Useful Cinema

Cet article se concentre sur la relation entre les critiques Juan Piqueras et Léon Moussinac et leurs projets pour une pédagogie critique du cinéma. L’essai adopte une lecture alternative de l’avant-garde comme un modèle « pouvant être traduit » pour démontrer la synergie productive ente les cultures cinématographiques radicales françaises et espagnoles de la fin des années 1920 et du début des années 1930. En tant que traducteurs des luttes sociales en initiatives culturelles, Piqueras et Moussinac ont poussé l’avant-garde internationale et certaines initiatives militantes à être adoptées dans et adaptées à leur contexte local. Dans un contexte politique et social de plus en plus radicalisé, l’esthétique révolutionnaire n’est cependant pas suffisante pour Moussinac et Piqueras. L’art ne peut simplement se « dissoudre dans la vie de tous les jours » de manière abstraite, mais doit au contraire donner lieu à la création d’institutions culturelles au service d’une émancipation politique et artistique. Les projets de Piqueras et Moussinac révèlent non seulement la manière dont l’intervention du cinéma dans la société était imaginée, mais aussi sa mise en pratique dans les domaines culturels, politiques et sociaux de la vie de tous les jours, au-delà des simples cercles esthétiques élitistes et des institutions étatiques.

The Documentary  School oF Santa Fe and its founder, Fernando Birri, are inescapable references in the story of the New Latin American Cinema. The school grew out of a brief course offered by Birri in 1956. The young Argentine had recently returned from studies at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and he was asked to help organize a course on film with the Instituto Social at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (UNL) in Santa Fe, Argentina. The course was deemed a great success and, soon thereafter, Birri and the UNL institutionalized their efforts by establishing the Instituto de Cinematografía, which began offering classes in April 1957. In the years that followed, the IC would further consolidate itself, becoming known across Argentina and throughout Latin American for its focus on social issues of the time.
This chapter returns to 1956 and the beginnings of that experience. There, the local converged with the transnational, and an internationally renowned film program was born out of a faith in amateurs—their knowl- edge, their perspective, and their capacity for self-expression. In Part I, we show how Birri’s initial effort—an introductory course on documentary,offered at the university’s margins (as part of its extension program, out of the social sciences division), and counting among its enrollees painters, schoolteachers, lawyers, even social workers—drew inspiration in equal parts from professional and amateur realms. In Part II, we analyze a key aspect to the filmmaker’s early approach: the use of fotodocumentales—photodocumentaries or photo essays—as a first step for those learning to make films. We reconsider this practice of using photography and social surveys as borrowing from the possibilities of the amateur. The act of taking a pic ture or asking a question made the filmmaking effort accessible to enrollees with little or no background in production, and it was an adequate first step given the limited initial resources of the IC. Most important, fotodocumentales helped focused students’ attention on the capturing of local realities  and on the social possibilities of the cinema. As such, although clearly part of a certain (socially and politically conscious) professionalization project, these practices belong to the broader field of amateur cinematic cultures for providing an alternative vision of cinema’s social function and an alternative means of institutionalizing nonindustrial cinematic practices. In Part III, we focus on the well-known documentary Tire-dié (1958–1960). We look at the project’s evolution from a student-made fotodocumental to the IC’s first documentary film, finished in 1958. We pay special attention to the film’s deliberately noncommercial character, both in terms of how it was produced and how it was used socially, across informal networks of exhibition, through community screenings and postscreening audience surveys. Finally, in Part IV, in order to show their impact in later professional film production at school, we return to those unpublished surveys. We note that Birri and his team utilized commentaries from nonfilmgoing audiences to assess their successes in film and to develop the next set of films—a series that, as with the others, featured almost exclusively amateur actors.
Birri himself was no “amateur,” and his film school quickly became a point of cinematic reference the Latin America, but the initiative, at least in its origins, stemmed from a bottom-up approach, one that drew inspiration, where not direct investment, from local, amateur practices and bases of knowledge. In many ways, it was the IC’s incorporation of amateur participants, from its students and its film subjects to the neighborhood audiences with whom it shared its films, as well as their association with alternative film cultures, such as local “foto” or “cine-clubs,” that proved an ideal means for training future professionals, thus demonstrating the fluid and productive boundaries between the amateur and the professional. In so doing, the IC’s particular approach charted a new path for the institutionalization of innovative cinematic practices.

In:  In: Masha Salazkina and Enrique Fibla (eds.), Global Perspectives on Amateur Film Histories and Cultures. Indiana University Press, 2021; 149-168.

This essay reflects on the pedagogical value of integrating nontheatrical and useful cinemas into a standard film history survey course. It takes as its example my experiences teaching a one-semester survey titled, “International Cinema to 1960,” at a university in the United States. The essay suggests how looking beyond the narrative feature reorients film history in several ways: first, by highlighting alternative film production practices (such as government- and corporate sponsored nonfiction); second, by offering generative context for specific national film movements (such as the Golden Age of Mexican cinema and Italian Neorealism); and third, as a lens to contend with the history of European imperialism and the colonial gaze (i.e., travelogues, colonial film units). It argues that putting nontheatrical and useful cinemas in conversation with classic survey content offers a more dynamic history of cinema and becomes a vehicle for organically sparking important conversations about the Eurocentric, racial, and gendered limitations of the film canon—especially prior to 1960. Integrating nontheatrical cinemas creates a survey that actual surveys the scope of film history.

This paper was a first account of the methodological framework I am trying to develop for the analysis of corporate films. Assuming that corporate films are films “without authors”, different criteria for the definition of units of analysis can be stipulated from the usual criteria of auteur theory. Instead of analysing films in their integrity, or the specific contexts in which they appear, one can assume the broader perspective of “corporate culture” (Hediger, Hoof, Zimmermann), and define a research corpus by the identification of the visual regularities circulating in the corporate communication networks. These visual regularities (or patterns of montage, of space and time editing, of stagings of the body, etc.) work as the aesthetic conditions of possibility for the managing procedures in which films are integrated. By considering these regularities as independent units of analysis, crossing films and companies, and coming from different backgrounds (different areas of knowledge, but also different media) it is possible to write their history, a history completely independent from sponsors’ and institutions’ singular intentions – a history of the visual conditions of possibility for the uses of media by corporations.

El director italiano Ermanno Olmi comenzó su carrera cinematográfica realizando películas para la empresa hidroeléctrica Edison Volta, de la que era empleado, durante los años cincuenta. Siguiendo las líneas teóricas de autores como Vizenz Hediger, Patrick Vonderau, Thomas Elsaesser, Paola Bonifazio o Elena Mosconi sobre cine industrial y sobre los primeros trabajos cinematográficos de Olmi, este artículo pretende matizar algunos de los paradigmas teóricos desde los que se ha abordado la producción cinematográfica de la Edison Volta, al tiempo que propone otras herramientas para investigar el vasto y poco considerado corpus de cine industrial. // The Italian film director Ermanno Olmi began his cinematic career in the 1950s making promotional films for the hydroelectric company Edison Volta, where he was employed. Following the theoretical lines proposed by scholars such as Vizenz Hediger, Patrick Vonderau, Thomas Elsaesser, Paola Bonifazio or Elena Mosconi on industrial cinema and Olmi’s first cinematic works, this paper aims to refute some of the theoretical frameworks from which the film production of Edison Volta has been approached. At the same time, this article proposes other tools to investigate the vast but disregarded corpus of industrial cinema.

Il saggio riflette sulla natura “sponsored” dei film realizzati dalla Incom su commissione della Fiat per documentare il raid transafricano del pilota Paolo Butti, da Algeri a Città del Capo a bordo di un fuoristrada ‘Campagnola’. Le riprese furono montate in tre servizi e un numero speciale del cinegiornale “La Settimana Incom” e ri-montate dalla Fiat per un corto promozionale. Confrontando le tre edizioni si ricostruirà la sponsorship come “contratto negoziale” tra committente e compagnia cinegiornalistica e come agency istutizionale sottesa al racconto del
viaggio.

For three decades, state-sponsored short filmmaking educated Danish citizens, promoted Denmark to the world, and shaped the careers of renowned directors like Carl Th. Dreyer. The first book-length study in English of a national corpus of state-sponsored informational film, this book traces how Danish shorts on topics including social welfare, industry, art and architecture were commissioned, funded, produced and reviewed from the inter-war period to the 1960s. Examining the life cycle of a representative selection of films, and discussing their preservation and mediation in the digital age, this book presents a detailed case study of how informational cinema is shaped by, and indeed shapes, its cultural, political and technological contexts.

Using testimony and subpoenaed exhibits published in the seventy-two-volume record of a Federal Trade Commission investigation, this article traces the role of motion pictures in the private utility industry’s public relations campaign against municipal ownership and federal regulation in the 1920s. This article reconstructs the utility companies’ decision to employ films in its campaign; the production, distribution, and exhibition strategies for its motion pictures; and the relationship of producers to sponsoring organizations. Ultimately, the article argues that the use of film in this campaign was experimental and, relative to other media, limited, but by investigating such experiments with film, we can identify institutional agents struggling to find a “use” for cinema, thereby enabling media historians both to identify what determinants might cause an organization to find cinema more or less useful at different historical moments and to better assess cinema’s changing cultural status and social functions.

Useful Film in (Neuro) Psychiatry Europe, 1900–1950
Update on Current Research

University of Lausanne 3-4 March 2022

**Abstract submission deadline: October 30, 2021**
A workshop is organized in the framework of the SNSF project
Cinéma et (neuro)psychiatrie en Suisse: autour de la collection Waldau, 1920-1990
https://waldau.hypotheses.org/

Focusing on the study of films shown in medical institutions, in lecture halls and at scientific conferences, this workshop has several goals: to map the state of research on works devoted to useful films in the field of neurology, psychiatry and neuropsychiatry, in Europe between 1900 and 1950; to highlight investigations on poorly known or unknown film collections; to serve as a starting point for one to two publications (journal issues). The main purpose is thus to increase our knowledge on practices that have long been considered “marginal” both in the medical humanities and in the history of cinema (and the media).