Mémoire battante

Drawing from a meticulous and relentless work of memory and gathering indigenous voices from countless films, Arthur Lamothe recounts his journey from recognizing the political and material dispossession of "Amerindians," which led to the classic "pauperization" of traditional populations upon contact with modern Western society – a term he borrows from Germaine Tillion when describing the fate of the Kabyles – to an even graver dispossession: that of their rich spiritual universe.

Confronted with an invisible interlocutor, Lamothe sparingly appears on screen throughout the film to reflect upon himself in a way, thus creating a unique type of interaction. Analyzing the relativity of the documentary perspective in general, and establishing correspondences between his own films, he demonstrates how they intersect around certain themes and reveals the evolution of his concerns and the trajectory of his intentions in a dual movement of criticism and reflection. By visualizing and embodying this thought in action (but at odds with strictly theoretical, intellectual, or rationalist considerations, notably those of the Jesuit branch of Christianity, yet fertile in revelations, apparitions, and dreamlike dimensions), Lamothe's film, 40 years later, appears just as invigorating and inspiring today, amidst the flow of new conventions and slogans as regressive as they are affected and emphatic about the issues facing indigenous nations and cultures.

This spiritual dimension that Lamothe embraces with his protagonists, and through which he brings forth the poetic power of traditions with them, allows us to step like no other film into this "other world" from which we are carefully cut off, the filmmaker restoring it in every sense of the term before revealing, with his fascinating final sequence that precisely brings together several levels of realities, just how seriously he has taken it.

Simon Galiero
Director, screenwriter and editor
of the documentary journal Communs.site