Benoît Turquety (Université Paris VIII – Vincennes-St. Denis)
Louis Delluc’s notion of “photogénie” is often read as designating an atechnical quality of human and nonhuman beings, an impalpable attribute of certain faces or objects, as against boring others. But in fact, Delluc’s 1920 Photogénie is essentially a technological book. It describes the way to use — or not use — light and shadow, perspective, blur, analyses cinematography as well as costumes or settings, describes a studio and the organization of work. Yet, within the cinema technological corpus, Delluc has a singular position: his sweeping critical judgments are formulated from outside the trade, aiming precisely at denouncing the cliches, in other words the technical habits of the time. This standpoint gives us a rare glance into a world of recurring practices that seldom are described or formulated — for instance, the use of black velvet instead of the setting behind tender scenes. As negative theology was not the negation of theology, Delluc’s negative technology does not ignore or devalue the technical as such; on the contrary, he calls for an “algebra of light”, the construction of a film as a good theorem, and discusses with precision the implications of technical decisions on every level. The reconsideration of dominant practices doesn’t require the negation of technicity, it requires technology as aesthetic negation.
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Benoît Turquety is a professor in film studies at the Université Paris 8, director of the EUR ArTeC and of SNF research projects on Bolex (2015-2019) and Nagra (2021-2026). He has published Politiques de la technicité. Corps, monde et medias avec Gilbert Simondon (2022), Medium, Format, Configuration: The Displacements of Film (2019), Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivists” in Cinema (2020), among others. A second edition of his book Inventing Cinema: Machines, Gestures and Media History (2019) is currently being republished in French (2025).