“Les années déclic”, Depardon by Depardon

The 77th Cannes Film Festival brought us a marvelously restored version of Raymond Depardon’s Les années déclic, which was screened in its Cannes Classics section – this year, the French publisher Seuil published a book of the same title in which the photographer collaborated with the journalist and film critic Gérard Lefort. In a packed hall, the photographer and film director, accompanied by his wife and collaborator Claudine Nougaret, presented the film, which was made in 1984, with splendid black and white photography by Pascal Lebègue and editing by Roger Ikhlef and Camille Mestre-Mel. The legendary artist, Pulitzer Prize winner, and co-founder of the Gamma agency narrates in the film his youth and his initiation into photography, as well as his experience as a paparazzo and as a committed chronicler of his time. The close-ups in which he looks at the camera while commenting on photo after photo, as if it were the album of his own life, his entire career, the origin of his vocation, his first steps as a very young freelancer in Paris, to his most daring adventures, stand out.

Depardon reflects on his origins, but also his chosen profession, in the analysis of his snapshots and portraits, a dissertation that was spontaneously prolonged at the end of the screening when the audience on its feet kept applauding. Then, without a microphone and still standing in his chair, from which he had watched the film with us, he addressed the spectators who drank in his words with something akin to devotion. Without being preachy, with humility, he referred to the satisfactions that a profession to which he had given himself unhesitatingly from day one had brought him. Likewise, and significantly, he defended the profession of paparazzo, which, when exercised ethically, was on a par with any other chronicle considered more respectable.

Les années déclic is a testimony extracted from his archives, between 1957 and 1977, where, in the form of a cinematographic self-portrait, he reveals a unique and illustrative document of the two decades that radically transformed French society. What was going through my head? I don’t know what was going through my head. I wanted to be a photographer… or an image hunter. This card dates from 1957…, his monotone voice comments off-screen, and the viewer sees photos, documents, film extracts… And once again that close-up in which he questions us. Narrator and protagonist, he achieves a closeness, which after the screening we would find to be genuine, as had happened to some of us in other of his presentations and conferences in the past. The humility of an artist who seems to whisper to us, without fuss or grandiloquent or studied gestures, with the sole strength of his black and white face and his penetrating eyes, which serve as much to seduce us as to immortalize moments, does not hesitate to speak of his stumbles or to recognize the immense luck that chance has placed in his path since his beginnings.

Born and raised on a farm in Villefranche-sur-Saône, he did not allow his destiny to stand in the way of his vocation, so he left at a very young age for Paris, where he was to become one of the most renowned photographers and photojournalists of the golden age of the genre. Twenty years that were vital to the history, of unprecedented transformations, which his camera captured without pursuing them, as Gérard Lefort wrote: he was more of a gleaner than a predator. Therein lies one of the singular values of his work, the fruit of a gaze comparable to that of Agnès Varda, both capable of capturing the pregnant instant, with the simplicity of one who possesses the innate ability to find gold in the mire, to highlight meaning in a whirlwind of signifiers. We return to Lefort to quote a priceless definition of the style that made Raymond Depardon a prince among his peers: Behind a camera, whether photographic or cinematographic, as they say, he never loses a crumb, but always collects those crumbs – situations, landscapes, bodies, faces – to transform them into a vision of the world that, like a ‘table d’hôte’, is just waiting to be shared.

Les années déclic was presented by Films du Losange. The 4K restoration was carried out under the supervision of Claudine Nougaret and Raymond Depardon at the TransPerfect Media laboratory from image negative and 35mm magnetic and sound negatives.