Between montage and movement, overlapping views and resurgences, Gustav Deutsch's monumental project, Film ist., attempts to write the history of cinema through its own material, at the intersection of early cinema, avant-garde films of the 1920s, and contemporary experimental cinema. In his book Film ist. La pensée visuelle selon Gustav Deutsch (Film ist. Visual thinking according to Gustav Deutsch), Livio Belloï seeks to better understand the magnum opus of an artist who defies categorisation.

While Gustav Deutsch caused a sensation at the 2013 Berlinale with his film Shirley, which transposes  Edward Hopper's paintings to film, he was also attracting attention in the realm of film theory as the subject of a new book by Livio Belloï, Film ist. La pensée visuelle selon Gustav Deutsch(1). Gustav Deutsch has already been the subject of other, mostly generalist books. However Livio Belloï's book is the first to focus on Film ist., or rather one part of it. Deutsch's original cinematic oeuvre is composed of 13 chapters (1-6, 7-12, 13), and lasts 4 hours in total. Livio Belloï’s 300-page book focuses only on the central part (7-12). According to the researcher, the reason is simple: “it appears fairly obvious that the central part is the most relevant to Deutsch’s creation of a hypothetical definition of cinema itself; this is where his visual thinking reaches its pinnacle, where his artistry in harvesting film extracts and piecing them together crystallises into veritable analytical proposals."

In homage to Deutsch's film, Livio Belloï's book has the same structure and each chapter focuses on a series of questions about what we are watching. Seeing: this is one of the main themes of Deutsch's work. In this sense, Chapter 7 (and the first chapter of the film), is one of the most evocative: in segment 7.2, a man leans down to look through a keyhole, and the film shows us "the other side" through alternating countershots. Deutsch's choice is not insignificant: the lock shaped a series of early films in many ways, establishing a logic of continuity in the infancy of what would become cinematographic language. One example is Par le trou de la serrure, a 1901 Pathé production that serves as an archetype of  how early cinema tried to represent subjective vision. In the film, a room attendant observes, not-so-subtly, the eccentric behaviour of clients in their rooms. It’s a form of experimentation, of course, but it represents above all the scopic drive, this need to see what we can't normally see. The discourse is well known, but it nevertheless rings true: cinema is the art of voyeurism. This is exactly what Deutsch wants to point out: the filmmaker puts the viewer is the same position as the voyeur while playing on our perception of the world (and cinematographic language) by breaking the sacrosanct rule of continuity: images of a boat at sea, a North African landscape, the portrait of a young Asian woman, and a frightened actress being attacked by a snake succeed one another in no logical order, and with nothing in common other than their critical status as "objects of our gaze", "just" images.

(1) Livio Belloï, Film ist. La pensée visuelle selon Gustav Deutsch, L'Âge d'Homme, Collection "Histoire et esthétique du cinéma, 2013.