In the late 70's, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville made an extraordinary series (in twelve "movements") for French television called France tour détour deux enfants. It was essentially a portrait of two school-aged French children, Camille and Arnaud, but its moral, existential and philosophical reach extended out to the very borders of the French state and beyond. The work mapped the institutional contexts (family, school, media) of the boy and girl while exploring the phenomenological conundrums of lived experience. Made for and about television, it was emphatically a work of engaged, socially inflected video art. Godard and Miéville's central methodology consisted of merciless interviews with the children. Unseen, but heard from behind the camera, Godard would ask baffling, brilliant and sometimes comically inappropriate questions such as "is your image in the mirror real ?" or "when you hear the school bell, do you go to the school or does the school comes to...(extrait)

ETC