There was a time when politics was an ideological battle, a place where radically different visions of the world fought, carried by men who incarnated them. Pierre Juquin was one of them. A member of the French Communist Party since he was 23, he was expelled from it 35 years later because of his will to renovate the movement. A dissident candidate in the French presidential elections of 1988, he became then closer to the ecologist movements. Directors Marc-Antoine Roudil and Sophie Bruneau (Ils ne mourraient pas tous mais tous étaient frappés) went to Auvergne (central region of France) ten years after their film Pardevant Notaire to film Pierre Juquin. In this land of History, from Vercingetorix -who resisted the Romans– to the factories working class, through meetings and sequences assembled as a mosaic, the theme of the film emerges: the Republic, the geographic belonging, war, capitalism, religion, a certain way to see the world.

Little by little, through the testimonies of an Algerian worker or a nun, which echoes to the words of Pierre Juquin who has the role of a guide, the drawing of an assessment of French society and of the western civilization slowly stands out. Subtly, without any didacticism, the film raises fascinating questions and reveals the complex interactions of its themes. From a ceremony of French nationality accession to the meeting with a doctor working in a housing estate, brick by brick the film adds its sequences to build an overview of this “land of use”, which is only what we make out of it. Auvergne, filmed here without any cow and almost no volcanoes -traditional cliché emblems of this land-, becomes the illustration of the “march of the world”, which is opposed here to conscience and individual initiative. Guided by the words of Pierre Juquin, as a witness of the evolutions during the fifty last years, the film sets up the idea of a certain form of resistance to the forced forward march of the world, the illusionical “end of the History” promised by capitalism. Fascinating in its content and in its form, Terre d’usage is a very singular film that should be discovered.

Francis Chérasse

Bu the film on DVD or download it here exclusively on Dissidenz! (French audio only, no English subtitles available)

After The Camorra School and its criminal children, Nico Di Biase broaches another sensitive topic: infanticide. For this, it’s within a psychiatric and judicial hospital, in the middle of the Italian countryside, that he decides to film and, most of all, to listen. Because The Black Blood of Medea is attentive to its “protagonists” -women both murderers and wounded, refusing their maternity and feeling unable to be mothers. They intimately reveal themselves, without any taboo, demonstrating a remarkable clarity about the act that has taken them there. An act one would be too easily inclined to describe as monstrous while it’s above all desperate, the upshot of a painful past and an accumulation of frustrations, domestic and social, which they have been the victims of.

Seen as modern Medeas, the documentary takes an interest in two of them. The first one, Stefania, puts her newborn child in a bag following a denial of pregnancy, and the second one, Giuliana, throws him out of a window. It’s difficult to picture these two women to be able to commit such atrocities when we see them blossom with a brush in their hands, gilting their psyches on a big canvas. With therapy by art, they can express themselves more easily than with words, each stroke, each form, each color enabling them to lighten their burden and their malaise. Painting and drawing become a catharsis and make easier the comprehension that doctors can have of them. That is through their work, often abstract, that Stefania and Giuliana regain trust, little by little, and at the same time proving they almost can become emancipated of the hospital and win back their freedom.

The evocation of Medea is not only linked to the infanticide itself but, as the famous priestess of Greek mythology, to the suffering that has led up to transfer on the child, weak thing, the hatred they had for their boyfriends.

The documentary fastens also to show the functioning of this kind of institution, and more particularly how the various specialists supervise the patients: in-depth psychoanalytical analysis of drawings (the receptacle of their anxiety et their phantasms), long recorded conversations… everything with only one goal: to understand the monster, who sleeps in each of us, waiting for the trigger that will maybe awake him…

Mathieu Col

Download the film The Black Blood of Medea, exclusively on Dissidenz.com (Italian audio with French subtitles only)

Instrument (1998) by Jem Cohen.

“The project was initiated in 1987 by a debutant filmmaker, who will become one of the most singular character of rock cinema. During ten years he followed the musicians of Fugazi, from scenes to studios, from creative times to pauses, to make a documentary portrait of a burning poetry and energy. Before it, no rockumentary had captured with such a powerful incarnation the work of the rocker and the effect of music on its creator. It really is a beautiful film.”

More information about Instrument

A musician, a journalist and a film critic, Julien Gester worked for French periodical the Inrockuptibles, collaborated to Trafic and runs now the Culture pages of Grazia. He composes music for cinema in the duet Contingence (last original soundtrack: Restless by Laurent Perreau).

A phenomenon taking on an infinity of forms, addiction has never been so virulent than in our modern societies where, driven by pressure of everyday life, the human being throws himself into the consumption of various substances as the only way out to his malaise. Easy to get, existing anywhere in our lives, alcohol is an easy access solution to any trouble which torments us, while keeping a festive aspect and therefore outwardly harmless. It’s interesting to notice that when cinema decides to lean over alcoholism, two of the most famous -and most successful- movies dealing with the subject are the work of filmmakers especially known for their comedies: Billy Wilder with The Lost Weekend and Blake Edwards with Days of Wine and Roses. As if being an expert in humor enabled them to put into perspective the darkness of man and to seize any dramatic topic without sinking into the most dripping pathos and whining effects. A Monkey on My Back avoids that reef too, Jacques Maillot (Our Happy Lives, 1999, and Rivals, 2008) remain ’sober’ when he depicts the portrait of an alcoholic on the path of recovery.

That man is named Francis, played by Gilles Lellouche, a skilled car seller, a devoted husband and a good father. By making the choice of a character, who is apparently not an outcast, the movie underlines the inner mechanism that leads a man to destroy his family as he destroys himself. From drinking parties to “one last drink for the road”, he gives way to an entire system, which will crush him and his circle. Helped by a deconstructed narrative based on flashbacks, the movie keeps confronting Francis’s past and present -a few shots are enough to understand the couple’s life before alcohol gets it out of hand. That’s what makes its strength and increases the power of the infernal path crossed by the character along with the different phases inherent to the will to get by his situation, such as weaning and acceptance. A painful way of the cross letting us to witness the heartbreaking Alcoholics Anonymous meetings where, openly and unrestricted, these people tell their experiences and intimate stories. During those fragile moments, deprived of any voyeurism, A Monkey on my Back unveils its full sensibility.

Mathieu Col

Buy or download A Monkey on my Back here

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Four Nights with Anna (2008) by Jerzy Skolimowski.

“It’s a very surprising film with stunning lights, an awesome work on the dark, it really is a masterpiece. The lights are pushed as much as possible to darkness, in the contrasts, in nights where you can’t see anything, anything but what is necessary. It’s the story of someone that only sees this, a character apart, who spies on his neighbour, he goes into her home, touches things, movesthings. We are there, we only see what he sees, it’s really astonishing, I rarely saw a film so brilliantly lightened.”

More information about Four Nights with Anna

Georges Lechaptois is a cinematographer, who worked on Twentynine Palms by Bruno Dumont, The Passenger and Story of Jen by François Rotger or The Other World by Merzak Allouache amongst other films.