Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French Documentary Cinema in the Early Twenty-First Century by Audrey Evrard (review)

Reviewed by: Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French Documentary Cinema in the Early Twenty-First Century by Audrey Evrard Derek Schilling Evrard, Audrey, Precarious Sociality, Ethics and Politics: French Documentary Cinema in the Early Twenty-First Century. UP of Wales, 2022. ISBN 978-1-78683-842-1. Pp. 298. Not least among the effects of deindustrialization, which from 1980 onward brought entire sectors of French domestic manufacturing to their heels, was a challenge posed to documentary filmmakers: how to make visible the struggles of workers who, their factories shuttered or slated to close, found themselves up against not the expected company owners in suits, but faceless, multi-national offshore corporations? As Audrey Evrard shows in this capacious, probing study, the militant, action-based political dramaturgy that held sway from the Popular Front to May 1968 no longer succeeds in the era of finance capitalism. When production sites are bought out by holding companies intent on streamlining operations in a race for shareholder profits, how then can workers—made suddenly "redundant"—reaffirm their dignity and the solidarity required to sustain collective actions? The dismantling of steel, coal, and shipbuilding capacity in France has produced geographies of abandonment, vestigial working-class cultures explored by filmmakers like Marcel Trillat (Silence dans la vallée, 2007) and Régis Sauder (Retour à Forbach, 2017). In the new century, argues Evrard, the documentary mode starkly registers the epochal failures of capitalism as well as organized labor vis-à-vis rank-and-file workers, and the urgent need to forge democratic imaginaries anew. The dislocation and disillusionment that provided fodder for France's xenophobic far-right as well as for the Gilets jaunes can also give rise to a "documentary radicality" (Jane Gaines) dissociated from party politics and its handmaiden, trade unionism. Throughout, Evrard cogently borrows concepts from social scientists (Svetlana Boym on 'reflective' nostalgia 18, Claudine Offredi on poverty as stasis and precarity as mobility 107), clinicians (l'écoute risquée as respectful interlocution 147) and philosophers (Jacques Derrida on spectrality, Luce Irigaray on hospitality, Sandra Laugier on care) to illuminate the poetics and, above all, the ethics attendant to the documentary encounter. Filmed subject(s), filmmaker, and audience are implicated in reciprocal experiences of otherness out of which arise "embodied praxes of (precarious) sociality" (13). Five densely-packed chapters each focused on a cluster of films examine 1 the spectral temporality produced by plant closures; 2 the pernicious logic of cascade subcontracting, where immigrant laborers compete with a salaried domestic workforce; 3 the desire of class transfuges to reclaim their working-class inheritance by "recording a living memory of local affects" (98); 4 the pain, fear, and dis-ease born of workplace harassment dressed up as performance management; and 5 the commitment to intergenerational community furthered by auteurs Raymond Depardon, Denis Gheerbrant, and Agnès Varda who, from the Massif Central and Marseilles to the beaches of Normandy, "reactivate the End Page 169 residual vitality of a place" (191) through encounters both planned and spontaneous. Evrard eloquently urges that we ask ourselves in each instance, "Where do we stand?" In light of this perceptive study which opposes embodied perspectives and affects to the blank abstractions of neoliberalism, we can only stand on the side of those most vulnerable, no longer spectators to a would-be historic defeat (the "end of work") but attentive, responsible listeners who partake in the unending fight for economic justice. End Page 170 Derek Schilling Johns Hopkins University (MD) Copyright © 2024 American Association of Teachers of French