Film Review
Towards the end of his productive period of filmmaking in the 1930s, the
avant-garde director Jean Epstein was commissioned to make three documentaries
-
Vive la vie (1937),
La Relève (1938) and
Les Bâtisseurs
(1938). Of these, the latter is the most interesting, an effective
conflation of public information film and leftwing propaganda in which Epstein's
well-developed humanity and visual flair are put to good use to promote France's
construction industry in the heady days of the Popular Front.
The film was commissioned by the CGT (Confédération générale
du travail), one of France's leading trades union confederations and made
by Ciné-Liberté, a company that produced and distributed films
for the French Communist Party. In common with the earlier film
La Vie est à nous (1936),
it is both educational and laudatory, with an obvious left-wing agenda.
Les Bâtisseurs both extols the achievements of the construction
worker through the centuries and militates for increased public investment
in better housing for the less well off members of society, as well as better
working conditions.
The film includes contributions from prominent mouthpieces of the Popular
Front government (notably the trade union leader Léon Jouhaux), as
well as ordinary labourers and noted figures in the field of modern architecture.
The celebrated Swiss composer Arthur Honegger provided the film with its 'Hymne
au travail', for which the voice of the hardworking proletariat sings in praise
of the construction industry, in a way that is far more redolent of Lenin's
Soviet Russia than late 1930s France.
A similar impression of Utopian euphoria is formed by a lengthy interlude
midway through the film showing children enjoying themselves at school.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the film (unless we
suppose that all of the cheerful youngsters seen hopping and skipping across
the screen are destined to end up as construction workers) but it provides
another quaint reflection of the optimistic era in which it was made.
Whilst all too obviously a propaganda piece, one that positively drips with
unadorned Marxist sentiment,
Les Bâtisseurs still has considerable
interest today. For one thing, many of the concerns it addresses - such
as the siting of affordable housing for ordinary people in healthy, pleasant
surroundings - remain highly relevant to this day. More importantly,
the film gives us a palpable sense of the optimism that took hold of France
in the mid-1930s, a time when a workers' Utopia benefiting the ordinary man
and woman really did seem to be within grasp, before Herr Hitler came along
and ruined it for everyone.
© James Travers 2019
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
Dating from the late 12th century, Chartres Cathedral still dominates the
skyline in its prime location to the southwest of Paris. In 1937, this
triumph of medieval architecture is under repair, enmeshed in a dense web
of scaffolding. As they work, two cheerful stonemasons are prompted
to reflect on man's architectural achievements, from the Middle Ages to the
present time. Two distinguished modern architects, Auguste Perret and
Le Corbusier, continue the dissertation, one paying tribute to the construction
accomplishments of the 20th century (schools, hospitals and other public buildings),
the other presenting his ideas for the ideal modern city, where ordinary
people can expect to live in homes that are properly integrated with green
spaces and leisure areas.
The trade union leader Léon Jouhaux delivers a fierce critique of
the public services' poor record of improving housing conditions for the low-paid,
which has resulted in an unacceptably high rate of tuberculosis and other
infectious diseases in some of the poorer districts of Paris. At a
meeting of the National Federation of Construction Workers, the assembled
delegates argue passionately for an improvement in working conditions and
the abolition of the slums and tenements that are scarcely fit for human habitation.
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.