Take a classroom board, a maths teacher, and a call borrowed from Auguste Blanqui as a title. The scene is set. For a lesson? No, something else is up. With which actors, then? Secondary-school pupils, whose voices succeed one another in faltering German, to sing at first an extract from Wagner’s Parsifal. What is at stake here? It isn’t about giving people a say, that old delusive device, that so-called guarantee of authenticity. It is rather about providing ways to invent and elaborate such a speech. Other verses follow, by Mahmoud Darwish, Rimbaud, Plato revisited by Alain Badiou, or even Joy Division. The movement of the words unites with that of the teenage bodies for an eulogy of a deft run through the school facilities, an escape to a city taken from the rear: bypassing, climbing, going from black to white. The film develops a dialectic and a policy of individual bodies, glorified here as messengers of History. In a France denounced as postcolonial, via a detour through Palestine, Histories are going around. Thus in this first, openly ambitious film shot in a school, Laurent Krief turns words, philosophical dialogue and poetry into enemies of academic knowledge: a war catch for a future emancipation. Laurent KRIEF
Nicolas Féodoroff
