Field Diary

Cannes: Festival de Canard 1983.
A film-diary shot in the occupied territories before and during the invasion of Lebanon.
"The film consists of about fifty sequence shots conceived as autonomous capsules, mostly shot from a moving car as if this was its inseparable carriage, the moving base of the camera. The road is the transformed into an endless travelling shot, stretching across the occupied zones, with pauses, occasional stops, slowing down, with emphatic moments. Here, more than anywhere else, the travelling shot becomes a question of morality. (…) We never enter into the reality of the war, but we always remain on the edge of the scene, at tangent to it. The camera constantly slides over its subject without ever penetrating it, attacking it, just like our eye slides over the surface of the screen. In that way, the camera reproduces within the film our real position as viewers.(...) From one shot to the other the opinions expressed do not make contact with each other, but they end up outlining the image of the country's human geography, a torn image, caught between two antagonistic poles but not reducible to the expression of that opposition. While it is always easy to denounce a war, even to the point of becoming captivated by its fascinating spectacle of horror and of conveying nothing but that fascination (...),Field Diary offers a civilian image of war, (...) setting it apart from the rest of audio-visual production by its content as much as by its mode of operation, by the solution it offers to a problem that pertains to the ethics of the filmmaker as much as to the aesthetics of cinema." Yann Lardeau, "Uneéthique du travelling", Cahiers du cinéma, n°344, February 1983.