Blu-ray Review: America as Seen by a Frenchman Joins the Arrow Academy

If François Reichenbach’s America as Seen by a Frenchman evinces little of the formalist daring of Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch’s cinema verité classic Chronicle of a Summer, it nevertheless creates a vivid and essential portrait of American life in the late 1950s by keying into the darkness, and sometimes the death, that lurks beneath the surface of everyday life. To say that the film is anti-American would both overstate its cumulative effect and reduce the nuance of its editing and tone to mere polemic. But it’s certainly true that Reichenbach and his collaborators, which include Chris Marker and Jean Cocteau, aimed to channel the burgeoning, modern energies of the Nouvelle Vague into a documentary that speaks to how the political implications of American behavior and action resonate across the globe.

The film begins on the Golden Gate Bridge, which has “the exquisite audacity of a spider’s web,” according to the voiceover narration, and it charts various aspects of American culture before concluding, in seemingly ironic fashion, that “everyone makes their own conclusions” about the United States. After witnessing the showboats that meander the Mississippi River recreated at Disneyland in California, a carnival in Texas that turns prison inmates into comic fodder, and a terrifying gathering for similarly dressed twins of all ages, you may walk away from America as Seen by a Frenchman with the undeniable impression that the country is an incoherent clusterfuck of excessive behavior, sexual repression, and barely contained violence.

Throughout the film, no matter what’s happening on screen, a cheery score can almost always be heard (shades of Yasujirō Ozu). Michel Legrand’s music serves as ironic complement to one sequence depicting a carnival in which children scarf down ice cream and try to fit entire hot dogs in their mouths, as if to suggest we’re in the midst of pretty innocent fare. The narration, though, troubles a simple alignment of image and music by wryly noting that “mealtime can be a party or a competition.” What it isn’t, this insight implies, is either nutritious or enriching, and while one could be accused of pedantry by reading too much into this sequence, America as Seen by a Frenchman is very much concerned with how a nation’s mindless engagement with food, advertising, and other forms of amusement leads to apathy and ignorance, such as failure to address and resolve inequalities along racial and class lines.

In one particularly graceful sequence, several Black children are seen standing on tires and playing on oil barrels and with hula hoops. Again, the music strikes an upbeat tone, suggesting that these children are getting on just fine. But Reichenbach is demonstrating how sound and image can work to suggest happiness, perhaps even capture it in the moment, while also hinting at how poverty is linked to racism and segregation. It’s hard not to think that the very existence of such empathetic images being seen by French audiences at the time as a gesture of solidarity with Algeria during the height of the Algerian Revolution. That is, while the film purports to be a case study on the U.S., it’s also implying that France isn’t, nor has ever been, entirely exempt from any of these social, political, and racial problems.

Image/Sound

Arrow Academy’s Blu-ray transfer looks remarkable, as is generally the case with HD scans that have been taken from restorations conducted by the CNC in France. The film’s painterly use of Eastman color nearly leaps from the screen in just about every frame, especially in wide shots where the richness of the colors and the extensive depth of field result in a dynamic vibrancy. Grain is quite apparent throughout and generally consistent, though there are some sequences where its very visible presence is borderline distracting. The original uncompressed monaural audio is also solid, with the film’s voiceover, live elements, and Michel Legrand’s score given an impressively full-sounding experience.

Extras

The disc’s sole supplement is a new video appreciation of America as Seen by a Frenchman by author and critic Philip Kemp, who contextualizes both the film and François Reichenbach in relation to the broader trends in French filmmaking at the time. Kemp argues that Reichenbach has been unjustly forgotten as a significant figure in the Nouvelle Vague, with America as Seen by a Frenchman being perhaps his most noteworthy contribution. Kemp details Reichenbach’s younger years in both France and New York, where he developed an interest in making films as “cinematic poems in which image and word respond to one another.” Overall, Kemp provides an insightful primer on Reichenbach and briefly discusses several of the director’s other films, including 1976’s Sex ‘O Clock U.S.A..

Overall

This sterling new Blu-ray will hopefully cement the underseen America as Seen by a Frenchman’s reputation as one of the essential documentaries of the French New Wave.