Films by Armand Gatti made in the Montbéliard region with immigrant workers.
Images and editing: Hélène Chatelain, Stéphane Gatti.

In early 1975, Montbéliard's Centre for Cultural Activities invited Armand Gatti to create a work in direct collaboration with the people of the town. The Centre provided video equipment and a subsidy from the Cultural Intervention Fund. Armand Gatti observed Montbéliard, the second-largest working class concentration in France, dominated by Peugeot. The town is home to some 10,000 immigrants, out of a total population of 35,000. He found that Montbéliard was a "schizophrenic town", inhabited by people with different backgrounds and languages. A town like the Tower of Babel. The initial hypothesis: "a film about you" – or the story of a town recounted by its inhabitants – became a history of inhabitants with a common denominator of exile. A film made in close collaboration with immigrant workers. In the context of Montbéliard's nebulous form with many nationalities, Armand Gatti suggested that each community should write its own scenario and give its own view of Montbéliard. Accompanied by Hélène Chatelain and Stéphane Gatti, he proposed to turn the words into images. Video provided the material that was adequate for the requirements. Armand Gatti: "[…] It is neither cinema nor television, but it is the possibility of brining into existence a language that we couldn't have had with television. And it couldn't exist in the cinema either, because it has no working class vocation, it tends to elitism: you send off your films to the laboratory and the people don't see a thing, whereas here, they have an immediate view of what they are doing."1 In the January 30^th 1977 edition of Le Monde, Catherine Humblot wrote: "Le lion, sa cage et ses ailes is not only an exemplary form of activity, it's also a new way of writing, a Godard-like style of talking round and about communication …" The immigrants chose to speak out. They filmed inside the factory but also in the streets where they lived. A kind of immigration that takes on its own personality and finds its own identity. Armand Gatti doesn't work with groups; he follows the individual. The film escapes from the dominant ideology of the 1970's. It doesn't try to unite the working class and dissociates itself from the myth of homogenisation; on the contrary, it shows that everything that has been said about the class struggle doesn't necessarily correspond to the experiences that immigrants have lived through. Hélène Chatelain: " […] it caught on about immigration. Because we didn't have a political standpoint, nor a strategic approach, but a variable approach that gave a completely existential point of view. Suddenly, the desire to speak out, the desire for an identity took a strong hold. "2 Le lion, sa cage et ses ailes takes on the form of an epic of everyday life with the appearance of faces that come into view, with first names and surnames. Individuals who carry the traces of the past (marked by history, by war…). Altogether, the full video includes six films, which are interwoven and superimposed, a prologue and an epilogue. Armand Gatti's team followed the progress of each community's scenario – sometimes the scenario became the story of the scenario. Over a six-month period, 90 hours of tape were recorded. Armand Gatti gave up the idea of making a 90-minute film that he would structure himself and at the same time, he gave up on the notion of making a "film d'auteur". The team decided to make three films, then six, then seven – finally, one for each nationality. In spite of renewed resistance, Armand Gatti was able to obtain funding from the town's social action fund and the cultural intervention fund, as well as help from the INA. It took two years of shift editing, Stéphane Gatti during the day and Hélène Chatelain at night, to finish the work. The editing gives a constant pace for these eight films, which are always well framed and often have moving images. Just as Armand Gatti's theatrical works are a blend of historic context and imaginary transportation, these films tell the story of everyday life to which various imaginative aspects are added – themselves the subject of commentary. The film builds on repetitions and corresponding features from one community to another. Each pivots around a central point: Mijailovic Radovan's identity papers, Uncle Salvador and his images of the Spanish civil war, Charles's sculpture and the memory of Severian, the dance and colour of the Polish group, the Ramadan intonation and the photograph of Gramsci. And yet each work remains the very image of Montbéliard, a schizophrenic nebulosity that is set out through the culture of immigrants and the poetic vision of Armand Gatti. Each film contains several films.

1 La Nouvelle Critique, June-July 1978 (as reported by Emile Breton).
2 Jean-Paul Fargier, "Une expérience de vidéo" (interview with Hélène Chatelain), Cahiers du cinéma, number 287, April 1978.

Montbéliard (43')

Montbéliard, a cockpit of industry. Armand Gatti shows us the town through the environment of its immigrant population. This urban space is an archipelago of communities. Montbéliard? A Spanish town, an Armenian town, a Polish town, a Georgian town, a Portuguese town, a North African town, a Yugoslavian town, an Italian town, a Turkish town. Each community has its symbols. This evokes bullfighting, the mass, history, football, the family, singing and dancing and Antonio Gramsci. The town can be taken in through a dozen different cultures, with the common meeting ground of the Peugeot automobile plant. The film's subject? A "strange land with no language and no frontiers: emigration/immigration". This first part, as an introduction to films to come, superimposes fragments, establishes the relationships that certain workers have with their own culture. Initially it plunges us into a world where everything is channelled by the hours of normality, the world of the worker. A sculpture made from scrap, the work of a Pole, gives us the arcane meaning of the title and takes us to the heart of the matter: Le lion, sa cage et ses ailes (the lion, its cage and its wings). The Lion represents the production. The Cage represents the Montbéliard region. Les ailes, the lion's wings, symbolise the immigrants who have become workers. The voice off tells us that these are the people who "wrote, pulled, carried, thought, played and even danced". A Turkish worker composed the music. Montbéliard shows us portraits of men and women- this one, a poet in Georgia, a labourer in France! The narrative weave dwells on details, details that have their own importance and which, in their turn, return in one of the six community films. And this is how everyday life unfolds within the different communities: in the North-African part, the typewriters are double (two alphabets) and elsewhere, problems of social security and language are evoked. The Armenians are preoccupied with the problem of matriarchy and the Polish community is busy getting ready for a wedding. The film looks for corresponding elements. It tracks everyday lives in their daily simplicity – complexity? – and the most commonplace enlightens us and invites us to observe. A market becomes a source for reflection: and if, outside the frontiers, one lives like a dream of dressing in Western style, in Montbéliard one lives the need to dress as an Oriental. The film highlights the changes from one generation to another. Like the young, qualified tradesman, a naturalised French citizen, who returns to Spain to find a job, while his Spanish father came to France for the same reasons. This part finishes with the one thing that brings together all the communities, the factory gates. A pyrotechnic display of bicycles, mopeds, and buses – mechanical voyages that start to move again for the third time in the day.

Dominique Garrigues