Summary:

The network for autistic children set up in the Cévennes at the end of the 1970s under the auspices of Fernand Deligny offered an innovative and radical approach to the care of autistic children. With the primary aim of providing a livable space in which to live for the children it cares for, the network is based on a specific territorial development, as close as possible to the way of being of autistic children who are mutic and lack language. Deligny uses cinema as an essential tool in this process of transformation. Following in the footsteps of the avant-gardes of the 1920s, he sees the camera as a tool for exploration with its own capacity for analysis, capable of recomposing the world. With the infinitive ‘camérer’, he gives voice to these potentialities of cinema, and imagines a practice of cinema that supports this renewed apprehension of what can exist outside language for these children: new forms of connection, a particular attention to things and elements, or the existence of a primordial corporeity. Through a study of numerous texts and filmed images, our article examines Deligny’s thinking on cinema and the cinematographic forms of the ‘common body’ that emerges from this network of reception.

Key words: camerer | camera | image | experimental cinema | ou-of-language | autism | life spaces | Deligny