DENAIN, HAUT-FOURNEAU DE LA COLERE

of DELOEUIL Christian

FRANCE, 1979, 00:39:50

Production : MONAC 1
Genre : Documentary
Keyword : Industry, Memory, Society, Work

Summary :
« The members of the film workshop of Equipe Monac 1 declare that they fully support the social contest that has broken out in the region of Denain, for the defense of employment and against the lay-offs at the factory of Usinor-Denain. They declare that they want to serve that just and necessary fight, by siding with the workers » (quoted from the article published by Christian DELOEUIL in Cinémaction n° 12). Throughout my childhood and teenage years, I ate every Wednesday night with my parents and their « friends from Abscon », as I used to call them. Robert worked at Usinor and his wife Liliane was a former sugar refinery worker. All those years, I heard them talk about Usinor-Denain with passion and conviction. As time went by, enthusiasm was replaced by revolt and the feeling of injustice : the situation of Usinor-Denain was getting worse and worse… The month of december 1978, when they announced that the factory was closing down, was not far away… Pierre , the husband of a friend and neighbour of my mother’s, was also under the threat of a lay-off. He did unskilled work in a marlpit that provided exclusively for Usinor-Denain. He told me about his working days with a double shift, and the fact that when he went back home, he needed to partially deflate the tyres of his moped in order not to feel the bumps of the bikeway in his head, and then at home, to lay his forehead against the cool tiling of the kitchen… How could I be indifferent to the closing of Usinor-Denain ? Six years before, I had made a documentary in Denain about the local young people’s paid holidays. Now, ironically, we were talking very long holidays called unemployment or early retirement at the beginning of that winter 1979… Making that film was a tour de force. At the time, I worked as a teacher without tenure, a good hundred kilometers away from Denain. I admit that I had to lie and call in sick to be able to shoot and photograph. I also gratefully remember the help of comrades Francesco, Didier and Sylvie and all those who enabled that film to exist. DENAIN, HAUT FOURNEAU DE LA COLERE was made with very little money, but the film was widely screened, even as far as Norway, where it came to support the strike of the steel workers who fought for the same things. The only sad thing is that in spite of all my efforts to find funding for it, I never could make USINES, which would have been a follow-up of the film and an account of the situation triggered in the region of Denaisis by the closing of the Usinor factory. Neither Robert, nor Pierre, nor all the others, could ever voice their opinion on that.

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