24 Mar 04/11/23 Guillaume Soulez from Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3

Posted at 12:16h in Past Lectures by

A headshot of speaker Guillaume Soulez looking to the side. Challenging documentary: choice & deliberation in webdocs

Register for the virtual talk here.

This talk will focus on two issues that are both acute and traditional in documentary theory as the web documentary questions them by soliciting the participation of the viewer. What are the exact relationships between point of view and documentation (cf. Vigo’s “documented point of view”) and what specific relationship can be found between the discussion of points of view and the choices proposed by the interface? Coming in part from Pierre Schaeffer’s theory of the “dispositif” (as an organization of uses by a media – as opposed to the later “apparatus theory”) but also from the very pragmatic materialization of choices that web documentaries offer. Soulez will reflect on what “the deliberation of images” (as he calls it) teaches us about the web documentary and vice versa.

Guillaume Soulez is a full professor in Film & Audiovisual Studies and Communication Studies at the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris3. His research focuses on the interpretative activity of cinema and audiovisual spectators through the construction of a model: the “deliberation of images”. Through the study of the mise en ispo (or “ispositive”) and the analysis of the spectators’ argued reactions, we observe how images and sounds propose positions, points of view, choices (and not only a narrative or a plastic path) through the play of audiovisual forms, and how spectators themselves discuss with images and sounds, that is to say, how they produce the forms at the same time as they deliberate with the films and audiovisual documents.

Soulez co-directed the project Platform 14 (research, pedagogy and creation) about historical web documentary, with Laurent Véray and (co-)edited several books and journal issues on these topics. He is former head of the Institut de Recherche sur le Cinéma et l’Audiovisuel (IRCAV, 2016-2021) and the Cinema and Audiovisual Department (2014-2016).

Register for the virtual talk here.