Perec's cinephilia

Abstract

A passionate film lover in the 1960s and 1970s, like many young people of his generation, Georges Perec in a way gave up cinema when he wrote Les Choses, his first published novel, which had initially taken the form of a hold-up film script. Yet Perec’s cinephilia kept him writing, providing textual generators for some of his Oulipian writings. This article will, however, defend the hypothesis that the moving cinematographic image is in fact the antithesis of the image that Perec’s writing really needed: the fixed, framed (i.e. also truncated, even mutilated) image of photography.