Abstract | The statement and call of situationist militant and filmmaker Guy Debord at the end of the 1950s that “The cinema too needs to be destroyed” (On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Period of Time, 1959) was answered in multifarious ways during the decade of the 1970s, perhaps beginning with Godard’s own much later premonition of these developments in Le gai savoir (1969) in which the two protagonists call not for a “return to zero” but first to arrive there, as a prelude to creating something new out of the ruins of the cinematic apparatus. Paradoxically yet significantly this conversation takes place in a television studio. This reinvention of the audiovisual beyond the cinema as a technological mechanism and ideological institution is a concern that would be taken up in Godard’s work in video, television and cinema across the 1970s, but also in the work of a number of like-minded filmmakers, whether or not they actually embraced the use of new technologies like video. This paper will present the stakes of this attempted dismantling of the cinematic apparatus. It will argue that more recent methodologies such as Zielinski’s specific version of media archaeology as counter media history presented in his work Audiovisions, is able to shed light on this pragmatic reversal of apparatus theory in the 1970s via an emphasis on its radical televisual subversion. |
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