When the Arles Festival invited world-renowned photo-journalist Raymond Depardon to present a collection of his award-winning photographs, he instead chose to make a film-essay using slides from his personal and professional image archives. The result is an intimate meditation on the relationship between film and photography, on the nature of photography itself and its attendant, sometimes unpredictable connection to memory, and the vocation of chasing images all told through a touching stream of consciousness and displayed with a simple, magic lantern style. Sitting at his editing table, with his back facing us, Depardon clicks through the slides that tell the story of his existence, including images of him as a child, his fifteenth birthday, his life-affirming trip to Paris, his first journey to Africa, and his military activism. Tinged with the melancholia of time’s passing, Les Années déclic is a great, globetrotting narrative that adds up to an incredible life. It’s also a fascinating example of direct cinema, as Depardon claims he simply turned on the camera and extemporized the narration on the spot. “Les Années déclic favorably recalls the meditative film essays of Chris Marker, most notably Sans Soleil (albeit narrated in the first person), as Depardon interweaves memory (at times triggered by the recognition of images, at other times selectively trivialized or highlighted by the benefit of hindsight), captured images, and vocational (and existential) introspection on the toll of his career on his relationship with his beloved parents…Depardon achieves a thoughtful, distilled, lucid, and articulate introspection on the human imprint of turbulent history.” (Aquarello).

Rated PG