The cinematographic community: Fernand Deligny’s ‘tentatives’ and radical film education

Fernand Deligny’s experiments with film in the context of social work and therapeutic communities since the 1950s are part of what Marlon Miguel calls ‘semi hidden histories’, whose study is broadening the landscape of film theory and film education. Located at the margins of institutional forms of teaching and care, the ‘tentatives’ organised by Deligny involved a participatory use of the camera, the idea of film and film-making as an egalitarian and heterotopian space, and rested on the formation of radically inclusive communities. This article focuses on the proximity Deligny saw between cinema and that ‘common body’, made of contingent events and impersonal gestures, which for him constituted the common ground of the human. Inspired by the principles of éducation nouvelle, by his life with non-speaking autistic children, and taking shape through a collaboration with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Deligny’s work placed itself within an alternative vision of education, beyond the pedagogical model later criticised by Jacques Rancière, which understands it not as a series of techniques for the transmission of knowledge, but rather as a fundamental dimension of collective life.