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 Chatela 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.

Georgian film: La difficulté d'être Géorgien (57')

Severian [Shebarnadze], semi-skilled worker, has been a handler with Peugeot for forty years. At one time he was an economist and vice-president of the Georgian National Democratic Party. The voice off explains that the language he speaks dates back to Sumer. This man addresses History in the nebulosity that is Montbéliard. The Georgian community lives in History. The first part of the film introduces a correspondence across the various communities, through their History. The Portuguese are at the opposite end of the scale from the Georgians. They live for today. Taking a close interest in History has been discouraged: "Queen Inès de Castro taught them that looking too far meant losing their sight." The Moroccans are part of a culture before being citizens of a country. Armand Gatti points out a paradox: ever since Morocco became an independent country, large numbers of Moroccans have emigrated to the former colonial power. The Italians are part of a duality: the southerners seeking dignity for economic reasons, while the northerners are survivors of the social struggles of recent years. The Spaniards are split in two, with some who are still living a war and others who have given everything up to return to Spain. On the contrary, the Poles, coming from a country that has been devastated so many times in the past, come to obtain French nationality and build their own home. Armand Gatti goes on to describe the Algerians as people perceived in a double sense – "the "wog" of yesteryear and citizens of a foreign country that has been made rich by oil. Integration or returning home, they have to leave one behind". As for Montbéliard's Turks, they have taken on the mantle of the 'ideal' immigrant worker: "hard working, never complaining and forcing the pace". This dream has become a myth; the role was played first by the Yugoslavs and then by the Portuguese. The film debunks the idea of any kind of homogeneous working class. All that exists is a reality of cultures. There is no global political consciousness – for them, changing the world is a question of success as an individual.

For the Georgian community, the constant and all-consuming interest is in History. A poster spells out the following message: "Being Georgian means going against the current of all ideologies. Against the flow of Marxism-Leninism." Annexed by the USSR, the liberation of Georgia can only come through the class struggle – for the Georgians, socialism doesn't lead to progress but to oppression. The film puts the emphasis on the social reality of immigrants: "They aren't men, but semi-skilled workers, labourers…to become a man again, a citizen-patriot-father, a person has to return to their homeountry." The Georgians see themselves as deprived of this return and try to become integrated in the host country. The voice off says that they are always putting off the question of their reintegration in Georgia to the next week. The scenario of the film integrates the community's interest in History, as the chosen title indicates: The difficulty of today's Georgian in avoiding being someone from the 12^th century. The scenario becomes a shot by shot description of a histographic sculpture, which follows Georgia's epic history. The sculpture, carved in a beam of a demolished house, is the work of Charles, a semi-skilled worker with Peugeot for 37 years. He used to be a shepherd in Southern Georgia. The man recounts the history of his country by moving up through the figures carved in the wood. We find the Georgians of the 20^th century at the top of the column – sagging, bent over and un-free: "Carried by a long history and crushed by it: the very thing they cherish the most."

Dominique Garrigues