Video, colour, sound, 32 min.

Watch the movie. (restricted access)

The video work, Confessions d’un jeune militant (2008), in which the artist’s father himself appears along with a selection of books from his library which, like the earlier photographs of ephemera, recall his intellectual and political trajectory in post-war France. The artist’s son, who modelled incognito in the previous series, serves as an inter-generational go-between, duly yet nonchalantly handing his grandfather each title on request. Beginning with Léon Blum au congrès de Tours, the books thus serve as physical aide-memoires, as the former jeune militant recalls his past: from the Popular Front demonstrations in the mid-1930s, the Spanish civil war, his awareness of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact (between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union) and its consequences in 1939, which permanently distanced him from the French Communist Party. In the post- war period, he was active in several socialist formations: the SFIO (the French Section of the Workers’ International), which he left in opposition to Socialist Party’s handling of the war in Algeria, the UGS (Union de la Gauche Socialiste) and the PSU (Parti Socialiste Unifié, the Rocardian tendency) with a strong interest in worker self-management influenced by the Yugoslavian experiment.

Cinematography: Nicolas Guicheteau
Sound: Florence de Comarmond, Alexis Lazar
With the support of Fort du Bruissin, Francheville and Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris