Dinner with Car les hommes passent [For Men Come and Go]

Interview with Assia Piqueras and Thibault Verneret, co-directors of Car les hommes passent [For Men Come and Go]

How did you find out about the situation in Gardanne?
It was in April 2018, a day with a very strong easterly wind. There was this photograph in the paper. An apocalyptic sky, saturated with red dust. The story is already old, it began over a century ago. In the mid-60s the factory had a pipeline built that was used for fifty years to dump the toxic sludge from its production of aluminum oxide into the Mediterranean. Nowadays, they dry it and stock it in the old valleys of Mange-Garri, above Bouc-Bel-Air, out in the open.

Are you particularly interested in the environmental poisoning caused by industries? And by the subject of pollution caused by human activity?
Our intention was not to put the situation on trial. Our project is different from an investigation or a documentary in the strict sense, staying both closer to and further away from its subject. Closer since it is based on the lived part of the story, which comes from the photos and accounts of the residents. Further away to the extent that the places marked by environmental aberrations are symptoms, pathological mirrors of our acts on a large scale. Observing Mange-Garri was like looking at the state of the world, meditating on its destruction. Alain Bombard changed public opinion from the early-60s: “This pollution is uncontrollable. Even if those who create it declare and believe that the product that they’re throwing into the sea will remain steady and never change, we cannot be at all sure, because people come and go, but manufacturers remain, and no one can take responsibility for someone else who’ll come after them”. We side with the aphorism. That might be what separates a committed film from a militant one.

How did you build the film’s pace?
We wanted the story to build towards the image of the disaster, based on individual memories and the private and public archives of the struggle. But the pace “took on” some gaps during editing, in a manner of speaking. It became porous and plunged into mourning. The tragedy is made up of missing elements. The black images formalize this lack. We couldn’t recreate the story in its entirety, and we also wanted to go in the opposite direction by removing images and changing their movement. The interruptions also let the text build up and find a foothold. They constitute an irregular, uncomfortable pulse, traversed by a dialogue among five voices.  One reads while the others listen – together they remember and predict.

Did you gather a lot of testimony and information during your preparation?
We combed through the affair, the newspapers, the reports of the investigation, the existing films. That research helped our writing, and scouting made us dream of a living word, but the accounts that make up the oral component of the film were gathered as we filmed.

Why were you interested in an abstract approach to the subject and the directing?
The abstraction is relative. It was more about making expectation possible, and respecting the fictional potential of Abdellatif Khaldi’s archives, which wouldn’t be limited to just their documentary status. The photos could seem like they were taken during the last days of the earth. The images we shot on the site of Mange-Garri and in Gardanne are cuttings, visions. They don’t define a place per se but rather a (present and future) state of the world. It’s only at the end, and in what already no longer belongs to the film, that we decided to illuminate the facts. In a sense, the abstraction works to console, it offers possibilities to the imagination – free and exploratory, but for us it was above all the vector of the tragedy. It gave a universal, inexorable character to the facts as well as to the images of Mange-Garri and Gardanne.

How did you decide which images to use to illustrate the situation and the subject?
Our choices for the film went somewhat counter to the illustration. We did not want to give an exhaustive, paramount vision of the desert. The viewer’s eye should be absorbed by the traces and the dregs. For the most part, we renounced including the horizon and the surrounding vegetation. It wasn’t a question of showing the existence of a healthy world that is contaminated from within by a sick landscape, but of imagining a world completely consisting of and confined to that landscape. The difficulty was in preserving the paradox of its sick beauty without succumbing to sensationalist images or ecological proofs. We wrote the film with the intention of having a parallel thread within it, made up of amateur photographs taken by the residents of Bouc-Bel-Air. Abdellatif Khaldi’s archives bring to mind the reasons for such an intention, working in two ways. They are images of a daily photographic inventory of an emergency. But they also reveal a peculiar, clinical gaze that is meant to elicit a sense of strangeness, silence and interment.

Have you discovered any advantages that the short film form offers?
The short form in films has something in common with short forms in general, a strength that is common to fragments, miniatures and strokes. If the film had been longer it would have lost some of the ambiguity we held so dearly, and some of the sense of discomfort as well. When lightning strikes, you’re blinded, and then it’s over. But your eyes and ears may still retain something.

Which works did you draw from?
Certain books by the later prophets, the Psalms. The films of Pasolini, perhaps, or more specifically Porcile. Other films that often mix documentary and science fiction, such as Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson, Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park, The Host by Bong Joon-ho, and Behemoth by Zhao Liang. Most of those films present human action as both destructive and greedy, inevitably political.

Car les hommes passent [For Men Come and Go] is part of National Competition F4.