Refiguring the Primitive: Institutional Legacies of the Filmology Movement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This contribution examines how the discourse of “the primitive,” as an institutional point of reference developed by the philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939), influenced the establishment of the Institute of Filmology at the University of Paris in 1948. Filmology, a term introduced by Gilbert Cohen-Séat, is described as a positive science with its own strategy of systematizing the study of film as object and institution with its own series of emerging methods. The present article describes the formulation of the “filmic fact” as a positive science indebted to Durkheimian methods, but also as a means of engaging with the multiple strands of “primitivism.” On the one hand, this article elaborates upon the significance of Lévy-Bruhl’s discussion of “primitivism” as an effective cosmology for causation and related inferences which asserts a space of difference to be further explored, and on the other, it explains how “primitivism” has been used to designate historical and psychological attributes within the institution of cinema as an emerging structure of producing meaning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".