Vive Le Tour: Documentary Thoughts
August 17, 2008
Watching the French documentaries by Louis Malle, I can see that he has one cardinal point figured out: it is possible to turn the camera on almost anything and if it is edited critically it will be valuable. In the above picture we have Louis Malle filming people at a single location in Paris (Place de la Republique).. a project he continues over several weeks in 1972.
It is fascinating to see the questions that he brings to this project. The documentary goes on for over an hour and a half, and that time is filled to overflowing with people. At no point does he give a location shot that allows the viewer to imagine where we are.. nor is there information about where in Paris this place is located. We get scene after scene of people walking by and interviews with individuals from that crowd. As we should have guessed, people are surprising and spirited.. and rarely play the part we assume they will. This is all amply demonstrated with real insight on the part of Malle. But I longed for some disengagement from all the people so that I could look at buildings or look into a shop window or just take my bearings. I think that is the academic in me—wanting the filmmaker to adopt a more defined critical view of this world.
So much for Place de la Republique. I admired Vive Le Tour (1962) much more. At about 19 minutes in length it functions as an excellent model in my own effort to develop a style for the short documentary. Malle more or less documents the Tour de France, with an eye not so much for the sport as the event of the tour.
Again, he does not ask the questions that I am trained to ask, but concentrates entirely on the social world around the tour. Many of these scenes are charmingly old-timey.. such as the above family picnic. It is not as though everything is perfect, as we learn that doping has become a problem, but the global corporate presence that we expect at any major sporting event is absent. It is hard to imagine Lance Armstrong in this crowd of bikers.. and that is good! Contemporary sports events have been taken up into the symbolic world of global corporations.. and the character of events from the Tour to the Olympics to the World Series will never be like it once was.
In the above picture a tour helper passes out lunches to the passing bikers. They have to eat on the road or they will lose time. It is almost comical to see the riders chomp on bananas and other normal foods. Today it would be all about power bars, protein gels, and scientifically formulated drinks.
Riders farther back would sometimes get some assistance from onlookers, who came behind them and tried to help the bikers along. It was a different world.. but that is exactly the strength of this short documentary. It leaves us thinking not so much about a competitive race (we don't even learn the names of the winners) but instead about a different time with its different values. I can only hope that I someday create a documentary that so clearly captures the world around me.
