The opening shots of Tiresia (2003) transform the screen into a live mass of magma; scale and perspective dissolve into an assemblage of visions of utter chaos, dark matter in fusion filling the frame, heaving and exploding to let flows of combusting molten rocks pour out, while in a strange yet fitting juxtaposition of sensations, the expansive sound-track resounds with the classical composition of Beethoven's seventh symphony.

Working close to a much humbler furnace, Pizzaiolo Boni (Nénette et Boni, 1997) kneads a ball of pizza dough while fantasising aloud about the woman he desires. In one long single take, and in extreme close-up, the soft pasty mass is shaped, flattened, smoothed and roughed between Boni's impatient hands. Feverishly punctured by his fingers, the malleable surface metamorphoses from desert-like expanse to a moon-like, crater-filled landscape. Eventually, Boni's face bursts into the frame and sinks into the formless heap.

Both works, in their own way, celebrate the materiality of the medium of the moving image, film’s inherent processes of endless becoming. As Michel Guilloux, comparing filmmaking with the kneading of the pizza dough, eloquently puts it: ‘Cinema’s raw matter is the world in which it is filmed … it was necessary to work on this matter to shape the body of the film (pour que le film prenne corps), to create a new way of making film’ (Guilloux 1997: 12). Such comments remain an exception; in feature-filmmaking, directors are still more likely to be praised for their achievements as story-tellers than for their ability to engage with film as a physical entity.