La cabale des oursins

A funny, ironic and absurd 'pseudo-documentary' in which Luc Moullet himself plays the role of reporter who investigates the mysterious terrils, the stone hills which have been created in the northern French landscape by mining activities. In the films the hills, now useless and overgrown since the mining stopped, are regarded as a mysterious and inexplicable phenomena. La cabale des oursins is filled with inventive visual gags and can be regarded as an amusing geography lesson, but also as a parody on television reports which serenade the beauty of the landscape with resounding narration.Moullet himself calls the film a 'documentaire paraphysique' and a 'docudrame comique'. The title, La cabale des oursins, means some thing like 'the commotion of the sea-urchins'. In France, people are not keen on the hills and they are indicated on maps by spiral signs which look like sea-urchins.