Film Theory Unstilled: Raymond Bellour

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you a video recording of a two hour long talk by one of the most original and important of the major film and media theorists, Raymond Bellour, Director of Research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, and one of Europe's foremost theorists of film, video and new media.

Bellour's publications include L'Analyse du film, his now classic close readings of Hollywood films first published in 1979, several more recent collections, especially Le Cinéma americain and Le Western, as well as works on literature (especially on the Brontës, Dumas and Michaux). Since the early eighties, Bellour's work has concentrated on new media and on the relations between words and images.

Bellour's talk was recorded on May 23, 2002, a record of his contribution to the 'Moving Images' Programme, a collaboration between Tate Modern and Research at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design bringing to London major figures working in or on film and video to explore contemporary issues around these media. It is now freely available to view online as one of the many wonderful Tate Channel offerings about which FSFF waxed lyrical just the other day.

Below are links to a few other Bellour related resources -either articles by him, or ones by other scholars which discuss or employ his film theoretical insights.

• Raymond Bellour, 'The Film We Accompany', Rouge, 3, 2004 (on Ritwal Ghatak's 1960 The Cloud-Capped Star)
  

• Raymond Bellour, 'The Book, back and forth', excerpts, chrismarker.org, 2008
  

• Thomas Elsaesser, 'Around Painting and the "End of Cinema"', Theory Kit, 2007

• Rosalind Galt, 'The Obviousness of Cinema', World Picture, 2, Autumn 2008

• Judith Mayne, 'Picturing Spectatorship', in James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, Understanding Narrative (Ohio State University Press, 1994)
  

• Christian Metz, 'Photography and Fetish', October, Vol. 34. (Autumn, 1985), pp. 81-90

• Daniel Morgan, ‘No Trickery with Montage’: On Reading a Sequence in Godard’s Pierrot le fou', Film Studies, Issue 5, Winter 2004

• Laura Rascaroli, 'Like a Dream: A Critical History of the Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory', Kinema, 2008
  

• Nick Redfern, “Leading them Down the Garden Path:” Another Look at Hitchcock’s Psycho', EnterText 1.3

• Julian Savage, 'The Lost Cult of Wake in Fright', Intensities Four, December 2007

• Herman Wasserman, 'Review of Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film [Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2000]', Scope, February 2002

• Tony Williams, 'Power and Paranoia: 1940s Hollywood [review of Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and The American Cinema 1940-1950. New York: Columbia University Press 1986]', from Jump Cut, no. 35, April 1990, pp. 73-77