»The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the >state of emergency< in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history that takes this into account,« Walter Benjamin demanded in 1940.1 In Peter Nestler's film »Erzbergbau/Eisenherstellung, Teil 2« (Ore Mining/Iron Production, Part 2), made in 1974, Nestler depicts what is promised by the title with all the sobriety of a historical materialist. Many of Nester's films are more spectacularly political in their content: for instance, the »Chilefilm« (Chile Film) made the same year, which is also a production of Swedish Television, but was taken from the schedule a day before it was to be broadcast. Nonetheless, Nestler's unobtrusive shot of the elevator mechanism in the winding shaft continues to have an effect. It seems to focus less on the »state of emergency« and more on the »rule.« However, it is not a matter of the shot itself, but of the gesture of showing it. On the face of it, Benjamin's demand looks like the antithesis of the construction principle of film, which is ruled (as a rule) by a sanctioned storyline. And then something intrudes into this storyline, some sort of exception (love, a murder). Documentary films as Nester makes them are an endangered species, in so far as they toy with the possibility of not being perceived. This is not to say that no one looks at them, but that viewers do not know what they are precisely because it is so evident. Harun Farocki wrote in 1979 that Nestler's films are often compared with »educational films for schools.« Having been sensitized by Nester, we can perhaps say: the genre of documentary film runs the risk that its subject, or the fact that it has a subject at all – something »interesting,« »exciting« –, continues the tradition of the oppressed.
Thoughts like these seem to me above all relevant with respect to a certain tendency within contemporary French visual film practice. Here, I mean highly esthetic fictions that are saturated with documentary characteristics. (This is not only true formally, however, but also pragmatically: the Dardenne brothers, for example, had had long experience with documentaries before they made their first fiction, »La Promesse,« in 1996. And you can see it.) It is not a matter of underpinning or spicing up the fiction using documentary means. It is not a matter of similarity, of real life, even – or precisely – as fiction. (We have left Nan Goldin behind.) Instead of this, the documentary elements undermine the fiction as zero points of meaning, so to speak. Laurent Cantet's »Ressources humaines« (1999) is set amid the industrial action aimed at introducing the 35-hour week. The film tells the story of a father-son relationship that owes its dynamics to post-Fordian class fragmentation. The father works at a workbench in a factory in a small town. The son studies in Paris, then returns to the factory as a trainee. The director asks him to develop a plan to persuade the workers of the benefits of the 35-hour week using new consensual management techniques. In reality, this is a cover for a rationalization move that would cost the father his job as well. When the son realizes that he is being used, he instigates a militant strike with the representative of the CGT. In the key scene, the son is seen walking through the factory with workers who are prepared to strike, trying to mobilize the rest. His dutiful father is the only one who cannot be prized from his work bench. Until the son finally yells at him, and, in rage, makes the most apt accusation that can be made with regard to a social democrat: that he is full of »shame« up to his ears. This moment, this zero point of meaning has documentary character: it is a gesture of absolute despair. It meets with apathetic silence: in the end, truth cannot be represented.
This cry could have taken as a model the cry of the woman who, in Hervé Le Roux's »Reprise,« refuses to stop the industrial action in 1968 and go back to the Wonder battery factory like her colleagues after an uneasy compromise has been reached. »The conformism that has been indigenous to social democracy from the start clings not only to its political tactics, but also to its economic concepts,« Benjamin goes on to say. »It is a reason for its later collapse [Benjamin means 1933]. There is nothing that has corrupted the German work force to the same extent as the idea that it was swimming with the tide.«2 Le Roux bases his fiction, his (all too French) search for the despairing woman, on documentary material that a Paris student collective had filmed at the time. In Cantet's case, the documentarism is not on the level of indexicality, but of mentality. The category of shame, understood as an implicit confession of the son's own conformism, breaks through the fiction and reveals the truth of (or a moment of truth within) the social relationships. It is nice that a yuppie, a social climber, develops class consciousness: it is paradoxical that this consciousness does not at all fit his class. In fact, however, the assumption of an imitated identity has more political potential than his former petty bourgeois yearning for transgression, as it works against social fragmentation, the essential factor in control.
In his most recent film, »L'emploi du temps,« Cantet addresses the documentary level of fiction even more directly. A male protagonist is again the center of attention, a manager who leaves himself and his family in the dark about his being unemployed. Vincent is a nihilist, a bourgeois who has lost his class. He is therefore not tragically rationalized away; he slips out of working life. He prefers riding around in his car to improving himself. (To avoid any misunderstandings: the bourgeoisie exists – embodied in this film by Vincent's father. It is just that, for Vincent, it is no longer a form in which his life seems to make sense.) The fiction of work that Vincent constructs for his family, and us as well, is woven in such a virtuosic way that the actual unreality of what is happening on the screen is split once more. (As in Manet's »Bar at the Folies-Bergère,« the mirror effect itself takes over control and produces the impression of social opacity on a shiny surface.) The documentary element in this film is again not on the level of indexicality, nor on that of mentality, but acts as a hinge between the (fictive) levels of reality upon which Vincent surfs. It is the promise (of empirical experience) that there really is a connection between these levels – that, in this story of a permanent state of emergency, one can really get from here to there. This film, too, has difficulties coming to an end. Like the militant strike at the end of »Ressources humaines« or the turning back of the woman at the end of »La Promesse,« it really only begins with the closing credits. Unlike what is demanded by the popular press, Vincent is not forced to kill himself and his family to rescue the fiction, but is dismissed together with his audience into a present of social confusion.
»Martha...Martha« (2000) by Sandrine Veysset brings out the problems of class the most subtly and at the same time most sharply: here, the neo-pauperism of a youth become old that earns its money not with articles for the springerin, but at second-hand clothes markets. Veysett's Martha is a continuation of the feministic physiognomies that portray femininity as (patriarchal) dysfunction. Martha has been conditioned by a state of emergency, some experience with her brother (not sexual abuse!) that Veysset never shows. The documentary element here is a negative form that gives the filmic fiction its basis and keeps it moving. The film begins with Martha's losing battle to be accepted, or, rather, loved, by her farming family. It reaches its climax in the conflict with her sister, who has married into the upper class. Martha does not have much to offer. She cannot do anything – even get on with children. She can only use her austere charm to bring home to people who are better off than herself – and that means everyone – the most incomprehensible demand today of the three demands of 1789: equality. This does not work out well; in fact, her own demand is turned forcibly against her. But Veysset does not construct a victim, but a woman who, at the end – that again is not an end –, reconsiders her options.
Translated by Tim Jones