Losing touch with the image

A rejected abstract for a conference paper.

On serait tenté de dire que la pensée est toujours locataire: toujours en un lieue, toujours dans le lieu et l’avoir-lieu, mais jamais comme propriétaire, ayant sa propriété dans le transport et dans le déménagement. (Jean-Luc Nancy)

According to the formulation of Jean-Luc Nancy thought rents a place but never owns it. Its property and its properties inhere in transport, in moving from place to place. In an era characterised by fluidity of boundaries, in an era identified by pre-set obsolescence, by new velocities demanding a new ethology (in Virilio’s terms, a dromology), the era of dislocation is in full flow. The discipline of film studies is subject to a particular trauma in this context. As books such as Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film suggest, on the one hand its specificity as understood in a certain historical context is, in the eyes of some, already in the past, while for others that specificity is feast moveable through new supports and channels of viewing. In the first case what remains for writing and teaching in the area of film studies is a thanatographic enterprise, in the second a potentially problematic neutrality. What if the object of scrutiny – cinema -, the exemplar intended to stand in for the vanishing discipline (of Film Studies underpinned by ‘Theory’) were obstinately to remain lost in its out of joint “conducts of time” (Alliez), were itself intermittent (to use a Rancièrean formulation), or interstitial (to use a more Deleuzean vocabulary)? This paper attempts to sketch an answer to these questions by returning to an idea put forward by Raymond Bellour some twenty years ago but explored afresh in the light of key films in the intervening period where the ‘touch’ of video (and other media) and film takes place. It will be suggested that this ‘touch’ represents a challenge to the teaching of film studies as well as suggesting the exigency of film theory in the face of cognitivist and other declarations of abandonment. The argument will draw, inter alia, on examples from Rivette, Egoyan, Godard, Sissako and Gordon and Parreno.