Arlette Farge, l’échappée belle
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About - Arlette Farge, l’échappée belle
A multifaceted portrait of Arlette Farge, historian and specialist in 18th-century police archives, whose research continues to open up new horizons for tomorrow's historians. The film evokes this atypical journey, which takes us from the deposit rooms of the Archives Nationales to more unexpected encounters, such as with photographer Valérie Jouve. It's the twists and turns of a historian, between her passion for the little-known side of the Age of Enlightenment and her most contemporary commitments.
Frédéric Biamonti was born in 1964. He first studied at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po), before turning to cinema. He continued his studies at the national film school, FEMIS, and then moved into film and documentary production, working in particular as assistant director on documentary productions for Télévision Publique (France Télévisions). He also worked on fiction films by Arnaud and Jean Marie Larrieu, Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, Bruno Bontzolakis and Frédéric Videau. Since 1990, he has lived between Paris and the United States, first in New York, where he studied photography at the International Center of Photography, then in Chicago, where he teaches in the Film and Video Department of the School of the Art Institute. In Paris, he also teaches in the Cinema Department at the Université Paris 8. Since 2000, he has been making his own documentary films, initially working on American subjects: Huntsville, la colonie pénitentiaire (2001), Sun City l'antichambre du paradis (2003), Les leçons du Watergate (2004). Urban planning and architecture films followed on from L'île Seguin , from Renault to Pinault in 2002. Since Destin des Halles (2005), he has collaborated regularly on these subjects with architect and critic Françoise Fromonot. History is a recurrent preoccupation in his work, as demonstrated by the biographical films devoted to the politician Jean Lecanuet (2005) or the pamphleteer writer Jean-Edern Hallier (2006), or more recently to the historian Arlette Farge (2009).
