The conference “Plan” et “Champ” dans le cinéma des premiers temps was held from 8 to 12 June 2016 at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy.

Today, when we analyse a film, we generally employ fairly regularly the concepts “shot” (plan)and “field” (champs), which are then discussed in terms of questions around découpage and image composition, but whose origins in different media are barely examined today.

And yet neither one of these concepts was “invented” for or by the cinema: each came out of diverse cultural series (in particular the theatre, painting, photography, architecture, the illustrated press) and could be defined and used in different ways, which were necessarily echoed by the earliest forms of kinematography, not only in the filmed material itself but also in the discourses around it.

The conference, them, was an opportunity to reflect on the overlapping references between early kinematography and other cultural practices in the early twentieth century, not only in the ways in which they took up the concepts “shot” and “field”, which have long been seen as uniquely cinematic, but also in the very way they are named.

The program of the conference “Plan” et “Champ” dans le cinéma des premiers temps