Reviews & Ratings for
Humain, trop humain More at IMDbPro »

2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Beautiful, meditative and poetic, 13 September 2009

Author: Thorkell A Ottarsson from Norway

It documentary is quite daring. It has no narration, no interviews or text to guide you. It is in fact directed according to the rules of the silent films. The story is visual. It is about the workers of a Citroen auto factory in Rennes, Brittany. This may sound like Modern Times - The Documentary but that is not the feeling I got when I saw it. The film is quite meditative. I even sometimes got the feeling that I was watching a religious ceremony when they where putting the cars together.

The cinematography is fantastic. Malle focuses on small things like how the feet move while people work, or how a girl moves her eye. Even though the film shows us how much work goes into making a car, I would not say that that was the point of the film. The film is much more about humanity, the human face and the human touch behind the cars people buy. We seldom think about the many hands that slaved putting our car together. The community and lives we are connected to when we step into a car.

This is one of the best edited documentary I have seen, and it is in fact the seamless and rhythmic editing which contributes greatly to the hypnotizing effect of the film, almost to the point of leaving one with a religious feeling.

This is a beautiful, meditative and poetic documentary.

Humain, trop humain (1975), 12 January 2012

Author: Martin Teller from Portland OR

A look at the Citroen factory and the workers that inhabit it. The film is done entirely without narration, and in fact the only audible dialogue occurs during the auto show (which, curiously, happens in the middle of the movie) as potential customers vacuously dissect the workmanship of the cars. The workers themselves are voiceless automatons, laboring at their repetitive, compartmentalized tasks. Malle gets right up in their faces as they go about their jobs, capturing a humanity that's on the verge of being swallowed by the process, often framing them in a manner that suggests they're trapped by the machinery. However, although I get that the drudgery is kind of the point of the film, 72 minutes of this gets to be a little tiresome and the fascination starts to wear off. Still, the measured rhythms of the film can be hypnotic.

The Sum of Its Component Parts?, 1 September 2011
Author: billheron53 from Canada

Thorkell A. Ottarsson, who posted a review on 13 September 2009, called this film "beautiful, meditative and poetic." It is indeed meditative. With a steady series of "snapshots" depicting the production of automobiles at a Citroën factory, it follows the rhythm of the assembly line, and this suggests a poetic meter.

Beginning with a woman manoeuvring a travelling crane over a vast stockpile of rolled steel sheet, we don't know what is being manufactured until the first recognizable component appears in the frame: the hood of the car is flipped over and inspected by a young woman in a red vest.

We follow the process for the first quarter of the film. The pieces are fitted together, slowly building the automobile. Sometimes more interesting than the procedure is the ingenious jig or fixture that has been created to hold the workpiece or guide parts together. At each stage inspectors feel for correct alignment or smooth finish, peer into corners and consult clipboards. The overall impression is of a huge number of people busily involved in the manufacturing process.

After we see the finished cars being driven onto rail transport, the second quarter of the film shows people checking out the cars at an auto show. Here we see the result is an amazingly complex, highly refined machine— looking like a jewel box under the bright lights. An amazing variety of people pick over, peer at, explore, and comment on the finished product, completely oblivious of the many individual human beings who contributed to its existence.

The second half of the film returns to the assembly line. Now we see it at the level of the individual workers, often seen framed by their own machine or the components around them, so they appear alone, integrated with their machine. The process is mesmerizing. The camera lingers this time on individuals. Some stand at a work station and perform their task with a steady rhythm of repetitious motions. Others move in steady rhythm around components that move slowly, inexorably along the assembly line. We may watch them perform several different tasks as a car body moves along, then pick up their tools and walk back up the line to begin on another car body. No one talks. All focus on their assigned task.

What we see is a tremendously complicated task that has been highly organized into many small tasks each handled by one individual. A scene showing seat upholstery being sewn suggests how many components have come from yet another assembly line that we do not see. Some of the tasks are very simple: one person's role is to place washers on a pair of studs; an exquisitely-sculpted jig allows one woman to bend tubing into an intricate configuration in a few simple motions. Some tasks involve more craftsmanship: spot welding in the right places, filling and smoothing a body seam, hammering and levering until a hatchback door closes perfectly aligned.

We see the manufacturing process in roughly reverse order. The film ends with a freeze frame of the young woman in the red apron inspecting newly-welded hoods. We are left to wonder if mass production reduces the contributions of individuals to such small parts that they are usually forgotten. They become insignificant, and the public at the auto show refer to the car as a product of a corporation. The vehicle has features and changes that "they" have decided on.

We are also left perhaps to wonder if a mass produced article retains a part, albeit a minuscule part, of each individual who has contributed to it, and whether or not the sum total of all that is equivalent to what is in a work completed by a single craftsperson.

3 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Good, but too long, 8 December 2006

Author: Jugu Abraham (jugu_abraham@yahoo.co.uk) from Trivandrum, Kerala, India

This documentary is an interesting look at the people who work on the assembly lines of French automobile factories.

To the credit of cinematographer Etienne Becker and director Louis Malle, several details of the assembly line, the input of each worker, the body movements (lilt of a heel or the pouting of lips) are captured honestly and seemingly unobtrusively. To Malle's credit, the sound is limited to production sound--the workers seem to be mute. Voices invade the film once during the segment on the sale of the cars to customers at a car show.

Malle's film, screened as part of a Malle retrospective at the 11th International Film Festival of Kerala, is a veiled comment on automation and its effects on people. The film ends with a frozen shot of a woman worker absorbed in the life within the factory. The life outside seems to be deliberately snipped off--but we know it exists. Malle was probably stating that human beings are getting to be dehumanized and living the life of "an assembly line." That said, the film could have said the same things in a third of the total run-time. Compare Malle's film to Bert Hanstra's documentary on glass blowers called "Glas" (1958). Made 16 years before "Humain, trop humain", Bert Haanstra's work, which uses music, is far superior to this one on a somewhat similar subject.

0 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Film about the monotony of a car assembly line is monotonous, 16 September 2007

Author: dbborroughs from Glen Cove, New York

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

A film about the monotony of building a car on an assembly line.

This 72 minute film is a chore to get through, even at high speed. Sue me for giving in to the temptation to hit the fast forward button but I couldn't not do it. Even the mid point intermission where we see the Cintron cars at an auto show and watch and listen to the public talk about the product doesn't help much since many of the people are candidates for being slapped. Then we switch back to the assembly line and I began to nod off.

Interesting to a point the lack of narration and music just make this worse than being on the assembly line since the only thing worse than doing a repetitive job is watching it being done.

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