Through a single-plate camera, Raymond Depardon wants to capture a France he fears we are at risk of losing, in the world of photography and image at least, and perhaps beyond. Journal de France, which at once offers a personal account of the renowned photographer and film-maker’s four-year journey across France, as well as the journeys he made before embarking on it in 1996, is fascinating and enriching.

Depardon’s extensive archive material, unearthed and re-imagined by his wife and sound recordist, Claudine Nougaret, invites the audience to ‘listen and watch’ – as he did – in a world seemingly torn apart by a dichotomy of power and destruction. We watch, through Depardon’s shaky lens as the Soviet Union marches through Prague; we listen to the racist jokes of French military soldiers in Africa, alarmed, as Depardon was; we travel to Italy and see the horrors of state psychiatric hospitals there; we hear European officials discuss their insidious plans for post-independence Africa; we go to other parts of the world, and meet the people Depardon met – state advisers, patients, lovers, prisoners, the kidnapped, the oppressed and the average civilian. Throughout this travelogue, and interspersed in it, we remain with Depardon, in small towns and on highways in France.

Depardon has spent most of his life sharing the world he has encountered, and has upset countless dictators, officials and governments in doing so, including his own. Journal de France is an attempt to share Depardon’s life, to reveal the man behind the lens. We realise by the end of the documentary, however, that Depardon’s genius can only be exposed through his work; in discussions with the camera facing him, he does not speak much, except when the sun is too high for good light, or a pedestrian has walked in front of his camera.

Rosie Collington