Une rhétorique du banal \nLe Service de ciné-photographie du Québec et la modernisation rurale, 1940-1961
Bibliographic record
Abstract
FRANÇAIS \nEntre 1940 et 1961, l’agence audiovisuelle du gouvernement du Québec appelée le Service de ciné-photographie (SCP) amasse une collection photographique considérable dont environ 100 000 images sont aujourd’hui conservées. Ce corpus, réalisé par près de 500 fonctionnaires photographes dont une vaste majorité sont des amateurs, est constitué de photographies ordinaires dont aucune n’est passée à la postérité pour avoir marqué son époque. Elles n’ont pas pour autant été sans effet; si le gouvernement a commandité toutes ces images pendant une aussi longue période, c’est qu’elles servaient ses fins. \nCette thèse propose que la production photographique du SCP est délibérément sans éclat et qu’elle met de l’avant une rhétorique du banal dont l’objectif est d’accélérer l’entrée dans la modernité d’une société rurale encore largement traditionnelle en 1940. En s’écartant de la longue pratique des images iconiques du pouvoir, cette propagande discrète met de l’avant la production d’images individuellement banales et dont la force repose sur leur action en masse. Cette thèse soutient que la banalité est une stratégie majeure de la communication visuelle des États au XXe siècle et qu’elle correspond à l’accession des masses au pouvoir à la même époque. Cette stratégie s’inscrit dans le contexte général de la montée en puissance des États dans la vie quotidienne des peuples, puissance rendue effective par une bureaucratie animée du désir d’améliorer le niveau de vie général de la population. \nL’analyse de l’action du SCP permet de comprendre les mécanismes de cette rhétorique du banal visible partout en Occident à la même époque. Au Québec, le SCP soutient en particulier la modernisation de la société rurale, qu’il accélère en normalisant visuellement les changements sociaux qui en résultent. Les photographies de l’organisme, soutenant un processus de transformation en profondeur de la société dont elles ne questionnent jamais les fondements, montrent dans toute son ampleur la banalité du bien. \n \nENGLISH \nBetween 1940 and 1961, the Quebec government's audiovisual agency, the Service de ciné-photographie (SCP), amassed a considerable photographic collection of which approximately 100,000 images are preserved today. This corpus, produced by nearly 500 civil servant photographers, mostly amateurs, is made up of ordinary photographs, none of which have gone down in history as iconic of their era. That said, they were not without effect. The Quebec government commissioned all these images over such a long period of time because they were serving its purposes. \nThis thesis proposes that the SCP's photographic production was deliberately lacklustre, putting forward a rhetoric of the commonplace whose aim was to accelerate the modernization of a rural society that was still largely traditional in 1940. In a departure from the longstanding practice of iconic images of power, this discreet propaganda puts forward the production of individually banal images whose strength lies in their mass action. This thesis argues that banality is a major strategy in statist visual communication of the twentieth century, corresponding to the rise of the masses to power in the same period. This strategy is part of the general trend toward increased power of the state in the everyday life of the people, a power made effective by a bureaucracy motivated by the desire to improve the general standard of living of the population. \nAn analysis of the SCP program allows us to understand this rhetoric of the banal whose mechanisms were visible throughout the West at the same time. In Quebec, the SCP particularly supported the modernisation of rural society, which it accelerated by visually normalising the resulting social changes. The organization's photographs, supporting a process of profound societal transformation whose foundations remain unquestioned, show the banality of good operating at full power.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.001 |
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".