NCube/papyrus huggingface dataset:
L’empathie au coeur du cinéma anthropologique de Trinh T. Minh-ha : les cas de Reassemblage et The Fourth Dimension

Trinh T. Minh-ha's experimental mediation consists in conveying a singular cinematographic gesture that borrows different empathic strategies used during each stage of film production. This research aims at defining the polysemous notion of empathy, and then, from this plural angle, to approach the practical theory of the film, theorized and experimented by the director: Trinh T. Minh-ha aims at renewing the experience of the audience to the world and to otherness. To explain our problem, we will analyze the two of the anthropological films directed by Trinh T. Minh-ha: “Reassemblage” (1982) and “The Fourth Dimension” (2001). The visual anthropology produced by Trinh T. Minh-ha is based on the quality of the “plasticity” of cinema, such as Élie Faure defines it in his book “Fonction du cinéma, de la cinéplastique à son destin sociale (1921-1937)”. This social “cinéplastique” through the formal mix of its ethical and aesthetic characteristics, meets our concept of a cinematographic gesture, vector of empathy committed by Trinh T. Minh-ha.  The article “Visual anthropology and the ways of knowledge” written by David Macdougall and published in 2004 in the scientific magazine “Journal des anthropologues (98-99)” will help us to contextualize the anthropological cinema of Trinh T. Minh-ha inside the postmodern movement. We will also refer to the texts published in 2008 in the scientific magazine “Journal des anthropologues (114-115)” directed by Ghislaine Gallenga and entitled  "Empathy in anthropology" to discuss the filmmaking and editing approaches of the director in order to understand the following experience of the audiences as characterized as an aesthetic empathy in relation to these films. The practical theory of Trinh T. Minh-ha seems to cross a postmodern form with a poetics of cinema and thus produces an affective and perceptive theme, a polysensory “feel-with” described by the theorist of poetry Michel Collot whose ideas of a “continuum” between film, director and spectator we’ll apply.

Keyphrases: cinéma, Trinh T. Minh-ha, cinema, postmodern anthropology, empathy, plastic-art
Pour une nouvelle esthétique du documentaire écologiste

This master’s thesis aims to question the representation of neo-peasants in the ecologist documentaries produced from the beginning of the 2000s until now. These documentaries – which are now understood to be a genre in and of itself– claim to have a political purpose. Those neo-peasants, who are at the heart and primary subject of these films, have taken a political stance: to place the earth back at the heart of their lives. This political premise is, however, absent from these ecologist documentaries. The representation of the neo-peasants is limited to their words, recorded during the interview process, and it is those very words that monopolize the space and the frame in the film. We therefore raise the question: isn’t there a contradiction between their political premise and the aesthetic chosen to represent them cinematographically?  We thus suggest that this contradiction has a considerable impact on the political efficiency of the art form. To understand the political premise of neo-peasants and their idiosyncrasies, we will start with Agamben’s form-of-life. With Agel and Gaudin, we’ll then analyse the space that ecologist documentaries occupy and how their aesthetic affects the public. Finally, we’ll draw political and aesthetic conclusions with the help of Rancière and we’ll demonstrate that, within the « share of the sensitive », it is important that those who are « part of no part » are given visibility.

Keyphrases: Agamben, Rancière, neo-peasant, ecologist documentary, Agamben, Rancière, aesthetic.
Peindre la science : Caravage et le milieu savant de Rome

The scientific revolution that distingued the italian Seicento was marked by a breakthrough in astronomical, optical and mechanical theories, giving way to emerging scientific personalities such as Galileo Galilei and Guidobaldo Del Monte. This rupture with the knowledge of the world that was established since Antiquity coincides with Caravaggio's innovative pictorial techniques. Our paper examines the relationship between art and science in Rome by analysing the artist's paintings created under the patronage of Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, a strong supporter of the experimental approach that defined the studies of natural phenomena. This thesis seeks to understand in which ways the artwork’s content and subject matter, as well as stylistic techniques, reflect the scientific discourse that most probably took shape, among other sites, in Del Monte’s roman residences, the Palazzo Madama and the Casino Del Monte, known today as the Villa Boncompagnie-Ludovisi. Thus, Caravaggio’s paintings can be viewed as a reflection of the intellectually stimulating environment that he worked in. The pictures may also function as "epistemic images", meant to instruct and inform the viewer on various scientific theories. Furthermore, the importance of alchemy as an emerging legitimate science in the Cardinals circle is closely investigated. Caravaggio’s fresco painting, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto, located in what once was Del Monte’s alchemical distillery room of the Casino Del Monte is compared to Francesco’s I de Medici’s Studiolo in the Palazzo Vecchio. It helps to further shed light on the relationship between knowledge and power and to highlight the Cardinal’s role in the new up and coming sciences.

Keyphrases: Francesco Maria Del Monte, science, Caravaggio, optics, alchemy
Figures de l'impossible : perte, rencontre, devenir

This master thesis examines the experience of the impossible in two documentaries, reassembling and reagencing family archives material (home-movies, photographs, diaries), in which there is an experience of loss and mourning. The experience of the impossible that I'll also refer to as 'becoming' - from Gilles Deleuze's designation - will be considered as a committment, an attitude, an ethic to apprehend, acknowledge and to engage a 'wholly otherwise' presence in the world. This case study will analyze, refering to Jacques Derrida's concepts of 'gift' and 'event', both considered as figures of the impossible, how the relation commonly associated to the experience of loss (holding on to nostalgia, suffering, despair) can be transformed into a new disposition more capable to accept and welcome 'what comes'. This last ability would, therefore, initiate a new experience of the reality.            It is by defending the notion of 'becoming' – as an intrinsic feature within the film medium and as an exemplary space of 'distribution of the Sensible' – that I will study its incedences in Un'ora sola ti vorrei (Alina Marazzi, 2002) and in Mort à Vignole (Olivier Smolders, 1998). If the film experience always supposes and implies an encounter acting directly on the perception of the spectator and his various sensations (as a capability to welcome, what was thenceforth, unexpected and unlikely) my interest will focus on how he could apprehend and embrace this new experience. In short, how film - and more outstandingly films in which a painful experience of loss takes place - emerges as an experience of the impossible and thereupon as a undeniable new way of 'being-in-the-world'.

Keyphrases: experience, impossible, Derrida, archives, loss, encounter, becoming, gift, event
Le jeu vidéo sur YouTube : historique de la captation et de la diffusion du jeu vidéo

This research is aimed to understand the audiovisual recording and commentary practices of video games. First of all, we do a contextualisation of these types of production through a historical analysis of the way theses videos were diffused (from televised shows, to VHS, magazines’ bonuses, and on the Internet). After, we detail the limits and affordances of the YouTube sharing platform. Then, we create links between the commentary of video game and the concepts of film lecturer, performance and double performance. Finally, we analyse four genres of videos available on YouTube : machinimas, speedruns, let’s plays and longplays.

Keyphrases: Machinima, Longplay, Let's play, Speedrun, YouTube, Double performance, Video game, Film lecturer, Commentary
Vers une théorisation du hors-film : le cas spécifique de la ciné-transmission

In the last decade flourished a tremendous number of projections in cinemas frequently referred to as “hors-film” (in French). With operas at the forefront, this usage of cinemas has drawn the attention of many scholars and professionals. At the intersection of several media, “hors-film” remains a vague phenomenon that has resisted reductive definition and which has varied from author to author. This dissertation aims to provide a history of “hors-film” as well as a general definition by studying the way the concept is applied in different discursive domains. The outcome of this process is the development of a new concept, cinétransmission, which refers to the transmission of “hors film” events adapted for cinemas. Building on this new concept, this dissertation concludes with an analysis of the way ciné-transmission has transformed aspects of both opera and cinema, by refashioning productions with the specific purpose of rendering it adaptable for viewing within cinemas. As this research will show, not every opera production approaches this process with the same aesthetic premises.

Keyphrases: Hybridation, Hors-film, Ciné-transmission, Opera, Cinema, Remediation, Identity, Discursive community
«Cool crime films» : tendance cool de la représentation de la criminalité dans le cinéma des années quatre-vingt-dix

During the nineteen-nineties, an important number of crime films marked by a distinctive relationship to coolness started to appear under the influence of a handful of “major” examples, thus allowing the establishment of a “cool tendency” within the “genre”. It was as much thanks to their criminal characters—who, in a very conscious manner, displayed cool attitudes and aesthetics—as to their willingness to explore miscellaneous structural elements that could be viewed as cool that the cinema of Quentin Tarantino, Joel and Ethan Coen, David Lynch, Steven Soderbergh and Jim Jarmusch spearheaded this tendency. By offering an historical perspective on the concept of cool and on the crime film as a genre, this study suggests an analysis of the relationship between the cinema of crime of the nineteen-nineties and coolness—as depicted  through its criminal characters and through the organisation of its cinematographic materials.

Keyphrases: cool, coolness, protagoniste criminel, criminal protagonist, gangster, crime film, Quentin Tarantino
Le corps de l'acteur au cinéma et au théâtre : vers une conception du corps intermédial. 
Recherche-création sur la médiation du cinéma et du théâtre à travers la figure de l’acteur

In this essay, we look at how an actors’ body is one of the means of expressions available to a director, and at how intermediality influences this dynamic. Firstly, following Charles Taylor and M. H. Abrams’ thoughts on expression as a basic human need, we investigate the means of expression that are available to the actor and to the director. In each case, we find that the actor’s body is of critical importance to their respective expression. Secondly, we review the key ideas of intermediality, after work from David Bolter and Richard Grusin. We then explain how mediation on screen and on stage differ from one another, especially because the theatre is a hypermedia, as defined by Chiel Kattenbelt. We propose that an actor’s play is primarily remediated by the medium where it is manifest. Thirdly, we distinguish the “filmic body” and the “scenic body” on the basis of their specific mediations (Peter Brook, André Bazin, Vincent Amiel). Further, we examine the actor’s work within two intermedial set-ups, that of Denis Marleau and that of the Wooster Group. Lastly, we explore the creative process that supported our stage adaptation of Persona. To this end, we look at the intermedial aspect, the stage set and the themes of the adaptation. The outcome of this research opens to the concept of an “intermedial body”, form which two problematics are examined: the presence (Philip Auslander) and juxtaposition of expressions (Robert Bresson).

Keyphrases: Expression, Cinema, Theatre, Intermediality, Actor, Director
Les artistes artificiels de Human Study 1: l'automatisation en art actuel

The encounter between art and machine has historically been met with great social and intellectual resistance. Today, the mechanization and automation of art raises even more pressing questions since humans are being excluded from an increasing number of tasks now wholly entrusted to machines. Conversations about the automation of art become singularly relevant when we look at one area : robotic art. In this thesis we analyze the public's struggle to understand robotic art. By using the history of automata, the history of drawing machines, psychoanalysis, and the aesthetics of reception, we will demonstrate that the interactive robotic installations encompassed in Patrick Tresset's series Human Study #1 are often the object of aesthetic and moral resistance. By analyzing Tresset's work, this thesis suggests a new way of perceiving robotic art within the wider context of contemporary art practices. In addition, it seeks to defend robotic art as an ideal method of navigating relevant contemporary themes.

Keyphrases: Patrick Tresset, Robotic art, Drawing machine, Automation
Le sommeil d’or (Davy Chou 2011) et L’image manquante (Rithy Panh 2013), deux espaces filmiques de commémoration moyennant l’irrécupérabilité de l’absence

In this study, we would like to show how two Cambodian directors, from two different generations, tell the story of the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer rouge through different aesthetics of mourning. Rithy Panh unveils his personal mourning while Davy Chou conveys a mourning that was transmitted to him by his relatives. When it comes to The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh 2013), it is the director’s personal memories (and lack of memories) that allow him to talk about his childhood trauma. This enables the reconstruction of a collective memory that is bigger than his individual mourning. In Golden Slumbers (Davy Chou 2011), the young director’s device entails a collective recollection. Several people, who were related to the film industry during the golden age, share their memories about what happened in the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. Through their reminiscences, the lost films acquire a new life while the event that brought their destruction is put forward. Both directors produce images of the missing people and cultural objects as they portray the genocide to ensure its memory and to rebuild the khmer identity that Pol Pot’s regime intended to destroy. The purpose of our research is to understand how it is possible to talk about – or to tell the story of – a traumatic event where the intimate and the political spheres are intertwined, in an effort to incorporate it to the present-day collective memory.

Keyphrases: Absence, Documentary, Khmer genocide, Absence, Post-traumatic mourning, Intergenerational transmission, Vicarious witnessing
L’institutionnalisation du Street Art : l’exposition d’Os Gemeos à l’ICA de Boston

Street Art is a contemporary arts movement encompassing several art forms, which appeared in the 1970s, and that we can find on the street and in the public space. Some scholars have been interested in this movement from an historical point of view, following its evolution to the present day. Being an art form of the American counter-culture, Street Art has now evolved by giving us several artists known worldwide, such as Shepard Fairey and Banksy. Formerly anti-institutional, street art seems to have progressed greatly considering the impressive number of Street Art exhibitions that have been seen in museums in recent years.  The recent evolution of the movement towards museum institutions is particularly interesting. We ask ourselves the following question: How is the social and political dimension of Street Art institutionalized by museums? In order to analyze this transition of the Street Art movement, the study of museum exhibitions is necessary because we believe that this institutionalization requires the musealisation of street art. We did our research by analyzing various Street Art collective exhibitions and then focusing on some major monographic exhibitions that took place in the United States. All these exhibitions, curated works, exhibition catalogs and various communication tools helped us understand how museums institutionalize the social and political aspects of Street Art.  As a result of our research and analysis, a corpus of works by Brazilian artists seemed to stand out as being significant for the study of the institutionalization of Street Art. Os Gemeos, with their eponymous monographic exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (held from August 1st to November 25, 2012), have enjoyed a phenomenal success in the last decade. Several museums have shown a marked interest in the practice of the Os Gemeos brothers, which led us to question its musealisation. The study of their corpus and the visit of the exhibition Os Gemeos at the ICA of Boston in 2012 has helped us to understand several aspects of their notoriety in the museum world and thus to answer our research question.

Keyphrases: Street Art, Graffiti, Os Gemeos, Museum, Musealisation, Institutionalization
Esthétique et éthique de la responsabilité dans le cinéma d’Alfred Hitchcock

One may easily accept that responsibility is a matter that pertains to ethical thinking; but what if we also make it an aesthetical problem? Are we willing to accept that cinema has the ability to educate us and change us, so that we can acknowledge our own responsibilities? In other words, under what conditions can responsibility become a cinematographical problem? This dissertation is about the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in Hitchcock’s films, based on the problem of responsibility. Throughout analysis and descriptions of many of his films, I will examine how Hitchcock’s aesthetic can lead to an ethical questioning, and, conversely, how responsibility gives meaning or ethical value to the aesthetic of this filmmaker. In doing so, an additional objective is added: to demonstrate that Hitchcock problematizes responsibility only with the means of cinema, and that it is precisely through this ethical questioning that he discovers what is cinema, its means, its possibilities and its specificity. This ethical reading of Hitchcock’s films is divided into three sections. Taking up Deleuze’s reading where Hitchcock was described as the filmmaker of relations, the first section is an attempt to evaluate how relationship’s economy is articulated with or belongs to a deeper problem, that of responsibility and accountability. The second section follows by demonstrating how relationships transforms the very notion of identity, which is revealed as unstable, fictional, partial, when not simply violent. Indeed, we’ll see how during trials, the defendant is denied the possibility of having his own voice, or how domestic spaces represent a danger for the integrity of key feminine characters struggling to find their place in this world. In the final section, it will be clear to us that for different reasons, comically or dramatically, Hitchcock’s films are filled with character’s living a life of self-denial; characters who, instead of being part of this world, are simply haunting it. Therefore, the problem of responsibility will be defined as the demand for self-creation, that is, being the actors of our own existence. For this, we need to acknowledge our human condition, which is precisely that we are not yet accountable for our place in this world; but moreover, responsibility is about acknowledging who we are, who we’ve been and who we aspire to be.

Keyphrases: Relations, Responsability, Cinema, Ethics, Relationships, Personal identity, Aesthetic, Self-creation, Philosophy
L’eau et le sang, le païen et le chrétien : la Coupe des Ptolémées et la Patène de serpentine du trésor de Saint-Denis

The so-called “Cup of the Ptolemies” (Paris, BnF) and the Serpentine paten at the Louvre originally belonged to the treasury of Saint-Denis, France, from the early Middle Ages to the French Revolution. However, these objects were created even before the foundation of the abbey: of antique origin, they were mounted and reused as liturgical objects in the ninth century. They are thought to be gifts from the Carolingian Emperor Charles the Bald (823–877). In astonishing high relief, the Cup represents bacchic paraphernalia arrayed on altars. The presence of pagan symbols on an object reworked into a Eucharistic chalice call into question the appreciation of Antiquity by Charles the Bald and his court, and questions in the concept of a Carolingian “renaissance”. The eight golden fish encrusted into the serpentine of the paten have an uncertain origin. They were possibly added to “convert” the reclaimed cult object in the ninth century, or were perhaps part of its original conception in the first century B.C.E./ first century C.E.  The present research probes the semantic shifts assumed by these non-Christian objects when transferred to Christian sacred space, to be used for its most solemn celebration. To examine this question, we must go back to the Eucharistic debates of the ninth century that specifically inquired as to the meaning of the sacraments and the vessels that contained them. The Dionysian iconography of the Cup is then compared with these very writings, as well as other sources dealing with Bacchic myths. As for the fish, they are examined in the light of a wide range of documents, the most important being the work of John Scotus Eriugena. The Christianization of these objects is not only a consequence of their imagery: their materiality completes and enriches their rhetorical functions.

Keyphrases: Cup of the Ptolemies, Serpentine paten, Abbey of Saint-Denis, Spolia, Materiality, Eucharistic debates
L'orfèvrerie québécoise dans le contexte muséal : une relecture contemporaine de la Collection Henry Birks d'orfèvrerie canadienne

The presence of Quebec’s silverware in North American museums depends on the collecting activities of many individuals who have inserted them into coherent ensembles that they sold, bequeathed and donated to these institutions. This thesis, structured in two chapters, proposes an analysis of the museum discourse relating to Quebec’s silverware, notably within the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, which holds the Henry Birks Collection of Canadian Silver since 1979, the most representative and voluminous of this kind in the world. On the one hand, the history of the Collection is carried out in order to better characterize it and show its impact on the studies involving Canadian silverware between 1930 and 2000. The development and dissemination efforts executed by the Collector and the Museum are then compared in order to make a critical historical reading of the Collection and its museum representation. On the other hand, the analysis of the NGC's permanent exhibition of Canadian art, based on the theoretical writings and essays proper to museology, sheds light on the almost "silent" aesthetic discourse of the institution, its nationalist political ideology, and the way in which enhancement and display strategies, as well as pedagogical textual material, support its singular statement. It is thus demonstrated that the Collection is dependent on the circumstances surrounding its acquisition and that a general disinterest in the academic and institutional communities in Canada may explain its lack of dissemination in the country and internationally.

Keyphrases: Collection, Birks, Museum discourse, National Gallery of Canada, Silverware