MATINÉE DES IDÉES : Towards visual degrowth?

Should cinema add to the chaos of images, reject it or organise it?

The field of the visual has grown exponentially. As technological advances accumulate and replace one another, the image has proliferated and its practice has become universally democratised. This saturation is accompanied by another revolution: the ontological truth of photography – and, by extension, of cinema – is now being called into question. Digital technologies and the advent of artificial intelligence have profoundly changed its nature: it is no longer, strictly speaking, a fragment of reality but, potentially, a chimerical projection.

Given this voracious horizon, what should be the place and responsibility of cinema as a medium that produces images? Should it add to the ambient chaos, reject it or take on the mission of organising it? In recent years, some filmmakers have seized upon this flow in an attempt to structure it and instil a critical sense into it. Others, on the other hand, have clearly refused to feed the machine and have pursued a form of asceticism and purity of shot or dialectic, inventing an a minima or subtractive art.

This does not mean isolating cinema, but re-historicising it. Cinema is precisely an impure art: since its invention, it has always been a medium for capturing the cultural and visual signs that surround it, a place of “friction between art and non-art”, as Jacques Rancière puts it.

The Matinée des idées offers an opportunity to extend this reflection in the company of filmmakers whose practices of editing, collage, alteration, attention and diversion are precisely those that have a place in this new visual empire.

Moderated by: Dork Zabunyan, Professor of Film Studies, Université Paris 8

With the filmmakers:

• Gabrielle Stemmer
  — Clean with me (After Dark), 2019 ; Femmes sous algorithmes, 2022
• Arnaud Dezoteux
  — Miroir de Haute-Valnia, 2017 ; Grandeur Nature, 2023
• Jacques Perconte
  — Chuva (Madeira), 2012 ; Ettrick (Scottish Borders), 2015 ; Or / aor, Budapest, June 18, 2018 ; Avant l’effondrement du mont blanc, 2020 ; Silesilence, 2022