ABSTRACT
In his 1975 essay ‘The Unattainable Text’ – written immediately in advance of the video revolution that enabled cinephiles everywhere to possess film libraries of their own – Raymond Bellour speculated about that day in the future when people could own movies in the same way that they own books and records. Considering the implications of such ownership of movies for cinema scholarship, Bellour wrote, ‘If film studies are still done then, they will undoubtedly be more numerous, more imaginative, more accurate, and above all more enjoyable than the ones we carry out in fear and trembling, threatened continually with the dispossession of the object’ (Bellour 2000: 21).
