Raymond Bellour's 'La Querelle des dispositifs' Defends Cinema's Specificity Against Contemporary Art's Hybridity

Raymond Bellour's latest essay collection, 'La Querelle des dispositifs' (P.O.L, 2012), gathers texts from 1999 to 2012, continuing his exploration of the space between images. Unlike his previous 'Entre-Images' volumes, this book adopts a more polemical stance, arguing for the preservation of differences between cinema and contemporary art installations. Bellour insists that cinema is defined by the specific experience of the theater—forced bodily immobility in darkness and silence—and cannot be reduced to moving images. He critiques the tendency to subsume cinema under contemporary art, warning that this erasure accelerates its disappearance. The book examines artists who move between regimes, such as Chris Marker, Michael Snow, and Agnès Varda, showing that their transitions highlight irreducible differences. Bellour also addresses new image technologies like YouTube, the iPhone, and home projectors, which he sees as degraded forms of film viewing but acknowledges their singular force, revealing a tension between nostalgia for aura and melancholy of generalized reminiscence. The volume defends difference as essential for thought and for understanding mixed media, opposing the confusion that sees everything in everything.