Digital Humanities Initiative

The French Film Documentary Digital Repository
Martine Guyot-Bender, Professor of French

Background

Regardless of its national origins, film documentary is a fleeting, ephemeral art form, one that suffers greatly from lack of centralization. Thousands of documentaries are made each year, sometimes after strenuous research, filming and editing, but cannot gather more than a very small audience, in film festivals for example, to which their authors have to apply for a restricted number of places, or in late night programs on television. Once festivals are over, the documentary often vanishes from public space, as does its content. Indeed, unlike books, which, once published, are systematically archived in national libraries, which are now connected to each other, film documentaries are exceptionally difficult to research. We are still, in the 21st century, a book-centered world.

Taking the example of France, since this project is concerned with French films, many documentaries of the Cinéma verité period are now quasi impossible to find even at the impressive Cinématheque française, funded through the efforts of Henri Langlois in the 1930s, or the no-less imposing Archives du Film, first funded in Paris by Andre Malraux in 1969, then moved to the town of Bois d'Arcy. For teachers-scholars of French, and for Cinema and New media studies abroad, including in the US, accessing this wealth of information is almost impossible.

Guyot-Bender has been trying to develop a course on Contemporary France that uses solely film documentary. The course could take many forms, one of which would be students creating their own documentary on their exploration of the topic. To be as complete as possible, building the Repository would need the aid of partners knowledgeable both in French and in Film (there are many to be found on Liberal Arts Campuses). The project could lead, even before it is finished, to the organization of a Flaherty seminar on French films, open to academics, but also high school teachers of French and artists, that would help bring this crucial art form, which has been a staple of French cinema and television since Louis Lumiere, to any French curricula.

Project Details

The proposed DHi Repository will help increase access to this information through several ways.

1. Access Films

Sift through French film documentaries that are already available in digital forms; work with documentary producers (e.g. Films d'ici, SLON/ISKRA, Films du Losange, ARTE) and also the French Embassy in New York which owns several hundred documentaries (that are rarely seen), to select films that could be digitized for use among institutions.


2. Gather Resources

Gathering under one roof the main digital sites on French film documentary or documentary written in French, (e.g.: film-documentaire.fr; various festivals) so that those films could be studied not only for their content, but as an art form in socio-political contexts.


3. Provide Tools

A. Organization of films according to various criteria (e.g.: chronology; place; socio-political approaches; cinematography; genre)
B. Concrete tools to use film documentary as a pedagogical support.