Viva Paci (Université de Québec à Montréal)
In many of Louis Delluc’s writings, he expresses a great interest in documentary cinema, which is able to capture different living beings preoccupied with their everyday activities, while also generating an estrangement effect. This is a vision mediated by the camera’s eye. It is fundamentally simple to reveal the beauty of the world: in particular, there is a quality naturally present in animals which, when caught unawares, is intensified. We can see this in Delluc’s writings, whether in his enthusiasm for a film (“Parmi les fauves”, 1919), or, more frequently, in the cinema he wishes to come into existence (“Le cinéma art populaire”, 1921), or in the midst of a story that speaks of film procedures (“Le périscope” in La jungle du cinéma, 1921). In order to triangulate this apparent simplicity of the interest in the presentation of nature – with the idea that animals are spontaneously present before the camera – I propose to put this idea into tension with two contemporaries of Delluc who also reflected on the powers of the camera as a complex catalysator of alienation (the machinetta, in Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore by the Italian author Luigi Pirandello, published in 1916) and atmosphere (the eponymous camera patented in 1916 by the American natural scientist Carl Ethan Akeley).
CV:
Viva Paci is Professor of Film Theory and Visual Interpretations at the School of Media, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Director of the UQAM Master’s in Communication program: “Cinema and Moving Images,” since August 2009. She gained her PhD in Comparative Literature (Literature and Cinema stream) at the Université de Montréal. Her book publications include Chris Marker et l’imprimérie du regard (with André Habib, 2008), La Comédie musicale et la double vie du cinéma (2011) and La machine à voir à propos de cinéma, attraction, exhibition (2012).