Soixante-sept millisecondes

They are everywhere. Scattered across the landscape, their cyclopean eyes produce evidence and preserve the traces of an event, like the LBD-40 round that blinded a 19-year-old in 2020. Following Contraindre (VdR, 2021), Antoine Fontaine and Galdric Fleury (a.k.a. fleuryfontaine) dissect an “ordinary” arrest in a French suburb. For exactly “67 milliseconds”, a surveillance camera captured the image of a projectile fired without warning by a member of the BAC (Anti-Crime Brigade) — a unit often associated with a particular vision of law enforcement in France, one frequently entangled with police violence. Made public in the lead-up to a forthcoming trial, the footage directly contradicts the official narrative. The filmmakers examine it both as material evidence and as a fragment of a much broader system. By confronting the off-the-record accounts of the BAC officers with those of the young victim, and by using motion capture technology — in the lineage of Marey’s chronophotographs — the duo interrogates the hidden ideology behind the so-called “monopoly on legitimate violence” claimed by the zealous enforcers of the security state.

Emmanuel Chicon

Soixante-sept millisecondes, 2025
Contraindre, 2020
Ange, 2019