When Kristen Stewart’s jury at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival awarded the Golden Bear to On the Adamant, nobody looked more astonished than the film’s director, Nicolas Philibert. Arriving two decades after the French director came to international prominence with Être et Avoir, the new documentary offers a similarly considered depiction of an unusual psychiatric facility.
“I have a particular affinity with the people that you tend to meet in the world of psychiatry, maybe because they trigger something somewhere inside me, a small part of me that’s hidden. I wasn’t aware of this for a long time, but a few patients spark something in me,” he says. Philibert adds that, 28 years ago, he made another film inside the world of psychiatry – Every Little Thing, which chronicled a collaboration between staff and patients as they rehearsed for their annual summer play at La Borde psychiatric clinic in the Loire Valley.
“I was initially very reluctant to make it. The idea wasn’t mine. It was a friend who encouraged me to explore this world. I had a lot of scruples. I was very conflicted. My main concern was the idea of filming people and making their conditions into entertainment for others. And somewhere there was a fear that I might be contaminated. That maybe, if I went into that world, I wouldn’t get out. It was actually the patients that helped me make the film. They recognised and commented that I didn’t want to objectify them. So when I came to make On the Adamant, I didn’t have those fears and concerns. I know this world.”
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For On the Adamant, the 72-year-old film-maker spent months aboard a barge anchored on the right bank of the river Seine in Paris. As ever, he never appears on camera and is seldom heard. His films are immersive experiences, although entirely different in tone and structure from those of his good friend Frederick Wiseman. Where the latter shoots for hundreds of hours in prisons and educational facilities to better understand institutional functionality, Philibert is compassionately committed to the people within his institutions.
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The docked Adamant, his latest stopover, is a day centre for patients with a range of mental disorders, offering therapy, food and cultural outlets. The film opens with a quote from the pioneering educator Fernand Deligny – “If there are no gaps, where do you expect the images to go?” – and emerges through a series of encounters.
It opens with François, an Adamant regular, punkishly performing the 1970s French hit The Human Bomb. He later outlines all the positive relationships he has had with doctors and nurses and notes his need for “strong meds” – “Otherwise I think I’m Jesus.” Another musician, Frédéric, screens François Truffaut’s Day for Night at Adamant’s film club and ponders artistic torment through a photo-magazine character he has created that resembles both him and Van Gogh: “I want to find out why tragic things happen to us,” he says before outlining how Wim Wenders “stole” his character for Paris, Texas.
Muriel, another attendee, quizzes the film-makers about lugging their equipment. “I think you recover from madness,” she suggests later. “I’m going to recover; taking my medication every day, going to see the doctor, keeping busy, staying lucid.”
These scenes coalesce into a warm and very intimate film, one that is predicated on trust.
“I don’t approach films as if I was marching into a conquered land with the full knowledge of what awaits,” says the director. “On the contrary. The starting point is very much, for me, one of ignorance, the discovery of the other people that I will be interacting with. I don’t shy away from being very open about my concerns and fears. I say to the people I’m working with that they must approve the filming process. They must be sure. They must be happy to be filmed.
“That’s absolutely fundamental. If you have any doubts, if you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to justify yourself at all. I’m not a journalist. I don’t come in and assume I need to get something specific out of these patients. I’m not there to make them say anything. My starting point is that I’m open to everything. Anything is possible.”
The Adamant is a peculiarly French institution. Since the 1960s, key works by the philosopher and critic Michel Foucault have helped to reshape the institution of psychiatry in France. His primary arguments – that medical interventions aimed at treating the mentally ill, rather than curing and setting them free, were actually repressive, authoritarian measures, or a means of regulating threats to societal norms – dovetailed neatly with the revolutionary spirit of 1968. The patient-centric, creative remedies aboard the Adamant, where learning difficulties coexist with delusional thinking, are part of a lasting 1960s legacy that married philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology and the arts. Aptly, the barge is moored only a short walk from the Louvre and France’s national library.
“The Adamant is both a very exceptional place and one that’s similar to so many others,” says Philibert. “There are many day centres in France that have these types of workshops, where this type of psychiatry is practised. It’s psychiatry that’s based on very humane relationships. It considers people as persons instead of patients. What makes it exceptional is its location. It’s on the Seine; it’s on water. It’s a very open place where all sorts of people meet and have workshops and discussion groups. There are film-makers and musicians and cooks. They have the opportunity to go on trips to the forest and to the theatre. It’s a beautiful place that was built by an architect who worked in collaboration with care workers and patients to make it a beautiful, very calming, very therapeutic space. We feel good being there.”
In recent years the community-based innovations of French psychiatry have been usurped by Americanised models of care and an increased reliance on medication and on the prescriptive Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. “French psychiatry, which was world-renowned, innovative and pioneering, started little by little to go downhill because of America’s influence,” Marie-José Durieux, a Parisian psychiatrist, told France 24 in 2021. In this spirit, Philbert’s film closes with the words “In a world where thinking is often confined to ticking boxes, and singularity is stifled, some places continue to exist to keep the poetic function of mankind and language alive ... For how much longer?”
“In France, like a great many other places, I’m guessing, psychiatry has been devastated by things like funding cuts and a lack of beds and lack of care workers and nurses,” says Philibert. “Workers who find that they can’t treat people with the dignity and the time they deserve. So they leave the profession. I thought, in that landscape, it’s so important to show that there are still places like the Adamant that are resisting this. In the world of documentaries, there is a kind of political documentary that criticises and condemns. This documentary is political, but it doesn’t do that. It tells a story, a story of what is possible. It shows what can be done.”
On the Adamant opens in cinemas on Friday, November 3rd
