Scrapbooks

The scrapbook is born of idleness, doubt, a search for meaning. Never from an order. The scrapbook is a poor art, without constraint, where only the vision of the world counts. Born from an Anglo-Saxon practice mixing photo album and diary, it can gather photographs as well as drawings, stamps, postcards, press clippings or invitation cards. The multiple creative possibilities of collages that it offers justify that many artists have seized it to compose new universes, as is the case of avant-garde filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century such as Derek Jarman, Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, or more recently Pedro Costa and Bertrand Mandico.

This book presents some of the most beautiful scrapbooks of filmmakers, who are also photographers, poets or artists. It offers a journey to the origin of the creation of their films, giving access to private documents, revealing the intimacy at the heart of the creative process. The book also includes personalities who, in their own way, participated in the elaboration of films, such as William S. Burroughs, novelist but also scriptwriter.
The book  focuses on artists with a radical practice, pushing the boundaries of autofiction to the maximum, which today is extended by practices such as Instagram, of which the scrapbook is perhaps the unknown ancestor. For Matthieu Orléan, if films constitute a cinema present, the scrapbook is both their past (the place of their invention and their sketch) and their future (their archive). A link, sometimes missing, but fundamental to understand the circulation, the survival and the apotheosis of contemporary images.

This book is the catalog of the eponymous exhibition at the Rencontres d’Arles 2023, winner of the Rencontres’ 2021 curatorial research grant.

The artists
Christophe Berhault
William S. Burroughs
Pedro Costa
Robert Duncan & Jess Collins
Derek Jarman
Stanley Kubrick
Bertrand Mandico
Christian Patterson
Mary Pickford
John Truwe
Agnès Varda
Jane Wodening & Stan Brackhage