Framing and Staging Madness in the Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm: How Witold Gombrowicz's Operetka Expresses Nicolas Philibert's La moindre des choses

Abstract

Nicolas Philibert's 1997 documentary, La moindre des choses, depicts the daily lives of residents and staff at the private psychiatric clinic La Borde, and their production of Witold Gombrowicz's play Operetka. This paper will analyse the aesthetic and ethical implications of La Borde's production of Gombrowicz's play by mapping the documentary, text and production's collective expressions. The film's capacities to reconfigure audience subjectivities through a filmic and intensive entanglement will be explored at length by framing the documentary's cinematography in Félix Guattari's theories of the ethico-aesthetic paradigm and minor cinema.