Inmates preoccupy themselves with making cardboard boxes. While working together, talking, gaining trust, plans for an escape unfold.

“Hello. My friend Jacques Becker recreated a true story in all its detail. My story. It took place in 1947 at La Santé prison.”

– Jean Keraudy as himself

Le trou is based on a real prison escape and introduced by one of the men involved, Jean Keraudy.

It's easy… no lazy to put this documentary away as a failed Idi Amin propaganda project. In 1974, German-Swiss Barbet Schroeder, privileged son of a diplomat, already knew more than enough about how to select framing and manipulate timing. The result, Général Idi Amin Dada: Autoportrait, is a prime example of the neo-colonialist gaze.

“You film. Film helicopter.”

– The General explaining a director's one and only task

Amin, clearly not speaking his native language, tries to explain his plans for #Uganda. The camera (Spanish cinematographer) moves in on his gesturing hands, then a jump cut (French editor) to soldiers who – instructed in English – seem unsure of what is asked of them. When (in the copy I watched) people speak in Swahili, no translation is provided and the portrayed are little more than undeveloped, exotic backdrop. Everything seems to be a joke to Schroeder: the air force's MiGs, Amin and his higher-ups joining tribesmen in dance, even the President's children are used to exemplify the stereotype of the overly virile, primitive African male.

 

Amin was, as Schroeder is, a product of Europe's Scramble. With the difference that, although bloody and despicable, Amin's strategy was not to embolden the West's moribund empire.

A ripple went through France in the early months of 1968. It started when the Communist and socialist party joined forces in an attempt to remove President De Gaulle from office. A month later, students at Nanterre (a Parisian university) teamed up with poets, musicians and small leftist groups to discuss class discrimination and political bureaucracy on campus. The meeting was peacefully disassembled but tensions remained. In May, Sorbonne students stood up for Nanterre, by then shut down. Then, police invaded the university and 20 000 stood up against the police.

“Convert all Parisian universities into reception centres for the revolutionary youth of the whole world.”

– student proposal

Somewhere in that crowd were those whose interest went beyond the main spectacle: the toppling of the new ancien regime. A #JeanRouch​ian anthropologist of sorts, artist, photographer and filmmaker William Klein pushes the eye through the masses. But it's also his eye; each frame is a Klein. However, we see not a documentary. Sound is asynchronous. Suddenly, it's night and flames lick the black sky. When bricks fly, frames follow. And then… the end.

A man murders another and meets a drunk sailor. The drunk then tells the murderer about his life on the sea. Les trois couronnes du matelot is of course never a straightforward crime film. It's Raúl Ruiz, it never is.

“I got nothing out of this crime except the ring he offered me many times; several hundred marks; a collection of old coins, of no value; and a long letter where he advised me to leave the country.”

– the student

The sailor drinks, celebrates and mourns the women and men of his past, we all get drunk on life while the dark water closes itself again above our heads.

Commissioned by the #PanAfrican literary magazine Présence Africaine to make a short film about African art, Chris Marker and his collaborator Alain Resnais – the latter still emboldened by his Van Gogh (1948) – were struck that unlike the Dutch painter's work, this #art was not on display in the Louvre or a similar cultural temple, but in the ethnological Musée de l'Homme.

“An object dies when the living glance trained upon it disappears. And when we disappear, our objects will be confined to the place where we send black things: to the museum.”

– narrator

These works of “Negro” art that embody such a deep cultural and artistic significance for the creators and the people they are part of, were, within the boundaries of Western civilisation, merely things. The editing (Alain Resnais), photography (Ghislain Cloquet) and dialogue (Chris Marker) bring life to these works. Through these voices they speak to the viewer, escaping the institutes' walls.

 

This voice was enough for the CNC to censor Les statues meurent aussi; only the first third of the film, the segment that's not blatantly #AntiColonial, was to be watched. And to this day, the documentary still has not seen a restored, digital release.

Monsieur #Hulot – who in his final appearance happens to be an automobile designer – travels to a car show in Amsterdam to demonstrate his latest creation, a camper van par excellence. The vehicle of course accommodates the latest gadgets, such as a collapsible grill.

“Where are you going, Mr. Hulot?”

However regarded as a lesser #Tati, Trafic, is another display of lovingly choreographed insanity, notably a #CarCrash that makes me wonder if this was Tati's attempt to transpose Godard's Week-end (1967) into a pleasant, pre-May 68 France.

The opera world is in mourning. Edmea Tetua, the greatest singer of all time, has passed away. On a grande ocean liner, her friends, colleagues, admirers have come together to scatter Edmea's ashes near Erimo, the island where she was born.

“This is the funny thing abut sea voyages. After a few days, you feel as if you'd been sailing forever. You feel you've always known your fellow voyagers.”

During a tour of the ship, the passengers visit the boiler room where – urged on by the engine room crew – an impromptu operatic competition unfolds, all to the pulsating rhythm of the steamliner's bloated belly.

#Cocteau's Orpheus – here the mythological poet and musician is personified by Jean Marais – accompanies a fallen young poet transported to the Underworld by car. The car radio plays fragments of poetry, interrupted by #MorseCode. When back in this world, #Orphée obsesses over the lines of radical poetry he heard and returns to the car's radio to retrieve them.

“Sleeping or dreaming, the dreamer must accept his dreams.”

– The Princess

Morse code and other industrial sounds serve as a soundscape for Cocteau's characters. They swerve in and out of it, sometimes fully aware of them (#Orpheus himself is attuned to the #poetry to be found in emergency radio broadcasts), by times passing through like a mirage.