About 15 minutes before the end of Raymond Depardon's 2008 documentary La vie moderne/Modern Life, the film-maker frames Marcel Privat in a low-angle long shot as the elderly herdsman strides up a sunny hillside after his sheep. Two intersecting diagonals bisect the shot horizontally: a horizon line that separates hill from cloud, and the top edge of white clouds that give way to the deep blue of a summer sky (Fig. 3.1). On the soundtrack, wind rustles the tall grasses. Ewes’ bells clink as the animals move and graze. The next shot is also diagonal in composition, this time more subtly so as the focus is on Marcel, seated on the slope and framed from the waist up. ‘Vous avez combien de brebis là?’ (‘How many ewes do you have?) asks the film-maker, off-camera. Privat responds, ‘Une cinquantaine’ (‘About 50’). And then, after a pause, he adds, ‘C’est la fin’ (‘It's the end’). Depardon replies, ‘C’est la fin? Pourquoi vous dites c’est la fin?’ (‘The end? Why do you say it's the end?’). ‘Parce que moi je peux plus garder’ (‘Because I can’t tend any more’), explains the ageing herdsman. ‘Il n’y a plus personne pour garder. On va les vendre’ (‘There's nobody anymore to mind them. We’re going to sell them’). His younger brother, 83-year-old Raymond, declares in the next scene that ‘dans notre métier d’agriculteur dans les régions accidentées, il faut pas aimer son métier, il faut être passionné’ (‘In our job as farmers of the steep areas, liking your job isn't enough, it takes passion!’). Because of the rugged terrain, he continues, ‘on peut pas planter de la vigne ni semer du blé pour le vendre. Il faut bien que ce soit les animaux’ (‘we can't plant vines or sow wheat. We just have our herds’). After a pause, he too admits that he is ‘au bout du rouleau’ (‘at the end of his tether’).

The ‘elegiac’ tone that characterises Depardon's portrait of the Privat brothers permeates Modern Life, the final film in the Profils paysans trilogy, which opens with Gabriel Fauré's ‘Élégie Opus 24’ (Cooper 2010: 64). The three films include a series of portraits of family farmers in mountainous regions of central France, farmers who are ageing, dying, selling, or failing to start up new operations.

Black screen. Silence. Image and sound cut in, abruptly. A black-andwhite shot in close-up on a pair of hands. The torso faces the camera. It is wearing a puffy winter coat that covers the arms up to the wrists. The bright whites of jacket, fingernails, fingertips blaze against saturated black shadows that nestle in armholes and blanket the backs of the hands. The right hand holds a disposable plastic razor, also black, and uses the blade to slice into the skin of the upturned fingertips on the left hand. With a gentle rocking motion, the hand rolls the blade across the identificatory surface of its partner again and again, slicing into skin without drawing blood. Several voices murmur, offscreen, one perhaps belonging to the cutting hand's owner, perhaps to an onlooker: “Ah, là là. Ah, là là.” The camera cuts to extreme close-up, five shots in all, for a full 60 seconds of razor against fingertip. Then, faces and words, comments such as those above by young men explaining their attempts to evade fingerprint identification by European authorities. After another black shot, another series of close-ups focuses on fire, metal wires holding screws into the fire, and fingers pressing down on the hot screws. “I say it's our tradition,” says a voice. “They did it to our grandfathers. We are not going to wait for someone else to do it. We burn ourselves.” Then, an extreme close-up of fingers, crisscrossed by the white lines of fresh burn marks that will make the individual impossible to identify in any database.

This chapter begins with an ending. With the final shot of the 2012 film by husband and wife team Claudine Nougaret and Raymond Depardon, Journal de France. The camera looks out the front windshield of a car rolling down a curved road in a flat, nondescript landscape. A whitish glow washes out the colors into tones of yellow and sepia. The car passes some low buildings with illegible white signs. Then, suddenly, the road ends and there is nothing but sand ahead and water beyond. A beach. Sounds of wind and water. The car slows, but the camera continues its forward motion to take in the sky and sparkling water, fading to white for a moment, then to black.

Thus ends Journal de France, a recent collaboration between Nougaret and Depardon, coproduced by their company Palmeraie et Désert, with the participation of a list of distinguished organizations that locate the importance of this film in the broader landscape of French documentary filmmaking (France 2 Cinéma, France Télévisions, Canal+, Cinécinéma, the Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée, the Île-de-France region, Wild Bunch, and Arte Éditions). The film chronicles, on one hand, a six-year-long set of road trips that Depardon chose to make around France, alone, taking pictures with a large-format camera. In 2010, Depardon installed a set of massive prints (1.6 m x 2 m) of 36 of the photographs at the Bibliothèque nationale de France for an exhibit entitled “La France de Raymond Depardon.” Along the way, he shot autobiographical footage of himself taking pictures and sometimes chatting to the camera in the first person. In Journal de France, these sequences serve as an audiovisual refrain for the other main narrative thread of the film. This thread is made up of excerpts of Depardon's past film work that a first-person narrator, voiced by Nougaret, claims to have selected from the vast film archive that has accumulated in their shared basement.

Nicolas Philibert calls documentary filmmaking the process of “programming chance.” Even though much of what happens in documentary film is unplanned and unscripted, capturing it requires no small measure of preparation. The itinerary may not be known in advance, but the camera and microphone must be in the right place, in the space and time of an encounter, if there is to be a film. In the course of my own encounters with documentary, I have heard many filmmakers express variations on this idea. Jean-Louis Comolli writes that documentary filmmakers share “a love for the unplanned” and describes their work as “getting out in front of the real, exposing oneself to its risk.” Jean-Luc Lioult writes about documentary as an art form that “frames the unforeseen” through a “constant readjustment of the relationship between the intention and the unexpected.” To frame the chance event, a filmmaker must already be there, betting on the future as it were, by anticipating the potential that something more might happen. This stance of anticipation, as Philibert writes, begins with the choice of cadre.

Cadre is a capacious word in French: it includes the frame, the space carved out by the frame, and the broader inhabited environment where the filmmaking takes place. When Philibert starts work on a film, he begins by defining the cadre, and from that point of departure, he begins working with people to generate desire, the desire for a film. Filmmakers must locate, for themselves and for each project, the most pertinent place [“la place la plus pertinente”] and the right distance from the subject [“la bonne distance”]. As Raymond Depardon writes in Errance, “I must find what the Germans call Einstellung, that is to say how to situate myself with relationship to what I am showing, and at what distance.” “Programming chance,” in other words, is a labor-intensive process that begins with choices about place and space.

Throughout this book, I have consistently returned to questions about documentary space, about the choice of cadre as both environment and frame. I have allowed questions about space, location, and positioning to serve as a through line for navigation of a few films about France made by French filmmakers and drawn from the contemporary documentary archive.

Imagine, for a moment, a movie viewing experience in a darkened theater with breathtaking digital projection and surround sound. Wind and waves crash and roar as they pound an unnamed coast. Suddenly, the room goes quiet. Underwater, a marine iguana navigates a field of rocks and seaweed, perhaps three feet away. The camera pulls in closer to follow the muscular body in its rippling progress up towards the surface, with a point-of-view shot so tight the animal seems to be wearing a Go-Pro camera on its back. The camera then comes face-to-face with the iguana, at eye level, as it emerges onto a beach, buffeted by waves. The water sloshes around in the frame and splashes up over the field of view, almost spilling into your lap. Besides the pounding waves, tiny details of local sound are clear. The lizard's individual footsteps slap and squish as it makes its way up the beach; a horseshoe crab's shell creaks as it raises its body up and plops as it releases back onto the wet sand. A few shots later, a slow tilt up from an iguana's feet to its face is followed by a medium shot of six iguanas looking out to sea, as if they had come to see you at the movies. Then, in deep focus, horseshoe crabs move through shallow water in close-up against the flare of a rocket lighting up the sky in the distance. In the next shot, an iguana, viewed from the back, turns its head. An extraordinary close-up of the front of the head follows; the reflection of the rocket's glare is visible in its eye.

This sequence from Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud's 2009 film Ωcéans/Ωceans invites the viewer to enter the world of the marine iguana, to swim alongside the animal for a moment, and to imagine the multisensory stimuli that buffet it in its daily life.

The collection of documentary films presented in this book emerged across a 20-year period characterized by significant expansion in the growth and popularity of documentary film in France. Thousands of hours of television documentary roll out every year; theatrical releases of documentary films are on the rise; festivals and documentary events attract ever-expanding audiences; degree programs in documentary production have multiplied; and some documentaries have enjoyed an unprecedented level of commercial success. Within this broad context, established filmmakers have released major new works; new filmmakers have risen to prominence in the field; a broad range of new subjects have emerged; filmmakers have continued to develop new forms; and the French press revels in the dazzling breadth and creativity reflected in French documentary production.

The rising tide of visibility, critical acclaim, and commercial success for some documentaries, as well as increasing public interest in the genre, has also revealed some fragility in the ecosystem. The vast majority of documentary filmmakers struggle for production and distribution funding and have difficulty finding a space in the market for creative freedom. Many struggle to earn a living. An ongoing divide between film and television in public funding systems has been ill-adapted to documentary, which often straddles film and television. The proliferation of digital filmmaking technologies has drawn many more directors and producers into the marketplace, increasing the competition for existing distribution outlets. Many French documentary filmmakers and producers in recent years have expressed concerns about documentary losing its way, “a victim of its own success.”

The expansion of documentary markets and the worsening economic situation of individual films and filmmakers are both important elements to consider in the ecological view of the documentaries analyzed in this book. In the first part of this chapter, I sketch a roughly chronological overview of the creative ecosystem within which these films emerged and continue to circulate. I begin the overview with developments in the late 1980s and early 1990s that had a defining impact on French documentary production in the 1990s and beyond.