Themroc

A great film. Woefully cheap. Blissfully purposeful. Knows exactly what it thinks and says it with brutal clarity and biting humour, all shot in a ragged verité style that seems strangely contemporary. A factory worker goes off his trolley, throws society's rulebook out of the window and reverts to being a caveman. And that's about it - talk about a high concept! There's no dialogue, only gibberish and grunts, but, incredibly, it works. It's easy not to like this film, but hard not to be impressed by it. Check it out for yourself and see.

I too watched this movie over 20 years ago - it was shown at the student film night at college in England. I loved it at the time and would like a chance to see it again.

I viewed it as an absurdist black comedy, but I'm sure the director had some serious socio-political axe to grind. I liked the fence painting scene and found the spit roasting of a cop (pig - geddit?) wonderfully tasteless

A factory worker who, one morning, fed up with the routine of his work, decides to abandon the conventions of civilization and live primitively in the city kind of human caveman, expressing himself through grunts. He expresses dehumanization through routine and anarchism signifying the return of the human being, who rejects modern society from its root, to its primitive nature is explained by the 'representation' of wolves, hunts, and ultimately howling wolves.

Directed by truck-driver-turned-filmmaker Claude Faraldo, a French film composed entirely of nonsensical dialogue which is completely bizarre, but weirdly intriguing. The film works as absurd comedy and social criticism at the same time. Pure anarchism and demolition of the values of the modern world through a wild surreal mockery, sounding like a Grindcore album in it's runtime.

Among the roles of Michel Piccoli's impressive career in theatre and cinema, my all-time favourite remains the "THEMROC" (1973) who constantly cries out, growls, screams and repeats incomprehensible acts and vandalism as if he wanted to explode the hypocritical harmony of modern society. RIP Michel Piccoli.

This film is hilarious. It is inspiring. It captures the absurdity of everyday life in a repressive social order, and portrays the infectious poetic revolt of one man who "goes mad" against authority in every form.

It's interesting that the strategy of liberation in the film revolves around a very personal and playful attack on the architecture most immediate to our lives. This destruction and transformation of space is accompanied by a kind of sexual revolution, disrupting bourgeois family dynamics in a contagious way. Readers may recognize the resonance of these themes with the theory and agitation of the Situationist International, the revolutionary / avant-garde organization credited with sparking the revolt of May 1968 in France. Five years previous to Themroc's release, millions of people actually did occupy public spaces including universities and factories, creating "passionally superior ambiances" in many cases, armed to a significant extent with Situationist ideas, graffiti slogans from which plastered Paris.

Not that seeing Themroc is any substitute for actively engaging the rigorous revolutionary theory of the S.I. (see www.bopsecrets.org). But the film is in a way a dream-like rendition of the Situationist vision of changing life. And in fact, there is a passing reference to Themroc in "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?", a film by Situationist René Vienet: when the hero of that film is confronting the "bureaucrats", some onlookers comment something to the effect that "wow, that guy must have seen Themroc."

It is obvious that words, wonderful photography, direction and profound lessons are not needed in a film in order for it to pass its messages across to its viewers. Themroc is a movie with no dialogue so that it can be seen by any human around the world and still understand how authority has separated us and divided us in order to use us. Themroc is an ode to symbolism, a prime example of how you can do political commentary and show to people that freedom is easy to attain and that half measures is the mean authority uses to control us. More than that, Themroc examines human sexuality, sexism, exploitation and the limitations modern society has set for us thus limiting our life experience and happiness.

I absolutely recommend watching it if you manage to fin this film. 10/10