(Ed. Note: This was originally published in Image Facts.)
In the production notes for To Be and To Have, Philibert writes:
“I don’t know what you think but when it comes to summing up a documentary, all one can do is refer back to the subject. This invariably leads to such sentences as: it’s a film on Papous, on a chewing-gum factory, on a country school… In short, you always talk about ‘a film on’ and in doing that, in spite of yourself, you act as if there were no story. You need to know what it’s about and identify the subject. You must know how to describe and write it before filming it. You say in advance what you’re going to show in order to get across what it is you ‘want to say’. Everything has to be smooth, legible, articulate, forseeable, and transparent.
If only I could say, ‘This is a film…without a subject!’ Not on school but at school. An open and accessible film to dive into without knowing how deep the water is.”
To Be and To Have is an enchanting experience in the most literal sense of the word, its careful handling of such delicate material are as magical as the last few moments before naptime. A theologian once said of the Gospel of John, “It is shallow enough for a child to play in, but deep enough for an elephant to drown in.” One has the same sensation during a viewing of this Cannes award winning film, a documentary only in the best sense of the term, as it eschews an imposed narrative arc for the natural rhythm and routine of this classroom. Philibert may have stumbled across something greater in this classroom, a grand scheme in which a fading concept of youth is being lost to the spread of EU urbanization. But that isn’t necessarily the case, as such thoughts linger only at the edges of the film.
With a small camera crew Philibert spent ten weeks in the single class school of the French village Saint-Etienne-sur-Usson. The French countryside is still dotted with such small villages with one room schoolhouses in which a single teacher will tutor everything from kindergarten to those about to make the switch to middle school. In this day and age, it becomes harder and harder to find teachers willing to move to these small villages to perpetuate the traditional system. But Philibert struck gold in George Lopez, who was willing to let him be a fly on the wall through the winter months of the year.
Most of the time is spent in the classroom with the children; the camera alternating between following around the magnanimous Lopez and lingering on the amusing reactions of his less than altruistic students. Though we do spend time with most of the children, Philibert seems to favor the same students that Lopez does, such as the indomitable little Jojo. It is in this particular relationship that Philibert lights on the gentle, almost preternatural, attention required by children. We watch the kids make mistakes, get in trouble, sit and cry with Lopez about the stresses of moving up to middle school or dealing with hospitalized parents. As the film is episodic and edited with little narrative scheming, this commitment of Lopez to his students at all levels seems to be the common thread throughout the two-hour documentary.
To Be and To Have has the presence of mind to keep a foot planted firmly in both realism and reflection, framing larger blocks of the film with establishing shots of the French countryside, of snow falling impudently on dirt roads, or of two turtles pacing out the confines of the warm empty classroom. This sensitivity to both motivation and environment play sympathetically with each other as we wind our way to a moment of climax. Eventually breaking out of the third person mode, the camera takes on the role of interviewer as Lopez tearfully tells us, the audience, why it is he does what he does. By this time his character is well established, but to hear him tell us as confidants what keeps him in this dying tradition is perfectly riveting. “Being” is such a typically French preoccupation, films like To Be and To Have come along every now and then to remind us that it really is a worthwhile thing with which to be occupied. In Philibert’s terms, it now becomes apparent what the “subject” of his film has been all along, not really the children or the teacher, but the space in which they interact, grow, and eventually pass on. It is this space that has been challenged by changes in contemporary French society, a cultural distinction lost on the EU bureaucracy. The fundamental building blocks of French grammar, “etre” and “avoir,” and the wane of their traditional educational setting, make the pedagogical process documented here a metaphor for something vaguely sinister.
I have long thought that the French have a special knack for filming children. Films like Small Change and The 400 Blows only encounter the rare gem like The White Balloon as rivals. To Be and To Have proves once again that it is only the French that have enough peculiar charm to make 2 hours of watching children to be as whimsical as it is didactic.