In 1948, Siegfried Giedion, an architectural historian who co-founded the Congrès international d'architecture moderne with Le Corbusier in 1928, published Mechanization Takes Command in New York. The book examined the mechanized production of goods as well as the execution of domestic tasks and household chores. Giedion studied the long road that, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, led to the breaking down of the body's movements into component parts and equipping them with tools before replacing them with machines, showed how mechanization, which generally began in Western Europe, gathered speed and transformed life in the United States in the period from 1870 to 1950, and examined the prospects it offered industrial societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

The year before Mechanization Takes Command was published, Jacques Tati directed Jour de fête (The Big Day), which came out in 1949. Set in a French village on a public holiday, the film chronicles a day in the working life of a postman who adopts modern, i.e. American-style, working methods. It shows American industrial modernity disrupting even the most backward areas of rural France. A box-office and critical success, Jour de Fête won the Grand Prix du cinéma français in 1950, a reception that reflects the skepticism of French society about the need for productivity at the beginning of the Trente Glorieuses, the thirty-year postwar boom.¹ In short, Tati's film illustrates a way of life that was extremely resistant to mechanization and the rational coordination of work embodied by the United States. Jour de Fête is about two different systems of representation: on the one hand the United States, perceived as the stronghold of efficiency and rationality; and on the other France, subjected to the scientific organization of labor.

To what extent do these two images coincide? This article aims to provide some answers by examining several films by Tati, whose point of view shifted over time. A selection of documentaries, most of them made for television, viewed at the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA) and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), are also examined. But before analyzing and comparing these two audiovisual sources, it is important to recall some of the forms that the references to American working methods and practices took in France in the first half of the twentieth century.

The American Way of Work, A Longstanding Preoccupation

The First World War opened up a new chapter in the long history of French images of life in the United States. They were somewhat mythical² until the war brought the French population into contact with hundreds of thousands of real Americans. Curiosity about the New World evolved into fascination with the image of an unmatched industrial power.

After 1918, business leaders, engineers and technicians crossed the Atlantic to unlock the secrets of American industrial efficiency, following in the footsteps of Louis Renault's 1910 tour of Henry Ford's auto plants. French trade unionist Hyacinthe Dubreuil praised the rational organization of labor in Standards,³ a book about his experiences working in the United States. Many academics, writers and politicians also crossed the ocean, a sign of intellectual curiosity sometimes tinged with worldly and literary infatuation. Historian Bernadette Galloux‑Fournier has inventoried 127 travel narratives published by French authors such as Paul Morand and Jules Romains between 1919 and 1939.⁴ Georges Duhamel's book⁵ became obligatory reading about America; André Siegfried's carried even more weight in academic circles.⁶ Despite their differences in perspective, these authors expressed amazement at the country's boundless energy, industrial might, sprawling factories, and mechanized manufacturing processes. But they also worried about their impact on workers. While nothing suggests that the majority of French society shared Duhamel's negative views,⁷ the images of Chicago's slaughterhouses and Detroit's Ford plants left people feeling bewildered about “American-machinist civilization”.⁸ Other aspects of American life, such as homes, remarkable both for their comfort and standardized appliances, increased this ambivalence.

Images of American society looked exotic to the French in the first half of the twentieth century. The case of the Taylor method allows this distance to be measured. In two books published in the United States in 1903 and 1911, Frederick Taylor (1856‑1915) advocated a horizontal and vertical division of labor to boost industrial efficiency. Renault almost immediately experimented with the system, and in 1913 a strike made Taylorism famous in the spheres of labor and management. But the carmaker only intended to adapt some parts of the doctrine, not the whole system. This piecemeal approach was followed by some large manufacturing and mining companies in interwar France.⁹ While Taylorism had a relatively limited impact on companies, it made a resounding debut in the cinema in two derisive critiques of rationalized industrial work. But René Clair's 1931 film À nous la liberté (Freedom for Us) makes no references to the United States. Chaplin's Modern Times, made the following year, quickly surpassed its American origin and took on a universal scope.¹⁰

The Second World War changed images and practices. The defeat and Occupation undermined faith in the common sense, realism and traditions that were associated with resignation. The victory of the United States and the Soviet Union swayed public opinion in favor of modernizing ways: It made sense to think big and to get organized in order to build the future. Rationalization and planning became key words.

The United States uncontestably dominated the struggle for influence in French society. Even before the Marshall Plan was announced in June 1947, loans and donations helped the countries of Western Europe rebuild and modernize. The American government organized generous study trips, including tours, meetings, conferences, lectures and courses and produced a steady stream of multifaceted propaganda, extolling the virtues of American efficiency. In France, the movement was embraced by economic interests and government officials. From 1949, participation in jointly organized study trips was broadened to civil servants, business leaders, executives, trade unionists and experts, who crossed the Atlantic in their thousands.¹¹

When they returned, the travelers described their experiences in reports, lectures, courses, and countless public and private conversations. Written and oral accounts spread images of American life. They promoted methods to rationalize, supervise and control work in companies. This wave of testimonies expressed strong support for the American industrial model, its impressive efficiency, mass production, and the circulation of goods. But the “missionaries” were more circumspect when it came to the Taylorian method of organizing work, the quality of production, workplace safety and, sometimes, the racism they observed. Their reservations were echoed in French society, reflecting reluctance in the face of Americanization more than hostility, which, all things considered, was limited.¹²

The rational organization of work and activities became widespread during the period from the Liberation to the early 1970s. Most large and medium-sized companies created methods departments made up of engineers and technicians who systematically analyzed activities and their rational reorganization, inspired by American missions, consulting firms, and courses in French engineering schools. Design offices, methods offices, and planning departments were at the heart of industrial organizations and public service administrations. Banking and insurance were among the most active industries in this area. Large computer and office automation firms, mostly American, offered experimental interventions, equipment, and new services.

Jacques Tati: a shifting critical perspective

Most of Tati’s films about the attraction exerted by American productivism on French society were made in this period. Without focusing exclusively on work, several of his films give it a significant role. Tati’s perspective on this recurring theme shifted over the course of the Trente Glorieuses, the thirty-year postwar boom.

In 1946, Tati made his first film, a short comedy called L’École des facteurs (The School for Postmen). The film shows an instructor teaching postmen how to deliver mail as efficiently as possible in a half-Taylorian, half-military style. It then features one of the letter carriers implementing these ideas through a series of sight gags. Except for the score written by composer and jazz musician Jean Yatove (1903‑1978), there are no references to the United States.

The Big Day, Tati’s first full-length film, came out in 1949, at the beginning of the efficiency wave. The director had not yet gone to the United States. In fact, the American inspiration of his subject is not self-evident. In Jour de Fête, the plot is organized around a village’s annual festival. The festival, from the planning stages to the dismantling of the fairground booths and rides, forms the backdrop of a story in which the letter carrier gradually emerges as the central character. He adopts Taylorian methods in every part of his job: handling and riding his bicycle, planning his rounds and sorting, stamping envelops and delivering the mail are sequences illustrating “something mechanical encrusted upon the living”, as Bergson put it in his definition of comedy.¹³ The postman’s efforts and application in carrying out his tasks make the audience laugh. This time, the American reference is very clear.¹⁴ A documentary vaunting the modernity and efficiency of the US post office piques the village postman’s pride, especially as the residents praise the modernity and competitiveness of American letter carriers. Their teasing encouragement has an effect on the hero, who changes his way of working. The whole village follows his exploits—“François is making his rounds like an American”—until the final catastrophes. Through slapstick and sight gags, Tati critiques the American model of work: the obsession with saving time, lower quality, a mismatch between rationality and the activity and the decline of sociability and respect for users. The soundtrack alternates connotative musical sequences: the lively waltz during the opening credits attests that a traditional village society is open to change; jazzy pieces based on riffs accompany the postman's metamorphosis; the slow waltz during the closing credits indicates that the alien new working methods have been rejected.

Several of Tati's later films —Mon Oncle (My Uncle) shot in 1956-57 and released in 1958, Playtime in 1967 and, more summarily, Traffic in 1971— address the themes of work organization, and American influence in different combinations.

From satire to the hybridization of worlds

Mon Oncle is a study in contrasts between two worlds: a rundown district of grimy, crumbling buildings where modest but good-natured people live, and a posh neighborhood of single-family homes based on the model of American suburbs. In the modern residence where the protagonist, Mr. Hulot’s, nephew lives with his parents, there is a never-ending battle with household appliances that seem to have a life of their own. Home life is contrasted with urban sociability. Work is also part of the story. A long sequence follows the whimsical uncle in a new job his brother-in-law got him at his factory, which manufactures plastic tubes, an innovative product at the time. The plant embodies modern industry based on synthetic chemistry and automated systems. Mr. Hulot’s job is to keep an eye on operations rather than to perform the actual gestures regulated by Taylorism. This type of industrial modernity features in Le Chant du styrene (The Song of Styrene: a pun on sirène, French for mermaid), a short documentary that Péchiney, a major aluminum company at the time, commissioned Alain Resnais to make in 1958, the same year as Mon Oncle. But while Resnais, with help from Raymond Queneau, treated the subject poetically, Tati took a slapstick approach. The hero, a well-intentioned dilettante, throws the machinery out of whack so that the tubes come out looking like sausage links. The factory suggests Chicago’s slaughterhouses, the pioneers of assembly-line work and mass production in the late nineteenth century.

While references to the United States are absent from the images and the characters’ lifestyle and relationship to work, the music, by Franck Baroncelli, Alain Romans (who had already composed the soundtrack of Les Vacances de monsieur Hulot), Georges Durban and Maxime Saury, borrows from 1930s jazz, conjuring a vision, however outdated, of the United States. The successive arrangements of the main theme, which seamlessly flows from swing to accordion musette, illustrates the influence of Americanization.

Nearly ten years later, in 1967, Franco-American cross-fertilization played a key role in the film Playtime. A group of American women visiting Paris is shocked to find that the capital looks just like all the other big cities in the world, with the same cold glass and steel towers, the same apartments, offices and American-style grey cars (a model produced at the Chrysler‑Simca plant in Poissy), while information in the public space is in English. The world of work is illustrated by executives and secretaries bustling around the office, phone calls in franglais, and incomprehensible business deals. The modern city seems to have erased industry and production from its landscape. Clothes, social behavior and private life are standardized. When the harmonious palette of all the shades of gray is torn, a warm, multicolored and whimsical social life can be glimpsed. In short, Paris is Americanized. But as the musette waltz by Francis Lemarque suggests, the charms of bygone days persist in the interstices of modern life.

Tati’s last film, Trafic (Traffic), released in 1971, further explores these themes. After opening credits filled with images of assembly-line work in a large French car plant, the first sequence takes place in the workshop where a prototype recreational vehicle is being developed in creative disarray. The film recounts the vehicle’s eventful journey to a car show in Amsterdam. Industrial and urban modernity has taken hold in French society.

Tati’s films are not about work, which occupies a limited, sometimes very restricted, place in the plots. But apart from Les Vacances de monsieur Hulot (Monsieur Hulot's Holiday), where at best the work of the hotel employees is seen, it is always present. It is part of the modernization of society, the main vehicle for Tati’s observations and interpretations of the changes taking place. In his early works, the director questioned the shadow cast by the United States in the deployment of modernist forces. From the sketch of L’École des facteurs to the feature-length film Jour de fête, Tati moved from satirizing the civil service to questioning recommendations based on the American model, which is as compelling as it is external to French society, as seen through its rural component. Ten years later, Tati set up his camera in the city and compared two lifestyles. He criticized the emptiness of work, where the prescription of rules and the execution of tasks are dissociated, and vituperated against the propensity of large organizations to operate in a vacuum. More originally, he underscored the fragility of activities governed by rationalist ideas borrowed from American modernism, which, after another decade, had become the new normal in Playtime and Trafic. At the end of a process of acculturation, its foreignness has evaporated. In both films, a social life based on personal relationships and the accomplishment of useful tasks shows resilience. By the early 1970s, the American model has permeated French society.

Beyond the evolution of the filmmaker’s view of the relationship between America and France, between rationality and life experience, between different conceptions of the value of work, this examination raises the issue of how these perspectives can be compared with other representations on French screens.

A new industrial rationalism in documentary films

Comparing Jacques Tati’s filmography with other audiovisual productions creates a body of work with different perspectives. Examination of the INA’s holdings, which include films shown on television, allows us to draw on the institutional filtering by the RTF, then by the ORTF from 1964 onwards. This group is limited to documentaries linked to the rise of television reporting and the advent of major magazines with large audiences in the 1960s and 1970s, to which some educational films from the BnF collection were added.

A search was done using key words—work, rationalization, productivity, America and the United States—with the aim of finding films at the intersection of two themes. Nearly 20 different types de films were found for the period covered. The first includes rare works, such as an anti-American communist broadside, Les Américains, en Amérique!  (Americans in America!), and the loading of an American freight car in Cherbourg as part of the Marshall Plan, both dating from 1950. In 1962, a one-minute television news story reported on a strike by female workers at Ford. Training materials account for a second type of film, also few in number here. A third, later category of films accounts for the largest group. It is made up of ten works, part of which are by great filmmakers: François Reichenbach, Pierre Dumayet, Emmanuel de la Taille, Jacqueline Baudrier and Éric Rohmer, who cooperated with Anne Gaillard, a television personality. Some of these films, made between 1958 and 1976, are about work in France, others about the United States.

In the documentaries about work in France, there are no direct references to American influence. The armed forces film department was even in denial when in 1955 it produced motion pictures about "work organization courses taught in Air Force training facilities". In one of them, Analyse méthodique du travail (Methodical Analysis of Work),¹⁵ the camera rests for many minutes on a seated worker demonstrating inefficient movements first, then rationalized ones. The narrator says several "French engineers [...] have studied these methods of analysis for a long time" and quotes officers who rationalized work in arsenals in the late nineteenth century, adding, “a practical method based on the same ideas recently developed in the United States”; in other words, rationalization originated in France and was transplanted to the United States. However, most of the films were made after the period of productivity missions and discussions about American efficiency. Rationalization has not disappeared from the debate, but, as in Tati’s work of the same period, it has been tied in with the issues raised by changes in French society. In a 1962 film, À quoi rêvent les jeunes filles? Celles qui travaillent¹⁶ (What Do Working Girls Dream Of?), young female assembly line workers, hairdressers, secretaries and electronics technicians talk about their jobs and disappointments. At the same time, Colette Thiriet made a film for students called Le Travail à la chaîne (Working on an Assembly Line).¹⁷ In a pedagogical tone, a host instructs the viewers to take notes based on three major principles “that govern all modern activity: reducing the time taken to produce—note the time; reducing the consumption of materials; reducing the physical effort—there’s absolutely no doubt about that...” After a sequence showing how a family applies the idea by cooperating to wash the dishes, the documentary describes a series of manufacturing methods used in a variety of industries: pharmaceuticals, clothing, footwear, bottling, trucks, typewriters, etc. The commentator saturates the soundtrack with explanations of the division of labor and its variants, the usefulness of planning and the various stages of mechanization, which can even lead to the elimination of manual labor.

In 1967, Éric Rohmer and Anne Gaillard made a far more refined film for Swiss television on the same theme, the mechanization of work. L'Homme et la machine¹⁸ (Man and the Machine) questions the social impact of technological changes in the textile industry. It compares two situations. On the one hand, retired employees go back to work on old machines to perpetuate niche products and traditional quality while earning extra income; they talk about how hard work was in bygone times, the decline of the industry and bankruptcies. On the other, the young owner of a hosiery company has opted for modernity: automated industrial knitting machines and the Taylorization of labor according to the most advanced methods of the time considerably boost productivity. Asked about the employment of women in unskilled jobs, the boss replies that they are better suited to repetitive work: “Their nerves are better able to cope with quick, repetitive movements, and they're faster than men.” How could monotonous movements make them tired? The viewer is left to decide which way is better.

On the whole, from the 1960s onwards, these films were no longer concerned with prescribing, but with describing work in France, and they hardly ever mentioned an American imprint on the technical and managerial developments they presented. Does this suggest a “de-Americanization” of production and productivity? As with Tati’s films, it is probably more that American techniques and methods have become widespread, and often hybridized, so that the films use a different vocabulary to convey the issues of modernity at work. In any case, the United States remained a benchmark for these subjects, as a review of documentaries about the country at the time shows, according to evolving representations.

Discordant views: the other side of American prosperity

In the 1950s, a few news images briefly showed the industrial power of the United States, but discordant views emerged at the end of the decade. In 1958, Reichenbach, a documentary filmmaker at the beginning of his career, directed L'Amérique insolite¹⁹ (America as Seen by a Frenchman). Cocteau praised Reichenbach, who was passionate about America, for his ability to bring to light “surprises, excesses and marvelous disorder” despite automation, depersonalization and regimentation, terms the poet used to describe the United States. Power is represented by agriculture; manufacturing work is shown in a prison. Most of the film focuses on special features of United States culture from eating habits to marching majorettes and weddings. Through these situations, Reichenbach shows one-of-a-kind bodies and social figures. The film’s anthropological slant is far removed from presenting a model.

Yet the model held up, as two audiovisual documents show. The first is a 1965 report on the newsmagazine Cinq Colonnes à la une evocatively titled General Motors: le budget de la France (General Motors: the Budget of France).²⁰ The reporters painted an impressive picture of power, productivity, in-house competition, perks and promotions and asked a number of European CEOs if it frightened them. The 1964 film Notre Oncle d’Amérique (Our American Uncle) portrayed a Frenchman who became an entrepreneur in the United States and extolled the American qualities of hard work, taking risks, striving for excellence and getting back up after falling down.

Perspectives shifted in the late 1960s. Political films focused on the unrest roiling American society, protest movements, the civil rights movement, racism, student movements and the Vietnam War. Films about work struck a critical tone. In 1971, Danielle Hunebelle, Jacqueline Baudrier and René Marchand made La Société de mes rêves (The Society of My Dreams),²¹ a three-part documentary about a young French aeronautics worker, Laurent Piccolo, who visits Cuba, Japan and the United States, where a computer engineer talks to him about high wages and low job security. He has conversations with African-Americans, students, unemployed people, Indians on a reservation, a business owner, etc. While Piccolo is impressed by the technological level, affluence and personal freedom in American society, but job insecurity and the lack of community social leave him unconvinced. It is not the society of his dreams. In a similar vein, Le Rêve américain: l’argent (The American Dream: Money  1971),²² contrasts stories about high-earning self‑made men with precarity, the limited career opportunities for Puerto Rican seamstresses, and the 13 million people living in deep poverty.

The same year, Emmanuel de la Taille, made Les Derniers Serfs de l'Amérique ou Californie: les Mexicains américains (America’s Last Serfs, or California: the Mexican-Americans)²³, a documentary about the first movement of undocumented farm workers fighting for their rights. He filmed them in different situations, notably a large march and rallies, interviewed several of them and portrayed their struggle as the last freedom movement rocking American society at the time.

In 1976, the year of the United States bicentennial, excerpts from three American documentaries—Fred Wardenburg's Work, Ralph Arlyck's Undelivered: no Such Country and Bruce Davidson's Living off the Land—were combined into a single program called Happy birthday America ou l'Amérique par elle-même (Happy birthday America, or America by Itself).²⁴ In part one, an off-screen voice talking about mechanization and alienation accompanies footage of assembly-line workers in an auto plant, a place that in France has become emblematic of working conditions. Part two shows a letter sorting center recalling the mythical US post office featured in Jour de fête. But this time, an elderly African‑American worker says: “The front is the front, but inside it's not the same thing. It gets a little harder every day. We're a little like slaves. I get tired too. I'm tired as soon as I arrive.” Interviews reveal the constant surveillance of workers and the authoritarianism of managers. Part three shows a destitute New York ragpicker and scrap metal dealer struggling to keep his family afloat—the dark side of American prosperity.

Americanization: a short-lived horizon?

Unsurprisingly, these films do not come near to reflecting the intensity of the exchanges between the American and French business communities and government departments. The gap between filmed representations and technical practice offers a variety of perspectives.

The documentaries’ content differs significantly from Tati’s films with regard to representations of work in the postwar decades, its modernization and the role played by American standards. For the television documentaries, the gap is largely chronological. The 1950s saw a very gradual expansion of French television programming, both in terms of content, diversity and hours. The pioneering newsmagazine Cinq Colonnes à la Une premiered in 1959, long after the end of the Marshall Plan and the productivity missions of 1952-1953. In addition, films with other purposes, such as educational films on rationalizing work, were silent on American influence in this area, as is the case with the Ministry of the Armed Forces. At that time, documentaries were also shown in cinemas before feature films, but many of them were barely modified reworkings of corporate or institutional films expressing their sponsors’ viewpoint. So, for this early period, no documentaries echo the criticism Jour de fête makes of an American-style transformation of French society.

The situation changed in the late 1950s. From then on, the modernism Tati lampooned in Mon Oncle was only implicitly associated with America. Its defenders were business executives. At the same time, several television documentaries were made about modernization and the quest for productivity in France. Some were nuanced, if not reserved. Here again, they only alluded to American influence. Nevertheless, the image of the United States remained closely associated with productivism. This is what Reichenbach’s film is about. Then, filmmakers took an increasingly dim view of American society and the American economy. However, this critique differed from Tati's: the folly of “progress” is portrayed as hegemonic in the western world. Television documentaries emphasized the social costs of the American model: the poverty of certain social groups, harsh working conditions for some wage-earners, the fragile situation of immigrants and job insecurity. this criticism of the American myth extends to French society. Whether in Tati’s films or television documentaries, the radical strangeness of the post-1945 era gave way to a nuanced comparison of the two worlds with regard to work.

In 1972, Louis Malle directed what became Humain, trop humain (Human, Too Human), a film envisaged as one segment of a multipart documentary on French society. It provides an exceptionally rich insight into work at a large automotive plant managed on the basis of Taylorian and Fordist rationality. His radical, humanist critique is along the same lines as Chaplin and Tati's films minus the comedy. Malle made no references to the United States, which he knew well and was very interested in, but considered the Citroën plant in Rennes an archetype of Western modernity. Like contemporary television documentaries, but with the critical eye that allows artistic creativity, the film closes the period of fascination with industrial modernity that the United States aroused in a wide swath of French society.