RAYMOND DEPARDON SHOOTING RURAL FRANCE WITH A VIEW CAMERA IN JOURNAL DE FRANCE

The fact guy, now doing tranquil stills

The title is somewhat misleading. This is not a "journal" of France, though a sporadic present-day "journal" of Raymond Depardon's large format still view camera wanderings around his native country is interspersed with the compendium of stored footage that makes up most of this "documentary." It's not exactly a "documentary" either, so much as a review and sampling of the long career of one of France's most accomplished international photojournalists. Whether all this works for you or not will depend very much on your interest in Depardon or in photojournalism. It is fascinating to get all these glimpses of the out-takes -- retrieved from the basement, edited, and narrated by Depardon's longtime companion and collaborator, Claudine Nougaret, who has often been his sound engineer. Even their first meetings, when his obsessive filming shows how attracted to her he was and how vivacious and appealing she was, are also memorialized here. (They first met on the set of Eric Rohmer's film Le rayon vert, and we get a haunting glimse of them sitting with the flirty, ageless director back then on a bench.) However, a better film, as a film, might have explained how this relationship and collaboration of the last quarter-century has played out in more detail. What work did they collaborate on? And when he was off to some exotic place on his own as she says he often was, what did she do in the meantime? (Is she along on this van trip in France? And if so, why don't we see her?) This is a mélange, and the only thing that holds it together finally is the versatility and wide curiosity and courage that Depardon shares with others of his relatively rare and remarkable breed.

The out-takes, if that is even the right term (it's not always clear where some of the footage may have been used elsewhere and how), includes both war zones and celebrity reportage. Depardon has been a filmmaker and a documentarian. In the present-time interludes that link the disparate clips of Congo, French politicians, Venezuela, Poland, and the rest together, he's driving around in a van through rural France randomly choosing spots to shoot with a big view camera, and along the way as he does that he explains something about what working with that kind of camera is like. He must wait for people to get out of the scene to shoot a street corner in Nevers. He does a portrait of a row of old codgers sitting in another town. He develops negatives with a portable device leaning into the back of the van. Driving on a small road yet again, he tells the camera (held by whom?) that this is the Meuse, and that he knows it less well than Indo-China. Sometimes in this France-wandering in the mornings he says, "Je me demande qu'est-ce que je fou là?" ("I ask myself what the hell am I doing here?"). This meandering, tranquil, lonely journey: is it retirement? A new career? An antidote to all the intensity of the earlier life? And also, as a festival blurb puts it, "The patience of this imagemaker’s practice," in the current view camera work, that is, "is testament to an alternative to the hyper-fast, instant delivery of digital images that now dominates the culture." On all that, the film itself and Nougaret in her narration, following to a fault perhaps the photographer's tradition of neutrality, are silent.

Depardon may be remembered by US festival-goers or DVD-watchers for his deadpan 2004 coverage or The 10th District Court: Judicial Hearings (NYFF 2004). This great chronicler is the quintessential neutral observer, and one is equally impressed by the danger he faced in shooting street fighting in Caracas and mercinary battlegrounds of Biafra in the late Sixties and by the intimacy he achieved in filming Giscard d'Estaing, in an underlit room with a group of associates, shrewdly and cooly discussing possible strategies for his presidential campaign. (He argues that he might win simply by saying nothing of substance, not antagonizing anyone, as other candidates would do.) We also see a clip from Reporters, Depardon's documentary about early Eighties French cameramen shooting politicians and cynically discussing their catches of the day. We learn that some of these work for Gamma, the photo agency Depardon himself co-founded in 1966.

Depardon may not quite have done everything as a photojournalist, but he came close. He must be admired for the scrupulous way he has avoided editorializing and interpreting, relying on the accumulation of detail in an approach he has called "caméra stylo," writing with a camera, in other words. Depardon and Nougaret co-directed this film, which is a primer of the photographer-filmmakers career, a history of the last half-century, and in part a portrait of the relationship between these two lovers and collaborators. One might wish it were more tightly organized, though how one could review such a catholic, diverse career in a more clearly structured manner may be hard to imagine, and however much this may seem a grab-bag, that doesn't keep this film from being "A tribute to a masterful eye, a humanistic heart and a wondrous life," as Jay Weissberg in Variety put it.

[i]Journal de France[/i, 100 mins., ] was released June 13, 2012 in France and got great reviews (Allociné press rating: 3.9). Screened for this review as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in collaboration with UniFrace Feb. 28 to March 10, 2013.


THE YOUNG DEPARDON
[from VARIETY]

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.