Place de la République
France, 1974, 35mm, color, 94 min.
French with English subtitles.
Louis Malle was always something of an outsider, never quite in synch with cinematic trends. Place de la République, made with Fernand Mozskowicz, seems a response to the great French cinéma vérité works such as Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronicle of a Summer and Chris Marker's Le joli mai. In each, the filmmakers established a method of approaching strangers on the street and asking them a provocative question. The interaction between the filmmaker and filmed subject is of utmost importance; Malle picks up this style for Place de la République, alternating on-camera interviews with sequences involving hidden camera and microphones. The result is a fascinating portrait of then- contemporary France, a film that clearly draws from the experience of his Indian films while looking ahead to Malle's American documentaries of the mid-1980s.
