Synopsis
Louis Malle presents his entertaining snapshot of the comings and goings on one street corner in Paris.
Place de la République
Cast
Studio
Country
Language
Alternative Title
Republic Square
Genre
Releases by Date
Theatrical
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France
Releases by Country
France
30 Apr 1974
- Theatrical
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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 Mrs Dyer’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…
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☆"The concept was simple: with camera and microphone in plain view, we struck up conversations with passers-by."☆
Though a minor work of his filmography, Place de la République deserves a significantly higher viewership for Louis Malle fans and documentary nerds alike. Ten days in the namesake locale makes for a splendid feature of people-watching – with crew Jean-Claude Laureux, Étienne Becker, and Fernand Mozskowicz – on the busy Parisian street, with Malle going beyond just filming strangers by interviewing them as well.
So, it's not quite the renegade Billy on the Street, but what I appreciated most about this genial approach is that Malle always asks how the people feel about being filmed. There's no pretense about sneaking up or…
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"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…
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“It’s surprising how quickly people speak of intimate matters”
“Because they’re bored stiff. People aren’t happy. If they were, they wouldn’t need to tell their life story to some woman they’ve never seen before”
A Louis Malle documentary distilled down to its purest form: just him, his crew, and the pedestrians going about their day on the Place de la République in Paris. And just like the rest of his documentaries where he talks to people I am very grateful that we have a time capsule like this, a true testament to people and their stories.
What’s most interesting about a film like this is how quickly after the shock of interacting with a stranger people are willing to divulge…
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If there’s one thing I love about Louis Malle’s documentary work so far, it’s the way in which he captures people being people. This film could be made on any street in any city during any time period, and therein lies the magic.
[📽: Eclipse Series 2 DVD Boxset — The Documentaries of Louis Malle]
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In my graduate program, I'm struggling with the idea that history tends to focus on the historical actors. That throughout time and in accounts & interpretations of history that the major people are brought up, the lesser people are left out. The people important to the story get the spotlight. This film recognizes the interest that I feel about the random people who are here.
Though the film focuses on these random people in the middle of their lives, the movie turns them into characters. The act of recording them places them within this framework, they become the actors of the movie. The film and audience meet many actors and recognize some of the reoccurring ones like the lottery ticket seller…
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This is all I need in cinema. People, their faces, and Louis Malle’s self-reflexivity. With Malle finally becoming not just an off-screen voice, but a person with a face that was last seen in a cameo from his debut as the stranger who mistakes Jeanne Moreau for a prostitute. Was just glad to see Malle on-screen if just for the full denim drip he wears. Don’t think I can truly convey my thoughts on this, or maybe it’s best to use the cliché of cinema’s capability to present people beyond the rules of time and space being its most enthralling quality. Any analysis of individual fragments and interactions in this would feel pretentious. That’s not to say analysis, personal thoughts…
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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…
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The obvious parallel here isn't Malle's own previous documentaries made in factories, in India and for the Tour de France. The manner with which Malle welcomes the totality of a passing face to peer down the barrel of the lens - "Oui, oui, je suis là, alors?" - is in all of them, but this really recalls the earlier experiments with verité (the actual movement, not the broad concept) and Chronicle of a Summer and Le Joli Mai (the methods, if not the broad politics). Self-referential as a point of course, Place de la République begins with the simple premise of capturing everyday Parisiens at one of the city's busiest intersections: here, in all of their je ne sais quoi,…
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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…
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"Do you realize we've been filming you?"
In the fall of 1972, Louis Malle and a six-man crew spent ten days -- one of them Malle's 40th birthday -- on the titular Parisian street interviewing the people that work and congregate there. Most of the passersby he approaches are either retired or unemployed, and some are self-conscious about being on camera, but it's surprising the things some of them say once he puts them at ease.