From ‘Stories’ to History. “Roman national” by Grégoire Beil: micronarrations and myths of everyday life

Abstract

How can cinema represent everyday life? The question is complex and concerns the very nature of the medium. The recent technological evolutions of devices capable of producing, sharing and reproducing moving images, in this sense, have only emphasized the inner ‘daily nature’ of the medium. This component seems to clash with an ‘old’ need: to organise the images of this daily life in the form of a story.
Contemporary cinema has often faced, more or less consciously, these themes. The film Roman national (2018) by Grégoire Beil, among others, is particularly emblematic: juxtaposing self-representations of several characters (‘stories’ collected through the social media Périscope) the director aim to reproduce a choral vision, through an impression of reality that, in its obstinate spontaneity, seems to relegate History off-screen, as an element of context. This ‘fragmentary unity’ can be interpreted, as I will try to do, in terms of a mythization of the real, obtained through subjective practices which, far from offering any increase in authenticity, merely highlight the essentially mythical nature on which our everyday life is founded. Within this technological-perceptive scheme, there seems to develop a different articulation between micro-stories and macro-history, where the formers do not necessarily make up the latter, but can sometimes contradict it, or deny it. The complexity of history, according to this dialectic, would be hidden by the same ambition, characteristic of the cinematographic medium, to represent it.