International symposium April 6-7 2022
MRSH | University of Caen Normandy
école supérieure d’arts & médias de Caen/Cherbourg
Café des images

Click here to attend the conference online via Zoom

Organization committee
Alexis Guillier
Prof. Philippe Ortoli (LASLAR, University of Caen Normandy)

Scientific committee
Julie Anselmini (Université Caen Normandie)
Garance Chabert (HEAD, Genève)
Pierre Jailloux (Université Grenoble Alpes)
Myriam Juan (Université Caen Normandie)
Alice Laguarda (ésam Caen/Cherbourg)
Isabelle Prim (ésam Caen/Cherbourg)
Vincent Souladié (Université Toulouse II Jean Jaurès)
Assoc. Prof. Penny Starfield (Université Caen Normandie)
Marie Voignier (ENSBA Lyon)
Julie Anselmini (University of Caen Normandy)
Garance Chabert (HEAD – Genève, Geneva)
Pierre Jailloux (Université Grenoble Alpes)
Myriam Juan (University of Caen Normandy)
Alice Laguarda (ésam Caen/Cherbourg)
Isabelle Prim (ésam Caen/Cherbourg)
Vincent Souladié (University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès)
Penny Starfield, Professor Emerita (University of Caen Normandy)
Marie Voignier (ENSBA Lyon)

Programme

Wednesday, April 6
MRSH

9:00 – 9:30 a.m. Greetings
9:30 – 10:00 a.m. Opening speech
10:00– 10:30 a.m. Alexis Guillier (University of Caen Normandy) Pour une histoire des accidents de tournages.
10:30 – 10:45 a.m. Discussion
10:45 – 11:15 a.m. Charlotte Servel (University Paris-Cité) Du prévu à l’imprévu : analyse des accidents de tournage des films burlesques muets.
11:15 – 11:30 a.m. Discussion
11:30 – 11:45 a.m. Break
11 :45 – 12 :15 a.m. Dick Tomasovic (University of Liège) * Images prodiges. Les monstrueuses métamorphoses du cinéma d’animation.
12:45 – 12:30 a.m. Discussion

12:30 a.m. – 02:30 p.m. Lunch break

02:30 – 03:00 p.m. Leslie Dick (Yale University, CalArts) * Intentional Accidents : Reflections on Sarah Charlesworth’s “Stills”. Videoconference in English with translation in French.
03:00 – 03:15 p.m. Discussion
03:15 – 03:45 p.m. Guillaume Agard (University of Caen Normandy) Le calvaire de Robin (ou Burt Ward l’acteur accidenté).
03:45 – 04:00 p.m. Discussion
04:00 – 04:15 p.m. Break
04:15 – 04:45 p.m. Yannick Langlois (artist) I fight ! I love ! I conquer… like a Barbarian !
04:45 – 05:00 p.m. Discussion
06:00 p.m. Screening The Last Movie (Dennis Hopper, 1971) Café des images

Thursday, April 7th
ésam Caen/Cherbourg, campus of Caen

9:30 – 10:00 a.m. Greetings, opening speech
10:00 – 10:30 a.m. Nicolas Boscher (University of Caen Normandy) Une étoile disparaît dans trois films perdus (1932—1939), écrits par Marcel Achard.
10:30 – 10:45 a.m. Discussion
10:45 – 11:15 a.m. Karen Redrobe (University of Pennsylvania) * Misdirection : Helen Hill, Hurricane Katrina, and the Accidentally Obscure Evolution of The Florestine Collection. Contribution in English with translation in French.
11:15 – 11:30 a.m. Discussion
11:30 – 11:45 a.m. Break
11:45 – 12:15 a.m. Paola Palma (École du Louvre) L’aventure de L’avventura, ou la naissance dans la douleur d’un film franco-italien.
12:15 – 12:30 a.m. Discussion

12:30 a.m. – 02:30 p.m. Lunch break

02:30 – 03:00 p.m. Film screening
03:00 – 03:30 p.m. Meera Perampalam (University of Caen Normandie) Inspecter « la bavure ». Accidents à surveiller.
03:30 – 03:45 p.m. Discussion
03:45 – 04:00 p.m. Break
04:00 – 04:30 p.m. Gary D. Rhodes (Oklahoma Baptist University) A Final Breath : Corpses, Characters and Hollywood Cinema. Videoconference in English with translation in French.
04:30 – 04:45 p.m. Discussion
05:00 – 05:30 p.m. Alexis Guiller (University of Caen Normandy) Pour une histoire des accidents de tournages.
05:30 – 05:45 p.m. Discussion
06:00 – 06:30 p.m. Vivian Sobchack (University of California, Los Angeles) * On Accident : A Meditation on Contingence, Coincidence, and Happenstance in Cinema. Videoconference in English with translation in French.
06:30 – 06:45 p.m. Discussion
06:45 – 07:00 Conclusion

* Guests

Abstract

This symposium focuses on production accidents throughout cinema history, from its creation to the present day. The term accident de tournage (“on-set accident”) qualifies the unforeseen event occurring during shooting and causing material and physical damages, sometimes lethal. We approach the accident de tournage through the paradoxical English expression “freak accident”, hammering home the rational – or even statistical – approach of the unlikely possibility (the exception stressing the rule) ; while invoking the irrational proper to the monstrous, a fatality whose causes would escape our understanding and over which we would have no control. Applied to cinema and its industry, this expression is compelling in many ways. By bringing the “freak”, the “monstrous” into the filming accident, it highlights the historical and fundamental active principle of chance and unlikeliness in cinema ; but also allows to explore the notion of monstrous in the picture of the accident itself, or its consequences, in a bodily and plastic way.

When they are integrated to the film’s final cut, accident pictures document the former. They are torn between the brutal demonstration of physicality and their contamination by fiction, showing the twisting of reality in the process of freezing the frame. To cross the on-set accident and the on-screen accident induces a modified reception of the pictures ; a freeze-frame able to break the fictional pact and to reveal what’s of screen : the production and its conditions, the shooting and its history. We aim to pursue research on the forms of contingency in cinema, in particular the questions they raise in the aesthetic field.
Cinema’s industrialization led to a progressive rationalization of conditions of production and an increased control over contingencies, at heart of the stakes of capitalism and productivism. This control is paradoxical since cost management and the continuous will to display spectacular scenes keep on holding a high level of risk.
When confronted to accidents, the film industry often uses the expression “freak accident”. The use of this term raises the question of a potential irresponsibility, given that the accident, by interrupting the flow of production, also unveils its modalities, its deficiencies and excesses.
From the standpoint of representation, “freak accident” could reflect a double movement, between figuration and disfiguration. Off screen, the pictures of damaged bodies, absent from the movie, appear in other media. The diffusion of these pictures seems to be a testimony by the body, encouraging to see the monstrous in the place of the accident and the industry. This work on the accident, starting from the very flesh of pictures, reflects the bodies suffering the accident’s action, the physical sequela testifying the contingency of bodies in production.

Through the methodologies it entails, a thought of accident in cinema constitutes a challenge to the writing of its history, which we explore here though the notion of “freak accident”. With the hybridity and transversality proper to the PhD program in research and artistic creation RADIAN (University of Normandy), this symposium will offer sensible, linguistical and philosophical approaches ; crossing paths of perspectives and experiences on university’s campus, at ésam Caen/Cherbourg and in Café des images. Bringing together guests of international reputation (Leslie Dick, Karen Redrobe, Vivian Sobchack, Dick Tomasovic), these two days will offer multiple encounters : burlesque accidents ; animated metamorphosis ; free-fall photographs ; the suffering of Batman’s Robin ; irradiated casting ; ultimate, painful, lost and cursed movies ; Katrina hurricane ; bodycams and blunders ; breathing of dead characters ; which will lead us to Vivian Sobchack meditation on the accident in cinema : contingency, coincidence and happenstance.

Biographies

Guillaume Agard
PhD candidate in film studies at the University of Caen Normandy, Guillaume Agard is writing a PhD dissertation on the humor elements in Clint Eastwood’s movies. He did various interventions on this subject but also on Alfred Hitchcock’s cinema, or the Twin Peak series.

Nicolas Boscher
Agrégation holder in French language and literature, doctor in film studies (University of Caen), Nicolas Boscher teaches cinema in classes préparatoires aux grandes écoles (Cherbourg) and is a member of LASLAR (Lettres, Arts du Spectacle, Langues Romanes – EA 4256, University of Caen). He did several interventions and publications (in Cahiers Jean Giraudoux, Positif, Demeter, Double Jeu…) about his PhD dissertation’s subject : Marcel Achard’s work.

Leslie Dick
Leslie Dick is a writer living in Los Angeles. She taught in the Art Program at CalArts from 1992 to 2021, and for the last ten years, she was a Senior Critic in Sculpture at Yale School of Art. She published two novels, Without Falling and Kicking, and a book of short fictions, The Skull of Charlotte Corday. Her writing on art has appeared in numerous magazines, journals, and catalogues, where she has written about Marisa Merz, Paul Thek, Sarah Charlesworth, Walid Raad, Fiona Connor, and Kang Seung Lee, among others. Leslie Dick joined the editorial board of the contemporary art journal X-TRA in 2011.

Alexis Guillier
Alexis Guillier is an artist. He creates performances, movies, texts or installations, which are narrative and documentary montages, born of investigations in personal and collective histories. They sweep him away, into falsification and deformation and disappearance of works of art, into on-set accidents and ghost ships, into climbing the contours of the giant Notre-Dame de France. His forms bring together a large variety of sources, coexisting in cultural history, but rarely associated together. Interested in fiction and cinema, he probes the circulation of images and cultural productions, the echo and recurrence, the formation of imaginaries through an esthetical approach as well as anthropological. His writing and editing methods consist in sewing fragments together, cut out of stories or other sources. The narration of these stories interrogates itself, between detached subjectivity and documentary lyricism. Alexis Guillier made interventions, had exhibitions or residencies in numerous places in France and abroad. Several of his projects were edited and two of his films were acquired by public collections. He is currently a PhD student at the PhD program in research and artistic creation RADIAN (University of Normandy) and teaches cinema at University of Caen.

Yannick Langlois
Yannick Langlois is an artist, a researcher and an independent curator. His artistic work was shown in numerous collective exhibitions in France and abroad (Pragovka Gallery (CZ), 2019 ; Fondation Lambert (FR), 2017 ; Fonderie Darling (CA), 2012). Nature’s Secret of Life, his second personal exhibition, took place in galerie gb agency in Paris in December 2020. He also participated to several events about exhibition and popular culture (“Imaginaires immersifs et expositions”, L’entour symposium, Beaux-arts of Paris, 2021, “Forme, Dispositif ou Circonstance : histoires et pratiques de l’exposition”, Beaux-Arts of Paris, 2020). In 2021, he became a doctor with his dissertation Dinosaures, baleines, mondes engloutis : une généalogie Populaire de la forme exposition. He takes part in the SACRe research program in Beaux-Arts of Paris/ENS.

Philippe Ortoli
Philippe Ortoli is a professor in film studies at the University of Caen. He is the author of numerous articles and books. The most recent are Il était une fois dans l’Ouest (ed. de la Transparence, 2010) and Le musée imaginaire de Quentin Tarantino (ed. Corlet/Cerf, 2012). He also published volumes of poetry (Le fond du puits and Je vais partir, ed. Saint-Germain des Prés, 1988, 1991).

Paola Palma
Author of a PhD dissertation on the relationship between cinema and literature in Colette’s work (La vagabonda dello schermo. Colette e il cinema, Esedra, 2015), Paola Palma teaches in Ecole du Louvre, Paris. She studies the relationship between cinema and the other art forms, as well as the actor of cinema. As a specialist of Italian cinema, she is associated researcher at the UMR Thalim (CNRS/ENS/Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) where she studies French-Italian movie co-productions between 1950 and 1970. She wrote several articles on the subject and co-directed, with Valérie Pozner, Mariages à l’européenne. Les coproductions cinématographiques intra-européennes depuis 1945, AFRHC, 2019.

Meera Perampalam
Meera Perampalam is a fellow researcher at the Institut de Recherche sur le Cinéma et l’Audiovisuel (Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3). She is the author of a dissertation thesis in film studies, entitled : « Surveiller et cadrer : les caméras de surveillance dans le cinéma des années 1990 à nos jours » (Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3). She wrote numerous papers on surveillance in visual culture. Her work revolves around visual studies, aesthetics, history of the technology, socio-anthropology. She teaches film studies in the Universities of Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle, Poitiers, Caen and cinema private schools. She also teaches for a broader audience (film screenings, training, reports). She collaborates to film productions.

Karen Redrobe
Karen Redrobe is the Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Modern Media and History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. There, she has served as Advisor to the Arts for the University, Department Chair of History of Art, Director of the Wolf Humanities Center, and Director of Cinema and Media Studies. She is the author of Vanishing Women : Magic, Film, and Feminism (2003) ; Crash : Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (2010), and is now working on a new book, Undead : Animation and the Contemporary (?) Art of War (under contract with University of California Press’s Feminist Media History series). She has co-edited three volumes : Still Moving : Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma ( 2008) and On Writing With Photography (2013) with Liliane Weissberg, and Deep Mediations : Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures with Jeff Scheible ( 2021) ; she is also the editor of Animating Film Theory (2014). Several of these books are available on open access platforms. For several years she served as a senior editor of the MIT journal Grey Room. She is on the Board of Directors for Scribe Video Center, a media center for social change founded in 1982 by Louis Massiah. As a faculty member her top priority is to expand access to higher education and media literacy.

Gary D. Rhodes, Ph.D.
Gary D. Rhodes, Ph.D. currently serves as Full Professor of Media Production at Oklahoma Baptist University. He is the author of The Perils of Moviegoing in America (Bloomsbury, 2012) and The Birth of the American Horror Film (Edinburgh UP, 2018), as well as seven books on Bela Lugosi. He is a founding editor of Horror Studies : An Interdisciplinary Journal. Rhodes is also the writer-director of such documentary films as Lugosi : Hollywood’s Dracula (1997) and Banned in Oklahoma (2004). His most recent book is Consuming Images : Film Art and the American Television Commercial (Edinburgh UP, 2020), coauthored with Robert Singer.

Charlotte Servel
Charlotte Servel teaches film studies at the University of Caen Normandy. Agrégation holder in French language and literature, she wrote a PhD thesis in 2020, entitled Le Cinéma burlesque, une autre origine du surréalisme. Les pratiques des surréalistes analysées au prisme des films burlesques pendant les années folles, under the direction of Laurent Le Forestier et Nathalie Piegay. Since June 2020, the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée made her in charge of coordinating workshops where children write their own TV series. She is a member of the executive board of AFHRC since 2020, where she manages communication. She published articles in 1985, Demeter, Double Jeu  ; she co-directed a book to be published, entitled La Séance de cinéma. Espaces, publics, imaginaires.

Vivian Sobchack
Vivian Sobchack is Professor Emerita in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA and former Associate Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. Her books include Screening Space : The American Science Fiction Film  ; The Address of the Eye : A Phenomenology of Film Experience ; Carnal Thoughts : Embodiment and Moving Image Culture ; and two edited volumes, The Persistence of History : Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event and Meta-Morphing : Visual Transformation in the Culture of Quick Change. Her essays have appeared in diverse journals such as Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Camera Obscura, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Animation : An Interdisciplinary Journal, Art Forum International, Body and Society, History and Theory, and Representations. In 2012, she was honored by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies with their Distinguished Career Achievement Award for the impact her far-ranging work has had on the field and beyond. The first woman elected President of SCMS, she also served for almost two decades as the only scholar on the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute. Her interests and publications are diverse and : philosophy and film theory, phenomenology of media, American film genres, animation and digital imaging, historiography, and cultural studies.

Dick Tomasovic
Dick Tomasovic is a professor in Théories et pratiques du cinéma, des arts audiovisuels et des arts du spectacle at the University of Liège where he is, since 2018, President of the Médias, Culture et Communication department. He also is a film columnist for various media in France and Belgium. He was the host and editor in chief of the TV-show Vidéographies (2011-2018), dedicated to video and digital arts. He was also scientific director of the Bibliothèque des Littératures d’Aventure (2010-2018). He published, among others, Le Palimpseste noir. Notes sur l’impétigo, la terreur et le cinéma américain contemporain (Yellow Now, 2002), Freaks, La Monstrueuse Parade de Tod Browning (Céfal, 2006), Le Corps en abîme. Sur la figurine et le cinéma d’animation (Rouge Profond, 2006), Kino-Tanz. L’art chorégraphique du cinéma (P.U.F, 2009), SHOTS ! Alcool & cinéma (Ed. du Caïd, 2015), et Batman, une légende urbaine (Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2019). He co-directs the collection “La fabrique du héros” at Impressions Nouvelles editions. His last book, co-written with Björn-Olav Dozo, is about Star Wars’s universe (Dark Vador, à feu et à sang, Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2021).