A Film Canon

 

 

This comic ancestor of the prison film explicates industrial society as the most effective imprisonment, presenting a pair of separated escapees who meet up again as employer and employee in a massive, dystopian factory. Not only does their gradual re-identification with each other subvert and humanise their workplace, it dramatically alters the aesthetic organisation of the film. During the first act, Clair's characteristic use of song as a cohesive device is tempered by his abstraction of the human voice, deflected into the gramophones that the factory produces, as well as a variety of other palpably disembodied sources, such as the jaunty instructions that are half-spoken, half-sung to the assembly line workers. At the same time, nature is firmly construed as the province of the embodied voice - epitomised by a scene designed to give the impression that birds, flowers and trees are singing - with the result that the escapees' anarchic catalysis of a distinctively human vocal presence is figured as a return to nature. In this way, the symbiotic (or, at least, commensal) urban ecology of Under The Roofs Of Paris and The Million is replaced by a much starker distinction between nature and culture, explaining the factory's incongruous location in the middle of an expansive rural landscape. There's also a much stronger slapstick sensibility at play, particularly evident in the final chase scenes, perhaps due to the conflation of comedy with the mechanised bodies that such an industrial focus entails.