[Bellour describes how his interest in video art grew out of his personal friendship with Thierry Kuntzel and the latter's growing interest in experimental filmmaking using the new technology, and how this interest prompted him to seek to understand how the new medium was leading to a modification of perception. He goes on to explain how video technology enables the production of images that escape the natural conditions deemed to constrain photography, also emphasizing the influence of painting on video art.]

Your book Between-the-Images was the fruit of your encounter with video, which led to a decentering of your work, a stroll along the edge, even to the antipodes of what had constituted your corpus up until then. How did you arrive at this dimension of your work?

To answer that requires me to retrace a bit of history. From the end of the 1970s, as we have seen, I was very closely linked to Thierry Kuntzel, both intellectually and emotionally, and I remained so right up to his death a few years ago. Shortly after the issue of Communications we did together, which was published in 1975, he progressively stopped writing in an explicitly theoretical mode in order to direct his work gently toward the creation of conceptual art in the first instance, and then video art soon after that. In a great burst of inspiration, when he was working at INA during 1979 and 1980, he made six films during this brief period of time . When I saw them, I experienced a real shock, like a revelation, with a strong feeling that I was seeing images that did not resemble anything I had encountered before, but demanded to be taken into consideration. I thought they involved something very different, extending beyond many of the things that I had glimpsed in experimental cinema up until then.

At this point, I need to add a parenthesis by recounting a little interlude. In 1972, I had been invited to the film festival at Hyères, devoted mainly to experimental cinema, on the pretext of evaluating whether the semiological methods could be applied to this different form of cinema, and, with this in mind, I had also managed to get Thierry Kuntzel invited.