David Dufresne’s Un Pays qui se tient sage (2020) and contemporary documentary activism

David Dufresne’s Un Pays qui se tient sage (2020) offers a critique of French police violence, particularly in relation to the Gilets Jaunes protests. The film is set in a viewing space where participants (including protesters, sociologists, lawyers, and police representatives) analyze footage of the protests, which primarily consists of mobile phone recordings shot by the protesters themselves as well as television reports from the mainstream media. This article argues that rather than understanding these images as representations of pre-existing events, they should instead be understood as politics in action. Drawing on critics such as Aurora Hoel, John Durham Peters, and Jacques Rancière, the article proposes that documentary film scholars move away from the idea of images as re-presentations (Hoel’s paradigm of “images-of”) and toward an understanding of images as “civilizational ordering mechanisms” (Peters).