[Bellour explains his concept of “between-images,” and comments on the status of the arrested image in relation to the time-image, suggesting how video was an instrument of transformation at a brief historical moment that is already in the past because of the advent of the digital. In the contemporary world, he suggests, the computer now enables a continuous, ideal passage between all the domains of words, images, painting, and photography, obliterating the boundaries that formerly distinguished them. He concludes this section by speculating on the nature of images, ways of forming them, and how they only make sense when related to psychic and physiological factors.]

Why do you prefer the notion of “dispositif” to that of “medium”?

I was very sensitive to the use of the notion of dispositif from the moment I had an impression that there was an impure scrambling taking place between moving images from cinema and those of contemporary art, and that, as a result, dispositifs that were widely disparate were beginning to be confused. At the time when I was working on the essays included in Between-the-Images, this issue preoccupied me to a much lesser extent, even though I was already using the term for the purposes of description. It is fascinating to note that in 1975, the same year (only a few months separated the separate publication projects), Jean-Louis Baudry used the term in the essay he contributed to the issue of Communications on “Psychanalyse et cinéma” that Christian Metz, Thierry Kuntzel, and I jointly edited: “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité” [The dispositif: metapsychological approaches to the impression of reality]; and Foucault, for his part, introduced this word-idea forcefully, as we know, in Discipline and Punish. From then on, the term began to take off, being used by important authors (Deleuze, Agamben, etc.), and it is true that it is extremely useful, given that it allows one to identify specificities while simultaneously allowing one to avoid reducing them to an issue of the medium. On top of that, a dispositif has a constructive dimension, supposing from the outset the existence of an intersection between the psychic and mechanical aspects.