Home>Review of the Masterclass on the film "Nous" by Alice Diop
13.05.2022
Review of the Masterclass on the film "Nous" by Alice Diop
Article written by Lisa Compagnon and translated by Paula Nájera, students of the Cultural Policy and Management speciality of the School of Public Affairs.
>Cinema, an invention of the Lumière brothers, from its creation has continued to "manifests its powers of encounter and understanding between different beings, all over the world, and at the same time mobilises relationships of exclusion and domination, under the sign of social inequalities, racism and sexism. More than a century later, (...) the question of the relationship to diversity is more than ever at the heart of the practices and effects of cinema". In the preface to his book Le cinéma à l'épreuve du divers, film critic and historian Jean-Michel Frodon recalls the central role of film production in the making of the gaze, the understanding of the world and of others. Through a journey along the RER B, the film Nous, directed by Alice Diop, quoted in the book, proposes to fill certain representation gaps, to detect and expose certain lives that are still invisible through a new, subtle form of cinema, outside traditional paradigms.
During the School of Public Affairs' Culture Masterclass on 22 March 2021, students from the Culture and Cultural Policy and Management specialisation at the School of Public Affairs were able to question their artistic inspirations, vision and perception of the representation of diversity in the cinema and its importance in the construction of a view about alterity.
Nous, a subtle invitation to shift the gaze
The gaze is projected into the vastness of a wooded landscape, lulled by the chirping of birds and the calm of the forest, through a first scene initiated without any guide, or landmark. A family is - like the spectator - immersed in this silent awaiting. What are they waiting for? What are we waiting for? This almost silent introduction seems to announce a subtle, suggestive cinematographic approach, far from bending to the usual (or at least frequent) demands of evidence and clarity. But after all, does this expectation really need an object? Is it not precisely an invitation to appreciate itself, an ode to patience, to time, a modest incitement to place, pause the gaze? In the distance, a deer appears, partially revealing the intention of the (themselves spied upon) observers, and suggests a first diversification of the glances, of their object, their origin, their purpose.
Then, in this calm, this slowness, the decor changes. A light flickers, the sounds of the city intrude, and finally Ismaël, an immigrant mechanic whose daily life Alice Diop follows behind the camera, takes the lead. Then, short glimpses of the ordinary follow one another: we meet N'deye Sighane Diop, the filmmaker's sister, a home nurse, her patients, the royalists in the cathedral of St-Denis in the midst of a tribute to Louis XVI, high school girls playing Uno, children, young adults, outside, on benches or in improvised camping sites, busy not being busy, to a background of George Brassens or Edith Piaf. The anecdotes and scenes are superimposed, without any clear interpretation or explicit political claim being made (let alone imposed). This multiplicity of narratives is interspersed with that of the filmmaker, who shares some personal archive footage, narrating certain family memories in a voice-over. We then understand the roots of her philosophy, of her cinephilia: she regrets the events that have no trace, "what has disappeared, everything that has been erased". "I film the house to have a memory”. She films so that the memory remains alive, to keep alive the existence of what is no longer, or to offer a new one, through the image, to those who have never - in the official narrative - truly possessed one. Through the material link created by the RER B line, the only (apparent) common point between the protagonists, Alice Diop explores, in the manner of François Maspero in Les passagers du Roissy-Express, or in the manner of the author Pierre Bergounioux in Gif-sur-Yvettes, the individualities, the particularities, of these “little lives'' that she intends - through her approach - to "tear out of the shadows". What Nous is about, very far from preconceived, demanding or overly sentimentalist speeches, is simply to offer a representation to "people who had lived without ever finding a representation of themselves in books or on the images that appear on the screens'', and to offer the spectators a new opportunity to shift their gaze, and enrich - always without instructions or constraint - their perception of reality, of others, and of this Nous (We) that cements our humanity.
Rejecting simplifications and formatting of diversity
With this new work, Alice Diop makes use of cinema and its poetic, human language - which is also more approachable - to question the complex notions of identity, the gaze, the representation of diversity, of memory. The narrative of territories, here through a RER line, allows, for the time of a journey, a displacement of thought and certainties. Through its slowness, Nous offers a way out of the furious media narrative of immediacy to invite us to contemplate the banal and the ordinary. This journey is offered by the director without any train crossings, "I had no questions (...) just the desire to let myself be crossed by the encounters, by the emotions, the sensations". In a documentary gesture, she undertook a month-long journey around the symbolic, metaphorical route of the RER B, and from her handwritten notes, the watercolours of her companion, and the exchanges that took place, she constructed her narrative for over a year. But in order to make a greater impression, to reach a wider and more diverse audience, shouldn't fiction have been chosen? For Alice Diop, as for Jean-Michel Frodon, there is simply no fracture between genres. Each film is a mixture, a balance between fiction and reality, between form and content, in which the staging, whatever the type and intention, is at the heart of the creation. Each film proposes and constructs our relationship to otherness, and, because of its individuality and systematic uniqueness, deserves to be conceived and analysed outside the rigid categories that simplify its examination.
However, despite the importance of this balance between form and content in each work, Alice Diop specifies that even if "having a political questioning on the production of images" is essential, for her, "what counts is the cinema". In other words, regardless of a film's political, social or militant significance, it is the quality of the cinematographic proposal and the artistic vision that remain the determining factors in creation. However, she insists on the unchanging need - which she tries to respond to with Nous - to think about the political imprint of images, their role in erecting a counter-narrative that allows us to better think about the complexity of reality, its density, and above all to rethink the representation of women and men that has been configured by others. In short, she tries to create new forms in order to offer new opportunities to make the gaze waver. This is also what Jean-Michel Frodon points out: for him, Nous is an "exemplary model" of an invitation to shift the gaze, freed from literal, habitual and easy mechanisms, which responds to this need to expose the diverse - in this case the suburbs - while providing an unusual response. Moreover, he insists on this distinction between the diverse and the diversity: the latter is only a caricature, a simplistic, statistical approach that impoverishes the reflection by encouraging "band-aid" measures - such as including actors and actresses from minorities, which he describes as "colourful formatting", instead of deeply thinking about the narrative, the political aspect and the sensory effects of a work. On the contrary, diverse recomplexes representation and the relationship to the difference precisely by disrupting these formatting lines. It is precisely in this line that Nous fits in, whose humility of discourse, subtlety of direction, silences and slowness offer us a political and contemplative work that thwarts simplisms.
Nous, documentary directed by Alice Diop, 2022, 1h57.
"A line, the RER B, crossed from north to south. A journey inside these indistinct places called the suburbs. Encounters: a cleaning lady in Roissy, a scrap metal dealer in Le Bourget, a nurse in Drancy, a writer in Gif-sur-Yvette, the follower of a hunt in the Chevreuse valley and the filmmaker who revisits the place of her childhood. Each one is a piece of a whole that composes a whole. A possible "us".
Le cinéma à l’épreuve du divers. Politiques du regard, Jean-Michel Frodon, 2021.
A Masterclass prepared and moderated by Inès Bréchignac, Lisa Compagnon, Henri Cordonnier, Lucie Garnier, Louise Gauthier-Martinet, Julia Hancart, Léo Hervada-Seux, Diane Laurent, Aurélien Lemaitre, Emma Lézier-Gibout et Paula Nájera students of the Culture and Cultural Policy and Management specialties of the School of Public Affairs.
