Bodies, care and power in La Permanence

<p dir="ltr">The final image of Alice Diop’s documentary <i>La Permanence</i>/<i>On Call</i> (2016) is a static shot of a silent and empty waiting room at a walk-in clinic in L’Hôpital Avicenne in Bobigny, Seine-Saint-Denis, a poor suburb north-east of Paris. Fixed seats are arranged in groups of six, facing a series of doors painted alternately yellow and blue (see Figure 1). Between these blocks of colour, the grey walls look institutional and cheap. Editor Amrita David holds the image for more than a minute before the screen cuts to black. For the preceding hour and a half, Diop’s camera has been confined to a small consulting room occupied by Dr Jean-Pierre Geeraert, where (at times accompanied by one of two female psychologists) he sees a succession of outpatients, all of whom are asylum seekers recently arrived in France. Geeraert is white French, and is probably in his late sixties or early seventies. His outpatients have come to Paris from locations including Sri Lanka, Guinea and South Africa. Often younger than him, and predominantly male, they are all people of colour (with one exception). Following as it does 22 such discussions, the shot of the empty waiting room can be taken to signal the end of a typically busy day. This is a moment of quiet, but one that constitutes only a temporary respite, a time when the labour that happens in this place is suspended, held in abeyance while the manifold problems to which it responds persist, but are located somewhere else for now. Soon the waiting room will be full again.</p>