Carried by two very different approaches to cinema, these are stories which nevertheless echo each other. Two real, improbable miracles, each of which tells a large part of the so-called “great story”. Both concern an architectural construction which occupies a significant place in the history of contemporary France.
In Dominique Cabrera’s documentary investigation, the modesty of the means underlines the magnitude of the events mentioned and makes them close to the intimate. With the resources of a classically narrative and illustrative fictional cinema, but which contribute to making even more romantic the unfolding of facts that actually happened and which have clearly visible effects in the landscape of France, while bearing witness to a period of its history.
The first could have been called “The Unknown of Orly”, the second “The Last Plan of the Grande Arche”. Neither what the films say nor the way they are made are alike. And yet, together they testify to the inventive capacities of cinema to provide access to what the world we inhabit is made of.
“The Fifth Plan of the Pier”, by Dominique Cabrera
There was a masterpiece unlike anything else in cinema history. It was short – 28 minutes – with almost only photos, in black and white. Time and love, “World War III,” a fatal childhood memory. The title: The Pier.
There was this new airport, the materialization of the Trente Glorieuses (1945-1973) which were the pride of France, this country which was at that moment losing its colonial war against the Algerians who were finally going to win their independence. French families went to the Orly pier to marvel at a present turned towards the future, the families of French people from Algeria landed there, distraught, past destroyed, future blocked.
It was the beginning of 1962, when the photos which make up the beginning of The Pieron the footbridge then open to the public which overlooks the runways of Orly airport. Dominique Cabrera, born in December 1957 in Relizane (Algeria) and who would become a filmmaker (not enough) known for considerable work, alternating or mixed fiction and documentary, had landed there a few weeks earlier with her parents.
It was spring 2018, there was an exhibition at the Cinémathèque dedicated to the director of the film The PierChris Marker, and a visitor discovered this science fiction short film like no other. In the second minute, before the main character sees something that would mark his life and decide his destiny, he, the visitor sees something: himself.
In any case, he believes it. He didn’t know The Pier, nor Chris Marker, but he has a cousin, Dominique. Together, they watch the film again, observing this fifth photo, which shows a little boy from behind accompanied by two adults who could be the parents of this cousin Jean-Henry. And from there…
From this image, which in itself is so unspectacular, a multitude of stories unfold, intertwine and illuminate, in improbable and ever more extraordinary ways. There is the story of the returnees from Algeria and that of the invention of such a particular film, which became a major reference for everything that would be invented in cinema, particularly science fiction. There’s the story of Chris Marker, the story of the Cabrera family, and even the story of the lead actor in The Pier.
Step by step, with smiling obstinacy and in the company of those close to him – those of his family, those of his cinema family –, Dominique Cabrera retraces the tracks, tells stories, finds other images, lets memories appear, welcomes games with hypotheses, listens to how everyone sees, understands, remembers.
One of the great ideas of Fifth Plan of The Pier is to have constructed the film largely from an editing room, where images from Chris Marker’s films appear, where members of the Cabrera family discover them, where the filmmaker’s traveling companions come to tell their stories. Each exit from this black box is like an excursion, into the real world, into the past, into memories, always emerging from this matrix place – which is also a metaphor for cinema itself.
There is no longer one coincidence, there are five, ten. There is what we know, what we believe, what remains or becomes valuable again. It was
“just a picture”as Jean-Luc Godard said, and even the great inventor of memorable and fertile images that was Chris Marker did not know that this one contained so much potential.
Then comes, joyfully, including if intimate or collective dramas participate in everything that appears, the hypothesis which supports The Fifth Plan of the Pier: that every image is possibly a carrier of so many stories, perspectives, echoes.
And from this “little film” that Dominique Cabrera made, in an artisanal way, about a simple photo taken from a short film from seventy-three years ago, something of a vigorous magnitude, lively and mysterious blossoms, making us want so many paths to be explored even further. A film, what.
“The Unknown of the Grande Arche”, by Stéphane Demoustier
This time, what really happened is so extraordinary that there is hardly any need to find a cinematic form to tell it. The story of the choice of the Grande Arche de La Défense project and its architect by François Mitterrand – and what happened to it – gave rise to a barely fictionalized version, the book The Great Archby Laurence Cossé (January 2016).
As announced in an introductory article, Stéphane Demoustier added romantic elements, particularly around the main character’s wife, while significantly reducing the number of protagonists. In addition to the Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen and his wife, it will be the French president, his advisor for major works and the French architect Paul Andreu (the builder of Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport), willy-nilly assistant to the Scandinavian visionary genius.
The best approach to reconstituting this memorable affair of the 1980s, which culminated with the celebrations of the bicentenary of the French Revolution, is to play as much as possible on the comedy register. This is particularly true about François Mitterrand and his advisor, the urban planner Jean-Louis Subileau, renamed Subilon, deliciously interpreted respectively by Michel Fau and Xavier Dolan.
Neither reverential nor unnecessarily ironic, clearly offbeat (including physically), this approach helps to accompany the chaotic journey which led to the construction of the hypercube designed by this unknown architect, confronted with the political, architectural, urban planning and ego hazards, which marked its creation and gave it its current form, partly different from what its designer had dreamed of.
As much as an evocation of this very real adventure, the translations of which in the form of a project are very well rendered, it is in fact a question of discussing the place of the author in the creation of a collective work with a public vocation. In this regard, The Unknown of the Grande Arche curiously echoes New wavewith a rather different – and much less positive – account of the role and possibilities of accomplishment of a creation.
More than the constraints linked to cohabitation from 1986 or more than the differences between the two architects – the French star and the maverick Danish–, the exchanges between Johan Otto von Spreckelsen and his wife, invented by the screenwriter, pertinently discuss the place of the artist in a collective project. More generally, they debate in the name of what to compromise or not to compromise, which is far from only concerning architecture and cinema.
This is the richness of this film from a director who clearly has no pretensions as an author, no concern to invent a form in accordance with what he is talking about.
A sort of Paul Andreu of directing, efficient and reasonable, Stéphane Demoustier tells the magical and tragic story of an “other”, of whom we do not know to what extent he envy or finds him absurdly unreasonable, even suicidal. Leaving it to the spectator to decide, rather according to what he already thought than thanks to what has been shown, this will be the other unknown of The Unknown of the Grande Arche.
