Séance: Technology of Disalienation

On June 2, 1961, in the French region of Lozère, at the cinema of Saint-Chély-d’Apcher near the psychiatric clinic of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, a very special séance took place. This screening was organized at the request of François Tosquelles, a militant anarchist doctor in exile who was one of the main initiators of the radical psychiatry movement known as institutional psychotherapy. With an audience composed of psychiatric patients, nurses and doctors, farmers, and local villagers, two films were shown and discussed: The Mad Masters (1955), by pioneer of ethnographic cinema Jean Rouch, and Chronicle of a Summer (1961), by Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin.

The Mad Masters—banned in France shortly after its completion in 1955—features the possession rituals and trance states of the Hauka movement in the Gold Coast, present-day Ghana, performed by African workers and migrants who embody and subvert European colonial figures such as Governor, Engineer, and Soldier. Chronicle of a Summer is another ethnographic film that, by contrast, focuses on everyday life in Paris. It relinquishes the authority of a voice-over in favor of polyphonic speech—scattered voices captured in both intimate exchanges and convivial group conversations with factory workers, students, artists, and immigrants. The film’s participatory approach treats the subjects as active collaborators: alongside Rouch and Morin, they conduct interviews with Parisians on themes such as happiness, memory, labor, and alienation. Issues of racism, the French colonial wars, and Holocaust trauma emerge as both topics of discussion and symptoms inscribed in the filmed bodies and environments. This founding film of cinéma vérité explores the limits of participation in cinema, unsettling the boundary between camera and filmed subjects, history and phantasm. At the time, the film had not yet been officially released in cinemas in Paris, so the Saint-Alban screening can be seen as a peculiar avant-première of the film.