2020 Between transmission and moving to action Between transmission and moving to action
The year 2020 was supposed to be the merry twentieth anniversary of the École documentaire and its Master’s programme. We had imagined proposing for this year’s États généraux du film documentaire a seminar, some screenings, a book, and an evening dance of course. These events have been postponed until next year: it’s true that you can take a year to celebrate a twentieth birthday.
In counterpoint to a celebration – always threatened by the notion of a mourning – we want to assemble the clues and traces of an ever-renewed present. A way of questioning and confronting what has remained alive for an entire generation now, and hence incredibly, mysteriously fragile.
This vulnerability is another name for life, as we have just had the shared experience, and is at the heart of what this school strives never to lose sight of; just like the films we will present here risk the encounter with what could never happen.
In this way, Marie Dault in a first film she has self-produced in Venezuela, wants to deal with the promise made by the Chavez government to the inhabitants of favelas: a property deed in exchange for a story, for a letter written by those who, to stay alive, decided one night to build their own houses at the same time as their history. While she was scouting during a writing residency, Marie checked that these texts existed, that they had been written and, stored in archives, awaiting Chronicle of the Stolen Land, the film that would drag them out of their sleep, offering them to the world so that they might embellish it with their existence.
Over a period of five years, during which the collective struggle of the favelas weakened under the blows of a history that contrived to contradict their aspirations, the film, caught in contrary winds, maintained its direction and resisted like those who struggle not to renounce what is possible, the promised hope. Those whose faces and voices will take their places in our memories, while we will also remember the crisscrossed web of electrical lines suspended above the tin roofs that shelter them.
Margot Dupuis’ film On Wine, Poetry or Virtue takes its risks elsewhere, but just as intensely, in a bodily struggle with possible happiness, here and now, together. How can you film without renouncing the experience of being with people? How can you be at the same time behind the camera and entirely within the experience of the unforeseeable, whose intensity is constantly threatened by the risk of collapse? Boire avec les dieux, the graduation film by Margot Dupuis, already established the terms of this magnificent wager in the form of an epiphany.
To film as a way of moving to action. To film this move to action, at the risk that the act might be a failure, or incomplete. These two films were produced in this year of 2020 which has so paradoxically separated and reunited us as we have never been before. Separation and reunification set into action an experience that the school strives to make possible: that, to repeat the words of Claudio Pazienza, who gives us the joy of associating one of his very first films to this programme, “of the tacit sharing of a certain idea of cinema. Not always tacit, in reality. And through that, of an experience of sharing in and of itself”. Less a school, actually, than a laboratory, a construction site where an unexpected community comes together based on an initial desire, on its uncertainties and doubts which crisscross and merge, but which also expose the participants “to the risk of being ridiculous (both as teachers and as students), a risk that is noble, but not without its tensions”.
A community in movements, questions, resisting all forms of institutionalisation, driven by its present, and echoing the communities that the two films presented here observe and accompany.
What happens, remains, disappears between the first work of research, of sharing and the film is torn from the Real? This is what we will attempt to question on the occasion of this programme.
Let’s not forget that these films, like so many others, were made possible by another community, that of the “First film meetings” which bring together, around the young creators who have studied at the school, audacious producers supported by a few television companies and the Tënk platform, so that films as fragile as life might see the light of day.
Chantal Steinberg
Other films made by Master’s students at the Lussas École documentaire will complete this program on the Tënk platform from 20 August at 9 p.m. to 6 September at midnight.
Debates led by Chantal Steinberg.
In the presence of Marie Dault, Margot Dupuis, Agnès Bruckert and Jacques Deschamps.