He also analyses another relationship with time, between the video and the spectator, this time, the notion of live transmission, which video enables, the notion of broadcasting a single signal on several monitors in real time. A relationship with time which would be aestheticised by Jean-Luc Godard, in particular, who cultivated the art of stammering or silence on the television, which are two characteristics of live reflection, the absence of the preparation of a discourse, and which however haunt television, which aims to fill in the gaps, which is scared of this same silence. We can already see that video, as an aesthetic and experimentation of time and image, in a certain way enables an interrogation of the limits and the fears of television.

To return to the simultaneity of the display of several images, Philippe Dubois offers a subtle conclusion. In relation to video it is erroneous to talk of shot and editing, which are inscribed in a linear definition of time. He privileges the concept of image over that of shot. And the term mixing is privileged over that of editing. The mixing of several images into one, which construct a story of simultaneity. He goes further in suggesting that we no longer take into account the scale of shots. The latter presupposes a homogeneity of the space of an image from a unique point of view. It no longer prevails in the case of the incrustation of images which represent different realities and spaces and which are assembled for an effect of meaning. He also interrogates two other major concepts of cinema, that of depth of field and that of off-camera. Once again, depth of field presupposes a homogeneity of a space in perspective, the same space in which certain elements are closer than others, where video offers images which do not share the same space. This simultaneous assemblage of images even goes as far as reducing the importance of off-camera to the benefit of a ‘totalising image,’ as everything the video director wants to shows is supposed to be found within it. The off-camera element is thus ruled out.

This definition is a seductive one. And yet we quickly run up against certain problems which limit the exclusive character of this new aesthetic. Cinema, already in the 1920s, used superimposition, or a mix of images. Conversely, video also develops cinematographic techniques for narrative or aesthetic construction. It does not have a code which is specific to it. It is fastened to that which surrounds and precedes it. It is stuck to cinema, television, contemporary art, the digital form, and the whole inter-influences itself in a constant brewing process. The book’s author there marks a decisive turning point, stops thinking through video and trying to define it by the image and instead embraces it in a whole, which notably integrates the other arts, but also video as an eminently confused state, inseparable from the image, certainly, but also from the medium’s very system, from the manner in which it asks questions.

Between cinema and contemporary art

The first part allows an idea of what video could be to be set up, even if it remains ambiguous, volatile and multiple. It permits the reader to become familiar with the concept, to be positioned within its key elements, in its relationship with other media. The book’s three remaining sections are stamped with an oblique, transversal, bootlegging and anachronistic approach, which allows us to envisage video not in terms of what it is positively, but what it is in relation to the Other, in relation to the manner in which it raises questions. Sections which thus abolish the borders, to the benefit of an extraordinary aesthetic brewing process.