San Sebastian Festival: "Return to Reims (fragments)", the cinema lesson of JG Périot
Director Jean-Gabriel Périot (here in 2015) was one of the guests at the 2021 San Sebastian International Film Festival with his feature film "Retour à Reims (fragments)".
AFP - JOHN MACDOUGALL
Text by: Isabelle Le Gonidec
12 mins
Director Jean-Gabriel Périot came to the San Sebastian International Film Festival to present his latest feature film “
Retour à Reims (fragments)”
, adapted from Didier Eribon's book.
The film is in competition in the Zabaltegui Tabakalera selection.
A film made up of archive images, like other works by JG Périot.
Meet.
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This section of the San Sebastian Festival hosts films of different formats and explores new forms of storytelling.
JG Périot's films are regularly hosted here and in particular in this selection, for which he won the prize in 2018 with his short film
Song for the jungle,
on the Calais jungle.
It is always a pleasure to be in San Sebastian, confides the director who pays tribute in passing to the public which, like in Berlin, is a "
real public very cinephile, open and very benevolent.
There can be disagreements in the debates but never vehemence as one could have in France
”.
►
To read also
: Festival of San Sebastian: Zabaltegui Tabakalera, the new horizons of cinema
The director accompanies
Retour à Reims (fragments)
, adapted from the book / autobiographical essay by Didier Eribon. A history of the working class in the 20th century through the prism of a family, that of the philosopher. From this first “
kaleidoscopic
”
text
- this is his expression - which spans a century with multiple characters, JG Périot drew a thread to knit his own story and imprint his paw on it: using the archives to question the representation of the history - the small and the big - and the memories. Understanding they are built and infused in the present tense. "
In many of my films, I go through the past to question the present
“, He explains to us. Going through the past supposes the archive and it is a goldsmith in the matter: we remember the sum
A German youth
or
Our defeats
.
In this last film, the common thread is the character of Didier Eribon's mother.
Through it, he is interested in working class women in France and their representation.
The film is constructed in three sequences: a sociological time in which the genealogical framework of the family is planted, a more political time in which the political context in which a French working-class family operates and a third, more contemporary phase, that of the current struggles, in this case the movement of yellow vests.
In voice-over, extracts from the text of Didier Eribon (“15 pages out of 250”) read by the actress Adèle Haenel.
►
Also to listen:
“Return to Reims (Fragments)” by Jean Gabriel Périot at the Directors' Fortnight in Cannes
OUR DEFEATS trailer from Jean-Gabriel Périot on Vimeo.
The genesis of the project
JG Périot is the author of a large and varied work in its forms.
“
I often get to my films by books;
like everyone else, I think about topics, I have interests and start to read ... and in the chances of reading, watching, there may be something lying around that I start to spend more than time, and which can lead to a film.
(Some) 90% of my films come from there, interests that I develop and which often start with history books
”.
But this was not the case for this last film.
At the outset, the producer Marie-Ange Luciani [who is also the producer of
Arthur Rambo
, the film by Laurent Cantet Editor's note] "
calls me saying to me: I would like to make an adaptation of this book and I thought of you ... because what she saw while reading the book was the archive ... My first reaction had to 'first was to say no because, in general, when the subject is too specific, even if it interests me, I often do not go. It is not enough staff ..
.
But I still reread the book and there I understood: both why she asked me and things appeared to me when I reread the book, imagining a possible adaptation -
the look is different
- and I had desire to transmit certain passages of the book, in particular to young people. To teach history a bit through Eribon
. "
Eribon and Périot share a little the same personal history even if they do not belong to the same generation and if the typologies of the trades of their respective families are different, but “it
was also an opportunity to come back to my own history. -
without that being said in the film
- but in any case to rework with it: where we come from and what do we do with it.
Knowing where you come from and where you are is important for JG Périot. He already said it in an interesting interview with the
Ballast
magazine
in 2018: “
When I started making films, I was somewhat apprehensive about filming the world: I thought I didn't even know how to do it.
Filming requires knowing where you are as a filmmaker, knowing your place in the world, knowing where you are looking from.
And if there was one thing that I did not know, it was what my place was in and in front of the world
”.
Working with archives
Each film represents years of reading and work, over different temporalities, so he leads several projects simultaneously.
The work on the archive images is done by a librarian.
“
It's mandatory because part of the research work is a bit technical, I don't know the uses.
Emmanuelle (
Koenig
), with whom I work, knows where to look and that reassures the rights holders when you go through someone professional, the director not being a research professional. When I watch the films, I get attached to the content: does it move me or not, is it interesting for the film. Emmanuelle, the question she asks herself is: does the material exist, is the film free of rights, what are the legal problems raised, how much does it cost ... questions taken in charge by the librarian and that I cannot take charge of.
"
In
Retour à Reims
, for example, there is a short passage on shorn women in France at the Liberation - a subject to which he had already devoted a very strong short film,
Had she been criminal
-, "
I need three images of shaved women, the number is quite finite, she will find them for me. Afterwards, in this mass of images, the subjective part of my gaze and my emotions cannot be shared. There will be images which, for Emmanuelle, are strong, and which for me are not, and vice versa. Rather, it prepares for me masses from which I will make my choice, while other directors / documentary makers will prefer to have a very limited choice of archives, selected by the librarian ... I need to see everything.
"
WAS SHE SUMMER CRIMINAL ... / EVEN IF SHE HAD BEEN A CRIMINAL ... (2006) from Jean-Gabriel Périot on Vimeo.
An assumed subjectivity
See all to then select and go up.
In these different phases which fall to him, JG Périot frequently uses the term "
emotion (s)
", a subjectivity perfectly assumed.
"
The work of looking is exercised with the editing. And what I like a lot is the part of chance: how chance plays in the editing ... sometimes, we put images aside for later and then we go back over them and two shots that were not thought to be together, we see them. Chance has made that they are next and something is happening ... it changes the way we see these two images, they respond to each other. Most of the time, it does not respond at all but sometimes surprising things happen and it allows us to better understand why certain images were retained but we did not really know why. And confronted with other images, they light up; the question becomes more precise. And this small part of chance, you have to give yourself the possibility that it exists and listen to it.Trust each other. That's why my point of view for me (director) and the point of view of the editor that I am collide
.
In the same way, there are images which for me director are obvious and which in fact do not find their place in the editing. The extract, the plan refuse to be edited. And there, we must not force: even if they are logically there, there is too much rupture, it does not work and it is necessary to remove them.
The essentials of
Return to Reims (fragments)
And when we ask him what images or what film extracts should be in
Retour à Reims (fragments):
“
from the start there had to be Rouch and Morin's film, the discussion on the stairs between Angelo and Landry in
Chronicle of a summer
...
"I really like this film and this sequence in particular, he continues,
" the image prepared what comes at the end of the film (whereas the image is given much earlier ) on the fact that when one sees oneself as belonging to a class, racial differences no longer play a role. This image is very astonishing for the obvious friendship of these two boys [
who knew each other beforeto be in the film when they pretended to suddenly get to know each other during this scene, Editor's note]
which I find magnificent.
In addition to their work at the factory, their friendship at work moves me a lot
.
"
Other images that had to be there:
The pretty May
of Chris Marker “
with this woman when she presents us her HLM, it had so dazzled me when I had seen the film, and the speeches of Le Pen, in a other register.
Painful, but we had to hear it.
»In the second part of the documentary, the images highlight the disappearance of the working class from the political lexicon as a class, its disappearance from the image (especially on television which is becoming the predominant visual medium) and the rise in power policy of the National Front.
There are also missing images and the director points out that in the archives women workers are little identified as women and that it was difficult to illustrate certain points of the book / film like the painful question of the abortion.
Poster of the film Retour à Reims (fragments) by Jean-Gabriel Périot, selected in San Sebastian in the Zabaltegui Tabakalera section.
© SSIF
Political cinema or political cinema?
When we talk about history and cinema, we often think of the work of historian
Marc Ferro
, who notably reflected on cinema as an “
agent of history
”. Marc Ferro "
rightly considers that the representation of history in films or historical events is a historiographical tool
", recognizes JG Périot, but with this reservation that the historian "
underestimates the tool of cinema as artistic and technical forms, which also says a lot in historical terms. We can't talk about Birth of a Nation (WD Griffith 1920) just for its content: (in this case) the movie doesn't say much other than that it's a racist movie. Afterwards, when we question cinematographic creation, the film as an object, that becomes complex. That's my difference with Ferro, I find it incomplete. He is too interested in the subject of the film and not in the way the subject is shown, given in the film ...
When we talk about political cinema we often confuse with the cinema about politics. And we forget the importance of form as a way of questioning the gaze, of changing the gaze of questioning what we show. And that often is a political point of view on what we are filming or when it comes to archives on the events of the past. And I, who work on counter-stories, counter-events, can only be in "counter-forms" or in any case in forms different from the classic forms of representation.
"
Young audiences more receptive to new forms of storytelling
In
Retour à Reims
, he evokes his obvious desire to transmit a story to people who do not know it or who do not know it.
To pass it on to young people.
“
In French cinema, I have always been set apart: it's experimental cinema, it's political cinema, it's bizarre cinema, not real cinema, not fiction ... These distinctions - there, they are not operative with the youngest. We can use so many forms in educational terms, it's fascinating. “
Hence the director's interest in young audiences. He is receptive to new forms of storytelling.
“In the end, I realize that the audience I'm most interested in, the one I most want to work with, is young people. It is going to high schools, to meet very young students, because they often receive my films quite well: they are not bothered by the form, they like it to be different and that raises questions. and this is the moment when we can discuss. This is still the age when we accept to be surprised and where we have not yet decided: this is cinema, this is not
”.
For his next film, he is also interested in films shot in Sarajevo during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
“
Young people (cinema amateurs or students) filmed in the city.
They continued to film during the siege and at the same time had to meet the military obligation to defend the city.
"He returns to this story with certain filmmakers and their archives,"
surprising and sometimes unexpected images because it is filmed by kids
. "
A film whose genesis dates back to 2006 or 2007, he does not know very well.
The time of history and the time of cinema are long times.
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