Le tombeau d’un invisible : Monsieur M, 1968Une cartographie de l’histoire et du quotidien ordinaire

Abstract

Monsieur M, 1968 (France, 2011), directed by Laurent Cibien and Isabelle Berteletti, is a documentary that originated from an agenda, dated 1968, found in a house after the death of its owner. Day after day, M, 41, an old boy living with his parents, an office worker at the National Geographical Institute, describes and recounts without passion the meagre events of his life, in a period when everything seems to be out of whack. Thus, the daily functionalism, lived by the strange diarist, transforms into a filmic daydream. But how does the audiovisual mediation create the poetry of daily life capable of making people think about the expression of history on screen? The ordinary daily life appears first of all essential. In addition, history is captured through the psychogeography of everyday life. Finally, the sound editing and the use of videography lead to affirm the disturbing strangeness of the story captured in M’s eye and the modalities of the resistance to May 68.

Keywords

• history
• common
• strangeness
• functionalism
• psychogeography
• videography