A Truly Amazing Documentary !!!
"Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper."-J Cocteau
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The only negative thing that I can say about Vive La Tour(1962) is that
it's way too short. I could've easily gone on watching this truly
incredible doc for another 2 hours.
I think that one of the possible reasons that this film is only 18 mins
longs is that creating just the 18 mins was so labor intensive.
Although the credits list only 3 cinematographers, I'm quite sure that
there were a dozen or more cameramen working simultaneously during each
part of the race that is shown. That's the only way that I can figure
out how the film sees the action not only in the race itself, but among
the spectators as well from so many different camera positions,
seemingly at the same or perhaps at closely proximate points in time.
If indeed it took the number of cameramen and cameras that I suspect
were needed to produce this film, not to mention the additional
equipment and back up crews needed to support each cameraman, then the
true cost of producing just an 18 min film must have been prohibitive.
From this perspective, maybe an 18 min film is all that the filmmakers
could afford.
Anyway, the film never does make clear if it's about a particular
running of the Tour de France or if it's even a patchwork of clips from
several different years. Nor is there a declaration in the film about
who the 3 winners on the dais at the end of the film even are. This is
because this doc is not at all about the winning or the losing of this
race but, rather, it is an intimate look at the race through a logging
of many mundane, even trivial details about what it's like just to
EXPERIENCE the Tour de France, both from the perspective of a racer &
from the perspective of a roadside spectator.
This doc is an incredibly "inside", multi-faceted, multi-perspective, &
intimate look at a complex social event that exceeds the perceptual
capabilities of any 1 person who even has anything to do with that
social event. From that standpoint, this little 18 min film is without
a doubt the very best documentary that I've ever viewed about any
topic.