[Bellour explains why he returned to a preoccupation with cinema in general, and the spectator in particular, and how he came to write Le Corps du cinéma, emphasizing his interest in the diverse dispositifs represented by Foucault's Panopticon on one hand, and by the phenomena of panoramas and phantasmagorias on the other. He describes how his discovery of Daniel Stern's The Interpersonal World of the Infant marked a critical turning point, leading him to explore an analogy between the infant and a spectator watching a film in the cinema – an analogy that enabled him to break with the psychoanalytic model, reflected in his eventual substitution of the notion of the body for that of the text.]

The four books that mark the different stages of your intellectual journey during the past three decades seem, on each occasion, to have taken a sort of malicious pleasure in foiling the dominant discourse of the period in which they have burst on to the scene: at the time when there was a desperate defense of a cinema-citadel, in Between-the-Images you dealt with what lay at its borders; when, toward the beginning of the century, the dominant critical discourse reversed itself to celebrate, instead, the joys of contamination and hybridization, Le Corps du cinéma and La Querelle des dispositifs put a stop to that elevation of this principle of mixture to insist on the uniqueness of a particular historical experience – what you call the “unique memory” of the spectator. Why did you move from having an open-minded position to one involving a defense of cinema? And what is the relationship between the first phase – the jaunt in the environs surrounding cinema – and the second – cinema “behind barricades”?

I find it difficult to evaluate the relationship between a history that might be characterized as objective – that which has occurred during the past two decades with respect to the history of cinema and the development of contemporary art – and the manner in which my personal relation with these two domains came to be formed. A major reason for the shifts you mention derived from various changes that occurred in the works themselves, and by the rise of discourses proclaiming the possibility of a death of cinema that they provoked.