After the explosion

Frédéric Strauss / Les Cahiers du Cinéma n° 511 – March 1997

Every Little Thing (La Moindre des choses). A meadow on the edge of a wood. They are there, haggard and apparently cut off from the world, zombies beneath the blistering sun, frozen in the dazzling light of some terrible eternity. This is how we find the mad people and this is exactly how we shall leave them. In between the two, there is a film, a sort of breach, opened and closed on this certainty: madness, this block of time and petrified, blinding light, is a place that we cannot enter with the (unhealthy) desire of seeing what it looks like or with the (generous) hope of easing the pain of what it appears to be. It’s a burden that we cannot bear for those who put up with it. We are either on the outside or the inside. But opening a breach in that certainty is the least one can do. With Every Little Thing, Nicolas Philibert treads a narrow path. At once rejected by madness, that presents its “unfilmable” nature to him as an impressive, paralysing and despairing cliché (the zombies), the filmmaker tackles this impossibility head on and does not attempt to get around it by filming, for instance, the supervision of madness. The clinic of La Borde, where Every Little Thing was made, is nonetheless a place where the question of psychiatric care finds different answers, far from the clichés, and stirs up ideas that it would be fascinating to see at work. We shall in fact see them, but in passing, almost outside the frame, without any commentary and without “patient supervision” providing the axis for our gaze. Every Little Thing begins where the cinema has lost its bearings and can no longer follow its own footsteps: neither a documentary on madness, nor a record of a psychiatric institution, the film has to find another reason to exist in the presence of those who have lost all reason. A magnificent project, both modest and ambitious, and that will be followed through with a humility that reveals the highest aspirations, with a faith in these people whose beauty can be revealed by the cinema.

At La Borde, Nicolas Philibert opens a potential space for the film by focusing on a simple thing that, when it is touched by the eyes, signifies a fine victory: presence. Presence is what escapes madness and madness is the place that the presence of the inmates at La Borde escapes to, where they lose themselves without warning. And so they don’t really care about being filmed in this exile that we imagine as a gaping chasm of distress and sorrow; they are no longer there. This indifference and impassivity are things that Nicolas Philibert fights against because what he puts into the act of filming, more than any other filmmaker perhaps, is the staunch determination that things should matter, on either side of the camera, that there should be a presence. Guided by this basic and essential requirement, Every Little Thing follows the sustained movement, increasingly broad and extremely beautiful, of a victory won, inch by inch, over absence, over the realm of madness. Each face looked at appears more and more inhabited, each person that appears before us at a given moment faces him or herself. The whole film relates the process leading to this presence as a story written with pain and joy. After seeing a bearded man with dishevelled hair, we shall wonder if he was there or not, if he was withdrawn into himself because of chronic bad humour or if he was cut off from himself by pain. The scene in which he has his beard trimmed gives a terrific intensity to this enigma: Philibert awaits the moment when the man’s mask will fall, when he will reveal himself as he truly is but that moment is fleeting or impossible to grasp. And when a boy, whom we have always seen distanced from everything and everyone, suddenly turns to the camera to ask Philibert if he is filming in black and white or in colour, the mask of madness falls for just a second. The film opens up this space again and again; it makes this moment linger more and more until it receives reality in return through the words spoken by Michel: he says that he “floats a little” (but that he fears nothing because “at La Borde, we’re all together and you’re with us now too.”) In following its narrow path, Every Little Thing casts a piercing gaze in order to perceive, within madness and protected by it, the place occupied by this presence shared “together”.

(…)

The thing that continually moves us in Every Little Thing is the feeling that the inhabitants of this world of madness have nothing: no bearings that belong to them (“the “structure” of La Borde gives them some), no shelter of their own (except the same as everyone else, this “structure”), no belongings (with no hold on themselves, the idea of property has little interest) or anything at all. And so the film refuses to take over their words, words that are always their own, never directed by questions, never taken in the logical flow of an investigation, never forced out by a confession, never obliged to make sense or invited not to make sense (the film does not attempt to seek out the “poetic language” of the “cranks”). The words are theirs and reveal them. When Michel speaks, his words form him as a person. Others, at his side, cannot say as much but, each time, it’s beautiful, with a primordial beauty for, there too, the presence of each of the others asserts itself in his words. When Nicolas Philibert revives the conversation during the take, he always does so to attain this fleeting presence. In one extraordinary scene, he brings back to the present the young woman who, opposite him, has suddenly fallen silent, as if swallowed up by familiar madness, bringing her back to her words through his own. Communicating with others here has the vocation of possible communication, localization and denomination. This is not the vocation of a therapist expressing itself but that of a filmmaker whose project is, from film to film, to make us hear another language. That of signs in In the Land of the Deaf (Le Pays des sourds), that of words snatched from the silence in this land of the mad. The strength of Nicolas Philibert lies in not believing that the documentary passes via the word (and certainly not the good word), but goes towards it, towards a word that is not ours and that expresses what we do not know how to see.

Through a miraculous stroke of luck, in which we have to recognize the inevitability that leads the strongest desires to their accomplishment, at La Borde Nicolas Philibert found his own film project already at work. That summer, in the grounds of the clinic, as every year, a play was being staged, Operette by Witold Gombrowicz, a merry fantasy in which everyone was invited to take part. In filming the rehearsals and part of the performance, Nicolas Philibert found himself at the very heart of this work of presentation, the issue facing him as a filmmaker. Taking over a text, speaking its words, waiting for one’s cue, matching one’s gesture s to the beat of the music to strike a tambourine, all lead, through this group effort, to the positioning of each person in the present, to his or her domination of a moment that, as they say in the theatre, belongs to him or her. The most beautiful thing is that this presence, that pushes back the spectre of madness to the extent that it is often not easy to tell the patients and care-givers apart, can also be played on, allowing it a free reign in an imaginary world where it encounters others, both fictional characters and those enjoying the show. Nicolas Philibert films this as a sort of vital pleasure, way beyond its mere therapeutic benefits: Every Little Thing is also a day of celebration and joy, inhabited by figures who have the power to be burlesque without us laughing at their expense because, through laughter, Philibert’s gaze highlights the human side and not the strange singularity of madness. Gombrowicz’s play helps a great deal – “ideal for La Borde or, if not, very well translated,” as Michel says. All the same, the filmmaker doesn’t use this almost surrealist play as a pretext for extravagance or for reassuring craziness (since it bears the stamps of literature and culture) but as an echo chamber for his own investigation of the world, with, over a shot of the château of La Borde, this line from Operette that appears as a key to all his films: “When human things are cramped by words, language explodes.” Every Little Thing comes after this explosion and gives its full measure to the reconstitution of human truth that it calls for. The most beautiful thing offered to the cinema for a long time.