Video installations that question the language of cinema

Abstract

In his essay The False Movements of Cinema, Alain Badiou describes the art of cinema as an impure discipline because of its extensive relations with other arts and the few techniques that are specific to this medium: takes and editing. From its beginnings, film theory focused on the mechanisms of editing, its function as an intermediary between the shots and the visual narrative. The skill of filmmaking is largely based on the idea of invisibility, for the viewers, of the editing of the audiovisual narrative. More than a century of film production and reception has educated us not to perceive its mechanisms and has even influenced our perception of the world. This article analyzes the work of three video installation artists who question the language of cinema to show its mechanisms and influences on our imagination: Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon and Stan Douglas.