Some may think that to attempt a synthetic overview of Raymond Bellour's major contributions to what is now known as film and media theory constitutes a violation of the very principles that he advocates, the most crucial being an attentiveness to specific art works, whether it be a film, a poem, or an installation, over time. Not coincidentally, he titles the longer version of the interview included here, published in French in September 2017 with Rouge Profond, as Dans la compagnie des oeuvres, “In the Company of the Work,” or even “In the Presence of the Work.” For Bellour, art comes before theory. Furthermore, for Bellour, whatever we can say about art will always be inadequate and incomplete with regard to the experience of the work itself.

Nevertheless, this volume proposes to offer a route, un parcours, into a very thickly wooded terrain of dense vegetation that must be examined in detail to understand its full effect and import. Bellour's corpus chronicles a complex journey, marked by twists and turns, that takes place over half a century, in which he explores the evolving new worlds of the moving image. His careful recording of that journey is such that the reader will inevitably find many points of entry (“des passages,” in Bellour's terms), through which he or she may join this scholar on his multi-faceted voyage of discovery. This study aims to offer one such point of entry, un passage, to the interested reader in the hope that she or he will find it useful in forming an understanding of this significant scholar's contribution to our knowledge of twentieth-century cinema and its avatars in the twenty-first century.

Bellour's writing style itself presents a potential impediment for the English-language reader, especially those with academic intentions. Philippe Azoury, writing for the trendy French publication Les Inrockuptibles, in his review of Bellour's third volume of collected articles, L’Entre-images 2: mots, images, explains, “The thought [thought-process] of Bellour is new, because it reacts though trafficking, rhizomes, hypertexts.” Azoury also notes that in the two volumes L’Entre-images and L’Entre-images 2, published ten years apart, “Bellour refers more and more frequently to the writings of Blanchot on Mallarmé,” suggesting the “French-ness” of the tradition in which Bellour himself approaches the work of art – that is, an approach that is deliberately hermetic, in a way that is characteristic of modernism itself.