[In this section of the interview, Bellour describes how he began to engage in film analysis in the 1960s, beginning with a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, with the aim of establishing the way that it worked as a “text.” He proceeds to describe his personal encounters with major figures like Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Michel Foucault, and his friendship with Christian Metz, suggesting how his interchanges with them helped to shape his own thinking, and how it diverged from theirs.]

The entire period leading up to May 1968, and after, was one of general excitement about theory. At this time, the very idea of criticism was reformulated: critical analysis discovered the tools that it still uses, to a large degree. In particular, this period dethroned artistic activity itself for a while, redefining it so that it became a transgressive, avant-gardist practice at the forefront of a historical moment. Several of your works reflect this radical atmosphere. Some of them, collected in Le Livre des autres at the beginning of the 1970s, extol the “renewed power of commentary,” as if the potentiality of all contemporary upheavals could take place in that form. How did you make your way through this theoretical field, from Barthes to Lévi-Strauss, and then Foucault? And how did this migration of concepts from the human sciences to cinema come about?

In 1968, I had begun teaching cinema (very much on a part-time basis) at Université Paris 1 [Pantheon-Sorbonne University], pursuing, in particular, the analyses that would later feature in my book The Analysis of Film. The most important of these was the analysis of a sequence, or more exactly a long fragment, from Hitchcock's The Birds. I saw it as an attempt to approach as closely as possible the materiality of what was then called “the filmic text,” and doing this provided the basis for my work on cinema during the years that followed. This was not as apparent at an intellectual level – where it appeared to be some kind of transgression – as it was at a practical level, because access to copies of a film at the time was very difficult. After that …