Traité d’optique
par Érik Bullot

« If you change every single part of your car, piece by piece, will the vehicle you’re using be the same as the one you bought? », enquires Pierre Sorlin. Of course, it’s the same story for the cinematograph. One by one each of its parts has been replaced, its support, camera, projector, but it continues to go by the same name. Did something get lost along the way? The camera has transformed, but does this mean it has become something other? Is its avatar employing another vehicle?  Can the body of cinema split in two? Can a film encounter its double or its spectre? Can it be restored? These are just some of the questions animating this lecture devoted to Traité d’optique, a forgotten student film made in 1987 based on the opening pages of Paul Virilio’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Esthétique de la disparition), and reactivated following the performative cinema hypothesis. 

A hard case speaking softly
       underwritten by shadows still
A soft touch playing hard to get
Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson

Following on from their work on the dark matter of cinema, the Infra-Quark Universe and Nocturnal Committees, Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson will be engaging with subtitles as the auditory shadow of a hidden film whose scattered contours lie amid disparate images that silently demand new worlds of listening.






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Monts de Blond, photograph by Érik Bullot, 2012.

Le Gai Savoir, title still from performance, Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson, 2015.