2018-08-30 - L'Obs
Ce dialogue avec le philosophe Alain Brossat permet d’expliciter les thèmes et la façon de travailler du cinéaste, tout en offrant un regard plus général sur le septième art et les différentes formes d’écriture. (...) Cette conversation de deux praticiens de la critique sociale, qui ont travaillé des années durant sur les mêmes thématiques sans pourtant se connaître, a quelque chose de décapant.
2018-09-10 - Laurent Etre - l'Humanité
Both the filmmaker, Jean-Gabriel Périot and the professor of philosophy, Alain Brossat have worked for years in their own field on common subjects: prison life, political violence, nuclear disaster and the women whose heads were shaved during the Liberation. It was inevitable that they would meet.
In this “conversation”, the two authors discuss the potential of cinema and the relationship between images and politics and history? How is memory created? How do we understand the archives? How do we go back in time in the historical and cinematographic sense of the term?
Jean-Gabriel Périot is a film director. A significant part of his work consists of documentaries made by using montages from audiovisual archives which examine different types of violence and look back at twentieth century or contemporary history. He has also made other documentaries (in prison or in the migrant camps in Calais) and several fiction films. His filmography includes two acclaimed feature films: Une jeunesse allemande (A German Youth) (2015) and Natsu no hikari - Lumières d’été (Summer Lights) (2017).
Alain Brossat is a philosophy professor. He is the author of Les Tondues, un carnaval moche (The shaved women, an ugly carnival) (Hachette Pluriel, 1993), L’Épreuve du désastre, le XXe siècle et les camps (The ordeal of the disaster, the 20th century and the camps) (Albin Michel, 1996), La Démocratie immunitaire (Democracy as immunity) (La Dispute, 2003), Autochtone imaginaire, étranger imaginé (Imaginary autochtone, imagined foreigner) (Éditions du Souffle, 2013), Abécédaire Foucault (An ABC of Foucault) (Demopolis, 2015) and numerous articles on cinema, in particular political forms and figures in film.