Futures of vernacular images

On 6 October 1960, in his Movie Journal, Jonas Mekas wrote: “Films will soon be made as easily as written poems, and almost as cheaply. They will be made everywhere and by everybody. The empires of professionalism and big budgets are crumbling.“

The continuing reduction in the cost of producing moving images is the key to the complete democratisation of film-making. In the days of film, the 8mm format became the standard for home cinema. Today, digital cameras have invaded everyday life and become commonplace objects. Amateur images represent an immeasurable mass, a sunken continent that continues to grow.

Several researchers have proposed grouping this infinite corpus under the generic title of ‘vernacular’ cinema, a term which, for the film-maker Peter Snowdon, corresponds to ‘the pooling of what is unique and fragile in each of us’. For the very nature of this phenomenon is that it is an absolutely anonymous, and therefore necessarily collective, work: the material emanation of a space-time, infra and situated, experienced and restored.

Tracing and preserving vernacular images, despite the enormity of such a task, has never seemed so legitimate, and many associations and institutions, often on a regional scale, are pursuing this work of archiving and showcasing. The stakes are as much scientific as they are political: caring for these amateur fragments also means bringing individual memories to life against the backdrop of the great official and structuring narratives.

A number of filmmakers and artists have regularly confronted this body of work, reusing it to produce composite, reflective or poetic works, whether the images are rendered raw and intact (American Dust
/ American Journal by Arnaud des Pallières) or altered, slowed down and dissected (Images of the Orient – “Vandalic Tourism” by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi).

This play on scale echoes the place given to vernacular practices in the long history of cinema. What status should be accorded to amateur images? Is the restoration process of the same nature as that applied to films whose artistic dimension is proven or claimed?

Moderated by: Antoine Guillot – journalist and producer – France Culture

Guest speakers:

• Bojina Panayotova
  — filmmaker, I See Red People (2017), Building of the Braves (2019)
  In residence at the Villa Albertine, as part of the ‘10 in America’ programme.
• Olivier Sarrazin
  — filmmaker, member of Archipop, an online collection and film library for private archives in the Hauts de France region
• Francesca Bozzano
  — director of collections, Cinémathèque de Toulouse, coordinator of the Mémoires Filmiques programme, shared with the Institut Jean Vigo (Perpignan), the Filmoteca de Catalunya (Barcelona) and the Arxiu del So i de la imatge (Mallorca)
• Sébastien Ronceray
  — author, teacher, co-founder of the associations Braquage and L’inversible, initiator of Home Movie Day Paris