Valence. Great success of the conference "The Object in the cinema"

Despite the pandemic, which sometimes makes people stay at home, this has not discouraged the now loyal public of Alva conferences from coming in large numbers – around fifty people – to listen to the speaker. So it was about the importance of the object in cinema. Frédéric Jourdain, associate professor of audiovisual and artistic culture at the Arènes high school in Toulouse, and therefore a great specialist in his field, was able to fascinate the audience with his historical and didactic approach. Explaining that objects have become the "precious anonymous and animated actors of cinema", Frédéric Jourdain then took his audience on a cinematographic journey towards objects which delighted by the richness of the subject, the parallels with the plastic arts and the many photograms and film footage that illustrated the whole. He showed that the first object of cinema can be the camera itself with the famous cinematograph of the Lumière brothers and how this object was an object of cinema with the astonishing film by Russian Dziga Vertov, "The Man with a Camera", dated 1929, with Chaplin and many others. The object in the cinema can become a critical object to denounce the failings of our societies. But the object, in Hitchcock's cinema for example, can still become a symbol, a very close-up of the cup that contains the poison in the film "Les Enchaînés", and in other films, it can be a totem , that is to say a personal object which is often the key to the film, like the doll of the little girl Pearl in "The Night of the Hunter". It can also take its total autonomy and become a real threat to man, as in the filmography of the "80s", with a film like "Christine", by John Carpenter, adapted from the work of Stephen King. This means that this lesson of objects in the cinema has helped everyone to better enter these films that we see every day on small or large screens.

But the purpose of a conference, beyond the mere pleasure of knowledge, is it not to make us better understand and apprehend the world in which we live?

In the name of the diversity desired by Alva conferences, the next conference will question the scientific field.