« Et l’animation… bordel ! » : Collectifs de travail et constitution progressive d’un monde professionnel de l’animation en France dans les années 1970

By 1973, when the SNTPCT (Syndicat National des Techniciens et des Professionnels du Cinéma et de la Télévision) incorporated a newly-created animation section into the union, the French animation sector was still extremely fragmented and under-structured, in spite of the efforts made by various parties to ensure its cultural, institutional and economic existence. The transitional period then underway seems to be as much about rethinking the economic model as it is about the gradual, trial-and-error constitution of a professional world with its own tensions, issues and logics. From this point of view, starting in the middle of the 1970s, the debates surrounding the introduction of a collective agreement specific to the animation industry provide an excellent opportunity to observe the mechanisms at work in the emergence of socialization circles that lead French animation professionals to think of themselves collectively as a group, if not a profession. The emergence of this new understanding of the animation industry in the context of French production is explored using documents, especially union archives, that trace the various negotiations involved in setting up a collective agreement for the animation sector, a text that was ultimately adopted only in 2004.