Cinema - Text 1
Documentary Cinema
While the expression “action cam” describes a category of miniature, portable and robust cameras designed to be used in extreme sports, many amateurs have taken them up to record images of everyday life. In this way, the notion of the action camera has been inflected in such a way as to stand for a range of devices used to capture images “in action,” sports-related or not, in a manner typically less intrusive than a professional stills or motion picture camera. Similarly, these miniature cameras have also been adopted by the film industry, at times to produce images which the expression “action cam” generally suggests (those in the extreme sports videos for which the GoPro is well known) and at other times to round out their kit of production tools.
Although the GoPro has sometimes been used as a sacrificial device, being used to capture images in dangerous situations or in places too small for a larger camera to be placed, the action camera category invites us to think more particularly about the body-camera-space relations at work in the shooting process, as well as the effect of this symbiosis between the camera and the body in action. In this sense, thinking about the uses of these cameras in film productions is a way of thinking about the role of the body concealed behind the production of the image. This is precisely what Richard Bégin proposes with the notion of “somatic images,”[1] a concept which emphasizes the possibility of sensing in the image the presence of the body handling the camera.
