André Gaudreault (born 23 April 1952) is a Canadian film historian and theorist who holds the Canada Research Chair in Film and Media Studies.
Bibliography After obtaining a bachelor's degree in 1975 at Université Laval in Quebec City, he continued his studies at Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, where he did doctoral work under and Michel Colin, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1983 with a dissertation entitled “Récit scriptural, récit théâtral, récit filmique: prolégomènes à une théorie narratologique du cinéma". During his studies, he became familiar with the work of Gérard Genette on narratology and with that of Christian Metz on film semiotics. These two thinkers have exercised a great influence on his work.See his interview of Christian Metz, « Entretien », 24 images, no 49 (été), p. 63-65. https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/images/1990-n49-images1122675/24212ac.pdf
Following his doctorate, he was named associate professor and later full professor at Université Laval, where he taught until 1991, when he became a full professor at the Université de Montréal. In 1992 he co-founded, with Germain Lacasse, the Groupe de recherche sur l’avènement et la formation des institutions cinématographique et scénique (GRAFICS) and then, in 1997, with three colleagues from the Université de Montréal, the Centre de Recherche sur l’Intermédialité/Centre for Research into Intermediality (CRI), which he headed until 2005. From 1999 to 2016 he was director of the journal Cinémas. In 2007, he co-founded, with Denis Héroux, the Observatoire du cinéma au Québec, a scholarly crossroads which encourages exchange and partnerships between cinema professionals in Quebec and film students. In 2012, he co-founded, with Gilles Mouëllic (Université Rennes 2) and Maria Tortajada (Université de Lausanne) the international research partnership TECHNÈS, of which he is also the director.
Since 2013 he has held the Canada Research Chair in Film and Media Studies. In 2016 he founded the Laboratoire CinéMédias. Currently, he is director of the Programme de recherche sur l’archéologie et la généalogie du montage/editing (PRAGM/e), which he co-founded in 2018.
He is or has been a member of various scholarly journal committees, including:See section 9.1 of André Gaudreault's complete resume: https://andre.gaudreault.openum.ca/a-propos/curriculum-vitae-telechargeable/ Les Cahiers de la Cinémathèque (Perpignan, France); Sociétés & Représentations (Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, France); Film History (American Museum of the Moving Image, New York); Archivos de la Filmoteca (Valencia, Spain); Early Popular Visual Culture (formerly Living Pictures: The Journal of the Popular and Projected Image, Abingdon, England); Cinema & Cie (Università degli Studi di Udine, Italy); Recherches en communication (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium); and 1895. (Paris, France).
Work His work combines a historical and theoretical approach. This dual orientation is at the heart of his principal books, Du littéraire au filmique (1988; translated in 2009 as From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema); and Cinéma et attraction (2008; translated in 2011 as Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema). These volumes examine the earliest years of cinema from both a historiographical and a narratological perspective.See section about André Gaudreault in Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie's Dictionnaire critique et théorique du cinéma, 3rd edition, Paris, Armand Colin, 2016.
His scholarly work forms part of what is known as the “new film history.” This new approach, which coincided with the emergence of cinema studies in North American universities, was the fruit of young film historians working in the late 1970s.Elsaesser, Thomas, “The New Film History,” Sight & Sound, LV:4 (Fall), 1986, pp. 246-251. These “new historians” rejected teleological and linear approaches, along with the “great man theory,” which had characterised film history before then. They were driven above all by a concern for scholarly accuracy rather than by cinephilia and based their work on close analysis of period sources (both films and non-film objects) and archival work.Paul Kusters, “New Film History. Grundzüge einer neuen Filmgeschichtswissenschaft,” Montage/AV, V:1, 1996, pp. 39-60.
In this respect, André Gaudreault's work underscores the importance of the intrication of cultural practices in cinema's genesis. In From Plato to Lumière (2009 ) and Film and Attraction (2011 ), Gaudreault also emphasised the role of a number of economic, technical and legal contingencies in the emergence and institutionalisation of cinematic practices. Known for the concepts “the cinema of attractions” and “kine-attractography” (“cinématographie-attraction”), André Gaudreault was also one of the first scholars to foreground the concepts “intermediality” and “cultural series.”See "Les vues cinématographiques selon Georges Méliès, ou : comment Mitry et Sadoul avaient peut-être raison d’avoir tort (même si c’est surtout Deslandes qu’il faut lire et relire)," in Jacques Malthête et Michel Marie (eds), Georges Méliès, l’illusionniste fin de siècle ?, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle/Colloque de Cerisy, Paris, 1997, pp. 111-131. See also "L'intermédialité du cinématographe," in André Gaudreault, Cinéma et attraction, Paris, CNRS, 2008, pp. 111-144.
With François Jost, he is the co-author of Le Récit cinématographique, an introductory volume to narratological theories of cinema which has been republished several times and translated into various languages. Developing terminology borrowed from Gérard Genette, Tzvevetan Todorov and Étienne Souriau, this book explores the different elements of cinematic narrative, such as the filmic narrator, time, space and point of view.Jean-Claude Jaubert, "André Gaudreault and François Jost's Le Récit cinématographique [compte rendu]," Cinémas, I:3 (Spring) 1991, pp. 151–153. Francesco Casetti explains: “[Gaudreault and Jost’s] merit lies in the analysis of the relation between the narrated story and the act of narration, as well as in the discovery—in the encounter of these two components—of the various forms a story can have".Casetti, Francesco. Les théories du cinéma depuis 1945. Paris, Armand Colin, 2012, p. 272.
With Philippe Marion, a professor at the Université catholique de Louvain, he is the author of numerous articles on what the two scholars call the “genealogy of mediaAndré Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, "The Cinema as a Model for the Genealogy of Media," Convergence, VIII:4 (December), 2002, pp. 12-18.” and the “double birth of media".André Gaudreault et Philippe Marion, "Un média naît toujours deux fois...," Sociétés & Représentations, 9, 2000, pp. 21-36. This work addresses narrative in early cinema and the institutionalisation of cinematic practices and led to the publication of a volume on cinema's recent transformations in the wake of the “digital revolution.” The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age (2015 ) examines cinema's many “deaths foretold” and interrogates the impact these periods of transition has had on cinema's very identity.
New film history Gaudreault's work on early cinema has contributed to the rise of film studies since the 1980s.See Wanda Strauven, "Introduction to an attractive concept," in Wanda Strauven (ed.), The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2006, pp. 11-27. The famous article he co-wrote with Tom Gunning in 1989, “Le cinéma des premiers temps: un défi à l’histoire du cinémaAndré Gaudreault and Tom Gunning, "Le cinéma des premiers temps : un défi à l’histoire du cinéma?," in Jacques Aumont, André Gaudreault and Michel Marie (eds.), Histoire du cinéma. Nouvelles approches, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1989, pp. 49-63.” (translated in 2006 as [“Early Cinema as a Challenge for Film History”) which drew on a joint presentation at Cerisy in 1985, is a key text for the new history of cinema. In it the authors propose a new way of looking at early cinema, no longer on the basis of a teleological approach, founded on aesthetic and discursive criteria completely alien to the pre-1915 context, but rather on the basis of cinema's own language and modalities and the cultural context of the period. Not only did this approach contest the traditional history of cinema; it also implicitly called for a return to period sources and the need to pay particular attention to the context in which the films under study emerged. This article also contributed to popularise the important concept Gaudreault and Gunning developed, the “cinema of attractions” (which Gaudreault contrasts with “institutional cinemaSee, among other things, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, The Kinematic Turn: Film in the Digital Era and its Ten Problems, Caboose, Montréal, 2012, p. 6; and, André Gaudreault, Cinéma et attraction, Paris, CNRS, 2008, p. 145.”). The cinema of attractions, also described as a “system of monstrative attractions,” stands apart from the later “system of narrative integration” primarily for the self-sufficient and autonomous nature of its shots.
As a historian and theorist, Gaudreault seeks to highlight the narrative and formal specificities of cinema while at the same time rejecting, sometimes in polemical fashion, the essentialist approach of film histories (film historians of previous generations, such as Jean Mitry and Georges Sadoul,See: "Les vues cinématographiques selon Georges Méliès, ou : comment Mitry et Sadoul avaient peut-être raison d’avoir tort (même si c’est surtout Deslandes qu’il faut lire et relire)," in Jacques Malthête and Michel Marie (eds), Georges Méliès, l’illusionniste fin de siècle ?, Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle/Colloque de Cerisy, Paris, 1997, pp. 111-131. almost all came out of film criticism). This approach measures this early kinematography against modern cinema, sometimes speaking incorrectly, in French, of “primitive cinema” or “nascent cinema” rather than conceiving it according to its own context.See Cinéma et attraction, Paris, CNRS, 2008, most particularly the chapter called "L'avènement du cinématographe", pp. 63-88.
André Gaudreault's earliest research was part of a process of “rediscovering” early cinema by the founders of the “new history.” It resulted in part from his participation in the now legendary 34th FIAF Congress in Brighton in 1978,"The Brighton FIAF conference (1978): Ten years after", Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, XI:3 (Fall), 1991, pp. 279-291, where hundreds of hitherto practically unknown animated pictures made between 1900 and 1906 were shown.Christian Dimitriu, "Eileen Bowser. A life between film history, MoMA and FIAF," Journal of Film Preservation, LXXXI:11, 2009, pp. 25-46. Gaudreault was one of the founders of Domitor (the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema), for which he served as the first elected president from 1987 to 1995.See André Gaudreault's interview by prof. Dudley Andrew for the SCMS video series Fieldnotes: https://vimeo.com/269205003