Through the years, Lieux Fictifs has built an approach that started with the idea of the active spectator, considering image as a motor for thinking and human transmission. It is this reflection that has led us to develop new ways of writing films, new ways of distributing and encountering the spectator. We accompany projects where the project leader will have to ask themselves these questions:
What’s an image? How to make an image? How to film others?
Between prison and the outside world, there are more similarities than differences. The specificity of prison as a framework comes from the very radicality it generates, to put the cinema to the test of prison (life) is also to put it to the test of our society. We think the question of cinema, and by extension of different artistic motions, can only come out richer from this clash.
Cinema must test itself, put itself at risk within the social framework and thus it must help us rebuild individual and collective narrative. What is at stake in this artistic research is our place as film makers in the writing and the making of films, but it is also our place as film makers within society.
We are looking to reverse the point of view, to re-establish some level of reciprocity in the way we look at each other (the one who films and the one who is being filmed), to rebuild narratives within frameworks that split them up, isolate them and erase them. To the concept of the controlling author, we prefer to oppose the place of the author and share it if necessary. We prefer to think up cinematic devices that allow us to ’do things with other people’ rather than ’do about other people’s history’ or even a charity minded ’for the others’.
It’s about rethinking our responsibility as image makers.
Critical sense, thought processes, emotions progressively disappear to make way to control, voyeurism and obscenity. The world ends up being represented by means of a certain kind of images (TV, movies, photo or digital).
Our work bias echo back and oppose the rise of commercial cinema and TV where spectators are increasingly put in a position of passive consumers, where imagination has no grounding on reality and where images are forgotten as soon as they are viewed.
As movie makers, we know that our perception of the world and indeed our very place in the world is not to take for granted but still to be invented. We know that we have to be conscious of the void, the emptiness, which lies between us and others, in order to develop our desire to be born to the world. That is what we wish to communicate and work on with various audiences in prison and outside.
As representations, images have to do with things that are traditionally separate: artistic creation, communication, history, pedagogy, human and social sciences, psychology... Whatever the diversity of approach that they are the object of, images appear to be hinges to the make up of an individual and a collective sense of identity.
Current filmic representations are increasingly locked in a process of reduction of identities to stereotypes, to neurotic symptoms. This primary link between images and identity is more than ever marked by confusion, stigmatisation and spectacular exhibitionism. TV-reality shows perfectly illustrate this trend. The consequences of fast progresses of information technology, the immeasurable flux of moving images that we absorb everyday cause worry, enthusiasm or indifference. Paradoxically, this profusion of images provokes more amnesia than it leaves traces and narratives.
In all cases, the ways of thinking and action have been turned upside down without giving us the time to take the measure of the change. We think that this debate must come/take shape from the way we make and broadcast images and in the way they put into contact tangible/perceptible experience and thought processes. It seems necessary to us to rethink ourselves as film makers and artists within a practice and a reflection about the place of images today in the make up/build up of our identities.
Thus, our processes have several levels: from the onset of the project on the setting up of writing and production mechanisms and further down in the dynamic process where the economies of research, social, training and audiovisual production coexist.
The last level is broadcasting, and through broadcasting, the launching of the piece into the debate and the critical construct through the network of broadcasting organisations and the set up of seminars and encounters. We are working towards an interdisciplinary network that would link different practices within artistic, critical, sociological, philosophical circles.
That’s why we’ve woven many collaborations with festivals, critical journals, philosophers and other individual experiences.
Today we are engaged in a process to formalise our experiences and our partnerships with a view to create a platform for discussions on the place of images within society, to initiate the establishment of new film writing ways/techniques.
Lieux Fictif’s partners :
• la Direction Régionale de l’Emploi, du Travail et de la Formation Professionnelle
• la Direction Régionale des Services Pénitentiaires PACA
• le Fonds Social Européen
• la Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles PACA
• le Conseil Général 13
• le Conseil Régional PACA
• la Politique à la Ville.
• le Système Friche Théâtre
