Reviewed by PETER CALDER
(Herald rating: * * * * *)
One of the best of a brilliant crop of documentaries in the 2002 festivals was this utterly absorbing fly-on-the-wall view of life in a rural French school and it's gratifying to see it get the wider audience it deserves.
Philibert - who has taken us into the lives of deaf children (The Land of the Deaf) and behind the scenes at the Louvre (Louvre City) - is a prince among film documentarians, a status underlined last year when New York's Museum of Modern Art screened five of his films under the rubric "The Extraordinary Ordinary". The title is apt: his genius is to find the wondrous in the observation of daily life. "Documentaries don't have to be didactic," he has said. "They can have emotion and tell stories."
Philibert cut this film together from more than 60 hours of footage shot during almost a year in the one-room school in the small (pop. 200) village of St.-Etienne-sur-Osson in the southern Auvergne.
The arithmetic is instructive: the cameras rolled for barely an hour a week on average but the investment of time allowed the subjects to grow used to the film-makers in their midst. As a result, the footage that is gathered is extraordinarily intimate and unaffected.
The school's teacher, Georges Lopez, who we soon learn is about to retire after more than 20 years in the sole-charge school, has 13 children - aged from 3 to 15 - who are divided according to age between three separate tables. Moving effortlessly between primary and secondary modes, Lopez is a quiet, almost serene figure in their midst, practising an old-fashioned form of education, full of rote-learning, drills and dictations.
Most of the time the film-maker just watches. He briefly interviews Lopez - although we learn almost nothing about his life outside the classroom - and even more briefly takes us into a student's home. Otherwise nothing much happens - and you can't tear your eyes away. Because we are taken so deep into the lives of the subjects, we are completely absorbed and the last scene - time for goodbyes as the kids move on to a bigger school - has real emotional force.
It's as much ethnography as documentary, and it answers its maker's belief in telling a story: in the end it's just a portrait of a man at work and yet, because of its unhurried pace, it allows us to see things as if for the first time. Recommended.
DIRECTOR: Nicolas Philibert
RATING: G
RUNNING TIME: 105 mins
SCREENING: Lido
To Be and To Have
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