#plumskaya

January 2019. Maureen Wingrove, aka Diglee, a French author and illustrator, published a story on Instagram to talk about a book she just finished. It was not the first time she did that, but this time, it went viral. She presented an ecofeminist novel, untitled Le Mur Invisible (Die Wand) written by an Austrian author, Marlen Haushofer, in 1963. It is a classic Austrian novel that had kind of fallen into oblivion. But in just a click, it became an Instagram star.

“It was three days of avid reading. During this time, I only thought of this book, lived through this book, in apnea, obsessed and consumed.” Diglee

In only a couple of days, people became passionate about this novel. And in two weeks, Diglee started to receive thousands of messages on Instagram. People told her that they bought it, wanted to buy it and had already even finished it, most of the time in just one night.

The result? Libraries followed the movement and started to order new copies. The phenomenon took on such a scale that the novel became quickly sold out. The publishing house, Actes Sud, decided to grant Marlen Haushofer with the fame she deserve and reprint it.

Before Diglee, the sales of Le mur invisible were quite stable with approximately two hundreds copies sold each month. After her Internet review, it was sold out. Today there is almost 500 Instagram publications under the hashtag #Lemurinvisible.

People write reviews, share their feelings about it and thank Diglee. Only yesterday some new reviews were published, proof that it was not a one shot thing. The novel really became a classic in France too and still has a success in bookstores. The comments are mostly always the same, resembling the first one emitted by Diglee “I think I have never read a book this fast”, “I can’t read anything else since I have finished Le mur invisible. It’s not that I don’t like the other books, it is that this one is still too much present in me.” It is always a heart stroke for the readers, which are mainly women.

Most of the time, digital stars tend to influence their community to buy a miraculous face cream or to order from a special restaurant. By just posting a picture of themselves eating somewhere or doing their beauty routine, they influence hundreds, sometimes thousands of people to do so. Diglee just wanted to talk about how overwhelmed she felt after reading this book. But her words were so strong that she became herself an influencer. Her community did the rest. As there were each day new people who published pictures of their brand new copy, of their incredible experience and of their passionate reviews, many more tend to do the same and offer, many years later, a beautiful tribute to Marlen Haushofer.

One of the artistic forms that uses archives is the found footage. It consists in finding audiovisual archives (whereas fiction or documentaries, home movies, publicities, propaganda…), select, cut and edit them in a brand new assemblage. The editing generates a new meaning.

In order to fully understand this artistic form, let’s have a look at three results: a famous found footage movie and its two declinations. A MOVIE, by Bruce Conner, is a twelve minutes found footage movie from 1958 using educational videos and several news footage. Conner reveals his vision of the American society in the 50’s where sex, war and violence are as obsessive as they are destructive. 63 years later, it is still very accurate. Very accurate to say the least and represented thanks to – among other things, two movies by the video artist Jean Proctor: A movie by Jen Proctor (2010) and A movie x 2 (2015).

The first one is a “loving remake” of the movie by Bruce Conner, as said by Jen Proctor herself. The artist also uses the found footage technic. But that’s not all there is. The length is the same, as well as the music and the editing. She recreates the movie and modernizes it by creating a gameplay of responses. The images she chooses to do this actualisation are vibrant and don’t leave the viewer indifferent. In fact, they are spectacular (accidents), violent (video games), colourful (the naked woman in thermic vision), full of memories (World Trade Center). The viewer has already seen them or their equivalents in his everyday life. While Conner shows us an American society fascinated by war, sex and violence, Proctor shifts the point of view to the 2000’s and proves that, in the end, nothing has really changed.

In 2015, she directed A Movie x 2 using split screen: on the left, we can see the original Conner’s movie, unedited. On the right, the 2010 Proctor’s version. In the first place, A MOVIE is an inspiration for Proctor. But using the split screen technique to join the vision of the 1958’s American society to her own vision from 2010, A MOVIE also became raw material. The viewer is doubly active: not only he has to think about what he sees, but also has to understand the evolution (or non-evolution) between these two eras. Wars haven’t been stopped, neither has striptease. The public taste for breathtaking falls, sex and spectacular drama is still relevant. But the 2010’s viewer wants more. Proctor knows it and everything is faster in her movie. Thus, the naked woman who takes-off her stocking in Conner’s movie opening became a succession of women in Proctor’s. Both movies merged like a unique mirror that showed us the reflection of our society, unchanged in the last fifty years.

Watching both movies at the same time has nothing to do with combining them both into the same screen. When we are watching A movie x2, we are not looking at two movies. We are looking at a one and only movie: the Proctor’s movie from 2015. A MOVIE by Conner, created by using archives images, became itself an archive used by Proctor.

Plume Bachur

A MOVIE, Bruce Conner, 1958: https://vimeo.com/96777553

A movie by Jen Proctor, Jen Proctor, 2010: https://vimeo.com/proctor

When you finish a show on Netflix (sometimes in less than a week, most of the time in two days), there is always another one that will spike your interest.

From rich blond girls who sell houses in L.A. to a competition between make-up artists in London, the offer seems limitless: house designers competition, surprises weddings, couples who have to choose between their dream wedding or a new house… There is even a show about stars being coached to organise their own houses! Those concepts can feel silly on – paper… But actually work!

Actually, in these bizarre days, Netflix shows help me to feel more serene and less alone: while a movie has an end (and when it’s your favourite one, it hurts), Netflix shows never really end as there is always another one to click on.

You may say, can’t I just watch another movie one after the other, like I do with these shows? The answer is no. While a movie allows me to feel deep emotions and to lean to its characters and atmosphere, everything is neutral and insipid with a Netflix show, and you can jump from one to another.

Since last summer, when I really started to sink into these programs, I feel I have been watching the one and only show: the Netflix show. The quality of the images and the light are the same, duration is always approximately the same and there is always, at one point, someone who cries talking about their childhood or trauma. All those different people with whom I spent 45 minutes seem to disappear in a blur, even if some of them have inspired me or touched me in the moment.

What happens when I watch a movie or series is that I remember characters and want to spend more time with them, and become frustrated (sometimes sad) that I can’t. Whereas when it’s a character on a Netflix show, I might end up missing them a bit, but 45seconds later there is another one, as touching or funny who appears on my screen, and I already forget about the previous one.

That leads us to the magic trick of Netflix: you don’t have to push a button to go to the next episode! You are lying down in bed, your current episode is coming to and end, the first lines of the generic appear on screen and before you even start to think (should I go outside? Should I work? Should I call my mom?), Netflix lets you go there. You don’t have to do anything to go to the next episode… But you have to act if you want to play pause. Who has such a will? I don’t.

There is always another show that will respond to your desire for one good reason: if you like one of them, you will like them all.

Suffering from attention disorders due to old age, cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease can make watching a whole movie an impossible task. To allow elderly people and their relatives to experience cinema again, the Broca Living Lab (a team of psychologists, health professionals, researchers and technicians) have introduced Cinémoire. Originally, the concept originated from the United-States and was developed in the 2010s by John Zeisel and the I’m Still Here Foundation under the name Meet Me at the Movies.

Between May 2018 and March 2019, the Broca Living Lab’s team worked on the elaboration of a program, selecting movies and specific extracts from these same movies. They worked in collaboration with the elderly to make sure each screening would be able to bring back memories, and confirm the chosen movies were classics back then and had been seen by a majority.

Cinémoire’s main goal is to provide a good time to everyone, thus allowing those who were no longer able to enjoy a good screening to do so.

This project, elaborated with and for people with major disorders and their families, is a ten session program designed to increase reactions using memory recalling and  emotions induced by these extracts. Emotions are a major part of Cinémoire. The extracts are not only chosen because they are part of classic movies, but also because they allow the group to go through an emotional panel: from tears with Bambi, to laughter with Gérard Oury’s movie La Grand Vadrouille, the public can also feel some joy, gloom, fear or tension thanks to movies like The Beauty and the Beast by Jean Cocteau or the American classic It’s a Wonderful Life. Each extract is chosen for its emotional content and its universal character.  

One session lasts approximately fifty-five minutes. Six extracts of classic movies are presented and screened to a group of ten to fifteen people. Each extract lasts from three to five minutes – never longer. There are breaks between each of these screenings, allowing time for discussions. Animated by a professional, these moments allow everyone to remember and share together. 

A young French animator decided to adapt this concept to the EHPAD Huguette Valsecchi (Paris, 15th arrondissement) where he currently works. Inspired by Cinémoire's concept, he decided to use INA’s archives and focus on TV, making it even funnier and participative by adding a quiz to the program. Between each extract, he asks a question to the group of residents that’s linked to what they are about to see. Whether it is TV shows like Intervilles and all the shows presented by Guy Lux, or music interpretations of Jacques Brel, Georges Brassens and Edith Piaf, he also likes to play them news broadcasts on what they might have known (Paris’ Halles, school in the '30s) or on current subjects they like to discuss (feminism, ecology). 

Practical effects can be noted during each session: once, a man –  suddenly stood up and started to sing and dance when hearing a Michel Delpech’s song, the same person who had stopped speaking, another time, – an old woman who, after seeing a report on women wearing pants in the seventies, told everyone her mother would never let her do it, wearing one at the same time.

Those examples lead us to think that cinema (and audio-visual universe in general), when adapted to a particular audience of elderly people, can be a real tool for socializing, remembering and expressing emotions.