Filmic Sociology: Theory and Practice (Social Visualities) 303133695X, 9783031336959

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SOCIAL VISUALITIES

Filmic Sociology Theory and Practice Joyce Sebag Jean-Pierre Durand

Social Visualities

Social Visualities Series Editors Gary Bratchford School of Journalism University of Central Lancashire Manchester, UK Dennis Zuev c/o Nickolay Nickolaevich Zuev City University of Macau Krasnoyarsk, Russia

This book series, affiliated with the ISA’s RC57 research group https://bit. ly/3mgQQ5S, examines the role and function of images, objects and/or performances within society and/or in particular cultures or communities. The series foregrounds visuality as a useful theme to approach the production, representation and naturalisation of power (state or otherwise) and society that otherwise remains hidden or unseeable. With an emphasis on socio-visual thinking, the series unpicks some of the pre-­ existing imaginaries and boundaries that still dominate a major discipline like sociology. In particular, the ways in which we engage with images, their production and use in specific spaces and contexts. To this end, Social Visualities looks to further normalise the visual as a valid data source as well as provide a platform for the interrogation and analysis of new, emerging and ever-changing types of visual data and image production practices. The series provides theoretically rich, case-study oriented guides that address the ongoing scholarly and pedagogic ‘visual turn’ in the social sciences, including, but not limited to visual global politics and international relations, visual criminology as well as topics more broadly associated to visual culture and society.

Joyce Sebag • Jean-Pierre Durand

Filmic Sociology Theory and Practice

Joyce Sebag University of Évry Paris-Saclay Évry, France

Jean-Pierre Durand University of Évry Paris-Saclay Évry, France

ISSN 2731-4626     ISSN 2731-4634 (electronic) Social Visualities ISBN 978-3-031-33695-9    ISBN 978-3-031-33696-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33696-6 © CNRS Éditions 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Jean-Pierre Durand This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

It will be one of the revolutionary functions of cinema to show that the value of photography is indissolubly artistic and scientific, whereas, until now, these two aspects have generally been distinct. Walter BenjaminThe Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, 1935

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To Simon, Maïa, Joseph, Lili, Stella Manon, Hannah and their parents

Foreword1

It is gratifying to witness the English publication of Filmic Sociology, which appears after decades of work by two great French intellectuals. Joyce Sebag and Jean-Pierre Durand distill insights from sociological filmmaking, theorizing, teaching, supervising visual dissertations, international dialogue, and other intellectual work into a coherent and persuasive statement. It is a gift to have these vast and varied insights brought into a single volume. The book is encyclopedic in scope, yet is constructed around several intellectual and methodological tensions. It is a theoretical tour de force that also describes filmic and visual methods in detail. Sebag and Durand describe origins of visual sociology in documentary photography and film, particularly in the work of Robert Frank, Alexander Rodchenko, and the American Farm Security Administration (FSA) project. They review filmic work related to French and British anthropological fieldwork, and, especially, parallels in early documentary film (Robert Flaherty, etc.) during its long gestation during the twentieth century, before the revolutionary impact of cinema verite in the 60 s. By the end of the book they have extended arguments to cell phone cinema and other aspects of the current digital and social media tsunami.

 Douglas Harper is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He is the founder of the “International Visual Sociology Association” in the early 1980s and of Visual Sociology, now Visual Studies. He is the author of numerous academic books including Visual Sociology (Routledge, 2012, new issue in 2023). 1

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Foreword

They question how sociological thinking represented in words is related to sociological thinking via the image. These are complex, speculative, and thought-­ provoking arguments, dealing with sequence, narration, symbolism, image versus word communication, visual imagination, and the nature of thought itself. The authors remind us of our assumptions that sociological interpretations and analyses can be unproblematically represented in words and statistical relationships, yet the discipline continues to struggle with the viability of visual representation as a path to sociological understanding. Durand and Sebag call their project a “spider’s web” in which visual (in most instances, filmic) thinking and technique is interwoven with sociological theory and method. Their book is not a “how-to” manual; rather it is a reflection on dialogues between research acts, intellectual theorizing, and negotiation of the visual. At the core of this spider’s web is the reconciliation of rationality and emotive sensitivity; the ability of images to denote the world (show us something that is absolutely there) while touching our human capacity for empathy, joy, and sorrow. It is in this dualism (rationality and emotion) that the mysterious potential of visual sociology ultimately comes to rest. The tradition that became filmic sociology is well represented by French photographers, filmmakers, anthropologists with cameras and sociologists with photographic strategies. A beginning list would include Louis Clergeau, Agnas Varda, Marc Riboud, Jean Rouch, Sabine Weiss, Gisele Freund, and sociologist Edgar Morin. French sociology has always balanced a commitment to scientific rigor with moral regard for the social order. While it has flirted with qualitative methods in recent decades it remained to Sebag and Durand to make the breakthrough to filmic sociology. Thus it is fitting that this revolutionary moment has taken place in France and is now available to English speaking audiences. Yet their filmic sociology is already becoming an international movement. Ten years ago Professor Sebag invited me to be an examiner of Alexandra Tilman’s film based Ph.D., completed under their supervision. This was, to me, an inspiring moment. I am American sociologist who has long fought to legitimize visual sociology, yet I know how easily experiments fail. As a visual sociology insider I am also one of its great critics. I am pleased to say that Tilman’s dissertation film was sociologically rich as well as visually compelling. As a feature-length examination of post-industrial communities in NW France the film presented the structural fact of de-industrialization in the context of an individual’s life, and then radiated into his search for meaning and his relationships, within his family and beyond. The film is a poetic, beautiful, and insightful application of C. Wright Mills’ dictum to see the structural forces of society in the lives of the individual. In Tilman’s film, as well as other films by Sebag and Durands’ graduate students (including films by Greg-

Foreword

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ory Cohen and Manon Ott) the proof has been in the pudding; the success of the student reflects the success of their professors in laying the groundwork, nourishing creative instincts, and, yes, keeping great experiments under control. It was in these films by their graduate students that Sebag and Durand’s commitment to professional quality filmmaking was matched to intellectual rigor, sociological imagination, and the poetic and narrative capacity of film. Sociology by and large has not followed the paths of our anthropology colleagues in developing a film tradition. There have been exceptions; John Grady’s well known documentary films made in the 1970s come to mind, and more recently the film projects of sociologists Molly Merriman and Greg Scott, in Scott’s case integrated into graduate studies. But I know of no Ph.D. program in the United States where a graduate student may produce a film as the substance of their sociological dissertation, as Sebag and Durand’s students have done. There is no doubt that the translation of this text into English will energize this possibility. In 2017 Durand and Sebag hosted the thirty-eighth meeting of the International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA) at the University of Évry near Paris. Until recently the IVSA had focused primarily on still photography, semiotics, theorizing about image meaning and the role of images in society. Durand and Sebag, for the first time, embraced film as a central theme of the conference. Instead of a keynote address they invited two American filmmaker-sociologists to join them in a discussion of the past and future of filmic sociology. It was a fascinating dialogue that showed how filmic sociology, experimental to its core, crosses national boundaries and scholarly traditions. In recent IVSA meetings developments begun in Évry have continued to flourish. Their book is much in the spirit of that meeting. The authors are innovators who teach, design programs, dialogue with colleagues around the world, try out new ideas in their own work, and always distill, refine and develop their work into a clear and coherent path. The translation of this book to English adds an important voice and perspective to the small but very interesting library of texts on visual sociology. The emphasis on the filmic dimension makes it unique. It is also the case that the orientation emerging from French sociology also distinguishes it from texts that have emerged from other countries and intellectual traditions. There is no doubt that the English version of this book strengthens and invigorates the international visual sociology movement and deserves to be read, debated, and integrated into our undergraduate and graduate visual sociology courses. Duquesne University, Pittsburgh 

Douglas Harper

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of a long process of academic research, university teaching, and documentary filmmaking. The master’s degree in Sociology, Image and Society, at the University of Evry Paris-Saclay was created in 1996 from a workshop that brought together professionals and academics; it has been a place of exchange that has enriched our reflection on filmic sociology. We would like to thank Maurice Kherroubi, Habib Tengour, Pierre Maillot, Sylvia Calle, Jean-Pierre Lenoir, Pierre Linhart, Christophe Novak, Réjane Vallée, Nassim Cherikh, Véronique Decours-­Rozencwajg, Jean-Marc Gayman, and Christine Louveau with whom we had intense intellectual exchanges. A number of those mentioned above have also read and enriched the manuscript. The supervision of doctoral students, Alexandra Tilman, Virginie Villemin, Manon Ott, Grégory Cohen, Émilie Balteau, Hanane Idihia, and Émilie Fernandez, was also an opportunity to reflect on filmic sociology over time. Progress also took place more informally during discussions and meetings with Jean-Pascal Fontorbes, Jean-Paul Gehin, Anne-Marie Granié, Michaël Meyer, Roger Rozencwajg, Daniel Vander Gucht, Fabien Reix, Sylvaine Conord, Francesca Biagi-Chaï, Daniel Friedmann, and Jacques Lombard. These research activities took place at the Pierre Naville Research Center of the University of Evry Paris-Saclay, with sociologist colleagues and successive department heads of it. All of them were convinced of the possible scientific possibilities opened by filmic sociology. The Pierre Naville Center also held several conferences in Evry and co-financed the production of some of our sociological documentaries. We also thank the presidents Michel Fayard, Patrick Curmi of the University of Evry, who actively supported scientific projects and events in filmic sociology. xiii

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Acknowledgments

The associations of French (AFS), European (ESA), and international (IVSA, ISA) sociologists have all enthusiastically welcomed filmic sociology and have supported its development. We thank them here. Our thanks go to Douglas Harper, Michael Burawoy, Suzanne Newman, Edgar Belmont, Luca Querero Palmas, Luisa Stagi, Massimo Cannarella, Alessandro Diaco, Paul Stewart, Aziz Hlaoua, and Alan Sitkin, who participated in the international development of filmic sociology at over the past decade. We wish to thank Armelle Lotton and Tom Larvor of the University Library of Evry and Mathieu Mulcey, Bénédicte Souffrant, Marie Léman, and Martine Bertéa of CNRS Editions for their efforts in the editing and publishing of this work. For this English version, we thank Nathaniel London, our translator, who did a valuable job of researching the American and English versions of the works cited. Sharla Plant and Elizabeth Graber referred us to our editors Gary Bratchford and Dennis Zuev who founded the “Social Visualities” series. They supported us in our project to publish this book. Their commitment to the development of this new field is a great help. Liam Inscoe-Jones, Connie Li, and Ellen Seo have been very rigorous in the production of Filmic Sociology. Finally, these acknowledgments would be incomplete if they did not include all the people we met during the production of our documentaries. They welcomed us with confidence and were fully committed to the collaboration that we offered them, whether it be among Nummi workers, Nissan employees, women, or men met during the shooting of Femmes en banlieue. The production of Boston, 50 years of Affirmative Action created lasting ties with Joel Schwartz, Sharon Reilly, Eden E. Williams, Nika Elugardo, and the Lee family, who never gave up on their generosity and commitment.

Praise for Filmic Sociology United States “What Joyce Sebag and Jean-Pierre Durand propose is literally to ‘think by images.’ The image is not an element constructed afterwards by thinking, it is first by the perception, and constitutive in the act of thinking.” —Guillaume Sirois, Professor, Université de Montréal, Visual Studies, Vol. 36 I.4–5, 2021 Canada “Harper, in the Foreword, compares filmic sociology to a ‘spider’s web. This powerful book is a reflective manual. It’s a manifesto for a visual and filmic sociology.” —Aziz Hlaoua, Professor at Rabat University, Communication (Quebec), 2022 France “In this book, filmic sociology emancipates itself from the written word, because if the visible and the lived can screen what is hidden, it is the narrative construction proposed by the film that must make them perceptible: the image contextualises what is said in order to better understand it, the image tells of relations ignored by traditional sociology.” —Pascal Cesaro, Assistant Professor (Aix-Marseille University), in Images du travail, travail des images (France), 2022 Brazil “For the authors, filmic sociology produces knowledges from the recording of sounds and images, during viewing or analysis of the rushes, and finally, during editing, which juxtaposes them to create meaning and fresh visions. Then the practice of the sociologist-filmmaker provides a reintegration of the sensitive in the discipline through the audiovisual production.” —Rafael Fermino Beverari, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Tempo Social (Brazil), 2021 France “For Sebag and Durand, the hybridization of sociological and cinematographic approaches is at the heart of filmic sociology. More than documentary evidence, the sociological film must be received as a tool for reflection and debate. It brings

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the reader back into the territory of reasoning after inviting him to open up sociological thought to the emotions and the imagination.” —Nicolas Hatzfeld, Professor of History, IDHES-CNRS, La Nouvelle Revue du Travail (France), 2022 Italia “The merit of Joyce Sebag and Jean-Pierre Durand is that they have skillfully shown us the heuristic potential of a complex discipline: images and sounds that are good for reflection, and for producing progress in the direction of a dialogic and polysemous knowledge of reality.” —Gianfranco Spitelli, University of Teramo, Voci (Italia), 2021 Canada “The authors defend two central ideas linked to the very foundations of sociological film-making. Firstly, an attachment to scientific rigor where the construction of the object, the fieldwork and the methodological tools of the discipline are combined. Secondly, filmic sociology is considered as a research tool as much as a medium, in which the out of shot is consubstantial with reality.” —Pierre Fraser, Sociologist-filmmaker, Sociologie visuelle (Canada), 2021

Contents

1 Introduction ���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  1 2 The  Approach of Filmic Sociology ���������������������������������������������������������  5 1 Three Interrelated Functions of Filmic Sociology ���������������������������  6 2 From Text-based to Filmic Sociology�����������������������������������������������  8 2.1 Revisiting the Written Scientific Production Process�����������  8 2.2 Consideration on the Scientific Production Process of Filmic Sociology �������������������������������������������������������������  9 2.3 Proposals for Making a Sociological Documentary������������� 12 3 What Does the Sociological Documentary Say That Text-based Sociology Might Overlook?������������������������������������������������������������� 14 3.1 How to Show Stress and Time Pressure on Employees������� 15 3.2 Showing Domination and Resistance Relationships at Work��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 21 3.3 Representing Proximity Through Transparency������������������� 24 3.4 Associate Interviews with Meaningful Images ������������������� 25 4 From the Master’s Degree in Image and Society to the Doctoral Thesis in Filmic Sociology��������������������������������������������������������������� 28 4.1 Creating Convergences Between Sociologists and Film Professionals������������������������������������������������������������������������� 28 4.2 Teaching and Research in Filmic Sociology ����������������������� 29 3 From  Ethnologist Photography to Filmic Sociology����������������������������� 31 1 The Documents of Ethnologists and Anthropologists���������������������� 32 1.1 From Albert Kahn to Anglo-Saxon Anthropologists����������� 32 1.2 French Ethnologists in Africa����������������������������������������������� 36 xvii

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Contents

2 Documentary Photography and Film ����������������������������������������������� 39 2.1 Documentary Photography��������������������������������������������������� 39 2.2 Documentary Cinema����������������������������������������������������������� 61 2.3 The Documentary and the Invention of Direct Cinema (1960 to the Present)������������������������������������������������������������ 70 3 Genesis of Filmic Sociology������������������������������������������������������������� 77 4 Cinema  and Sociology: A Promising Hybridization����������������������������� 83 1 Thinking with Words and Images����������������������������������������������������� 84 1.1 Words to Revive Images: The Power of Poetry and Novel � 84 1.2 What Is Thought? Visual Thinking��������������������������������������� 88 1.3 Ideas and Images ����������������������������������������������������������������� 92 2 Are There Sociological Images?������������������������������������������������������� 94 2.1 Documentary Photography, a Kingdom of Contraction������� 95 2.2 Sociological Value of Photographs���������������������������������������101 2.3 From Photography to Sociological Documentaries�������������110 2.4 The Sociological Documentary, Kingdom of the Extension of Signifiers���������������������������������������������������������118 3 Making a Sociological Documentary: From the Mastery of Signifiers to Film Editing�������������������������������������������������������������120 3.1 Learn How to Read Images to Be Able to Design Them�����121 3.2 Documentary Filmmaking as a Process�������������������������������129 3.3 Between the Imagined and the Realized Film: The Imperfect of the Sociological Documentary �����������������������137 5 Cinema  Enhances Sociological Questions ���������������������������������������������139 1 Filmic Sociology and Interactionism �����������������������������������������������141 1.1 American Interactionism �����������������������������������������������������141 1.2 An Increased Concordance���������������������������������������������������142 2 Detachment and Involvement of the Documentary Sociologist�������144 2.1 Does Detachment Contradict Involvement?�������������������������146 2.2 The Viewpoint, Geometrical Point of the Documentary �����152 3 Sociological Documentary and “Scientific Residues” ���������������������155 3.1 After Logging the Rushes Several Films Are Possible �������156 3.2 “The Circle of Lost Souls” in 50 Years of Affirmative Action in Boston�������������������������������������������������������������������157 3.3 Poverty Makes Me Happier Than Wealth�����������������������������159 4 Smartphones and Filmic Sociology �������������������������������������������������161

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6 Showing  the Invisible in the Sociological Documentary�����������������������165 1 On the Representation of Reality �����������������������������������������������������166 1.1 Pictorial Representation and the “Reality Effect” ���������������166 1.2 The “Real Unreality” of Photography and Cinema�������������169 1.3 The Visible and the Invisible �����������������������������������������������172 2 Representing the Social Invisible�����������������������������������������������������173 2.1 A Constantly Renewed Project���������������������������������������������174 2.2 Representing Time in Cinema ���������������������������������������������179 2.3 Portraying Relations of Domination: From Metaphor to Archive���������������������������������������������������������������������������������181 3 The Filmed Interview�����������������������������������������������������������������������184 3.1 From Sociology to Filmed Interview�����������������������������������185 3.2 The Filmed Interview, Producer of Knowledge�������������������188 7 Conclusion�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������203 Bibliography�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������207 Thematic Index���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������215 Index of proper names����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������223 Index of films cited���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������229

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3

Social and sociological documentaries. (Source: Authors)�����������������82 The concerns of documentary photography. (Source: Authors)�������100 Concerns of the sociological documentary. (Source: Authors)���������118 Developing a sociological documentary. (Source: Authors)�������������137

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Introduction

Documentary films—launched by Edison in the United States and the Lumière brothers in France—and sociology were born during the nineteenth century, some 50 years apart. Their initial encounter, however, took place when sociology started analyzing documentaries and using cinema and photography as raw materials that captured the reality it tried to describe and explain. This took place as sociology, associated with other related disciplines, such as semiology and aesthetics, attempted a critical analysis of films dealing with social issues, whether documentary or fictional. Practicing sociology through cinema, i.e., using all its techniques, from capturing images and sound to editing a film or mastering film writing, is a challenge that several universities have been attempting to meet, particularly in Europe and increasingly in the United States. This book presents an overview and outlines the principles of what filmic sociology can be. Images are not counterposed to text. Whether fixed or animated, they speak of reality but do so in a different way, giving great importance to emotions, to the colors of the world. Filmic sociology today follows the paths cleared by ethnology and anthropology. It aims at writing sociology in a new way: taking an interest in narration (often forgotten in sociological writing), considering the form of the presentation (the style in paper-based writing), the quality of images, and the rhythm of the presentation in the film. The practice of video in sociology reintegrates sensitivity, emotions, spaces, and bodies into the discipline. Filmic sociology produces knowledge from the recording of sounds and images, on the one hand, with greater detail than direct observation or audio interviews, and on the other hand, during viewing and analysis of the rushes, which requires repeated viewing of images and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Sebag, J.-P. Durand, Filmic Sociology, Social Visualities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33696-6_1

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1 Introduction

sounds, and finally, during editing, which juxtaposes them to create meaning and new visions. Of course, uniting cinema and sociology requires a solid background in the discipline, but above all, a willingness to break down the partitions separating disciplinary fields through a thorough apprenticeship in the techniques and history of cinema, particularly that of documentary films. Combining the different professions of cinema and sociology is a resolutely innovative approach that should lead to the emergence of new approaches. In-depth education in these two significant cultures is the foundation of this combination. This book draws on a collective experience, developed since the 1996 creation of the Image and Society program in the Master’s degree in Sociology at the University of Évry, a new university close to Paris opened in 1990 during the administration of François Mitterand. This experience includes the supervision of Ph.D. students in filmic sociology based on the production of a sociological documentary, and the subsequent creation of institutional networks in France and Europe, with branches in the United States and North Africa. The objective of this book is to gather the pieces of a vast puzzle in the establishment of a maturing field, filmic sociology. It proceeds from a cumulative approach to what already exists. It places reference points so that students or researchers can maintain an overview of the delicate task of making a sociological documentary. Nevertheless, it retains a reflexive dimension on the final product, that is, on the process that combines film culture—history, filmic analysis, techniques, and essential principles of filmic writing—with sociological knowledge. Thus, we do not deal with theoretical questions relating to image or cinema in particular chapters, but they run throughout the book, each chapter referring to the others. A puzzle, network, or a spider web are all images that refer to the complexity of this scientific field under construction. Nor do we cover here the technical issues to be mastered for shooting, sound recording, and editing because there are many specialized books and quality training courses on these subjects. These techniques are not a secondary aspect, since their mastery determines the quality of a sociological documentary. Apprentice sociologists or those wishing to consolidate their knowledge will refer to one of the many manuals or introductions to the discipline. This book brings together reflections, educational material, and articles produced over two decades, hence its diversity. This diversity is that of the objects treated as well as of the nature of the approaches, which can be theoretical—sociological, philosophical, or epistemological—or more analytical and critical when they comment on still or moving images. It includes a variety of points of view that are at once historical, sociological, or borrowed from other human sciences, such

1 Introduction

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as semiology, in order to anchor filmic sociology in the debates that have taken place in these disciplines. Finally, many personal achievements (photos and documentaries) associated with productions by other creators help to establish the reasoning and theses developed. This book brings together and deepens reflections and perspectives that have been dispersed over time. Each chapter or section gives coherence to this fragmentation on a particular issue. Thus, all these elements converge to support a possible hybridization or cross-breeding of the two approaches of sociology and cinema. Both are different expressions of a “relationship to the world,” a way of understanding the world. This hybridization reconciles two universes long perceived as contradictory, one of rationality and the other of emotion or sensitivity. The cinematographic writing of sociology gives us access to what is part of the understanding of the social world through emotion and sensitivity. It reinforces our understanding of the latter. This hybridization thus opens up many avenues for reflection and debate, far from certainties, and based on an innovative proposal: to produce something else, the sociological documentary. To get to the heart of the matter, Chap. 2 explains the approach of filmic sociology by comparing it to written text. Some necessary principles in making a sociological documentary follow, with a debate on its contribution to the sociological tradition. Filmic sociology is based on the distant heritage of ethnologists’ photography and films, and subsequently on documentary photography. Chapter 3 presents their history and concludes with documentary films in general, from the 1920s to today, with some points of reference in contemporary production. Chapter 4 goes to the heart of sociology/cinema hybridization by first asking what it means to think in images. This raises the question of the nature of sociological images and, finally, to the production of a sociological meaning of images in filmic sociology. Starting from the close relationship between interactionism and filmic practices in the sociologist-filmmaker’s relations with his characters, Chap. 5 raises, in particular, the question of the author’s distancing and commitment, far from false neutrality and compassion. Filmic sociology cannot avoid questioning the point of view adopted by the sociologist-filmmaker, especially since he must think about the camera’s position as well as its movement. This chapter ends with the status of “scientific residues”: it questions the future of those sequences and images/sounds that remain in the hands of the sociologist-filmmaker after editing. Chapter 6 seeks ways of representing the intangible in the sociological documentary. After a review of the representation and “reality effect” of cinema and some proposals to represent the invisible, the chapter discusses the contributions and status of filmed interviews in filmic sociology. By organizing the back and forth between theory and practice—hence the diverse character of the texts between chapters or between sections—this book

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1 Introduction

p­ resents and discusses filmic sociology to show that overcoming doubts about the hybridization of sociology and cinema is possible under two conditions. The first condition is to highlight the mutual willingness of sociologists and film professionals to converge their impulses toward a shared objective and, second, to open a Master’s curricula in Sociology to train documentary sociologists and pursue the institutionalization of the field of filmic sociology. This includes ensuring that sociologists enter the “society of images” at full speed, no longer by commenting on it, but by producing sociological images.

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The Approach of Filmic Sociology

The development of filmic sociology derives from a long process, associating several disciplines of the humanities with that of cinema as representations of the world. Light camera and synchronous sound development in the 1960s favored this convergence. Invention and dissemination of video soon followed, accompanied by the decline in material costs, especially in consumables such as film. However, one should not prematurely conclude that this decline in costs has solved all problems. Other questions have arisen around the supplementary costs of the digital pipeline or the over-supply of rushes. Following several earlier attempts in the 1960–1980 period (see the next chapter), the creation of the Sociology Master’s degree Image and Society in 1996 at the University of Évry initiated training and research in filmic sociology. This master’s degree and the defense of doctoral theses in filmic sociology have led to academic recognition. In 2012, a thematic network in the Professional Association of Sociology (rt47.hypotheses.org/) was inaugurated. Systematic questioning of image-­based work is now a thing of the past. Image and sound have gained status in sociology alongside of and in osmosis with text. Having developed the three functions of filmic sociology, the first chapter develops without hierarchization the differences between knowledge linked to writing and that linked to images and sounds. It then discusses what it means to make a sociological documentary before asking what such a documentary, which goes beyond the written word, might say.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Sebag, J.-P. Durand, Filmic Sociology, Social Visualities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33696-6_2

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With this in mind, this chapter plunges the reader at length into three documentaries showing what cinema can say from images and sound alone or by mixing them with interviews. These three documentaries deal with work at different worksites and underline, through the filmic analysis proposed, to what degree cinema can refine knowledge of what takes place in this enclosed space. This awareness of thinking through images appears to be a condition of access to filmic sociology, which this chapter proposes to introduce. It, therefore, ends with modalities for teaching this growing field and reasons for pursuing it up to a doctoral dissertation.

1 Three Interrelated Functions of Filmic Sociology Filmic sociology aims at developing cinema, combining the diversity of sociological theorization with cinematographic techniques—shooting images and sound, and editing—to which one must add a knowledge of film writing with its codes and customs. The foundations of sociological filmmaking thus bring together: • an attachment to scientific rigor, combining the construction of the object, fieldwork, and methodological tools of the discipline; • a research instrument as well as a medium—different from the text—opening up alternative approaches. Amongst other factors, it integrates emotions and body movements, including highlighting reactions of individuals as they become actors in front of the camera and no longer just “objects” of research. Thus, filmic sociology and the camcorder, far from a simple instrument or tool capturing images and sounds employed in research, filmed interviews, and spatial memorization also give access to the sensory world observed by the researcher. They question the epistemological dimension of the visible and the invisible. Even more, by highlighting the reality of off-camera, they question sociology about what it often leaves out, while having an acute awareness that the off-camera is consubstantial with reality. The sociologist-filmmaker chooses a point of view, or rather a point of vision (Magny 2001), through a certain amount of interference due to his physical equipment—the camcorder and tripod, or even a boom for sound and lighting equipment—that he places here and there. This point of vision becomes explicit in order to emphasize the connections in the filmed scenes, including the discussions between the film’s characters.

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This complexity, due to the interplay between sociology and cinema, has led to the concept of three intertwined functions and three interwoven moments that constitute filmic sociology and make it a specific field of research1: • Recording of social facts and events is another way of collecting data compared to direct observation, audio interviews, or through quantitative methods (Collier and Collier 1986, 5–13). One can speak of active observation in the sense that the sociologist-filmmaker must choose his frame, that is to say, must include what is necessary for the argumentation of his thesis, while knowing that the off-camera that he abandons can also be a meaningful part of his future film. He abandons the falsely objective dimension of observation from the outset, and far from reducing its scientific scope, calls into question the adopted viewpoint and thus opening it to debate, as Paul Ricœur (1990) has developed. • Logging and editing the film are among the privileged moments in the production of knowledge. Analysis of the rushes puts the filmed reality in acute tension, of which the sociologist-filmmaker is continuously reminded by the image and sound on the screen and its hypotheses. He discovers elements not seen during the filming in the social relations, in the tone of the debates, in the postures, or the mimics. By direct observation, he encounters significant objects absent from his vision. “Filmic observation [emphasis added] has persistent support, whereas direct observation can only have fleeting support” (Rosenfeld 1994, 45). Viewing the rushes and editing is generally a collective work that brings together editors and directors, thus multiplying the points of view and taking part in sociological research and the scientific enrichment of the film. Finally, the editing itself, through the dynamic association of sequences and shots, contributes to the creation of meaning. The logging and editing process is long and can appear time-consuming. It is the nodal point of filmic sociology and constitutes a moment of intense reflection and rewriting of the project. • Disseminating sociological documentary aims at a more extensive transmission of ideas than books or articles: filmic sociology aims at addressing a much  Here the use of the “field” concept may seem inappropriate. We will use it to underline the fact that it is not a methodology—to which image work has sometimes been reduced—while knowing full well that filmic sociology does not deal with a field such as urban life, work, family, migration, etc. The term “sub-discipline” is not appropriate either because it encloses filmic sociology in a framework which is too narrow. The notion of sub-discipline might be more appropriate if it had a clear meaning in French. One could also apply to it the term “transversal field,” which contains its own issues of scientific recognition within the discipline, which we will discuss below. All these reasons lead us to use the concept of field in its generic sense. 1

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wider audience. The preparation of such widespread distribution includes both the invention of an “economic model” integrating producers who are necessarily concerned in such films’ circulation and by the development of more institutional distribution supports (festivals, specialized internet sites, and support for translation and subtitling). These are all concerns that bring viewers into the loop of making such documentaries. These three moments and functions specific to film sociology must be fundamentally thought out and integrated into the traditional sociological approach: the concern for rigor and demonstration of advanced theses is constitutive of filmic sociology. Closer to sensibility and emotions—although these are regaining force in sociology in general—it does not submit to them and abandon the canons of sociology. This is what is at stake in filmic sociology. However, before observing the contributions of filmic sociology to the sociological approach in general, it is crucial to understand how sociological documentary embraces social relationships, for example, in work, and how it puts them into image and sound, sharing them with a broader audience. In this respect, we will take up one dimension envisaged by Michael Burawoy (2005), that of developing public sociology promoting the reasoned debates that democracies must encourage.

2 From Text-based to Filmic Sociology We attribute—through convention and language accessibility—the name “text-­ based sociology” to sociological research that does not use fixed or animated images. Text-based sociology uses text as a diffusion medium, documentation source, quantitative or qualitative data processing, and in data collection, such as interviews. We also refer to it as either paper or traditional sociology, without establishing a hierarchy. It is merely a question of reviewing the general approach of sociology to characterize the differences with the practices of filmic sociology.

2.1 Revisiting the Written Scientific Production Process All sociological work starts from intuition or the observation of an unexpected or insufficiently questioned social fact, such as school failure, work organization and relations, the gendered division of domestic work, and the hierarchization of urban spaces, among others. With the help of acquired conceptual devices, established

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theories, and archives, often enriched by a long history of frequent return visits to their field, the sociologist delineates and constructs an object to expose a question or a problem before making hypotheses. There can be no research without a well-­ founded, precise question, which the author can express clearly and which further research may induce him to modify.2 This entire first phase is based on the ­sociologist’s trajectory and conscious or unconscious achievements, that is, on his training, on his political choices, and even on the privilege granted to some authors—in other words, on his subjectivity as a researcher. The long process of building a representation of reality confronts situations, people, and characters through surveys, observations, or interviews to verify or refute hypotheses built over time. Only after this second phase, that of the confrontation—which one assumes to be rigorous, that is to say it does not omit the facts and declarations of the actors which might invalidate the constructed hypotheses— begins the restitution phase in writing: doctoral thesis, books, articles. One should note that the author, without really realizing it, orders his writing in a linear sequence: he divides the book into chapters, chapter sections, paragraphs, then sentences whose meaning tends toward a demonstration of his thesis. Finally, the article or the book is distributed to pre-established target readers according to the nature of the research, and the nature of the restitution: writing style, the vocabulary used, and objects treated. Thus, the background of the reader and his interpretative abilities of the text are also used.

2.2 Consideration on the Scientific Production Process of Filmic Sociology Unless one claims to have instantaneous thought or spontaneous videography, the approach of film sociology necessarily borrows the first two phases of “building a representation of reality” described above. One of the differences resides in the character of the field immersion during the preliminary observation period (second phase) since the sociologist-filmmaker can bring back photographs or video shots to aid in improving the development of his questions, validating his hypotheses, or in preparing the subsequent phases better. One cannot overemphasize that the quality of the sociological documentary rests on the relevance of the question posed. “In the absence of a theoretical framework, the terms of which will have been  See our collective work Sociologie contemporaine (Durand and Weil 2006), which presents sociological theories by major currents in a dozen fields such as the city, work, the family, politics, the rural world, education, or religions without forgetting methodology, or the collection and processing of data. 2

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previously conceptualized, i.e., clarified to make them operational, there is a great risk of not knowing how to distinguish between what is significant and what is accessory and therefore of never really entering into its subject” (Vander Gucht 2017, 245). It is in the third phase that the procedures diverge and become more complicated for film sociology. In order to organize the shooting and then the editing of a future film, the sociologist-filmmaker must carry out two operations simultaneously: • scenario writing (with a script breakdown which is the division into sequences of the scenario with, when possible, the position of the camera, the type of framing, and the choice of light), frequently including carefully selected characters whose engagement must be ensured until the end of the film; • field immersion through in-depth knowledge of the terrain of the future filming location (see the difficulties and pitfalls in the section below), therefore an extended presence. Naturally, this mastering of the field feeds the writing of the scenario and the script breakdown. It can or must be accompanied by spotting shots that introduce the camcorder and the filming team into the social and subjective terrain of the future film. It is at this stage that we know if it is possible to shoot the film. The results of these first images and sounds contribute to writing the scenario and even the script breakdown. Only once the field has been mastered and the cooperation of characters, if any, secured can shooting take place. This requires just as much rigor as does the simultaneous quality of images and sounds, the choice of meaningful images, framing, viewpoints, and points of vision (see Chap. 4). It is the same for camera movements (choice of tripod or camera-shoulder) and zoom movements which have been used and abused by less experienced filmmakers (see the strategic importance of movement in cinema: Maillot 1989, 2013). Documentary cinema is not the same as fictional filming where (almost) everything is predictable during shooting. Documentary cinema, on the other hand, requires permanent and, above all, immediate adaptation of film crews to a reality which never conforms to that imagined during the writing of the screenplay. Only deep field immersion (which requires an extended presence preceding shooting) can prepare the responsiveness of the crew, which includes the filmmaker-sociologist as a director or as a cameraman. Logging the rushes and editing film could be qualified as a geometric location in the making of the sociological documentary for two reasons:

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• recorded images and sounds are generally quite far from what had been planned by the scenario and by script breakdown. However, if their preparation had not been done with great care, let us insist, the film crew would not have had the necessary reactivity in the face of impromptu changes during shooting. Therefore, it is necessary to rewrite a script considering the film elements available, while maintaining the concern for the simultaneous quality of images and sounds. This first scenario inspires the second, which must continuously be enriched by the theoretical elements put forward by the sociologist-filmmaker; • logging and editing, through the repeated viewing of images and sound is the place of creation of new knowledge, either through the discovery of elements not previously perceived or because of an original assembly of shots and sequences that makes sense. It is one of the infinite resources of filmic sociology to promote new knowledge through creative, and occasionally entertaining, editing. Finalized sociological documentaries, including the post-production work concerning the technical quality of images and sound necessary for reasons of visual and sound “standards” created by cinema and television, are distributed today through diversified channels such as festivals, movie theaters, public meetings, the internet, and much more rarely, via television. Production quality—state of the projector, color temperature, brightness of some screens, particularly of television—and the size of the screen strongly influence the nature of the rendition.3 This, as well as the spectator’s background, affects the viewer’s reception. As with written text, the author has, in reality, little control over this rendition. As much as possible, he must consider this variety of distribution channels and the variety of the spectators themselves. Thus, in producing the diffusion medium to defend the author’s theses, filmic sociology requires more time and means than text-based sociology, although much less than the earlier attempts at filmic anthropology and filmmaking in the 1960s. The reader may wonder why we use the term “filmic” rather than “cinematographic” sociology. On the one hand, the filmic tradition of anthropology has adopted the term and, on the other, because “cinematographic sociology” could be interpreted outside the discipline as the sociology of cinema, which is not the object of filmic sociology. The latter aims at developing the integration between sociology and cinema, defined as integrating image and sound processing techniques  “Restitution” is the moment when the director shows his film to those who are present in his film (or who have authorized him to shoot it) so that there are no misunderstandings or misinterpretations. In the event of disagreements, the sociologist-filmmaker should take them into account, as much as possible, in the final version of his film. 3

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with a specific writing, that of cinema. In common parlance, the terms cinema and film function as equivalents with “film” being the product of the cinematographic process. Filmic sociology tries to practice sociology with the techniques and principles of cinema to make sociological documentaries.

2.3 Proposals for Making a Sociological Documentary Since filmic sociology proposes a global approach—and not a new method of data collection as some simplifications still suggest—it must question its practices and adopt a reflexive stance that is constitutive of the field that is being created. It is this concern that is at the heart of the 14 proposals of the Manifesto for Visual and Filmic Sociology that were discussed at the IVSA Congress in Bologna in 2010. The box below lists some of the elements: some of them have already been presented, and others will be discussed in greater depth in the next chapters. cc

Manifesto for Visual and Filmic Sociology

Sociological documentary overcomes the tension between the language of cinema and sociological argumentation While restoring the place of emotion, narration, and individuals who become characters, visual and filmic sociology does not abandon its scientific outlook, understood as the capacity to question, to conceptualize, to resist submitting to common opinions but to go beyond them and find the meaning of things. Sociological documentary de-constructs evidence Sociological documentary joins the sociological critique of preconceptions. The point of view of the sociologist-filmmaker is a structured, scientific, and contextual point of view. The point of view expressed in the documentary is a proposed interpretation of social reality. It is constructed from diverse points of view. Sociological documentary challenges diverse points of view The character of this work, based on the willingness to confront diverse points of view on the same subject, enables diverse social actors to recognize each other and to feel that their opinions have been heard. The multiple fragmented visions confront each other and offer the audience freedom of reflection. The sociological documentary situates the narrative by associating it with unique, professional, and generational histories and trajectories. It gives initial results in which some of the social actors should recognize themselves and opens up a dialogue with those who are challenged by these questions.

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The quality of a scientific film leads to broad dissemination of research work that raises fruitful questions. Sociological documentary shows intersubjective relationships The sociological documentary gives excellent visibility to the interactions and intersubjective relationships that are at the heart of the objects of contemporary sociological currents. Sociological documentary seeks to show the foundations of social phenomena The sociological documentary aims at going beyond the presentation of social appearances. It suggests or demonstrates the springs and mechanisms that are at the basis of social phenomena. Sociological documentary differs from the militant documentary The sociological documentary differs from the militant documentary, which favors a single point of view at the expense of a more complex construction of theses and social facts. Proposing a clear definition of visual and filmic sociology One can understand visual sociology as that which uses pre-­existing still or animated images to establish its demonstrations. This has been broadened to integrate shooting photography by sociologists. Filmic sociology is the sociology that integrates all the work processes of the sociologist and those of the filmmaker. Visual and filmic sociology combines the scientific and conceptual apparatus of sociology with the language of photography and cinema. Filmic sociology captures images and sounds in order to edit them in relevance and coherence with the subject treated. These processes are then an integral part of the sociological approach. From the fragmented human perception of reality to that of the camera Our perception of reality is fragmented. The film, in turn, re-­fragments this reality through its own technical devices. During the shooting and sound recording, and then during the editing, the sociologist-filmmaker discriminates. He classifies, orders, and structures these fragments of time and space in order to reconstruct meaning in the sociological documentary. Sociological documentary seeks to free itself from the incompatibility of word and image Since the image does not provide a means of conceptualization, sociological documentary uses metaphor and seeks to invent novel ways of representing concepts. We go beyond the primary perception of image and sound. Sociological documentary combines art and reason This is where the long-formulated opposition between sociology (didactic) and cinema (emotional) finds its resolution. The sociological documentary is part of cinematographic art. It is the product of the tensions between the artistic concerns

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of the filmmaker—narration, esthetics, or reflection—and the rational and scientific approach of the sociologist. To be a sociologist-filmmaker is to grasp the social aspect in its complexity with image and sound in order to express it with the esthetic preoccupations underlying cinematographic writing. Complexity of reality and multidisciplinarity Filmic sociology is the combination of these plural fields (those of the various professions and disciplines), which questions reality posing problems in terms of its interpretation and knowledge. Conditions for the inventiveness of the sociological documentary appear at this crossroads, in this situation of distancing and questioning. Filmic sociology requires considerable time The production process of filmic sociology requires a considerable amount of time. In addition to the traditional approach of sociologists, the sociological documentary requires the time for writing the scenario, the time to meet with the persons involved, editing time, and broadcasting time. It takes time for truthful expression. There remains a debate that we cannot resolve here concerning the relations, relative advantages, or even greater effectiveness of the written text compared to the image. As we will explain in Chap. 4, our position is to promote their ­complementarity rather than their opposition. However, of course, by deliberately choosing to work with images and sound, we recognize, in fact, their specific interest and effectiveness.

3 What Does the Sociological Documentary Say That Text-based Sociology Might Overlook?4 The sociological documentary takes advantage of the intrinsic qualities of cinema and in particular of its capacity to demonstrate the sensibilities and emotions of the viewer. Considering the work as the focus of a few documentaries, which, strictly speaking, are not sociological, the aim is to show how a documentary film is a complementary form of expression to text, not only because of the different audiences it reaches, but also because it shows something else. What then does the documentary say that the text might not express? More importantly, how does the documentary say something else or show what would escape a text reader? With  This section is partly inspired by a paper given at the Journées Internationales de Sociologie du Travail (JIST) [International Days of  Sociology of  Work] at  the  London Metropolitan University in June 2010. 4

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what devices during filming and editing does the documentary show facts and situations? How does it express feelings? Furthermore, how does it lead to perceptions that do not appear in the written word? For example, image and sound reveal work situations that one cannot capture by text alone. The documentary can treat the work in a quasi-ethnographic way by focusing on details, useful and useless gestures, the quality of movement (the skilled worker’s “flowing gesture”), the atmosphere, silence, or background noise, what was left unspoken, and facial expressions. These are all tenuous things which, when reproduced in a text, can quickly appear tedious, except for a few specialists. The documentary makes these details accessible to thousands of viewers. Does this help them understand the questions raised by the sociologists of work? The point here is to analyze how, using the “language” of video or film, the documentary filmmaker expresses elements of a thesis that would not appear as such in written (book, article) or spoken (conference) form. It is the various possible combinations of these approaches that will be the subject of our examination. Based on a few documentaries, we study the mechanisms that highlight particular situations that are known as such but are difficult to describe in the text because they involve behavioral details, fleeting attitudes, grins, and grimaces. However, the aim is not reintroducing a type of sociology with a subject disconnected from its social (or economic) context, but showing all “levels” combining in the real world, including the acceptance by workers of their working conditions and remuneration.

3.1 How to Show Stress and Time Pressure on Employees5 In his film Femmes de l’ombre [Women in the Shadows] (1998), Stéphan Moszkowicz tries to show how secretaries and assistant managers are subject to the time constraints of senior managers. It reveals the heavily charged and increasingly constricted schedule of secretaries in the service of very highly paid executives. At the beginning of his film, Stéphan Moszkowicz uses at least three devices to signify this situation: • an incessant back and forth, the camera accompanying the exchange of information between the executives and the secretaries. These camera movements  Chapter 6, in particular, the section “Represent the invisible in sociological documentary” delves further into this question of the representation of time in cinema in general and in documentaries in particular. 5

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(long prohibited by cinema schools) give the film a rhythm which is that of the work of the secretaries and their managers; • the music, unrelated to the secretaries’ agitation since it is the slow rhythm of Summertime. The contrast between sound and image leads to a heightened awareness of the pace of secretaries’ activities, and their use of short moments of respite; • shots showing the secretaries’ work interspersed with shots of a meeting of IBM’s senior executives. The editing process rhythm fully contributes to the acceleration of time. The moderator of the meeting talks only of figures, volumes, and financial objectives, in an assured and peremptory way. The film director thus clearly shows, from the outset, that these are people in positions of domination who are expensive, whose time is counted, and how the assistants have to support them by carrying out the “detailed” tasks for them, such as various reservations, agenda management, and ordering meals on the spot. The rapid movements of the camera are the leitmotif of the language used by Moszkowicz in this documentary. The camera moves constantly from one character to another, following them as they move around the office, in the corridors, or in the elevators, without ever trying to stabilize the image. Filming was done ­entirely without using a tripod. This extremely mobile camera captures the agitation in the offices, corroborated by an order shouted from one office to another, always to the attention of a secretary (come right away, order a meal immediately, etc.), which adds to the tension that dominates the life of these offices. Thus, camera movements accompany or redouble what the secretaries say about their managers’ or their own stress. This would not have been made perceptible by long, stable shots. This tension is also communicated through the fact that the cameraman never takes care of placing doorways or walls vertically. Quite the contrary, the essential thing for him is to place his subject (the manager/secretary relationship) at the center of the image. This deconstruction of the space strongly contributes to destabilizing the spectator who, little by little, enters this tension and completely participates in it, making him as breathless as the secretaries! The physically destabilized spectator enters into a kind of vertigo that seems to correspond to the general atmosphere of the offices of the managers of this division of IBM. Editing also contributed to this instability. The rather short shots alternate between work situations and interviews. Although shooting could have been done with long sequences—which we can see by watching the film where we can reconstruct sequences from short edited shots—it is the editing that gives the film its rapid rhythm, illustrating the tension and pressure that is exerted on secretaries. The film’s introduction appears as a caricature of this approach in the form of a

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medley of secretaries’ statements, edited at high speed. The object of the interviews is to show the proximity between secretaries and managers, as well as their dependence, which is the film’s thesis. However, from the outset, the editing expresses concern for the pace of work employing erratic editing. Among the editing details of Femmes de l’ombre, apart from the form adopting the work rhythm, the director gives substance to the documentary through the skillful succession of images showing work situations and interviews with secretaries. The editor uses the voice-over of an interview to cover images of work situations in which the secretary is involved in the interview. This includes, for example, an impatient and virulent manager or a fleeting look of annoyance thrown by a secretary over her glasses at her boss, who cannot see her because he is absorbed by her files. Rapidly, the image of the work situation is abandoned in favor of the image of the secretary in the interview. Then we shift back to the work situation. This repetitive, fast-paced flow between interview and work situation (secretary/manager relationship) aims at making the viewer aware—like the other devices described above—of the pressures exerted by the pace of work, stress, and tensions. At the same time, this restores the proximity between the two categories. In its own way, the overlap between image/sound and interview/work situation underlines the complicity between secretaries and their managers. In Rêves de chaîne [Dreams on the assembly line] (Joyce Sebag and Jean-Pierre Durand, 2001, in English with French subtitles on YouTube: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=S10pXjbbrXU&t=222s), the question of the pace of work is at the heart of the film since the pick-up truck shop at the Nummi factory (California) is seen by the workers of other shops as “hell.” However, we did not want to use filmic devices (slow motion filming and accelerated projection 6, sudden camera movements, jerky editing, etc.) to show this time pressure. Hence a perception of rhythm is largely dependent on the public. Spectators who know factory work immediately perceive the time pressure on the workers. Those who work on images or in the cinema have the same feeling. However, those who neither know the factory nor master the language of images have a hard time grasping the high rhythm of workers’ work. Indeed, the fluid, linked, or flowing movements of assembly workers have the appearance of simple gestures, precisely because they are calculated in this sense by the workers themselves, who “economize their efforts” to get through the working day (Durand and Hatzfeld 2003). The video finds it hard to capture the difficulty of the gestures and the monotonous and incessant repetition.  Everyone here thinks of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936): on the one hand, it’s fictional, on the other hand, shooting took place in slow motion so that the projection made the movements appear very fast. 6

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Rêves de chaine shows a complete cycle of the car seat assembly, seen from an overhead gangway, with the return of the workers at the start of the shift, a sequence of approximately one minute (which is also the duration of an assembly cycle or nearly 60 cars/hour). Operators do not appear stressed although they are, because any problem in using the equipment manipulating the seats forces them to stop the line. Here, the time pressure is shown only through images and sounds as demonstrated in these few examples: • a worker literally runs, crossing the line to give a missing piece to a colleague; • a worker places his foot before the “starting line” drawn on the floor, showing that the worker starts his cycle before what is authorized, either to “keep up” the pace or to gain a few seconds of rest at the end of the cycle; • repeated honking of horns punctuates the soundtrack. These are calls for help from workers asking for the intervention of their team leader or a colleague to repair a defect or get out of a “hole” when they fall behind on the assembly line. Interviews with the workers are a complement to the work situations. These take place in a room next to the assembly line, which gives the soundtrack the necessary unity: one can hear the thud of the workshop and the horn honking. In the interviews—often presented in fairly long sequences to contrast with the workshop rhythm—the workers clearly express their difficulties at work, the intensity of the line speed, or being forced to leave a post. The interviews serve as complementary devices to the images so that the interviewees express what the images cannot show. Then, by commenting on their work activity, the workers talk about their perception of work, its organization, the role of team leaders, and the place of the trade union. Finally, the workers express themselves on their plans: all those who have the resources to do so want to leave the assembly line rhythm, either by becoming team leaders or by leaving the factory and obtaining diplomas they are preparing while being workers (hence the title Rêves de chaîne). Workers, team leaders, and the group leader are often filmed in interviews in a tight shot. The intention of underlining the extent to which these workers are involved in their work and how they talk in great depth and with emotion about their jobs, their professional life, and the plans that make up their identity justifies this choice. The easiest way to express this commitment seemed to us to be through the close-up that projects the interviewee out of the screen into the midst of the viewers, who may then appear embarrassed by statements, as clear as they are intimate, about the work and about how it is transcended as they leave the factory.

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In Human, too human, Louis Malle (1974) also addresses this question of how to portray the pressure of time on workers, since it is a film on an automobile assembly line (Hatzfeld et al. 2006). It denounces the “cadences infernales” [hellish work rhythm] and repetitive work with no commentary, voice-over, or employee interviews7. In other words, there are only images and sound recorded in the factory shops. How did Louis Malle do this, since he did not have light equipment such as that available to Stéphan Moszkowicz in 1998? In one sequence, the film director shows the eye movements which go from the hands (which manipulate the work object) to another site, getting information guiding the completion of the cycle. Through this medium-length shot that includes five back-and-forth movements, Louis Malle shows the extreme brevity of the work cycle (3 to 4 seconds). The spectator sees this fixed shot, more than a jerky movement, as highlighting how many cycles are executed during the day. In another situation, in the seat assembly shop, the film director again focuses on the gaze of a woman, this time on a sewing machine. She totally fixes her gaze on the needle as if riveted or absorbed by its movement. She feeds the machine by pushing the fabric with one hand while pulling it at a steady pace with the other. Here, Louis Malle uses the editing of short shots to show a worker always in the same position, who does not lift her eyes from her work object, and whose gaze expresses the effort to avoid making mistakes (pushing the fabric too quickly or too slowly), to produce well while maintaining the rhythm. The concentration and attention of her gaze contrast with the rhythm of the editing of the shots, thus expressing the stability of the result despite the intensity of the work. In the seat assembly shop, on the assembly line where rubber bands are used to mount upholstery on seat frames in upgraded 2CV style seats, Louis Malle demonstrated the dexterity of the hands that constantly stretch these rubber bands, without stopping and at high speed. Again, Louis Malle uses what would look like a jerky edited “rough cut” to illustrate that the movement never stops and there is no pause to catch one’s breath. As if by chance, a man crosses the field of the camera, taking a big bite of a sandwich. Of course, the editing of the film is not accidental. It  Through its bias of not giving a voice to workers, this film is clearly opposed to most documentaries on work. This is particularly true of the series of documentaries which the Ministry of Labor commissioned a film company, Le point du jour, to produce (Le travail en questions, 1998). One of the films, on Taylorism (Sommes-nous condamnés aux cadences ? [Are We Doomed to Follow Work Rhythms?]) by Alain Rabechault), is essentially based on interviews with labor specialists (sociologists, doctors, and occupational psychologists). Work activities are shown in the form of counterpoint clips without interviews or commentary— this is the only link with Human, too human—as if to illustrate what the analysts have to say. 7

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shows a man taking a break in the middle of women at work. With so many rubber bands to assemble, the line moves very slowly. Louis Malle then closes in on the trampling of women’s legs. This “on the spot” shot of women’s feet contrasts with the agility and the pace of work of the hands, with emphasis on the latter. Comparing all movements, only those of the hands are productive, that of the feet appear ridiculous and absurd. This also illustrates the parable of a social system of work that is equally absurd and has lost the meaning of work and the body as a whole, in favor of a desynchronized body (see footnote number 9 for a more general interpretation of the film). This interpretation also certainly applies to the last shot, which presents the beautiful face of an androgynous being—no doubt, a young woman— caught up in the rhythm of work on the presses, as if the factory work led to blurring workers’ identity. The framing endeavors to show the detail of the faces and their expression in tight shots when possible. The range of workers’ movements must not be too pronounced, on pain of not being able to take into account the faces being observed. It is these close-ups that best reveal the women’s boredom as, through symmetrical movements of both hands, they repetitively position pieces on large metal structures that pass in front of them on a conveyor belt. Unlike the seamstresses, they seem to have a blank stare, as if they were elsewhere, their workstations requiring no attention. Here, rather long shots are used to express this boredom, which is much more effective than any commentary. Indeed, sociologists of work know that on uninteresting workstations, escape to something else like domestic life or ­after-­work activities is the only way to get through the eight or nine hours in the factory. The women workers cannot speak to each other, not only because it is forbidden, but because the deafening noise of the machines prevents any verbal communication. We should take another look at the fantastic soundtrack of the Louis Malle film: no audible human speech can be heard, but only a few workers’ voices covered by the fury of the machines. Throughout the film, the deafening noise of the factory saturates the soundtrack. Even in the seat assembly shop where the noise should be less pronounced, one barely hears the hum of the sewing machine of the worker filmed in medium shot. This permanent noise of the factory dominates everything, and Louis Malle makes it one of the elements suffocating individuals or crushing them. The sound of the press is transformed into the breathing of a monster at the end of the film. Why not the cyclops of which Marx spoke about in connection with the steam-hammer, of dead labor dominating men with its overwhelming power.

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3.2 Showing Domination and Resistance Relationships at Work In Human, too human, Louis Malle shows the domination of man by machine— and therefore by capital. 8 Indeed, against a background of religious music, the beginning of the film shows a large warehouse for storing rolls of steel. A worker on an overhead crane dominates the warehouse, like an “angel” gliding over the space. The factory looks like a cathedral—reminiscent of the “cultural models” thesis dear to Touraine (1977), with the differentiated use of surpluses in different societies. In the factory, the workers become subjects of machines just as they become subjects of God in cathedrals. Throughout the first part of the film, men are shown as appendages of their machines. When we see them, it is through machine-like skylights. For example, they are filmed in front of their press, through it, and the press movements show them in a truncated form: we see them when the press is raised, and they disappear the moment it comes down. This movement gives rhythm to their work, the handling of metallic sheets, that is to say, their status. Their existence in the image depends entirely on the press and the speed of the machine. The metaphor is complete: their life appears as discontinuous in front of a self-confident machine. Finally, the material on the presses appears in perpetual movement. The roller unrolls automatically for several hours. Man serves the perpetual movement of matter and machines (capital). Close-ups of the hands are alternated with the movement of the presses. We even see gloved hands without the fingertips of the gloves. Here the most diverse interpretations are possible: are these gloves which are worn out but not replaced? Are these special gloves for better grip, knowing that the risk is

 In fact, the demonstration is more subtle if you look carefully at the structure of the film:

8

• part 1: the machine dominates man in an inhuman system with factory images where men are always very small behind the machines or don’t appear in the image of the machine; • part 2: at the Automotive Show, it is men and women who buy. It is human beings who consume with the same rationality that dominates production. Even more so, the background noise of the Automotive Show is as saturated as the background noise of the factory! • part 3: it is humans who produce and the filmmaker shows them to us—much more so than in the first part—with close-ups and faces grimaced with pain, bored, struggling, etc. Human (the buyer), too human (the producer), the production-consumption cycle places people at the heart of the system and the film proves to be a radical critique of consumer society and/or capitalism (“losing one’s life in earning it”) in the spirit of the early 1970s.

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on the palm of the hand and not on the fingers? Or is it to suggest the dangers of working on a press through gloves amputated from its ends? Moszkowicz made domination—and the ambiguity of the social relationships that surround it to make it acceptable or even enjoyable—the central theme of Femmes de l’ombre. Several shots show managers and colleagues adding the adjective “General” to the name of the assistant to the IBM division manager. She seems indispensable to the smooth running of the institution, governing the boss’s agenda, and controlling everything that goes on in his environment, given the boss’s tight schedule. She manages his presence on the premises, down to the minute. The camera follows the “couple” in the elevator where the General accompanies him to settle a few organizational details with him while he goes down to the ground floor. This work of personal service accompanies a scene of a short interview in which the person concerned declares, “I am not in the shadows.” This affirmation said in a peremptory tone takes on its full force in the editing of the work situations demonstrating the temporal dependence of the General on her boss. What is more, it appears as the internalized negation of the facts themselves, presented only a few seconds earlier. This contradictory identity, characteristic of the salaried worker in general, and of this type of function of personal assistance, can of course be described in a text, but the contradiction comes through much clearer in the image— the truth of the statement experienced on the screen—and through the contradictory relation of the statement to the real facts. Accepting their contradictory identity—all executive assistants interviewed in the film say they love their jobs—involves denying their dependent status (“I’m not in the shadows”). Other assistants express this dependence and difference in status from the executives with a clear awareness of the contradictory nature of their identity. One assistant says “I accept everything so that they are in a good mood because then I feel good about myself.” Femmes de l’ombre shows many work situations where the assistant is dependent on her boss or in a dominated position, in a more or less authoritarian or good-natured relationship, depending exclusively on the personality of the boss. There is no room for resistance in this intense and long-lasting interpersonal relationship. There are only attitudes of diversion of the meaning of the relationship, of circumvention, or even denial. The intertwining of work situations and interviews with the partial overlapping of image and sound reflects the interpenetration of the personalities involved in the work. Here more than elsewhere, work is only relational, which images and sounds make even clearer as they are combined and merge. Indeed, this fusion is not only rendered by the contents but by continuity established between the scenes, since images of one are partially covered by the sound of the other in a clever “shot/counter-shot” arrangement between images and sounds.

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This contradictory identity can also be expressed in the admission of a degree of frustration at work. An assistant says she is frustrated in preparing the work of others without ever being in the action that only leaders experience. She is aware of meetings, the themes and questions dealt with, without ever actively participating in them. The close-up of this assistant’s face says a lot and shows an admission of frustration. It pierces the mystery of the meetings that are talked about throughout the film without ever being invited. The assistant regrets not experiencing the real action, the one that comes from the status of being a manager and is exercised as a decision-making power, the one that truly counts in the most shared representations of social success. Whether in individual or group interviews, the assistants produce refined comments and precise analyses of their work that the film director shares with us through images of relational situations. The spectator is struck by the fact that the assistants provide self-analysis, reminiscent of the self-­ confrontations practiced by ergonomists9. In the interviews, the interviewer sometimes questions the assistants about their colleagues and the nature of the working relationship they have with their boss. Once again, the “knitting” of work situations and interviews allows the viewer to produce his or her own analysis instead of those provided by a text. There is clearly every indication that through these calculated comparisons, the director leads the spectator where he wants. The spectator sees himself as active in the analysis of the work projected on the screen, whereas in the reading of a text, he would appear as being rather active in the controversy between the analysis proposed and those he knows elsewhere. The ambiguity of the relationship between a secretary and her boss is one of the most widespread ideas. In Femmes de l’ombre, there is no question of embroidering the theme with unfortunate innuendoes. On the contrary, the film exposes the content’s ambiguity in order to point out its social function: acceptance of dependence and the difference in status in order to maintain effectiveness in the assistants’ work. They confess to performing for their boss specific tasks that they refuse at home (sewing buttons, buying car stickers, etc.). In a tone of derision, they say they are as close to their boss as they are to their husbands. Thus, they do not leave to others, and especially not to potential analysts, the power to expose the inadequacies of their profession. They reverse their position by their ability to take distance and criticism. The images and sounds allow them to suggest this in a nuanced way, where the written text would tend to affirm it. This reversal, therefore,  Ergonomists and occupational psychologists show videos to employees that they have previously filmed in a work situation. The comments and analyses of employees talking about their work on their own images enable them to deepen their knowledge of work activity and to act on its conditions. We will come back to this practice with regard to elicitation. 9

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seems to us an essential element in recognizing men and women’s intelligence in their work situation. It can also help change our view of the role of the labor sociologist and to understand him or her more as a midwife of understanding.

3.3 Representing Proximity Through Transparency Work situations may include the proximity of the assistant and her boss, the ability to communicate through half-expressed ideas, and a correct interpretation of succinct directives. This proximity is the basis for effective results based on a minimum of words exchanged. Moreover, while each assistant has links to a boss, they are located in adjoining spaces. Since the bosses are interconnected, so are the assistants. How can this be expressed? Moszkowicz uses a reasonably simple subterfuge by taking advantage of the workspace’s topography. He shoots either through the windows recording what happens in the neighboring office10—for example, a manager focused on a file, thus advancing status differentiation because secretaries are never seen concentrated on a task, or and even better, he shoots and frames wide enough to include the doorway in an office image where an assistant is talking to a manager in order to fix them into the same space. By systematically placing a foreground in his wide shots, the cameraman gives the viewer the impression of ­entering into the intimacy of a relationship, that is, crossing the social wall of the private interview. He thus accesses the heart of the working relationship, in a word, experiencing a moment of social transparency. By filming “between two doors,” the director plunges us into the confidence of the “in-between.” In this general proximity, the film director uses the narration of assistants about each other, and of managers about their assistants, to show the employee-subjects building their relationships with others from the way they look at others and the way the latter look at them. From office to office, the film director creates everyone’s mirror-image. This cross-fertilization of actors’ images is, of course, organized by the camera movements that continuously change the point of view. This same interplay of images, with a very mobile camera, reflects in turn, an essential dimension of the assistants’ work, namely the relational aspect that requires their continuous movement. The extreme mobility of the camera expresses and, in a way, demonstrates the assis The film director can also use the interview in which an assistant expresses her critical point of view toward her boss. For example, she sees through the glass offices that another boss stays with her assistant much longer than her own boss does. Here, spending time means recognizing the usefulness of the other’s work. 10

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tants’ mobility. The secretaries’ function as intermediaries, the regulation of social relations both within the company as well as outside it, such as appointments and visits fixed and then moved or canceled, and purchases of plane or train tickets, restaurant and hotel reservations, etc., is experienced by the spectator who follows the rhythm of the camera’s movements. Finally, the occasionally jerky editing of shots, alternating work situations and interviews, in turn, reflects not only the time pressure but the fast-paced nature of the work, constantly interrupted by phone calls or calls for help from their bosses. Here there is no room for the continuity and tranquility of thoughtful reflection—as may be the case from time to time for the manager filmed behind Venetian blinds. The intensification of time and fragmented nature of work are shown by camera movements and the editing, which is itself fragmented as if to prove the correctness of Henry Ford, who saw the fragmentation of tasks as the best way to combat the porous nature of the working day.

3.4 Associate Interviews with Meaningful Images Devices for showing work, especially its essential characteristics—time pressure, work rhythm, domination, and personal dependence—differ from one film to another. They are, in fact, limited in number. The creativity of film directors and operators finds its limits because it shows ideas, concepts, or paradigms on-screen that are based on images and sounds from concrete and real activities. Hence the frequent recourse in these documentaries to interviews with the people involved in the work. However, at the same time, the conduct of these interviews and the way they are recorded raise questions, in particular, for film directors and sociologists. Indeed, for many reasons, it is difficult to present work while conducting an interview: • ambient noise in workshops or transportation prevents quality sound recording while the sound recording device weighs so much, or is so close to the subject, that it interferes with both the worker and the conduct of the interview; • mental activity required by the job prevents the worker from being sufficiently available (mentally) to answer the interviewer’s substantive questions. Thus, interviews conducted during work are rare and relate to specific situations, such as the monitoring of a process, for example. Here it is possible to present the work (gazes, gathering information, gestures, and movements) provided that an event does not occur that prioritizes and drives the filmmaker away. In

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monitoring work, without other incidents, it is therefore exceptionally possible to present the content of a subject’s activities and to question him about his work, and his interpretation of his working conditions. Also enabling this approach is a differentiated device, the self-confrontation device used by ergonomists. After filming employees at work, they are questioned about their job while viewing the images that show them at work. Although this tool is a definite contribution to the analysis of work, it appears to be used infrequently and to be quite impractical in sociological documentaries, as it breaks the rhythm of the narration by its cumbersome nature. The power of reflexivity—the interviewee in front of his own image, commenting on it—breaks with what is usually emphasized in work. For all these reasons, documentary filmmakers who use worker interviews conduct dissociated interviews, i.e., interviews that take place outside of actual work activity. This is already a first essential difference with the traditional activity of the sociologist, who may accompany the subject in his work to question him very precisely about his concrete activities (gestures and skills used), which generally makes it easier to establish a relationship of trust between the sociologist and the worker. The filming location is essential to the success of the interview and the quality of the film itself (see, infra, Chap. 6). In many cases, however, the interviewees— especially the operators (workers, transport, and general laborers)—have left their working environment to be filmed in places or premises that are unfamiliar to them or that have particular emotional charges (classrooms adjacent to workshops, management offices, etc.). From then on, taking an interest in the positions of those concerned, in their more or less controlled bodies outside of their workspace, can introduce some distortions. The question of the shot’s value—whether to capture the environment in this situation outside work itself—is no longer of much interest and the operator concentrates on body, face, and hands. We can say that here the film director or the cameraman are caught by the device, in the sense of being trapped or locked up, and have few choices, greatly detracting from their possibility of expression, and even from the esthetics of the film itself. It may be added that the lighting is often limited to the neon lights in the ceiling. This lighting introduces an esthetic aspect that is generally rejected in cinema and photography even though it says a lot about these places. As Guy Chapoullié pointed out during a

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projection, greenish reflections appear, as a strong element in a cold space reserved for workers.11 In the other cases of dissociated interviews, where white-collar workers are filmed in their work environment when they are not working, it is easier to make the environment speak through wide shots, to understand the subjects and give them meaning because they “stick” to their reality. The interview, or its effect, will be all the more compelling and convincing as a result. The restitution of the environment by taking detailed shots (personal objects on a desk, posters, lighting, and atmosphere, but also by showing how work tools are arranged, and whether they are tidy or in disorder) will serve as cutting shots for the editing, confirming the meaning that the subject gives to his interview. Thus, despite the constraints faced by the documentary filmmaker, image and sound can show a work situation commented on by the subject. This has nothing to do with an illustration of the interview through images. It is not a redundancy, but a commentary or controversy, an analysis or better still a self-analysis of his activity. The intensity of the discourse (images, soundtrack, and interviews) must compensate for the fleeting nature of certain sound-images. Because the projection of a documentary for a viewer is shorter than reading a book and more ephemeral, one does not turn back as in a book or an article. It is, therefore, the combination of what is seen (image/sound) and heard (voice) that marks the viewer and leads him or her to thoughtful consideration. This back and forth between film practice, field research, and teaching is at the heart of the development of filmic sociology. It has favored exchanges between University sociologists and film professionals, to the point of leading to the emergence of teaching and diplomas in this field.

 In Nissan, une histoire de management [Nissan, a story of management] (Joyce Sebag, Jean-Pierre Durand, 2005. In English with French sub-titles on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSfRYLWFJ30&t=249s ), we filmed an interview with the director of a plant. He chose to film it in a place he considered neutral, namely a rather soulless meeting room. As his subject was the local version of the managerial discourse of the general management, we shot the main part of the interview in a very wide shot, giving an important place to the smooth table. The image of the director at the end of a large table under neon lighting leads the spectator to better hear and interpret his discourse on quality and zero stock as being impersonal, albeit effective thanks to the battery of devices that accompany it in spite of himself. 11

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4 From the Master’s Degree in Image and Society to the Doctoral Thesis in Filmic Sociology The Image et Société Master’s degree was founded in 1996 after experimenting with the relationship between image and sociology in a workshop open to all students from the first year of the sociology curriculum. The President of the University supported the project with the supervisory government ministry in order to obtain accreditation, on condition that it did not cost it anything financially. The priority task was finding funds through professional training or the apprenticeship tax to buy filming and editing of material—the VHS format still dominated production and distribution—because the first certainty was that the team of sociologists, helped by professionals, had to shoot and edit their own images and no longer be satisfied with talking about images produced by others.

4.1 Creating Convergences Between Sociologists and Film Professionals When a sociologist (Joyce Sebag) created the Master’s program, the team brought together, on the University side, an ethnologist, a historian, and a philosopher and, on the cinematographic side, several cinema professionals including a screenwriter, a cinematographer, a sound engineer, an image analyst, and an editor. Meetings between cinema professionals and social science researchers were not always simple affairs despite a general willingness to try an experience ignoring individual trajectories and egos. We based this on the belief that pooling very diverse professional skills would enrich collective work. There was a persistent disagreement. On the one hand, image and sound professionals feared the “necessarily” didactic, cold, analytical, and rationalizing dimension of sociologists. On the other hand, sociologists and ethnologists feared that too much importance would be given to the affective, emotional, and narrative dimension of documentary filmmakers, thereby losing what underlies the specificity of the sociological approach, namely the construction of a certain distance from the object. This original theme was then broken down into questions that continue to animate the constitution of the French field of filmic sociology. For students to benefit from these fruitful debates, the teachers and professionals decided to teach together. If for understandable reasons, the whole team was not present at all sessions of professional obligations, the spirit that prevailed was that of the need to cross-fertilize, in the long term, the practices and convictions of each one through

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teaching in order to build robust transversality capable of founding a pedagogical and scientific collective. Not only did each person now know what the others thought, but he respected them by influencing his own knowledge and skills so that a “commonality” would emerge, a shared platform of knowledge on which each could then build his specific teaching, relating to his profession. Learning the method itself was difficult, first because it was time-consuming, but above all because the points of view and dogmas were so far apart—and the debates sometimes so heated—that discouragement could have outweighed the objectives. Film professionals—often intermittent in show business—were paid during these hours of collective teaching, but, above all, each one quickly perceived all that they could draw from such a collective experience for their own professional practices and intellectual training. Sociologists were trained in the use of camera and sound recording to measure the gap between the image envisaged and its result. The projected image and especially its meaning deviated widely from the original intentions, leading social science teachers to question the consistency of the medium. On the other hand, film professionals were familiar with the approach of sociologists and their stubbornness to constantly ask questions, where no one perceived the obvious: how to cross the veil that screens the knowledge of the social or inter-individual relations? The constitution of a “common base” lasted the entire academic year, to the great satisfaction of the students who had never before benefited “live” from debates between teachers on such radical issues since the foundations of filmic sociology were being laid. The following years saw more traditional activities, with an enlargement of the teaching staff and the recruitment of an assistant engineer. This twofold phenomenon is the basis of the reputation and attractiveness of the Image et Société Master’s program: students produce an end-of-study film using high-­ quality material; they are supervised by an integrated and committed teaching team, fully available to students.

4.2 Teaching and Research in Filmic Sociology Two questions rapidly emerged: if one year’s training is too short, why not prepare a doctoral thesis along the line of the Image et Société Master’s degree? How could this field of filmic sociology be institutionalized in the academic world, since it renews the practices of sociologists while posing new epistemological problems? Training teacher-researchers in filmic sociology by having them defend a doctoral thesis in this field should eventually lead to the strengthening of the field itself through the creation of new University courses. These were the two converging

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questions that gave rise to doctoral training and doctoral seminars in which students from the Pierre Naville Center took part before being able to defend their doctoral theses in filmic sociology, starting in 2014. What then is a doctoral thesis in Filmic Sociology? It is, of course, a sociological documentary (usually between 30 and 60 minutes), solidly constructed according to the standards of sociology while demonstrating mastery of cinematographic language (this is the whole composite aim of this book!). However, the thesis cannot be based only on a film: it must be accompanied by a written reflection on the film itself and more precisely on its inscription in filmic sociology that is being created. Moreover, a sociological documentary always focuses on a principal subject falling within one or several fields of sociology: the city, work, migrations, family, social classes, gender, etc. In order to make a doctorate-level documentary, the student must master the theses and the authors present in his/her specific field(s). By writing a high-level thesis in a field, he or she can easily compete for an academic position. This is also because he or she has another skill which is the mastery of the moving image and cinema. What is then the format of the filmic sociology thesis? Nothing is standardized here, and that is a good thing; as long as it meets the double challenge of: • proposing a sociological documentary that is both esthetically pleasing, with a narrative, while offering sociological content and background, i.e., based on theses that viewers can readily perceive; • providing a written dissertation that deals both with current theories or authors in the field in question and demonstrates a considered position on the documentary in question in terms of filmic sociology. Such a thesis turns out to be much more than a normal thesis and its realization in three years—as the Ministry of Higher Education would like to impose—is impossible here. But the challenge is worth taking up for sociology students who wish to discover other means of knowledge and expression than the written word, by associating image and sound. It is thus conceivable that, in the years to come, additional issues will emerge, such as film writing, experimentation, style, and esthetics in writing. This will testify to the maturity of filmic sociology.

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From Ethnologist Photography to Filmic Sociology

All historians of cinema have recognized the social dimension of documentary cinema. Its similarity to and distinction from the sociological documentary is one question addressed in this book. The history of the documentary film raises fundamental questions about its contribution to the process of filmic sociology. Twentieth-­century documentary photography and cinema contributed more or less directly to sociological documentary. It is, therefore, a question of showing how this sociological documentary continues an earlier tradition while asserting its specificity. This chapter is not a history of the relationship between the human sciences and still or moving images, given that there are many specialized books and articles on this subject—to which we will refer later. The following pages simply aim at shedding light on the present and future based on over a century of experience. In the presentation of this short evolution, we highlight data and remarks, which may be useful to those who want to enter the field of filmic sociology. This chapter, therefore, aims at being a “compass,” a set of partly subjective reference points. Before cinema penetrated the documentary, it was, of course, through photography that ethnologists and anthropologists brought back valuable documents from faraway lands about populations that were unknown to the general public. Subsequently, photography and documentary cinema developed in parallel, with different maturation processes that filmic sociology has inherited.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Sebag, J.-P. Durand, Filmic Sociology, Social Visualities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33696-6_3

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1 The Documents of Ethnologists and Anthropologists The importance of observation in ethnology and anthropology encouraged an intensive use of photography from its earliest developments. It constitutes a rich and precise complement to the scriptural descriptions of the clothing, habitat, culinary practices, and of course, the ceremonies of the populations studied by anthropologists in Oceania and Africa. Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), who based his work on the field observations of his students, expressed his interest in photography and film in lectures in the 1930s. In the Manuel d’ethnographie, published in 1926, he shows his awareness of the difficulty of accurately describing rituals or the making of objects. He multiplies recommendations for using photography and cinema, considering that “cinema will make it possible to photograph life” (Mauss 2007, 15). Very attached to the body techniques, which he defines as the basis of cultural transmission and social relations in general, he recommends their study “with the help of photography and, if possible, slow-motion cinema” (idem, 26). This question of the body came back in force in the 1980s (Guéronnet 1987), followed by research on gender relations and family sociality in Western societies (Guéronnet 1987, 1994).

1.1 From Albert Kahn to Anglo-Saxon Anthropologists Collecting original documents on cultures, populations, or situations in danger of disappearing—the documentary function of photography and subsequently that of cinema—transformed Albert Kahn (1860–1940), a businessman and a banker, into a master collector. Between 1909 and 1931, Kahn, bankrupted during the 1930 crisis, sent several photographers and filmmakers throughout the world, including to France, to collect “aspects, practices, and modes of human activity, whose fatal disappearance is now only a matter of time,” he wrote. Over 70,000 autochromes (color photo plates) and a hundred hours of film show us how other peoples lived in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Often static, these shots illustrate what an archive can be, in which clothing and individual attributes play a crucial role, allowing us to read the social reports of submission, as depicted in the portrait below.

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Autochrome by Frédéric Gadmer, Chief Justin Aho surrounded by his wives, 1930

In the same period, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), who emigrated from Poland to Great Britain and then to the United States, stayed in the Trobriand Islands (Papua New Guinea) from 1916 to 1922. There he photographed the village population in detail to complete his written notes. One will notice in these photographs Malinowski staging himself in a posture that illustrates rather well the approach that the criticism of anthropological work has subsequently amply formulated (Douglas 1996).

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Photo by Billy Hancock, Picture of Bronislaw Malinowski with natives on Trobriand Islands, 1917–1918

Malinowski advocated participant observation (Malinowski 1989) involving the immersion of the researcher in the society he is studying, instead of earlier studies that relied on descriptions borrowed from travelers, missionaries, and others. These photos demonstrate the anthropologist’s somewhat paternalistic, even dominating attitude, which is reinforced by his attributes (colonial helmet, immaculate white safari jacket). Immersion does not exclude the incorporation of the researcher’s culture. Such immersion can highlight the distance between the researcher and his or her research field. Today, the sociologist-filmmaker may still explore this question when he is involved in observational work, or even when he plans to adopt a “participatory” approach to observation. Among the lessons learned from the countless works on this methodology, let us remember the necessary long-term presence in the field and a certain degree of attention to distancing oneself from the object under study.

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Photo by Billy Hancock, Picture of Bronislaw Malinowski with natives on Trobriand Islands, 1917–1918

Two decades later, Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) and Margaret Mead (1901– 1978), American anthropologists, lived in Bali between 1936 and 1939. They brought back thousands of photographs from their fieldwork, publishing 750 of them. They bear witness to a very acute sense of observation of daily life, of the ceremonies and trances that may accompany them. The very title of their 1942 work: Balinese Character: a Photographic Analysis registers their photographic priorities. A large part of the original work deals with the transmission of culture by the parents through gestures and body language. This education in everyday life or dancing does not take place, as is often the case in the West, through words but by guiding the movement of the body and limbs. Therefore, “technically, the juxtaposition of photographs makes it possible to solve the problems of description that any investigation of body techniques encounters. This juxtaposition also makes it possible to have a better grasp on the more subtle relationships existing between various behaviors codified by the same culture: the friendly brutality of the father towards his son, the rivalry between brothers, and the mother’s behavior towards her baby. These are so many cultural traits that often appear more clearly in a look, a gesture, or a bodily attitude than in a long literary description” (Bateson 1977). The book combines photographic plates with texts commenting on and analyzing them so that the reader grasps the essence of the cultural differences with what he or she knows of his or her own experience. Through their long-term immersion,

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the authors detach themselves from their scientific objects and create a distance between what they report back from Bali and the reader. This distancing leads the reader to question his or her own cultural practices. We will find this essential question of detachment in Chap. 5. Finally, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead brought back from Bali the film elements to construct Trance and dance in Bali (edited only in 1952), which meets the same requirements as their photographic practice. A voice-over explains the connotation of figures and movements, much as comments on photos in a printed work.

1.2 French Ethnologists in Africa Marcel Griaule (1898–1956), a French ethnologist, had much less luck with cinema and especially with its producers who withdrew at the last minute during the Dakar-Djibouti expedition (1931–1933) which he co-managed with Michel Leiris.1 Most of the films shot were lost or were not of good technical quality. The few minutes available accompanied Marcel Griaule’s lectures as illustrations. He would have better luck during his subsequent long missions in Dogon country in northern Mali, from which he brought back a short 15-minute documentary, Sous les masques noirs (1938), [Under Black Masks], which describes making masks and interprets their functions. These masks would also be the subject of his doctoral thesis. Anthropologists and ethnologists have frequently used photography to “work on their subject” in close osmosis with written texts. The complementarity of the two media runs throughout this book. On the other hand, their successes and setbacks in the use of cinema underline the difficulty of mastering this medium when the anthropologist-director wants to go beyond mere description. This problem is at the center of André Leroi-Gourhan’s 1948 article in the Revue de Géographie humaine et d’Ethnologie. He distinguishes three kinds of ethnological films: “the research film, the exotic film (a type of film made by travelers), and the [social] milieu film.” The latter, filmed with no intention of doing scientific research, takes on an ethnological value “by being exported, as for example a good film of New York gangsters which is transformed into a painting of curious customs when exported to another continent” (Leroi-Gourhan 1948, p. 42). The author rejected the exotic film as badly prepared, poorly filmed, and edited to bring some entertainment to an ill-informed public. He recognized two types of research cinema: on the

 Michel Leiris, L’Afrique fantôme, Paris, Gallimard, 1988 [1934].

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one hand, cinematographic notes when the ethnologist uses the camera as a notepad without having the project of constructing a real film, and on the other hand, the organized film that requires a mastery of cinema. In the latter, “the scenario is provided by the action already known and repeated, a meticulous cutting of sequences and indispensable images. The angles, panning, and shots are studied and prepared according to the most rigorous technique” (idem, 45). Then follows a complete description of possible cinematographic studies in the human body: the general attitudes at work, in walking, at rest, in the movements of the worker’s or swimmer’s hand, and in the mimicry expressing feelings (idem). Hence, the interest of the training implemented at the Centre de formation aux recherches ethnologiques [Center for Training in Ethnological Research] that he created in 1946. Returning to the organized research film, André Leroi-Gourhan wonders in his conclusion: “We do not see why, in the extreme, an ethnologist would not one day support a filmed thesis. This film, designed for scientific use, like a medical film, is sometimes likely to become a documentary for a limited audience or a mainstream documentary.” These reflections were contemporary with the creation of the Congrès international du film d’ethnologie et de géographie humaine [International Congress of Ethnological and Human Geographic Film] held at the Musée de l’Homme in 1947, which was transformed into the Comité international du film ethnographique2 in 1952, which in turn became the Festival international Jean Rouch named after its initiator. Indeed, according to Luc de Heusch (1927–2012), Jean Rouch (1917–2004) understood very early on that the development of ethnological film required the creation of a robust network, including the financing of missions, filming equipment, and film. He was a prolific filmmaker with more than 100 films to his credit, mostly documentaries on Africa but also highly documented fiction, sometimes referred to as “ethnofiction.” Among the latter is Cocorico Monsieur Poulet (1977), a kind of small car road movie on the Niger River that takes us on a journey through everyday Africa, full of landscapes, villages, laughter, and comical resourcefulness. Dionysos (1984) is also an offbeat film about a France that doubts its academics. This film gave rise to a documentary (Dionysos, fin de tournage, 1987) by Éric Darmon at the request of Rouch himself. This film shows the working methods of the director of Les Maîtres fous [The Mad Masters] (1954). We could also mention Moi, un noir (1958) [I, a Negro], which reverses the ethnological vision of the world through the eyes of Nigerien students on mainly white urban life in the suburbs of Abidjan. Jean Rouch was one of the first to use

 The founders included: Marc Allégret, Roger Caillois, Germaine Dieterlen, René Clément, Pierre Ichac, André Leroi-Gourhan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edgar Morin, Alain Resnais, and Jean Rouch. 2

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synchronous sound in his fieldwork, co-inventing direct cinema, whose technique, or rather practice, gave rise to Chronique d’un été (1961) [Chronicle of a Summer], which he directed with Edgar Morin. Jean Rouch was a field worker who had a keen eye in placing the camera at the best angle. Above all, he was able to penetrate the most difficult situations, even with the camera. He gave an impetus and set a standard among anthropologist-directors such as Jacques Lombard and Michèle Fiéloux (Les Mémoires de Bindute Da, 1990 or Le Voyage de Sib, 2006). In 1969, Jean Rouch also created a cinema teaching course at the University of Paris X-Nanterre with other anthropologists-filmmakers (Claudine de France, Colette and Marc-­Henri Piault, and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan, among others) leading to the establishment of a DEA [diplôme d’études approfondies—the first year of the PhD thesis] in 1975. In her dissertation published in 1982, Claudine de France proposes an analysis and extremely detailed methods for filming the rituals, actions, and gestures of individuals or artisans. She deviates somewhat from the notion of profilmie introduced by Étienne Souriau (1953). Souriau defines profilmic events as “every existing event specifically intended for filming.” Anthropologists see profilmics as the changes in the behavior of observed subjects due to the camera’s presence. She then takes up, and extensively develops André Leroi-Gourhan’s typology, differentiating between exhibition films presenting the results acquired in research antecedent to the making of the film and exploration films that use the camera as a tool for observation and research, including for the audience to comment on the contents of the projected scenes. For example, Jean Rouch recounts how “the projection of a Horendi film on the initiation of possession dancers in Niger, [enabled him], by studying the film on a viewer, to gather in fifteen days of work more information from the priests in charge than in three months of direct observation and interviews with the same observers” (cited by de France 1989, 306). The proposal of a third type, the post-exploratory film, brings together an observation phase with the camera, followed by a phase of clarifying the data, and lastly, a final, more interpretative, and demonstrative stage. This is what filmic sociology proposes, through an integrated approach of the three phases in the sociological documentary intended for an audience that goes beyond the researchers alone. Parallel to the use of photography and cinema, and subsequently of video, by ethnologists and anthropologists during the last century, photographers and filmmakers have been using the same tools to disseminate their images narrating social phenomena widely. Their work is of interest to image sociologists just as they have learned from ethnologists and anthropologists.

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2 Documentary Photography and Film 2.1 Documentary Photography Arbitrarily, we have started documentary photography with Lewis Hine (1874– 1940), an American photographer who first studied sociology before becoming a photographer in 1904. He began by photographing immigrants on Ellis Island, the gateway to the promised land,3 before being hired for a decade by the National Child Labor Committee to denounce child labor in mines, wool and cotton mills, and in all workshops with deplorable working conditions. “Show those things that need to be corrected,” he wrote. He left some iconic photos such as that of a worker tightening the bolts of a steam engine, or the builders of the Empire State Building sitting at rest on the steel girders dozens of meters in the air. His photos may now appear rather static, showing characters rather than the work itself while staging many of the images. Do not forget that the photographer used a massive camera with a heavy tripod, which of course, prevented any “live-action” shots. As Naomi and Walter Rosenblum write, “today’s documentary filmmakers are asked to focus on the facts, to describe, for example, deplorable living and working conditions without making heroes or archetypes out of their actors.”4 Nonetheless, Lewis W. Hine’s style announces the photographers of the Farm Security Administration.

 See Georges Perec, Ellis Island, Paris, POL, 2019 and especially Robert Bober’s film written with the author, Récits d’Ellis Island, histoires d’errance et d’espoir, 1980. 4  In Lewis W. Hine, Paris, Centre National de la Photographie, 1992. 3

Lewis W. Hine, Child trying to weigh himself, n.d.

Lewis W. Hine, Young worker in a spinning mill, n.d.

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2.1.1 FSA Photographers and the “Documentary Style” After the great crash of 1929, the Roosevelt administration set up many development programs during the New Deal, one of which, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), aimed at helping small farmers ruined by the crisis and by particularly unfavorable climatic conditions. This economic program included an Information Division and a photographic section headed by Roy Stryker, who recruited about 20 photographers5 to show the state of American agriculture and the positive effects of the New Deal. These photographers traveled throughout the United States (particularly the Middle West, the South, and California) from 1935 to 1942, shifting their focus somewhat “from agricultural problems to a project of documentation aimed at the whole of society and popular culture” (Lugon 2001, 97). The FSA thus collected 270,000 photographic documents, showing both the diversity of the authors’ approaches and the poverty of the rural populations, some of whom were trying to reach the new Eldorado that they saw as the American West and California. Arthur Rothstein worked on symbols, such as this dead buffalo head on the cracked earth or through street scenes in Birmingham, Alabama, that highlight the apartheid practices that reigned there.

 Those who left their mark on the program were Walker Evans (1903–1975), Dorothea Lange (1895–1975), Jack Delano (1914–1997), Russel Lee (1903–1986), and Arthur Rothstein (1915–1985). We have not listed a bibliography of the photographers of the FSA and on their work as the number of publications devoted to them in all languages is immense. 5

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Arthur Rothstein, Colored Balcony, Birmingham, 1940

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Dorothea Lange approached social reality with a particular sensitivity that gave her international recognition. Everyone knows this photo of a migrant mother, sometimes referred to as “Dorothea Lange’s Pietà” (California, February or March 1936) in the iconic tradition that has spanned the centuries from religious painting to cinema and photojournalism, deploying this “genre” to create emotions in the face of poverty or war.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936

This photo, which became an icon, remains enigmatic. The gaze with bright, uncertain eyes, staring neither in the foreground nor in the distance, immediately raises the question of “why” without being able to go any further. This immobility

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of the gaze without goal or objective, supported, one might say, by the hand under the chin, refers to the rest of the image: three children, one of whom is sleeping while the other two are hiding from the photographer for an unknown reason. Are they crying, and, if so, why? Are they afraid of the stranger? Do they, in their own way, signal a refusal to expose their poverty and their difficulties, most clearly expressed in the mother’s clothes? At the same time, the beautiful, abundant hair of the two older children, together with the grain of the photo, make up the quality of the image. It is a photo that is both overly significant and lacking any particular meaning. This could be the root of the intensity of the image, trapped in this paradox: questioning the obvious.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936

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This paradox is possible because the spectator is kept ignorant of the context of the shot, a real lesson for the sociologist-photographer or sociologist-filmmaker. Ignorance of the conditions under which the viewer has taken the shot produces a halo effect that undermines its profound meaning, or at least the sense someone desired to give to their work. Knowledge of the context makes a large part of the mystery disappear—perhaps because of the rationality it introduces between the image and the spectator.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936

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Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936

The traveling exhibition (2018–2019) Politics of the Visible [Politics of Seeing] presenting Dorothea Lange’s photos helps to explain her work method. She takes her first photo from afar to get in touch with her subject. Then she gets closer and explains her presence and that of her camera. After the subject’s agreement, she continues to photograph (seven shots of which we reproduce only four, including the final photo above). Knowing that she worked with an 8 × 10 inch camera (about 20 × 25 cm), the reader understands the reason for the considerable movements of the characters between shots. It was necessary to change the plate after each shot. This whirlwind of children taking different poses, the ordinary life of a family of four children, removes all mystery from the photo of the “Pietà.” A contextualized

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image—unlike the iconic version of this photo, very tightly focused on the mother—then becomes more documentary by losing its esthetic part. Proof of this can be found in the following photograph taken in Oklahoma in August 1936, which certainly shows the same interrogations in the subject’s gaze, dramaturgy aside.

Dorothea Lange, Drought Refugees from Oklahoma, camped at the roadside, 1936

Of course, Dorothea Lange’s ability to produce mystery and enigma in her images makes her a photographer who can transcend epochs. The expressive power of her style can also capture the symbolic violence of social relationships, as in the photograph that follows.

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Dorothea Lange, Plantation Manager, Mississippi, 1936

This picture says everything we need to know about the domination of whites over blacks in the southern United States and the plantation manager’s assurance that it will continue. The big car (this is 1936), the knee on the bumper with the hand grasping the knee, the prominent belly with its shoulder straps, and the thin bodies of the Blacks maintained by physical work and who, of course, are in the background testify to the state of social relations in this great South. It is a photo that wields symbols, but because it is not overloaded with them, because it is synthetic, it becomes documentary. It is even more so because it goes beyond the archive document to become a narrative: it tells the story of social relations of work and exploitation. Walker Evans uses an entirely different method and tries to distance himself from any social approach. Straight photography, a current that developed in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, had a significant influence on him. The principal question for this current was to represent things or situations in the most “objective” way possible by renouncing all technical or esthetic artifice.

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In an interview quoted by Olivier Lugon (2001, 78), he states: “Flaubert’s esthetic is absolutely mine … his realism and naturalism, and his objectivity of treatment, the non-appearance of the author, and his non-subjectivity.” Another influence was that of Eugène Atget (1857–1927), whose photographic collection was purchased by his colleague Berenice Abbott immediately after the French photographer’s death. Atget and Walker Evans saw this current as being the embodiment of documentary photography in which the photographer disappears in favor of objects, namely the streets and Atget’s Parisian life. This conception is close to archival photography, and it is not surprising that both authors received commissions to take architectural photographs of buildings and houses in New York (idem, 81 seq.). This search for objectivity explains Walker Evans’ predilection for frontal photography of cityscapes and objects in general, as shown in the following two photographs.

Walker Evans, Farm at Westchester, New York, 1931

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Walker Evans, Row of Frame houses in Virginia, 1936

Walker Evans, Graveyard, houses and steel mill, Bethlehem Pennsylvania, 1935

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The first photo tells us about the farmers, what they are really like, although they do not actually appear in the photographer’s field. We see the curtains carefully tied to each of the windows and the Model T Ford parked in front of the house somewhat ostentatiously testifying to the taste, aspirations, and the affluence of the owners. The frontal shot, which is also very well executed with low light to give relief to the facade, contributes to the peace and quiet that permeates the picture. In the third image, the same method accompanies an entirely different approach, again in the absence of any persons. The urban landscape expresses workers’ conditions, from the factory in the background to the cemetery in the foreground, although the houses are more like those of executives than workers. The symbolic functioning of the chimneys (work) and the cross (death) is direct, without nuance. Once again, the raw lighting on the cross and the frontal view telescopes many plans, summing up the life of the worker confronted by the industrial machine. Working with a photographic chamber, Walker Evans is careful to bring out the details in all the plans of the photo: the rough exterior of the cross, the bricks of the houses, and the alignment of the steel mill chimneys. The absence of people is an esthetic choice, but above all, a functional one. It aims at making the objects and the environment of the men and women who live there speak for themselves, to show their personality and status. However, his work presents some notable exceptions,6 for example, when Walker Evans and a writer friend, James Agee, spent several weeks with the Burroughs, a family of cotton pickers in Hale County, Alabama. Because he developed a trusting relationship with this family, whose meals he shared, he photographed the members in their homes. However, his best photos were those he took of the family, either in groups or individually. Once again, these are frontal views of the house and its wood siding in harsh light.

 Another exception is the series of portraits made by Walker Evans in the New York City subways taken without the passengers’ knowledge as he was hiding behind a newspaper. The device itself illustrates Evans’ bias to capture the characters “objectively” without the emotional disturbances caused by the photographer. The result is portraits of pensive characters, often lost in the depths of their thoughts … while others seem to wonder about the bizarre activities of their opposite number behind his newspaper. 6

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Walker Evans, Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama, 1936

Olivier Lugon drew a “model” from this method of composing photos, which he called “documentary style,” by associating it with August Sander (1876–1954), whose work we present in the next chapter. Here, what might be called the search for absolute objectivism aims at erasing the photographer’s subjectivity. Whether illusion or unwavering will, the “documentary style” asserts principles that interest the documentary filmmaker, whether photographer or cineaste: • • • •

frontal shot giving it an objective character; raw light that brings out the details; sharpness and precision of the image; overt impersonality and maximum objectification.

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Faced with this primacy of accuracy and coldness, other photographers, such as Berenice Abbott, were determined to reintroduce the human element into documentary photography: “The contemporary documentary movement … can be seen as a revolt against the coldness and lack of human content in some straight ­photographs … the image has too often excluded humanity. The tendency today is to put human beings back where they belong: at the center of the stage” (quoted by Lugon 2001, 104). Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) followed a somewhat similar path. Greatly influenced at the beginning by straight photography, with her geometric photos of radio towers or metal bridges, she gradually reintroduced man at work or in urban landscapes.

2.1.2 Two Documentary Photographers: Robert Frank and Alexander Rodchenko American documentary photographers continued along this line, especially after the Second World War. Too numerous to be presented or even simply listed here, we will mention only one: Robert Frank, with his first book Les Américains, first published in France in 1958. In 1955, Frank, a recent Swiss immigrant to the United States with a European outlook, discovered the country during a nine-­ month road-trip (which justified Jack Kerouac’s introduction to the American edition). He brought back 27,000 photographs, of which only 84 were published— with a bitter reception from the American press, which judged the work to be sad, perverse, and even subversive. This judgment was close to the truth, as expressed in the photo below.

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Robert Frank, Navy Recruiting Station, Butte, Montana, from the book The Americans, 1956

With a minimum of elements—the flag, the inscription on the desk, and the open door—Frank shows us a fallible America. The partition of Korea in 1953 was not exactly a clear victory. The Navy recruiter, with beautiful shiny shoes, has fallen asleep during his tour of duty.

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The following photograph is a radical demonstration of what loneliness is in the Middle West: only one mailbox, and therefore only one family at the end of the road, lost in this vast expanse of land. There is only one house, the other buildings being farm outbuildings. There is no electric wire between the post and the farm, another sign of isolation. Finally, the composition does not respect any rules: the horizon, like the pole, is in the middle of the picture. This rigorous cut of the rectangle gives more strength to this remote mailbox, and the house struck by a dead tree.

Robert Frank, U.S. 30, between Ogallala and North Platte, Nebraska, 1956

In this last photo—one could select several dozen to show an America other than the one perceived by most of its inhabitants—the automobile is queen. It is summer, and young people flirt in bathing suits, far from their parents from whom they have borrowed the car (driver licenses may be issued as early as age 16). A beer bottle reenforces the signs of liberty of post-war American youth. In a more subversive way, one could also read this as the crushing of lightly dressed bodies by masses of metal, such as those denounced by the hippie youth protesting consumerism 15 years later.

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Robert Frank, Public Park, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1955

Frank’s strength is in being able to condense so many conflicting or converging symbols in a space as compact as a 24 × 36 cm frame, telling us how a self-­confident America lives. The doubt he introduces into his photographs is a testimony to his sharp eye and the precise distance he puts between himself and his objects or his characters. At the other end of the world (geographically and ideologically), a documentary photographer and his October Group created their own rules: Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956), who belonged to the constructivist current in the 1920s in his early career as a painter. This experience led him to experiment a great deal with violent geometries, which resulted in his being accused of formalism by the Stalinist authorities. It is not uninteresting to note that his rigor and coldness of lines and framing converged at the same time with the “documentary style” in the United States and Germany.

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Alexander Rodchenko, Making piles at the sawmill, 1931

Regardless of this being about work, what immediately strikes the eye in the photo of Alexander Rodchenko is, of course, the framing that creates a succession of triangles, leading us by the same path as the worker, to his comrade who will receive the board to be stacked. The force of framing with the wooden plank, which almost entirely occupies the diagonal, highlights the skills of the worker: his physical strength and the skill to align the boards in a perfect stack.

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The image below is provocative—like most of Rodchenko’s urban photos, which are crossed in all directions by lines—since, for reasons of diagonal composition, the figure defies all the laws of balance and leans forward. At the same time, this distortion or imbalance gives the character extra movement and accentuates the viewer’s astonishment at the image. Every image is also an emotional, cultural reference point. One cannot help but bear in mind the shots of Battleship Potemkin filmed four years earlier and the scene of the tsarist repression on the stairs in Odessa. Our interpretative imagination then associates this visual imbalance with the fragility of peaceful moments.

Alexander Rodchenko, Stairs 1930

In response to the accusations of formalism, Alexander Rodchenko and his group photographed the pioneers, athletes, workers, and others. However, he retains his formalist bias as in the photograph below where he expresses the sporting victory head-on: only the medal in the foreground is clear while the gaze and the windy hair underline the commitment of the young girl.

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Alexander Rodchenko, The sportswoman, 1932

In France, the humanist photographic movement was to have a global impact, at least as significant as that of the American photographers of the FSA. This recognition took place during their own lifetime. This current emerged with pictures of the working-class districts of Paris and its suburbs in the 1930s and flourished in the post-war decades. It developed at the same time as a powerful workers’ movement in Europe and particularly in France. Their photography was above all social, but social in a vast spectrum ranging from photos of urban poverty to that of horseracing. The aim was to include the salient features of the objects selected, bringing out their significance in photographs: streets and squares, people, singular objects, everyday gestures, homes and their interiors of all social classes, cafes, leisure activities, and many others. Those who left their mark on this “poetic realism—a formula that some people reject because

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it ignores the social criticism at the root of this trend—are Robert Doisneau (1912– 1994), Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004), Willy Ronis (1910–2009), Édouard Boubat (1923–1999), Izis (1911–1980), Sabine Weiss (born 1924), Brassaï (1899– 1984), Lisette Model (1901–1983), Jean-Philippe Charbonnier (1921–2004), and others. Ending this list with Jean-Philippe Charbonnier leads us to talk about the media which publishes documentary-photographs. Charbonnier was one of the few photographers to be permanently attached to a magazine, Réalités (1946–1978), a right-wing paper with a relatively high price tag for the time, but which attached particular importance to the choice of its iconography and the editing of its cover. Previously, and at the other end of the political field, Vu (1928–1940) and Regards (1928–) published the documentary photos of Willy Ronis, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa (1913–1954), Gerda Taro (1910–1937), Chim (1911–1956), and Germaine Krull (1897–1935).7 This popular photo-based press shows that the boundaries between documentary photography and photojournalism are blurred and may not deserve the voluminous commentary they have generated.8 Especially when some of these photographers, working together, created the cooperative photographic agencies such as Magnum! Regards drew its inspiration from Arbeiter illustrierte Zeitung, and this European press, in turn, played a significant role in the reorientation in 1936 of Life (1883–1972) or the creation of Look (1937–1971), magazines of documentary photography and photojournalism. This period also saw the birth of the first documentary films. If photographic cameras were difficult to handle before the advent of the 6x6 and 24x36, this was, even more, the case concerning cinematographic filming equipment until the 1960s.

 See the exhibition catalog of the Centre Pompidou Photographie Arme de classe (Amao et al. 2018) and the article by Gaëlle Morel (2001). 8  The same could be said about the boundaries between art photography and documentary photography, which have conquered museums, exhibitions, and auctions, where prints by Andreas Gursky have reached record highs of between $2 and $3 million. 7

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2.2 Documentary Cinema The sociological documentary is inspired by documentaries of society, which are frequently and colloquially referred to as social documentaries. The history of the latter has been the subject of a large number of scholarly publications, and we will limit ourselves to listing the most important ones. On the other hand, we will discuss, in broad outline, what these documentaries have in common with many themes that interest film sociology. Documentary cinema flourished in North America and Europe starting at the end of the nineteenth century, reaching maturity between the two world wars, and today it has conquered every continent. History records the Lumière brothers not only as being the inventors of cinema (1895) but also as the precursors of documentary filmmaking with, in particular, their first film La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon [“Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon”]. Workers leaving a factory is a social subject, but making ­workers visible is also a way of obscuring workers’ work itself—or workers’ revolts if we think of the Canuts, silk workers in Lyon who engaged in a series of revolts starting in 1831. Could this be due to technical issues, the lack of light, or are there other reasons for showing only the outside of the factory? Harun Farocki’s film (1944– 2014), Arbeiter Verlassen Die Fabrike [“Workers leaving the factory”] (1995), edited from excerpts of documentaries and films showing factory exteriors—principally of workers leaving the factory—is one of the possible answers that very often close off the workshops themselves to the free camera. Thus, the Lumière brothers’ first film already questioned the staging of reality by not showing the inside of the factory and by offering the public the vision of a dressed-up working-class contrasting sharply with the photographs of the same social class at the time. For some authors, frequently Americans, cinema was invented by Thomas A. Edison (1847– 1931) with his first film Dickson Greetings (1891) and his kinetograph. As it is a film of only ten seconds, historians agree that the brothers from Lyon invented the projection of moving images.

2.2.1 The Invention of the Documentary (1920–1930)9 Robert J. Flaherty (1884–1951) is considered one of the founders of the documentary, along with Dziga Vertov. He traveled the Canadian desert for a long time with his father, a mining prospector for several American companies. Hired in turn to

 This periodization of the history of documentary film in three stages is obviously artificial, as individual filmmakers cut across different periods. However, it has the advantage of illustrating the transformations of the genre, including in terms of technique, while taking into account history itself, since documentary filmmakers have participated in  it themselves. For a history of the documentary and a reflection on it, see Luc de Heusch (1962). 9

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map the expanses of Canada in preparation for the construction of an East-West railway line, his employer offered him the opportunity of filming the people, landscapes, and wild animals. Following the unfortunate destruction of his first film in a fire—the nitrate medium was highly flammable—he returned to the North to film the daily life of an Eskimo family. Révillon Frères, a French furrier which owned several dozen fur collecting camps around the world, subsidized him in his new expedition (1920) in which his wife, Frances, took part. He brought along the development and projection equipment to check the quality of his rushes every evening and share them with his subjects. Flaherty invited Allakariallak (who became Nanook in the film because it was easier for Americans to remember) to film a seal hunt “as in the old days” before the arrival of the explorers. Flaherty has his Inuit friends play their roles in a world that is already no longer theirs. For example, he eliminates from his setting any element of modernity such as guns. In his notes, he writes, “I am not going to make films about what the white man has made of primitive peoples … What I want to show is the former majesty and character of these people, while it is still possible— before the white man has destroyed not only their character, but the people as well. The urge that I had to make Nanook came from the way I felt about these people, my admiration for them: I wanted to tell others about them” (quoted by Barnouw 1974, p. 45). Here Flaherty is working as an anthropologist, without their academic agenda, but, like them, wishing to preserve the memory of people whose culture is about to disappear. The staging of the daily life of this family—Nanook was not married to the woman who appears to be his wife—was made easier for him because he knew the Eskimos well and lived among them for a long time. Nanook, the principal character, understood very well what it meant to be in the film. Flaherty had half an igloo built and organized family life around it to be able to film in daylight. The real igloo was too dark to shoot. Flaherty later was criticized for this, although this was not a fiction and he had the characters play their actual lives.10 He intuitively sensed the underlying codes (see Barnouw 1974, p. 39). Hence, the notion of ethnofiction created around this film. The Hollywood majors rejected Nanook of the North and refused to distribute it. This did not prevent the documentary from becoming an international success until Paramount proposed to Flaherty to direct other Nanook-style films elsewhere in the world. Moana, A Romance of the Golden Age (1926), directed in the Samoan

 On Flaherty and Nanook of the North [Nanouk l’Esquimau], see the article by Paul Rotha, “Nanook and the North” in the special issue of Studies in Visual Communication, n° 2, 1980. 10

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Islands, was a failure. It lacked both a character like Nanook and the dramaturgy that worked in his first significant documentary. Other explorers tried their hand at documentary filmmaking, such as the Citroën expeditions, without really taking into account the epics of the North-South crossing of Africa (1924–1925) or the Croisière jaune, literally the “yellow expedition,” an expedition by automobile from Beyrouth to Beijing (1931–1932). On the other hand, The Man of Aran (1934), financed by a British producer and filmed in Ireland—Flaherty was of Irish origin—was a second success. Here the action is a bitter struggle between the man and the elements he has to face, demonstrating the urgency and the risk. It is the fraction of a second that reveals the professionalism of the fisherman, the fraction of a second contrasted to women’s long wait for the men’s return. Flaherty thus plays with these temporalities peculiar to the world of fishermen. Many academic critics—often ethnologists—have perceived a romantic and magnified vision of life on the islands, while denouncing the reconstruction of the sinking of the boat on the rocks, which nevertheless looked very real. The Man of Aran also took part in founding documentary filming,11 including in its meticulous preparation the writing of a script that served as a filming program. Flaherty released his last documentary, Louisiana Story, in 1948, with the young Richard Leacock (1921–2011) on camera. The result was a far cry from the commission placed by Standard Oil, which wanted a hymn to the progress which the company had brought to the whole world, particularly to the people living on their own in the bayou. Once again, this was a struggle of men against the elements. The shot of a child trying to control a powerful alligator in the marshes, which he knew very well, alternate with those where oil company workers try to control the explosion of an oil well in the heart of a bayou. This film is also about the mutual discovery and misunderstanding between an industrial culture that will come to dominate the planet and a hunting and gathering society destined to disappear, undermined from within by manufactured objects.

 Occasionally, this work, like Flaherty’s subsequent film, has been left out of the documentary genre. However, it can be defended that this is a documentary through the choice of the object of the film. This tries to bring back to life a society and its vanishing fishing or agricultural practices by actors (this is how he describes them in an interview reproduced in the DVD box set published by Editions Montparnasse) who embody the characters, because they belong to the island community. Even if they play a role, it is their lives and subjectivity that they replay and reproduce. This distinction between documentary and fiction, moreover, is not very useful when it establishes rigid boundaries or endless gender oppositions. 11

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During the first half of the twentieth century, cinema played an essential role on the neighboring continent in the nascent Soviet Union. Cinema was both a new and, therefore, revolutionary mode of expression and a propaganda vehicle for the revolution. Denis Kaufman (1896–1954), who was close to French and Italian Futurism, chose a pseudonym illustrating his desire for movement: Dziga Vertov, which means “turn and return.” His first political task was to edit newsreels arriving from the different fronts of the war between the Red and the White Armies, the latter supported by German, American, French, English, and Japanese forces (1917–1921). The films he edited were then broadcast throughout the region and on the front lines thanks to the agit trains. At the end of the fighting, he edited all these news items to make the History of the Civil War (1921). Later, he invented Kino-Pravda [cinema-truth] partly against the Leninist views of the NEP (New Economic Policy) in 1921 that he thought might weaken revolutionary radicalism. His films show the daily life of the Soviets and encourage social transformation. To go beyond literature and theater, he recommends in his manifesto to use the camera “as a cinema-eye, more perfect than the human eye for exploring the chaos of visual phenomena filling the universe.” A little later, he declared, “My mission is the invention of a new perception of the world. Thus, I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you … But, it is not enough to show beats of truth on the screen, separate frames of truth. These frames must be thematically organized so that the whole is also the truth” (quoted by Barnouw 1974, p.  58). He attached great importance to editing, in full emulation of Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) and his great films such as Strike (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925), and General Line (1929). Dziga Vertov directed many documentaries, including A Sixth Part of the World (1926), which, with its subtitles, prefigured talking pictures. The film attracted a broad audience in the USSR and abroad as the filmmaker’s disgrace began. For Stalin, a director who refused to write a screenplay beforehand was uncontrollable. However, it was the film The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) that would go down in history. Shot with his brother Mikhail Kaufman on camera, the film is a hymn to movement. It is a cinema of movement (the word cinema is already movement!), first with transportation and urban travel: tramways, cars, firefighters, ambulances, taxis, etc. Dziga Vertov puts forward technology (telecommunication, transportation), work (with its repetitiveness and monotony), speed (through erratic editing), and of course the eye, which he very often associates with the lens (the collage of an eye on a lens) and the camera. Hence, we find the omnipresence of a man with a camera (one of the two Kaufman brothers) in continually changing surroundings. This documentary asserts the superiority of cinema over the theater. While the first

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sequence shows an empty theater, the cinema (a music hall?) in the last shot is packed. Dziga Vertov is always inventing. He invented multi-windowing for the screen. He is careful with the esthetics of images (their composition) without sinking into estheticism. He highlights the body through sports, and even through hairstyles. There are no words or synchronized sound, but he shows the sound, for example, by placing an image of an accordion on the membrane of a loudspeaker. We continuously see this efficiency of editing, both fast and relevant, by bringing together, or even superimposing, images or shots as so many highly significant collages and juxtapositions. One can compare these collages to the complexity of some shots of Serguei M. Eisenstein’s cinema in General Line. Georges Sadoul asserts that cinema “is not the artificial fabrication of the alchemists, [it] has borrowed almost all its resources from the various forms of universal culture” (quoted by Albera 2013, 205–206). The photo below from General Line bears witness to this.

Serguei M. Eisenstein, Photogram from General Line

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Returning to The Man with a Movie Camera, the two Kaufman brothers film in the most unexpected situations in the city: hanging on the side of a wagon, on a platform suspended from a crane, or in an open car: always filming, always having their camera with them. This is the apparent meaning of this film, which prefigures the idea of the camera-pen (see, infra, chap. 5) and, of course, the direct cinema of the decades to come.

2.2.2 The Maturity of the Documentary (1930–1960) Another pioneer of documentary filmmaking was John Grierson (1898–1972), a British citizen. While collaborating with Flaherty, he never ceased to accuse him of favoring the distant and the primitive. Because of his family history and the influence of his mother, a suffragette, Grierson saw the urgency that lay in his own society. He advocated what today would be called “citizen cinema.” In Drifters (1929), he emphasized steel and steam or the relationship between these new machines and herring fishermen. To make Industrial Britain (1933), he called on Flaherty for photography and Alberto Cavalcanti, a great soundtrack experimenter. Grierson criticized his fellow directors for their esthetic views, to the detriment of a more political vision of popular education that made viewers aware of a better and richer life. For the Song of Ceylon project (1935), funded by the Ceylon Tea Propaganda Bureau, Grierson called on another team led by Basil Wright (1907–1987). A large part of the film departs somewhat from Grierson’s views of an enchanted vision of Ceylonese life, even if tea, the reason for the exploitation, is at the heart of the film. After the disappearance of the Empire Marketing Board, which had subsidized him, Grierson joined the GPO [General Post Office] and developed the General Post Office Film Unit. A skilled organizer and political activist, he filmed less and less, but he financed and supervised many documentaries, including the famous Night Mail (1936), directed by Basil Wright and Harry Watt with sound by Alberto Cavalcanti. Through rigorous editing and an extreme economy of esthetic means, the authors expressed the professionalism of the train and station postal workers throughout the night journey.12 Grierson’s position at the GPO Film Unit enabled him to finance over ten documentaries.

 For a detailed film analysis, see, Pierre Maillot, “Filmer le travail dans un train postal. À propos de Night Mail,” La Nouvelle Revue du Travail, 2, 2013. http://journals.openedition. org/nrt/792. 12

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Thus, with John Grierson, a new type of documentary was born. While it is not committed to a denunciation of social inequalities, the documentary reveals societal facts, such as those that underpin the relationship between men and reality through work. This approach seems necessary to him if individuals are to have the opportunity to understand a world undergoing rapid industrialization. He encourages a style of writing that seems very descriptive, allowing the viewer to grasp the intensity of the work, gestures, and difficulties (night postal train, trawlers, and fishing in the open sea), without forgetting a particular esthetic that should not, however, mask the heart of the filmic discourse. During the same period in the United States, with the arrival in office of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, several government administrations—including the FSA presented above—encouraged the production of photographs and documentaries on the situation in the country. Organizations such as the Film and Photo League, founded in 1930 in New York City, and its 1934 dissenting organization, Frontier Film, brought together photographers and filmmakers interested in showing the daily lives and struggles of American workers. The list is too long to name them all, but it is worth noting that several FSA photographers also participated in this movement. Pare Lorentz (1905–1992), little known in France, made The Plow That Broke The Plains in 1936, a poignant film about the drying up of the Great Plains of the Middle West that stretch from Texas to Canada. After driving out the Indians, the new conquerors fattened hundreds of thousands of cattle, and then plowed the land with horse-drawn plows, before tractors and combines arrived, in tight rows as in an epic. The result has been the desertification of the region, with dust tornadoes, increasingly scarce rains, and the drying up of rivers. Pare Lorentz shows the cracked earth, the abandonment of farms and farming equipment lying next to them, eyes filled with despair. This led to the exodus westwards in cars and trailers that passed by the sandy farms, arriving at government-organized camps as at a dead end: “No place to go, nothing to do, nothing to eat.” The importance of the film lies in the quality of its editing of sequences and shots (acquired with difficulty in different institutions) to music by Virgil Thomson, written during the editing itself. The rhythm is quite fast, alternating, for example, tractors and tanks in a European war to signify the end of the Great Plains: wheat is indeed the sinews of war. Each shot or sequence shows close-up indications of the drought and the inevitability of the land’s deterioration with the impoverishment of farming families. By writing on the presentation panel that the film “is a picture of what man has done with his land,” Pare Lorentz has made one of the first films in the ecological fight to save the planet. After having contributed to the creation of the US

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Film Service, Pare Lorentz directed The River, about the development of the Mississippi River with New Deal funds, and then The March of Time, which received many awards. Henri Storck (1907–1999), often presented as the father of Belgian documentary filmmaking, made more than 60 short films, including several about Ostend, his hometown, which he presents through very high-quality images and editing that remain examples for any documentary filmmaker (see in particular Ostende, reine des plages [Ostend, Queen of Beaches], 1929–1930). In 1933, he made Misère au Borinage [with English subtitle: Borinage, a region in southern Belgium] with Joris Ivens, which shows the destitution of coal miners on the French border. Intertitles—the sound version is dated 1963—clearly indicate the economic and social causes of the workers’ situation. The miners’ demonstration, scripted by the directors, was suppressed by the gendarmerie, which only belatedly understood that it was a fiction. A sequence that the authors kept in their final version. In France, Jean Vigo (1905–1934) produced a silent film À propos de Nice (1929), filmed with Boris Kaufman, brother of Dziga Vertov. This is an acerbic and poetic documentary on social inequalities and the holidaying in Nice of the wealthy European classes. Two fiction films imbued with a social vision of the documentary, L’Atalante (1934) and Zéro de conduit (1939), were censored and only allowed for public screening, in their original version, after the war. During the Popular Front, several filmmakers responded to the call of the CGT [General Confederation of Labor, the principal trade union in France] at the beginning of 1938 to make documentaries emphatically showing manual labor and workers’ struggles while at the same time highlighting trade union organization. Jean Epstein (1897–1953) made Les bâtisseurs [the builders] at the request of the Fédération du bâtiment [CGT Federation of Construction Workers], a real “hymn to labor” (Perron 2002). Jean Lemare (1912–1988) shot Les Métallos [the ­metalworkers], and Boris Peskine (1911–1991) directed Sur les routes de l’acier [on the roads of steel]. These three documentaries promote CGT unionism while being part of a modernity movement (see, for example, the interviews of Le Corbusier and Perret in Les bâtisseurs). As a film pre-dating these CGT commissioned productions, we can cite here, Grèves d’occupation [sit-down strike] (1936), directed by film workers joining the metal workers in their union struggles. This was the most widely broadcast short film (13’) at the time, although many other short documentaries were shot. The list is quite long.13

 We could also cite Jean Renoir’s film La vie est à nous [Life is Ours] (1936) produced by the PCF, which is a fiction based in part on filmed documents, in which personalities as different as Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Maurice Lime, and Jacques Becker took part. 13

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In 1946, Georges Rouquier (1909–1989), who had already filmed Vendanges [grape harvest] en 1929, directed Farrebique [a village in southern France], a documentary showing daily life during four seasons on a family farm in Rouergue. Like Flaherty forty years earlier, he stayed there with his team for some time to immerse himself in the culture and practices of farming. By highlighting traditions, particularly in terms of inheritance (the eldest receives all the inheritance and does not share the land), the film may have disappointed and received a rather cold reception among urban modernists. This later led Rouquier to shoot Biquefarre (1984), a fiction film that shows another reality of agriculture, that of the transformations of lifestyles, but also the importance of economic issues. In other countries, the 1930s inevitably bring us back to a documentary filmmaker who remains a key figure, Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003). Chosen by Hitler for the expressive nature of her images to make the official films of the Third Reich, her first significant film was Triumph des Willens [Triumph of the Will] (1935), about the Nazi party congress and demonstration in 1934 in Nuremberg, which showed the world Hitler’s strength and the new Germany’s will to power (Bach 2007). According to the director, while Hitler recognized the importance of cinema to accompany his politics, she nevertheless maintained strained relations with him to the point of demanding that neither he nor Goebbels intervenes in the making and editing of her films. After the success of the Triumph of the Will, she was hired to cover the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, using exorbitant means, such as pits in front of the jumping areas, towers to overlook the swimming pools, traveling rails scattered throughout the stadiums, a zeppelin for the opening of the games, etc. In Olympia (original version) or The Gods of the Stadium (1938), Riefenstahl honors muscular bodies by filming them in such a way that they remind us of Greek athletes and sculptures extolling nature in general and the power of man, two components of Nazi ideology and Aryanism. Hitler left the stadium before the black medalists reached the podium.14 Gods of the Stadium remains a classic for those who want to make bodies speak in cinema, something Eisenstein had already grasped well, as shown by the shots about workers’ bodies from one of the ­sequences of Strike (1925). With determined trumpets, enthusiastic comments, and the crowd’s clamor, the music magnifies the exploitation of these bodies.

 The historical importance of this film can be seen in the subsequent making of several documentaries about it. In France, Serge Viallet directed 1936. Les Jeux de Berlin (2013), showing the technical innovations used by Leni Riefenstahl. In Les Jeux d’Hitler (2016), Jérôme Prieur analyzes the role of this film in Hitler’s propaganda strategy. 14

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In Great Britain, Humphrey Jennings (1907–1950), whom John Grierson considered a dilettante (Barnouw 1974), made several documentaries on how the British lived through the war: Listen to Britain (1942), and Fires Were Started (1943). He did not denounce the war or the aggressors, but experienced the daily life of the population with empathy and showed the war’s reality. Hence the enthusiastic reception of his films by the English—who recognize themselves in them— and their international distribution. This marks a profound difference with other documentary filmmakers opposed to military aggression, whether in Spain, with Robert Capa (1913–1954), Gerda Taro (1910–1937), and Roman Karmen (1906– 1978), etc., with Karmen in China and Vietnam, or in Japan with the movement of the directors of Prokino (Japanese League of Proletarian Cinema) who opposed the invasion of China by the Japanese military. Beyond content and orientation, the distribution method also distinguishes this genre.

2.3 The Documentary and the Invention of Direct Cinema (1960 to the Present) In the post-war period, international cinema was marked by Italian neo-realism, which, although non-documentary, dealt intensely with social issues in the same way as documentary film, which inevitably made its influence felt. Films such as Ladri di biciclette [Bicycle Thieves] (1948) by Vittorio De Sica; La Terra Trema [The Earth Trembles] (1948), and Bellissima [Beautiful] (1951) by Luchino Visconti; Roma, città aperta [Rome, Open City] (1945), and Stromboli (1950), by Roberto Rossellini, etc., are part of the training of any documentary filmmaker, especially a sociologist. cc

Some Works on the History of Documentary

This short chronological list aims at providing some pointers for those entering filmic sociology. • Rotha Paul, Sinclair Road & Richard Griffith, Documentary Film, London, Faber & Faber, 1968 [1935]. • Barnouw Erik, Documentary. A history of the non-fiction film, New York, Oxford University Press, 1974. • Gauthier Guy, Le Documentaire, un autre cinéma, Nathan, 1995. • Prédal, René (dir.). Le cinéma « direct ». Paris, CinémAction-Corlet, 1995.

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• Marsolais, Gilles. L’aventure du cinéma direct revisitée. Laval (Canada), Les 400 coups, 1997. • Odin, Roger (dir.). L’âge d’or du documentaire. Europe: années cinquante. 2 tomes, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1998. • Piault, Marc-Henri. Anthropologie et cinéma : Passage à l’image, passage par l’image. Paris, Nathan, 2000. • BiFi (Bibliothèque du Film). Filmer le réel. Ressources documentaires. Paris, Éditions BiFi, 2001. • Breschand, Jean. Le documentaire, l’autre face du cinéma. Paris, Les Cahiers du cinéma/CNDP, 2002. • Gauthier, Guy (dir). Le cinéma militant reprend le travail. Paris, CinémAction-­ Corlet, 2004. • Gauthier, Guy. Un siècle de documentaires français: des tourneurs de manivelle aux voltigeurs du multimédia. Paris, Armand Colin, 2004. • Graff, Séverine. Le cinéma-vérité. Films et controverses. Rennes, PUR, 2014. • Carrier, Jean-Pierre. Dictionnaire du cinéma documentaire. Paris, Vendémiaire, 2016. Influenced by film crews during the Second World War, documentary filmmakers abandoned the cumbersome 35mm cameras in the 1950s in favor of the lighter and more maneuverable 16mm version. It was also an opportunity to make less systematic use of tripods. At the end of the same decade, engineers such as André Coutant in France, who developed the reflex camera, also found solutions to improve the regulation of filming. Above all, they ensured wireless synchronous sound between the camera and the recorder, developed by Robert Drew in the United States. In Montreal, engineers at the Office national du Film (ONF) [National Film Board (NFB)] worked with the same objectives (Bouchard 2012) as defined by John Grierson, who had lived in Canada, in 1939. In France, Jean-Pierre Beauviala (hired by Éclair at the same time as Coutant) and Stefan Kudelski (creator of the Nagra portable tape recorder) joined forces to achieve the same goal: to invent an autonomous camera that allowed the camera operator great freedom of movement. Other improvements became necessary, such as the silent camera (so as not to disturb live sound recording). The visible result was the digital camcorder of the end of the second millennium combining all the qualities that had been pursued for a century: synchronous sound, autonomy, maneuverability of the camera-sound recorder, and high definition of the color image. These camera characteristics paved the way for direct cinema at the end of the 1950s, that documentary form of cinema that questions the means of bringing the real to the screen. The founding films of direct cinema are generally considered to

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be Primary (1960) by Richard Leacock and Robert Drew on the Democratic primary in Wisconsin for the American presidential elections and the films of Jean Rouch, including the film he directed with Edgar Morin, Chronique d’ un été [Chronicle of a Summer] (1961). Michel Brault’s documentary Les Raquetteurs [The Snowshoers] (1958) and the film he directed with Pierre Perrault, Pour la suite du monde [For Those Who Will Follow; Of Whales, the Moon, and Men, also known as The Moontrap] (1962) on porpoise fishing in the St. Lawrence, are part of the same movement. Direct cinema influenced fiction cinema, particularly in France, with the emergence of the New Wave. Many directors of this current had long since established close contacts with Jean Rouch’s ethnological cinema. In Primary, the filmmakers never asked the two presidential candidates to change their behavior and followed them step-by-step, often in very close shots, in their strategy meetings, in debates with voters, in meetings, in fundraising, etc. The filmmakers also followed the two candidates in their quest for the presidential nomination. To this day, “no other film has captured the euphoria, sweat, and political maneuvering of a campaign” (Barnouw 1974, 238). In Chronique d’un été, the directors ask Parisians if they are happy, which makes it possible to approach the themes of work, love, leisure, culture, racism, and other themes with great ease, partly due to the mobility of the camera. This rather complex film also shows the difference in approach between sociology and ethnology: “Rouch questions, and even provokes, while Morin interprets and suggests. Morin waits for people to explain themselves, to reveal themselves and possibly to look at each other, while Rouch expects something from their encounters” (Piault 1992). These two approaches have long distinguished ethnology and sociology along the lines of two different methods, one based on sensibility and the other on reason.15 By adopting a cinéma-vérité [cinema-truth]16 approach, these directors try to capture the real, to reveal the truth, both intimate and social (Graff 2014). The illusion of such a project gradually faded away in the mid-1960s, and today we speak instead of direct cinema to characterize the ambitions of the documentary filmmakers while referring to the technical rupture created by the autonomous, light, and synchronous camera.17 With the creation of the “Festival du réel” [“Real Film Festival”] at the Centre Pompidou at the end of the 1970s, documentaries tended to adopt the name

 In another work, Marc-Henri Piault (2000) criticizes the general usage that most ethnologists have made of cinema as if they had remained “the guardiens of civilizations and cultural forms threatened by the expansion of industrial worlds” (p. 132) without having understood all that cinema could bring to the discipline. In this respect, this work is an important contribution to a critical history of visual anthropology. 15

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cinéma du réel, [cinema of the real] or even cinéma du vécu [real-life cinema] (Prédal 1995; BiFi 2001). Documentary cinema developed from the 1970s onwards, benefiting from technical innovations that lightened the weight of filming equipment. Later, the invention of the camcorder and then digitization once again changed the conditions for shooting/sound and editing. The disappearance of film (expensive to purchase and develop), the miniaturization of equipment, and the overall reduction of costs broadened the field of the documentary to new practitioners. The number of documentary films continues to grow with or without assistance from the Centre National du Cinéma, Procirep (Société des producteurs de cinéma et de télévision), or other organizations in France. They were shown at festivals, in some theaters, and by some television channels. Beyond their growth in number, documentary productions are diversifying their style and broadening their field of investigation. As this book does not aim to provide a complete presentation of the production of contemporary documentary cinema, we will limit ourselves, before returning to the transition to filmic sociology, to classifying a few dozen films (post-1960s) organized into several fields covered by documentary.18 cc

Some Landmark Documentaries After 195519

(sorted by major fields) Political Night and Fog (1956), Alain Resnais Primary (1960), Richard Lecock and Robert Drew (US) Le Chagrin et la pitié (1971), Marcel Ophüls Muhammad Ali The Greatest (1974), William Klein Une partie de campagne (1974–2002), Raymond Depardon

 The term cinéma-vérité used by Edgar Morin in the columns of France Observateur in 1960 to report on an ethnographic film festival held in Florence is obviously a tribute to Dziga Vertov’s ciné-vérité. 17  For a detailed and reasoned critique of the “mythe de la technique légère” [myth of lightweight technology], see Graff (2014). 18  Of particular note is the Maison du Doc [The House of Documentaries] de Lussas, which has 15,000 documentaries listed in its catalog: http://www.lussasdoc.org/liste-tous_les_ films-5,0.html. The short list below excludes documentaries on artists and their works, documentaries on animals or nature, historical documentaries or documentaries on famous people (the “portraits”), etc. The list is not exhaustive. 16

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Comment Yukong déplaça les montagnes (1976) Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan Shoah (1985), Claude Lanzmann 2001, la prise de l’Hôtel de Ville (2001), Serge Moati Les hommes de la Maison blanche (2008), William Karel Quai d’Orsay. Les coulisses de la diplomatie (2015), Serge Moati National Liberation Struggles Viet-Nam (1955), Roman Karmen Cuba Si! (1961), Chris Marker Blazing island (1961), Roman Karmen Algérie, année zéro (1962), Marceline Loridan and Jean-Pierre Sergent Peuple en marche (1962), René Vautier, Ahmed Rachedi, and Nacer Guenifi Loin du Viet-Nam (1967), Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, William Klein, Joris Ivens, and Claude Lelouch 17th Parallel: Viet Nam in War (1968), Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan Calcutta (1969) et L’Inde fantôme (1969), Louis Malle Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès (1972), René Vautier* Work, Business, Farming Le chant du styrène (1958), Alain Resnais Pour la suite du monde (1963), Pierre Perrault (Canada) Les enfants de Néant (1968), Michel Brault (Canada) Salesman (1969), Albert and David Mayles (US) Humain, trop humain (1974), Louis Malle La Jungle plate (1978) Johan Van der Keuken (Hollande) La voix de son maître (1978), Gérard Mordillat and Nicolas ­Philibert The Store (1983), Frederick Wiseman (US) Portraits [d’artisans et de travailleur/euses] (1987–1991), Alain Cavalier Roger and Me (1989), Michael Moore (US) La vraie vie dans les bureaux (1993), Jean-Louis Comolli Coûte que coûte, (1994), Claire Simon Charbons ardents (1998), Jean-Michel Carré Femmes de l’ombre (1998), Stéphan Moszkowicz Ressources humaines (1999), Laurent Cantet* Profils paysans (L’Approche, 2001; Le Quotidien, 2005; La Vie moderne, 2008), Raymond Depardon

 Films with asterisks have been classified commercially as fiction, although they have significant aspects of the documentary. 19

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Ikéa en kit (2000), Gérard Poitou-Weber The Navigators (2001), Ken Loach (GB) La sociologie est un sport de combat (2001), Pierre Carles Attention danger travail (2003), Pierre Carles Fabrika (2004), Serguei Loznitsa (Russie)20 Cheminots (2010), Luc Joulé and Sébastien Jousse Crazy Horse (2011), Frederick Wiseman (US) Entrée du personnel (2011), Manuela Frésil Les chèvres de ma mère (2013), Sophie Audier C’est quoi ce travail? (2015), Luc Joulé and Sébastien Jousse I, Daniel Blake (2016), Ken Loach* (GB) Labor and Feminist Struggles21 Borinage (1933), Henri Storck (Belgium) À bientôt j’espère [Be Seeing You] (1967), Chris Marker and the groupe Medvedkine22 Classe de Lutte (1968), groupe Medvedkine Oser lutter oser vaincre, Flins 68 (1968), Jean-Pierre Thorn Reprise du travail aux usines Wonder (1968), Jacques Willemont Black Panthers (1968), Agnès Varda Sois belle et tais-toi (1970), Delphine Seyrig Week-end à Sochaux (1972), Bruno Muel and the groupe Medvedkine Avec le sang des autres (1975), Bruno Muel Réponses de femmes (1975), Agnès Varda Quand les femmes ont pris la colère (1977), René Vautier and Soizig Chappedelaine Le Soleil des Hyènes (1977), Rhida Behi (Tunisie)* L’une chante, l’autre pas (1977), Agnès Varda* Marée noire, colère rouge (1978), René Vautier Le Dos au mur (1980), Jean-Pierre Thorn Je t’ai dans la peau (1989), Jean-Pierre Thorn* Reprise. Un voyage au cœur de la classe ouvrière (1996), Hervé Le Roux Bowling for Columbine (2002), Michael Moore (US)

 For a detailed analysis, see https://journals.openedition.org/nrt/1719.  In this category, many films can be described as activist, but they are also documentaries. See below on the different possible characterizations of documentaries or see Gauthier (2004b). 20 21

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On a grèvé (2014), Denis Gheerbrant City,23 Urban, and Daily Life Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967), Jean-Luc Godard* Week-end (1967), Jean-Luc Godard* À nos amours (1983), Maurice Pialat* Genèse d’un repas (1978), Luc Moulet Grands soirs et petits matin (1978), William Klein Mural Murals (1980), Agnès Varda Faits divers (1983), Raymond Depardon Route One/USA (1989), Robert Kramer (US) Marseille de père en fils [Coup de Mistral, Ombres sur la ville] (1989), Jean-Louis Comolli Berlin 10/90 (1990), Robert Kramer Chronique d’une banlieue ordinaire (1992), Dominique Cabrera D’Est (1993), Chantal Akerman Amsterdam, Global Village (1995), Johan Van der Keuken (Hollande) The Gleaners and I (2000), Agnès Varda The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (2002), Agnès Varda De l’autre côté (2003), Chantal Akerman La République Marseille (2009), Denis Gheerbrant Visages, villages (2017), Agnès Varda Institutions Titicut Follies (1967), Frederick Wiseman (US, on a mental institution) Hospital (1970), Frederick Wiseman Alertez les bébés ! (1978), Jean-Michel Carré San Clemente (1980), Raymond Depardon (on a mental institution) Urgences (1987), Raymond Depardon Femmes de Fleury (1990), Jean-Michel Carré La ville Louvre (1990), Nicolas Philibert24

 These are two groups made up of activists from the film industry (including Chris Marker, Joris Ivens, Pierre Lhomme, Bruno Muel, Jean-Luc Godard, René Vautier, Colette Magny, etc.) and activists from the Besançon and Sochaux region (1967–1974). Alexandre Medvedkine (1900–1989) is the Soviet filmmaker who invented the ciné-train, which traveled around the Soviet Union between 1932 and 1935 to film workers, develop the films, and show them immediately to those concerned. 23  See in particular the work by Thierry Jousse and Thierry Paquot (dir.), La ville dans le cinéma, Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma Éditions, 2005. 22

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Récréations (1991), Claire Simon La fête prisonnière (1991), Marion Ruspoli Naissance d’un hôpital (1992), Jean-Louis Comolli Délits flagrants (1994), Raymond Depardon High School (1994), Frederick Wiseman (US) Grands comme le monde (1998), Denis Gheerbrant (on schools) Pas vu pas pris (1998), Pierre Carles (a criticism of the media) Être et avoir (2002), Nicolas Philibert (on schools) At Berkeley (2013), Frederick Wiseman (US) As the documentary established itself as a significant genre, some critical directors have distanced themselves from it to show viewers that they too must keep a minimum of distance when watching documentaries. We can cite William Karel’s documenteur [“mockumentary” in English, that is a parody of a documentary],25 Operation Moon (2002), which casts doubt on the reality of the American astronauts’ moon landing, suggesting that Nixon lied to the American nation. This brings us back to the importance of the question of distancing in filmic sociology (see, infra, chap. 5), which we will discuss from the point of view adopted by the sociologist-filmmaker and which the viewer must consider as a possible version of facts and social situations rather than an absolute truth.

3 Genesis of Filmic Sociology Film sociology has its roots in the history of the discipline, with its own methods, in the history of still or moving images of ethnology or anthropology, and in the history of cinema, particularly documentary. Pierre Naville (1903–1993), close to the Surrealists and himself a painter, was interested in the cinematographic image and the technical progress in the weight reduction of the equipment that led to direct cinema. He closely followed the films of the New Wave—Jean-Luc Godard was his nephew—and from the 1960s ­onwards, he wanted to bring sociology and cinema closer together. He created an audiovisual laboratory at the CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research) in 1968, co-directed by Edgar Morin, who had previously directed Chronique d’un

 We should mention as precursor documentaries, Les Statues meurent aussi (1953) by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker and Hôtel des Invalides (1951) by Georges Franju. 24

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été with Jean Rouch. This, of course, raised the question of financing both the material and personal investment, the center’s functioning, and the purchase and development of film. Pierre Naville was aware of the resistance among his colleagues, considering that “significant progress would then be possible in a direction in which sociologists in France remain very cautious.”26 He assigned several objectives to this laboratory, which he recorded in a personal document27 that can be summarized as follows: • conservation of photographic, cinematographic, and sound archives; • teaching the techniques of visual and audio recording, the methodology and the deontology specific to the use of cinema in the social sciences; practical initiation course in cinematographic techniques given to the researchers of the laboratory by Jean Rouch and Gilbert Rouget (1916–2017): two hours per week plus the shooting of test films at the end of the training course; • collaboration and assistance of filmmakers (invitation to Jean-Luc Godard, for example) and researchers in the audiovisual field; • the making of research films, films on significant collective phenomena, and cinematographic investigations. In the same note, Pierre Naville specifies that such an approach requires a specific investment: recruitment of technical staff (operator, sound engineer, editor) and purchase of equipment valued at 342,900 francs, not forgetting the question of premises dedicated to this activity. In an article published in 1966  in La Revue française de Sociologie, Naville develops the theoretical questions raised by the use of cinema in sociology, not only as a means of capturing reality but also as a means of knowledge (he speaks of instrumentation), likely to renew the discipline (see, infra, chap. 6). As a sociologist of work, he always attached great importance to professional gestures and body movements. The image, especially animated images, seemed to him the most precise means of observing and memorizing human behavior to study them better. The question is how to film and then integrate the images and sounds into the argumentation and sociological analysis and finally into the final presentation of

25  Not to be confused with Agnès Varda’s Documenteur (1981), a fiction (dodo cucu maman vas-tu-te-taire) through which the author shows the other side of Los Angeles through the life of a woman separated from her husband and living in precarious conditions.

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research. Can a film replace a research report? Is it just a simple appendix to be attached at the end of the process? Can the results of sociological research (or social science research in general) be presented through images and in particular in the form of a film? This raises the question of the script because if the film f­ unctions as does research, it is difficult to conceive of a definitive scenario. Confronted with this difficulty in writing his film project on automation, Pierre Naville wrote to T.  Grjebine, a member of the Association pour le Film Social et Economique [Association for a Social and Economic Cinema] and co-screenwriter. “It would be better to look for a formula ‘with drawers,’ with more or less unexpected developments, depending on the course of the investigation.”28 These are all questions that continue to arise for the sociologist-filmmaker, since writing a screenplay in a sociological documentary cannot have the same function as in a fiction film. The “navillian” project of sociological films has not succeeded, despite several attempts, due to lack of means, of cinematographic skills among sociologists and, more generally, because of the rejection of cinema as a tool of knowledge. Several audiovisual units have started working at the CNRS, but the visual image too often remains confined to the status of an adjunct to the written word. During the 1980s and 1990s, several initiatives brought cinema, filmmakers, and sociology closer together in France, as Yvonne Mignot-Lefebvre (1992) accurately describes. Anne Guillou and Monique Haicault created the network “Pratiques audiovisuelles en Sociologie” [Audiovisual Practices in Sociology], which organized an annual meeting with proceedings from 1987 to 1989.29 They worked on already existing films (documentaries or fiction) and did not make films. On the fringe of the network “Langage et Travail” (CNRS), which is also interested in cinema (Borzeix et  al. 1996), Anni Borzeix and René Baratta create a group called “Les Ergonautes” bringing together ergonomists, sociologists, ethnologists, and filmmakers. Beyond the debates on what it meant to film work, researchers, and filmmakers used cinema as a tool to capture behavior at work or in public places (the crowds at the Gare du Nord rail station and interactions with SNCF agents: cf. Borzeix (1997) and Baratta (2006). From the 1960s to 2000, photography gradually entered the academic world as a practice among geographers and historians. It had already done so among ethnologists or anthropologists. It has been somewhat slower among sociologists, with a few photographic practitioners and theorists (Terrenoire 1985; Laulan 1970,

26 27

 Pierre Naville Archives, dossier n° 34, section audio-visuel, Musée Social, Paris.  Idem.

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1982; Maresca 1996; Conord 2002; Maresca and Meyer 2013). However, this has occurred even later with the cinema or video. Bernard Ganne (sociologist) and Jean-Paul Pénard (director) have produced several research films (Ganne 2012) on the transformations and internationalization of Canson paper mills (since 1997) and Asian firms (the 2000s). During these decades, teaching cinema or video as a means of research and expression has been mostly absent from Sociology departments. The only UFR (Unité de Formation et de Recherche, a component of French universities replacing the former university departments) providing such courses is that of Anthropology at the University of Nanterre, in the line of the educational program created by Jean Rouch in 1969, perpetuated by Xavier and Claudine de France. The first Master’s degree in Sociology, Image and Society, was the one created in 1996 at the University of Évry, leading to a doctorate in filmic sociology. Several universities have opened Master’s in Cinema, providing technical teaching and documentary history but rarely integrated into the human sciences, except for the one at the University of Paris X-Nanterre already mentioned. At the same time, most of the teacher-researchers working in the UFRs of cinema, who are reluctant to teach the production of cinema at the University, focus on theories of cinema (generally fiction cinema). Some defend film creation in the University by bringing together film theories and practices to show “how ‘thinking’ and ‘making’ cinema can be a happy combination” (Le Péron and Sojcher 2020, 6), thus linking the field of fiction to the concerns of Filmic Sociology in the documentary. This goes hand in hand with the growing interest of the academic world in images, as shown by the emergence of specialized magazines such as Images du Travail, Travail des Images (online since 2015), La Revue Française des Méthodes Visuelles (online since 2017) or the “Champs et contrechamps” [Shots/countershots] section of La Nouvelle Revue du Travail (online since 2012). Finally, the recognition of filmic sociology as an academic field requires its institutionalization

28 29

 Pierre Naville Archives, letter 25 June 1956 to T. Grjebine, idem.  References to the three published works:

• CNRS-LERSCO-LEST, Pratiques audiovisuelles en Sociologie, Actes de la Rencontre de Nantes, Avril 1987, Presses de l’Université de Nantes, 1987; • CNRS-LEST, La Parole dans le film, Pratiques audiovisuelles en Sciences Sociales, Actes de la 2e Rencontre d’Aix en Provence, Avril 1988, Aix en Provence, LEST, 1989; • CNRS-CRIV, La caméra sur le terrain, Pratiques audiovisuelles en Sciences Sociales. Actes de la 3e Rencontre de Vaucresson, Avril 1989, Vaucresson. CR1V, 1991.

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in learned societies: The thematic network “Sociologie visuelle et filmique” (RT 47) was founded in 2006 in the Association française de Sociologie (see Chap. 2). The research stream “Visual and Filmic Sociology” was created in 2016  in the European Sociological Association. Finally, the International Visual Sociology Association began to enlarge its field to include filmic sociology since its congress held in Évry in 2018. Internationally, documentary sociology is of interest to more and more sociologists who make documentaries, in Europe, North America, or the Maghreb. Sociology is gradually leaving the shores of sociology on the image (the essence of visual sociology) to focus on sociology by the image, particularly film. Luc Pauwels proposes an original presentation of the different visual approaches by the social sciences (working on images or making images) in a Synthetic Table of Visual Social Research (Margolis and Pauwels 2011, 5 sq.). This three-column table distinguishes the origin and nature of the images (external or produced by the researcher), the research orientations (analytical, theoretical, or methodological), and the resulting formats (paper, graphs, films, photos). Although a little complex on first reading, this presentation allows us to identify the tensions between the approaches using visuals in the social sciences. It underlines the maturity of the uses of photography and video in the production of knowledge in the social sciences. The distinction between social documentary and the sociological documentary has also been questioned. There is, of course, a continuum, and there is no watertight boundary between the two: it all depends on the director’s trajectory, as well as that of the cameraman and the editor. A documentary filmmaker who is very sensitive to social issues, social relationships, and the subjectivity of the characters can make a film that is more “sociological” than a sociologist who is locked up in theories and frozen emotions. However, to establish this distinction, we can say that the sociologist works long and hard to get to know and interpret his field by mobilizing the sociological theories that he masters. In general, his conceptual background is better established, with more rigorous reasoning linking facts and opinions (although some social documentary filmmakers may have this fiber without having acquired it on the benches of the University). In other words, the polarization in the diagram below is based on manufactured “ideal types” that accept many exceptions (Fig. 3.1). This polarization has the merit of leaving room for other genres and other forms of expression. For example, fiction film is outside the central axis, but it often inspires filmmakers, especially social documentary filmmakers. The distinction between fiction and documentary is not hermetic, a distinction that has given rise to many works (see, among others, Menegaldo and Murcia 1992). The position of fiction on the social documentary side can also be explained by the fact that soci-

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experimental cinema

[continuum]

sociological documentary

public sociology

social documentary

activist cinema

Fig. 3.1  Social and sociological documentaries. (Source: Authors)

ologists tend to do less replaying of scenes or interviews. They do very little fiction. Activist cinema is foreign to the documentary axis because, although it may not be intended, it addresses an already convinced public. The purpose of the social or sociological documentary is not only to inform but above all to make viewers think. The activist film is not a sociological documentary because the latter, unlike the former, proposes a variety of points of view to allow the viewer to think about a social situation from his or her own values. This does not mean that the sociologist should show neutrality or objectivity, but his or her position, which is reflected in the film, is one among others that viewers can construct. Finally, as we will see later, public sociology (Burawoy 2021) can take the documentary as a tool of knowledge, for example, by making it with those who become the characters of the documentary, or even by lending them a camera. Here the reader immediately grasps the possible confusion with the activist film when the Rubicon is crossed. Hence its proximity to public sociology in the diagram above, while insisting on the fact that the documentary claiming to be public sociology is different from the activist film. It is time to go deeper into the very project of filmic sociology and to consider what are the forces influencing it, including those from literature, and how it relates to emotions and brings them to life, as in the cinema.

4

Cinema and Sociology: A Promising Hybridization

At the 1952 International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Vienna,1 Jean Rouch questioned the relationship between ethnoanthropology and cinema in the following terms. “When filmmakers make ethnographic films, they may be films, but they are not ethnographic. However, when ethnographers make films, they may be ethnographic, but they are not films” (quoted by Poirier 1968). This is the challenge of hybridization that we face: making sociological documentaries that are truly cinema. The first question that comes to mind concerns organizing the convergence of two approaches to knowledge, through words and images. Hence the importance of borrowing from all the arts that utilize text (the novel, poetry, and theater) and image (painting in particular), without going back to prehistoric cave art, which already posed the question of movement in iconic representation, as Sergei M. Eisenstein (2016) remarks. In common-sense terms, thought is first formed using words, language, and the written word to construct concepts from reason. Perception through the senses and the resulting images are supposed to have little to do with thought itself. However, can we simply continue to deny the role of perception and images in the process of knowledge, affirming the primacy of words over images in the activity of thinking? What is the place of perception, senses, and emotions in thinking? This chapter attempts to answer these troublesome questions (1) by proposing to “think through images” (2) before asking what might be the sociological meaning in documentary

 US Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2005689771/.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Sebag, J.-P. Durand, Filmic Sociology, Social Visualities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33696-6_4

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images. It is thus the moment to return to the proposals of Chap. 2 in order to deepen the different stages of (3) the making of a sociological documentary envisaged as a mode of knowledge production.

1 Thinking with Words and Images In the previous chapter, we saw the history of documentary photography and cinema that prepared the emergence of filmic sociology. In this chapter, the analysis of the place of the image and the imaginary in literature encourages the sociologist-­ filmmaker to consider the artistic sensibility necessary for the production of sociological documentaries. This leads us to question the meaning of thinking through images and then to discuss the relationship between image and language in the cognitive process.

1.1 Words to Revive Images: The Power of Poetry and Novel Major authors, novelists or poets, who obviously express themselves in words, place images at the height of their art. This enables readers to experience the power of the images they have lived, seen, and want to transmit. In other words, work with words has the image as its ultimate goal. This shows how important the image is to them since they put it at the heart of their style and creativity. Marcel Proust excels in this area: in the box below, he brings to life the image of a character both physically and morally, arguing that “our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of others.” His description of Swann’s physical appearance—the image of reality—is the fruit of his sensitive perception, primarily influenced by his memory of his character. He calls on both sight and hearing to draw the line of the nose and sound of the voice. Little by little, Proust draws us toward Swann’s dual personality, or the diversity of the roles he plays, while momentarily relegating his worldly side to the background—although he gives the reader information which is vital for the continuation of the novel—in order to favor the reassuring image of the narrator’s parents. Nevertheless, this is the essential part of the construction of this image, which is purely emotional, made up of “the idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, around the game table or in the garden, during our life as good country neighbors.” It is also reassuring, made up of the fullness of the beautiful season in the countryside, in the well-to-do class. And that is not all: Proust makes it clear that this was only an image which remained anchored in his imagination by

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writing that his “corporal shell” does not correspond to the other Swann, which is distinct, working differently in another environment. To complete the description of the image of this neighboring Swann so much admired by his parents, Proust uses a third sense, citing “the aroma of the tall chestnut tree, baskets of raspberries and a sprig of tarragon,” which implicitly refers to taste. The intensity of Proust’s images of Swann with his busty nose and the sound of his voice—elements of the “false character” who does not immediately appear in his category—and the country setting, means that we can already see the images and sounds of a sequence filmed under the chestnut tree. We can even hear the chirping of sparrows in the late afternoon. Such is the strength of the words of major authors that they give rise to images in the reader’s mind that become stronger than the words themselves. However, to bring them to life in the reader, the narrator must have already lived, seen, and met them before writing about them. cc

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way2

But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as “seeing someone we know” is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him, which we compose in our minds, those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end, they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice, it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen. Thus, no doubt, from the Swann they had built up for their own purposes my family had left out, in their ignorance, a whole crowd of the details of his daily life in the world of fashion, details by means of which other people, when they met him, saw all the Graces enthroned in his face and stopping at the line of his arched nose as at a natural frontier; but they contrived also to put into a face from which its distinction had been evicted, a face vacant and roomy as an untenanted house, to plant in the depths of its unvalued eyes a lingering sense,

 From 1922 translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, page 19–20; distributed online by Project Gutenberg. 2

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uncertain but not unpleasing, half-memory and half-oblivion, of idle hours spent together after our weekly dinners, round the card-­table or in the garden, during our companionable country life. Our friend’s bodily frame had been so well lined with this sense, and with various earlier memories of his family, that their own special Swann had become to my people a complete and living creature; so that even now I have the feeling of leaving someone I know for another quite different person when, going back in memory, I pass from the Swann whom I knew later and more intimately to this early Swann—this early Swann in whom I can distinguish the charming mistakes of my childhood, and who, incidentally, is less like his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as though one’s life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the same (so to speak) tonality—this early Swann abounding in leisure, fragrant with the scent of the great chestnut-tree, of baskets of raspberries and of a sprig of tarragon. As with Proust, we find in Rimbaud a perception that thinks. The poet offers the reader a perceptive sensory image, which he develops from the use of the senses, sight, smell, and hearing in particular. Thus, for Jean-Michel Maulpoix (2001, pp. 170–171), the poet appears as “the one to whom reality is revealed through images.” He writes that “images think within us, we who live among their ghosts. And if they are the folds of our interiority and the products of our perception, how can we be surprised that under the brush of the painter or the pen of the writer, they appear to join both the interior and exterior.” Maulpoix’s demonstration is expressed in Arthur Rimbaud’s poem, Le buffet [The Cupboard]: under cover of a neutral description of this piece of furniture, Rimbaud gives us his most intimate aspect, the quest for maternal love. Through the objects—the cupboard with open doors containing yellowed and moldy linen—he metaphorically portrays the arms of a mother who never offered herself, while the ray of light that filters under the door of the parents’ bedroom symbolizes what is forbidden. Images produce meaning if we are willing to focus on them—that is, to understand them. The linking image assumes the tension of looking and thinking in order to exist. The sociologist’s theoretical and methodological tools contribute to this work. Thus, filmic sociology combines these two approaches in this “adjoining” [ajointement] of the exterior (detachment) and the interior (singularity of the gaze). It can build socialization of the intimate or encourage us to think about social intimacy, an intimacy that we can share and socialize. We should not be concerned by the passage from the perceptive image to that of the imaginary—influenced by the memory context and the reconstruction in the imaginary—as we have reported above, because their distinction, rationally made,

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cannot erase their interconnection. The perceptive image cannot escape from the subject’s memory reservoir, and the imaginary image expresses the accumulated reality in the form of memory traces.3 This leads Maulpoix (2001, p. 177) to say that it is a nested cupboard because “other images of faded and withered life are gathered together in the image of the old piece of furniture. The cupboard is full of being. A container (a piece of furniture) is filled with other containers (pieces of cloth) so that it underlines the absence of the content, which is the body.” Thus, this poem,4 if we follow Maulpoix’s interpretation, shows the power and significance of the image that goes beyond words, the latter being only the mode of transport or transmission of the image. Previously, by having us experience these idle hours of weekly dinners under the fragrant chestnut tree in the presence of a sociable two-faced Swann, Proust showed us a cinematic sequence. This text is indeed a prefiguration of the image-­ artifact of cinema and its later use for the general public. We use the term artifact-­ image (others speak of object-images to designate its tangible dimension) to distinguish photography, cinema, and even much earlier, drawing or painting, from the image perceived by the subject or the image he imagines from the traces of his memory. These image-artifacts are objects shaped by humanity on material supports. Dematerialization through digital technology does not take detract from the artifactual or artificial nature of photography or cinema. They are physically external to it. However, as cinema and sociology converge, we need to situate these two types of images (artifact-images and perceptual images) reciprocally, to both distinguish them and have them work together. In the same vein, the textual image of Rimbaud’s cupboard—the words of the poem become an imagined image in the reader’s mind—contains all the elements of an artifact-image that would show “my mother’s cupboard,” with its odors, filled with rags, and with arms open (the open doors). It would be an excellent exercise to have students film such a cupboard to plagiarize Rimbaud’s poem or any object that could make sense in their memory. Based on these two texts, we have suggested the importance of words for authors who excel at arousing emotion through language, particularly by making disturbing images appear to their readers. Such geniuses are not very common, but

 We could also discuss dreams based on Freud’s theses, but this is somewhat off the subject, at least for the moment. 4  See the translation and the poem in French: https://allpoetry.com/From-’The-Cupboard’(Le-buffet). 3

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they have shown us how objects perceived with sensitivity can be transformed into words, becoming poetic images charged with emotion transmitted to the reader. By resuming this process and adjusting it to our questioning, we strive to understand the thought process.

1.2 What Is Thought? Visual Thinking The fundamental question lies in the definition of thought in simplifying and, above all, summarizing past and present debates. For some, it is limited to the exercise of reason, expressed in language and used to construct concepts, ­indispensable tools for demonstration and reasoning. In other words, the image as the result of perception by the senses is foreign to thought. Jean-Paul Sartre, in L’imagination, reviews several philosophical theories in an attempt to invalidate this conception: “One maintains an autonomous structure called an image, opposed to thought, but one recognizes that thought penetrates deeply into the image, for it is said that every image must be understood” (1950, p. 86). He then questions his opponents: “Isn’t it a priori possible that, instead of being inert support for thought, the image is thought itself in a certain form?” (idem, p. 79). Thus, unlike the early philosophers who dismissed perception from the activity of thinking, Sartre, and many others incorporated it. All of Rudolf Arnheim’s work in Visual Thinking (2004), aims at showing that sensory perception is part of thinking, rejecting any perception-thought dichotomy: “l shall suggest that only because perception gathers types of things, that is, concepts, can perceptual material be used for thought: and inversely, that unless the stuff of the senses remains present the mind has nothing to think with” (Arnheim 2004, p. 1). More precisely, these concepts are constructed through the subject’s social trajectory and visual perception5 derived from the physical object, e.g., an elephant seen at the zoo, is not “a mechanical recording, but the active grasping of structural features” closely related to “memory residues” constituted as a counterpart6—namely, the conceptual image of the elephant—in the subject (idem, p. 97). In other words, perception thinks: “My contention is that the cognitive operations

 The example is taken from visual perception, but it could be taken from the other senses. Along with hearing, another sense specific to cinema that interests us here, sight is obviously the most relevant choice because it is the most “pedagogical.” 5

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called thinking are not the privilege of mental processes above and beyond perception but the essential ingredients of perception itself” (idem, p. 13). Broadening the activity of thinking about perception leads to associating reason and emotions and bringing words and images closer together. According to Régis Debray (1992, p. 23), the image comes before the idea in the history of representations, even in the small child, and he states that “the idea was late and second.” The thought process integrates the image and the sensory: “It is true that the speaking animal remains ‘mute in admiration’ before a beautiful image. It will always fail to transmit in words its perception as it is, to articulate its immediate emotion. However, if nothing had been transmitted to him by this image, he would not have been immobilized before it. Paradoxically, it is by maintaining the distinctiveness of the visible compared to the readable, of the image compared to the symbol, that we will best save its function of transmission. … Thinking about the image presupposes first of all that we do not confuse thought and language since the image makes us think by other means than a combination of symbols.7 Why, then, according to Valéry on Corot, is it necessary to ‘apologize for speaking of painting’? Because there is no verbal equivalent of a colored sensation. ‘We feel in one world. We name in another’, Proust lamented [in Remenbrance of Things Past. The ­Guermantes Way]. Color is a step ahead of the word—a few hundred thousand years, no doubt. What does a ‘written cry’ weigh in the face of a screamed cry, anguished or raw, immediate, and full of joy?” (Debray 1992, p. 47). The activity of thinking—an activity that is not conscious except during reflective moments—goes through several stages that are artificially distinguished, for

 Arnheim also speaks of an “inner design,” which he distinguishes from the “external image” of the canvas, thus echoing what we have designated above as an image-artifact. The importance of this “inner counterpart” of the percept or internal image is highlighted in a text by Howard Becker (2007) about photojournalism. He describes how photos of homeless people that show them very clean and closely shaved would be rejected by editors because they “know, or think they know, in advance of any investigation, the angle to be taken for the story. Whatever the content of the paper on the ‘problem’ of homelessness, it must be consistent with what readers already know or think. An appropriate photograph, for instant reading, builds on this kind of knowledge among readers. … The [editors’] problem is technical: how to get the image that best tells the preconceived story?” (idem, pp. 211–212). This “preconceived story” corresponds to Arnheim’s “inner counterpart,” an image that the documentary filmmaker will have to fight against, since neither the photojournalist nor the editor “try to find out things they do not know in advance” (Becker 2007: 212). 7  It is obviously a bit more complex, because Debray only understands signs as letters and words—if possible written—whereas the semiologists we will meet later on also see signs in images or in photographs. 6

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rational reasons, but that should not be conceived as a linear or chronological sequence. On the contrary, we must consider them as a back and forth sequence between the percept and the concept, self-enriching and improving the long-term result in a memory context that continuously and selectively supplements them. The subject perceives objects or actions according to stimulus from his five senses,8 of which some, such as sight and hearing, may rightly or wrongly be considered more important. He perceives them differently according to the objective context—the reality surrounding the object or action—and according to his subjective disposition, even his physiological condition, which weighs on his subjectivity and vice versa.9 Here, memory has a considerable influence on the constitution of this sensory image, known as the percept (sensory knowledge). The sensory image is active. It excites the intellect and memory and is transformed into an idea, which can be expressed in words through speech. It is then called a concept.10 It is the specificity of the human species to participate in cumulative social exchanges through speech, starting from concepts and arranging them rationally into paradigms. There is no end to demonstrating the importance of memory in the act of thinking. First of all, we could speak of pre-perceptive images at the level of the senses with the influence of previously acquired forms on perception. These pre-perceptive images influence perception via memory and the subject’s social trajectory. The summoning of memory elements, which are selected—hence the link with the unconscious— by the sensory perception senses demonstrates the active and already “intelligent” character of perception. Finally, at the intellectual and rational construction level of the handling of concepts, collective memory—socially constructed as the memory of a social group—more than individual memory, develops what constitutes the

 We do not elaborate on the nature of the stimulus, generally external to the subject. But for the subject to perceive the object or action, he must be in certain state of mind making him receptive to this stimulus. 9  See also Sarah Pink, who proposes a “multi-sensory approach to visual methods” (sight is only one of the five senses, while the image itself is material, sound, tactile, etc.), emphasizing the contextualization of image production, both on the part of the researcher-producer and on the part of the subjects participating in the research. Receptors could be added to this list (Pink 2007; 2011, p. 606). 10  Here, one could distinguish between concrete and more abstract concepts. The concept of table (a concrete concept) refers to a piece of furniture with several legs surmounted by a plane on which one eats, writes, or works. Unlike the latter, the abstract concept of justice or freedom refers to a diversity of images of reality and requires long sentences to express what it represents. 8

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specificity of the human species, namely the cumulative nature of exchanges to produce science and the arts. However, the composition of collective memory probably consists more of images than words, relying on an endless imagination that plays with dreams and reminding us of the permeable relationship between conscious and unconscious. In the conception of thought, here developed as a process ranging from perception by the senses to the intellectually constructed representation of the world and others, we no longer oppose the percept to the concept, nor the sensory to the rational.11 They combine to go from image to words, and vice versa, in a unified process that has its roots in memory. Hence the possibility of visual thinking. Thus, in this conception of thought, the activity of thinking—or just simply thought in general—is based on images. It is on these images that we put words to express them and, above all, to communicate between humans, including about images, commenting on them in increasingly abstract and conceptual ways. What is commonly called thinking would go from perception, via the five senses, to abstract reasoning, no longer attributing the term thinking only to the last phase but rather to the complete process. This is illustrated, in its own way, by Frances Flaherty’s interview about her husband’s camera (see box below). cc

Interview with Frances Flaherty

“The camera was a machine that could see more than what the eye could see. [Flaherty] didn’t presume to write scripts. He didn’t presume to tell the camera what to see. He didn’t say to the camera, ‘this is a life.’ He asked the camera, ‘What is this mystery that you can see better than I can see? Or better than I could see in movement. And life is movement. Better than I could see, not only movement that betrays emotion, but those finite, inner movements that reveal the spirit. You take us to a new dimension of seeing. You give us a new awareness. Through your eyes, we rediscover the world around us. We rediscover ourselves. The world is at mourning again and we are reborn. Avid as a child he let the camera see everything, impatient as a scientist, he has exhausted it.’”

 In another context, the understanding of a painting, Arnheim reports two types of perceptive thinking, called intuitive cognition and intellectual cognition, which are similar to what we propose. He concludes: “there is not necessarily a conflict between intuitive cognition and intellectual cognition” (1976, p. 248), before attacking the unilateral approach of certain language determinists who impoverish thought (idem, pp. 250–252). 11

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“It was a purely visual process. Words had nothing to do with it. It went beyond words. Because seeing is quick, and words are slow. Seeing is immediate, and words are mediate. Seeing is whole, words are partial. These two, words and seeing, have different rhythms. They belong to two different worlds. And the miracle of the camera is that it can take us out of the verbal world into the non-verbal. Out of the world of many meanings, into the world of one being. Out of the world in which we flounder, enmeshed in the arbitrariness of words… The poets know this best for it is the barrier between these two worlds they seek to overcome. And cannot quite overcome through words.” In Flaherty and Film, interview by Robert Gardner on Louisiana Story, 28’ 1958.

1.3 Ideas and Images If the perceptive image of reality leads to the abstract concept or idea, there is nothing absolute or definitive about it. Quite the contrary: the idea is itself declined in a multiplicity of contents, even of genres, going from the immediate, poorly reasoned idea, close to the percept, to the reflected idea, that is to say, the idea that draws from the collective cognitive and cultural background, crystallized in the subject. Thought builds (increasingly abstract) concepts and paradigms from which the idea is formalized in order to lead the subject to a result (a constructed and reasoned thought) likely to take part in public debates, thus formulated in words (spoken or written). The expression of considered and constructed thought, with a view to public discussion, takes place on particular media more or less durable in time and exchangeable between subjects. This is what we have designated as artifacts (image-­ artifacts above), i.e., as human creations that range from the Mesopotamian tablet to books, photography, and cinema,12 as well as medical images. However, one cannot detach considered thinking on the techniques of presentation and diffusion, from their technical “density,” which participate in the expression of this thought. Jack Kerouac’s scroll is not a book. It expresses outside of words a will to unfold

 See Debray’s three media spheres (1992, pp. 222–227) for a shortened history: the logosphere (after the invention of writing), the graphosphere (after printing), and the videosphere (after audiovisual). 12

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time otherwise than in a series of paragraphs and chapters. We will never be able to separate the form or media from the content or thought. This leads us to conceive cinema or video as thought itself, which expresses itself through a medium other than the written word. This is what Jean-Luc Godard, in his own particular form of expression, says: “Cinema is a thought that takes shape, a form that thinks.”13 We could specify here, a form that can think like a sociologist, as far as we are concerned. All these artifacts (including the arts, radio, television, and all digital media) are essential to man and are constitutive of his evolution from the Paleolithic to today. They are his nature. Thought, or the activity of thinking, goes from perception to expression through these artifacts, through conceptualization. Limiting it to reasoning is a conventional definition that atrophies man by discarding his sensations, emotions, and, therefore, images (percepts) in favor of reason alone. We must, on the contrary, recognize the importance of the image that occupies human thought from perception to exchange (via the artifacts imaged from drawing to the image of “virtual reality”). According to Arnheim (1969, p. 321), “photographs and films are true ‘aids’ [to reasoning] only if they satisfy the requirements of visual thinking. The unity of perception … which I have endeavored to demonstrate throughout these pages, suggests that intelligent understanding lies in the realm of the image itself, but only if it is in a form that allows the relevant features to be interpreted in visual terms.” The activity of thought begins with the process of sensory perception, which at the same time, can not be only sensory. Perception is enriched by the contents of memory, including accumulated knowledge borrowed from reason. The image (the percept) is penetrated by intellectuality and “coagulates” all these elements. “The whole effort of Leibniz concerning the image,” says Jean-Paul Sartre (1950, p. 10), “is to establish a continuity between these two modes of knowledge: image, thinking, the image in him is penetrated by intellectuality.” Sartre recognizes here the intellectual charge of the perceptive image, which is, therefore, not only sensory. For Régis Debray (1992, p. 51), “from the sensory to the intelligible, there is emulation.” More generally, the thought process, from perception (the percept) to intellectuality (the concept) to the artifact supporting expression, should not be conceived as an unambiguous process. Not only are all these elements, which can be distinguished very artificially, closely intertwined, but they are enriched by knowledge and memory information while reacting in return on each other. Artifacts

 Quoted by Antoine de Baecque and Philippe Chevallier, Dictionnaire de la pensée du cinéma, Paris, PUF, 2012. 13

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constantly retro-activate the perceptual and intellectual elements that contribute to the modification of sentient modes or intellectual categories. In short, the image is not an element constructed subsequently through the thought process. It is temporally first—in perception—and constitutive of the act of thinking. Hence the importance of this somewhat abstract chapter. Therefore the certainty that the image-artifact is not an element foreign to thought, a sort of supplement to words and mature thought, but is an intrinsic element of it, which, moreover, integrates the sensory. Better still, “the main virtue of the visual medium lies in the fact that it represents forms in two- and three-dimensional space, whereas the sequence of verbal language is one-dimensional” (Arnheim 1969, p. 245). The unity of the percepts and the intellect, with its intuitive and intellectual cognitions, lays the foundation for visual thinking which “requires the ability to see in the forms available to the eye, the images of the patterns of forces underlying our existence—the functioning of minds, bodies or machines, the structure of societies or ideas” (idem, p. 328). Taking the role of the image as essential in thought—from the percept to the internal representation or “image” in English—the question ­becomes that of the passage from image to “picture” (the image-artifact), whether it is on paper, acetate, or today in digital form. Without forgetting the sociological preoccupation of this representation.

2 Are There Sociological Images? If images are forms that think or through which the subject thinks, how can we think sociologically through images? How can sociologically meaningful images and sounds be created? Because this book uses a paper medium preventing us from showing animated images and because fixed images preceded the animated,14 we propose a detour through photography continuing the reflection started in the previous chapter in order to explain “how social and sociological meaning is built up in an image.”

 This section is derived from a lecture given at the Musée du Quai Branly as part of the International Symposium “Arrêt sur image. Pour une combinaison de la photographie et du film,” April 9–10, 2010. 14

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2.1 Documentary Photography, a Kingdom of Contraction Documentary photography is a snapshot that “says something.” To achieve this goal, the photographer concentrates the story of a place, a character, or a group of human beings in a split second. He concentrates a duration, the long story of a person or a place in a single instant. In the same way, he concentrates a volume or large space in a two-dimensional frame. Therefore, we use the term contraction of time and space to characterize the photographic shot. Contraction is the confinement of infinite duration and space in a frame and especially in a limited and frozen space at the instant “T.” In other words—and this is primarily intended for the beginning photographer or the beginning filmmaker—the difficulty experienced by the photographer is to imagine what his photo will be like, which differs greatly from what he sees with the naked eye. The naked eye has the virtue of embracing at the same time a field of about 120° and of distinguishing details whose angle of vision is only 5° to 20°. Using a wide-angle or telephoto lens is merely an artifice to take several pictures successively with different angles of an object or landscape that the eye has perceived simultaneously. This ability to imagine or “see” the photo as it will be, and not as reality presents the object to the naked eye, is the photographer’s primary asset, the result of a long apprenticeship. This is the relationship that the photographer maintains with the object photographed, which includes making the photograph meaningful for the spectator, reader, or visitor to an exhibition. This sense of photography is based on at least three qualities: being meaningful (significant), being able to surprise the spectator, and having esthetic value. However, the canons of these three qualities change according to the historical moment, social background, and the singular trajectory of each spectator. A photograph that endures possesses these three qualities and transgresses individual, social, and historical particularities, such as the one by Jacques-­ Henri Lartigue below. When we speak of the spectator in the singular, we are, of course, referring to spectators15 in a very generic sense, that is to say in their diversity. This includes considering that some photographs do not interest all spectators because of the object or the scenes treated. Underlining the differences between spectators also raises questions about education in the reading and interpreting of images—and sounds, but we could also talk about taste—something which the education of chil-

 Some authors refer to regardeurs [literally “watchers” or “gazers”] to designate the spectators. We are not enthusiastic about this vocabulary, even if it is more precise to mark the importance of the gaze. 15

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dren and adolescents around the world neglects completely. The issue is not new, but cannot be ignored. Each author, photographer, or filmmaker tries to overcome or circumvent it with his or her own means.

Jacques–Henri Lartigue, Untitled, 1913

2.1.1 Making Sense with Photography, Telling a Narrative Photography informs, proposes an interpretation of what is social, and adds information for the spectator to the information he already has about the object or the scene shown. To have meaning refers to the contraction described above that the photographer has made at the time of shooting. He has constructed an image that has one or more meanings. How do these meanings appear in the photograph? Usually, from signs, symbols, or details16—which we will call attributes—that the

 Cf. Christine Louveau de la Guigneraye and Jean Arlaud, in Ethnologie française, 2007, 1, p. 104: “[The image] allows the observer to bring out details of reality that the unaided eye does not have the capacity to perceive. Still, ethnographic photography must not be a simple passive detail of reality, but, in the fullness of the inspired moment, the relevant crystallization of the characteristics of a scene, a being or a place.” 16

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photographer has chosen to include in the image. These include excluding others that are just as real, but that might obscure the image, that is to say, making it more complicated and weakening the researched meaning. The best example of these attributes can be found in August Sander’s photographs People of the 20th Century for which Olivier Lugon wrote that “the dryness of the images, their deliberate coldness and the lack of involvement of the photographer make the work open to all interpretations” (Lugon 2001, p. 115). The locksmith has keys in his hand; the gas workers carry gas lamps; the gardener digs with a shovel; the art history professor wears small round intellectual glasses and poses next to an amphora, etc. (Lugon 2001, p. 115). All documentary or sociological photography has attributes. They are the instruments of the concentration of time and space in a frame. They are the supporting foundation of the signified17 that is, the raison d’être of the image. Using attributes in this way can impoverish photography because they are generally static. To represent duration, they have to be much more dynamic, and this is the difficulty. Attributes, as far as possible, show changes, prove the history that is being made before our eyes. Thus, documentary or sociological photography “tells a story.” Photography strives to be descriptive. It can capture an action. Thus the problem of narration is simplified, although the image also captures something that identifies the place or the period. If there is no historical action in progress, the photograph captures the signifiers and attributes that tell a story: the sequence of signifiers, features of the characters (body positions, facial expressions), etc.

 The English adjective, “signified” (the equivalent of signifié in French), can be used to designate a signified object by transforming the adjective into a passive noun, “the signified.” To designate the word or image that expresses and signifies an object or a fact, the active verb “to signify” becomes “signifier.” See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in general Linguistics, translated by Wade Baskin and Perry Meisel New York, Columbia University Press, 2011 [1916]. 17

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August Sander, Gas-men, vers 1930

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August Sander, Art Scholar [Karl Wirth], 1932

Photography must be attractive, and there are numerous ways of achieving this goal, which are occasionally but not necessarily, related to esthetics. So as to be seen and observed in a world of what some image specialists would call “visual pollution,”18 photography strives to surprise the potential spectator who will then pay attention to it. Clearly, the surprise created is consistent with the meaning and esthetic values of the image. It is based on the same documentary codes and, for example, leads to the refusal to accept all the compromises of the commercial image. One of the most interesting ways of creating surprise is to cultivate paradox by capturing scenes of life, portraits, landscapes, etc., which astonish the viewer and then lead him to question the meaning of the photograph, or even the paradox contained in it.

18

 Rick Poynor, La loi du plus fort. La société de l’image, Paris, Pyramyd, 2002.

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2.1.2 Photography and Esthetics A documentary image responds to specific esthetic standards. Without them, it cannot survive historically or give full value to the meaning it carries within it. The photographic composition follows some rules: golden ratio and golden point, the role of the diagonal, the opposition of chromatic values, etc. Good composition can (or should) transgress habits to increase the attractiveness of a photograph. One of the masters of this transgression is Alexander Rodchenko with his horizons or lines of flight, which never are where one would expect them. This is especially the case with his formidable diagonal compositions (workers in a sawmill, woman on the stairs, etc.). Finally, good photographers of the humanist movement were also those who instantly framed to give meaning through contracting space and time. In fact, they strongly affirmed this capacity for instant framing without retouching or cropping the shot (except for Lisette Model) from the “decisive moment.” Documentary photography can then be represented in the following way, as a process that goes from shooting a photo to the face-to-face with the viewer (Fig. 4.1): Steps 1 to 3 are those that underpin the photographer’s professionalism since he simultaneously contracts time and space, selects and prioritizes the attributes of the character or situation that makes sense, and finally composes his image to give it its esthetic dimension. This includes the choice of light, although we are

(attributes)

narration

paradox

2

imaginary

CONTRACTION time space

1

decisive moment

SIGNIFICATIONS

3

4 spectator

SURPRISE

transgression

COMPOSITION of the photograph

Fig. 4.1  The concerns of documentary photography. (Source: Authors)

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silent here on the important technical issues, such as shutter speed and field depth. In doing so, he organizes the narration of his image and chooses his decisive moment. The complexity of the “layers” of signifiers, narratives, and esthetics explains why some great photographers like Robert Doisneau have “scripted” some of their photographs that have become the most famous. If the photographer’s aim is to share a feeling and an idea with the spectator, it is necessary to attract his attention, to surprise him, so that he lingers on his image. This surprise is the fruit of the ingredients gathered in the three stages of image construction. Thus we can see the photographer’s permanent preoccupation without it overriding that of the meaning of the photo. These are the components of a “good” photo. Finally, let us not forget to leave an essential place for the imagination of each spectator, which occupies the entire surface of the rectangle and the image itself. It is this imagination [imaginaire]—socially constructed from each person’s singular experience—that makes the surprising side of photography work, the paradox it can include, and the potential transgression. The photograph’s significance matters above all else, based on the meaning given by each person to the attributes and signifiers in the narrative, irrigated by the spectators’ imagination.

2.2 Sociological Value of Photographs Through the analysis of seven photographs, all with socially decipherable—or sometimes less decipherable—meanings, we will observe how they work and how there is a continuum between documentary and sociological photographs.

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August Sander, Young Farmers, 1914

August Sander’s photo Young Farmers (1914) is so rich in narrative possibilities that it has given rise to a novel by Richard Powers, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance,19 which is no less than 520 pages long. The novelist tries to answer the haunting question: what are the farmers looking at over their right shoulder? Although there is no real answer in the story, the author believes he has “discovered

19

 Richard Powers, Trois fermiers s’en vont au bal, Paris, Le Cherche midi, 2004.

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one of those points of conjunction between past and present, a moment when the two intersecting planes juxtapose to evoke at best the three dimensions of the original model which pre-exists the negative and is timeless” (p.  511). What better formulation can we expect of the contraction of time and space that characterizes photography in our eyes? The stopped movement of the canes and legs reinforces their fixed gaze: but, in any case, they are going somewhere. The result is a mystery that says something without saying it, that creates a paradox and makes the viewer uncomfortable. The second photo, that of Mohamed Bourouissa (2007), belongs to a series on the suburbs. It shows an equivocal scene whose questions are based on the boy’s gesture but also on many attributes: the characters’ clothes, the beer bottle, the second boy’s gaze, a food package open on the pedestal table (the notion of duration), the emptiness of the room and the cheapness of the furnishings, the electrical sockets in poor condition, the quilted bedspread, etc.

Mohamed Bourouissa, Ile de France [Parisien suburbs], 2007

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These two documentary images have been very widely distributed and recognized. Their only weakness, according to some photographers, lies in their somewhat fictitious character because they have been staged. This reduces any instantaneous character they might have had and reveals a considerable accumulation of signifiers. At the same time, their strength lies in the viewer’s indecisive ­interpretation of the mystery they contain about the action taking place within them. It is this enigmatic dimension that reinforces their possible significations. Documentary photography gathers enough data in its narrative to be self-­sufficient, with a written accompaniment reduced to its minimum: a place and a date. It is so demanding and gathers (contracts) so many conditions and attributes or signifiers— not to mention its esthetic or surprise values—that it is rarely “a success.” The picture below of the painter in Shanghai surprises the viewer with the artist’s posture, seated, and telephoning while painting. This picture is not scripted. For those interested in Chinese art of the last decade, it is representative of the studios installed in disused factories around Beijing or Shanghai. It has large spaces and pictorial expressions inspired mainly by the heritage of the Mao era. This image says it all about the serial character in this recent painting. Paintings more or less painted in series, but, above all, series represented in the paintings (especially portraits of Mao) as here a race between soldiers. Or does this represent a degree of weariness of the painter who chooses to do two things at the same time because he does not need to summon his creativity all the time?

Jean-Pierre Durand, Shanghai, 2006

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In the Tokyo subway, passengers sleep at any time, including outside rush hours. This photo was taken in mid-afternoon as evidenced by the number of unoccupied seats. The young office worker (or blue-collar worker?) has a strict dress code (pants, flowery blouse, ordinary handbag), including keeping her umbrella very upright in her sleep. The high school student has enough room to tip over in his sleep but in a dignified manner. He tightens his umbrella and backpack with the straps behind, proof that safety is no longer what it used to be on public transport. He has the full panoply of the high school or young university student: stained military trousers, shirt out of his pants, backpack, and especially the earphones in his ears. This image is a precise witness of urban Japan at the end of the twentieth century. It is attractive, thanks to the unexpected position of the high school student.

Jean-Pierre Durand, Métro de Tokyo, 1992

The following photograph shows the front of a manicurist’s shop in old Beijing (2006). The figure is photographed from a distance through the store window. She appears to be made of wax, even with her gaze staring at the photographer. In addition, the image of a cyclist (with sunglasses) is reflected in the bottom left window. He also seems to be very interested in manicures. The young woman has many signifiers that do not hide her real profession, but the viewer does not need to

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analyze them to grasp the meaning of the expectation. This image is scripted ­without being wholly classical. The main subject is situated approximately at the golden point with an enigmatic reminder (the Western viewer does not read Chinese) of her function or profession in ideograms, while the middle bar cuts the image into two almost equal parts to question the viewer: is the real one on the objective side of the written announcement or on the side of the “appearances” attributed to the character by the viewer himself?

Jean-Pierre Durand, Beijing, 2006

The image below (of poor quality because the original has been lost) shows Japanese majorettes in working clothes, with their accompanist (Kyoto 1995). The photograph presents a double paradox: the first shows young girls in very short skirts (in work clothes) looking at a window of a luxury American store, while the second paradox contrasts their show clothes with the rather rigid double-breasted suit of the accompanist. The latter smiles at the situation, as if he has given in to their insistence that they stop at the window on the way to work. For it is indeed a question of going to work since the accompanist is holding in his right hand the camera that will enrich his company’s book of majorettes. In other words, this photograph is both paradoxical (therefore attractive) and narrative. It does not tell

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us anything about Japan in general, about its society, etc. However, it nevertheless tells us that Japan is not only an industrial archipelago but also a service society (the majorettes) with different expectations of the population which are turning to luxury.

Jean-Pierre Durand, Kyoto, 1992

The photograph of this woman from the souk of Kairouan (1968) shows us the traditional Tunisia of the 1960s. It, therefore, already belongs to history and raises questions for Westerners. Rural Tunisia was not free from the veil as were the towns of Bourguiba. The veil only shows one eye. The image is cut in two. The very bright and colorful foreground increases the depth of field and positions the woman a little further back, in the shadows, with her black veil. The red line of wool increases this effect because it is in the foreground. Finally, through the gesture and movement, the hand holding the veil—the natural or rather ordinary position of this right hand in the street—increases this desire to hide from the gaze of others. Finally, the position of the eye, almost off-camera, extends the character of the photo and the open glance toward the light of the wool she has come to buy. All the attributes mentioned and the composition of the image contribute to the narrative inscribed in this photo.

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Jean-Pierre Durand, Kairouan (Tunisia), 1968

The last image telescopes the hyper-modernity of Shanghai (2006) and its supposed history of the Great Helmsman, who achieved Chinese unity for half a century. The first approach, or attraction, goes through this conflict of values between the two characters whose glances make the diagonal, assuring the quality of the composition. The smile and the rather joyful look of the young Chinese girl on the cover of the French magazine contrast with Mao’s confinement behind bars: as if capitalism had definitively defeated Maoism (and all socialisms). One is retrograde, military green, embellished, amateur painting abandoned in the shade behind green plastic plants. He has everything from the past, even mythified (and precisely because mythified). The other is young, under real sunlight, not even ostentatious or too provocative. It is the China of today, “fighting and valiant.” Finally, on the axis of the glances that the two characters exchange, there is the SOS! that Mao seems to throw to the victorious holder of capitalist modernity.20 It is the only

 The arrangement called for the development of this diagonal of glances. In this case, capturing Mao’s eyes between the bars was not easy when the picture was taken. Hence other photos in which a bar blocks Mao’s gaze. The photo is deeply modified because the axis of gaze is no longer obvious to the viewer (the focus is much less powerful). But if we look carefully at the image, Mao’s blindness makes the call for help written in the SOS at the level of Mao’s mouth even stronger! 20

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expression (with the title of the magazine) written in Latin, i.e., in a Western alphabet. This photo thus questions the false overthrow of a China that is proud enough of itself to adopt modernity without letting go of its language, its culture, and its history, but which falls in line with the most intensive consumerism and the values intrinsically linked to it.

Jean-Pierre Durand et Joyce Sebag, Beijing, 2001

To sum up, documentary or sociological photography, is even more significant as a narrative through the attributes and signifiers it addresses to the viewer. However, in order to be noticed, it strives to surprise, disturb, or even irritate through some transgressions. Finally, it works even better when its composition respects certain canons well known since Antiquity or cleverly violates them. However, how can we then move from photography to sociological film?

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2.3 From Photography to Sociological Documentaries Our first sociological documentary films dealt with work and management in the global automotive industry. We had spent over two decades going from workshop to workshop and writing numerous articles and books, 21 thanks to the network of the Groupe d’Etudes et de Recherches sur l’Industrie et les Salariés de l’Automobile [Study and Research Group on Autoworkers and the Auto Industry] (GERPISA). The question here is: why, after so many years of paper research, would one want to make films? How and why can we make visible what does not appear in articles and books? What more can the filmed sociological documentary contribute, or rather contribute in a different way, from what is said by writing on paper? To answer these questions, we chose two documentaries that we directed and for which Jean-Pierre Lenoir was the editor: Rêves de chaîne, (Dreams on the Line), a 26’ documentary (2003) and Nissan, une histoire de management, (Nissan, a Story of Management), a 30’ documentary (2003–2006).22 Dreams on the Line was about the workers of the NUMMI (New United Motor Manufacturing Inc.) automobile factory located in Fremont, California. This plant, which had been reborn thanks to a General Motors/Toyota joint venture (now owned by Tesla to assemble its electric cars), appeared to many American and French researchers as a symbol of a new era in the work of workers in the automotive industry. We had visited this plant in the late 1990s, and when we suggested making a film about group work and lean production, the plant’s communications department agreed. So it was with management’s agreement that we were able to make this documentary. Of course, we were aware of the constraints, but we thought, thanks to our

 See in particular: Sebag Joyce and Jean-Pierre Durand, “Management global, management transversal: Carlos Ghosn chez Nissan,” Entreprises et Histoire, December 2005; Jean-Pierre Durand and Joyce Sebag, The Hidden Face of the Japanese Model, Monash Asia Institute, Clayton, Australia, 1996; Jean-Pierre Durand and Joyce Durand-Sebag, “The Condition of the Working Class and the Strategy of the Chaebols in the Korean Car Industry,” Trade Unionism and Society, Paris, ISERES, January 1998; Jean-Pierre Durand, Paul Stewart, Juan José Castillo (eds), Teamwork in Automobile Industry: Radical Change or Passing Fashion?, London, MacMillan, 1998; Jean-Pierre Durand and Nicolas Hatzfeld, Living Labour. Life on the line at Peugeot France, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; Jean-Pierre Durand, The Invisible Chain. Constraints and Opportunities in the New World of Empoyment, London, Palgrave, 2008. 22  The reader can see these documentaries on YouTube. The titles of the films may be in French, but as they were filmed in the United States or Japan, the speakers speak English and the few French participants are subtitled. In the same spirit, it is possible to view our documentary 50 Years of Affirmative Action in Boston. 21

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knowledge of the field, we could escape the constraints of institutional film. The management had chosen the group of male and female workers that we were going to film. However, at the same time, we had contacts with women workers who were committed to a very critical vision of the new work organization. The images in the credits, which were not included in the project, testify to the ongoing intellectual mobilization of the documentary filmmaker-researcher. We drove to the factory by car, and everything in the Californian landscape reminded us of the automobile American culture: traffic jams, bridges, immense highways that intersect, overlap, tangle up and make the earth disappear, cars compressed and loaded onto a truck. The whole cycle of the automobile unfolded before our eyes. We filmed through the window. In the car, a song magically offered itself to us. We recorded it. It was Sixteens Tons.23 It told the lives of these people considered only as mud, blood, and muscle and who lose their lives while earning it. We were at the center of Taylorism and Fordism, of the crude man of Taylor who manipulated his workers, of the Fordist worker who does not think, and of those beings who had been denied all rights to expression. The documentary then could tell, in image and sound, about this cycle in the product’s life as well as that of the worker about which we wanted to talk. This road took us to the factory, around the excavators that turned the earth. The workers lived too far away. It was more efficient to build their homes near the factory. Although the narrative remains somewhat vague, the feeling of isolation of the factory in a quasi-desert landscape remains, which situates well the spirit establishment of green plants in the United States. In this first sequence, we wanted to give as much information as possible about the place and the brand name. Already the haunting sound of the plant production line imposed itself as soon as we entered the factory and, therefore, before the end of the credits.

23

 The words of Sixteen tons:Some people say a man is made out of mud A poor man’s made out of muscle and blood Muscle and blood and skin and bones A mind that’s weak and a back that’s strong You load sixteen tons, what do you get Another day older and deeper in debt St. Peter don’t you call me ‘cause I can’t go I owe my soul to the company store I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal And the strawboss said, well, bless my soul!…

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During the editing of the documentary, we chose to follow the assembly line. What is striking is the absence of the masses of workers that were characteristic of the automobile industry from the 1960s to the 1980s. There are no archival photos to recall this contrast, so we are counting on the collective memory of these images. The workers are scattered, relatively isolated from each other. They are in the middle of a quiet mechanical ballet that nothing seems to be able to stop. Nor is there any evidence of an urgency characteristic of the imagery of assembly-line work.24 With Dreams on the Line, we try to say that appearance does not allow us to see the gravity of work. We decided to alternate the movement of machines with that of men. There was no perception of urgency, and the pace seemed slow—we would be accused in some debates of not showing the stress. We did not want to resort to the artifice of repetition, which would transform our perspective into one of compassion. This was not about tears. Alain Wisner’s work on ergonomics at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers [National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts] (CNAM) had shown that work on the line that was considered to be purely physical included mental activity. The film was an opportunity to show this, to listen to him testify to the reflexivity of the workers on the line. We thought that, as sociologists, in-depth interviews would allow us to access a narrative that would go beyond conventions or pre-constructed discourse. This question has placed the film at the center of an ongoing debate with image and sound professionals. For the latter, a film is about situations. However, is the situation documentary the only hope? Are situations the only elements that are expressive in cinema? Furthermore, don’t these interviews also constitute situations? Particularly, since they are the moment of reflection, of reflexivity on what organizes life, on what builds or de-constructs it? What about another form of the documentary film that we could call the documentary of thought or reflection in which a central place is given to the filmed word? Why admit, as its detractors think, that the interview is only about a universe of discourse and representations, and not the complex social universe of practices? The filmed dialogue in question is the result of an exchange with our interlocutors. An exchange based on the tools that sociology gives us. The objective is to encourage strong reflexivity by these workers concerning their experiences, their  Question: Is Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, which is always in demand when it comes to production line work, a conceptualization of such work? Did Charlie Chaplin summarize or synthesize all the characteristics of this production process? Isn’t the cognitive efficiency of Louis Malle’s film, Humain, trop humain (1974), which chooses expansion of time rather than its concentration, just as interesting? This can be seen on YouTube. 24

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lives, in order to give substance to their practices and to their ignored, and sometimes despised, ideas. The interview is also the subject of much controversy: does it inform us about representations rather than “reality”? In Quand voyagent les usines (1985), Alain Wisner, a medical ergonomist, presented his mistrust of interviews in so far as they produce value judgments and encourage the expression of opinions about work. Nevertheless, he recognized the usefulness of interviews in explaining the drudgery of a job: this “explanation becomes an immense and underestimated source of information. For example, the interview reveals the mental activity associated with manual work and” its cognitive load [or] density of thinking activities. A sequence of the film Dreams on the line (3’03 to 6’23) puts into perspective the words of the communication manager, those of a trade union leader, and those of workers, editing in alternation with gestures at work. We can hear the different concerns of each of them. For the former, the comments are organizational, technical, and informative. The union leader categorizes the end of the balance of power formerly favorable to workers at General Motors and the acceptance of new labor standards that go as far as the renunciation of strike action. It is a new production system, which many researchers have claimed is revolutionizing the work organization. Nevertheless, the camera only shows us gestures similar to those of the Taylorian-­Fordist workers: simple, repetitive gestures. The narration of the workers takes us into their world, that of boredom, repetition, arduousness, physical and mental problems, but also of mutual aid, which is essential to avoid cracking. Moreover, this was at a time when the researchers were writing about this factory, underlining the positive dimension of this organization from the point of view of productive efficiency, without ever raising the question of the intensity of the work that brought about such results, or that of the worker’s investment in which constraint was eliminated or sublimated. In the sequences in the middle of the film (22’03 to 24’47), we are given social and professional trajectories to see and hear. What are each person’s strategies in this space? To progress in the hierarchy, to become a team leader in order to escape the immediate pressure of “just in time,” to build “free time” of a few seconds, to learn from books and prepare another future, to fantasize about enrolling in a singing school in New York. These are so many dreams to leave the reality of the factory that the young men and women workers offer us. Finally, it is also questioning the “leadership” practices of team leaders who do not have a hierarchical status: how to lead by persuasion? How to put oneself in the shoes of someone who is slightly ill (but not enough to get sick leave) or who has family problems that morning? Alternatively, everything that makes the life of a workshop.

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The sequence on the group leader (15’44 to 17’58) opens questions on another and a quite classic trajectory: running a shop (or here an assembly line of about 100 people) when you come from the army. The group leader must, at the same time, understand the particularities of the workers, think about both hierarchy and solidarity concerning objectives that are declared to be ordinary: thinking with ­authority, listening to what the workers’ say in their struggle to keep pace, hearing concerns rooted in generational and gender issues. Hearing assembly-line dreams! The other documentary we made, Nissan, a Story of Management, can be seen as the second part of a diptych on the automotive industry and its people. The footage and interviews with Nissan’s management team were shot in Tokyo in 2003. The film was edited in 2005. The starting point for this documentary was the highly publicized success of Renault’s takeover of Nissan. The takeover and reorganization were led by Carlos Ghosn and Patrick Pellata, who became Nissan’s President and Vice President respectively before returning to Renault group headquarters. They were sent to Tokyo by Renault management with a small team from 1999 to turn Nissan around, following Renault’s purchase of 34% of the shares. After consulting all the written documents on the terms of this turnaround, our project was to interview Nissan’s management and Carlos Ghosn to understand the process and, above all, the long-term prospects of a new management team. The editing of this sociological documentary primarily aimed at showing how a strategy developed at the executive level is translated through the different levels of management up to factory production and how a consensual discourse is built on the objectives set by management up to the point of reorienting the daily actions of each employee. This documentary helps us understand how the workers and the different hierarchical levels of management can internalize the managerial language. The management activity is challenging to film outside of situations of negotiation or command that only constitute the implementation or applications of the managerial strategy: the ethnographic approach revealed its limits concerning our project. Indeed, we wanted to capture the foundations of this strategy, necessarily expressed in discursive forms. The filmed interview seemed to be the most appropriate form to carry out this project. To film what managers say is to access a form of objectification of managerial thinking. To manage is to speak. “Saying is doing” has never been more accurate than in this case. Here, even more, to say is to get things done. We have tried to show how, starting from saying, things get done. We invited all those who had to get things done in order to talk about the CEO’s first speech to understand how they interpreted and translated it so that their subordinates could understand it. With what autonomy, with what fidelity to the original? Apart from the problem of how to film “abstract” work, it is a matter of questioning the meaning of the filmed interview and what it offers us in terms of the

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potential for analysis of management’s control of its image as well as of what escapes that control. Moving from common speech (le discours) to more personal language (la parole)25 then became an important problem for the researcher. Filming managers is challenging. We face people who have completely mastered their rhetoric (or are working to achieve this mastery). By the time it reaches the ­audience, their rhetoric has generally been smoothed over. It has been constructed to dodge all the flaws. So what are the intentions behind the researcher’s approach? What knowledge does he or she wish to approach? The challenge here was to go beyond the stage of common speech to find the personal language that is supposed to reflect a more contradictory thought. Can we make managers’ doubts emerge? Can we have an intra-managerial vision? Can we have access to a critique of their own discourse, of their practice? Is it a dialogue between two people with objectives that remain essentially different? The researcher aims at decoding managerial logic and expression. The manager’s aim, especially in the short time they gave us—which, in this case, was an hour—is more in the field of institutional communication. The challenge for us was to get out of the “trap” of communication alone and to establish what we could call a dialogue or the emergence of the spoken word. These questions emerge as soon as the researcher is in the interview position. Filmed speech is supposed to help the spectator gain access to this interplay between questions and answers. This interplay is partially distorted in the film we made, as we were interested in managerial speech and filmed only the answers and not the questions we asked. There is a real challenge in adopting a device in the framework of recording the filmed speech and the interest of filming the interview. However, the problem is that this interest itself evolves. We did not question the manager/researcher dialogue from the outset because we had given priority a priori to managerial speech as it was being constructed in front of us. Our objective was to understand their questions and motivations. Do these only appear indirectly, or can they become more explicit? This would also mean that we have reached the limit in the permissible level of trust and transparency of a personality, highly exposed to the media, who is also in contact with a competition that we can think is on the lookout for these questions or doubts. Thus, the researcher is immediately forced to question the manager’s media construction. We propose to analyze the practice of the filmed interview around these questions, confronted with a dialogue that never

 “Common speech” here refers to a dialogue which is agreed, acceptable, and unconvincing while “personal language” is subjective and individual, a form of self-expression. 25

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forgets that it is public. Does one gain access to knowledge through the intermediary of a rhetoric which itself proposes a representation? In the first sequence, which is also the credits, we introduce the man. His relationship with the media is his basic image. He masters the rules of the game. He bends to them and flows into them for the benefit of his own message. He imposes himself on them. His chosen device—the podium, similar to the pulpit from which they preach the sacred word—isolates him. He can now present his results. There is a mass of journalists. Their position could be assimilated to that of his own employees if they did not have all the recording material with them (camera, microphones, etc.). The staging of this communication shows the manager’s mastery of the environment, his image, and his rhetoric. The master’s image fully mobilizes the journalists, who isolate it. Filming this sequence without isolating the manager means being able to demonstrate this mastery, but it also means grasping the construction and production of this rhetoric. By the same token, the researcher, through the place he occupies, introduces a distance into this mediatization and makes visible something that is an integral part of the media’s relationship with their subjects. In the management of multinationals, we face people who dominate researchers by their status within society. However, can researchers, through the work done prior to the interview and through their general and specific knowledge, encourage the emergence during the interview of what we have called “speech,” going beyond rhetoric? Detachment from the event also facilitates a more precise grasp of the company’s overall objectives. From the outset, the editing proposes the company’s fundamental postulate and, thus, management’s strategy and decision-making. Profit is a sacred, unquestionable norm and the basis for the smooth running and development of the company. Doubt about this principle’s validity that might be suggested by the researcher is swept away by the Nissan President and Vice President. Moreover, it is Nissan’s lack of perspective in terms of profit that was at the root of its failures, which Carlos Ghosn had critically read about (3’06 to 34’20). “This company was not managed by profit,” he tells us. “Profit was seen more as a necessity [in the sense of constraints] than as a goal. However, the profit of a business is not accidental. It is not a coincidence or a consequence. It must be something that drives the business, which has to be organized according to this profit maximization goal.” And further on: “There are still many company managers who consider a little bit of profit as a duty much more than a driving force. Profit is not a duty. If you see profit as a duty, you should do something else.” The remarks by Nissan’s Vice President, responsible for communications comple-

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mented this point during the editing: “we have put these basic notions of profitability at the center of decision-making” (2’54 to 3’05). These results are obtained because they are imposed by the shareholders, absent from the management but omnipresent in the capital-based companies. In a very fast-paced editing editing, the Director of Communication declares: “We are not the ones who determine the absolute level. It is a requirement. As the shareholders become aware of it, the profitability that is generated leads to a [stock market] valuation by the shareholders. We do not make the valuation or decide in what sense the trade-off in relation to another constructor is to be made” (3’25 to 3’45). Carlos Ghosn explained to us that “Nissan is not an exception. Many companies in France are not attracted by profit-making. People make profits because o­ therwise they will be shouted at by shareholders or will attract the wrath of this or that media. Basically, they are not convinced of the need to create value. They are often more attached to notions of power or permanence and duration, rather than notions of profitability. This is often the reason for their very poor results” (3’46 to 4’21). The documentary then deals with the application of managerial principles by the plant manager or the head of transversal management. These adaptations show the variations and interpretations of the official rhetoric by the managers themselves, to the point where they become immediate management tools, quite far removed from the stated principles. These few excerpts have real relevance in questioning the company’s objectives and, as such, are part of the current debate on the relationship between the production of goods, the satisfaction of people’s needs, and the protection of the environment, which underlie the concerns of many people and individuals. We are thus at the heart of the confrontation on the meaning and values that are favored. Some will see in it the confirmation of the need for a strong managerial position that will resonate as an example of success to be emulated. Others will read in it the weight of objectives set without any link to the general interest, for the benefit of the individual interest of a few (the shareholders). On another level, we should also deal with the soundtracks of our documentaries in a more specific way by analyzing their paradoxes. For example, in Dreams on the Line, the horns that are so many calls for help saturate the sound in the factory so much that they are part of everyday life, of normality, and so on. As a result, no worker has ever talked about them. We have not highlighted them in the film, or even shown them as permanent cries for help, with their consequences on working conditions, stress, etc. What is more, most viewers do not hear these horns or consider them as an ordinary factory noise, even though they are actually calls for help!

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Finally, we could add many signifiers to those presented above (the composition of images, attributes of subjects or contexts, movements in the field or of the camera, and the choice of points of view). Many others are only suggested in this book, such as the nature of lighting, field depth, the duration of shots, sound level, the choice of music (or its absence), the length of periods of silence, etc. (Maillot 1989, chap. 4) that the sociologist-filmmaker can look for in film theorists.

2.4 The Sociological Documentary, Kingdom of the Extension of Signifiers Cinema has radically modified the “model” of the functioning of documentary photography presented above, due to the strong specificities of moving images associated with sound, and the movement of or within the image (Fig. 4.2). The first characteristic lies in the “space-time” starting square. This is no longer a contraction as there is for photography. On the contrary and paradoxically, this involves an extension: the movement of the camera widens the field considerably. Even if the question of off-camera remains, it is no longer posed in precisely the same way. Editing widens the space even further since it allows the viewer some ubiquity. In a few seconds, he can be transported from one place to another and can observe an object or a scene almost instantaneously from several different points of view.

SIGNIFICATION

sound and image

2

EXTENSION time space

1

imaginary

4 SUSPENSE

dramatization

FRAMING, CAMERA MOUVEMENT, EDITING 3

Fig. 4.2  Concerns of the sociological documentary. (Source: Authors)

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In the same way, cinema lengthens time for the spectator by presenting successively scenes that can take place at very different periods. One could also support the opposite thesis of contraction of time since a day or a century can be condensed “physically” into a few minutes by the artifact-cinema. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the spectator has seen, experienced, and lived a day or a century in a short instant. It is this long time and enlarged space that interests us here. Thus, the two crucial moments of shooting (choice of viewing angles and fields, soundtrack) and editing the film (two of the three elements of concern in the diagram) allow an almost unlimited play on time and space by dilating them in the spectator’s perception. Sound gives the sociological documentary the possibility to present filmed interviews. Although this practice does not meet with unanimous approval, it gives a voice to subjects who do not always have it. As for those who already have it, like Carlos Ghosn in Nissan, une histoire de management, the filmed interview can lead to questioning their dialogue or how they express it. In this dialectic between filmed dialogue and situation documentary, all combinations are possible. Special mention should be made of the soundtracks of documentaries that add meaning to the images (the significations of point number 2 in the diagram are examined in the following section). The sociological documentary is also a narrative. It is part of the time frame at the moment of projection, and it must capture the viewer’s attention in that period. It has a certain number of assets that photography does not have: camera movement and especially film editing, which must organize the dramatization in order to maintain tension (point number 4). In photography, the author tries to discard some signifiers to avoid confusing the image. Photography thus appears as an exercise in economy of means—hence the bias toward “frontal photography” in documentary style, or even in straight photography.26 In video documentary, constraints as well as results necessarily appear more complex because of this medium’s advantages: the sound, of course, but also movement within the image and with the camera.

 Straight photography (or “pure photography”) is a current among American photographers from the 1920s that promotes a direct, uncluttered and realistic style by capturing everyday objects, such as landscapes and flowers. 26

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3 Making a Sociological Documentary: From the Mastery of Signifiers to Film Editing The technical qualities of sounds in images of sociological documentaries are today evaluated by the technical standards of those used everywhere, from film festivals to television, and of course, in smartphones. We cannot repeat often enough that sociological documentaries must meet these standards of quality. We find unacceptable the arguments of some sociologists who refuse to be concerned by the quality of images and their films, claiming that only the content matters. They deny the ambition of filmic sociology, which is to go beyond the academic world. We can describe this technical quality of the sociological documentary as follows: • image quality in terms of quality of the light chosen when shooting, of light and color quality, and of framing; • sound quality particularly quality of speech which must be audible throughout; the coherence of the place of shooting and sound recording; • camera movement quality (panning, tracking, zooming) and, above all, their justification (see box); • film editing quality, which respects the essential rules in order not to “lose” the spectator; this also requires the mastery of increasingly sophisticated software or the use of a professional editor. Obviously, all these qualities must be in line with the sociological content that the director wishes to convey to the audience. Post-production is the ultimate phase that has become essential for documentaries if they are to reach a wider audience. Its cost may require finding a producer who will take charge of the distribution of the film (on the question of the distribution of sociological documentaries, see, infra, “Conclusion”). cc Cinema, the Art of Movement Cinematographic writing relates images and sounds, the values of scenes, and makes the off-camera speak, etc. However, this would be to forget the specificity and the very essence of cinema, i.e., movement, since it is constitutive of the cinematographic concept itself. According to Pierre Maillot (2000), the elementary particle of cinema would not be the shot, nor the image, but movement as the word is in language or in a text P. Maillot distinguishes three types of movement:

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the movement of objects and characters in the visual field which is related to movement in the sound field (connected or not), in each shot, the camera and microphone movements (tracking and panning) that relate to the movements of objects and characters building a “strategy of visual and auditory perception. A shot is a cinematographic form which is not developed by the actor, the action, the set, the image, etc., but by the way in which the narrative (action, actor, set, sounds, etc.) is perceived, according to the position(s) of the camera(s) and the microphone(s)” (idem, p. 53). Hence the importance of the point of view (cf. infra, chapter 5) in the fabrication of image and sound to construct meaning, the assembly of shots into sequences during the editing of the film, because “editing of a film means building increasingly complex structures of different shots, i.e., constructing relationships between points of view and of listening, of relationships of movements” (idem). “All these movements are dialectised by the same set of movement relationships in shot by shot soundtrack editing, in the sequence of shots, and the sequence connections” (Maillot 2012). Cinema is the construction of permanent relationships between these basic elements of movement: “making a film, thinking in cinema, means building increasingly complex structures of movement, building relationships between these perceptual relationships, relationships of relationships, movements of movements” (Maillot 2000, p. 52; see also Maillot 1989).

3.1 Learn How to Read Images to Be Able to Design Them Supporters of a radical thesis have questioned the semiology of images according to which image and cinema have no language. For example, Régis Debray explains: “a painting, a photo or a shot cannot be broken down into fragments, snatches or features comparable to words or sounds, which could make sense through the interplay of their oppositions. The variations of the ‘raw material’ space, apart from coded images (road signs, badges, flags, and descendants of the medieval coat of arms), are continuous, contiguous, and infinite” (Debray 1992, p. 56). He continues, “if the image were a language, it would be translatable into words, and these words in turn into other images, for the very nature of a language is that it is subject to translation … Let us specify. An image is a sign that has this peculiarity that can and must be interpreted but cannot be read … A string of words

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has one meaning; a sequence of images has a thousand.27 Inexhaustible polysemy. You cannot make a text say everything you want—an image can” (idem, pp. 57– 59). Far be it from us to equate images with a language made of words, since this work relies on their differences in constituting filmic sociology through their convergence, despite the pitfalls that are primarily rooted in our Western culture. However, since there can be some interpretation here, why not make use of the essential tools of semiology without locking ourselves into reductive structuralism? Nor does this mean that it is the only way to interpret images, for isn’t it too rigorous to express emotions?28 To take just one reference text, that of Roland Barthes (1985) on advertising for Panzani pasta, this could be a methodological element for analyzing still or moving images (See picture of this advertising p. 49: https://www.persee.fr/doc/ comm_0588-8018_1964_num_4_1_1027). The author dissociates several messages in the image (distinctions made easier by the advertising image which exacerbates signifiers): the denoted message shows us a shopping bag with pasta, grated parmesan, a can of tomato sauce, and fresh vegetables (we can include in this denoted message the linguistic message: Panzani). The connoted message, constructed here to reinforce the first one, makes use of symbols present in everyone’s mind: the three green-white-red colors of the Italian flag (Italianity) dominate the whole photograph, even on the pasta packets themselves, with the background of the image and in the diversity of the vegetables (tomatoes, mushrooms, and onions, the green tail of the pepper). Finally, this wide-­open bag refers to the horn of plenty. Semiology, provided that we do not lock ourselves into it and avoid any mechanical interpretation, provides keys to interpreting the images that sociologists can adopt by irrigating them with their knowledge of the social, of cultures, and of shared symbols.

 Reference to the sentence attributed to Confucius according to which “an image is worth a thousand words” and repeated by Jean-Luc Godard. 28  On the analysis of images and films, the reader can refer to specialized books (or specific chapters of general works) in French: Jacques Aumont and Marie Michel, L’analyse des films, Paris, Nathan, 1988; Pierre Maillot, L’écriture cinématographique, Paris, Les Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989; Roger Odin, Cinéma et production du sens, Paris, Colin, 1991; Françis Vanoye and Anne Goliot-Lété, Précis d’analyse filmique, Paris, Nathan, 1992, and many others (see bibliography). 27

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However, we can go even further: beyond the symbolic, intentional level, which Roland Barthes refers to as the obvious meaning, a meaning “which moves ahead, which seeks me out,” he situates a third meaning, the obtuse meaning, “which appears ‘in excess’ as a supplement my intellection cannot quite absorb, a meaning both persistent and fugitive, apparent and evasive” (1985, p. 44). In some way, it is indicible. “It is a matter of the sensitive and the emotional; it possesses an element of mystery, says ‘the contrary without renouncing the thing contradicted’” (idem, p.  51). It gives power to the image. Roland Barthes discovers it in the films of Eisenstein and quotes Eisenstein: “the basic center of gravity … shifts to inside the fragment, into elements included within the image itself. And the center of gravity is no longer the element ‘between shots’—the shock, but the element ‘inside the shot’—the accentuation within the fragment” (Barthes 1985, p. 61). This may seem disconcerting on the part of Eisenstein, recognized as one of the greatest innovators of cinema editing of all time when he puts the isolated shot at the heart of his art. One can also argue here that there is a real continuity between the making of the shots and the editing of them! It is this reflection on the foundations of the meanings of images that Barthes pursues in Camera Lucida [La Chambre claire] by developing the concept of the punctum of a photograph: it is the detail, the partial object that attracts the eye, that points to the looking subject. That is to say, that springs from the image to touch it, like an arrow that reaches the subject-spectator in the most sensitive points of his or her imagination. In this text, in which he looks at several photos (1993), Barthes lists the details that affect him: a wide belt, shoe straps, a necklace, bad teeth, an unexpected body position, certain hands, the texture of a street … so many “sharp,” “pointed” objects and details that become signifiers. The punctum is thus the spectator’s lightening, a kind of lightening of a part of the image which throws itself upon him. Moreover, as Barthes (1993) masterfully puts it, the punctum is “what I add to the photograph and yet is already there.” So to be here, the object-sign, the attribute, the signifier must be placed there, voluntarily or not, consciously or not,

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by the photographer, by the sociologist-photographer, or by the sociologist-­ filmmaker. Our proposal, based on this punctum theory, is to lead sociologists who shoot their images to think about them upstream of the shooting so that they can place and enhance in them the details, the objects, and all the other signifiers necessary for these “extras” to produce a “good” image. In the photograph that follows, Barthes’ theoretical framework works very well for structuring an image analysis. However, the first recommendation remains that of “taking a good deal of time” for such an analysis. Everyone can linger on the reading-understanding of a newspaper or magazine article. However, for widespread societal reasons of urgency, we only skim over a photograph, be it in the same media or even more so in a book of photographs. Because there are too many demands on our time, we do not stop at a single photograph! Extended time is the first ally of the reading-interpretation29 of a photograph—and a fortiori of a film.

 François Cardi (2015) prefers to refer to analytical commentary “in that putting the perception of the image into words imposes a systematic work of observation and an inventory of the elements in the image, a research into the production processes and their technical characteristics, elements of sociological knowledge about the author and the circumstances of its production, and the explanation of the references to sociological theory that guide the analysis.” 29

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Jean-Pierre Durand, London, Porto Bello, 1971

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This photograph shows a message of denotation—a couple of people meeting an older woman (without her looking at them) in a snowy city (London according to the photo caption) with a tag next to a road sign. This first-level message is not very rich in itself; we will come back to how it works and its role in the perception of the image. The linguistic message is clear but means nothing beyond its presence, which tends to situate the image historically in a period of social revolt—the 1970s, as the legend indicates. However, we are already in the connotation. This same linguistic message in large letters refers to the two main characters and confirms their relationship. Barthes (1985) points this out when he says that the linguistic message contained in the Panzani advertisement “fixes the floating chain of signifiers [by answering] in a more or less direct, more or less partial way to the question: what is it? … the text directs the reader between the signifiers of the image, making him avoid some and receive others. Through often subtle dispatching, it teleguides him towards a pre-selected meaning.” The point here is to make the relationship between the couple (dressed in a certain way, see the photo of London above) and the slogan to situate a historical moment in the West. Connotation messages are those that use cultural codes to “read” the photograph, leading Barthes to point out that due to the differences in cultural codes, viewers could have different interpretations of the signifiers or connotations in the images, which we have also called attributes in the previous pages—or even not be able to “read” them at all. Here, the man’s clothes (“bell bottom” trousers and black pea coat) and above all, the tousled hair are evidence of someone who is protesting the social order with echoes of “URBAN GUERILLA.” The couple will cross the path of a woman dressed in old-fashioned clothes, with a long coat and a scarf covering her head, carrying a basket to go shopping without exchanging any glances. The scene connotes the “conflict” of generations and cultures that marked the decade. It is winter. Snow and bundled up characters express the season and London’s freezing cold. They are walking fast, and the movement of the young man’s legs (the only blur in the image) attests to the couple’s haste to get out of the cold as quickly as possible. Thus, it is the cold that animates the photograph and gives it its movement. The dilapidated wall’s poor state contrasts with the colonnades and the arch to show the district’s decay, or, more generally, the past of the capital of an Empire. We are indeed in the London of the 1970s, a crisis period for the city before its significant financial rebound. We can also read this past in the crest on the bumper of the car: a D in very traditional English writing. All these elements connote (the clothes and the looks, the state of the walls) a historical ­period.

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There may also be a connotative and perhaps more interpretative reading of the language messages30: the public road sign indicates a “play street,” i.e., a street reserved for children’s games between 6 am and 10 pm. So we should question this juxtaposition of the two linguistic messages, “URBAN GUERILLA” and “play street,” from a historical perspective. The slogan brings two languages closer together, testimony to an internationalization of the political struggles of the time, which also takes the form of the importation into old urbanized Europe of the military practices of the South American peasantry. Does the tension between urban guerrilla warfare and games (not in a sense here of a playful game, but of social adjustments) testify to this capacity of youth, at a given moment in history, to distance itself from its own society in order to contest its orientations? Thus, the connotation messages appear to be the most important in understanding and interpreting this photograph. However, to follow Barthes, the denotation or literal message, without code, has an essential function here, that of “naturalizing” the connoted messages through the mechanical capture of the photograph or video, a guarantee of objectivity. Again according to Barthes (1985), photography is “an anthropological revolution, because the type of consciousness it implies is truly unprecedented. Photography does not install consciousness of the thing being there (which any copy could provoke), but a consciousness of having been there. It is, therefore, a new category of space-time31: immediate local and anterior temporal. In photography, there is an illogical conjunction between here and the past. It is, therefore, at the level of this denoted message or message without code that we can fully understand the real unreality of photography. Its unreality is that of the here because photography is never experienced as an illusion. It is in no way a presence, and it is necessary to fall back on the magical character of the photographic image. Furthermore, its reality is that of having been there, because in photography there is always astounding evidence of the: it happened like this. We then possess a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered.” Since we refer to films in this book, we should add a fourth type of message to those proposed by Barthes: cinema and video, which add movement to the still image. We use the term cinematic message to capture the effects of movement in the shot, from the camera, and during film editing. Pierre Maillot writes about the “relations of movement” through which the sociologist-filmmaker expresses him-

 This confirms the very irregular nature of the signs constituting the “symbolic,” cultural or connoted message mentioned by Barthes. 31  This converges with our proposal of a photography that contracts time and space in Fig. 4.1, “The Concerns of Documentary Photography.” 30

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self. We should consider these related movements to be signifiers in their own right on which the author must work to express the signifiers he favors in his film. Here we can take up some examples cited in the previous chapters. In Humain trop humain, Louis Malle discarded the shots showing the actual work of the men and women workers because he did not take into account the pace of work and the ­fatigue. He preferred to show their feet which kept moving forward and backward or the frantic rhythm of the machines with workshop noises or fast music. In Femmes de l’ombre, Stéphan Moszkowicz chooses the untimely movement of the camera and “ragged” editing to communicate to the viewer the intensity of the executive secretaries’ work. In our documentary Dreams on the Line, the editor Jean-Pierre Lenoir reduced breathing time and systematically cut the interviews right at the last spoken syllable. Mixed with the rhythm of the workers’ work itself, these sharp cuts made during the editing of the film leave the viewers breathless after a 26-minute film. Through these three examples, the reader can grasp how movements, not limited to those in the image, become obvious signifiers shared by the spectators, even outside of learned codes. It is perhaps part of the force of video to share cinematic messages. It is also necessary to connect the role of sound, itself a form of movement, to all these movements of the image. In summary, we have the possible bases for a theory of interpretation or analytical commentary of moving images. The message of denotation reminds us that the image (on paper or screen) is simply the projection “of space on a flat surface using different values of black, white and grey” (Moholy-Nagy 1969). So the “objectification” of things and people is not objectification. Hence the idea of the real unreality of photography (and cinema) put forward by Roland Barthes. Connotation messages are placed at the heart of the interpretation by the viewer, who more or less shares the cultural codes with the director. It is the signifiers (attributes) installed in the film that justify the creation and viewing, that is to say, the very existence of the sociological documentary, with the exchanges it brings about. Exaggerated attention and an extended period of time are, therefore, the indispensable dimensions of this work of interpretation. Finally, cinematic messages (born of movements and relationships between movements) can also be signifiers of a different nature, reinforcing the previous ones. The next sub-section provides the sociologist-filmmaker with the essential elements to build a system for interpreting images and films in general. This should lead to focusing efforts on the panoply of available signifiers, which can be summoned, or discovered thanks to his tenacity. Without this work of reflection in the organization of the osmosis between visual and rational thought, which involves the mobilization of signifiers in their diversity (images, sounds, and movements), the sociological documentary runs the risk of not achieving the objectives that have been set for it.

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3.2 Documentary Filmmaking as a Process The first operation of synthesizing analytical sociological groundwork, such as the field and sociological theories relating to the object treated, consists of writing a scenario that is as precise as possible. Scenarios and script breakdowns are essential strategic elements before going to the field to film with the entire crew. On the one hand, the scenario presents the overall structure of the documentary in broad chapters. On the other hand, it shows the sociological arguments with their corresponding filmic elements such as locations, actions, and possibly characters. In other words, this scenario, as with any sociological research, can only exist after a long period of sociological investigation completed by immersion in the field and location scouting, preparing the recordings of images and sounds. Listing guidelines, signs, suggestions, and attributes as much as possible will make sense of the images and sounds. Chapter 2 and the 14-point Manifesto present the main stages of this process, with the conditions and pitfalls that accompany them. Let us insist on the collective nature of this process, which relies on a sustainable team, including associating film professionals with sociologists. It is essential to give narration its full place in the construction of the documentary to avoid making a film that resembles a didactic memoir, illustrated by images and sounds rather than composed by them. Social sciences and humanities tend to neglect this dimension.

3.2.1 Scenario and Narration The narrative is a kind of envelope with sociological content, shared with an audience. Regrettably, sociological writings do not pay enough attention to this, too often offering books that are boring or difficult to read. Thus, for viewer enjoyment, the narration or storyline that structures the sociological documentary must keep up the suspense until the end of the film. The viewers can then grasp what is said and sharpen their thinking so they feel like discussing it. Emotion, sensations, and affections are the primary basis of the narrative, which, at the same time, cannot be detached from the reasoned content proposed by the sociologist-director. This is the thesis of Antonio R. Damasio, a neurologist who wants to build bridges between his discipline and the human sciences. He rehabilitates emotions—traditionally referred to as disrupting reasoning—by showing that they always accompany thought, that they are inseparable from it and, even more so, that they are its driving force under certain conditions. “Based on neurological studies of patients suffering from both decision-making defects and emotional disturbances, I put forward the hypothesis, known as somatic markers.

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­ motion is part of the reasoning process and can assist reasoning rather than necesE sarily disrupt it, as had been commonly assumed … Intuition is simply rapid cognition, the required knowledge being partly hidden under the rug, thanks to emotion and much practice. I have clearly never wished to oppose emotion and reason. Rather I see in emotion something that at least assists reasoning, and at best maintains a dialogue with it. Nor have I ever counterposed emotion and cognition, since I consider emotion as delivering cognitive information, either directly or through feelings” (Damasio 1995, pp. II and V). This author, contested by some currents in psychiatry, sheds light on the intertwining of emotions and reasoning. We cannot separate the narrative and its emotions from rationalism and its sociological content. The greatest challenge is building a filmic narrative from the recordings of images and sounds during film production. The documentary filmmaker has much less control over filmic narrative than in the case of fictional films. The principles of narration or storytelling are multiple, stemming from the novel or fictional film (Maillot 1989). Occasionally a voice-over supports or even spells out the narration. The presence of a voice-over expressing the contents rather than suggesting them is part of the overall consideration when structuring the film. Many documentaries follow a fairly classical narrative pattern that experimental writing might lead us to reconsider. However, we thought that we should present the phases that make up the initial script of the film: • an opening accompanying the opening credits and setting the place (environment) and period of the study. This is the “initial situation” in the traditional narrative.32 It is necessary to pay a good deal of attention to this during the film’s editing because it is the “catchphrase” of the film. However, one should not express everything in it so as not to weaken the later tensions; • a primary interrogation or node of sociological questions during which the characters in the documentary can be presented. These questions are expressed in situations or through excerpts of interviews. This moment corresponds to the presentation of the plot or the “disturbing element” in the tradition of storytelling;

 To reassure himself or herself about the sequencing of the script, the apprentice documentary filmmaker can refer to the many books and articles on narrative in literature or film. A distinction can be made here between storytelling, the story that is told, and narration, which is the way the story is told. 32

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• the presentation of each other’s arguments as answers to questions, i.e., as possible viewpoints33 put in tension. This development corresponds to the presentation of “adventures” or actions in a narrative; • Denouement presented as the author’s answer to the questions posed at the beginning of the film, expressing his possible thesis. Fundamentally, what we are trying to promote in the sociological documentary is establishing an argument to engage the viewer’s reflection on the theme under discussion. As we ­discussed above, we distinguish this from the militant documentary primarily based on a viewpoint shared by the viewers. The director-sociologist chooses a perspective and opinions that he elaborates, based on his preliminary investigations and his filming work. This is the final position that the classic narrative defines as a “new state of stability,” but which the sociologist sees as the beginning of a new cycle of questioning, which he transmits to the spectators so that they, in turn, can question themselves! Amos Gitaï, a film director, trained in architecture, said in a lecture at the Collège de France (November 20, 2018) that a film rests on two pillars: one at the beginning of the film and the other at the end—the opening and the denouement— and that diagonals are woven between the two. This account of the sociological documentary narrative remains very theoretical because, when editing the film, the author never has the image and sound elements hoped for when initially preparing

 The concept of the point of view in sociological documentaries is central, because it expresses both the political or ideological position that socially situated characters can take (the viewer can then assume one of the proposed roles) on a concrete social object (a question), and the place where the filmmaker places the camera and the microphone to record a situation or a character (Ricœur 1990; Maillot 2000; Sebag et al. 2018). It remains for the author to establish the concordance of the two. This dual point of view approach obviously relates to the filmmaker’s own point of view, which questions his choices (reflexivity) of characters (and their statements) as well as the positioning of the camera and microphone. Choices that are considered to have something to do with the author’s trajectory and which by their singularity are part of his conscious or unconscious history. The concept of “mémoire cache” [memory screen] invented by Jean-Michel Maulpoix is particularly telling: “Images and words lead an obscure life in us. We think, speak, and write words without knowing anything about how our experience of life and language has shaped or inflected their understanding … As for the images … that rush towards us … we never have a clear idea of the place they occupy … in our mind or our memory” (Maulpoix 2001, p. 169). We can also say with Frederick Wiseman, in his interview in Le Monde of November 17, 1999, that “the documentary must reflect the complexity and ambiguity of things … and that it is the totality of the film that represents my point of view on the subject.” 33

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his project. He must then reinvent a scenario from the material available for his final editing of the film. However, before going into detail about the film’s editing, it is useful to present the script breakdown. This is an indispensable tool for the director, which he puts together before filming to maximize his chances of shooting quality images and sounds that more or less correspond—and therefore do not exactly coincide—with his expectations.

3.2.2 The Script Breakdown The script breakdown script breakdown is a written document that presents a detailed breakdown of the script by sequential steps. It generally takes the form of a double-entry table. The lines indicate the development of the envisaged script, and the columns show the contents listed below, with the projections indispensable to the shot’s success. There is no point in detailing everything since shooting a documentary is made up of many unforeseen events. However, at the very least, the script breakdown should be as follows: • to give meaning to the film, describe the situation, position of the characters (especially if it is an interview), objects, attributes, and signifiers for each scene as previously analyzed at length. Do not forget to describe the environment, for the same reasons; • specify whether it is an internal or external sequence; • think about the light of the scene or on the characters. This is not a question concerning artificial lighting. In many cases, on-site lighting is more difficult to control, particularly with video, which tends to overexpose the darker ­surroundings; • placing the camera and micros: which viewpoints and why? (Maillot 2000); • Consider moving the camera if necessary; • think about the shot value and its changes; • design the camera movements (panning, zooming, tracking); • think about the maintenance system (see, infra, chapter 6): who is in the field, who is out of the field (which voices to use in the final editing of the film); • anticipate the unforeseen: light (be careful of strong backlighting), untimely movement of the characters, noise pollution (planes, outside traffic, air conditioning, heckling in the next room, etc.). The complexity of filming and the diversity of unforeseen events encountered during the actual shooting suggest that identifying locations and sites be undertaken with all the care necessary to have the best possible organization of the script

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breakdown. This also suggests taking advantage of these well-prepared sites to film with a triple objective: • make sure (on a computer screen and not only on the camera monitor) that the results are satisfactory in terms of sound and image quality, that changes in shots, points of view, and camera movements are well thought out. It is a question of using these results to optimize filming in the field; • test the relationship of the characters to the camera and the operator, thus ensuring that there will be no last-minute refusals; • improve and enrich the script breakdown (by removing what appears to be shooting impossibilities and adding alternatives). Why should we make such a lengthy description of the shooting script breakdown since shooting never takes place in ideal conditions? Many overburdened filmmaker-sociologists tend to neglect this stage or even to do away with it. It is crucial for us because, beyond the meticulous preparation of each shooting moment, the long reflections around the script breakdown—with the filmed locations as complements and first experience—will allow us to deal quickly with any mishap during shooting. These tend to replace the professional experience of the reporter, who immediately adapts to any situation to make the shot or the sequence so desired. The script breakdown participates in the filmmaker-sociologist’s real appropriation of the terrain, an appropriation that is essential to the success of ­filming.

3.2.3 Editing and Knowledge Production Editing is a matter of singular experiences. There is no one position or point of view better than another. Pointing out the experiences below is an attempt to capture the diversity of approaches, both in the different filmmaking stages and in singular attempts. Some readers may find this section too pedagogical. For the sociologist-­filmmaker, moving toward documentary cinema also means sharing feedback, including from professionals. In the interview excerpt below, Frederick Wiseman insists that one cannot delegate the editing of a documentary. Such delegation does not prevent one from hiring a professional, as long as one makes sure that the sociologist-filmmaker retains the initiative and control over the content. He stresses the importance of narration or dramatic structure and how central it is to view the rushes is in appropriating the images/sounds and details that make sense in finding this structure of the narrative. In collaboration with a well-chosen professional, film editing allows an external view and a distancing that one may need, in as much as immersion in the

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film always risks leading to a monochrome discourse. Editing a film with a professional creates a common sociologist-filmmaker/editor space in developing cinematographic thought. However, collaborative editing means accepting working in concert with another who follows a different approach where form and rules may prevail over sociological content. The long editing of the film in its public form makes it possible to exchange and adjust the relationship between two different worlds, which is not always smooth: it is a time of co-learning, of reciprocal discoveries that can give the documentary a relief that it would perhaps not have without this external contribution. Adjustments can be made to each person’s narrative approach: how can elegance of purpose that does not question the content be achieved? What place will ellipses and metaphors have in it? How can a relationship with the spectator be created, his interest maintained, telling a story arousing emotion that will not erase reason and questioning? The text below by Frederick Wiseman shows us that various configurations are possible and that they question everyone’s deep desires and pursued objectives. cc

Interview with Frederick Wiseman in Le Monde (November 17, 1999)  “Film editing is the process of understanding the event I filmed. That’s why I do it myself. I don’t understand how it can be entrusted to someone else. I almost always spend a year doing it. I discover the film while I am editing, and usually towards the end. It takes me eight or nine months to start finding the structure. It’s a personal and also intellectual adventure that involves analyzing the sequences. What’s going on? What do I see? Why these words, these gestures? Editing the sequences is totally reasoned but in the sense of dramaturgy. If there is no dramatic structure, it is not a film! The structure brings us closer to fiction, in the sense that events are arbitrated, put in order. An order that I choose. It doesn’t follow the chronology of the shooting at all.”

Removal of useless, irrelevant, or inferior quality elements occurs during the first viewing of the rushes. However, note that one can keep sounds or images of appalling quality if they are essential, considering that they can be edited with other images or sounds. At the same time, extensive notes are taken, unless one has an excellent memory. The subsequent viewing(s) have two objectives: • to have total control of the available materials through extensive note-taking; • to sort, archive, and above all index the contents of images and sounds in the trim bin of the cutting room so they can be quickly located. The methods of

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archiving and indexing are multiple and cannot be described here. They range from a computer classification of sequences and shots (for example, on Excel with “keywords” to designate them in order to find them and not forget them) to classification by sticky notes on large poster sheets, themselves organized by significant themes or chapters (see Sebag and Durand 2019). The interviews merit being transcribed and, in the same way, sorted and classified by themes and sub-themes. The use of sticky notes makes it possible to unify the classification of interviews and image/sound sequences. This is the phase of the production of knowledge specific to filmic sociology. Also, except during the doctoral dissertation, in traditional sociology, one rarely takes the time to transcribe all the interviews and reread them carefully or return to the logbooks with the detailed observations of the situations. Here, to prepare the final film editing, the sociologist-filmmaker not only has to view all recorded shots and be familiar with his interviews to place them wisely in the film, but he also has to have the details to ensure smooth film editing and narration. This production of knowledge takes place at several levels or through a variety of processes: • the in-depth reading or analysis of images and sounds always reveals new elements of reality, in the sense that they were not perceived during the shooting or are inadvertently there. Here we join the vast tradition of the history of visual ethnology. These elements can be used to support the sociological demonstration or become “scientific residues” to be taken seriously later (see, infra, chap. 5). The diversity and richness of recorded material never cease to astonish and stimulate the researcher, and it would be wrong to dismiss it because it is unexpected. On the contrary, he should use it to suggest the complexity of situations without, however, confusing the narration, making explicit the diversity of points of view that will serve to increase the tension between sequences in the narrative; • Beyond the work on the shots’ contents, new ideas and knowledge often emerge from the contents’ classification, which the sociologist-filmmaker operates mentally or does concretely in the trial-and-error phases of editing the shots themselves. Because there is generally more material preserved than just the preparation of the written word, and because trial and error in the film’s editing multiplies the juxtapositions, viewing the rushes and editing the film create new meanings that must be evaluated. • Finally, the relationships between image and sound can contain dissonances that one can interpret as relevant signifiers. This is particularly true in interviews where body expressions may diverge from speech or say more than speech

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i­tself, making it possible to understand vocal expression differently or more profoundly. One could multiply the sources of knowledge that filmic sociology offers, going beyond mere visual observation (Guillou 1988, pp. 14–20). When the sociologist-filmmaker and the editor who might accompany him are wholly absorbed in these materials, they can begin to write the second screenplay, which borrows from the original screenplay, but which takes into account, above all, the concrete material available.34 The latter must invent, in general, a new narrative structure based on the tension of the situations and characters’ words, which, moreover, continue to evolve during the editing of the final script. This is the most demanding—but most entertaining—moment in documentary work, the moment when the sociologist-filmmaker is the most involved in discussions when the editing of the film is undertaken jointly with a professional. Through trial and error, he or she must reconcile the film’s contents, the narration to maintain the viewer’s attention, the esthetic qualities of the whole, and avoid any break or error that would interrupt the film’s rhythm. The process of documentary filmmaking and production-reception of knowledge can be summarized in the diagram below (Fig. 4.3): In the first phase, the sociologist perceives a reality with his senses and experience and appropriates it through fieldwork. Then, armed with the conceptual and theoretical apparatus of the discipline (or more generally of the human and social sciences), he constructs a “scientific” representation of reality. Up to this point, he shares the approach of traditional sociology. In phase 3, he writes the scenario and prepares its script breakdown (reflection on attributes and signifiers, and interview guides if necessary). He returns to scouting in the field to refine the scenario and the sequence. He uses a camera to test what is possible and to choose the best points of view. He can then shoot his images and sounds (phase 4) with as much precision as possible (framing, lights, sounds, camera movements) to avoid ending up with dozens of hours of rushes. He then views and logs the rushes (archiving and indexing the sequences or shots selected for editing) and writes the second scenario (phase 5) from the materials available. It is here that the film’s final narra-

 This question had already been pointed out by Pierre Naville, confronted with the difficulty of writing his film project on automation. He wrote to T. Grjebine, a member of the Association pour le Film Social et Économique and co-scriptwriter of the film: “It would be better to look for a multi-faceted formula with more or less unforeseen developments, depending on the course of the investigation” (letter dated June 25, 1956, Musée d’Histoire Sociale de Paris). 34

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background of the documentary sociologist sensory perception, construction of the objet, field work…

1

conceptual apparatus

2

process of construction of the representation of reality: shooting sketches (paper)

writing initial scenario and shooting script derushing and rewriting with new materials

location scouting, shooting draft, character selection

3

4 shooting: framing, light, vision point, camera mouvements

5

reality

EDITING

documentary on screen

reception by the spectator spectator’s background

Fig. 4.3  Developing a sociological documentary. (Source: Authors)

tive structure is built, with the possible collaboration of a professional editor. The final editing requires a tension between the film’s components, with the optimal contribution of sociological knowledge in an attractive form for the spectators.

3.3 Between the Imagined and the Realized Film: The Imperfect of the Sociological Documentary Thus, editing, the ultimate step in the narrative of filmic sociology, constitutes a moment of truth with all the questions it raises. It is the moment of confrontation with the shots and sound recordings, the initial interrogations, and the original intentions. The sociologist-director confronts his images. They are the only ones that will or will not allow him to make the film he has imagined. It is also the moment of choices: sometimes, it is necessary to give up parts of a film that one firmly holds on to but no longer fit in with the general purpose.

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Can the sociological documentary then only be conjugated in the imperfect tense? In any case, it is the conjugation of both senses of the imperfect. It is at the same time what is past and what is not perfect: • Editing is inherently imperfect because it relies on unpredictability during shooting. Indeed, it is sometimes necessary to abandon situations that were considered essential during location scouting at the time of shooting, either because they are no longer active or because the characters have become disinterested. One must then submit to the principle of the reality of the images, their materiality, and deal with regrets, disappointments and frustrations. Missed opportunities are also those that allow us to be more sensitive to the new chances they offer because the mind is then stretched toward the objectives initially set. The ups and downs of filming make editing a particular moment. It is the “center of gravity” on which the balance of the sociological documentary will depend. It is the privileged moment of its construction, the geometrical locus of the many questions raised by this chapter. • It is a work of creation. Perfection makes no sense here. The trial and error to order the images stops at the moment when the feeling of having come as close as possible to what one wanted to say seems to have been achieved. At the same time, the association of images and sounds constructs meanings that may be unexpected. Editing is the back and forth between these two dimensions of the imperfect. It moves the sociologist-filmmaker forward among multiple solutions. And it is the one that will appear satisfactory in the structuring of space and time, if not perfect, that will be chosen. For as Stefan Kristensen (2010) writes, “montage as the temporal structure of images also appears as an essential moment in the institution of sensorial reversibility at the same time as a sharing of sensibility,” this sensibility that completes the traditional approach of sociologists.

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What motivation inspires sociologists who use documentary cinema? At its origin is a remark made during a field study by a trade unionist, a skilled worker. He described the repeated suppression of their expression. Such expression existed, of course, in moments of resistance such as strikes, demonstrations, or elections, but remained without much effect. Raising questions about the researcher’s role, he also observed that the interviews collected by the researcher would serve his career since they would translate into “scientific work.” However, they, the workers, would not see any change in their professional careers. He agreed, along with his co-workers, in letting the researchers enter the workshop “clandestinely.” He did this in a way that was sufficiently conspicuous for the supervisor to spot them, despite the borrowed coveralls. Given the union’s strength and a “balance of force” favoring skilled workers, the supervisor remained silent. Therefore, bringing researchers into the workshop was a sign of their ability to impose something on management and its hierarchy. This went hand in hand with the organization of life in the workshop when, at lunch break, they set up what looked like a buffet to share pastis [an anise-based apéritif] and sandwiches in the middle of the assembly line. This was an act of which they were very proud since it was a mark of resistance to the supervisor. However, researchers never referred to this in their publications, having internalized the idea that this ban should not be made known outside of the factory and that talking about it could harm those workers who had invited them. The advent of lean production aimed at bringing workers’ factory life back into line. One of the first acts by what workers called the new management was the ban on alcohol in the shop. The midday apéritif was part of the logic of symbolic victories, such as installing benches at the edge of the production line. These made it possible for © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Sebag, J.-P. Durand, Filmic Sociology, Social Visualities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33696-6_5

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workers to meet and discuss during line breakdowns, which they saw as a kind of humanization of the workspace. For example, this activist explained that these benches even made it possible for them to talk about the “corns on their feet,” an act of recognizing themselves as persons and not as machines. Therefore, filmic sociology’s wager is to restore a deleted expression by showing or suggesting what a book or article cannot report. Writing and conceptualization are part of the knowledge of a milieu. Filming this environment and these men and women does not always make them more visible but makes a world of work that industrialization had closed to the outside world visible in a different way. Fiction has dealt with this problem and continues to do so through many films. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) remains emblematic of the separation of these two worlds.1 However, fiction must work by recreating or occupying places formerly dedicated to production and now abandoned (see, for example, Laurent Cantet’s Ressources Humaines, 2000). Without disowning itself, how can sociology, based on its traditions and standards, account for reality through images and sounds, whose intrinsic relationship with sensitivity and emotions we have previously established? What can cinema or video reveal about sociology and particularly about sociology as a research discipline? These are the points and questions that will guide this chapter. (1) We will analyze the relationships between filmic sociology and interactionism, (2) we will then borrow from Norbert Elias to grasp how the sociologist-filmmaker places himself between engagement and detachment, giving full importance to the point of view, (3) finally, we will examine the future in filmic sociology of what is known as “scientific residue,” before concluding with pocket films and the use of smartphones.

 See the fascination that the invisible has had on researchers as well as filmmakers. Cineasts have also singled out beauty, as demonstrated in this excerpt from an interview with Michelangelo Antonioni by Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du cinéma n°160 (November 1964): “Before, it was the relationships between characters that interested me. Here, the central character is also confronted with the social environment, which means that I treat my story in a completely different way. It is too simplistic to say, as many have done, that I accuse this industrialized, inhuman world, where the individual is crushed and led to neurosis. My intention, on the contrary … has been to translate the beauty of this world, where even factories can be very beautiful … The line, the curves of the factories and their chimneys are perhaps more beautiful than a line of trees, which the eye has already seen too often. It is a rich, living, useful world.” 1

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1 Filmic Sociology and Interactionism Unlike opera or theater, cinema continuously stages at least two characters in interaction. This interaction allows us to grasp a situation or an idea and produces knowledge through the development of individual consciousness, including the maintenance of dramatic tension. What filmic sociology shows directly in images and sound or through the presentation of a situation is a series of interactions that produce thought and knowledge. In other words, the primary object that film sociology puts into images and sounds is a set of interactions that make sense for the director and the viewers. Thus, there is a kind of concordance (homothétie), at least formally, between filmic sociology and the founding paradigms of the current of symbolic interactionism (or even ethnomethodology).

1.1 American Interactionism This current, which emerged in the United States between the two world wars, has its foundation in a number of underlying principles also constitutive of filmic sociology studies. We can summarize the basic principles of interactionism as follows: • the importance of fieldwork; • in situ observation of small groups and communities, e.g., a city or neighborhood, or a specific type of deviant; • the observation of daily interactions, each person acting in response to the others based on the meaning he gives to his action in a general context, sharing meanings so that activities are regulated; • a degree of complicity between the sociologist-observer and the interacting subjects; • any interaction initiates a dramatic game where each person develops one or more roles in a limited and controlled space. In filmic sociology, the director observes interactions and films them in situ. However, he often intervenes—even if he is physically absent from the image and soundtrack—by posing questions to the filmed subjects.

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1.2 An Increased Concordance Here the formal concordance with the current of symbolic interactionism stops. However, the latter’s principles persist by introducing another type of interaction. This is the relationship between filmed subjects and sociologists who question them on the significance of their acts and representations of their environment or the world in general. The primary interaction is no longer only within the film. It is between the filmmaker and the filmed, preserving the essence of the constitutive context of interactionism: small communities (very often deviant), priority given to fieldwork, complicity with the subjects interviewed (see the following chapter for a critique of this), and the sociologist’s dramatic attempt to push the interviewed subject to the limit in defense of his positions in order to make him expose his representations and the values underlying his actions. These are all borrowings from Weber’s comprehensive sociology, from interactionism, and from ethnomethodology. In short, sociologist-filmmakers privilege the relationship with subjects rather than the interaction between individuals, as does interactionism but unlike fictional cinema, bringing out an idea and producing knowledge. One could speak of reinforced concordance since, beyond their interest in the mere interaction between two people that must be objectified, sociologist-filmmakers must privilege their interaction with the subject to achieve the quality expected while shooting films and beyond. This does not mean that textual sociology does not have to self-­analyze its relationship to the research’s interaction-object. However, it does not have to concern itself with its staging, or more precisely with its image and sound production. This reflexivity and anticipatory work intensifies and deepens the vivid interaction between the sociologist and his subject, an interaction, a scene, or an interview. This moment of reflexivity on the filmmaker/filmed relationship is even more important as the camera instrument transforms this relationship: • initially, the sociologist may have a concern that the camera will induce a refusal to continue his or her relationship with the people filmed; • in other situations, on the contrary, the camera appears to enhance the value of the individuals filmed and favors the relationship with them, leading to an acceptance of being filmed; • in all cases, one must measure the extent to which the presence of the camera implies, at least at the beginning of shooting, changes in behavior and

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­declarations2: some subjects overplay a role they think corresponds to their situation or the filmmaker’s expectations, while others shut themselves off. However, the camera generally increases tenfold the filmmaker/filmed relationship’s quality if the preparatory work has been well done3 and the filmed subject has received a guarantee of the rendition4 Here, the camera’s potential is much greater than that of a traditional interview, even a well-conducted one, because the sanctioned presence of a material instrument objectifies and strengthens the relationship between the sociologist-filmmaker and the characters. Thus, the camera functions as an instrument of mediation, building a reciprocal recognition of the treated object’s validity. This is the condition for developing a coproduction of knowledge, since the filmed interview’s questioning, as much as listening to the answer, establishes a quality of expression. It is a question of generating little-­known knowledge or bringing out its invisible parts. However, going beyond observing interactions alone, filmic sociology also concerns social structures, how interactions influence them, and the factors that explain behavior and values. Reductive interpretations have led to the conception of interactionism as a current turned toward interpersonal relations. However, its founders, particularly Erving Goffman, were keen to consider such relations in a structuring social framework. Some sociologists who claim to be part of this current, particularly in France, may have underestimated this. Thus, we can say that interactionism and ethnomethodology show their limits when they claim that the analysis of interactions and personal experience suffices to know social structures. For here, as Robert Weil writes, “the social structure that generates social order already resides in the meaning of the interactions that individuals master.”5 In other  Here we find the profilmic dimension of documentary as defined by Claudine de France about the changes in subjects’ behavior in front of the camera (see, supra, chapter 2). 3  This preparation is a delicate moment, because it is necessary to explain the project with its ins and outs in order to convince the prospective characters to participate in the film, without saying too much so as not to induce “adapted” behavior and statements, i.e., corresponding to what they think it is good to say or do or corresponding to the supposed expectations of the sociologist-filmmaker. 4  The “rendition” is the moment when filmmakers show their films to the subjects who are present in their film (or who have authorized them to make the film) so that there are no misunderstandings or misinterpretations. If there are disagreements, the sociologist-­ filmmaker must take them into account, as much as possible, in the final version of the film. 5  For a critique of this sociological current, see chapter 10 of J.-P. Durand and R. Weil, Sociologie contemporaine, Paris, Éditions Vigot, 2006, which includes a detailed analysis with references to authors discussing interactionism and ethnomethodology, such as Alain Coulon, Michel Crozier, Lewis Coser, Pierre Bourdieu, etc. 2

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words, this profoundly empirical conception crumbles social structures into microstructures (interactions) by privileging an endogenous production of meaning, without thinking about the nature of the relationships between these structures. While filmic sociology can borrow the wealth of reflections on interactions— particularly in the filmmaker/filmed relationship—from these currents, it must also enrich them and deal with themes and objects beyond the concerns of microsociology. This is a way of questioning the sociologist-filmmaker’s relationship to the world or his relationship to his object.

2 Detachment and Involvement of the Documentary Sociologist Before getting to the heart of the matter, we should return to an observation made as teacher-researchers in the Image et Société Master’s program. Distancing oneself from the treated object is even more central as the students’ first films directly relate to their social and family trajectory. This is already more or less true when choosing a subject for a written thesis, but the investment is even more emotional when it comes to making a 15-minute film at the end of one’s studies. Although we discourage family portraits, the closeness of the proposed films to the student’s recent past requires an enormous effort of detachment, which does not negate the need for an equally profound involvement. The work also involves constructing an analysis of social relations that privileges the form of the narrative and valorizes one or more characters with a universal dimension, as in good novels or fiction films, for example. One of the preliminary reflections concerns the role of the “I” in research and then in the narrative. Although this question is already present in written text, the audio-visual media has probably illuminated it in a more critical and obvious way than when it existed only in a latent state: • The “I” is in the observation, that is to say, engaged in the “I”s relation to the object. The question of the point of view, of the perspective, in the treatment of the object, is thus primordial, defining the camera position and the microphone. Then come the choices of framing, camera movement, light, and depth of field in constructing the meaning “I” gives to the script. Hence the need to include education in image analysis in filmic sociology so that sociologist-filmmakers can create images and sounds that think or help to think. • The “I” is also in the “object” observed as in Maurits C Escher’s Drawing Hands (1948): that is to say that the “I” filming is not only external to the object,

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but that the “I,” which is drawing in Escher’s work, looks at and thinks about the object, including itself in order to understand it. Alternatively, the mere presence of the “I” modifies the object itself. A game is played between the observer and the observed, in the sense that the observed reacts and observes the observer in turn, including to manipulate him in extreme cases and make him publish what he wishes and does not necessarily think. The question of the observer/ observed relationship runs through all sociological fieldwork. However, the use of the camera, whose power of communication rightly or wrongly appears more significant than that of the written word, amplifies this game. Hence the importance of extended time in filmic sociology so that the sociologist can master this social game as much as possible. • It is indeed a social game that has to do with each person’s identity—both that of the observer and the observed—and with their trajectory. The “I” of each person is at the heart of the image and sound question of filmic sociology. • In this social game, certain risks, such as compassion, appear for the documentary sociologist. These can victimize the persons being filmed, which they generally do not want since it demeans them and may cause them to lose their self-esteem. Or they can lead to the adoption of an unequivocal approach that does not consider the complexity of the situation and characters.

Maurits C. Escher, Hands Drawing, 1948

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Cinema and photography likely introduce more “I” into sociology than has been done for a long time through written text. The “I” in the “scientific” subject contextualizes it and refers to its source. It is an “affirmation saying, I am there,” as Luce Irigaray points out (1985). She adds: “The scientific discourse aims at being neutral, a replication without affecting reality. This science is not without naivety, especially when it aims to be a science of the subject, psychology, sociology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and irreversible, universal reason. It aims to be non-invasively subjective.” This introduction of effect is at least in part what is at stake today in this interaction between filmmaker and filmed, which is also a stake in the wager of filmic sociology. The latter confirms the rupture of sociology with its past positivist positions, a rupture made by introducing the “I” into the analysis object. Here, by resorting, for example, to emotion, inseparable from cinematographic expression, filmic sociology reaffirms the place of the “I” in the discipline. Hence, there is a need to return to detachment and involvement questions, situating the “I” in the process.

2.1 Does Detachment Contradict Involvement? Like any researcher in the social sciences and humanities, sociologists cannot dismiss the question of their place in their society whether they are studying this society or analyzing another one. In France, the question of political—and, one might say, societal—engagement has been that of the status and place of the intellectual in society since the famous J’accuse d’Émile Zola in 1898. Like any other individual, the intellectual is socially situated and his approach, his point of view, has to do with the social norms of the group to which he belongs. However, the intellectual who emerges as a social figure with the “Dreyfus affair” reveals himself, including to himself, while being constrained, in the words of Maurice Blanchot (1996, p. 23), to “a simple demand, a demand for truth and justice, a demand of the free spirit against fanatical vehemence, a demand from which [he draws] a new authority and sometimes a moral benefit.” Thus, the intellectual finds himself at the center of the defense of these ideals of justice that are given as universal. This role, which has characterized him for more than a century, has itself been questioned. Quoted by Maurice Blanchot (p. 59), Michel Foucault questions the role of the intellectual with destructive attacks: “For a long time, the so-called ‘left-wing’ intellectual has spoken out and been recognized as having the right to speak as a master of truth and justice. He was listened to, or claimed to be listened to, as a representative of the universal. To be intellectual was to be a bit of everyone’s conscience.” But the figure of the intellectual is

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not only left-wing, and Alice Kaplan (2014), in her work on the trial of Robert Brasillach, recalls the involvement to the extreme right of many French intellectuals and questions their responsibility during the occupation and the justification of Nazism, which they helped have accepted as an acceptable or defendable ideology. As the title of Blanchot’s work emphasizes, the intellectual discussed and challenged today is the man or woman who, because of his or her position, addresses statements to many people that will serve as an already thought-out package for those who are supposedly unable to construct a point of view with discernment. And here again, Blanchot (1996, p. 60) interprets May 1968 as the moment when, “in the full force of the anti-authoritarian movement … everyone saw themselves in the anonymous words on the walls. Even if these slogans had been elaborated in common, they were never announced as having been written by a particular author. They were of all and for all in their contradictory formulations. But, of course, this was an exception. It does not provide any solution even if it indicates what an upheaval can be that does not need to be victorious or to reach a pre-defined goal … and whose ultimate failure is irrelevant.” Thus, as Agnès Pégorier evokes in her homage to Blanchot,6 “the Blanchotian project appears as much aesthetic as ethical, or even political. However, less naïve than the Surrealists, he does not believe that poetry or words can change the world. However (again), even more of a poet than a revolutionary, he believes in the challenging power of the Word. However (once again), less aesthete than many intellectuals, he unceasingly questions the limits, contradictions, and ethical values inherent in speech. However, always less dogmatic than many of his contemporaries, he does not seek to resolve these questions through some ‘ideological’ detour in its practice.” All these questions necessarily cross the mind of the sociologist-­ filmmaker whose function is to produce and disseminate knowledge and ideas to a more or less broad audience.

2.1.1 From Bertold Brecht to Norbert Elias: Detachment and Involvement For Bertold Brecht, detachment is a form of involvement. Emotion and identification inhibit thought, whether in the theater or elsewhere. Yet in an author’s argument there is always a desire to get across ideas, and perhaps also to re-produce a relationship of domination (see also Castoriadis, 1975, on the institutionalization of domination in the “social historical” world [le social historique]).7 For Brecht,  http://www.alalettre.com/blanchot.php.  “Le social historique” is a concept of Castoriadis which considers society as the result of a history of social contradictions. See: The Imaginary Institution of Society: Creativity and Autonomy in the Social-historical World [1987]. 6 7

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detachment makes it possible to make our relationship to the world conscious. Through the diffusion of certain images, the media, and more particularly the television news with their “subjects” treated in 2–3 minutes, create emotions and focus on them rather than on their meaning, even abandoning the political sense of the images. This is what Bertold Brecht understood when he proposed a theatrical approach based on detachment. This implied: • that spectators are not passive objects in front of what is proposed to them, that they do not lose all critical thinking with the emotion born of their fusion with the performance; • but also that he maintain a critical outlook at all times. In his theater, Brecht seeks to reduce emotion, returning the spectator to his state of a thinking spectator, without dissolving his intelligence in the emotions to which compassion can lead in the face of on-stage events, leading the individual to lose his capacity for analysis and judgment. Yet political propaganda works on this loss of capacity for judgment, in particular through images, by playing on emotion, on identification with ideals, with a nation, with a people that could only be one unified entity (Gourevitch 1998). Here, detachment is a matter of reflection and taking a step back from the immediacy of the image. That is to say, an intellectual work that generally cannot be accomplished alone and which paradoxically requires adherence to other ideals, and other values, which in turn are based on an ideology. For Norbert Elias (1987), social life is a continuum between two poles, detachment and involvement, which according to him are pathological extremes. On the one hand, there is total social withdrawal—an acceptance somewhat different from detachment since he speaks of withdrawal—and, on the other hand, total involvement. According to him, modes of detachment and involvement include individuals in their social group. They are attitudes based on the social norms of the group to which the individual belongs. While detachment and engagement constitute two poles, they should not be conceived as absolutes, but rather as a space in which individuals move between these two boundaries. “As tools of thinking, therefore, ‘involvement’ and ‘detachment’ would remain highly ineffectual if they were understood to adumbrate a sharp division between two independent sets of phenomena. They do not refer to two separate classes of objects; used as universals they are, at best, marginal concepts. In the main, what we observe are people and people’s manifestations—such as patterns of speech or of thought—and of other ac-

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tivities, some of which bear the stamp of higher, other of lesser detachment or ­involvement. It is the continuum that lies between these marginal poles that presents the principal problem” (Elias 1987 p. 4). Norbert Elias endeavors to describe this continuum with its historical variations and corresponding class affiliations. Thus, the relationship to emotions is characteristic of a given society, a given era, and a given group. Romanticism cultivated and constructed an emotional vision of the world and its sentiments. From the Age of Enlightenment, we have kept the modes of rationalization of the social world. Some populations will show more detachment than others in particular situations such as sterility, the passage to adult status, or marriage according to the norms that govern their society. For Norbert Elias, detachment increases with the growth of knowledge. With the development of science, the approach to nature becomes less fusional, although it does not exclude affective reactions and emotion. Another way of questioning the relationship between detachment and involvement is to consider that this continuum between the two poles is penetrated by the tension between them and that each researcher himself oscillates between them. One could even add that they constitute a single unit within which each of us is struggling. These opposites inhabit each one of us, and we need to live and resolve this tension permanently. It is only through the effort of reflexivity, analyzed by Pierre Bourdieu, in the conduct of research and in the relationship of the researcher to his or her object that this tension, which gives life to the continuum described by Norbert Elias, arises and is resolved—always provisionally.

2.1.2 Pierre Bourdieu and Critical Reflexivity For Pierre Bourdieu, individual practices are class practices. Relations between individuals and classes are the basis of social phenomena. Positioning strategies in relation to situations of domination in this or that field include attitudes and actions. Society is thus a multidimensional space within which social groups and individuals position themselves. The social space is a stake in struggles to legitimize taking a position. It is a stake in power. This social space is fragmented into multiple interacting fields, be they cultural, economic, educational, social, symbolic, etc. These places represent stakes, power relations, and struggles between the dominated and the dominant. The social distance between agents (or rather between social agents, a concept preferred by Pierre Bourdieu to that of the individual, the actor, or the subject) is in this dominant/dominated relationship. Sociology is thus “a combat sport” because sociologists necessarily position themselves in these relationships of domination—of institutions, of other sociological currents, or of economic forces. Even if sociologists are a bit attentive to their intellectual status,

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sooner or later they take a step back and adopt a reflexive view of their writings and of this positioning in order to justify it. This is what is at stake in Science and Reflexivity (2004) in which Pierre Bourdieu develops the concept of critical reflexivity to conclude: “I am caught up and comprehended in the world that I take as my object. I cannot take up a position, as a scientist, on the struggles over the truth of the social world without knowing that I am doing so, that the only truth is that truth is a stake in struggles as much within the scientific world (the sociological field) as in the social world that this scientific world takes as its object and with respect to which its struggles over truth are engaged. In saying that, and in recommending the practice of reflexivity, I am also aware of handing over to others instruments which they can turn against me to subject me to objectivation—but in so doing, they show that I am right” (2004, p. 115). Adopting another approach, Paul Ricœur criticized the evidence that invades our minds, even when proclaimed to be scientific. For example, he stressed “that in history events get their properly historical status from having been initially included in an official chronicle, eyewitness testimony, or a narrative based on personal memories. The specificity of this first level of discourse is completely ignored in favor of a direct relationship between an individual event and the assertion of a universal hypothesis, therefore of some form of regularity” (Ricœur 1990, p. 111). Paul Ricoeur casts doubts on the selection of characteristics that make an event become a social fact. He thus emphasizes what has been largely ignored by the positivist current in the human sciences, and which became central to the approach of the École des Annales: the importance of the choice of theme and perspective. For Ricoeur, this has been established by Marxism, but only in the form of the causal social relation that affirms that the dominant ideas are those of the dominant class, a form expressing the primacy of the social group taken as the social subject. Thus, paradoxically, what established this current as the dominant intellectual model, namely the place of the workers’ movement in most Western societies, has been ignored. The intellectual left’s historical interest in the working class confronts us in a period when the working population no longer enjoys the same prestige and when the themes that directly address it are being abandoned in favor of issues centered on gender, minorities, and questions of identity. These theories, which underlie the approach proposed by filmic sociology, guide and construct the gaze of sociologist-filmmakers. This explains why militant cinema, which by definition rejects any process of detachment by advocating total involvement to a cause, tends to lose its social and even its political effectiveness. The militant film is based on a double conviction: the first is that the position or

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point of view adopted is the only possible one, and the second is that viewers are misinformed. Thus the activist film generally presents only one point of view and rejects the debate with other opinions and points of view that is internal to the documentary. In a way, this singularity of the film presenting only one opinion weakens the point of view adopted, because only controversy gives the film a certain relief. This will favor a narration allowing the viewer—always active and perceptive—to construct a position that will be all the more firmly rooted he is the actor, in order to make him the citizen of a democratic state. It is the confrontation with the alter that makes one think and produces personal and socialized knowledge. Without the presence of argument, the opponents of the univocal thesis will have the advantage of denigrating the militant film, which, in this way, turns its cheek. What’s more, the militant film tends to weaken the dominated even further by victimizing them. Compassion has only led to charity and almsgiving, which of course is not the goal of the militant film. But it does lead to this paradox, because it also works to the involuntary and often unconscious domination of the filmmakers over the filmed. The technical equipment and associated knowledge are not the only factors that mark this distance. Above all, there is the desire to present the dominated and have them speak, which produces another type of relationship of domination by contributing to victimizing and inferiorizing them. Once again, compassion becomes “counterproductive.” This is why, in our opinion, the internal debate within the documentary is vital and much more convincing because, by presenting the points of view of the alter, it leads the “me” to build myself. Using Norbert Elias’ detachment/involvement polarization, we could make a parallel critique of documentaries that could be called an-axiological or anomic and flat, on the side of total detachment or complete disengagement. For example, such documentaries might present disorganized opinions without hierarchies leading to novel forms of absolute relativism, the enemy of knowledge and action. This is the subtlety inherent in the tension and dialectic between detachment and involvement to advance knowledge in order to reveal relations of domination and exploitation and push for change in the social order. This includes the question of who is as an author-director, and of where and when one expresses oneself: in other words, the critical reflexivity that Pierre Bourdieu proposed, which cannot be separated from the question of the author’s point of view.

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2.2 The Viewpoint, Geometrical Point of the Documentary In his “Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France,” Pierre Bourdieu goes a step further when he attempts to found sociology as a science (1990) by posing the question of the objectification of the facts analyzed and their limits. The interest of the approach is to start with the viewpoint in order to convoke the social and collective dimension of scientific production through the diversity of points of view— without, of course, falling into relativism, which he condemns just as much as absolute knowledge: “Whatever his scientific pretensions may be, objectification is doomed to remain partial, and thus false, for as long as it ignores or refuses to see the viewpoint from which it is stated, and thus view the game as a whole. To construct the game as such, that is, as a space of objective positions which is one of the sources, inter alia, of the vision that the holders of each position may have of the other positions and their holders, is to give oneself the means of scientifically objectifying the set of more or less brutally reductive objectifications which agents involved in the struggle indulge in, and of seeing them for what they are, symbolic strategies which aim at imposing the partial truth of a group as the truth of the objective relations between groups. It is to discover in addition that by leaving out the very game that constitutes them as competitors, adversaries become accomplices, agreeing to keep concealed the essential thing, that is, the interests attached to the fact of participating in the game and the objective collusion which results therefrom” (Bourdieu 1990, p. 184). If the opponents have strategies in the scientific field, they also have them as characters in documentaries, strategies and interests linked to their own trajectory that they will try to assert in and through the film. This brings us from the question of the characters’ points of view to that of the sociologist-filmmaker’s (Sebag et al. 2018, p. 9 ff.).

2.2.1 Viewpoint Polysemia A viewpoint can be looked at in different ways: • It can be a location, the place, or the point where you should be to have the best view of an object or a scene: an expression of this privileged place is the “photo point” of the American national parks which advise tourists on the choice of the place where you enjoy the most picturesque view, • It can be the particular way of representing a situation or answering a question; it can be an immediate and ill-considered representation (an opinion) or a scientific construction.

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From the scientific point of view, the combination of these approaches leads to conceiving of the observer’s viewpoint—according to his social, emotional, or reasoned trajectory—as a particular angle or perspective of a representation of a social object, situation, group, or of individuals. The latter also have their point of view of the situation, their neighbors, themselves and of the observer. In other words, each point of view, including that of the observer, is structurally and socially linked to other points of view. The observer must develop a critical reflexive approach as recommended by Pierre Bourdieu, i.e., have a clear awareness of these interactions, of the stakes and struggles in the field observed and analyzed. For the sociologist-filmmaker, the second question to address is that of the location of the camera and microphone in accordance with his or her viewpoint as a sociologist. This includes anticipating camera or zoom movements, light, character movements and all the technical details: Is it too dark or too bright? What should be the field depth? The sociologist-filmmaker’s questions regarding his social object are multiple. Without being exhaustive, here are a few examples: • The distance between the camera and character or camera and situation is also a social distance, a question of class, of belonging to a social group. How to find the right physical distance? • Prejudices and distance of the camera from the subject: how to combine the personal feelings of the author and the sociological point of view? What are the cinematic solutions? • Does the camera create distance or proximity? • The high-angle shot is significant: it asserts the dominance of the operator over his subject. The low-angle shot situates the subject as dominant. What is the balance of these signifiers? Or can one choose to escape them? • Acceptance of the existing order legitimizes domination. How can the relations of domination and resistance be expressed while taking into account the singularity of each culture? • Does the use of pronouns such as the use of “I” by the subject or by the director exclude taking the point of view into account? • Is it necessary to objectify what is being said by moving the camera back and shooting wider? Or should we, on the contrary, “enter” the character through close-ups? According to Joël Magny (2001, p. 17), “the filmmaker not only places his camera at the best viewpoint, but places it where he will transmit his vision, and his point of view. Certainly, this is in the physical sense, but extends to the psychological, and then to the moral and ideological sense.” The sociologist-filmmaker

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must constantly ask himself: What does the image bring to my work as a sociologist? What expectations can I have in relation to the image? Is it quite certain that what I say through this filmed image and narration is not simply “capturing reality” but the construction of a viewpoint? This leads the sociologist to greater modesty as compared to an approach that would be “scientific” in the positivist sense of the term. Sociology’s ambition is revealing what is hidden or what is masked by appearances. Filmic sociology’s ambition is to break with taboos. The two fields build public-private relations in different ways. They build on ever-shifting domains. This also means that there is no single right way to film or to edit the documentary, but only ways or solutions that are more or less relevant than others, arrangements and recompositions of a multiplicity of factors, and combinations whose effectiveness grows with professional experience.

2.2.2 Point of View and off-Camera The choice of the shot type is necessarily linked to placing the camera8—and vice versa. The choice of shot includes or excludes numerous objects surrounding the scene or the main character. This question of the presence or absence of significant objects in the field must be addressed as soon as the script and the script breakdown are written—or at least very well thought-out immediately before shooting. Because, while the sound camera always seems to be a good recording tool, the operator risks forgetting that he is the sole master of the captured content. Too many significant attributes can “kill” the film’s subject matter. But the lack of contextualization of a scene or a dialogue makes the essential character disappear. The selection of the signifiers in each shot—and the choice of the type of shot itself— are at the heart of the sociologist-operator’s work (Durand 2001, p. 36 et seq.). The field’s contents, as well as its absences, refer back to the off-camera, which is a kind of second nature of general cinema. Field selection leads the spectator to question the surroundings. Hence the interest in providing clues through certain previous shots. The mystery of the off-camera, that is, what is momentarily absent from the viewer’s gaze, is a powerful instrument, precisely because it is enigmatic by nature. It arouses the viewer’s curiosity and can be used to express what can only be suggested, or to show what is so central that it is more effective to insinuate it than to show it directly. Filmic analysis in general, and documentary filmmaking in particular, note how powerful off-camera is. It is the power of hide-and-seek:  On this subject, Henri Langlois writes: “it is not the fruit of chance, it is science. The operator identifies how things are going and in a few seconds, without changing the position of the camera, manages to take the maximum number of shots: general shots, American shots, close-ups” (quoted by Magny 2001). 8

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even if the movement of off-camera objects into the camera field does not lend more truth to the subject matter, it remains very influential. There are so many long reflections which take place during the preparation of a sociological documentary, during the writing of the script and the script breakdown, and during shooting, logging, and editing. This includes the many questions to be dealt with in advance because new issues will emerge during this last phase of documentary making: the discovery of unforeseen content in the images and in the interviews. Such are the risks in the field: what can be done with this data that does not immediately enter the film?

3 Sociological Documentary and “Scientific Residues” In any sociological research, some material such as statistics, fragments of interviews, elements of observations or logbooks, and various data do not appear in the final presentation. This is generally due to two factors that one can easily distinguish: • They more or less deviate, at least partially, from the developed argument and would require an extensive development to integrate them into the general thesis. Or, even worse, they would destabilize the thesis so much that they cannot appear in the text. The elements that do not find their place in the framework of this work make up residues that can be preserved for subsequent research. This, in turn, could deepen the previous results, or even amend them. • These residues disturb the presentation and are therefore removed from it. They resemble a digression that weighs down the presentation or makes the viewer lose the thread of the argument. Sometimes they are so far away from the central object that they would require another plan—indicative of their scientific importance!—or the reconstruction of the presentation. These “scientific residues” seem to bother the sociologist-director in filmic sociology much less than they do the paper-author. There is one essential reason for this, specific to filmic sociology, namely that it tends to present multiple points of view of several actors. These residues do not appear as such because one can easily integrate them as counterpoints to other points of view, or even to the author’s own thesis. Other problems arise from the emergence of another category of rather technical “residues” around the homogeneity of image values—dark/light relations, colors, and the tone of the interviews—constraints of shot connections or of the con-

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tents, ensuring the fluidity and above all the coherence of the narration. Thus a new category of “too-much” has appeared, which the author is forced to classify as such, despite wanting to integrate them into the film.

3.1 After Logging the Rushes Several Films Are Possible Seeing the rushes several times and classifying them makes it clear that several films are possible. The choice of each of the possible options excludes a part of the rushes, not because of their redundancy in relation to that part which will be conserved, but on the contrary because the distance is too great between these new residues and what constitutes the backbone of the chosen film option. No option can integrate all the rushes and themes contained in them, except to show a confused film. Selecting an option also means organizing its coherence and the coherence of its purpose. It means avoiding sequences that are too distant in terms of theme, characters (characters that do not reappear in other sequences), environment (places that are too out of step), tone of the interviews (condescension and certainties without proof), violent oppositions in the style of the images (not to mention the poor quality of the images or the sound of some of them, which makes them unusable), etc. Arguably, this question is just as true for the novelist, the journalist or the sociologist writing a text. The difference is that this sound/image material may become an obsession for the sociologist-filmmaker who has seen and revisited these residues while logging the rushes. The physically present material confronts the director-­editor and makes the choice of the best option much more difficult for the author who wishes to make the most of it without risking diluting his purpose. The film material appears more robust and resistant, flowing into the coherence of the documentary, than the information worked on by the paper-author in an article or a book. Here are two concrete cases: In the first, footage considered important and significant was transformed into scientific residue, with regrets and tensions in the editing team. In the second case, despite the discord in the dialogue of one woman interviewed in relation to the overall content of the documentary, this dialogue was retained because it marked the extent to which poverty is not only a question of ethnocultural belonging.

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3.2 “The Circle of Lost Souls” in 50 Years of Affirmative Action in Boston 50 years of Affirmative Action in Boston is a sociological documentary that investigates the approach of affirmative action in the United States, its socio-political effects, and its limits in the transformation of the living conditions of African-­ Americans and the evolution of the reciprocal views, including racism, of the two communities. At this time, the theory of positive discrimination was being considered by Nicolas Sarkozy as a solution to the social problems encountered in certain urban areas. This film is largely composed of interviews with academics, practitioners such as social workers and elected officials, business leaders, and lawyers who have discussed and/or written on this issue. The main chapters of this documentary of American cities in neighborhoods with a high African-American population—in this case, Boston and New York—are separated by sequences that capture the atmosphere and daily life: murals, gospel in Boston, and hip hop in the New York subways. The film is available in English on YouTube. The most difficult sequence to edit was more than an hour long and shot at night. It was of a meeting of people in great social and economic difficulty, who gather once a month, or even more often, in the basement of an African-American evangelist church in the suburbs of Boston. After a common meal in a church annex, all participants would go down to the basement. The master of ceremonies placed the participants in a circle in a large, rather impersonal room. In the center of the circle, a participant lit a firepot on the floor in a sort of basin surrounded by figures holding hands. This sculpture represented the live scene in the room. The ten or so people present held hands and remained that way throughout the ceremony. After a brief introduction, each one gave his or her first name and told about the difficulties he or she encountered at the moment as a climax to a very depressing situation. They were all at the “bottom of the pit” for many reasons: car accidents, alcoholism, drugs, leaving prison without a job, going to prison for a crime that happened five years earlier,9 or serious depression. Each one told of a life full of disasters and appealed to the circle or to God to be saved. The atmosphere was pathetic in the situations described and the hope placed in this session. Group solidarity was ineffective since everyone returned to their isolation or to the other side of America as soon as the ceremony was over.

 Since this crime, this woman had rebuilt her life, found a job, and raised her children. She had to abandon all this rebuilt equilibrium to go to prison the very next day since the judgment had been handed down after a five-year wait and the sentence finally pronounced. 9

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The circle operates in the dual register of evangelical churches—the incessantly repeated calls to God and Jesus—and inherited or revived animist cultures via Brazil or the renewal of one’s origins through visits to West Africa. The strength of the community bond combined with the strength of the welcoming church of the same community creates a solidarity that is indispensable in dealing with the misfortunes that afflict these isolated people. The circle is a workable sequence as it concentrates on human distress lost in a world of violence and misery. There is also a sub-sequence that tells the story of how a white man had regained meaning in his life a year earlier by participating in the African-American community. Isn’t this the necessary link in integrating the circle sequence into the affirmative action documentary? Obviously, it’s not enough because this is told in a single sentence. How should we proceed with this integration? Is this integration possible? For several reasons, the answer is in the negative. Beyond the insufficient link with the theme of positive discrimination (the white man going against the tide of the dominant society), several elements prevent the inclusion of this sequence in the documentary: • The form of the ceremony breaks with the tone of the film; • It takes place at night while the rest of the film is set in broad daylight; • In the general shots of this sequence, we do not see the characters, but only the flame in the firepot; • The close-ups of the firepot are not enough to give meaning to the ceremony because we do not see that the basin that maintains the fire is the replica of the living scene in the room (dark night in a basement); • The catastrophic nature of the narratives in tone but especially in substance—is very personal, individual, intimate, often arising from a need for psychological support or help. In this sense, it can only be easily combined with the analyses of affirmative action specialists through a device which is not present.10 Indeed, the debates and interviews of specialists focus on the social, political, and economic dimension of the separation of communities, of inequalities, and of the solutions to remedy them. In the change of scale from the macro to the intimate that the viewer might intellectually experience when reading a book or an article, he or she must be guided by the documentary, whose rate of diffusion of information—and therefore of reception by the viewer—is always faster than in the written word. This question of the reception of concentrated information and the audience’s mental agility prohibits the mistreatment of the viewer, ex Including because we considered that the film material—dark images with a discourse whose speakers are unseen—was unusable. 10

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cept at the risk of losing him. Without finding a solution to have the spectator pass from the social to the intimate, the abandonment of the circle sequence proved unavoidable. This would perhaps have been avoidable in a written text.

3.3 Poverty Makes Me Happier Than Wealth We had another sequence that was important to us, which made sense because it went against all our expectations, although we did not know exactly what it meant beyond the expression of a multiplicity of paradoxes. The district of Charleston, north of Boston, has been the object of major investments by the city of Boston to renovate housing and the immediate environment—green spaces, public facilities, etc. As we walked through the neighborhood, we met a woman who was cooking a long series of hamburgers on a small grill in front of a small apartment building. Not being able to film the population in this neighborhood, which is suspicious of the media, we were nevertheless able to come into contact with this woman because the scene was interesting from a cinematographic point of view: a white woman crouching in a cloud of smoke from the barbecue, surrounded by many white, black, and mixed-race children. After oral authorization of the shooting, Tracy Olsen traced part of her trajectory, telling us about the difficulties of living here without a car, with scarce public transport, which means enormous problems in finding a job: “In my opinion, affirmative action doesn’t really work. Here I have no chance of finding a job. I can’t get around. I sold my car to come here. Anyway, it’s useless, nobody knows how to give directions.” Then she concluded: “I really prefer poverty to wealth. I’ve experienced both, and I much prefer poverty. You’re happier, and money stresses you out. Because with the help of the right people, you can get by and at least feed your children.” This sequence partially reverses the thesis that runs throughout 50  years of Affirmative Action in Boston. A well-conducted economic policy should allow the vast majority of the population in the United States to “become rich.” Yet this woman claims that she does not want “to be rich” and “prefers” the simplicity of life outside—that is the meaning of the smoky barbecue—surrounded by those close to her. In the American population, the standard of living of African-­ Americans is generally much lower than that of whites, although at the same time everyone suspects that there are also poor whites. Is it necessary to integrate points of view in a sociological documentary that are so opposed to the thesis or to the point of view proposed by the authors? Should this be done in the name of the viewer’s plural “information,” with the implied idea

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that the author could remain “neutral” by delivering the points of view with the objective that the viewer is mature enough to construct his or her own point of view? Or is there not a risk of losing the spectator in a multiplicity of points of view? We felt that the documentary should present different points of view while allowing the author’s position or point of view to emerge. It should not be univocal at the risk of becoming “militant.” So we wanted to integrate this sequence for several reasons. On the one hand, as already mentioned, the image is very significant. Let us add that the presence in the background of one or two African-American children complicates the situation and tells us where the action is taking place. On the other hand, it expresses—beyond the white woman’s dress—the poverty of some white people without resorting to a verbal demonstration or a spoken affirmation of it, such as complaints or a request for compassion. Faced with this poverty, Tracy Olsen shows in just a few sentences how the public authorities have failed because there is not enough public transportation, how the federal government is cutting back on social assistance, and so on. The condensed expressions and the certainty of the tone contrast with the situation of this woman who has a well-thought-out point of view on her situation, until she uses the paradox by declaring that she “far prefers poverty to wealth,” even after having experienced both. Such an unexpected counterpoint is by nature difficult to place in a documentary. This could have accompanied several interviews on social classes in which the speakers would stress that affirmative action should also concern the white working classes. But this type of illustration remains weak from the point of view of cinematographic expression. The strong risk was that this sequence, although interesting from our point of view as sociologists, would turn into a filmic and scientific residue. The solution found by the editor, Jean-Pierre Lenoir, was to introduce this sequence as a moment during which the viewer could catch his breath between very intense interviews. Based on the editor’s professionalism, there are ways for a sequence that could become a “scientific residue” to still find a place through some device of which the spectator would not obviously be aware. These are all questions on the status of “scientific residues” in the mind or memory of the researcher. After writing a report, an article or other publication, the residue tends to fade from the author’s memory, especially because he has rationally circumvented the obstacle. He tends to erase it as a non-event, although traces of this residue appear diffuse in a mass of written, rarely classified, material. On the contrary, in filmic sociology, the “scientific residue” becomes embedded in the author’s mind in a more obsessive way until he promises to make a new film out of it. Indeed, paradoxically, the “scientific residue” takes on a bewitching materiality:

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• through logging the rushes and attempting to integrate them into the film, the director has seen and heard these residues several times and knows their contents and forms intimately; • this document durably imprints the author’s consciousness until he regrets the impossibility of its integration into the documentary, destabilizing him until he starts building a project of a new film from this residue. Basically, this question of “scientific residues” raises the question of the status and future in the film of the fortuitous or unexpected event that occurs during filming. What interpretations and cinematographic uses should be made of it? This question converges with that of the growing use of smartphones, which capture more and more immediate events. Will the frontiers of the “scientific residue” become the center of the documentary? Thus, the increasing use of smartphones to film comic or dramatic scenes of everyday life, gives an account of social reality, raising new questions for filmic sociology.

4 Smartphones and Filmic Sociology This book shows that spontaneity in the making of a documentary film is an illusion. At the same time, it has its place in documentary in general and in sociological documentary in particular, since nothing is totally predictable. The general orientation must therefore accommodate the fortuitous. But this remains quite different from a production that is entirely subject to improvisation. In our opinion, fortuitous events may be directly useful in that they can spring forth in reality from deep truths. One must have the greatest possible mastery of one’s objective to know how to recognize and understand such events. It is like the musician who improvises. He can only do it in the mastery of the technique of his instrument and with a deep knowledge of the musical composition. So, the question is: if filming with smartphones is unavoidable, what should we think about it? Is it a new form of filmic writing and a new, very immediate look at the “real world”? Are we being outdated when we propose making sociological films with real prior preparatory work? As Roger Odin said on the Pocket Films website (2009), such films can be another approach fostering the emergence of “a reflexive spectator, a playful spectator who, in a way, becomes himself, the creator of the films he sees. Or he will at least be the co-creator, because without this effort of changing positioning, the film will not produce the desired effects.” The change of positioning and reflexivity are objectives pursued by documentaries and socio-

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logical films in particular. They are still very much in the development stage in the case of Pocket Films, since what still predominates is the reference to spontaneity. We can draw a parallel with today’s empirical or inductive sociology, which thinks it can do without systematizing the problem and theorizing social issues under the guise of scientific innovation. With Pocket Films, a concept proposed by Alexandre Astruc as early as 1948, the idea of the “pen camera,” resurfaced. Some see it as an easy way to make movies that could serve as a springboard for a different kind of access to cinema. But Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb proposes another reading of the pen camera, one that converges with our analysis. Taking up Alexandre Astruc’s article, the author underlines the many misinterpretations of the 1948 text. For him, the camera-pen is a “text proposing what will be the authors’ policy, [but to which] no film school has yet been associated, not even that of direct cinema in Canada. The pen camera should not be associated with the New Wave.11” The author sees it as a theoretical text on “the quality of the transmission of thought through images.” Moreover, the sentence highlighted by Alexandre Astruc characterizes the problematic at the basis of his approach. He takes up Orson Welles’ provocative statement: “What interests me about cinema is abstraction.12” This is what Welles puts into practice in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Alexandre Astruc in The Crimson Curtain (1952) where they reveal through images the characters and feelings of their protagonists. Finally, Alexandre Astruc (1948, pp. 98–99) continues his challenge in this programmatic text: “Cinema will gradually tear itself away from this tyranny of the visual, of the image for the sake of the image, of the immediate anecdote, of the concrete, to become a means of writing13 as flexible and as subtle as that of written language. This art, blessed with so many possibilities but a prisoner of so many prejudices, will not continue to eternally draw from this small domain of social realism and fantasy allotted to it within the confines of the popular novel … It should not be banned from any domain. The barest contemplation, a point of view on human production, psychology, metaphysics, ideas, and passions are very pre-

 Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb, Cours au Forum des Images, “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra-stylo,” January 8, 2010; http://www.forumdesimages.fr/la-webtv/ cours-de-cinema. 12  Interview of Alexandre Astruc by Bernard Payen in 2002: http://www.cinematheque.fr/article/879.html. 13  Robert Bresson employs the same formula in Notes sur le cinématographe (Gallimard, 1975), affirming that “film writing is the writing of tomorrow.” 11

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cisely within its purview. Better still, we say that these ideas and visions of the world are such that today only cinema can account for them.” So the camera-pen is not immediate writing, as one might think. On the contrary, the term camera-pen leads to structured writing and thinking. It is an author-­ cinema, containing language and emotion, within which one can recognize the sociological documentary. Smartphones’ rapid technical progress in terms of their usage possibilities could change the game—as was the case with the miniaturization of digital camcorders—but they will not replace the intensity of intellectual reflection and preparation of quality films and documentaries, especially sociological ones. Even in 3D cinema will not be able to dispense with thinking about how to show the invisible.

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Cinema, like all the arts, aims to show the invisible, in the sense that they are all interpretations thwarting the projects of the proponents of objectivism or pure realism—of reality, the world around us, and the humans who populate it. Sociology’s primary task is to unveil what is hidden, that is to say, to dismantle social phenomena in order to reveal their underlying forces which are imperceptible to the naked eye. Thus, one convergence between sociology and cinema rests on this capacity and disciplinary will to render visible what is invisible, to practice the “revealing function” emphasized by the theorists of cinema. This perspective is another way of talking about the hybridization between the two approaches (Chap. 4) and of returning to visual thinking by going beyond the perception of the senses to reach the imaginary. (1) The present chapter returns to the question of the representation of reality and how artistic and pictorial techniques (from photography to cinema) seek a “reality effect” without ever neglecting the representation of the invisible. (2) However, this appears even more problematic when it is a social question. The visible and real life can screen what is hidden. Finally, abstractions like time, fear, uneasiness, domination, segregation, etc., are almost intangible and rarely appear through facts. The sociologist-­ documentary maker must, however, fix and capture these facts, forms, or fleeting events. (3) By resorting to the speech of observers or other individuals, the film interview becomes a powerful but difficult to use instrument, with its own rules for going beyond appearances. When characters are closely linked to the making of the sociological documentary right up to its conception, it is also a way to make “public sociology” (Burawoy 2005).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Sebag, J.-P. Durand, Filmic Sociology, Social Visualities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33696-6_6

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1 On the Representation of Reality What does representing reality mean? It is to use sensitive and reasoned means to express a lived experience or feeling, resulting from a sensitive perception (see Chap. 4). Artists and scientists strive, each in their own way with more or less specific tools, to recount reality. Nevertheless, the most faithful representations of reality are interpretations, as Maupassant tells us so well in his Preface to Pierre et Jean, and there is no reason that this should be upsetting.

1.1 Pictorial Representation and the “Reality Effect” Representing reality in the pictorial arts—such as painting and its related derivatives, photography, and cinema—comprises the invention of techniques to produce a “reality effect.” Provided he has the aptitudes and codes, the spectator perceives this reality, which is always an arranged reality, reorganized by the author. There is no accurate representation of the real, nor an exact copy in the sense of a totally faithful reproduction. Even photography, which in its early days was perceived as a limited technique for reproducing the real (Freund 1980), is no longer seen in this way. Everyone agrees that the photographer interprets the real by choosing the frame, the light, and of course the angle from which to shoot. Thus, as Maupassant writes, representation can only be an illusion. However, knowing this, everything leads us to participate in it as a specificity of humanity. cc

Realism and Illusion of Representation: Maupassant’s Preface to Pierre and Jean

The realist, if he is an artist, will not try to show us the banal photograph of life, but to give us a more complete, more striking, more convincing vision of it than reality itself. Telling everything would be impossible, as it would take at least one volume per day to list the multitudes of insignificant incidents that fill our existence. A choice is thus imposed—which is a first attack on the theory of the whole truth. Life, moreover, is made up of the most different things, the most unexpected, the most contrary, the most disparate. It is brutal, without a sequel, without a chain, full of inexplicable, illogical, and ­contradictory catastrophes that should be classified under the heading of “trivial news items.”

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Therefore, having chosen his theme in a life cluttered with coincidences and trivialities, the artist will only take up the characteristic details that are useful for his subject and he will reject everything else, everything irrelevant.… Life still leaves everything on the same level, precipitating facts or dragging them out indefinitely. Art, on the contrary, consists in using precautions and preparations, in making clever and hidden transitions, in bringing to light the essential events by writing skills alone, and highlighting all the others according to their importance, in order to produce the deep sensation of the special truth that one wants to show. To make something true thus consists in giving the complete illusion of the truth, according to the ordinary logic of events, and not in slavishly transcribing them in the jumble of their succession. I conclude that talented realists should rather be called illusionists. What childishness, moreover, to believe in reality since we each carry our own realities in our minds and bodies. Our eyes, our ears, our sense of smell, our different tastes create as many truths as there are men on earth. And our minds that receive instructions from our bodies with diverse effects, understand, analyze, and judge as if each of us belonged to another race. Each one of us therefore simply makes their own illusion of the world, an illusion that is poetic, sentimental, joyful, melancholic, dirty, or gloomy depending on its nature. And the writer has no other mission than to reproduce faithfully this illusion with all the artistic devices he has learned and can use. Illusion of the beautiful—a human convention! Illusion of the ugly—changing opinion! Illusion of truth—never stable! Illusion of the vile which attracts so many people! The great artists are those who impose their personal illusion on humanity. There are multiple techniques for producing a “reality effect,” starting with description, as Roland Barthes demonstrated concerning the interior of Mrs. Aubain’s home in Flaubert’s Un cœur simple [A Simple Heart]: “The description [of the barometer and the pyramidal pile of cardboard on the piano] thus appears as a kind of characteristic of the so-called higher languages, the apparently paradoxical degree that it is justified by no finality of action or communication. The singularity of description (or of the ‘useless detail’) in narrative fabric, its isolated situation, designates a question which has the greatest importance for the structural analysis of narratives. This question is the following: is everything in narrative significant, and if not, if insignificant stretches subsist in the narrative syntagm, what is ultimately, so to speak, the significance of this insignificance?” (Barthes 1989, p. 143). Thus, the description produces an atmosphere in the living room that the reader immediately shares as if he or she were there. Such is the strength of the great writer to

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make us enter into reality, into his reality, through a few segments of sentences, of which these few “insignificant segments” in relation to the narrative create the atmosphere of the novel. In the pictorial arts, copying or imitating reality in the most accurate way possible contributes to this “reality effect,” as for example in Rembrandt’s collars or in the drapes of classical painting. But if you look closely, the strength of the copy is already based on a technique of brush handling that in fact gives this resemblance to reality, via a substantial (and unconscious) work of imagination on the part of the viewer. However, this technique has nothing to do with the exact reproduction of the real: it is its overall effect, the arrangement between the brushstrokes or their association, that produces the “reality effect.” The impressionists made it an essential principle of their artistic movement after the Salon des Refusés of 1863. It is by their brushstrokes or their skillfully arranged touches of color that they create the effects of light and represent landscapes that are interpretations of reality. In other words, representation is always an interpretation of reality that uses specific techniques to render a perceived-transformed reality, aimed at spectators who may or may not have the codes to follow the artists and grasp a reality that may evolve away from the most faithful copy. Nevertheless, representation remains an image that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, competed with photography, a technical system capable of faithfully reproducing the real. This is the idea that painters and critics had of photography: a technique (based on optical and chemical laws) that offered images identical to those perceived by the eye. Hence the innumerable conflicts over whether or not photography was an art form, since its detractors believed that it could only produce “documents” (Freund 1980; Rouillé 2005, p. 60ff.). One of the first responses was that of the pictorialist photographers (ca. 1890– 1915) who claimed the status of artists, occasionally imitating the impressionists by blurring or even adding brushstrokes to their prints. In fact, these two currents, impressionists in painting and pictorialists in photography, converged on one point: writing with, or utilizing, light, which is the etymology of the word photography. But, as in all artistic movements, as painters increasingly broke with the faithful representation of the real (from Cézanne to the Cubists, not forgetting the Russian Constructivists), photographers tried to produce images representing a reality that was truer than life: it was the movements of straight photography in the United States (1910–1930) or the new objectivity in Germany (1920s, see Chap. 3) that opposed pictorialism without denying their status as artists. All this back and forth between artistic currents (painting, photography, but also music and theater) shows how much the proximity or fidelity of representation to reality is a poorly asked question: any representation must be thought of or considered as a work of inter-

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pretation. Even more so if we add movement, then color and finally 3D to the photo, that is to say, so many techniques that can increase the “reality effect,” the interpretative dimension remains at the heart of the representation for both the image’s creator and the spectator.

1.2 The “Real Unreality” of Photography and Cinema Michel Foucault’s criticism (1972, p. 60) argues against the narrative linearity and in favor of “a theory of discontinuous systematizations.” This consists of a critique of the rationalist illusion that gives preference to absolute knowledge through a rational development of thought and a corresponding narrative that accounts for reality, another “reality effect.” Foucault underlines the interest of taking into account the effects of narrative discontinuity, that is to say of their functioning as a series of relationships of discontinuous events. Thus, linear and “total” narrative produces an effect different from that which one might expect from the sequence of segments taken one by one. But isn’t this also the definition of film editing, where the continuity of the sequential meanings of the basic elements produces a narrative different from those contained in each of them? Film editing thus participates in the “reality effect” at the very foundation of cinema. This is a lesson to remember so as not to mislead the viewer of the sociological documentary. This false objectivity of the photographic (or cinematographic) image can be shown in several ways. The first consists in going back to the debate in which the Cahiers du cinéma opposed the journal Cinéthique and Jean-Patrick Lebel on the production of ideology through the “impression of reality” born of cinema. Is this production of ideology inherent to cinema or is it linked to a certain use of cinema (by film producers and directors) as the author of Cinéma et Idéologie maintains (Lebel 1971)? The second way consists of recalling that photography (or cinema) makes selections through framing. While eliminating part of the context, photography deprives the spectator of a part of the reality and partially reduces his possibilities of understanding and interpreting this reality. This necessarily raises questions on the status of the image in knowledge: “To assert that the naturalist can really make discoveries with the help of the image, as he would have done by observing the object in nature, is to postulate that documentary-photographs exactly duplicate objects in the world, totally merge with them, substitute for them without loss. Thus, perfectly identical to the object—to its appearance and constitution and substance as an object—the image becomes indistinguishable as an image, and the very notion of image and imitation is even more threatened” (Rouillé 2005, pp. 82–83).

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From this observation of the logical impossibility of the image’s identity with reality, André Rouillé returns, in another context, to Roland Barthes of Camera Lucida [La Chambre claire]: “‘Whatever it shows and whatever its appearance,’ Barthes asserts, ‘a photo is always invisible, it is not what we see.’ This blindness to images is opposed to the extreme attention paid to things: ‘I only saw the referent,’ Barthes reports, justifying this posture by the fact that with photography ‘the referent attaches’ directly, almost automatically, to the images” (Rouillé 2005, p. 84). And this is the second path of deception1: by looking at a photograph or a picture, that is, a sheet of paper or a screen—which has become invisible and is not seen or perceived as such, as a paper or a screen—one sees something else, namely the referent or the object photographed or filmed, and not the image itself. Is the viewer not then deceived by the image, which is what Barthes assumes in the same work that places the subjective viewer in the forefront? This leads to a radical critique of photography, and then implicitly of all images, that is, of pictures, including of course those of the internet: “Carried along in the infernal spiral of the media, images tend in fact to become autonomous from the real world, and to become themselves a world [emphasis added]. … In the contemporary situation of images, one could say that photography, even if it is documentary, does not represent reality and does not have to do so, that it does not take the place of something external, that it does not represent a reference. Photography, like narrative and other images, creates being in line with its own means: it makes the world, it makes it happen” (Rouillé 2005, p. 86). This absolute critique of the image—in the sense of a picture or a material support for representation—which makes it a more relevant and perceptive reality than reality itself, encourages us to distance ourselves from it. Is it necessary to abstain from making images? Of course not, but it is better to be warned of the capacity of images to become a world rather than to represent it within known limits, namely that “the transparency of the image, or the indistinguishability of the gap between the image and the thing are part of the statements of truth that have accompanied document photography since its inception” (Rouillé 2005, p. 89). In an eloquent chapter on the critique of the image—in the sense of representations or beliefs that have guided the world since the dawn of time—William J. Mitchell (2005), chap. 4, on the surplus value of images) also distinguishes images from pictures which French translators have transformed into pictions. The latter constructs “a secondary pictorial” of mankind that would reinforce the im With regard to the betrayal of the image and the image that escapes us—in what is not strictly speaking a history of the image—see “the close link between image and emotion,” which the psychoanalyst highlights (Tisseron 2010). 1

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ages and values that guide them with no force to stop them. This author perceives a new idolatry or a new fetishism in the relationship of our contemporaries to these images, referring to Marx and the fetishism of the commodity (p. 162). Hence, his proposal of a necessary return to totemization which, in his opinion—and unlike idolatry or fetishism—creates a distance between the totem and the real. In other words, everything happens as if photography or cinema objectively represented reality, as if it was independent of the photographer or filmmaker. This is what Roland Barthes refers to in his already quoted article on Panzani advertising, “Rhetoric of the Image”: “In the photograph, in effect—at least on the level of the literal message—the relation between signifieds and signifiers is one of ‘transformation’ but of ‘registration’, and the absence of a code obviously reinforces the myth of photographic ‘naturalness’: the scene is there, registered mechanically, but not humanly (the mechanical is here the warrant of objectivity); the human interventions in the photograph (framing, range, light, focus, speed, etc.) all belong as a matter of fact to the level of connotation; everything happens as if there were at the (even if utopian) outset a raw (frontal and distinct) photograph, upon which man might arrange, thanks to certain techniques, the sign resulting from the cultural code. Only the opposition of the cultural code and the natural non-code can account, it would appear, for the specific character of the photograph and permit us to measure the anthropological revolution which it represents in human history, for the type of consciousness it implies is indeed unprecedented. The photograph institutes, in fact not a consciousness of the thing’s being-there (which any copy might provoke), but a consciousness of the things having-been there. Hence, we are concerned with a new category of space-time: immediately spatial and anteriorly temporal; in the photograph and illogical conjunction occurs between the here and the then. Hence, it is on the level of this denoted message, or message without code what we can fully understand the photograph’s real unreality; its unreality is that of the here, for the photograph is never experienced as an illusion, it is in no way a presence, and we must deflate the magical character of the photographic image; and its reality is that of having-been-there, for in every photograph there is the always stupefying evidence of: this is how it was: we then possess, by some miracle a reality from which we are sheltered” (Barthes 1985, p. 33). Thus, this real unreality of photography and the “reality effect” that it produces should make us constantly doubt its objectivity, a point of view shared by image professionals, but much less known by spectators. This should commit the sociologist-­filmmaker to include in his or her work the means of distancing the spectator from the images and sounds he or she offers. Documentary photography and cinema are constructions, or rather artifacts. They only partially and subjectively reproduce reality, despite appearances, appealing to the viewer’s imagina-

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tion. Here, the question becomes: beyond all these limits in the representation of the real, can the image—here more particularly photography and cinema—show the invisible or at least suggest it to the spectator?

1.3 The Visible and the Invisible “There is the visible and the invisible. If you film the visible, you’re making a TV movie,” Jean-Luc Godard told a journalist. However, we don’t know exactly what a TV movie is today that can also show moods and feelings. It is the same Godard who also believed that watching a film on television (a fortiori today on a computer screen or on a smartphone) is watching the reproduction of a work and not the work itself. Such is Godard’s idea of television,2 telling us in depth what cinema is and the primary function of cinema: to show us the invisible. This task is much easier for fiction cinema than for documentary, the former reconstituting situations it enriches through the sets and mastery of camera movements. The sociological documentary also aims at showing the invisible and the intangible, and has a relationship with television reporting similar to that which, according to Godard, cinema has with television. Thus, the invisible would consist in the understanding of the situations through which we can reach the dimension which has been hidden from us at first glance. This brings us closer to sociology, which like other related disciplines, pursues this search for the hidden, for what is not immediately visible. Consequently, we rethink “our access to the world,” in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, of learning to see, a theme that resonates with chapter 3 on perception and thought. And Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968) adds: “I can only see if it is within my own radius of action … As if my vision of the world itself were formed from a certain point in the world.” This leads him to deal with perception, but also with reality. Instead, sociologists try to relate the object observed to the diversity of points of view and to each person’s individual trajectory, questioning the possibility of a plural vision generating knowledge, a “future science” (see, supra, chapter 4) that does not ignore what is hidden in the social world. Merleau-Ponty started out from the frustration of what he called philosophy’s overthrow of the “chiaroscuro,” that is, philosophy’s revelation of what was previously hidden. He then invited humanity “to think of itself as an enigma.” “The world is what we see and that, nonetheless, we must learn to see it … We must  For example, according to the same filmmaker, “when we go to the cinema, we raise our heads. When we watch television, we lower them.” 2

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match this vision with knowledge, take possession of it, say what we and what seeing are, act therefore as if we knew nothing about it, as if here we still had everything to learn” (idem, p. 4). Learning to see means deconstructing “the perceptual experience” (idem, p. 37), because “science presupposes perceptual faith and does not elucidate it” (idem, p. 14). Thus, seeing the visible presupposes a to-andfro between the description of experience and the critique of knowledge, while knowing that the visible cannot be the antinomy of the invisible “for the simple reason that since the visible is not an objective positive, the invisible cannot be a negation in the logical sense” (idem, p. 257). This conception of a continuum between the visible and the invisible replacing that of a rupture or dislocation between the two directly interests filmic sociology, which aims at showing the invisible and the hidden.

2 Representing the Social Invisible To the now classic question “how can we film the invisible?” we can add the intangible which does not directly relate to cinema since it is evident that cinema is not the expression of touch but of sight and sound.3 Adding the intangible to the invisible, is tantamount to extending the invisible toward one of its important dimensions for the filmmaker, namely that which has no physical existence as such. For example, services are intangible and are not directly observable. But are they invisible for all that? Yes and no: no as visible physical objects, but yes in their effects or more immediately in the means used, such as trucks for logistics or the hospital for health care. A V-shaped flight of geese is visible and yet intangible; what remains invisible and intangible is the reason for the change of position and then a signal that makes the lead goose abandon its function to place itself at the back of the V.4 Moving from the invisible to the visible is one of cinema’s objectives, an aim in which fiction has had greater success than documentary cinema. It shares this with a large part of sociology that aims at revealing what remains hidden in social rela-

 We should add the inaudible, that is to say what cannot be heard or is not easily accessible to the ear or rather to the hearing of each individual, as understood by the great sound engineers, whose sensory sensitivity is too often neglected in documentaries. 4  This brings us back to a philosophical question in order to distinguish the tangible from the material. For the materialists, this change of position of a goose has no physical thickness, but remains a material fact, from the point of view of the theory of knowledge. This is why we do not use the term material in its common meaning equivalent to physical or tangible. 3

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tionships. But what makes the expression of social phenomena visible—something which cinema will obviously use—should not be confused with the nature or raison d’être of the facts themselves. Listing the invisible or intangible social elements for the sake of completeness—elements which are difficult to film—may seem superfluous. However, to illustrate our approach, we can propose some social categories not immediately perceptible to the camera: • relationships between subjects and between groups: physical encounters, facial expressions, clothing, activities such as cocktails, meals, hikes, quarrels, and wars, are the visible and filmable elements. But the unspoken opinions one person has of another, mutual representations, relationships of domination or submission, etc., are not directly visible; • feelings such as friendship, love, hostility, xenophobia are not always visible. It is the narrative construction that will make them perceptible; • knowledge, and culture in the broadest sense are not visible either, except through demonstrations of this knowledge or through a style of dressing, a manner of walking or of standing in public or at a dinner party, etc.; • causes at the origin of individual or collective actions or conduct: some may be obvious, such as protecting oneself from the rain by opening an umbrella, or using public transportation in a congested metropolis. Such simple causal relations cannot explain the complex social relationships dealt with by sociology and which are difficult to capture on the camera; • concepts and paradigms of social science theories—often subject to profound disagreements between authors—are abstract and by nature invisible and ­intangible; • time and space are just as intangible, although we can employ devices to show traces or characteristics of them in certain situations that are easy to expose through images and sounds; • social phenomena such as fatigue and hardship at work: speed, acceleration, braking are all time-related facts that are intangible and barely visible, except to those who experience these working conditions. In the same vein, how can job satisfaction be represented?

2.1 A Constantly Renewed Project Pierre Naville had already considered using cinema in the practice of sociology. He considered the image as the bearer of a new form of sociological writing. For him,

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it was not simply a matter of an instrumentalized utilization accompanying the scientific text. On the contrary, the image was the principle of “a whole conception of the creation of sociological data and of its treatment … breaking with acquired mental habits, that is to say, a new way of handling symbols and signs” (Naville 1966). This led Naville to pose “the question of whether the optical and audio images that populate the world—in which we live almost as equals to these specific signifying images that are words—can give rise to a particular system of signifiers that would allow their direct use in research” (idem, p. 166). In other words, can images express concepts? Can a theory or scientific research be carried out directly through the use of the camera without the support of the written word? S. M. Eisenstein more or less asked himself this question when he wanted to make a film based on Marx’s Capital, a film he could never shoot. However, many of his movies metaphorize on this same theme. Nor did Naville conclude any research through the cinema.5 The question remains open to this day. However, the question is not posed in exactly the same terms with regard to an evolution of the social sciences, which have partly abandoned the field of the structural causes of social behavior in favor of a reflection more centered on the individual and on the relationship to the subject. Indeed, individualizing themes are easier to put into images than major historical questions. Naville considers that the image in sociological research is part of the foundation of filmic sociology and is in part related to instrumentation. It is part of an entire collection of techniques implemented in the quantitative and qualitative gathering of data, which thus plays an increasing role in the scientific investigation of social phenomena. Instrumentation makes up a “fundamental element of method,” or even “a form of operation that predetermines the results to be achieved” (idem, p.  158). For Naville, there are three types of instrumentation: organized language, for which he deplores the absence of a sociological lexicon, the mathematical processing of data, and finally, the use of images and sounds (idem, p. 160). Using images and sounds can take several forms: to illustrate a subject, to dis His team made several films, particularly in the urban field. Essentially ethnographic films such as the one on the ways of living in the same configuration of new apartments in Vélizy, a city close to Versailles, they are hardly convincing from the point of view of cinematographic form. They put us in direct contact with highly differentiated cultural and social uses of space, in what a priori seemed to be a very socially homogeneous residence. In this, they constitute an interesting example of the use of cinema in sociology (Aline Ripert, Colette Sluys, L’utilisation de l’espace. Les salles de séjour d’un ensemble résidentiel, CNRS, Centre d’Études Sociologiques et Ve section EPHE, 1970, 24). https://videotheque.cnrs.fr/index. php?urlaction=doc&id_doc=450&rang=1. 5

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seminate it pedagogically, to become itself an object of study, and finally to become an instrument of research. Here, it would then be a matter of thinking about “a whole conception of the process of creating sociological data and its processing” (idem, p. 164). This gave rise to an entire research program that Naville sets out in the box below. By limiting itself to the instrumental character of the use of the camera, this program does not grasp the entire process of knowledge production, for example, during editing based on the reasoned and problematized association of images. Likewise, it is not interested in the quality of narration or formal or experimental cinematographic writing which are part of intellectual creation. Can the image account for social reality in the same way as the written word by handling concepts and paradigms? Can it formalize? Can it conceptualize? Or are ideas only constructed in words (cf., supra, chap. 3)? Naville had already grappled with this question in an article in the journal Épistémologie sociologique (9/1970). In it he engaged in a debate with the theses presented by Roland Barthes in his Elements of Semiology (1968). In this text, Roland Barthes raises the question of the autonomy of signs in communication and information and argues against the position of Saussure that only “human language possesses true sociological depth.” Of course, he adds, “objects, images, and behavior can signify, and they do so abundantly. But this is never done in an autonomous way. Any semiotic system is mixed with language.” Naville’s interest in images and the use of the audiovisual leads him to confront such a radical position and to question sociologically this predominance of language over image from the examination of the domination of written and verbal form in school education. Naville believes that we are “the often unconscious interpreters of many sets of signs. We cannot be certain that some of these sets (optical, among others) will not play a more important role in new sign systems than they have in the past.” And he adds: “It is a reversal in the order of things to say that all signs exist, but they exist without being autonomous, while language is autonomous and can substitute for all signs (by translation into its own code). If language, and especially writing, can translate everything, it is insofar as they are not autonomous, but are grounded and take root in more complex signaling sets” (Naville 1970). This Navillian argument for a non-hierarchicalization of languages converges with our approach developed in Chap. 4 of this book, where it is a question of rehabilitating sources of thought other than those based on words alone, opening up other perspectives to the image, independent of the written word. Taking stock of ethnographic and sociological films in a study commissioned by UNESCO, Luc de Heusch asked: “Can we grasp through cinema what the social sciences seek to apprehend and define through complex techniques?” (de Heusch 1962). According to Edgar Morin, who prefaces Heusch’s text, the camera makes

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more conspicuous the question of the mediation of the researcher’s eye in the recording of data. It recounts “sensitive data” instead of translating it. The cinematographic image is a “more faithful,” and an even more reliable transcription of reality than the notes taken by the researcher, more precise than the human eye, although less mobile. There is, however, the problem of the neutrality of the instrument which Edgar Morin does not evade and which, quoting Naville (1966), he links “to the work of abstraction that the human mind operates on reality in order to understand it.” cc

Pierre Naville and the Use of Image and Sound in Sociology

The intervention of audiovisual instrumentation can then be presented in several forms which correspond to the previously distinguished types. In its passive form, audio or optical images have a substitution function. They can replace or complete a narrative, record it, store it, or reproduce it. But the data remains an element that we must re-­translate into verbal language in order to give it an explanatory value and to allow calculation. In another form, the one that should particularly interest us, the image can become active when it is the creator of new data, and when it is itself, alone or in composition, an instrument for detecting relations one cannot grasp otherwise. Finally, in a third form, the image can become an element of experimental control and enable the verification of something other than by a conclusive word or number. These last two expressive forms of the role of the image would commit us, if we systematize them, to break with mental habits, that is, to adopt a new conception of the handling of signs and symbols. In order to do that, it would be necessary to free oneself from today’s widely admitted reduction of signs to their function of information and communication, that is to say, a rather passive function, restoring their combined function of stimulation and creation. The question is then to know if the optical and sound images, which fill the world in which we live almost on a par with the specific signifying images that are words, can give rise to a particular system of signifiers that would allow their direct use in research. In order to answer this question, two approaches are necessary and correlative: One consists of elaborating a specific projective codification of the optical and audio images, whether or not joined to verbal expression. In short: What questions can the image answer? This supposes a preliminary criticism of verbalization and writing linked to the techniques of printing. The other consists of producing on a trial basis a whole material of images, in manipulating them, in experimenting with them, in learning how to use tools which produce them. The two approaches could hardly go one without the other. Source: Naville 1966, pp. 165–166

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Do these qualities which Edgar Morin has recognized in the image make its use relevant in sociology? Can the metaphor replace the concept? Can we speak of functional equivalents? Or, to rephrase the question, how can concepts be expressed, represented, or shown through images such as photo or cinema? One could define the concept as an abstract proposition of thought representing an object or a social fact. It is universalizing or generic in the sense that everyone knows what the concept of a table, a dog, a strike, a war, a carnival, etc. represents regardless of the differences between disciplines or the variations between objects defined by the same concept. One can film a dog, but it is not the concept of “dog” that is filmed. Such a dog could in its turn represent the concept, except that in its singularity, the filmed dog struggles to reach an abstraction of the concept of “dog.” On the other hand, concepts are only interesting in their combinations as paradigms, themselves defined as a coherent arrangement of ideas or principles that intellectually reorganize reality. We can define metaphor as a figure of style comprising a transfer of analogical meaning between two elements of language (words) or an image to a word, expressing an idea or a concept. The expression “this golden sickle” used by Victor Hugo in The Legend of the Ages, replaces the crescent moon. The mental image created is much stronger than the ordinary designation. Poetry resorts to metaphor to reveal or share a mystery or to go further into the imagination. Very early in his work, Eisenstein (2016) understood the link between poetry and editing. Hence, the idea of our traditional modes of knowledge being sometimes insufficient or inadequate, “our conceptual system [can] only formulate certain abstract and subjective ideas through metaphors” (Fromilhague 2007, p. 92). For George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980, p. 5), “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” It is a kind of translation of an element from one domain to another that “represents” it in a visible or explicit way. These same authors do not separate categorically metaphors and concepts considering that the latter “that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor” (idem, p. 3). There are many types of metaphors, and on this point, we refer the reader to specialized works. Connotation is a form that is highly prized by advertisers, as Roland Barthes has shown in his analysis of the Panzani advertisement. On the one hand, the dominant colors of the image (red background, white pasta, green labels)

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and those of the vegetables (tomatoes, mushrooms, the tail of the bell pepper) refer to its Italian character, and, on the other hand, the open net that pours out the products designates the cornucopia. This last case underlines how much the metaphor depends on the culture that produced it, and how much the receiver must have the knowledge and the “codes” of this culture to understand and follow it.

2.2 Representing Time in Cinema6 In Metropolis (1927), Fritz Lang portrayed the pressure of time on the workers. Beyond their saccadic gestures showing the exhausting rhythms, the director ­focuses on time and its representation. Several times, he places a clock in the center of the screen. But this clock has only 10-digits, the number of hours worked per day. By doing so, he draws the viewer much closer to the question of time than by showing a 12-digit clock. The dominance of time over men is even better expressed by the gestures of the workers who must constantly place three needles in front of light bulbs that turn on and off at a frantic pace around a large disk while the sweaty men (they wipe their faces with a dirty rag) replace each other as soon as one wavers. At the end of the film, the disk lights up and transforms into the 10-digit clock seen earlier. In the same film, the tight march of the replacement workers, all dressed in the same black or gray uniform, all bent over with their heads tucked into their shoulders, metaphorizes their crushing by the machine—in other words, by capital in the Marxist conceptualization—and their ineluctable submission. One can also read in this army of workers, all alike, all squeezed together, the metaphor of serialism linked to Fordism which de-subjectivizes individuals to make this passive mass. After the explosion of the immense machine that injures and kills the workers, it is transformed into an immense ogre with a wide-open mouth that literally swallows the human flesh that is the workers. The resumption of metaphors expressing or developing ideas and concepts in Metropolis leads us to question the ability of directors in the silent era to substitute images for words, and attest to the capacity of the image to depict working-class labor. Let us recall that Fritz Lang had to resort to devices, figures of cinematographic style in addition to the text boxes included in the film, which only served as a thread for the narrative and said nothing about the content. It is this effort of  For an extensive development of this theme, highlighted by a debate with a number of philosophers, see Joyce Sebag, “Le temps de travail au cinéma: comment représenter l’intangible?” in Claude Durand and Alain Pichon (coord.), Temps de travail et temps libre, Brussels, De Boeck, 2001. 6

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Fritz Lang to make his conceptualization of the world understandable that converges with the preoccupations of documentary sociologists who, if they have sound and speech, must also use filmic devices and rhetorical figures such as metaphor if they want to share abstract representations of society and social relations. It is thus a question of calling upon the interior language of which Jean Mitry speaks (2000, p. 163), which by linking perception and comprehension of the film makes it possible to assemble the separate images to give them meaning. This is what Jean-Luc Godard practices in his own way in Numéro Deux in dealing with waiting time of women (Sebag 2001). Here, the director shows a divided couple where the presence/absence of the other (who works outside the home) brings to a climax the perception of loss of the sense of working time for the one who does not work (outside the domestic sphere!). The woman perceives the working time of the one who works and is active in the social field as a time that divides, a time stolen from life in the relationship between work time and non-work time. This film, by its experimental character and its difficulty in visualization, resists any immediate interpretation. It demands a permanent work of reflection from the spectator, a sustained observation and not the evasion characteristic of commercial films. The presence of two screens in the cinematographic image constitutes a way of rethinking synchrony in the dichotomy of time, operated by the division of labor within industrial societies. Here, however, Jean-Luc Godard does not resort to metaphor. He uses a crude language and a technique, that of the presence of two screens on the same image. Two worlds live in parallel. They don’t live side by side. They have nothing to say to each other and when they come into contact, they don’t get along. The audio work, the sound variations on the two screens characterize, as much as the images that do not meet, these two worlds that cannot understand each other and that live in different times: political time, factory time, and external time, which are once again those of urgency, efficiency, and productivity, even when claiming revolutionary ideas. This is a long, extended time period whose interstices appear indefinite, infinite, and worrying for the world of production. Waiting time characterizes so many feminine figures in cinema: the long duration of time in the process of biological reproduction, the future time of intensely building the education of our children, the time of love that is never assured. Jean-­ Luc Godard shows, in a certain way, the essential failure of not accepting the separation of these two worlds, of these two times of production and reproduction. These two worlds cannot coexist. Their coexistence was, perhaps mythically, possible in traditional societies, when man was subject to the rhythm of nature. To want to associate them again requires economic, political, and mental revolutions which are utopian today, as well as in the past. These are utopias that have filled a lifetime: Godard’s film summarizes 40 years of work and activism in two minutes

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of cinema. All the passions, the fears, the anxieties, the joys that have structured the life of the old man, lose meaning in this summary and make this project very derisory in his eyes. There is no turning back either. “Why do we always say either/or? Why not both?” asks Sandrine. Godard tries to say both, production and reproduction. They merge in a screen when the retired man and the elderly woman have left the working world. But before that, the two do not manage to reconstitute themselves into a single entity. The two times remain fundamentally separate. Godard does not demand the end of work either, or at least the end that would occur when men and women no longer have a job without it being their choice: “I think that when there is pleasure in being unemployed, it is fascism that sets in,” he makes Sandrine say. To say both is difficult, “difficult like the revolution. But difficult is not i­ mpossible.” At the end of the film, we find a single screen showing hands, those of Jean-Luc Godard, on a sound mixer. He tries to harmonize the sound levels. The volume that he assigns to one or the other of the two screens attempts defining the meaning he is trying to give to his message. This film appears as the slow elaboration of the filmmaker so that two worlds, two times, meet. Showing two screens in the same image leaves the trace of this impossibility and incommunicability. The volumes that he assigns to one or the other of the two screens try to specify the meaning he wants to give to his subject matter. This film appears as the slow elaboration of the filmmaker so that two worlds, two times, meet. Showing two screens in the same image leaves the trace of this impossibility and incommunicability. Godard’s film, despite the difficulty that the spectator may experience in following his message, tries to escape from the question of metaphor and cues in cinematographic language. He proposes a new filmic writing to express the intangibility of time. Can we use such devices in sociological documentary? Why not? Through Numéro Deux, we are invited to work on writing and renewing cinematographic styles in documentary cinema. This is difficult if we also want to meet the challenge of making sociological documentaries visible to a wider public.

2.3 Portraying Relations of Domination: From Metaphor to Archive Portraying the relations of domination between two social or ethnic groups or communities is a difficult task in documentary filmmaking—unlike in fiction, which can reconstruct and script such relations. The transience of these relationships and the impossibility of re-enacting them, and the unpredictability of their occurrence, make the work of the documentary filmmaker arduous or difficult. There may be

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situations or individual attitudes that last, but in general they are rather sudden and ephemeral, and the sociologist-cinematographer sometimes has difficulty in grasping them or, more exactly, in being immediately able to film them. Based on our documentary 50  Years of Affirmative Action in Boston, we put forward a few proposals or solutions for dealing with this immediate invisibility or the difficulty of reporting on relations of domination that were, at least in appearance, that of a policed-dominated country. Indeed, when we choose as a scientific object a social phenomenon such as the question of the domination of African-­ Americans by the white majority in the United States today, including the “reparative” measures of Affirmative Action, putting it into images appears even more difficult, since it is a question of recounting an unfinished and contradictory process made up of social advances, resistances, and deviations. We have resorted to metaphor, archives and, more generally, to film interviews (see below). One of the theses of the film is the emergence of a middle class among African-­ Americans, a class that is present from the very beginning of the film’s credits, which show African-American golfers. This sport, even if it is more “democratized” in the United States than in Europe, appears here as a metaphor for this social change. As this is an emerging trend, these players’ presence on the green is in a wide enough shot to suggest the slow pace of transformation. Moreover, if we continue the metaphorical analysis, the last shot of the film is that of an isolated African-American accordion player—like the golfer, also in a green space, but here a public garden. The accordion player sings in a beautiful, hopeful voice and the shots are closer together. The viewer perceives in this bringing together of the two sequences the distance between the promises of the affirmative action program and the reality of the daily lives of African-Americans who have certainly gained in symbolic status, but who remain far below the average American standard of living. This type of metaphor is generally created during the editing process, after repeated viewing of the rushes. Metaphors that are expected during the shooting, such as the differentiation of living spaces or modes of consumption, quickly become too crude and do not work in the narrative, risking making the film univocal or militant, thus losing its credibility. This underlines the fact that domination relationships are not only physical ones, such as violence and prohibitions, but can be highly symbolic and less directly visible. This perhaps gives them their even more unbearable character because they affect the subjects in their innermost being. Using archives, essentially those of the civil rights movement between 1954 and 1965, helps distance ourselves from the present and therefore from the interviews, which are put into perspective. They show the historical foundations of affirmative action while justifying the choice of the subject treated by the film. In what way are

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the archives revealing, or even more enlightening than current shots? The first thing that strikes you about these archives is the fact that the situations of racial segregation were contemporaneous films, shot in a certain way. Besides the symbols and signs of separation between whites and blacks, the camera captures the acceptance of the white operator’s approach by the African-Americans. No rebellion, but a look that, without being indifferent, is a sign that being filmed without one’s agreement, not being questioned about that agreement, is fundamentally an extension of a dominated social relationship that is more general than the scene itself. The very idea of opposing it is neither envisaged nor conceivable. Archives exist because no one considered the situations filmed or photographed as abnormal in the 1960s. The separation of racial communities was an institutionalized social fact which one could film. For the television operator, this filmic situation did not have to be questioned because it was part of everyday life. Today, we use the “normality” of this situation of yesterday because we find ourselves at a point of time in which we question its validity. The normality of the archive becomes abnormal today. This is the main cinematic function of the archive in this context. The archives are also used to put current statements relating an experience in the past into images. For example, when we interviewed Sharon Reilly, an African-­ American woman, in the 2000s, she relived for us the humiliation and racial segregation she experienced in the South of the United States in the 1980s. She told us how a white passenger entering the bus pointed out to her that her seat was at the back—as it was in the era of racist laws—and not at the front of the bus. We immediately associated this fairly recent experience with archival images. The young woman’s comment brought to life, more than 40 years after the abolition of racial laws, a certain constancy of racism which was not always expressed so openly. Moreover, the bus has a strong connotation in the history of the struggles for civil rights. It is from the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat to a white passenger in 1955 that Martin Luther King launched a campaign of boycott of the company which lead a decade later to the abolition of the segregationist laws in buses. The bus was also at the heart of another struggle, that of busing, which, according to one of the principles of affirmative action, was to integrate schools which were no longer segregated by the racial laws but by housing patterns (idem). Thus, in recent history, from the struggles for civil rights to the decisions of affirmative action, the bus has acquired a symbolic dimension in the question of domination. The scene reported to us by Sharon Reilly could not be restored by images. The recourse to archives showing buses, themselves historically and politically connoted, was the optimal way to reinforce the social and emotional depth of her remarks. For if racial segregation has become illegal, the behavior that

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comes from it is in fact strongly “invisibilized” and therefore difficult to grasp through image and sound. In summary, the ways and means of representing the invisible and the intangible in sociological documentaries remain to be explored. Metaphor is a solution and an active research principle to represent through image and sound what cannot be directly shown as ideas or more generally as symbolic thought. The thoughtful use of archives can be another way when they are not mere illustrations. But often, all the detours and all the cinematographic subterfuges are not enough to express the invisible in the documentary which does not always have the dialogues of fiction cinema. Therefore, beyond the efforts made by sociologist-filmmakers to acquire and master the language of film, they also resort to film interviews.

3 The Filmed Interview One difficulty faced by filmic sociology is therefore to grasp what is most invisible and intangible in social relations and more generally in the social world. For example, work gestures, particularly those of the skilled artisan, have made the fortune of visual ethnology and sociology. One can also film professional practices such as those of the employee, the engineer, the executive, and even the telephone-­ operator or the teacher, although they are sometimes more difficult to put into images. But how can one film the physical fatigue of the worker or the mental fatigue of the teacher in a difficult class? Usage of the filmed interview as a privileged means of expressing thinking on work and any social practice in the family, in the street, in the market, in a neighborhood meeting, or in a church seems unavoidable. The filmed interview is a complement to the narrative and not a substitute. The place of the filmed interview in documentary films in general, and in the sociological documentary in particular, gives rise to real debates between film directors. While some people insist documentaries show social facts, sociologists may insist that a well-prepared and carefully worked-out interview becomes a situation in itself, an “interview on location,” i.e., integrated into the time and space of a social fact, thus contributing to its understanding and analysis. One can moreover argue that the interview shows what is hidden just as well, if not even in greater depth, including by multiplying the points of view of the actors through intelligent editing that does not erase the subjectivity of the sociologist-director.

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3.1 From Sociology to Filmed Interview The interview, and even more so the semi-structured interview, sometimes called the in-depth interview, is one of the four or five primary tools of investigation in sociology, particularly in written sociology. It has easily found its place in filmic sociology, on the one hand to express, or rather to have expressed, the invisible and the intangible, and on the other hand, because it is widely mastered by most professionals in the discipline. The risk is to make this, for the sake of convenience, the essential part and the heart of the sociological documentary. The latter would thus become research reports or “audiovisual” books instead of printed works. This would make filmic sociology lose its second pillar, namely the power of image and sound based on the language of film, including the emotions transmitted by this medium, while keeping in mind that from its very beginning, cinema—and Godard later extensively used such a structure—can be organized by chapter. The interview has inescapable heuristic qualities, as shown in the box below in a very specific anthropological situation. In different conditions, such as those at work, the interview allows us to go much further than a simple behavioral observation, because it highlights the motives and motivations for action, the reasons for resistance or commitment to work, or quite simply allows us to understand what intellectualized work is, the essential characteristics of which are essentially invisible. Following research carried out for a Works Council of a large company belonging to an international group on the relationship between work malaise and project-based organization, we planned to extend this first work by making a sociological documentary. We can rapidly summarize the causes of work malaise as fatigue for project managers or department directors who have to work 55-to-65-hour weeks, i.e., they have to take work home. Besides this increase in working hours, the simultaneous participation in several projects adds to their concerns and mental stress. The obligation of mobility that pushes these same engineers to find “a position” every three years on another project leads them to show constantly their skills and to “overvalue” themselves. How can we discuss these social facts without going through interviews? How can we film the pressure of time, the overload of work, or the fatigue of being? Filming suffering, complaints, and even tears, shows emotion, so necessary in cinema, but does not inform the viewer about the causes of this malaise. For it is rather a paradigm that must be accounted for, that of project-based organization and more precisely here of matrix management. To demonstrate this to the spectator, we have to look for attributes, metaphors, catharsis, or revealing situations we can film and

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edit, but also through work impressions. Only interviews conducted with people concerned can express the foundations of work malaise. We refer the reader to the first chapter of Dreams on the Line, in which the interviews have the viewer experience the fatigue of the worker on the Tacuma production line or the difficulty of being a female team leader in a male work group. cc

First Contact, Distancing via the Interview

First Contact (1982, 58) is a documentary that brings anthropologists Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson into contact with Papuans. These directors brought with them film archives of the Leahy brothers who arrived in New Guinea in the 1930s. This archive shows scenes of the daily life of the Papuans that the Leahy brothers recruited to sift river sand to find gold. In 1980, Connolly and Anderson projected this archive to the Papuans for whom the Leahy brothers had been the first white men they encountered. The Papuan interviewed after viewing the gold-­sieving footage said, “Before the white man came, each man was his own boss. That ended with the white man’s arrival. When they said work we worked, they chose the days … We didn’t know anything about money, or even what it looked like. What we wanted were shells. When someone died, they were burned, and the ashes were thrown into the river. When we were given these bowls to sift the dirt in the river, we thought our ancestors had come back to get their bones!” At first glance, these archives show the traditional life of a village with naked men and women in the company of white men who make indigenous people work. Reading these archives now takes on another meaning thanks to the interview, which, through its reflexivity, reveals what they have hidden and what is not visible: How these white men used the beliefs of the Papuans. It is only when they have mixed more deeply with Western civilization and have somehow adopted their codes that they have discovered the discrepancy between their original beliefs and the real objectives of the white man. The interview gives meaning to the images; it accompanies them and proves once again that we cannot understand man by his behavior alone. Through this interview, we have been able to go beyond the appearances of a single work situation closer to those we know. In still other circumstances, we have measured the power of the interview, which is not only revealing, but gives the interviewee a social and human dimension that reinforces the veracity of his statements. In 50 Years of Affirmative Action

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in Boston, Hudson, an African-American lawyer, shows us how the long legacy of slavery leads the most disadvantaged black populations to refrain from seeking the resources offered by affirmative action. He also shows the harmful effects of drug trafficking on young African-Americans who, after a period in prison, have ­difficulty finding a job. The very pessimistic picture he paints of white America may lead the viewer to perceive a deep resentment toward it. Except that, in a very beautiful parable about going deep-sea fishing with his white friends, he shows how the dangers of the raging ocean make men a single species that must overcome the elements, just as they must eliminate the relationships of domination and eradicate racism in American society. How else can we express the strength of these convictions than in interviews that go deep into the characters of the interviewees? However, it cannot be repeated often enough that the sociological documentary aims at bringing to life for the spectators these perceptions and this relationship to the world, associating images and sounds to the narrative, demonstrating and deconstructing it as much as possible through metaphors or other tools of abstraction. Therefore, filmic sociology, while practicing the interview, avoids making films in which it would predominate. Some non-sociological documentary filmmakers, such as Raymond Depardon (Délits flagrants, Profiles of Farmers, Les habitants) or William Karel (Les Hommes de la Maison Blanche, Une terre deux fois promise: Israël-Palestine), inject emotion into their interview films through editing and narration, including the use of archival footage. But the challenge of filmic sociology is to avoid the filmed interviews as much as possible. It is still necessary to define the latter: is it a question of a percentage of interviews in the film? What should be the threshold at which we consider the documentary film to be composed of interviews? Or is it a question of the interviews structuring the film (Hamus-Vallée 2015)? Because the always present risk lies in the making of sociological documentaries that are too didactic. Conversely, editing images and sounds that are not well-thought-out during shooting can lead to showing a sociologically superficial or even pointless film, which would then only be saved by a voice-over, risking the reproduction of bookish knowledge. This also means that we must strongly differentiate the type of sociological interviews, based on a knowledge derived from long experience, from interviews specific to reporting and journalism, which have a different purpose and different audiences. Thus, Jean Arlaud (2006, p. 81) proposes that the social sciences and humanities should detach themselves “from reporting that is far removed from our primary concerns, from the quest for a narrative that is not merely informative, but that brings out the emotional range of the deep feelings of the subjects filmed.”

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3.2 The Filmed Interview, Producer of Knowledge The filmed interview in the sociological documentary fulfills three inseparable functions: • to say or show what is invisible and intangible that images and sounds have difficulty in capturing; • to produce knowledge based on the experience of the characters expressed through their own reflexivity, their feelings, representations, and sentiments; • to diversify the points of view, starting with those of the actors, without falling into relativism, but by confronting them with the thesis of the sociologist-­ filmmaker. The filmed interview requires particular attention in fulfilling these three functions, which involve putting the filmed subjects in complete confidence by establishing the filmed research over the long-term, until the personal language can be expressed in context. Hence Roger Cornu’s distinction (1988, pp. 51–52) borrowed from Pierre Perrault7 “between three types of language: • “Provoked language: when a person answers a question, you get an answer, a word, a story, a lie, a tale, etc.; • “Provoked-experienced language: several people answer in the form of a dialogue: ‘the dialogue takes the speaker beyond the discourse. He involves himself, discusses. He is passionate. He lives by his word but he does not act yet’; • “Language in action: ‘to make the events happen in front of me—and not for me—but between them or between us. I would get not a narrative but the act, not a testimony but life itself.’” According to our own terminology, the provoked language is not what its name suggests. It is really common speech and very often what we can call an agreed-­ upon speech, that is, one that the status of the interviewee should produce, or better still, one that the interviewee considers as expected and therefore suitable by the filmmaker. The discourse is of little interest to the sociologist, unless he is conducting an opinion survey. The provoked-experienced language is the one that interests us centrally and for which we develop below the conditions to be fulfilled in order to capture it.  Cf. Pierre Perrault, “Un cinéma de réalité,” Interview with Guy Gauthier, Image et son, n° 183, April 1965, p. 55–60. 7

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Language in action is what the sociologist-cinematographer hopes to capture because it is as close as possible to the activity of the person interviewed, who comments on and analyzes it. Such language is not, however, the ultimate solution. Firstly, because the filming conditions, such as surrounding noise, insufficient or unsuitable light, can ­prevent useful images or sound from being produced. Secondly, because the camera can objectively prevent the character from speaking in an ordinary and normal way, thus biasing the image and the reality that it will show. In the third place, the actor caught up in his activity does not have all the freedom of mind and reflexivity to answer the questions as in the reception of provoked-experienced language. However, such language in action, because it can shed light on the statements of the provoked-experienced language, is undoubtedly an asset in the filmed interview, as soon as it can be recorded. All directors of human science documentaries insist on the need to create the conditions for the production of quality language. Jean Arlaud uses the notion of staging this language to designate the precise preparation of devices that favor the most thorough expression of the characters (see box below). cc

Staging Personal Language By Jean Arlaud In order for this living language to unfold freely, a concern for method, an appropriate context, and the invention of a device are necessary. Our experience has confronted us with this fragile process of the emergence of language by the subject being filmed. Besides the fact that a long preliminary immersion is necessary to the development of a film, the recording of sound coupled with the image necessarily brings into play a particular device based certainly on intuition, as well as on a long work of ethnographic observation and an intimate knowledge of the considered society. It is in this respect that it seems to us legitimate to speak of “staging” the language, as it cannot be captured without a carefully thought-out procedure, in direct relation to the psychology of the characters, their habits, their cultural codes.… If we expect the Other to reflect on himself and his culture from the depths of his being, to make a statement that may stutter but is self-searching, then we must provide the necessary framework for this to happen, so that the statement does not come up against the awkwardness of the equipment and the context. In our ethno-­ cinematography work in France and elsewhere, we have constantly questioned ourselves about this way of recording language and about the procedure to be invented and reinvented in each of the situations we confronted. In the elaboration of our sequences, what led us was to find the adequate filmic conditions so that our char-

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acters felt the desire to express themselves. The requirement was to seek the ideal point where the Other would finally give free rein to his language. If he is badly situated, uncomfortable, in a position of emotional discomfort, he will not say anything worthwhile. It is also necessary to know what we can ask of him, up to what point it is possible to record his language and his image, and at what point it is necessary to stop recording. Perhaps it is at this precise moment that we are tempted to give a definitive form to what is being said, to eliminate life under the weight of an idea which has arisen untimely from our own culture and prevents us from listening to the Other in the respect of his difference. The search for privileged places of language is the foundation and the principle of articulation of any ethnographic scenario. When we shot the film in the Goutte d’Or neighborhood, an immigrant district in Paris, our preliminary field study helped us identify the places where our characters were most comfortable expressing and showing themselves. For each of them, a particular café was more appropriate than others, as there was greater intimacy with the owner and with the other customers. Then, a staging could be set up—“Conditioning” would perhaps be more accurate. In this situation, the goal being to make the other person’s language unfold as naturally as possible, the sound engineer and the camera operator are just as involved as the person being filmed and are part of the staging. Source: Jean Arlaud (2006, pp. 81–82)

3.2.1 Toward a Dialogued Knowledge Thus, in the sociological documentary, the reflexivity of the characters is engaged. These are not fictional actors, who have much less freedom to play their role and are in a relative situation of subordination to the director and producer. But it is also, and above all, the reflexivity of the sociologist-filmmaker that is engaged because he has been influenced by the relationships and the environment of the characters he has filmed. The previous preparation, which remains as open as possible, and the knowledge of the subject—both the theme and the characters—give the filmmaker the capacity to react quickly enough to grasp the strong moments of the situation, to understand its originality or singularity and sometimes to anticipate it. Like the written word, the sociological documentary is a confrontation of ideas that are embodied in the diversity of viewpoints of the characters expressed in the interviews. This reminds us of Plato’s Symposium, which systematically opposes opinions based on common knowledge and points of view built on problematical approaches, impregnated with the state of knowledge of the time and the acceptance of “morality” and the relationships it allows within the dominant social class. Each of the actors of the Platonic dialogues is called upon to give his point of view either according to his own experience and personal practice or according to his

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scientific or institutional status in the City. Thus, these dialogues, which do not deliver a definitive truth about Eros, inform us about what is accepted or acceptable within this class of citizens who produce the norms of society. We see a link with the debate of ideas proposed by the sociological documentary. In Symposium, the mode of production of knowledge is based on the exchange with others around a common object, more or less fixed in advance: desire (Eros), beauty, good, evil, or all the objects of everyday life taken as a pretext to increasing the knowledge of others and their perception of reality. By linking and questioning everyone’s claims to knowledge, the dialogue opens a space of confrontations which in its turn give rise to questions and new debates for reflection. What counts here is the totality of the points of view expressed. The linking and analysis of these confrontations, which allow each person to emerge from his or her isolation, encourage the production of new knowledge, generally synthesized and analyzed by Socrates, in order to draw out new questions about what should be discarded and what makes sense in order to produce a spiral of knowledge that will be questioned in its turn. Other evidence came to support this hypothesis as we were reflecting on the question of dialogue. Stephen Greenblatt’s (2011) book, The Swerve, which recounts the journey of Poggio Braccioloni—a Renaissance humanist close to the Vatican—in search of a manuscript by Lucretius, On Nature, is an opportunity to question both the circulation of works and the place of dialogue in the production of knowledge in ancient Greece. Indeed, this problematic allows Greenblatt to imagine an encounter with different authors such as Cicero. In On the Nature of the Gods, Cicero reminds us of the “great variety of opinions [that emerge] in the course of a close, in-depth debate.” Greenblatt offers the following analysis: “Cicero does not present his thinking as a treatise written at the end of a solitary reflection, but as an exchange of views between people of the same social and intellectual level, a conversation in which he himself plays only a small role and at the end of which no one emerges as the winner. At the end of this debate—an extensive work which would have filled several good-sized papyrus rolls—Cicero does not decide. ‘Having thus spoken, we parted. Velleus judged that the truth lay rather in the ideas developed by Cotta. To me those of Balbus seemed to have more plausibility’” (Greenblatt 2011, pp. 69–70). And Greenblatt continues, “This open-ended conclusion is not a matter of any intellectual modesty—Cicero was not a modest man—but of a strategy of being affable with his friends. It is the exchange itself, not its conclusions, that is above all meaningful. It is the dialogue that matters, the fact that we think together, with a mixture of wit and seriousness, without ever falling into gossip and slander, always leaving room for opposing opinions.”

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Today, dialogue can be a means of shattering preconceived ideas, the obvious facts that have become certainties, and even rumors and other fake news spread by a multiplicity of converging channels. By taking up these ideas, the author-­ dialogist, in this case the sociologist-filmmaker, can dismantle them to bring out other interpretations and other representations of reality. The dialogue, in all its forms, thus appears as a fragmented writing. Not least of its merit, this also serves the dramaturgy of the play, the tale, or the film. In Voltaire, as Patrick Neiertz (2008, p. 81) notes regarding his Philosophical Dictionary, “the ironic dialogue has a formal flexibility, a receptivity to playfulness as well as to discursive seriousness, and an ability to represent the different topics of the dialogue—for example, the contradictory opposition, the dramaturgy of the convincing and the convinced, or the ridiculing of the adversary in ideas. This procedure is the perfect weapon for a guerrilla war of the mind … Every dialoguer, including [Voltaire], is confronted with the challenge of having to combine the techniques of persuasive rhetoric, the procedures of representation of conversational reality and the necessary gravity of a dialectical process between two or more speakers. Its major difficulty lies in its dual character: it is simultaneously the communication of a conceptual message and the organization of this communication in spectacle.” Each element, whether fragmented or the fragment of a whole as a total thought, is itself a point of view defended by one of the speakers. And it is up to the reader to reconstitute the author’s thought through the arguments, the hesitations and the debates proposed, because the latter does not deliver, in fine, a ready-made opinion, but leads him to deepen his reflection. The philosophical dialogue prefigures editing, even resembling it. Beyond the idea of editing, dear to the surrealists and later taken up by Alexander Rodchenko in photography or in the article below by Bertold Brecht, the relevance of dialogue between image and text as a producer of knowledge—whether that dialogue is written or spoken in a sociological documentary interview—is demonstrated. Georges Didi-Huberman (2018) revisits Bertold Brecht in his montages made for his Journals (1934–1955) (1993) and for his War Primer (2017). Exiled in several European countries, Brecht lost his theater stage and lived in a fierce hatred of Nazism. He expresses himself through the collage of photographs borrowed from many media, with the most varied origins. He often uses photos from press agencies or newspapers, with the commentary of the photographer or journalist. His photos are almost always part of his political struggle against the Nazi regime or against the world capitalist order. However, the journalistic captions accompanying the photos soon seemed to him to be too descriptive, even redundant in relation to the content of the image, or to specify the context of the shot, but without ever understanding the political analysis.

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Brecht therefore goes beyond the explicit content of the photo (with the accompanying spatio-temporal details provided by the journalist) to give it its historical and political meaning through a text in four lines. For example, a photo of an American soldier who has just killed a Japanese soldier had the following journalistic caption “American soldier in front of a dying Japanese soldier he has just been forced to shoot. The Japanese, hiding behind the boat, was shooting at the American troops” (in Didi-Huberman 2018, p. 34). Brecht added the following poem at the bottom of the picture on a black background:And with their blood they were to color red A shore that neither owned. I hear it said That they were forced to kill each other. True. My only question is: who forced them to? Georges Didi-Huberman proposes an enlightening reading of this assemblage (image/legend/Brecht’s poem) in which Brecht seeks to teach the spectator to read images since “the illiterate of the future will not be illiterate, but ignorant in matters of photography” (Moholy-Nagy quoted by Didi-Huberman 2018, p.  35). For Georges Didi-Huberman, “a dialectic is thus at work. It precludes reading Brecht’s poem independently of the image it comments on, or to which it even seems to ‘respond’. Conversely, it prevents us from believing [that by reading] the ‘original’ caption, we are informed once and for all about what the photograph represents. It introduces, in this way, a salutary doubt on the status of the image without, for all that, its documentary value being contested. In political terms, Brecht’s attitude is also a dialectical position: it was necessary and beneficial for America to counter the expansion of fascism, but it was inevitable that this operation would serve its own strategies of expansion as an imperialist power” (Didi-Huberman 2018, p. 42). Brecht’s textual writing is thus much more than an explanation, he proposes an epigram, according to his own vocabulary: it is the back and forth between image and words or between image and sound and interview in the sociological documentary. It is a dialogue between the two forms of expression, but above all not the illustration by the image or the commentary that would reiterate what one or the other states. This historical and political perspective of the image through the text reminds us of the text panels Eisenstein borrowed from silent cinema, later taken up by Jean-Luc Godard. Similarly, Dorothea Lange considered that the captions accompanying her photographs deserved a longer commentary, in which she frequently included a summary of the interview with the person photographed. Regarding the photograph The Migrant Mother (see, supra, chap. 2), she writes:

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I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. [Popular Photography, Feb. 1960, on-line at https://history.hanover.edu/courses/ excerpts/336lange.html]

Unquestionably, this commentary enriched by the content of the exchange with the person serves the interpretation of the photograph, including demystifying it, giving it its true social meaning. This dialectic of image and text or interview is the basis of the sociological documentary. The text can appear live with the characters addressing the sociologist conducting the interview, or through a voice-over that takes up or synthesizes the statements of the characters in the image, as in Manuela Frésil’s Entrée du personnel, even with the characters mimicking their work in front of the factory gates, or in C’est quoi ce travail? by Luc Joulé and Sébastien Jousse. The interview is thus constitutive of the sociological document, provided that it resonates with the images without being redundant with them. This is also the position defended by Jacques Rancière when he maintains that there can be no pure visual media, in the sense that all images are associated with the text and the spoken word, in their history or their environment: It was important for me to emancipate the image from visuality [Rancière refers here to his work The Future of the Image (2009)], to say that an image is not simply a copy or a visual form, but always the fruit of a set of relations between the visible and the audible, a relation between what is present and what is absent. Modernist ideology claimed an emancipation of the visual, an emancipation of materiality, an opposition between visual form and language. I opposed this because for me it is not a question of an emancipation from language, but rather of another set of relations between the visible and the dicible. An image is never a presence in its raw state. (Rancière 2014, p. 49)

Image and language are considered here to be inseparable, corroborating the place of the interview in sociological documentary, since thought is largely associated with mental images. We have proposed the concept of dialogued knowledge (Durand and Sebag 2016) to characterize the process of knowledge production during dialogue and— for what interests us most—of the well-conducted interview that highlights dis-

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putes between different points of view. This is the maieutic process encouraged by the Greek philosophers. If the director opts for the subjective camera during a film interview, he attests to his relationship with his character. This recognition is the moment of construction of a reciprocal thought, a co-production, or a co-­ construction of knowledge. In this way, knowledge unknown to both parties is constructed in the interview. It is invented in the interaction. If the sociologist-film director believes that this is a dialogue between himself and the other, he may judge the environment to be disruptive and exclude it. On the other hand, if the film increases the relationship with the other tenfold when the camera intervenes after a mutual recognition between the film director and those being filmed, the camera and film crew may remain present in the film. In order to account for a situation of other people who react to the interview between the interviewee and the sociologist-filmmaker, the latter will use larger shots that will include those present and listening with their reactions that will characterize them: true or false indifference, opposition, support, pursuit of activities with no interest in what is happening on camera, etc. In this way, the image contextualizes what is being said for better understanding. It tells us about relationships ignored by traditional sociology, showing features and expressions of faces that enrich sociological thinking and what it says about social reality. We can thus identify four levels of dialogue in the sociological documentary: • between the sociologist and the characters interviewed who bring their experiences, their knowledge, and their points of view. This requires great dexterity in conducting the interviews in order to go beyond rhetoric to arrive at the “true language,” i.e., their subjectivity. • between the different characters interviewed. Here the quality of the dialogue depends on the editing, not only in the cinematographic sense but in the Brechtian sense, i.e., to produce new knowledge through the tension between different points of view. • between the images and the spoken text of the interviewed characters. Images of the speakers themselves on the one hand and dialogue between the images of the film and this spoken text on the other. • in the final dialogue of the spectators with the sociological documentary. This can moreover continue in the confrontation between spectators and directors. The documentary 50 years of Affirmative Action in Boston voluntarily stages the different points of view of the actors to establish a dialogue constructed in a fictional way by editing the research and experiences of positive discrimination. This device allowed us to obtain a dialectical and non-homogeneous view of a complex

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reality. It questions us on our own position as researchers, which comprises grasping the often-contradictory points of view where the relations of cause and effect are not linear but intertwined in the spiral of the rational and the emotional. And we can do this, without dispensing with a comprehensive attitude on the emergence of such propositions in a period of political, economic, and social exclusion of a part of the population. In the plural perspectives of this confrontation, we hoped to find some traces of the maieutics present in the Platonic dialogues. Dialogues which, despite the reminiscences that each person carries within him or herself and the forms of socialization that are specific to him or her, can bring back the doxa and question the opinions that are part of our social construction.

3.2.2 From Reflexivity to Elicitation The first function of the filmed interview is to have the characters express their feelings about a particular dimension of their existence or activity and above all to accompany them as far as possible in analyzing it. This is the first quality of the filmed interview, to lead the interviewees to an ever-deeper reflexivity. The sociologist-­cinematographer’s understanding of the situations allows him to reach the dimension that would have been hidden at first glance or at first hearing. The conduct of filmed interviews relies on the same mechanisms: the greater the knowledge of the situations and characters, the better the knowledge produced in the interaction between the filmmaker and the person being filmed. Elicitation is an approach or a method in which the documentalist-sociologist asks people to comment on an image (photograph or film) in which they have a particular interest because of what appears in it: themselves, or people close to them in a particular activity, or places they have visited. Photo-elicitation was first practiced by anthropologists who needed the comments by the populations studied of photographs of objects, daily practices, or rituals in order to understand the functioning of these societies (Collier and Collier 1986, p. 100 et seq.). The sociologist acts in much the same way, recording the words of the speaker commenting on a photograph of a character or scene. “The difference between interviews using images and text, and interviews using words alone lies in the ways we respond to these two forms of symbolic representation. This has a physical ­basis: the parts of the brain that process visual information are evolutionarily older than the parts that process verbal information. Thus, images evoke deeper elements of human consciousness than do words; exchanges based on words alone utilize less of the brain’s capacity than do exchanges in which the brain is processing images as well as words. These may be some of the reasons the photo elicitation interview seems like not simply an interview process that elicits more information, but rather one that evokes a different kind of information” (Harper 2002, p. 13).

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The author situates this information in the register of feelings and memories that the photographic mode of representation brings out. By asking subjects to comment on photographs showing their actions or the social facts that interest them directly, elicitation aims at intensifying the reflexivity capacities of the characters and at diversifying the dynamics deepening the sociological analysis. The method, as we have understood, goes beyond the rational interpretations only to load the comments with all affection, feeling, and emotion; it is a device that enables the projection of the intimate on the object or on the photographed fact, while detaching itself from the projective tests of the psychologists, for reasons of purpose. It builds a distancing of the subject from the reality represented by the image. Finally, whether the elicitation interviews are collective or carried out with subjects taken one by one, it necessarily produces a diversity of points of view which interests the sociologist: “my enthusiasm for photo elicitation also come from the collaboration it inspires. When two or more people discuss the meaning of photographs, they try to figure out something together. This is, I believe, an ideal model for research.” (Harper 2002, p. 23). This method has long been used by ergonomists and occupational psychologists, although much less so by sociologists. Here, video recordings are generally projected for the workers concerned so that they can analyze their gestures aloud, or even project their intellectual processes, in order to supplement the direct observations made by researchers (Clot et  al. 2000; Baratta 2006; Bonnemain et  al. 2015).8 It is also a formidable efficiency tool that is sometimes used by work rationalizers, who replace the stopwatch with a video, leaving less and less room for employee autonomy (a case observed by the authors at a major photocopier manufacturer in Dieppe). Filmic sociology brings together photo-elicitation as practiced by sociologists with the use of film in the self-confrontation of ergonomists. The difficulty here lies in the form, since the sociologist-filmmaker wishes to preserve a narrative and a certain aesthetic, which is not the preoccupation of ergonomists or occupational psychologists. Indeed, how can a sociological documentary show people commenting on their daily life, their work or local democracy, based on a film that is shown to them? The primary concern of the sociologist-filmmaker becomes the invention of a device that implements the principles of elicitation while preserving the narrative dynamics of the documentary. The shortest path is obviously to replace the filmed document during the elicitation phase by still images (which can then be placed in the final cut). However, one misses the power of the moving im See also the review Activités, the voice of the “dynamics of activity” current in work psychology: https://journals.openedition.org/activites. 8

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age enriched with sound, which can lead to more in depth or finely analytical comments. Basically, what is important in the filmed elicitation interview is to give a primary role to the filmed subject or character rather than to the researcher (Harper 2002, p. 15; see also below), as is often the case in traditional sociology. Another advantage of filmic sociology using the filmed interview is that it pays attention, through image and sound, to paralanguage. Under this term we group together everything that does not belong to words or spoken language but that accompanies them and reinforces oral expression: gestures, body postures, facial expressions (including looking or glancing), voice intonations, silences, and rhythms of speech. It is largely through paralanguage that emotions, feelings, impressions, or non-­ conscious sensations pass through, all of which also build the meaning of speech, which the written text lacks (Vander Gucht 2017, p. 254).

3.2.3 Paralanguage and the Status of the Interviewer During filming, the sociologist-cinematographer ensures the recording of everything that comes under the heading of paralanguage, metalanguage, or metacommunication, names that vary from one linguistic or anthropological school to another. This is difficult work, especially if the operator uses only one camera, because these are close-ups of hands, faces, or showing postures that may not be usable in the editing process—but which may be just as indispensable to it, including changing shots when moving from one interlocutor to another. When logging the rushes, these paralanguage shots are sometimes discarded because they are not essential, even though they will be missed in the editing process. Hence, the need to create a separate category for them, mainly so that the editing of the film interview does not become monotonous. Eisenstein, the theorist (and practitioner) of editing, draws fascinating parallels between types of editing, music, and poetry. His Notes for a General History of Cinema shows how an understanding of dissonance in musical writing allows us to think about tension and its resolution in editing, as does knowledge of poetic writing. On the other hand, the sociologist-filmmaker can exploit his characters’ movements to use all the advantages of cinema. In 50  Years of Affirmative Action in Boston, we were in the presence of powerful personalities. By filming them in full frame, there was a significant risk of seeing them move beyond the frame. But this risk was not a risk because, in fact, if their hands or part of their face left the frame, their statements were even more powerful. The work of the sociologist-­ cinematographer on the image, audio, and paralanguage, is even more important because it is through this that he leaves the canons of the film interview to return to the cinema by showing the emotions through the image.

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However, the sociologist-director is not yet finished with questions related to the interview: how should one position oneself, in or out of the picture and sound? Should one assert one’s identity as a researcher or blend in with the characters interviewed in the sociological documentary? In other words, what physical and social distance should one build with the filmed subjects? Before answering these questions, we cannot help but remember the physical and vestments position adopted by Malinowski with the Trobrianders, which leads us to question the meaning of a methodology based on “participant observation” (see, supra, chapter 2). In all cases, the set-up or staging of the interviews needs to be thought out well in advance of the filming and accepted by the subjects being interviewed. The more the sociologist who conducts the interview is involved in the image, the more the set-up must be thought out and the framework of the questions well prepared, including so that the result does not appear to be artificial with an agreed-upon discourse made by the interviewed subjects. Most of the time, the set-up calls for shooting with two cameras, a device that can create as many difficulties that will emerge at the time of editing, if it is not well understood. The more cumbersome the set-up, the more it can hinder the subjects’ reflection and prevent them from questioning themselves, and from putting forward their subjectivity, their feelings, and their own thoughts. In the same way, this complexity of the set-up can harm the presentation of the progression of the spectator’s reflection throughout the film. This is perhaps one reason for the significance of Chronicle of a Summer [Chronique d’un été] in the imagination of the humanities: the diversity of the set-ups that get people to speak with such ease, including in an exercise of elicitation (Harper 2002), that they disappear behind the speech. Hence, the idea that this is the first film of filmic sociology (Friedmann 2012). The complications caused by the interviewer’s presence in the image very often lead directors to place only the questions asked to the interviewed subjects in the soundtrack, and sometimes the follow-up. The director then risks proposing an acousmatic voice (Cornu 1988, p. 44), i.e., a voice whose origin is not seen and which can, as a result, momentarily destabilize the spectator. It is above all the difficulty of bringing to the screen interviews in a dynamic documentary where, if the interviewer is not in the image, the spectator must be able to identify instantaneously the status of the voice that he hears. This difficulty in creating a soundtrack giving voice to someone who is absent from the image leads many sociologist-filmmakers to place only the answers of the people questioned in their film. This creates additional problems in the editing process: how can a sequence of answers without a question be proposed to the spectator in a non-artificial way? One solution is to have the interviewees begin their answers by repeating the question, or at least by pointing out what they are

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talking about. But in fact, everything here is based on a convention that is now widely shared by viewers: everyone knows the questioner exists, even if he or she does not appear on the screen or in the soundtrack (which avoids the trap of the acousmatic voice). Finally, in the editing, the director is careful to make the interviews interact with each other, using the tensions that arise, including reinforcing the general narrative of the documentary.

3.2.4 Anonymity and Public Sociology The filmed interview maintains a very ambivalent relationship with the anonymity of the interviewed characters. Unlike written publications which generally give only the minimum identity characteristics of the informants, the filmed interview places them in full view. Unquestionably, filmic sociology has the role and political function of making visible through the image yesterday’s anonymous people of the written text. One can formulate here the hypothesis of the subversive value of image and sound in sociological research, in that it literally makes visible those who are traditionally the “objects of research” at the same time as sound gives them the possibility of speaking out, restoring their thought which one saw previously only through the conceptualization of the researcher. This lifting of anonymity raises additional questions about protecting people expressing themselves in a public documentary. For example, filming work in a contemporary workplace means giving a voice to employees and committing them to present their point of view and to reveal themselves. This can pose a problem with their peers, their management, and their professional organizations. This is because, with very few exceptions, the use of blurring techniques such as the temptation to film the characters of a sociological documentary from behind or in the shadows, is an expedient solution. It is by building a relationship of trust with the filmed characters that both parties agree on what can be made public and that they find the forms to present or say things, making them audible without betraying the authors’ original intentions. Does this open the door to concealment or to lying by omission? These are questions that arise in sociological documentaries, but we can affirm, from experience, that the brakes or refusals to express oneself do not stem from self-censorship or fear of the possible effects of statements, but rather from personal choices not to be in the picture (privacy in the Anglo-Saxon world). Finally, the process requires, in fine, a restitution through a projection of the film in front of the interested parties so that they validate the presentation of their expression. Filmic sociology is thus a powerful tool of subject’s reflexivity. It creates a different relationship between researchers and individuals, the subjects-objects of research. The latter become research actors insofar as filmic sociology, even if it re-

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produces the researcher’s discourse, takes part in the subjects’ expression. Taking the example of work—although we could also take the life of the neighborhood or the family as an example—raises the question of the sociologist’s exteriority in relation to the work situations analyzed. It may then appear that the workers are in the best position to conduct the filming and editing, primarily because they know the work from the inside. At least this is what the followers of the “cine-train” in the Soviet Union in the 1930s or of militant cinema after 1968 believed and practiced. This poses another problem through the possible malaise of the filming worker, who has the feeling of being detached from his status, perhaps also of betrayal in relation to it. How does this device, which favors a comprehensive approach, combine with the sociologist’s distancing? For it is this distancing, with the tools of the social sciences, that allows for analysis. From the point of view of the documentary, the interpenetration of the sociologists’ approach and the actors’ knowledge of the work is an old story. Implementing this intersubjectivity very often creates a double dissatisfaction, even a double frustration: loss of autonomy by the actors of the work and decline in the researcher’s status as an author. It is a question of opening up, despite the pitfalls outlined above (intangibility and abstraction of work, going beyond the “militant film”), renewed conditions of collective expression on life at work and its analysis. This is in line with Michael Burawoy’s concerns about public sociology: “We have spent a century building professional knowledge, translating common sense into science, so that now, we are more than ready to embark on a systematic back-­ translation, taking knowledge back to those from whom it came, making public issues out of private troubles, and thus regenerating sociology’s moral fiber” (2005, p.  5). This movement to disseminate and popularize sociological knowledge to relevant audiences is intended, according to Burawoy, to foster social change for the benefit of those audiences. This is, it seems to us, what we practice when we share our results and especially our tools of investigation and reflection with, for example, trade unionists or managers for proposals of rapid transformation of work. Filmic sociology opens up new perspectives for public sociology (Sebag et  al. 2018, p.  27ff.) based on the making of sociological documentaries shared between sociologists and audiences. Here we confront two pitfalls: on the one hand, the illusion that learning and mastering the camera or editing (and sociology) are immediate. Indeed, for cooperation to be egalitarian, it is necessary to include this learning time with a view to the realization of a common objective. Most of the time, this can only be done during leisure time, which thus considerably lengthens the time required to implement the project. On the other hand, one cannot overlook the risk of seeing the emergence of a “militant film” adopting the univocal point of view of a group and its audience. Such a documentary would thus be disseminated

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only in the social milieu of origin and would be appreciated only by viewers who are already convinced. However, the sociological documentary has a certain universality in order to be seen by the greatest number of people and above all to encourage debate and reflection. Of course, there have already been such experiences, for example with the Medvedkine Group during the 1970s in France. Closer to home, Patrick Zachmann spent a long time among the young people of the Bassens housing project in Marseille, lending them a dozen cameras to produce a book of photographs of their daily lives (2009) and a film, Bar Centre des autocars (2008). The Laboratory of Visual Sociology of the University of Genoa developed similar approaches centered on a prison in Barcelona (Buscando Respeto, 2013) and the evolution of the Tunisian Spring (Après le printemps, l’hiver, 2017), situating itself here at the margin of militant cinema. For, as Burawoy (2005, p. 17) puts it, “In pursuit of popularity public sociology is tempted to pander to and flatter its publics, and thereby compromising professional and critical commitments.” The challenge of the sociological documentary goes far beyond that of fiction cinema, which has the great advantage of choosing its settings, meticulously planning its angles of view, and making the actors say what the director wishes to express. However, they converge in emotion, thus proposing a renewed approach to sociology that tradition has tried to confine to exclusively rational discourse. These are the concerns that led us to re-interrogate the representation of reality and the “effect of reality” in photography and then in cinema (L’épreuve du réel à l’écran: Essai sur le principe de réalité documentaire, by François Niney is a reference work). But it is beyond the visible that filmic sociology questions its tools and its methods to represent what escapes the eye and which nevertheless constitutes the heart of the social, essential object of sociology. Although it is a question as old as the image itself, showing the invisible through photography or cinema mobilizes an inventiveness that this chapter has tried to explore, without claiming to be exhaustive. The young generations, armed with new technologies and bearing intellectual innovations, will have for preoccupation to go always further, including by opening still wider the doors of the imaginary, the indispensable horizon to reflection and human knowledge of societies. In this perspective, language—quite different from speech—will necessarily always occupy a central place. It remains the specificity of our species, we animals endowed with logos, who can exchange abstract ideas and feelings, express our emotions, our disagreements, to “make society.” So filmic sociology can meet public sociology by associating more and more closely the actors of its films to their conception and realization.

7

Conclusion

Filmic sociology is a currently emerging discipline for two essential reasons: an intrinsic ethical necessity within the discipline and the role of the image in contemporary society. The first reason involves the desire to bring to the forefront those “forgotten voices” who have granted long interviews with the promise of anonymity. Filmic sociology lifts this anonymity and gives them a public voice as citizen actors. The second reason is inherent to the present requirement to use the image in a society in which it holds a prominent place: at work, during leisure time, and in the totality of social exchanges. As we define it, filmic sociology rejects the idea of being only an instrument or a support in the dissemination of research results. As the chapters of this book show, filmic sociology intends to use images and sound in the production of other knowledge. This is the case, of course, during the shooting of the film. However, it is also true in viewing the rushes and in the film’s editing, which juxtapose and confront facts, behavior, ideas, and emotions. Finally, like other disciplines or artistic practices, filmic sociology encourages the spectator’s critical viewpoint by distancing him from reality. This is William Mitchell’s “Showing Seeing” (2005), which aims at dismantling the process of vision in order to move from the social construction of the visual to the visual construction of the social. The association of cinema and sociology often seems to be paradoxical during the projection of a sociological documentary. Spectators perceive this as a new exotic creature which aims at combining a scientific approach with cinematographic writing belonging to the artistic world. This is why, throughout this book, we have considered the question of the combination of these two worlds side by side, convinced of the possibility of overcoming an abusively binary vision of a project having “too much” sociology—therefore boring or not sufficiently © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Sebag, J.-P. Durand, Filmic Sociology, Social Visualities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33696-6_7

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c­ inematographic—or of being “too deeply” influenced by the codes or cinema aesthetics and not sufficiently sociological, having abandoned its sociological scope along the way. Others may expect a sociological film to show researchers theorizing their results on screen: from then on, there would be no cinema here since there would be no cinematographic writing! This book shows how the hybridization of sociology and cinema is possible, desirable and even welcome, giving birth to new form and content where learning to see becomes essential. This is necessarily a long-term project that requires the creation of solid training for future sociologist-filmmakers. The latter must indeed master both: • the sociological theories of the field(s) dealt with in their research as well as the methods of investigation of the fields based as much on observation as on interviews which, when filmed, will contribute to the documentary writing; • cinematographic techniques (filming and sound recording, including framing and camera movements, lighting, logging rushes, and editing) to obtain quality images and sounds on the one hand, and cinematographic writing so that emotions and scientific arguments converge to make sense of the documentary on the other. This is a long apprenticeship, which does not exclude—far from it—cooperation with film professionals. The more the sociologist masters cinematographic techniques and writing, the more fruitful the combination of skills will be. Becoming a sociologist-cinematographer consists in systematizing the back-andforth between rational and objectifying sociological theories and thinking through images, giving a large place to the subjective feeling. It is a matter of thinking of theses through images and giving sociological content to the images-sounds perceived. Imaging sociology requires a mastery of sociological paradigms and a mastery of cinematographic language leading to renewed forms of representation. With these foundations we need not be afraid of experimenting, including by relying on previous experiences in the human sciences to make filmic sociology an approach based on invention, inventiveness, and creation. This process through which the sociologist conceives his object, producing knowledge about it in cinematographic terms, can refer to the concept of transduction as it functions in the sociology of innovation. Transduction consists of “a physical, biological, mental, social operation by which an activity propagates from person to person within a domain, basing this propagation on a structuring of the domain operated from place to place” (Simondon 2005, p. 32). It generally accompanies an auto-complexification, which filmic sociology encounters today through

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the interpenetration and hybridization of sociology and cinema. It is this process that Amos Gitaï (2019, p. 8) also talks about when it concerns going from paper to cinema: “The script must simulate by a means that is not expensive—paper—the idea of the film, but it must not be executed, and I insist on the verb execute in all its interpretations. The cinema that is content to execute a concept, or a text, is limited. It is the process of interpretation that interests me.” This learning of cinematographic writing by the sociologists is the node of the project of the filmic sociology. Experimental cinema could influence this process in order to lead sociologists, whether or not they are associated with film professionals, to invent novel ways of writing sociological documentaries. Another equally important project is opening up to us today: the distribution of those specific works born of filmic sociology. On the one hand, the existing festivals privilege the cinematographic approach because the selection committees and juries mainly bring together film professionals, critics, and specialized journalists. On the other hand, there is the danger of limiting the diffusion of research films only to researchers during conferences or educational events. Today, scientific events rarely screen entire works, and debates are based on extracts from sociological documentaries. Yet, in essence, film is a unity element that can be distorted by segmentation or partition. It seems urgent to open up new national and especially international spaces to disseminate these sociological documentaries, as well as those of related disciplines. The recent creation of a Research Group on Image, Transmedia Works, and Social Sciences by the CNRS should encourage initiatives in this direction. At first glance, the internet might appear to be a favorable medium for the dissemination of sociological documentaries. Beyond the impersonalization of the medium and the predictable swamping of this kind of film in the YouTube ocean, or even that of Vimeo, it will always lack the dimension of debates that necessarily accompany this cinema: debates with the public and debates between researchers that always follow the in  vivo projections of sociological documentaries. Researcher-­filmmakers in the human sciences are waiting for the creation of an internet platform—certainly publicly run to avoid advertising an invasion—recognized and dedicated to research films. With a diffusion to a wider public, this tool could lead to public debates such as those that take place around books and scientific journals. Better still, using available technology, such a trans-media or cross-­ media platform could develop the hoped-for osmosis between images-sounds and critical texts (meta-texts themselves being illustrated or audio) in order to consolidate a scientific community with its tensions, its norms, and its debates, in an emerging cyber space.

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Filmic sociology, a new field in sociology, is opening up to all influences with a clear awareness of the theoretical, epistemological, or simply practical problems it has to face. But the countless challenges it faces are taken up by increasing numbers of researchers whose professional structuring is no longer in doubt.

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Thematic Index

A Abstract, abstraction, 90–92, 94, 114, 165, 174, 177, 178, 180, 187, 201, 202 Advertising, advertisement, 122, 126, 171, 178, 205 Affects, 11, 123, 182 Affirmative action, 157–160, 182, 183, 187 Agit trains, 64 Agriculture, 69 Alter, 151 American agriculture and the positive, 41 Analogical, 178 Angle shooting, 100, 199 of view/vision, 95, 202 wide, 95 Anonymous, anonymity, 147, 200–203 Anthropologist, anthropology, x, xi, 1, 11, 31–38, 62, 72, 77, 79, 80, 186, 196 Appearance, 13, 17, 84, 106, 112, 154, 165, 169–171, 182, 186 Architecture, 131 Archives, 9, 32, 48, 78, 134, 181–184, 186 Archiving, 135, 136 Art, 13–14, 60, 83, 84, 91, 93, 97, 104, 120–121, 123, 162, 165–168

Artifact, 92, 93, 171 Artist, 73, 104, 166–168 Attributes (of characters), 100, 103 Autochrome, 32, 33 Awareness, 127, 141, 161, 171, 196 See also Consciousness B Background noise, 15, 21 Blur, blurring, 20, 126, 168, 200 Body, 1, 20, 26, 32, 35, 37, 48, 55, 65, 69, 87, 94, 97, 123, 135, 167, 198 movement, 6, 78 Broadcast, 11, 92, 148, 158, 205 See also Diffusion Busing, 183 C Camera autonomous, 71, 72 light, 5, 72, 136, 144, 153 movement, 3, 10, 15–17, 24, 25, 64, 71, 118–121, 127, 128, 132, 133, 136, 144, 153, 172, 204 Cameraman, 10, 16, 24, 26, 81 Capitalism/capitalist, 21, 108, 192

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Sebag, J.-P. Durand, Filmic Sociology, Social Visualities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33696-6

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216 Capture, see Recording Car, car industry, 18, 23, 37, 48, 55, 64, 66, 67, 110, 111, 126, 157, 159, 194 Character, 3, 6, 9, 10, 12, 16, 39, 46, 51, 52, 56, 58, 62, 63, 81, 82, 84, 90, 95, 97, 100, 103, 104, 106–108, 121, 126, 127, 129–133, 136, 138, 140, 141, 143–145, 152–154, 156, 158, 162, 165, 171, 176, 179, 180, 182, 187–190, 192, 194–200 Child, 39, 40, 63, 89, 91 Cinema activist (see Militant) direct, 38, 66, 70–77 experimental, 205 vérité (see ciné-vérité) See also Fiction Cinéma-vérité, 71–73 Cine-train, 25, 64, 66, 67, 76, 201 Ciné-vérité, 72, 73 City, cities, 9, 30, 66, 126, 141, 157, 159, 175, 191 Class, classes dominant, 150 middle, 182 social, 30, 59, 61, 160, 190 working, 59, 61, 150, 160, 179 of objects, 148 Classic, classical, 69, 106, 114, 130, 131, 168, 173 Classify (to), classifying, 73, 156 Code, 6, 62, 99, 105, 126–128, 166, 168, 171, 176, 179, 186, 189, 204 Cognition, 91, 94, 130 Communication, x, 20, 110, 113, 115–117, 145, 167, 176, 177, 192 Compassion, 3, 112, 145, 148, 151, 160 Composition (of the image), 65, 107, 118 diagonal, 58, 100 Concept, conceptualization, 7, 13, 25, 83, 88, 90–93, 112, 120, 123, 131, 140, 147–150, 162, 174–176, 178–180, 194, 200, 204, 205 Confrontation, 9, 117, 137, 151, 190, 191, 195, 196

Thematic Index Connotation, 36, 126–128, 171, 178, 183 Consciousness, 6, 16, 22, 32, 91, 153, 206 See also Awareness Constructivist, 56 Consumption, 182 Context, contextualization, x, 15, 45, 86, 90, 91, 118, 141, 142, 154, 169, 170, 183, 188, 189, 192 Continuum, 81, 101, 148, 149, 173 Contraction, 95–101, 118 of time, 95, 103, 119 Copy, 127, 166, 168, 171, 194 Creation, creativity, 2, 5, 7, 11, 25, 29, 37, 60, 67, 72, 80, 84, 92, 104, 128, 138, 175–177, 204, 205 Cubist, 168 Culture, cultural, 2, 32, 34–36, 41, 58, 62, 63, 65, 69, 72, 92, 109, 111, 122, 126–128, 149, 153, 158, 171, 174, 175, 179, 189, 190 Cupboard, 86, 87 D Decisive moment, 100, 101 Deconstruction, 16 Denotation, 126–128 Depth of field, 101, 118, 153 See also Field depth Description, 32, 34–37, 84–86, 133, 167, 173 Detachment, 36, 86, 116, 140, 144–155 Device, 8, 13, 15, 17, 18, 25–27, 51, 115, 116, 158, 160, 167, 174, 179–181, 189, 195, 197, 199, 201 Dialogue, ix–xi, 12, 112, 115, 119, 130, 154, 156, 184, 188, 190–196 Didactic, 13, 28, 129, 187 Diffusion, 64, 68 See also Broadcast Discourse, 90, 114–116, 120, 135, 147, 148, 165, 180, 188, 198, 199, 202 See also Speech Dissonance, 135, 198

Thematic Index

217

Distance, 23, 28, 34, 36, 43, 48, 56, 77, 105, 116, 127, 149, 151, 153, 156, 170, 171, 182, 199 Documentary style, 41–53, 56, 119 Documenteur, 77 Domination, 16, 21–25, 48, 147, 149, 151, 153, 165, 174, 176, 181–184, 187 Dramaturgy, 47, 63, 134, 192

131, 133, 136, 143, 154, 158, 166, 173, 174, 176–178, 180, 181, 183, 186–190, 195, 200, 202, 204 Eye, 19, 37, 38, 43, 56, 57, 64, 67, 85, 91, 94–97, 103, 107, 108, 111, 123, 140, 165, 167, 168, 177, 181, 202 Eye, 64

E Editing/editor, 1–3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13–17, 19, 22, 25, 27, 28, 60, 64–69, 73, 78, 81, 89, 110, 112–114, 116–138, 155, 156, 160, 169, 176, 178, 182, 184, 187, 192, 195, 198–201, 203, 204 Effect, see Reality, effect Elicitation, 26, 197 See also Self-confrontation Emotion, 15, 17, 37, 86, 101, 111, 130, 138, 153, 162, 166, 172, 174, 187, 188, 196–199, 201, 202, 204 Enigma, enigmatic, 43, 47, 104, 106, 154, 172 Ergonomist, 23, 26, 79, 113, 197 Esthetic, 14, 26, 30, 47–49, 51, 65–67, 95, 99–101, 104, 136 Ethnologist, ethnology, 1, 3, 28, 31–82, 135, 184 Executives (at work), ix, xi, 5–9, 11–28, 30, 32–39, 41, 45, 46, 48, 51–53, 57, 61, 63, 64, 67, 72, 78, 79, 84, 86–88, 97, 101, 106, 110–114, 116, 122, 124, 128, 131, 135, 136, 138, 140, 142–145, 147, 148, 154, 155, 159, 161, 168, 170–172, 174, 177, 178, 180–182, 184–186, 189, 191, 193, 194, 197, 198, 200–203 Experience, experimental, see Experimental cinema Experimental cinema, xi, 2, 23, 28, 29, 31, 35, 56, 84, 87, 101, 112, 130,

F Face, 11, 20, 21, 23, 26, 43, 63, 83, 85, 89, 115, 116, 148, 179, 195, 198, 206 Factory, 18, 25–28, 39, 61, 108, 110, 111, 113, 117, 128, 139 See also Plant Fake news, 192 Family, x, 7, 9, 30, 32, 46, 51, 55, 62, 66, 67, 69, 85, 86, 113, 144, 184, 201 Farm, 55, 67, 69 Fascism, 181, 193 Fear, 165, 181, 200 Feeling, 1, 3, 6, 8, 12, 14, 18, 43, 81–83, 87–89, 91, 93, 122, 129, 130, 134, 140, 146–149, 163, 170, 185, 187, 197, 198, 202–204 See also Emotion Fiction, 37, 62, 63, 68, 69, 72, 74, 78–82, 134, 140, 144, 172, 173, 181, 184, 202 Field (of the discipline), 2, 4, 6–7, 12, 14, 27–29, 31, 34, 73, 78, 81, 204–206 Field depth, 144 See also Depth of field Fieldwork, ix, xi, 5–9, 11–28, 30, 32–39, 41, 45, 46, 48, 51–53, 57, 61, 63, 64, 67, 72–74, 76, 78–81, 84, 86–88, 90, 97, 101, 106, 109–114, 116, 122, 124, 126, 128, 131, 135, 136, 138, 140–145, 147, 148, 151, 154, 155, 159, 161, 168, 170–172,

218 174, 177, 178, 180–182, 184–186, 189, 191, 193, 194, 197, 198, 200–203, 205 Frame, 7, 19, 24, 56, 64, 86, 95, 97, 119, 166, 198 G Gaze, 19, 25, 43, 44, 47, 58, 86, 95, 103, 105, 107, 108, 150, 154 Gender, 30, 32, 63, 114, 150 Gesture, 15, 17, 25, 26, 35, 38, 59, 67, 78, 103, 107, 113, 134, 179, 184, 197, 198 God, 21, 157, 158 Golden point, golden ratio, 100, 106 H Habitat, 32 Hand, 1, 3, 10, 11, 17, 19–22, 26, 28, 29, 36, 37, 44, 48, 61, 63, 80, 97, 106, 107, 123, 129, 139, 148, 157, 160, 181, 185, 195, 198, 204, 205 Hearing, 84, 86, 88, 90, 114, 173, 196 History of cinema/photography, 2, 3, 77, 84 of sociology, 2, 77, 84 Housing, 159, 183, 202 Humanist, 59, 100, 191 Hybridization, 3, 4, 83–138, 165, 204, 205 I I, 144–146, 153 Identity, 18, 20, 22, 23, 145, 150, 170, 199, 200 Illusion, 52, 72, 127, 161, 166–167, 169, 171, 201 Image et Société, see Master Imagination, imaginary, x, xi, 58, 84, 86, 87, 91, 101, 123, 165, 168, 171–172, 178, 199, 202 Imitation, 169 Imperfect, 137–138 Impression, 24, 169, 186, 198 Impressionist, 168

Thematic Index Indexing, 135, 136 Instrument, instrumentation, 6, 78, 97, 142, 143, 150, 154, 161, 165, 175–177, 203 Intangible, 173 See also Tangible Intelligence, 24, 148 Internet, 8, 170, 205 Interpretation, x, 12, 14, 20, 21, 24, 26, 87, 96, 97, 104, 117, 122, 124, 126, 128, 143, 161, 165, 166, 168–169, 180, 192, 194, 197, 205 of image(s), 87, 97, 122, 126 Interview, interviewer in depth, 112, 185 filmed, 3, 6, 114, 115, 119, 143, 184–202 Intimate, intimacy, 18, 24, 72, 86, 158, 159, 189, 190, 197 Invisible/invisibility, 13, 61, 71, 89, 110, 116, 140, 165, 172–174, 178, 181, 182, 186, 194, 200, 202 See also Visible/visibility Isolated, isolating, 112, 116, 123, 158, 167, 182 J Journalism, journalist, see Photojournalism Just in time, 113 K Kino-Pravda, see Cinéma-vérité Knowledge, production, 7, 81, 84, 133–135, 143, 176, 191, 194 L Landscape, 37, 51, 53, 62, 95, 99, 111, 119, 168 Language body, 35 cinematographic, 30, 181, 204 personal, 115, 188–190 Lean production, 110, 139 Legacy, 187

Thematic Index

219

Leisure, 59, 72, 86, 201, 203 Light, lighting, 5, 6, 10, 19, 26, 27, 31, 51, 52, 61, 72, 86, 100, 107, 118, 120, 130, 132, 136, 144, 153, 155, 166–168, 171, 179, 189, 204 Listen, listening, 85, 112, 114, 121, 143, 190, 195 Location, 10, 26, 129, 132, 133, 138, 152, 153, 184 scouting, 129 Love, 22, 72, 86, 174, 180

N Narrative, xi, 12, 28, 30, 48, 96–99, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 109, 111, 112, 119, 121, 129–131, 133–137, 144, 150, 158, 167–170, 174, 177, 179, 182, 184, 187, 188, 197, 200 Nazi, nazism, 69, 147, 192 Neo-realism, 59, 70, 162, 165–167 Neutrality, 3, 82, 177 Novel, 13, 83–88, 130, 144, 151, 162, 168, 205

M Machine, 19–21, 51, 66, 91, 94, 112, 128, 140, 179 Manager, 15–17, 22–25, 48, 113–117, 185, 201 Master, 2, 4, 6, 27–30, 38, 78, 80, 184 Image et Société, 29, 144 Meaning, see Sense Medias, ix, 36, 60, 92, 93, 115–117, 124, 144, 148, 159, 170, 192, 194 Memory, 62, 84, 86, 87, 90, 91, 93, 112, 131, 134, 150, 160, 197 Message, 116, 122, 126–128, 171, 181, 192 Metaphor, 13, 21, 134, 178–185, 187 Militant (film or cinema), 151, 201, 202 See also Cinema, activist Mockumentary, see Documenteur Modernity, 62, 68, 108, 109 Movement, x, xi, 3, 6, 10, 15–17, 19–21, 24, 25, 35–37, 46, 53, 58, 59, 64, 67, 68, 70–72, 78, 83, 91, 100, 103, 107, 112, 118–121, 126–128, 132, 133, 136, 144, 147, 150, 153, 155, 168, 169, 182, 198, 201, 204 camera, 3, 6, 10, 15–17, 19, 24, 25, 64, 71, 91, 118–120, 127, 128, 132, 133, 136, 144, 153, 155, 172, 204 Music, 16, 21, 65, 67, 69, 118, 128, 168, 198

O Objectivity, 49, 82, 127, 169, 171 new, 168 Observation active, 7 direct, 1, 7, 38, 197 filmic, 7 participant, 34, 199 Offices, see Work Out of shot, 133 P Painting, 36, 43, 83, 87, 89, 91, 104, 108, 121, 166, 168 Paradigm, 25, 90, 92, 141, 176, 178, 185, 204 Paradox/ical, 44, 45, 99, 101, 103, 106, 117, 151, 159, 160, 167, 203 Paralanguage, 198–200 Passion, 162, 181 Percept, 89–94 Perception, 13, 15, 17, 18, 64, 83, 84, 86, 88–91, 93, 94, 112, 119, 121, 124, 126, 165, 166, 172, 180, 187, 191 PhD, 38 Photojournalism, 43, 60, 89, 116, 156, 172, 187, 192, 193, 205 Pictions, 170 Pictorialism, pictorialist, 168

220 Plant, 17–21, 51, 61, 104, 110, 111, 113, 114, 117, 139, 140, 143, 151, 154, 155, 180, 194 See also Factory Poetry, 83–88, 178, 198 Point of view/vision, 3, 6, 12, 13, 24, 77, 113, 121, 131, 133, 140, 144, 146, 151, 153–155, 159, 160, 162, 171, 173, 175, 190, 192, 200, 201 Preconception/preconceived ideas/ preconceived story, 12, 89, 192 Pressure, see Time, pressure Privacy, 200 Professional (film professional), 4, 27–29, 129, 184, 204, 205 Profilmie, profilmic, 38, 143 Public sociology, 8, 82, 165, 200–202 Punctum, 123, 124 Q Quality (of images and sounds), 11 Questions, questioning, x, 2, 3, 5–9, 12–15, 17, 19, 23, 25, 26, 28–32, 34, 36, 43, 44, 48, 71, 72, 77–79, 83, 84, 88, 94, 95, 99, 102, 103, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112–115, 117–120, 126, 127, 130–134, 136–138, 165, 167–169, 172, 173, 175–183, 187–189, 191, 194, 196, 199–203 R Racism, 72, 157, 183, 187 Radio, 53, 93 Reading, 23, 27, 81, 89, 95, 127, 135, 158, 162, 186, 193 Real, 15, 22, 23, 25, 37, 62, 63, 68, 71–73, 97, 102, 105, 106, 108, 115, 117, 123, 133, 161, 165, 166, 168, 170–172, 184, 186 Realism, see Neo-realism Reality, 1, 6, 7, 9–14, 27, 43, 61, 67, 69, 70, 77, 78, 84, 86, 87, 90, 92, 95, 96,

Thematic Index 113, 127, 136, 138, 140, 146, 161, 165–173, 176–178, 182, 189, 191, 192, 195–197, 202, 203 effect, 3, 41, 45, 107, 127, 139, 146, 157, 161, 165–169, 171, 173, 187, 196, 200, 202 Reason, rationality, rationalism, x, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13–14, 21, 25, 26, 28, 44–46, 58, 61, 66, 72, 83, 88–90, 93, 117, 124, 130, 132, 134, 146, 155, 157, 158, 160, 166, 173, 185, 196, 197, 199, 203 Recognition, 5, 7, 43, 59, 80, 143, 195 Recording, 1, 2, 7, 13, 15–17, 24–26, 29, 47, 51, 71, 72, 78, 79, 88, 97, 114–116, 119, 120, 127, 129, 130, 133, 137, 154, 157, 161, 165, 174, 177, 183, 188–190, 196–198, 204 Reference point, 2, 31, 58 Reflexivity, reflection, x, 2, 3, 7, 12, 14, 25–27, 30, 37, 61, 94, 112, 123, 128, 131, 133, 136, 142, 144, 148–151, 155, 161, 163, 175, 180, 186, 188–192, 196–202 Relationships (social), 8, 22, 47, 81, 173–174, 183 Reporter, see Journalism Representation, x, 3, 5, 9, 15, 23, 83, 89, 91, 94, 112, 113, 116, 136, 142, 152, 153, 165–174, 179, 180, 188, 192, 196, 197, 202, 204 Research (sociological), 7, 8, 79, 129, 155, 175, 200 Residue, 155, 156, 160, 161 Restitution, 9, 11, 27, 200 Revolution, 64, 127, 171, 180, 181 Rhythm, 1, 16–21, 25, 26, 67, 92, 128, 136, 179, 180, 198 Rituals, 32, 196 S Script breakdown, 10, 11, 129, 132–133, 136, 154, 155

Thematic Index Segregation, 165, 183 Self-confrontation, 196–199 See also Elicitation Semiology, 1, 121, 122 Sense, xi, 2, 3, 7, 9, 11–13, 17, 20, 22, 26, 27, 29, 35, 44, 45, 66, 83–88, 90–92, 94–101, 106, 114, 116, 117, 119, 121–123, 126, 127, 129, 132–136, 138, 141, 143–145, 148, 153, 154, 158, 159, 165–167, 169, 170, 173, 174, 178, 180, 181, 186, 191, 193–195, 197–199, 201, 204 Sensitive, sensibility, 8, 14, 72, 81, 84, 123, 138, 166 Serial, 104 Shot shot/reverse, 23 shot’s value, 26, 132 Sign, 55, 89, 96, 121, 126, 127, 129, 139, 171, 175–177, 183 Signified, 97, 171 Signifier, 97, 101, 104, 105, 109, 118–138, 153, 154, 171, 175, 177 Sociological theories, x, 9, 30, 80, 81, 88, 124, 128, 129, 150, 157, 166, 169, 173–175, 204 Space, 1, 6, 8, 13, 16, 21, 24, 27, 56, 94, 95, 97, 100, 103, 104, 113, 118, 119, 121, 127, 128, 134, 138, 141, 148, 149, 152, 159, 174, 175, 182, 184, 191, 205 Spectator, 11, 16, 17, 19, 23, 25, 27, 45, 95, 96, 99, 101, 115, 119, 120, 123, 128, 131, 134, 137, 148, 154, 159–161, 166, 168, 169, 171, 172, 180, 181, 185, 187, 193, 195, 199, 203 Speech, 27, 67, 112, 114, 115, 134, 146, 150, 158, 188, 199, 201, 202 See also Discourse Speed, 4, 17–19, 21, 64, 101, 171, 174 Staging, 33, 39, 61, 62, 116, 142, 189–190, 199 Straight photography, 48, 53, 119, 168

221 Stress, 15–20, 25, 112, 113, 117, 133, 159, 160, 179, 185 Strike, 57, 68, 113, 139, 178, 183 Subjectivity, intersubjectivity, 9, 52, 63, 81, 90, 184, 195, 199, 201 Suburb, 37, 59, 103, 157 Subway, 51, 105, 157 Symbol, symbolic, 41, 47, 48, 51, 56, 89, 96, 110, 122, 123, 127, 139, 141, 142, 149, 152, 175, 177, 182–184, 196 Synchronized, 65 Synchronous (sound), 5, 38, 71 T Tangible, 165, 172–174, 184, 185, 188 See also Intangible Taro, Gerda, 60, 70 Taste, 51, 85, 95, 167 Taylorism, 19, 111 Teaching, teachers, see Master Team leader, 18, 113, 186 Television, 11, 73, 93, 120, 148, 172, 183 Tensions, ix, 7, 12, 13, 16, 17, 25, 81, 86, 113, 119, 127, 130, 131, 135–137, 141, 149, 151, 156, 179, 185, 195, 198, 200, 205 Text-based sociology, 8, 11 Theater, 11, 64, 65, 73, 83, 141, 147, 148, 168, 192 Theory/ies, see Sociological theories 3D, 163, 169 Thinking, see Visual thinking Time long, 61, 62, 119, 146, 180, 202 pressure, 15–20 (see also Stress, Tensions) Touch, 46, 123, 168, 173 Trace, 87, 160, 174, 181, 196 Train, see Agit trains; Cine-train Trajectory/ies director’s, 81 individual, 28, 153, 172 social, 88, 90, 113, 144 Transgression, 100, 101, 109

222

Thematic Index

Trim bin, 134 Types of research cinema on the one hand, 36–37

Voice, xi, 19, 20, 27, 84, 85, 119, 132, 182, 198–200, 203 Voice-over, 19, 130, 187, 194

U Unexpected, 8, 66, 79, 105, 123, 135, 138, 160, 161, 166 Universal, universality, 65, 144, 146, 148, 150, 202 Urgency, 63, 66, 112, 124, 180 U.S. Film Service (US), 68

W Willemont, Jacques, 75 Words, x, 5, 9, 13, 15, 19, 24, 30, 35, 64, 65, 79, 81, 83–95, 97, 106, 111–113, 115, 116, 120–122, 124, 129, 131, 134–136, 141, 144–147, 151, 153, 158, 168, 172, 175–179, 188, 190, 193, 194, 196, 198 Work, 16, 24, 26, 27, 66, 67, 105 See also Executives (at work); Fieldwork; Time Worker, see Working class Working class, 15, 17–22, 25–27, 37–39, 51, 57–59, 61, 63, 66–69, 76, 97, 100, 105, 110–114, 117, 128, 139, 140, 150, 157, 160, 179, 184, 186, 197, 201 Workshop, see Factory Writing cinematographic/documentary/filmic, 2, 3, 14, 120, 161, 176, 181, 203–205 experimental, 130, 176 a scenario/a script, 10, 14, 63, 91, 129 sociological/textual, 1, 129, 174, 193

V Vaillant-Couturier, Paul, 68 Valéry, Paul, 89 Value judgment, 113 shot’s, 26, 132 Viewing, 1, 7, 11, 26, 119, 128, 134, 135, 182, 186, 203 Violence, 47, 158, 182 Visible/visibility, 6, 15, 143, 165–202 See also Invisible/invisibility Vision, 2, 6, 7, 10, 12, 37, 61, 63, 66, 68, 95, 111, 115, 149, 152, 153, 163, 166, 172, 173, 203 Visual thinking, x, 6, 80, 83–94, 113, 114, 121, 129, 144, 148, 163, 165, 176, 184, 191, 195, 204

Index of proper names1

A Abbott, Berenice, 53 Africa, 32, 36–38, 63 Agee, James, 51 Akerman, Chantal, 76 Alabama, 41, 51 Albera, François, 65 Allakariallak (Nanook), 62, 63 Allégret, Marc, 37 Amao, Damarice, 60n7 Ann Arbor, 56 Arbeiter illustrierte Zeitung, 60 Argonauts, 199 Arlaud, Jean, 96, 187, 189 Arnheim, Rudolf, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94 Association française de Sociologie (AFS), 81 Astruc, Alexandre, 162 Atget, Eugène, 49 Audier, Sophie, 75 Aumont, Jacques, 122 B Bach, Steven, 69 Baecque, Antoine (de), 93n13

Bali, 35, 36 Baratta, René, 79, 197 Barnouw, Erik, 62, 64, 70, 72 Barthes, Roland, 122–124, 126–128, 167, 170, 171, 176, 178 Bateson, Gregory, 35, 36 Bayou, 63 Beauviala, Jean-Pierre, 71 Becker, Howard S., 89 Becker, Jacques, 68 Behi, Rhida, 75 Beijing, 63, 104, 105 Berlin, 69, 76 Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 50 Bibliothèque du Film (BiFi), Paris, 71, 73 Birmingham, Alabama, 41, 42 Blanchot, Maurice, 146, 147 Bober, Robert, 39n3 Bonnemain, Antoine, 197 Borzeix, Anni, 79 Boubat, Édouard, 60 Bourdieu, Pierre, 143, 149–153 Bourke-White, Margaret, 53 Bourouissa, Mohamed, 103 Brassaï, 60 Brault, Michel, 72, 74

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Sebag, J.-P. Durand, Filmic Sociology, Social Visualities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33696-6

223

224 Breschand, Jean, 71 Burawoy, Michael, 8, 82, 165, 201, 202 Burroughs (family), 51 C Cabrera, Dominique, 76 Caillois, Roger, 37 California, 17, 41, 43–46, 110 Canada, 62, 67, 71, 74, 162 Canson (paper mill), 80 Cantet, Laurent, 74, 140 Capa, Robert, 60, 70 Cardi, François, 124 Carles, Pierre, 75, 77 Carré, Jean-Michel, 74, 76 Carrier, Jean-Pierre, 71 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 60, 68 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 147 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 66 Cavalier, Alain, 74 Centre Pompidou, 72 Ceylon Tea Propaganda Board (UK), 66 Chaplin, Charlie, 17, 112 Chappedelaine, Soizig, 75 Charbonnier, Jean-Philippe, 60 Chim, 60 China, 70, 108, 109 Clément, René, 37 Clot, Yves, 197 CNRS, 77, 79, 175, 205 Collier, John, 7, 196 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 74, 76, 77 Confédération générale du travail (CGT), 68 Conord, Sylvaine, 80 Cornu, Roger, 188, 199 Corot, Jean-Baptiste Camille, 89 Coutant, André, 71 D Dakar-Djibouti (expedition), 36 Damasio, R. Antonio, 129, 130 Darmon, Éric, 37 De Sica, Vittorio, 70 Debray, Régis, 89, 93, 121

Index of proper names Delano, Jack, 41 Depardon, Raymond, 73, 74, 76, 77, 187 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 192, 193 Dieterlen, Germaine, 37 Dogon, Mali, 36 Doisneau, Robert, 60, 101 Drew, Robert, 71–73 Durand, Claude, 179 Durand, Jean-Pierre, ix–xi, 9, 17, 104–109, 125, 135, 154, 194 E Edison, Thomas A., 1, 61 Eisenstein, Sergueï M., 64, 65, 69, 83, 123, 175, 178, 193, 198 Élias, Norbert, 140, 147–149, 151 Ellis Island, 39 Empire Marketing Board (UK), 66 Empire State Building, 39 Epstein, Jean, 68 Ergonautes (Les), 79 Eskimos, 62 Europe, European, 1, 2, 32, 53, 59–61, 67, 68, 81, 127, 182, 192 European Sociological Association (ESA), 81 Evans, Walker, 41, 48–52 F Farm Security Administration (FSA), ix, 39, 41–53, 59, 67 Farocki, Harun, 61 Festival international Jean Rouch, 37 Fiéloux, Michèle, 38 Film and Photo League (US), 67 Flaherty, Frances, 91–92 Flaherty, Robert J., ix, 61–63, 66 Flaubert, Gustave, 49, 167 Foucault, Michel, 146, 169 France, Claudine (de), 38, 80, 131, 143, 152 France, Xavier (de), 80 Franju, Georges, 77 Frank, Robert, ix, 53–60 Fremont, California, 110

Index of proper names Freund, Gisèle, x, 166, 168 Friedmann, Daniel, 199 Fromilhague, Catherine, 178 G Ganne, Bernard, 80 Gardner, Robert, 92 Gauthier, Guy, 70, 71 General Motors, 110, 113 Germany, 56, 69, 168 Gheerbrant, Denis, 76, 77 Ghosn, Carlos, 114, 116, 117, 119 Gitaï, Amos, 131, 205 Godard, Jean-Luc, 74, 76–78, 93, 122, 140, 172, 180, 181, 185, 193 Goebbels, 69 Goliot-Lété Anne, 122n28 Gourevitch, Jean-Paul, 148 Graff, Séverine, 71, 72 Great Britain, 33, 70 Greenblatt, Stephen, 191 Griaule, Marcel, 36 Grierson, John, 66, 67, 70, 71 Griffith, Richard, 70 Grosjean, Michèle, 79 Guéronnet, Janne, 32 Guillou, Anne, 79, 136 Gursky, Andreas, 60 H Haicault, Monique, 79 Hale County, Alabama, 51, 52 Hamus-Vallée, Réjane, 187 Harper, Douglas, ix, 196–199 Hatzfeld, Nicolas, 17, 19 Heusch, Luc (de), 37, 176 Hine, Lewis W., 39, 40 Hitler, Adolf, 69 Horendi, 38 I IBM, 16, 22 Ichac, Pierre, 37

225 Iles Trobriand, 33–35 International Visual Sociology Association (IVSA), ix, xi, 81 Irigaray, Luce, 146 Italian, Italy, 64, 70, 122, 179 Ivens, Joris, 68, 74, 76 Izis, 60 J Japan, 70, 105, 107, 110 Jennings, Humphrey, 70 Joulé, Luc, 75, 194 Journées Internationales de Sociologie du Travail (JIST), 14 Jousse, Sébastien, 75, 194 Jousse, Thierry, 76n23 K Kahn, Albert, 32–36 Kairouan, 107, 108 Kaplan, Alice, 147 Karel, William, 74, 77, 187 Karmen, Roman, 70, 74 Kaufman, Denis, 64, 66 Kaufman, Mikhail, 64, 66 Kerouac, Jack, 53, 92 Korea, 54 Kramer, Robert, 76 Kristensen, Stefan, 138 Krull, Germaine, 60 Kudelski, Stefan, 71 Kyoto, 106, 107 L Lacoste, Michèle, 79 Langage et Travail (Paris), 79 Lange, Dorothea, 41, 43–48, 193 Lanzmann, Claude, 74 Lartigue, Jacques–Henri, 95, 96 Laulan, Anne-Marie, 79 Le Corbusier, 68 Le Roux, Hervé, 75 Leacock, Richard, 63, 72

226 Lee, Russel, 41 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 93 Leiris, Michel, 36 Lemare, Jean, 68 Lenoir, Jean-Pierre, 110, 128, 160 Leroi-Gourhan, André, 36–38 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 37 Life (US), 60 Lime, Maurice, 68 Loach, Ken, 75 Lombard, Jacques, 38 London, 70, 125, 126 London Metropolitan University, 14 Look (US), 60 Lorenz, Pare, 67, 68 Loridan, Marceline, 74 Louveau, Christine, 96 Loznitsa, Serguei, 75 Lugon, Olivier, 41, 49, 52, 53, 97 Lumière (brothers), 1, 61 M Maghreb, 81 Magny, Joël, 6, 153, 154 Mailllot, Pierre, 10, 118, 120, 121, 127, 130–132 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 33, 34, 199 Malle, Louis, 19–21, 74, 112, 128 Mao, Tse-Toung, 104, 108 Maresca, Sylvain, 80 Margolis, Eric, 81 Marie, Michel, 122 Marker, Chris, 74–77 Marsolais, Gilles, 71 Marx, Karl, 20, 171, 175 Maulpoix, Jean-Michel, 86, 87, 131 Mauss, Marcel, 32 Mayles, Albert, 74 Mayles, David, 74 Mead, Margaret, 35, 36 Medvedkine Group, 202 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 172 Meyer, Michaël, 80 Middle West, 41, 55, 67 Mignot-Lefebvre, Yvonne, 79

Index of proper names Mississippi, 68 Mitchell, William J., 170, 203 Mitry, Jean, 180 Moati, Serge, 74 Model, Lisette, 60, 100 Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 128, 193 Montana, 54 Moore, Michael, 74, 75 Mordillat, Gérard, 74 Morel, Gaëlle, 60 Morin, Edgar, 37, 38, 72, 73, 77, 176–178 Moszkowicz, Stéphan, 15, 16, 19, 22, 24, 74 Moulet, Luc, 76 Muel, Bruno, 75, 76 Musée de l’Homme (Paris), 37 Musée du Quai Branly (Paris), 94 Musée Social (Paris), 79 N Nagra, 71 National Child Labor Committee (US), 39 Naville, Pierre, 77–79, 136, 174–177 Nebraska, 55 Neiertz, Patrick, 192 New Deal, 41, 68 New Economic Policy (NEP, USSR), 64 New Wave, 72, 77, 162 Nice, 68 Niger, 38 Niney, François, 202 Nissan, 114, 116, 117 Nummi (New United Motor Manufacturing Inc.), 17, 110 Nuremberg, 69 O Oceania, 32 October Group, 56 Odin, Roger, 71, 161 Office national du Film (ONF, Canada), 71 Oklahoma, 47 Ophüls, Marcel, 73 Ostende, 68

Index of proper names P Panzani (advertising), 122, 126, 171, 178 Paquot, Thierry, 76n23 Pellata, Patrick, 114 Pénard, Jean-Paul, 80 Perec, Georges, 39n3 Perrault, Pierre, 72, 74, 188 Perret, Auguste, 68 Perron, Tangui, 68 Peskine, Boris, 68 Philibert, Nicolas, 74, 76, 77 Pialat, Maurice, 76 Piault, Marc-Henri, 38, 71, 72 Pichon, Alain, 179n6 Poirier, Jean, 83 Poitou-Weber, Gérard, 75 Popular, Front, 68 Powers, Richard, 102 Poynor, Rick, 99n18 Prédal, René, 70, 73 PROCIREP (Société des producteurs de cinéma et de télévision), 73 Prokino (Japanese League of Proletarian Cinema), 70 Proust, Marcel, 84–89 R Rabechault, Alain, 19 Rancière, Jacques, 194 Réalités, 60 Regards, 60 Renoir, Jean, 68 Resnais Alain, 37, 73, 74, 77 Ricœur, Paul, 131, 150 Riefenstahl, Leni, 69 Rimbaud, Arthur, 86, 87 Road, Sinclair, 70 Rodchenko, Alexander, ix, 53–60, 100, 192 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 41, 67 Rosenblum, Noemi, 39 Rosenblum, Walter, 39

227 Rossellini, Roberto, 70 Rotha, Paul, 70 Rothstein, Arthur, 41, 42 Rouch, Jean, x, 37, 38, 72, 78, 80, 83 Rouget, Gilbert, 78 Rouillé, André, 168–170 Rouquier, Georges, 69 Ruspoli, Marion, 77 S Sadoul, Georges, 65 Sander, August, 52, 97–99, 102 Sardan, Jean-Pierre Olivier (de), 38 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 88, 93 Sebag, Joyce, ix–xi, 17, 28, 131, 135, 152, 180, 194, 201 Seyrig, Delphine, 75 Shanghai, 104, 108 Simon, Claire, 74, 77 SNCF, 79 Souriau, Étienne, 38 Spain, 70 Stalin, 64 Standard Oil (US), 63 Storck, Henri, 68 Stryker, Roy, 41 Swann, 84–87 T Taro, Gerda, 60, 70 Terrenoire, Jean-Paul, 79 Tesla, 110 Texas, 67 Thomson, Virgil, 67 Thorn, Jean-Pierre, 75 Tisseron, Serge, 170 Tokyo, 105, 114 Touraine, Alain, 21 Toyota, 110 Trobriand Islands, 33 Tunisia, 107, 202

228 U United States of America, xi, 1, 2, 33, 41, 48, 53, 56, 67, 71, 110, 111, 141, 157, 159, 168, 182, 183 U.S. Film Service (US), 67–68 V Vaillant-Couturier Paul, 68n13 Van der Keuken, Johan, 74, 76 Vander, Gucht Daniel, 10, 198 Vanoye, Françis, 122n28 Varda, Agnès, x, 74–76, 78 Vautier, René, 74–76 Vertov, Dziga, 61, 64, 65, 68, 73 Viallet, Serge, 69 Vietnam, 70

Index of proper names Vigo, Jean, 68, 143 Visconti, Luchino, 70 Vu, 60 W Weiss, Sabine, x, 60 Westchester, NY, 49 Willemont, Jacques, 75 Wiseman, Frederick, 74–77, 131, 133–137 Wisner, Alain, 112, 113 Wright, Basil, 66 Z Zachmann, Patrick, 202

Index of films cited

Numbers and symbols 17th Parallel: Viet Nam in War (1968), Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan, 74 2001, la prise de l’Hôtel de Ville (2001), Serge Moati, 74 A Alertez les bébés ! (1978), Jean-Michel Carré, 76 Algérie, année zéro (1962), Marceline Loridan and Jean-Pierre Sergent, 74 Amsterdam, Global Village (1995), Johan Van der Keuken (Netherlands), 76 Atalante (1934), Jean Vigo, 68 At Berkeley (2013), Frederick Wiseman (US), 77 Attention danger travail (2003), Pierre Carles, 75 Avec le sang des autres (1975), Bruno Muel, 75 Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès (1972), René Vautier, 74

B Battleship Potemkin (1925), Sergueï Eiseinstein, 58, 64 Berlin 10/90 (1990), Robert Kramer, 76 À bientôt j’espère (1967), Chris Marker and the Medvedkine Group, 75 Biquefarre (1984), Georges Rouquier, 69 Black Panthers (1968), Agnès Varda, 75 Blazing island (1961), Roman Karmen, 74 Borinage (1933), Henri Storck (Belgium), 68, 75 Bowling for Columbine (2002), Michael Moore (US), 75 C Calcutta (1969), Louis Malle, 74 C’est quoi ce travail? (2015), Luc Joulé and Sébastien Jousse, 75, 194 Charbons ardents (1998), Jean-Michel Carré, 74 Cheminots (2010), Luc Joulé and Sébastien Jousse, 75 Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été) (1961), Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, 199

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Sebag, J.-P. Durand, Filmic Sociology, Social Visualities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33696-6

229

230 Chronique d’une banlieue ordinaire (1992), Dominique Cabrera, 76 Classe de Lutte (1968), Medvedkine Group, 75 Cocorico Monsieur Poulet (1977), Jean Rouch, 37 Comment Yukong déplaça les montagnes (1976), Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan, 74 Coûte que coûte, (1994), Claire Simon, 74 Crazy Horse (2011), Frederick Wiseman (US), 75 Cuba Si! (1961), Chris Marker, 74 D De l’autre côté (2003), Chantal Akerman, 76 Délits flagrants (1994), Raymond Depardon, 77, 187 D’Est (1993), Chantal Akerman, 76 Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967), Jean-Luc Godard, 76 Dionysos (1984), Jean Rouch, 37 Dionysos, fin de tournage (1987), Éric Darmon, 37 Documenteur (1981), Agnès Varda, 77, 78 E Entrée du personnel (2011), Manuela Frésil, 75, 194 Être et avoir (2002), Nicolas Philibert, 77 F Fabrika (2004), Serguei Loznitsa (Russia), 75 Faits divers (1983), Raymond Depardon, 76 Farrebique (1946), Georges Rouquier, 69 Femmes de Fleury (1990), Jean-Michel Carré, 76 Femmes de l’ombre (1998), Stéphan Moszkowicz, 15, 17, 22, 23, 74, 128

Index of films cited G General Line (1929), Serguei Eiseinstein USSR, 64, 65 Genèse d’un repas (1978), Luc Moulet, 76 The Gleaners and I (2000), Agnès Varda, 76 The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later (2002), Agnès Varda, 76 Gods of the Stadium (1935), Leni Riefenstahl (Germany), 69 Grands comme le monde (1998), Denis Gheerbrant, 77 Grands soirs et petits matins (1978), William Klein, 76 Grèves d’occupation, (1936), CGT, 68 H High School (1994), Frederic Wiseman (US), 77 History of the Civil War (1921), Dziga Vertov (USSR, in Russian), 64 Hospital (1970), Frederick Wiseman, 76 Hôtel des Invalides (1951), Georges Franju, 77 Human too Human (Humain, trop humai) (1974), Louis Malle, 19, 21 I I, a Negro (Moi, un Noir), Jean Rouch, 37 I, Daniel Blake (2016), Ken Loach (UK), 75 Ikéa en kit (2000), Gérard Poitou-Weber, 75 J Je t’ai dans la peau (1989), Jean-Pierre Thorn, 75 L La fête prisonnière (1991), Marion Ruspoli, 77 La reprise du travail aux usines Wonder (1968), Jacques Willemont, 75

Index of films cited La République Marseille (2009), Denis Gheerbrant, 76 La sociologie est un sport de combat (2001), Pierre Carles, 75 La ville Louvre (1990), Nicolas Philibert, 76 La voix de son maître (1978), Gérard Mordillat and Nicolas Philibert, 74 La vraie vie dans les bureaux (1993), Jean-Louis Comolli, 74 Le chant du styrène (1958), Alain Resnais, 74 Le Dos au mur (1980), Jean-Pierre Thorn, 75 Les bâtisseurs (1938), Jean Epstein, 68 Les chèvres de ma mère (2013), Sophie Audier, 75 Les enfants de Néant (1968), Michel Brault (Canada), 74 Les hommes de la Maison blanche (2008), William Karel, 74, 187 Les Mémoires de Bindute Da (1990), Jacques Lombard et Michèle Fiéloux, 38 Les Métallos (1938), Jean Lemarre, 68 Le Soleil des Hyènes (1977), Rhida Behi (Tunisia), 75 Les Raquetteurs (1958), Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx (Canada), 72 Les Statues meurent aussi (1953), Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 77 Le Voyage de Sib (2006), Jacques Lombard and Michèle Fiéloux, 38 L’Inde fantôme (1969), Louis Malle, 74 Listen to Britain (1942), Humphrey Jennings, 70 Loin du Viet-Nam (1967), Chris Marker with nine other film directors, 74 Louisiana Story (1948), Robert Flaherty (US), 92 M The Mad Masters (Les Maîtres fous) (1954), Jean Rouch, 37

231 The Man of Aran (1934), Robert Flaherty, 63 Marée noire, colère rouge (1978), René Vautier, 75 Marseille de père en fils (Coup de Mistral, Ombres sur la ville) (1989), Jean-Louis Comolli, 76 Moana (1926), Robert Flaherty (US), 62 Muhammad Ali The Greatest (1974), William Klein, 73 Mural murals (1980), Agnès Varda, 76 N Naissance d’un hôpital (1992), Jean-Louis Comolli, 77 Nanook of the North (1922) Robert Flaherty (US), 62 The Navigators (2001), Ken Loach (UK), 75 Night and Fog (1956), Alain Resnais, 73 Night Mail (1936) Basil Wright and Harry Watt (UK), 66 À nos amours (1983), Maurice Pialat, 76 O On a grèvé (2014), Denis Gheerbrant, 76 Oser lutter oser vaincre, Flins 68 (1968), Jean-Pierre Thorn, 75 P Pas vu pas pris (1998), Pierre Carles, 77 Peuple en marche (1962), René Vautier, Ahmed Rachedi, 74 The Plow That Broke The Plains (1936), Pare Lorentz, 67 Portraits (1987-1991), Alain Cavalier, 74 Pour la suite du monde (1963), Pierre Perrault (Canada), 72 Primary (1960), Richard Lecock and Robert Drew (US), 72, 73

232 Profils paysans (L’Approche, 2001; Le Quotidien, 2005; La Vie moderne, 2008), Raymond Depardon, 74 À propos de Nice, Jean Vigo, 68 Q Quai d’Orsay. Les coulisses de la diplomatie (2015), Serge Moati, 74 Quand les femmes ont pris la colère (1977), René Vautier et and Soizig Chappedelaine, 75 R Récréations (1991), Claire Simon, 77 Réponses de femmes (1975), Agnès Varda, 75 Reprise. Un voyage au cœur de la classe ouvrière (1996), Hervé Le Roux, 75 Ressources humaines (1999), Laurent Cantet, 74, 140 Roger and Me (1989), Michael Moore (US), 74 Route One/USA (1989), Robert Kramer (US), 76 S Salesman (1969), Albert and David Mayles (US), 74 San Clemente (1980), Raymond Depardon, 76 Shoah (1985), Claude Lanzmann, 74 A Sixth Part of the World (1926), Dziga Vertov, 64 Sois belle et tais-toi (1970), Delphine Seyrig, 75

Index of films cited The Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la pitié) (1971), Marcel Ophüls, 73 Sous les masques noirs (1938), Marcel Griaule, 36 The Store (1983), Frederick Wiseman (US), 74 The Strike (1924), Sergueï Eiseinstein, 64, 69 Sur les routes de l’acie r (1938), Boris Peskine, 68 T Titicut Follies (1967), Frederick Wiseman (US), 76 Triumph of the Will (1935), Leni Riefenstahl (Germany), 69 U Une partie de campagne (1974–2002), Raymond Depardon, 73 Urgences (1987), Raymond Depardon, 76 V Vendanges (1929), Georges Rouquier, 69 Viet-Nam (1955), Roman Karmen, 74 Visages, villages (20th), Agnès Varda, 76 W Week end (1967), Jean-Luc Godard, 76 Week-end à Sochaux (1972), Bruno Muel and the Medvedkine Group, 75 Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (1895), Lumière Brothers, 61 Z Zéro de conduit (1939), Jean Vigo, 68