La Maison de la Radio

Beyond being a portrait of a day in the life of French national broadcaster Radio France, it is hard to work out what La Maison de la Radio might be about. There is nothing about what the institution is meant to be for, little hinting at the attitudes defining the content aired and a lack of context for the people seen on screen. No one is specifically identified by name or role, and the nature of what is in production or being broadcast is hard to determine.

It is possible that director Nicolas Philibert (pictured below right while making the film) – a veteran documentarian – did not set out to make a bland, collage-like and unilluminating portrayal of the Paris-based Radio France and the seven stations it runs, but the benefit of the doubt disintegrates after assimilating what he has said about the film. In the press material, he says “the content [of the programmes] as such could prove to be a trap: the ‘stronger’ it was, the more likely it was to undermine the film, insofar as it might overshadow what interested me in the first place, namely the grammar and mechanics of radio.” What Philibert has created is, indeed, a film concerned with “the grammar and mechanics of radio.”

Because of this, La Maison de la Radio frustrates. Nothing is developed. One thing does lead into – or even illuminate – the next. It begins, in the morning, with the weather: “Fairly bad weather today. Low temperatures.” It’s a Thursday. There’s news of a road accident and unemployment figures. A woman – a producer perhaps? – is seen in an office drilling a young man – maybe a trainee or a new employee? – on how he should speak while on-air. “It has to be perfect,” she says. Philibert drops moments from this in as the day, and the film, progresses, and also edits in scenes from a studio spoken-word recording session. With each, the impression is that both have taken place over the whole of the working day.

There are shots of endless corridors. Literally endless, as Radio France occupies a circular building – the maison of the title – strikingly similar to the BBC’s former television centre. Aural collages collect the many, simultaneous voices of the station. A game show is seen being recorded. Motorbike-borne coverage of the Tour de France is caught. So are the rehearsals of a choir and a classical recital. There are live, on-air interviews with authors and a late-night request programme. A classical music presenter declares that the CDs he plays “form a network of happiness for the human spirit”.

The blinkered Philibert has not done Radio France a favour

The film hints at defining what Radio France is – specifically, its channel France Inter – just once, during a production meeting when Justin Bieber crops up. France Inter does not, it is said, have a pre-teen audience and they would rather broadcast a sociologist than a kid talking about Bieber. A left-wing sociologist.

Philibert compiled his figurative day-in-the-life of the broadcaster after filming from January to July 2011. Whatever his yen for the “the grammar and mechanics of radio”, if these are the highlights of his seven months on the job, then the lacklustre La Maison de la Radio suggests that the routine of working at Radio France is very boring indeed. The blinkered Philibert has not done Radio France a favour. Give this a miss and see Frederick Wiseman's National Gallery instead.

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 Overleaf: watch the trailer for La Maison de la Radio