As part of the exhibition Nouvelles saisons, self-portraits of a territory, écrans urbains is showing three films shot in the Gironde region.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025 - 8:00 p.m.: Des gens sans importance by Henri Verneuil, 1956
On the Nationale 10, between Paris and Bordeaux, Jean Gabin at the wheel of his semi-trailer rushes headlong toward his personal drama, and the more collective drama of the dissolution of proletarian culture.
Tuesday, April 15, 2025 - 8:00 p.m.: Rodéo (Rodeo) by Lola Quivoron, 2022
The fantasized imagination of a gang of young thugs who roam the suburbs of Bordeaux on motorbikes in search of an improbable deliverance.
Tuesday, May 13, 2025 - 8:00 p.m.: Merci la vie by Bertrand Blier, 1991
Blier, as a dream conductor, chooses the Lacanau seafront as the setting for a dreamlike drama. The boring buildings of middle-class seaside resorts become the unreal setting for a psychodrama as only he knows how to do.
Des gens sans importance
Henri Verneuil, 1956
film duration: 1 hour 41 minutes
Tuesday, March 18, 2025, 8:00 p.m., Utopia cinema
The first film in a cycle of three feature films devoted to cinematic representations of Bordeaux, Des gens sans importance(People of No Importance) immerses the viewer in a long-discredited culture, where professional conscience is based on class affiliation.
Trucker movies are a sub-genre of the road movie that stands out for its focus on the living conditions of asphalt workers. This is the case of Des gens sans importance, a melodrama shot in 1956 by Henri Verneuil, on the N10 connecting Bordeaux to Paris. While the few shots of the banks of the Garonne, in their port configuration, justify the architectural interest of the film, its true richness lies elsewhere.
To begin with, Des gens sans importance (People of No Importance) revives the close, almost intimate bond that truck drivers have with their vehicles. Made at a time when there were always two people driving at night, the film is a tribute to French mechanics, with Jean Gabin at the wheel of a big Willème “shark nose” semi-trailer, the most imposing vehicle on the roads of France, just before the creation of the motorways.
The film also accurately captures the spirit of camaraderie and solidarity that still prevailed in the 1950s. The 1960s, with their cult of modernization and consumerism, are not far away. This archaeology of class consciousness strangely resonates in an era like ours, dedicated to liquidating the last residues of any proletarian culture.
Des gens sans importance is valuable in that it revives a working culture that is now disappearing, lost in the new forms of slavery of precariousness and every man for himself. If architecture is returning to the forefront, it is in the sense of an architecture of human relations, of a proletarian ethic and visible and less visible solidarities, which structure popular psychology, and of which this film is a testimony.
Screening presented by Christophe Catsaros