Profils paysans: Raymond Depardon’s Rural Trilogy

Abstract

Filmmaker and photographer Raymond Depardon has moved between Europe, Africa, and elsewhere in his long and prolific career. In 1966 he co-founded the photojournalism agency Gamma, becoming its director in 1974, and he is a member of the highly influential Magnum Photos. As a filmmaker Depardon is best known for a series of documentary shorts and feature films that set out in various ways to represent the spaces of society and the relationship between these spaces and the individuals who inhabit them. While his career has seen him travelling widely and producing photographic and filmic representations of Africa, Vietnam, and Cambodia, he has simultaneously maintained a fascination with his native France, particularly the rural France of his childhood, revealed to us in his autobiographical documentary of 1983, Les Années Déclic (The Declic Years). In the Profils paysans trilogy — L’Approche (The Approach, 2001), Le Quotidien (Daily Life, 2005), and La Vie moderne (Modern Life, 2008) — he returns once again to his origins: Lozère, Haute-Loire, and Haute-Saône, the semi-mountainous, rural regions at the heart of France. In these gentle and elegiac films he captures the quotidian life of farmers as they face the sale of their land, the approaching obsolescence of their labor and the inevitable, inexorable creep of their own aging. In forming and filming a relationship with his subjects and the landscapes they inhabit across three films and a period of over ten years, Depardon produces a nuanced portrait of a rural life that seems increasingly threatened with imminent extinction.