TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES

Raymon Depardon and Claudine Nougaret

Urgences

Raymond Depardon
1988 - France - 1h45

Paris. Hotel-Dieu. Psychiatric emergencies. People arrive desperate: an exhausted bus driver, a self-made man who collapses, a housewife who can no longer stand her position in life, a young woman who has tried to commit suicide, a retired person who calls himself “morally ill”... The patient-psychiatrist relationship is established.

Urgences is the first film Raymond Depardon made with Claudine Nougaret on sound. She freed him from the weight of the sound recording, allowing him to be more flexible and to have fixed frames. In an interview with Serge Daney at the release of the film, Depardon revealed that he was looking for was a situation that was close to a confessional, a situation where people were at the ends of their tethers. His camera then explored all aspects of mental illness (schizophrenia, alcoholism, paranoia, suicide, depression, mythomania) and revealed extreme urban loneliness. Talking about the patients observed, Depardon said that “if you are completely honest, you see yourself in them”.

CAST AND CREW

Cinematography : Raymond Depardon
Sound : Claudine Nougaret
Editing : Roger Ikhlef

Production : Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC), Double D Copyright Films, TF1 Films Production

French distributor : Palmeraie et désert