Fifteen theses on impurification

We begin this final chapter with a difficult but fundamental thesis: cinema is an inessential art. Obviously this is not to say that cinema is unimportant artistically; rather, cinema is an art devoid of essence. We have seen something of this thesis already, in our assertion that cinema is at base a superficial art, an art of surfaces (it cuts from what appears, not what is). For if film is, as Badiou states, at its heart ‘nothing but takes and montage’, then it can by definition have no essential properties. Or again, there is no such thing as ‘quintessential’ or ‘pure cinema’ (save in the impotent dream of a blank screen on which is projected a silent and imageless vacuum). For a ‘take’ must first be understood in its literal sense – as something that is ‘taken’, ‘held up’, wrested from its proper place – while ‘montage’ is itself nothing but a film's final arrangement (qua statist counting), the ultimate coupling and uncoupling of all of these ‘taken takes’.