This chapter begins with an ending. With the final shot of the 2012 film by husband and wife team Claudine Nougaret and Raymond Depardon, Journal de France. The camera looks out the front windshield of a car rolling down a curved road in a flat, nondescript landscape. A whitish glow washes out the colors into tones of yellow and sepia. The car passes some low buildings with illegible white signs. Then, suddenly, the road ends and there is nothing but sand ahead and water beyond. A beach. Sounds of wind and water. The car slows, but the camera continues its forward motion to take in the sky and sparkling water, fading to white for a moment, then to black.

Thus ends Journal de France, a recent collaboration between Nougaret and Depardon, coproduced by their company Palmeraie et Désert, with the participation of a list of distinguished organizations that locate the importance of this film in the broader landscape of French documentary filmmaking (France 2 Cinéma, France Télévisions, Canal+, Cinécinéma, the Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée, the Île-de-France region, Wild Bunch, and Arte Éditions). The film chronicles, on one hand, a six-year-long set of road trips that Depardon chose to make around France, alone, taking pictures with a large-format camera. In 2010, Depardon installed a set of massive prints (1.6 m x 2 m) of 36 of the photographs at the Bibliothèque nationale de France for an exhibit entitled “La France de Raymond Depardon.” Along the way, he shot autobiographical footage of himself taking pictures and sometimes chatting to the camera in the first person. In Journal de France, these sequences serve as an audiovisual refrain for the other main narrative thread of the film. This thread is made up of excerpts of Depardon's past film work that a first-person narrator, voiced by Nougaret, claims to have selected from the vast film archive that has accumulated in their shared basement.