Philippe-Alain Michaud, Anime primitive, 2023

So it’s a book about cinema? Not exactly, or rather, not only, even though it deals with animated images or animation. It’s more about drawing and games, trance, dreams, spectres, the union and disjunction of the soul and the body…

A book on art history, anthropology, philosophy? I wouldn’t say so, even though I borrow concepts from these disciplines to tell a story that is ultimately the story of all stories: that of the transformation of the body into a figure and its appearance in representation. I look for traces of this phenomenon in the most diverse forms, from the universe of Krazy Kat or Little Nemo, to burlesque or scientific cinema, from the tarantism of southern Italy to Indo-American mythologies…

And why the title Primitive Souls? Primitive souls are separated souls, as are figures. For a figure to appear, a body must disappear: figurativeness is nothing more than the story of a separation. This is why the question of representation is so closely linked to mourning, and mourning in turn always refers us back to the enigma of representation.

In The Primitive Mind, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl describes the dead, or rather ghosts, as beings that resemble the living but are “incomplete and decayed”: when they appear, they look more like ghosts or shadows than real beings. They have bodies similar to ours, but without substance or thickness. The logic of being is therefore replaced by a logic of appearance: ghosts are persistent figures that are charged with an effect of delay or suspension.”