LE CORPS DU CINÉMA

Bellour's magnum opus, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (The Body of Cinema: Hypnoses, Emotions, Animalities), a massive volume of more than 500 pages, brings together many themes that have marked his exploration of classical cinema over the previous decades. Described as “the first large-scale work on the rhythmic and formal aspects of cinema that unify the animal, the viewer, and the production and unfolding of film,” the volume focuses on the relations among these last, within the context of a particular dispositif or apparatus. Bellour uses this term to refer to the “set-up” within which the viewer engages with the moving-image narrative or “the cinema-situation” that characterized the film experience at a certain moment in time – the period after the rise of the studios and before the dominance of television, roughly from 1925 to 1965, with a high degree of variation between national contexts. In Bellour’s, terms, the cinema-situation must meet the following requirements to be deemed to offer the cinema-experience (“le cinéma”) to a given spectator: it must consist of the projection of a film, in a darkened (“dans le noir”) theater (“salle de cinéma”) over a prescribed period of time (with a beginning and an end), in which the viewer sits with others at the screening (“une séance … collective”). These requirements constitute “the condition” that permits “a unique experience of perception and memory” (“une experience unique de perception et mémoire”). This experience defines the cinema spectator as a specific embodiment that any shift in the viewing situation changes, more or less.

For Bellour, only this cinema-situation (and the experience that it produces) “deserves to be called ‘cinema’” (“Et cela seul vaut d’être appellé ‘cinéma’”). Bellour sees his goal, in the above analysis, as moving toward an understanding of cinema as part of “an archeology,” in Foucault's terms, in which the cultural and social forces of the late eighteenth and of the nineteenth century came together to produce “psychoanalysis and cinema.” In this trajectory, both of the latter “appear to have been born together out of hypnosis, which, for Freud, led to an enlargement of the field of memory – an enlargement that cinema, in its own way, also achieved.”