Raymond Depardon (1942-) was born to a family of farmers in the Rhône region of France. Fascinated by images, he picked up a still camera at age 12 & has been associated with the apparatus ever since.

Pursuing a career in photography, he formed the photographic agency Gamma in the mid ’60s & documented celebrities, major events (the Algerian War, Prague Spring, the Vietnam War) & everyday French life, & later went on to join the eminent Magnum agency (for whom he still shoots). In 1974 he made his first feature documentary on the presidential campaign of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, finally released 28 years later as 1974, Une partie de campagne.

Not leaving still photography behind, Depardon also developed a unique style in documentary filmmaking & has gone on to make over 40 features, shorts and installations, including the ground-breaking The 10th District Court: Moments of Trials in which he was allowed special access inside the Parisian tribunal court. Greatly influenced by the cinéma vérité & direct cinema movements, he is considered one of the most important documentary filmmakers working in France today, & perhaps the only living heir to the cinematic style of Jean Rouch. His filmic approach, though seemingly at a distance from his subjects, imparts a melancholic respect, a compulsion to capture the humanity of the maltreated, the forgotten & the vanishing, & the grace & the simplicity of their existence.

7:00 - 1974, UNE PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE
Raymond Depardon (1974) 90 mins

Influenced by Québécois cinéma direct documentary, Depardon undertook this project as a commission from 1974 presidential hopeful Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to document his campaign. Winning by a narrow margin & receiving 50.81% (the film’s original title) of the vote, Giscard d’Estaing considered the film inappropriate, banning its release for 28 years. Important as a historical document, Depardon’s film offers a unique snapshot of power & political process.

35mm print courtesy of CULTURESFRANCE

8:40 - LES ANNÉES DÉCLIC
Raymond Depardon (1984) 65 mins

A meditative autobiographical essay assembled from personal archives, commissioned photographs & film excerpts. Depardon’s charmingly self-effacing narration guides us from his gauche pastoral beginnings to his novel trajectory through international photo-journalism. Intimately revisited are key periods from his industrious 20-year career: the rise of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Algerian War, May ’68, an odyssey across Chad’s desert in search of the ethnographer Françoise Claustre, & the birth of the newspaper Le Matin de Paris, to name a few.

35mm print courtesy of CULTURESFRANCE

9:55 - UNE FEMME EN AFRIQUE
Raymond Depardon (1985) 85 mins

Depardon’s first fiction feature is a subtle, multi-layered & highly subjective account of a failed relationship between an enigmatic filmmaker & an aimless young woman (Françoise Prenant) who decide to travel across the desert from Djibouti to Alexandria. This fascinating & mysterious film provides an important link between the director’s work in fiction & documentary, exploring the “empty” spaces of the landscape & the melancholy efforts of the filmmaker to capture both the shimmering world that surrounds him & his elusive muse.

7:00 - THE 10TH DISTRICT COURT: MOMENTS OF TRIALS
Raymond Depardon (2004) 105 mins

Depardon’s most celebrated film is constructed entirely from testimonies given over the course of three months by people inside judge Michèle Bernard-Requin’s Paris courtroom. Depardon’s Frederick Wiseman-esque documentary edits together footage of illegal immigrants, knife carrying citizens in defence of their petty crimes, traffic offences & misdemeanors, & the efforts of the judge to reach a verdict in the name of the people. Depardon fascinatingly revisits the territory & themes of his earlier Délits flagrants.

35mm print courtesy of CULTURESFRANCE

8:55 - DÉLITS FLAGRANTS
Raymond Depardon (1994) 109 mins

This absorbing snapshot of contemporary French justice & criminality follows an assorted array of freshly-caught petty criminals as they are interviewed by police & lawyers. The fundamental clear-sightedness of Depardon’s work is summed-up by the director himself: “A courtyard, an office, two chairs.... A policeman, a pair of handcuffs, the accused. The district attorney, pink & green files. Words, more words, sometimes calm, sometimes tense, funny too, & in the end pathetic. A document of imminence. A universal problem. In short, a film.”

35mm print courtesy of CULTURESFRANCE.

7:00 - PROFILS PAYSANS: L’APPROCHE
Raymond Depardon (2001) 90 mins

To make his most personal series of films, the “profils paysans” (“rural profiles”), Depardon spent 10 years with his camera following the lives of several agricultural workers & their families in the Haute-Loire region of France. This first chapter introduces retired farmers, young couples & family-run farms, all in a striking, almost stark, always respectful visual language, proffering a cinema about the art of time, patience & the documentation of human traces (& humanity).

Preceded by

Quoi de neuf au Garet?
Raymond Depardon (2005) 10 mins.

Depardon & his brother Jean chat about their memories of the family farmhouse as it is put up for sale.

Both 35mm prints courtesy of CULTURESFRANCE.

8:50 - PROFILS PAYSANS: LE QUOTIDIEN
Jacques Demy (1982) 90 mins

Depardon revisits the farmers he introduced in the first chapter of his powerful trilogy (L’approche), this time to concentrate on the vicissitudes of everyday life as his characters’ livelihoods are affected by globalisation & the mounting pressure to sell family farms. Depardon – himself the son of farmers – resists political dogma & hackneyed sentimentalism to create a restrained elegy. Shot very simply, it differs from the earlier film by dispensing with the principles of direct cinema to achieve an explicit dialogue with its subjects.

35mm print courtesy of CULTURESFRANCE