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Présentation

Céline Ruivo

Boucles et rêves emboîtés dans les dessins animés de Satoshi Kon

Yaël Ben Nun
This article analyzes the use of the loop in the hand drawn animated films of Satoshi Kon. The loop is a recurring device in the director’s films, contributing to a mise-en-scène that tricks the viewer’s perception, creating confusion between the real and the imaginary. This study focuses specifically on the case of the nested dream sequences. Through an aesthetic and narrative analysis of the use of dream loops in Perfect Blue (1997) and Paprika (2006), this article investigates the mechanisms behind the nested dream sequences in these films. The aim is to identify the devices employed by Satoshi Kon, using, notably, the work of Thomas Elsaesser on mind-game films and those of Aurélie Ledoux on trompe-l’oeil films. We will consider the role of film conventions and the way their use can be displaced; therefore, questioning our perception of the images. Finally, we will be looking at the loop’s rich symbolic dimension in Satoshi Kon’s films.

Sublimation et médiation effervescente de l’oeuvre Mythologie de mon aquarium

Svetlana Gencheva
This article explores sequential art through Mythology of My Aquarium, an animated film directed by Svetlana Gencheva, with an original score composed by Philippe Marion. Conceived as part of the Storytelling Project, which combines oil painting, animation, and augmented reality, the work is situated within a reflection on time, perception, and narrative progression in sequential art, where the animated loop functions as a structuring principle. By mobilizing the mediation of sequential art in the digital era through GIF art, augmented reality, performances, and immersive installations, Mythology of My Aquarium foregrounds both the resonances and tensions between traditional and digital art, as well as their respective modes of interaction with the viewer. Structured around an interplay of light and darkness, this hybrid artwork evokes themes of otherness, transmission, and personal quest, lending it an initiatory significance.

Le cinéma publicitaire investit l’espace public : le projecteur-boucleur automatique de La Publicité Animée (ca. 1927-1937)

Benoît Carpentier and Céline Ruivo
During the interwar period, La Publicité Animée produced and distributed advertising films. Equipped with its own filming and animation studio, the company created commercials for its advertising clients. These short films were screened using 16 mm projectors fitted with a looper and an integrated, fold-out frosted screen measuring 30 × 23 cm. These automatic projectors were installed in strategic locations throughout Paris, such as the rotunda of Gare Saint-Lazare. The economic history of La Publicité Animée provides a framework for analyzing the marketing discourse adopted by salespeople, in which the mechanical and the automatic acquire a certain “chic” in magazines, as they interpenetrate the forms of modernity present in art and architecture in the 1920s. The technical ingenuity of the projector was emphasized alongside the films themselves, which sometimes feature celebrities from cinema and theater, as well as short silent animations. Unfortunately, many of these films have yet to be recovered.

The Illusion of Forward Motion: Reflections on the Origin and 21st-Century Resurgence of Repetitive Loop Animation

Rod Bantjes and Guido Devadder
This two-part essay explores circular, loop-based animation at two pivotal moments in media history: its 19th-century emergence at the advent of the moving image, and its 21st-century reimagining within contemporary art. Rod Bantjes’ reconstructions uncover how spectral illusions, which still elude explanation, were generated by experimental uses of machines, revealing an early form of machine self-reflexivity embedded in the aesthetic and epistemological logic of the devices. Guido Devadder extends this inquiry through artistic research, analyzing how contemporary installations like CourtCirquit reconfigure the structural principles of the phenakistiscope within a digitally mediated, hyper-reflexive context. Together, the two parts argue that the loop is not merely a visual device but a cultural form—reappearing in times of technological upheaval to expose the limits of perception, the illusion of progress, and the recursive entanglements of human and machine vision.

Des ciné-danses qui (dé)tournent en rond

Bárbara Janicas
Drawing on the principles of rotation, repetition and brevity at work in proto-cinematographic visual devices and attractions, this article explores the lingering presence of dancing movement loops in experimental film. Whether appearing as visual or rhythmic motifs in the avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, operating as formal strategies, closely tied to the material and perceptual conditions of the cinematic apparatus, in structural film from the 1960s onwards, or emerging from choreographic language itself (from Loïe Fuller to Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker), such loops both reenact and unsettle the modes through which these works are created and perceived. Structured in four sections, this article weaves together an archaeology of moving-image devices and analyses experimental dance films in order to examine the cinematic loop as a catalyst for turning “frame-by-frame movement” into a “pure act of metamorphosis,” in the words of Paul Valéry.

La projection en boucle, une forme filmique : concept, milieu, présence, accommodation, structure, durée

Olga Kobryn
Through an examination of a series of key concepts—conceptual space, milieu, presence vector, gestures of accommodation, structure, duration, and non-anthropocentric art—this article argues that looped projection in moving-image installations (analog, video, and digital) should be understood not simply as an adaptation to the museum environment, but as an autonomous cinematic form in its own right. The discussion opens with an analysis of Zen for Film (1962–1964) by Nam June Paik, a work that, while not technically based on mechanical looping, anticipates many of the loop’s defining features in ways that echo the experimental investigations of John Cage. The loop also makes it possible to interrogate the politics of images through the convergence of form and content: from the feminist and anti-colonial struggles of Joyce Wieland to practices that seek to move beyond anthropocentric cinematic logics, such as the images of Anne-Charlotte Robertson and David Claerbout. In this context, the loop emerges both as a political gesture and as a formal vessel capable of holding, engaging with, and revealing reality in all its unruly and non-vectorized complexity.

Flux sans fin programmés. De la boucle à la spirale

Benoît Montigné
While the loop is undoubtedly a constitutive process of early cinema, it re-emerges at different moments in the intersecting history of technology and art, particularly with the advent of digital media. From that moment onward, the sequencing of images and sounds becomes programmable through a new type of loop: the computer loop. Operating as a dematerialized playback head in the background, this form of looping reveals, in the context of different digital works, a granularity of image and sound flows closely akin to that explored in structural experimental cinema—particularly in the work of Martin Arnold. In its digital form, constantly reproduced and renewed by the program, the loop can then dissolve itself into its own variations, giving rise to artworks of a new nature: infinite generative flows.

Hybridations et altérations bouclées : les performances hybrides d’Anna Atta et Maxime Hack-Sim

Anna Atta and Maxime Hack-Sim
The practices of Anna Atta and Maxime Hack-Sim converge in the importance given to the craft laboratory as a place for reflection and experimentation with obsolete technical objects. As part of our experimental approach, we have worked on visual and sound looping to create a narrative. The choice of 16- and 8-millimetre projection (tape recorder) brings a critical perspective to the now-minority practice of film, and to the now-dominant practice of digital video and the normative consequences of this technological mutation on cinematographic practices.

Cosmic Disintegration in Béla Tarr’s Late Films: An Aesthetic Approach to Nihilism

Gustavo Gutiérrez-Suárez
The present article aims to study certain pivotal features in the nihilistic aesthetics of Béla Tarr. To achieve this goal, I address three cinematographic images observed in Tarr’s late films from an aesthetic perspective: crowds of people, animals and climatic phenomena. Firstly, the article provides a comparative review of the aesthetic qualities of crowds. Secondly, animals and climatic phenomena are analyzed focusing on their meaningful interactions with humans. This comparative-analytical study reveals two salient aesthetic themes: crowds, animals and climatic phenomena comprise the entirety of a cosmos in disintegration; moreover, these cinematographic images are being coalesced by the continuity principle that defines such cosmos. Tarr’s aesthetic approach captures a cosmos that is being shaped and held together by the organic interconnectedness between humans, animals and climatic phenomena, while they slowly undergo the same process of annihilation. This article engages in a dialogue with Stellino’s philosophical study of nihilism in Tarr, Handelmann’s anthropological theory of cosmos in Western ideology, and Rancière’s essays on the poetics of Béla Tarr.

Imaginaire cinématographique de la langue et du dialogue en Méditerranée

Anaïs Farine
Situated between documentation and fabulation, this article argues that analyzing the staging of languages in films shot in countries around the Mediterranean Sea could help break away from the dominant imaginary of “antagonistic pairs” which, in the case of the Maghreb for example, opposes French to Arabic, or Arabic to Tamazight (Dakhlia 2004), or which, in certain conceptions of “Mediterranean cinema” advanced in particular by Euromed Audiovisual, positions European languages against Arabic. Through the study of eight films “at the crossroads of languages” (Suchet 2014), and taking Tariq Teguia’s cinema as a starting point, this article explores how translation (subtitling) and interpretation (sign language) of spoken language in film can offer a renewed understanding of language, dialogue, and the Mediterranean space.