The Abyss on Screen. "Warning Device" and Sociological Analysis in Three Contemporary Films

• Grant number: 24/06993-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: November 28, 2024
• End date: February 25, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Mauro Luiz Rovai
• Grantee: Mauro Luiz Rovai
• Host Investigator: Anne Simon
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: École Normale Supérieure, France

Abstract

This research discuss the notion of the "enterprise" as a social imaginary signification in three contemporary films - Sorry We Missed You (directed by Ken Loach, UK, France, Belgium, 2019), Exil (directed by Visar Morina, Germany, Belgium, Kosovo, 2020) and Un Autre Monde (directed by Stéphane Brizé, France, 2021). It aims at identifying certain approximations, distances or insistences that allow us to put spcific aspects of contemporary societies into perspective, especially those in which the "enterprise" form is dominant in how people make sense of their own lives, the others and the world they inhabit. The hypothesis is that these films constitute a kind of triptych and that, together, they could be seen as a "warning device", because some elements that are constant on them seem to stage imaginary significations more linked to the desire for heteronomy than that of autonomy. From a methodological point of view, both the epistemic basis - the theoretical foundations that allow us to deal with images and sounds as objects of investigation in sociology - and the procedural basis - the mode of analysis - are mediated by two authors: sociologist Pierre Francastel and historian Pierre Sorlin. The underlying concern is to give a heuristic character to the analysis of films, making them speak from hypotheses placed on their plastic, expressive universe, and not taking them as secondary to prove what other areas of the social sciences have already shown through different methods.