A Film Canon

This elegant docudrama presents prison escape as the logical conclusion of the need for work, and the sense of collectivity and solidarity that it brings, eliding the genre's more conventional focus on a gradually collaborative homosociality with a collective that is already fully-formed when protagonist Michel (Geo Cassine, one of a handful of mostly non-professional actors) is relocated into its cell - a collectivity that is defined by eating and excreting together, clarifying both the prison's periodic inspection of food for weapons, and the opening hunger strike, as somewhat misguided. To this end, Becker provides an idiosyncratic equation of the prison itself with a cloyingly maternal state, completely continuous with the female entanglements responsible for most of the prisoners being housed there, and more comparable to a hospital, or even hotel, replete with doctors, hairdressers, and officials who are (apparently) prepared to go out of their way to help their charges. As a result, the fact that the prisoners effectively eat their way of this luxurious confinement ("here we do nothing but eat"), by way of a series of luxury items brought in from outside, signals a certain paradox at the core of Becker's vision, or perhaps just the intensity of his socialist-utopian vision, which envisages a world in which shared labour can produce foie gras, honey, strawberry jam, and chestnut spread for all. Similarly, Becker's preoccupations tend to subsume the genre's more conventional preoccupation with logistical ingenuity into extended depictions of hard physical labour, or at least ensure that whatever moments of ingenuity remain are imbued with a particularly corporeal collaboration - a man standing on another's shoulders, edging round a pole to avoid detection by a night watchman - as if to explicate the socialism inherent in Bresson's obsession with the hands, and their continuity with the tools reappropriated from the prison storeroom. The first space encountered by the prisoners' tunnel, this provides them with the equipment needed to elaborate the substructural topography that constitutes the centrepiece of the film, and largest respite from Becker's otherwise quite straightforward, unadorned direction - a series of engulfing darknesses that ultimately require the men to expand their strategy from two (the flattened boxes they receive from the prison guards) to three (the extended shafts they are supposed to construct from them) and eventually four dimensions, as their construction of a crude hourglass completes their re-embodiment.