NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
Les anatomies possibles : vers une phénoménologie du corps de l'actrice au cinéma

This thesis constitutes an overlap between acting studies, cinematic phenomenology and feminist studies. It aims to follow the actress’s body at play as a tool for analysis of the movie. We will thus explore a corpus of six movies showing actresses playing the role of actresses, in order to try to understand how the female body problematizes the cinematographic image. Through the analysis of the body at play, from skin to bone, we will try to establish a “playful anatomy” (anatomie ludique) of the actress and the movie; an embodied way to think about the film. We will look at performances by Emmanuelle Riva, Béatrice Dalle, Meryl Streep, Alex Essoe, Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann and Laura Dern to extract the aesthetic, political, or philosophical meaning resulting from both the human body and cinematographic body. In a first part, we will focus on highly sensitive skin of bodies, namely those of Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) and H Story (Nobuhiro Suwa, 2001), which reveal the tactile quality of the actress’s play and the cinematographic image. The sense of touch becomes a way of seeing and being in the world, it emphasizes the fact that the actress’s memories heighten the traumatic memory of the historical event. Later on, skin will give way to muscle, gesture and movement. Through the hysterical bodies of Death Becomes Her (Robert Zemeckis, 1992) and Starry Eyes (Kevin Kolsch/Dennis Widmyer, 2014) emerges the importance of mimesis in cinema. The female body’s hysteria seems inseparable from the advent of the cinematographic image: it contaminates the film’s body and presents the conflict between body and image. The work of the actress shows that mimesis, much more than a simple “imitation”, is in fact a way to express oneself. Finally, we must dig within the body to reach its core: the viscera, vital organs, and skeleton. Here, the vital functions of Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) and Inland Empire (David Lynch, 2006) are intrinsically connected to those of the actress. Acting becomes a matter of life and death tied to the perception of time: time standing still during a close-up shot, the time between each heartbeat, each breath. The body of the actress at play thus underscores the intermittent temporal structure of the movie: its dis/continuity.

Keyphrases: anatomie ludique, sensation, chair, actress, body, female, film's body, phenomenology, film analysis, playful anatomy, sensation, flesh, touch, mimesis, hysteria, temporality
CyberPowWow : discours chronopolitiques autour des arts et muséographies numériques autochtones

In 1996, the Nation to Nation art collective founds CyberPowWow, an on-line Indigenous arts gallery. Between 1997 and 2004, four exhibitions are curated, and more than twenty artists take part in the project. CPW plays an essential role in structuring the Indigenous digital arts scene and community in Canada by designing an alternative and self-determined space for the production, circulation and critique of original artworks. This thesis studies the position of CPW – its exhibition platform and its artworks – in a set of chronopolitical discourses at the intersection of arts, digital technologies and Indigenous identities.

Keyphrases: CyberPowWow, Skawennati, arts autochtones, Indigenous arts, digital arts, chronopolitics
Jacques Linard, Une nature morte de 1640, marqueur de son temps

Abstract The French still lives of the first decades of the 17th century lend themselves well to meditation and to intellectual and philosophical discourses. The contribution of the French painter Jacques Linard (1597–1645) to French still lives are fundamental, however, his work is seldom studied. We wish to contribute to the research, by offering an original analysis of Still life with shells and a coral, dated in 1640, which portrays characteristics of French sensitivity. The apparent simplicity of this painting reveals a hermeneutic that goes beyond the spiritual context proper to the decrees of the Counter Reformation on art. The presence of natural objects abounds by mythological and religious symbolism, raises the question of Linard’s goal, and their relevance in 17th century French society. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of Archaeology, this memoir aims to develop with multiple points of view the message that Jacques Linard expresses pertaining to the interests of a changing France, suggested by the content, the composition and the naturalistic style of the painting. We will first relate the cultural history involving Christian symbolism, then we will carry out an original iconographic analysis in order to show the religious, moral and scientific meaning of this work of art. In 17th century France, the presence of natural objects also suggests new societal behaviour linked to ancient philosophy and scientific development which we will give an account of in correlation to the French cultural challenges that overlay its religious message.

Keyphrases: Jacques Linard, 1640, Collections, Cabinet of curiosities, Still-life With Shells and a Coral, Neo-stoicism, Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation, Discourse on the Method
Du traité à l’expérience : le paysage dans les jeux vidéo

This thesis presents research focusing on landscape in video games. To analyze video game landscapes, a set of methodological approaches and theoretical tools are presented to focus our study on the relationship woven, as a player and researcher, with certain games. With emphasis on: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Bethesda Game Studios 2011) and The Long Dark (Hinterland 2014).  This work considers a recent reflection of the concept of a landscape defended by the French geographer Augustin Berque (1984). For him, the notion must be understood both as an imprint (“empreinte”) and as a matrix (“matrice”). We will see that landscapes in video games can be approached as an imprint because they can be considered as a technique of creation and human conception (Arsenault, Côté and Larochelle 2015). They can also be understood as a matrix because they create new ways to perceive, act and “do with” space (Stock et Lussault 2009).  At the crossroads of cultural geography and video game studies, these propositions will help us to better understand our experience. Our questioning will inspect the value attributed to a landscape experience by examining the space and time that create a meaningful relationship between a player and a landscape.

Keyphrases: experience, Skyrim, The Long Dark, landscape, space, geography, video games, player, gamer
Images de l'ironie : de la chute de Babel aux plages de Spring Breakers

This work aims to define the notion of irony by questioning a singular practice of it, that of Harmony Korine's film Spring Breakers (2012). This reflexive approach, at the conjuncture of a definitional work and an essayistic approach, consists in searching through history, theory and various ironic phenomena the tools capable of formulating a concept that answers the problems and reflections raised by the peculiar irony to Korine's work.  To achieve this, this work will begin with the question: "What is irony?'' And will review the various definitions proposed over the centuries, from Socrates to postmodern theories. These considerations will allow us to state the conditions of possibility of a properly artistic and, more specifically, cinematic irony. This artistic potential will take shape through the practice of the American avant-garde from the 1950s to 1970s and some of its filmmakers: Anger, Conner and Warhol.  Subsequently, the viability of this artistic practice of irony will be questioned due to its institutionalization since the 1980s. This reconsideration, formulated according to a text by David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction (1993), will articulate one of the contemporary problems that meets the artistic future of irony: its cynical hegemony. Finally, this problem will find its answer through various contemporary manifestations of irony, from the first season of Lynch and Frost's Twin Peaks (1990) to Korine's Spring Breakers. These answers will gradually build the concept of ironic amputation and thus help to elaborate a current definition of irony in art.

Keyphrases: irony, Harmony Korine, Spring Breakers, postmodern
La popularisation des œuvres d'art : étude du cas de Jean-Michel Basquiat

In the 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artworks generated great interest in the art world, making him an artist in demand by gallerists and other specialists. This interest has remained unabated: today, collectors pay large amount of money to purchase his paintings. Even though the New York-born artist died in 1988, the enthusiasm persists and his works circulate inside the institutional sphere. Yet, they get outside the institutions to be part of the public space (on Internet and in the street area and distributed by the cultural industry). A large public is now exposed to images that comes from a special corpus of art history: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s art production.   The aim of our research is to study the increasing popularity of Basquiat’s artworks in order to identify the reasons behind this phenomenon, now visible in the public space. To that end, it is important to analyze both his most visible artworks, as much as his most popular ones – for example, those where the crown appears – as well as the works that are the most often reproduced. To explain this phenomenon, it is also important to go through significant steps in the research : first by studying cultural theories supported by Pierre Bourdieu and Lawrence Levine to enlighten the questions surrounding the distinction between the “serious” and the “popular”; then by taking our attention towards the artist figure, in the sense of the theories developed by art sociologist such as Nathalie Heinich; finally, by proceeding in a search influenced by Antoine Hennion’s theories on mediation, helping to examine and to retrace the circulation of the reproductions of Basquiat’s artworks that takes part of a global media visibility.

Keyphrases: public, popular culture, American painting, visual culture
Penser les lieux du capital : architecture moderne, périurbain et espace industriel dans le cinéma de Michelangelo Antonioni

This thesis proposes to dwell on the representation of the modern urban space in the cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, especially on its antagonistic relation with the characters. What are the difficulties and problematics involved in adaptating to such a space? To answer this question, we will undertake an analysis of the relationship between urbanity and neo- capitalist ideology in three of the filmmaker’s major works, La notte (1961), L'eclisse (1962) and Il deserto rosso (1964). To support our reflections, we will use the help of different urban and architectural theorists, but also of philosophers who are interested in the existential and phenomenological relation uniting the human to his environment. The first chapter will focus on how modern architecture and some of its aesthetic characteristics – such as its geometric shapes, lack of facade and its transparency – are perceived as hostile and inhuman by the main character. More focused on suburban urbanism, the second chapter will take a look at the signs linking the urban environment to the capitalist force that produces it. We will then analyze the characters’ place within the urban environment of the film, as well as the complex relationship between modernity and temporality. Finally, we will examine the cinematographic methods used by Antonioni to convey to the viewer a neurotic experience of the uninhabitable nature of the industrial park.

Keyphrases: Michelangelo Antonioni, Henri Lefèbvre, Italian cinema, Modern architecture, Urban space, Cinematographic space, Modernity, Capitalism
Visualisation du cerveau et théories de l’esprit : la création d’une interface cerveau-machine

Thanks to modern medical imaging, the brain-computer interface (BCI) can transform the working mind into a kinetic control tool, which has many medical and artistic applications. Thus, for the past fifteen years, this emerging field of research has studied the correlations established by neuroscience between the cognitive activity and the electrical activity of the brain. We developed our research plan by studying the following question: how does BCI define a new topology of the self – defined as the relationship between the subject and oneself – through various neuroimaging technologies (fMRI, EEG)? Our analysis will demonstrate how the history of neuroimaging, from prehistory to the present day, brings together representations of the brain and the development of theory of mind. In addition, we will discuss theories of pictorial representation and the main models of thought supported by cognitive science. Finally, we will reflect on the challenges encountered while creating BCI for the Telekinesium project.  To conclude our three-pronged analysis – a brief history of neuroimaging, the thought image and Telekenesium: a BCI – fundamental questions surrounding our identity resurface, which are linked to the opening of this black box: the human brain.

Keyphrases: Brain-computer interface, Theory of mind, Medical imaging
Répétition et musicalité dans l’univers « underground » américain : interférences entre le cinéma structurel et la musique répétitive

This master thesis, entitled “Repetition and Musicality in the American Underground universe: Interference between Structural Film and Repetitive Music,” develops the idea of a musicality specific to “structural” film (Sitney 1979) by establishing certain correspondences between this type of “experimental” cinema and the so-called “repetitive” music – which take place, at the turn of the 1960s, in the heart of the same underground universe in New York, in the same institutions (universities, museums, art galleries) and in the same “parallel circuits” (Desjardins 1999, p. 223). Structural filmmakers (Snow, Frampton, Landow, etc.) keep meeting repetitive composers (Glass, Reich, and Riley). In an interview from the Millennium Film Journal, Philip Glass recalls the program of a session given jointly with Michael Snow: “In fact, there was a period in which I’d show a film of Michael’s in the first half of the concert and I’d play in the second half. We showed either Wavelength or Back and Forth. What linked us together was the preoccupation with process (Glass cité dans Simon 1983-1984, p. 137).” The identifiable connections between these musical and cinematographic tendencies (see Noguez 1985; Desjardins 1999; and Sitney 2008) attest to a common objective for filmmakers and musicians: to deepen the relationship between the formal components of the medium. This deepening goes through various processes: (1) rejection of any teleology by an emphasis on the process and the work in layers; (2) questioning the primacy of the narrative structure by a repetition creating textures and spaces; (3) reflections on the technique and the medium used (camera, film, magnetic tape recorder) by the practice of the loop; (4) interrogations on the bases of the cinematographic and musical languages by experiments on the temporal organization of the work. Thus, for example, comparing the singularity of the repetitive musical regime of Steve Reich's piece It's Gonna Rain (1965), and the singularity of the repetitive audio-visual regime of Hollis Frampton's film Critical Mass (1971), we discover in the cyclical and mechanical configuration of this film a structural musicality.

Keyphrases: Structure, Avant-garde, Structural Film, Minimal Music, Experimentations, Repetition, Musicality, Structure, America, Avant-garde, Aesthetics, Politics
Montage polyphonique et excessif chez les Wachowski : les doubles connexions de sens dans Sense8 et Cloud Atlas

We are interested in alternate, parallel and connected stories in the movie Cloud Atlas (Wachowski, 2013) and the Netflix’s series Sense8 (Wachowski, 2015). Although there are different depending on their format (being respectively a movie and a series) ; stories are connected and linked by several techniques that have differences and similarities in those objects. From those narrative connections results the polyphony of our objects. Focusing on the analysis of this polyphony, we will outline five blocks about polyphonic key concepts. To maintain the narrative polyphony, the editing between the stories is essential. Narrative connections in between stories, spaces, time and characters, whether connected or not at first glance, are maintained and emphasized by the editing. By using our five polyphonic blocks concepts, we will see connections, interactions and cohabitation of spaces, time and characters in Cloud Atlas and Sense8 because of the editing. Thru those connections that maintain polyphony, we will question the excessive narrative editing as a way to end up with a sensory editing inside our two objects. We will see that the editing becomes essential to create new connections that overcome the narration between different diegesis and we will show how these connections help creating a single and entire network, produced by a multitude of spaces and times.

Keyphrases: Wachowski, sens, Sense8, Cloud Atlas, intermédialité, polyphony, editing, connections, senses, movie, series, intermediality
Pour une esthétique de la non-réconciliation Montage, histoire et politique dans le film Nicht Versöhnt de Jean- Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet

The work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet is often considered one of the most radical in the history of European cinema. We have tried here to question the political character of their cinema, focusing on their first film, Nicht Versöhnt Oder es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht, which presents what we will describe here as an aesthetic of non-reconciliation. A cinematographic aesthetic that emancipates from the codes generally used by the film industry to try to get closer to a less corrupted vision of reality. The resulting form of cinema will allow them to offer a different perspective on our reading of history. This film was first made in response to the fact that the German people claim to be reconciled with its history, whereas for our filmmakers it was not at all the case at the time. We will show that a really political cinema for our filmmakers must bring back traces of the past repressed under the surface of a present smoothed by the ruling classes.

Keyphrases: Straub, Huillet, Politics, History, Fugue
Les femmes, les hérétiques et les marchands : trois groupes sociaux représentés sur la façade de l’église abbatiale de Saint-Gilles-du-Gard

This study focuses on the Romanesque façade of the abbey church of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, built in the last third of the twelfth century. Although this subject has been well-studied, our contribution aims to reassess the social, economic, and religious context of the sculpture and to address the sculptural representations on the façade of three distinct social groups: women, heretics and merchants. The church in Saint-Gilles will be compared with other contemporary sites in the region, including the cathedral and cloister at Arles. This will allow us to address the question of stylistic or representational differences in different types of religious spaces: the façade was accessible to all (public space) as opposed to the cloister, which was reserved primarily for monks (private space). First, the southern portal of the abbey includes many representations of women, while the rest of the façade does not. This led us to conclude that gender segregation within the church was still a common practice at the time and was represented on the façade. Secondly, the inscriptions, the many symbols associated with the sacrament of the Eucharist, and representations of Judas refer to the Church's struggle against heresy. Finally, scenes rarely represented on a Romanesque façade, such as Jesus Chasing Merchants from the Temple and The Holy Women Buying Spices, reminded merchants at Saint-Gilles not to trade inside the church and that women are allowed in the public space of the market.

Keyphrases: Sculpture romane, Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, France – XIIe siècle, Church of Saint-Gilles, Romanesque sculpture, France – XIIth century, Women in the Middle Ages, Christian heresies, Trade in the Middle Ages, Religious space
Le film casse-tête polymorphique

In order to generate research on creation rooted in the definition of the research-creation, I propose to make a collaborative film (the puzzle film) in a context of plurality of genres (polymorphic). This new type of film tends to dissociate itself from the sketches film and omnibus films. It finds his anchoring in some already theorized subjects, hospitality and community. The puzzle is developed using a conductor who co-ordinates several directors in a single film. The theory leads to a film, which is then analysed according to Coutinho’s concept of provisional utopian equality (2004).

Keyphrases: Filming practice, Puzzle, Polymorphism, Conductor, Hospitality, Community
Interface utilisateur dans le jeu vidéo : étude de l’immersion et de la transparence

Following Jørgensen’s gameplay-centric approach, this master thesis is about user interface and its link with immersion and transparency trends. Using different points of view, those three key concepts are defined and detailed to answer these questions: Does the presence of UI diminish players’ immersion? If so, is transparency a design solution? This study consists of a historical overview of game user interface origins and first steps, divided in three different categories (arcades, consoles and computers), an analysis of its evolution in adventure games and, finally, a state of play of its contemporary forms, which allows us to confront UI with different theories of immersion and transparency. As a result, we propose a UI design methodology for an optimal user experience, serving gameplay.

Keyphrases: GUI, immersion, video game, user interface, overlay, transparency, gameplay, diegesis