Robert Guédiguian

Joseph Mai

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526107787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Intervening at the crossroads of philosophy, politics, and cinema, this book argues that the career of Robert Guédiguian is the result of one of the most original and coherent projects in contemporary French cinema: to make a committed, historically-conscious cinema, in a local space, over a long period of time, but most especially with friends. The account starts with in-depth consideration of friendship and its relation to philosophy, politics, time, and space. The book chronologically traces this project as it begins in Guédiguian's hometown, the Communist-leaning Marseille. It further unfolds through the political transformations of the 1980s Left and the local activism and utopias of the 1990s, and spreads into Guédiguian's varied explorations of genre and register. Close analysis is accompanied with historical and social contextualization, but also with a consistent return to the underlying, radical and philosophically rich project.

1

Living with friends

‘Le cinéma ne m’intéresse pas comme métier: c’est une façon de vivre en collectif.’¹

(Danel 2008: 95)

‘Que ce soit la politique, les échecs, les boules, le tricot, la pêche à la ligne, le bricolage ou le cinéma, il faut une pratique pour rester amis très longtemps, c’est indispensable: il faut du grain à moudre.’²

(Danel 2008: 47)

‘Mais, lorsque nous nous retrouvons, se met en place en un clin d’œil une communauté étonnante, un moment d’utopie où nous allons à nouveau confronter notre histoire à l’Histoire, c’est-à-dire continuer à vivre.’³

(Danel 2008: 46)

Robert Guédiguian has had an industrious and productive career lasting thirty-five years (and counting), producing, co-writing and directing nineteen full-length films, as well as a parallel career as an independent film producer with Agat Films & Cie, a company that he co-founded in the early 1990s. His work attracts a core of loyal fans, numbering approximately 200,000, who consistently turn out for every film he releases. His most successful film, Marius et Jeannette (1997), attracted over 2.5 million viewers in France, had worldwide success and can be considered a key film of its decade.⁴

And yet, Guédiguian insists, as he does in the above citations (typical of many statements he has made over the years, and so to be taken seriously), that he really does not care so much about the cinema, that it does not interest him as a career or as a craft but as a practice with another goal: to enable friends to ‘live together’. The critical reception of his work may reflect this ambivalence: though he has many defenders, he also has a number of detractors who find his work too ideological, too simplistic, too Manichean, too melodramatic, etc. Guédiguian has sometimes been criticised for making ‘fictions de gauche’, well-intentioned leftist narratives that argue for a different world while neglecting to imagine a different cinema. The charge may or may not have some justification in the case of some individual films, but it is blind to the profoundly original and durable project of ‘living together’ that underpins Guédiguian’s work and that constitutes a truly different cinema. In this book, I will discuss all of Guédiguian’s films to date, sometimes in great detail, but I will do so with an eye to developing this deeper project. Indeed, much of their aesthetic merit, it seems to me, will appear more evident once it comes into focus.

L’Estaque, political commitment and the Common Programme

Living with friends, to ‘remain together for a long time’, involves a particular practice that I hope to explain over the course of this introduction. But it also has to do with ‘newly confronting our story with History’. On one hand, as we will see, this means that friendships are self-aware. On the other hand, the capitalisation of ‘History’ should tip us off that Guédiguian has a view of history related to Marxism. For Guédiguian, history, as Marx argues in The German Ideology, begins with life, the ‘real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity’ (Marx 1983: 163). Human life is moulded by these conditions, but humans also act upon the world to produce new conditions for living. When there is a contradiction in the ways in which the means of subsistence are produced, for example, when the social organisation of feudalism no longer reflects an economy in which the bourgeoisie is the main producer of wealth, then a revolution takes place – thesis gives way to antithesis – and a new synthesis is, at least provisionally, put into place. Guédiguian is a film-maker from the working class, and so ‘living with friends’ involves, for him, a constant evaluation of friendship from an outside perspective, in light of the place of this class within History.⁵ These two strands of friendship will be at the centre of this book: friendship as a local story and friendship within a broader, collective History.

This understanding of ‘living’ in history is anchored in Guédiguian’s own upbringing, in L’Estaque (and surrounding areas), the working-class neighbourhood of Marseilles where he was born and raised and where most of his films are set. L’Estaque, today forming a somewhat isolated northern neighbourhood of the city, sits on a bay surrounded by rocky hills, protected from the strong Mediterranean winds: the Provençal word ‘Estaca’ refers to floating landing stages in the bay where passing vessels sought shelter in bad weather. (The word’s literal meaning, ‘attachment’, rings true to many of Guédiguian’s thematic concerns.) L’Estaque has been inhabited since prehistoric times, served as a port for loading wine during antiquity and later became a small hamlet of peasants and fishermen, though eventually the mackerel, sardines and sea urchins will have disappeared.

Émile Zola’s 1884 novella Naïs Micoulin reads like a sepia photograph of the village during the transformations of an industrial revolution characterised by toil and class divisions. Zola tells the story of two lovers: Frédéric Rostand, the son of a wealthy lawyer from Aix, and Naïs, a beautiful young peasant girl whose father is the caretaker of the Rostand family’s country estate in L’Estaque. In an earlier period, Micoulin would have been a fisherman, and he still supplements his table with excursions into the bay to check his traps, but the family’s way of life is disappearing, and his daughter Naïs must take a job in one of the new cement factories in town. Frédéric, who has known Naïs since childhood, becomes infatuated when she becomes a young woman; at night the two sit on rocks looking out at Marseilles at the other end of the bay. Micoulin discovers the affair and plots to kill Frédéric, but he is killed in the process, when a chance bolt of lightning causes a landslide in the ground that he has weakened by creating an irrigation system for the olive trees. (Modernity kills him.) Frédéric, though a bourgeois and becoming a lawyer, comports himself as a kind of village lord. An injustice is expressed in gendered power relationships in a way that announces many of Guédiguian’s narratives: he soon tires of Naïs and abandons her; she marries a hunchback from the factory and grows old and ugly. Zola’s story bears witness to rapidly disappearing, centuries-old work traditions – fishing and agriculture – rapidly transformed through modern, capitalistic industrial techniques.

Characters in Guédiguian’s films still set out on a fishing excursion from time to time, in an evocation of antique L’Estaque. But his films are, of course, usually set in the stages of late capitalism, when the factories themselves are being torn down, as can be seen famously in Marius et Jeannette. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, L’Estaque experienced an influx of immigrants who came to work in these factories, following a promise of a better life, mainly from Italy, Spain, Algeria and Armenia, that would increase its population from a few hundred early in the twentieth century to 13,000 by 1931. Construction of canals, the Estaque train station and the viaduct of Corbière linked the town more closely to Marseilles. For many years L’Estaque remained a seaside resort known for its beach, village atmosphere and cuisine. At the same time, a neighbourhood like Les Riaux, built on housing allotments surrounding the factories, contrasted starkly with the few bourgeois homes of the village. This period also saw a rise in labour organisation and Communist Party activity. L’Estaque fell on hard times, however, after the Second World War, during recession, decolonisation and globalisation. Tile factories began to close, the bay was depleted of fish, shanty towns near factories started to appear in the empty lots made available by factory owners. Skilled labour jobs disappeared overseas; most factories were gone by the 1970s. Rouge midi attempts to tell much of this history. Even in 2015, while L’Estaque enjoys something of a third life with tourism, unemployment stands at over 16 per cent.

Guédiguian was born during the early days of L’Estaque’s decline, in 1953, though he has fairly recent foreign origins. His paternal grandfather was an Armenian who had come to France to study theology and stayed in Marseilles, eventually giving help to the influx of Armenians escaping genocide in Turkey. His mother came from a Catholic, anti-Nazi family in Germany, where she had met Guédiguian’s father in 1943, when he was stationed for obligatory work at a hospital near Cologne in the STO (Service du Travail Obligatoire) during the Second World War. At the same time, the first and strongest sense of significant group identification for Guédiguian did not come from national origins but from class and the Communist Party. Guédiguian’s mother worked as a housecleaner and stay-at-home mother, his father as an electrician on the docks; they voted communist but were not politically militant. Guédiguian observed his parents’ difficulties, feared for his own economic future and was politicised from an early age. He also owes a great intellectual and political debt to his childhood friend and future collaborator, Gérard Meylan, whom he had met at age five, when the latter was delivering the communist newspaper L’Humanité from door to door with his father.⁶ It was while listening to conversations between Meylan’s father and uncle (one was a schoolmaster and the other a leader in the Conféderation Générale de Travail, France’s largest labor union – Guédiguian compares them to his personal Marx and Engels) that he started to form an understanding of the world.

Guédiguian’s political consciousness grew during adolescence as he and Meylan became communist youth organisers. (He is proud that the youth cell he led was the largest in Marseilles.) During May 1968, at age fourteen, the two were organising demonstrations at their high school in Marseilles. Guédiguian eventually would attend the University of Aix-en-Provence to study law and economics and hone his debating skills against the conservative student body that dominated the university. (At the time there was no law school in Marseilles.) A year after meeting Ariane Ascaride in Aix in 1974, Guédiguian followed her to Paris, where he started a thesis at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (the EHESS), on the conception of the state in the history of the worker’s movement, under the direction of a well-known Marxist historian, Georges Haupt.⁷ History, and historiography with a militant and pedagogical goal, will be central to his cinema as well.

Despite this political commitment, Guédiguian underwent a major personal political crisis in the late 1970s, resulting in his departure from the French Communist Party in 1980. This departure was not unique to him: after decades of growth, the late 1970s and early 1980s were particularly difficult times for communism in France, and the party was in the throes of defeat, for many reasons. There are many ways of looking at the demise of communism in France, but two versions seem relevant here.

One version is perhaps best told by those whom one might consider Haupt’s intellectual enemies, the anti-communist historians who took the weakening of the Communist Party for a positive sign of the end of totalitarianism. In his account of what he calls the ‘communist illusion’, François Furet argues that communism (and fascism) grew out of an historical break from aristocratic societies by which modern societies set forth on a course towards individual freedom and wealth. A new cultural figure is identified, the bourgeois, whose value is asserted through having more wealth than his neighbour. The bourgeois is ‘animated by a corpuscular agitation, constantly driving it forward’, blazing a self-sustaining path away from the common good, atomising society and turning government into a means of protecting economic interests (Furet 1999: 3). Furet, however, is sceptical of the intellectual fixation on the bourgeois and claims that much anti-bourgeois passion is simply self-hatred of the victorious bourgeoisie itself, torn between the need to protect the new money-based social order and feelings of guilt for having instituted a ‘market, not a citizenry’ (Furet 1999: 13). For Furet, communism and fascism were totalitarian choices within a much wider array of responses to the modern democratic world. Both begat violent, repressive regimes: in communism, ‘Stalin would exterminate millions in the battle against the bourgeoisie’ (Furet 1999: 29). Rather than the promise of democracy and the social link, communism crudely defended the single-party state of the Soviet Union. This definition of communism as a totalitarianism became ambient among historians of the 1970s and 1980s, partly in reaction to academic historiography, dominated by Marxists such as Haupt. It does reflect the increasing conviction among many that the USSR was a monolithic roadblock to democracy; its fall could only be welcomed.

Since Guédiguian went on to make a film about him, it is important to mention the role played by François Mitterrand in administering the final political blow to communism at the French national level. Mitterrand had opposed communism his whole life but realised that the number of true believers in Stalinism and the French Communist Party was actually quite small and that most of the party’s support resulted from anti-bourgeois sentiment and dissatisfaction with Gaullist and other rightist policies. He set out to gain the trust of as many party supporters as possible. This was the period of the ‘Common Programme of Government’, negotiated in 1972, between the socialists and the communists, which included an official leftist alliance through a shared platform, including mass nationalisations (Tiersky 2000: 111). The Common Programme returns intermittently in Guédiguian’s interviews and even in films, including Les Neiges du Kilimandjaro, where a union organiser imagines that he has received a copy of it for his wedding anniversary. Mitterrand was never sincerely committed to collaboration with the communists but instead was interested in the electoral influence that the socialist reformers could win in communist strongholds. Eventually the communist leaders sabotaged the Common Programme b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Series editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Living with friends
• 2 Fragile friendships: Films of the 1980s
• 3 Crossing every barrier: The decade of the conte de L’Estaque
• 4 Themes and variation: Films since 2000
• 5 Conclusion: Another cinema – a project in time
• Filmography
• Select bibliography
• Index