Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave by Steven Ungar (review)

If social documentary in France arguably reaches back as far as the paradigmatic vue of 1895 showing workers exiting the Lumière factory, not until the late 1920s did avant-garde filmmakers, prompted by Surrealism's call poetically to change the world, bring forth a film language capable of unraveling social contradictions while restituting the marvelous quality of quotidian existence. Though cognizant of multiple historical temporalities that inform the "emergence and trajectory of social documentary in France" (viii), Ungar singles out the period from 1928 to 1963, with Georges Lacombe's portrait of suburban ragpickers (La zone, 1928) as its starting point, and Chris Marker's inquest into happiness at the close of the Algerian War (Le joli mai, 1963) its endpoint. From the outset Ungar acknowledges the transnational character of French documentary film culture, which after World War I benefited from the expertise and vision of expatriates and journeymen Europeans. The first two chapters explore the human geography of greater Paris in such symbolically charged spaces as the central market (Les halles centrales, Boris Kaufman 1928), canals and road networks (Études sur Paris, André Sauvage 1929), and suburban watering holes for working-class day-trippers (Nogent, eldorado du dimanche, Marcel Carné 1930). Chapter 3 places Éli Lotar's exposé on slum housing in the communist "red belt" Aubervilliers (1946) in dialogue with Lotar's earlier slaughterhouse photographs and with Jean Vigo's irreverent juxtapositions of urban squalor and bourgeois comforts in À propos de Nice (1930). Its title notwithstanding, chapter 4, "Colonial Cinema and Its Discontents," assesses anti-colonialist films, among them René Vautier's denunciation of vulture-like labor practices in the long-banned Afrique 50 (1950) and Jean Rouch's ethno-fictional exercise in re-voicing, Moi, un noir (1958). A final chapter sets off Alain Resnais's less obviously social Toute la mémoire du monde—viewed here as a poetic extension of Nuit et brouillard—from Le joli mai's streetside portraits of politically (dis)engaged citydwellers. Detailed, linear readings of representative films are framed by comments on production history and reception. At times, Ungar proleptically refers to much later works on the basis of similar shot composition or shared motifs (21–22, 33). Three "Transitions" between chapters unpack the independent networks and State policies (in particular the complément de programme mandating screenings of short subjects before each feature from 1914–1945), which allowed documentary film practice in France to flourish despite chronic underfunding and periodic legislative setbacks. Works of the Popular Front and French Resistance are marginally present, perhaps because their propagandistic intent is inimical to the poetic strain of social documentary defended by Vigo. Impressive in its scope if not wholly settled in its historical claims—Georges Perec's post-situationist, anthropological notion of the "infraordinary" is forcibly applied to modes of attention of the 1920s (17–19)—Critical Mass delivers an accessible, extensively researched survey of an underappreciated component of independent French filmmaking and distribution. Readers unfamiliar with one or more titles, the majority available only in Zone 2 DVD editions, will appreciate the 128 frame grabs, which achieve a critical mass all their own.