30 years of Le cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse: reflections on aesthetic film education

This edition of the Film Education Journal is dedicated to the 30th edition of the international film education project Le cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse (CCAJ). Founded at the occasion of the centenary of cinema in 1995 in France and including today around 40 classes worldwide, CCAJ, is a particularly complex and far-reaching example of aesthetic film education. It has developed over the last 30 years an extensive methodology, combining film analysis and practice, and engendered, year after year, what is now a unique collection of films made by young people from primary to high school. Specific is the conceptual coherence of the project, outlined by one of its founders, Alain Bergala, in his seminal essay The Cinema Hypothesis (2002/2016), and ‘put to test’ by him and co-founder Nathalie Bourgeois in choosing a new aesthetic subject each year. For many actors, cultural partners, filmmakers, teachers and academics, the project functions as a source of inspiration, as it brings together the often rather incongruent fields of education, film production and research, and makes significant efforts to disseminate its methodology and pedagogical experience, especially with a website providing concepts and materials to those who do not participate. When the founding institution the Cinémathèque Française decided in 2021 to abandon the project, about 500 filmmakers signed an open letter of support – among them famous names such as Jeanne Balibar, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Claire Simon, Wim Wenders, Hanna Schygulla, Miguel Gomes, Lucrecia Martel, Mahamat Saleh Haroun and Nobuhiro Suwa. In spite of its institutional and economic instability since then, the coordinating team as well as the international partners have shown an extraordinary willingness to continue their engagement in the project, which for many of them has become an important network of peers in film education. All this seems reason enough to take a step back and have a look at the theoretical, social and pedagogical dimensions of the project. The contributions from practitioners and researchers in this edition cover a wide range of questions; they touch on specific gestures and exercises as well as the overall philosophy, on the observation of single workshops, as well as on the network as a whole and therefore might inspire not only to think about the specificity of CCAJ, but in more general terms about the experiences and potentials of aesthetic film education.

Before introducing these contributions, we would like to recall the basic principles of the project. Each year, the work in the participating classes is dedicated to a new aesthetic question of cinema, explored by the pupils together with their teacher(s) and a filmmaker. This exploration relies on a corpus of film extracts from different historical, cultural and aesthetic contexts, and on practical exercises following the same ‘rules of the game’. In the second half of the year, the pupils produce a film essay they present to the other participants of CCAJ at the international encounters in June. The work in the classes is framed and facilitated by exchanges between the adults, organised three times a year. In autumn, an introductory workshop in Paris is led by Alain Bergala and other participants of the network in order to present and discuss the year’s subject and methodology. In spring, several decentralised mid-term meetings offer the opportunity to present and discuss in smaller groups the exercises made by the pupils. In June, during the international encounters, pedagogical exchanges among the adults take place each day after the screenings with the pupils. The pedagogical concept and the year’s subjects are introduced on the website and the annual blogs of the project,¹ that also contains the exercises and the film essays made by the pupils.

In the past, CCAJ and its methodology have already been the subject of research. On the one hand, The Cinema Hypothesis was widely discussed in view of its cultural, historical and theoretical contexts or the proposed methodology (Henzler, 2013; Chambers et al., 2018); on the other hand, a series of case studies from practitioners and researchers involved in the project, some of them published in the Film Education Journal, dealt with the work of the pupils on specific subjects, as well as with the implementation of the project in different cultural and institutional contexts (Assenova, 2023; Chambers, 2020; Donnelly et al., 2018; Reid, 2019). Moreover, in the context of two dissertations, qualitative empirical studies of single workshops in Britain and France have been carried out. Michelle Cannon (2018) investigated CCAJ alongside other workshops to discuss the potentials of digital media practice as a specific contribution to literacy. Elise Tamisier (2016, 2022) dedicated her (unpublished) work to CCAJ covering a diversity of approaches: she situates it in theoretical debates on spectatorship in the 20th century from Walter Benjamin to Gilles Deleuze, explicates the history of its concept, especially in discussing the aesthetic conception of the 30 subjects, accounts the observation of a workshop during a whole year, and, finally, analyses films made by the pupils during three years focusing specifically on their conception of characters and articulation of conflicts (of ‘Climate’, ‘Play’ and ‘Places and Stories’).

What this edition undertakes is to add a series of different perspectives – sociological, phenomenological, anthropological, didactical – on the project and to widen the horizon to a more international approach, comparing different workshops and having a look at the larger network. The edition starts with two articles that deal with the community created by CCAJ. Invited as a special guest to reflect on his experience, Alain Bergala decided to describe CCAJ as a community of adults and pupils, created by a shared imaginary museum of films. In addition, he reflects on the attitude of filmmakers towards pedagogy, as well as on the potential of film to become for some pupils an object of affective engagement. Mark Reid, a long-term British partner in CCAJ, considers his own fascination with the project as a cinephile commitment. He situates this ‘cinephile habitus’, its routines and rituals, in the context of French cultural history, analysing its sociological dimensions (with Pierre Bourdieu) and its aesthetic dimensions (with Gilles Deleuze). Both articles may thus be read as complementary.

The next two articles focus on the specific pedagogical impact of the methodology of CCAJ, deduced from qualitative research on several participating workshops. Bettina Henzler and Emmanuel Siety analyse interviews with four tandems of teachers and filmmakers from France, Bulgaria and Lisbon of the cycle ‘Filming the Other – The Documentary Gesture’ with regard to the specific gestures of filmmaking relating to others and the world. This ‘typology’ is contextualised by a discussion of the existential dimension of the aesthetic subjects of CCAJ in a phenomenological perspective. Perrine Boutin and Bettina Henzler compare the long-term observations made in a French and a German workshop of the cycle ‘Centred/Decentred’ with regard to their potential to inflect the social dynamics: they discuss how the act of showing as a form of mediation passes on to the pupils who make and present their films.

The last two articles examine more closely specific exercises and materials provided by CCAJ. Michelle Cannon and Sa-Ra Zarteeven focus on the project’s seminal exercise of the Lumière Minutes as a way of engaging with the world through the lens of post-digital ecologies. They compare two examples of Lumière Minutes realised in the context of a primary school participating in CCAJ and an MA course at London University, interpreting them as a means of ethnographic orientation and as a possible act of resistance. Jana Telscher has a closer look at the website of CCAJ and discusses how the materials and methods proposed there might be adapted to school curricula of literature and langue. She develops a detailed didactic concept for the subject ‘The Real in Fiction Film’ in a German literature class, linking it to a method called material-based writing. She also addresses the relevant question why this methodology has not yet a stronger impact on film education and school curricula outside the project.

The authors of the articles represent different modes of engagement of the project: being at the ‘core’ as Bergala, as participants (cultural partners or filmmakers), as those who are familiar with the project ‘from the outside’, or as someone never involved in it. All are situated in between practice and research, are teachers as well as theoreticians. Nevertheless, there are many voices missing in this edition: Nathalie Bourgois, head of the project since its beginning, as well as teachers, filmmakers and cultural partners especially from non-central European countries, and of course, recent or former pupils – even if these are cited in some of the articles. There are also questions that still have to be investigated, especially on the biographical and historical dimension of the project, on different aspects of the pupil’s learning pathways, on the intercultural dimension or on the corpus of pupil’s film essays. We regret that several authors, willing to contribute to this edition, could not finish their articles to be ready for publication. This might be a sign of the economical fragility of the project: the engagement for film education leaving little time to take a step back, reflect and write on it. We would like to encourage these and others to hand in their articles in later editions of the Film Education Journal – this edition, then, may function as a starting point, or a stopover, in further ongoing reflections on this pedagogical experience.

This edition was made possible by the Erasamus+ project ‘Exploring cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse’ 2022–2024.

Note

1. Website: www.cinemacentansdejeunesse.org; blog: blogcinemacentansdejeunesse.org.⮭