A journal, a voyage through time. He photographs France, she rediscovers the unseen footage he has so carefully kept: his first steps behind the camera, his TV reports from around the world, snatches of their memories and of our history.
If you're at all interested in global history with a French slant to it, then this is a must watch. Though her narration is a little on the descriptive side, Claudine Nougaret takes us on quite a fascinating look at events filmed over his extensive career by acclaimed photo-journalist Raymond Depardon. We feature just about everything here from the French colonial events in Africa - the much medalled Bokassa included, through a succession of French Presidents dealing with issues across their country from immigration and industrial relations to poverty and urban troubles. Clearly as time progresses, so does the camera technology used allowing us even greater and more intimate access to his subjects as Nougaret incorporates occasional sound-bites from contemporaries to put some extra meat on the bones of these frequently quite potent images. For the most part, the photography was self-filmed by Depardon and in some of the more hostile or less developed environments, you do realise quite effectively just how perilous his projects were as he accessed areas and people in his quest for honest journalism. It's certainly a journal of France's recent history, but there's plenty for others to get from the narrative and the well constructed use of the archive.