There's something about the nature of the tape, the grain of the image, the sputter black-and-white tones, the starkness – you think this is more real, truer-to-life than anything around you. The things around you have a rehearsed and layered and cosmetic look. The tape is superreal, or maybe underreal is the way you want to put it. It is what lies at the scraped bottom of all the layers you have added … The tape has searing realness.

The ‘eyes’ made available by modern technological sciences shatter the possibility of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems building in specific translations and ways of seeing, that is, ways of life. There is no unmediated photograph or passive camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies and machines; there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds.

In its present endeavors cinema increasingly approaches, with ever increasing perfection, absolute reality: in its banality, in its veracity, in its starkness, in its tedium, and at the same time its pretentiousness, in its pretention to be the real, the immediate, the unsignified, which is the maddest of enterprises …