Guillaume Cagniard: Rivages Film Captures Port Tradition
In every port, in every city, thousands of large freights come in monthly, carrying tonnes of goods that sustain the world around it. As they dock, the men of the port unload the goods and carry on a proud tradition that echoes back centuries, even millennia ago.
French filmmaker Guillaume Cagniard, set out to capture who these men truly are in a film titled Rivages in conjunction with the work of JR, for his Woman Are Heroes work.
Cagniard’s film looks to “show through the portraits of dockers an example of a profession embodied by proud and solitary men.”
The film was shot at the port of Le Havre, France —which is managed by only men—and runs for around 6-minutes, filled with nothing but black-and-white moving images of both the men of the port and the landscape they have come to know through the trade being handed down from generation to generation.
From the shot of three workers heading to work early in the morning under the dimly lit street lights in the early morning, to a shot of three generations of dockers stacked up on each other, Cagniard creates a video showing the deep traditional roots of the 21st century ports men. Cagniard was able to capture this legacy so well, because the port of Le Havre, France only allows dockers to work through a father-son lineage.
However, without JR, Cagniard may have never been able to get access to this isolated area that is blocked by lineage and is also secluded and closed off. Fortunately for Cagniard, he was able to get into the uniquely isolated port, by linking up with JR and his project that took only 10-days.
In those days, JR and his team were able to place 2600 strips of paper on containers and a freighter bound for Malaysia as a part of his Woman Are Heroes campaign.
