La "ville décor" : accueil de tournages de films et mise en place d'une nouvelle esthétique urbaine

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 90s, different French cities and regions have been organised to host film shooting teams. In a way to help them to choose the different film settings, the city is "cut" by the local authorities into "selected pieces", presented on different materials (Books, CD-ROMs, SIG, etc.).Our hypothesis has two main points: first, these materials both create and communicate a new idea of urban aesthetics, which does not follow the classical aesthetic codes of current urban communication materials. These are not the "aesthetics of conformity" of the urban marketing brochures or materials, but "anti-aesthetics" exploiting different, unusual, or original elements. Second, local authorities tend to exploit these cinematographic aesthetics: they try to show the city as it has been caught by the camera. "Cinema eye" gives an added value to places which did not necessarily have a recognised aesthetic quality.We speak about the "city as a setting" because we think that the different initiatives taken by the local authorities in a way to attract film shooting tend to transform the city into a gigantic set. Material created for this occasion (brochures, books, CD-ROMs) "cut" the city into photographic sequences, which are characterised, annotated, commented. In a context in which, thanks to television, cinema, the internet, urban experience tends to be less and less real, and more and more virtual, the question of the creation of urban images and aesthetics by the cinema becomes extremely important.

Keywords

• city
• cinema
• hyperreality
• urban image
• virtual image
• urban communication