HomeFilm Creation
Film Creation
La création cinématographique
Artistic Cooperation and Industrial Frameworks
Coopérations artistiques et cadrages industriels
Published on Wednesday, March 29, 2017
Abstract
This conference aims to examine the articulation between the different modes of industrialization of the film production work, and the creative interactions between the different members of the film work team.
Announcement
Argument
Between a so-called « auteurist » practice – implying the personal management of the different know-how required by the production of a movie – and the studios’ «industrial » organization –relying on a strict division between the different tasks of the production process – the forms of collaboration in matter of film work greatly vary from a production to another, and from one national industry to another.
This conference aims to examine the articulation between the different modes of industrialization of the film production work, and the creative interactions between the different members of the film work team.
A major issue is to understand how technical processes influence collective work: to which extend do they determine everyone’s place and function, as well as the interactions between the members of the work team? How do they contribute to explain the stylistic particularities of a given production? Symmetrically, since the practical necessity of taming the objects and uniting the persons involved in the production process implies a case-to-case treatment, how do technical processes cope with the interpersonal dynamics inherent to the production of a prototype? Finally, how does the film team interact and shape itself as an organic entity, which is ephemeral by essence, even if the overhanging industrial components determine its temporalities?
By confronting various times and spaces, we will look for eventual patterns behind local specificities, and for relevant types of periodization. We would also like to explore the versatility of the notion of technical staff. Can we consider the traditional work crew as an out-dated phenomenon, which might disappear at our digital era to the benefit of more fragmented forms of collaborations? How do individuals, who sometimes never meet, can manage nonetheless to process collectively? We would also like to question the shifts from production norms: how are certain works of art being created on an explicit departure from the usual forms of collaboration? Why are they being successful? Do they lead to a lasting transformation of the way professionals cooperate, or are they only a mean to start a professional career in the traditional frame of the film industry?
In short, we wish to investigate the articulation between stylistic creativity and industrial organization, personal investment and functioning of the film collective, aesthetical singularity and technical repetition.
Main topics
We wish to draw scholarly attention to three topics:
– Studying the Integrated Film Production: the Studio Model
The analysis of the functioning of the creative work teams, and the observation of the interactions between the different creators, in places such as the Hollywood studios, or other comparable industrialized production structures (the UFA; the French, Italian, Soviet, Japanese studios …) should offer highlights on the different forms of the so called “classical cinema”. What is specific to each of these production places, and what is common? To what extent can we consider that the way artistic collaborations are being organized contributes to explain the stylistic characteristics common to the period, but also those specific to each production structure? How does individual artistic sensitivityexpress itself in this type of context? Broadly, how can we apprehend the articulation between entrepreneurial logic and artistic creation, in the different contexts of integrated production?
We also wish to call attention on the plurality of integrated production models, even in one environment – recent works, for instance, underline the plurality of production situations covered by the appellation Bollywood. How can we explain these differences of organization? To what extent do they lead to real differences in the creative practices? It should also be interesting to study the different movements of propagation and contamination of these models: the influence of the Hollywood model during the Classical era, that of the Japanese model on the Asian area, but also, for example, the circulation of production models in the Communist block after WWII. To what extent does the importation of production models contribute to shape the production of a given country?
Finally, we wish to investigate the mutations of these organization models: how do they evolve, and what are the consequences of these transformations on the collective work? To what extent do the movements of diffraction and concentration punctuating the history of production structures lead to fundamental reorganizations of the collective work? And how does the history of techniques interfere with this process? In a contemporary perspective, it would also be interesting to analyse the modalities of perpetuation of the integrated models: how does it still influence more recent forms of organization? Which are the new types of human interactions and exchanges that these contemporary integrated structures favour? To what extent does the studio still work as a centripetal force, faced with the new disseminated working forms within it?
- Working in a dispersed way: innovative forms of collaboration
We also wish to focus on the contemporary gaps, evolutions, and re-compositions of the forms of cinematographic collaborations in industrial contexts. The challenge of technical changes - the digital technology and more broadly, the accessibility of production tools that were for a long time only used in industrial context - will therefore be questioned: to what extent are the different forms of professional collaborations and artistic cooperations being transformed by these changes? In the same vein, attention will be given to hyper-specialization, versatility and sharing of tasks, as well as to the cooperation’s modalities in fragmented production contexts. A particular attention will be given to transnational collaborations and to the emerging role of new cinematographic actors from the "South".
We are thinking in particular of the growth of agents and intermediaries. For example, the intervention of structures such as Initiative Film - the first French consulting firm specialized in film development - in the tailored accompaniment of filmmakers and producers, but also in the writing process itself and in the professional framing of projects, deserves to be questioned: how can a story editor recompose the artistic co-operation within a team? Moreover, very complex arrangements may involve various production and post-production structures, and their possible subcontractors: their combination will be discussed too. How do professionals co-operate in cases of international coproduction where the imbroglio of structures and loads is likely to become even more complicated? Moreover, artistic collaborations can condition these transnational productions beyond the economic determinants, as in the case of the Greco-Franco-Croat Interruption (Yorgos Zois, 2015).
The function of festivals, co-production markets and links between polymorphic industrial structures for the creation of heterogeneous teams in the transnational space will also be explored. The role of alternative economic organizations - associations, cooperatives, crowd-funding, etc. - andnetworks in the dissemination of the classical industrial organization should be studied too. Finally, under what form(s) are the continuity and the unity of the film teamwork anticipated and preserved in the use of tax shelters and other tax credits? Indeed, many small or, at the opposite, very large scale structures relocate postproduction on the other side of the border - or on the other side of the globe, because of their mobilisation. To what extent does a film crew still exist in these cases? What role is defined for freelancers or structures that choose to settle in countries such as India, China, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand (etc.) in the thick of the new challenges of globalization and dematerialisation?
- Technical Expertise and Artistic Collaborations
Commercial orientations or technological evolutions often require the use of engineers, or various specialists of specific techniques, whose status, degree of involvement and responsibility in the definition of the project are not set by principle, and can greatly vary. To what extent does their presence, which sometimes becomes rapidly indispensable, imply a reconfiguration of the fields of expertise and of the usual modes of artistic collaborations, in the field of fiction as well as documentary? Indeed, the role played by certain artists, technicians, or producers in the transformations of the modalities of collaboration needs to be discussed.
Observing and understanding the specificities of the integration and recognition of a technical craft within an artistic collaboration process will be part of our priorities. The first sound engineers, visual effects supervisors, DIT, post-production managers, colorists, computer graphists… How do those “new” work crafts integrate pre-existing working teams? What tension can appear between the technical expertise and the artistic collaboration, at the risk of disrupting for a time the establish habits of team functioning?
In addition, what are the consequences of the intervention of external experts in the creative process? Not only the involvement of recognized experts, such as a 3D graphic designer to conceive a previz, or a stereographer for a three-dimensional movie, but also the part played by the actor-informer in a documentary movie – one can think for example at Être et avoir, and the controversy its success led to between the main actor and the director. It would also be interesting to consider the contribution of the individual or collective actor possessing a specific technic, in cases such as a “filmopera” (like Losey’s Don Juan), an adaptation of a collective show (Scola’s Le Bal), or a musical. In short, certain types of techniques, including body techniques, imply peculiar modalities of cooperation: how are they artistically justified? What tensions do they provoke?
Submission guidelines
Please send your proposal (biographical notice+ 300 words max abstract)
by June 1st, 2017,
to the following addresses: melisande.leventopoulos@gmail.com; jean-marc.leveratto@univ-lorraine.fr; katalin.por@univ-lorraine.fr; caroline.renouard@univ-lorraine.fr
Conference organizers
- Mélisande Leventopoulos,
- Jean-Marc Leveratto,
- Katalin Pór,
- Caroline Renouard
Composition du comité scientifique
- Bérénice Bonhomme, MCF, Université Toulouse 2
- Mélisande Leventopoulos, ATER, Université Paris 8
- Jean-Marc Leveratto, PR, Université de Lorraine
- Katalin Pór, MCF, Université de Lorraine
- Caroline Renouard, MCF, Université de Lorraine
Bibliography
- Alion Yves, Camy Gérard, Le Cinéma par ceux qui le font, Paris, Nouveau monde, « Cinéma », 2010.
- Becker Howard, Les Mondes de l’Art, Paris, Flammarion, 1988.
- Benghozi Pierre-Jean, Le cinéma, entre l’art et l’argent, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1989
- Bonhomme Bérénice, Les techniques du cinéma : image, son, post-production, Paris, Dixit, 2011.
- Bordwell David, Thompson Kristin, Staiger Janet, The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, Londres, Routledge, 1985.
- Chion Michel, Le cinéma et ses métiers, Paris, Bordas, 1990.
- Comolli Jean-Louis, Sorrel Vincent, Cinéma mode d'emploi, de l'argentique au numérique, Paris, Verdier, 2015.
- Creton Laurent, Palmer Michael et Sarrazac Jean-Pierre, Arts du spectacle, métiers et industries culturelles, Paris, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2005.
- Delli Colli Laura, Les métiers du cinéma, Paris, Liana Levi, 1986.
- Feigelson Kristian, La Fabrique filmique. Métiers et professions, Paris, Armand Colin, 2011.
- Freidson Eliot, « Les professions artistiques comme défi à l’analyse sociologique », Revue française de sociologie, 27, n° 3, 1986, pp. 431-443.
- Gaut Berys « Film authorship and collaboration », in Richard Allen et Murray Smith (dir.), Film theory and philosophy, Oxford university press, 2003 (deuxième édition, première édition 1997), p. 149-172 Gauthier Armelle, Les métiers du cinéma, Paris, UGC, 1994.
- Gauthier Christophe, Vezyroglou Dimitri (dir.), L'auteur de cinéma: histoire, généalogie, archéologie, éditions de l’AFRHC, Paris, 2013
- Gomery Douglas, The Hollywood Studio System: A History, Londres, British Film Institute, 2005.
- Grimaud, Emmanuel, Bollywood Film Studio ou Comment les films se font à Bombay, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2004.
- Hamus-Vallée Réjane, Renouard Caroline (dir.), "Les métiers du cinéma à l'ère du numérique", CinémAction no155, Condé-sur-Noireau, Corlet/CinémAction, avril 2015.
- Inge Thomas, « Collaboration and the concepts of authorship », PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 3 (May, 2001), p. 623630
- Leguèbe Eric, Confessions : un siècle de cinéma français par ceux qui l’ont fait, Paris, Ifrane Editions, 1995.
- Le Forestier Laurent, Morrissey Priska (dir.), Histoire des métiers du cinéma en France avant 1945, 18.
- Revue d’Histoire du Cinéma no65, AFRHC, 2011.
- Menger Pierre-Michel, Portrait de l’artiste en travailleur. Métamorphoses du capitalisme, Paris, Seuil, 2002. Naumburg Nancy (dir.), Silence, on tourne ! Comment nous faisons les films, par vingt artistes et techniciens de Hollywood, Paris, Payot, 1938.
- Prédal René (dir.), « Les métiers du cinéma, de la télévision et de l’audiovisuel », CinémAction hors série, Corlet-Télérama, 1990.
- Rot Gwenaële, « Les repas de tournage : Contraintes productives et commensalité », in Thomas Bouchet, Stéphane Gacon, François Jarrige, François Xavier Nérard et Xavier Vigna (dir.), La gamelle et l'outil : Manger au travail en France et en Europe de la fin du XVIIIe siècle à nos jours, Nancy, Arbre bleu éditions, p. 337-351
- Rot Gwenaële, de Verdalle Laure, Le cinéma : travail et organisation, Paris, la Dispute, 2013.
- Sellors C. Paul, « Collective authorship in film » Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65:3, 2007, p. 263271
- Stollery Martin, “Technicians of the unknown cinema: British critical discourse and the analysis of collaboration in film production” Film History, Volume 21, 2009, p. 373–393.
- Villain Dominique, Le travail du cinéma 1 : rencontres avec Pedro Costa, Dominique Auvray, Jean-Marie Straub, Jean-Charles Fitoussi, Andrei Schtakleff, Alexandra Mélot, Saint-Denis, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2012.
- Villain Dominique, Le travail du cinéma II : rencontres avec André S. Labarthe, Alain Cavalier, Claire Denis, Albert Serra, Saint-Denis, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2013.
- Webdocumentaires et fiches métiers de l'Observatoire des métiers de l'audiovisuel (Commission Paritaire Nationale Emploi et Formation de l’AudioVisuel) : http://www.cpnef-av.fr/films/.
Subjects
Places
- Université de Lorraine
Metz, France (57)
Date(s)
- Thursday, June 01, 2017
Attached files
Keywords
- création cinématographique, coopération artistique, studio, expertise technique
Contact(s)
- Jean-Marc Leveratto
courriel : jean-marc [dot] leveratto [at] univ-lorraine [dot] fr - Mélisande Leventopoulos
courriel : melisande [dot] leventopoulos [at] gmail [dot] com - Katalin Pór
courriel : katalin [dot] por [at] univ-paris8 [dot] fr - Caroline Renouard
courriel : carolinerenouard [at] gmail [dot] com
Information source
- Mélisande Leventopoulos
courriel : melisande [dot] leventopoulos [at] gmail [dot] com
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Film Creation », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Wednesday, March 29, 2017, https://doi.org/10.58079/xbj