The Act of Filming: Yellow Vests, Smartphones and the Gesturality of Struggle

Since the rise of several political protests at the end of the Nineties, social sciences and humanities have repeatedly focused on the militant use of video. Most of these studies consider activist media uses from the point of view of the product created, the video, and focus their analysis of media activism on assessing the conditions for the possibility of building an alternative space for expression. This article proposes to go beyond this reduction of the act of filming to the act of showing by proposing a political reading of the act of filming law enforcement by holding a smartphone at arm’s length as it is one of the recurrent motives of the visual repertoire of contemporary protests in the urban space. My body of research is comprised of videos shot in the context of the yellow vests protests in France in 2018 and 2019. My approach is above all materialistic because it focuses less on the intentions or purposes behind the acts envisaged than on the pragmatic situation produced by using technical interfaces.