Introduction - Text 1
This parcours is made up of four end-of-term projects by students in the master’s and Ph.D. seminar Cinéma et innovations technologiques (CIN 6060) held at the Université de Montréal in the fall of 2022. The format of this parcours is thus different from the rest, because it does not take up a particular problem on the basis of a clearly established interdisciplinary issue. The goal of this heterogeneous parcours, rather, is to make available the results of a pedagogical experiment on the way in which the Encyclopaedia of Cinema Techniques and Technologies can be used when teaching cinema technology.
It is important to note that initially none of these students was a specialist in technical matters. In other words, these questions were not necessarily the focus of their master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation. The whole point of the seminar was to let them grasp the interest in incorporating technological issues into their work. The pedagogical experiment not only presented them with different ways of working on these questions; it also invited them to develop an argument which would form part of these ways of conducting research.
First, they learned the primary methodological approaches specific to the history of technology; to simplify: the history of cinema equipment, analysis of the discourses around technology, and study of professional and amateur practices. With this methodological framework in mind, each student studied a parcours in the Encyclopaedia which was already online. The pedagogical objective of their mid-term project was to grasp the topic of the parcours, the approach adopted by its authors and the more precise issue formulated therein.
Next, in practical workshops, the students also had the opportunity to better understand the role of the editor of the parcours, the duties of the content curator, and the way in which the Encyclopaedia’s database makes it possible to document and display textual and media content. They were able to discuss these topics at length with three people in charge of different parcours: Karine Abadie (The Imaginary of Film Technology), Philippe Bédard (Action Camera) and Stéphane Tralongo (Bolex: Cinema's Amateur Horizons).
In the final weeks of the seminar, the students conceived a section of a parcours on their own. For this they had to write a text and incorporate media content into it such as photographs, film clips or filmed interviews, digitised advertisements, etc. They planned not only the illustrative function of these media elements but also their place in the development of their argument.
For the present parcours, their work was also lightly revised to be in keeping with the standards of the Encyclopaedia while respecting the tone adopted by the students, whose originality is quite remarkable.[1] With respect to the students’ topics and the approaches they developed, we should note that most of them decided to conceive a section with a connection to an existing parcours (which was often the parcours they had chosen to study for their mid-term work). One of the students, Félix Caraballo has focused on the field of experimental cinema, providing a discussion of the singularity of Stan Brakhage’s work for Mothlight. Jean-Philippe Sansfaçon explored action cameras, developing a study of the discourses around the use of the VX1000 camera in the skateboarding community. Marilou Houde delved into the field of animated cinema, examining the connections and differences between stop-motion filming and 3D modelling. Charles-Antoine Sporns studied the parcours Ruins, Accident, Glitch and designed a section on the concept of white noise. The present parcours thus demonstrates the way in which the Encyclopaedia can serve as a pedagogical tool by bringing master’s and Ph.D. students to develop their own point of view on the history of technology in cinema.
