey analysed earlier was funded by television and intended to be screened there. In all these cases, there was a fundamental relationship either with the televisual apparatus or video technologies or both, which warrants further investigation as well as finer distinctions.

Famously, Godard characterized the film and video relationship as equivalent to that between Cain and Abel, or, at least, this appears on the blackboard behind the clearly self-referential character of Paul Godard in Sauve qui peut (la vie) (Slow Motion, 1980), the implication being that the younger brother, video, had jealously conspired to kill its older and more prodigious sibling, film. This is surprising, considering that Godard and his partner Anne-Marie Miéville had spent most of the 1970s working both with video and television, and, despite many earlier indications, Godard only really fully returned to engagement with cinema in the 1980s, without ceasing to produce numerous video works.