2022 Editorial Editorial
This year was marked by the death of Jean-Paul Roux, Mayor of Lussas for the past thirty-five years and indefectible supporter of the activities devoted to documentary film in the commune. Then it was the critic and filmmaker Jean-Louis Comolli who left us. Faithful companion of the États généraux du film documentaire, we owe him intense moments of reflection. A page has been turned in 2022 but their memories will accompany us for a long time. We pay them the most appropriate of homages by continuing their work of transformation, that of the commune alongside its inhabitants for the former, and that of summoning us to reflect on cinema and political responsibility for the latter.
Times are changing and the world seems to be in the throes of convulsion, crushed by violence and a suffocating, inflammable heat to which respond hope and convictions. No doubt we belong to a period, a period which has formed us and which we have formed in turn, and our political engagements have also something intimate about them. Cinema’s commitment, the responsibility of filming can mean that in a film, women look directly at us, in calm silence, straight in the eyes, and elsewhere can push men to avoid our gaze, called out for their acts by a woman filmmaker.
If it is always possible to rebuild the world in our imaginations, it can above all be done by striding all about it, and rather than “rewriting history”, revisit it, question it anew. The seminar “Genoa 2001. A Memory of the Future” will take steps to reconsider history and will propose an exploration of that moment of rupture by attempting to articulate archive, interview and experience to understand how this period has been prolonged and transformed. How can this history be reconstructed in order, in particular, to deconstruct the one fashioned by those who hold power, to give new meaning and a place for human experience, that is to say singular fictions. Taking another approach, these questions are also at the heart of the dialogue between two filmmakers, Jyoti Mistry and Kumjana Novakova, who attempt, each in their own way, to make visible eluded histories.
“It’s hard to put into words”, say the survivors of the terrible catastrophe that hit Japan in 2011. Saying this and searching for words, they construct their own fiction. In “Doc Route: Japan”, Voices from the Waves is a film on the difficult catharsis via language to transform the trauma of reality and to allow it to enter the realm of imagination. What does a film transform by the act of shooting and the choice of writing? In Cuba, cinema was an active party of the revolution and a hothouse of political and formal experimentation. With “From Politics to Poetics”, we continue to explore a cinema that, freeing itself this time from the interview and speech, imagines other aesthetics to represent labour, exploitation and alienation in the wake of the Leslie Kaplan’s book L’Excès-l’usine, “transmit the Real, not the reality”. Imaginative forms, fiction, poetry, experimentation make it possible to transform reality and to resist the state of things. That is what is important for us. In a film, this transformation can pass sometimes by a fragment, a moment, “a passage, which captures in images the trace of a presence in the world” says Mauro Santini, preoccupied by a poetry of looking, even before that of the film. Nonetheless, documentary cinema is no less attentive to the people being filmed and to the manner in which they can exist through a relation, but also via the exploration in their company of a space at the edge of two distinct worlds. This is amply demonstrated by the films of “Docmonde” and “Viewing Experiences”, as well as in the films selected by the filmmakers affiliated to LaScam, another revealer of the intensity of documentary creation.
The entire sum of programmes in this edition will express the demands voiced by Jean-Louis Comolli among others who unceasingly called for a cinema lived as an experience as opposed to a spectacle, designed as a commodity. In the worrying political context that is continuing to deteriorate and to stoke competition, at the same time that cinemas are having trouble recovering their audiences, the importance of coming together this summer around documentary film for moments of exchange and shared reflection seems to us more crucial than ever.
Pascale Paulat and Christophe Postic