This book aims to showcase and analyse a wide range of French social and auteur documentaries from the past two decades that focus on ‘precarious subjects’: people who are in one way or another confronted by the damage inflicted on ‘resources, bodies, and time’ by late-stage capitalism (pp. 107, 13). It is, of course, a book about film, and it is also a book about the effects of globalization on workplaces and workers in metropolitan France. A central contention of the argument is that the work that documentary filmmakers have been doing to chronicle the human consequences of the changing workplace is a praxis of solidarity, of community-building, of ethical resistance. As the book reveals, the filmmakers discussed — consistently engaged on the side of the workers — have not necessarily been working in the same mode as earlier practitioners of militant cinema. Instead, they use an innovative collection of new documentary forms to bear witness, express care, and resist the ‘dissolution, dislocation and disjunction’ that lead to precarious forms of existence (p. 15). This book does not aim to present a general overview of documentary production in France over the past two decades; instead, it offers the lens of precarity as ‘one suggested entry point among many more available’ into a vast and expansive archive (p. 22). It is organized into chapters that share a central thematic concern (vanishing factories; migrant labour in the shipyards and the cleaning industry; filmmakers’ homecomings to post-industrial towns; workplace suffering; and journeys around rural France) as well as some commonalities in documentary approach and praxis. A wide variety of filmmakers, both well-known and emerging, are showcased here. This is one of the book’s important strengths: in addition to providing new takes on a few of the more familiar works, it also offers an initiation to many films that readers will be eager to discover after reading Audrey Evrard’s fulsome descriptions and carefully articulated analyses. Clearly demonstrating a wide-ranging knowledge of French documentary and its history, Evrard effortlessly draws out useful echoes with, and distinctions from, earlier periods and documentary practices, including worker films from the 1930s and militant films from the 1960s through the 1980s. Whether or not readers are persuaded by all of the book’s critical claims, they will likely be compelled by the central thread: these films’ consistent attention to the voices and experiences of individuals from all walks of life, to the pain and shared humanity of their subjects. Of great interest, as well, is the attention to ethics, and particularly the ethics of care in documentaries (also the focus of Ethics of Care in Documentary Filmmaking since 1968, a recent issue of French Screen Studies ed. by Grace An and Catherine Witt (2022)). If occasionally the throughline temporarily seems to digress via its simultaneous engagement with multiple theoretical strands, most of the book reads tightly and fluidly, with a clear focus on its central concerns. Overall, Evrard’s book is a welcome addition to a growing body of English-language scholarship devoted to recent French documentary production.
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Jun 1, 2024
Nicole Cohen + 1
Open Access