The selection of texts in this book represents a journey through pivotal moments of the history of
experimental cinema.
What cinema. Voluntarily without punctuation, with the aim of leaving a
free reign to multiplicity and avoiding any hasty interpretation.
During
the course of the 20th century, cinema, television, and then other media
have imposed the principle of realism in a radical way. They have
developed such a level of crisis that in the orgiastic marriage between
the world in which we live and its image, our contemporary society only
thinks through its representation.
This selection of texts is not just an
exhaustive study of a shifted history of the animated image—film—but a
succession of markers in an artistic domain, which was lucky enough to
stay on the sidelines.
Filmmaker and writer, a specialist of avant-garde cinema, Jean-Michel Bouhours is curator at the Musée national d'art moderne,
Centre Pompidou for the modern collections, in charge of
Dada and
Surrealism. He is also a curator of
cinema and cinematic events and
co-founder of the Paris Films Coop.
