Transcript of the event
Transcript of the audio recording of Benoît Labourdette’s talk (by video link) and of the discussion with the audience. Nantes, June 13th, 2018. Moderation: Pascal Massiot.
The talk
Pascal Massiot: The joys of technology: when people are not here, they are here all the same. The technical team of the Grand T is going to put us in contact, by video link, with Benoît Labourdette. Hello Benoît. Where are you, geographically?
Benoît Labourdette: Hello. I had planned to come, but there is a small problem of train strikes. If it had not been for the strike, I would have been with you. So I am in Paris.
Pascal Massiot: You are in Paris, and you were in Saint-Nazaire not long ago, we will no doubt talk about it later. Now, if I say that you are a filmmaker, do you agree with that? Educator, trainer, does that fit too? And you are deeply involved in media and image education, which is fitting today.
Benoît Labourdette: Yes. I would like to take an example, quite simply, because mediation with digital technology is something I do. I am indeed a filmmaker. As it happens, I say “filmmaker” rather than “director”, because directing is a technical profession; a filmmaker is someone who makes cinema. To introduce myself very quickly: I have always been concerned not only with making films, but also with showing them. In 2005, two important events took place in the world of media. The camera appeared in mobile phones: we had mobile phones before 2005, but the camera appeared at that point. And a website appeared, among many others, called YouTube, which changed a great deal. At the time, in 2005, with the Forum des images in Paris, which is a sort of film library of the city of Paris, we founded together the Pocket Films Festival, devoted to films shot with mobile phones. Which, for some people, could seem rather absurd: we have cameras to make films, why use “lousy” mobile phones, if I may say so, to make films, what is the point? What interested me was what was going to happen tomorrow. Let me ask you the question: among you, in the room, who does not have a camera in their mobile phone?
Pascal Massiot: Let’s take a show of hands, Benoît, if you will.
Benoît Labourdette: I see that nobody is raising their hand... Ah yes, there is one person.
Pascal Massiot: One person, Benoît, out of about a hundred people present. 1%, is that representative of reality?
Benoît Labourdette: It is fairly representative of reality. One might say: “The camera in the phone, I don’t care, in any case I use my phone to make phone calls.” Perhaps we can say that. But if we look at teenagers’ usage over the past ten years, all the studies show it: 95% of phone use is not for making calls, it is for doing other things. Thirteen years ago, when I created this festival, I said to myself: “In ten years, everyone will have a camera in their pocket at all times.” And it is a social fact: whether people use it or not, this camera has changed a great deal. The first news images were the London bombings in 2005, then the Arab Spring, then the whole movement of citizen appropriation. Just today, the young man who saved a small child by climbing up a building in Paris: we have proof of it because someone filmed him. This ever-present camera changes our lives, quite simply. And when you said that I am interested in image education: yes, this question of passing on critical thinking is crucial for me. Why? Let me give you some of my ideas, and then I will speak very concretely about this example in Saint-Nazaire, to see what can be done with these ideas.
We are, to begin with, in a world of writing: our laws are written. Democracy, for me, is something important, and I imagine for you too. For democracy to be possible in a world where laws are written, citizens must know how to read and write. But we are also in a world of images, we express ourselves with images, and that is a fairly major change. Later on, when you leave the room, you may see something funny in the street, you will take a picture of it, send it by MMS to your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your mother, your son, perhaps without even adding any words. The image has become a language. Take the Snapchat application, which you probably know, and which teenagers used a lot (it changes quite quickly, teenagers’ usage): in Snapchat, images are not kept, you see them for a few seconds and then they are erased, unless you take a screenshot of course. We realise that the image is changing function: it used to be memory, it is becoming a form of orality. Our world is a world of images, a world where we exchange through images, a world where power is largely taken through images: one only has to look at the Daesh videos, or the issues at this very moment around Alain Soral’s YouTube channel, which YouTube may close or leave open. The image really is a language. It therefore seems to me that learning to read and write images, if I may say so, is very important. There are democratic stakes in this, because with images, it is easy to manipulate. That, roughly, is my idea, and I am going to take an example that illustrates what can be done, because saying all this is easy. What can be done?
Pascal Massiot: Mediation, which obviously interests us, and you have been doing a lot of it, for a long time, Benoît. You are going to give us a few reference points that illustrate what you have been saying.
Benoît Labourdette: Big words are all very well, but one can also be moralistic. For instance, the question of image rights: you are not allowed to film or photograph someone against their will. You can give these speeches to teenagers, but it serves no purpose, because in everyday reality, all of us photograph and film people all the time without asking their permission. It seems to me important, not to be demagogic, but to understand what the uses of the image are today, and to see what can be done with them, how something can be contributed. So I am going to take a concrete example, a project I have been running in Saint-Nazaire for three years, which took place no later than last Saturday. The images you see playing are a recording of this event, filmed last year, in 2017.
Let me explain the project. For three years there has been a festival in Saint-Nazaire called “Zones Portuaires”, on the theme of harbours. Within this festival, the organisers offered me the opportunity to run a workshop for teenagers, in two parts. During the Easter holidays, with a neighbourhood community centre, I invite a group of teenagers to make films; I will explain how films can be made in four days, because on the face of it, filmmaking is a somewhat heavy undertaking. Then, during the festival, in June (last year it was the closing night, this year the Saturday evening, in the middle of the festival), we offer a travelling screening of these films through the city. But the films are made by the teenagers, and the screening is carried out and organised by the teenagers. I am there to provide a framework, to authorise, if I may say so, their expression. And I am going to explain how digital technologies are, for me, a tool that makes this possible.
First, a short preamble. A camera, a screen, has become something ordinary. That was the great fear when television arrived in the 1950s: television is going to kill cinema. It was also the fear when Canal+ arrived in France in 1984: Canal+ is going to kill cinema because it will broadcast films. It is in fact for this reason that Canal+ is required to devote 20% of its turnover, not of its profits, of its turnover, to financing cinema. That is why French cinema is, to put it briefly, financed for the most part by Canal+. And as Canal+ is going to stop, I can tell you that there will be major changes in our professional world. Today, then, a camera, a screen, is ordinary, like a pen. What could be more ordinary than a pen? But one can offer a writing workshop, invite people to write a poem or a short story with a pen, and it will be very important. Whether my pen is a Bic costing fifty cents, or a Montblanc costing 500 euros, the text will not be of better quality for it. For filmmaking, it is the same today: the phones in your pockets are, for some of you, of extraordinary technical quality, superior to the professional cameras of five years ago. What counts is no longer the tool, it is what one does with the tool. What is key, to my mind, in the use of digital technology, is how one uses it. In France, there has been very much a culture of tools. Remember the “Plan informatique pour tous” in 1985: lots of computers were put into secondary schools, where they gathered dust within a fortnight, because computers were provided but people were not trained. Today, digital technology is no longer a question of tools, it is a question of practice: what do we do with the tools?
For the images you are watching, the tool I have been using since 2011, since it has existed, is the pico projector, a portable video projector. It is a very small object. As it happens, I do not have it to hand, I will go and get it, I will be right back.
Pascal Massiot: No problem. It is a small device that makes it possible to share the students’ work he is going to tell us about, on all kinds of surfaces, and indeed to play with many contrasts of context. There you are Benoît, very good.
Benoît Labourdette: Here is a pico projector. Some phones, still rare today, are equipped with one. This video projector runs on a battery, the films are in its internal memory: I just need to switch it on, you can see the light, and I can project wherever I want. What is amusing is that the biggest part is the sound. We always forget the sound: we have a fairly heavy portable speaker, a little like the ones used by musicians who play in the street. In itself, this object is ordinary: if I take this projector and project images more or less anywhere in the room, it is of no interest whatsoever. What will create the interest is precisely the mediation. This tool is mobile, it allows us to work in an extremely flexible and light way; the city is informed, of course, but there is no need to block off streets. I can hold it in my hand and, if I am careful not to move, give a screening. But what will matter is all the preparation and all the mediation: where I project, which film I project in that place, how I welcome the spectators, how I provide context, how I bring people in, how I think about the articulation between the content of the film and public space, how we build an itinerary.
Between last Thursday and Saturday, then, I met up again with the group of teenagers in Saint-Nazaire, and we wander around the cinema: now, where could we project films? Ah, there, that would be nice. But as it is daytime, we cannot tell: we find a wonderful wall, and in the evening, when we go back to run the tests, bad luck, above this wall there is a big street lamp shining, and we cannot project in that spot. It is not so simple, in fact, to find places. We also think about the spectators, we put ourselves in their place: what are they going to feel? The places must not be too far from one another, otherwise people will get tired of it. We think about all this, we find places, we draw a map, then we look at the films we have and we ask ourselves all together: that one, where shall we put it? And then each of the teenagers, in turn, projects. The sharing is truly embodied: it is with my body, in the end, that I embody the screening and share this film with the others.
Pascal Massiot: And then there can be play, Benoît: one can project in places that are not necessarily predestined for this or that film, this or that tone. You play on contrasts, on these ruptures.
Benoît Labourdette: Absolutely. And then, as I was saying, what is very important is also the mediation, the way the audience is welcomed. Here, the teenagers are in charge: they are the ones who take the microphone, who welcome people, who introduce the films. The films are very short, they last one to three minutes, and each time we arrive in a small spot, it is like a miniature cinema. We reconstitute a ritual, in a way: we settle in, we welcome, we give value to what we are about to watch, we watch it, we say “the end”, and we move on elsewhere. It is like a journey. The itinerary lasts an hour, but we have travelled a great deal, both through the city and through the imaginations of the young people.
There are several things at stake in all this. First, the question of the reappropriation of public space, of one’s place of living, whether through the screenings or through the films: the films are made by the young people themselves, they shoot in their own city, and so they also make it their own. Making a film, in inverted commas, is easy: I take my phone and I can film; in a way, technically, it is a film. But making a film knowing it is going to be seen by people, there, all of a sudden, the stakes are different. And it is important, in the workshop, to make it well understood that what we are doing here has nothing to do with everyday life. In everyday life, we film our family, our friends, and there is no problem; it is even important, because identity is built there: family films, the images made by our parents, our grandparents, ourselves as children, these amateur images are very important in building our identity. But here, we are doing something else: we are creating something that will offer an experience to spectators. We think of the spectators, and that is an entirely different position. And the little film we have made while thinking of spectators, apart from a few very pretentious people, we are not proud of it, because we know it has flaws. The moment of the screening, the moment when people see it, is somehow the most important moment. The young person has made their film on their own, it is fragile, and they have organised the screening of this film themselves. There is feedback, people applaud, laugh. It is very important: what they have created is going to have a social function, is going to enrich the spectators with something. Not only is there an appropriation of the language of cinema, which is very important, but there is also a real social function for the teenager. We are not pretending: people really have been enriched by what this young man or young woman has produced. And that, I believe, is what digital technology makes possible.
Pascal Massiot: Thank you already for these reference points on this pedagogical and cinematic approach. Making films in four days, is that reasonable? And what are the subjects of these films?
Benoît Labourdette: I would first like to say a word about pedagogy, I will take two or three minutes, because the two are linked. One must realise that digital technology is, in a way, only a tool, but that it is not only a tool: it changes our ways of life, it changes our ways of working, we all experience it daily; it changes the ways we collaborate, the ways we express ourselves. And I believe we must take the measure of this: it offers creative possibilities that did not exist before. I quite often see, and this is not meant as criticism, film-making workshops with digital technology which rest on the same pedagogical processes as those used twenty-five years ago: we make a film, we write a script, and so on. Very well, but one can also do otherwise, because the changes brought about by digital technology run very deep.
My proposal, for example: the first film I have people make is a collective film, shot as a sequence shot, that is to say in one go, without stopping the camera. We pass the camera from one to the next, like a chain. Each person films an object they have chosen, an object that matters to them. On screen, we see one object, then another object, then another. Since the film is a sequence shot, you must pay attention not only to how you film your object, but also to how you pass the camera to your neighbour, because that is part of the film. So there is a listening to everyone. And the idea is that each object speaks about its life: these objects have the floor, as in an animated film. People film the object and, at the same time, speak and invent: what does the object tell, what does it have that is important to say to the world? It is easy to say, but very hard to do, because if the second-to-last person has a problem, makes a mistake, the film has to be started again from the beginning. There is pressure, and then what idea to find, how to offer the spectators, with this object that has the floor, something humorous, something important, something serious, something political, why not. Each person does it in their own way. Generally, we do two or three takes, it is already quite extraordinary to manage it, and we can watch the film right afterwards. We see on the big screen what it looks like, we discover the impact of what the others have done, of what we have done ourselves. It is a starting point: doing something. We could do it together, here, for instance. I often do it in cinemas, with 50 or 100 people: we pass the camera around and, incredibly, we manage to make the film. Without digital tools, this kind of thing could not be done.
Pascal Massiot: And it can be done in entirely modest economic conditions, because the tools are very inexpensive, more and more so.
Benoît Labourdette: Exactly. I will not take too much time. If you wish to go further, I have recounted this workshop in detail, and others, on my website, where you can watch the films: type my name, Benoît Labourdette, you will find my site, then in the search field enter “Saint-Nazaire”, and you will come across it straight away. To finish: I work a great deal on transmission, I run a lot of training courses. On the home page of my site you will find a small book, freely downloadable as a PDF, “Éducation à l’image 2.0”, which I published two years ago with the Pôle Image de Picardie, and which sums up proposals for workshops with digital technology. And at present, I entirely agree with what you were saying earlier, Catherine, about the necessity of thought and reflection: in 2018 and 2019 I am conducting an action-research project I have called “Éducation aux images 2.1”, which will lead to a new publication at the end of 2019. We are about a hundred people, mainly in the Paris region, trying together to innovate and to think about mediation with digital technology, and also about the question of the cinema theatre, of its importance: the independent cinema theatre is in danger. There is a great deal to do. And how do we find things? By experimenting, by sharing, by exchanging. Which makes a transition: exchange, it is now my turn to listen to you.
Discussion with the audience
Pascal Massiot: You should be on the radio! Benoît Labourdette, then, who from Paris has set out his approach for us very precisely. I noted that this digital mediation allows a reappropriation of the projects, of the films in this case, a verbalisation. It also creates a form of citizenship, somewhere. One question, Benoît, before I hand over to the room: the young people, in inverted commas, with whom you carry out this work, what is the age range?
Benoît Labourdette: All ages: it goes from nursery school to film students and professionals. I teach in many schools, notably La Fémis, and I also do a lot of professional training; I trained half the staff of Arte, in Strasbourg, on questions of digital strategy. There is no age.
Pascal Massiot: Thank you. Let’s open the discussion. Please feel free, questions and contributions from the room. Many people here belong to cultural organisations which are developing, or wish to develop, projects connected to this digital mediation; there are also representatives of local authorities.
Benoît Labourdette: While you prepare your questions and contributions, I would like to say two things. I am sharing my experience here, but what I fundamentally think is that we each have different experiences, and that sharing them is the richest thing we can do. There is no one person who knows. And then, in terms of pedagogical process, there is something very important for me, particularly with teenagers: the question of listening. How do we make it possible for people to truly make something their own? I say “truly” because one can pretend: one can easily instrumentalise people, frame everything oneself, seek to control things. I believe we absolutely must place our trust in teenagers. Not say that they know everything and that we have nothing to teach them, that is demagogy: we have things to contribute, but they have things to contribute too. About ten days ago, I was leading a film-making workshop in a class of fifteen-year-olds. At the end, the teacher said to me: “Thank you, because with you I understood that one could obtain silence without asking for it.” And yes, one can obtain silence without asking for it. It is enough to trust. We all make society together, there is no abuse of power to be exercised, no need for violent authority. Silence, in a group, will come of its own accord if one is oneself listening to people. There is something very important there. It is easy to say, it is not easy to do, because we are conditioned by a hierarchical and pyramidal system, a system of power. And digital technology also makes it possible to loosen these things, and to build deeper things.
Pascal Massiot: Thank you Benoît for these illuminating considerations. It is a sort of direct cinema, in the end? I thought of Jean Rouch, myself, though comparisons only go so far. This cinema that is screened on the very day it is shot, this cinematic short circuit, it brought that to mind.
Benoît Labourdette: Yes, I rather agree. Learning images means, above all, looking at them. Often, when you make a film, for those of you who do, you know this, between the moment of shooting and the moment you see the finished film, an enormous amount of time goes by. When it is a professional project, very well, that is our job. But if our aim is education, in the fine sense of the word, this short circuit you speak of is precious: we make images and we watch them on a big screen, we see straight away what they look like, we learn by looking at the images. I work a great deal in this way: the young people shoot things, we watch them together, I do not need to say much. If there are technical problems, if the sound is not good, they see it for themselves, they hear it for themselves. And when they go back to make images again, they learn by themselves, they are the ones trying to understand. We know it: pedagogy means learning by oneself. The educator’s job is to put in place a framework so that people learn by themselves. The “I give you a piece of information and you swallow it” approach does not work, it has never worked. Célestin Freinet and Maria Montessori wrote this more than a century ago, we know it. But it is not reassuring. Why? Because we are not in control: we do not know exactly what people are going to learn, they are the ones doing it, they are the ones making their own way. I draw a distinction between control and work. Control is something to reassure oneself. Work is not reassuring: it is a questioning of oneself, but it is deep. Seeking to control is seeking to reassure oneself, and that is not working, to my mind, in the deep sense of the word. There, I am giving you some of my ideas.
Pascal Massiot: It is the mindset of Emmanuel Kant: daring to think for oneself. A question from the room, Benoît, addressed to you.
Véronique Benallouane: Hello, thank you very much for your talk, which is truly very rich. Véronique Benallouane, diocesan directorate of Catholic education. For two years we have been offering our schools, from nursery to upper secondary, a short film festival, with this aim of making short films with the everyday tools of young people: mobile phones, tablets, and so on. We are quite pleased with this project, because we wanted to reach the young people. The idea came following an exchange with partners in the département on knowledge arising from digital practice, and from the wish to meet young people where they are, in their own practice, particularly secondary school pupils, who often have a better command of these tools than many adults. The idea was also to put them on their favourite ground, so that they could contribute something on an equal footing with the teachers, and build a project together. I have a question for you: what do you think of the ban on mobile phones in schools?
Benoît Labourdette: First of all, congratulations on your project, and I strongly encourage you to continue it. You should know that it always needs to be supported, it does not hold up on its own. Listen, the ban on mobile phones is a very bad decision, that is obvious. And it will unfortunately not be the last. It is a very bad decision because we are bionic humans now: we have prostheses and we live with them. Of course, these prostheses can imprison us, take us in directions where we can no longer concentrate. But they are part of our lives, and banning them means putting on blinkers: it means precisely not taking the risk, it means setting things aside, as if they did not exist. But they do exist. And there is a civic problem: in the bill, it is very clear that it is very good for teachers to have phones, but bad for pupils to have them. People are really being taken for fools, to put it bluntly. Here again, an attempt is being made to be reassured, to control something. But what is actually being done? A lid is simply being put on a pressure cooker; it is nonsense. That is my opinion on this law.
Pascal Massiot: Thank you Benoît. A question in English from the room, which will be translated.
A person in the audience: Sorry, I’ll have to speak in English.
Benoît Labourdette: You can, I can understand.
A person in the audience: Congratulations, this is a fabulous project. I wanted to share with you the fact that we have something very similar in India, that I’ve been involved with. One of the things I was hoping you could talk about is that in projects like these, there is also an aspect where we try to build a relationship of young people with a kind of alternative image-making, which counters the mainstream, the kind of Hollywood or popular television, and to develop a relationship with the moving image which is not only about glamour and larger than life. I was wondering whether in your workshops you had interactions or conversations with young people about that aspect: the need to build and reclaim the image-making space as something real, something that belongs to us, and not something that is just on a large screen. Not just George Clooney.
Benoît Labourdette: Thank you for your question. I will answer in French, since it is being translated. The question was: through these workshop practices, do we also develop a taste for a cinema other than mainstream entertainment cinema? Yes, I believe that precisely, working on expression, taking the camera as a pen in the end, means making small forms that are pure, if I may say so, that is to say forms that do not need a great deal of resources to be strong and to address an audience. In the thirteen years I have been in this field of mobile phone films, I have had thousands and thousands of films made by thousands of people. Among these films, some, made in very little time, have travelled through festivals, won prizes, been shown more or less everywhere. It is like painting: oil painting, which requires a whole set of equipment, is very fine, but one can also make a drawing with a ballpoint pen or with charcoal. They are different forms of expression. And I absolutely agree with you: I have strictly nothing against entertainment cinema, it is great, but it is important that spaces of expression should always exist, and that they should be valued. It is quite closely linked to pedagogy. The teenagers who come to do these workshops and organise these travelling screenings have, I think, a somewhat more open outlook than if they only went to see mainstream films. But once again, it takes all sorts to make a world.
Pascal Massiot: Nothing is in opposition, and it is something that complements education, which was our subject. We will take the last question, time flies. I refer you to Benoît Labourdette’s website, which is very easy to find, and where you will find excellent things that complement what he has told us this morning.
A person in the audience: Thank you very much for your presentation, and sorry for speaking in English. The first question would be: if the image is such an important aspect of our world today, shouldn’t it be taught at school as a discipline, as a kind of image literacy, as we have with reading and writing? The second question, which is related: I’ve seen a recent survey showing that half of the world’s population still doesn’t have access to the internet, and probably doesn’t have a mobile phone with a camera either. When it comes to access to technology, which is not democratized, aren’t we deepening that social distance and inequality? How can people who don’t have access to those technologies also be engaged in that sort of project?
Pascal Massiot: Thank you for your question. This digital divide, how can it be reduced? And should images not be taught at school? I will let you answer directly.
Benoît Labourdette: There were two questions. The first: should the image be a discipline, taught at school? Yes, I think so. I in fact support a great deal of work with the national education system. We are not yet at the point of cinema as a school discipline; there are intentions, taken up rather by local authorities than by the national education system. But yes, I am in favour, for the reasons you gave. The second question is very important. Let me rephrase it for those who do not speak English: half the people in the world have no access to the internet or to these technologies, so what do we do about that? Let me give you an example. I have carried out several projects with Burkina Faso, one of the poorest countries in the world. Precisely, this pico projector: we bought a great many of them for Burkina Faso, along with small cameras and solar chargers, because all of this runs on batteries. In villages where there is no electricity, people make little films during the day, then organise screenings on the village squares, and it works very well. I also ran a training project there for young sociologists, who invited people to make videos to encourage young people to vote: the country, which was a dictatorship for a long time, which is politically complicated, is trying to reinvest in democracy. One might say: yes, but in Burkina Faso, people have no money. Precisely, it was very interesting: we analysed the situation on the ground, and there, people are very poor, but everyone has two phones. A small Nokia, like the ones we used to have, for making calls with a small subscription, and a cheap Chinese phone, which looks like a smartphone, with a large screen, but which is not connected to the internet. They exchange photos, videos and music by Bluetooth. So we made very short, very light videos, which could be exchanged by Bluetooth. And on the question of computers, we brought in second-hand computers at 100 euros each, which work very well. This question of the democratisation of digital practices is very important, there is a great deal to do in this field, and I absolutely agree with you.
Pascal Massiot: Benoît, how much does a pico projector cost? A few tens of euros?
Benoît Labourdette: No, it is very expensive: it costs 350 euros.
Pascal Massiot: Very good, thank you. Please give a round of applause for Benoît Labourdette.
