I've been spacing these posts a little too far apart, and letting them pile up. So, I'm devoting a full week to new installments of my "Great Directors" series. Enjoy.
One of the often overlooked pioneers of early cinema is the French director René Clair, who did his best work at the beginning of the sound era, in musicals and comedies. He was one of the first to use sound as an element of his comedy, characterized by complex set pieces, fanciful concepts, and a certain optimism about life and humanity, even in hard times. Despite his successes with sound, his filmmaking always felt more reminiscent of the silent era, with their larger-than life characters, gag-based humor, and simple narratives.
Most of Clair's best loved films are about the working class, and feature large casts of ordinary folks who inevitably get caught up in big chases or commotions by the end of the picture. "À Nous la Liberté," or "Freedom For Us," is a fable about two escaped prisoners who take very different paths. One becomes a lowly vagabond who falls in love, and one becomes a rich factory owner whose crimes catch up to him. The whole thing is a satire on the modernization and mechanization of labor, where toiling away at the factory is equated with miserable incarceration, and much humor is mined from the endless conveyor belts, assembly lines, and timekeeping machines. It has long been rumored that Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" lifted its sequences of factory chaos from "Liberté," though Clair himself dismissed this. It's difficult not to have lingering doubts, however, when you look at the similarities in the production design and the anti-capitalist themes of the two films.
"À Nous la Liberté" was Clair's third sound feature, and by this point he had largely worked out how to use sound for his own purposes. One of his biggest breakthroughs was the realization that sound didn't have to be used realistically, but could be used as an element of fantasy the same way he used his visuals. So in "Liberté" there's the lovely sequence where it appears to the hero that flowers are singing, before it's revealed to be a phonograph just out of sight. The relentlessness of the assembly lines are echoed by clattering xylophones, and the percussion of the marching prisoners' shoes. Songs are also an important element of all of René Clair's early films. Though there aren't often full musical numbers, everyone sings. A chorus narrates events through song. The two prisoners keep singing lines from the title song to each other, usually when they're about to try and get away with something.
René Clair was one of the first directors who was successful enough to have creative control over nearly all aspects of his films, from the scripts to the editing. This gave him the ability to experiment and innovate in his filmmaking the way that few others did at the time. His roots were in surrealist and avant garde cinema, and he got his start making amusing shorts like "The Crazy Ray" and "Entr'acte," where he essentially played with the film form, seeing what it could do. As his productions became more complex, they embraced a certain artifice - he nearly always shot on meticulously prepared sets, and his films presented a very idealized, often nostalgic view of France and the French.
There's a charming naivete and Utopian worldview to the film's ending that is awfully poignant in retrospect. Simply handing over the new automated factory to the workers means that nobody ever has to work again, and they can all spend their time at their leisure. And after failing in their attempts at romance and financial ventures, in the end, the two prisoners decide to go off and be happy tramps, washing their hands of society altogether. I don't think it's any surprise that the work of René Clair is considered a major precursor to the films of my favorite French filmmaker, who would return to many of the same themes - Jacques Tati.
What I've Seen - René Clair
The Italian Straw Hat (1928)
Under the Roofs of Paris (1930)
Le Million (1931)
À Nous la Liberté (1931)
Bastille Day (1933)
The Ghost Goes West (1935)
I Married a Witch (1942)
And Then There Were None (1945)
Man About Town (1947)
Beauty and the Devil (1950)
Beauties of the Night (1952)
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