“René Vietto shows that melancholy can be at the heart of the effort”

Seghir Lazri works on the theme of the social vulnerability of athletes. In this column, he takes a few pictures of sport through the social sciences. How the social explains sport, and vice versa.

It was in Nice that the Tour de France 2020 was to start on June 27, not far from the Col de Braus where the ashes of René Vietto rest, which marked this history of cycling and this competition greatly. As such, it is the subject of a documentary produced by journalist Julien Camy, the melancholy King, the legend of René Vietto. Through this superb film which restores the life of the one who wore the yellow jersey 26 times without ever winning the Tour, Julien Camy, co-author, among others, of the totemic work Sport and Cinema, also presents a popular sports figure whose talent and hard work invite us to rethink the concept of effort.

What were the reasons that prompted you to make a film about René Vietto?

As part of the book Sport and cinema, co-written with my father [l’historien du cinéma Gérard Camy, ndlr], I took care of the chapter on cycling and I was therefore interested in the whole filmography devoted to this sport. I noticed that unlike other disciplines, there were very few biopics, which prompted me to look for cyclists whose life course could be adapted. This is where I came across René Vietto. A name that resounded in my head since, being from Cannet-Rousillon, I participated in the René Vietto challenge when I was younger, without really realizing its importance. Subsequently, I had the chance to meet the English journalist Max Leonard, who wrote an article on him and advised me to meet René Bertrand, incredible character, friend of René Vietto, and who would have kept the little toe of the cyclist, like a relic. I went there with my camera, and through discussions, meetings and research, I made this documentary. In particular by trying to highlight this similarity that I could find between cycling and a cinematic genre like the western.

What were the difficulties?

Funding. It is often quite complicated to finance such a project when it is not a prior order from a media. Even if I set up a crowdfunding and found funding via private partners and local authorities, it is always harder to assert a project with the intellectual and cultural bodies of cinema, when you add the word sport. Because although by demonstrating that many great directors had worked on this theme, there still remains in the cultural world a lot of a priori on this subject, far from being perceived as a noble object.

Why did you name your film René Vietto, the melancholy king ?

René Vietto was already nicknamed King René thanks to the writer Louis Nucéra. It was during a discussion with the former cyclist, become author, Olivier Haralambon, in which he evoked the notion of melancholy about the psychological springs of the sportsmen, that I found this interesting and particularly significant image concerning René Vietto. His relatives and teammates have always portrayed a cyclist with great selflessness and immeasurable thoroughness. He showed an unimaginable sense of sacrifice, he was ready to die for this sport. We even wonder if he had a real desire to win, if that would have really made him happy to win the Tour. In reality, I think that the sporting act, this act of going beyond, was more important to him than the prestige he could get from it. And he emanated from this melancholy a real force. And by drawing a parallel with the artistic world, we can say that René Vietto’s journey shows that melancholy can also be at the heart of sporting endeavor, as it is often the foundation of artistic creation.

You mentioned the sense of sacrifice, and this is what made him famous during the 1934 Tour, when he turned around during a stage to give up his bike to the leader of his team, Antonin Magne, whose machine is broken. Isn’t this act basically a demonstration that cycling is above all a collective sport?

It is said of cycling that “It’s an individual sport that is run in teams”, and, by this sacrifice, Vietto fully fits into this characteristic of the bicycle. He does not do anything other than what he should have done. Afterwards, many also think that at that time he was also very late in the standings, and that Antonin Magne still had great chances of winning the Tour [ce qu’il fit]. But this example of altruism, of action for the collective, also shows us that cycling, through potential sacrifices, is essentially a sport that creates heroes. In particular with a story that we can write around, images that we can produce. I am thinking here of this famous photo, where we see Vietto in tears at the side of the road after having given her bike. Storytelling is truly important in cycling, and while the question of the team is important in cycling, the question of the hero is often the most fascinating and appealing.

In your documentary, you return greatly to the intimate and meticulous work of René Vietto to improve his equipment. This echoes the work of the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, and more particularly this idea of ​​”margin of indeterminacy” which teaches us that technical improvement is always the result of a practical relationship between man and machine. Can we say that René Vietto is part of this approach?

He demonstrated both seriousness in his lifestyle and hyperactivity – he slept very little, for example. Beyond his physical asceticism devoted to the bicycle, it must be said that René Vietto was obsessed with the bicycle object, and on the elements that could make it more efficient. Thus, by redesigning the handlebars of the bicycle to gain speed during descents or by being the first to fix the container on the frame, its objective was to combine the bicycle as much as possible with the human body. But conversely, he also tried to adapt his body to the machine. For example, his toes were completely damaged, because he wore shoes that were smaller than his original size for aesthetic reasons. To tell the truth for René Vietto, elegance was the sign of an accomplished physical effort, of a perfect symbiosis with the bicycle. In his eyes, a successful runner was necessarily an elegant runner.

As a specialist journalist and filmmaker, do you think that cycling is a particular object for cinema?

Cycling has a particular narrative and temporality. First of all, the cycling time is long with very varied moments, sometimes very intense and sometimes very slow. This allows us to develop this notion of empathy when we film the sports show. During a cycling event, there is time to break down the moments, to play with the plane values, everything is not immediate. A whole visual language can be deployed around a cycling race that is not found in other sports. And cycling is also a setting, diverse landscapes which give different values ​​to the action, participating all the more in the construction of an epic. This sport exists through its narrative, which is already in itself a singularity and a similarity with cinema.

Julien Camy’s film will be screened this Sunday in Beaulieu-sur-Mer. Other dates are planned in different festivals at the start of the school year.

Seghir Lazri