arbeit macht frei
by Douglas Messerli
René
Clair (writer and director) À Nous la
Liberté (Freedom for Us) / 1931
We
begin in prison, with prisoners on an assembly line creating toy horses. For
the first few moments there is almost something charming about this, as certain
prisoners apply paint and others put in the legs of the nearly magical beasts.
But as the bored supervisors watch, with one of the two central prisoners,
Louis (Raymond Cordy) and Ėmile (Henri Marchand) slipping a working tool into
their prison-issued shoes, we recognize this “work” as forced labor in stark
contrast to the song they sing they whistle while they work:
Liberty is the happy
man’s due
He enjoys love and
skies of blue
But then there are
some
Who no worse crimes have done
It’s a sad story we
tell
From a prison cell
A sad story indeed, reiterated by the
regimented meal they must consume after working throughout the day. Pretending
to sleep, the two cell mates saw through their cell window, Ėmile cutting his
finger in the process. Gently, with apparent kindness and love, Louis takes out
a handkerchief to mend the wound, and the two successfully leap to a retaining
space. They have only one more wall to climb, which Louis quickly succeeds in
doing, but the sudden sound of a siren, the appearance of guards, and Ėmile’s
shorter stature, leaves him behind, as he throws his rope over the wall to
further help his comrade escape.
The comic interlude is as good or better
as anything Chaplin, one of Clair’s favorites, might have created, as the
escaped prisoner accidentally knocks a bicyclist participating in a bicycle race,
off his vehicle, racing on the bike—mostly to escape the police—over the
finishing line to win the race.
Louis, in fact, quickly appears to be a
winner, successfully robbing a local store, and, after finding temporary
employment in a record store, becoming a wealthy industrialist who owns several
factories that produce phonograph players.
Although Louis has achieved wealth, his
workers are even worse off than the prisoners on the assembly line, as Clair,
combining images reminding one of Fritz
Lang’s Metropolis of five years
previous with humorous factory scenes that Chaplin would openly steal in his Modern Times, which premiered five years
later. So similar are the worlds of the prison and in the factory—where a
Guard, noticing a slacker, shouts: “Not at work? Don’t you know that….” To
which the factory worker answers “…work is mandatory. Because work means liberty”—that,
in hindsight, we only link it with the German-inspired phrase, “Arbeit macht
frei,” which cynically greeted prisoners and Jews to the concentration camps of
Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen, Theresienstadt, Dauchau, and other notorious
institutions of death only two years after Clair’s comic film.
Work in this world not only does not
result in “liberty,” but enslaves the willing participants and the factory
owners alike. Suddenly freed from imprisonment, Ėmile, resting peacefully in
the countryside, is roused by the police and forced into labor as if he had
never left his cell. Like Chaplin’s tramp, he fouls up the well-oiled machine,
intruding upon another worker’s space as he has missed the opportunity to screw
into the phonograph a needed bolt, causing
a near riot, as, bothered by Ėmile’s intrusion into his space, the second also
is unable to accomplish his task, the third, the fourth and so on, until the
entire factory breaks down in the process.
Ėmile also bollixes up the factory hierarchy
by falling quickly in love with the manager’s niece, Jeanne, leading, after a
couple of attempted meetings with the girl, to another chase which ends with an
encounter with the owner, his former prison mate! Fearing blackmail, Louis
tries to offer him money, which the honest Ėmile refuses, shaming his former
comrade.
Before long, the two, winking at each other,
return to what apparently were their habitual “games” back in prison, pushing,
shoving, wrestling, and touching one another as if they were two child-like
schoolboys—almost adolescent lovers. To placate his conscience, Louis invites
Ėmile to a dinner party that evening, which, because of the servants’
incompetence, results in a ridiculous free-for-all, forcing his haughty and
“shocked” visitors to leave in disgust. His wife, Maud, kisses her secret lover
goodnight at the door, promising she will leave with him the next morning.
Relieved by the mass exit of his guests, Louis
joyfully dances with Ėmile, while sending a missile of a wine bottle into his
own portrait, clearly demonstrating his disgust of his current life.
Equally delighted by his wife’s morning
departure, Louis does not recognize an ex-prisoner in the street, a man who,
however, perceives him. More comic events follow, including Louis’ attempt to
marry off Ėmile to Jeanne, and a group of gangsters’ (all ex-prisoners) attempt
to “out” Louis as a former prisoner. Gang members chase Louis (who has gathered
all his savings in a suitcase), and cops chase behind—again demonstrating
Clair’s love of Mack Sennett, Chaplin and Keaton shorts—which all ends where we
know it must: with the two “comrades” taking once more to the road, enjoying
each other in their simple roles as vagabonds more than the world of work and
regimentation.
In the end, Clair reveals that these two
can be free only without the societal pressures. The light-hearted songs the
men and others sing throughout are all lies. The true joy exists in their
camaraderie and idleness.
Given the very social issues that were
occurring throughout Europe at the moment of Clair’s farce, his work may have
seemed far more radical than Clair intended it. For only a few years later
these two would surely have arrested for vagrancy, imprisoned, overworked and,
perhaps, killed. But for an idyllic moment this Flaubertian, Beckettian, and
Laurel and Hardy-like couple were, for once in their lives, truly free, of
which Ėmile reminds his partner with a good, swift kick in the pants. If Clair’s
film, so beloved in its day, has lost its significance as the years have
passed, it is only because the horrors of World War II could no longer permit
theater-goers to laugh at the absurd logic behind the terror that would follow.
Los Angeles,
November 17, 2013
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