Honeymoons, marital crises, children leaving home: as in real life, fictional characters film their loved ones, confide in their cameras and, above all, look at images from the past. Today’s cinema is full of references to amateur practices made commonplace by technological developments: home movie, filmed diary, reportage, surveillance footage and snuff film are all made using Super-8 or video, webcams or pocket films.
This book takes stock of this all-too-often invisible process, whose reflexivity makes it a revealing motif that can disclose a secret meaning and create a signature effect. The book is based on numerous analyses of sequences and films, some of them very well-known – Rebecca, Peeping Tom, Paris, Texas, Caché – and others that have become cult films thanks to the use of this aesthetic matrix, both in mainstream cinema – The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, for example – and in autofiction, with Pardonnez-moi or Tarnation.

‘It’s 2012, and the films flashing before my eyes are those shot by my grandfather. I was immediately charmed by their distinctive grain, their lightness and even their sincerity. But I realise that the family film is no longer relevant. It’s as if the camera had turned around 180 degrees, giving value to the author of his own images! So I couldn’t help myself, I had to find a way of safeguarding and enhancing this practice by preserving some of these family films. By making what I call chronographic plastic poems, I reinject them into an artistic sphere. So this work is motivated both by a quest for the veracity of the cinematographic image and by a concern to safeguard this audiovisual heritage.’