About Intervalles is a laboratory, a meeting place for exploring reality and finding ways to represent it through a dialogue between filmmaking and the social sciences. Thinking about intervals means uncovering the paths between these worlds.
Intervalles’ activities are structured around three areas of experimentation: filmmaking, facilitating workshops, and distribution.
The Production
Committed to exploring alternative forms of research writing and dedicated to the expression of open science, the Intervalles association develops audiovisual projects in collaboration with researchers. Depending on the research teams’ expectations and the constraints of the field, Intervalles uses film as a tool for investigating reality, enabling the production of sensory and empirical knowledge that engages both our senses and our analytical minds. Within these collaborations, Intervalles also uses film as a tool for structuring and presenting research results, which can interact with other visual, textual, or numerical data. Intervalles thus offers the opportunity to explore unique dynamics that, through narrative and staging choices, seek to provide access to broader phenomena. Together with research teams, we develop filmic devices that get as close as possible to the people being interviewed in order to bring about an embodied discourse that produces situated knowledge.
Facilitating Film Writing workshops
Committed to exploring socially engaged film writing practices, the Intervalles association offers workshops where popular education tools, theatrical improvisation exercises, and physical expression are used in the creation of audiovisual materials. Intervalles uses these workshops as a preliminary step to the writing of a film, aiming for a collaborative approach to the research film. Researchers and/or participants are introduced to cinematic language and image and sound recording techniques. While research participants are encouraged to shoot their own footage, researchers can revisit their research methods, their modes of scientific argumentation and narrative, to develop a more sensitive expression of the world, and to become autonomous in the production of their own films. These workshop sessions are also used during film screenings to encourage discussion during film debates. This allows for reflective dialogue between researchers and diverse audiences.
Distribution/dissemination
Dissemination is a crucial aspect of the open science project. It is the final stage, the moment when results are shared and allow for discussion. This is why we place great importance on how we organize these exchanges, on the collaborative creation of immersive film screenings followed by discussions. These event-screenings, presented as immersive experiences, expand upon traditional dissemination methods in conferences, cinemas and educational spaces. The event-based approach, geared towards local residents, allows us to attract a different audience. Intervalles is also involved in the dissemination of socio-anthropological films and, more broadly, creative documentaries which, through their artistic choices, open up spaces for discussion and reflection on our world. These sessions, open to residents of urban areas, but especially rural ones, invite us to question aspects of reality that we elude, different ways of inhabiting the world, of experiencing it, of expressing it in words and stories. They challenge us and make connections with what we don’t know, prompting us to think and renew our ways of seeing and hearing. They provide opportunities for discussion with the filmmakers and/or with specialists in cinema and/or the social sciences.