Discovering Alice Diop, from MUBI to Venice: ‘Noi’ and other suburban films
His job is that: to look. Alice Diop, a French director born of Senegalese parents, has made something more of it: a talent. in the willingness to listen; in shrewd waiting; in the search for an encounter. The prologue of We (Nous) his latest film awarded at the Berlinale (2021, section Meetings), contemplates three people watching, waiting, listening patiently at the edge of the bush: a man (the elder Marcel), a boy (Ethan), a woman (Florence). They prepare the hunt which then, a good documentary, will involve a whole team, that of the Rallye Fontainebleu. It is on the sharpening of her eyesight that Alice Diop has built her career as a documentary filmmaker – as a hunter, more than stories, of authentic fragments of life.
From the award to the Caesar with the medium-length film Towards tenderness (Towards the curtain2016), when already behind him he had insightful filmic reflections of the caliber of Danton’s death (Danton’s death2011), his was a ‘escalation which has led her to establish herself among the authors to be monitored with greater attention in the contemporary scene. The special in five films on MUBI, between July and August 2022, provides the opportunity to discover it. But they are not five easy pieces: serving to focus.
About the periphery
And documentary makermoreover, not even enough, since at the 79th Venice Film Festival Alice Diop participate in the competition with a work that presents itself as a fiction film, Sant’Omer. Beyond formats and genres, his cinema, always within reality, has been refined on a sure about it. A certain lookbut I would like to translate – as “false friend” from French – also as some regard. His is a sensitive, even passionate hunt for the human: at the borders, in the peripheries, in the social interspaces. Own We, in this sense, it is the ideal film to discover a filmography compact in purpose, multifaceted in solutions. It is the center, that is, of a work centrifugemade of stories far from the center itself: tales from the periphery (this is the title of the special of MUBI).
Originally from Aulnay-sous-Bois, Alice grew up for ten years in the residential complex City of 3000, not without social complications known to the French press. But it is a place of the unknown. Alice, in no wonderland, he takes an interest in people and communities of the margins, sketching portraits of them that are interspersed with his own confessions. This is how her cinema is generated: born on the edge of the suburbs.
We: the trailer
We: what are you talking about (or who are you talking about)
On board the Alice Diop cinema, the film route is often intersected by the route of the RER Bthe train that shuttles between the center and the suburbs of Paris, connecting the invisible threads of a micro-geography of stories in the metropolitan area. Sacred RERone would say, paraphrasing the Sacred GR by Gianfranco Rosi. In We the station is a fleeting image, a memory that combines past and present in the banlieue; the rattle of the train is the necessary passenger of the sound montage. Openly inspired by the author and publisher François Maspero and his book Les Passagers du Roissy Expressthe director moves – not too much – along the railway line, intercepting experiences that overflow with lived experience.
There is a mechanic from Mali trying to make ends meet; a woman (Alice’s sister) who works as a caregiver with a care equal to that of the author; Writer Pierre Bergounioux he is interviewed to tell how, in his work, he wanted to dare a literary identity to the unrecognized community of Corrèze, in central France. And then, little girls gossiping; young men relaxing among the buildings listening to Edith Piaf. A cinema that to rediscover the nous – The wethe collectivity – it must be nthat is naked: he must recover, without censorship or distraction, the human space of the invisible.
Because We is the ideal film to discover Alice Diop
All this, were it not already self-evident in a cinema with such a strong hold on reality, We he declares it bluntly. In the interview with the writer Bergonioux, whose literary operation of recovery of the invisible periphery can be considered in parallel with the filmic one of Alice Diop, she reveals that she has thus rethought her own cinematographic experience in the light of the encounter with the author:
I realized that I made films about the suburbs in an obsessive way. And in part it is precisely the same obsession with leaving a trace, preserving the existence of ordinary lives, which otherwise would disappear if I didn’t film them.
Such a cinema – with a loose, wandering, free structure: Cinematic jazz F-RER – would run out in the siding of the click on the camera, if it weren’t for the keenness of that gaze. In short, serving soul. In Wethat is, as many aspects of her filmic personality a bit for fun, four souls of Alice Diop can be found, that is, as many aspects of her filmic personality as well as a better understanding of her work.
4 × 4: 4 Alice Diop anime and 4 movies to see
Alice the patient
There is a scene, in We, in which the director films the entire telephone conversation of the mechanic Ismael with his mother in Mali. The man speaks with his head stuck in a hood while he is in the process of repairing a car. The camera does not move. The dialogue is absorbed without restlessness. Dead moments are living moments in Alice Diop’s cinema, patient director. And the patients are actually in the film On call (The permanence2016), shot in a medical office that welcomes refugees, to heal both the body and the mind.
It is a film that by listening to the listener, in a game of Franco-Chinese boxes, it becomes almost the manifesto of attention: that of the director, of the doctors, but also of the gaze, which has to try its gaze in slow films, free from structure, dialoguing even empty. An attention that is care.
Curious Alice
In the special of MUBI dedicated to Alice Diop, a gem appears: a short film of 99 seconds entitled RER B (2017). Here the train that is the leitmotif of the French director’s work – who knows how many traces of existence in that million passengers a year – is observed and painted by the French artist Benoît Peyrucq from a bridge in Drancy. Transfigured into art, the engineering structure is almost invested with an aura of beauty. In a cinema without fireworks, which does not pretend to elevate songs to beauty, there is a scene of We which shows how the curiosity of the ordinary, the pilgrimage among the simple, necessarily, also open the doors of beauty. A group of children watch the fireworks; Alice Diop, with an attention to the public rather than to the show in style I 400 shots by Truffaut, he captures their faces illuminated by flashes of light and wonder. Now Alice (the curious) is in Wonderland.
Alice the listener
Alice Diop who listen who listens is present in another portion of We, the one dedicated to his sister. There, with direct, the first of the elders dealt with by the bad is not shown. In the other houses, the sister’s sunny character emerges in her willingness to be told stories, or even just to talk (with therapeutic kindness) about this and that. In Danton’s death (awarded at Cinema du Reel), the director followed the troubles and ambitions of Steve, a 25-year-old black from the Parisian suburbs fleeing the violence of the neighborhood to study in one of the most popular acting schools in the country. He soon discovers, despite him, that the system wants to relegate him to “black roles”. The sincerity of some exchanges, in which cinema is almost made, is impressive in this film listening therapy. Steve experiences moments of deep despair that Alice welcomes and incorporates with delicate reserve. Will it be a family dowry?
Alice the interventionist
One of the fragments of stories from We it refers to the director herself. Alice Diop talks about her origins, involves her sister, makes her father talk about her, shows an old family film. The passing away at other stories remains fluid. The community to be recreated, which the film aspires to, includes the author herself. What you put your face, then, in the aforementioned dialogue with the writer.
The author does not hide. At Bergonioux’s house, even the microphone of the sound jack stands in plain sight, in the upper part of the field. Contrary to a certain school of pure objectivity, Alice Diop in the documentary gets involved: it is body, voice, presence. In Towards tenderness (2016), in some moments his dialogue is also edgy. The film is a sort of “I don’t know how to talk about love”, in which the documentary filmmaker interviews young people from the suburbs caged in cliche of masculinity. With the first of the protagonists, Alice offscreen is almost pressing with her questions: what do you mean “easy girls”? What does “relationships based on lies” mean? By intervening, instead of merely observing, the strongest relationships are built.
Vers la vie
therefore, Alice Diop has seen them and shows them. Her cinema, hypersensitive to the ordinary as a reservoir of diversity, has the anxiety of losing the traces of existence. Explore by necessity. It does so away from the centers, which are already saturated with looks. And he firmly believes in the vitality that the cinematographic image can restore to anonymity. Talking, always inside Weof the filming of her father before he died, the director states:
It was nice to think back. They were more alive than that empty tomb. They are my first images. And so it is thanks to these that I still make films today.
Otherwise said: images have a soul. Even those who catch them, as if hunting. Perhaps there is no need to look for Alice Diop’s masters in the documentary school. The progenitor of Alice Diop’s cinema – French, provincial and peripheral – is in the 19th century: the inventor in painting of Realism, Gustave Courbet, with its anonymous scenes from Ornans. Not surprisingly, he said he wanted to do a living art. Alice Diop, at the moment, in the seventh art, is doing very well.