Les Grignoux - Ecran large sur tableau noir
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"Écran large sur tableau noir" is an event organised by the cultural center "Les Grignoux" (Liège - Belgium) which includes 2 main parts: the first one is the programming of movies for schools and the second one is a collection of educational books intended to back up the movies of this program.
This event is backed by several partners (other cultural centers and/or experimental cinemas) in the main cities of the Wallonia/Brussels Community (Belgium).
Each year "Ecran large sur tableau noir" offers a program of about thirty movies destined to elementary and/or secondary students. These movies are chosen because they are accessible to a very large audience (children or teenagers), in connection with the production, as well as the themes treated in them.
More accurately, this choice tries to cope with three different demands; that coming from the experimental cinema which defends "minority" works of high quality, that from the education whose multiple and complex goals are naturally not limited to art (and specially not to cinema), and the last one, coming from the students themselves, who already have a certain experience as members of an audience. The program of "Ecran large sur tableau noir" is aiming to make the young audience discover some works they would probably never go see by themselves. Thanks to its variety, the program also tries to satisfy everyone's expectations as much as possible.
On top of being recent, the programmed films are shown without anyfrom the current publicity and the fleeting success of the movie: the main goal of this program is to favor a reasoned choice made by the teachers. So at the beginning of the season, the different partners of "Ecran large sur tableau noir" work out a movie presentation brochure which explains the targeted public (as a matter of age), as well as the attractive and thematic qualities of all the presented movies, and last but not least, the educational goals the teachers can carry on with their classes thanks to the vision of these movies.
"Ecran large sur tableau noir" wants to promote movie watching in a theatre because it provides an essential dimension to the show. The different partners are then able to guarantee a movie projection in the best possible conditions.
In order to make the access to movies easier for people, the entrance ticket price for all the "Ecran large sur tableau noir" films is given a 50 to 60% discount off the normal price.
The originality of the "Ecran large sur tableau noir" project mainly lies in the choice of the educational assistance tools, which consist in books that are destined to the teachers who come with their students to the school matinées. These books are given (free of charge) to the teachers before they actually come and watch the movie.
The teachers constitute the major partners of the "Ecran large sur tableau noir" project: therefore it is essential to take into account their expectations, backgrounds and abilities, which are multiple, various and surely incomplete as far as cinema is concerned. Thanks to these educational books, the people in charge of the "Ecran large sur tableau noir" project can address the teachers in a very simple way, which does not require any previous training course in the cinematographic field; that way, the teachers just need to use the abilities and tools they already possess.
Moreover, these books are taking the current film knowledge into account: even though there are many theories about cinema and many methods to analyze a movie, some of these theories are not even close to ensuring a proper knowledge that could enable people to broach all the movie productions in a thoughtful and critical way. From an educational point of view, it is therefore pretty risky to popularize a knowledge which is incomplete, hypothetical and controversial at the same time. The books made at "Ecran large sur tableau noir" are never limited to a simple popularization of a knowledge meant for the teachers to analyze the critical tools or the possible reflections possibly proposed with the other teachers and/or with their students.
Each educational book meets 2 requirements:
If the quality of the answers given in the different books may vary from book to book, it is nevertheless a permanent educational concern that constitutes the originality of "Ecran large sur tableau noir". Giving several documents or various approaches to acquire cinematographic knowledge to the teachers is definitely not the purpose of the books whose goals are to give the teachers some real operating methods that could be easy to use with their students.
Compared to the usual movie approaches, the people at "Ecran large sur tableau noir" were gradually brought to define an original point of view of the movies, which would question certain traditional cuttings such as the opposition between content and form, the cinema language itself and the themes, or between the picture and rational thinking.
By favoring the usual vision conditions of the movies (with no technical equipment such as DVD players), the people at "Ecran large sur tableau noir" give teachers and students the opportunity to work on a very fragile and essential material: the collective memory of the class. The object of this recollection work is the whole movie itself, composed by several significant relations between its different parts. Unlike a TV show, a movie is not made of an accumulation of independent and disparate pieces, but it results from the whole significant project. This project, far from limiting itself to one single story, to certain themes or to an ideological talk, also expresses itself by esthetic choices whose coherence would be hard to understand based on one single isolated sequence.
Finally, it is not possible to define the elements that could be important in the complex and multiform composition of the movie beforehand. For each movie, the most adapted point of view has to be chosen with no dogmatism to match the author's idea of the movie- a movie realized by Jacques Tati won't be analyzed the same way as one of Ken Loach's films. But it also has to match the interests, the goals and the pleasure of the teachers and the students for whom the movie was made. That's the reason why the team realizes a specific book for each and every single movie presented in the "Ecran large sur tableau noir" context, although these books give many tools and methods applicable to lots of other movies.
The different partnerships of the "Écran large sur tableau noir" network are committed to following the main principles laid out above, and specially the annual programming, the reduced prices, and the free handing out of educational books to the teachers. However, the partners may take the local programming specificities into account. The partners may also propose some activities or realizations in order to make up the educational accompaniment given by the books.
"Les Grignoux" ensure that the educational coordination of the activity as well as the sharing of information and experiences between the different partners take place. Two annual meetings make this possible.
The meeting at the end of the school year mainly enables "Les Grignoux" to elaborate the new program, taking all the suggestions and remarks of the different partners into account.
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