Picturesque Auvergne (1914) User Reviews

A Look Backwards

[boblipton · 5/10 · 31 January 2019]

Even today, Auvergne is considered a mountainous, rural part of France. Its best-known city is probably the spa town of Vichy, and even that is best known for being where the remnants of the French government settled while the North was occupied by the Germans during the Second World War.

It is not surprising, then, that this half-reel travelogue shows its audience the townsfolk practicing crafts that seem quaint: shoemaking, barrel-making, coppersmithing, wheelwright and ragpicking. Yet they seem happy enough in these humble trades. Can the modern, sophisticated urbanite say as much?

If you wish to look at this film, the Eye Institute has posted a nicely colored print to their YouTube site.

Beware of imitations

[kekseksa · 1 February 2019]

This Pathé film En Auvergne in colour (hand-coloured by the Pathé stencil process) was released in May1914 and was known as Picturesque Auvergne when shown in London in July and in the US in August. The description that appears here is essentially a translation of that which appears in the Pathé catalogue and it was principally a touristic landscape film. In April 1914 they had also brought out Les Environs de Mont-Dore, also shot in the Auvergne and also in colour. In 1917 they made a further film in the same region, La Vallàe de la Dordogne, a river that is born amongst the volcanic glaciers of Auvergne before making its stately way to the Atantic. One remnant of these films (generally about five minutes in length) is a three-minute educational film produced for the Pathé-Baby home-viewer in the 1920s called Les Monts d'Auvergne: Le Massif du Mont-Dore which probably makes use of footage from the 1914 or 1917 films. This is available on the internet but in poor quality and not of course in colour (Pathé-Babies in colour do exist but are rare).

Th e EYE film, on the other hand, is a tinted Lux film of 1912 from the Desmet Collection whose full catalogue title was Auvergne pittoresque. Petits métiers. As the title implies, and as one can see from the film, it was maily cocerned with working life and folk customs.

The Clermontois, the good folk of Clermont-Ferrand, will be rather dismayed to learn that people in the US only associate the region with Vichy, well known, however, for its mineral water. The region is also famous fo its wondeful green lentils (Puy-en-Velay) and its impressive volcanic landscape. It is however, in parts, still very much "la France profonde" despite having provided France with one President - the unprofound and unpicturesque Valéry Gichcard d'Echtaing (VGE) who, like msny auvergnats, cannot pronounce "s" correctly..VGE is very largely responsible for the iniquitous neo-liberal constitution with which the Europan Union is now saddled and which is its principal problem today but, at 92, France's youngest ever President (before the present incumbent) still refuses to die of shame.