Les Lip - l'imagination au pouvoir

Cecil says:

I have to declare an interest: I studied this industrial dispute for my undergraduate degree at Sussex Uni when I lived not far from Besancon in eastern France in the 1970s. So the archive footage and the present-day interviews with people who had been involved seemed fantastic to me (I'm not sure how Bea felt about sitting through 2 hours of largely face to camera interviews in French!)

In a nutshell, Lip was an old family watch-making firm which sold out to a big Swiss conglomerate in 1973; when the new owners tried to close the factory, the workers took over and for a few years it was a great success-story of the left in France. The film takes us back through the early years of the dispute and talks to the main participants (workers, management and government of the day) about how they view the whole conflict 33 years on.

What I didn't know before seeing this film: that when Jacques Chirac became Prime Minister in 1975, he nationalised Renault (!!) but then immediately cancelled the contract Renault had with Lip. As this was the main source of orders for Lip by 1975, the factory closed. The manager of the day says in the film that, in the wake of the oil crisis of 1973, the new government knew that other companies like Lip would also be getting into trouble, and if workers elsewhere saw that a take-over could succeed, they might follow suit. Lip could not be allowed to work, he says...

Sitting here in 2007, it is easy both to marvel at the creativity of the workers (in hiding their stash of watches - and money) and to cringe at the oh-so-typical battles on the left over what is the right path to follow in any dispute.

The film stops in 1975 when the factory has once again closed, but those of us who followed the dispute know that there was a follow-up: the workers then created a co-operative, which continued to make and sell L.I.P watches (they weren't allowed to call them Lip anymore). I bought one of their watches in 1979 and then lost it on the Sydney underground in 1986 (yes, somewhere out there is a lucky Aussie who has a beautiful watch they probably have no idea of the historical significance of).

On our way out of the cinema in Paris, Bea and I stopped to chat to a couple of the other cinema-goers about the film. One of them had been involved himself back in the 1970s and when I told him the story of my watch, he told me he would write to the strike organiser and see if he could track down a new watch for me. The very next day, this man emailed me with his draft letter to Charles Piaget and we await the response with excitement...

Bea says:

Yes it was difficult for me, as I have very little French, to follow this film, particularly as there were a lot of face-to-camera talking head shots. I did enjoy the archive footage of the factory and the strikes, however, and as one of the French cinemagoers said to me afterwards "You can see the emotion of those involved, even if you can't understand the words".