Claire Angelini

Avant-garde filmmaker Dziga Vertov is best known and appreciated for his formal inventions and his theory of life captured unexpectedly. But he was also a tireless promoter of the cause of women and their concrete emancipation. This film is a personal tribute to this aspect of her work and a militant film tract which raises the question of women's aspiration to a society emancipated from patriarchal archaisms and the alienating weight of religious customs.

This film takes a look at the French concentration camp at Rivesaltes. It does not deal with the site of memory but rather memories of the site through the concrete and physical data visible on the ground perceived as a holed-out space mined by disappearance, in particular the buildings, which subsist as ruins. This film is less preoccupied with drawing lessons from history than fuelling the present with a history that, like a blinding mirror, is of the utmost concern.

While the living find in the mountain indecipherable fragments of our former humanity, some absent in the plain seem to have left behind them remains that we no longer even know how to read and decipher. Thus the sense of the presence and disappearance of foreigners gradually emerges within this small territory, where they have constituted – Spaniards, Harkis, Poles – the most advantageous and most exploited workforce. To trace their presence buried in the post-industrial landscapes of this region is to find a memory of places and beings, and by this emergence of another history, to act of resistance. The practice of archaeology observed in parallel to this quest, allows to open a reflection on history as a materiality as well as on the part of opacity and lack that is at the heart of our otherness.