Les Bâtisseurs (1938)
Directed by Jean Epstein

Film Review

Towards the end of his productive period of filmmaking in the 1930s, the avant-garde director Jean Epstein was commissioned to make three documentaries - Vive la vie (1937), La Relève (1938) and Les Bâtisseurs (1938).  Of these, the latter is the most interesting, an effective conflation of public information film and leftwing propaganda in which Epstein's well-developed humanity and visual flair are put to good use to promote France's construction industry in the heady days of the Popular Front.

The film was commissioned by the CGT (Confédération générale du travail), one of France's leading trades union confederations and made by Ciné-Liberté, a company that produced and distributed films for the French Communist Party.  In common with the earlier film La Vie est à nous (1936), it is both educational and laudatory, with an obvious left-wing agenda.  Les Bâtisseurs both extols the achievements of the construction worker through the centuries and militates for increased public investment in better housing for the less well off members of society, as well as better working conditions.

The film includes contributions from prominent mouthpieces of the Popular Front government (notably the trade union leader Léon Jouhaux), as well as ordinary labourers and noted figures in the field of modern architecture.  The celebrated Swiss composer Arthur Honegger provided the film with its 'Hymne au travail', for which the voice of the hardworking proletariat sings in praise of the construction industry, in a way that is far more redolent of Lenin's Soviet Russia than late 1930s France. 

A similar impression of Utopian euphoria is formed by a lengthy interlude midway through the film showing children enjoying themselves at school.  This has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the film (unless we suppose that all of the cheerful youngsters seen hopping and skipping across the screen are destined to end up as construction workers) but it provides another quaint reflection of the optimistic era in which it was made.

Whilst all too obviously a propaganda piece, one that positively drips with unadorned Marxist sentiment, Les Bâtisseurs still has considerable interest today.  For one thing, many of the concerns it addresses - such as the siting of affordable housing for ordinary people in healthy, pleasant surroundings - remain highly relevant to this day.  More importantly, the film gives us a palpable sense of the optimism that took hold of France in the mid-1930s, a time when a workers' Utopia benefiting the ordinary man and woman really did seem to be within grasp, before Herr Hitler came along and ruined it for everyone.

Film Synopsis

Dating from the late 12th century, Chartres Cathedral still dominates the skyline in its prime location to the southwest of Paris.  In 1937, this triumph of medieval architecture is under repair, enmeshed in a dense web of scaffolding.  As they work, two cheerful  stonemasons are prompted to reflect on man's architectural achievements, from the Middle Ages to the present time.  Two distinguished modern architects, Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier, continue the dissertation, one paying tribute to the construction accomplishments of the 20th century (schools, hospitals and other public buildings), the other presenting his ideas for the ideal modern city, where ordinary people can expect to live in homes that are properly integrated with green spaces and leisure areas.

The trade union leader Léon Jouhaux delivers a fierce critique of the public services' poor record of improving housing conditions for the low-paid, which has resulted in an unacceptably high rate of tuberculosis and other infectious diseases in some of the poorer districts of Paris.  At a meeting of the National Federation of Construction Workers, the assembled delegates argue passionately for an improvement in working conditions and the abolition of the slums and tenements that are scarcely fit for human habitation.