It could be said that the director of Ser y estar (2002), that endearing documentary about the school in a lost village in deep France, has always been linked to madness. In the beginning, in the mid-seventies, Nicolas Philibert (Nancy, 1951) was René Allio's assistant in a mythical film, based on a chilling true event: Moi, Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et mon frère … A very long title that reproduced the beginning of the confession of a young man who, in nineteenth-century Normandy, had killed his entire family. Within the framework of the L'Alternativa Festival in Barcelona, Philibert remembers that case that obsessed Michel Foucault: “It was very interesting, because Pierre Rivière was considered the town fool, but when he turned himself in, after surviving a month in the forests, wrote a ninety-page confession, which was very lucid in many aspects, and was seen to be very intelligent. The film already had a documentary aspect, because Allio had locals to play the peasants, and I was in charge of recruiting them.”
Years later, now one of France's most revered documentary filmmakers, Philibert directed La moindre des choses (1997), about La Borde, a mental health center located in a Moulinsart-style castle on the banks of the Loire: “It was quite a place. particular, in which there were no walls. Some friends suggested I visit it, although the idea of showing up with my camera and turning the suffering of those people into a spectacle was unbearable to me. But, once there, when I told them my scruples, it was the patients themselves who encouraged me to film them. In the end, I made the film to overcome my own fears. “Twenty-five years later, I have returned to the field of psychiatry, and I am no longer afraid.”
In La moindre des choses, the common thread was the preparation of a play, which, on paper, can be reminiscent of Titicut Follies (1967), Frederic Wiseman's first documentary. But, as Philibert says, “the big difference is that I don't disappear behind the camera like he does. On the contrary, I am very present, I get completely involved, I talk to people while I film them and I also get along very well with those who do not want me to film them, because I understand that a camera is an instrument of power with which, very quickly, “You can exert pressure.” In any case, aboard the Adamant, which is a center located on a barge docked in the center of Paris, with a spirit similar to La Borde, “I no longer needed a common thread, I let myself be carried away by chance. It is an open, effervescent place, where many things happen all the time. There are workshops on film, music, radio, sewing, drawing... They constantly invite people to come and give talks, they are very connected to current events. It is a place where the collective is therapeutic.”
True to his immersive style, Philibert mixes with the crew and films them without distinguishing between therapists and patients. “Madness is part of Humanity, it is society that raises barriers,” he claims. Some characters have a physique deteriorated by madness, but there are also others, such as Frédéric Prieur, whose eccentricity could simply be that of a total artist: “Is it possible to be creative without being a little crazy? I made this film so that we reflect on madness. Prieur also draws, paints, writes. I don't know what his medical history is, because I only film what they give me, I don't get involved. But artists are hypersensitive people, just like many we encounter in the world of psychiatry. Clichés want crazy people to be incoherent, potentially dangerous people, when in reality it is quite rare for a violent situation to occur. And when it happens it is usually to hurt themselves. What differentiates us the most is that we have strategies to protect ourselves from the violence of an extremely dark world, while they are much more exposed, they do not know how to protect themselves and they also speak to us without filters, free of all social conventions.
Finally, precisely in the courtyard of the CCCB, where the exhibition dedicated to Francesc Tosquelles took place a couple of years ago, Philibert ends up telling us “about the Catalan psychiatrist, who crossed the Pyrenees, with his Lacan thesis under his arm, to flee from Francoism. He is the father of institutional psychotherapy, a school of thought that, among other things, reminded that institutions also had to be cared for. They must be protected from abandonment and routine: Adamant was created in 2010, but it is a very fragile institution. The field of psychiatry is devastated in France. Very few resources are invested, and thus it is less attractive. And you cannot be a good caregiver if there is not a strong personal involvement. For me, Tosquelles settled the issue when he distinguished between those who had succeeded with his madness, the great geniuses like Dalí, etc., and those who had failed.
