André Gaudreault

A medium is always born twice …1

The writer does not ‘wrest’ speech from silence, as we are told in pious literary hagiographies, but inversely, and how much more arduously, more cruelly and less gloriously, detaches a secondary language from the slime of primary languages afforded him by the world, history, his existence, in short by an intelligibility which preexists him, for he comes into a world full of language, and there is no reality not already classified by men: to be born is nothing but to find this code ready-made and to be obliged to accommodate oneself to it. We often hear it said that it is the task of art to express the inexpressible; it is the contrary which must be said ...: the whole task of art is to unexpress the expressible, to kidnap from the world’s language, which is the poor and powerful language of the passions, another speech, an exact speech.

Méliès the Magician

The title of this article is “The Magical Magic of the Magic Image”, but I might also have chosen as its title: “The Magical Magic of Magic Montage”, such is the importance, in Méliès, of gluing, matching and assemblage. Indeed the essential quality of Méliès’ magic is produced, in a remarkable and primordial way, by fragmentation, cutting, and breaks in continuity. In his films, Méliès’ magic wand was, first and foremost, a pair of scissors. And yet, until as recently as the early 1980s, Méliès had always been seen, paradoxically, as a kinematographer who contributed very little, if anything at all, to the development of editing. This, in my view, is a perfect example of the historicism of historians – historians in denial whom we have now caught red handed. For reasons that I have explained elsewhere,2 but which are increasingly evident today, “traditional” film historians have always denied the role of editing in Méliès’ work and his contribution to its development. Whether it was Sadoul, Mitry or Jacobs, each had his reasons, axiological and ideological, for bestowing upon others than the “magician of Montreuil” the socalled paternity of the “syntactical” and “language-like” function par excellence that is editing. And, I would now say, that is assemblage. And yet practically without exception Méliès’ films all bear the stigmata of the numerous cuts found throughout them. Take for example the film Le Diable Noir (The Black Imp), something of a classic of the genre. This is a truly Meccano-like film, made up as it is of no fewer than sixty fragments—fragments sometimes no more than a few frames in length and whose traces are easy to locate (at points where there are appearances or disappearances) when one is prepared to see them and knows to look up (in a Méliès film, the traces of gluing are always located in the upper part of the image, where the viewer is not inclined to gaze, since no action occurs there). For in fact, as an examination of the film strip would reveal, the traces of gluing are well and truly located in the upper part of the frame, while the viewer is summoned to look towards the bottom, because of the actions of the characters there. We can assume that, like every good magician, Méliès knew, even when wearing his kinematographer’s cap, one must draw the viewer’s attention towards areas where nothing is happening but where everything appears to be happening in order, as he must, not to reveal his secret. Since each cut in the film shows traces of gluing, creating the trick effect supposes the existence, as we are now well aware, of two distinct successive moments (the only way not to reveal the secret of the trick):

Measuring the double birth model against the digital age

The model of the ‘double birth’ of cinema relates the invention of an apparatus for capturing and restoring moving images to the establishment of an institution for the production and exhibition of moving images. This model rejects any singular conception of a phenomenon as complex as cinema. While its ‘second birth’, that of the medium’s institutionalisation, consists in fixing for a period of time the federation of cultural series which make up the cinema, the hybridisations taking place today in the moving image field suggest the need for an extension of the model. Like all media, cinema’s identity is being radically called into question. One might thus advance the concept of a ‘third birth’ to give shape to the idea of a kind of constant rebirth of cinema in light of the cyclical dimension of the identity crises which oblige the institution to adapt or die. Intermedial hybridisation highlights the implicit creation of hierarchies at work in every institutional medium. Looking at recent discourses about cinema’s mediality, this article shows that when the boundaries of cinema’s identity become uncertain, this is felt in hesitancy about what to call it: there is an increasing trend to call it ‘moving images’. We reflect that cinema’s present phase may very well be the sign of a return to animation as its primary principle, showing that, today, animation, the repressed of the history of institutional cinema, is forcing cinema to revise not only its name but also the boundaries of its identity.

Teaching ‘cinema’: for how much longer?

This paper focuses on the changes in the titles of university programs about cinema to argue that the approach adopted by the film teaching community is quite different from the one that prevailed until quite recently. The terms cinema and movies often disappear in favour of an ‘extended’ definition: ‘Moving image’ becomes the new creed of universities. Other institutions such as cinémathèques or scholarly associations are too in the midst of a cinematic identity crisis. The paper then analyzes the context of this transformation, the advent of digital, and examines the turmoil it causes.

Cross‐cutting in the face of history: The case of Attack on a China Mission

This article explores, from historiographical and archival perspectives, the tumultuous trajectory of Attack on a China Mission (1900) by James Williamson. Seen by traditional historians as a precursor to cross‐cutting, for several years the film existed only in the form of a sales catalogue description. No copies of it seemed to exist in the archives. The discovery of two copies in 1950 and 1985 raised many questions among historians, since neither copy matched the alternating editing structure described in the catalogue. This article will examine the historical relevance of these two copies, as well as the ‘reconstructed’ version now available at the National Film and Television Archive in London. The obvious differences between each of these versions, as well as the changes that were made to them, affirm the importance historians and archivists should grant to the integrity of film artefacts. The modifications also display a relatively classical conception of film that is out of place in the context of early cinema.