The Spectator’s Position as a Thinking Space for the Contemporary Essay Film: Face aux fantômes (2009) and Jaurès (2012)

Abstract

This article aims to carry out an analysis of the spectatorial position as a thinking space for the contemporary essay film based on the comparative study of two Francophone films: Face aux fantômes (Jean-Louis Comolli and Sylvie Lindeperg, 2009) and Jaurès (Vincent Dieutre, 2012). The dialogism of the essay film, the interpellation to the spectator to produce self-reflection on their position and critical thinking about the images shown, is then generated from the premise of identification. The analysis shows how Face aux fantômes offers an audiovisual thinking process on the mobilization of the gaze of the emancipated spectator theorized by Jacques Rancière, while Jaurès provokes the same reflection from the opposite approach: the fixation of the gaze and the representation of spectatorial passivity. In this way, both films reveal the possibilities of the spectator’s position as an epistemological space for the contemporary essay film.

Women’s Essay Films in Francophone Europe. Exploring the Female Audiovisual Thinking Process

“…(Bluher 2019, 75). The reflection on the memory-history-art axis concerning the film by Alain Resnais (Nuit et brouillard / Night and Fog, 1956) is produced by placing the historian as a spectator, accompanied by the filmmaker (Monterrubio Ibáñez, 2022). Reflection aims to expand its territory to convert the literary spectator-historian into a filmic one, through a thinking process that the filmmaker transforms into an audiovisual process.…”