Philippe Marion

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.

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.