"Les intermittences du visible. Reprises de vue dans le cinéma expérimental américain"

After a brief historical and theoretical survey of the found footage film tradition, this text discusses the issue of reprise in the field of contemporary experimental cinema, focusing on two films by American filmmaker Bill Morrison. In "The Death Train" (1993), Morrison takes up again three series of distinct images in a gesture that tends to foreground the mechanical dimensions of the cinematic spectacle. In "Decasia" (2002), the filmmaker capitalizes on fragments of decaying nitrate film, thus exploring film as materiality. However different they may seem, both works seem to address the same visual theme, that of visible intermittencies, in so far as they can be considered as an act of definition of a modernity ingrained in the very mechanics of the gaze.