Here again, the tension was high

[Shishirgano9]

Every Wednesday, the French went to the cinema to watch the screening of Actualités françaises, Fox Movietone, and Actualités Gaumont. Sententious voices, spectacles of a world that was, after all, happy, the major dailies critiqued these agency films every Wednesday, as one critiques the work of a famous director. Great moments of history thus paraded before the eyes of all generations. Intrepid operators had been there at the right time. Serge Viallet's series "History Catchers" on ARTE is fascinating from this point of view.

And then there was that day in 1950 in Nogentel in the Aisne. A teacher was teaching the inhabitants of the small village a new show called: television news. His name was Roger Louis and he also used his teaching of the image to his advantage for himself as a senior reporter for the magazine "5 colonnes à la Une".


The story is more than well-known. The General's television moj database was under a bell jar, with a few narrow spaces of freedom in information. 5 Colonnes was one of them, because Pierre Lazareff, the boss of the weekly show, was close to the head of state. The images were scrutinized, weighed, crossed out in surreal projections in the presence of the censors. The value of the information image defined in some way by the economy of the forbidden.

The embedded image

Over time, scarcity became opulence. Multiplication of channels, image sources. Some episodes were resounding. Particularly, that of the first Gulf War in 1993.