Last night my wife and I watched Anatomy of a Fall and were both blown away — it immediately became our favorite Oscar candidate, and it’s certainly LH fodder, since the central character is a German writer who speaks English with her French husband, and at the French trial that takes up much of the movie she speaks French to begin with but lapses into English when she feels she can’t say what she needs to in French. It’s right up there with Le Mépris as a language-centered movie. But what brings me to post about it is something more specific. Impressed by Milo Machado-Graner, who plays the lead character’s son, I looked him up and discovered he “has completed shooting for Spectateurs!, the new film by Arnaud Desplechin”; this caught my interest, since Desplechin directed one of my favorite early-’90s movies, La sentinelle, so I followed the link to his Wikipedia page, where I read that “In 2014, he adapted Alexander Ostrovsky’s play The Forest.” Now I was really interested, because I love that play, so I went to the French Wikipedia page for Desplechin’s adaptation, which says that “cette œuvre — qui n’est pas une captation — s’est faite avec les acteurs du Français, institution commanditaire du téléfilm, mais dans une mise en scène originale conçue par Arnaud Desplechin.” But what is a captation? The Trésor de la langue française informatisé has various senses, the only applicable one being “Action de représenter le réel dans une œuvre, en particulier picturale”… but don’t all plays and (non-abstract) movies represent reality in some sense? What is it that La Forêt is said not to be doing?
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captation_(audiovisuel)
Pointing a camera at a live performance
Ah, that makes perfect sense — thanks!
Le Petit Robert (éd. 2017) has the following citation for captation:
and gives enregistrement as a synonym. I think that is the sense here: the téléfilm is not just a recording of a theatrical performance.
I just wish I could see the damn thing — PBS is unlikely to broadcast it. I suppose it might turn up as an extra in a Criterion set someday.
Enregistrer, FWIW, also means “save” in the computer sense.