Maurice Pialat's L'Amour existe (1960)

Maurice Pialat's L'Amour existe is one his first shorts, and is a kind of documentary, a kind of social critique, but more of a poem, or a very poetical rant. It lasts a mere twenty minutes, and Pialat's words are spoken over a number of images of mainly the Parisian suburbs, as opposed to central Paris itself, by Jean-Loup Reynold. The first word is 'Longtemps', as if Pialat were pouring out his knowledge in Proustian fashion. But here is a knowledge of the suburbs of Paris, of the change that 'progress' has brought, the (not so attractive as in some parts of Paris) HLMs which block out the sunlight, the two-, three- or four-hour commute to work and back, the immigrant bidonvilles in Massy just three kilometres from the Champs-Élysées. In the bidonvilles is a 'Hotel Floride' which is either ironic, hopeful, or a joke on Pialat's part. Also ironic – and presumably a blackly humorous touch by Pialat – is the felled street sign 'Rue Oradour Glane', a reference to the Nazi massacre of the inhabitants in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane (Haute-Vienne) in the closing months of World War II.

There is a number of statistics here, such as there being only three per cent of working-class children at universities, of whom there are only one and a half per cent in Paris. The most devastating sentence in this wonderful work is 'De plus en plus la publicité prévaut contre la réalité' ('Increasingly, advertising triumphs over reality.') In our post-political internet age, this sentence rings far more true than when it was written more than sixty years ago. This is a wonderful work of immense anger.