LA MAISON DE LA RADIO

More than twenty years after La Ville Louvre, Nicolas Philibert sets out to discover another “world-inside-a-place”, a city within a city, yet his approach is not to give a exhaustive sociologising and didactic picture of the hive-like Maison de la Radio in Paris. Plunging into the heart of Radio France, the film questions our relationship to the world: how can you get an idea across, how should you speak? When the news-flash intern is taught that each comma counts and that his still ingenious smile will not redeem her syntactical shortcomings on the air, the challenge of radio broadcasting is driven home. Like something taken for granted, radio is present as a collective auditory memory, an ensemble of familiar sounds, voices and jingles that feed us, where we feel no need to “see”. Perhaps, because this invisibility allows us to travel through different tiers of society and identify, in our imagination, with those we hear. With his feisty and resourceful editing, Nicolas Philibert takes us on a day’s visit around this “sound factory”, gleaning situations where the glances between radio hosts and their guests, rushed moments of going on air and the challenges of infinite rigour and attention to detail flesh out this faceless world. This exploratory journey through the Maison de la Radio “breaks the sound barriers” to offer us the joy of penetrating this off-screen sound dimension of reality. (Aurélien Marsais)