La Tour (René Clair, 1928)
Symphonie mecanique (Jean Mitry, 1955)
L'Ere industrielle, métamorphoses du paysage (Eric Rohmer, 1964)
Humain, trop humain (Louis Malle, 1972)

La Tour (11 mins, Silent, B&W) is René Clair's impressionist trip to the top of the Iron Lady, the Eiffel Tower. As in his best work of the twenties, Clair uses superimposition, fades, and extreme verticality to effect a sense of perpetual movement. Jean Mitry's “cinematographic essay” Symphonie mécanique (10 mins, B&W) parallels Pierre Boulez's serial music and images of working machines, shown simultaneously on three adjoining screens. Eric Rohmer, ever the moralist, notes, “We can't dismiss modernism as ugly. We must learn how to look at it.” His L'Ere industrielle, métamorphoses du paysage (23 mins, B&W) is in its way a teaching film, comparing industrial and waterfront scenes with painting and placing the industrial landscape in a historical context. Louis Malle's Human, Too Human (75 mins, B&W), shot in a Citroën assembly plant, looks at the movements, the time, and the intensity of the worker's investment in Modern Times. His dispassionate stance is at times almost Bressonian, at others, as comic as Tati.