Introduction: In Praise of Hybridity
Utensils that are a priori entirely reducible to their functionality can become objects as unique as the people who own them and make them work. The completely standard character of the object is gradually altered by adaptation and marking procedures. With our camera or our boat, we all build affinities and intimate connections that transform the tool, way beyond the extension of the hand or an instrument of reason, into an alter ego. Between the churinga and the coffee grinder, two experiences of ‘the thing’ can be grasped, one in the realm of the strange, the other in the realm of the familiar. Whereas in religious rites the irruption of the thing, skillfully generated and staged, turns it practically into a person (a subject), the daily use of common objects and their capacity to answer us (‘the feedback of reality’) gives them a life that is inseparable from the one of their owners. It is therefore necessary, with Mauss, to seriously consider the singularity and ‘the soul’ of things and understand that a gift is never an exchange. Visible token of a personal and collective history, it opens an infinite debt, and beyond, a circuit of singular objects, a transfer of personalized things1.
On October 13 and 14, 2011, the Cinémathèque française organized a symposium named Digital Revolution: What if Cinema Lost Its Memory? Among the participants: Jean-Pierre Beauviala, the president of the Aaton Company, until 2013. He proposes the large audience in the Henri Langlois hall a dialogue around the question Towards a hybrid cinema? The idea of a possible hybridity that could allow for the preservation of the best of silver-based film in the digital realm, “to temper the loss, to limit the differences between film and digital,2” was never abandoned by the inventor. Jean-Pierre Beauviala added touches of this hybridity, sometimes with little scientific evidence: in the same symposium, when he stated that “the autochrome is exactly the principle which is used in the best performing digital cameras3” and launched the project of a digital sound recording device with two optical stereo tracks, visible to the naked eye; in his conversations with the students of the ENS Louis- Lumière he stressed the importance of continuing to teach silver-based film (March 13, 2018); when he imagined tools that resulted from the observation of gestures and lastly, in his last patent for the Delta Penelope camera.
Aaton: Imagining Tools through Gestures
Director Éliane de Latour has experimented with the interconnections of tools and gestures in all her films:
As we were rock, reggae, or rap, we were ‘aatonien,’ and in good company. Albert and David Maysles, Ricky Leackok, Michel Brault, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle, Pierre Perrault, Jean Rouch, and on the activist side: Renaud Victor, Richard Coppans… For twenty-five years, all my films were shot with Aaton cameras. My path followed their evolutions: LTR 16 mm, XTR Super 16 mm, 35 mm with accessories invented over the days by Jean-Pierre Beauviala. Integrated time code, comb shutter (never sold), white magazines against the sun (never sold), black frame in the viewfinder (never sold). I liked to frame. It’s something that can’t be learned but that you feel inside, with impressions of failure, relevance or euphoria in moments of fusion with a gesture or a light: two notes which suddenly vibrate together4.
These impressions of relevance, of euphoria, of failure, of fusion with a gesture or a light are evoked by the professionals who have had the opportunity to use the Delta Penelope camera: an unusual digital camera, tactile rather than digital. As Martin Roux emphasizes, with its shutter fitted with a classic rotating mirror, its flexible device randomly shifting the physical position of the sensor by half a pixel for each image, it gives the impression of regaining the aesthetic quality of the film roll. Its optical viewfinder, on which Pascal Martin focused his attention, “offers a particular feeling that is almost timeless, because nothing tells the person using it whether the recording is done on a sensor or on an emulsion behind the lens”. And he adds: “Doesn’t the flicker caused by the shutter (mainly on highlights) create, even unconsciously, a resonance with film projection?5”
Beyond the qualities or defects attributed to this camera that remained a prototype, for Thomas Weyland, it “allows apprentice operators to learn the ropes … forces to think the limits, to confront them and to find solutions that allow to exceed them, and possibly come back to them later to go even further.6” The reason that explains why the École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière devoted an educational workshop to the Delta Penelope, and why in this issue of the Cahier ENS Louis-Lumière it is a subject of focus to teachers, students and ex-students lies in the perspective of the ontological project which presided over its invention: to locate the aesthetic stake in the confluence of the gesture and the tool because “its entire conception is an invitation to the manual apprehension of the operator, be it the rotary selector, the optical viewfinder, or the shape of the camera made to fit to the shoulder.7” In contrast, therefore, to the increasingly disembodied perception of the digital tool. Hence the challenge of the educational workshop “Filming with the Delta Penelope” that allowed students to reflect on the concept of a prototype, of the non-standardized, thus leaving open the possible responses to technical constraints.
Among the devices built by the Aaton Company, the Cantar, the first eight-track digital sound recorder, is also special in its design. The latter results from the praxis, “the gestures involved in handling the recorder, the way in which the device allows movements and influences them are important during the phase of the development of the object but also for its integration in work.8” It is through the observation of working gestures, through discussions with sound engineers that the Cantar had been designed to meet the constraints of the profession: fast, discreet, flexible. As Jean-Pierre Duret testified to in an interview with Camille Pierre: “the essential thing is to maintain lightness, the proximity with the performance, with the set and the scene in the making, which the Cantar allows.9” It is this principle that tools need to be designed from gestures which is at the heart of the collaboration between the ENS Louis-Lumière and the ANR Beauviatech project; such as this publication that brings together academics, archivists, professionals, teachers, students, around the Aaton Company (1971-2013) whose inventions have always been imagined by users (technicians and filmmakers).
Life in the Factory and in the City
The objects in question here belong to both a personal and collective history: of Jean-Pierre Beauviala—the inventor, artist, industrialist of the Aaton Company, and of the professionals solicited to discover, test, suggest new tools. Certainly, cameras, sound recorders, accessories, are “objects as unique as the people who own them and make them work.10” The premises of the Aaton Company, located in the old quarter of downtown Grenoble, were thought out as a space designed to facilitate exchanges between Aatonians, technicians and also filmmakers. The latter frequently visited and on this occasion the prototypes were improved, the devices were experimented with, their qualities were sometimes called into question. “The Visit to Grenoble: The Aaton Factory Manufactures Images and Sounds” is a call that Vincent Sorrel and Nicolas Tixier made in order to collect testimonies on this mythical place; the first responses are published in this issue. The filmmaker and director of photography Bruno Carrière, the filmmaker and visual artist Valentine Miraglia, the photographer-director Eric Hurtado share their memories in rich details though they sometimes date back to 1979. A few days’ stay in Grenoble to discover the very special premises of the factory, try out Jean- Pierre Beauviala’s new jewels and chat with others who arrived at the same time, in particular: Raymond Depardon, Julie Flament, Jean-Pierre Rouette, René Vautier, William Lubtchansky.
Along with these oral testimonies, there are photographic traces which, no doubt, Jean-Pierre Beauviala favored. He let things happen, even in private; he became a model, he was the actor and the complacent eye of the photographer because he was aware that these images would one day constitute as many traces of the public and personal history of the Aaton Company and of Beauviala himself. He was careful not to separate the factory from the city people, the city people from the factory people:
Aaton is on the street where—as we were able to show yesterday with Raymond [Depardon]—all the people on the street can see what is happening inside a company, in a factory, in workshops, in a word, people at work. It was one of my concerns (…) A city for me was a place of life. Not only a place of merchants, not just a place of dormancy, but it was also a place of work and unfortunately in cities today there is no more work. The work is gone, the real work: the transformation has disappeared, what we call the secondary sector in economics; the primary being mining, agriculture …, the secondary being transformation and the tertiary being trade. And in the city there is practically no secondary left. Before there were carpenters, coachbuilders, painters…11
The series of photographs presented by Caroline Champetier and Pascal Lagriffoul opens on an emblematic image: the Aaton mechanical workshops seen through the windows of the rue de la Paix. It continues inside, where prototypists, technicians and filmmakers, “up to their elbows in it”, test the balance of a camera, of a viewfinder, or even the quartz devices for time marking. These photographs show another important aspect of Aaton’s activities: the presentation of its devices at trade shows, such as Photokina. The Aaton factory as a model—militant, committed but also attentive to the market—is also defended through advertising and put forward in the various interventions of Jean-Pierre Beauviala in the press and in particular in Les Cahiers du cinéma.12
Draw, Experiment, Redraw to Reinvent and Finally Patent
The constant exchange with the users of the devices is one of the characteristics of the Aaton Company. In their study of the Aaton archives preserved at the French Cinémathèque, Alexia de Mari and Jean-Baptiste Massuet present a hybrid collection of heterogeneous elements “ranging from personal documents—photographs, letters, drawings—to precise and detailed technical files—manufacturing plans, customer files (after-sales service), etc.13” Its analysis gives the opportunity to write a history of techniques in use in which the human and the technological come together, as the reader will be able to see from one text to another.
Marianne Bauer and Simon Daniellou have more specifically studied from this archive collection film documents that cover the period 1965-2008, from the advent of direct cinema to the digital transition. There too, hybridity reigns: technical essays, rushes, 16 mm, Super 16 and 35 mm formats, production copies, magnetic tapes, digital sound files, family films, documentaries, fictions. Even more so given that the shooting locations are both private (at Beauviala’s) and professional (at Aaton’s) and the purposes are of different kinds: formats, cameras, sound recorders suited for film professionals and others for television professionals. The tests relate both to new prototypes and to commonly used devices that can be transformed and developed. Thus, the Super 9.5 format is tested with a modified camera Beaulieu 9.5; the Super 16 format is tested by modifying an Éclair 16 camera in order to obtain an image much larger than that of the standard 16 mm (+ 40%), for an image ratio of 1.66:1 more suitable for blow ups in 35 mm, but also subsequently to transfer to 16/9 format (i.e. a ratio of 1.78:1). Tests for the 3-perf format are performed with a transformed Aaton 35 camera. As for time marking, it is the subject of numerous tests intended to test two possibilities. On the one hand, the simultaneous recording of images and sounds (preferred by Jean-Pierre Beauviala) by processes such as the “single system”. On the other hand, the independent recording of images and sounds whose synchronization is ensured by a clear-marking system readable with the naked eye (a principle Jean-Pierre Beauviala was attached to), such as the system integrated in the Aaton 7 LTR camera (option T) or later, in the mid-1980s, the double time marking (Aaton Code) incorporated in the Aaton XTR cameras and “read”, in post-production, thanks to the dual reading heads of the Linker telecine. For Marianne Bauer and Simon Daniellou, with these tests “thus emerges a Beauviala ‘director,’ who knows what matters to a filmmaker, a cameraman and therefore a camera: the depth of field management, the luminosity, the relationship of the imager to the space and the filmed object (impact of the ergonomics on the cameraman’s movements, panoramic versus traveling, 45° viewfinder for low angle and management of the frame tremor) and the respective freedom between the latter and the sound recorder.14”
Upstream and downstream of a praxis where Jean-Pierre Beauviala sometimes plays alternatively the role of director of photography and the role of filmmaker, the drawing is made to set the patent and the prototype to come. In an interview with Bérénice Bonhomme and Frédéric Tabet, he told them: “I often have ideas in the shower: ideas mature through the night. […] When I arrived at the office in the morning, I made a sketch … or not even, I certainly explained it to Aaton’s chief drafter. I probably didn’t do the drawing myself. Once I had the idea, we made a small prototype.15” In the same interview, he also explained that to rethink a mechanism that did not satisfy him (such as the LTR drive system borrowed from the Éclair) he needed to draw it in order to imagine a new one and patent it.
The patents enlighten this work of invention, correction, and then of reinvention in the genealogy of Aaton devices. They show “an obvious desire for continuity which runs through the history of the company and is characterized by a progressive integration of new technologies.16” Alexia de Mari 17 notes that patents can have several functions at Aaton: they set innovations; serve as a protection after a lawsuit; preserve future applications. Thus, the single system whose genesis is presented by Jean-Baptiste Massuet rests on three successive patents18 ; the one on the 8-35 was never really conclusive but the experiments on the prototype made it possible to better think through the Aaton 35 before patenting it19; the “Paluche” marketed under the name Aaton 30 was initially intended as a video assist of the Aaton 7, before standing on its own under several successive versions20. This “obsession” to improve the existing and not only imagine the new accompanied Jean-Pierre Beauviala from his very first steps in the world of machines when “he perfected the design of an auto-focusing enlarger while still only in high school21” and in 1955 when he offered Semflex to modify their phonographic devices in order to optimize the surface of the photographic film. The idea of perfecting the quality of roll film will never leave him, including in the transition to digital technology where this quality will remain his reference. Thus for chronometric marking22, despite the transition from the analogical to the pixel, he dreams of a solution that would make it visible, visible to the naked eye.
Reclaiming the Tools to Imagine New Aesthetics
After the genesis of the inventions and the research on the Aaton Company, it was necessary to turn our attention to the films that had used the equipment. Several studies allow us to measure the impact of the machines on the aesthetics of films. The A-Minima cameras, the Paluche, the Aaton 16 LTR, the Aaton XTR Super 16, the 8-35, the Cantar are thus studied in relation to the direction of images and sounds. Yet, to question a film and to interpret it through this alternate point of view and of listening is to assume a posture which is still quite rare in the academic and the film critique worlds. To consider film analysis from the point of view of the devices “encourages us to think the question of cinematographic creation from a new point of view, by articulating the directors’ directing methods with the equipment chosen for the shooting—and therefore, with the know-how of the technicians who fully contribute to the stylistic identity of the film, thought as a collective work23”.
Such is the case of Urban Sax in Venice (1981) by Bénédicte Delesalle and Marie-Ange Poyet, where the performance of the Paluche and the performance of composer Gilbert Artman and his group Urban Sax merge as “the camera improvises and abolishes distances: she examines a saxophone, follows the choreographed steps of the musicians, skimming the ground, at knee height, accompanies the procession, meddles in the group, over their heads and shoulders. We get closer, in a striking proximity, we suddenly move away, surprising the group of intrigued passers-by 24”. It is also via two (Aaton 16 LTR) cameras that Jean-Rouch and Raymond Depardon execute a practical exercise on the act of filming. Ciné-portrait de Raymond Depardon par Jean Rouch et réciproquement directed in 1983 in the Tuileries gardens is a short film which demonstrates in ten minutes a real concept of documentary films: “the exercise of reflexivity on which it is based [this ciné-portrait] particularly highlights the preponderant place of technique, in this case light and maneuverable devices developed by Jean-Pierre Beauviala and the Aaton Company25”.
A device is at the center of the Beauviala/Godard encounters: the 8.35 camera—so longed for, and then immediately rejected by the filmmaker. And yet it corresponded to a desire to “be able to make a simple image” or “simply make an image26” by the appropriation of an unclassified object27: a prototype imagined to capture the emergence of a phenomenon before it disappears and allowing the filmmaker to do the framing himself. If only a few shots (those on-the-fly of the opening of Passion, 1982) remained of “this story, where the technical invention meets the formal invention,” Vincent Sorrel nevertheless notes that “we find shots of clouds, referencing those shot with an 8.35, almost from film to film, and this, throughout Godard’s work, until Adieu au langage (2014)28”. This prototype as well as the Delta Penelope camera, although they were never industrialized, left lasting marks in the imagination of the filmmaker. For Route One/USA, the two are one as Rober Kramer, with XTR Super 16 camera on his shoulder, can go out to meet his fellow citizens without having to worry about miking thanks to the synchronization provided by time marking. This freedom seems to have allowed this expatriate American to rediscover his own country with a new eye: “Cat on the shoulder, but now also a cat whose senses of sight and hearing are no longer necessarily alerted to the same stimuli, the XTR camera will contribute to the view and hearing that Robert Kramer has of these United States which he tries, after a long absence, to reconcile the pieces of at the end of the Reagan era29”. Robert Kramer’s flagship work would probably not have the definitive form we know it for without the Aaton equipment available to the filmmaker when he began filming in 1987.
It is difficult to imagine the performance of free and collective speech in Entre les Murs (Laurent Cantet, 2008) without the device made out of two Aaton Cantar multitrack digital recorders that allowed the simultaneous recording of sixteen tracks. This sound device coupled with three Panasonic VariCam HD cameras “allows for the responsiveness of all participants, each being able to be fully focused on the present”. Gilles Mouëllic continues by stating that “this will not to ritualize the director’s interventions desacralizes the recording and releases new energies based on permanent exchanges between the film crew and the actors, exchanges which create a form of pleasure of playing that we find throughout film30”. The portability, and the miniaturization of three Aaton Cantars with eight tracks, plus a four-track Sonosax have also allowed the live sound recording with twenty-three HF microphones of the famous music band sequence in Saint-Merri Church (Holly Motors, Leos Carax, 2012)31 . With this device, photogenics of the image and aesthetics of reduced listening complete each other. This principle of multiple technical devices is, again, at work in Démineurs (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008). Here several Aaton cameras—an XTR and an A-Minima—are orchestrated to reinforce the proximity with one of the characters and emphasize the distance with others. The A-Minima is in the middle of the action while the XTR cameras are set back in an observation role. Through the immersiveness this camera allows for, the spectator and the cinematographer of the film, Barry Ackroyd, share “the way in which the character lives and experiences his job as a mine-clearer, without distance, constantly caught up in the urgency of the situations he is confronted with32”.
The last example presented in this issue, the hybrid shooting of First Man (Damien Chazelle, 2018) for which, among the range of cameras used, the Aaton Super 16 or 35 mm cameras occupy a prominent place. The use of analog cameras in 2018 on a Hollywood film set for a block buster movie retracing a famous period of the space race was anything but obvious. Unless you consider that the filmmaker’s interest is much more in the intimacy of the Armstrong couple, their hearts shaken not so much by the jolts of a rocket taking off as by the vagaries of an upended life 33.
Of course, these studies are limited to a few significant examples and specific cases of Aaton cameras and sound recorders. Nevertheless, these brief studies bear witness to the importance of taking devices into account in the aesthetic analysis of films. And yet, many movies still have to be examined from this point of view, because, despite the increasing interest shown by researchers and critics in the history of techniques, the separation between art and technique persists. However, the fact that artists have always used the technology of their time is a banality. The cinema, like all art, has its materials and its machinery. As Pamela Z—composer, performer, intermedial artist (performance, theater, cinema)—emphasizes, it is difficult today not to be touched by the rise of computers and digital technology, and in this regard, she is no exception:
The computer is a tool, and I have a very strong relationship with my tools […] I have made some of my greatest artistic advances and discoveries every time I have started using a new tool to do my job. I’ve learned over the years that one of the best ways to spur growth or a new direction in my work is to introduce a new instrument in my arsenal. I can, in fact, trace back major changes in my work throughout my life as coinciding with the introduction of these instruments. Of course, tools alone don’t make great art. I like to think that the breakthroughs I have described above stem from the combination of the effects of using the new tool and my strengths as an artist34.
In art, nothing goes without technique. “There is no artistic object that does not depend on technique. But it is impossible to define art through technique” (Marc-Mathieu Münch, “Una cosa mentale…?”, Le Portique, n° 3, 1999). This is the fundamental paradox of the relationship between art and technique: Nec tecum possum vivere nec sine te (“I can’t live with or without you”). Paradoxically, “Aaton: A New Take on Cinema” does not dodge the question but on the contrary searches in order to overcome the sterile opposition between aesthetics and technique and accept the problematic presence of technique. The studies and testimonies in this number 14 of the Cahier de l’ENS Louis-Lumière focus essentially on Aaton’s activities in France. There is still much research to be undertaken to account for the international impact of Jean-Pierre Beauviala’s technical and industrial, as much as human and artistic, adventure.
^ [^15]: Cité in BONHOMME B. et TABET T., “Jean-Pierre Beauviala: Thoughts on Inventions”, p. 61-68.
Giusy Pisano
Giusy Pisano is a university profesor at the École nationale supérieure (ENS) Louis-Lumière, researcher at IRCAV, research director at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. Her latest publications : Des ciné- goûters aux séances pour les cinéphiles. Les cinémas des Instituts français et des Alliances françaises (dir. 2021), Magie numérique, (codirection 2020), Le Panorama, un art trompeur, (codirection 2019), Dispositifs sonores (codirection 2019), Stéréoscopie et illusion, (codirection 2018), Machines. Magie. Media, (co-direction 2018).
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GRIZET D., Les appareils de prise de vues de la société Aaton (1971-2013). Du «direct» au «numérique»: enjeux techniques et esthétiques, Master’s thesis, Recherche en Études cinématographiques, under the supervision of MOUËLLIC G., Université Rennes 2, 2017, p. 87.↩︎
Vers un cinéma hybride? Dialogue avec Jean-Pierre Beauviala.↩︎
DE LATOUR E., “La fausse bataille de l’art et de la science. Mise en scène cinématographique en ethnologie” Revue française des méthodes visuelles, 2 | 2018, posted on July 12, 2018, consulted on 08/11/2020, Enlace.↩︎
MARTIN P., “Optical Viewfinding”, p. 145-149.↩︎
WEYLAND T., “ Learning the Image: From the Camcorder to the Delta Penelope”, p. 153-165.↩︎
ROUX M., “The Penelope Delta, the Last Tactile Camera”, p. 139-144.↩︎
PIERRE C., «Manier le Cantar: la mise en œuvre d’un geste de travail», p. 166 à 172.↩︎
ROUX M., “The Penelope Delta, the Last Tactile Camera”, p. 139-144.↩︎
BAZIN J., BENSA A., “Les objets et les choses: Des objets à ‘la chose,’” Genèses, 17, 1994, p. 6.↩︎
MIRAGLIA V., “An Aatonian in Grenoble”, p. 100-109.↩︎
GODEFROY T., “Jean-Pierre Beauviala in the Cahiers du cinéma: The Story of the Inventor”, p. 125-135.↩︎
DE MARI A. et MASSUET J.-B., “The Study of the Aaton Collection: A Challenge to Cinema Research and a Sign of the Times”, p. 29-38.↩︎
BAUER M. et DANIELLOU S., “The Aaton Film Collection: Technical Tests and Slices of Life”, p. 39-53.↩︎