After decades of alienation from family and origin, Didier Eribon travels to his hometown Reims – and looks at his family history.
Frankfurt am Main – Based on Didier Eribon’s sociological study, the film “Return to Reims” on Arte this evening leads through a history of class differences in France. For Eribon, whose book was published in France in 2009 and a German translation in 2016, returning to his homeland meant not only dealing with his personal past, but also exploring the working class and its political transformation over the past decades.
The filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Périot had already created a film essay with “Eine deutsche Jugend”, which dealt with the student movement, which gained its expressiveness primarily through the skilful montage of archive recordings. He proceeds similarly in his approach to Eribon’s book, while the text of the book is spoken by an actress on the soundtrack. In the French original, which is also available in the Arte media library, Adèle Haenel (from “Portrait of a Young Woman in Flames”) has taken on this role. For the German version on Arte, Nina Hoss Eribon lends the voice, as in Thomas Ostermeier’s staging of the book at the Schaubühne Berlin.
Today on Arte: “Return to Reims” – class differences are left out
While Haenel’s way of speaking remains more sober and her intonation remains closer to an everyday language, with Hoss you can hear more pathos, but also more distance from the text due to the pronounced emphasis. The film creates a double distance from the original. Because even with the choice of a female actress, the Arte film “Return to Reims” sets different aspects than the book, which in addition to the sociological treatise also tells the autobiographical emancipation of a homosexual intellectual from his milieu. The film omits this as well as the class differences in the academic world as described by the author. The original title of the film, which contains the addition “Fragments”, indicates that there is no oversight, but a deliberate reduction.
Périot focuses on those aspects of Eribon’s remarks that focus on the generation of parents and grandparents and thus remain in the working class milieu. This was characterized by hard work and the associated destruction of the body, which is derived from the social differences: “The word ‘inequality’ is actually a euphemism. In truth, we are dealing with naked, exploitative violence. “This violence also continued in the conditions that prevailed within the working class and in families, not least in the way men dealt with their wives and children:” Everything, what my father was, what I reproached him for and what I hated him for, had been shaped by the violence of the social world ”it says here about the father, who in the book only enables the author to return through his absence.
“Return to Reims” (Arte): fragments of old reports
In the film on Arte, the focus is on the female path in life, which is also an explanation for the choice of a female speaker. Oppressed by the ruling classes as well as their own men, many women were exposed to the double burden of being workers and mothers. In addition, there was often the fear of unwanted pregnancies and their consequences.
Abortion was illegal in France until 1975. The fatal consequences of this can be read in the recently published German book “The Event” by Annie Ernaux – an author who has long thought about autobiography and class issues and acted as a role model for Eribon. But Périot also emphasizes this aspect again by showing excerpts from old reports in which doctors talk about the consequences of illegal abortions and tell with a shudder about the “scrap metal in the wombs”.
“Return to Reims” (Arte): The result is an impressive panorama
Archival material like this gives the film its strength and expands the spoken text to make it vivid. In addition to reports and documentaries, excerpts from films by Georg Wilhelm Pabst to Jean-Luc Godard are also used here. In this way, the film makes one think about the media staging of the workers. Most importantly, it enables you to see and hear these people instead of just talking about them. Fortunately, Arte decided to keep these sequences in the original in the German version and only to subtitle them.
In this way, ways of speaking can be experienced that no longer exist today; The result is an impressive panorama of the gestures and looks, the living quarters and workplaces, the machines, wallpaper and tablecloths of the working class of the past century. The film offers a counter-image to social development, as Eribon describes it: “What disappeared from political representation and critical discourse was not just the labor movement with its struggles and traditions. It was the workers themselves: their culture, their specific living conditions, their hopes and desires. “
To the broadcast
“Return to Reims” on Arte, Tuesday, November 23rd, 2021 at 9.45pm. The broadcast on the net.
In the last part of the film, the question is asked why the working class has disappeared as a visible social class, but also as an association of left interests, and why the theses of the book have been expanded into the present. Eribon sees the shift to the right in large parts of the French population as rooted in the “everyday popular racism” that he has noticed since early childhood. With the disappointment with the left Mitterand government, there was a migration to the right-wing extremist camp of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front National. This also resulted in a transformation of the political camps, which instead of class differences raised questions of national affiliation.
Eribon urges to create a left-wing resonance space in which the questions of the workers can be negotiated instead of leaving the field to the right. Périot responds to his hope that social events such as strikes and demonstrations can bring about a change with a montage of public protests, yellow vests and Fridays for Future activists, striking nurses and anti-racist actions. The sudden onset of emotional music, however, cannot hide the fact that the film lets political struggles fall into one another, in which very different positions are sometimes represented and whose claims inequality could also be exacerbated. The audience: to release the inside of the film with a nudge of activism through these images may be found sympathetic – but they seem too short-sighted as answers to Eribon’s questions. The film is most impressive where it does not try to look into the future, but rather brings the past into the present. (Jendrik Walendy)
