ABSTRACT
This dangerous formulation of mine from 1971 was wrongly taken to mean that film's essential nature was the proper area of investigation for avant-garde/experimental film. It was never up to the structural/materialist filmmaker to recover films' essential nature, i.e. film as film. If anything, it is a film's concrete existence which must interest; its possibilities of militating against transparency; its presentation/formation of processes of production which have as their uses meanings constructed by, through, and for. In what interests are constructions constructed? Films can operate to produce their processes against imaginary constructions. Imaginary constructions are those whose components and meanings are not produced as obsessive, difficult, contradictory, because an uncontradictory construction is one that gives itself as natural. Not produced at all — out of the blue! That imaginary then becomes that area that demands narrative identification, ideological desires fulfilled, and so on.
