When my friend Anne-Marie Duguet came to Sydney about five months ago to take up her appointment as a Visiting Research Professor at the iCinema Centre at the College of the Fine Arts, Carol and I picked her up for to show her some of the sights in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. We ended up at Doyles Hotel, Watson’s Bay, for a fish meal.
As we were sitting down she told us the sad news that Thierry Kuntzel had passed away earlier in the year. Anne-Marie’s words engulfed me in a state of speechless disbelief. How is this so? To hear her terrible news in such a belated fashion appalled me.
As I am trying in my clumsy fashion to pen a few words about Thierry’s awful death and the tragic loss to his close friends and to anyone who cares for the cinema and video art will acknowledge that his departure from our shared world is of an incalculable importance.
Thierry’s death is not only a poignant subtraction from the present vitality of French art, film and video, it is an appalling loss in world terms: such was the measure of Thierry’s subtle theoretical intelligence and haunting melancholic artistry. He was one of the great flaneur–poets of the cinema and video art. It is that simple. When the media archaeologists of the future construct their cartographies of the fate of the image in the twentieth century, Thierry’s film/video essays, fragments, notes, and most importantly, his astonishing vapour videos and installations of Proustian subtlety will compel them to acknowledge his singular presence somewhere in their calculations.
I can’t claim that I was a personal friend of his – far from it – but I had the good fortune to meet him twice in Paris in the 1990s. On both occasions Thierry was gracious, generous with his time, and quite humorous in a self-deprecatory and ironic way.
On the first occasion in the early 1990s, I had to go up a rather winding ‘Caligaresque’ stairs to get to his apartment. But before I entered Thierry’s apartment I had to stoop (a la Alfred Jarry) to enter through the door. There was Thierry, bent over a ghetto-blaster located on his sink, intently listening to a pulsating rock tune. I asked him who it was and he immediately replied: ‘John, it is great music. It is Kurt Cobain.’
Then Thierry turned around welcoming me to his apartment and went to his refrigerator to offer me some food to eat. He opened the refrigerator to see what was there. But it was virtually empty. Embarrassingly so. It resembled an Yves Tanguy surreal mineral landscape. We laughed about it and then he took me to an adjoining room where he generously played some of his early video works, including his legendary Nostos I(1979).
As I was watching his ‘writerly’ calligraphic Nostos I and, I think it was Time Smoking a Picture(1980), amongst other videos, it occurred to me that here was an artist who used his everyday surroundings as his audio-visual ‘magic writing pad’ canvas to explore his ongoing enquiry of the unconscious, the real, representation and memory. Groundbreaking videos that are achingly beautiful in their ghostly vapour appearance and anchored in the codes of the cinema, photography and painting.
The other time I meant Thierry was around 1996 when I had a residency at the Cite De Arts complex near the Notre Dame Cathedral. This time he took me to a nearby bar for a few drinks where we talked about various things like the cinema, film theory and video art. That was the last I saw of him.
Now as I am listening to Johnny Hodges’ mellifluous rendition of the Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington classic composition Day Dream, what am I to say of Thierry’s life as a distinguished film theorist and a video artist – not forgetting his many fragmentary essays and notes that still need to be translated? In this context Anne-Marie’s friendship and nurturing editorial assistance to Thierry should be singled out. We have the invaluable DVD-Rom/book project ‘Title TK’ (2006), that was edited by Anne-Marie and features Thierry’s notes, essays, drawings, works and database. Unfortunately, as yet, I don’t have a copy of this critical anthology of Thierry’s art and writings, but I know this item is invaluable not only for Thierry’s eloquent works but also for the collection of contributors who wrote about Thierry. Thierry’s close friends Raymond Bellour and Jean-Paul Fargier have written for this DVD-ROM/book, and notable video curators Peggy Gale and Barbara London have also contributed, as have American film and media scholars Tim Murray and Maureen Turim.
And someone else has written for this homage anthology, no one less than video artist Bill Viola. Unless I am mistaken, Bill Viola rarely writes about other artists working in the video medium.
As a student Thierry studied philosophy, linguistics and semiotics with Roland Barthes and Christian Metz. With Barthes, Thierry did a thesis (‘Film-work/Dream-work’) and he proceeded to write important film theory and analysis. He was an important contributor to textual analysis. His theoretical texts deployed critical applications of psychoanalytical and semiological ideas concerning the relation of the filmic and psychical apparatuses.
When Metz died, Thierry was inconsolably stricken with grief.
He became the head of the Research Division of both of the French Radio and Television Office (ORTF) and Institut National de la Communication l’Audiovisual in Paris. He taught at numerous universities: the University of Paris, the Centre d’Etudes Americain in Paris, the State University of New York, Buffalo, and other tertiary institutions. By the end of the 1980s, Thierry dedicated his life to his art. His videos and installations have been exhibited throughout the world, in festivals, galleries, institutions and museums.
Recently here in the Antipodes we were blessed to have the opportunity to see his Nostos IIwork in the Beaubourg touring video art retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
All of us who are interested in the cinema and video are, in some measure, indebted to him.
He was an original just like Johnny Hodges, Billy Strayhorn or Duke Ellington.
John Conomos, November 2007.
Thierry Kuntzel – A Selective Bibliography, 2007. Compiled by John Conomos
“A Note on the Filmic Apparatus,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 1.3 (1976), 266-67.
“The Film Work,” Enclitic 2.1 (1978): 38-61.
“The Film Work, 2”, Camera Obscura (1980): 7-68.
“Le Defilement: A View in Close-up,” in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, ed., Apparatus: Cinematographic Apparatus, Selected Writings, New York, Tantam Press, 1980, 232-247.
“Sight, Insight, and Power: An Allegory of a Cave,” Camera Obscura (1980), 6: 92-110.
Thierry Kuntzel. Anne-Marie Duguet, ed. Paris: Galerie Nationale du Jeu Paume, 1993.
“Freaks Show” (1972), trans. Adrian Martin, Rouge, no. 7 (2005), www.rouge.com.au/7/freaks.html.
Secondary Sources
Frederique Baumgartner, “Thierry Kuntzel Automne (le Mont Analogue),” in Christine Van Assche, ed.,Collection New Media/Installations. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2006, pp 180-183.
Raymond Bellour, Catherine David, Christine Van Assche, eds., Passages de l’Image. Barcelona, Fundacio Caixia De Pensions, 1991.
Raymond Bellour, “Thierry Kuntzel and the Return of Writing,” Camera Obscura 11 (1983), 29-59.
Janet Bergstrom, “Enunciation and Sex Difference (part 1),” Camera Obscura, Summer ’79, pp 32-69.
Anne-Marie Duguet, “Thierry Kuntzel Nostos II”, in Christine Van Assche, ed. Collection New Media/Installations, 184-185.
Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, eds. Illuminating Video, San Francisco 1990.
Timothy Murray, “Et in Arcadia Video: Poussin’ the Image of Culture with Marin and Kuntzel”, MLN 112.3 (1997), 431-453.
Timothy Murray, Like a Film. London and New York, Routledge, 1993.
Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg. eds. Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996.
D.N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, Or, Philosophy After the New Media. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001.
D.N. Rodowick, The Difficulty of Difference. New York, Routledge, 1991.
Created on: Wednesday, 19 December 2007