Louis Malle - Humain, Trop Humain (1974)

http://i493.photobucket.com/albums/rr292/surrealbb/louis%20malle/human.jpg

http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/5333/imdbimage.jpg

A classic of the documentary genre, HUMAIN, TROP HUMAIN is Malle's rigorously lyrical study of a Citroën factory in Rennes. Notwithstanding avant-garde films from the Twenties, no other factory film comes as close to capturing the aestheticized beauty of mechanical reproduction. Setting a playful and subversive tone, the film begins with Gregorian chants as a woman rises up a mechanized scaffold. Malle, cinematographer Étienne Becker and soundman Jean-Claude Laureux shot the film in fifteen days, with very little money and without a script, capturing a clanging chorus of repetitive movements and automatic actions meant to convey the exhausting experience of working an eight-hour-long shift on an assembly line. Despite the rapturous rhythms of the machines, Malle's camera cannot help but seek out the comely workers (male and female), revealing a factory of hyper-efficient, dolled-up employees. The film sparked outrage for its lack of polemics, for its silent observation in a charged post-'68 atmosphere when Citroën employees were known for striking. Thus, we see a fabricated factory (une fabrique fabriquée), a limitation which is to be expected given that Malle would have needed permission to shoot in this monitored environment. His choice to forego voice-over incited the intelligentsia, but his satirical treatment of the auto show says it all. The film was edited by Tati favourite Suzanne Baron who, together with Malle, infused the film with humour and irony, somehow missed by the critics. (from www.cinemathequeontario.ca)