Á Nous la liberté (France) | Click here to watch
(97 min; 1931; b/w; French with English subtitles)
Director: René Clair
Recipient of the Audience Referendum Award, Most Amusing Film, Venice Film Festival 1932; Kinema Junpo Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Kinema Junpo Awards 1933; and NBR Award for Top Foreign Film, National Board of Film Review, USA 1932
An engrossing satire on modern society’s belief in the new industrialization age, showing the Machine was not mankind’s salvation. It is the classic film that inspired Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). The heady film of French director Rene Clair impressed with its startling images of mass production on the assembly line and humans acting like robots in a factory setting. Its leftist radical politics was delivered with an easy going breeziness and its intermingling of song throughout made it feel uniquely like an operetta.
