In the following years, we have passed an année entière à regarder and Wiseman's films in his mother's details for writing and memory of the image and the reality. Welfare. Littérlement, the social aid, filmed in a center in New York, the Waverly Center. Je connaissais par cœur certains dialogues, j'avais l'impression d'une intimité avec les personnages, je me désespérais de ne pas savoir ce qui leur arriverait une fois sortis du center, où ils dormiraient, s'ils finissaient par se pendre ou par trouver des Amis chez qui passer quelques jours, s'ils étaient là à new le lendemain.
J'aime les polars et les romans-fleuves, les tragedies grecques et les comédies de Molière, avec un début, un milieu, une fin, la boucle est bouclée, univers clos dont on peut sortir sans l'angoisse de laisser des personnages à une place qui ne serait pas la leur. Alors pourquoi this fascination for ce film qui n'est que points of suspension ?
Nous étions en 2002, an après l'effondrement des tours, dont j'avais pris connaissance en sortant du RER A. À l'époque très peu de téléphones portables, ça captait trop mal pour qu'on puisse déranger la totalité de la rame en écoutant de la musique forte, en hurlant, désolée je ne peux past te répondre je suis dans le RER, ou juste en ne regardant personne, indifférent au monde, renvoyant imperceptiblement chacun à l'insignificance de son existence puisque même un regard ou une ébauche de sourire seraient inutiles. In sortant de terre, this is a message from my father who told me that this new one doesn't have anything to do with immédiatement compris qu'elle venait de dévier le cours de l'Histoire. Je suis rentrée chez moi, où je n'avais pas la télévision, j'en ai parlé, j'ai essayé de comprendre les conséquences de ces attentats sur le monde, sans percevoir le basculement qui s'opérait. You can't go on tours tomber.
I share a work on the perception of the real thing in the image documentaire, and pourtant je n'ai pas cherché à regarder de vidéos, à peine quelques photos en une des journaux, rien de plus. This is not the moment when you see the images at the moment. I don't have a theory or a verbalization to let you know. With the recul, and also that I chose a film in black and white tourné in 1973, errance of plus deux hours in a center d'aide sociale New-Yorkais, il me ensemble qu'il y avait là une sorte de choix inconscient, ou de malaise de ce que The télévisuelle était en train de venir, un mélange de voyeurisme, d'immédiateté et de sensationnalisme qui annihilait la possibilité de penser ce qui se jouait dans ce moment de notre histoire qui a marqué le changement de siècle.
Nous n'avions pas encore les yeux toujours entre un écran et le réel, les yeux qui se détournent de l'écran juste le temps de prendre en compte le réel, pour traverser une rue ou répondre à une question, et quand le réel nous surprend, vite The recorder in the screen for the partager, the commenter, the mettre en scène, not pour the questionner mais au contraire pour le mettre en ordre. Les prémices étaient là pourtant, et l'accélération qui a suivi fut spectacular.
Aujourd'hui, the image coule à flots, il ya des caméras partout, au fond des mers, à l'entrée des banques, en prison, sur la Lune, mais also chez les gens qui nous font partager leur intimité – notons que plus le privé devient public, plus on interdit aux personnes d'apporter In the public space the most important sign is the private one. L'invisible a envahi nos vies, on pense voir toujours plus, quand on regarde toujours moins. The existence of additional manners of cacher quelque chose, mais la plus efficace est encore de la noyer sous une masse toujours plus grande. The aiguille in the botte de foin. À force de trop voir, notre œil se fatigue, il ne distingue plus rien. The sommeil de l'œil is inseparable d'un endormissement de la pensée.
The screen is also a fenêtre sur l'autre, a moyen de renderre visible l'invisible, on finirait presque par l'oublier. I searched the films of Wiseman for a response to the need for politics of Lutter against the confusion between the image of the world and the reality of the world. These films nous disent: Voyez les hommes and les femmes, there are no small points in the tomb of the loin, there are masses of chair and douleur in the tomb of doucement pendant that you look at the ailleurs.
The imaginer Wiseman, with son acolyte, camera portée à l'épaule, agile and rapid, lui permettant de se mouvoir à la vitesse des événements. Il dit: Au tournage, the man à la caméra a un œil dans la caméra et un œil sur moi, moi j'ai un œil sur l'événement et un œil sur lui. Aujourd'hui cela paraît évident, avec son téléphone on peut courir derrière l'événement, zoomer, le regarder de côté, oublier même qu'il advient, preferer la trace au réel. Mais à l'époque, c'est une révolution, pas d'éclairage traditionnel au prix certes d'un grain plus visible, des micros sur perche qui permettent de saisir des conversations et des bruits relativement éloignés de la camera, aucune théâtralisation des prizes de vues, un dispositif dont la légèreté a As an object of transparency, it is different from the team of tournage to relax the view. Wiseman doesn't know that the presence of the camera has changed, but the changes in question are not important, but they are not a résidu, and the vision of the cinema doesn't disappear without entering the recognition of the events by the spectator. Plus the days are suitable, plus there is fondant in the décor. À dire vrai, on les oublie assez vite. D'autant que, in a center social, les gens ont bien trop de soucis pour penser à jouer un rôle. It's sont, et si perturbation il ya, elle n'est que le reflet de la Folie humane.
Constance Rivière, La vie des ombres (Stock, 2023).
The whole film Welfare online at archive.org
At the age of twenty-two, I spent a whole year studying one of Wiseman's films in minute detail in order to write a thesis on image and reality. WelfareLiterally translated: social welfare, filmed in a New York center, the Waverly Center. I knew some of the dialogue by heart, felt familiar with the characters, and despaired at not knowing what would happen to them when they left the center, where they would sleep, whether they would end up hanging themselves or finding friends they could stay with for a few days, or whether they would be back the next day.
I love crime novels and serialized novels, Greek tragedies and Molière's comedies, with a beginning, a middle, an end—the circle is complete, a closed universe that one can leave without the fear of abandoning the characters in a place that isn't theirs. So why the fascination with this film, which consists entirely of ellipses?
It was 2002, a year after the collapse of the towers, which I learned about when I got off the RER A. Back then, there were very few mobile phones; the reception was too poor to disturb everyone on the train by playing loud music and shouting. Sorry, I can't reply, I'm on the RER...or simply looked at no one, indifferent to the world, subtly reminding everyone of the meaninglessness of their existence, for even a glance or a smile would be useless. When I emerged from the earth, I received a message from my father, who delivered this news, which I didn't immediately grasp had altered the course of history. I went home, where I had no television, talked about it, and tried to understand the impact of these attacks on the world, without perceiving the shift that was taking place. But I didn't see the towers fall.
I began a work on the perception of reality in documentary images, and yet I didn't attempt to watch any videos, just a few photographs on the front pages of newspapers, nothing more. Only recently did I see the images I had taken at the time. I had neither theorized nor verbalized this refusal to see. In retrospect, and as I decided to turn my attention to a 1973 black-and-white film, a more than two-hour walk through a New York social services center, it seems to me that there was some kind of unconscious decision or unease about what the television image was about to become—a mixture of voyeurism, immediacy, and sensationalism that extinguished the possibility of reflecting on what was happening at that moment in our history, marking the turn of the century.
We haven't always had our eyes constantly shifting between a screen and reality, eyes that only looked away from the screen long enough to perceive reality—to cross a street or answer a question—and when reality surprised us, quickly saved it to the screen to share, comment on, and stage, not to question it, but on the contrary, to bring it into order. The beginnings, however, were already there, and the acceleration that followed was spectacular.
Today, images flow in torrents; cameras are everywhere—on the ocean floor, at bank entrances, in prisons, on the moon, and even in the homes of people who share their intimate lives with us. The more the private becomes public, the more people are forbidden from bringing even the slightest trace of their private lives into the public sphere. The invisible has invaded our lives; we believe we see more and more when we look less and less. There are many ways to conceal something, but the most effective is still to make it disappear beneath an ever-growing mass of information. Like a needle in a haystack. When we see too much, our eyes tire and can no longer discern anything. The sleepiness of the eye is inextricably linked to the stupor of thought.
The screen is also a window to the other, a means of making the invisible visible; one would almost forget this in the end. In Wiseman's films, I seek an answer to the political necessity of combating the confusion between the image of the world and the reality of the world. His films tell us: Look at the men and women; they are not small specks falling from a distance, they are accumulations of flesh and pain falling gently while you look away.
Imagine Wiseman with his companion, a camera slung over his shoulder that is agile and fast, allowing him to move with the speed of events. He says: During filming, the man with the camera keeps one eye on the camera and one eye on me; I keep one eye on the event and one eye on him.Today it seems commonplace; with a phone, you can follow the event, zoom in, view it from the side, even forget it's happening and prefer the trace of reality. But back then it was revolutionary: no conventional lighting at the cost of more visible grain, microphones on poles that allow conversations and sounds to be recorded relatively far from the camera, no theatricalization of the footage, a setup whose lightness aims for transparency, allowing the film crew to disappear and let life unfold. Wiseman is by no means saying that the presence of the camera changes nothing, but rather that the changes it brings about are unimportant, like a residue, a byproduct of the filmmaker's vision, whose insignificance cannot hinder the viewer's grasp of the events. The more days pass, the more they merge with the surroundings. To be honest, you forget them pretty quickly. In a community center, people have far too many worries to think about a role. They are simply there, and if there are disturbances, then they are merely a reflection of human madness. 1
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- “That’s what I’m chasing: a man born a good boy who one day decided to discover America. The land of the invisible, of voices and faces erased by institutional logic. The America of the margins, but also of those you no longer see because you encounter them every day.”
I'm following a man who has four instruments — a 16mm camera for the image, a rod for the sound, scissors for the tension, and glue for the meaning — has gone out armed to observe how people live.'
At first glance, nothing seems to connect the writer Constance Rivière with the American filmmaker Frederick Wiseman. Neither their origins, nor their nationality, nor their age. Is it this profound difference that forms the basis for this book?
What Wiseman has been searching for for half a century in over fifty documentaries about American society is the trace left by those left behind, the internees, the victims of domestic violence, those excluded from the economic miracle, the residents of housing estates, but also the members of a scattered human community that stretches from the small port of Belfast in Maine to the suburbs of Chicago and rural America in Indiana.
The factory of human exception. What do we refuse to see? How can we say what is happening outside the frame, on the theater of the world?
Constance Rivière, for her part, wanted to see what lay behind the apparent logic of the images, what stories could emerge from them.
Neither a biography of a documentary filmmaker with a camera's eye nor an essay about a humanity gone astray, Constance Rivière's narrative is a profoundly personal journey, akin to a detective's surveillance. A modern-day learning story.
The Life of Shadows "It's a fascinating hybrid book that sometimes feels like a comedy, sometimes like a tragedy, and always tells a story about a part of our humanity." (Translation of the publisher's announcement.)>>>
