Dominique Païni's 'Le Temps exposé' Rethinks Cinema's Plasticity

Dominique Païni's new book 'Le Temps exposé', published by Cahiers du cinéma, follows his 1997 'Cinéma, un art moderne'. In the intervening five years, Païni left the Cinémathèque for the Centre Pompidou (Beaubourg) and co-curated the seminal exhibition 'Hitchcock et l'art' with Guy Cogeval. The book's subtitle reflects both a general prognosis and a personal trajectory. Païni argues for relocating cinema by rereading its technical and aesthetic history, rejecting narrative and the 'visual' in favor of cinematic 'plasticity' as an expression of thought and a shaping of time. He aligns his argument with the lineage from Epstein to Deleuze. The work includes brilliant analyses (the Straubs' Cézanne, a portrait of Walsh as a landscape artist) and less engaging passages (deference to Godardian oracles). Patrice Blouin's review questions whether this lineage alone can sustain the seventh art, noting that cinema's 'contrary fable' (Jacques Rancière's phrase) always exceeds a simple exposition of time.