Synopsis
Louis Malle presents his entertaining snapshot of the comings and goings on one street corner in Paris.
Place de la République
1974 Directed by Louis Malle
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Alternative Title
Republic Square
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It feels a bit strange to finally tick off a long-held goal to watch the complete Louis Malle filmography. I watched my first Malle film, Zazie dans le Métro (1960) on a French videotape in Mademoiselle Belmonte's year 10 French class in 1966. She was young, French, super chic and loved movies. God only knows what she thought about being in Brisbane and teaching a bunch of semi-interested Australian kids, but I have her to thank, in part, for opening up my mind to the fact that there was more to cinema than we were seeing in Hollywood studio releases. I had her through to year 12 and she turned us on to the French New Wave.
It is also…
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"In spite of everything, I love France. It's a good country. In spite of everything."
With a conspicuous two-camera-plus-unconcealed-mic setup, Louis Malle and a small crew stalk a working-class Parisian street corner to take the temperature of French society in the early 1970s. Speaking with anyone who will face the camera (and some who refuse), Malle asks mostly banal questions, but his aleatory approach elicits surprisingly revealing confessions. Among his most compelling interview subjects are Margot the widow-cum-streetwalker ("I'm out here hustling; I console suffering humanity"), a racist lab worker ("Imagine what Paris will be like in five years with all the foreigners now…It doesn't feel like our country anymore"), a Polish tailor who adamantly defends his French neighbors for…
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“It’s surprising how quickly people speak of intimate matters”
“Because they’re bored stiff. People aren’t happy. If they were, they wouldn’t need to tell their life story to some woman they’ve never seen before”
A Louis Malle documentary distilled down to its purest form: just him, his crew, and the pedestrians going about their day on the Place de la République in Paris. And just like the rest of his documentaries where he talks to people I am very grateful that we have a time capsule like this, a true testament to people and their stories.
What’s most interesting about a film like this is how quickly after the shock of interacting with a stranger people are willing to divulge…
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If there’s one thing I love about Louis Malle’s documentary work so far, it’s the way in which he captures people being people. This film could be made on any street in any city during any time period, and therein lies the magic.
[📽: Eclipse Series 2 DVD Boxset — The Documentaries of Louis Malle]
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This is all I need in cinema. People, their faces, and Louis Malle’s self-reflexivity. With Malle finally becoming not just an off-screen voice, but a person with a face that was last seen in a cameo from his debut as the stranger who mistakes Jeanne Moreau for a prostitute. Was just glad to see Malle on-screen if just for the full denim drip he wears. Don’t think I can truly convey my thoughts on this, or maybe it’s best to use the cliché of cinema’s capability to present people beyond the rules of time and space being its most enthralling quality. Any analysis of individual fragments and interactions in this would feel pretentious. That’s not to say analysis, personal thoughts…
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Oh, I loved this with a similar kind of joy as when I watched Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle Of A Summer. Louis Malle’s documentary, made some 13 years after that film, similarly concerns itself with people but is a different film. Unlike that film which was a social experiment that tried to draw some conclusions about people’s happiness and honesty with the camera , Malle’s approach is simple and direct. Namely stay on the Place de la Republique for a period of time and engage with passers by and see what they have to say. It is the engagement with each individual that is paramount and whether the street is busy and noisy or if people block the…
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Director Louis Malle rejected the popularly used phrase “cinema verite” in favor of “cinema direct”, which argues for a fully improvised shooting process that relies on impulse and curiosity as the guiding factors in narrative development (an ethos exemplified most spectacularly by the Maysles brothers). Place de la Republique, which Malle shot over a few weeks in 1972, uses the simple premise of a small film crew interviewing whoever they can on the busy Parisian square. If the film is about anything, it is about the Parisian’s fascination with the act of filmmaking—nearly every scene is full of background extras eager to see and hear what Malle and his team are filming. The excitement of the people on the street…
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"Do you realize we've been filming you?"
In the fall of 1972, Louis Malle and a six-man crew spent ten days -- one of them Malle's 40th birthday -- on the titular Parisian street interviewing the people that work and congregate there. Most of the passersby he approaches are either retired or unemployed, and some are self-conscious about being on camera, but it's surprising the things some of them say once he puts them at ease.
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A Paris that is probably hard to find today, WWII and Indochina veterans without pensions, the end of the Parisian manufacturing class, wigs made while you wait on the sidewalk, and self-described hustlers. It would all be gone in a few decades.
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I’d love to know the history of the “man on the street” interview. Stand in a crowded place, grab a passerby, and ask them about the latest news. Or, if you’re Jay Leno, ask them any old piece of trivia and then laugh at them when they don’t know it. Or, if you’re Billy Eichner, make your presence and people’s reaction to your absurdity part of the humor. But what if you just wanted to talk to people and capture the essence of a time and place? Louis Malle does that here.
Place de la Republique is a documentary that follows Malle as he interviews people in a small radius (just a few blocks in any direction) in the titular…
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Louis Malle sets his camera up on a corner in Paris where he gets into a variety of conversations with people.
PLACE DE LA REPUBLIQUE is certainly a "people watchers" wet dream. I've known several people who I'd go places with and they'd do nothing but watch at what others were doing. We'd go to a concert and instead of watching the bad this person would watch other people's reaction to the band.
I thought of that person quite a lot while watching this because it seems Malle enjoyed watching people and perhaps talking to those he found interesting. I'll be honest, I thought some of the conversations here were rather boring but at the same time there were some…