Since 1995, the Périphérie association organizes the Rencontres du cinéma documentaire (Meetings of Documentary Cinema), and since 2005 presents each October a one-week long non-competitive festival at the cinema Le Méliès of Montreuil. Open to diverse audiences, the festival brings together heritage films and recent works around a cinematic theme.

Using a single hundred-foot roll of 16mm film to create an unedited camera-roll film -- fresh from the lab and onto the screen -- has a certain appeal to me. Partly it’s the practical aspect of DIY efficacy that comes with circumventing the costly steps of post-production. With editing there is something diluted from this raw power of the pure, unadulterated footage, no matter how masterfully the material is pruned and refashioned. Perhaps the phrase of Allen Ginsberg, Chogyam Trungpa, and others, “First thought, best thought” expresses this energy present in the camera-roll film?

From the earliest Lumière actualities to King Vidor’s *The Crowd* (1928) and onward through *Spring Breakers* (2012), cinema has given apt expression to masses and what they seemingly do best: massing. This program presents a survey of crowds, masses, and swarms in their many and varied manifestations: from the elemental to the complex, and from the archaic to the contemporary. Though often hidden beneath a veneer of solidity, masses and swarms are the very stuff of life. Gathering and dispersing, contracting and expanding, are the formal figures most proper to them. They exist at the level of particles and parades, demonstrations and desktop icons, spermatozoa and shopping mallers. Even the grain of film, the noise of video, the pixilation of a buffering stream—they, too, with their swirling and spreading, justly merit the name of “crowd.” Wherever division, multiplicity, and movement co-exist, masses and swarms are sure to follow: on the street, in the density of a throng; in the depths of the body, cell against cell.