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.
Merci la vie, Bertrand Blier, 1991
film duration: 1 hour 57 minutes
Tuesday, May 13, 2025 - 8:15 p.m. Utopia cinema
Cinema tells stories, but it also tells us about places. It feeds the collective imagination, film after film, forging a shared, generic idea of a house, a street, or a city. Sometimes it freezes them in stereotypes, sometimes it allows them to break free and experiment with other ways of existing and being questioned. A house can be the ideal family home with a gabled roof, as in most American films, but also a semantic prison, as in Lanthimos's Dogtooth. In doing so, cinema collectively constructs a city that does not exist. With no obligation to respect either temporal or spatial continuity, it constitutes a chimerical entity made up of fragments of urban clichés.
The setting of the dreamlike drama Merci la vie is the backdrop for the psychological ramblings of its characters: two girls on the run who are caught up with a manipulative doctor. The film deals with transgenerational relationships, female emancipation thwarted by the resurgence of conservatism in the 1980s, and the carnage of the AIDS generation. The setting for these intertwined stories is just as disparate and artificially constructed. Blier, as a dream maker, connects, for the duration of the film, the modern seafront of Lacanau, a disused train station and a casino in Occitania, as well as a picturesque village in the Haut-Languedoc (Olargues). This nocturnal setting is reminiscent of certain paintings by Delvaux. It is designed to accommodate the dreamlike wanderings projected onto it.
All these places achieve a form of narrative coherence that allows them to interact and, above all, to populate the viewer's imagination. These imaginary places are as important, from an expressive point of view, as the choice of words or the actors' performances. The scene where the two girls enter a sleepy little town at night, wondering if they have “ever taken possession of a town” before, reflects this convergence, common in Blier's work, between a setting and a psychological state. Long after seeing the film, we will probably remember one or two lines and one or two locations. What this urban representation does to our perception of the real city is another matter entirely. This is one of the reasons behind the Écrans Urbains project.
Screening introduced by Christophe Catsaros
Rodéo (Rodeo), Lola Quivoron, 2022
film duration: 1 hour 50 minutes
Tuesday, April 15, 2025 - 8:15 p.m. Utopia cinema
There is something amplified in Lola Quivoron's Rodeo. Like a discrepancy between the reality of the subject addressed and what is projected onto it: urban rodeos, these demonstrations of dexterity on two wheels practised in the middle of the city by very young people, far from any regulation and control.
A feminist emancipation story immersed in the imagination of the neighbourhoods, Rodéo gradually shifts towards another reality: the more aesthetic one of a secret society of crime, where testosterone mixes with the smell of petrol. The filmmaker's immersion in this fantasy world led to her finding herself at the centre of a controversy for having claimed that rodeo accidents were mainly due to the police chasing young bikers.
The film's appeal lies in this veil of sublimation that fantasises a code of honour and a collective spirit around a fundamentally asocial practice. This distorting prism is reminiscent of the yellow filter that Fassbinder uses extensively, in Querelle de Brest, to make Genet's fantasy world - an erotic underworld - coincide with his own obsessions. The filter acts as a device that distorts reality, allowing an idealised world to be superimposed on the sad reality of prostitution.
In Rodeo, this distorting prism is just as active, although less visible. It manifests itself in the filmmaker's sublimated gaze on her characters, and especially in her efforts to make them the vectors of a culture defined by a love of challenge, of surpassing oneself, and the games of loyalty between thugs.
The film, which was mainly shot on the outskirts of Bordeaux, offers few views of the city itself. The camera is often trained on the young heroine. Where Rodeo teaches us something about the city is in its ability to fantasise a reality that exists only in the imagination of its author. The perception of the urban fact comes under this interpretive filter: a veil of meaning and intentions delicately placed on the surface of things and actions.
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.