Cartographier les dispositifs de réalisation des films documentaires

• Published in: Mise au point 2023-07, Vol.17 (17)
• Main Authors: Gantier, Samuel, Givois, Ève, Jacquemin, Bernard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: audiovisual indexing; documentary cinema; documentary film; film mediation; filmmaking dispositif; VOD platform
• ISSN: 2261-9623; 2261-9623
• DOI: 10.4000/map.6522

This article analyzes documentary films based on their multiple production devices. The aim is to propose an alternative to the categorization of documentary cinema by theme, production period or director. The first part presents the socio-professional use of the term "Dispositif" by filmmakers and programmers since the early 1990s. The second part summarizes the different meanings of the concept of Dispositif developed in human and social sciences since the 1970s. The objective is to formalize a theoretical model of the documentary filmmaking Dispositif that articulates six distinct entities: the person filming, the person filmed, the situation filmed, the filmic materials, the filmic text and the audience. In the third part, this theoretical model is used as a basis for the creation of a thesaurus in order to index a corpus of 331 documentaries extracted from Tënk VOD platform’s catalog. To conclude, the visualization of the metadata, in the form of a film network graph, translates families of documentaries whose production practices are close or even similar. This unprecedented mapping of documentary territories opens new perspectives for documenting, categorizing and recommending the great variety of heritage and contemporary documentary creation.