Issue 40, Autumn 2022
Guest-edited by Frédérique Berthet and Marion Froger
This issue explores the medial dimension of the act and gesture of “entrusting” through the prism of the practices and works that enable its exploration. It examines the relations of entrusting involved in the act of creation, as well as the forms allowing for its expression and perception. How do the media shape these connections of trust? How do the forms—or the medium’s powers of narration, figuration, staging or writing—transmit them? The eleven articles in this issue take into account the history of cultural practices, the potentialities of certain techniques of reproduction and dissemination, of the necessary know-hows, of improvisations and risk-takings, that have shaped relationships of trust since medieval times, as well as the media spaces in which contemporary works circulate. A lengthy introduction situates the act and gesture of entrusting within larger problematics: the sharing of intimacy in the cinema, the modalities of transmission of filial memory as a way of making history, the dual scales—micro and macro—of analysis, and the epistemic virtue of trust found here in visual, sound and literary practices and works.
Thanks to the contributors to this issue (philosophers, literary scholars and film studies specialists), readers will be invited to return to the time of Saint Augustine (Stout, Méchoulan, Trudeau-Beaunoyer), where the auteurist act of entrusting arises in the medium of writing, to practice an intensified kind of listening to imaginary relational or compassionate scenes (Garneau, Piégay), to follow the intermedial trajectories of what life forces us to entrust (to media) when threatened with disappearance, and to hence share in its happiness or burden : a presence in the world (Sarrazy), a community of remembrance (Mariniello), a cryptic trauma (Lamoureux). This issue’s guest artists (Suzanne Beth and Anne Lardeux, and Christophe Loizillon) will take readers inside the act of entrusting that lies at the heart of their practice as filmmakers, whether this ethical, political and aesthetic act is hoped for, prevented or accomplished.