Product Description

Over the course of a nearly forty-year career, Louis Malle forged a reputation as one of the world’s most versatile cinematic storytellers, with such widely acclaimed, and wide-ranging, masterpieces as Elevator to the Gallows, My Dinner with Andre, and Au revoir les enfants. At the same time, however, with less fanfare, Malle was creating a parallel, even more personal body of work as a documentary filmmaker. With the discerning eye of a true artist and the investigatory skills of a great journalist, Malle takes us from his French homeland to India to the United States, in some of the most engaging and fascinating nonfiction films ever made. Six Disc Set Includes:

Vive Le Tour Humain, Trop Humain Place de la Republique

An energetic evocation of the Tour de France, a meditative investigation of the inner workings of a French automotive plant, and an entertaining snapshot of the comings and goings on one street corner in Paris - Louis Malle's three French-set documentaries reveal, in an eclectic array of ways, the director's eternal facination with and respect for, the everyday lives of everyday people.

Phantom India Malle called his gorgeous and groundbreaking Phantom India the most personal film of his career. And this extraordinary journey to India, originally shown as a miniseries on European television, is infused with his sense of discovery, as well as occasional outrage, intrigue, and joy.

Calcutta When he was cutting Phantom India, Malle found that the footage shot in Calcutta was so diverse, intense, and unforgettable that it deserved its own film. The result, released theatrically, is at times shocking - a chaotic portrait of a city engulfed in social and political turmoil, edging ever closer to oblivion.

God's Country In 1979, Louis Malle traveled into the heart of Minnesota to capture the everyday lives of the men and women in a prosperous farming community. Six years later, during Ronald Reagan's second term, he returned to find drastic economic decline. Free of stereotypes about America's "heartland," God's Country, commissioned for American public television, is a stunning work of emotional and political clarity.

...And the Pursuit of Happiness In 1986, Malle, himself a transplant in the United States, set out to investigate the ever widening range of immigrant experience in America. Interviewing a variety of newcomers (from teachers to astronauts to doctors) in middle-and working-class communities from coast to coast, Malle paints a generous, humane portrait of their individual struggles in an increasingly polyglot nation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48060 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-04-24
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Box set, NTSC, Subtitled
• Original language: French
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 6
• Running time: 818 minutes

Amazon.com
Certainly the most underrated of the best-known directors to emerge from the French New Wave of the 1950s, Louis Malle (1932-1995) was also one of the most versatile. Unlike his contemporaries Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, et al., Malle was born into French nobility (as an heir to the Beghin beet-sugar fortune), which only makes The Documentaries of Louis Malle more remarkable for their compassionate humanism and empathy for the daily struggles of everyday people. Having begun his career as an underwater-camera operator for pioneering ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, Malle quickly developed a highly personal approach to filmmaking, and after co-directing Cousteau's Oscar-winning documentary The Silent World (1956), he made an auspicious directorial debut with the taut and commercially successful thriller Elevator to the Gallows. And while Malle is best known for such classics as Murmur of the Heart, Atlantic City, My Dinner with Andre and Au Revoir, Les Enfants (in addition being married to Candice Bergen from 1980 until his death), this terrific box set (comprised of seven films on six DVDs) stands as a testament to Malle's uncommon skill as an astutely observant documentarian.

One short and two feature-length documentaries show how Malle's gift for nonfiction filmmaking was fully formed at an early stage. The 1962 short "Vive Le Tour" (19 minutes) is a remarkably intimate look at that year's Tour de France bicycle race, offering a vivid account of the race itself, in addition to the rural French surroundings, rabid fans, and bicyclists in various stages of exhaustion as their endurance test continues. The 72-minute Humain, Trop Humain ("Human, All Too Human," 1973) is a fascinating and pointed experiment in verité style, eschewing narration as Malle's camera probes the numbing routines of dehumanizing labor on the assembly line of a Citroën auto factory. In the middle of the film, Malle offers the stark contrast of eager auto consumers at a Paris motor show, but otherwise this remains a riveting (pardon the pun) look at laborers performing robotic duties, with Malle serving as a subtle admirer of their daily endurance. Malle returned to the subject of working people in Place De La République (1974), a wryly amusing, 95-minute study of a small stretch of sidewalk in a working-class Parisian neighborhood. As Malle interviews various passersby, the film evolves into a penetrating and often humorous examination of the social and personal factors that make people happy or discontent, and a testament to Malle's refined sense of class-conscious curiosity.

In 1969, Malle said he was "fed up with actors, studios, fiction, and Paris" (referring to his battles with Alain Delon during the making of the omnibus film Spirits of the Dead), so he traveled to India with a two-man crew to create his seven-part, 363-minute masterpiece Phantom India. Originally broadcast as a miniseries on French television and financed with Malle's own money, this was the film that Malle considered the most personal of his career. Epic in scope yet intimate in its embrace of India's impoverished majority, it provides what was (in the late '60s) an unprecedented portrait of India's culture--its poverty, caste system, and maddening contradictions. As a companion piece assembled from his vast amount of Indian footage, Malle made Calcutta (99 minutes) to focus on that city's own unique history, personality, and people. Here, Malle trades the slow, contemplative pacing of Phantom India for a more intensely focused examination of the sociopolitical issues that plagued all of India, most conspicuously in its most densely populated city.

After relocating to the United States in 1975 (to direct Pretty Baby), Malle continued to alternate narrative features with documentary projects. The PBS-funded God's Country (89 minutes) was originally broadcast in 1989, and focuses in the close-knit farming community of Glencoe, Minnesota, with 80% of its population of 5,000 comprised of German descendents. Most of the film was shot in 1979, but when it took several years for PBS to finance the editing process, Malle returned to Glencoe in 1985, only to find the farmers (who had welcomed Malle as a curious outsider) struggling in the aftermath of economic recession. Thus, once again, does Malle's work focus on the tenacious survival of working-class people. It's only fitting, then, that the final film in this set (also Malle's final documentary) is titled ...And the Pursuit of Happiness (81 minutes), in which Malle focused on recent immigrants to America including Cambodian refugees, a Pakistani schoolteacher-turned-cosmetics salesperson, an Ethiopian cab-driver, a NASA astronaut from Costa Rica, and many others. Drawing upon his own perspective as an outsider in America, Malle continued to express his uncommon empathy for people in various stages of adjustment or displacement.

As the reasonably priced "Series 2" release of the Eclipse division of the Criterion Collection, The Documentaries of Louis Malle does not include any supplemental materials aside from well-written liner notes, but the superiority of these films speaks for itself. If it wasn't obvious before, it's now quite clear that Louis Malle ranked highly among the most accomplished documentary filmmakers of the 20th century. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

Essential.
This collection is really terrific -- definitely one to buy, rather than rent. (For one thing, the total run time is something like 13 hours.)

The first full-length film in the set (it also includes a fun short about the Tour de France) is a subtle, quietly thought-provoking take on the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. Wait -- that sounded pretentious. It's a movie about factory work. And it's brilliant. It's tedious in spots, to be sure, but that tedium is an essential part of the way the film works. Many of the scenes are initially intriguing, then boring, and finally horrifying; the workers appear to have become clockwork components of the assembly line's machinery. I physically ached when this film was over.

The second one, "Place de la Republique," was my least favorite, perhaps because experiments like Malle's (hanging out for ten days at a busy intersection interviewing people at random) have been repeated so many times since he made this movie . . . but even this one had many surprising moments and insights, and it's fun to get such a detailed look at the Paris of the early seventies.

"Phantom India" is the masterpiece of the set. A lot of people expected this to be released separately, in the standard overstuffed and overpriced Criterion package, but the people at Criterion have thrown us poor folk a bone and included it in the "bargain" Eclipse set. Oh, boy -- this movie is just awesome: a hypnotic, totally engrossing portrait of the most deliciously weird -- and relentlessly "contradictory" -- country on Earth. There are so many highlights here. Two early scenes -- at a dance school, and at a temple festival -- were so breathtaking that I actually had to rewind an hour and watch them again before moving on.

One caveat: the sound quality is terrible for the first half-hour or so. (Apparently, the original elements were so damaged that the restorers couldn't perfect some of the audio.) If the buzz and hiss of the first few scenes is driving you crazy: trust me, it gets much better.

If "Phantom India" was full of surprises, its sister film, "Calcutta," was not; it's more or less what I imagined "Phantom India" would be like: a beautiful, thoughtful, very serious film about poverty and human misery, man's inhumanity to man, etc. It's really good -- but in 2007, these kinds of images of suffering have become so ubiquitous that they've lost some of their power to shock (which is obviously a sad statement). My favorite parts of "Calcutta," then, were the other moments: the singing and dancing, the wrestling in the park, the religious festivals.

Malle's last two docs -- "God's Country" and the unfortunately titled ". . . and the Pursuit of Happiness" -- were shot in Malle's adopted home, the U.S.; both are quite warm and humane, resisting caricature. In fact, there were times when I felt Malle was going too easy on the folksy Minnesotans of "God's Country" -- but every time I had this thought, Malle came through with a challenging interview question, exposing the homophobia, racism and anti-Semitism of this isolated farm community. He never does this in a shrill, reductive, predictable, or demeaning way, however; in the end, it's not just his affection, but also his sincere respect for his subjects that comes across.

Malle is one of the most underrated filmmakers of all time, I think. He's praised -- and was praised throughout his career -- but not enough, especially when you consider how his critical reputation compares to that of directors like Resnais, Truffaut and Godard.

Malle's reputation may actually be a victim of the director's own versatility. Instead of carving out his own niche, repeating the same exercise again and again and again, he tried jarringly new projects throughout his career, usually pulling them off with dazzling success. You'd never know, unless you were told, that "Elevator to the Gallows," "Zazie on the Metro," "Lacombe, Lucien," "Atlantic City," "My Dinner with Andre," "Goodbye, Children," "Damage" and "Vanya on 42nd Street" (to name just eight of his best movies -- there are many more) were the work of the same filmmaker. And all of the movies I just named are so wonderful, so assured; you never sense that Malle is stretching.

This set -- along with the DVD release (soon, I hope) of his Palme D'Or- and Oscar-winning collaboration with Jacques Cousteau, "The Silent World" -- may make it impossible, finally, for anyone to get away with denying Malle's greatness. What a body of work this guy left behind.

DOC BLOCK
The centerpiece of this Criterion Collection box set (Eclipse Series #2) is Louis Malle's "Phantom India," a landmark seven episode docu-series made for French television in the 1960s. Malle seeks the India not usually seen by foreigners, the secret temples and dusty byways, the street festivals, the remote tribes and hidden cities full of beggars, mystics, and madmen. Malle's narration (in French) gives information about the country and its people, its hierarchical and complicated caste system, its politics, its tribes, its culture, and its polyglot religious reality. Malle's impressions and observations, given in voice-over, make it a very personal journey into the heart of India. At first you feel how shocked and repelled Malle is by the country, but, as the film flows on at its leisurely pace, it becomes a spiritual journey for him, one that Malle allows you to share through the rhythm of his shooting and editing. Malle tried to capture India's rhythm in how he edited the film, which takes some adjusting to since most of the 363 minutes are shot in long takes that really immerse you in what you are watching, steeping you in its atmosphere. For the most part, Malle eschews British colonial India to discover regions untouched by the West. Alternately glorious and horrific, banal and mesmerizing, the series made me run the emotional gamut, including, I must confess, disgust. Having recently seen Chris Marker's "San Soleil" (another excellent documentary released by Criterion) it seems obvious to me that Marker was influenced by Malle's "Phantom India." At one point in "San Soleil" the narrator says, "Frankly, have you heard of anything stupider than to say to people, as they teach in film school, not to look at the camera?" Malle shoots "Phantom India" in the same spirit, engaging with the country's people, inviting furtive glances, penetrating stares, filming their holiness as well as their degradation not with the cold eye of a clinical observer but with the empathy of a fellow human being.

"Vive Le Tour" is a 19 minute study of the Tour de France. It focuses more on the cyclists struggling to finish the race than on the winners.

"Humain, Trop Humain" is a look inside a French automobile plant. There is hardly any narration or speaking. Malle uses very long, sometimes exasperating takes, of workers doing their job. If you ever wondered what work inside a car plant is like, this is your film. Some might be bored because the film seeks to convey the monotony, the endless repetition, of these jobs.

In "Place de la Republique" Malle stands in a crowded square in Paris and films people at random, asking them questions and eliciting reactions. It's an absorbing study of street life. Malle focuses on the quotidian rather than the extraordinary, on the banal rather then the spectacular, but he gets at the hidden truth of everyday life.

The last two documentaries are delightful observations about America. In "God's Country" Malle travels to a small German-American town deep in the heart of Minnesota. He chronicles life during the 1980s in this small rural community. Almost to a person, these people are Republicans who voted for Reagan, yet, as the Reagan years grind along, we see the increasing poverty and dissatisfaction of these heartlanders. Malle began shooting in 1979 and did not set out to make an anti-Reagan film. But by 1985 the dissatisfaction of the farmers was palpable.

The last docu, "And the Pursuit of Happiness," is a delightful look at immigrants who have come to the United States from all over the world. Malle has a way of getting into people's lives so that you are not watching clinical case histories, or mere subjects, but real people living their lives and talking about their fears, hopes, and dreams. I was surprised to see poet Derek Walcott pop up amid the seemingly endless stream of immigrants. Malle (himself an immigrant) shows what it's like to be a newcomer to the U.S., whether you are an ousted Nicaraguan dictator, a family of Chinese peasants who just got off the plane, or a Cuban exile drinking a "cortadito" outside a popular Cuban restaurant in Miami.

Much Anticipated...
After viewing a small portion of Louis Malle's fictional films (the well known films, "Au Revoir Les Enfants," "Murmur of the Heart," and "Lacombe, Lucien.") I became interested in the director's complete body of work. A subsequent search led me to the Harvard Film Series website which profiled not only Louis Malle's fictional works, but also his diverse and numerous documentaries (the most intriguing being his work in India and the television series he later worked on regarding the country). \

It Should be quite interesting to see what Criterion does with this new Eclipse line, as it will bring a number of previously unattainable films and directors into the library of film buffs around the United States. This series of diverse documentaries, as well as the early Bergman (an announced set which consists of the films; Torment, Crisis, Port of Call, Thirst, and To Joy) and Raymond Bernard (Wooden Cross and Les Miserables, announced on the Criterion blog) films will provide a great backbone for the Eclipse series. Looking forward to more greatness in the future.