La ciné-danse est une forme artistique hybride qui entrelace étroitement les propriétés techniques et esthétiques de la danse et du cinéma. Ce n’est pas un genre nouveau: d’une certaine manière, la ciné-danse existe depuis les tout débuts du cinéma. Mais elle est théorisée pour la première fois au milieu des années 1940 par Maya Deren qui propose aussi avec A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) un film-manifeste qui s’est avéré déterminant pour la reconnaissance et le développement decette catégorie la plus transdisciplinaire du film de danse.Néanmoins, c’est seulement à partir des années 2000 etsurtout depuis le début des années 2010 que les festivals spécialisés se sont multipliés et que le genre a commencé à recevoir un éclairage théorique. Cette thèse contribue ainsi à ce tout jeune domaine de recherche que sont les screendance studies en proposant un premier panorama historique de la ciné-danse et en examinant certaines de ses spécificités formelles et dramaturgiques dont beaucoup n’avaient pas encore été analysées.Cette étude prend notamment le parti d’explorer la ciné-danse sous l’angle inaperçu de son hyper-sensorialité et des corporéités originales qu’elle façonne.J’y commence par retracer l’histoire plus large dans laquelle la ciné-danse s’inscrit, celle de la danse au cinéma en général et du film de danse en particulier. Puis,je propose d’esquisser plus spécifiquement l’histoire du genre. Je souligne ensuite la fécondité de l’hybridation artistiquequi définit la ciné-danse en analysant certaines de ses singularités formelles et dramaturgiques. J’examine notamment l’usage sui generis du gros plan dans ces films, la (re)matérialisation des corps à laquelle ils procèdent par un traitement hyper-sensoriel et synesthésique des images et des sons ainsi que les corporéitésétranges qu’ils créent et les implications critiques que celles-ci renferment. Enfin, je me concentre sur un aspect capital de la ciné-danse : les lieux qu’elle investit et les rapports complexes entre corps et espaces qu’elle interroge. Cette thèse brosse ainsi le portrait historique et esthétique d’un art hybride, d’un genre éminemment corporel et sensoriel et d’une pratique in situ. J’y mets au jour des oeuvres expérimentales qui explorent la capacité de ce croisement artistique à mettre en exergue la matérialité des corps ainsi que la sensorialité des films et de l’art chorégraphique. / Screendance is a hybrid artistic form which inextricably interweaves the technical and aesthetic properties of both dance and cinema. It is not a new genre: in a certain sense, screendance has existed since the very beginnings of cinema. It was first theorised, however, in the mid-1940s by Maya Deren, whose film-manifestoA Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) proved central to the recognition and development of this most transdisciplinary category of dance films. Nevertheless, it is only from the 2000s and even more-so from the 2010s onwards that specialisedfestivals have proliferated and that the genre has begun to receive theoretical attention. This dissertation is thus a contribution to the emerging field of screendance studies: it proposes a historical panorama of the genre and examines its formal and dramaturgical specificities, many of which have not yet been the object of in-depth analysis. This examination aims in particular to explore screendance from the previously unconsidered perspective of its hyper-sensoriality and the originalcorporealities it constructs.I begin by retracing the larger history within which screendance has grown that of dance in film and especially that of dance films. I then propose a more specific history of screendace proper. Next, I emphasise the fecundity of the artistic hybridisation which defines screendance by analysing certain of its formal and dramaturgical singularities. More specifically, I examine its sui generis usage of closeups, its (re)materialisation of bodies through a hyper-sensorial and synaesthetic treatment of images and sounds, as well as its strange corporealities and the critical implications they suggest. Finally, I focus on a crucial dimension of screendance: the places it investigates and its complex interrogations of the relationships between body and space. This dissertation paints a historical and aesthetic portrait of a hybrid art, an eminently corporeal and sensorial genre, a site-specific practice; it celebrates experimental works which explore the richness of an artistic cross-over and highlight the materiality of bodies as well as the sensoriality of dance and film.

The history of video art has tended to be told through a narrow lens, one that understands video as a single, coherent medium, or as defined by a single political project: an opposition to broadcast television. This thesis proposes instead to look at “actually existing video”, a methodology adapted from music scholar Benjamin Piekut that looks at the concrete variety of forms that video took at particular moments and in particular places, and in the hands of particular people. Such an approach does not seek to predetermine what video is, but rather insists on video’s heterogeneity. This thesis applies this methodology by outlining the contours of what I call, following critic Jud Yalkut, “the alternative video network”. This network was an open-ended assemblage of people, instruments, practices and shared ideas that, in the 1960s and early 1970s, embraced video as a means of engaging with the politics of technology. It included the New York-based figures Nam June Paik, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Aldo Tambellini, Juan Downey and the Raindance collective (especially Paul Ryan, Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny), and a contingent from the West Coast and Canada including the collectives T.R. Uthco, Ant Farm, Image Bank and General Idea. Its ideas and practices were circulated at places like The Kitchen in New York and the Everson Museum in Syracuse (under the guidance of curators James Harithas and David Ross), and in the publications Radical Software (edited by Korot and Gershuny) and FILE (edited by General Idea). Ultimately, I argue that this network, which assembles a variety of different art histories, and social and theoretical concerns, was unified by a shared engagement with the central problem of Cold War US discourse: how to integrate humans with the new electronic technologies that proliferated in the US in the wake of World War Two. The alternative video network analyzed the dominant solutions to this problem, and offered their own alternatives.