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…

"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…

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…

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…

Just after completing his documentary Humain, trop humain Louis Malle took a completely different approach to the form. Instead of his noted absence, both visually and aurally, as was the case in the previous work, which captured factory workers on an assembly line, Malle is completely present here, taking part in and even disrupting the goings on of a city square in Paris. Simple conversations make up the majority of the film's footage, with Malle probing, interested in whatever the subject is willing to discuss. The small crew spent less than two weeks shooting and cut the footage for release later on.

The result of this seemingly haphazard experiment is more than watchable in its straightforward portrayal of "normal" people.…

Criterion Eclipse Series 2

This documentary has an interesting idea - within ten days, with a camera and a microphone, interview anybody who’d be keen to chat in a busy plaza in Paris. As you’d expect, the final cut ends up focusing on senior citizens and the unemployed (as they’d have the most free time), so you do wonder if they really represent the kind of folks that live in the area.

That said, there are some fascinating characters here - like a hypochondriac lottery seller that seems like the inspiration for one of the characters in Amelie. At one point, an unemployed young woman who we’ve met earlier becomes the interviewer, bringing to the fore what other answers this…

I watched this the same day as Agnes Varna’s Daguerreotypes. Both are mid-70s documentaries focused on daily life of ordinary people in a particular Parisian setting - for Malle, the bustling Place de la République, for Varda, her own relatively quite street near Montparnasse.  But despite ostensible similarities, the two films are quite different. Varda provides intimate profiles of shopkeepers she knows personally, in most cases interviewing and filming her subjects on multiple occasions.  Malle’s approach is hit-and-run, pulling people seemingly at random off the street and prodding them to reveal snippets about their lives. Quite a few of Malle’s subjects are interesting and some common themes and preoccupations emerge - especially the challenge many are facing getting by on…

"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…

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…