Etre Et Avoir - a Documentary

Etre et Avoir.

Etre et Avoir tells the story of six months in the life of a small primary school in the Auvergne, a predominantly rural part of France. It is a documentary film, primarily operating through a fly-on-the-wall mode, that is to say without any discernable interference from the film maker. The camera appears quite simply to sit alongside the children and observe them as they go about their daily business in the classroom. What I want to do in the lecture today is discuss the ways in which the film both conforms to this idea of simply offering a window on the world, and the ways in which it is clearly constructed, using the same kind of ordering of material we would find in a fiction film. I will be concentrating firstly on the ways in which the mise-en-scene and editing is ordered by the director: secondly, on the ways in which the film thirdly, on the scene where the primary school teacher does talk directly to camera, breaking with the fly-on-the wall-mode, and lastly, about the ways in which the film's title plays with and adds to these layers of meaning within the film text. The most important message to take away with you at the end of the lecture is the concept that a documentary, as much as fiction film, re-orders the world it finds. All films operate a selection of material, the documentary no less than the fiction film. No film is simply a window on the world, a motif indeed played with in Etre et Avoir through its insistent use of the classroom window to symbolise the divide between the warmth, intimacy and knowledge of the classroom against the harsh, cold, rural world outside. The window itself then operates as symbol rather than clear screen, a motif that we could take to underline the function of cinema generally. The screen is not a clear view into another world, but the way in which we see bits and pieces of carefully composed footage that is put together through narrative and editorial codes.

Nicholas Phillibert, the director,