It was 35 years ago, in the full flower of cinema semiology and the ‘analysis of film’, of Roland Barthes’ paradoxical reveries on this word text (definitively unfashionable today), that I decided to baptize the film text an unattainable text. Because this was a time before either VHS or DVD existed, when it took considerable effort to arrange (always precarious) access to film prints and Moviolas alike. But the film text was unattainable, above all, for the simple reason that it was not truly a text, and thus unquotable. Whereas it is quite simple, in approaching a literary text, to draw fragments of the studied work into the thread of one's own commentary, easily incorporated into the new text elaborated on the basis of the source text, in an endless accumulation. By contrast, we cannot cite, in the same way, this composite of images, music, sounds, and speech which is a film. Only, literally, its dialogues, intertitles, or voice-over commentaries. But the amazing thing is that, of all the arts, cinema is the only one to push this paradox of quotability and unquotability to such an extreme.

For, if film is not a text, it nonetheless can become so by virtue of the simple fact that, of all the spectacles that it belongs with, it is the only one whose material, like that of the book, is forever fixed – variabilities of projection and print quality comparable, in the scheme of things, to the variability of printed editions across time.