Vive le tour
The esteemed
Louis Malle spent his career alternating between features and documentaries;
the latter often brought him a much-needed respite from fictional projects,
by enabling him to shoot cinema direct footage in a "hands-on" manner
- acting as a refresher and renewing his interest in filmmaking. Vive le Tour
constitutes a relatively minor work in Malle's catalogue but is skillfully made
and quite enjoyable. For a number of days in July 1962, Malle and his crew (Ghislain
Cloquet, Jacques Ertaud and others) travel to the Tour de France bicycle race
and film a series of inclusive spectacles. The overall mood is jovial and bouncy
- the film shot in bright rotogravure colors, with a peppy Georges Delerue score
- but Malle continually varies the overtone of the picture depending on the
spectacle at hand, interweaving notes of ebullience, whimsy, jet black humor,
awe and unspeakable tragedy. The covered events include: two riders sharing
a fudgesicle as they race; a number of cyclists pilfering food from local shops;
one rider growing ill from "fish that was not fresh, eaten the night before,"
and - on a heartbreaking note - a rider who falls and cracks his head open,
presumably unaware of the extent of his injury and complaining constantly, "put
something on my head, my head is cold." Most of all, Malle underscores,
with great admiration and astonishment, the grueling physical exhaustion that
the race exacts from even the most seasoned riders. Vive le Tour is a worshipful
documentary of a sport made by a man who knew it intimately and loved it: next
to filmmaking, cycling was Louis Malle's second great lifelong passion.
Humain, trop
humain
Louis Malle
shot the 75-minute documentary Humain, trop Humain (produced 1972, released
1974) at the end of a rare creative dry spell in his life - in between the fictional
masterworks Souffle au cœur (1971) and Lacombe Lucien. Malle and his two-person
crew (Jean-Claude Laureux and Etienne Becker) travel out to the Citroen auto
plant in Brittany, France, cameras-in-tow, and shoot three tangentially-related
sequences. In the first third of the picture, Malle observes the mechanical
nature of the assembly line process, following the construction of an automobile
from a flattened piece of metal to a finished product. He overlays choral music
on the soundtrack, painting the step-by-step linearity of the events in a satirical
light. In the second sequence, Malle and his crew travel to an automobile showroom,
where customers babble on and on about nothing in particular, making banal small-talk
for a seemingly endless period of time. And in the last third of the picture,
Malle and co. return to the assembly line. Here, the director deliberately places
an obscene emphasis on watching the assembly line workers toil, attempting in
the process to physically exhaust the viewer with the repetitive, laborious
onscreen movement of the men and the machinery. This film serves as an unofficial
companion piece to the documentary Place de la Republique.
Place de
la république
For the minor
feature-length documentary Place de la Republique (produced 1972, released 1974),
Louis Malle and his mini-crew (Jean-Claude Laureux, Etienne Becker and Fernand
Mozskowicz) travel to the Place de la Republique in Paris during the autumn
of 1972 and utilize a "man on the street" approach, filming various
passersby and asking them random questions about their lives, their experiences
and their feelings. At one point about 2/3 of the way through the film, a pretty
girl who starts off as one of the subjects takes Malle's camera and conducts
the interviews herself. Place acts as a kind of companion film to the director's
Humain, trop Humain; both are cinema direct works, but only in Humain does the
director utilize a schematic editorial structure. Though Suzanne Baron edited
Place, here Malle generally resists imposing any kind of an editorial vision
and simply films what he comes across, letting the events unfold before him.
