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Seeing where there's nothing to see: French filmmakers and writers and everyday life in postwar social space

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Seeing where there's nothing to see: French filmmakers and writers and everyday life in postwar social space

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SEEING WHERE THERE’S NOTHING TO SEE:
FRENCH FILMMAKERS AND WRITERS AND EVERYDAY LIFE IN POSTWAR SOCIAL
SPACE

by

Richard McLaughlin

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE – COMPARATIVE
LITERATURE)

December 2022

Copyright 2022 Richard McLaughlin
ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………………….iii
Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...iv
Introduction: ……………………………...………...…………………………………………......1
Chapter One: Illustrating Labor: Everyday Scenes of Work in Chronique d’un été, A bientôt
j’espère and Ressources humaines………………………………………………...20
Chronique d’un été and the illusion of the real in the representation of work…….22
A bientôt, j’espère and Marker’s use of montage….……………………………....32
Conclusion: Representing an Emergent Politics 30 Years After in Ressources
humaines…………………………………………………………………………...37
Chapter Two: From Communication to Critique: Chris Marker and Guy Debord’s Reponses to
the Transparent Cinema of Rouch and Morin…………………………………….40
Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai : Documentary Style and the Specter of Colonial
Violence in Parisian Social Space………………………………………………...42
« Ce mouvement assez lent de dévoilement » : Everyday Life Through the
Negative Aesthetics of Guy Debord……………………………………………...50
Chapter Three: « Le temps comme il s’écoule » : Making Everyday Life Sensible in the Parisian
Films of Agnès Varda…………………………………………………………...64
Cléo and Everyday Life in Paris, June 21, 1961………………………………...70
Varda and the Rhythm of Everyday Life on the Rue Daguerre…………………79
Chapter Four: Writing the City (or the New Town): From Lefebvre’s Hilltop Meditation to
Ernaux’s Journal du dehors……………………………………………………...91
Lefebvre, or a Sociology of Everyday Life Seen From the Hilltop………...……92
Ernaux and « l’expérience bouleversante » of the New Town………...……….101
Overcoming the Solitude Without Isolation of the Non-Place…………..……..105
Chapter Five: The Archivist of Protest: The Attention Economy and Chris Marker’s Use of
Détournement in Chats perchés………………………………………………....117
Staring Back: The Archivist Reflects on His Archive…………………………..120
Chats perchés : The Archivist in the Streets…………………………………….124
Representing Violence in Everyday Paris……………………………………….138
Conclusion: Structural Irrationality, Relative Mobility, and the 21
st
Century Everyday……....145
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………154
iii

List of Figures
Chapter Two
Image #1……………… …… …………………………… ……………………………… …….…62
Image #2 ……………… …… …………………………… ……………………………… …….…63
Image #3……………… …… …………………………… …………………………...… ………..63
Chapter Three
Image #1……………… …… …………………………… ……………………………… ….……90
Image #2 ……………… …… …………………………… ……………………………… ……….90
iv

Abstract
In Seeing Where There ’s Nothing to See: French Filmmakers and Everyday Life in
Postwar Social Space, I focus on the transformation of postwar urban space in metropolitan
France, using Paris as my object of study. Whereas the French state and the planners responsible
for the city’s reorganization claimed that a new era of abundance and happiness could be secured
for the population through efforts like new housing projects, forms of circulation, and patterns of
consumption, I foreground the theorists, filmmakers, and writers who point to the ways in which
French modernization tended to reinforce social inequalities and limit the political agency and
collective power of inhabitants. Taking as my point of departure Henri Lefebvre’s claim that a
critique of everyday life must also be a transformation of everyday life, I look to the films of
Edgar Morin / Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Guy Debord, and Agnès Varda and the writings of
Annie Ernaux; read together, these filmmakers and writers embrace the documentary practices of
cinéma vérité and écriture plate while constructing, out of representations of the real, arguments
for how that daily life can be changed by and for the collective. By showing everyday life in its
different modalities – the time and experience of labor, the dismantling of the old style of life
practiced in the city’s quartiers and the new spatial organization of the villes nouvelles, and the
possibility of politically mobilizing within urban space – these theorists, filmmakers and writers
establish daily experience as the place from which social change and solidarity occurs, rather
than simply existing as a space of atomization and individual consumption. Their work maintains
its significance as France continues its project of modernization while spatial, economic, gender
and racial inequality persists.

1

Introduction
« Ça me regarde » : The Location of Everyday Life and Maspero and Frantz’s Les Passagers du
Roissy Express
In his 2014 article “Apprehending the banlieue,” Edward Welch revisits the now more
than three-decade old Les Passagers du Roissy Express (1989), noting how it has been
established by other critics as a foundational text on the Parisian suburbs. While others have
focused on Maspero and Frantz’s work in its recasting of the tropes of travel writing and its
engagement with different voices of the banlieues the two explore, Welch advocates for a
reading that foregrounds the spatial analysis the writer and photographer undertake in their
journey, in particular, “the ways in which they map spatial change, transition, and instability”
(176). Indeed, as some of the earlier readers noted, Les Passagers is significant in, as Welch
writes, “its prolonged engagement with the Parisian banlieue, and its desire to challenge the
dominant perceptions and representations of the suburbs that had accumulated in France by the
late 1980s” (174). Its protracted focus on the suburbs as opposed to Paris intra muros, the
periphery as opposed to the center, is, as Maspero notes in the book’s opening chapter, the
pursuit of a hunch about life in the banlieue. In concluding the outline of their project to travel
and stay overnight along the RER B line for one month, he observes that in general, Parisians
informed about their plan viewed the suburbs as homogeneous and unworthy of attention: « Ils
[François et Anaïk] découvrirent que beaucoup de Parisians voyaient les banlieues comme un
magma informe, un désert de dix millions d’habitants, une suite de constructions grises
indifférenciées; un purgatoire circulaire, avec au centre Paris-Paradis » (24). In his summation,
Maspero expresses a general anxiety shared by Parisians about the spatial configuration of the
suburbs. As Welch notes, “Even when the banlieue was not being portrayed as a dangerous place

2

beset by problems of lawlessness and social unrest, it was assumed to be a homogeneous and
endlessly reproducible zone of urban sprawl” (174); in Maspero’s account, what is dangerous is
not the threat of a violent other but the very lack of form and variation of spatial style. The space
is evoked as empty, the buildings cold and disconnected from the lives of their tenants, an
unchanging waste land whose very lack infects the spiritual life of its inhabitants: « Un terrain
vague. Un terrain pour vague à l’âme » (24).
This anticipatory malaise is echoed by an inhabitant of one of the villes nouvelles, Annie
Ernaux, in the avant-propos to her Journal du dehors. She describes her feelings upon moving to
Cergy-Pontoise after living in provincial Normandy her entire life thus: « Arriver dans un lieu
sorti du néant en quelques années, privé de toute mémoire, aux constructions éparpillés sur un
territoire immense, aux limites incertaines, a constitué une expérience bouleversante » (7). She
touches upon the newness and lack of history of the new town that is reflected in the spatial
arrangements - as Maspero states, « Un paysage livré en vrac » (24), the materials prefabricated
and set down all at once - as vertigo-inducing. She continues: « L’impression continuelle de
flotter entre ciel et terre, dans un no man’s land. Mon regard était semblable aux parois de verre
des immeubles de bureaux ne reflétant personne, que les tours et les nuages » (7). Echoing
Maspero in describing the space as a terrain vague (using, as he does, the English expression for
a dangerous space over which neither competing country claims sovereignty), Ernaux
paradoxically evokes the purgatory that Maspero’s Parisians talk of from a distance while she is
situated in the space, unable to find an anchor to hold her to the ground.
Following Ernaux’s illustration of her bodily and spiritual malaise resulting from the
uncertainty of her surrounding and Maspero’s formula (« Un terrain vague. Un terrain pour
vague à l’âme » [24]), Welch’s reading of Maspero on the perceived vacuity of the suburbs is

3

apt; the banlieue is thought of by Parisians as “the sort of landscape which framed and
exemplified the drab monotony of daily routine endured by the region’s millions of inhabitants
and commuters” (174). In short, the banlieue is the spatial configuration of everyday life under
modernity, following Henri Lefebvre. As Stuart Elden notes, the standard translation of la vie
quotidienne as everyday life misses a key meaning of the expression: “‘Everyday’ perhaps
suggests the ordinary more than the repetition of the ‘every day’” (112). For Lefebvre, la vie
quotidienne (hereafter everyday life) contains within it two ideas, the first a notion of historical
development in the wake of industrialization and urbanization, and the second reflecting the
sociopolitical effects of that development: “‘The word everyday [quotidien] designates the entry
of daily life [vie quotidienne] into modernity… the concept of ‘everydayness’ [quotidienneté]
stresses the homogeneous, the repetitive, the fragmentary in everyday life” (112). In a short
article called “The Everyday and Everydayness,” Lefebvre continues to outline how modern
forms of production and consumption have imposed themselves on everyday life, leading the
reader to consider how the diversity of life in the past – all the variations in housing, clothing,
and everything that defined styles in different places, cultures, and classes – has been reduced to
similar patterns: “This diversity has never been well acknowledged… it has resisted a rational
kind of interpretation which has only come about in our own time by interfering with and
destroying that diversity” (7). In short, it is only now that we have felt the constricting effects of
homogeneous production that the uniqueness of different cultural practices in the past becomes
apparent. Inversely, Lefebvre shifts here to outlining how the homogenizing of culture has
developed. Through examples such as architecture (where a range of styles has been reduced to
an “‘architectural urbanism’” [8] that privileges rational, technologically-aided arguments about
inhabiting space), food production (optimized for more widely used appliances like freezers),

4

and circulation (where, as Maspero and Frantz show in their text, the significance of the car has
overtaken all other forms, producing inequalities that the two chronicle), Lefebvre argues that
what masquerades as diversity and choice in his contemporary France is really an “artificial
mechanism” serving to uphold practices of production and consumption, from the grocery store
to the motorway to the apartment building. Maspero and Frantz, in their journey through the
suburbs, embody the subject imagined by Lefebvre in his article, observing and experiencing
“the fatuousness of [the] diversity” between forms of contemporary life; they punctuate the
ideology that underwrites the naturalness of these practices in a way that not only exposes how
these elements of daily life support and reproduce one another, but also witnesses the widening
inequalities produced by these privileged forms.
Lefebvre is careful to point out that the everyday is not new; indeed, he notes, “the great
problem of repetition” (10) has always been with human societies. However, whereas in past
eras, the attention and anxiety surrounding everyday life was centered around what he calls the
cyclical mode of repetition (“seasons and harvests, activity and rest, hunger and satisfaction,
desire and its fulfillment, life and death,” and the brute problems associated with producing
within these cycles), in modernity, rational forms of repetition inherent in labor and consumption
overshadow and dominate the traditional forms. In this linear mode of repetition, all forms of
daily life are subsumed under a principle Lefebvre calls “organized passivity,” reflected in the
consumption of spectacles in leisure, the specialization and ennui of the workplace, and the
production of desire around consumer goods in the marketplace by means of advertising. The
linear repetitions that Lefebvre describes in his contemporary society (which we could formulate,
given our experience of the always-on online economy of the 21
st
century, as shorter cycles that
allow for the reproduction of labor and continued consumption, overtaking the organic cycles)

5

are experienced, based on one’s place in the social order, as a burden “distributed unequally…
[weighing] more heavily on woman, who are sentenced to everyday life, on the working class, on
employees who are not technocrats, on youth – in short on the majority of people” (10). Within
this schema, modernity is situated as the production of spectacles that “veil without ever
eradicating the everyday blahs,” providing either images of daily life that divert from the
audience’s own experience, or the extraordinary that seems to transcend daily life, the sudden
events that punctuate it and figures that seem to exist outside it by virtue of their exceptionality
or resources.
Seen this way, as a level of life indistinguishable from its maintenance in capitalist
production, the concept of everyday life offers another way of reading Parisians’ views of the
suburbs as Maspero summarizes them. For inhabitants of the center, the periphery, with its new
forms of housing, circulation, and its infrastructure for the forms of daily consumption (food,
domestic products) that come together to reproduce contemporary life, embodies the linear
monotony of the everyday that is then reflected, in differing amounts, back on the city dwellers.
To emphasize this point and return to the other stereotype about the banlieues, that they are
populated by the dangerous other, I turn to Kristin Ross, who in her book Fast Cars, Clean
Bodies outlines how in a rough twenty-year period from the mid 1950’s to the mid 1970’s, both
working-class and immigrant populations were resituated in the suburbs in a shift that mirrored
France’s “movement inward” (11), away from their colonies lost to the independence
movements of the mid-20
th
century. As she writes, “The movement inward… is a movement
echoed on the level of everyday life by the withdrawal of the new middle classes to their newly
comfortable domestic interiors, to the electric kitchens, to the enclosure of private automobiles,
to the interior of a new vision of conjugality and an ideology of happiness built around the new

6

unit of middle-class consumption, the couple” (Ross 11). She outlines the emergence of a new,
technically trained middle class or technocracy, which both took the place of the working class
within the city borders and led the efforts to reorganize the suburban spaces that working class
would live and work within. From the perspective of such a class, benefitting from and yet
inextricably enmeshed within the system of production (with its emphasis on the complements of
modern appliances, automobile circulation, and the focus on the couple as consuming family
unit), the suburbs were a space to disavow. Moreover, in terms of the movement of the working
class and marginalized groups to the banlieue, the distinction between city and suburb becomes a
tacit avowal of irreconcilable difference; as Ross writes: “If the ideology of modernization says
convergence – all societies will look the same – what it in fact sustains and freezes into place is
the very unevenness or inequality it was supposed to overcome: they will never be like us, they
will never catch up. In today’s Paris that frozen temporal lag appears as a spatial configuration:
the white, upper-class city intra-muros, surrounded by islands of immigrant communities a long
RER ride away” (12). In other words, the spatial division that occurs in Paris and its suburbs
allows privileged Parisians to disavow the real inequalities produced by the economic systems
from which they benefit as well to the extent to which those forms of organized passivity, to use
Lefebvre’s term, define and burden their own lives. Moreover, as Maspero and Frantz move
outward to the suburbs, they uncover a schema that is more multilayered than a center /
periphery binary; they encounter a divided suburbia, where working-class red belt banlieues run
up against middle-class pavillonnaires who in turn speak in coded language about the immigrant
other in neighboring communities.
To return to Maspero’s hunch about life in the suburbs, he recalls a pattern than he and
Frantz notice that runs contrary to their fellow Parisians’ accounts of a grey, static banlieue. The

7

writer and photographer both witness, in their respective quartiers of Saint-Paul and
Montparnasse, the departure of « tout ce qui faisait une rue de Paris » (24), the craftsmen,
workers, and shopkeepers that were a holdover of the dense streets of the 19
th
century, as a result
of the renovation of neighborhoods and rent increases. As a result of this spatial reordering and
migration, Maspero posits a reversal: it is Paris proper that has been emptied, of its people and
spirit, to become « une grande surface du commerce et un Disneyland de la culture » (25). In this
formulation, recalling Lefebvre’s development of the concept of everyday life, Paris is now the
site of a spectacle of modernity, as Welch notes, “for the benefit of a tourist gaze” (179).
Following this reversal, Maspero predicts that the suburbs are now the site of « la vraie vie »
(25), but as Welch observes, “At the same time, [he] is also sensitive to the increasing spatial
complexity of the Paris region, a consequence especially of the proliferation in the post-war
period of modern, planned space” (179-180). Maspero concedes something to the contention that
the new towns are dropped into a space without history and that they might be rundown and in a
constant state of renovation; in other words, he and Frantz set out to see how the suburbs are
both a space indelibly marked by the priorities of everyday life within capitalist reproduction and
how they offer opportunities for habitation and remaking community.
As Welch notes, Maspero and Frantz “aim to differentiate what is perceived as
undifferentiated space” (175), to get at both stereotypes about the suburbs suggested by the
expression « il n’y a rien à voir » that they come up against speaking both to Parisians and
suburban dwellers. This expression conveys both that there is nothing interesting to see, only
bleak housing and warehouses, thus disavowing the suburbs’ integral part in the maintenance of
everyday life in capitalist reproduction, and also expresses a perspective Jacques Rancière
attributes, both literally and metaphorically, to the police. In his “Ten Theses on Politics,”

8

Rancière opposes politics to policing and broadens the scope of policing to acts on the part of the
state that delimit who is a part of society, and what they can do or say; from the state’s
perspective, “[in] this matching of functions, places and ways of being, there is no place for any
void. It is this exclusion of what ‘is not’ that constitutes the police-principle at the core of statist
practices” (36). Put another way, the difference between policing and politics is a matter of
counting: “[Policing] counts real parts only – actual groups defined by differences in birth, and
by the different functions, places and interests that make up the social body to the exclusion of
every supplement. [Politics], ‘in addition’ to this, counts a part of those without part,” that is, the
people whose actions or existence isn’t recognized by the state. Rancière’s conception of
policing begins to sound very similar to Lefebvre’s formulation of everyday life in modernity, in
that it is maintained and reproduced through a highly arbitrary confluence of practices and
objects (appliances, automobiles) that are propped up ideologically as the natural way of life.
Practically, in Rancière’s terms, policing is an establishing of space as an unquestionable
essence: “[The police] consists, before all else, in recalling the obviousness of what there is, or
rather of what there is not, and its slogan is: ‘Move along! There’s nothing to see here!’ The
police… asserts the space for circulating is nothing but the space of circulation” (37). In a very
significant way, Maspero and Frantz’s journey to the suburbs connected by the RER B line is a
political resistance to the idea that the railway line is nothing but the space between Roissy
airport and Paris proper; their difficulty in navigating these spaces without a car and what Welch
identifies as “the centripetal force” (175) that forces them to circle back to the airport or the city
shows the extent to which built space reinforces this perspective on the suburbs.
In a telling example, through their description of the built environment and their itinerary
from Garonor to Villepinte, Maspero shows how suburban space privileges the car, and how

9

walking or taking the bus often extends one’s journey to an absurd degree. First, as Maspero and
Frantz wake up and collect themselves at their hotel in Garonor, they observe how dominated the
space is by the sight, and furthermore, the sound of trucks: « Cet hôtel, dit Anaïk, il est au bord
de l’autoroute comme d’autres au bord de la mer. La terrasse, c’est la plage. Et le grondement
des voitures, celui de l’océan… Et les vapeurs d’essence brûlent les yeux comme des embruns. »
(63). At their roadside stop, their senses are overwhelmed by the effects of the convoys of trucks,
the noise surrounding them and the gas fumes burning their eyes; it is a distillation of many
scenes throughout their journey where they find themselves at a crossing or an overpass and the
nearby space is inundated with rushing vehicles. The ocean metaphor that Frantz uses turns out
to be apt, as Maspero describes the bizarre nature of their journey, where to get from one point to
the next, they must often take multiple buses or trains and backtrack to previous stops they’ve
made. Their destination is Villepinte, the closest RER stop, where they can continue their
trajectory south along the commuter line. But, they find, their itinerary does not align with the
current bus routes and train lines; in order to go ten kilometers east, they must take a bus back to
a station at Roissy airport, then take the expensive SNCF line from Roissy to Villepinte. In a
pattern that they pick up on throughout their journey, the places they are trying to go to are often
quite far from the stations that carry their names. So, they must then take another bus to the
village of Villepinte. At the end of their protracted ten-kilometer trip, which took three hours by
bus and train whereas traveling by car would have taken 15 minutes, Maspero assesses the lack
of mobility that, as their journey continues throughout the book, proves to be endemic to the
suburbs: « Il n’y a vraiment de tourisme raisonnable qu’automobile. Tout le reste relève du
temps de la marine à voile et de la lampe à huile » (68). Only car owners can navigate the
suburbs in a timely fashion, while other means of transportation force them to double back or

10

leave them stranded at train stations far from the destinations they’re named after, like travelers
on the open seas.
Furthermore, Maspero realizes that it doesn’t often help to reach out to locals; they are
often just as lost or uninformed as he is: « Il est vain ou pire, dangereux, de se renseigner
localement: les autochtones interrogés, soit ne prennent jamais l’autobus, soit ne connaissent que
leur autobus, soit… n’ont aucune idée de l’endroit où se trouve la destination qu’on leur indique
… [parce qu’ils] ne sont pas des autochtones » (68). They either have the means to own a car and
benefit from the spatial privilege it affords them, only know their own commute, or are
transplants and have little knowledge of how to access the suburban area around them. A young
woman Maspero and Frantz meet on the bus lives near Villepinte in a pavillon and commutes
into the city for school. She describes her trajectory: « Elle fait le trajet en bus plus RER plus
métro. Ça va encore, c’est surtout quand on doit aller de banlieue à banlieue que c’est dur : elle a
une copine qui habite Villepinte et travaille à Bondy, ce n’est pourtant pas bien loin, et cela fait
une heure et demie dans chaque sens » (68). In describing their own journey as well as
documenting the experience of locals like the young woman and her friend, Maspero and Frantz
demonstrate that social space in le Grand Paris is classist, in that it is built for cars to the
detriment of other forms of mobility. This car-centric design disavows an engagement with space
as historical place in favor of the point A – point B of the work commute. To follow Rancière,
“Politics… consists in transforming this space of ‘moving-along,’ of circulation, into the space
for the appearance of a subject: the people, the workers, the citizens… in re-figuring space… in
what is to be done, to be seen and named in it” (37). In their project, Maspero and Frantz seek to
reopen space that has cordoned off, not only by the perspective of middle-class city-dwellers but
also in terms of the very means to access it (public transportation, available maps), as well as,

11

through encounters with inhabitants of the disparate suburbs, to outline a collective subject that
can speak about that space and thus alter it, challenging established and co-constitutive truths
about the danger and emptiness that lives there.
From the outset, Maspero and Frantz make clear that the aim of their journey is not
academic or journalistic: « Il noterait, elle photographierait. Ce serait une balade le nez en l’air,
pas une enquête : ils n’avaient nullement l’intention de tout voir, de tout comprendre et tout
expliquer » (20). This approach is explicitly lacking in the expertise and attempt to rationally
articulate a totality that colors the police of Rancière’s essay. They even reserve the right « de ne
pas noter, de ne pas photographier, si le cœur n’y était pas » (23), abandoning for the time being
Maspero’s orignial intention to produce a radio series on their journey, due to their fear « de la
présence permanente du magnétophone… de la contrainte, de la nécessité d’enregistrer coûte que
coûte » for the sake of having adequate material for a program. In this sense, their touch is much
lighter and their sense of medium is very different from the cinéma vérité ethos of Edgar Morin
and Jean Rouch, who emphasized the significance of sync-sound and handheld camera
technologies in accessing daily life; the two filmmakers edited dozens of hours of footage into a
90 minute film, and also established encounters with the film’s subjects that steered discussion
toward the important political matters of the day, including the Algerian War and the memory of
the Holocaust. Maspero and Frantz’s aim would be, rather, « de saisir la géographie des lieux et
des gens : de voir leurs visages. Qui étaient ceux qui avaient habité là ? Comment y avaients-ils
vécu, aimé, travaillé, souffert ? Qui y vivait aujourd’hui? » (20). Maspero is careful, however, to
leave unanswered the question of the importance of the past over the present, or of the past to the
present, and vice versa. Looking at a large Michelin map Environs de Paris in the planning
phases of the journey, he traces their railway trajectory, noting the 2 million people who live

12

across the region: « Serait-il possible de retrouver là-dessous les traces du passé, les traces de la
plaine de France et du Hurepoix? Mais qu’est-ce qui l’intéressait le plus: le dessous ou le
dessus ? Le passé ou le présent? » (16). Certainty, in his excavation of the development of
housing projects built for immigrant workers in the factories of companies like Citroën,
Maspero’s attention to the recent past helps to show how the perspectives of urban planners
helped to set the stage for present uncertainties surrounding working-class and working-poor
suburban communities.
Following the metaphors of sailing and the ocean in relation to the lack of mobility for
inhabitants of the suburbs, when Maspero and Frantz visit the estate of Les 3000, which is also
known as La Rose des Vents or, simply, le Paquebot (ocean liner). Maspero reflects on the
origin of this epithet and concludes it is less because of any architectural resemblance to a ship
and more because of its utter unsustainability as a habitat for its tenants; instead, it is a space of
transience that, due to the lack of social mobility of its residents, becomes an unsuitable
environment where one is nevertheless stuck: « Un paquebot à bord duquel… les passagers
s’embarquaient pour de longs voyages immobiles, mais restaient toujours en transit » (50). The
ocean liner metaphor gets at the spatial and social paradox experienced by the residents of Les
3000. Their immobility and their state of being toujours en transit stops being a contradiction
when one considers how the French state, city planners and the Citroën corporation managed, by
their combined actions, to make the lives of the inhabitants of the estate more precarious.
Maspero outlines the problems: the estate was built in 1970 to house workers at a Citroën plant,
who needed more unskilled labor and hired immigrants from Turkey and from former colonial
North Africa. Because so many jobs needed to be filled at the factory, the estate was not
designed with circulation back and forth from the city or neighboring suburbs in mind, the logic

13

being that residents had no need to commute to search for other jobs. The result was, to extend
the metaphor, a shipwreck: « Les 3 000 à l’écart. Sans train ni métro. Loin du reste d’Aulnay
comme de tout. Isolés des autres quartiers, des autres cités, du reste du monde par l’autoroute
comme par un fossé » (49). Les 3000 was spatially separate from the rest of the suburbs, the city,
and indeed the world because of its origins with the factory. When Citroën laid off many of its
workers in 1975, the design of the estate proved to heighten the precarity of the inhabitants who
sought work or a new place to live beyond its confines: « Comment vivre sur le Paquebot?
Chercher le travail ailleurs. Loin. Très loin. Des heures de transport. Le chômage. L’aide au
retour ? Plus besoin d’eux » (53). The terse brevity of Maspero’s sentences convey the dire
situation many of these immigrants found themselves in; unable to find work nearby or the
means to return to their home countries, they experienced the sudden contraction legible in the
phrase « [plus] besoin d’eux ». They were no longer needed and were given no opportunities to
move on with their lives; indeed, Maspero writes about the quota systems other estates took on in
terms of limiting the number of tenants who were foreign or people of color, as well as the
difficulty that came with being rehoused if you moved from Les 3000, with its reputation of drug
crime: « Allez donc sortie de la cité quand elle vous colle à la peau, cette réputation. Le sud
d’Aulnay se shoote aux fantasmes sécuritaires. Alors on revient toujours aux 3 000. On reste
retranchés derrière la barrière des autoroutes. Au-delà du Sausset. Exclus » (55). The metaphor
of a reputation that sticks to the skin is amplified by the racial difference of the estate’s
inhabitants when faced by middle-class white suburban dwellers to the south, who shoot up on
the perceived threat of the outsiders. Thus, the residents of Les 3000 remain, doubly imprisoned
by a lack of spatial and social mobility that reinforce one another.

14

Maspero lays the blame for the residents’ inability to improve their standard of living on
the Citroën corporation, but also on the city planner in charge of the estate’s construction:
« [L’urbaniste] ne s’intéressait qu’à la photo aérienne: évidemment, vues d’avion, les questions
de promiscuité, d’étanchéité, d’insonorisation, de qualité du matériau, s’estompent: seules
comptent les grandes masses » (52). Maspero allows us to see that the designer’s top-down point
of view is a problem of scale, wherein the real problems of habitation, like crowding, noise, and
the durability of materials that affect a resident on an everyday, embodied level become
invisible. In addition, the real issue of conflict that may emerge from different cultural groups
with different mores living in the same space is elided by considering the estate’s residents as
one homogenous group. Describing the planner’s perspective, looking at the future estate from
above with the aid of a blueprint, Maspero identifies a key element of critiques of everyday life
and social space that I engage with in the following chapters. As Jeanne Haffner notes in her
book The View From Above: The Science of Social Space, aerial photography was instrumental
in organizing the space of the villes nouvelles in postwar France, including the design of housing
estates. This epistemological practice, she demonstrates, has its origins in the wartime practice of
photographing enemy positions by the French military in World War I so as to develop a
representation of their psychology based on their movements.
1
This technique was later extended
to the colonies, as ethnographers like Marcel Griaule, Jean Rouch’s mentor, used aerial photos to
interpret the unconscious motivations underlying social practices of tribes like the Dogon people
of Cameroon.
2
Finally, sociologists like Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe, whose work proved
instrumental to Paul Delouvrier’s 1961 plan to build new towns in the suburbs and extend the

1
Haffner 8.
2
Haffner 35.

15

metro and commuter rail lines, used aerial photos in order to make claims about the habitability
of Parisian neighborhoods.
For theorists of everyday life like Lefebvre and Michel De Certeau, the top-down
perspective of city planners and government officials on the city had to be reconsidered because
of the limits of these representations and the consequent effects of designing the built
environment for the spaces’ inhabitants. As De Certeau writes in his Invention du quotidien, « La
ville-panorama est un simulacre « théorique » (c’est-à-dire visuel), en somme un tableau, qui a
pour condition de possibilité un oubli et une méconnaissance des pratiques » (141). By
emphasizing that top-down representations of the city privilege the scopic to the detriment of the
other senses, De Certeau illustrates their disconnect from the lived experience of inhabitants at
the level of the street. As Maspero notes in his analysis of Les 3000, the planners claimed to be
able to anticipate the needs of inhabitants and incorporated it into the estate: « On trouvait sur
place tout l’environnement social nécessaire: crèches, écoles, dispensaires, salles de sport. Un
vrai petit paradis » (53). Yet, as Lefebvre in his studies of new towns and filmmakers like Chris
Marker (in Le Joli Mai) make clear in their anticipatory critiques, the separation between top-
down planning and ground-level life can be seen in the poverty of shops and services that do not
sufficiently cater to inhabitants. Furthermore, in the case of Les 3000, when the Citroën plant
laid off workers, the nearby goods and services went away too; as a friend of Maspero’s who
works in the Aulnay suburb notes: « Il n’y a rien. Pas un bistrot tranquille, aucun lieu où se
retrouver au calme une heure ou deux. Pas d’endroit pour flâner » (52) Amid unemployment, a
lack of transportation and so an inability to travel conveniently for work or pleasure, and a
general impoverishment of the social space to meet the practical and psychical needs of
inhabitants, Maspero is right to acknowledge that the estate’s planners have left something out of

16

their blueprints. He writes, « [Dès] le depart, ceux qui ont dessiné ça ont oublié, ont supprimé
carrément une dimension… où est la troisième dimension ? A-t-on vraiment pensé qu’elle allait
naître, comme ça, à l’intersection de deux surfaces planes » (59). He emphasizes the flat
surfaces, the two-dimensional nature of the planner’s drawings, and how this is represented in
the estate’s surfaces: walls, windows and doors. But, Maspero asks, « Qu’est-ce qu’il y a derrière
tout cela ? Jamais de profondeur. Où sont les cours, les recoins, la boutique dans son
renforcement ombragé, la lucarne de ciel où l’on voit passer les nuages et la queue du chat de la
concierge, la terrasse paresseuse du café et son store qui nimbe les consommateurs de lumière
orangée » (59). Here, Maspero leans on the dual meaning of profondeur, listing the spaces (the
courtyards, the doorways, the café awning giving shade) that indeed provide physical depth but
also a shelter to pass time and to reflect, a necessary psychical activity. In Maspero’s description,
depth of space gives way to duration, and he makes clear how, in order to be habitable, spaces
must offer room for respite and the unfettered passage of time.
Anaïk Frantz’s photograph’s act as an important counterpart to Maspero’s written
analyses of social spaces. Whereas, as in the example of the Les 3000 housing estate,
contemporary conditions serve as a point of departure for Maspero to consider the historical
roots of spatialized inequality, Frantz’ photos serve as a record of the present of le Grand Paris
and its people. As Michael Sheringham writes in his study of Les Passagers, the photos are also
“mementos of real exchanges where the ritual of having one’s picture taken played a part” (318).
A scene and its aftermath at Les 3000 estate dramatize what is at stake for Frantz in these
encounters. After she asks Mme. Zineb, an Algerian woman living at the estate, if she can
photograph her, Zineb invites Maspero and Frantz for tea. Maspero declines, but later, after their
trip has concluded, Frantz returns to Les 3000 and joins Mme. Zineb for tea. Then, her host tells

17

Frantz about her life, her husband, who is unemployed, her hopes for her nine children, and her
concerns about drug use by young people on the estate. For Frantz, the photograph is the record
of an encounter in which the photographer engages with the subject of the portrait and represents
them on their terms, invited into their daily life. In one instance on Maspero and Frantz’s trip,
this ethical agreement breaks down, as, in the courtyard of a building in the Sevran-Beaudottes
suburb, Frantz takes a quick snapshot of some men without asking their permission first. The
men, who are immigrants from Mali, confront Frantz and Maspero and remind them that it is not
right to photograph someone without their permission: « Une longue leçon de morale et de
dignité sur le thème: … le respect avant tout » (127). But for these men, respect on an
interpersonal level is tied to a larger cultural difference that must be addressed; as Malians, they
grew up respecting French culture, but their experience living and working outside Paris has
taught them that France « a perdu le respect des autres » (127). For one of the men, his rejection
of Frantz and Maspero taking their photo is tied to his concern with how Mali is represented by
French journalists, and by extension how Malians are perceived by the French in France: « Il
veut bien admettre qu’ils ne sont ni flics ni journalistes, ils peuvent même être des amis, mais
justement des amis ne se comportent pas comme cela. » (127). Because of the way in which
Frantz approaches the men, not engaging them as a potential friend but rather simply taking their
photo, she and Maspero find themselves outside the threshold of sociability; for the Malians,
they might not be police or journalists but they remain on that perimeter of social forces that
impose representations on marginal communities and don’t act on a relation of exchange and
trust.
Frantz is very critical of herself after the exchange, noting to Maspero that « les images
clandestines » are not her style and that she prefers the alternative, but that the difficulties of

18

their journey have made her actions unrecognizable: « Moi qui aime prendre le temps de discuter
d’abord, de faire connaissance, depuis le début de ce voyage, à photographier comme ça, à tout
bout de champ je me sens devenir un robot » (128). As she reflects on her camerawork, she
makes clear that the way she takes pictures has an ethical dimension. By framing people in
medium or extreme close-up, she must first interact with them, and in this relation she learns
about their lives and exchanges her interest and her time for their willingness to pose. Whereas,
in taking photos from a distance, he forecloses that possibility of relation and becomes nothing
more than a photographic machine, an extension of the camera apparatus.
In considering her work (and by proxy, Maspero’s written account of their journey) in
terms of her relation to the other, Frantz is in conversation with Sarah Cooper, who writes in her
book Selfless Cinema about documentary ethics in French filmmaking. Cooper notes that debates
around the ethical relation to participants in documentary has to do with the filmmaker’s (or by
extension, the photographer’s or the writer’s) positionality. Documentarians must acknowledge
that the work that they produce is not a record of reality but instead what John Grierson called
“the creative treatment of actuality… creation on the basis of fact” (qtd. in Cooper 4), that,
through writerly style and the use of montage, their work is always a representation that
incorporates their own perspective. One issue, particularly for the filmmakers that I consider in
the following chapters, is that, as the result of technological innovation of lightweight cameras
and synchronized sound, filmmakers find themselves in Frantz’s position. As Cooper notes,
starting in the 1950’s, “[the] equipment allowed the camera to move among the group of people
it filmed, rather than standing outside them, making it into the position of a participant rather
than an external observer” (10-11). This mobility, as I will show, presents its own problems in
terms of representation. For Morin and Rouch, who wanted to use film to produce identification

19

with the participants and the audience, they privileged editing and camera techniques that hid
their authorial interventions in the service of reproducing scenes from their subjects’ lives and
that captured emotional tics through extreme close-ups. By contrast, filmmakers like Marker,
Guy Debord, and Agnès Varda made filmic efforts to foreground their participation and to make
more explicit their critical voice in relation to the changing experience of everyday life of
inhabitants of the city and surrounding suburbs. For the many forms of documentary media that I
consider in the following chapters, from cinéma vérité experimentation to fictional films and
their use of documentary material to non-fiction writing, a quote from Gilles Deleuze that
Cooper cites is instructive: « le cinéma peut s’appeler cinéma-vérité, d’autant plus qu’il aura
détruit tout modèle du vrai pour devenir créateur, producteur de vérité » (qtd. in Cooper 7). As I
show in Seeing Where There’s Nothing to See, the films and writings on everyday life in Paris in
the postwar era share a practice based on the idea that the aesthetic should always serve the
political, and that their work is not a means to record reality more directly but rather to use the
tools of their media to produce truth. In other words, through montage techniques and an
engagement with everyday life on the level of inhabitants, they challenge dominant
representations of the city and give space to reflect on alternative futures for that urban space.

20

Chapter One
Illustrating Labor: Everyday Scenes of Work in Chronique d’un été, A bientôt j’espère and
Ressources humaines
In “Sixties,” a 2008 essay to commemorate the re-release of his film Le Fond de l’air est
rouge, Chris Marker begins by resituating an acronym commonly considered as a trope of the
May 1968 revolt in Paris. As he notes, “‘CRS/SS’...is not a May ’68 slogan. It appears during the
great miner’s strike in 1948, a movie by Louis Daquin shows it painted on the wall. One example
among thousands of the inordinate mythification that never ceased to enshroud the events of that
prodigious decade” (26). In a spectacularly condensed fashion, Marker makes several moves in
this opening statement: he points to the need to extend the timeline of May ’68 to account for
worker’s protests predating it, thus suggesting a link between student and worker revolt; he
suggests that this incorrect attribution is part of a larger historical process of willful forgetting;
finally, he looks to cinema to provide the material evidence of this history. In doing so, he echoes
Kristin Ross, who in her book May ’68 and its Afterlives argues against what she calls,
borrowing from Rancière, “the police conception of history” (19), the concerted effort by French
public intellectuals and politicians (many of them active on the Left in the 60’s) to reduce the
history surrounding the May protests to a simple month-long student revolt, without precedent or
traces for the future. In centering on the student, she claims, they conveniently erase two
essential actors: “[The] massive politicization of French middle-class youth in the 1960’s took
place by way of... two figures now conspicuously absent... the worker and the colonial militant”
(10). By foregrounding the influence of worker organizations and decolonizing groups on
student practices, Ross resituates a timeline that for her stretches the May “moment” to a 20 year

21

period (“the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s”) and even to the present.
3
Indeed, as Marker notes in
“Sixties” and Trevor Stark echoes in his essay on Marker’s late 60’s collective film project with
textile workers in Besançon, no less a figure than former president Nicholas Sarkozy proclaimed
his intent in 2007 to “‘liquidate the heritage of May ‘68’” (qtd. in Stark 117-8), simultaneously
reducing the political struggle to a brief moment and pointing to its still-nascent menace to
power.
Returning to the brief essay “Sixties,” when he cites the image of “CRS/SS,” linking the
riot police’s brutality against the workers with the violence of the Holocaust, as appearing in a
Louis Daquin movie, Marker points to the ability for film to act as a resistance to the dominant
narrative “limiting of ‘May’ to May” (Ross 9). In works as distant in time and content as Edgar
Morin and Jean Rouch’s cinéma vérité experiment Chronique d’un été (1961), Chris Marker and
Mario Marret’s A bientôt, j’espère (1967) and Laurent Cantet’s fictional Ressources humaines
(1999), the respective filmmakers focus on representations of factory labor, the lives and
relationships of workers forming communities around political consciousness of their alienation,
and the possibility of their forming a “relational” subjectivity with an intellectual or student class
(Ross 11). Moving from Morin and Rouch’s cinematic effort to transmit to their audience truths
about the interior lives of workers, students, and other Parisians represented on-screen to a film
aesthetics (Marker and Marret’s) reliant on the dissociating effects of montage, the genealogy I
trace then extends across over three decades, to a moment in which, as Martin O’Shaughnessy
argues, “[contemporary political film in France] must seek to exist productively somewhere in
the difficult space between the politics that was and an emergent new politics” (2). In conclusion,

3
See Ross 9, where she notes that other scholars have traced ’68 activism to rural France and, more broadly, the
global politics of food.

22

I argue that, despite the earlier films’ adherence to “a totalizing dramaturgy of the social”
(O’Shaughnessy 3), recent films like Cantet’s can be read alongside films preceding May ’68 for
their parallels in portraying the alienation of work and the possibility of political relation through
struggle.
I. Chronique d’un été and the illusion of the real in the representation of work
In his essay entitled “Total cinema: Chronique d’un été and the end of Bazinian film
theory,” Sam DiIorio argues that Morin and Rouch’s film is indicative of a shift in French film
culture that it helped to produce in the 1960’s. In short, their attempt at “direct communication”
(DiIorio 25) serves as a transition from a cinematic cultural adherence to post WWII-era
phenomenological thought to an emphasis on the semiotic construction of (filmic) texts.
Equipped with (for at least part of the filming process) new portable cameras with synchronous
sound recording capability, the filmmakers were able to come closer in their material production
to the idea of “total cinema” that André Bazin envisioned in his phenomenological film theory,
“‘a total and complete representation of reality ... a perfect illusion of the outside world’” (qtd. in
DiIorio 28). Bazin emphasized the importance of creating “an illusion of non-intervention” that
suited Morin and Rouch’s own reasons for engaging in the project. In his “Chronicle of a Film,”
Morin sets out his working definition of “a new cinéma vérité” that he began forming at an
international festival for ethnographic film in Florence in 1959.
4
As judges, Morin and Rouch
chose The Hunters, a 1957 anthropological film set in the African bush; as the former noted,
“We chose this film... not only for its fundamental human truth but also because this truth
suddenly revealed to us our inconceivable yet certain kinship with that tough and tenacious

4
As DiIorio notes, Morin’s “Chronicle” is a diary of the film’s production and acts as a supplement or extension of
the finished film, in that the reader can establish the actual chronology of often separate scenes grafted together
through the editing process or cut entirely.

23

humanity, while all other films have shown us its exotic foreignness” (Morin 231). Here, Morin
is already writing in a universalist mode, citing in the filmmaking of the anthropologists a means
of recognizing truth that exceeds cultural difference. Continuing in this vein as he embarks on his
project with Rouch, Morin professes his desire in making a film that would allow for the same
transparency between the people of contemporary Paris, alienated from one another in their
common space:
Can we now hope for equally human films about workers, the petite bourgeoisie,
the petty bureaucrats... the men and women of our enormous cities? Must these
people remain more foreign to us than... the Bushman hunter? Can’t cinema be
one of the means of breaking the membrane that isolates each of us from others in
the metro, on the street, or on the stairway of the apartment building? (231)
5

Through a simple logic, Morin answers his own question: if the ethnographers who created the
Hunters can communicate the “truth” of universal human experience through their filmmaking,
then he and Rouch can do the same by means of a similar aesthetics. As Tom McDonough
argues, they “[turn] the ethnographic gaze back upon the métropole at the moment of
decolonization” (7) and, aided by technology more and more capable of instantly capturing
sound and image from daily life, attempt to capture universal human truths through
conversations and encounters in Paris.
Critics of the film have noted that Morin and Rouch’s work sits uncomfortably between
the documentary-fiction dichotomy. As McDonough observes, the film “occupied an uneasy
ground between [a] conception of film as evidence and a recognition of film as text” (12),
suggesting the transition I’ve noted between phenomenological and semiotic film theory. DiIorio
puts it more strongly and suggests the effect of the production’s more portable technology,

5
I will return to Morin’s example of the stairway in my analysis of the scene showing the meeting of Angélo the
factory worker and Landry, the student.

24

stating that “by attempting to draw even closer to the world, [the film] eventually undermines its
claim to truth” (26). These contradictions can be better explored by returning to Morin’s own
account of his work in “Chronicle of a Film.” For from the outset of his effort to define cinéma
vérité, he situates it in an indeterminate zone: “I am referring to the so-called documentary film
and not to fictional film” (229). Yet he is emphatic that up to his time, fictional film, through its
aesthetic devices, has been the only genre to communicate the types of truths he wants to convey,
“truths about the relations between lovers, parents, friends; truths about feelings and passions;
truths about the emotional needs of the viewer,” but not “the authenticity of life as it is lived”. In
addition, he later states in an official synopsis of the project, “This is not a documentary film”
(232), using the language of ethnological research. In his refusal to align the work with either the
documentary or fictional genres, Morin illustrates what DiIorio calls the “tension” of cinéma
vérité: “[While] it promises a closer connection to an unspecified, pluralized notion of truth,
Morin also suggests that cinéma vérité remains connected to the aesthetic experience that film
affords” (30). This ideal of showing reality (and the contradictions inherent in Chronique’s
attempt of it) is modeled further by Morin. He argues that amid a cycle of fictionalized media
images, “life in its Sunday best” (229), we occasionally have access to “a fragment of truth”
(229-30) that we are often unable to capture and reproduce: “This scene taken from life is most
often a scene taken from death. As a general rule, the camera is too heavy, it is not mobile
enough, the sound equipment can’t follow the action, and what is live escapes or closes up”
(230). Morin thus sets up an aesthetics of film based on his desire to capture truth, or the
presence of audiovisual reality; he must have an apparatus that is capable of pursuing his object
in a long take, or he risks losing it in its apparent phenomenal wholeness.

25

In short, Morin, in agreement with Rouch, does not believe that montage is able to
produce the kind of direct communication of image and audience he desires. Referring to the
camera eye aesthetics of Dziga Vertov (whose notion of kino-pravda forms the key reference for
cinéma vérité), Morin argues that “stealing snatches of life from the streets” is not enough; the
truth of these instances of life “can’t be seized or caught like scattered snapshots” (230).
Corroborating Morin’s assessment, Rouch, in a footnote to the former’s comments on Vertov,
writes that the Russian director’s problems were a result of technology: “Vertov and his friends
ran up against equipment that was too heavy and difficult to handle. The camera in the street was
visible to those it filmed, and this seemed to the authors to invalidate its results” (263).
6
Here,
Rouch seconds the call for a mobile technology that would allow for the film aesthetics the two
directors desire, wherein long takes with synchronous sound are able to create a Bazinian
“illusion” of reality that erases the camera’s presence. Tom McDonough argues that here and
elsewhere, Rouch misreads Vertov’s project as his own; whereas “at the most basic level,
Vertov’s practice had depended crucially on experiments with montage... [as] the site of a
contestation of meaning... [Rouch’s] camera was thought of as an innocent, neutral instrument”
(12). We can resituate these differences in terms of Benjamin’s categories of reception in the
essay on “The Work of Art”: while Vertov’s snatches from life were in the service of a non-
linear aesthetic that engages the viewer on the level of distraction (and thus of alienation from
ideology), Morin and Rouch search for an aesthetic of contemplation, an unfettered image of the
real that allows for projection onto and identification with on-screen figures (DiIorio 37-8).
Thus, Morin valorizes the ethnographic film practice of Rouch, exemplar of “the ‘filmmaker-
diver,’ who ‘plunges’ into real-life situations” (230); armed with a portable, synchronized-sound

6
See Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography. The English translation of Morin’s “Chronicle of a Film” features editorial
footnotes, surprisingly, by Rouch himself.

26

camera or camera/recorder combo, he sacrifices the quality and framing of the cinematic image
in order to “infiltrate the community as a person and not as the director of a film crew” (230).
Morin continues this emphasis on the ethnographic skill needed to perform this kind of work,
and his commitment to the non-hierarchical relation of filmmaker to subject parallels the later
projects of Marker, Marret and the SLON group with the Medvedkin worker/filmmakers, in
addition to the efforts of Laurent Cantet to use a non-professional cast in films like Ressources
humaines.
7
However, where Morin and Rouch diverge from these two latter film projects is their
effort to promote identification and transference of “psychoanalytic truth” between on-screen
figures and the audience through hiding cuts in image and sound.
8
As McDonough argues, by
presenting the illusion of scenes pure of the intervention of a camera and editing techniques, the
two filmmakers create “a metaphysics of reality” (12), one that the film’s participants ultimately
reject in the final screening scene.
A key example of Morin and Rouch’s efforts to mask the supports of their medium
through editing in the service of presenting a supposedly unmediated and “true” scene occurs in
their representation of factory workers. Here, the directors register a critique of labor conditions
in France that is sustained through filmic intervention up to (and beyond) the recent past of
Cantet’s Ressources humaines. As DiIorio notes, this is one of the historic values of Rouch and
Morin’s film; through the technological advances they pioneered, “[the] film introduced the
complexities of spontaneous speech generated by regular people in ordinary environments to a
commercial cinema... dominated by trained actors delivering mannered, literary dialogue... It
provided a crucial platform for the voices of workers, students, housewives and immigrants”

7
See Stark 122 and throughout, and, for example, Williams 150 on Cantet’s filmmaking choice.
8
See McDonough 10. Both he and DiIorio (30) note how Morin and Rouch use the camera as an intermediary in a
Freudian scene of analysis, staging situations in order to capture participant reactions.

27

(33). In short, their film, through its techniques but also its choice of subjects, allowed for a
wider audience to see and hear marginalized sectors of French culture, a trend that would
intensify in the collective filmmaking of Marker and Marret and which can also be seen in
Cantet’s range of represented figures – from factory management to workers, from whites to
blacks, from male to female, and from the workplace to the home (Higbee 239). In a scene from
Chronique, Morin conducts a roundtable interview with three workers, Jean, Jacques (Gautrat),
and Angélo (Borgien). The scene begins with Jean describing the repetitive daily life of the
factory worker. He lists every event, exhaustively registering its sameness: that you wake each
day at 6 AM, « vous prenez le même trajet tous les jours... vous rentrez par la même porte tous
les jours », and so on.
Angélo argues more strongly that this organization of the worker’s time by the
constraints of his job is utterly alienating and that he in effect works 24 hours a day: «On fait
neuf heures par jour, c’est vrai. Mais, le restant des heures, on s’enserre pour dormir, et on dort
pour le travail. Or, c’est pareil!». The film then transitions to a representation of Angélo’s daily
life. The scene opens on a close-up of an alarm clock, then cuts to a medium shot of Angélo
waking; his mother enters and serves him his breakfast and they embrace, exchanging greetings
as the camera frames them in a long shot. The camera continues to frame Angélo in a series of
relatively long takes as he prepares for work and walks to the factory. The camera stays back as
he enters the factory doors. After shots depicting the time of work in the factory, the camera
follows Angélo back to his house, as he does some judo training, then opens a book (a biography
of Danton, no less); a shot taken from outside his window in the darkness of night indicates he
doesn’t get far in the text before succumbing to sleep. Throughout this entire scene, Angélo
never engages with the camera, in contrast with both the preceding scene, where he participates

28

in an interview and the filmmakers are clearly present, and the succeeding one, where Rouch
emerges in diegetic space to introduce Angélo and Landry, the university student from Côte
d’Ivoire. Here, Angélo emerges as a privileged character in the film in a directorial choice by
Rouch; as Morin notes, “he thinks the film should be centered on two or three heroes; otherwise
the spectator runs the risk of being lost in a succession of images, unable to relate to characters
he knows nothing about” (237). Sandwiched between two scenes of clear technological and
authorial intervention in the frame, Morin and Rouch attempt to create an unmediated narrative
of Angélo’s life as a worker. As DiIorio argues, this involved hiding the evidence of their cuts
and presence. Morin’s “Chronicle” tells a different story of the origins this scene; as opposed to
the strict chronology or morning to night that mirrors Jean’s critique of factory life, Morin and
company filmed Angélo beginning with his departure from the factory at the end of a workday.
9

Filming until he goes to bed, the crew then arrived early the next morning with a key that Angélo
supplied them, and, in keeping with the provocative aspect of the film’s production, flipped on
the worker’s light to film his reaction. Morin notes, “The shot of his waking is retained in the
film. It does not strike the spectator, who cannot tell the difference with a fake movie alarm
clock ring” (245). The evidence of editing, extant in Morin’s notes, is of course erased in the
film, along with any dialogue or eye contact between Angélo and the filmmakers throughout; the
formal choices thus obey the 180º rule of narrative, fiction film. The film crew then followed
Angélo up to his entrance into the factory, where, Morin notes, “we see, as though a director had
prepared everything, two guards in uniform watching the entrances and, in front of the door, a
worker distributing leaflets” (245-6). Through the use of editing, Morin and Rouch preserve a

9
See Morin, “Chronicle,” p. 245.

29

representation that owes much to fictional film and its formal means of eliciting audience
identification.
Within the filmed illustration of Jean’s critique that is Angélo’s workday, Morin and
Rouch insert film from the Renault factory at which the three “worker-heroes” are employed.
This places Chronique in relation to the later works by Marker/Marret and Cantet, as the 1967
film contains scenes shot secretly in the Rhodiaceta factory, while the 1999 fictional film was
notable for being shot in an operational factory.
10
However, as Morin notes, the crew had
obtained permission from Renault to shoot at the factory. Although he recalls the difficult
balance between wanting to get footage and “fear of unfavorable reactions from the
management, either for [the workers] later or for us at the moment” (240)
11
, Morin seems a bit
optimistic in suggesting that with his handheld camera, Raoul Coutard is able to film without the
workers’ awareness. Instead, the scene resonates with the larger Angélo scene that frames it, in
that several workers appear to be averting their gaze, as if directed. This scene of the factory can
be read alongside its fictional counterpart in Ressources humaines, where, as James S. Williams
notes, “Franck’s first entry on to the factory floor is initiated by virtually the only subjective
point of view shot in the film... followed by a gently sweeping, lateral tracking shot of Franck
walking across the floor that graphically reinforces his alienation from the workforce” (151). As
Williams argues, Cantet’s film is otherwise devoid of the kind of camera angles that would lead
the viewer to identify with a character; here, the point of view shot guides the audience to see the
blank, wary gazes of the workers from Franck’s position as surveilling eye. Notably, Franck is an

10
See Stark 122 and Williams 150.
11
See Morin 239, where he wanted to film the relations between management and workers but knows that, in his
words, it would be a scene in which “everyone masquerades” (230).

30

entre-deux figure
12
, a rising member of the bureaucracy because of his intellectual status, who
grows to see himself as caught between the working class of his childhood and the managerial
class of his education. Similarly, Morin and his crew, in an effort to form the kind of relational
community of the intellectual and working classes Kristin Ross finds surrounding May ’68, find
themselves faced with a self-censoring looking away on the part of the workers, identifying the
cameras with the intervention (or the threat) of management.
Ultimately, Rouch and Morin have the same goal in including the factory scene as they
do for including Angélo’s workday: to illustrate Jean and the other workers’ critique of the
repetition and alienation of factory labor. As Morin puts it, “What we have to film... [are] the
faces and hands of the workers. The vacant faces of those who do mechanical work, the
specialized workers, appendages of their machines, eternally repeating the same gestures” (239).
I emphasize Rouch and Morin’s attempt to illustrate this critique because of the profound distrust
their approach generates in a near-contemporary figure of French film, Guy Debord. In an
introductory pamphlet for the film version of La Société du spectacle, he says of his work, “The
text and images of this film form a coherent whole; but the images are never mere direct
illustrations of the text, much less demonstrations of it... Instead, the film’s use of images... is
governed by the principle of détournement, which the situationists have defined as
‘communication that includes a critique of itself’” (Debord). In addition, he notes that, because
of the possibility of editing, the cinematic image is always unreliable and can never be read as
true or unmediated.

12
See Williams 149-50.

31

By contrast, Morin and Rouch work in different ways to hide the conditions of its
production in order to foster the kinds of affective response triggered in fiction films; however,
in a surprising conclusion, the directors open up a space for critique of the film by filming the
screening of the final film to its participants, then including this scene, as well as a final
commentary by the directors, at the end of the work. An important scene in the film, where
Angélo the factory worker and Landry the African student meet on the apartment stairwell is
instructive for how this critique is mediated. In the initial scene, the film extends the critique of
labor through Landry and Angélo’s discussion of working conditions; Landry makes the point
that every worker seems wealthy enough to own their own car, to which Angélo responds, in a
scathing critique of the honte de classe of the proletariat: « Il faut te dire... En France, ce type
[the worker] est un individu. Il travaille pour lui, il pense seulement pour lui... Quand tu le vois
dans une usine tout à l’extérieur, c’est plus le même mec ». His critique of the « rigolade » of the
worker’s bourgeois desire reemerges in both the narration of À bientôt, and, in the figure of Jean-
Claude, in Ressources humaines. However, as is visible in the film’s penultimate scene, Rouch
and Morin’s efforts to efface their own intervention in favor of showing the real is not
completely convincing to its audience of participants. Though several viewers (including Morin)
praised what they saw as the unfolding of an authentic relationship, participants Marceline and
Jacques rejected the idea that Landry and Angélo were equals in terms of their problems or that
the scene read as unmediated. As DiIorio notes, “[Morin’s] belief in universals seems to have led
him to assume that the feelings the film transmitted were unmistakable, that its audience would
all understand them in the same way: his own” (39). Though this final scene and the film as a
whole can be read as an experiment and failure of film to directly communicate human
universals, in the process, Morin and Rouch represent both the alienation of the contemporary

32

workplace and the possibility of worker-student solidarity, themes taken up more centrally in the
SLON/Medvedkin project.
II. A bientôt, j’espère and Marker’s use of montage
In his article on Chris Marker’s involvement with SLON and the Medvedkin group of
worker-filmmakers, Trevor Stark notes that Sarkozy’s choice of Besançon as a location for his
speech against “‘the heritage of May ‘68’” is highly symbolic in that the city “emblematizes both
the immediate prehistory of the upheavals of May... and their most potent afterlife” (118). In
establishing Besançon as a “counterhistory of the moment” (118) of May, Stark argues for the
expanded timeline that Kristin Ross and Marker himself outline, as opposed to the gesture of
Sarkozy that would limit the “‘lack of culture’” exemplified by revolt to an aberration. In
addition, as Stark notes, the strike that Marker and company represent in A bientôt can be linked
to 1936, the period of le Front populaire and the last time in French history that workers had
occupied their factory as a tactic. As Stark writes, during the March 1967 occupation, “1936...
[was] a date that reverberated within the factory walls for the duration of the strike, lending the
demonstrations an incipient sense of historicity” (120). This material and affective relation to a
history of the worker’s movement in France wasn’t lost on Marker, who, covering the strike for
Le Nouvel Observateur, observed, “‘The question for these men is not to negotiate – in the
American style – their integration into a ‘society of well-being,’ but to contest this society itself
and the value of the ‘compensations’ it offers’” (qtd. in Stark 122). As opposed to Angélo’s
description in Chronique of workers who attempt to pass, through expensive clothing or a car,
for the successful capitalists whose power they can never attain, the Besançon workers reject the
system of social mobility that could benefit them at the cost of others’ exclusion.

33

Just as Jean and Angélo spoke to the inability for factory workers to be free outside of the
time allotted, both at work and at home, to labor, Marker, in the film’s narration, observes the
strikes as a reaction to this fundamental alienation: « Cette idée [a été] repris que le déséquilibre
dans des conditions du travail s’est traduit par un déséquilibre dans toute la vie, et nulle
augmentation de salaire ne suffira de compenser ». This idea of revolt as fundamentally
challenging “the mechanical time of the factory” (125) and its regulation of proletariat lives and
bodies can be seen through the act of occupation; by stopping the flow of work, the factory can
and did become a space where the workers knew “the liberating experience of laying claim to
sectors of life inaccessible to the worker-as-such: to creativity, to culture, to communication”
(124). As Marker intersperses interview footage and still images of the March occupation over a
continuous interview soundtrack of union leader Georges Maurivard, the unfolding of this
experience is recounted: « Dans ces conditions-là, tous les gars se sont trouvés ensemble et ils
ont vécu pour la première fois une experience de collectivité... on s’est découvert mutuellement,
quoi! » But, as Marker shows by including a brief clip of student protesters holding a sign in
solidarity with the workers, the strike wasn’t only a means for workers to communicate amongst
themselves. As Stark writes, “By refusing the stultifying identity of the worker denied all
opportunity for ‘self-cultivation’ and by establishing lines of communication between striking
workers, artists, and militant student ‘comités de soutien,’ a community emerged that
destabilized monolithic and integral categories of identity [and] exceeded the bounds of... union
or party representation” (124). This notion of a sustained relational community that Stark takes
from Jean-Luc Nancy and that parallels Ross’ arguments can be seen late in the film, when after
two workers finish an interview, they get up to go to the factory and break the line of the shot to
shake the hands of the film crewmembers.

34

As in Chronique d’un été, Marker and his team were concerned with portraying a critique
of repetitive factory labor. Early on in an interview, three unidentified workers share what struck
them about the March 1967 occupation; one of them describes « l’ambiance de la grève », that
what impressed him was « le fait d’entrer dans l’usine comme ça et manger quand on voulait »,
as well as using the space for watching films and dancing. Any seeming lightness in these
observations is tempered by the workers’ own critiques of the mechanized, regulated space of the
factory. As one worker describes how the 8-hour work day is broken into increments of time and
production quotas that must be met, Marker creates a visual montage, moving back and forth
between a medium shot of the interviewed and rapidly jump-cut film from secret shoots in the
factory. Whereas Morin and Rouch sought to emphasize the faces of the workers in the Paris
Renault plant as means toward viewer identification, Marker instead focuses on the machinery
and the hands of the workers through a form that highlights its own construction via quick
cutting and non-diegetic sounds. Rather than attempt an aesthetic that would try to naturalize this
scene of alienated labor, Marker heightens the experience of estrangement, adding pings of
synthetic sound to mark a shot of the factory’s exterior and cutting from the movement of boxes
on the assembly line to an extreme close-up on a computer interface when the worker speaks of
«le cerveau electronique» that decides when laborers can eat rather than their own bodies.
Marker’s montage approach, “a typically dialectical juxtaposition of voiceover and image”
(Stark 124), doesn’t attempt to naturalize the filmic image in a Bazinian effort to represent the
real; rather, it recreates the message of enforced repetition and total control in the speed of the
spooling machines and the cuts. Morin notes in his “Chronicle” that the scenes shot in the
Renault factory diverge from an industrial documentary in foregrounding the faces and hands of
marginalized workers. In an approach closer to Debord’s aesthetic, Marker assembles his

35

montage with images that would not look out of place in a documentary valorizing the efficiency
of textile machines, but with the necessary critique of the worker’s voiceover description.
Though in his involvement in making A bientôt, j’éspere, Marker registers the singularity
of the community established between workers and intellectuals, in his narration, the audience
can recognize an authoritative device that links his film to the work of Jean Rouch, both in
Chronique d’un été and his earlier films set in Africa. As Steven Ungar notes, the opening of
Rouch’s Moi, un noir demonstrates the way in which the filmmaker often established himself in
relation to his anthropological subjects: “The transition [between Rouch as narrator and
Oumarou Ganda] recalls practices of ethnology in which a primary investigator... draws on local
informants to interpret words, gestures and actions whose meaning he presumably fails to
understand” (3). The reverse side of this relation is the extent to which the narrator feels justified
in offering his own interpretation through an authoritative voice that overpowers that of the local
informant. Indeed, in his voiceover narration, Marker often interjects over the voices of the
strikers, situating their actions in the identitarian discourse of the worker’s struggle. At the end of
A bientôt, he notes paternalistically in his voice-over as the image track of the striking crowd
plays, « Ils continuent d’apprendre ». Indeed, as Stark notes, at a screening of the finalized film
to the very workers who participated in making it, Marker was criticized in his privileged
position as filmmaker for portraying the events as a dialectic between “the debilitating working
conditions... [and] the liberating experience of the strike” without attending to the “unromantic
daily labor of organization” (126). Marker responded in a manner that echoes the ethnographic
practice of Morin and Rouch, stating that “we [filmmakers] will always be at best well-
intentioned explorers, more or less friendly, but from the outside... the cinematic representation
and expression of the working class will be its own work”. And, just as Rouch supported the

36

growth of an African film community through training and supplying emerging filmmakers with
equipment, Marker and SLON provided the Medvedkin Group with the resources to produce
autonomous works.
I would emphasize that despite the intervention of narrative voiceover, Marker’s use of
montage as a critical tool allows for him to interject his own critique of working conditions while
also allowing for the amplification of workers’ perspectives. As David Oscar Harvey notes in his
article “The Limits of Vococentrism,” drawing on Michel Chion’s observation that in a film’s
sound track, the human voice is given precedent over other sounds, “essayistic voice-overs
disavow the epistemological mastery put forward by classical documentaries” (7). In other
words, through narration, as well as other stylistic techniques Harvey later explores, films that
have been identified as essay films by contemporary scholarship are able to foreground the
filmmaker’s unique subject position rather than conflating it with the work itself and positing a
claim on objective reality or truth.
13
In the specific case of Marker’s A bientôt j’espère, it’s
important to note that other filmic techniques can foreground authorial voice; as Timothy
Corrigan notes, “[This] act of enunciation can… be signaled in various formal and technical
ways, including editing and other representational manipulations of the image” (qtd. in Harvey
8). For instance, in the example I’ve cited of the workers’ critique of the 8-hour work day in the
Rhodiaceta plant, Marker accentuates the workers’ voiceover testimony with editing that is both
illustrative and evocative and that André Bazin identified in earlier films by Marker as horizontal
montage. As Jennifer Stob notes, referring to Bazin’s review of Lettre de Sibérie, “He held that

13
For recent work on the essay film see Harvey, as well as Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker
and Alter, Corrigan, Essays on the Essay Film. For the purposes of this project, it has served me better to consider
the specific filmic choices of a small group of artists connected by their attention to a specific geographical space
and a shared language tradition, rather than considering these films as examples of a specific genre.

37

Marker’s film was unlike any other documentary before because its ‘primary material’ was not
the actual images projected, but rather its ‘intelligence’ – the combination of sounds and speech,
the order of images, and the way the two tracks were timed to play off of one another” (37). For
Bazin, this was a “shift in filmic significance from that which is viewed to that which is thought”
(Stob 37), and the viewer of A Bientôt is invited to consider the difference between the workers’
voiceover, in which they emphasize the strain on their bodies and minds of the Taylorized
working conditions, and the footage and sounds of the machines smoothly and rapidly turning.
This careful montage of sound and image track stages ironically, in this case, the difference
between human need and mechanical repetition in arguing that conditions in the factory must
change.
III. Conclusion: Representing an Emergent Politics 30 Years After in Ressources humaines
Both Marker, in his representation of class struggle at Besançon in 1967, and Rouch and
Morin, who as DiIorio notes, imagined a new community that would be formed through direct
communication between subject and audience, adhered to “the old, universalizing leftist
dramaturgy of struggle” (2) that O’Shaughnessy argues is untenable for the contemporary
political situation.
14
The latter critic notes that, as members of French society mobilize against
neo-liberalism, racism, and threats against employment rights, recent French fiction films have
shown a political commitment that recalls ’68 era film, foregrounding “workplace oppressions,
unemployment, social ‘exclusion,’ racism... and social class” (2). Laurent Cantet’s Ressources
humaines stands as one example of engaged French cinema that recalls in its tropes films not

14
See DiIorio 39.

38

only of post-’68 collectives, but also pre-’68 works that engage with worker’s rights, Chronique
and À bientôt included.
I’ve noted that the film concerns a university student, Franck, caught between two
classes, the working class of which his parents are a part and the upper middle class represented
by the management of the factory at which he takes an internship, the same factory where his
father and sister work. Many of the film’s critics have argued that Cantet uses aspects of
melodrama, focusing on “the family as the site of wider social crisis” (Higbee 237); while Rouch
and Morin and Marker’s films pointed to the effects of the mechanized factory on the alienated
worker, Cantet dramatizes this condition in the body of Jean-Claude, Franck’s father. While he is
represented at his machine performing repetitive gestures in the factory, Cantet also portrays him
at home in his workshop, continuing the same mechanical movements in a parody of leisure. In
his reading of the film, O’Shaughnessy argues that “although the hero’s father is a passive
character, his silent and docile working body bears eloquent testimony to the disappearance of
working-class consciousness... [the film portrays] the worker’s body as a lack and an
impossibility of being heard” (58). The father is alienated not only from his body but also from
his own political subjectivity, as he promotes respect for hierarchy within the factory.
It is against this lack that Franck acts as a figure of “an emergent new politics” that the
film maps through his exclusions, silences, and temporary affiliations with individual workers
like Alain and the local union led by Mme. Arnoux. Though the workers and the union depicted
in the film do eventually stage a collective strike that presumably continues beyond the
conclusion, Franck does not find alongside them (nor the management class for which he was
educated) a sense of identity. Instead, he establishes his identity negatively. Reacting against the
figure of Jean-Claude, “[accusing the] father of projecting onto him his own repressed social

39

climbing fantasies and of inculcating a legacy of shame at being blue-collar” (150), Franck also
rejects, like the Besançon workers and the “compensations” of the factory, the possibility of
advancing in the capitalist system that produces the betrayal of class consciousness exemplified
by his father. With the final words of the film, «Elle est où, ta place?», Cantet doesn’t resolve
Franck’s political work into a class-based identity; in the ambiguity of the entre-deux, the
protagonist gives testimony to the continual struggle for community in a time between the
struggles of the 60’s and a newly forming critique of capital.
15

15
See Williams 151, where he reads Franck’s question to Alain as directed back at himself.

40

Chapter Two
From Communication to Critique: Chris Marker and Guy Debord’s Reponses to the Transparent
Cinema of Rouch and Morin
In his essay on Rouch and Morin’s Chronique d’un été, Sam DiIorio notes how, unlike
many contemporary depictions of Paris, the filmmakers’ representation of the city’s space is
intentionally vague; as he observes, “[Rather] than dwell on familiar symbols, their work focuses
first on individuals” (26). Indeed, the privileged space of Rouch and Morin’s film is very often
the face in extreme close-up of their interviewees: “[Faces] fill the screen, blown up excessively
large so that even the smallest tics and most subtle movements are made visible” (DiIorio 27).
As both DiIorio and McDonough note, this formal choice is tied to the motivations of Rouch and
Morin’s experiment, to produce, through the technological immediacy and spatial intimacy of
portable, sound-synch cameras, moments of communication. This emphasis on the psychic
drama of the individual’s face and speech, the way in which, as McDonough notes, the
emotional, linguistic breakdowns of participants anchor the film in spontaneous, unmediated
truth, can be connected to the way in which, by excising portions of interviews and only using
first names, Rouch and Morin’s film produces “[never] completely individualized, semi-
anonymous subjects” (DiIorio 27).
16
For both Morin and Rouch, their film experiment was “an
effort at communication, an exchange not only between the people on screen, but between the
film and its audience. […] While focusing on the singular, the project was ultimately intended as
a starting point for phenomenological communion in which spectators are led to a universal truth
about contemporary life” (DiIorio 37). However, as I argue in the previous chapter, by trying to

16
See McDonough, “Calling From the Inside”, p. 15-6, where he argues that these ruptures in communication
actually reinforce the film’s claims to authenticity.

41

produce a cinema of identification through hiding the traces of their editing, Morin and Rouch
end up producing a film of social types rather than political actors. Their use of the new
technologies tries to elide the difference between representation and reality in hiding the frame,
rather than foregrounding montage as a Vertovian “contestation of meaning” (McDonough 12).
By contrast, Chris Marker, in Le Joli Mai, emphasizes the critical role of montage; rather
than attempting to illustrate participants in their social roles, he foregrounds his own editing as a
means of challenging his fellow Parisian’s sense of their daily life. His technique is an effort to,
as Cynthia Marker notes in her essay on the film, “gradually [reveal] what [he] is seemingly
intent on concealing”, that is, the Algerian War and decolonization. Marker makes visible the
extent to which the distinction between private, consumerist happiness in the métropole and the
‘police operation’ in Algeria cannot hold in Parisian space, which saw steady acts of state and
terrorist violence – his film shows a society living from day to day within an unacknowledged
civil war. Similarly, in Guy Debord’s films, he rejects the possibility of film to produce a
transparent representation of everyday life by means of a détournement of documentary practice.
In short, his two détourned documentaries (or antidocumentaries, as McDonough calls them)
contain a critique of documentary practice as well as a critique of contemporary everyday life in
urban France. By means of a negative filmic aesthetics, he argues that, against the pursuit of
psychological transference evidenced by Rouch and Morin’s work, the poverty of daily life can
only be suggested by the poverty and inadequacy of a given film, its aural (sound and voice over)
track’s inability to account for its image track, and vice versa.

42

I. Chris Marker’s Le Joli Mai : Documentary Style and the Specter of Colonial Violence in
Parisian Social Space
As Kristin Ross notes in Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, “[It] was above all the unevenness of
the built environment of the city... that came to crystallize, for [Henri] Lefebvre, the
contradictions of postwar life” (8). For Lefebvre, the city at this moment in history was the
victim first of a wedding of government initiative and speculative capital that sought to produce
the most units as quickly as possible for the lowest cost and second, of a fragmentary discourse
emerging as urban planning. In his work throughout the 60’s and 70’s, Lefebvre continued to
chart the ways in which “the production of space”, to quote the title of his well-known 1974
work, was predicated on a modernizing rationality that attempted to reduce the city to a range of
functions, of universal human needs to be satisfied by design and construction. In his 1967 text
Le droit à la ville, he argues that this misreading, in which life on the ground does not mirror
their representations, leads rationalist planners to play the role of « médecin de l’espace social
malade », making social prescriptions through architecture in an effort to make reality adhere to
their models; as Lefebvre notes, the main problem of this rationalism is understanding only « ce
qu’ils peuvent traduire en termes d’opérations graphiques: voir, sentir au bout du crayon,
dessiner » (21).
In terms of the stakes for representing the city, then, for planners who would seek to
materially transform it or for those, like Lefebvre or Chris Marker, who try to engage with it
critically, one must start from the realization that the city as material reality does not match the
fragmentary models that try to account for it. What one sees and judges on the ground, Lefebvre
argues, «peut au mieux passer pour l’ombre d’un objet futur dans la clarté d’un soleil levant »
(96). However, he notes in distinction, « l’urbain persiste, à l’état d’actualité dispersée et aliénée,

43

de germe, de virtualité » (96). This idea of the urban as futurity or possibility or germ is what the
critic of the city must search for, in its dispersal, at the level of the everyday. For as Lefebvre
pointed out in Volume II of his Critique de la vie quotidienne, this potential embedded in the
alienated daily experience of city inhabitants, this germ of a different future, is perhaps the most
succinct definition of everyday life as he conceived it: “Should we define the everyday as the
petty side of life, its humble and sordid element? […] [Yes] and no. […] [It] is in… and starting
from everyday life that genuine creations are achieved… which produce the human and which
men produce as part of the process of becoming human… These superior activities are born from
the seeds contained in everyday practice” (42-44). For Lefebvre, the possibility for inhabitants to
lay claim to their city and their future is a process of retrospective critique, of reinvesting the
materials and practices of daily life.
« Paris n’est pas un sujet », Chris Marker states at one point during the « exposé des
motifs » for Le Joli Mai, his 1963 documentary on Paris during the month of May 1962: « s’il a
des clefs, il les a jetées dans la Seine ». From being a door without a key, Paris becomes the glass
slipper of Cendrillon: « Paris est un objet de conte aussi éculé st fabuleux que le soulier de
Cendrillon. N’importe qui peut se targuer de l’avoir tenu, et personne de l’avoir chaussé ». At the
level of planning, we could say, there is no map that fits the territory, and Marker finds himself
between the facts to be seen on the ground, the shadow of the future, and the urban, as expressed
by the city’s inhabitants. In the series of questions that he proposes asking his participants,
Marker lays out the stakes for the film (Image 1). He seeks to engage with Parisians, confronting
them with the ways in which their withdrawal into domesticity is implicated in their country’s
withdrawal, linking their engagement (or lack thereof) to their sense of political power in
shaping France’s future, and returning us to the space of the city, its own future uncertain.

44

Unlike Chronique d’un été, where the filmmakers avoid landmarks, focusing instead on
the communicative potential of their participant’s faces, the first ten minutes of Le Joli Mai
tackle the problem of everyday from a vantage point above the city. The views of the city are
reminiscent of the section of The Practice of Everyday Life, “Walking the City,” where Michel
de Certeau situates the reader momentarily at the top of one of the World Trade towers in New
York. This position, de Certeau notes, removes the viewer from the pre-systematized actions of
everyday life and “[constructs] the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city
readable, and immobilizes it in a transparent text” (92). This is the vision of urban planners and
policymakers, who conceive of the city and its inhabitants atomistically, “a finite number of
stable, isolatable and interconnected properties” (94). De Certeau’s point, which resonates with
Lefebvre, is that the actions of street-level practitioners cannot be rationally reduced in this
manner. Likewise, Marker’s narration and editing stress this impossibility of “[perspective]…
and prospective vision” to account for the level of everyday life. In the conditional mood (« On
voudrait la decouvrir à l’aube »), the narrator expresses his desire to see the city without the
encumbrance of habits or memories, using the methods of a detective in a novel, telescopes and
microphones. Yet the rapid cuts from angle to angle over the city and the chaotic musique
concrète of the audio track (featuring radio transmissions, overlapping voices, and suggesting
audio surveillance is taking place) undermine any faith in this ability to track the city from
above. The images and narration reinforce this a bit later in the opening scene. We are given
several recognizable landmarks, but as the camera lingers almost too long over a shot of le Point-
du-jour and the construction of multi-story housing projects, we’re left to ask whether we can
still call this neighborhood by its name, a recurring question as Marker follows the major
modernizations of Parisian housing. The shot that leads into the titles, with its dramatic sweep

45

directly overhead pedestrians, is reinforced by the narration; only the city’s inhabitants can
account for the difference in daily life wrought by these changes.
In the first half of the film, « La Prière sur la Tour Eiffel », Marker quickly engages with
the overdetermined relationship between le bonheur and le logement. His use of statistics
throughout the film is, rather than an appeal to authority, an ironic critique of rationalist
planning. When the narrator notes, over footage of a traffic jam, that « [les] spécialistes ont fixé à
16 mètres carrés le ‘seuil de houspillement’, c’est à dire la surface nécessaire à un être humain
pour vivre » and that the population density of the city is 82,000 people per square kilometer, the
conclusion is obvious: « il apparaît que deux Parisiens sur cinq se houspillent ». He makes clear
that what is taking place in Paris is not only a crisis of housing and of basic services, but also a
crisis of happiness. As the narrator notes, « le bonheur est affaire de définitions, avouables ou
inavouables », and the film moves to consider how it is defined on the Rue Mouffetard.
In contrast to the aerial point of view of the opening scene, Marker’s camera moves at the
level, speed and inquisitiveness of a pedestrian, panning across shop signs, eye-catching clothes,
following two policemen, and lingering on posters, as the narrator notes in an homage to Nicole
Vedrès’ film about the city during the belle époque, « Cette ancienne voie romaine... des signes
la tournent vers un avenir indéchiffrable... Dans dix ans, ces images nous dépayseront davantage
qu’aujourd’hui celles de Paris 1900 ». I think we should hear this verb dépayser in the strong
sense of being disoriented or separated, literally, from home, as in Marker’s later use of it in his
photo-roman about Japan (Le Dépays, 1982). As Marker’s camera moves throughout the open-
air market, he notes, referring to the conversation with the owner of a brasserie, that the planners
of Paris’ future should consider a qualititative, idiomatic definition of happiness, la sympathie.
This experience of knowing everyone in the quartier is what is at stake, and Marker is skeptical

46

it can be reproduced in the new spaces of the villes nouvelles. The sounds of a street musician
fade into the somber extradiegetic piano as the visual cuts register, literally, the writing on the
wall, the signs of a future outside of quartiers like La Mouffe (even within the frame, an
interesting linkage between the handwritten ‘Poésie 2000’- the poetry of the future! – and ads for
apartments and pavillons). We hear the shop owner take up a literal use of dépayser, noting that
« Ailleurs, on sera des déportés », and the film cuts to show us the threat of new construction that
waits at the door of old Paris. The difference between how the new towns and La Mouffe are
shot is striking; here in a series of wide shots, aerial views, and the two tracking shots at the end
of the scene, the camera registers the grand scale (when compared to the people in the frame) and
monotony as the camera tracks in front of the cars and along a building covered in windows.
This sense of scale, as well as the voiceover, reminds us of « la cellule originelle: la solitude » as
mentioned in the earlier scene about overcrowding, and reinforces the difference between the
quartier and the ville nouvelle: « Du moins qu’ici, il y avait place pour le bonheur. Et là... on ne
sait pas ».
In a later interview with a young soldier and his fiancée, Marker uses both the techniques
of montage and a polemical approach to questioning in order to draw out the contradictions
embodied by the young couple. The man, we learn in the course of the interview, is set to depart
for service in Algeria, and thus the couple is extremely affected by what Ross called the tension
of the two stories, France’s modernization and its implication within decolonization. By use of
zoom, editing and other techniques and paralleled by Marker’s line of questioning, the camera
registers a critique of their wholehearted embrace of, to return to Ross, ‘coupledom’ and the
home as a withdrawal from political life. The scene opens in a close-up framing the face of the
young woman, scanning over to the soldier, who lists a very prescriptive notion of a happy life,

47

where one « [a] le plaisir de préparer son intérieur », and suggests that they are like many
couples their age, pining for the two staples of middle-class prosperity, a house and a car.
Significantly, their interview takes place on the Pont de Neuilly, bordering on Neuilly-sur-Seine,
one of the wealthy suburbs; as opposed to the old quartier on the Rue Mouffetard or the more
functionalist HLMs, this is a place where one can dream of such prosperity. As Marker
challenges them to think beyond their private contentment, he cuts to a visual metonymy of their
clasped hands as he asks about others in society, emphasizing their co-dependency at the cost of
solidarity. When the woman suggests that others aren’t like them, the camera fixes on her in
close-up as Marker asks forcefully, « Précisez! Quelle est la différence? Ils s’aiment moins? »,
confronting the way in which they set themselves apart. A significant and suggestive cut divides
the interview; after the two say they met at a wedding, the film cuts to a reception, where the
older relatives boisterously carry on but the bride appears rather unhappy, as if to reinforce that
the couple as unit in marriage is not everything. When the film returns to the couple, Marker
continues to confront them, asking whether or not they think of historic events and future
problems; when the woman suggests, « on n’y peut rien à tout ça », Marker retorts, « Tout ça,
vous n’y pouvez rien? », leading to the soldier acknowledging his imminent departure for
Algeria. Despite the fact that the couple maintains their faith in « le bonheur éternel » at the close
of the scene, Marker manages to register their difficulty in thinking about solidarity beyond the
bounds of marriage. Their scene, which begins with an affirmation of consumerist happiness at
the beginning but which unravels when confronted with the reality of decolonization and social
belonging, serves as a powerful transition from the first to the second part of the film.
In a contemporary review of the film, Jean-Louis Pays observes that whereas « La Prière
sur la Tour Eiffel » “is [about] space and all that that word means”, in part 2, “Le Retour de

48

Fantômas”, it is time that dominates, it is the vertical, or we could say, synchronic part of the
film, which attempts to register “the end of the Algerian war, Salan’s trial, the OAS… [as well as
being] a flashback to the popular demonstrations of February 8
th
[1962], the funeral rites for the
victims.” Pays’ list gives us a sense of the turmoil of daily life in France and belies any notion of
this being “the first springtime of peace”: despite the fact that a ceasefire had been called in
Algeria in March, violence was a painful recent memory in the city, in the case of the killings of
several Parisians by police outside Charonne metro station during a protest in response to a
bombing the day before by the OAS (Organisation armée secrète).
In the second half of Marker’s film, his use of montage in bringing together still and
moving images and audio gives us the traces of recent history visible in Paris. The narrator notes
that the words plastiquer and putsch have taken on a new significance as we are confronted with
images of a burned car, blown out windows, a headline reading « Paris mis en état de défense »,
and tanks parked outside of government buildings. These words, the narrator notes,
« recouvraient d’autres, plus obscures, sur lesquels les murs, au moins, prenaient position ».
Here, in his commentary, Marker registers a critique of the inhabitants of the city, who, we’ve
seen, are often reticent to speak of the war and its effects on the métropole; in giving agency to
the walls that ‘take a stand’, he points to the fact of these strong political messages that aren’t
avowed as clearly in conversation. Beneath the ubiquitous « Défense d’afficher » stencil which
forbids posting on the walls in Parisian space, we see a series of graffitied messages, some half-
obscured, like « OAS = SS, «Vive Jeanson » or a simple « Non », reflecting a range of politics
and dissent. The footage of the February 8
th
demonstrators and police is overlaid by an audio
recording of a chant, « OAS, assassins! », and we then see the silent unfolding of police violence
as the narrator provides a description of where protestors tried to take cover. Here, Marker’s

49

style blends the vérité emphasis on closeness and movement with the events of the Charonne
massacre with an insistence on the critical gesture of montage, confronting the language of the
time (plastiquer, putsch) with the messages scrawled in the street and the sounds of collective
dissent.
Marker’s film shows us everyday life from several angles, presenting us first with the
impossibility of representing from above life as lived by the city’s inhabitants. Descending to the
street, through a dialectical approach to the interviews and through use of montage, Marker
challenges the film’s participants and its audience to confront how they are imbricated in both
the violence of decolonization and the return of its rational controls upon the métropole. In the
second half of the film, he gives us a moment of political art as described by Jacques Rancière; if
the police can mean both the actual officers and, more generally, the social institutions that claim
“there’s nothing to see,” then Marker, through montage techniques that show the viewer the
archival trace of protest, makes a filmic argument that the political potential of those spaces are
not foreclosed. He makes sensible, in the competing graffiti on the walls, the ephemeral traces on
the city of the tensions condensed in popular words like ‘plastiquer’ and ‘putsch’ and gives us
the sound and image of political collectivity in social space, a prescient representation of things
to come.
And yet, like the words scrawled on Parisian walls, Marker’s representation seems of a
part with what Ross calls a “familiar palimpsest” (41), in which the counted violence at
Charonne stands in for the relatively unacknowledged attacks of October 17
th
, 1961 on Algerian
demonstrators. Despite Marker’s continual prodding of those interviewed in the film to discuss
« évènements historiques » that elicit some references to Algeria and the war, as well as the
interview late in the film of a young immigrant worker, as Nora Alter notes, there is a

50

“particularly puzzling… absence of strong references to Algeria” (67) in Marker’s early 60’s
work. What she calls his “silence” on moments like October 17
th
might be explained by Cynthia
Marker’s idea that he is exercising a form of self-censorship, wherein the “textual silences” (25)
end up conveying the reticence of Parisians to speak about Algeria. Ultimately, as Ross notes,
“Charonne was a ‘French’ event” (41) around which a mass, decidedly French reaction against
the undeclared war formed; Marker’s film may be addressed to them, “the happy many”, and less
to the Algerian workers living in France, survivors of violence unavowed.
II. « Ce mouvement assez lent de dévoilement » : Everyday Life Through the Negative
Aesthetics of Guy Debord
Just as Marker bookended his film about Paris with images of the city that represent it
from above while also troubling any authorial mastery that traditionally comes from this
perspective
17
, Guy Debord, in his work predating and as part of the Situationist International,
continued to mark the tension between what Lefebvre called in The Production of Space the
distinction between “representational spaces” and “representations of space,” or between the
practices of users in social space “as directly lived” and the “conceptualized space” of urban
planners and leaders, as evidenced in photographic representations, models and maps (38-9). The
long take that forms the backdrop of the titles sequence of Marker’s film, in which the camera
pans to a bird’s eye view of strollers beneath the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower, can be
compared to a détourned image in the first issue of the International situationniste, in which,

17
In the Le Joli mai, the opening sequence of the film, where a succession of shots from above the city is
confronted by a sound track and voice over that deny any possibility to represent the city from above (thus
gesturing toward the interviews with Parisians that makes up the bulk of the film, as the narrator notes, « c’est eux
seuls, en fin de compte, qui peuvent nous dire de quoi est fait Paris au mois de mai »), is matched by the sped-up
shots of the city from above that mark the film’s conclusion, in which a series of facts about Paris (« On avait
allumé pour 263’000 kw/h d’électricité. On avait fumé 900 tonnes de tabac… ») only serves to illustrate the
poverty of such statistics in comprehending the everyday life of the city.

51

above an aerial photograph of the city, is added a caption, « Nouveau théatre d’opérations dans la
culture» (Image #2). Consolidated here is a critique of the sociological practice of Paul-Henry
Chombart de Lauwe and his contemporaries, in which a military and colonial practice of
knowledge was brought back to the métropole in order to shed light on the daily life of its
citizens. As Tom McDonough notes in his analysis of this appropriated image as well as
Debord’s 1957 map of Paris The Naked City, the photograph’s caption was also a call to arms to
use the dérive within the space of the city as it was constructed under contemporary capitalism:
“[In] the words of Clausewitz, a military theorist Debord greatly admired, the dérive as a tactic
was an ‘art of the weak.’[…] The dérive… does not possess a space of its own, but takes place in
a space that is imposed by capitalism in the form of urban planning” (259).
18

Debord’s advocacy for spatial dérives that “[take] place literally below the threshold of
visibility of… aerial overview” (McDonough 255) can be generalized in conceiving of the
aesthetic practice of the Situationists, in their journal publications as well as visual and filmic
productions. As McDonough notes in the introduction to his book The Beautiful Language of My
Century, the Situationist practice of détournement was at its most basic level a statement on the
positionality of the critic: “[The Situationists] did not simply place themselves above the
everyday life of advanced capitalism, even in its most debased forms, but rather threw
themselves into every kind of filth… in order, by way of its appropriation, to make it speak
otherly” (6). McDonough illustrates this practice on the part of Debord and his colleagues by the
line that graces the title of his book, « je voulais parler la belle langue de mon siècle » :
détourned by Debord from Baudelaire, it stands as the final line of Debord’s 1959 Mémoires, the

18
See also De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 36-7, where, in outlining the difference between strategies
and tactics, notes that the space of the latter is “the space of the other,” and that users of social space who deploy
tactics in maneuvering do not have recourse to perspectives of mastery or distance.

52

words of which are all appropriated from other sources. It is a performative and descriptive
utterance; through a final gesture of literary détournement, Debord the writer illustrates and
announces what that linguistic practice is. As McDonough notes, “[It] was a declaration that a
critique of the world of spectacle could be articulated only through the components of spectacle
itself, that there was no lofty height from which social analysis could be pursued, but that only
by working through the surfaces of social life could a critical position be found” (6). Moving
from the practice of literary détournement as a means of “working through” the contemporary
situation of culture under capitalism to spatial practices and their representation, the Situationist
captioning of aerial photographs and Debord’s 1957 map The Naked City put into practice this
awareness that there is “no lofty height” for critique (Image #3). As McDonough notes, “The
Naked City… [fragments] the most popular map of Paris, the Plan de Paris, into a state of near-
illegibility” (246). Whereas the latter map stands as a text of Lefebvrian representation of space,
presenting to the viewer “a timeless present… imaged spatially in the map’s (illusory) total
revelation of its object” (246) and placing them at an impossible perspective removed from the
succession of moving through these different spaces, Debord’s map offers, in the model of the
plaque tournante of a railway, a means of circumventing the strict determinations of
contemporary social space, instead outlining , via a series of arrows, passages based on “‘unities
of atmosphere’” (243) rather than the actual distances and literal trajectories from point to point.
His map stands as a way of highlighting and subverting the illusory omnipresence of the
canonical map by repurposing its materials.
Debord continued to practice détournement in his film work of the late 50’s and early
60’s, repurposing aural, linguistic, and visual materials in order to challenge the contemporary
form of the documentary and, particularly, its ability to represent that contested level of

53

existence, everyday life.
19
In a 1960 letter to André Frankin after the filming of Sur le passage de
quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps, Debord highlights the fact that in
the earlier film, there is « [une] difference de correspondence du commentaire à l’image, entre
les première et deuxième parties du Passage » (489).
20
He goes on to describe his method, in
which a film that begins, ostensibly, as documentary, begins to lose clarity, « car le texte apparaît
de plus en plus inadéquat et emphatiquement grossi par rapport aux images » (489), that is, the
commentary ceases to illustrate or communicate clearly with the image track. Debord continues:
« La question est alors: quel est donc le sujet? Ce qui est, je crois, une rupture de l’habitude au
spectacle, rupture irritante et déconcertante». On this question of the subject, McDonough notes
that Debord raises it explicitly in Critique de la separation, writing in the commentary, « La
fonction du cinéma est de présenter une fausse cohérence isolée, dramatique ou documentaire,
comme remplacement d’une communication et d’une activité absentes. Pour démystifier le
cinéma documentaire, il faut dissoudre ce que l’on appelle son sujet » (541-2). For McDonough,
Debord’s invokes the subject in a double sense, “suggesting the need to break up both the
carefully circumscribed subject matter of the typical documentary film as well as its existential
guarantor, the coherent ego of its author” (19). In both the commentary for Critique and
Debord’s earlier letter on the technique of Sur le passage, the question of the supposed subject of
documentary (« ce que l’on appelle son sujet ») and its (lack of) adequacy for representing
everyday life in its revolutionary, possible sense is emphasized; the cinema gives us, in the

19
See McDonough, “Calling From the Inside,” 8-9, where he establishes that Debord was aware of Rouch and
Morin’s filming of Chronique d’un été in 1960. I argue that, beyond these explicit connections between the
filmmakers, Debord’s 1961 Critique and earlier Sur le passage… (1959) should be read as critiques of the
documentary, or indeed any, form to represent everyday life – that both films dismantle documentary / vérité
strategies and offer a negative presentation of everyday life.
20
Compare what Debord notes in the fiche technique for Critique de la séparation on the subject of the relation
between the filmic elements: « Le rapport entre les images, le commentaire et les sous-titres n’est ni
complémentaire ni indifférent. Il vise à être lui-même critique » (556).

54

description of a social activity, an isolated and ultimately false coherence, a spectacle meant to
stand in for a whole, a continuity that doesn’t exist. Thus the gradual unraveling of the film,
according to Debord:
La forme correspond au contenu. Ce n’est pas la description de telle ou telle
activité (la marine marchande, le forage pétrolier, un monument à admirer – ou à
démolir comme le magnifique Hôtel des Invalides de Franju), mais du centre
même de l’activité, qui est vide. C’est la peinture de « la vraie vie » qui est
absente. C’est ce mouvement assez lent de dévoilement, de négation, que j’ai
essayé comme plan du Passage. (489)
With his approach to film, Debord contests the function that documentary serves within
spectacular culture – to describe, within a discourse of truth, a cultural practice as a means to
reify a certain continuity within the practice of daily life. Instead, his goal is to present, within a
slow negative movement of setting up generic expectations only to subvert them, « [le] centre
même de l’activité, qui est vide… «la vraie vie » qui est absente », illustrating by means of this
negation the impossibility of communication within the contemporary level of daily life.
Although Debord’s second film, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une
assez courte unité de temps (1959), predates Rouch and Morin’s Chronique d’un été, it can be
seen within an ongoing project within the former’s cinema to contest, by using and abusing
cinematic techniques, the conventions of film genres, documentary in particular.
21
As Soyoung
Yoon notes in her study of his film, after 1952’s Hurlements en faveur de Sade, in which the

21
It can also be seen, as I’ve argued, to be part of a general intellectual and aesthetic practice by Debord and the
situationists to subvert practices in order to draw attention to everyday life. For example, his “Perspectives For
Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life,” a lecture delivered by tape recorder rather than in person to the Groupe
d’études de la vie quotidienne, a working group convened by Henri Lefebvre at the Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique, on May 17, 1961. He uses the gesture of taping his speech as an example of the
elusiveness of the quotidian, that can only be drawn out via such a “break with accustomed routine… (which
brings] directly into the field of questioning of everyday life (a questioning otherwise abstract) the conference
itself… [and] other forms of using time or objects, forms that are considered ‘normal’ and not even noticed, and
which ultimately condition us” (68). Alteration is his term for deliberately bringing to light normative and repetitive
behaviors as means of ultimately altering everyday life, echoing Lefebvre’s idea that a study of everyday life can
only have as its goal the transformation of everyday life.

55

visual is negated save for shifts from a white screen to a black screen, privileging the sound track
in a reversal of cinematic tradition, “Debord returns to visual representation after its radical
negation – a step back, a change of tactic from anticinema to countercinema… a different
modality of negation. The question was how to make negation register and resonate” (47).
Keeping in mind Debord’s reflections on the various elements of his films (the sound track,
image track, and sub-titles), in his Sur le passage and later Critique de la séparation, he refuses
to allow any of those elements to unproblematically support one another, instead pointing to their
insufficiency, or to use his language, inadequacy.
After the opening credits of the film, in which the overlapping dialogue of the 3
rd

Situationist International (SI) can be heard, the film opens on a panning shot of houses in the
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, as Debord identifies for us in the scenario, and the subtitles “Paris,
1952” (470). It is the setting of a scene, « l’environnement étranger de notre histoire », but the
relevance of the image track is only retroactively given by the voice-over, as it relates to the tale
of the Lettrist International (LI) as it transformed throughout the 50’s into the SI, to the spatial
practices of this group within a rather circumscribed area of Paris. The narrator begins, « Ce
quartier était fait pour la dignité malheureuse de la petite bourgeoisie, pour les emplois
honorables et le tourisme intellectuel. La population sédentaire des étages était abritée des
influences de la rue. Ce quartier est resté le même » (470). Debord condenses here the main
themes of the film which will carry on to Critique de la séparation and marked in its title, the
contemporary separation that prevails spatially in the distinction between the respectable
workers that are protected from the influences of the street, that is, the very group of people who
Debord chronicles in the film. It is literally the façades that matter here, because what takes place
with Debord and his cohort is in the street, in the cafés they frequent, the market of Les Halles,

56

and the circumambulations of their dérives. In addition, in the time marked between the panning
shot of those facades and the narrator’s « Ce quartier est resté le même », Debord’s theme of loss
resounds, that, just like the buildings on this street and the way of life that makes it up, nothing
has changed in the broader life of the city’s inhabitants.
This tone of fatigue and despair is tempered by the use to which cinematic techniques are
put throughout the film; from this opening scene, which recasts a documentary’s establishing
shot as the scene of situationist practices in the nearby streets and cafés, the film cuts to a photo
of two couples (Debord included); as Debord notes in the scenario, « Une photographie de deux
couples, buvant du vin à une table de café, est étudiée par la caméra, dans le style du film d’art »
(470). As the camera moves and highlights details from the photograph, the narrator states, « Ici
était mis en actes le doute systématique à l’égard de tous les divertissements et travaux d’une
société, une critique globale de son idée du bonheur » . Instead of highlighting details of the
group’s works as in a documentary on art, the camera zooms on the wine glasses and the faces
and gestures of the members, as the narration continues, discordant: « Ces gens méprisaient aussi
la prétendue profondeur subjective. Ils ne s’intéressaient à rien qu’à une expression suffisante
d’eux-mêmes, concrètement ». These figures, lighted upon by the camera yet unnamed, figure
within this group whose only goal is a sufficiently concrete expression of themselves and their
lives.
This play on the art-film is mirrored by a later scene, where, set against a white screen,
another narrator intones that, because of the ruling class’ hold on the means of artistic
production, « Un film d’art sur cette génération ne sera qu’un film sur l’absence de ses œuvres »
(477). This foregrounding of the absence of the means by which the situationists could make a
material alteration of everyday life and its spaces, against the insufficiency of the white screen,

57

lends itself to Debord’s own assessment of the film in his letter to Frankin mentioned above, the
film’s text becoming « plus en plus inadéquat » (489) in relation to the image track. I argue that
this goes both ways, that the image tracks often falls flat, and in a deliberate way, in relation to
the aspirations of the voice over. Or, for example, in a way that mirrors the assessment of Saint-
Germain-des-Près in the film’s opening as « le même », the representation of contemporary
space perfectly conveys the inadequacy of political practice. Toward the end of the film, after a
long sequence of a détourned advertisement and stock footage of a solar flare and Japanese
police throwing gas canisters in a space now bereft of demonstrators, a third, female narrator
laments, « Ce qui doit être aboli continue, et notre usure continue avec. On nous abîme. On nous
sépare. Les années passent, et nous n’avons rien changé » (480-1) After this mourning for a past
transformation that was not to be, the text accompanied powerfully by an image of police
completely dominating a public space, the image track cuts to documentary-style shots of Paris,
most notably a panoramic shot of the Place des Victoires, where Debord breaks with his
resistance to filming monuments, focusing on the statue of Louis XIV astride his horse. The
second male narrator states, « Encore une fois le matin dans les mêmes rues. Encore une fois la
fatigue de tant de nuits pareillement traversées. C’est une marche qui a beaucoup duré » (481).
For Debord and the situationists, who, as Yoon has noted, argued in a study of the Paris
Commune that “[the] nondestruction of the Bank of France or the Notre Dame cathedral was a
continued grip of ‘the myth of property and theft’,” so that the Commune “‘was defeated less by
force of arms than by force of habit’” (46), the sight of the same statues, buildings and streets
was exhausting, seeming to confirm their initial spatial practices within a zone where « ce qui
manquait était ressenti comme irréparable » (Debord 474).

58

In a film that takes on the tropes of an art documentary in order to talk about a group
without artistic works in the traditional sense, the spaces that the situationists traverse in their
dérives are key; yet, how can one represent these ephemeral practices? This is another sense in
which Debord’s images of Parisian space are significant in their inadequacy. As Vincent
Kaufmann notes:
These [scenes] show the places where something had been experienced, but only
to the extent that there is something visible or ‘legible’ (a map is meant to be read,
not lived). They are images from which all sense of experience is missing, which
allow us to glimpse the incommunicability of experience. Their function… is less
to represent life, and even less to transmit it, than simply to evoke it, to make it
more desirable and at the same time unreachable, absent, achievable only on
condition of once and for all stepping outside of art. (49)
In short, Debord’s images, in Sur le passage and Critique de la séparation, force the viewer, in the
absence of “all sense of experience,” to consider the distinction between the city as legible and as
practiced, to go back to the theories of Lefebvre and De Certeau about the city as modeled from
above as opposed to its experience on the ground. The scene in Critique de la séparation that
prompts Kaufmann’s reflection is a perfect example of Debord’s filmic technique; as he notes in
the film’s scenario, the opening shot is structured like an establishing shot in a documentary:
« Panoramique sur le quai d’Orléans, vu de la rive gauche » (546). However, as the camera pans
from left to right, it becomes clear that he will not provide the sort of false coherence of traditional
documentaries, a representation of life in this particular quartier; instead, he states, « Voila la
lumière du jour, et des perspectives qui, maintenant, ne signifient plus rien. Les secteurs d’une
ville sont, à un certain niveau, lisibles. Mais le sens qu’ils ont eu pour nous, personellement, est
intransmissible, comme toute cette clandestinité de la vie privée, sur laquelle on ne possède jamais
que des documents dérisoires » (546). Instead of knowledge of a place, there is daylight, and
perspectives separated from the situationists’ experience of them; the inability of cinematic images

59

of these spaces to convey this experience is, as Kaufmann notes, an incentive “[to step] outside of
art,” or in Yoon’s words, a way “to make negation register and resonate” with all the unfulfilled
potential of the built environment.
The situationist’s practice of moving through the urban space surrounding Saint-Germain-
des-Près and Les Halles market is the story that Debord and his fellow narrators tell throughout
Sur le passage and Critique de la séparation, a story clearly at odds with the image track’s
inability to represent their traversal of that space. In Sur le passage, over successive shots of Les
Halles, the narrator notes, « Il y avait la fatigue et le froid du matin, dans ce labyrinthe tant
parcouru, comme une énigme que nous devions résoudre. C’était une réalité en trompe l’œil, à
partir de laquelle il fallait découvrir la richesse possible de la réalité » (473). Here, the space of the
city is likened to a labyrinth, pointing to the restrictive geography of the built environment, and
soon after to a trompe l’oeil image, a two-dimensional illusion of three-dimensions, which we
could read as the stricture placed upon urban space and its inhabitants to conform to models of use
and circulation. Responding to these strictures, the situationists, via the dérive, attempt to
reactivate the potential embedded in the material life of the city, in a way that recalls Lefebvre’s
notion of l’urbain in Le droit de la ville as a dispersed germ or possibility. Just as Marker
confronts the inhabitants of Paris in May 1962 with the changing spaces and experiences of their
city and challenges them to confront their own access, or lack thereof, to participate in these
changes to daily life, Debord confronts, through the dialectic established between the verbal
narrative of the situationist’s actions and the images of the city, the possibility of resistance to the
built environment.
In other scenes in Sur le passage, Debord’s formal choice to offer an image track that
illustrates rather straightforwardly his voice-over is a continuation of his filmic argument that

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spatial separation leads directly to the cultural alienation he is trying to alleviate. Matched with a
stationary shot of people passing by the Musée de Cluny, the narrator notes, « Les autres suivaient
sans y penser les chemins appris une fois pour toutes, vers leur avenir prévisible. Pour eux déjà le
devoir était devenu une habitude et l’habitude un devoir. Ils ne voyaient pas l’insuffisance de leur
ville. Ils croyaient naturelle l’insuffisance de leur vie » (478). Here, the formal match between the
image of and voice-over about other inhabitants is tied to the unsparing reading Debord gives of
his fellow Parisians; unlike Marker, he won’t allow them a chance to respond to his critique
through the interview
22
; their inability to see the insufficiency of their social space is reinforced by
their conventional use of it, which reifies their sense of everyday life. For Debord, only existing
precariously outside the sphere of reproduction as a situationist allows one the possibility of
seeing and practicing the city differently.
In his films, as Tom McDonough notes, Debord sets up a binary opposition that recalls the
early writings of Georg Lukács in Soul and Form, in which the latter makes a distinction “between
absolute life, what he called ‘authentic life,’ and relative life, ‘the concrete life of society’ as lived
in an empirical, corrupt, and corrupting world” (23). The only possibility for engaging with urban
space differently is to resist the habitual flow of spatial circulation, otherwise known as the
repetitive cycle of reproduction, which crucially puts the means to materially transform the built
environment out of reach. Yet, as McDonough also notes, within the trompe de l’oeil experience
of everyday life, Debord holds out “the possibility of a different life” (23), in the figure of dreams
that he describes in Critique de la séparation. As the narrator notes, « Ce qui n’a pu être oublié

22
We can compare this resistance to dialogue in Sur le passage to Debord’s explicit refusal in Critique de la
séparation to provide the female protagonist a chance to speak or even a description: “[Je] ne parle pas d’elle.
Faux visage. Faux rapport. Un personnage réel est séparé de qui l’interprète , ne serait-ce que par le temps passé
entre l’événement et son évocation, par une distance qui grandira toujours, qui grandit en ce moment » (551).
Here, Debord signals his unflagging refusal to contribute to the creation of spectacle, providing a description of
another that would make of the fragmented past a false coherence.

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reparaît dans les rêves. À la fin de ce genre de rêve, dans le demi-sommeil, les événements sont
encore tenus pour réels, un bref instant… Ces rêves sont des éclats du passé non résolu » (545-6).
This epiphanic instant of waking from the dream, between taking it for real and realizing it was
‘only’ a dream, can be generalized as the experience of potential that Debord’s practice of the city
affords, a means of encountering what, in his words, could not be forgotten. By engaging with the
potential richness of the everyday that is dissimulated by the seeming immutability of urban space,
Debord draws closer to the thinking of Lefebvre and the filmic practice of Marker. In figuring
these dreams, “flashes from the unresolved past,” as the distance between the recounted (but never
directly transmissible) experience of the situationists and images of the built environment, he
makes clear that it is not the images themselves or their relation to the other filmic elements that is
inadequate; rather, it is the spaces themselves, which reinforce the practices of social reproduction
and reject other forms of living. In Debord’s own words regarding the formal quality of his films,
« La pauvreté des moyens est chargée d’exprimer sans fard la scandaleuse pauvreté du sujet »
(549). In addition, his films leave open the possibility that the past is not past or out of reach. By
approaching the space of the other through the logic of dérive and détournement, one can resist the
spatial logic of advanced capitalism and reengage, if only fleetingly, with other inhabitants of the
city. Just as his films remain, as he states explicitly, incomplete, neither does he offer a complete
idea of political praxis, only gesturing towards the shift De Certeau will make twenty years later
from the knowledge of planners to the practice of users.

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Image #1

63

Image #2

Image #3

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Chapter Three
« Le temps comme il s’écoule » : Making Everyday Life Sensible in the Parisian Films of Agnès
Varda
The film is as much about Paris as a woman.
- Jill Forbes, “Gender and Space in Cléo de 5 à 7”
In her article, Jill Forbes’ reading of Varda’s film is indebted to an earlier generation of
feminist film scholars who consider it a narrative of “an empowered female subject” (83). Forbes
focuses in particular on Sandy Flitterman-Lewis’ thesis in To Desire Differently: Feminism and
the French Cinema that Cléo’s travels throughout the film represent “a spiritual journey which
transforms her from object to subject of desire,” and that the film is structured to facilitate this
subjective awakening, a story told in two halves: “when Cléo takes off her wig (i.e. gets rid of
her ‘disguise’) she appropriates the gaze” (Forbes 83). Forbes notes that this is a seductive
reading in that it cleanly accounts for the film’s formal structure and that it is compelling to
feminist viewers in that it stands as “the exemplary Bildungsroman of May 1968 and beyond”
(83), of women’s liberation movements. And while later critics of the film like Forbes and
Steven Ungar retain elements of this canonical reading of Cléo, they also point to elements of the
film that represent a less sure codification of gender in urban space. Both critics identify how
Varda uses documentary techniques to represent Paris in Cléo, and how the film in conversation
with cinéma vérité experiments like Chronique d’un été and Le Joli Mai, as well as early
Nouvelle vague films in their capturing of everyday life by shooting quotidian scenes on the
street and in public spaces. In addition, both Forbes and Ungar emphasize the significance of
Cléo’s movement through Parisian space and how her body is read differently in public and

65

private spaces, and in indoor spaces of commodities and outdoor spaces of circulation. Forbes in
particular reactivates the debate about flânerie and gender difference to show how Cléo’s
trajectory cannot simply be read as a movement of subjective liberation, that there is a tension
between her actions as Situationist dérive, consumption and transgression of norms.
As Forbes notes in her analysis, Cléo can be read alongside other Parisian films by
Varda, including Opéra Mouffe (1958) and Daguerréotypes (1975), not only because they
preserve an archival trace of daily life in Parisian neighborhoods of the time, but because these
documents of the city are framed by a particular (that is, a gendered and embodied) way of
seeing. In Opéra Mouffe, as Ungar notes, the film, while evincing a documentary attention to the
Rue Mouffetard and its quotidian inhabitants and scenes, is also a demonstration of
“attentiveness to sensory detail… in images and associations that may accompany pregnancy”
(29-30). When Varda spoke in an interview later in her career, she cited the film in reference to
her tendency to include herself in her films: « Je revendique le droit de faire des documentaires
subjectifs! Déjà quand je tournais Opéra-Mouffe, c’était en 1957, on ne me voyait pas du tout,
mais j’étais enceinte jusqu’au cou. Ce que je sentais, ressentais, me faisait filmer d’une certaine
façon. Mettre la caméra là ou là, être en état d’émotion ou pas, c’est complètement différent.
J’assume complètement » (18). Here, she foregrounds how her pregnancy impacted her choice of
shots and subject matter, how her bodily and psychic experience outside the frame enters the
film. As Ungar notes, Varda’s film is preoccupied with “images tracing the passage from life to
death… [as well as] animal body parts” (30). Crucially, this conditioned gaze is also a
documentary gaze, recording the daily actions of the open-air market, a Parisian tradition subject
to erasure under the aegis of spatial reordering, as well as the precarious condition of the
passersby she captures with her camera, “the faces of the elderly, alcoholic and homeless, some

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of whom died during the severe winter of 1957-8” (30). Varda’s subjective gaze is exemplified
by what I call rhyming images, match cuts between, for instance, a nude pregnant torso and a
pumpkin being cut in half at the market (Ungar 30). Varda’s fascination with the act opening and
removing the innards of the ripe, circular vegetable represents “an affective dimension of
pregnancy” (Ungar 31) that is inseparable from Varda the filmmaker / cameraperson’s
apprehension of the Parisian street. The film finds its sibling in another documentary,
Daguerréotypes, in which Varda restricts her gaze to the hyper-local, limiting her range of
movement to the blocks of the Rue Daguerre that could be reached by the length of her recording
equipments’ electrical cables, an umbilical metaphor as she balanced her domestic life raising
her two-year-old son and her filmic practice. But critics like Forbes and Ungar are right to tie
these more explicit documentary works to the “subjective documentary” that underlies Cléo de 5
à 7. Though Cléo is a fiction film, Varda chose to film on location and foreground contemporary
Parisian spaces; in addition, through the figure of Cléo, who navigates the city while convinced
she has cancer and awaiting the results of medical tests, Varda dramatizes the perspective of the
practitioner of city space. Cléo’s Paris is initially overdetermined with signs and symbols of her
impending illness and death, but her relation to the city’s spaces also shifts as her attention shifts
from passive (killing time in spaces of consumption) to active (a curiosity and desire to traverse
spaces initially unknown to her).
As Forbes notes, many critics have focused on the nature of time in the film, in that its
90-minute duration roughly follows the diegetic time represented in the film’s chapters. While
acknowledging this, she cautions against drawing correlation between filmic and real time, as
does Ungar, who instead suggests that we read duration in the film as a “mix of measured and
subjective time” (34), accounting for the ways in which Cléo’s fears and preoccupations about

67

her condition is reflected in how time seems to speed and slow in certain scenes. Forbes offers
another reading as to the significance of time in the film, one that directly relates to circulation
and gender in modernity: “[If] we remember that time is also space, we can see that the
relationship between the title ‘de 5 à 7’ and the activities taking place at that time is significant.
For Cléo is the kind of social being to whom the hours between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. traditionally
belong, namely, a demimondaine” (85). When Cléo receives her lover José at her apartment for a
brief visit, Varda suggests the terms of their relationship, when Angèle, Cléo’s assistant / handler
suggests that José rarely visits and thus doesn’t know about Cléo’s possibly declining health.
Cléo is a mistress of sorts, socially acceptable enough in domestic space, but when she enters
public space, her transgressive role is amplified by the strict norms regulating space in
modernity. As Forbes notes, “[The] woman on the streets is… an ambiguous figure” (86): she is
often read, like the main character in Hiroshima mon amour (1959), as a sex worker.
Whereas early feminist critics like Flitterman-Lewis read Cléo as a female flâneur,
Forbes points instead to how gender roles are both represented and troubled in Varda’s film.
Indeed, it is tempting but incorrect to lift the figure of the flâneur wholesale out of the 19
th

century and attach this role to more contemporary city inhabitants. As Susan Buck-Morss
observes in her study of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, “The flowering of flânerie was
brief, corresponding to the first blooming of the arcades. This era of origins is irretrievable”
(103). The flaneur was a specific figure of pre-Haussmann Paris; his (and I emphasize gender
here) was the Paris of the interior shops of the arcades, where he could stroll unencumbered by
the circulation of carriages and, eventually, automobiles. However, Benjamin’s point is not to
lament for this past state that can no longer be attained; instead, his notes serve as what he called
dialectical images, where he gave attention to past events and practices that can inform our

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contemporary condition. Flanerie has not been lost; instead, in the movement of history, a
specific type has been sublated and generalized and now informs a mode of perception: “Such
images are ‘dialectical,’ in one sense of the term, when they are negated and preserved in history
at once. In our own time, in the case of the flaneur, it is not his perceptive attitude which has
been lost, but rather its marginality. If the flaneur has disappeared as a specific figure, it is
because the perceptive attitude which he embodied saturates modern existence, specifically, the
society of mass consumption (and is the source of its illusions)” (104). Thus, Cléo is not so much
a liberated flaneur because she assumes her own gaze as subject over the course of the film; she
is expressing the generalized flânerie of consumption when she lingers in the hat shop, moving
from product to product, gazing at her reflection in the series of mirrors that lines the store.
Varda, for her part, never allows for the camera (and, thus, the audience) to wholly identify with
this narcissistic logic of desire; instead, in a long tracking shot, the camera follows Cléo through
the window outside the shop as she moves among the hat stands. Reflected clearly in the glass
and loudly represented in the sound track, we see and hear the evening traffic of cars and
pedestrians. Critics like Forbes note that with the rise of modernity out of industrial capitalism in
the 19
th
century and the codifying of public space as male and domestic space as female, there
remained exceptional female figures and spaces that, while reversing the terms, ultimately
upheld this public-private dichotomy. Thus, women deemed outside the heteronormative sexual
economy or who were able to pass as men were able to walk the street, and public spaces like
stores were acceptable gathering places for bourgeois women. However, Forbes’ point is that
Cléo doesn’t exist outside this economy; she is not a marginal figure, she instead embodies the
culture of consumption. Varda’s intervention is to represent how Cléo participates in a sublated
form of flânerie while also, in her confrontation of the outside street and the interior of the shop,

69

showing the co-constitutive relationship of these spaces of circulation in the reproduction of
capital.
If Cléo is not an exemplary female flaneur in the tradition of a George Sand, the film
dramatizes a shift in her attention that allows her to apprehend the city differently. As Varda
notes in a retrospective study of the film in Varda par Agnès, “Cléo awaits the results of medical
tests. Fear awakens her” (qtd. in Ungar 88). Like her other Parisian films, Varda’s Cléo is a
subjective documentary in that it is the account of a subject’s affective relation to place,
modulated by their bodily and psychic circumstanced. Ungar makes an apt comparison between
Varda’s subjective associations of pregnancy and her surroundings in Opéra Mouffe with
Surrealist practices. André Breton, Louis Aragon and other surrealist writers practiced a
relationship with Parisian space in their writings that involved being open to wandering and
being guided by landmarks without consciously understanding their attraction, thus allowing for
the possibility of experiencing everyday life in its fullness and reality. Michael Sheringham notes
that the surrealist practice of everyday life is essentially about training oneself to shed habitual
modes of seeing reality: “[The] object of perception has no need to be extraordinary; what is
extraordinary is the renewal of seeing. Surrealism does not aim to see new things, but to see
things anew: to make the act of perception performative rather than merely constative” (82). Just
as Varda’s own bodily and psychological circumstances impacted on her choices of subject,
framing and editing in Opéra Mouffe and Daguerréotypes in ways she cannot fully account for,
in Cléo, Varda’s main character’s anxiety regarding her health transforms her perspective of the
city. Varda stages this transformation through the character’s actions (breaking her routine and
going off on her own to unfamiliar parts of the city) as well as by using filmic techniques to
demonstrate Cléo’s state of mind when engaging with Parisian space. As Ungar notes, Cléo

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ultimately is not a flaneuse; she breaks free of patterns of consumption while still experiencing
the social interdictions around women circulating in public space. Instead, she becomes a
“baladeuse” (93), in that her trajectory becomes a more random wandering tied to her curiosity
about the everyday life around her. Ultimately, Varda’s techniques of subjective documentary,
whether in works like Opéra Mouffe or Daguerréotypes or incorporated into a fictional film like
Cléo, serves a similar function to Benjamin’s dialectical images; for him, focusing on the
elements of 19
th
century daily life that resonated with his contemporary moment was a means of
critiquing the present: “the old-fashioned, undesirable, suddenly appeared current, or the new,
desired, appeared as a repetition of the same” (Buck-Morss 100). In the same way, Varda
critiques post-war modernity in Cléo by showing how contemporary everyday life simply
reproduces, through commodity fetishism and interdictions on female mobility, the everyday life
of the past.
I. Cléo and Everyday Life in Paris, June 21, 1961
If, at a certain level of abstraction, all films are about time
and space, some are more so than others.
- Steven Ungar, Cléo de 5 à 7
As Ungar notes in his analysis of the film, Cléo’s transformation can be marked by her
attention to the spaces she traverses, from the modality of “[killing] time” (91) to a newfound
interest in the city and a curiosity for new spaces and the people that inhabit them. He points out
that in the second half of the film, Cléo moves south into neighborhoods she is unfamiliar with,
reaching the Parc Montsouris in the 14
th
arrondissement before backtracking north toward Place
d’Italie and the Hôpital Salpêtrière. She is using a different mode of transportation, the bus, and

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distracted by Antoine’s conversation, her surroundings, and her neighboring riders, she arrives at
the hospital in a state of disorientation: « Je ne sais plus où c’est. Je suis venue en taxi l’autre
fois ». This spatial confusion is tied to her confession to Antoine, earlier on the bus, that the city
and inhabitants have taken on a new cast for her: « Aujourd’hui, tout m’étonne. La figure des
gens, et la mienne à côté. Vous savez où est l’arrêt ? » Here, the sudden shock of seeing
everyday life in the specificity of its iterations is defamiliarizing, and her sense of herself as well
as of time and space (« [Où] est l’arrêt? ») is affected.
Initially, however, Cléo’s mode of engaging with city spaces has more to do with the
specters of 19
th
century flânerie and its remainders in 20
th
century life; women walking the street
are read as sex workers or only experience flânerie as a mode of consumption tied to the
spectacle. Throughout the film, as she moves through Paris, she is perceived by men to be
sexually available; she is solicited either directly (a man asks to buy her a drink at Café du dôme,
a man tries to pick her up while she’s riding in a taxi) or by the gazes of male passersby. In the
initial meeting with Antoine and Cléo, he asks if she is married, to which she responds, « Est-ce
que j’ai l’air d’une aventurière qui cherche quelqu’un? » The implication being, if she is not
married, she is searching for a man. In the scene that takes place in the hat shop, Cléo is playfully
caught up in the choice of products and the spectacle of consumption, including that of her own
image. Mirrors reinforce her sense of her own beauty and worth, tied up in the desire for
commodities; she says, to herself, « Tout me va… c’est agréable, je me saoulerais d’essayer des
chapeaux et des robes ». She is drunk on spectacle as a means of deferring death.
However, in other situations, she is momentarily distracted from this narcissistic flânerie.
For instance, when she and Angèle get in the cab with the female driver, the three share a
fleeting feminine solidarity, initiated by the DS / déesse joke. At one point, after the driver puts

72

on one of her songs, Cléo begins complaining about how the song was recorded, and tells her to
stop the song; the driver assumes she wants to stop the car. They share a laugh, but Cléo
suddenly feels sick when her gaze lights on African masks in a shop window. This sight is
followed by art student revelers in the street; a black student with their face painted peers into the
cab window, frightening her. Between Cléo seeing the masks, followed by the rapid appearance
of the student, Angèle brings up the topic of the taxi driver’s profession, that it must be a difficult
job for a woman. The cab driver agrees that it can be dangerous but she likes it, and Cléo
suddenly breaks from her reverie, asking, « Et la nuit, vous n’avez pas peur, la nuit? » For Cléo,
the masks and the student (whom Varda seems to be using to suggest the animation of the
masks) are linked to a series of associations with the obscure or the unknown, and which she
mentions again in her conversation with Antoine: « Pour moi, la nudité, c’est l’indiscrétion.
C’est la nuit, et puis la maladie ». These uncertain images all lead back to Cléo’s anxiety
surrounding her condition. The cab driver continues talking about her job, telling about a time
she was almost mugged. After she drops them off at Cléo’s apartment, it’s clear that the
temporary feminist respite of the cab’s interior has been broken; while Angèle is impressed by
the cab driver, Cléo responds, « Ça me révolte ». Caught up in her personal spatial associations
with illness, she also rejects this transgressive female figure who takes on traditionally male roles
in public space.
In her apartment, Cléo suddenly breaks off a meeting with her musical arranger and
lyricist. As Ungar notes, the lyrics to « Sans toi » overcome her with their references to death and
decay: « Et si tu viens trop tard / On m’aura mise en terre / Seule, laide et livide ». Varda’s
framing of the sequence is remarkable, a single shot that pans past the piano and zooms to an
extreme closeup of Cléo’s face, framed against a black patch of wall, as if she is in an empty

73

void. The viewer sees that Cléo becomes overwrought and cries while singing; then, she abruptly
storms out of the apartment, and unlike the past 40 minutes of the film, she wants to move
through Paris alone. Even her relation to mirrors and her reflection has changed; as she gazes at
herself in a shop window, she says, « Cette figure de poupée, toujours la même… Je ne peux
même pas y lire ma propre peur. Depuis toujours je pense que tout le monde me regarde et moi je
ne regarde personne que moi. C’est lassant ». Her face no longer seems to be her own in that it
doesn’t reflect her anxiety, and suddenly her image of herself as object of desire is suspect; at the
same moment, she becomes aware of the fact that she doesn’t look at others. It is as if her
habitual mode of everyday life is what tires her out, and she begins to shift toward a more active
relation to her surrounding world. When she enters Café du dôme, she is attentive to the patrons,
watching them and eavesdropping on snippets of their conversations. In her notes accompanying
the scenario of the film, Varda writes, « [Cléo] regarde. Et sa curiosité donne de l’importance
aux autres. Ce chapitre est comme un petit documentaire sur les gens qui fréquentent le café du
Dôme et le quartier. Nous les voyons avec elle, visages de la rue, sérieux, fermés sur eux-mêmes,
mystérieux ou occupés. Certains éléments seront reconstitués d’après des photos prises
auparavant à la sauvette ; d’autre part on filmera au hasard. La caméra, souvent se substituera au
regard de Cléo » (63). Varda encourages the viewer to see the camera’s point of view and Cléo’s
perspective as one and the same, and yet reveals that what occurs in the fictional scene can also
stand alone as a documentary vignette; the film’s two modalities overlap. Through Cléo, the
viewer is privy to two men who mutter about the événements in Algeria, intermingled with an
older professor discussing a lecture he gave, two women caring for two infants, some young men
debating Surrealist art, and others. All these conversations are given the same weight, observed
in silence by Cléo. Later, Varda dramatizes Cléo’s singular attunement to the everyday by

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showing us what Ungar calls “a visual equivalent of… free indirect discourse” (69); as she walks
down the street, the camera represents Cléo’s point of view. As passersby gaze at the camera and
thus at Cléo, Varda intercuts static images of patrons from le Dôme looking directly at the
camera, along with other people Cléo has interacted with throughout the day (Irma the tarot
reader, José, Bob the musician, etc.). Once again, Varda folds her documentary technique into
the fictional scene, using footage à la sauvette to construct a representation of Cléo’s
preoccupation with the faces she has encountered, and by doing so the filmmaker stages the
experience of thinking while walking in the city.
Later, after Cléo meets up with her friend Dorothée the studio model, they drive around
the city. Dorothée comments on the banality of the names around the train station (« Rue du
Départ, rue de l’Arrivée »), which leads Cléo to reflect on the practice of memorializing the dead
with street names: « Moi j’aimerais que les rues aient des noms de gens vivants: la rue Piaf, le
boulevard Zizi, l’avenue Aznavour. Et on changerait de nom dès qu’ils seraient morts… Ça
vivrait, ce serait gai au moins ». Her rumination on the signification of street names leads me to
Michel De Certeau’s consideration of proper names and their effects on inhabitants that move
through city space. De Certeau’s model of space in L’invention du quotidien is structured by a
dual impossibility. He articulates two perspectives: first, the top-down view of planners and
figures of state power, who seek in their representations to foreclose the city and freeze it as text,
and second, the everyday practices of users who elude this model. As he writes, « Sous les
discours qui [idéologisent La Ville] prolifèrent les ruses et les combinaisons de pouvoirs sans
identité lisible, sans prises saisissables, sans transparence rationnelle – impossibles à gérer »
(145). He opposes the city, capitalized like a Platonic ideal, as represented from above to the
range of practices that cannot be reduced in their singularity and thus cannot be reified into that

75

top-down perspective and effectively organized. But if it is impossible to totally articulate,
program, and predict the flows of the city from above, it is equally impossible to De Certeau’s
Wandersmänner to write their own progress through the city; he often refers to the blindness of
these practitioners and resorts to linguistic forms (particularly synecdoche and asyndeton to
account for the ways in which trajectories are not totalities but rather consist of emphases and
ellipses on the part of the walker) and the unconscious logic of dreams as a means of structuring
the actions of inhabitants. Against the commonsense logic of built space as presence, he asserts,
« Marcher, c’est manquer de lieu. C’est le procès indéfini d’être absent et en quête d’un propre.
L’errance… [est] une expérience… [qui est] effritée en déportations innombrables et infimes
(déplacements et marches), compensée par les relations et les croisements de ces exodes qui font
entrelacs, créant un tissu urbain » (155). De Certeau establishes here the non-identity of
apprehending place, and the absence at the heart of moving among landmarks and along streets
that are codified and identifiable and that, nevertheless, every walker interacts with differently.
Walking, for him, is essentially an experience of being lost, to oneself not least of all, and yet
despite the feeling of spatial disconnect and interdiction suggested by the word déportation, he
notes the provisional croisements that result from inhabitants encountering one another and
finding meaning in those interactions.
In his analysis of how users come to find meaning, or in his words passages that connect
space with their own history, proper names are extremely significant. He writes, « Les relations
du sens de la marche avec le sens des mots situent deux sortes de mouvements apparemment
contraires, l’un extériorité (marcher, c’est se mettre dehors), l’autre, intérieur (une mobilité sous
la stabilité du signifiant). La marche… est attirée ou répoussée par des nominations aux sens
obscurs » (156, my italics). Here, De Certeau points to the multiple meanings of sens, both

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spatial direction and signification or meaning, and draws those two meanings together. Although
the two sens seem to be governed by different logics (walking as exteriority and the meaning of a
word as an inward movement toward the identity of signifier with signified), De Certeau’s point
is that language, in the case of the proper name encountered in urban space, causes effects for
which there cannot be a denotative account. Instead, the walker and the proper name have a
relation like a magnet in nature; the walker is attracted and repelled and cannot fully give an
account of why, in both senses of sens, the meaning of their relation and where, spatially, it
attracts and sends them. De Certeau describes « [le] texte urbain sans obscurité » (156) and
opposes to this functionalist space of circulation the uncanny power of the proper name: « Dans
les espaces brutalement éclairés par une raison étrangère, les noms propres creusent des réserves
de significations cachées et familières. Ils… impulsent des mouvements, à la façon de vocations
et d’appels qui tournent ou détournent l’itinéraire en lui donnant des sens (ou directions) jusque-
là imprévisibles » (156). De Certeau both cites and updates, in his use of the verb détourner and
dériver, the practices of the Situationists, emphasizing the lack of subjective mastery and
captivation that the encounter with the proper name demonstrates: « Un ami habitant la ville de
Sèvres dérive, à Paris, vers les rues des Saints-Pères et de Sèvres alors qu’il va voir sa mère dans
un autre quartier » (156-7). The proper name and its associations intervene and supersede any
intention on the part of the walker to arrive at a specific destination (or, in the case of the
Situationists, to wander without destination).
In Cléo de 5 à 7, the built environment that Cléo traverses and Varda stages (in the sense
of the mise-en-scène of framing shots and choosing locations) is filled with signifiers, most often
suggestive of Cléo’s fear of illness and death. As she and Angèle leave a café and cross the street
before entering the hat shop, a store’s façade reads « Rivoli Deuil »; this linguistic marker can be

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linked to the many superstitious signs and images of death and bodily harm she encounters
throughout the film (street performers swallowing live frogs and piercing their flesh, a broken
mirror that is followed by shattered glass near a crime scene where a man has been killed). These
images and scenes serve to show Cléo’s heightened anxiety and sense of her impending death.
However, other encounters with the proper name serve as moments of relation and kinship with
others, as when Cléo and Angèle board a taxi with a female driver. Noting the make of the car,
Cléo says, « C’est une DS, j’aime ça ». The driver corrects her: “C’est pas une DS, c’est une
ID ». They are playing on the homonyms of the two Citroen models, déesse and idée. Cléo
responds, « Idée comme une drôle d’idée? » Their word play opens a space of lightness and
camaraderie for the tired Cléo, worried about her test results, but it is a tenuous respite, broken
by cat-calling male passengers in passing cars, raucous art students, and, ultimately, Cléo’s
rejection of the female driver’s choice of work.
Place names and linguistic play take on importance as Cléo and her friend Dorothée
approach the Parc Montsouris later on, again in a cab. Cléo comments, « Montsouris. Ça fait
sourire, rien qu’en le disant. C’est comme « Cheese » ». She plays on the smile-inducing English
word, and perhaps links the mouse with its favorite food. This linguistic drift is continued after
she enters the park and encounters Antoine, whose verbosity annoys her at first, especially when
he inadvertently lands on her fear of illness. He seems to be able to psychically divine the
relationship between her and the seasons; before she mentions that her name is Florence, he says,
speaking of the equinox, « Mais aujourd’hui c’est l’été officiel, c’est Flore, c’est vous ». He soon
hits a sore spot, noting that June 21
st
is the day the sun leaves Gemini for Cancer. But eventually
his poetic play wins her over, as when he brings up again « la fête à Flore », to which she
responds, « Presque, mon nom c’est Florence. Mais on m’appelle Cléo, pour Cléopâtre ». He

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intones, « Quel programme! Florence, c’est Italie. La Renaissance, Botticelli, une rose.
Cléopâtre, c’est l’Egypte, le Sphinx, et l’aspic ; une tigresse. Non, moi je préfère Florence. Je
préfère la flore à la faune. » Faced with her given name and her professional name, he explores a
string of associations like a poet: Florence evokes Italy, the beauty of Renaissance art and a rose,
while Cléopâtre leaves him cold, with a list of inscrutable animals. Significantly, she chooses to
present herself differently to Antoine, and he in turn rejects the name that others associate with
her capricious persona (The musician Bob sings, « Cléopâtre, je vous idolâtre »).
Cléo (also known, now, as Florence) moves through the city differently with Antoine.
They take a bus (his choice, « plus gai [qu’un taxi] »), and, through their dialogue, she engages
more actively with the proper names of the city. At one moment on their journey, Cléo’s gaze
lights on a woman sitting across from her; she is a foreigner, and a man who sits down next to
her asks if she is familiar with Paris. She responds, « Chaque jour, je visite une nouvelle
arrondissement ». It acts as a frame for Cléo to look out the window at the passing city, and just
after the woman mentions Place d’Italie, Antoine makes the connection - « Florence… Vous
voilà chez vous, ou presque » – before leaping even farther afield : « Connaissez-vous le nom de
ces arbres ? Des « paulownia » […] il y en a aussi place de la Contrescarpe, et puis en Chine et
au Japon. C’est un arbre plutôt rare, il vient de Pologne ». By the end of their time together,
Antoine helps Cléo break out of the centripetal association of Paris with death and, instead, they
follow a centrifugal movement, via Polish Paulownia and Lebanese cedars, to Eastern Europe,
the Middle East and Far East Asia.

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II. Varda and the Rhythm of Everyday Life on the Rue Daguerre
« Ces daguerréotypes en couleurs, ces images à l'ancienne, ce portrait collectif et presque dagué-
stéréotypé de quelques types et typesses de la rue Daguerre, ces images et ce son qui se veulent
modestes et discrets face au silence gris qui nimbe madame Chardon Bleu, tout cela est-il un
reportage, un hommage, un essai, un regret, un reproche, une approche ? En tout cas c'est un film
que je signe en voisine, Agnès la Daguerréotypesse. »
- Agnès Varda, Daguerréotypes

I want to begin at the end of Agnès Varda’s 1976 film Daguerréotypes to observe how, in
its closing moments, the filmmaker registers in voice-over the uncertainty engendered by the
work; en guise de conclusion, a lingering question about the status of the work. The intractable
opacity of Varda’s film to herself and, by extension, the participants and audience stands in stark
contrast to two other representations of the city I would briefly like to consider that are part of a
larger project: first, in general, the attempts by social scientists and planners to capture, often
through the use of aerial photography, a true image of urban space upon which to act; and
second, the exemplary work of cinéma vérité and representation of everyday life in Paris 15
years earlier, Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch’s Chronique d’un été. These two, contemporaneous
forms of visuality can be read as counterpoints to Varda’s signing of/signing off on
Daguerréotypes.
In her book The View from Above: The Science of Social Space, Jeanne Haffner
illustrates a change in postwar urban planning and in the thinking of social scientists in
considering how cities like Paris should be reorganized in order to meet the needs of its
inhabitants. In particular, she charts a paradigm shift from a more geometric sense of space and a
traditional mapping of spatial structures to an understanding of social space, which emphasizes
individual (and by inference group) activity within and across lived spaces. In a moment of

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modernization where, as Kristin Ross noted, there was “a relentless dismantling of earlier spatial
arrangements… equivalent in scale to those Haussmann oversaw a hundred years earlier” (6),
social scientists like Gaston Bardet and Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe sought to bring their
ethnographic, empirical investigations to bear on cities in conjunction with techniques like aerial
photography. Bringing these methods together allowed them to argue that they were moving
beyond the outdated techniques of earlier architect-planners like Le Corbusier, whose
Functionalist projects assumed the needs of their future inhabitants “based on preconceived
notions rather than on direct sociological or anthropological investigation” (100).
While with these methods, scientists like Bardet and Chombart attempted to align
planning with the daily experiences of city dwellers and fashion it malleably after patterns they
observed, they left behind the abstraction of geometric space only to embrace biological
metaphors. With his practice of social topography, which mapped “the interweaving of human
activities” (196) rather than existing structures and the related concept of tissu urbain (rendered
as urban fabric in English, which obscures its organic meaning), Bardet likened the collective
actions of inhabitants to a body. Indeed, he went farther in suggesting that his new techniques
could cure that sick body, noting that social topography allowed for “discoveries of ways of
living offered by an urban fabric not already degenerated or decayed at birth” (95). As Lefebvre
summed it up in Le Droit à la ville, this is the social scientist as « médecin d’espace sociale
malade ». Moreover, Bardet claimed that, with the combination of aerial photography and
ethnography on the ground, social topography had a claim to truth at the level of everyday life: “I
believe that the introduction of the methods of social topography can be compared to the
introduction of the microscope in biology… We have at one stroke removed the roofs from the
houses, which were only the material aspect of urban form, to look at the swarming of

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individualities that make up the very structure of the town” (95). Here, he likens the precision of
his technique to the microscope, suggesting a similar fidelity and magnified access to the real,
and once again downplays the significance of material, existing structures in contrast to his real
object, the truth of individual movements that make up patterns of behavior. Bardet, as well as
Chombart in the latter’s work on Paris, laid claim to a combined top-down / ground-level
visuality that purportedly allowed them to access patterns on the level of the social that could
then be acted on by city planners in transforming the city for the benefit of its inhabitants.
Meanwhile, in his manifesto for the genre that predated his film with Jean Rouch, entitled
“For a New Cinéma Vérité,” Edgar Morin expresses his faith in the new technology of the
portable 16 mm camera with synchronized camera and its ability to allow the “‘filmmaker-diver’
[to plunge] into real-life situations”: “In accepting the loss of formal aesthetic, he discovers
virgin territory, a life that possesses aesthetic secrets within itself” (230-1). It should be noted
that for Morin, this aesthetic transparency is connected to a psychological transparency; within
his psychoanalytic theory of cinema, he argues that the intervention of the camera allows for an
encounter in which the participant’s assumption of social roles and the repressed truth of their
personality comes to the surface. In the work of social scientists and planners to make the city
legible from above in order to transform it and in the writing and film aesthetics of cinéma
vérité’s founders, there is a shared claim that through technological means, one will be able to
transparently access individuals, their behavior and indeed their psyches at the level of everyday
life. While using some of the same techniques – an ethnographic approach to filmmaking and the
use of a portable camera - Varda holds fast to her doubt that she can offer up such a
representation.

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She signs off on the film as neighbor and daguerréotypesse, producer of daguerreotypes.
And indeed, far from being simply a play on the fact that she is filming on the street where she
lives, the Rue Daguerre in Montparnasse, she affirms that the collective portrait she has made
shares something with the ancestral medium of photography. Louis Daguerre, along with Joseph
Niepce, established the earliest means of producing a physical image from a camera obscura; the
former inventor, by use of a chemical process, was able to affix the material, which was then
covered in glass to prevent damage. While the exposure time was drastically reduced from hours
to minutes by the 1840’s, allowing for daguerreotype portraits to become an industry, what is
evident in the street scene of the Boulevard du Temple (image #1) is the physical inscription of
time in the image, the imprint of a space’s inhabitants on it. Significantly, what gets registered
(and what doesn’t) is a matter of time – the stillness of the two men in the lower left means they
show up in the image and not the circulation of traffic in the street. Similarly (image #2), as
Varda notes in her voiceover narration, it is initially the storefront and the objects in the windows
of the Chardon Bleu parfumerie, their seeming intractability in the passage of time, that captivate
her: “I like its windows. There, one breathes in a forgotten air, a scent of suspended inventory.
One sees there objects that haven’t moved in the 25 years I’ve been living in the neighborhood.”
As the camera moves slowly in closeup along these displays, occasionally cutting from one point
to another along the storefront but mimicking the real time of a curious gaze, this filmic looking
is reinforced by ambient, diegetic sound, the passing of a motor scooter or voices of passersby.
The camera pans once more, left to right, pausing to frame the woman who Varda refers to
throughout as Mme. Chardon Bleu, herself framed by the wood panel, handle, and window of the
door, as Varda notes, “As for Mme. Chardon Bleu, with her meekness of a captive, she

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fascinated me more than the boutique, where M. Chardon Bleu sold his handmade (fait main)
perfumes.”
The image of Mme. Chardon Bleu behind glass, both in this scene and just earlier beside
her husband beneath the store’s sign, and well as the emphasis that her husband’s perfumes are
fait main (handmade) leads me on in taking seriously Varda’s labeling herself a
daguerreotypist.
23
The paradox of visual transparency and physical opacity of the window brings
me back to the glass plate of Daguerre’s images, protecting the work and separating us from the
reality represented in the material. As one of the curators notes at an exhibition of
daguerreotypes included with the DVD of Varda’s film, “One can imagine the great surprise of
the people who saw these images for the first time, these images of a very great precision… very
magical, actually”. The work of the pencil of nature, as Henry Fox Talbot would have it, was of
course caught up in a technological discourse surrounding its relationship to reality and the
intervention (or lack thereof) by its operator, a discourse familiar to us with the emergence of
film as medium and the writings of Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin on the “ontology of the
photographic image”. I argue that Varda performs or makes visible her construction of filmic
Daguerreotype portraits by presenting her participants from behind the windows of their stores,
one of the ways in which she foregrounds the limits of the cinematic image in making
transparent or knowable its subjects. As Phil Powrie notes in his essay “Heterotopic Spaces and

23
Varda’s emphasis on fait main compels me to draw a connection between her work and Chris Marker’s. I’ve
already emphasized his attention in A bientôt j’espère to the hands of the workers in the Rhodiaceta factory. Of
course, his film compiling footage of anti-imperialist protest around the world, Le Fond de l’air est rouge (1977), is
structured by an attention to hands, with the film broken into two parts, “Les Mains fragiles” and “Les Mains
coupées”. For Chang-Min Yu, the camera’s attention to hands in Marker’s films is significant in that it resituates the
audience’s attention. Whereas a film like Chronique d’un été relies on the extreme close-up of faces and the tics
that ensue as an index of psychological truth, in focusing on hands, Marker remains interested in the unconscious
motivations of his subjects while also making a political argument. As Yu writes, the hand can be read as “a socio-
political sign” (11) that allows the viewer to consider the gestures of the individual as well as the “suffering
collectivity.” See Yu, “Ciné-méta-vérité: Le Joli Mai and the Politics of Fictionality.”

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Nomadic Gazes in Varda”, “Her cinema… crosses the boundaries between the object and the
subject to create the space of the imaginary. Objects, like le hasard objectif of the surrealists,
reveal traces of hidden subjectivities. In that respect, the real world, if taken at face value, at
topographical value, lies, hence Varda’s pun… “documenteur”. The real can be apprehended
only through subjectivity. But equally, the subject can be apprehended only through objects”
(68). In this radical co-determinacy of subject and object that Powrie argues is part of Varda’s
aesthetics, she puts into question the representative power of the image, instead reinforcing the
need for the montage of sound and image tracks to make meaning.
This is in keeping with Varda’s description of her work as cinécriture, where, as she puts
it, “the cutting, the movement, the points-of-view, the rhythms of filming and editing have been
felt and considered in the way a writer… [advances] the story or [breaks] its flow… [In] writing,
it is called style. In cinema… cinécriture” (qtd. in Smith 14). Varda is concerned with the
stylistic choices a filmmaker makes and what a film offers its audience beyond its documentary
function. I am thinking here of what Siegfried Kracauer described as the dual function of film, to
record and reveal. He notes in his Theory of Film that film’s medium specificity allows it capture
fleeting events that might not be registered: “Street crowds, involuntary gestures, and other
fleeting impressions are its very meat” (Kracauer 1960: xlix). What does Varda’s film show
about her subject, the Rue Daguerre and its inhabitants and merchants, by means of montage,
what Godard called the “form that thinks" (Aumont 2013: 42)? I follow Varda in thinking of
montage as filmic writing, the way in which framing, cutting, and editing of sound and image
come together to create a text rather than a document.
Before analyzing scenes from Daguerréotypes, I want to consider this notion of montage
as it relates to Varda’s own description of her work as cinécriture. Alison Smith notes that the

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director was trained in the history of art and as a photographer rather than as a filmmaker and
that her background in the still image and literature informs her film work. For Smith, Varda
considers photography in terms of “the conjunction of elements and the relationships between
them [that] are carefully chosen to produce meaning from the interplay between them,” and later,
that Varda “[locates] the heart of a successful photo in an unexpected detail… [as well as] the
relation between image and the world outside the frame, photographer or spectator” (Smith 1998:
13). As Smith notes, Varda’s attention to still photography can be extended to her film work and
how she constructs scenes by use of montage, both in term of the construction of a single shot
and how cuts in the image and soundtrack create meaning. As Jacques Aumont notes, montage
can be traced to earlier representative forms, “paintings or drawings which joined up moments to
tell a story… Here, if I wish to understand the connection between one image and the adjoining
one on the level of meaning, I have to contribute something myself” (Aumont 2013: 7). In the
same way, Varda’s construction of scenes invites the viewer to construct meaning based on the
interplay of the image and soundtrack, part of what Aumont calls “montage ideals… the use of
montage to say something,” referring to “a film, or a piece of film, made up of shots which are
not linked by narrative logic but whose aim is to suggest, describe or comment upon” (Aumont
2013: 35). In her description of her work as cinécriture, Varda outlines these techniques that the
film director uses in an analogous manner to the writer to distinguish the former’s work from that
of the scriptwriter, signaling to the viewer of her work that the construction of image and
soundtrack holds a key place in the filmic construction of meaning.
Smith observes that in Varda’s films, “[Each] shot will have implications of its own, as
will the ways in which the shots are joined, possible changes of rhythm between shots and so on”
(Smith 1998: 15). Let us consider Varda’s cinematic writing in a scene that takes place in the

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Chardon Bleu shop, keeping in mind the hands implied in fait main, the glass of the windows,
and the magical quality of Daguerre’s images. The scene begins as Varda’s daughter Rosalie
enters the shop; the camera pans as she greets first Mme. then M. Chardon Bleu. The scene
oscillates between a realist emphasis on the long take and diegetic sound, as we hear street noise
and the clock ticking during the real-time conversation between Rosalie and M. Chardon Bleu,
and a clearly motivated use of close-up on the filmmaker’s part, as the camera pans as before in
close up along the objects for sale, ephemeral objects on the walls like a photo postcard and
knickknacks, and lingers uncomfortably at points on Mme. Chardon Bleu, whose battle with
dementia, chronicled throughout the film, is evidenced. As the scene continues and Rosalie and
another customer leave the shop, the sound of the clock ticking emerges again as a sound cue for
Varda’s rumination on time, the camera lingering again on Mme. Chardon Bleu’s face. She
states her desire to go through the windows of the shops she films, in what may be a reference to
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, initially translated in France as La Traversée du
miroir. In any event, beyond the appearances of the windows and storefronts and into the
everyday rhythms of the storeowners, formulating this in a way that spatializes time: “in the
slowness and the patience of their work, in the moments of waiting… in this dead time, this
empty time, in these parallel looks, in these mysteries of daily exchange.” In a way that reminds
us of the magical precision of Daguerre’s images, the hasard objectif, and the presence of the
magician Mystag throughout the film (who I’ll return to), Varda alludes to the mystery she tries
to access through experiencing this embodied time inside the space of the shops. The rapid
montage, which shows us the various participants of the film, the boulangerie, the quincaillerie,
the hairdresser, and the grocer, among others, closes with a performative refusal of the

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transparency Varda wishes for; instead of doors being opened, we see the repetition of doors
shutting before moving to the next scene.
The camera also lingers on the hands of M. Chardon-Bleu as he goes about his work.
Throughout the film, Varda is fascinated with the hands of the workers she portrays, even, at the
end of the film, giving us a montage cut of the different tradespeoples’ hands as they go about
their work. This scene, as are many throughout the film, is intercut with the scene of Mystag’s
magic show. The magician, who both Powrie and Alison Smith have argued acts as a double of
Varda’s, introduces the film before the title credits, and is the only figure who appears outside
the Rue Daguerre (in the opening scene, in front of the Eiffel Tower). Furthermore, as Powrie
and Smith observe, Varda finds surrealistic linkages between Mystag’s performance in the café,
which the shopkeepers attend, and the daily practices of the latter group. In a sleight of hand
routine where he imprints a handprint on a chalkboard by using a young woman as medium,
Varda demonstrates via montage (to quote Powrie) “the process of making a film as a vehicle for
transforming the everyday, for revealing what the surrealists called the marvelous” (75). From
Mystag’s show, where his attempt to send the handprint through the medium of the woman
(whose resemblance to La Joconde is given to us by the camera’s zoom) is dramatized by the
rapid cut from a long take to a medium range shot of her holding the wrapped chalkboard, the
ominous music bleeds into footage of her daily life training as a figure skater, as if the
transference is happening on ice; suddenly the sound track and shot change to energetic
accordion playing, which again bleeds into the image track zooming in on the player’s hand, then
a rapid sequence of cuts of the participants’ hands in their work, the tailor, butcher, baker and
others. The music again leads us back to the magic show, where the handprint has magically
appeared; the music suddenly disappears and the diegetic sound of the Chardon Bleu shop

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returns, with a disembodied (plastic) hand being picked up by another hand (Mme. Chardon
Bleu’s) separated from its body by the frame. Finding parallels between the spectacle of the
magic show and of everyday life, Varda embraces a surrealistic linkage of sound and images that
renders the quotidian marvelous. Powrie notes that Mystag’s show “destabilizes the film in
various ways” (74), not least in the ways it serves to rupture the repetition of daily gestures.
I would argue that the magician’s (and Varda’s) intervention isn’t simply an act of play
but ultimately a political gesture. Taking the suggestion from Varda’s closing voiceover
statement that the film could be read as a reproach, I note that at one point, she observes that at
one end of the Rue Daguerre is a market with sellers of political newspapers, militants and
discussions, but that on her street, no one speaks of politics, that it’s considered bad for business.
Her voiceover occurs as we see two men conversing, talking about how one must make their
hands black to earn white bread; the camera again focuses on the hand. But if this overheard
conversation doesn’t turn into a discussion of labor politics, Varda later smuggles in the political
newsprint, as the paper the figure skater uses to wrap the chalkboard in Mystag’s show marks the
debate surrounding abortion in the mid-70’s in France.
Beyond this explicit gesture, Varda’s gentle reproach of her neighbors can be heard in the
way she speaks about their immobility, their sleep, and the poverty of their dreams. In the
context of Mystag’s show, she refers to them like the items lingering for 25 years in the window
of the Chardon Bleu: (this is Varda) “He will sweep away logical ideas and reassuring
certainties, he will revive the mediums that sleep, he will put to sleep an already immobile
world”. In this description of the musicians performance, Varda also comments on the
“immobile” world of the shopkeepers, and her act of surrealist overturning of everyday gestures
and objects via the work of Mystag is a subversive, if playful act. It also refers us to a scene later

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in the film, where Varda questions her participants about their dreams. It is clear here that she
wants her audience to think of dreams in the sense of aspirations, transformations or fantasies,
possibilities of another life. In the case of these storeowners, whose lives are so structured by the
everyday as repetition, their dreams are often the same, mundane scenes of work, or forms of
escape that inevitably end when they awaken. In any event, their work inevitably bleeds into any
possibility of a dream, either literal or figurative, and this scene, starting from a moment in
which Mme. Chardon Bleu, motivated by a daily “force interieur” to leave the shop’s confines,
but quickly return, Varda observes, “Perhaps we all want to leave at night. We are, without a
doubt, all prisoners of our lives. But for those that are proud to be normal, the dream is an illness.
They talk more readily about concerns with work than of their dreams, refusing every daydream
or inner volition (movement interieur). It’s truly the silence of a profound sleep. It’s immobility.”
Directly after this scene of dreams refused, Mystag reemerges to put his audience, and, by virtue
of the camera, us, to sleep; his magic act is intercut with another round of filmic daguerreotypes,
as the merchants and their families stand still, often for uncomfortable lengths of time, in front of
their wares or their storefronts, as if they were waiting for the exposure of a true daguerreotype.
Thus, we leave the people of the Rue Daguerre to their daily, enforced immobility, while
wondering, as Varda surely did, how long they will be able to linger with the objects in the
windows in the face of a rapidly changing Paris.

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Image #1

Image #2

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Chapter 4
Writing the City (or the New Town): From Lefebvre’s Hilltop Meditation to Ernaux’s Journal du
dehors
In her study of Journal du dehors and La Vie exterieure, Robin Tierney argues that
Ernaux’s emphasis on the body as the site of everyday life and the foundation of what she calls
social memory stands in stark contrast to foundational texts by Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord
theorizing the everyday. She also notes that Lefebvre and Debord are particularly critical of the
types of spaces in which Ernaux records her daily experiences, the ville nouvelles or new towns
that emerged around Paris and across metropolitan France in the post-war era. As Tierney notes
of the place Ernaux describes in Journal de dehors, “Created in toto in the early 1970’s, Cergy-
Pontoise is distinctly lacking in the Benjaminian ‘aura’ that emanates from the dynamic mixture
of old and new that has made urban areas so compelling to those ‘who walk the city’” (114). Yet
it is important to note that the distinction Tierney sets up here, between suburb and city, is not
the distinction Lefebvre explores in the essay she later cites, “Notes on the New Town.” There,
Lefebvre explores the difference between his rural, agrarian hometown of Navarrenx, north of
the Pyrenées in Southern France, and the new town built northeast of it, Mourenx. Upon a
rereading of Lefebvre’s essay, it is less clear than from Tierney’s reading that the body in
Lefebvre’s text is invisible, although its relation to the newly constructed spaces of Mourenx is
as alienated as Ernaux often finds herself in relation to Cergy. Morever, I am less convinced than
Tierney that Lefebvre closes by “[denouncing]” the New Town as a space of boredom; rather, in
1960, it is merely an ambiguous, undecidable space, a space he is clearly pessimistic about in
terms of its possibility to support a collective, political community. However, it will be up to
Ernaux, who uses her own body traversing space and the memories and feelings this produces to

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produce an account of it, to investigate how even, to use Marc Augé’s language, amid the
proliferation of non-places in contemporary urban space, individual users find means to establish
the significant characteristics of anthropological place, that is, a shared relation to place and
sense of history tied to place.
I. Lefebvre, or a Sociology of Everyday Life Seen From the Hilltop
Lefebvre opens his “Notes on the New Town” with a stark contrast; between the
“timeworn house” of his village home and “the derricks of a building estate without a past”
(116). To conjure the image of the medieval community of Navarrenx, he rejects the metaphor of
reading the stones like the rings of a tree for “a different analogy… the image of a seashell”
(116). This image proves useful for him in that it illustrates the necessary symbiosis of the
village’s architecture and its people throughout history: “A living creature has slowly secreted a
structure; take this living creature in isolation … and you are left with something soft, slimy and
shapeless; what can it possibly have in common with this delicate structure, its ridges, its
grooves, its symmetries, its every detail revealing smaller, more delicate, details as you examine
it more closely? But it is precisely this link, between the animal and its shell, that one must try to
understand” (116). It is this relation between the body, the successive bodies that have shaped
and lived in the spaces of Navarrenx, and the space of the town that Lefebvre goes on to
describe. He notes in particular a distinct lack of separation that prevails in the village and
expresses the fluidity of movement in the second-person: “There is no clear-cut difference, yet
no confusion between the countryside, the streets and the houses; you walk from the fields into
the heart of the town and the buildings, through an uninterrupted chain of trees, gardens,
gateways, courtyards, and animals” (117). Spaces are not divided into separate functions, they
present themselves to inhabitants to freely move through.

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Lefebvre, in his contemporaneous analyses of daily life and social space, makes the urban
street the only possible site of a transformation. In his analysis of the village, however, “the
street is not a wasteland, nor is it the only place where – for good or ill - things happen. It is not
the only human place… not simply there so that people can get from A to B, nor does it lay traps
for them with lighting effects and displays of objects. It is a place to stroll, to chinwag, to be
alive in” (117). In other words, it is a space that has not been reduced to the bare exigencies of
circulation and the production of commercial desire. There is a porousness between the street
and the windows, houses, and courtyards, where passers-by are both gazed upon and have the
ability to look. The body and its relation to this space are key for Lefebvre, as he intones
dramatically, “Listen to the song of the craftsmen and their hammers, listen to the shrilling of the
carpenters’ planes and the children crying and the mothers scolding” (117). Yet this evocation of
an integrated historical place is indeed a fiction, or at least in the present tense, as Lefebvre
quickly shifts to note, “[None] of this really obtains any more. This small town, with its
craftsmen and shopkeepers, in its well-established context of peasantry and countryside, is
vegetating and emptying, like so many other villages and towns” (117). And the freely
circulating body that he evokes, with its ability to move without hindrance across the land, town,
and in the street, gives way to the alienated body, that of the narrator/writer himself, as he moves
to describing the new town.
In shifting from his home village to the new town of Mourenx, Lefebvre begins by giving
his embodied, psychological reaction: “Whenever I step foot in Mourenx I am filled with dread”
(118). Yet, significantly, he immediately moves to giving an account of the town from the
perspective of its designers, referring to “[the] overall plan (the master blueprint)” (118). He
gives a rapid overview of the layout of the apartment buildings in comparison to the surrounding

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land, noting the low cost of housing and the modern amenities offered, concluding, “Our
technicists and technocrats have their hearts in the right place, even if it is what they have in their
minds which is given priority” (118). This evocation of the technocrat’s point of view, which
brings together the various functions planners have established are necessary for life and
assumes that a fulfilled daily existence will be achieved if those functions are accounted for in a
topographic design, brings to mind the tripartite model of space that Lefebvre will establish in
his 1974 book The Production of Space. With what he calls the “perceived-conceived-lived
triad” (40), he attempts to move past what he identifies as a (Western) philosophical model of
binary opposition that claims to have, in his words, “the magic power to turn obscurity into
transparency,” but which instead finds itself lost in conceptual abstraction and alienated from
daily life: “[Their] dualism is entirely mental, and strips everything which makes for living
activity from life, thought and society” (39). In an effort to think through space in a way that
both allows for conceptualization and adheres to the material changes that result from the daily
acts of inhabitants, Lefebvre’s threefold model of concepts or valences of space includes, first,
spatial practice, or the way in which inhabitants engage with the organization of space, the way
spatial structures impact on their behavior. Lefebvre notes of this level of space, “[the] specific
spatial competence and performance of every society member can only be evaluated
empirically,” (38) suggesting the necessity of an observer of spatial practice. His model also
includes the notion of representations of space or “conceptualized space”, which accounts for the
abstractions of space produced by technocrats and city planners, “all of whom identify what is
lived and what is perceived with what is conceived” (38), in other words, that there is a one-to-
one correlation between a planner’s blueprints and their ideology of how a space should function
and how that space (and its inhabitants) turn out to function. Finally, he refers to

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representational spaces, or “the dominated – and hence passively experienced – space which the
imagination seeks to change and appropriate” (39). For him, this is space as it is experienced on
the ground by inhabitants and, importantly, by artists, and there is a fundamental difference
between what it offers to those users and the space as planned and executed by planners; as
Lefebvre writes, “[representational space] overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its
objects” (39). In short, the representational space experienced by inhabitants below allows for
meaning-making and use that does not adhere to the organization and expectations handed down
in spatial design by its planners.
Despite this potentially productive gap that Lefebvre later establishes between
conceptualized planned space from above and the level of space practiced by its users, in 1960,
at the moment of his notes on Mourenx, he seems profoundly unsure that the kind of everyday
life that used to prevail in his rural village can establish itself. Much of this uncertainty stems
from the extent to which the space of Mourenx reflects the ideological expectations of its
planners. As Lefebvre writes, “Here, objects wear their social credentials: their function. Every
object has its use, and declares it” (119). Writing of this bare functionalism, he asks, “Will
people be compliant and do what the plan expects them to do, shopping in the shopping centre,
asking for advice at the advice bureau, doing everything the civic centre offices demand of them
like good, reliable citizens?” (118-9). His underlying question, which he explores later in the
essay, is what will motivate any sort of shared everyday life beyond this narrow functionalism;
why will such a town’s inhabitants want to build something like the coherence of movement and
activity described in his account of Navarrenx?
Significantly, Lefebvre’s lack of assurance about the possibility of community in
Mourenx is matched by his physical disengagement with the space he is investigating. He frames

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his conclusion as an inner monologue, from what he states is his preferred vantage point on the
new town: “When I come to Mourenx by road, I always climb a small hill which overlooks the
brand-new housing estate, where the water tower is being built” (122). He refers to these
instances as his “hilltop meditation” (122), and later says to himself that he will shortly descend
the hill and meet with some acquaintances, yet the text leaves this contact with the space of the
town deferred, just as it leaves open the possibility of a shared community (as opposed to a bare,
functional existence). He speaks to himself as a failure; referring to the inhabitants of new towns,
he states, “You call yourself a sociologist, but you haven’t even come up with any useful
concepts for understanding them” (122), later referring to his propensity for “large-scale ideas”
(123). He finds himself at the level of representations of space, of the concepts of planners, while
trying to account for the daily practices of users. However, he is clear on his certainty that the
experience these inhabitants have to surmount is beyond the conceptual framework of sociology;
speaking of the theory of adaptation, he notes, “For them, to adapt means being forced into a pre-
existing context which has been built without them in mind. It means ceasing to exist” (122). In
other words, the sheer difference between the functionalist expectations of planned space and the
uprootedness that this produces for new residents is unprecedented. Lefebvre reflects on this
experience at length:
When they arrived, they were hoping for a radiant life… That was what they had
been promised. Then came the shock. The initial disappointment may lose its
edge, but it is as tenacious as the scar left by a deep wound. People are only too
aware of the shortcomings of this society to which they don’t belong. And despite
being keenly conscious of this, their everyday life becomes gradually numb. They
sink into the stupor of indifference. The day will come when they will insist that
they are satisfied. What will that insistence conceal? (123)
From the separation imposed by a functional design comes a lack of any sense of society
between an inhabitant and their neighbors; Lefebvre uses his multivalent notion of everyday life

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here to describe an absence of community and of the isolation and self-denial that arises as a
result. In this passage, he continues by suggesting that the outcome of this separation will be a
lack of continuity, that the children of families will eventually move away from the new towns.
Returning to his metaphor of the sea creature’s shell, Lefebvre continues to distinguish
between the organic daily life produced in the rural village and the uncertain future of the new
town: “Before, elsewhere, everyday life existed. It was alive. The slimy creature secreted its
beautiful shell. Everyday life was apparent only through its metamorphoses: art, culture,
monuments, or quite simply discourse, a naïve rhetoric, symbols” (123). Through the historic
traces present in the daily life of the village and way coherent meaning was conveyed across time
by inhabitants, Lefebvre argues, everyday life continued in the register of a shared, communal
existence. Now, however, in the midst of a technological and spatial reordering of that existence,
“[everyday] life [is] like a massive weight, reduced to its essence, to its trivial functions, and at
the same time almost disintegrated, nothing but fragmented gestures and repeated actions” (124).
Yet despite what he sees as a life almost completely reduced to and determined by the functional
imperatives of planners, Lefebvre concludes by suggesting that precisely this, the new town,
must be the site of a renewed struggle on the part of inhabitants to produce their own everyday
life. He notes, striking a Benjaminian tone, that in the lack of realization of the past there is
preserved the latent material for a possible future: “Here, in the new town, boredom is pregnant
with desires, frustrated frenzies, unrealized possibilities” (124). Ultimately, he states, “[Here] we
are facing the same problem as before: how to reproduce what was once created spontaneously,
how to create it from the abstract” (125), that is, everyday life, in the sense of a shared
community striving toward a future together; though he does not leave any sense of how the
inhabitants of Mourenx and other new towns can achieve this, he makes clear that, out of the

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“bourgeois mentality” and its historic development of “the evil genius of abstraction and
separation” (120) of which the new town is a chief product, action must be taken to forge some
type of collective life.
The distinction that Lefebvre encounters in his “Notes on the New Town” and later
formalizes in The Production of Space between functionalist planning and its top-down vision of
urban space and the apprehension of that space by users is echoed by other theorists of space,
including Michel De Certeau and Marc Augé. In De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, he
writes of the disconnect between the point of view of the city-planner above and the inhabitants
below. He writes, describing the perspective of the planner, “The panorama-city is a ‘theoretical’
(that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a
misunderstanding of practices. The voyeur-god created by this fiction, who, like Schreber’s God,
knows only cadavers, must disentangle himself from the murky intertwining daily behaviors and
make himself alien to them” (93). His example of cadavers is especially significant in suggesting
the inadequacy of the representations of planners, who rely on accounts of past behavior in order
to structure the spaces of future action; in other words, the map can never be equal to the
territory. Meanwhile, De Certeau argues, the city’s inhabitants “live ‘down below,’ below the
thresholds at which visibility begins… they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow
the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it” (93). What he sets
up, however, is a double blindness; planners cannot account for the future acts of inhabitants, and
the inhabitants cannot account for their own use of the space that they move through. For De
Certeau, this text of bodies and practices that unravels the predictions and interdictions of
planners cannot be reproduced, it is endlessly rewritten: “in relation to representations, it remains
daily and indefinitely other” (93). In short, to return to Lefebvre’s tripartite model of space,

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between the spatial practice of individual users and the representations of space of planners,
there is no room in De Certeau’s model for representational spaces, that is, an account by
someone directly engaging with social space to give an account of it that removes it from the
language of functionalism and puts it in the context of a shared culture.
De Certeau’s account of the difference between the perspective of the planner and
inhabitants clearly impacted on Marc Augé, who refers to the former in his Non-Places:
Introduction to An Anthropology of Supermodernity. As Augé writes, “Space, for [De Certeau],
is a ‘frequented place’, ‘an intersection of moving bodies’: it is the pedestrians who transform a
street (geometrically defined as place by town planners) into a space” (79-80). However, this
“act of locution” (80) on the part of users, their means of repurposing the materials established
by planners, seems to be missing as Augé moves from his discussion of anthropological place to
the proliferation of what he calls non-places in contemporary space. His primary contribution in
the text is thinking through how the technological acceleration of daily life has impacted on the
experience of place. In the tradition of anthropological place, the “minimal stability” (54) of that
place and the people who were born, lived and died there was co-constitutively produced, and
everything, “[the] layout of the house, the rules of residence, the zoning of the village…
configuration of public open spaces… [corresponded] for every individual to a system of
possibilities, prescriptions and interdicts whose content is both spatial and social” (52). Now,
however, he outlines an interconnected contemporary world where “non-places are the real
measure of our time; one that could be quantified… by totaling all the air, rail and motorway
routes, the mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’… the airports and railway stations, hotel
chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless
networks” (79). The overarching characteristics of these non-places he describes is that they

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produce “neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude” (103); that is, they
hail all users, be they travelers or customers, the same way, thus homogenizing relations while
reducing the possibility of community. The supermarket customer does not enter into the chain
store primarily to engage with others; instead, they silently explore their options and
retroactively secure their identity when they pay. As Augé notes, “the user of the non-place is
always required to prove his innocence” (102); it is by paying by using a card linked to their
identity that they ensure the right to be present and a shopper, after the fact.
Yet, as Annie Ernaux makes evident in her accounts of trips to the supermarket and
journeys through public transit, such events are not cold exercises in Althusserian identification
and functional behavior; they contain moments that bring her back to herself as an
autobiographical and historical subject through encounters with others. Augé himself is clear:
“[The non-place] never exists in pure form; places reconstitute themselves in it; relations are
restored and resumed in it; the… ‘invention of the everyday’ and ‘the arts of doing,’ so subtly
analyzed by Michel De Certeau, can clear a path here and deploy their strategies” (78-9).
However, as with Lefebvre in the case of the inhabitants of Mourenx, Augé is silent about the
ways in which these practices emerge within functionalist space, or non-place. As opposed to
anthropological place, which includes its users within a shared horizon of relation to history, the
non-places Augé describes are only defined by the way in which they interact with and
individualize their users, leaving them in the situation of what he will call elsewhere solitude
without isolation. But what about what occurs in these (non-)places as they become De Certeau’s
spaces; that is, when embodied subjects encounter one another while in the midst of these
mutually isolating relations to space? They still interact with one another, gaze at each other,
overhear things - despite being in these situations of what Augé calls “the urgency of the present

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moment” (104) - and their engagement in these interactions and observations brings them back to
themselves as autobiographical subjects with individual pasts and collective histories.
II. Ernaux and « l’expérience bouleversante » of the New Town
Like Lefebvre, Ernaux, in her Journal du dehors, finds herself spatially alienated from
her surroundings in the new town of Cergy-Pontoise that she calls home. In the Avant-propos,
which, it should be noted, was written in 1996, three years after the initial publication of the
book, and added to the 2
nd
paperback edtion, Ernaux characterizes her experience as a gradual
recovery from pathology, or « schizophrénie » (7). She begins by noting that she has lived in the
new town for twenty years, and that before that, she had always lived in provincial towns « où
étaient inscrites les marques du passé et de l’histoire » (7). She then outlines the « expérience
bouleversante » (7) of moving to her new home, a place whose separation from history in its
utter lack of the marks of the past is matched by the separation of its design, with its
« constructions éparpillées sur un territoire immense, aux limites incertaines » (7). She describes,
in the language she uses here – a shattering experience, the scatter and breadth of her new habitat
- a sort of untenable identification with this illegible, incomprehensible space that continues
throughout the paragraph. She recounts the impact of this temporary identification with the space
of the new town in a sensory fashion, noting « [l’impression] continuelle de flotter entre ciel et
terre, dans un no man’s land » (7). This sense of floating or bodily detachment, with nothing
anchoring her to the ground of daily experience, is mirrored by how she characterizes her gaze:
« Mon regard était semblable aux parois de verre des immeubles de bureaux, ne reflétant
personne, que les tours et les nuages » (7). I find the perspective of this simile significant, in that
like the reflection off of the office building’s glass, Ernaux’s gaze is detached, unable to perceive
anyone around her. Indeed, she relates that she was « incapable de voir autre chose que les

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esplanades ventées, les façades de béton rose ou bleu, le désert des rues pavillonnaires » (7) ; her
eye-level surroundings are only depopulated surfaces.
As I’ve noted, Ernaux’s Avant-propos suggests a gradual emergence from this state
brought on by the new town. She notes, « Je suis sortie peu à peu de cette schizophrénie. J’ai
aimé vivre là, dans un endroit cosmopolite, au milieu d’existences commencées ailleurs, dans
une province française, au Viêt-nam, au Maghreb ou en Côte-d’Ivoire – comme la mienne, en
Normandie » (7-8). This second sentence suggests a clear transition from alienation to the
solidarity of people, collectivized by the fact of their shared uprooting and participation in the
spatial experiment of Cergy. This sense of collectivity is mirrored in the concluding section of
Ernaux’s book, where the sight of a young man and a little boy transport her to her early
adulthood and her time as a new mother. Noting that it is in the gestures and bodies of passers-by
in the train or shops that he recovers her past, she sets up a model of reciprocity: « Dans des
individus anonymes qui ne soupçonnent pas qu’ils détiennent une part de mon histoire, dans des
visages, des corps, que je ne revois jamais. Sans doute suis-je moi-même, dans la foule des rues
et des magasins, porteuse de la vie des autres » (106-7). Far from the deserted (sub)urban spaces
she describes in the first paragraph of her book, here, it is through the anonymous crowd she
regularly encounters that Ernaux rediscovers herself. Yet, as Marja Warehime notes in her article
on Journal, Ernaux’s book owes its structure to a spatial ambivalence: “the ‘ensemble’ is not a
novel… [there is] no plot, no continuity of characters or situation - just the frequent evocation of
certain places… the book’s unity comes from the double movement of alienation and recovery
of the self in and through the city as other, or others” (101). It is this double movement of
alienation that Ernaux experiences in the sites of her daily life, moving between Cergy and Paris,
that I want to explore, the ways in which particular bodies and spaces affect her in her

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movement. As Warehime continues, citing the modified preface to the English translation, “the
fact that she continues the diary ‘even up to the present day’ (7) suggests her need to convey
‘that acute yet indefinable feeling of modernity associated with a new town’ (7) and its
importance to her creative sensibility” (100). In short, Ernaux’s text explores that truism first
brought to wide attention by Henri Lefebvre, that space and people are co-constitutive. She
explores the elusive feeling of the new town and its linkage with the city by chronicling its
spaces and the people who inhabit it.
This oscillation between viewing the new town as a no man’s land and seeing it by virtue
of the gestures and behaviors that make it up is consistent throughout the text. As Warehime
notes, Ernaux’s choices of spaces that he describes throughout the book is just as representative
as her rhetorical use of grammar; for instance, her sparing use of the first person singular ‘je’ and
reliance on an impersonal third person still belies her interest in moments and encounters: “her
presence is implicit in the framing or selection of the fragment of reality” (100), even when she
does not explicitly comment on the scene. In the same way, Warehime observes, “Ernaux’s
Paris… [is] a city of transitional spaces – the subway and subway stations, trains and train
stations, stores… no parks, just a ‘terrain vague’” (101). As Warehime notes, Ernaux develops a
sense of a “constant ‘passing through’” (101) rather than a cohesive sense of place, and the fact
that she habitually accesses the new town by car contributes to her spatial alienation. In one
passage, Ernaux begins, « Les jours de soleil comme aujourd’hui les arêtes des immeubles
déchirent le ciel, les panneaux de verre irradient » (64). She has returned to seeing the new town
as a series of surfaces and edges, and in her writing, she performs the breakdown she describes in
the Avant-propos: « Je vis dans la Ville Nouvelle depuis douze ans et je sais pas à quoi elle
ressemble. Je ne peux pas la décrire, ne sachant pas où elle commence, finit, la parcourant

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toujours en voiture » (64). Her abilities as a writer falter here, she can only record the flatness of
what she sees and cannot use the powers of metaphor or memory to give her descriptions weight.
There is a lack of defined dimensions, as the space and totality of the town does not correspond
to her daily commute. She continues, « Je peux seulement noter « je suis allée au centre Leclerc
(ou aux Trois Fontaines, au Franprix des Linandes, etc.), j’ai repris l’autoroute, le ciel était violet
derrière les tours… » . Aucune description, aucun récit non plus. Juste des instants, des
rencontres. De l’ethnotexte » (64-5). She describes the impoverishment of the writer to account
for the space of the new town. Her example of first-person narration suggests a spatial
redundancy, that any of the stores she went to could easily stand in for each other, that these
chance encounters don’t add up to anything, just a series of accounts of “the other… in the
present” (18), to quote Marc Augé in his definition of the activity of the anthropologist practicing
ethnography.
Before moving to the encounters with “the city… as others” (Warehime 101), as the
passers-by whose words and gestures she recounts, I want to consider a few other mediations on
space by Ernaux. Despite these moments of experiencing the new town as an alienating
construction that enforces separation spatially, I find it significant that even when Ernaux finds
herself alone witnessing the transformation of space, she considers it in relation to others, to its
uses and the danger of its erasure for contemporary experience and knowledge. For example,
when she discovers, across, from a stretch of houses, a terrain vague, a space of abandoned
homes, overgrowth, and trash, rather than lament the space as a blight or question why it has
fallen into disuse, she falls upon the debris she finds there as signs of new practices: « Un papier
de sables hollandais Spirits, une bouteille cassée de Coca-Cola, des emballages de bière… Cet
endroit désolé est donc constamment fréquenté, mais à des heures indéfinissables, plutôt

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nocturnes sans doute. Signes de présences accumulés, de solitudes successives » (27) ». She
studies the various bits of trash littered about and becomes aware of an alternate, unofficial use
of this open space. The trash, Ernaux suggests, signifies a desire on the part of the space’s users
to historicize it, to tie it to their lives: « Il est naturel de jeter les boîtes et les papiers dans cet
endroit sauvage, remporter ses traces est un geste du surmoi civilisé » (27). Clandestine yet
regular, the users of the terrain vague leave their marks and Ernaux notes the paradox of their
successive or accumulated solitudes, a regular populating of this space which doesn’t add up to a
communal mixing. Her description recalls Augé’s description of the network of non-places in
contemporary society, “a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the
temporary and the ephemeral” (78). Writing of the Paris metro, he states, « [Telle] est bien, pour
ceux qui l’utilisent chaque jour, la définition prosaïque du métro : la collectivité sans la fête et la
solitude sans l’isolement » (55). Like the metro, which many must use at once but which is
traversed by individiual itineraries, thus producing a collective solitude, the terrain vague Ernaux
explores is a space germane to other, but ultimately not collectivizing uses.
III. Overcoming the Solitude Without Isolation of the Non-Place
In his book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Marc Augé
significantly sets up a distinction with what he calls the anthropological place of modernity and
the proliferating non-places of the contemporary world with a literary example. He paraphrases
Jean Starobinski in defining the essence of modernity as “[the] presence of the past in a present
that supersedes it but still lays claim to it” (75), and takes up one of Starobinski’s main artistic
representatives to illustrate this temporality expressed spatially. Citing Baudelaire’s Tableaux
parisiens, Augé notes, “the spectacle of modernity brings together in a single poetic flight: ‘…
the workshop with its song and chatter; / Chimneys and spires, those masts of the city, / And the

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great skies making us dream of eternity’” (76). In Baudelaire’s poem, Augé argues, there is a
continuity of spaces, languages and lives, despite their differences there exists a shared legibility
across time, what he later calls “the willed coexistence of two different worlds” (92). He
continues, referring to Baudelaire’s poem, “Behind the cycle of the hours and the outstanding
features of the landscape, what we find are words and languages: the specialized words of the
liturgy, of ‘ancient ritual’, in contrast to the ‘song and chatter’ of the workshop; and the words,
too, of all who speak the same language, and thus recognize that they belong to the same world.
Place is completed through the word” (77). For Augé, echoing Lefebvre’s evocation of a shared
discourse in the everyday life of rural village communities, these different ‘languages’ or
specialized ways of speaking come together, as does the landscape of spires, workshops and
private spaces, to construct an anthropological place. Starobinski develops a musical metaphor
for this relation and sense of history that adheres in modernity, evoking the “‘bass line’” of time
“‘that chimed the hours of the terrestrial day’”, bringing together in polyphony “‘the virtually
infinite interlacing of destinies, actions, thoughts and reminiscences’” (75) of individuals. Augé
latches on to this notion of a bass line as particularly illustrative of the way modernity reconciles
“ancient places and rhythms” within modern place: “[Modernity] doesn’t obliterate [older places
and practices] but pushes them into the background. They are like gauges indicating the passage
and continuation of time” (77). What Augé foregrounds in his exploration of modern time and
space, as evoked by Baudelaire, is a vision of continuity of the past within the present, ensuring a
stability and intelligibility to place that should thus stabilize one’s identity within that place.
However, by continuing to engage with Baudelaire, Augé points to the inability for this
continuity between different worlds (and times) to adhere.

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While De Certeau models a « double blindness » or gap between the representations of
space produced from above by city planners who foreclose the present and future behaviors of
inhabitants and the practices of those users below who cannot read the text their actions produce,
Augé’s description of the proliferation of non-places also produces a gap. He notes how non-
places attempt to ceaselessly function; in short, they demand from the user proof of identity,
whether retroactively in the case of the supermarket, where a customer browses on the
expectation that they will prove themselves (in their role as patron and in their identity) through
their credit card, or initially in the case of an ATM, where the patron inserts their card and is then
hailed by a series of messages that guide them through the transaction. Significantly, if non-
places demand identification (one’s ID card or proof of payment), their messages, Augé notes,
“are addressed simultaneously and indiscriminately to each and any of us: they fabricate the
‘average man’” (100); non-places only address users individually if they exceed or are close to
exceeding the contractual limits (Augé gives examples of red-light cameras at intersections).
This simultaneous individualizing of users and generalizing of communication produces, for
Augé, a test of innocence, which, once proven by the user by their forms of ID and behavior,
allows for the liberty of anonymity, of solitude: “[A] person entering the space of non-place is
relieved of his usual determinants. He becomes no more than what he does or experiences in the
role of passenger, customer or driver… he tastes for a while – like anyone who is possessed – the
passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleasure of role-playing” (103). He continues
by describing the strange experience of time in such spaces, noting that it is “as if there were no
history other than the last forty-eight hours of news, as if each individual history were drawing
its motives, its words and images, from the inexhaustible stock of an unending history in the
present” (104-5). The user of this space, agreeing to be only the role assigned them, finds

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themselves cut off from history, “[assailed] by the images flooding from commercial, transport,
or retail institutions… [experiencing simultaneously] a perpetual present and an encounter with
the self” (105), but an encounter mediated by those images, with which he identifies.
From this description of absolute separation, in which, to quote Augé, “The space of non-
place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude” (103), where is
there any room for the kinds of behavior that Augé insists will disrupt this sterility? For he,
following De Certeau, is certain that despite the prevalence of non-place in contemporary life, “it
never exists in pure form; places reconstitute themselves in it; relations are restored and resumed
in it” (78). However, it is difficult to see, following Augé’s model, how from a space that both
hails its users while at the same time emptying them of their singularity and their relation to
others and to history, producing mutual experiences of isolation, there can emerge anything like
politics or community. Significantly, Michael Sheringham describes how the inversion of the
« je » in Ernaux’s texts can lead to the production of relation or collectivity.
As he notes, “‘Transcribing for Ernaux means using a wide range of strategies to render
the way the subject’s participation in the event (generally that of an onlooker in whom it
provokes a tacit reaction) does not point to more or less familiar psychological traits that could
help build up a portrait, but to less individualized regions of identity” (322). In short, what
Ernaux gives us in her accounts witnessed predominantly in the non-places of the new-town, the
metro system, and Paris does not amount to an image of (her)self, but rather of the differences
imbedded in daily life that cause her to react, in short, the scaffolding of her relations with
others, and the basis of a collectivity out of the way in which these differences mark experience.
A long passage from 1986 chronicles a scene in which the non-place of the supermarket
and the clarity of its functional roles is maintained. Significantly, Ernaux begins by describing

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the cashier: « âgée – par rapport aux autres, qui ont moins de vingt-cing ans – et lente » (24). She
follows by outlining the other figures, « La cliente, quarantaine, simplicité recherché, lunettes
fines », who, after having her items rung up by the cashier, thinks there’s been an error and asks
for her receipt to be checked against her purchases, and finally, the supervisor, who, it is noted,
« une surveillante qui, seule, pourra faire enregister l’erreur et la modification de l’erreur par la
machine ». In this description of three women, Ernaux doesn’t give the reader any physical
characteristics of the supervisor; she is defined by her spatial authority, her ability to override the
transaction. The customer, whose style is a reflection of her status as a middle-class consumer,
stands in stark contrast to the cashier, who is later described as « grise, grande et plate » (25), her
age, speed, and size standing out in its difference and disruption of the flow of commerce. The
customer’s freedom of action and movement is also set up in distinction to the cashier; the
former is able to consult her ticket and request assistance, the latter must move on to the next
person in line, only to disrupted in her work as the customer twice demands to have her receipt
checked. The supervisor plays her part as well in this scene of power out of balance. When she
realizes the cashier’s mistake, a small drama ensues; she tells the cashier, who does not respond,
to which the supervisor insists loudly that the other has indeed made a mistake: « Tous les clients
qui font la queue entendent ». There is an element of performance here that, as Sheringham
states, Ernaux is careful to note in her observations: “[She] is a keen observer of what Goffman
called ‘impression management’ – people forging identities by dress and gesture and above all
‘talking to the gallery’” (324-5). The drama is also one of time and suspense; the customer is
able to insist there is a problem and dump all of her purchases back at the register, stopping the
flow and culminating in the supervisor’s loud reprimand. Ultimately, the scene closes as it opens,
with descriptions of the customer and cashier. As Ernaux writes, the customer « attend son dû,

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sans expression sous ses cheveux bien coiffés. Face à la puissance anonyme de Super-M, elle se
dresse comme la consommatrice sûre de son droit ». Her hairstyle, matching her entire calculated
look, communicates her middle-class entitlement, and her expressionless face stands as a
challenge to the authority of the company, ubiquitously disseminated within the store where she
shops. Alternatively, the cashier is completely deflated and metonymically condensed to her
hands that have failed in the transaction: during the exchange with her supervisor, « ses mains
qui ont quitté la machine enregistreuse pendent le long du corps ». In the final assessment,
« [elle] n’est qu’une main qui ne doit pas se tromper, ni au profit de l’un, ni au profit de
l’autre » ; she is reduced to the function of her hands, which must accurately account for the
customer’s purchase, thus setting up the smooth relationship between consumer and company.
She appears only in the breaking-down of her usefulness to the functionality of the space in
which she serves.
If this early account of the supermarket illustrates how social inequality and class roles
are maintained through the organization of space, Ernaux is also careful to point to the moments
when, in social space, these categories are disrupted or shown in their absurdity and abjection. In
a brief passage, Ernaux describes a young cashier, « peut-être remplaçante, [qui] rit avec des
connaissances, deux filles debout près d’elle » (91). In opposition, she notes the « [réprobation]
visible des clients de la file ». Ernaux’s inclusion of herself within the annoyed crowd of
customers starts at the beginning of the passage; perhaps the cashier is a temp, she proffers, that
would explain her flaunting of the decorum of the space of the supermarket. For that is the issue:
« On voit clairement qu’elle n’a rien à faire de nous, elle tape les produits, un point c’est tout. On
lui en veut de ce dévoilement ». Ironically, what Ernaux describes in the earlier supermarket
scene, the reduction of the older cashier to her hands, is here inverted by the younger cashier.

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She makes plain that she doesn’t care about the customers and is only doing her job in the most
perfunctory of manners; if she is only a set of hands for the continued flow of consumption, she
wears that plainly. As Sheringham notes of the passage, “The laughter and the gestures of
checking out groceries are seen to expose a socio-cultural space marked by social division,
exclusion, indifference, clannishness. Crucial here is the laying bare (‘dévoilement’), the making
obvious of what is conventionally hidden; the behavior of the girl at the check-out lays bare the
reality of social relations – indifference – generally hidden under the social comedy” (55). What
is striking in the passage is how Ernaux is caught here and shows herself caught between her
own status as one of the bourgeois customers, wanting the artifice of social relations to be
maintained, and her desire, on the other hand, to portray the consequences of social division
upheld in social space, the operation of mutual indifference; the customers want the cashier to act
out her functional role and the cashier performs her lack of solidarity.
In addition, as Sheringham observes, the scene is one of many in which Ernaux finds
herself caught between her working-class, provincial origins and her status as gained by social
mobility, as an educated member of the urban middle class. As he notes, there may be “a double
identification” (55) with the cashier and the bourgeois crowd. The grocery store scene above is
emblematic of a persistent and unresolved double movement between recognition and repulsion
that occurs when Ernaux encounters both the signs of her past milieu as well as the world in
which she ostensibly is now a part, thanks to her education and move to the urban periphery.
This marginality, produced by an inability to feel comfortably a part of either social class, is
evident, for example, when she finds herself in an art gallery on the rue Mazarine in Paris. The
scene opens with the gallery’s director beside another female visitor, admiring a painting: « «
Une toile d’une telle sensualité » » (21), to which the woman responds with a deep sigh,

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conveying her sympathetic reaction to the artwork. As the director continues with a description
of the painting’s formal attributes, Ernaux gives her own evaluation, as well as a description of
her effort to match her reaction to that of the others she observes: « Je cherche à associer la
sensualité telle que je la sens à ce paysage désertique qu’il me semble voir. Il y a là une operation
de l’esprit, ou de la sensibilité, que je n’arrive pas à effectuer. Impression qu’il me manque
l’initiation à un savoir » (22). Initially, she experiences her inability to square her reaction to the
painting to that of the others and to the sensuality evoked as a personal deficiency, a lack of
mental ability, refinement, or knowledge on her part. However, as she realizes, « [Il] ne s’agit
pas de savoir puisque – en y réfléchissant – à la place « d’une telle sensualité », ils auraient bien
pu dire « une telle fraîcheur ! » ou « une telle violence ! » sans que l’absence de rapport entre le
tableau et l’appréciation soit modifiée : il ne s’agit que de l’acquisition d’un code » (22). She
observes that what is at stake here is not her inability to appreciate the aesthetic representation of
sensuality in the artwork, but rather her lack of familiarity with the patterns of speech of the art
gallery as a space. Here, as Ernaux notes in conclusion, appreciation is wedded primarily to
monetary value and the language that conveys that value in aesthetic terms is interchangeable;
what is ultimately significant about the paintings is not their formal characteristics but their
price.
If she finds herself unable, here and in other scenes, to fully assimilate with the social
codes of the middle and upper middle class, Ernaux also registers the moments in which her
social mobility has irreparably separated her from her working-class past. This is evident in the
language and gestures of people she encounters; for instance, the expressions she hears a woman
say in a pharmacy when speaking of her sick husband (« « quand il a avalé tout ça il n’a plus
faim » ») cause Ernaux to reflect on the transmission of such working-class idioms and her

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relation to her past in recognizing them: « Paroles transmises de génération en génération,
absentes des journaux et des livres, ignores de l’école, appartenant à la culture populaire
(originellement la mienne – c’est pourquoi je la reconnais aussitôt) » (70). Here, Ernaux observes
a level of everyday life intractable to the representations and institutions that define and order it;
yet, as she is quick to note in other passages, her ability to observe these moments tied to a
shared popular culture does not allow her participate in them. In one scene, she observes a group
of men and women, probably co-workers, loudly enjoying each other’s company on a Saturday
night out. She is shocked to hear them use expressions she recognizes from her provincial
childhood, which leads her to reflect on two laws that one separated from the conditions of their
upbringing experiences: the first, « [Croire], parce qu’on cesse d’employer certains mots, qu’ils
ont disparu, que la misère n’existe plus quand on a de quoi vivre », and the second, « pourtant
exactement contraire, s’imaginer en retournant dans une ville d’où l’on est parti depuis
longtemps qu’on retrouvera les gens tels qu’ils étaient, immuables » (74). In the tension between
these two expectations, Ernaux illustrates the paradox of such alienation, « la même
méconnaissance de la réalité et le moi comme seule mesure » : her nostalgia and separation are
reflected in the feeling that the language and gestures of one’s past stop when one stops using
them and experiencing them and that this past self and form of expression can be completely
regained, that time has somehow stopped and the place of the past is somehow reserved.
Faced with her inability to fully access the social codes of her new milieu and the
evidence of her separation from her past, Ernaux finds herself doubly marginalized, but, as
Sheringham notes, the passages in her Journal du dehors engage with the differences she
encounters. As he writes, the book “features a mobile subject, looking, listening, accepting to be
displaced by what she encounters. Each fragment is the record of a moment of disequilibrium

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(and of the regaining of balance through writing)” (55). Ernaux’s engagement with the way her
encounters with others bring her back to herself as a divided subject is evident not only in how
she is struck by and frames the language of passersby but also their bodies. These bodies in turn
communicate to her the social division maintained in and by social space. During her commute
home on the RER, she pays particular attention to a man’s hands and what they signify. At first,
he sits with his hands on his knees: « Puis ses mains se mettent à bouger convulsivement, à se
frotter l’une contre l’autre » (43). She notes that they are « couvertes d’une desquamation
blanche, uniforme, comme en produisent les acides », and is particularly struck by the disparity
between the man’s stillness and his hands : « L’homme, un Africain, est d’une immobilité
absolue, seules ses mains, inlassables, comme des poulpes » (44). Returning to the scenes of the
two grocery store cashiers, we find here a tragic unfolding of the reduction of the worker to the
function of their hands. Ernaux reads his body and its internal alienation as a mark of her
difference: « Être un intellectuel, c’est cela aussi n’avoir jamais éprouvé le besoin de se séparer
de ses mains énervées ou abîmées par le travail ». Here, social division is not expressed, for
instance, in the conflict between the indifferent cashier and frustrated consumers, but instead is
written on the very body of the worker.
At other points in the text, Ernaux reflects on the female body and racialized bodies in
terms of their vulnerability as produced by space. This is often as fleeting but striking as the
moment when, leaving the elevator and entering an underground floor of a parking garage, she
notes that, with the noise of the air purifiers, « On n’entendrait pas les cris en cas de viol » (29).
She registers here the material, spatial separation that underwrites sexual violence. In another
moment that she records, the body of a woman is instantly racialized when she steps into a space
of middle-class consumption: « Chez Hédiard, dans le quartier des boutiques chic de la Ville

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Nouvelle, une femme noire en boubou est entrée » (75). The rest of the scene unfolds in a single
sentence: « Immédiatement, l’oeil de la gérante se transforme en couteau, surveillance sans répit
de cette cliente qu’on soupçonne de plus en plus de s’être trompée de magasin, qui ne sent pas
qu’elle n’est pas à sa place ». The closing clause of the sentence frames the situation perfectly;
this space is shown to be a racialized space, in which people of color are excluded implicitly as
part of the functioning of consumption and can only be seen as threats to this ongoing process.
Ernaux shows here the way in which such functional spaces lend themselves to racial profiling,
and the ease with which the guard’s gaze shifts punitively on this expectation. She also gives
particular attention to the homeless and to panhandlers in her observation of the social inequality
that persists within and molds social space. In an early passage, she gives an account of a blind
man who sings at the St. Lazare metro station. He defines the space with his presence for the
commuters: « L’aveugle… était là. On commence à l’entendre quand on glisse le ticket dans le
tourniquet. Une voix puissante, pleine de fausse notes, au bord de l’éraillement » (20). He simply
is there, his singular voice preceding his body; he places himself, as she notes, at the point where
the hallway branches in two for the opposite directions of the train, so all who pass must engage
with him. Ernaux describes here, as in many passages, the sort of working knowledge a
commuter with her same itinerary would have of these spaces and the vulnerable other that the
commuter must engage with, if only registering them in memory or a journal extime.
As Sheringham notes, Ernaux wrote an essay entitled « Vers un Je transpersonnel » the
same year that Journal du dehors was published. He takes the “transpersonal” and Ernaux’s act
of transcribing scenes in her journaux extimes to be an attempt to establish collectivity out of the
seemingly random events of la vie quotidienne: “[In] the course of her daily life… Ernaux finds
herself engaged in encounters that simultaneously reveal the age she lives in and aspects of her

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own identity… What is being explored is less a psychological reaction… than the way in which a
dimension of one’s identity is… held in suspension in the outer world” (321-2). Like Agnès
Varda and her subjective filmic documentaries of Paris, Ernaux moves through the city space in
search of the spaces and spontaneous happenings that bring her back to a sense of herself in
relation to her moment in history as a French person, a woman, a writer, and an inhabitant in the
entre-deux between Paris and the ville nouvelle of Cergy-Pontoise. The implied « je » of
authorial voice (since, as Sheringham notes, for a diary, the « je » is significantly missing for the
most part) is thus “an impersonal [« je »], or rather transpersonal, as it fuses self and other,
seeking not to bolster an identity but to grasp, in the field of Ernaux’s own experience, the signs
of a wider collective reality” (322). In this collectivity, individual markers of identity – “class,
gender, cultural status, economic power, consumerism, language, education” (322), to name a
few – allows for a differential access to space; while some move relatively unencumbered,
women, people of color, and the unhoused are marked as suspicious, criminal or vulnerable. By
being engaged by scenes from her contemporary suburban and Parisian life, and engaging with
them by writing them down, Ernaux moves away from the vertigo of a space without history into
an all-too-familiar everyday life where inequality is reinforced by spatial interdiction. However,
she also records the moments in which practitioners flout the unspoken codes of social space,
pointing to their constructedness and the possibility of a different set of relations to come.

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Chapter Five
The Archivist of Protest: The Attention Economy and Chris Marker’s Use of Détournement in
Chats perchés
In his book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, Jonathan Crary cites Jean-Luc
Godard’s 2001 film Eloge d’amour and, in particular, an open question posed by voiceover
narration in the film: “When did the gaze collapse? […] Was it ten years, fifteen years ago, or
even fifty years ago, before television?” (34). Crary turns to Godard’s question as a way of
thinking through his own reflections on the effects of our contemporary, always-on attention
economy. Godard’s film predated social media networks and the ubiquity of smartphones, but as
Crary acknowledges, the filmmaker’s point is that “the crisis of the observer and the image is a
cumulative one, with overlapping historical roots, unrelated to any specific technologies” (34).
He opens his book with an example of what he calls “perpetual illumination” (33), referring to
plans by a Russian / European business conglomerate to use satellites to reflect sunlight back to
earth, and thus allow for the exploitation of natural resources in the northern Russian latitudes
and for the ability to light cities 24/7.
24
The plan he cites is farfetched and was immediately
objected to by environmental and humanitarian organizations, but he uses it as an example to
establish how never-ending illumination has become so pervasive in our discourse. He links it to
what he calls “an immense incapacitation of visual experience” (33), that in our continual
engagement with media networks, there is both too much to see, and that, moreover, because of
the algorithmic logic of new media, what we see is determined by how often and how long we

24
See Crary, 4-5. He also cites DARPA studies on the white-crowned sparrow ability for stay awake for days during
migration as a means to condition soldiers to function without sleep, as well as the sleep and sensory deprivation
techniques of US torturers in dark sites around the globe as prescient examples of the global economy’s war on
sleep as the final frontier of 24/7 capitalism.

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interact with the content that precedes it. What results is “a disintegration of human abilities to
see, especially of an ability to join visual discriminations with social and ethical valuations” (33).
In short, what Crary seeks in contrast to the contemporary visual regime is a means of engaging
with representations that allows for collective action, as opposed to stasis and polarization.
25

For Crary, the question posed in Godard’s film points to a contemporary crisis in media
consumption: “We are swamped with images and information about the past and its recent
catastrophes – but there is also a growing incapacity to engage these traces in ways that could
move beyond them, in the interest of a common future” (34). He argues that this is a result of
both the ubiquity of representations and also the nature of the media through which we receive
them: “24/7 [media networks] [disable] vision through processes of homogenization,
redundancy, and acceleration” (33)
26
. This impasse on the part of users is emblematic of the
temporality he lays out in his book, a 24/7 existence that detaches itself from any possible
political action in the form of a long-term project. A clear example of this temporality, in which
a tremendous amount of labor and resources are expended to produce the consensus that no
political change is possible or necessary, is the 24-hour news cycle. This form of spectacular
culture was thriving at the time of Godard’s film and, as Crary points out, was a late stage of the
impact of television as “the setting in place of conditions which would subsequently be essential
for the 24/7 ‘attention economy’ of the twenty-first century” (80). Television viewing as a

25
In his critique of the contemporary spectacle, Crary is in conversation with Nicolas Mirzoeff, who counters
visuality, or the current scopic maintenance of power, with he calls the “right to look,” which is less about sight
and more an ethical relation to the Other: “It means requiring the recognition of the other in order to have a place
from which to claim rights and to determine what is right” (1).
26
Crary outlines the difference between old and new, portable media by considering how when one does
disengage with a device and the continuous network, they notice the difference between this unending
stimulation and what he calls the “inflexible resistance to being clicked away in an instant” (89) of material objects.
With the move toward portable devices, however, it is much less common to have to completely disengage with
the virtual and experience “the apparent shoddiness and insufficiency of a world in common.”

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practice of modernity already had an immense homogenizing impact on populations, and it
performed a disciplinary function not only by effectively disseminating ideologies but also
simply by normalizing passive reception.
27

As televisual media expanded beyond the limits of the home theater and, via portable
devices, permeated daily experience, Crary notes that “[it] became a nebulous but loaded figure
for evoking the texture of modernity and a transformed everyday life… Television incarnated the
falseness of the world, but it also eliminated any position from which a ‘true’ world could be
imagined” (82). In both its content but also the ubiquitous nature of its address then, the complex
of televisual media of the 21
st
century limits its users at the level of everyday life. In its
acceleration and unending delivery, it disavows a place from which to contest its content.
However, the example of Guy Debord, the Situationists, and other practitioners of détourning
media can offer a critique of both the nature and the significations of our contemporary attention
economy. In Chats perchés (2004), his film contrasting the contemporary French news media
with scenes from Parisian protests in the wake of the United States’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
and the presidential elections in France, Chris Marker takes up Debord’s practice of
détournement, reversing the production-consumption flow of images and creating a new situation
for thought and action. Marker’s use of voice-over and montage to repurpose both the news
media and documentary images of protest serves as a means of breaking out of the 24/7
temporality of the contemporary spectacle, allowing the viewer to tie the present to previous
instances of revolutionary agency and to imagine the possibility of future political change.

27
Crary echoes Lefebvre on everyday life in the twentieth century as a homogenizing of activity in this description
of television’s impact: “All of the myriad ways in which time had been spent, used, squandered, endured, or
parcellized prior to television time were replaced by more uniform modes of duration… It involved an immense
displacement of human praxis to a far more circumscribed and unvarying range of relative inactivity” (80-1).

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I. Staring Back: The Archivist Reflects on His Archive
In Staring Back, a book published in conjunction with a 2007 photo exhibition of the
same name at Wexner Center for the Arts, Chris Marker found, in two images of the same place
in Paris taken forty years apart from one another, a means to reflect on his decades of work as a
filmmaker and archivist of political demonstrations. The exhibition and book, much like the CD-
ROM / web art project Immemory, are built of images, some of which have been repurposed and
edited from Marker’s earlier films; these later works have a retrospective feel, as the artist
considers his engagement with leftist politics and with cinematic practice while finding new
contexts for images that continue to captivate him. In addition, as I noted in chapter one, he
shows once again how adept he is at tying together moments of protest into a coherent narrative
and history, rather than a series of isolated events. In “I Stare 1,” we see a group of people
gathered in a public square in Paris; in the background, in front of a brasserie, a single tree
stands. Marker gives context, noting that the picture was taken the week after the Charonne
massacre, in which, as I noted in chapter two, a rally against the actions of the Organisation
armée secrète turned deadly, with riot police killing nine protestors.
28
Here, Marker recycles an
image from the film he took of the funeral procession and demonstration included in Le Joli Mai,
but his focus is on a particular detail in the image: “Straight in the middle of the frame, on the
balcony, among those tense faces, a young tree recently planted. Forget the faces for a moment,
just watch the tree” (1). Beyond the specificity of the police violence in Paris in 1962, Marker
asks us to consider a single detail that will act as a bridge connecting not only his filmic work

28
Marker is mistaken about the date and the number of people killed. The Charonne massacre took place on
February 8, 1962, with the funeral demonstration taking place on the 13
th
. For more on the event, see Alain
Dewerpe, Charonne, 8 février 1962, anthropologie historique d'un massacre d'Etat (2006).

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across time but also a legacy of activist work across time and space, from France to the US to
Europe and the third world and finally back to Paris in the 2000s.
In the following pages, Marker presents hundreds of faces and bodies, sometimes
obscured by movement or inadequate lighting, taken à la sauvette or sur le pouce, in haste, in the
heat of the moment. On the page opposite the portrait of a man bleeding from the impact of a
policeman’s baton, originally appearing in Marker’s La sixième face du Pentagon (1967) and
reused in Le Fond de l’air est rouge (1977), Marker writes, “During those years, I came to the
conclusion that the only sensible weapon against the cops could be a film camera. Not that
glorious but, as times, efficient” (7). What years is Marker referring to? The image seems to refer
us back to the late 60’s and 70’s, as his interest in international leftist movements was recounted
in the films made up of his attendance at protests all over the world. Those years also suggests
the tone of an older man looking back on the entire body of his work; he refers a bit later,
disparagingly, to his career as a filmmaker. What strikes me as well in this passage is the
language he uses to describe his weapon: he refers to his first 16mm camera that he claims was
stolen from the UNESCO offices, that even the light that he worked with was clandestine: “I
caught my first demo footage, rather fuzzy, stealing light from the television people” (7). The
technological device with which Marker confronts state power is striking in its modesty, and he
takes pains to represent himself as outside the reproduction of capital tied to consumption of
products and media images; his means are the illicit remainder of what Guy Debord called the
society of the spectacle.
In addition, his ethos parallels the idea of détournement Debord and his Situationist
colleagues developed. At its most basic level détournement is, to quote Debord, “the reuse of
preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble” (67), but, as Martin Jay has noted, it served a

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political function in countering the mediatic images of everyday life by repurposing those images
and sounds: “[It] meant confronting the Spectacle with its own effluvia and reversing their
normal ideological function” (424). As Debord wrote in his analysis of the function of the
technique, “Détournement has a peculiar power which obviously stems from the double
meaning, from the enrichment of most of the terms by the coexistence within them of their old
and new senses” (67). Importantly, however, this practice as advocated by the Situationists is not
intended to make art pour l’art simply for the pleasure of combining the old to make the new;
instead, it was a means of opposing a prior regime of spectacular culture in a dialectical manner,
using its own materials to negate its ideological hold on its audience. Also, crucially, by
benefiting from the production value of the original media and using low-cost editing techniques
to produce a new text, detournement is an inexpensive artform and can effectively by practiced
by anyone: “The cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the
Chinese walls of understanding” (18). Marker’s suggestion that even his filming operated in a
parasitic relation to mass media, absorbing the light of television cameras to make his own
images, is apt; throughout his career, including his 2004 film Chats perchés, he repurposes
television broadcasts, the films of others, as well as his own film archive, in order to critique the
filmic practice of mass media networks and to reintroduce legacies and potentials for political
action so often disavowed by these networks.
In “I Stare 1,” which incorporates stills from the footage of Chats perchés, among several
others of his films, a meditation on a single place captured by the camera and the passage of time
allows him to link together instances of his documentary engagement with social movements. He
ties in his filming of the anti-Vietnam War protests outside the Pentagon in 1967 as well as May
1968, and, later in the commentary that accompanies the photos, writes, “The ‘Spirit of May’

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still hangs over the demos” (21), referring to the Parisian protests in the wake of le 21 avril,
Jean-Marie Le Pen’s advancement to the second round of the presidential election in 2002. The
text joins together the images on the facing pages; the first, surely an artifact of ’68-era
demonstrations, shows an older woman, head-down, walking with a somber demeanor while a
barricade of burned-out cars fills the background, while the second image shows a few young
bodies in profile, obscured by smoke (tear-gas, perhaps) and the banners of workers’ unions. “At
once the youngsters invade the street. Many for the first time” (21). His hope that this initial
engagement will lead to substantive change is tempered as time goes on; he notes: “Four years
later, that jubilant mode hardly shows up in my images… [The] fight isn’t any longer… about
changing the world. Today’s mottoes deal with unemployment, income, fears of uncertain
retirement… As my lens slips inside the crowd like an inquisitive snake, what it frames is,
despite the apparent cohesiveness of the groups, the everlasting face of solitude” (27). On the
page and the facing page, four close-up images of solitary demonstrators, looking away from the
camera in their own reverie, represent a clear departure from the long shots of group protest that
precede them. These faces evoke the private, financial concerns of the protestors four years later.
At the end of “I Stare 1,” Marker returns to the balcony at Place de la République where he told
us to watch the tree; below the image of the crowd and the tree in 1961, he shows an image from
the exact same perspective, forty years later. He writes, “In between I have been in Japan, Korea,
Bolivia, Chile. I have filmed students in Guinea-Bissau, medics in Kosovo, Bosnian refugees… I
traded film for video and video for the computer. In the middle, on the balcony, the tree has
grown, just a little. Within these few inches, forty years of my life” (43). In concluding the photo
essay, Marker turns inward; the image of the passage of time at the Place de la République
allows him to travel, in his memory, the distances he’s travelled as an itinerant documentarian of

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global events, as well as to consider the media he’s utilized. This autobiographical turn in the
text matches a moment in Chats perchés, where Marker’s camera lingers on an older man giving
a V for victory hand signal during a May Day protest in 2002. The narrator comments, “How
many May Days in his memory?” As Flinn notes, “One is tempted to see in this older gentleman
a stand-in for Marker himself” (98). To a degree, Marker’s late film on protest in the 2000’s can
be read as a personal referendum on his work in the 60’s and 70’s, as he expresses criticisms of
the means and motivations of his contemporaries in the streets. However, he also works to tie
these later acts of protests to a tradition of revolutionary practice, bolstering these images and
considering what possible collective future they may bring about after his May Days are through.
II. Chats perchés : The Archivist in the Streets
Toward the beginning of Marker’s film Chats perchés, the viewer is presented with an
image of two places and two times. It is described by an intertitle as a flashback, although the
audiovisual seepage of one into the other begins before this intertitle. As Marker performs a sort
of filmic double take in registering the ubiquitous presence of the painted cat, Monsieur Chat, we
hear the sound of the bagpipes that heralds the spatial superimposition of New York City on
September 11, 2001 on Paris in November 2001, and even Paris later, at the time of narration
(summer 2003, the time of the flash mob at Centre Pompidou shown at the beginning of the
film). The “watchful eye of the cat,” to quote Marker’s English language narration, kept vigil
over the flash mob and this gaze over Paris in the time of narration. This gaze over Paris in the
time of narration is tied to the flashback to November 2001 by virtue of the sound of the
bagpipes, as well as the fact that the image of “Paris, November 2001” appears to have been
taken from the viewing deck of the Centre Pompidou, where the flash mob later takes place. But
even within the flashback, there are two times and places represented – in the image of the Paris

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skyline overlapped with the slowed newsreel footage of the second plane hitting the second
tower of the World Trade Center. This doubling of time and space and the lingering image of
destruction is mirrored by Marker’s narration, in which he describes the sentiment of fraternity
of the French media and public for the American people that remains months later.
This layering of time and space within the frame, and the combination of personal
handheld video with archival news footage is what I want to focus on as a stylistic key for
Marker in this film. In particular, I want to ask two questions. First, what is Marker doing by
combining these elements, having the soundtrack of one moment in time bleed into another like
in this scene, for example, and what kind of critical work is he doing upon the materials of news
media, these familiar images and sounds? How can it help us to read these images in a new way?
And second, what is Marker's relationship to the images he provides his audience, for example,
as we'll see, the images of protest in Paris in the wake of 9/11 and the decision by American
leaders to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the "catastrophe" of the 2002 French
presidential elections, in which no socialist candidate made it to the second round? As he notes
in the narration about this feeling of fraternity the French shared with Americans, "Don't know
who's to blame for the fact that it didn't last. Certainly not the cats". This is a way of condensing
the shifting mood he'll trace from late 2001 to mid-2003, when the French public's lack of
representation and their anti-war sentiment made itself felt in the streets.
One way to address Marker’s practice of combining image and sound tracks is to
consider the material he is using. As Jean Baudrillard has written, part of the force of the terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center towers was the knowledge on the part of the perpetrators that
the acts would produce a pervasive and ongoing media event: “Among the other weapons of the
system which they turned round against it, the terrorists exploited the ‘real time’ of images, their

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instantaneous worldwide transmission” (27). They hijacked not only airplanes but also the
spectacular media networks that we increasingly engage with on a continual basis. Jenny
Kijowski, responding to Baudrillard’s point, states that “the perpetrators of 9/11 not only planned
the murder of thousands of Americans in buildings that symbolized capitalism in its most stark
facelessness, but they did so in a way that would be most appealing for visual consumption by a
culture that understands and respects spectacle above all else” (198). Although her point about
the hijacking of media networks is well-taken, I think her choice of words suggests that such
media viewership is a conscious choice rather than a state of daily life.
Returning to Jonathan Crary and 24/7, the title of his book refers to an experience of time
characterized, as Crary puts it, by "the discrepancy between a human life-world and... a
switched-on universe for which no off-switch exists" (30). It is expressed by the impossibility of
being constantly engaged or consuming and the fact that, Crary states, "since no moment, place
or situation now exists in which one can not shop, consume or exploit networked resources, there
is a relentless incursion of the non-time of 24/7 into every aspect of social or personal life" (30).
As Crary describes the unique temporality of our networked, always-on lives, what I find most
significant is the way in which the media networks with which we engage reinforce this sense of
a ceaseless present without any possibility of what he calls long-term change: “Behind the
vacuity of the catchphrase, 24/7 is a static redundancy that disavows its relation to the rhythmic
and periodic textures of human life. It connotes an arbitrary, uninflected schema of a week,
extracted from any unfolding of variegated or cumulative experience” (9). He opposes the logic
of this mediated time to “‘24/365,’” in that the extended timeframe of a year would allow for
some collective action. Crary emphasizes that in terms of everyday life and the possibility for
political change, we are in a very different position from the inaugural thinkers of critical theory:

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“A 24/7 environment… must be distinguished from what Lukács and others in the early 20th
century identified as the empty, homogeneous time of modernity… What is new is the sweeping
abandonment of the pretense that time is coupled to any long-term undertaking, even to fantasies
of ‘progress’ or development.” He continues, “An illuminated 24/7 world without shadows is the
final capitalist mirage of post-history, of an exorcism of the otherness that is the motor of
historical change” (9). In this way, the temporality of media networks that Crary critiques is
wedded to the neoliberal fantasy of the end of history, that the management of populations can
be undertaken by the gains of the global free market. It’s an escalation on a worldwide scale of
the logic of modernity that Kristin Ross uncovers in the French state of the trentes glorieuses.
There, the disavowal of the failing colonial project is tied to an emphasis on a homogenous,
middle-class standard of living. The logic goes: if some members of society cannot attain this
standard, it isn’t the result of historical inequity, it’s personal failing (Ross 12).
If Crary’s book brings out the always-on economy of our devices and networks that
pervade our everyday life, Adam Greenfield, in his book Radical Technologies: The Design of
Everyday Life, points to the ways in which the data flows produced by our engagement with
smart phones, credit card transactions, CCTV and the like molds that daily experience. He takes
Paris as his opening example of a networked city in his introduction, “Paris year zero.”
Greenfield’s analysis is particularly acute when he notes how correlation of data structures
knowledge and, in Jacques Rancière’s sense, the policing of the city, that is, the maintenance of
order. He gives an example of two rival fans of Paris St. Germain and Olympique de Marseille
getting in a minor fight outside a bank. This scuffle is picked up on an ATM security camera,
and investigators can compare this footage to the transaction history to determine the fighters’
identities. From there, data can be mapped on top of other data – if there’s a connection to the

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individuals and protests like Nuit Debout (or more recently, les Gilets jaunes) or suspected
terrorism, the individuals can be read as a heightened threat. Of course, the data can always be
correlated in more innocuous ways, which nonetheless shape future patterns of consumption and
management of the population: for instance, comparing instances of violence breaking out
between fans and the football league schedule, or the unemployment index.
What strikes me in Greenfield’s depiction of the contemporary networked city is the
disparity between, to use Nicolas Mirzoeff’s language again, the right to look and visuality.
Mirzoeff gives the name visuality to the series of projects imperial, military and other
governmental powers have undertaken to represent the sensible world through media in order to
maintain hegemony: “This practice must be imaginary, rather than perceptual, because what is
being visualized is too substantial for any one person to see and is created from information,
images and ideas” (2). His examples of this scopic power include the army officer and their use
of aerial photography to assess the battlefield; the visual account is always mediated and
inherently incomplete, yet it does create an actionable reality. Returning to Greenfield’s account
of Paris as networked city in 2016, there’s a disparity between the network’s representation of
these flows of data to itself (but always with gaps) and the figure he describes as “the most
sensitive observer” who “could never hope to witness or impress upon their recollection more
than the tiniest fraction of [daily events], however long they watched the city go by” (2). This
latter position is Marker’s, the precursor to our inextricably networked age, the flaneur who
walks the city with digital camera in hand – but in his repurposing of news media and his own
footage, he is also anticipating the convergence of networks and devices that accounts for our
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For Crary, physical sleep is the last remaining barrier to the ever-increasing demands of
production and consumption of 24/7 time. However, he also observes how often critical theory
has resorted to the metaphor of sleep as a way of accounting for "impaired or diminished
perceptual capabilities combined with routinized, habitual, or trance-like behavior" (23). One
such example is Guy Debord's statement, "The spectacle expresses nothing more than society's
wish for sleep". To the specularization of his contemporary society Debord advocated the
practices of dérive and détournement, literally highjacking the texts of that culture and removing
them from their accepted contexts. But, Crary argues, perhaps in this non-time of 24/7, there can
be no "epiphanic disturbance," no awakening because there is no sleep, no distance or irony from
these networks. As Anselm Jappe notes, Debord didn't simply mean television when he spoke of
the spectacle - he referred to the general experience of alienation reinforced by media networks,
in which, to quote Jappe, "direct experience and the determination of events by individuals
themselves are replaced by a passive contemplation of images (which have, moreover, been
chosen by other people." In Chats perchés, through the montage techniques of shot choices and
editing, as well as through the intervention of voiceover, Marker fulfill Debord's demand,
reversing the production - consumption flow of images and creating a new situation for thought
and action by extending and amplifying the acts of protesters.
In the film, Marker goes, digital camera in hand, looking for the cats, and he finds them
in the streets, on the metro, as well as on his TV screen while he watches the news: one scene
shows news coverage of a protest that includes footage of M. Chat being hoisted on a sign by a
participant. He also encounters him on the internet, and even aids his journey: in one extended
sequence of the film, Marker uses his editing tools to play with the boundless dissemination of
images online, placing him on CNN, Time Magazine's website, and even the whitehouse.gov

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page. But it's also true that Marker hardly needed to exert himself, as he also chronicles real
instances of sightings of M. Chat elsewhere in France documented online, as well as blog
articles. M. Chat is truly part of, while working against, spectacular culture. As Flinn writes,
“[For] Marker, the cat (the animal) is that which is the un-co-optable, irrecuperable, the
inappropriable” (102). In the interview she cites from Libération around the release of the film in
France, in which Marker and a representative of M. Chat spoke with a journalist, Marker reflects
on the resistance of the cat as a symbol: « le Chat [est] le seul être du monde qui depuis le temps
immémoriaux a conquis sa place au premier plan de la vie quotidienne, de l’image, du sentiment
et de la mythologie sans jamais avoir été récupéré ». Whether or not this is a defensible claim, it
works to Marker’s advantage to evoke the animal’s ubiquity in everyday life and in mythology –
it is, following Flinn, “[resistant] to human domination” (102), retaining its independence even in
domesticity and, more importantly, as a symbolic figure that evades foreclosure.
Marker describes M. Chat early on in the film as a “comforting sign,” but the cat also
functions as a sort of disruptive hero, emerging in public space and particularly amidst the
demonstrations. Marker follows his traces as a means of uncovering another, enduring, nearly
invisible Paris. As Flinn notes, the figure of M. Chat was in part such a salient figure of urban
space in Paris and beyond because of the relative ease with which he could be reproduced,
something that the artists’ collective behind the image was aware of: “[The] appropriation of M.
Chat was an intended consequence of the simple style in which the cat is painted” (103). In this
way, the image of M. Chat in is line with the Situationist tactic of détournement, insofar as both
the repetition of the cat as proto-meme and the détourned artwork rely on the resources of
spectacular networks to carry their message. For M. Chat, anyone with paint (or, as we see later
in the film with signs and masks, a printer) can perpetuate the image, and televisual networks

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connected by personal camera, social media and television cameras help to disseminate it, just as
the détourned artwork relies on the materials of spectacular culture, and the artist only intervenes
by means of reassembling those elements. Marker constructs, via the explicit search for the
proliferating cats, a counterdiscourse – commenting on and reacting to, through recycling and
manipulation, media images surrounding the 9/11 attacks, the French allied support of the war on
terror, and France's elections. In addition, he brings to the fore the daily, mundane experiences of
Parisians during this time, recovering the everyday of life in Paris after 9/11, and documenting
the public’s response to French politics and global war.
While in search of the cats, Marker is drawn to rhythms, whether they be the strident
drums of protestors in the streets or the highbrow chamber music of the underground metro
stops. « Sur la bande-son du Métro », he states, « je parcours la ville ». The English language
film translates parcourir as wander, but it could also be translated as cover, as in, to cover a lot
of ground, or even to skim or glance, to note surfaces. The metro is hallowed ground for French
critics of everyday life: it is the non-place of constrained time between family life and labor time.
Yet Marker professes to love the metro for the temporal, sensorial experience it affords. Unlike
Eddy Mitchell's popular song, « Métro, boulot, dodo », in which sleep is, Crary-like, the only
barrier between the monotony of commute and work and one's apartment is a polarizing,
apoliticized prison cell, for Marker, it is a place of access to culture, of a different temporality
offering respite and the possibility for engagement. Mitchell’s song is worth considering, in
terms of the temporality reflected there and its image of everyday life in Paris. The lyrics, written
by Claude Moine, Jean Édouard, begin : « Je n'ai jamais vu ma voisine / Mon Alcatraz, c'est
Paris / Dans ma cellule: deux-pièces cuisine / Je mange, je dors, je bois, je ris ». Though Mitchell
could never be confused with a soixante-huitard, the lyrics reflect a certain post-’68 mood, a

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sense of failure in the dismal conditions of the quotidian. He evokes a never-changing present, an
endless, repetitive, and mundane daily life, summed up in the present tense: « Je mange ». In
other words, I do these actions over and over, alone in my tiny apartment. The song continues :
« Dès le matin, dans mon bureau / Je pense déjà à mon dodo / Midi: sandwiches et re-boulot /
Tout en parcourant les journaux ». Here, the only respite is sleep, and Mitchell describes another
sense of the verb parcourir: to skim, to only consider the surface, glancing over the headline of
his newspaper and not really engaging with the world outside of his home-metro-work bubble.
Finally, the chorus reminds us of the song’s bleak vision, a lack of collectivity: « Chacun pour
soi dans son ghetto ». Everyone is atomized, alone in their prison cells of their apartments, their
specialized work, and the lack of social connection that characterizes the metro.
The everyday world that Mitchell’s song evokes is reminiscent of the pervasive sense of
shared spaces like the metro as spaces of collective isolation, as I noted in chapter four: to quote
Augé, the metro is the embodiment of « la collectivité sans la fête et la solitude sans
l’isolement » (55). Yet, for Augé, if the métro sometimes takes on the character of the mundane,
it is also the space of memory, of past trajectories that form an autobiography tied to place, and
ultimately, this spatial relation to one’s past ties Augé and all métro travelers together: « En cela,
mes itinéraires sont semblables à ceux des autres, que je côtoie quotidiennement dans le métro
sans savoir où… ils en sont et où ils vont, alors qu’au moment même où nos regards se
rencontrent et se détournent, après s’être parfois attardés en instant, ils sont peut-être eux aussi
en train… d’envisager un changement de vie et, accessoirement, de ligne de métro » (11). In this
image of a shared gaze and potential recognition, Augé describes the common experience of
living in Paris and how that life is defined by the points on a métro map. As Marker explores the
métro, he too finds it an egalitarian space, one where anyone can enjoy, at one moment, a group

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of Russian folk musicians. and at another, a small chamber music performance. As the voice
over narrator states: “The musicians get a standing ovation. Of course, those people were
standing anyway, but don’t forget that probably not one of them ever entered a concert hall.
That’s why I love the métro.” Like Varda in her exploration of the Parisian streets in Opéra
Mouffe and Cléo de 5 à 7, Marker seems drawn to loners, his camera following their trajectory or
their reverie; he continues: “In the métro, you meet the destitute and the tourists, equally lost.
You too get lost at times, unless you join the society of those who are simply lost in their
thoughts. Sometimes with good reasons.” At this moment, he is able to, by means of the montage
of his voice over and the synchronicity of a woman “lost in [her] thoughts” while a prerecorded
announcement plays, register the precarity of contemporary Parisian space. The announcement
over the intercom requests that métro travellers alert authorities if they note any suspicious
activity and signs off, « Merci de votre vigilance ». This complex montage of video, diegetic
sound track and voice reminds the viewer of the heightened post-9/11 security and the need for
spaces of reverie in uncertain times.
Marker's emphasis of the separate rhythm that exists in the metro allows him to make a
distinction between the underground and life above ground, where the electoral politics of
consensus reigns. Much like his use of a video synthesizer in 1983's Sans soleil to construct the
Zone, in Chats perchés, he affixes the "morpheye" on TV soundbites of politicians. In Sans
Soleil, a pseudonymic stand-in for Marker, Sandor Krasna, who communicates with the narrator
by letter throughout the film, talks about his friend Hayao, who uses a video synthesizer in order
to alter images. In describing the effect of transforming these images, Marker is in conversation
with Godard and Crary, attempting to address the never-ending present tense of televisual media:
« Mon copain Hayao Yameko a trouvé une solution : si les images du présent ne changent pas,

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changer les images du passé. » By processing the images (Marker’s own footage of protests,
repurposed in the film), they lose their specificity and exist between figuration and abstraction;
bodies, actions, and objects are occasionally visible, then dissolve into a lack of contrast and
resolution. Marker continues: « Il m’a montré les bagarres des Sixties traitées par son
synthétiseur. Des images moins menteuses, dit-il avec la conviction des fanatiques, que celles
que tu vois à la télévision. Au moins elles se donnent pour ce qu’elles sont, des images, pas la
forme transportable et compacte d’une réalité déjà inaccessible. » With the video synthesizer of
the Zone, Marker is able to foreground the fact that images are only representations; by calling
attention to their mutability, he also reminds the viewer of how images can used to stand in for
the reality of moments and events in the past. As David Montero writes: “In the iconicity of the
snapshot we enjoy the illusion of capturing a single moment in the past, while film provides a
feeling of possessing a specific temporal sequence that we can literally ‘replay’ over and over
again” (113). Marker troubles these feelings by replaying film and video and editing them in
order to demonstrate their status as images, and to demonstrate the constructedness of all
spectacular culture. Montero continues: “In the film, non-fiction images travel the road from
their often misinterpreted documentary value towards a much more complex regime that
inscribes them as the raw material of an artistic practice” (113). In Sans soleil, Marker’s foray
into the Zone is an opportunity to reflect on the defamiliarizing gesture of editing as a means of
critiquing how images, disseminated through televisual media, take on the value of truth in
discourse.
In Chats perchés, Marker uses a technique he labels the morpheye, in which a video clip
taken from a news broadcast is visually slowed. The speaker’s expression is lost as their face
slowly morphs from one position to the next, while the sound track retains their unedited speech.

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This editing has the effect of detaching the rehearsed political rhetoric of French and American
elected officials from the affective force of their facial expressions and gestures. In one instance,
Marker forces the face of Prime Minister Raffarin to congeal, drawing attention to the words he
spoke the night of his cabinet's election in 2002. In addition, Marker threads this news footage
into his video of protestors in 2003, capturing ironically the distance in time and the lack of
action on the part of government institutions. To quote him in response to Raffarin, "Fine, but
one year later, nothing has changed." The drums of the protestors lead him to another condensed
burst of archival memory, as he replays footage of Vietnam and May '68 era demonstrations
while leading us through the ways the chant has changed with the issues of the times. The
protestor's calls for a general strike lead him to call up scenes from Eisenstein and the French
memory of the Popular Front, bringing all these revolutionary moments into diachronic tension.
As in his photo-essay included in Staring Back, Marker emphasizes the fact that a new
generation mobilizes in the streets, and he links their activities to the global protests of the late
‘60’s. However, at other moments in the film, he is critical of the various demonstrating groups
for various reasons. In one of the scenes of protest throughout the film, Marker positions himself
behind a human wall of police officers holding riot shields. One turns to him and says, “Hello,
sir, are you filming us?” to which Marker responds “No, nothing to see,” adding, with the
intertitle and voiceover, “It’s nearly true.” In his commentary, he echoes the logic of « il n’y a
rien à voir » at the heart of Rancière’s distinction between policing and politics, but in a way that
seems to align him with the forces of order. Instead of coming together as a collective subject
demanding to be seen and addressed in a way that changes the political order, perhaps Marker is
arguing that these disparate causes will simply dissolve back into the status quo. What is
Marker’s relationship to the crowd that he documents in the film, whether in the metro or in the

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street filming the police and the demonstrations? He often notes the competing claims of the
protestors, as well as their haste to conflate what he sees as historical moments of different
scales; for example, when he notes, in a snide tone, when some switch the lyrics in a song in
order to equate Jean-Pierre Raffarin with Petain, the Vichy leader and Nazi collaborator, "what a
great asset in life it is to not know what you're talking about." In addition, he casts a wary eye on
the way in which the events are mediatized. In the intertitles between footage of protests, he
writes, « Telle est la vie des mots… « Intermittent » fut le mot de l’été… A l’automne, ce serait
« foulard » ». Marker points to the fashionable nature of certain causes, amplified by media
attention; the coverage of the protests focused on temporary worker’s rights in the summer only
to shift to the right to wear the hijab in the fall. As he films the activists in support of the hijab,
his framing is reminiscent of Godard’s Le Mepris. First, we see a man coaching the young
women about who will be a spokesperson when they interact with journalists; then, as the
women chant their message, Marker’s camera pulls back to frame the photojournalists snapping
pictures. He foregrounds the spectacular nature of the scene and the extent to which this protest
is a calculated act of political theater.
Yet, Marker also leaves us with the question, "Why should the streets of Paris be less
chaotic than the rest of the world?" and emphasizes the fact that an alleged apolitical generation
would demonstrate in such varied and impassioned ways. He also never misses an opportunity to
find resonance between contemporary acts of protest and their historical analogues. He films a
“die-in,” a demonstration memorializing AIDS victims and protesting the lack of funding for
research in which participant lie on the ground, representing the bodies of those who have died
from the syndrome. As the sound-track moves from the diegetic sound of a speaker criticizing
the government for funding the war effort but not AIDS research to a dense, synthesized drone,

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Marker edits footage of a giant black screen positioned in front of the Eiffel Tower with red
numbers counting off the number of vicitims. Then, as Marker edits together still shots of the
silent mass of bodies, the soundtrack abruptly shifts to the haunting piano theme from Hiroshima
mon amour. As Flinn notes, “The AIDS demonstration images consist of bodies lying down…
suggesting a strange conjugation of the two most famous passages of Hiroshima and La jetée:
the opening of Hiroshima where the intertwined bodies of the lovers are shown in the near-
abstraction of close-up and the single moving image of La jetée of the reclining woman” (99).
Flinn is right to link the use of Hiroshima’s theme to Marker’s progressive shift to black and
white stills; in addition, the images he chooses move from a large mass to smaller groups and
pairs of bodies, aligning with the comparison of the Hiroshima couple. I would go further in
considering the significance of the parallel Marker is making: first of all, as Resnais films the
lovers in extreme close-up, a powder like ash falls on their bodies, suggesting the destruction of
the atomic bomb. The opening sequence is an illustration of trauma and the possibility of
memory: as the man intones, « Tu n’as pas vu d’hôpital à Hiroshima. Tu n’a rien vu à
Hiroshima », the woman’s response (« J’ai tout vu. Tout. Ainsi, l’hôpital, je l’ai vu. J’en suis
sûr ») and the P.O.V. shot of the hospital corridors and the visible evidence of victims of the
bombing says otherwise. What is at stake in the Hiroshima sequence – remembering and having
knowledge of historical tragedies – is also at stake in the protest that Marker films. By bringing
these two sequences together, Marker emphasizes that seeing the bodies of the protestors can
give us a true sense of the magnitude of the victims lost to AIDS, and he explicitly links these
two moments of historical violence perpetrated on populations, whether as an act of neglect or an
act of war. Through his use of montage effects, Marker answers Debord's call to create new
situations through a rerouting of media. He does not simply present his footage as a documentary

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record; instead, as Flinn notes, “Chats perchés’ self-reflexive montage deformation of
information reminds its viewers that history is never unmediated” (100). Moreover, by finding
filmic intertexts like Hiroshima, which grapples with the (im)possibility of recounting the trauma
of war, Marker helps to bolster the claims of the protestors by linking it to a historical claim for
justice. He thus extends the actions of the participants and turns an image for consumption into
an image for reflection and potential political action in the future.
III. Representing Violence in Everyday Paris
In a passage of the film where Marker comments on the general disorder of the first
round of the 2002 presidential elections in France, he cuts from a series of campaign posters of
the left-wing candidates to a shot of a trash bag on the side of a Parisian street. While Flinn
rightly points out that Marker’s montage is “wryly [commenting]” (101) on the need to clean up
the mess that the political race has become, I argue that Marker is also registering, in the same
way he did in the métro with the Vigilance intercom announcement, the effects of acts of
violence on the everyday life of Parisian inhabitants. The green bag reads « Vigilance –
propreté », but its transparent material allows for another kind of vigilance (and a moral
propreté) in that suspicious objects can be spotted and reported to the police. Anyone who has
spent time in Paris and seen Vigipirate notices and military and police patrols in high-traffic
areas cannot help linking these instances of surveillance. Marker’s film opens the specter of the
attacks on the Twin Towers superimposed on the skyline of Paris; in constructing this image, he
implicates France’s capital in a changing global relationship to space in an era where violence
can and often does occur in daily life and lines demarcating zones of war and peace have eroded.
In these brief moments of observation, Marker is in conversation with critical theorists
like Arjun Appadurai and Slavoj Zizek, who have written on the effects of acts of mass violence

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on the experience of everyday life. Appadurai, in his book Fear of Small Numbers, notes a post-
9/11 shift in the conception of quotidian experience in social space, in which “the division
between civilian and military space” (31) cannot no longer be upheld. He argues that
contemporary conflict can be read not as confirming the clash of civilizations thesis argued by
Samuel Huntington but rather as a conflict between two contradictory systems.
29
Nation-states
attempt to maintain what he calls vertebrate power by appealing to a central, sovereign order
(with secure borders) based around a shared ethnic, cultural narrative and economy, while
cellular powers, embodied by the global market, terrorist cells (that often benefit from the
decentralized and deregulated flow of capital), and diasporic populations, travel back and forth
across borders. Within the tension created by vertebrate power and cellular flows of people and
capital, acts like the hijacking and mass murder of 9/11 are less a traditional act of war and more
an explicit and extremely visible instance of violence within a grander, globalized system of
violence where both resources and suffering are distributed unequally. These two valences of
violence as explicit act and as ongoing inequity are at the heart of Slavoj Zizek’s Violence: Six
Sideways Reflections, where he distinguishes between subjective violence as a visible public
event and systemic violence, “or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning
of our economic and political systems” (1). He emphasizes this difference in order to give
historical continuity to violent events like acts of terrorism that seem to erupt without a clear
cause (or with too clear a cause, explained away as an ideological difference or a difference in
values). Systemic violence, when properly accounted for, then appears as the structural ground
concretizing inequity and setting the scene for individual acts of subjective violence.

29
Appadurai 21.

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In his 2000 film Code inconnu, Michael Haneke chooses Paris to explore the tensions
between the vertebrate nation-state and cellular flows of money people, as well as the systemic
ground of violent events. His use of Paris as setting was deliberate; in an interview around the
film’s release, he noted that he “can only see two multicultural cities in Europe: Paris and
London, two capitals of countries with a colonial past… This is obvious just from sitting in the
underground / métro” (quoted in Ince 86). Kate Ince notes that Haneke’s second sentence is
revealing; he is most interested in considering the sensible differences between inhabitants of a
city like Paris, for instance, their racial or linguistic difference. A city like Haneke’s native
Vienna couldn’t work “because the physiognomy of its inhabitants does not visually signify their
provenance” (Ince 86). Within this contemporary multicultural city, where Haneke foregrounds
conflict based on racial and cultural difference and explores the effects of the French nation-state
maintaining its sovereign borders from the opening scene, the character Georges, a
photojournalist, serves as a significant figure. Throughout the film, he struggles to live within the
everyday life of Paris, accustomed to the war zones of Afghanistan and Bosnia where he works.
In a scene where he and his partner Anne are dining out, a friend asks him what it’s like to be
back in la civilisation, he replies « Sérieusement, c’est pas trop difficile à revenir … C’est après
quelques jours, ça devient difficile… Là-bas, c’est simple, c’est clair. C’est ici que la vie est
compliquée ». In the way his friends react uncomfortably to this statement, as well as the way
Anne abruptly switches the conversation to small talk about a toothache, Haneke shows that
Georges expresses an uncomfortable truth that spaces of war and peace aren’t so distinct.
During the scene in the restaurant, Georges and his friend Francine also argue about his
ability to communicate the depth of suffering and injustice experienced in the war zones through
his photography. Their argument returns us to Crary’s point in 24/7 that while we are inundated

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with spectacles of the violence of contemporary life, these images and the media through which
we receive them do not give us the means to act and change these crises. In Etienne Balibar’s «
Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty », he notes that such circulation of journalistic images in a
world of globalized inequity may indeed be counterproductive: ““[Talking] about and showing
the images of everyday horror produces, particularly in the relatively wealthy and protected
regions of humanity, a very ambivalent effect: raising compassion but also disgust, reinforcing
the idea that humankind as such is really divided into qualitatively different cultures or
civilizations” (23). Indeed, it produces an effect like Kristin Ross mentions in the wake of French
modernization in Paris and its surrounding banlieues: inhabitants who cannot, because of
persisting inequalities, or do not want to attain the norms of middle-class everyday life are seen
as irredeemably other. On a global level, figures as represented by Francine, citizens of
developed nations who inordinately contribute to the destabilization of zones of war, experience
what Balibar pinpoints as ambivalence, their sympathy tempered either by a disavowal that their
lifestyles contribute to such far-distributed violence or a sense of powerlessness to change the
outcome.
Ultimately, Georges finds he is unable to adapt to life back in Paris, and he returns to
work in Afghanistan. He reflects on this in a letter to Anne; as he reads it in a voiceover, portraits
of riders he has taken surreptitiously on the Paris métro pass by in a black and white montage.
30

30
Interestingly, Haneke détourns a work by a real photojournalist, Luc Delahaye, who published his photos taken
secretly on the métro in the photobook L’Autre (1999). Baudrillard, in an essay included in the book, praises
Delahaye for his ability to, in J.M. McGonagle’s words, “[produce] images of people who neither seem self-
conscious nor appear aware of being seen” (171). For Baudrillard, the images show “‘ce qui reste indéchiffrable en
chacun de nous’ » (quoted in McGonagle 171), a formulation that is reminiscent of Blanchot and the remainder of
everyday life that cannot be recuperated. However, as McGonagle points out, Delahaye’s project raises ethical
questions of consent while also breaking French law of le droit à l’image, and the question of what is
communicated in these images of alterity and non-reciprocity makes them complementary, in Haneke’s film, to
the question of the value of images of war zones.

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As the viewer sees one portrait after another, Georges concedes that Francine may be right to
question the utility of the images he produces: « C’est très simple de rester à l’écart et de parler
d’écologie des images et de la valeur de l’information non-transmise. Mais la vraie question c’est
celle de conséquence ». He too feels unsure that presenting images of wartime suffering and
inequity within the current spectacular mediascape can lead to any positive result. He decides he
is unequipped for life « en temps de paix », then qualifies his statement: « Enfin, ce que vous
appelez la paix. » The contrast between the images presented in the scene, which convey what
I’ve called the collective solitude of the métro, an example of the atomized condition of everyday
life in contemporary capitalist society, and the wartime images that Georges describes is striking;
the viewer is forced to consider the ambivalence that Balibar and Crary refer to, the economy of
images and the powerlessness that consumers of those images have to produce a different world.
Yet, Georges’ insistence that Paris is not a space of peace foregrounds what Zizek terms
systemic violence, that the everyday life of subway travelers in a European city underwrites the
visible violence of global sites of war.
While in the scene of the métro portraits, Haneke highlights the relation between spaces
of ostensible peace and visible violence and what Crary calls an incapacity to respond to images
of that violence in a productive way, Marker, in Chats perchés, performs another act of
détournement in bringing, through his camerawork and montage, the violence of spaces of war to
the everyday life of Paris. An intertitle reads «20 mars, bombardement de Bagdad», and as the
sound track shifts to the sounds of explosions and rapid gunfire, the image track shows métro
travelers on the moving walkways between train lines. Occasionally, Marker conveys the effects
of bombs falling on a captive city, the stark light of the pathway contrasting with the black of an
imageless cut simulating the sudden flashes of an explosion coupled with the darkness of a

143

downed power grid. The imposition of the sound track forces the viewer to consider how the
everyday sight of commuters trudging from work to home or tourists moving about the city with
their bags resembles the movement of refugees from war zones. In one striking moment,
Marker’s camera catches the worried gaze of a man surrounded by his luggage, and the sound
track suggests he is trying to determine the path of fire and get to safety. Marker’s choice of
setting is significant, in that it recalls for viewers the 1995 bombings of French métro and
railway systems. His détournement of the sounds of combat and the documentary images of
commuters in the métro explicitly links the space of everyday consumption and capitalist
reproduction with the space of war, reminding the viewer that despite their ambivalence, these
spaces are inextricably linked by the inequalities produced by globalization.
IV. Conclusion
In Chats perchés, Marker takes up the problems posed by Godard’s question in Eloge de
l’amour: « Quand est-ce que le regard a basculé? ». As Crary points out in his study of the
contemporary attention economy, Godard’s question about the gaze and the failure to account for
and address the global crises is not the result of the newness of our technological innovations;
instead, he explores how television set the stage for the 24/7 accumulation of images and an
archive that seems insurmountable, with its disciplinary effect that homogenized behavior both
through its ideological messaging and by regularizing engagement with the apparatus. Crary also
points to how television already offered a “promiscuous interface with a stream of luminous
stimulation” (87, my italics); now, portable media have allowed for what he calls “perpetual
illumination,” in the forms of continual engagement and algorithmic feedback loops. Crary’s
point in considering the history of the development of this mediatic apparatus is to highlight how
it has changed qualitatively, that is, how it is changing us, its users, and to prompt his readers to

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the fact that resistance to these systems of signification has never been more important if we
want to unite and act in any meaningful way. Marker’s use of détournement in Chats perchés
reminds his audience of the power of the weak or the minor. He notes in Staring Back, while
reflecting on his career as a documentary filmmaker, that his project began with a stolen camera
stealing light from the television crews. Considering Crary and his cautions about the perpetual
illumination of our attention economy, stealing light takes on a particular poignancy. By
détourning from a wide-ranging archive, including television broadcasts, the history of film, and
his own documentary images, Marker answers Debord’s call to create out the detritus of
spectacular culture and in doing so, challenge the ideology of that audiovisual regime. Moreover,
through his use of montage, Marker makes connections across time and space in the everyday
space of Paris: he makes diachronic links to other moments of leftist protest in France as well as
synchronically linking Paris to global sites of violence. In doing so, he invests his contemporary
Paris with a legacy of social activism, and charges it with the responsibility of continuing to
imagine a better future together.

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Conclusion
Structural Irrationality, Relative Mobility, and the 21
st
Century Everyday
In his 2006 book Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals, Bernard Stiegler
begins with an anecdote: while planning a drive from Rabat to Casablanca in Morocco, he speaks
with his colleague, Abdelkebir Khatibi, who warns him that the ring road surrounding the city
may be dangerous, as children who live in the shantytown near the highway were known to
throw rocks down at cars from overpasses. Stiegler then traces this phenomenon to Italy, where
an incident in Naples being reported on national news had the unintended effect of copycat
instances throughout Italy and in France. For Stiegler, as for Zizek in his book On Violence,
these are not casual or isolated acts, but rather symptomatic of systemic inequity: “As the Third
World extends further into the industrial world, this being so often the reality of globalization,
there are increasing numbers of people who find themselves excluded from technological
development, who benefit the least from such development, and yet who suffer the most from its
many forms of pollution” (Stiegler 15). Stiegler identifies, along with Appadurai, the cellular
flows of people moving across national borders due to the equally cellular, and more
importantly, unequal distribution of capital. These communities are made visible in many of the
works I’ve considered here; to take one example, in Maspero’s Les Passagers du Roissy-
Express, the North African and Turkish workers who migrated to France to work at Citroën in
the 70’s and live at Les 3000 find themselves in unsustainable housing and facing unemployment
two decades later, but their lack of mobility, in terms of the built environment of le Grand Paris,
their lack of resources, and the racism of nearby estates who refuse them on the basis of quotas,
forces them to continue living at the estate.

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Stiegler’s point is that in what he calls the “globally integrated and functionally
integrated technical system” (15), the rational logic that has as its raison d’être increasing
efficiency is ultimately irrational, in that it only ultimately benefits the few who have
consolidated control of its reproduction. Living within the everyday life of a complex, globalized
world involves trust, as he illustrates by continuing the highway example: “When we travel at
high speed on the freeway, we trust spontaneously and unreflectively in the bridges and
roadways of which the freeway is constructed, in the society that maintains it, in the car industry
that built our vehicle, in everyone that is travelling directly ahead of us, in mechanics… in the
police, in the systems dedicated to creating a smooth flow of traffic” (15). He describes here the
many moving parts of the contemporary world, including the planning, construction and
maintenance of local infrastructure, the global market that makes possible the manufacture and
sale of cars, the population of the city, the security forces regulating circulation in that city, and
the networks of sensors and computer servers to automate traffic control. It is a system at once
global and local, and the complexity of its daily functioning requires that everyone working to
maintain it and use it be invested in its continuation. What becomes increasingly apparent,
however, is that there remain parts of the population who, as Stiegler observes, “are forced to
‘live’ within the system, and who… are frequently unable to… derive any benefit from it” (15),
who instead only suffer from it. He continues: “[The] development of a technological system that
manifestly operates against society or against a part of society becomes structurally irrational”
(17). Contemporary industrial society, whether in the United States, France, or elsewhere,
persists in unequally distributing the harmful effects of its continued functioning on those who
have the least to gain from that continuation. However, when Stiegler notes, “[The] vulnerability
of the technical system increases proportionally to its sophistication – and, for this reason, the

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price paid for the hyper-power of the current system is its hyper-vulnerability” (16), he is clearly
not advocating for more invasive or optimized security. Instead, he makes clear that the
industrialized world must course-correct with “a new political and economic reality” (17), or else
face the consequences of a generalized disenchantment with society and an end to its ability to
sustain even the few that currently benefit from its reproduction.
Tom Conley begins his article-length analysis of the tracking shot that opens Haneke’s
Code inconnu with another illustrative anecdote, this time from Marc Augé, who in his
autobiography Casablanca recalls how the Liberation of Paris at the end of World War II was
not a clean transition from German occupation. Instead, moments of violence punctuated the
allied forces’ effort to secure the capital. Augé describes a moment when he and his father go to
the square outside Notre-Dame to witness De Gaulle’s return to the city, only for the assembly to
be broken up by gunfire from lingering Nazi soldiers. In his flight, he and his father hid behind
the portes cochères or entry doors that led into the courtyards of apartment buildings; as Augé
notes in a parenthetical, “[There] were no codes and so shelter could be sought everywhere” (qtd.
in Conley 113). Augé observes that the streets through which he and his father fled have become
upscale residences, and Conley follows up, noting, “Paris is no longer a place where shelter is
available for anyone. The new system of door codes assures safety only for those who can afford
to live in spaces of confined splendor” (113). His reflection on Paris’ contemporary inequality
leads him to consider the sequence near the beginning of Code inconnu that begins with one
character, Jean, trying to access the now-rarefied shelter of a bourgeois Parisian apartment,
where his older brother Georges and his partner Anne live. Confronting her outside the building,
he says, « J’ai besoin de logement, ici, à Paris ». The scene unfolds as a representation of
differing means of mobility within the everyday space of a contemporary street in Paris. Jean,

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who lives with his father on a farm in rural France but who has run away, argues his precarity,
but as shown in the scene, his connection to his family allows his passage in the city; he gains,
albeit temporarily, the door code and access to lodging in Anne and Georges’ apartment, as well
as food (the viewer sees Anne go into a viennoiserie and get Jean a pastry). Jean argues with
Anne, stating that he doesn’t want to live on his father’s farm and take over the family business,
and, as Conley observes, they are standing right in front of a real estate agency: “The irony is
that the… agency… displays behind its windows rectangular small pictures of domiciles that are
visually analogous to the door code seen on the wall at the beginning of the shot, and,
furthermore, that the conversation has to do with habitus: where to be, how to live, in what
milieu, whether urban or rural, and under whose aegis” (118). Extending Conley’s point, I would
say that by staging Jean and Anne’s argument in front of the agency, Haneke is using irony to
show that comparatively, Jean has a privileged access to the street and to the safety of a
bourgeois interior, despite his claims to the contrary.
Whereas Agnès Varda, in her film Cléo de 5 à 7, used over-the- shoulder camera angles
and direct point-of-view shots in order to simulate Cléo’s perspective and thus her state of mind
while engaging with spaces in Paris, Haneke maintains an impersonal tracking shot that resists
identification with Jean or any of the other focal characters. The questions of “where to be” or
“how to live” prove to be much more precarious for two other characters that are introduced as
the scene continues; Jean turns and Haneke’s camera pulls back, revealing an alleyway between
two rows of shops that operates like the mise-en-scène of a theater set, allowing for the staging
of dramatic irony. In the foreground to the left, the viewer sees a woman (later identified as
Maria), seated in the posture of a person who is SDF (« sans domicile fixe »); as Jean leaves a
small crowd who have gathered to watch a street musician outside a shop, he deliberately throws

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his pastry trash into the woman’s lap. This sets into motion a scene of conflict and
misunderstanding that lasts the rest of the shot; as Conley notes: “At the end of its itinerary the
tracking shot has staged a plethora of ‘codes’ in multifarious conflict” (120). These conflicts
reveal the respective mobility (or lack thereof) that each character is allowed in the Parisian
street. While initially, Amadou, a Malian immigrant, is able to stop Jean’s unfettered movement
and pull him back to the scene of his transgression, it is quickly apparent how little power he has
in a majority white, bourgeois space of consumption, as he tries to constrain both Jean and Maria
in order to mediate a resolution. First, the white male merchant of one of the nearby businesses
breaks up Amadou and Jean’s scuffling, calling them « voyous » (delinquents – and he later
makes clear who he sees as at fault, gesturing at Amadou and muttering, « Ces gens-là », a racist
implication) and drawing the attention of Anne and the crowd. As Jean attempts to assert his
mobility and walk away from the scene, Amadou pursues him, and the camera is brought back to
a closer range, enclosing the characters to their respective fates as the police enter.
In the figure of the two policemen, the situation becomes an issue, in Rancière’s terms, of
circulation. The authorities are uninterested in Amadou’s demand for civility; when he recounts
Jean’s actions against Maria, their response is to demand Amadou’s papers and to track down
Maria, who tries unsuccessfully to flee the scene, and who cannot produce identification. In one
of the ironic codes of the scene that Conley observes, “A self-involved adolescent tosses a ball of
crumpled paper into the hands of a sans-papiers” (120). As the scene concludes, the police
determine who has a right to access the space of the street: the merchant who intervenes is asked
to come to the police station and voluntarily make a statement, and Jean and Anne are directed
away from the scene, presumably free to go. Meanwhile, Maria is taken away by the police, and
in the next scene in which she appears in the film, she has been forcibly separated from Paris and

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France as a whole; the viewer sees her handcuffed and in custody on a plane as she is deported to
Romania. The figure of menottes (handcuffs) continues as the police refuse to return Amadou’s
ID, then compel him to come to the station by force, first by threatening handcuffs and ultimately
by two officers restraining him. In both instances, the police act with absolute force, determining
who is free to circulate in public space (the white bourgeoisie) and who must be constrained and
physically removed in order to maintain the stability of that space (people of color and
undocumented immigrants).
In his reading of the scene, Conley urges his reader to perform a semiotic study of the
signs that make up Haneke’s tracking shot: “Closely analyzed, say, in the manner by which
Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze ask their readers to “break open,” “split,” or “crack apart”
visible and discursive forms that convey the signs of everyday life, « viennoiserie » is a visual
symptom of the broader conflicts of code that Haneke stages in this film. Vienne . . . noiserie:
“let there be noise” or a staging of violence” (121). I’m compelled by Conley’s work upon an
otherwise banal signifier in the everyday life of a Parisian street. Noise means trouble, as in
« chercher noise à quelqu’un » or « chercher des noises », to look for trouble or pick a fight. The
viennoiserie is not only part of the mise-en-scène for Jean and Anne’s argument about his
lodging, it is also the site of Amadou confronting Jean about his conduct.
31
And as their explicit
conflict is registered by the crowd in the street, broader conflicts, espoused by members of the
crowd, about who has rights within the city’s public space as well as who has access to the
protection of the city’s domestic spaces, come to the fore: “The disruptions calling attention to
rules as they ought to be observed – or transgressed in order to be made visible – make clear the
contradictions defining the given social space” (Conley 121). In short, Haneke makes visible the

31
See Conley 119, where he emphasizes that these two conflicts are staged at the same location.

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code that governs Parisian social space in everyday life at the turn of the 21
st
century, and, to use
Stiegler’s language, he demonstrates that the logic organizing this space is irrational, in that it
defines itself against a part of society instead of accounting for everyone in that society.
The films and writings I’ve considered in Seeing Where There’s Nothing to See have each
attempted, through an emphasis on the lived experience of diverse Parisians, to perform the same
gesture as Haneke in the opening of his film: to represent the various lives and practices of
inhabitants that are made invisible by the police dictum « il n’y a rien à voir ». Returning to
Maspero’s Les Passagers, he counters the stereotype of the Parisian suburbs as homogenous,
empty and dangerous (a representation he encounters in guide books and in conversation with
Parisian friends and even the suburban inhabitant he and Frantz encounter) with an engaged
attention he describes by borrowing a sentence from his friend Miguel Benasayag: « « Plutôt que
de regarder, dire: ça me regarde » » (22). The colloquialism means “it’s my business,” but also
reverses the subject and the object of the gaze; instead of being the active force that surveys
space, the writer (or filmmaker, or walker) is captivated by what compels their interest. This is
the mode of attention that the viewer sees in the title character of Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7; she is
moved out of her subjective concerns by her dérive in the Parc Montsouris. Yet, even if the
character of Antoine helps to lift her out of her mundane relation to Parisian space, the two are
ultimately figures of les Trente glorieuses, in which, as Kristin Ross has noted in her Fast Cars,
Clean Bodies, France’s cultivation of a life-style of middle class modernity centered around
consumption of household goods, the car, and the couple as a domestic, depoliticized unit,
functioned as a disavowal of the colonial project and a recentering of administrative control on
the métropole.

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Haneke’s film and his scene of the unequal access to space that governs everyday life is
also significant in that it questions the terms of Maspero’s guiding phrase. When Anne
intervenes to separate Amadou and Jean from their fight, Amadou turns and challenges her: « Ça
vous regarde? ». As the scene unfolds, however, he is made aware that, due to the racist and
classist code underwriting the street, he is unable to engage in space as he sees fit, or to prevent
Anne and the bourgeois crowd of which she is a part to construct the scene on his behalf. He has
no place from which to speak, as the police’s intervention soon shows. Haneke’s film is
important in that it brings out the precarity of daily life for some inhabitants of Paris, to the
extent that some, like Maria, are forcibly removed from that space.
For the filmmakers and writers of everyday life in France in the late 20
th
and early 21
st

century, it is necessary to address the fact that different individuals and groups have access to
differing levels of mobility in social space. By extension, their claims on space and how those
claims are articulated (in other words, to what extent they are heard, by the broader public and by
the state in terms of recognizing those claims as rights) are weighted and valued differently, both
in public space itself and via media networks. For a filmmaker like Marker, who in one of his last
films Chats perchés uses images détourned from television and the internet, as well as films and
his own camera work, the emphasis is both on challenging the ideological message of televisual
media and to provide filmic images that counter dominant media representations.
At one point in Chats perchés, Marker uses his “morph-eye” technique to isolate the image
and sound tracks and highlight what Pierre Lellouche, a National Assembly member, says: “The
flood of anti-Americanism in which this country is swimming nowadays is incredible! We are on
the verge of the canonization of Saddam Hussein.” In the voice over as well as the image track
that shows a montage of diverse groups of protestors, Marker contests this idea that what is

153

happening on the streets of Paris is merely anti-American sentiment; rather, like in Haneke’s film,
Paris is shown to be, increasingly, a nodal point on global stage, as much a site of the cellular flows
of people and capital as it is the capitol of a nation-state. The narrator states: “Not smart, but
mainly, not true. These youngsters don’t canonize anyone, they’d rather demonize everybody…
They think global, and their slogan is: ‘To each his own.’” Just after this, Marker’s camera lingers
on a group of protestors singing, linking France in a chain of violence committed by world leaders
on disproportionate targets: «Bush, c’est l’Irak, Chirac la Côte d’ivoire, Putin la Tchétchénie, et
Sharon la Palestine ». The demonstrators shown throughout Marker’s film highlight many forms
of violence: acts of war, ethnic cleansing, far-right nationalism, laïcité and religious expression,
the slow death of AIDS, to name a few. Their concerns are representative of a France that is very
different from the one chronicled in the early 60’s by cinéma vérité filmmakers. Instead of a France
looking inward to the borders of the hexagone and away from the ending of the colonial project,
the France represented by the demonstrators of Marker’s 2004 film is one invested in the daily
violence committed against its own population as well as its implication in broader, systemic
violence. The crowd, Marker included, participating within it as a filmmaker, wants to show what
Rancière would call the « « il n’y a pas » » (241), the part of society that has no part, that is not
counted in the police’s construction of social space.

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Creator McLaughlin, Richard (author)

Core Title Seeing where there's nothing to see: French filmmakers and writers and everyday life in postwar social space

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (Comparative Literature)

Degree Conferral Date 2022-12

Publication Date 08/22/2022

Defense Date 07/22/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cinéma vérité,documentary,everyday life,France,OAI-PMH Harvest,Paris,Situationists,social space,Work

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Language English

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Advisor Norindr, Panivong (committee chair), Hill, Edwin (committee member), Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee member)

Creator Email richarsm@usc.edu,rsmclaughlin0@gmail.com

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