The Revolution Has Been Televised

Raymond Bellour's short 1975 essay ‘The Unattainable Text’ (which first appeared in English in the same landmark issue of Screen journal as Laura Mulvey's ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’) has, in recent years, enjoyed renewed life as a founding reference text of the loose, global movement devoted to the making and theorizing of the audiovisual essay. It has also, in a backlash action, provided the basis upon which to criticize this movement.

Where the film-text was once indomitably introuvable (Bellour's original word) to scholars and artists alike – variously unfindable, inaccessible, unreachable, unquotable, unmanipulable – now, as current wisdom declares, we can get our hands on it and do what we like with it, mainly thanks to the various technological waves (VHS, LaserDisc, DVD, Blu-ray, and, less legally, digital downloading of torrents), which were still only a distant dream for a film teacher, critic, analyst, or writer in 1975.

Drew Morton, for instance, suggests that ‘videographic film scholarship can redeem visual analysis. We can play out sequences in real time, pause upon individual frames, weave in primary and secondary research, and formalize an argument via voice-over commentary’.