Vivre Ici: Space, Place and Experiences in Contemporary French Documentary by Alison J. Murray Levine

Abstract

Reviewed by: Vivre Ici: Space, Place and Experiences in Contemporary French Documentary by Alison J. Murray Levine Martine Guyot-Bender Levine, Alison J. Murray. Vivre Ici: Space, Place and Experiences in Contemporary French Documentary. Liverpool UP, 2018. ISBN 978-1-78694-041-4. Pp. 320. Film documentary is still often perceived as cinema's parent pauvre. However, cinema itself began as a new technology whose purpose was to record life. Today, thanks to smaller cameras, film documentary is flourishing all over the word, most notably in France. Film documentary does not merely record "life caught unaware," as Vertov claimed. It uses the same components as fiction: a camera, lighting, framing, and situations that are assembled into coherent narratives. Apart from nature films, however, documentary is rarely considered as an esthetic experience. In this context, Levine's book fills in an important gap in French film studies in that it moves away from the topic of a small set of films to focus on what matters the most—that documentaries can transmit a sensual experience to the audience. Levine examines films produced over the last twenty years in metropolitan France. However, her analysis can apply to general documentaries, past or future, French or not. For Levine, documentaries are cinematographic, experiential objects. She carefully lays out her theoretical frame, which combines theorists such as Jean-Louis Comolli and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and a brief review of the recent history of documentary, which she calls "Renaissance?" The question mark suggests that there is no renaissance, that documentary has long been an important genre, but has only recently become a subject of analysis. Levine separates the vast theme of her book into well-defined subsets. The chapter titled "Planet" describes various cinematic strategies used in nature films—that is, the nonhuman dimension of planet Earth—to guide their audience into feeling, in a tactical way. A second chapter, with examples from Depardon, Varda, and Marker, presents road documentaries as the complement of fictional road movies: people who travel and observe their world. Considering the excitement that surrounded Nicolas Philibert's Être et avoir (2002), a chapter focused on the filming of schools was logical. Using a series of recent films on the challenges of multiculturalism in urban schools, Levine shows the French fascination for education. She evokes the tightrope on which filmmakers find themselves when attempting to represent issues such as laïcité, without voyeurism. There is also France's fascination for the transformation of rural life, which, [End Page 194] as Levine shows, is often filmed by the means of portraits, some "dark," some "golden," which contain a strong political stance. The last chapter, "Edge," addresses documentaries that focus on human misery on the margins of society, such as Claude Dextrel's extraordinary Au bord du monde (2013). Levine handles the challenge of introducing a myriad of documentary sub-genres by using a systematic, narrow focus, which will help many viewers and non-specialist educators of cinema to see documentary as cinema, instead of seeing it as a raw representation of reality, which it has never been. Martine Guyot-Bender Hamilton College (NY) Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French