Reframing the creative city debate from locally-based artistic activities.The case of independent films scenes in Paris suburb

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to open a discussion on utilitarian approaches to the territorial embeddedness of creative activities, using the concept of "scene. This concept highlights the desire to create as a defining feature of artistic creation, compared to other human activities. The article presents the results of a survey conducted with stakeholders in the independent film scenes in north-eastern Paris. It stresses the importance of self-training and selfproduction in the emergence of these independent cinema scenes, and highlights the role played by cultural policies in their structuring. Yet these independent scenes seem disconnected from urban and economic development policies, despite their support for creative industries. The concept of scene offers an alternative theoretical framework to analyse and understand the local anchoring of an artistic community led by the share of aesthetic or moral values: for the ones, a certain vision of filmmaking based and traditional techniques, for the others, a political will to voice as postcolonial subjects.

Exploring implicit and explicit cultural policy dimensions through major-event and neoliberal rhetoric

“…Attempts to build and develop creative cities has long-stimulated needs to adopt standardise cultural policy agendas with urban development (Grodach, 2017). This often means new art galleries, ethnic festivals, cultural district, co-working spaces, and public art displays or contemporary art biennials (Lazzeretti, 2008;Pratt, 2021;Vivant & Morteau, 2020). However, mimetic formulas tempered by local specificities are aimed at urban reconversion.…”

“…The revised pandemic strategy seemed to focus on cultural districtualization processes (Lazzeretti, 2008) and clustering the culture and creative industries (Pratt, 2021;Vivant & Morteau, 2020), which is a well-tested strategy of the creative city, with imprecise outcomes (Comunian, Chapain, & Clifton, 2014). The Rikard Benčić complex was converted from an administrative building of an old tobacco factory into Rijeka's new cultural district (constituted by the Rijeka Civic Library, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka Civic Museum, and Children's House).…”

Author's cinematograph of new Hollywood

“…It is important that today in mass Hollywood cinema, the audience is presented with African-American, Asian characters, representatives of sexual minorities, whose screening until the mid-1970s was impossible for Hollywood cinema (Trotter, 2020). As a result, the creators of author's independent cinema were doomed to limited public attention (Vivant & Morteau, 2020). Since innovative films were too different from films of classical cinematograph, an elementary psychological mechanism of the viewer was triggered: a person thinks and perceives by analogy, as the new correlates with the conventional, while the speed of perception and understanding of what was seen directly depends on the degree of coincidence with the known and familiar.…”