Time Smoking a Picture 1980

Directed by Thierry Kuntzel

In Time Smoking a Picture, simple gestures and images — a figure smoking a cigarette, a frame within a frame — unfold in time as elusive manifestations of reality and representation, transformed by barely perceptible variations of shifting color and passages of light. Raymond Bellour has written of Kuntzel's achievement in "representing the unrepresentable: the spatial or temporal in-between created by the disjunction/conjunction between mental representation and perception, surface and depth... past and present, conscious and unconscious. As the hero — the author and original spectator — establishes his presence, crossing the room in both frames at once, we are given the outline of what representation holds out to fiction: the hero's gaze into the window, where he can see his life slipping past, inside and outside."