Unreconciled representation: Operai, Contadini and documentary history

There are moments in French film history when the distinction between documentary and fiction becomes less important – the mid-1940s to the early 1970s, for example – and others, like the present, when the border is sharper, more perceptible, and more vexed. In the hopes of bringing this shifting boundary into clearer focus, my paper returns to a film from the very beginning of the new millennium, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s Elio Vittorini adaptation Operai, Contadini (2001). Drawing on writing by Jean-Louis Comolli and Jacques Rancière, I consider how the conceptual origins of Huillet and Straub’s project connect to this long postwar period, to an understanding of cinema that leads from midcentury realism to a totalizing vision of cinéma direct. I explore how their film stages political and aesthetic oppositions and how its approach to representation is tied to a particular conception of dialectical reasoning. The final section considers the present-day relevance of this postwar French tendency to view documentary not as genre, but as practice.