Richard Falcon

Nicolas Philibert’s Etre et avoir (To Be and To Have) is the most successful theatrical documentary feature to date in his native France. As a documentarian Philibert is renowed for closely observed films whose accumulation of subtle insights – whether into pupils in a school for the deaf (Le Pays des sourds, 1992) or life behind the scenes in a great art gallery (La Ville Louvre, 1990) – have a lingering, emotionally impact. Although his latest work’s popularity places it in the same league as Wim Wender’ Buena Vista Social Club and Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, it is a much more unlikely success story, centring as it does on unspectacular everyday activities – the processes of teaching and learning.

Philibert’s record of a group of 12 children between the ages of four and ten in a one-room school serving a small community in the Auvergne is both minimalist and intimate. At its centre is fiftysomething Georges Lopez, a quietly dedicated man who has been a teacher for 35 years, 20 of them in this tiny school. Lopez, with his black clothes and neatly trimmed grey goatee, has the still presence of a film actor – so much so that initially audiences might be forgiven for believing they are watching a naturalistic French drama. This is particularly the case as Philibert eschews the norm of both vérité – the children all seem oblivious to the camera and hardly ever return its gaze – and television documentary, giving us a minimum of information with the exception of one brief interview with Lopez. Here the teacher talks of his work in terms of patience and its rewards, touchstones for Philibert’s own documentary technique.

Part of the film’s pleasure undoubtedly rests in the innocent charm of the children as they struggle with things most adults have mastered (seven coming after six, writing the alphabet) and things many haven’t (socialisation, living together in harmony). Philibert’s nuanced portrait is free from the “issues” – league tables, drugs, truancy – that usually dominate the media focus on education. Instead “Etre et avoir” gets back to basics – to the mysteries and optimism at the heart of acquiring knowledge – and ultimately delivers a far from facile message of hope.

Richard Falcon : Was Etre et avoir a commission ?

Nicolas Philibert : No, it was an entirely personal project. The original idea was to do a film about the agricultural economy, about farming bankruptcies, but then I met with farmers and agricultural workers and the subject matter changed. For some time I‘d wanted to make a film about learning to read. It’a an important moment in life that can perharps be seen as a metaphor for montage : you put the letters together to make syllabes, the syllabes together to make phrases – a building process, like film editing. So in the end the combination of the two subject matters – the difficulties facing remote agricultural communities and a fascination with the process of learning to read – led me to seek out a remote rural school.

I believe you shot around 60 hours of footage. Was there initially a lot about the community to which the children belong ?

I rejected a sociological approach from the start ; I didn’t film the village or the working lives of the farmers, except for Julien, because he’s a pupil at the school and this was part of his everyday life. The film isn’t a documentary about life in a village in the Auvergne but an attempt to capture something more universal : what is it to learn, to acquire knowledge and social skills, which are the building blocks of civilisation.

You must have been very pleased to find a man like Georges Lopez on whom to centre the film. He strikes me as a superb teacher, patient and understanding.

I was very happy to find him. In the end I made the decision to use this particular school after spending only half a day there. And since you can’t tell much about someone after only half a day, there was no shooting script or outline – we began filming to see what we were going to do, and the filming was like a continuation of our research. So the film constructed itself as we went along and then took on its own form which carried us along rather than us shaping it.

There are two scenes that deal with issues outside school – when M. Lopez talks to Olivier about his sick father and to Nathalie about her communication difficulties. How did you decide wether to introduce information about the children’home lives ?

This was discussed with the children and parents from the very beginning. I wanted to film children at home doing their homework and this was worked out beforehand. In the scene when M. Lopez talks to Olivier I had no idea he was going to discuss his father’s illness, because they began by talking about Olivier’s academic performance. But at the moment when Olivier started to cry I began to feel uncomfortable about filming. I’d already explained to everybody that there would be a lot of film shot and relatively little used. So the editind gave me a second chance to ask wether I should keep something that exposed the children’s vulnerability. Such decisions weren’t taken lightly.

A lot of documentaries today are shot on DV and/or shown on television. How important was it for you how the film would look on a big screen ? For instance, there’s a very cinematic movement between the close-ups of the children’s faces and the shot of the countryside.

My culture is cinema. I detest television. Television is obscene in its transparency – it’s a place where people lay bare their lives for very little return. Cinema isn’t transparent – it uses elements like the grain, the depth of the shot, the play of light and shadow. Cinema is the art of ellipsis : the language is metaphorical and every film has its secrets and mysteries.

M. Lopez describes teaching as a process that demands great patience and takes time but is very rewarding. Is this how you feel about documentary film-making ?

The roles of the teacher and the documentary film-maker both involve the transmission of knowledge and require patience and the ability to keep an appropriate distance from your subject. Documentary film-making demands an aesthetic and moral distance. So the shots of nature in the film are very important because they create a contrast between this small class and the rest of the world. We open with the snow, the whistling wind and the cows being herded ; we thus recognize the school as a refuge from the violence of the world outside. The first shots you see of the school itself are the tortoises creeping across the floor : it’s a way of saying that the viewer needs to be patient as the film is going to take its time and will illuminate its subjects only gradually.

The children seem very comfortable with the camera. Did you work with them much before you started filming ?

I first met the children when we chose the school and then after M. Lopez had given his agreement we had a meeting with the children and the crew – five of us – to discuss the plan. Then we started to film. I’d worked with children in an earlier documentary made in a school for deaf kids and what I noticed was that far from distracting them, the presence of the camera seemed to concentrate them. As with all of us, the camera makes us want to look our best.

The children don’t seem obsessed with popular culture as urban children might be.

The idea was never to pull the school into the past – for instance, the school has computers but the film of children using them was incredibly boring. So I preferred to focus on the moments that illuminated the relationship between M. Lopez and the children. Then in Julien’s house the television was always on, but to film we had to turn it off.

Have you shown the film to many teachers ?

Thousands of teachers have seen it and there are various reactions. But generally they feel their work is undervalued by society and take the film as a welcome tribute to their profession.

What did the children think ?

They were moved, they laughed, but they didn’t talk much about it afterwards. Nathalie, Julien and Olivier, who were shown in situations that rendered them vulnerable, seemed even to draw strength from it. In a sense the way we made the film reflected the children’s experience – we were filming them overcoming obstacles, while overcoming obstacles ourselves. So we told the children we were in the same boat, both discovering things as we went along.

Why do you think the film has been such a success with audiences ?

At the moment schools everywhere face problems, but the film conveys the message that the situation is far from hopeless. And though it’s a documentary, it’s constructed as a fable or fairytale in which we feel we get to know the characters well. The shots of the landscape add to the dramatic narrative purpose, suggesting the dangers surrounding the school.

The film derives humour from scenes like little Jojo holding his tray at head height to reach the canteen counter.

I was always the smallest in the class so I identified with them struggling with the photocopier and climbering up to see things. The subject of the film is how difficult it is to grow up.

Do you wish you’d gone to this school when you were a child ?

As children we are forced to go to school. As adults we’re forbidden to return. I went to a very different school in the city and was very unhappy. In making this film I was able to take pleasure in school for the first time.