In 1948 Alexandre Astruc, a filmmaker and theorist suggested the notion of caméra-stylo (camera pen) in his essay, The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo (PDF). He imagined that cinema would eventually break free of the demands of classical narrative and images and would become a flexible means of writing with the same expressive power, complexity, and subtly, of written language. Astruc also envisioned a distribution system with “projectors for everyone,” anticipating what we experience with YouTube and other online video services today. He was a bit off regarding the material conditions (16mm films on library shelves), but the conceptualization was spot on.

Today, writing with a camera has yet to achieve the expressiveness Astruc envisioned, but the trend towards its realization is palpable. Astruc would have loved our contemporary media landscape, especially artist’s videos, music videos, and video essays challenging traditional film grammar. Astruc wrote that the future of cinema would revolve around the director as auteur, which was an important idea behind the French New Wave. Fast forwarding to the present: personal videos shared on Vimeo and YouTube and the renaissance of television series on streaming channels like Netflix and Hulu have become the dominant narrative forms of a new generation. And we've recently witnessed the rise of the YouTube New Wave, an artistic movement that has emerged as a response to the so-called “Beastification” of YouTube.

Astruc’s idea of film as a language independent of literature provides the theoretical and historical foundation for this site. We are in the midsts of a cultural transformation in which the moving image is becoming more personal, a form of visual writing, we are both media producers and consumers as we enter a new age of “visual orality” (following Walter Ong’s analysis). The articles, handouts, and resources on this site are designed to prepare you to express yourself using the moving image effectively in the contemporary media ecosystem.

David Tamés
August 26, 2023