Machines cinématiques et dispositifs visuels. Cinéma et « pré-cinéma » à l'œuvre chez Alfred Jarry

Cinematic machines and visual devices. Cinema and « pre-cinema » in the work of Alfred Jarry. The following contribution develops an epistemological reflection on cinematographic apparatus around the end of nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. If the whole research will deal with very different discourses, scientific, philosophical, artistic, among others, in other to study different discursive occurrences of optical apparatus, the author considered here is one : the French writer Alfred Jarry, whose work is concerned with many aspects of modernity, as mechanics, photogrammatic elements, speed and movement ; in fact elements shared with cinematographic apparatus.Two important cinematografical figures can be described among other persons or machines: « le Surmâle », the hero of the homonymous roman, and Ixion, condemned in Inferno to turn eternally, tied to a wheel. Thus, the « machine-cinema » acquires a particular status in Jarry's work. It becomes a scheme which proposes a synthesis of some mechanical and optical elements in an original form able to work as a model for human thought and sight. The particularity of Jarry's « cinematographe » consists in constructing a spectator, which is neither the one that the public of 1900 use to know nor the one is known today. In reference to different machines, Jarry elaborates a singular apparatus. This essay will study different variations of the machine and the apparatus through the transformation of Ixion's figure in Minutes de sable mémorial, César-Antéchrist and La Chandelle verte.