VIVE LE TOUR
[via Louis Malle]
Voyageur / Pigeon:
it isn’t quite looting, but they demand anything.
Van Looy takes the lead.
Everyone was going flat-out
Lay still
(eaten some bad fish).
Terrible--once they see a bike, they’re off.
Only stragglers are pushed.
Up more exhausted than the
racers.
Barry Alpert / Silver Spring, MD US / 12-28-05 (5:49 PM)
Written during my first viewing of this 18-minute documentary made in 1962,
part of an exhaustive retrospective of the unpredictable French director
mounted in Washington DC by the National Gallery of Art and the American
Film Institute. Having seen most of his feature-length fictional
narratives more than once in the past, I confess to being not particularly
excited by this retrospective until I began to realize the extent of
Malle’s work in the documentary idiom and that I had never witnessed any of
those films. Particularly intriguing was the variety of the literal
presence of Malle and his crew within each documentary film. “Vive le
tour” had a voice-over narrative by the director, and I tried to limit the
choice of language to that which exited his mouth and appeared as
subtitles.
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