À nous la liberté

I was lucky enough to see "A Nous La Liberte" along with it's sister film (in my mind, anyway) "Le Million" at an early age at the Museum of Modern Art. I have never gotten over them. They are both miracles of studio production with even many of the exteriors built in studio. Both films were designed by the great Lazare Meerson and evoke the magical Paris of the 20's. Both films make wonderful, inventive use of music and song, though neither one is exactly a Musical in the modern sense. "A Nous La Liberte" is also interesting for having been Chaplin's inspiration for much of "Modern Times."

Sobering indeed that this innovative and quite unique early French "talkie" has garnered but four reviews. This is akin to the Cistine Chapel going six months without visitors!

As any student of early film would have discovered, the premise of "A Nous La Liberte" was undoubtedly "lifted" and used by Chaplin in his revered MODERN TIMES. Others have mentioned this aspect.

The film is a satirical comment, almost a control experiment from one viewpoint, focusing on the ideology of big business, and in regard particularly to newly gestated industrial technology, just how the individual is viewed as little more than a means to an end. A resource to be used and no more. Clair poses the question, is the worker..the LITTLE man - any more or less a free-thinking and needful entity than the embittered prisoner serving out his time?

The film follows the fortunes of two ex-cons. One makes it to the top of the industrialised ant-hill, the other makes it to the nearest sheltered alleyway or park bench. Whilst Clair experiments freely here with music and song, the Metropolis-like buildings lend a sombre note to the proceedings at hand.

Stylistically dated perhaps now, and the humor betrays its thirties origins, nevertheless at its core the observations made still hold true. This remains a critically important cinematic benchmark not just in terms of early French cinema but also in terms of a director's extraordinary vision so many years ago.

This early talkie is an unexpected joy to watch and an artful piece of transitional cinema. It's difficult to believe that Charlie Chaplin claimed he never saw René Clair's fanciful 1931 musical comedy since it predates many of the same leitmotifs that came up in "Modern Times" five years later, including pointed jabs at corporate greed interlaced with Keystone Cops-style slapstick. In fact, Clair seems completely inspired by Chaplin in the way he carefully orchestrates the chase scenes and the robotic assembly line in this film, so much so that Chaplin borrowed back the visual cues in "Modern Times".

Clair sets up his story as an elaborate parable centered on two convicts, best friends Émile and Louis, who make toy horses in the prison assembly line. In a long-planned attempt to escape, Émile escapes thanks to a generous leg-up from Louis, who is caught and returned back to their cell. Years pass, and Émile becomes a successful industrialist in charge of a phonograph manufacturing business. Meanwhile, Louis serves out his term and upon release, ironically finds himself working in the assembly line of Émile's factory. After some hesitation, Louis and Émile reunite and join forces with a rapid-fire series of chaotic complications leading the two friends to realize that a life away from work may be their true fate.

The film master does not belabor his sociopolitical statements about materialism, but it is intriguing in hindsight to appreciate the film's prescience in showing France disconnected from the encroaching Nazi menace. Moreover, the film boasts startling visual elements thanks to Lazare Meerson's unmistakably Expressionist art direction. Henri Marchand and Raymond Cordy make a fine comedy team as Émile and Louis, though what really shines is the timeless spirit that Clair imbues this film. The 2002 Criterion Collection DVD includes two deleted scenes, a brief 1998 interview with Clair's widow, and a twenty-minute short, "Entr'acte", that Clair made with French artists Francis Picabia and Erik Satie. Speaking of Chaplin, in an audio essay, film historian David Robinson describes the plagiarism suit that the film's producers brought against Charlie Chaplin when "Modern Times" was released.

Emile and Louis are two jailed friends who dream of freedom and plan to escape. Louis is successful and becomes a phonograph factory tycoon, after Emile finally breaks out he seeks work at Louis' factory. Tho initially the harshness of industrialisation keeps them poles apart, they both come to realise that friendship and being honest to oneself is far more rewarding than love or any sort of financial gain.

À nous la liberté {orginaly titled Liberté chérie} is a truly biting musical satire written and directed by the considerably talented René Clair. Filmed without a script, with Clair giving his actors free licence to improvise, the picture focuses on the dehumanisation of workers at an industrial plant. Shifting as it does from prison to this monstrosity place of work, the viewer is forced to wonder just exactly which is the prison of the picture? For workers trundle in to work, punching in to a clock and sitting at a conveyor belt for hours on end, they are merely robots for this corporate machine, life is indeed desperately dull.

Clair pulls no punches in portraying everyone who doesn't work on the shop floor as greedy capitalist schemers, one sequence literally see the elite grasping for Francs strewn by the mounting storm. This wind of change also releases Emile and Louis from their respective constraints, and it's thru this change that we the viewer are rewarded with a truly uplifting ending that closes the film magnificently. The picture was a flop on its initial release, managing to offend parties from various corners of the globe, but now in this day and age the film has come to be hailed as something of a French masterpiece, coming some five years before Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times {Clair's camp even wanted to sue Chaplin for plagiarism, but Clair actually took it as a compliment}, this clearly is the template movie for industrial indictment. At times devilishly funny, at others poignantly sad, À nous la liberté is a cinematic gem that all serious film lovers should digest at least once. 9/10

It was striking watching this film shortly after having attended a very fine museum exhibit on American Precisionist painting, a style in vogue at the time this film was made. As in Precisionism, the imagery here is concerned with the industrialization of society. Every facet of social life, not just the work-place, but the school and the prison-system seems to director Rene Clair to have been turned into a factory. The film features some extremely clever editing making the connection between industrial production and the production of passive subjects of capitalism clear. The difference between Clair and the Precisionists is that most of the latter saw in industrialization a utopian promise. What few who didn't, such as George Ault , understood industrialization in apocalyptic terms. In either case, it represented for the Precisionists an absolute transformation of life from which there was no turning back. For the filmmaker's part, Clair clearly understood modernity in sinister terms, industrialization bringing about the mechanization of the subject, but his humanism made it impossible for him to see the modernist challenge to humanity as insurmountable. For Clair, human dignity could be salvaged just by forsaking the materialist temptations of capitalism for the simple pleasures of life. Exploiter and exploited could return to a loving, communal relationship by embracing poverty and freedom. Art historians have proposed that the utopianism of Precisionist art was abolished by the horrific realizations of WWII. That would, it seems to me, to apply equally to the humanist utopia of Clair's cinema.