In musician John Cale's 1999 autobiography What's Welsh for Zen, he recalls a particularly turbulent, chaotic period of his life, and offers an intriguing analogy for the experience: “This was something close to cinema. A vicarious, unstable reality”. His assumption is striking: cinema, so often conceived of as offering us a whole world, a slice of reality, is here something not only emotionally close to us – a vicarious, substitute life – but also as fundamentally discontinuous and unstable, a world in pieces.

Once, teaching a university course on film theory, I gave my students a tough assignment: rather than comment on the theories of other, famous people (André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Maya Deren, etc.), I challenged them to sketch out their own, original, possible theory of film. Their theory was to be based (as all such theories are) on some proposed essence of the film medium. In general, my students – like most of the hallowed masters of this genre – preferred to postulate something large, flowing and unified as the essence of cinema: time, movement, emotion, space, light … Perhaps if any of them had lived the intense rock’n’roll lifestyle of Cale, they might have gone in his completely different direction: cinema as fragmented, scary, psychedelic.

Witold Gombrowicz described his 1965 novel Cosmos as the account of “a reality that is creating itself” – a state of ceaseless fluctuation that would certainly appeal to Andrzej Żuławski, whose films, including the immortal Possession (1981), often plunged themselves into the discontinuous and unpredictably unfolding chaos that Cale's autobiography evokes.