Sociology of film buff

French sociology has long had an unfortunate relationship with cinema. From this point of view, it was not until the 2000s that a real inflection took place under the effect of a triple impulse: the advent of a new generation of researchers trying to extend the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeon, the growing echo of “ Cultural Studies In the hexagonal academic world and the development of the original model, designed far from Parisian seminars, “ Cultural expertise ». Laurent Jullier’s attempt (professor of cinematographic studies in Paris III) and Jean-Marc Leveratto (professor of sociology of culture in Metz II) To think about the consecrated question of filmphilia belongs to this last current.

Portrait of the film buff

It is immediately necessary to dispel a frequent misinterpretation with regard to this approach. In continuation of their previous works, the two authors mobilize the concept “ expert »In its original sense. Far from defining a restricted population category, distinguished on the basis of a higher degree of knowledge and skills, the term here designates anyone who “ experience “, Who “ make the test of ». So it’s a Sociology of experience that it is a question, developed in a pragmatist spirit. This theoretical framework explains that the “ cinematographic pleasure »Serve as a basic axiom for analysis. From this apparent truism follows all the originality of the work. In reverse of traditional historiography, whose work of Antoine de Baecque remains to date the best reference, the two researchers indeed dispute the reduction of cinephilia to his learned conception. The affirmation of a ritualized Germanopratin and Champs-Élyséan practice of the room in the after Second World War is only a chapter in its history. It is neither her introduction or her model. In doing so, the authors call on the epistemological principle of “ symmetrical anthropology “: No longer think” ordinary cinephilia ” And “ scholarly film In a relationship of subordination from one to the other but on an equal footing. Consequently, the love of cinema merges with the very history of animated images, declining in four successive periods: the birth of the Cinema Affection Report (1900s and 1910), its standardization phase (the 1930s) , its institutionalization (the pivotal decade between 1950 and 1960) and its recent domestication. The identification of this last period, corresponding to a privatization of the relationship to images under the effect of the development of audiovisual equipment, calls for a second precision as to the perspective adopted: no more than it comes to learned practices, The love of cinema is not reduced to the attendance of dark rooms. By resuscitation in this way a cinema formerly buried by Serge Daney, Laurent Jullier and Jean-Marc Leveratto open a vast field of exploration, ranging from consumption techniques (room, television, DVDcomputer, nomadic screens) to recent mutations in practices (sequencing, dissemination of an analytical relationship to images on the basis of the generalization of secondary and university education, development of critical amatorat via new open expertise spaces by internet). In this universe of cinephile 2.0, classical distinctions (author/commercial film films, room/television, Paris/province, shape/background, male space of the room vs. female space of the living room, etc.) give way to participatory and relativist heterocling. Star Wars, the “ nanars », The clips, the pastiches circulating on YouTube or the latest award -winning author at the Pusan ​​Korean Festival make up the active consumption of spectators, who jump from a film object to another, with the sole end the pleasure drawn of his wanderings.

Anthropology of cinephilic activity

In addition to a description of this overhaul of the aesthetic sharing lines, the work brings important elements of understanding of the cinephilic activity. Any film buff is a “ body technique », In the double sense given to this expression by Marcel Mauss and Michel Foucault. The cinema is both a vector of mimetic behavior, a home of constantly renewed affects, a source of knowledge on the world and on oneself. This complex, dynamic process, which does not exclude a refinement of uses over time, has the search for the search for “ quality », Heard as a subjective category for valuing film objects. On this basis, the authors carry out a series of requalifications invalidate the intellectual heritage of the Frankfurt School. Consumption, the market and its various satellites (presses fandom“ genres », Stars, multiplexes, television, websites, amateur forums and coteries) are rehabilitated as resources of film actions, which the quest for pleasure inclines to optimize.

Angular stone of the demonstration, the essentially hedonistic character of the moviegoer could however be discussed. The focus on pleasure indeed pushes the two authors to mining the noble tradition of cineclasty and cinephilic asceticism. However, the acrimony of polemist criticism (from François Truffaut to Louis Skorecki) or the gravity of a certain fringe of modern cinema (from Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet to Philippe Garrel) tend to nuance the thesis of the book . More attention paid to the acidity of ordinary criticism (the virulence of certain comments posted on specialized sites or evenings “ pizzas Organized around a film whose mediocrity is the pretext of verbal jousts typical of a post-adolescent mode of sociability) would also test the model defended by the two authors. More generally, we may regret that the bias of “ symmetrical anthropology “Is not perfectly respected, due to an asymmetry not so much argumentative (“ ordinary cinephilia ” And “ clever Being treated equal to the work) than normative. Certain pages of the book indeed testify to a more or less latent aggressiveness against the “ scholarly film “, Which could be justified in the space of ordinary criticism, but which serves sociological analysis by situating the subject on a particularly abrasive ground. The company in every way laudable exploration of the filmphilia thus occasionally tends into a vengeful requalification, motivated by the position of overhang of the instituted cinephilia. Pushed to its end, this gesture would amount to reverse the traditional hierarchy of cinephilic values, in favor of a new gradation just as arbitrary as the previous one.

Scholars and popular

The same polemical spirit lives in certain references to the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The authors are linked in this to the tradition of sociological populism, embodied in the 1970s by Michel de Certeau, consisting in questioning the theses of The distinction On the grounds of better taking into account the complexity of ordinary practices. The relaxation and scarcity of deterministic models carried out on this basis in sociology of culture for forty years have proven historically timely due to the dissipation of the feeling of “ Class for oneself And the redistribution of cultural hierarchies, which made the boundaries of eponymous legitimacy more tenuous. Nevertheless, when celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the master’s work by Pierre Bourdieu, this vagueness must not obscure the difference in nature between the approach defended once by the reproductive sociologist and that adopted by Laurent Jullier and Jean-Marc Leveratto. The first aspired a political macrosociology of cultural, based on the systematic identification of causal links between social stratification and lifestyles (research program which has notably served as canvas for the cultural practices of the French managed for several years by Olivier Donnat). The latter are targeting a cultural anthropology focused on the attachment between actors and objects in situation, registering in the wake of Pragmatic Turn of French sociology operated in the 1980s. Once this nuance is specified, the two models prove to be less rival than complementary, which places the interest of Cinephiles and cinephilia Beyond traditional theoretical cleavages.