"Films seen long ago but unavailable for rewatching often loom large, like myths shadowed by fear: Will a second viewing confirm or dispel the initial impression? I first saw "Caught in the Acts" ("Délits flagrants"), a documentary by the French director Raymond Depardon, in Paris, a few months after it opened there, in 1994, and it struck me as one of the greatest documentaries I'd ever seen."
"Depardon started out, in childhood, as a still photographer. He tells the story of those early days in his 1984 autobiographical documentary, "The Declic Years"-a weird mistranslation of the French title, "Les années déclic," or "The Click Years." At around ten or twelve, he built a darkroom and a studio in the family's attic, and, at just fourteen, after completing his basic schooling, he became an apprentice at a local optician which also sold photographic equipment."
Raymond Depardon creates films that interrogate social conflict and private interiority. "Caught in the Acts" captures behind-the-scenes interrogations of suspects in a Paris courthouse and retains a striking power on rewatch. Other works in Depardon's filmography, both documentary and fiction, resonate with that film and amplify its force while clarifying its role within a lengthy career. Born in 1942 to a farming family in east-central France, Depardon began as a still photographer, building a darkroom and studio in his family's attic around age ten to twelve, apprenticing at fourteen, and moving to Paris at sixteen to work as a photographer's assistant before going freelance.
Read at The New Yorker
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