The Digital Challenge: From the Theater to the Gallery

This chapter demonstrates how Bellour’s work on video art (or what was later termed moving-image installation art), while a product of his own preoccupations, is situated firmly within more general speculations about spectatorship. Confronting this new medium, or media, as it turned out, Bellour introduced the notion of “le spectateur pensif,” the pensive spectator, or the spectator engaged in thought – who is not an entirely rational spectator, nor one who is completely sutured into the narrative as some scholars felt was the case with the spectator of classical cinema. He also sees the emergence of new relations between images which he calls “l’entre-images,” the between-images, complicating his initial ideas about the “défilement,” a concept, at least initially, referred to the movement of the celluloid print through the projector’s mechanism and the filing past of the cinema images in front of the spectator. In this same period, Bellour, along with film critics such as Serge Daney and filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, began to speculate about the death of cinema due to the changing situations (or dispositifs) in which the spectator encounters the moving image. An important influence on his thinking as this time was the film theorist turned video artist Thierry Kuntzel.