Testimony, Instant, Memory. Spaces of cut and interruption in Video Letter (1982), by Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa

Abstract

This text takes as a central subject of investigation the documentary film Video Letter (1982), by Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa, inquiring its technical procedures and thematic approaches in parallel with a Jacques Derrida’s essay which is built around a fictional text,L’instant de ma mort, by Maurice Blanchot. The approximation between these two works permits us, despite their differences – one, a video work, the other, a literary text, - explore issues associated with the instant, dead, memory, and the relations inscribing the factual and the fictional, writing and image, as well as conceive new forms of temporality proceeding through the fragmentation and the interruption of the univocal diegetic structures. We try to suggest, by this mean, the privilege of processes related with editing and cut, assessing the emergence of points and singular instants which, being normally attached to the consideration of the still image, ultimately participate and profusely determine the reconstitution and reevaluation of the filmic structure and the image in motion.