“Image and mobility”

For several years, Benoît Labourdette, director and teacher at La FEMIS, has been pursuing creative (experimental films) and educational (workshops) work around the “new images”. Pocket cameras, cell phones and drones allow everyone to produce images - real or fictional - of a new kind. On the occasion of his participation in the MOOC EPSAA Ville de Paris last March), we interviewed Benoît Labourdette on the potentialities of “filmic art”, from cell phones to drones.

• Beyond your own practice as a filmmaker, what meaning do you give to the workshops for all audiences that you have been conducting since the creation of the Pocket Film Festival to your latest “drone” masterclass with Toronto’s Digifest?
• It seems to me that offering people the opportunity to appropriate these images, to invent, to write with them, to divert the primary uses of these devices - telephones, pocket cameras, drones -, to play with them, is not only playful, creative, a new place of expression and subjects, but is also very important to build our own relationship, free, to these new modes of representation that are being built at the moment, without us being very aware of it.

• In this last session of the MOOC, you insist on the rupture introduced by the drone-camera. What does it consist of?
• We have been, for some years now, daily users of images seen from above, through the interactive cartography that accompanies us (Google maps on our phones and others), offering us an augmented experience of the world. Moreover, inside video games and virtual worlds (Second Life, Minecraft...), we manipulate a flying camera, which allows us to see the action from multiple angles.
  The “world seen from above” is thus a representation, that we use almost daily, via cartography in particular, which is today part of our collective imagination, but whose manufacture escapes us, is pre-empted by large industries. If we make, ourselves, images seen from above, it is a rather striking relationship, a “taking of power”, a demystification, very enriching, especially if, with these images, we try to build and transmit something sensitive, our imagination, to others.
  This flying camera, the drone, now exists in the real world. It is only in its prehistory today, but it is there. Will it bring us to look at reality differently? To look at the real world as we look at virtual worlds? Will this superhuman point of view, now accessible, invite us to new forms of representation, visual, but also narrative, thematic? Will new film subjects be born?

• How do you explain the strangeness of the images produced by drones ?
• When an image is made with a camera, the camera is almost always linked to the body. Whether it is carried, placed on a stand, or a crane, the mechanical recording tool of the moving image has a link, more or less direct, to the body of the operator. The body, that is to say the gaze. There is thus intrinsically, most often, a relation of very great proximity between the glance of the one who films and the filmed image, a kind of translation from one to the other. In the three-dimensional virtual universes (video games, virtual worlds), a character (avatar) represents the spectator-actor, but the camera, which gives us the sight, can completely be disconnected from the glance of the spectator: one can see oneself from behind, from in front, from above, from below...
  On the other hand, the drone-camera, piloted by the mediation of a computer program, placing itself where it wants, where we want in space, allows the operator to produce an image of the real world in the same way that we produce an image of a virtual world. Thus, the drone allows us to look at the real world in the same way as we used to look at virtual worlds. The manufactured look is no longer one with the lived look of the one who is filming. The drone thus brings to a deportation of the glance on the real. Seizing experience if it is for the operator. As if the body, so present behind the camera that films the real world, was no longer, or rather had changed its nature: the body carrying the camera has become an abstract entity, even in the real world. Experimenting leads to a reflection on writing and editing, to changes in perspective, perhaps quite major ones.

• The realization of images with a cell phone or a drone suffers however from irreducible technical hazards: lack of fixity of the image, obligation to record the sound apart in the case of the drone, without speaking about the search for the images of the day on the roof of a building of 5 floors after the crash of a drone carried away by the mistral as you lived it with La Compagnie (Marseille).
• Indeed. After having experienced many drone pilots and shootings, I realized that in many cases, the drone seemed to move by itself, going up, going down, drifting... impossible to perfectly control its movement. It was not a space of absolute control of the gaze on the real world, as I had conceptualized it at first. In fact, the drone is carried away by the wind, the hot air... in short, natural elements that are invisible to us. It is animated by organic movements. The cinematographic camera and projector (with photochemical film) at their emergence were not technically perfect either, the film, driven by a machine, could have problems of fixity, small spots, etc. The fact that the machine could not be totally hidden from it brought to the spectator some sensibility in the experience; the consciousness of the device made feel the reality of the trace of a pre-existing reality. A rough and touching reality. In digital technologies, the pixel is absolutely fixed, the machine wants to be as transparent as possible (it is not always so with a cell phone); the images can be quite cold. With drones, because the shooting machine cannot be completely fixed, because we can feel the “rustle” of the world, its slight permanent movement, the technical device is no longer hidden, and gives an enormous sensitivity to the images produced.

Words collected by Guillaume Renoud-Grappin

Link to official page to MCD issue 75 “The Conjuring of Drones” (2015).