Good Luck, A Throw of Dice
Montage with Jean-Gabriel Périot

“Does the name Jean-Gabriel Périot ring a bell?” The question popped up in a friend's chat a few months ago, along with a link to the program of the Festival di letteratura working class in Campi Bisenzio, an industrial suburb of Florence. This literature festival was organized by Edizioni Alegre in Rome, by Alberto Prunetti, who is in charge of the Working Class series at the publishing house. Together with the Collettivo Di Fabbrica, a collective of workers at the former GKN factory in Campi Bisenzio, which had developed structures and models of co- determination over a decade and has been occupying and virtually managing the factory itself for the past three years following its sale. The situation is precarious for everyone involved, the outcome is uncertain, the political negotiations are deadlocked, but this interweaving of work and culture, of cultural (self-)representation and collective worker entrepreneurship (co- operative models) seems elementary in order to make labour struggles heard dynamically and at the same time to understand the quality and value of labour as an object of culture. Not culture as entertainment. In this context, Périot's name appeared alongside Didier Eribon in the section ‘Literature by the working-class children’. The question in the chat about Périot, whose name didn't ring a bell, overlapped at that moment with a random open tab from nd-aktuell and a critically annoyed article by Frédéric Valin, “Against Eribon—From We to I: The Children's Literature of the Workers replaces the Workers‘ Literature’.” Book and film: Retours à Reims (Return to Reims). The film responds to the author's I with the We of film history, assembled like a kind of collective historical evidence. Périot says that he is not interested in telling the story of those who have managed to escape their class, rather, how can the history of the working class be told?

In Return to Reims (Fragment), Périot has divided this story into two movements: the chronological unfolding of a presence and its disappearance. The presence of the workers, their work, their housing and living conditions, becomes apparent in the image through the quality of the film material, in a montage of film excerpts from the 1920s to the 1970s, the source of which only becomes visible in the end credits. Films created through the interest and the work of the journalists and filmmakers, but also of the producers, editors and broadcasters. Presence also as dignity, reflecting voice, stance, as looking back, struggle and physical friction against the voice-over text, spoken by Adèle Haenel, whose voice brings another, currently political presence. This text is a fragment of Eribon's book, about a tenth of it, says Périot, the voice of the mother distilled out. The version of the women, of the female workers, interested him above all, he says, finding in it an echo of his own childhood, growing up in a working-class household, with his mother and several aunts. Working on the film began with the idea of producer Marie-Ange Luciani, who knew Périots' way of working with archive material and asked him if he would be interested in the book. Layering and condensing the presence of many.

The second movement of the film, that of disappearance, intertwines the history of film technology and politics. The introduction of video and the associated loss of image resolution generates a poor image, flat, that is unable to create this physical presence. While video is supposed to potentially turn viewers into producers, this democratic idea is in no way emphasised in Retour á Reims. What is becoming noticeable is that interest in the documentary quality in television is being lost. It is the loss of details, of distinctions, of the wide angle; what is left is working with contrast and close-ups. The shift from film to video on television stations has also changed the programming focus. In Retour à Reims, this is shown as talkshow and election campaign and the workers are rather shown in their function as voters, as an audience in front of the election campaign. Shifts on several levels. With the loss of image quality, the interest in listening also seems to be changing; the contrast, transferred to the speech, is expressed as rhetoric, and this is becoming ever sharper. This was accompanied by the economic crisis at the beginning of the 1980s. This second movement also describes a political drift towards the Front National, with Le Pen as the main protagonist, who invokes the phantasm of the identity of a French people and offers himself as a protest to a disappointed working class. The slogan “same boss, same struggle”, as the foundation of a solidary, transversal understanding of class affiliation, beyond the nationality of the workers, is being systematically dismantled. With the drift to the right, class is also increasingly disappearing as a non-identitarian, non-religious frame of affiliation. And from a debate about work and labour relations in capitalism, about their meaning and quality, about education and apprenticeship, migration is played off against unemployment.

An epilogue in 4K jumps from the grizzled video images from the 1980s to the digital present and ends with the agitprop montage of a wide-ranging, angry riot choreography and continues on a visual level what the voice-over of Adèle Haenel also stands for, a revolution permanente. Especially in France, her voice is known as an explicitly feminist and anti-capitalist stance; two years ago, she withdrew completely from the film industry, performs mainly in theatre, does anti-racist politics with Rokhaya Diallo, and publicly supported Anasse Kazib's presidential candidacy in 2021 (“Thank you for making us collectively smarter.”). Kazib was active in the railway workers' union for years until he campaigned for his party, calling for the continuous upheaval of conditions. There is joy in this struggle (2017).

Image, Imaginer. In the first minute of Une Jeunesse Allemande (2015), we hear Godard speaking, indistinctly, overlaid by background noises, a laugh, the gong of a railway station announcement. Another voice translates the scraps of words into a question: “Is it possible to make films in Germany?” Hellmut Costard twists image, imaginer, en Allemagne into a film- political question. Godard spins the question associatively further, more fundamentally. He suggests that the ability to imagine (imaginer) cannot be separated from the image (image), from image-making (faire des images). As if the quality of potentiality were dependent on the quality of images. What can be imagined (imaginer) at all without images? All time planes and possibly images resonate here. The past and the not-yet-happening. The archive and filming for the future archive. We see a Super 8 film strip on the editing table, and photos from Super 8 cameras, also on a tripod. Filming, producing moving images, made affordable, democratized, semi-professional. An economy of imagination? The minute comes from 1978, the year in which Costard's film Little Godard was released. In the same year, Godard travelled to Mozambique with the same question, at the invitation of the newly independent national TV station. “Is it possible….?” Traveler of an exploration of possibility: image/imaginer. Godard's insistence on first and foremost understanding the production apparatus did not lead to a film in Mozambique. Instead, a dossier in Cahiers du Cinema: “Nord contre Sud ou Naissance (de l'image) d'une Nation” (North against South or the Birth (of the Image) of a Nation). Not an article or analysis, but diary fragments and reflections on what to do, a proposal, a project, in between a page with a kind of word-image. The same word, repeated, written one below the other: APPRENDRE. Learning. In French, it contains the “take”, prendre. To absorb knowledge. Taking an image, absorbing it, and learning in the process. Learning as directly linked to the complexity of what it means to make a film. Not making a film is still a film project.

Périot's interest in images, in archive material, in history has to do with determining this field of possibility. To reach a past-present reality through images, a reality that cannot be separated from its mediation and the medium through which it is fabricated. But not in order to get stuck in this loop in a cynical or overly eloquent way, but rather to utilise the interaction between sound-image-reality as a space for action. In all his films, the image, the moving image, is the generative starting point. The selection and montage of archive images suggests possibilities of reading something out of the images that could have developed differently at the time of recording. To see in the images (arguments put forward) of the past the potential for a different future, history as a narrative, as a non-nostalgic, unfinished project. To build on something.

This also has to do with presence and what can unfold from it. Uncovering material and thus moments and not covering them up with explanation, but questioning them anew. For example in Jeunesse Allemande. Giving Ulrike Meinhof, her arguments and her eloquence space, for example in various talk show programs. Excerpts that Périot took from a portrait film by Timon Koulmassis from 1994, as can be seen in the credits, but without any psychologizing statements by Klaus Rainer Röhl or others. Périot's montage spans arcs and develops in a searching manner.

To rephrase again: Television with an educational mission. In another talk show round, this time with Alexander Kluge, the moderator asks, describing the work and intention of a director, to move a society with moving images, ‘perhaps to touch it, and ultimately even to change it’ - and after an artistic pause, the voice at the end of the question, friendly, openly drawn upwards: is that possible? Périot does not wait for Kluge's answer, but is interested in the career of Holger Meins, and cuts to Willy Brandt, still the governing mayor of Berlin, giving the welcome speech to the first class admitted to the dffb, in 1966. But why did the best filmmakers in this class give up film-making and opt for terrorism instead? The insistent calmness with which Périot searches for answers in the material itself makes it possible to see, or rather hear, something that could have been possible ... what if Ulrike Meinhof had become editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, or of ARD, Holger Meins could have financed a film every year... .

Questioning images, verbalizing them, developing a language for what is seen — as a method of constantly redefining the relationship to reality, to the respective reality of life. As a filmmaker, Périot repeatedly creates this in-between space as a different constellation. In Our Defeats (2019) together with high school students in a suburb of Paris, in Facing Darkness (2023) together with filmmakers from Sarajevo, who managed to continue making films during the siege of Sarajevo from 1992-96, as a survival strategy, as a document. Translation plays a major role in both films, with a completely different approach to finding a language based on film material. Périot re-enacts scenes from political films from the 1960s and 1970s with the students. They speak texts, make sound and camera, look for the appropriate angles and shots and finally reflect on what they have actually done. They translate Marxist-Maoist language and analysis into their respective understanding of the present. Godard's APPRENDRE is realised here in the repetition and speaking of a language that is not that of the pupils, for example the re-enactment of radicalism, and to the same extent that the pupils seem to have no idea what kind of text they are reciting or distancing themselves from, they have long since understood and absorbed it. Just differently.

“When the camera started rolling, we said: good luck”. The filmmakers in Sarajevo filmed without knowing what would happen to them, whether they would still be alive the next day, whether those they were filming would return. Filming in ignorance, possibly in the hope that the material might be helpful or necessary as a document in an uncertain future. “You can't survive without culture.” Périot viewed it thirty years later and took it as an opportunity to visit the filmmakers Nedim Alikadić, Smail Kapetanović, Dino Mustafić, Nebojša Šerić Shoba, Srdan Vuletić and to talk about the time of the occupation, the war and their experiences, based on and alongside their films. The constellation is shown through repeated axis jumps, in which the crew is shown from a distance, a small group that brings interest, listens, asks questions, absorbs.

Annett Busch
Kolik Film
October 2024