America As Seen By A Frenchman — America As Seen By A Frenchman(Blu Ray)
America As Seen by A Frenchman (L'Amérique insolite) appeared in the year 1960- and it was the first feature-length documentary from Reichenbach, who before this had made a selection of travel-related shorts. Between the early 1950s & early 1980s, he helmed seventy-one productions- with the focus of his docs going from film stars & directors like Brigitte Bardot & Orson Welles, pianist Albert Rubinstein, Flower Power bus, and various travel-related docs. America As Seen By A Frenchman is certainly very well filmed & scoped- with Reichenbach get often very creative shots of his subjects & the changing landscape of the USA.
The film begins with Reichenbach & his crew coming into the port of San Francisco- and from here they move at a fair pace from place-to-place & subject-to-subject. Over the top of the footage, we get both French male & female description of what we’re seeing- this in an often fairly tongue in cheek, playful & more than a little smug with its digs at US culture.
Subject wise there’s a lot of ground covered- we go from prisoners watched rodeo, with all the prisoners been moved back & forth in crisp white suits. Various marches & parades, late teens dancing & blowing bubble gum bubbles. youngsters in a Hulu-hoop competition. LA’s muscle beach & a little boy trying to get rid of his shadow by throwing sand on it. Various profiles of older Americans, trips to an ice cream parlor to watch a small boy eat a small bath of icecream. Autumn landscapes of water-bound vehicles, shots of moody city suburbs as the bright & powerful sun goes down, and much more. The whole thing is soundtracked by a mellow blend of easy listening & jazziness. Largely the film flows from one set of images to the next, more often than not you don’t really get the feeling of traveling & often we’re not entirely clear where we are in American. The film also feels too long for its own good at the hour & a half mark. There’s no doubt that there are some great imagery & moments captured here- and if you are fascinated by Americana- this will certainly be of interest- I just felt ultimately the whole film lacked good enough flow & focus, the voice-over does get a little too smug at times, and it all feels too long- it really would have been better either cut into three or maybe just an hour-long total
Moving onto this new Blu Ray release on the film- we get a nice bold & punchy print of the film, which really brings out the 1950’s color pallet. The sound is nicely balanced & clear so the soundtrack of easy listening & light jazz flows nicely with the film's commentary. On the extras side, we get a twenty-five-minute appreciation of the film/overview of François Reichenbach career by author and critic Philip Kemp. This is informative/ interesting enough, and he discusses some of the directors slight more edgy/ grim docs- like 1957’s Les marines, which focused in the often brutal treatment of United States Marines in training. We lastly get an image gallery, though the finished edition of the release also comes with an illustrated booklet featuring new writing on the film by Caspar Salmon- but as we have only seen the screener disc I can’t comment on this.
As a curio/ look at USA in the 1950’s America As Seen By A Frenchman is passable- the issue is that it lacks structure, flow, or any real edginess. At times it plays like a Mondo film without the shocks & disturbing stuff, at others like a well-shot if rather twee/ quaint travel log. As we’ ve come to expect from Arrow it’s nicely presented/ put together release, the film it self just feels a bit too safe & lacking in its focus.