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With a social science dissertation, a documentary and a book, Manon Ott has spent a decade observing and living a city in Les Mureaux, near Yvelines, near Paris. The result, loaded with individual and collective stories, is fully up to his commitment.
Ash and embers , the book and the film, arrived on the screens and tables of booksellers at the end of September. The first is published by Anamosa , a young house that, like Manon Ott, wonders about the way to do human sciences otherwise. It is divided into two parts: one is devoted to the "voices and stories of a popular suburb" which has grown and populated in the wake of the factories of Renault-Flins, the other to "the experience of 'a film', which tells us about the director's approach and the protagonists' life paths.
Five years in immersion
The second, produced by Docks66, was shot in black and white between 2011 and 2015 and opens with a subtle interweaving of vintage images of the Renault- Flins strikes in 1968 and those filmed by the director at the time. another mobilization of the early 2010s. If the spirit of the challenge remains, the reality of work, it has completely changed. Interim workers are now very numerous at the factory, on the hardest jobs and the overall workforce has been divided by five in fifty years. In a precarious situation, workers are more difficult to organize and the slightest protest is paid for the refusal of a new contract.
The film rests entirely on a fictional tour de force that tends to encompass all these stories as part of an imaginary night. Mainly shot outdoors, it leaves more room for men, but the two women who express themselves there are unforgettable. It is necessary to read in particular Antoinette's story in the book after having heard her tell the years to wait for her great love, incarcerated for delinquency. " I did everything to change, " she said with a smile.
Manon Ott works with her companion Grégory Cohen, whom she accompanied in the production of La cour des murmures (released in 2017), a film between fiction and documentary about love to the Mureaux. With him, she organized photo workshops, shot a video for a young person who dreams of becoming a rap star, took part in community life, moved to the scene for a while, made links to random encounters, breaking codes of a cold sociology, supposed to keep the distances with its object. " Their life stories are singular, certainly not representative, but significant, " she wrote of people she filmed with the same love of images and words.
The poetry of the real
The poetic license, which the writer and director allows herself in her fieldwork, in the filming and the magnificent montage of Pascale Hannoyer, goes hand in hand with an ethical rigor which implies waiting for the right word - would she story of a dream seized on the fly- and an impressive research archive. The book is worth as much for its reflection on the art of the documentary, as for its historical contribution on a fragment of the working world, or the impressive iconographic sum, also in black and white, with the neat layout, which gives want to flip through it like an album before confronting the text.
Franc-Comtoise, Manon Ott grew up thirty kilometers from Besançon in contact with another industrial and working history. Between 2005 and 2010, she hosted the ItinErrance festival , dedicated to exile and immigration, also open to social movements. Around the Lip, but not only, Besançon was one of the laboratories where cinema and rebellion fed, where workers, workers and strikers used the camera as a way out of the silence and the invisibility. " The question of form is fundamental ", repeats the one who conceives her work as a collective adventure, where the involvement of the researcher opens the way to other possibilities.
In De ashes and embers , a short sequence shows a young girl parading in front of her on the back wheel of her scooter. On both sides of the camera, the cliché changes into a moment suspended by the grace of their complicity: the young man offers a show that the filmmaker captures as a feat or a game.
Released in a few rooms for its first week, the film will take all the time necessary to make a tour of France. Almost every time, her programming will be accompanied by a projection-debate with the director. Sometimes, too, some of the protagonists will come to talk about it, alone or accompanied. The nightly round of images and words is just beginning.
Manon Ott, Ashes and Embers , Anamosa, September 2019.
Images: movie poster and book cover.
Manon Ott at the entrance of the EHESS, Paris, September 2019.