Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics

French Documentary Cinema in the Early Twenty-First Century

Audrey Evrard

• Éditeur: University of Wales Press
• Année: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781786838445
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Histoire
• Sous-sujet: Histoire de la France

Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French Documentary Cinema in the Early Twenty-First Century brings an original perspective on French cinema's 'return to work' in the early twenty-first century, focusing on the transformation of cinematic activism in view of the rapid dissolution of class narratives and solidarities. It is argued that, reckoning with widespread anxieties about job insecurity, social uncertainty, loss and invisibility in French society, filmmakers catalysed new modes of intervention, best described as embodied praxes of sociality. Combining rigorous film analyses with concepts borrowed from philosophy, sociology, geography and political theory, this study positions documentary as a privileged point of articulation between aesthetics, politics and ethics. The wide-ranging film corpus features well-established auteurs (Agnès Varda, Raymond Depardon, Denis Gheerbrant) and less canonical filmmakers to celebrate the vitality of contemporary French documentary cinema and its creative contributions to international discussions about work, precarity and social resilience.

Chapter 1

The vanishing factory

At the end of Luc Decaster’s 2003 documentary film Rêve d’usine, a long white dissolve slowly erases the Epéda mattress factory whose closure has been the subject of the film. Turning the documentary image into pure digital matter, this striking visual effect brings the spectators to witness the disintegration of the 294 employees’ shared dream of preserving their jobs as their workplace ends up dematerialised before their eyes (see Figs 3–5). In doing so, Rêve d’usine powerfully draws the spectators’ attention to the role that cinema, as a medium and a discourse, continues to play in the in/visibility of industrial labour.

Central to the politics of workers’ movements since the late nineteenth century, the factory provided film-makers with an iconic site where the workers’ subjective empowerment could be dramatised, defined and refined. In the 1930s, cinéma engagé constructed a political subject, the collective body of the working class, from crowds of workers on strike. Together, these men and women marched in solidarity with one another and in support of the Popular Front, filling up the streets of French towns. Later, in 1968, cinema’s militancy became more individualised as film-makers found themselves witnessing and recording dissenting voices bursting out of these same crowds, drawing attention to the repression of singular affects in the name of class solidarity. Film historian Tangui Perron explains that, because they were forced to stay outside of the factory during the strikes of 1967 and 1968, film-makers creatively reinvented militant cinema as a practice committed to capturing the subjectivity, and subjectivities, driving working-class struggles:

Aligning itself with work and workers, [militant cinema] remains at the factory gates often due to executive orders refusing filmmakers the right to shoot inside the shops or, when it does make its way inside, work is often stopped, the factory occupied by workers on strike. Work is then told orally, with interviews, represented by tired bodies and a few symbolic shots often filmed under cover or diverted away from their original purpose […] The camera must therefore penetrate the ‘restricted area’.¹

Figures 3–5. The long concluding dissolve in Rêve d’usine (Luc Decaster, 2003) © Courtesy of 24Images.

Whereas mines, ports and factories – three crucial cornerstones of working-class political activism – started shutting down in the 1980s, what was true about the militant cinema of 1968’s relationship with the workplace still applies to the social documentary practice that resurged in the 1990s. Film-makers continue to stumble upon closed gates when seeking to document strikes, as chapter 2 illustrates. As a result, they are either forced to trespass into restricted areas or to rely, more than ever, on oral testimonies as they continue to cast light on working conditions, support various labour struggles and use their films as sounding boards for voices otherwise unheard.

Certainly, for film-makers, staying close to local struggles long-term is crucial. Film-makers like Luc Decaster pride themselves on being present before TV cameras arrive and on staying long after they have left. It demonstrates their ethical commitment to ‘filming people rarely represented, with as much respect for their dignity as possible’.² True to the practice’s long-standing political inclinations, this focus reflects their individual and collective efforts to give visibility to industrial conflicts that result from the geographical redistribution of the economy. In that regard, focusing on the growing Kafkaesque judicialisation of factory closures has built national momentum around very localised work conflicts by making more explicit connections between such instances and broader critiques of neoliberalism’s global expansion. Reacting against the logic of sensationalism governing television newscasting, documentary film-makers have resisted the mainstream media’s demonisation of workers and local union leaders. Instead, they have made them key voices of their counter-narratives.

Today, a couple of decades into a new century, work is stopping, or has already stopped, for many employed in the industrial sector, leaving both workers and film-makers at a loss. As Western Europe and North America face deindustrialisation, can film-makers reclaim the emancipatory value of the factory? Can they resist the systemic crushing of subjectivities in the workplace and the global economy? Can workers’ struggles (la lutte ouvrière) still aesthetically anchor a socially and politically committed documentary practice when they no longer take place inside the factory? Can the industrial workplace still provide a stage where a more just politics can be imagined? The position I defend in this chapter is that the workplace, even when it is no longer operational, still holds significance, particularly in a context where work, and its absence, continue to organise social relations and the economy, serving as the ultimate, yet abstract, measure of a person’s worthiness.

The three films analysed in this first chapter, Rêve d’usine, Silence dans la vallée (Marcel Trillat, 2007) and Les hommes debout (Jérémy Gravayat, 2011) introduce factories at three different stages of this vanishing process. The first bears witness to the end of industrial activity; the second considers the value of industrial ruins in France’s regional landscapes, and lastly the third film follows the gentrification process that converts manufacturing sites into residential neighbourhoods and erases the political struggles of past labouring bodies from the social and geographical fabric of a place. Across these three films, the vanishing workplace is not fashioned into a lieu de mémoire, which Pierre Nora describes as ‘the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it’.³ Instead, I argue that the three featured vanishing factories become vessels through which living and spectral memories re-actualise a present that is otherwise already in the process of being historicised, ‘suppress[ed and] destroy[ed]’.⁴ These workers’ precarious subjectivity, as well as their chance to reclaim presence, lies, therefore, in the very spaces of disjunction and dislocation that deindustrialisation has generated, spaces that hold possibilities for new kinds of political solidarities.

While the workers in Rêve d’usine have remained attached to the lutte, the lasting currency of this collective practice seems highly compromised. In the last fifteen years, affects have become more central to a documentary practice historically driven by an action-based dramaturgy. As a result, we observe a greater investment on the part of film-makers in an aesthetic of loss, nostalgia and dislocation. However, in this chapter, these terms will not be seen as markers of resignation and defeat.

As a trope, the vanishing factory calls into question common affects about place, time and community. Considered together, in the sequence that I am laying out across this chapter, these three films certainly manifest their film-makers’ nostalgia for a militant praxis, but such disposition should not be confused with nostalgia for past representations. The attention of film-makers to presence, in particular, distinguishes Rêve d’usine, Silence dans la vallée and Les hommes debout from a longing for a lost dramaturgy revolving around working-class activism. Following Svetlana Boym’s distinction here, the nostalgic impulse found in these films is not ‘restorative’: it is, I contend, ‘reflective’.⁵ ‘Reflective’ nostalgia stems, in Boym’s account, from ‘defamiliarization and a sense of distance’ that individuals and communities experience when their ‘home’ has been ‘shattered’.⁶ She was most directly concerned with the difficult, complex process that Russians underwent to reconstruct their personal and national identities after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Having lived in the United States for a while, she described her experience of returning home and standing by her home ‘in ruins or, on the contrary, [having] been just renovated and gentrified beyond recognition’.⁷ Notwithstanding the fact that Boym referred to post-Soviet Russia – a specific, and very different, shattered home – her words resonate almost perfectly with industrial workers’ experience, as they stand by their factories, empty, in ruins, or in the process of being gentrified. Filming the factory in the process of decaying and fading out of our view plays into this necessary ‘defamiliarisation’ and ‘distance’, while maintaining a connection to what its presence still means for the people and locales whose lives and identities have been defined by it.

Rêve d’usine films the exhaustion of working-class activism and the erasure of working-class history from our collective memory. Silence dans la vallée uncovers one of the many industrial ruins that persist in the social and environmental landscapes of French regions. Meanwhile, Les hommes debout audaciously ‘[re-]awakens multiple planes of consciousness’ while tackling the last stage of this effacement, gentrification.⁸ This last film weaves together an ‘impure history of ghosts’, that of successive generations of migrant labourers called upon to do the dirty work of industrial production or post-industrial reconstruction.⁹ In doing so, these migrant workers are perversely charged with doing the work of erasing their own history as workers, or that of their predecessors.

In these films, Luc Decaster, Marcel Trillat and Jérémy Gravayat – themselves representatives of three generations of socially and politically committed documentary film-makers – shift their focus from the event of closure which has dominated mainstream media and, to some extent, social sciences. Conjuring Jacques Derrida, I propose that their films actively ‘hauntologise’ the prevailing ‘discourse of the end’ as well as ‘the discourse about the end’ of the industrial working class.¹⁰ Each film contributes in its own way to a broader narrative that, as Boym suggests in the context of post-Soviet Russia, reflects the immediate response individuals feel, individually and collectively. When confronted with their own loss, the primitive scene of militant cinema, they ‘narrate the relationship between past, present and future’.¹¹ Most significantly, they do so by envisaging ‘non-teleological possibilities’ and unveiling new, radical ‘collective frameworks of memory’.¹²

Screening industrial decline

Since the 1980s, more French manufacturing sites have closed than new ones have opened, and many production activities have been relocated abroad. In an early 2013 study, Trendeo, a national survey agency specialising in business investments, reported over one thousand locations closed since 2009. Additionally, relocations abroad caused the loss of up to 8.5 per cent of industrial jobs in France during the same time.¹³ About five hundred more closures were added in 2013 and 2014, once again exceeding the number of new active sites of production in France.¹⁴ Politicians have not missed an occasion to use this sombre economic trend to score quick victories and publicly exhibit their sympathy with French workers. In 2012, ArcelorMittal’s two Lorraine sites in Florange and Gandrange took centre stage in the presidential campaign between Nicolas Sarkozy, the incumbent president, and François Hollande, who eventually won the election.¹⁵ More recently, in 2017, Marine Le Pen’s parking-lot photo op with the employees of Whirlpool in the northern town of Amiens, while Emmanuel Macron was meeting with their representatives inside the factory, made international headlines.¹⁶

Since the late 1990s, several violent conflicts have opposed the employees of high-profile companies to management – Cellatex and Moulinex (2000–1), Metal Europ (2003), Goodyear (2006–12), Molex, New Fabris, and Continental (2009), and more recently, PSA-Peugeot Citroën (2012) and Air France (2014–16). Over sixty films dedicated to conflicts like the ones listed here, and to many others overlooked by national media, were produced between 2000 and 2010, including Ex-Moulinex: Mon travail, c’est capital (2001), Moulinex, la mécanique du pire (Gilles Balbastres), MetalEurop: Germinal 2003 (2003), Conflit MetalEurop (2004), Les Conti, Gonflés à Bloc (2010), Molex, des gens debout (José Alcala, 2010), Au prix du gaz (Karel Pairemaure, 2011) and La saga des Conti (2012).¹⁷ Still growing, this now established sub-genre of post-1995 French social documentary saw a production peak between 2003 and 2009, a short period during which over forty films were released.¹⁸ Unlike the two-minute video snippets headlining local and national newscasts, these films were typically shot over several months, sometimes years, giving workers and local union representatives a chance to explain at greater length their anger, actions and defiance of politicians, mainstream media, business leaders and, at times, even national union leaders thought to be working in alliance with the government. In the opening sequence of Au prix du gaz (2011), for instance, director Karel Pairemaure refers to the New Fabris’s 2009 occupation strike in Châtellerault, which took place just a few miles away from his home, as that ‘summer’s saga’. The use of this phrase, echoing a radio bulletin heard in the background, underlines the broad vulgarisation of labour struggles in mainstream media, and the reduction of months-long social conflicts to background noise and political spectacle.

Aesthetically, film-makers have also had to adjust, and most of these films follow, for...