Action directe, discours indirect
Action directe, discours indirect is a film without images that breathes new life into the syndicalist and libertarian struggles of interwar Geneva, through testimonies, individual conversations, collective struggles, revolutionary songs and anarchist speculation. The sound archives (a 22-hour corpus of interviews with former Genevan libertarian activists) that served as the material for this film were gathered by Christiane Wist in the early 1980s for her book La vie quotidienne et les luttes syndicales à Genève, 1920–1940 : des anciens du bâtiment racontent.
The invitation to create a « sound piece » was extended by CIRA (the Centre International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme in Lausanne) and the Collège du Travail foundation, which made the recordings available and whose mission is to keep the memory of Geneva’s working-class history alive. The film was written and edited over a few weeks during a residency at the Atelier Suisse in Schaerbeek in 2018. Made on a shoestring, what became an hour-long film was created for its premiere at the 2018 Lausanne Underground Film and Music Festival. No provision had been made for its promotion or any further screenings. And yet the film went on to find a place in several cultural institutions, including the Carreau du Temple / Videobox in Paris through the Rosa Brux collective, and more recently Krone/Couronne in Biel (CH) as part of the group exhibition Radical Sources.
Above all, however, this film owes its longevity and singularity to members of the self-organised activist networks of French-speaking Switzerland, who have claimed it as their own since its release and continue to do so today. Various groups in struggle have spontaneously organised screenings in precarious spaces, squats, artist-run spaces, concert venues, bars, union meetings, demonstrations, libraries and associative cinemas. These events, almost always followed by discussion and debate, provide an opportunity to exchange ideas around one of the rare cultural objects addressing the history of Swiss workers’ struggles, one that, despite the limitations inherent in such an undertaking, was conceived as a tool in the service of contemporary left politics. The voices of these courageous activists, now all deceased, remind us, should we need reminding, of how much direct action and the struggles against employers, the bourgeoisie and the fascists made possible, winning significant victories and hard-fought social gains.
