CCAJ as cinephiliac pedagogy: cultural reproduction and renewal through watching and making film

Introduction

Le cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse (CCAJ) is a French film education programme that has been running annually since 1995. It began as an initiative of Alain Bergala, French cineaste, theorist and educator, and Nathalie Bourgeois, then Head of Education at the Cinémathèque Française, in 1995, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of cinema. As an English film educator, my initial encounter with CCAJ in 2009 provided a ‘shock to thought’ (Colebrook, 2002). I had taught film for nearly 20 years at that point, very securely within what Bourgeois called an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ tradition. When meeting Nathalie Bourgeois for the first time and showing her how the British Film Institute’s film education programme related to the National Curriculum in England, she was nonplussed; surely we promoted an encounter with cinema as valuable in its own right, and not for any other instrumental purpose, such as to develop children’s wider literacy or for examinations?

In this article, I am working out what kind of encounter with cinema Nathalie was referring to, what kind of a programme CCAJ actually is, and why it has been so successful, for so long. I use the thinking of Pierre Bourdieu and Gilles Deleuze to help me understand how the programme sits between the fields of cinema and schooling, but also what drives it, and its participants (of whom I am one), forward every year: why do they – we – keep it going? I begin by situating CCAJ, as others have done (Henzler, 2013, 2023) as a ‘cinephiliac’ education programme, and I go on to position cinephilia as a specifically French post-war cultural phenomenon. I find the figure of Alain Bergala pivotal as both embodiment of this post-war cinephiliac ‘moment’ and habitus (Bourdieu, 1977), and as a symbolic figurehead whose pedagogic thinking maintains the participants’ belief in the structure and durability of the programme.

If Bourdieu for me explains the reproductive power behind CCAJ, I find in Deleuze an explanation for the perpetual renewal of the programme – its ability to think of cinema afresh every year, with and through its young participants. Throughout, I draw on interviews with key participants in the programme, including Bergala and Bourgeois. My first move is to examine cinephilia itself.

What is cinephilia?

There are different understandings of the term ‘cinephilia’ and the kinds of practice it alludes to. In lay terms, cinephilia tends to be taken to mean some kind of (over) attachment to film, whereby one becomes a ‘film buff’. Jullier and Leveratto (2012) formalise this wider sense of the term, while situating a specialist, narrower definition in the time and place of Paris in the 1950s and 1960s. There is a third sense of cinephilia, one connected to contemporary, digital forms of engagement with the moving image – an engagement with film in ‘fragments’ (Elsaesserl quoted in Henzler, 2013) which will become useful later.

For the purpose of this enquiry, I will draw on the classic French conception of cinephilia as analysed by Christian Keathley (2006), that is as a whole system of beliefs, behaviours and forms of response to cinema, rooted in French cinema culture of the mid-twentieth century. Keathley also adds an ‘-iac’ suffix to the term which he takes from Willemen (Keathley, 2006, p. 38), who uses it deliberately for its ‘necrophiliac’ connotations: that somehow to love cinema is to over-invest in a dead thing. As a reviewer of an earlier version of this article pointed out, the ‘-iac’ suffix tends to refer to itself as somehow a condition of existence: in other words, to a habitus. Willemen also coined the conception of the ‘cinephiliac moment’ in which ‘what is seen is in excess of what is shown’, and which ‘is produced en plus, in excess, or in addition, almost involuntarily’ (Keathley, 2006, p. 30). A film will offer viewers moments which resonate maybe only with them, and which resonate deeply and for a lifetime, in an ‘excess of exchange between a film’s maker and its viewers’ (Keathley, 2006, p. 53).

The ‘moment-ness’ of the cinephiliac moment is also significant, and criterial: Chris Darke asks ‘What does the idea of the “cinephiliac moment” designate? Why choose this term over others such as shot, scene, or sequence?’ He answers: ‘Precisely because it points to a dimension of the spectator’s reaction that is seen as escaping these recognizable, regulated units of cinematic grammar’ (Darke, 2010, p. 153). Crucially for a discussion of film education, the ‘cinephiliac moment’ thus resists those critical frameworks of systematised thinking, generalisability and ‘regulated units of cinematic grammar’, which are the prerequisite components of a standard Film Studies curriculum.

Cinephiliac moments are essentially ‘fragments’ of film, what Francois Truffaut called ‘the insignificant detail that doesn’t draw attention to itself’, wherein he felt one could find the essence of cinema (Keathley, 2006, p. 85). Keathley deals at some length with the notion and importance of these details, tracing the interest in insignificant details to the art historical practice of authenticating the work of masters through the insignificant dettaglio of a painting: the rendering of a hand, the fold of a robe, a cloud in the background. Roger Cardinal, also cited by Keathley (2006, p. 41), writes that when ‘pausing over an insignificant detail’ one disrupts the ‘congruity’ of spectators with the thing they are watching – that imagined unity of representation, narrative, idea, image. Because cinephilia is subjective, it breaks that congruity; it is looking for other things – or rather the cinephiliac viewer finds things other than those meanings they are already primed to look for.

While film studies, as a curriculum subject, offers a kind of ‘disciplined viewing’, cinephilia offers a ‘wilfully perverse gaze’ (Cardinal quoted in Keathley, 2006, p. 41). In a binary reminiscent of Roland Barthes’ figuration vs representation, Cardinal contrasts ‘literate’ vs ‘non-literate’ viewing, where non-literate viewing pays attention to the ground, the periphery, rather than what is being foregrounded as the figure. The ‘wilfully perverse gaze’ is not limited by the expectation of what it will find; it is not ‘always-already known’. The viewer’s eye is able to roam across the screen in a ‘panoramic gaze’, rather in the mode of the Surrealist ‘flâneurs’ wandering through Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.

For cinephiliacs, what is distinctive about the moving image is found in the two dimensions of movement and time (Deleuze, 1983, 1985), and from there, the fleeting nature of our engagement with film; our desire to recapture the feelings associated with its fleeting appearance; and our failure to do so. Film teases us with its proxy representation of the senses: the wind in the trees, the sun on one’s face, the ground beneath our feet, the sounds and smells of the city. We feel like we are present in film’s ‘sensorium’, or sensory world, but we are always at one remove; whatever action we witness has always, already, happened; even if we replay it, we are just left with the same sense of ‘lost time’.

Cinephilia then is the recognition, the awareness of film as this fleeting sensorium, felt personally and subjectively, present only in fragments, and then (sometimes) obsessively sought after. We re-rehearse those pleasures, those sensory experiences in talk and writing – in the language of film writing, of film clubs or just in the desire when the film is over to talk to someone who shared the experience.

Andre Bazin, whose writing about film helped re-launch post-war French cinema culture, argued that because the camera is mechanical, much of what it captures is done so without human agency or choice, and therefore much of what registers in the shot isn’t put there deliberately. Bazin thus proposes that ‘chance and reality have more talent than all the world’s filmmakers’ (Keathley, 2006, p. 81), a position which represents a challenge to formal Film Studies: in cinephilia the film becomes radically unstable, and endlessly re-interpretable, offering multiple different experiences to each individual viewer.

Beyond cinephilia as a mode of response, there is a tradition or canon of films that became associated with the ‘cinephiliac mode’: those films which, in the view of cinephiliac critics, were more likely to yield those fleeting, sensuous, but indelible impressions in viewers (Jullier and Leveratto, 2012, p. 146). In Keathley’s (2006) telling, the tradition and style are embodied in a lineage of filmmakers stretching from just before to just after the Second World War. In France, the key figures in the 1930s were Jean Vigo and Jean Renoir, and after the war Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette – all critics influenced by Bazin who became filmmakers. In Italy, there was also a style of ‘realist’, or ‘neo-realist’, cinema that was made quickly, on location, with non-professional actors and stories taken from the street, almost as sketches – furtive impressions snatched from reality under pressure of time.

Keathley refers to this style or lineage as ‘the Cahiers Line’ (2006, p. 85) after the film journal Cahiers du Cinema, founded by Bazin. The Cahiers Line of films and filmmakers is a repository of cinephiliac moments, insignificant details ‘that don’t draw attention to themselves’, which are fleeting, aleatory, sensual and ‘sketched’ (2006, p. 41). They shaped the cinema sensibilities of the post-war period beyond France, and resonated in cinema across the world.

To help account for the emergence of this style, and these filmmakers, at this time and place, Bridget Fowler (2012) applies Pierre Bourdieu’s tools of historical cultural analysis to the emergence of an avant-garde cinema in post-war France. She sees in that moment an example of what Bourdieu coined ‘ethical rupture’, similar to moments in the nineteenth century that he argued led to the emergence of other revolutionary artists and artistic movements (Flaubert; Manet and Impressionism). The post-Second World War moment, Fowler argues, enabled cinema to be reborn or rebooted as one of Bourdieu’s (1993) ‘restricted sub-fields of cultural production’, in what Alan Lovell has called ‘a new Kuhnian paradigm’ for culture (Lovell and Hillier, 1972, p. 342).

Bourdieu’s ‘restricted’ or ‘autonomous’ fields of cultural production become engines for generating new forms of capital – both cultural and symbolic – typically driven by social groups disenfranchised from economic capital (1993, p. 40). They become separate, self-contained and self-sustaining, creating and circulating new cultural value in opposition to mainstream social or economic value. The post-war cinephiliacs created such a new field using a range of cultural instruments: Bazin, through his tireless writing and teaching, and the creation of Cahiers du Cinema; the film club Objectif 49 and the Festival du Cinema Maudit; and the writing and polemicising of the young Turks of the New Wave.

Beyond the establishing of a new field, however, lies the question of its continuation: if the purpose of the new field is to create new cultural value, how will it be distributed and reproduced? As in any economic system, restricting those to whom symbolic value is given is a way of maintaining that value. Bourdieu (2001, p. 16) draws on Weber’s description of the Church as managing the ‘monopoly of legitimate manipulation of sacred goods’ to propose how cultural fields similarly control access to their own goods and values. In the ‘restricted field’ of film culture, this might mean having your film selected for or being given a prize at a film festival or being featured in a film magazine – or indeed being included in a film education programme.

For Bourdieu, a whole range of agents and instruments are necessary for sustaining – and restricting access to – a field of cultural production, including, at the end of his list, educators:

The sociology of art and literature has to take as its object not only the material production, but also the symbolic production of the work, ie the production of the value of the work of art. … It therefore has to consider … not only the direct producers of the work in its materiality (artist, writer, etc) but also the producers of the meaning and value of the work – critics, publishers, gallery directors and the whole set of agents whose combined efforts produce consumers capable of knowing and recognising the work of art as such, in particular teachers. (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 37; author’s emphasis)

But there is a tension within educators, including those in CCAJ, between reproducing this restricted field, while at the same time wanting to disseminate, or transmit and share its values; cinephilia as a mode of engaging with film needs protecting, but without generating new participants and new ideas it will wither away. In fact, one participant, in interview, said that the reason they continue with the programme is that without it, ‘this approach to cinema will die’ (participant interview 14 December 2023; online).

So, the institutions that created and propagated the new ‘cinephilia’ – the national film school La FEMIS, the Cahiers du Cinema, the little film clubs all over France, and other national programmes such as Ecole et cinéma, Collège au cinéma and Lyceens et apprentis au Cinema – all had educational missions. Equally importantly, they all featured the involvement of CCAJ’s artistic patron Alain Bergala, author among other works of The Cinema Hypothesis (2002/2016): an argument for the artistic value of cinema to be enshrined in educational work. Bergala’s position here is almost literally pivotal: he is an embodiment of post-war French cinephilia through his membership of these key institutions, and then through his role in CCAJ the programme comes to embody cinephilia in its own right. Bergala’s relation to cinephilia and CCAJ is an example of Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘mystery of ministry’, in which certain charismatic individuals come to embody a set of practices, beliefs and values and then ‘stand in’ for those values:

The mystery of ministry is one of those cases of social magic in which a thing or a person becomes something other than what it or the person is, so that a person (a government minister, a bishop, a delegate, a member of parliament, etc) can identify, and be identified, with a set of persons, the People, the Workers, etc, or a social entity, the Nation, the State, the Church, the Party. The mystery of ministry culminates when the group can only exist through delegation to a spokesperson who will make it exist by speaking for it, i.e. on its behalf, and in its place. The circle is then complete: the group is made by the person who speaks in its name, who thus appears as the source of the power which he or she exerts on those who are its real source. The circular relationship is the root of the charismatic illusion in which, in extreme cases, the spokesperson can appear to himself or herself and others as a causa sui. (Bourdieu, 1985, p. 740)

Bergala’s role is multiform: he brings the history and cultural value created by post-war French cinephilia to the service of CCAJ, which in turn expresses, maintains and reproduces those values and practices. Throughout interviewing key participants in the programme, Bergala’s importance was frequently cited, in both concrete (as writer, thinker, curator of the programme) and symbolic ways.

CCAJ and cinephilia

Is CCAJ a cinephiliac film education programme? There are several superficial indicators that establish it as clearly cinephiliac in mode:

• One can argue that at its core, CCAJ follows a ‘cinephiliac canon’ – the Cahiers Line of Renoir and Vigo, the Italian neo-realists, the French new Wave, and contemporary realists like Kiarostami. The evidence is in the repeated use of clips from these auteurs in the successive annual ‘questions of cinema’.

• The viewing curriculum itself consists of ‘fragments and details’, linked together in a typology (see Henzler, 2023).

• The questions of cinema constitute an ‘aesthetic framing’ of cinema, rather than a semiotic one: we are looking at motifs, patterns, sensory connections and philosophical dimensions rather than the semiotics of ‘shot equals meaning’.

• The repeated focus on ‘Lumiere Minutes’ enables students to allow chance and reality to work their magic, resisting the over-designed nature of much classical filmmaking instruction.

Can Bourdieu help us understand how CCAJ functions as one of the agents of a new post-war mode of cultural (re)production? And if so, how does CCAJ both reproduce and transmit the cinephiliac mode of cinema culture while at the same time rigorously maintaining its borders and parameters? A Bourdieusian analysis may help us see deeper structures and practices that effectively maintain the cinephiliac character of CCAJ – and which conspire to reproduce it. First, there are the rules, routines and rituals of the programme, and second, there is its distinctive pedagogy.

CCAJ: pedagogy and cultural reproduction

The pedagogy of CCAJ could be described as a specific subset of its rules, routines and rituals. Indeed, there is a striking correspondence between cinephilia and the pedagogy of CCAJ, and one might argue that it is this pedagogy that distinguishes CCAJ from other traditions of film education. In pedagogy, it is the thinking of Bergala, in particular his notion of ‘horizontal pedagogy’, that is criterial.

In an interview, and numerous times in his book The Cinema Hypothesis, Bergala dismisses the notion of a ‘vertical’, top-down film pedagogy, in which expertise is handed down from expert to novice (interview, 13 April 2022). The resistance to top-down pedagogies again comes out of a French post-war intellectual context, in which writers were suspicious of the way formal education maintains distances between teacher and student (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1964; Ranciere, 1991). In fact one might claim that cinephilia itself is a horizontal mode of engaging with film – non-hierarchical, opportunistic, creating randomised links through its ‘like’ ‘panoramic gaze’ (Keathley, 2006).

The horizontal nature of Bergala’s pedagogy is also visible in CCAJ in the idea that the same pedagogy should be applied to ‘all the age groups’: one of the rules of CCAJ from the beginning. But also important is the notion that formally challenging films should not be kept from younger children on the basis of their imagined ‘difficulty’. In interview with Alejandro Bachmann, Bergala argues that the more arcane, experimental cinema is actually better suited to young children, for whom it ‘addresses the sensual … [and] foregrounds forms and rhythms that are often veiled by characters’ trajectories in narrative cinema’ (Bergala, 2016, pp. 129–130). Bergala also argues for using ‘the same pedagogies for [pupils from] all backgrounds’, rather than ‘making allowances’ for less advantaged students, as many projects might (interview, 13 April 2022). Throughout his work and practice, Bergala is arguing for a democracy of experience through pedagogy, in ways that are reminiscent of Ranciere’s challenge to Freirean pedagogies, that equality (of students) should always be a starting point, instead of, as with Freire, an outcome (Ranciere, 1991).

Bergala’s pedagogy can also claim to be horizontal in the way in which concepts are introduced to students. Rather than starting with concepts – for example, the abstracted ideas about what might be the purposes of some kinds of shot – he advocates starting with film extracts themselves and then pursuing their effects: ‘You start with the films, and the ideas come from there’ (interview, 13 April 2022). The horizontal approach resonates with some of the thinking derived from Deleuze (see Wallin, 2010), that films have a way of doing ‘thinking for us’, rather than merely expressing the ‘already-made’ concepts dreamt up by the director. Deleuze and Guattari (1993) coined this mode of thinking as ‘rhizomal’ – after the horizontal, subterraneous growth structures of rhizomal plants – following its own logics and lines of desire.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Bergala’s ‘horizontal pedagogy’ is his methode comparatif. Taken as he says from art history, this approach links images or shots from different films in an associative chain. It is the method he uses in his pedagogic DVD series ‘Petit à petit’ (2002) in which chain-links of scenes and shots criss-cross a thematic compilation of cinema clips, looking at cats in film, or the relation of very wide shots to big close-ups. The pedagogic work is done by the clips themselves, or rather by the differences and similarities between them, where viewers or learners make connections (Bergala, 2009). In CCAJ, Bergala and Bourgeois use the comparative method extensively – in training the educators every September, but also on the website. The ‘typology’ he develops every year is a formalisation of the collections or groupings of film extracts in pedagogic ways, so that they can illuminate an idea from different, but cognate perspectives.

The comparative method can also be read as Deleuzian. For Deleuze, film can imagine new concepts given that ‘we no longer have the resources or the will for thinking a world out-of-sync with its given image’ (Wacquant, 1989, p. 178). Rather than merely expressing the ‘already-thought’, film’s privileged relation to both time and movement enables it to project ideas in concrete form that hadn’t been thought or spoken before – and the juxtaposition of two or more images creates more novelty as the viewer superimposes those images on each other. The resistant reality that Bergala claims is the raw material of cinema can also break out of the human frame of thinking, in which the future is usually only a projection of the known present. Because film ‘messes with time’ it can imagine different futures, with starting points in other possible presents. It has ‘disruptive’ potential.

CCAJ has faced criticism for the supposed narrowness of its viewing curriculum – the Cahiers Line of realist and neo-realist post-war European masters (for example Burn, 2018), and these chime with the Bourdieusian notion of the ‘restricted cultural field’, whose parameters and borders are policed to manage the ‘legitimate access to the monopoly of cultural goods’ (Bourdieu, 2001, p. 16). For one thing, the focus on a particular style of cinema, from a specific time and place, can feel narrow and limiting. After all, the fragmentary image is also the constituting logic of YouTube, TikTok and Instagram Reels – none of which are given space in the official format of CCAJ. Even when the curated film clips of CCAJ include more radical and experimental content (the films of Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman and Jonas Mekas feature often), I would argue that these belong to the ‘restricted’ field of cinema, rather than its demotic, boisterous and popular cousins in social media.

While being an advocate of the DVD and its potential for creating chains of connected film clips, Bergala is quite dismissive of most television and formats peculiar to social media. Contemporary commercial Hollywood film is pretty much non grata in CCAJ, although even films from the Marvel comic universe must offer subjective ‘cinephiliac moments’ in spite of the almost total control of the studios over the image (see Andrew, 2012). The strongest explanation for the limitations over what kind of cinema is allowable is that CCAJ’s raison d’être is in reproducing the classic era and mode of cinephilia; that is simply what it does. The other forms of moving image that are excluded from the formal arm of the programme come from Bourdieu’s ‘unrestricted field’ – the commercial fields of mainstream cinema and social media.

Still, to focus on the watching curriculum of CCAJ is only to get half the story. Making film, trying out, reproducing and imitating the aesthetic and formal choices made by canonical filmmakers, is the true purpose of the programme: to attempt to get to the ‘heart of the creative act’ (Bergala, 2003/2016, p. 23). In that sense, it would be impossible to engage in making film in the mode of commercial Hollywood, with its computer-generated images, total control of the frame, motion-sensors and automated dialogue replacement. Making in the mode of cinephilia is much more within the grasp of 7-year-olds.

In fact, the film-making aspect of CCAJ is actually how it remakes itself year on year. The young participants of the programme themselves effect an annual renewal of the programme. Whatever the repetition in the programme or the curriculum – the same canonical films and directors, the same structure for the rules of the game, the same venues, routines and rituals – it is the young people themselves who represent the novelty each year: the refreshing among the reproducing. It is in their films each year that the annual theme, with their echoes of the chosen clips, is reproduced but reversioned. And in the presentational screenings at the end of each year, the collective, in Elliot Eisner’s phrase, ‘discovers the ends in process’ (2002, p. 7) – a set of answers to that year’s ‘question of cinema.’

So however legitimate the critique of the inputs to CCAJ, with its canonical view of cinema, it is in its outputs that cinema is rediscovered afresh every year. While CCAJ, does, in Bourdieu’s terms, reproduce cinephilia every year, it also renews and refreshes it, and its ‘ends’ are unknowable until the final moment of revelation.

There is something else about this annual renewal: Jason Wallin (2010) writes, following Deleuze, how education programmes can fall into one of two kinds: the first being the curriculum that, following its Latin root ‘currere’, runs along a ‘cursus’, or chariot track, representing an experience of schooling as repetition, and competition, on a track without terrain; artificially constructed not for the pursuit of knowledge or experience, but expressly for its learners to race against each other. Against this model of curriculum Wallin poses another, Deleuzian, version, derived from a different sense of ‘currere’ – to run, or flow, following a desire, an instinct or a question. Wallin’s image of this sense of currere, following a ‘line of flight’, is the final flight of Antoine in Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups, as he literally leaves the field of formal education and runs, without a destination, a teleology, until he is brought to a stop, confronted by the sea, at which point he turns and looks directly into the camera, at us. It is this sense of curriculum that CCAJ seems to emulate: each year a new question, a new beginning, handed over to the design and desire of its participants – first the adults, then the young people.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, a number of contradictions at the heart of CCAJ’s cinephiliac mode of engaging with film have come into view. Its dirigiste, highly directed and tightly controlled framing – through its rules, both hidden and overt – would seem to run counter to cinephilia’s democratic view of a subjective, open, interpretable cinema. Alain Bergala’s horizontal pedagogy has the potential to disrupt traditional film education but is sometimes expressed in lofty and dogmatic ways (e.g. ‘it is possible to speak very simply, and without fear, about cinema, if you only adopt the correct posture’ (2002, p. 20)). The programme has been accused of being elitist, and yet every year turns out powerful cinema driven by the agency of expressive and empowered children and young people. And finally, there is Bourdieu’s fascination with the question ‘how can behaviour be regulated without being the product of obedience to rules?’ (1990a): CCAJ actually does require ‘obedience to rules’, and yet hundreds of adult participants come in their own time, paying their own travel and accommodation, to follow these rules of their own free will.

Contradictions are difficult conceptual tensions to resolve; in his figure of ‘bi-stable oscillation’ (Lanham, 1993) the rhetorician Richard Lanham offers a way of holding together two opposing positions without compromising either one at the expense of the other. Bi-stable oscillation signifies a dialectical relationship between the two contrasting poles in each contradiction, like a force field kept in stasis. Bourdieu’s ‘fields’ also operate like this, like force fields, in which various positions, like minus and positive charges, help keep the field stable (Bourdieu, 1996). CCAJ, one might propose, operates in this way as a field within cinephilia, helping maintain it as a durable set of dispositions, or, in Bourdieu’s often quoted but cumbersome definition of habitus, ‘durable transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures’ (1977, p. 72). As a practice, CCAJ keeps the habitus of cinephilia going, within the fields of film and education. Its ‘force-field’ is kept in permanent tension with other versions of film, of education, and of film education.

There is maybe one final dimension of CCAJ to consider within the ‘cool frame’ of Bourdieu’s analytical tools: no matter how persuasive his field analysis, they fail to account for the heat – the passion – with which adults and young people each year commit themselves to the programme, and in the case of many of the adults, to the repeated renewal over many years, even decades. Counting myself among the participants now, we are not merely the instruments of cinephilia in our participation in the programme: as unwitting Deleuzians we drive it forward, along a collective ‘line of flight’, following a group desire to rediscover cinema anew, both for ourselves, and with each other.

Declarations and conflicts of interest

Filmography

L’Eden a la Ciotat (The Eden of Ciotat) (I 2022, Alain Bergala).