18 November 2023

15:40 – 16:25

Amphithéâtre Faure

Cyril Lepot

Cyril Lepot holds a doctorate from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. A specialist in stop motion, his research focuses mainly on analyzing the specificity of the medium and its effects, with a view to developing the concept of plasmaticity and the possibility of analog simulations. He has published several articles in English and French, including “Understanding the empirical process of animating to open up the field of stop motion analog simulation”, “Transfiguring matter: from the multiple in power to the multiple in act”, “Stop motion: cinematographic singularity and alternative to CGI simulations”, “Stop-motion: from plastic to plasmatic cinema”, “Poetics of movement in image-by-image”, “stereoscopic 3D: when watching is animating”, “From image order to ordered gaze in stereoscopic 3D cinema”.

Conference: Are we talking about energy in cinema to promote an energetic or vitalist discourse?

Since the work of Sokal and Bricmont, we know that the use of a vocabulary derived from the sciences by the humanities tends to divert notions into various forms of ultimately pseudo-scientific discourse. In a logic that is often vitalistic, some writings on cinema, particularly animated film, invoke energy as an artistic character with a mechanistic purpose, as well as a vitalistic manifestation of a “spirit of matter” revealing a hidden order, a divine architecture or program specific to living things. We’ll also see that cinema isn’t necessarily concerned with a logic of intensity or attraction, but that mechanisms of transformation and effects of matter can also be at play, particularly when film is concerned with problems of plasticity and sensitive appearances. This theoretical return to materiality is a reflection of principles relating to time scales and the properties of matter. In the final analysis, it’s not only the abusive extrapolation of scientific statements that can be criticized, but also the logic of Promethean power and artistic demiurgy that can be seen in the interpretation of works derived from many film theories.