La Question humaine

Simon (Mathieu Amalric) is a psychologist working in the Human Resources department of a petrochemical company. Following the success of his “restructuring plan”, he’s put in charge of an investigation into one of the company’s factory executives. LA QUESTION HUMAINE is a fantastic film in which the invisible being that haunts the present is history itself: the Shoah and its dehumanising technicity, a matrix of advanced capitalism’s management of the human. If the relationship between Perceval’s script and Klotz’s staging produces such a powerful experience, it’s due to how this relationship coincides with the film’s central subject: the relationship between our use of language, and how we make use of bodies. What transforms and frees Simon is his realisation that a 1942 technical note about the “performance” of gassing people in trucks uses the same “dead language” as his liquidation plan for “non-performing” employees. Genius casting—Michael Lonsdale, Jean-Pierre Kalfon and Lou Castel—are able to embody the haunting of history and the need to welcome it, because they themselves have passed through the history of cinema. On their faces, the critique of technical rationality changes scene after scene in order to praise the virtues of listening and thinking. (Cyril Neyrat)

In the presence of Elisabeth Perceval and Nicolas Klotz.

Elisabeth Perceval, Nicolas Klotz: PARIA (2000), LA BLESSURE (2004), LA QUESTION HUMAINE (2007), LOW LIFE (2011), L’HÉROÏQUE LANDE (2017), FUGITIF OÙ COURS-TU ? (2018), SAXIFRAGES, QUATRE NUITS BLANCHES (2021)