Frank Smith

Les Films non exécutables

Les Films non exécutables (The Non-Executable Films) is a series of texts that take the form of scripts and serve the function of evidence. Each text describes a film that cannot be shot, not for lack of means, but because a legal, physical or conceptual prohibition prevents its execution. From this point of impossibility, the text constructs the entire film, at the exact place where the camera has no right to go, where the shot cannot be held, where the image has not yet taken place or can no longer take place. This gesture is the exact reverse of the paysmage because, whereas the fixed shot places a camera before what resists being seen, the non-executable text places a film before what resists being filmed. This resistance is not a failure and it is precisely what gives these texts their necessity, since they bring into existence what they cannot show. Seeing and saying reach here their point of maximal non-rapport, no longer the productive tension of shot and caption, but the impossibility of any shot at all, which shifts the entire weight of the film onto saying alone. The Non-Executable Films are therefore not unrealised screenplays or projects awaiting funding. They are films that exist entirely within the text because they can exist nowhere else, and that pose, from within this very impossibility, the question of what it means to film.