Enquêter sur une réalité sociale à partir de la fiction cinématographique

Abstract

Does the detour through fiction make it possible to investigate social realities that are difficult to access and to do research differently with the respondents by placing their speech at the heart of it? In the context of a socio-filmic research on young people and love in a working-class neighborhood in the Paris region, we were led to work from fiction and improvisation to tackle such a subject that usually remains in the realm of private life. We set up film workshops in which we proposed to about twenty young people, aged 14 to 16 years old and inhabitants of the neighborhood, to reflect on these questions of love and relationships between girls and boys by playing improvisations that were filmed and then projected and discussed with them.If it allowed to set tongues wagging, this passage through fiction and improvisation also aimed to create a space for dialogue and exchange with the respondents. It was thus a question of creating spaces for words and games, but also of bringing the young people filmed to a certain reflexivity about their own image, their behaviour and their representations of relations between girls and boys in the neighbourhood, notably through the practice of video elicitation. Fiction was thus not only a means of restoring knowledge about a social reality, but also a real investigative tool.By going back over one of the improvisations that came out of these workshops, the discussions and interviews that followed, we will analyze the way in which the young people tried to represent themselves and the social logics at work in this process while sketching out certain methodological and epistemological reflections raised by this investigative work from an imaginary reality.

Keywords

• fieldwork
• fiction
• improvisation
• working class district
• youth
• love