Alain Bonfand's 'Le cinéma saturé' Examines Saturation in Cinema and Painting

Alain Bonfand's new book 'Le cinéma saturé' (Presses Universitaires de France) explores the relationship between cinema and painting, focusing on the concept of saturation in moving images. Drawing on Freud's 1922 note about hidden themes, Bonfand questions whether the visible itself has become problematic in cinema. The author, who has extensively studied Paul Klee and Michelangelo Antonioni, analyzes films by Albert Lewin, Alfred Hitchcock, Yasujirō Ozu, and Jean-Luc Godard. The book culminates with an examination of Andrei Tarkovsky's cinema, which Bonfand argues defeats theory, leaving it annihilated before an evidence of another order. The work is characterized as an aesthetic experience tested by phenomenology, with a meditative passion that goes beyond theory. Claude Minière's review highlights the ethical dimension of Bonfand's inquiry into the limits of theory.