Introduction: Destroying the (Cinema) Apparatus, Transforming the (Audiovisual) Machine

The statement and call of Situationist militant and filmmaker Guy Debord at the end of the 1950s that ‘The cinema too needs to be destroyed’ (On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Period of Time, 1959) was answered in multifarious ways during the decade of the 1970s, perhaps beginning with Godard's own much later premonition of these developments in Le gai savoir (The Joy of Learning, 1969), in which the two protagonists call, not for a ‘return to zero’, but first to arrive there, as a prelude to creating something new out of the ruins of the cinematic apparatus. Paradoxically, yet significantly, this conversation takes place in a television studio. This reinvention of the audiovisual beyond the cinema as a technological mechanism and ideological institution is a concern that would be taken up in Godard's work in video, television, and cinema across the 1970s, but also in the work of a number of like-minded filmmakers, whether or not they actually embraced the use of new technologies like video or not.

In contrast, ‘apparatus theory’, as developed from the work of Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, and others was taken up in film-theory circles, notably in the journal Screen and by authors such as Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, Stephen Heath, Teresa de Lauretis, largely as a form of psychoanalytically informed ideological critique of mainstream Hollywood cinema. This was then developed as both feminist and psychoanalytic film theory in the 1970s and 1980s, assuming a hegemonic position in film studies, before being challenged from positions ranging from the empirical and the historical, to the phenomenological and Deleuzian (see Shaviro 1993). In the sphere of radical cinema and audiovisual production, however, the critique of the cinematic apparatus was taken up differently, as a challenge for a joyful destruction of the cinema machine and the creation of new audiovisual assemblages in its place.

These new assemblages can be seen in several different film practices, from militant film collectives like SLON, the Dziga Vertov Group, and Newsreel, to new developments of the essay film, to experiments with video and multi-media as Expanded Cinema (Youngblood 1970), but surprisingly, would especially be expressed by and on the fringes of television, ranging from the radical auteur television of Godard, Fassbinder, and others to the proponents of guerrilla television in the US.