Digital video and Alexandre Integrated Media – WEEK 2 Reading: Astruc’s caméra-stylo: the new avant-garde in documentary realized?

Bjørn Sørenssen’s article describes how the remediation of film from the early 1900’s to today, has created an evolution of film and how narrative can be presented through different formats and styles. Sørenssen quotes “Astruc in Graham 1968” where he describes how “the day is not far off when everyone will possess a projector” and will hire out educational films at the “local bookstore” now known as video stores and progressively evolving into iTunes Movies or Pirate Bay for those delving in illegal piracy. This explains how he contends that the evolution of film being continuously appropriated and remediated will lead to a more accessible media via the internet, as opposed to just stopping at “local bookstores”. He then explains how “video stores are closer to the kind of superficial entertainment”, contradicting Astruc’s “wishful thinking of a French post-war intellectual” media stage. Astruc’s filmic style of using the camera “like a pen” as an author would write a book, is explaining how he became the new ‘avant-garde’. I’m not too sure how this connected to Sørenssen’s contention, but I can understand how the creator of the new avante garde for his time would be seen to have an influence on the remediation of filmic style as well as the accessibility of film through the introduction of 16mm footage in cinemas during the early 1930’s.