TÉMOIGNAGES

En même temps exactement, je me demandais ce que, face à ce poids lourd, pèsent les « petits films » que programme, avec une belle constance, la chaîne culturelle Arte. Sans doute, ils ne sont pas tous identiques, tant s’en faut. Leur point commun (involontaire) est que je n’en avais jamais entendu parler avant de les découvrir sur le site de la chaîne. Frappe, d’abord, la variété de leurs origines : films allemands, autrichiens, britanniques, italiens, turcs, iraniens, japonais, argentins, boliviens voire saoudien. Tous les pays qui ont un peu d’industrie cinématographique sont représentés, dans une égalité de principe assez excitante (l’Afrique est la grande et éternelle absente, sa copieuse production restant très locale). Pour une fois, on n’a pas d’un côté le colosse étasunien et de l’autre, le reste du monde, mais des films – à prétention ou à intention d’auteur – sans gros budget, généralement sans star (quel repos), et souvent inattendus. Inutile de dire qu’en regardant sans préjugé Wadjda (Haifaa Al-Mansour, Arabie saoudite, 2012), Téhéran tabou (Ali Soozandeh, Allemagne, 2017) ou Sous-sols (Ulrich Seidl, Autriche, 2014), je ne cherchais ni n’attendais de chefd’oeuvre. Aussi n’en ai-je pas eu, mais à chaque fois, quelque chose de tout aussi précieux : un témoignage. D’abord, un témoignage sur l’état du cinéma « d’auteur » (c’est-à-dire, en gros, du cinéma qui n’est pas produit par une grosse firme et à destination d’un public compté par millions). Il est surprenant, et réconfortant, de découvrir des films qui, sans être tous d’une inventivité prodigieuse, sont tous faits consciencieusement – au double sens, intellectuel et éthique, du terme. Il m’est arrivé de m’ennuyer devant certains, parfois de les lâcher en route (j’avoue), mais jamais de penser qu’on se moquait de moi. Il y a, en somme, un état moyen du film d’auteur qui est sympathiquement bon. Mais surtout, j’ai été étonné et, pour tout dire, content d’avoir à chaque fois le sentiment d’apprendre, de la plus concrète des façons, quelque chose sur des pays, ou des milieux, que je ne connais que de nom. Partager la vie d’une fillette saoudienne qui fait son possible pour rester dé

lurée dans une société qui ne l’y encourage pas ; traverser le Téhéran d’une oiselle de nuit vivant de ses charmes; explorer les dessous pas nets d’une des dernières sociétés catholiques d’Europe ; être épaté par l’héritage de l’ukiyo- e dans le cinéma de genre nippon… Le cinéma raconte des histoires, c’est connu ; on sait aussi que le cinéma dit documentaire a fait, ces deux dernières décennies, une percée remarquable dans la programmation des salles. Je me rappelle Jean Louis Schefer, il y a vingt ans : « Le cinéma n’a jusqu’à présent été exploité que sur le fond moral d’une histoire (récit) (3) », et semblant le regretter. C’est justement ce qui m’a plu, dans presque tous les films que j’ai vus lors de cette expérience (une quinzaine) : ils racontaient des histoires, mais valant pour portrait moins d’une idiosyncrasie que d’une situation. Des histoires « morales » : documentaires sur des moeurs. Je ne veux pas grossir ni figer ce tableau naïf d’une cinéphilie clivée entre bouquets d’orchidées et humbles fleurs des champs : plutôt redire que, dans l’écologie du cinéma, les unes ne poussent pas sans les autres – ni sans fumier. in its warm and old-fashioned venue, in front of a packed, fervent audience: dream lectures (from the speaker’s point of view).The cycles are thematic: styles, actors, Hollywood, and so on. This time the organizers had concocted a sort of meta-programme, returning in a reflexive way to the themes of previous years. I had inherited the impossible subject, ‘Not all films have the same value’ (implication: there are masterpieces). Damn it: what is a masterpiece?

I’m not going into detail about how I tackled the question. Suffice it to say that I thought it was clever to compare the main versions of the Joan of Arc story, concluding with the one that’s in the top 10 of all the charts, Dreyer’s Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). And to add that, in practice, this wonderful idea was a perfect trap. Of course, one can always wriggle out of it by historical remarks (1), and without too much trouble compare the solutions imagined by De Mille, Besson, Rivette and Dumont to make the fabulous story of the Maid of Orleans something digestible. The difficult part was the closing exordium: why on earth do they insist Dreyer’s film is a “masterpiece”? My answer is nothing new. We know that the transition from artisanal to art has made the “masterpiece” an abstract notion, drawn towards an ideal that is sometimes Platonic, sometimes academic, and unattainable, like any ideal. There is something of this in the cinema, in comic form, with the Caesar ceremonies and the lists of the twenty best films of all time. But in passing (via Romanticism and its long list of descendants), the term has passed into critical appreciation, where objective criteria aren't legion, and has become even more charged with ideals.To return to Dreyer's film, its status as a masterpiece comes in part from its own virtues (it is a film as monstrous as its heroine), but above all from the meeting between its project (getting the most out of an actress and her face) and that of post-war critics. It was in the 1950s that André Bazin, Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette made a monument of it. No masterpiece is a masterpiece without the encounter between its own aesthetic work and favourable conditions of reception (the Mona Lisa has only been a masterpiece since the 19th century [2]). As I cautioned, it’s nothing new, but it’s always good to go over the obvious.

At exactly the same time, faced with this heavyweight, I wondered what weight is carried by the “little films” that the cultural channel Arte programmes with such consistency. No doubt, they aren’t all identical, far from it. What they have in common (unintentionally) is that I had never heard of them before I discovered them on the channel’s website. First of all, the variety of their origins is striking: German, Austrian, British, Italian,Turkish, Iranian, Japanese, Argentinean, Bolivian and even Saudi. All the countries that have a bit of a film industry are represented, in a rather exciting principle of equality (Africa is the great eternal absentee, its copious production remaining very local). For once we don’t have the American colossus on one side and the rest of the world on the other, but films – whether or not with the pretention or intention of being auteur films – without a big budget, usually without a star (what a relief), and often unexpected. Needless to say, viewing without prejudice Wadjda (Haifaa Al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia, 2012), Tehran Taboo (Ali Soozandeh, Germany, 2017) or I’m Keller (Ulrich Seidl, Austria, 2014), I wasn't looking for or expecting a masterpiece. Also, I didn’t get one, but each time got something just as precious: a testimony. First of all, a testimony on the state of “auteur” cinema (which is to say, basically, cinema that isn't produced by a big company and intended for an audience counted in the millions). It is surprising, and comforting, to discover films which, without all being prodigiously inventive, are all made conscientiously – in both the intellectual and ethical senses of the term. I have been bored by some of them, sometimes dropping them halfway (I admit), but never thinking that they were taking the mickey.There is, in short, an average state of the auteur film that is agreeably good. But above all, I was surprised and, to tell the truth, happy each time to have the feeling of learning in the most concrete way something about countries or backgrounds that I only knew in name: sharing the life of a little Saudi girl who does her best to remain untroubled in a society that doesn’t encourage her to be; crossing Teheran with a night bird living from her charms; exploring the shady underbelly of one of the last Catholic societies in Europe; being amazed by the legacy of ukiyo-e in Japanese genre cinema... It’s a given that cinema tells stories; we also know that so-called documentary cinema has made a remarkable breakthrough in the programming of cinemas in the last two decades. I remember Jean Louis Schefer, twenty years ago: “Until now, cinema has only been exploited on the moral content of a story (narrative) (3)”, and seemingly regretting it. This is precisely what I liked in almost all the films I saw during this experience (about fifteen): they told stories, but were less a portrait of an idiosyncrasy than of a situation. “Moral” stories: documentaries on mores. I don’t want to magnify or freeze this naive picture of a cinephilia split between bouquets of orchids and bunches of humble wildflowers: rather I want to repeat that, in the ecology of the cinema, the one cannot grow without the other – or without manure.

Translation: Chloé Baker