Always building life, and my home office: 'On the Adamant' (2023)
A documentary on a floating psychiatric center celebrates the adaptability and vitality of public space.
On the Adamant (Sur l’Adamant) (2023), dir. Nicolas Philibert, France
I watched a video the other day where cultural critic Mina Le connected conspicuous consumption to the disappearance of third places (“third places, stanley cup mania, and the epidemic of loneliness”). Le argues that we want to adorn our lives—especially our private spaces—because we lack fulfillment and beauty in social and civic life. You will not go to the ugly, underfunded library when you can curate an image-worthy home office. There you will end up alone, but comfortable and aesthetically content.
I curated my home office with a massive dining table desk, two walnut stained bookshelves, a red Persian rug, and a large poster of Nadezhda Rumyantseva in one of my favorite films, the 1962 Soviet rom-com The Girls. I love to show my office off when people come to my apartment for the first time. I work there every day and though I don’t always feel at peace when I do, I feel ideal; I burn taper candles and sometimes incense, listen to Takashi Kokubo, and, lately, try to absorb Ram Dass, but I haven’t really written anything. I play the old scholar role, working into the night, but still feel like I am getting ready to do something rather than doing something.
This month I am preparing a guest lecture on Larisa Shepitko’s Wings (1966) in one of my former professor’s classes. I am thrilled to be flexing this muscle again and thought, to limit distraction, that this time I would print my readings instead of using my iPad, and I went to the library to do so.
Every other time I worked at the library, I have wrestled with attention and trust in my ability to hold it. I never work in silence (my favorite background music is Chris Campbell’s Meetings with Remarkable Alloys) and have tried pomodoro and YouTube study-with-me videos with limited success. Without both my iPad and laptop, I read my Wings essays on paper, with pencils and pens and in quiet. I don’t know why it helped to keep my concentration so well, but I think that, as Le discusses in her video, I have trapped myself recently in a meticulous and solitary box. Working around others, not the perfection of my personal space, brought me the calm I designed that space to bring but which it has often failed to do. I underestimate how much I (and the rest of us) need to be with others, even in imperfect but social silence, for me to keep my head on straight.
I saw today’s film, On the Adamant, at an advance screening for the French film festival at Lincoln Center, where I will be working temporarily as an assistant. They showed the film in the massive Walter Reade Theater; it would be impossible to fill it on Monday morning with just press, so it felt sparse and gentle, like the library often does.
The film made me think of these public and semi-public spaces, like libraries and movie theaters, because it takes for its subject a Parisian day center for psychiatric patients housed in the Adamant, a boat moored in the Seine. The center creates a simulation of public space where its visitors can find social connection and practice their hobbies among psychologists, aides, and one another. I would be wrong to really call it a simulation, though, because the “publicness” of the space is genuine. Like any other community center, it plays multiple roles that the community reshapes according to its needs and its visitors see and speak with one another as anyone else would. I resist—and the film resists—calling the Adamant center what it appears to be: isolated in the middle of the river, a shelter from the world or a halfway point between sequestration and “real” society (but I will get back to this).
The film suggests how the center adapts to the community’s needs by shooting the space obliquely. I get no wide shots of the boat’s interior, but plenty of its impenetrable exterior and mid-range shots of its many nooks, which the camera partitions with invisible barriers. I see no hallways or doors on the inside, but rooms seem to pop up out of nowhere. I leave the boat only once or twice; other outdoor scenes take place on the boat’s deck, which seems to wrap completely around it. The film’s refusal to organize space top-down closes it off completely, but consistently reorganizes its interiors. It turns the Adamant into a collection of blocks in a frame, confined to its borders but freely and infinitely reassembled within them. I see its main room as a concert stage, a café, an art studio, a dance hall, and a council room. A library corner appears, then a music studio. I can picture the boat’s areas, but could not navigate them.
This kind of spatial construction through camera angle presents the space in its shifting forms, but privileges none. The film could tour me through the boat programmatically: here is the kitchen, the café, etc. Instead, it limits my understanding of the space to flexible components, not as a clearly marked floor plan but a collection of snapshots. It insists that I see the space as those who use it do, rather than as an observer in an audience. Because it belongs to a public, the Adamant can change into whatever people need from it. The film makes me a part of that public; now I can see the boat as it changes.
This adaptability refuses the stasis of commercialized architecture and draws that refusal from its human vitality. I mean that the city environment built for cars and businesses lacks life and feels heartless for it. But a public space that mutates for the good of the people who use it imbues itself with their life; it absorbs life into its floors and walls. The library did this for me when my home office couldn’t because my office took on the character of an ossified ideal self: I want to be the type of person who writes film criticism by candlelight at a large desk in his home office, which the décor proves. The library did not demand I prove myself a certain type of person, so I could get on with my work.
Life only lingers in my office when I leave it; a space will struggle to soak up life when only one person builds it to cater to themselves. An empty subway car is interesting because of its rarity, but the novelty wears off quickly and I always end up looking out the window again for more people. But a subway car before dawn is very interesting, not because of how empty it is, but how many people are still riding and what kind (mostly men—construction workers—people sleeping, bakers, people with luggage).
The Adamant’s communitarian adaptability makes it a sponge for life. This is why I hesitate to call the center a shelter or to argue that the film demonstrates its separation from the rest of the world, even though I rarely see its visitors anywhere else but the Adamant, adrift in the river. Instead, its visitors take what they find in the rest of the world, decide how to put it together, and do so in the boat. One patient (Catherine, in the middle of the second picture) insists on the connection between health and expressive body movement; she demands to teach a dance class, the Adamant can become a dance studio. Others need to hone their budgeting skills; they reconcile the center’s books, the main room becomes an accounting office. Like me and my office, they build the space to house the lives they want to live. Unlike me, crucially, they do it together, and because a community’s needs always change, so does the Adamant. The process goes on forever; several purposes recur, but the Adamant does not end up as anything particular.
The film constructs space to celebrate its flexibility and to stress that flexibility is not only a virtue, but a demand for life. I don’t fear turning into a fossil after On the Adamant as long as I still respond to life, and I hope I can start to apply the same living changing-ness at home and outside of it.
See other films from: 2020s | France
Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s essay. Thank you for reading!
Love, Tyler