ABSTRACT
Before becoming a major director of some of the masterpieces of French Poetic Realism in the late 1930s and 1940s, John Carne began his career as a film critic. In his aversion to "filmed theater," he famously argued for a cinema that would "go down into the streets," focusing on the lives of ordinary people. The film starts with images of trains, buses, and railway tracks, which are juxtaposed to shots of deserted Paris streets, empty factories, and typewriters packed in slipcovers. It is a natural landscape organized by industrial infrastructure and populated by the urban crowds who are swimming, rowing, canoeing, sailing, fishing, or biking. The film's rhythmic editing evokes the joy and freedom of the escape to the countryside. Striking point of view shots from helter-skelter and unusual angles give the film a highly avant-garde touch in line with city symphonies and their evocations of the chaos of the great metropolitan centers.
