Raymond Depardon’s Documentary Confrontations with Power
Films seen long ago but unavailable for rewatching often loom large, like myths shadowed by fear: Will a second viewing confirm or dispel the initial impression? I first saw “Caught in the Acts” (“Délits flagrants”), a documentary by the French director Raymond Depardon, in Paris, a few months after it opened there, in 1994, and it struck me as one of the greatest documentaries I’d ever seen. That film, showing behind-the-scenes interrogations of suspects in a Paris courthouse, has never been released here; I only recently was able to see it again, ahead of a copious retrospective of Depardon’s films opening at Film at Lincoln Center on February 20th, and that rewatch only reinforced my original feeling. Moreover, I found that other Depardon films in the series, both documentary and fiction, reverberate with “Caught in the Acts” in unexpected ways, intensifying that film’s impact while illuminating its place in the eighty-three-year-old director’s extensive career.
That career is an unusual one, both for its precocity and for its variety. Born to a farming family in east-central France in 1942, Depardon started out, in childhood, as a still photographer. He tells the story of those early days in his 1984 autobiographical documentary, “The Declic Years”—a weird mistranslation of the French title, “Les années déclic,” or “The Click Years.” At around ten or twelve, he built a darkroom and a studio in the family’s attic, and, at just fourteen, after completing his basic schooling, he became an apprentice at a local optician which also sold photographic equipment. At sixteen, he moved to Paris to become a photographer’s assistant, and, six months later, he went freelance. He already had designs on the cinema but was warned away from it because of his scant formal education. He began to film short TV documentary segments while continuing to travel widely on photo assignments. (He also co-founded a new agency, Gamma.) In 1970, he and a colleague were held prisoner for a month by Chad’s Army. In 1974, while covering the French Presidential candidate Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, he asked the candidate for permission to make a documentary about the campaign, inspired by the seminal 1960 documentary, “Primary,” produced by Robert Drew, about the rival campaigns of John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Giscard agreed, and Depardon made the film, which concluded with Giscard’s victory—yet, as France’s newly elected President, Giscard prohibited the movie from being shown. (It wasn’t released until 2002.) Nonetheless, Depardon got what he needed: the project made him a filmmaker.
The Giscard movie, “A Day in the Country” (“1974, une partie de campagne,” a pun: also “A Day in the Campaign”), set a definitive tone for Depardon’s career, as the first of many films in which he gets behind the scenes and shows what’s usually out of public view. Those films are inextricable from the question of access and its implications, both practical and legal—and the resulting tensions energize Depardon’s filmmaking aesthetic. In his most imaginatively conceived films he confronts fearsome systems of power—law and violence—and his terms of access to those systems forge the projects’ artistic form.
Take, for instance, his 1988 documentary, “Emergencies,” a masterwork of the genre, filmed in the E.R.s of a Paris hospital’s psychiatric ward. The bulk of the movie is set in intake rooms where potential patients are evaluated by medical professionals; hovering over their questioning is the possibility of patients’ involuntary hospitalization, whether for observation, protection, or treatment. The stakes of the exchanges are maximal: some individuals are accused of crimes; other are enduring mental-health crises that endanger their livelihoods or social standing; still others have been brought to the hospital as a result of suicide attempts. Trauma lurks in the background—sexual violence, family conflicts, substance abuse, solitude, the threat of deportation. The film’s artistry emerges in large part from the constraints of his shoot inside the hospital: Depardon (who does his own cinematography) is forced to film from only a few angles in a few tight spaces, and that compression both sharpens the interactions he captures and symbolizes the legal and medical power being brought to bear on the subjects. The filming requires, above all, a reserved, noninterventionist method, and Depardon turns that method into a cinematic style. (His first film on the subject, “News Items,” from 1983, involves a police station and its officers—but, strangely, his wide-ranging access on that project left the images relatively slack.) In “Emergencies,” his camera sits on a tripod or is handheld with minimal movement; frames remain static for extended periods of time. The effect isn’t passively observant but, rather, rigorously formal, embodying Depardon’s own concentrated engagement and demanding the same involvement of viewers.
With “Caught in the Acts,” Depardon rarefies this method further. In France, a person who, per the title, is arrested during a supposed criminal act is brought to an interview with a prosecutor—with no defense lawyer present. Depardon received permission to film such interviews at a courthouse in Paris (with the accord of individual suspects). His presence is so recessive that the resulting footage, however cannily composed, looks, for the most part, like it was made by an unattended surveillance camera. The interviews are presented in extended takes, with minimal editing, mainly via jump cuts. They are filmed in side views, with the suspect and the prosecutor facing each other across the official’s desk—but this compositional symmetry is the only thing equal about the discussions taking place. The prosecutor recites the official version of each case and asks the suspect for his or her version of events. A young and hearing-impaired man with a somewhat bewildered air, who committed many small offenses but had never been imprisoned, is now legally an adult and is terrified to learn that he may face jail time for stealing a bag from a car. A man arrested for running a game of three-card monte tells the prosecutor that the police offered to let him go if he would inform against big-time gamblers or pimps, a betrayal that he fears would amount to a death sentence.
Some of the suspects try to minimize their actions with euphemisms or paraphrases; others do so with explanations that the prosecutors find utterly implausible. Some deny the charges outright, while others confess freely. As filmed by Depardon, the clashes reveal a radical disconnect between the representatives of the law and the people accused of breaking it. One prosecutor suggests that an addict leave Paris and move someplace where drugs are unavailable (he corrects her, explaining that there’s no such place); another responds sarcastically to a young man who claims that the police beat him into a confession. The film reveals racial inequities, too, as suspects who are preponderantly not white are brought before prosecutors who almost uniformly are. But what the pressurized interviews yield, above all, is a historical disconnect. The accused bring with them the burdens of poverty, addiction, isolation, physical or mental illness, and the relentless stress of exclusion. The interviews are filled with a litany of these troubled personal histories, which come across as sentences unto themselves. Late in the film, after a long and tense shot of a man being brought in handcuffs to a prison cell, Depardon cuts to an exterior view of the courthouse, with pedestrians going by. The breath of air, and the freedom of movement, only reinforce the moral asphyxiation taking place inside—and emphasize the unyielding authority sustaining the city’s public life.
“Caught in the Acts” and “Emergencies” are part of an unofficial trilogy that’s capped by “The 10th District Court—Moments of Trials,” from 2004, another film of momentous legal clashes. Again, Depardon got special permission to film what others can’t—actual trials, in a courtroom. The cases involve charges of the same sort as in “Caught in the Acts,” but whereas that earlier film puts interrogator and subject together in the frame, as if in a bullfight, “The 10th District Court” is made with minimal intervention of another sort: multiple cameras filming subjects in isolation, emphasizing the defendants’ desperate solitude. These trials are by judge, not jury, and defendants wear street clothing of a startling informality. Unlike the highly codified theatre of rational analysis and rhetorical flair that’s staged in American courtrooms, the French system on view in “The 10th District Court” is confrontational: defendants are free to lie, and judges pound away skeptically, even derisively, and the filmed effect is of watching defendants squirm as they become aware that the hot water they’re in is starting to boil. Most are evasive, a few are obsequious, many are defiant, a few are enraged, and all appear to feel their lives slipping away under the seemingly boundless force of judicial inquisition.
Depardon has made only four fiction features in the course of his career, and one of them, “Captive of the Desert,” stands alongside his legal trilogy and his autobiography as an idiosyncratic, audacious masterpiece. Released in 1990, it is based on the story of a real-life French archeologist, Françoise Claustre, whom Depardon (as he explains in “The Declic Years”) filmed, as a documentarian, in the mid-seventies, when she was being held captive by rebel forces in Chad. Whereas his documentaries are among the great cinematic fusions of word and image, “Captive of the Desert,” filmed in Niger, is a work of enforced silence amid images of ineffable awe. The actress Sandrine Bonnaire (who’d risen to fame in the eighties, as a teen-ager, with Maurice Pialat’s “À Nos Amours” and Agnès Varda’s “Vagabond”) plays the unnamed title character, whom Depardon catches in medias res, already a prisoner of nomadic rebels who are being driven across the desert by government persecution.
The captive Claustre told Depardon that she tries “to think of the present, to think of nothing,” and Depardon, in dramatizing such a story, visualizes and externalizes the nothingness of her thoughts. Only a few of her captors speak French, so most of her days are spent nonverbally (and Depardon reinforces the isolation by not subtitling the rebels’ dialogue in their native language). The film shows the captors’ comings and goings, their discussions among themselves, and the captive’s efforts to keep occupied with her few books, with photos, with basic hygiene, and with memory games involving her address book. The pace isn’t slow but, rather, timeless; Depardon builds it with long takes that are emptied of what the captive thinks of as her life but full of an alternative time scale, a meta-experience of its own. Some of the film’s greatest images, of the captive simply walking alone in the desert, have the trance-like, hypnotic power of visual music (and make the desert views of this year’s acclaimed “Sirāt” look like stage sets). “Captive of the Desert” is a movie of power, too—that of the captors, that of the desert itself—and, like the courtroom and prosecutors’ offices, the harsh environment determines the movie’s form.
As Depardon’s films show, one form of power common to all is the power of memory, and in “The Declic Years” he finds a form for his own. In making himself the subject of scrutiny, he pointed a movie camera at his own face, in extreme closeup and with stark frontal lighting, putting himself into his own exacting interrogative spotlight as he dredges the practical and emotional specifics of his past and considers his own photos and films. “The Declic Years” was made a few years after the death of his father, and at one point Depardon expresses regret that he didn’t spend more time and effort filming the places of his childhood, his family, the farm. He did ultimately make three films about farm life, two volumes of “Profils Paysans” and “La Vie Moderne,” but the sensibility arising from his childhood is more vigorously present in his films capturing subjects that seemed remote from it. By contrast with the work of other documentary filmmakers of similarly observational ardor, Depardon’s method is rugged. Where Frederick Wiseman’s attention is analytical and the Maysles brothers’ attention is dramatic, Depardon’s is a tree trunk—blunt, rough, heavy, a raw thing to hew that keeps its rings of history even after shaping and trimming. His patience as a documentarian is that of the longue durée—of a childhood spent under the fourteenth-century gates of his parents’ property. He keeps the camera in place long enough that it seems to grow roots and draw strength from the earth. The beauty of his images, amid unnatural constraints, isn’t a matter of style but of natural force. ♦