Ruth Zylbermann’s documentary on dissent in Eastern Europe (Dissidents. Artisans of Libertyprogrammed this Wednesday, May 5 on Arte at 8:30 p.m.) offers us the testimony of actors in history – their speech, their troubles and their floats. He shows that commitment is a political gesture, but also an intimate provision, a break -in in the time of history. Proof that cinema can have its own historiographical dimension.
A historian who looks at a history documentary can question the historical operations prior to the production of the film – its particular documentation – and be led to assess its quality or relevance. We can then see him deplore the simplifications imposed by the pedagogy of the image, criticize the spectacularization of history, etc.
But it also happens that the historian is faced with a completely different question: that allows the implementation inaccessible to the work and the historical writing ? What happens, in particular, when we see actors of the past testify to the camera, when we show a word on the past being produced or uttered ? Because filming and showing witnesses’ speech can speak to us both in relations present in the past and the actors of engagement of the actors in history, which are not seized by the historiographical operation.
“” I don’t go back »»
In the first chapter of “ novel »That Yannick Haenel has just devoted to the figure of Jan Karski, the narrator looks and describes his interview with Claude Lanzmann in Shoah. He sees, and shows the reader, the eyes of Karski, who saw the ghetto of Warsaw in 1942 and “ look at you through time “:” They have seen, and now it’s you they look at. »»
The text of Yannick Haenel, – this is his great merit – explicit in writing what the device produced by Claude Lanzmann produces the device produced by Claude Lanzmann ; A device in which a witness sees a past that we cannot see and, in doing so, makes this past, in a way, visible, as a living and horrified memory. This cinema allows an impossible operation to the historian who would have questioned, “ testify “, Actors of the past: where the filmmaker shows and” mounted “, The historian most often inscribes snapshots of interviews transcribed into elements of context (biographical, social, political), treating this word like any other source, even if what” context Also includes the situation of speech specific to the interview (the presence of the historian constituting his interlocutor as a witness, the smoothing specific to the face-to-face, etc.). How to restore in historical writing the difficulties of the word of testimony, the moments of vagueness, the perceptible negotiations between what comes and what is expected, the disorders of the enunciation, the floating of attention, the resurgence of the memory ? How also to show an individual’s own force, like Karski, and the journey of his word, his particular presence in time and history ? So many questions as the historian, at first attentive – and for good reasons – to the facts told, mostly have to give up going through.
The moment of testimony, facing the camera, is nevertheless marked first by a refusal: “ No, I don’t go back. But this judgment in front of the threshold of memory precedes (at least in the assembly) the striking reinforcement of Karski on his journey on the other side of the walls of the ghetto. There, the story hangs and gives way to a series of horror images, shameless sentences, or scenes, almost vignettes, hell. The cinema speaks here not only of the emergence of memory, but of the mode of presence of the past of the disaster in the present of Karski (and thus in ours): scenes to which we do not want to return, of the scenes which are to our threshold and against which the story breaks.
“” Plunge into the dimension of time »»
Ruth Zylbermann’s documentary on the history of dissent in Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia), entitled Dissidents. Artisans of Libertyin a singular commitment the historiographical resources specific to the cinema. If the narrative and educational dimension remains strongly present (it is a documentary of history co -produced by Arte), the writing of the film, the interviews carried out with important actors of the Polish, Hungarian and Czech dissent, the choice And the assembly of archive documents open towards another questioning: that of engagement, not only as a moral and political gesture, but also as an intimate provision, inner movement. What means that, at a given time, the present becomes unbearable and that we resist ? Where does the courage come from ? How and why does an individual enter the time of history ? And how to grasp this experience, to show it, as singular and collective at the same time, singular and collective by the historical time which informs it and that it informs (that of dissent), singular as individual on the background of movement collective ?
“” Plunge into the dimension of time “: The expression comes in the mouth of Miklos Harazsty, Hungarian philosopher and poet, arrested in 1973 for a text entitled” Salary to documents », In which he denounced the condition made to workers in this very world who claimed to glorify the working class. Ruth Zylbermann alternately films him with his home and in his former prison. The return to the places of imprisonment digs time: there is a past whose experience is over, a past that can be proven in visible – and showable traces – like this cell (“” It’s weird to come back here. This is proof that it was communism and a police state »). But what remains alive, and what the interview so strongly seizes – that of Ruth Zylbermann with Harazsty, as with all those she meets – is that dissent, as resistance, gap, critical distance and As a set of actions, above all mobilizes a relationship with time, an intimate perception of the historical registration of the individual, of his commitment over time.
“” The most difficult, explains Harazsty, it may be the problem of time. How long would it still last ? All these years, I have practiced what I would call “a tunnel work”. You are locked up in an enclosed labyrinth system. You have to go down there, you got down there to be able to get out one day, but you have no idea of the time you will have to spend there. You have no idea. »»
Getting out of the tunnel means getting back time, entering action, engaging your personal time, biographical in historical time ; It is to refuse, in thought then in acts, the mode of articulation in the meantime and collective time imposed by the communist model, where the inscription of the individual in collective history, outside the heroic and exemplary hypothesis , is in anonymous participation in history as a mass movement.
But these remarks fall under historical discourse ; What Ruth Zylbermann films is individual provisions, faces, questions. And what she makes to win in the filmed speech is the way in which these individuals, personalities who have become famous of the Polish, Hungarian and Czech dissent, have “ felt (The term often comes back) history as intimate threat and have engaged in it, in the most literal sense of the term.
Get into time
Laszlo Rajk, the son of the Minister executed in 1949, tells how, during the Budapest insurrection in 1956, this “happened” strange ceremony “And silent:” Fathers, brothers and uncles took the children, the boys, and took them to the streets, to show them weapons and the dead. (…) It was like a strange initiation ritual that strongly marked souls and left deep traces in all memories. With repression, it is another silence that settles, that of official amnesia and silence forced to all, even to children (“ It does not exist, there is only silence “):” Surrounded by this silence, 1956 has become a skeleton in our closet. “Resistance, comments Ruth Zylbermann in voiceover, then” name these ghosts », Resist oblivion.
Historical discourse could once again try to inscribe these gestures and words (showing the dead silently in a revolutionary moment, learning to be silent and learning not to be silent, etc.) in a collective history ; This is present, carried by the voiceover and the rich material of audiovisual archives which alternates with the interviews, but it does not ease the speech of the actors in the mode of the historian context. By arousing this word where entry into history is said to be an intimate movement, by filming faces closely in the interviews and, above all, by choosing in the archives of televisions, Western or Communist, images where, from a Stroke, a face arises where we usually see the masses, the filmmaker writes another story: it is not – not only – of telling “ individual intended Remarkable against the backdrop of a collective history which would be both the product of the action of these individuals (Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, the Kor Then Solidarnosc in Poland, etc.) and would enlighten it, but to show as singular experience individual engagement in the time of history and to produce, for our present, a word which designates this experience both past and perennial.
The result is a certain lyricism, which distances the film from a production of reality as harsh, specific to contemporary documentary. Lyism of images (forest landscapes, so strong scene of clandestine reunion, in 1988, in a mountain clearing on the Czech-Polish border, dissidents of the two countries) ; Lyrism of setting to music (served by the compositions of Krishna Lévy) ; But lyricism contained, almost tense, which belongs to the actors themselves as a way of being in time or entering it, of asking the question of hope in action. The film device thus finds the difficult ways of an understanding story, which shows words and attitudes, without replicating them or reducing them to context. The capture of faces, speech over time and history, speech aroused by the empathetic questioning of the filmmaker and filmed speech, allow the seizure of time experiences which most often escape historians.