Policy of the machines
In his essay Les Champs de l’audiovisuel, Patrice Blouin defines the ‘policy of the machines’ as a critical option that ‘insists on the part played by technical procedures in the creation of works, as opposed to the part usually played by authors and/or other actors’. From yesterday’s cinematographs to today’s artificial intelligence, via the long genealogy of analogue, videographic and digital cameras and their associated tools (colourisation, filters, stabilisers, drones, etc.), no technology that has ever made images is neutral. Each method of recording or reproducing reality induces a specific and determined relationship with the world.
In a way, then, machines produce their own autonomous form. There is a risk, then, in allowing ourselves to be carried away by a certain fetishism for the machine, encouraged by industrial marketing, and in adopting, without giving it too much thought, their automatic aesthetic. This would be to forget that they are still technologies of impressive sensitivity, whose every bias can be reinterpreted – turned upside down – for the benefit of a reflexive and plastic artistic work.
This morning session will bring together a number of artists, filmmakers and cinematographers to consider the effects of standardisation directly induced by technology, but also, and above all, the room for manoeuvre available to directors and cinematographers to free themselves from these effects and create images and ways of perceiving them.
Moderated by : Dork Zabunyan – professor of film studies, Université Paris 8
Intervenants et intervenantes :
- Jonathan Ricquebourg, director of photography
— Voyages en Italie de Sophie Letourneur (2022), Tijuana Bible de Jean-Charles Hue (2018), La Mort de Louis XIV d’Albert Serra (2016), Gorge cœur ventre de Maud Alpi, etc. - Eponine Momenceau, artist, video-maker, director of photography
— Deephan de Jacques Audiard, 2015 - Jean-Marc Chapoulie, video-maker, filmmaker
— Mr Google, à qui appartient la réalité ? (2013), La Mer du Milieu, (2019), etc. - Laure Portier, filmmaker, Dans l’œil du chien (2019), Soy Libre (2021)
Accessible to French speakers only
