The Documentary film school

Cinema, form and morality today :

– Where do we stand with Kapo’s Travelling?

De l’Abjection, Rivette’s article published in 1961, in which he denounced the tracking shot decided on by Pontecorvo in his film Kapò, which moves towards Riva’s face as she commits suicide on electrified barbed wire, ‘taking care to register the raised hand exactly in an angle of its final framing’, In other words, an ethic internal to the form itself, which goes beyond films about the camps and the Shoah, and with which a whole generation of filmmakers and critics have identified.

Today, the moral demands of cinema seem to have largely shifted to the individuals who make the films (identities, behaviour) and to the subjects of the works and their themes (gender, ecology, sexist violence, racism). Less so in terms of filmmaking, where sometimes everything seems to be summoned up without restraint or compass in order to move the viewer, even to the point of seeking pathos, which Rivette rightly denounced.

So how can we conceive of a new cinema ethic that would return to the essential questions of directing, internal to form, while integrating these new demands – in other words, how can we put the question of what it means to think like a filmmaker back at the heart of our current issues?

Moderated by : Christophe Cognet – filmmaker, SRF documentary delegate

with the participation of :

• Stefano Savona, filmmaker
  — Tahrir – Liberation Square, 2011
  — Samouni Road, 2018
  — The Walls of Bergamo, 2023
• Yolande Zauberman, réalisatrice (sous réserve)
  — Classified People, 1987
  — Would you have sex with an Arab ?, 2011
  — M, 2019,
  — The Belle from Gaza, 2024
• Jean Breschand, réalisateur
  — Joan the Pope, 2017

Other speakers may be added to the guest list.

Accessible to French speakers only