THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
We do not know by what curiosity of the mind a documentary as fundamental as Welfare, dated 1975 and signed by the American Frederick Wiseman, a somewhat papal figure of the genre, had remained unpublished in France. This Wednesday, July 5, the error will at least be repaired, and even over-repaired since a play inspired by the film, directed by the director of the National Dramatic Center of Saint-Denis, Julie Deliquet, will make the same day the opening of the Avignon Festival. It was the filmmaker himself who suggested to the director, keen on cinema – she who has already been on the boards of Bergman, Desplechin and Fassbinder – to get started.
Waiting to see what will be played on stage, we return here to the original work, which is in itself a huge piece. To situate the thing, we are still at the beginning of a work inaugurated by the percussive Titicut Follies (Life in a Criminal Insane Asylum) in 1968, which has more than 40 feature films averaging two to three hours in length, and which continues today notwithstanding Wiseman’s 93 springs. All American institutions – from the police to the hospital, from the university to the army, from the department store to the racetrack – will more or less have been filmed by this man, at the end of a long and immersive presence in each of them, in films devoid of the slightest commentary but which speak oh so much for themselves.
Welfare In this set, we approach the American conception of social assistance, in a center of New York in the middle of Manhattan, from which we will not leave for about three hours. Subject that we sense to be delicate, both from the point of view of the social interventionism of the American State which is from that time moribund and from that of the current situation which does not seem to have changed much since the great neoliberal cleansing of Ronald Reagan. .
theater of the absurd
You have to imagine, to use an expression that made some noise in our country a few years ago, that all the misery of the world, at the very least that of this world-city that is New York, met you in these offices. In which Wiseman lets the camera spin, enhancing this tragedy of poverty with vibrant close-ups, moving fluidly from one case to another, according to the interviews that take place there not without clashes, the abysses that are there reveal, Kafkaesque traps that close in, omnipresent social violence.
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