This project accomplishes an innovative and challenging analysis of the enunciative devices of the European Francophone essay film –from a semiotic-pragmatic approach and through an interdisciplinary and intermedial study from its first materialisations in modern cinema to the very present– in order to determine the audiovisual procedures that embody the expression of subjectivity, the thinking process and self-reflexiveness, which define this stimulating filmic form. Starting from the concept of Francophonie, and through an innovative interdisciplinary and intermedial approach that relates cinema to philosophy, semiotics to aesthetics and cinema history to cultural and gender studies, the research establishes firstly a typology of the different enunciative devices: audiovisual materials, intermedial forms and filmic procedures. Secondly, the research analyses the relationship between these and the themes addressed by the essay films and the artistic movements they belong to, from its birth in modern cinema to the very present, where this essayistic practice has known a great proliferation due to the digital revolution. Thirdly, the research determines the functionality of the different enunciative devices, exploring how identity –individual, social, political, gender, artistic– thinks through cinema, and how European Francophone culture has thought itself in the past and thinks itself in the present. The project includes the gender dimension by analysing if there is a gendered subjectivity in women’s authorship and its possible specificities. The research also studies the representation of the woman in the essay film and the possible presence of a gender bias. Finally, the project, considering the essay film as a social, political and artistic developer that fosters critical thinking by both the spectator and society, also analyses the function of the spectator in this dialogic filmic form. Thus, the research contributes concretely to European excellence in Film Studies and to the creation of a common, current and widespread European culture.
OBJECTIVES
1) To establish a typology of the different enunciative devices of this audiovisual form, describing their functionalities to generate subjective audiovisual thinking.
2) To analyse the functionality of each enunciative device of the essay film regarding the artistic movements to which the work belongs and the topics discussed.
3) To analyse the functionality of each enunciative device regarding the spectator’s reception.
4) To analyse the evolution of the different enunciative devices at all these different levels and to present the final conclusions of the research.
