4 - Trading in Images: The Case of Kerviel

Summary

SCREENS WITHIN SCREENS

Much of what goes on in L’Outsider (2016, directed by Christophe Barratier and produced by Jacques Perrin) concerns what is happening on the screens of financial trading terminals used by traders at the French bank Société Générale. We are at several moments in the film given screens-within-ascreen (Figure 4.1). In one variation of this, the shot of the trading screen is followed by a reverse shot, from the point of view of the screen, showing the characters looking at it, and therefore almost as if also looking at the audience (Figure 4.2). However, the characters’ eyes are not looking directly at the camera lens, but just above it. Another variation of this is when we see the screen with a reflection, in focus, of characters looking at it, thus merging both the data on the screen and those scrutinising it.

Some 40 minutes into the film, the main character has just made a large profit during a frantic trading session and, in a moment of calm after the storm, looks with his colleagues at the numbers. As we see below, the trading screen consists in prices and commands to buy and sell a product. Reflexive moments such as this not only signal that the ‘action’ of this story takes place through the data coursing through the trading software and the graphs they translate themselves into, but also that people interacting with screens may itself be suitable material for a film. Like le boiteux in Chapter 2, the traders are fascinated by their screen: a form of ‘ploutéidoscomanie’. The film's blue palette here creates correspondences between the blue hues of the traders’ shirts and those of the screen. That said, L’Outsider is a relatively traditional dramatic film, and much of the story takes place outside of the trading hall.

L’Outsider is the film adaptation of the memoir of Jérôme Kerviel, L’Engrenage: Memoires d’un trader (2010). As is well known, Kerviel was a young man who worked as a trader for Société Générale until January 2008 when he became the focus of a major scandal as he was accused by the bank of what was then supposed to be the largest financial fraud in history.