Framed, autonomous, vernacular: a typology of the regimes of images

The audiovisual cultural object is commonly reduced to works holding a visa d’exploitation, the certificate required for theatrical release in France. Yet the other images exist, and act in people’s lives, whether institutions recognize them or not. I propose here a typology in three regimes, framed, autonomous, vernacular, so that what exists can be named without being ranked, in order to decide better and to accompany better.

Images without legitimacy, but not without effects

In most educational projects, “image education” means, in practice, education in framed professional works, theatrical films, broadcast documentaries, sometimes series. The rest of the images, that is, almost everything that people watch and produce every day, is treated as devoid of legitimacy, and therefore left out of the field. Yet an image does not need to be legitimized in order to act. The videos circulating on social networks, family films, the images exchanged in a conversation build identities, representations of the world, bonds, because they occupy daily life, several hours a day on average. An education, a public policy or a body of research that cannot name these images is therefore talking about something other than what is going on.

This blindness comes from mistaking a framework for a definition. The visa d’exploitation, and more broadly the regulatory and economic apparatus surrounding commercial audiovisual production, frames a certain type of cultural object, and this framework has ended up standing in for a definition of the audiovisual cultural object itself. It would be naive to believe that it defines it. An administrative authorization for public screening says something about the market and about public order in entertainment; it says nothing about the nature of images.

The semiologist Roger Odin laid down, from the 1980s onwards, the principle that allows us to leave this confusion behind. Amateur images are not inferior to professional images, they do not have the same function. The former entertain, inform, make people dream; the latter keep traces of people’s lives and take part in the construction of identities. There is no hierarchy to be established between different functions. Cultural rights, written into French law in 2015 and 2016, give this principle legal and political weight, since respecting the dignity of persons implies respecting their cultural practices as they are. The stance that follows is ethnological in nature. Before evaluating images, one must describe the regimes in which they exist, as the ethnologist describes the practices of a society before interpreting them. That is the purpose of the typology that follows. In an article published in 2016 in the journal Esprit, I had distinguished two regimes of images, professional images and amateur images. The work of the following years led me to refine this distinction, because it left in the shadows a widespread confusion, the one that equates “professional” with “framed by commerce”. Three regimes, in my view, must be distinguished.

A visa number at the bottom of the poster

On every French cinema poster, in small print, there is a visa number. The visa d’exploitation is an administrative authorization, issued by the minister for culture after the opinion of a classification board, and the French film and moving image code makes it the condition of any public theatrical screening in France. Its origin goes back to 1919, when the State instituted a control of films, that is, a censorship, of which today’s age classification is the heir. Around this visa, since the creation of the Centre national du cinéma (CNC) in 1946, a whole edifice has been built: financial support for production and exhibition, the media chronology (the legally fixed sequence of release windows), the deposit of works, attendance statistics.

An order of magnitude is enough to situate what this edifice leaves outside. A few hundred feature films receive a visa for theatrical release in France each year. In the same period, five hundred additional hours of video are uploaded every minute to the YouTube platform alone. Framed production is the most visible of audiovisual productions, and, in quantity, the smallest.

First regime: framed images

I call framed images the audiovisual production caught in the double regulatory and commercial framework of dissemination: theatrical films, series, broadcast documentaries, television programs, as one encounters them in cinemas, on the airwaves, on published media and on platforms.

This framework is defined by French law, and it has two branches. The cinematographic branch organizes what is first released in cinemas. The visa conditions public screening, every ticket sold is taxed to feed a support fund managed by the CNC, and the media chronology fixes the order in which a film moves from the cinema to the other modes of dissemination. The audiovisual branch organizes what is first broadcast on television. Since the law of 30 September 1986 on freedom of communication, channels operate under agreements, are subject to broadcasting quotas for European and French works and to investment obligations in production, under the control of a regulatory authority, the CSA, now Arcom, and their contributions feed a support fund for audiovisual production, created in 1986 and also managed by the CNC. In both branches, the logic is the same. The law levies on the revenues of dissemination in order to finance production, and in doing so it creates professions, obligations, rights, funding desks, collective agreements, a whole social organization of the work of images. The CNC is presented as the instrument of support for creation; in its actual operation, it is first of all the regulator of an industry, collecting on dissemination and redistributing toward production in order to guarantee the diversity and renewal of the offer.

This regime can thus be recognized by what carries it. Its production is industrial, organized as a value chain, with regulated financing. Its circulation goes through authorized and accounted channels, which makes it measurable, and therefore visible in statistics and in public debate. Its conservation is organized by the State, through legal deposit. It raises real questions, which have been worked on at length: access, price, rights, release windows. But these are questions of managing a cultural industry, and they concern this regime alone. The error begins when its categories are extended to all images, as if what does not enter its channels did not exist.

Second regime: autonomous images

I call autonomous images the elaborate creation, most often professional or artistic, that exists outside the commercial framework of dissemination and gives itself its own structures. I choose this word because these images are not defined by a lack (“outside the circuit”, “without a visa”, “non-commercial”), but by the fact that the milieus that produce them organize their social existence themselves: their dissemination, sometimes their publishing and their conservation.

This regime is far vaster than one might think. It includes experimental and avant-garde cinema, whose dissemination rests on cooperatives founded and run by the filmmakers, the Collectif Jeune Cinéma since 1971, Light Cone since 1982, which today distributes several thousand films. It includes video art and the moving image works of contemporary art, which circulate through galleries, museums and biennials, and some of which reach high market values, a sign that autonomy designates another economy rather than an absence of economy. It includes dance films, scientific films, from Jean Painlevé to the productions of research laboratories, institutional and commissioned films, music videos, the documentary and fictional creation born on the internet. Publishing itself exists within this regime. Re:Voir, founded in Paris by the filmmaker Pip Chodorov in the 1990s, publishes on video the major works of experimental cinema, from the historical avant-gardes to contemporary artists. Simply, this publishing, this dissemination and this conservation rest on structures that the milieus concerned give themselves, with limited means, and not on the large public and commercial apparatus that carries the first regime. It is this difference in what carries them that distinguishes the two regimes, and not a difference in value or in professionalism.

Third regime: vernacular images

I call vernacular images all the audiovisual material that people make, in families, across territories, in associations, on social networks. The word comes from the Latin vernaculus, that which belongs to the house, to the place. We speak of vernacular architecture for buildings built without an architect, of vernacular languages for languages spoken without an academy, and the history of photography has adopted the notion of vernacular photography for images produced outside any artistic intention. The term thus defines these images by their mode of existence, anchored in the life of persons and places, and not by a lack of quality or professionalism.

Roger Odin has shown, notably in Cinéma et production de sens (1990) and in his work on the home movie, that these images fulfill functions of their own. They keep traces of the lives of persons, of their family, of their community, and take part in the construction of identities, a function that the painted portrait fulfilled before photography. Since cameras arrived in telephones in 2005, this regime has become, by very far, the most massive, and the exchange of images has become a form of everyday expression; I have proposed elsewhere to speak of image-orality. It is also, in my view, the most directly political regime. The representations of a territory that circulate and that remain are, to a growing extent, those made by its inhabitants. Structures such as the Cinémathèque de Bretagne, since the 1980s, or Normandie Images collect the amateur films of their region, and these collections have become unrivaled sources on the ordinary life of the twentieth century, the gestures of work, the celebrations, the vanished landscapes.

A family film can become an archive

These three regimes are not essences, and it is one of the contributions of Odin’s semio-pragmatics to make this clear. The same object changes regime when it changes communication space. A family film shot on 8 mm in the 1960s, deposited at the Cinémathèque de Bretagne, becomes an archive, then a creative material when a filmmaker re-edits it, then a framed work if that re-edit is released in cinemas with a visa. A vernacular video filmed during an event enters the television news and acquires there a function of proof. An experimental film enters a museum collection and becomes heritage there. The typology therefore does not classify objects once and for all; it describes modes of social existence of images, according to who makes them, for what purpose, how they circulate, who keeps them and who derives value from them. Framed, autonomous, vernacular: three ways for images to exist socially, through the regulated industry, through the structures that artistic milieus give themselves, through the everyday gestures of persons.

There are border zones, and they confirm the usefulness of the tool more than they weaken it. The films produced within cultural outreach work, in workshops held in libraries, schools, hospitals or prisons, are made by the persons themselves, and are therefore vernacular by their authors, but they are accompanied by professionals and carried by institutions, and are therefore close to the autonomous regime by what carries them. These works constitute a memory of mediation practices and of the people who took part in them, and their conservation is almost never organized. Without a typology, one does not even see that there is something there to conserve.

2005, the year public dissemination escaped the framework

The framework described above has a historical justification that must be restored in order to understand what then unfolded. Until the mid-2000s, for a film to reach large numbers of people, it had to go through the cinema or through broadcast. Outside these two channels, there remained itinerant screenings, rented municipal halls, film clubs, real but marginal circuits. The State thus framed, in practice, the totality of the public dissemination of the audiovisual, and this framework had its coherence: watching over what reaches everyone’s eyes, first through censorship and then through classification, and levying on the revenues of this massive dissemination in order to redistribute toward creation and guarantee its renewal. In its principle, this apparatus was rather virtuous.

In 2005, YouTube and then Dailymotion opened public dissemination to everyone. For the first time, anyone could make images made outside any framework public, on a worldwide scale. Social networks and community platforms do not, for all that, constitute a fourth regime. They are spaces of dissemination, in which the three regimes circulate side by side, excerpts from framed films, autonomous creations born on the web, vernacular videos, and where they answer one another and hybridize. This space, first conceived for amateurs to whom no one granted any legitimacy, produced an economy, through the advertising attached to videos, and revealed a public taste for images perceived as more authentic. It legitimized itself little by little, to the point that framed actors came to disseminate there in their turn. And the framework ended up joining the platforms rather than the reverse, since a 2021 decree now requires subscription video-on-demand services to finance French production. The chain is instructive. The framework follows the audience and the flows of money, wherever they move; it still does not define images.

The myth of payment per view

The framework does not only carry rules, it also carries representations, and the most tenacious one concerns the economic model. The whole edifice was built on direct payment: the cinema ticket, then the purchase of the physical medium, then the rental of the file. When Apple launched the iPod in 2001 and then the iTunes Store in 2003, inventing the sale of music tracks by the unit, the audiovisual sector saw in it the confirmation of this model and transposed it into transactional video on demand. UniversCiné, launched in 2007 by independent French producers and distributors around the rental of art-house cinema, is one of its most estimable attempts, and this model never took off. What worked for music did not work for the audiovisual.

When Netflix arrived in France, in September 2014, with the opposite model, a subscription and unlimited viewing, the professionals saw nothing serious in it. Ten years later, the unlimited subscription has become the dominant mode of access to framed images, and yet the representation holds firm. The platform Tënk, a cooperative based in Lussas and dedicated to creative documentary, whose spirit is among the closest to what I am defending here, gives access through its subscription to a selection of only about ninety films, while the rest of its catalogue, about two thousand titles, remains available as pay-per-view rental. One can hypothesize that making the whole catalogue available within the subscription, with revenues shared in proportion to viewings, would bring more to the rights holders; if payment per view endures, it is because it belongs less to calculation than to belief. Describing a regime of images therefore also requires describing its real economy, that of actual uses, and not that of the representations professionals have of it.

Three legal deposits, modeled on the frameworks

Since the law of 20 June 1992, the legal deposit of the audiovisual in France has been divided among three institutions :

• The Institut national de l’audiovisuel collects what is broadcast on radio and television.
• The Archives françaises du film, which depend on the Centre national du cinéma, receive cinematographic works, that is, those holding a visa d’exploitation.
• The Bibliothèque nationale de France, which receives what is published, the videograms, and, since 2006, legal deposit has extended to the French internet, a large part of which is audiovisual.

This division matches the channels of the first regime, the broadcast, the visaed, the published, and the public memory of the audiovisual thus follows the frameworks. Where the legal deposit of print could aim at exhaustiveness, the archiving of the web proceeds by harvests and by sampling, that is, by choices, and these choices are not sufficient to constitute an archive of what is being produced. Most vernacular images, and a large share of autonomous images, fall through the mesh of the three legal deposits. What will be transmitted of the audiovisual production of our era therefore depends on decisions that remain to be taken, and that cannot be taken without naming what exists.

The Vidéothèque de Paris, a memory in the sociological sense

There was, in France, an institution conceived according to the openness I am defending here. The Vidéothèque de Paris, opened in February 1988 at Les Halles on the initiative of the poet Pierre Emmanuel, had the mission of constituting the audiovisual memory of the city of Paris, in the sociological sense of the term. Its collection brought together images of the city filmed since 1895, without distinction of regime: fiction films and documentaries, advertisements, music videos, television news, institutional films, amateur films, experimental films, as well as films it produced itself, for instance on Parisian construction sites. Pierre Emmanuel wanted a means more alive than the file or even the book to grasp what, at one period or another, “the world of people and forms” had been in Paris. The institution was renamed Forum des images in 1998 and reoriented itself toward programming and education in images. The Parisian collection remains, but the project of a living audiovisual memory of the city, collecting all the regimes of images in the present, was not pursued as such. This experiment remains, to my knowledge, one of the rare institutional attempts to approach the audiovisual as a whole, and it shows that this openness is practicable.

UbuWeb, a pirate archive turned reference

When institutions do not conserve, others do, sometimes outside any legality. In 1996, the American poet and conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith created UbuWeb (ubu.com) to put online unfindable works of concrete poetry. The site grew without any rights authorization, through patient accumulation, and became within a few decades the reference archive of the avant-gardes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, experimental films, video art, sound poetry, music, from works by Marcel Duchamp to those of Yoko Ono or Samuel Beckett. Goldsmith told this story in Duchamp Is My Lawyer (Columbia University Press, 2020), whose title sums up the line of defense, since the gesture of appropriation and of making available belongs to the very tradition of the avant-gardes the site archives, that of the readymade. A pirate archive, maintained essentially by a single person, has thus become a resource cited by researchers and museums, because it conserves and makes accessible what the legal apparatus of conservation did not take charge of. The Internet Archive, founded the same year in San Francisco, plays a comparable role on a larger scale, archiving the web and entire audiovisual collections that no one else keeps. These initiatives demonstrate, through facts, that conservation does not follow legitimacy, it follows the decision to conserve, and that this decision, when public authorities do not take it, is taken by others, according to their own criteria.

An education in images that names what it looks at

There remains the place where this typology seems to me most necessary, education in images. Average screen time amounts to several hours a day, and these hours are very largely filled with images of the second and third regimes, vernacular videos, web-born creations, hybrid formats. An education in images that would define only the first regime, because it is the one the institution knows and legitimizes, would be talking about something other than what the people it claims to enlighten actually live. It would be pretending.

Cultural rights provide a framework for doing otherwise. Respecting the dignity of persons also means respecting their audiovisual practices as they are. These practices are neither good nor bad a priori, they are what they are, and we need to dialogue around them. This requires looking at them with an ethnological eye, in order to understand the functions they fulfill before evaluating them, and building education as co-education, in Paulo Freire’s sense, rather than as a top-down transmission of the only legitimized culture. Pierre Bourdieu showed, in Distinction (1979), how cultural legitimacy manufactures social hierarchy, and the hierarchy of images is a textbook case of it. The typology of regimes is, from this point of view, a tool of equality, which does not claim that everything is of equal worth but which establishes that everything exists, and that what exists deserves to be named.

Whether one is a teacher, a librarian, an elected official, a curator, an artist or an economic actor, one cannot take good decisions about images while seeing only part of them. The visa d’exploitation frames a circuit, it renders real services to that circuit, and it does not define the audiovisual cultural object. Framed images, autonomous images and vernacular images together form the audiovisual reality of our time, and it is this whole that must be looked at squarely, in education as in institutions, in art as in the economy.