What does political action mean today?
Where do we stand today, in 2018, in France, with regards to politics and the political? If there still exists resistance to the many upheavals in the world – which do not inspire optimism either from an ecological or from a social perspective – this resistance does not offset the feeling of apathy or resignation which seems to define our era.
NOS DEFAITES was built around this questioning of our contemporary political condition.
To talk about politics in France today, we must to look back at our own history in order to find a point of comparison. When it comes to reflecting on our politics, what other period is as paradigmatic as the events of May 1968 and their aftermath? It was the last revolutionary moment of our history. Or at least it was the last time everyday life was so extensively politicised.
To talk about politics in France today, rather than address activist, we must look for those whom we expect to be fully aware of the world they live in, of its qualities as well as its faults. That’s why these high school students, youths on the threshold between adolescence and adulthood, struck me as the most interesting interlocutors.
What remains of 1968 and what has disappeared
For this film, I worked with about ten students, who were both the protagonists and the subjects of this film to be. The film presents two kinds of very different materials. Firstly, there’s the remakes, the re-enactments of excerpts from existing films. These excerpts were drawn from films made around 1968. These films were chosen independently of their genre (fiction or documentary), aesthetics and reputations. They range from LA CHINOISE (1967) by Jean-Luc Godard to LA SALAMANDRE (1971) by Alain Tanner, and also include documentaries by independent filmmakers such as the Medvedkin Group or the collectives Arc and Cinélutte. It was the spoken word that led to the choice of film clips.
The excerpts, reproduced identically – same frame compositions, order of shots, soundscape, montage, similar settings, etc. – are acted by the high school students, who bring (back) to life a mode of expression, in terms of the words they use but also the beliefs they articulate.
And it’s here that a form of contradiction emerges, a gap in signification that allows us to question what of 1968 has remained and what has disappeared.
While in some clips the characters are students, in others they are adults (workers, unionists, activists, etc.). In any case, aside from the differences in age and social status between the characters and the students, an entire vocabulary and phraseology that has disappeared is recited by today’s youth.
In parallel, these clips are intercut with interviews with the high school students. The interviews always had as their starting point the re-enacted clips, and what the student had understood and taken from them, in order to reflect on their relevance in the world that he or she lives in.
The other questions, which were the same in all interviews, probe how they perceive and evaluate the notion of political engagement nowadays.
The main topic of the film is, ‘What is the role of politics today?’ At the same time, NOS DEFAITES is also a film about cinema as a possible space for political as well as poetic expression. (Jean-Gabriel Périot)
