What is it in cinema that cuts up? What organizes the relations between part and whole, fragment and other, unity and punctuation, principle and secondary? What drives a filmmaker to confront two systems of proportion in one and the same film or to invent a discordant economy to show something about the body, time or the human community?

Roland Barthes’ response: “the knife of Value,” which is not used to slice between two paradigms, but cuts to the heart of a word, between uses, between meanings, between synonyms. As far as moving images are concerned, the knife can pass:

1. Between motifs: A fade to black in À propos de Nice ( Jean Vigo, 1930) separates two organisms absolutely—the grotesque body of pleasure and the merry face of labor. This produces a stylistic opposition between a shot of rupture, which opens a rift and stops analogies, and every other shot, which favour analogies. To take an example from a very distantly related kind of filmmaking (despite the echoes of Eisenstein's influence via the intermediary of camera operator Gabriel Figueroa), The Fugitive ( John Ford, 1947) has the same structure. Every shot is constructed using a clear partition between pure white and black, with one exception, where the blurring of contrasts and light on the character of Sergeant Juan-Raphael (Pedro Armendariz) listening to the gunfire that transfigures the priest (Henry Fonda) into a martyr, attests to his deep spiritual doubt. The film is therefore plastically divided between the certainty of faith or unwavering political fanaticism and the fleeting but final vacillations of all certainty. (I will also note that the way the narrative treats indestructibility—“I shot him a dozen times”—recalls the strictly figurative treatment of the immortal revolutionary soldier at the end of Dovzhenko's ApceHaл [Arsenal, 1929]).

2. Between shots: Film theories have often made a distinction between a classical regime of filmmaking involving continuity and a modern regime that privileges forms of discontinuity under the auspices of dissonance and continuity errors.