The director Jean-Gabriel Period embodies and prolongs the founding text of the Philosopher and Sociologist Didier Eribon by associating them with extracts of movies or TV shows.
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There is a cinema without camera: that of developers-editors who drink in the world archives, this bottomless well of images turned by others, to give them a new life, to reassemble them in another order. Every time it is to make images speak otherwise, to bring up the bottom of them other meanings – intimate, social, political or historical.
One of the specialists in this matter is French Jean-Gabriel Periot, born in 1974, renowned for having already revisited by this bias the history of the red armed fraction in a German youth (2015) or that of The purification of women in liberation would have been criminal (2006). With Return to Reims [Fragments], its latest feature film (presented at the fifteen directors in Cannes in July), it probably gives the best possible adaptation to the eponymous test of Didier Eribon (return to Reims, Fayard , 2009), autoanalysis leading to a socio-political reading of the French society.
“Class Defiller”
In this flagship work of deterministic thought, the philosopher and sociologist traveled his care of “Class Defiller” by drawing the portrait of his original environment (parents and grandparents) and, through him, of The working class at the XX e century. Saving him the artifices of a ripolinated fiction and a necessarily reducing incarnation, periot retains text some striking passages, especially devolved to the women of his family (his grandmother and his mother), read by Adele Haenel and mounted on Excerpts from movies, archives or television emissions from the 1930s until today. Images that are not content to illustrate the point, but give it difficult to infuse, through the bodies, faces, places, period performances that extend it.
In the lot, obscure bands succeed to other famous, such as zero driving (1933), Jean Vigo, the pretty May (1962), Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme, or chronicle of a summer (1961), Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin. The words tell by the intimate the constitution of a political subject, while the images testify to the social imaginary of which they are the product. At their cross, operated by the assembly, arises something amazing: the collective unconscious of the classrooms “dominated” as tectonics of a story that did not say its last word. And it is on the forehead of the current struggles that periot allows us to extend the comment of the book, as if to better enter the verdict.