Le Cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse

In the summer of 2009, BFI joined a film-making programme hosted by the Cinémathèque Française since 1995 called ‘Le Cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse’.  These pages track the progress of the English participation in the project, from our first venture in 2009/10 (‘Why move the camera?’).  The latest theme is ‘Centred/Decentred’, 2022/23.  In the summer of 2021, the programme cut loose from its parent, the Cinémathèque Française, and went independent, after 25 years!  It is supported until 2024 by the Erasmus Programme.

What is ‘Le Cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse’ ?

In 1995, a group of film educators set up a young people’s film-making programme to celebrate the centenary of cinema. The programme had a specific approach and working method which is still going strong more than 25 years later.  Firstly, all the young people involved in the programme follow the same process: to make films that respond to an aspect of film language.  Second, the programme is very tightly structured into exploratory exercises and the production of a final ‘film essai’.  The whole process takes between 30 and 50 hours, over two terms.  Thirdly, there is a comprehensive ‘viewing curriculum’ of clips taken from the history of cinema and from around the world. Fourth, each workshop is run by a film-maker and a teacher, each with particular responsibilities.

In 1995 the subject was ‘Lumière’: all participants made films in the same spirit, and under some of the same constraints, as the Lumière Brothers.

Over the next 10 years the programme grew to involve 25 – 30 workshop groups or ‘ateliers’ each year, expanding into Spain, Italy, and Portugal aroundf 2005, and then in 2009 the BFI brought groups from south London into the programme.  In 2010 our first cohort of Lincolnshire primary schools joined, and in 2012, several groups from Edinburgh and Dundee, led by the Centre for the Moving Image at Edinburgh Filmhouse.  In 2013/14 there were 31 workshop groups in Scotland, and more in Lincolnshire, London, and Taunton.  By 2018/19, the international cohort had expanded to Lithuania, Bulgaria, Germany, Finland, Romania, and Belgium, and Brazil, India, Japan and Cuba and Argentina, and then in 2020 a major push into South America brought in Chile, Columbia, Mexico and Uruguay.

The film language topics covered include ‘light’, ‘colour’, ‘figure/fond’ (foreground/background), ‘camera movement’, ‘hiding/revealing’, ‘real/fiction’, mettre en scene’ or ‘staging’.  In 2013/14 we followed with ‘plan sequence’, or ‘the long take’, and the year after it was ‘L’Intervalle’, or the gaps and spaces between characters, and between film and audience.  In 2015/16, the programme joined the international climate change conference in Paris, COP 21, by exploring weather and climate: ‘Le Meteo’.  In 2016/17 the focus was on ‘play’ in the cinema.  In 2017/18, the programme moved on to consider the relationship between ‘places’, and ‘stories’: how particular places can generate, or be associated with, stories in cinema. 2018/19’s theme was ‘the situation’: the common patterns of narrative, and relations between characters, that make up different types of story situation, followed in 2019/20 by ‘sensory cinema’: how film mobilises the senses in creating stories, characters, and feelings.  2020/21 covered ‘time in cinema’, and the following year, we looked at ‘motifs’ in film.  The theme in 2022/23 was ‘Centred/ Decentred’ – in shots, scenes, and stories.  In 2023/24 for thefirst time we left formal themes and moved to consider a whole genre: ‘la geste documentaire’, which is hard to translate, but something like ‘the documentary mode’.

Film-making groups in education settings in the UK are welcome to join the project by emailing mark reid at gap435@yahoo.co.uk.

LIFT films with LNS

Saskia at London Film School drew our attention to Marc Isaacs’ 30 minute documentary ‘Lift’, which combines many of the techniques we are supposed to look at this year. The film is notionally observational – though the filmmaker is so close to his subjects that he can’t help interact. We printed out a letter for the boys to hold for lift occupants to read when they entered, giving them the option to ask the boys to stop filming. None did, of course!

Here are two versions – shot in the Royal Festival Hall or National Theatre. Tugi and Nikita lost the original sound, so they’ve added some of their own (raised eyes emoji). Abu wasn’t the only person in his group.. and the third film was corrupted somehow in the transfer (another raised eyes emoji, for myself).

There’s something sad about this lonely lift, on its endless search for passengers; each stop offers hope, only to be disappointed..

But this one is much more populated, and there’s a real sense of being squashed in – very induglent passengers, especially when they have to squeeze in a large TV screen! It has a nice shape to it, switching to an external view, and then ending on a kind of ‘closure’, back where they began. And the non-diegetic sounds aren’t that bad..

Dermantsi, Bulgaria

A number of us were privileged to be able to visit the Neofit Rilski school in Dermantsi last week, where Daniel Simeonov has been teaching film and photography for many years – at least 6 or 7. He has a class that has been following film since 3rd or 4th Grade (I think 9 or 10 years old) who are now in 7th Grade – 12 and 13 years old.

The filmmaker attached is Maria Dacheva, who has also been working with the group for a few years. The partnership is overseen by Arte Urbana Collectif, under the warm and watchful eye of Ralitsa Assenova. In addtion to CCAJ, the school follows CinEd – a broader viewing curriculum of European cinema.

Danile has set up his classroom as a mini cinema space: visual work on the walls, nice seats, big projector, screen, and sound – and a small library of film books. In one of the displays, the children play the game of ‘exquisite corpse’: starting with an image from an extant film (they used a shot from Jacques Rozier’s Rentree des Classes – or ‘Return to School) each child makes an image that follows the previous one, in a narrative daisy-chain. No-one sees more than the single preceding image. (See photos below).

And then they showed us some of their films..Below is a montage of four Exercises: first, a long Lumiere Minute – a two minute piece watching a couple of workmen spreading concrete; then another 2-3 minute piece observing a group of women working in a textile workshop in the village (no subtitles I’m afraid); the best piece I think is a three minute condensation of the 50 minute bus journey to school, summarised from an hour’s worth of footage (and how did they film inside and outside the bus?); and finally, a tattoo parlour film. Daniel the teacher said he had no idea there was a tattoo parlour in the village.. The bus sequence is very reminiscent of the opening to Etre et Avoir – which the children haven’t seen yet!

For the seamstress film, the children spent time getting to know the women – some they know already, but the focus woman (with the magenta hair) is from another village. Maria also talked to me about whether it’s easier or harder to film people you know: ‘For example, it might be your grandmother, but in your film she has to be ‘a grandmother”.

Without subtitles, it’s hard to know what Magenta Lady is talking about: it turns out she was a handball player until she was 40, but then had to turn her hand to something else. She says ‘Soon the snow will come and everything will become magical’. At one point, turning over the sheet she is sewing, she says something like ‘you have to love what you make otherwise it’s unbearable’. The children made the decision to stick with the filming as the women went outside for coffee; they film this beautiful ‘pause’, while the women smoke pensively, broken by one of their phones going off. It’s an incredibly mature piece of filming: one of the German filmmakers at the meeting said ‘I forgot I was watching films made by children’. They’re not Exercises; they’re like extracts from feature length documentaries.

Дерманци_Практически упражнения Киното, сто години младост 2023_24 from Arte Urbana Collectif on Vimeo.

Wragby farm film

This year Ivor has moved to start a new film club at Wragby Primary School, also in Lincs. They’ll be coming to Lisbon in June to show their film. They’re probably going to make something about a local farm park. In one of their Exercise 1’s, the children shot some footage of the animals, which we felt was reminiscent of some of the footage in Etre et Avoir.

Worcester Boulevard

As a welcome back to Chris Waugh (ex London Nautical School), I’m sharing one of his school’s (Christ’s College in Christchurch New Zealand) Lumiere Minutes. It’s a bit less than a minute, and clumsily screen-grabbed by me 😦 , but I love it. I’ve just been reading about Bakhtin’s Chronotope – essentially, I’ve always thought, ‘a place in a text where time happens’. But it turns out, not so fast (or simple, or loose).

There are two ways Bakhtin uses the term, I think. First, a chronotope can be a kind of structuring device in a narrative: a railway station, a crossroads (which is what a railway station kind of is), or my favourite (not cited by Bakhtin), the post box on the corner of Brookside Close. That post box was a device that enabled characters to meet in their stories. Railway stations are places of high drama. Crossroads are where stories collide, decisions and deals are made. These are essentially generic chronotopes – identifiable across genres and stories and forms.

But, as I take it, a chronotope can also be a specific location and time in history: this place, at this precise time: an anchor for the text in the world, in life. I’m not sure we’ve looked at Chronotopes in CCAJ (maybe something close, in Places and Stories), but this Lumiere Minute, that I’m calling Worcester Boulevard, anchors it in Christchurch New Zealand last week (or the week before), as well as being an example of the ‘crossroads’ chronotope in film (and novels, and the Robert Johnson song..). And if you didn’t hear Chris say so on the voice-over, or know it’s from Documentary Gesture Exercise 1 (Lumiere Minutes on labour), you might wonder what the focus is.

First Exercise 1 film!

Saskia and Eleanor, running the London Film School Saturday club version of CCAJ, have begun with Lumiere Work Minutes. Here’s the pick of them below – Saskia reports how giving students a focus for their Minute – ‘find someone doing some work’ – has made the task much easier and more rewarding than previous Lumiere Minutes.

Launching 2023/24: Documentary

The new theme for 2023/24 is ‘filmer l’autre: le geste documentaire’ for which, as usual, there’s no easy translation into English. It seems to be the question of filming – and constructing? – ‘otherness’ – ‘alterité’, in French terms. Jack Lang, sometime French Minister for the Arts, and for Education, determined that the purpose of the arts in education was to enable children and young people to encounter ‘the other’. This notion has been influential with Alain Bergala, the artistic patron of Cinema Cent Ans de Jeunesse.

As usual, the theme is sub-divided into categories, enabling us to structure a programme. There are types of ‘otherness’: animals, children (though are they really ‘other’ to other children?), ‘labour’ (how work makes us ‘other’ to ourselves..), and maybe controversially, types of mental or cognitive or behavioural difference.

There are also styles – or ‘regimes’ – of documentary, of which the three main ones seem to be ‘neutral observation’; interaction between filmmaker and subject(s); and more direct intervention, such as voice-over and maybe reconstruction.

There’s a Vimeo album of clips to watch: https://vimeo.com/showcase/filmer-l-autre-le-geste-documentaire; the password is FLA.

And here is the PPT we followed on Wednesday evening to introduce the theme, Exercises, clips.

London Film School Exercises 1 & 2

Saskia van Roomen has been running a film club supported by the London Film School, on a Saturday morning. Here’s two films of Exercise 2 – in which sound is used to decentre the action, and the audience’s attention. Filmmaker Eve writes:

today we had to film a scene with action ‘de-centred’ sound ‘centred’. We wanted to have a long shot with no cuts so we had to find a good location that was large enough to easily have two things going on at once. We decided to make it slightly funny and ridiculous by having a conversation happening about something unimportant with another person below trying to help someone seriously injured. The complete opposites worked well and we made sure we had a microphone right by the conversation so we could layer it over the audio so you weren’t actually able to hear what was happening with the injured person. The audience would be listening and watching the conversation at first making it ‘centred’ and then when the silent but dramatic action came in the conversation would become ‘de-centered’ and the action would become the main focus. It was a very fun exercise and it was interesting to play around with the audio in the edit.

We also liked this take on Exercise 1, adding voice to a montage of close-ups of a photograph

Some Long Takes

With London Nautical last week, we tried out long takes, where the camera wanders off for a bit, then comes back to the focus of the shot – centring, decentring, then centring again. We watched the opening of Welles’s Touch of Evil – the version restored by Walter Murch following an infamous memo by Welles, attempting to mitigate the worst of the studio’s butchering of his original footage. We also watched the sequence from Sunrise, where the man comes to meet the girl from the city by the river.

Alid’s group chose to shoot around the entrance to BFI Southbank, picking up stray characters along the way, and switching camera position from following to shooting face on.

And Darren’s group took an ambitious path through benugo riverfront restaurant, with a ‘look away’ moment from the camera during which new characters join the shot. The take changes from being a ‘following’ shot of Othniel, to becoming a chase. There’s a lovely sleight of hand when Tuggy hands the camera to Darren, who joins the chase, just before the stairs.

Decentring sound

This week’s excitement with London Nautical boys involved trying out exercise 2: using a sound element to decentre, dislocate, or otherwise disorientate the central action.

Two clips here: one finds a use of the alarming hand dryer noise, that so upsets some people, and the other features a tour de force of improvised interruptions to an attempted piece of to-camera journalism. Very pleased with the use of accidental noise – they didn’t plan the toilet scene until they came upon it – and the framing of Daniel’s would-be journalist – and his consternation in improvising along while Alid did the chat behind the camera.

Exercise 2 Off screen sound

Exercise 2 of centred/ decentred is about how sound can refocus an audience’s attention, recentring the shot, or the action. a few years ago, during Shown/ Hidden, there was an exercise that did this very nicely, so I’ll put it here.