59 Sequences and Fragments

What are we going to continue to call cinema exactly? This is what Erik Bullot wondered when it came to establishing the relationship between cinema and modern art. If we consider the answer by employing the rigorous approach that is standard practice when we come to classifying things according to disciplines, then we may well fear that film has a rather uncertain future; however, on the other hand, if we try to provide a response to this question from the sphere of art, or the visual arts, which is a hybrid discipline, that has long been corrupted by other fields of knowledge and practices, we will be able to look towards the future optimistically. And although nowadays we may no longer be interested in the answer, the way in which it is framed, on the other hand, entails the potential for change that the motion picture currently has.

However, this change had already begun with the advent of the video camera. As artists were aware of its potential, they wanted to use this new device as a political tool, and gave a foretaste of what was to become an explosion with the digital camera: the boundaries between amateur and professional, analogue and digital, and fiction or documentary have gone beyond the genre of film and have given rise to a new scenario. It is now quite common to find installations in galleries in museums in which images converge from several projectors, that no longer correspond to the characteristic sequence followed in a linear narrative, that cinema has displayed so well, but reflects a serial, non-linear editing method. These “constructive ruptures” not only warn us that large-scale narratives are impossible, but also open up new courses of action, that are more modest, but are no less creative for all that.

“We are in the age of partial objects, of bricks, and leftovers or waste. We no longer believe in the false fragments that, like the pieces of an ancient statue, expect to be completed and stuck together again to form a unit that is also the original unit”, Deleuze and Guattari said in Anti-Oedipus. It looks as of they had written this sentence with editing software. This is the tool that enables us to build up a whole unit by starting out from fragments that previously could have another kind of unity, and which, in turn, may take on other different forms. It’s all about continuing to experiment and not merely fitting in with what is visually correct