Les Barbares
2010 · 5m · France
Directed by Jean-Gabriel Périot
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
Group photographs — heads of state, soldiers, sports teams, wedding parties, families — are montaged into a single orderly, smiling mass, until images of demonstrators and anarchists in motion disturb the consensus and expose the quiet violence of the group.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Périot's doing the obvious move here—stacking cheerful conformity against radical dissent like it's some kind of moral equation—and yeah, it lands, but it's not exactly subversive when the montage itself is the argument; the form and content are too busy shaking hands to actually surprise you.
A precise essay film that inherits the DNA of structural montage cinema while executing a remarkably clean dialectical argument about consensus and disruption; Périot's restraint in letting the image sequence do the philosophical work—never overselling the edit—marks this as formally sophisticated work in a lineage most viewers have forgotten.
The singular move is the decision to keep the photographs utterly still and orderly until the motion of the crowd footage enters—that one choice of *how* to introduce rupture, quiet versus kinetic, transforms what could've been a pat political statement into something genuinely disorienting about collective bodies.
Reviews
Jean-Gabriel Périot a les idées claires, pour autant il laisse toujours assez de distance pour permettre au spectateur de réfléchir par lui-même à ce qu'il vient de voir. Jamais dans un discours propagandiste, il reste un créateur attaché à sa liberté.