Abstract
Cinema, like all the arts, aims to show the invisible, in the sense that they are all interpretations thwarting the projects of the proponents of objectivism or pure realism—of reality, the world around us, and the humans who populate it. Sociology’s primary task is to unveil what is hidden, that is to say, to dismantle social phenomena in order to reveal their underlying forces which are imperceptible to the naked eye. Thus, one convergence between sociology and cinema rests on this capacity and disciplinary will to render visible what is invisible, to practice the “revealing function” emphasized by the theorists of cinema.
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Notes
- 1.
With regard to the betrayal of the image and the image that escapes us—in what is not strictly speaking a history of the image—see “the close link between image and emotion,” which the psychoanalyst highlights (Tisseron 2010).
- 2.
For example, according to the same filmmaker, “when we go to the cinema, we raise our heads. When we watch television, we lower them.”
- 3.
We should add the inaudible, that is to say what cannot be heard or is not easily accessible to the ear or rather to the hearing of each individual, as understood by the great sound engineers, whose sensory sensitivity is too often neglected in documentaries.
- 4.
This brings us back to a philosophical question in order to distinguish the tangible from the material. For the materialists, this change of position of a goose has no physical thickness, but remains a material fact, from the point of view of the theory of knowledge. This is why we do not use the term material in its common meaning equivalent to physical or tangible.
- 5.
His team made several films, particularly in the urban field. Essentially ethnographic films such as the one on the ways of living in the same configuration of new apartments in Vélizy, a city close to Versailles, they are hardly convincing from the point of view of cinematographic form. They put us in direct contact with highly differentiated cultural and social uses of space, in what a priori seemed to be a very socially homogeneous residence. In this, they constitute an interesting example of the use of cinema in sociology (Aline Ripert, Colette Sluys, L’utilisation de l’espace. Les salles de séjour d’un ensemble résidentiel, CNRS, Centre d’Études Sociologiques et Ve section EPHE, 1970, 24). https://videotheque.cnrs.fr/index.php?urlaction=doc&id_doc=450&rang=1.
- 6.
For an extensive development of this theme, highlighted by a debate with a number of philosophers, see Joyce Sebag, “Le temps de travail au cinéma: comment représenter l’intangible?” in Claude Durand and Alain Pichon (coord.), Temps de travail et temps libre, Brussels, De Boeck, 2001.
- 7.
Cf. Pierre Perrault, “Un cinéma de réalité,” Interview with Guy Gauthier, Image et son, n° 183, April 1965, p. 55–60.
- 8.
See also the review Activités, the voice of the “dynamics of activity” current in work psychology: https://journals.openedition.org/activites.
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Sebag, J., Durand, JP. (2023). Showing the Invisible in the Sociological Documentary. In: Filmic Sociology. Social Visualities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33696-6_6
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