Quote:
René Clair, the most distinguished of the French motion-picture directors, is one of the great men of the cinema. His triumphant photoplays, Sous les toits de Paris, Le Million and, the finest of them all, A nous la liberté, stand among the genuine classics of the films. Now M. Clair, who has tried cheerful sentiment in Sous les toits, farce in Le Million, and brilliant social satire in A nous la liberté, gives up some of his adventurousness and returns to the quiet romantic mood of his earliest success in the new work called Quatorze juillet (“Fourteenth of July”). It is true that the latest of the Clair offerings is not being particularly courageous in its efforts. Instead of going in for the new and exciting field of scornful social criticism, it plays reasonably safe and once more tries out the mood of amiable sentimentality. Its story of the romance between a flower girl and a handsome taxi-driver is managed directly and sincerely, without any sophisticated pretense at mockery. In addition, there is a certain formlessness about the film, wherein it darts back and forth between comedy and drama.

Noticing these two widely separated moods and the apparently careless way in which the film wanders about between them, skeptics have suggested that M. Clair has lost all sense of form. Realizing that the story involved is a slight one, and that it possesses nothing of the significant import of A nous la liberté, critics have declared that the eminent Frenchman was falling back on mere simplicity, where he should have been going ahead with witty profundity.

In answer to the first charge it should be said that the director has not lost his sense of unity. The only thing is that Paris, rather than a dramatic mood, supplies the central unity of the work. In reply to the latter attack, it should be said that the work, even if it is not as ambitious as it should be, is one of the loveliest, most enchanting motion-pictures of its time.

That, in addition to the delightful playing of the heroine, Annabella, and the beautiful villainess, Pola Illery, is enough to make a screen play which will bring joy even to those who are not so sure that they are French enthusiasts.

Rating: AAAA (outstanding)

Quatorze.Juillet.AKA.July.14.1933.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 32 min
Size: 	2.82 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	690x576 
Aspect ratio:  	1.198
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	4 214 kb/s
BPP: 	0.442
Audio
#1:  	French 2.0ch AAC LC @ 137 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/44A3BEBB4CB63AA/Quatorze.Juillet.AKA.July.14.1933.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, Japanese

The post René Clair – Quatorze juillet AKA Bastille Day (1933) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
René Clair’s exuberant anti-capitalist satire À nous la liberté was one of the early triumphs of sound cinema and is still considered one of the all-time greats of French cinema. The film is a light-hearted comic tour de force, erupting into unbridled farce in a few places, and yet it also offers an intelligent reflection on one of the major social preoccupations of the time: the gradual dehumanisation of mankind through technological progress. In characteristically humorous vein, Clair gives us a speculative glimpse of the future in which human beings are reduced to quasi-machines to meet the remorseless capitalist imperative for ever greater efficiency and increased output. The demoralising repetitiveness of life on the factory production line mirrors the endless monotony of the prison scenes at the start of the film, and both contain echoes of the Fascistic nightmare that would overrun most of Europe in the 1930s. In an era of immense social and technological change, Clair poses a timely question: what is man’s destiny, to be a free individualist or a robotic slave to corporate greed?

What is perhaps most surprising about this film is, that having conjured up a truly horrific Dystopian vision of the future, one of Art Deco-flavoured uniformity, Clair demolishes it with casual ease, so confident is he that mankind’s natural inclination for freedom will prevent him from ending up as a mindless mass of components in a soulless capitalist machine. The film ends with the factory fully automated, allowing the proletariat (not the industrialists) who now own it to spend their days doing the things they enjoy, like fishing and singing. Today, Clair’s version of Utopia appears absurdly naïve, a far cry from the more likely outcome that is portrayed in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), where humanity is split into two totally separate strata, the wealthy elite and the toiling lowlife.
As in René Clair’s previous two films – Sous les toits de Paris (1930) and Le Million (1931) – À nous la liberté’s most striking aspect is its highly inventive use of sound. Whilst many of his contemporaries were content to limit their films’ use of synchronised sound to recorded dialogue, Clair employs sound far more imaginatively to consolidate the images on the screen. The repetitive aching thud-thud-thud of clogs and hammers in the opening sequences drives home the monotony of prison routine, and is reprised in the factory scenes, the never-ending clunk-clunk-clunk on the production line becoming a powerful aural motif for the dehumanisation of mankind by the twin demons of capitalist greed and technological advancement. This grim expression of grinding mechanical drudgery is effectively counterpointed by Georges Auric’s uplifting music, which, in its glorious celebration of freedom and friendship, evokes those nobler human qualities by which the ordinary man will (in Clair’s view) ultimately overcome bondage and exploitation. The profit-hungry capitalists dance to an altogether different tune, the sound of a howling windstorm, as they go chasing after banknotes in a mad self-interested frenzy.
Charlie Chaplin is reputed to have been influenced by À nous la liberté when he made Modern Times (1936), which repeats many of the themes and situations of Clair’s film, most notably its strident anti-capitalist subtext. Shortly after Modern Times was released, Tobis, the German-owned company that financed and distributed Clair’s film, threatened to sue Chaplin on a charge of plagiarism unless he withdrew his film from circulation. Clair himself played no part in the ensuing legal battle and was flattered by the idea that Chaplin, whom he greatly admired, should be inspired by his work. After years of persistent threats of legal action, Chaplin finally paid Tobis a sum of money to end what he regarded as unjustified harassment. Although Chaplin vehemently denied the plagiarism charge (and even claimed never to have seen Clair’s film), there are some striking similarities between Modern Times and À nous la liberté. The production line sequences in both films employ very similar gags and the two films end in an identical fashion, with the two main characters setting off down a country road to a better life. Was Chaplin really copying Clair, or is this simply a case of two great minds thinking alike?
James Travers, Films de France.com

https://nitro.download/view/9C8F441E656D027/Rene_Clair_-_(1931)_A_Nous_la_Liberte.mkv

https://ddownload.com/dbl5himdfs43/Rene_Clair_-_(1931)_A_Nous_la_Liberte.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post René Clair – À nous la liberté (1931) first appeared on Cinema of the World.