The Declic Years

Among Raymond Depardon’s most personal and powerful films, The Declic Years turns the camera back on the director himself, as Depardon goes through an array of images—both of his childhood and of major French political events in the 1960s and ’70s—and muses on their shifting significance as his life and career march on. A potent and influential work of autobiography, The Declic Years is marked by a formal simplicity that belies the moving profundity of Depardon’s reflections on the previous three decades of his life, and the result is an astonishing meditation on some of cinema’s most essential ingredients: face and voice, image and testimony, past and present. 

Preceded by:
Jan Palach
Raymond Depardon, 1969, France, 12m
French with English subtitles
Depardon documents a ceremony in tribute to Jan Palach, a Czech student who publicly self-immolated in protest against the Warsaw Pact invasion of then-Czechoslovakia.

10 Minutes of Silence for John Lennon
Raymond Depardon, 1980, France, 10m
Depardon captures the ceremony in which 10 minutes of silence were observed in Central Park, in lieu of a funeral, for the recently slain John Lennon.