As a publishing act, Migrant Thoughts argues that the image is inevitably nomadic and inexorably migrant and, as Henri Bergson reminds us, is everywhere. Everything is image. We are images among images, and in this respect film is no more than one of the media through which images move. Images become a gesture of resistance, as by being just an image and not a just image, as Jean-Luc Godard said, they are worthy and can never be subdued by power, despotism or an all-too human will corrupted by the idea of ownership.

Comment « rendre compte » des expérimentations sans récit et comment « expérimenter » depuis les récits du cinéma narratif ? Dans les textes écrits par Prosper Hillairet, des passages s’opèrent, circulent dans les films, entre les films, les styles, les cinéastes, les époques. L’ ensemble, tour à tour consacré à l’avant-garde des années 20, comme aux cinéastes expérimentaux français des années 70 et 80, avec quelques incursions tardives dans le cinéma narratif, tisse une réflexion à partir du cinéma comme « forme visuelle ».

Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) is internationally recognized as one of the most important painters of the 20th and 21st centuries. The leitmotif of her painting, the act of rendering her body awareness visible, found additional expression in the films she made in New York in the early 1970s. And what films they are! Influenced by painting, but also by U.S. experimental film, the feminist movement, animation, and her new hometown of New York, Lassnig created a remarkable body of radically independent short films in just a few years.

A pioneer of cinema, Germaine Dulac (1882-1942)  is one of the major figures of the 1920s French Avant-Garde. Hugely influential, she founded and directed numerous organisations and, in parallel, was a tireless activist in the defense of women’s rights.