Labore nobile

In Saint-Nazaire, heavy industry operates in the open air, where the Loire meets the Atlantic Ocean. The film brings together images of the estuary’s landscapes with the words of those who live and work in the area, portraying them as individuals caught in the contradictions of our time and of contemporary labor.

‘Through work that ennobles you’: Juliette Achard’s debut feature takes up the motto of the Donges commune, home to an oil terminal and refinery in the port of Saint-Nazaire. Labore Nobile never sidesteps the idea of alienated labour, but it refuses to make it labour’s inevitable fate, reminding us that ‘humans love to work, have never been grudging with their efforts’. Achard’s approach consists of giving work back to those who labour: various workers, dockers and residents become the protagonists of a film that revisits the history of the Loire estuary’s development, its environmental transformations, the reconfiguration of its social relations and the shifting nature of the very concept of work. Saint-Nazaire provides the setting of a landscape that this notion has shaped entirely, and still keeps alive the memory of a ‘time when work kept the earth in balance’. There is much to learn here: about the construction of ships at the Chantiers de l’Atlantique or of aircraft fuselages at the Airbus workshops, about the adaptation of landscapes to industrial gigantism or the abandonment of the neighbouring marshes. But this knowledge is conveyed only through the voices of those who work and live there: different generations of residents who inevitably hold divergent views on the ideology of growth.

It is here that Achard’s project – which constantly interweaves the representation of labour with the craft of filmmaking – takes shape. Drawing from both mainstream education and Straubian pedagogy, she starts from a simple conviction – that ‘power always plays out through enunciation’ (Daney) – to develop, with her performers, a framework in which speech is both crafted and asserted. The film oscillates between repetition and spontaneity and between lived experience and theory, drawing on the analyses of workers as well as those of writers who have reflected on the structures of economic domination. Through a sure-handed sense of narrative flow, suspensions of language, and the connections made in the edit, Achard avoids the risks of flattening what the film, through speech, has to tell us. A sentence left hanging finds its continuation in an image; a reflection is extended into an aria accompanying the launch of an ocean liner, and the film strikingly fulfils the promise contained in its motto. Beau travail.

Antoine Thirion