Bâtir (1930) review: A sweaty, scaffold-dangling tribute to concrete

Is a twelve-minute French documentary from 1930 about concrete worth your afternoon? Yes, if you get a weird kick out of seeing how old cities were physically put together, but stay far away if you need a plot or characters.

It is basically a silent hype video for modern architecture, contrasting the messy construction of the Berlitz Palace with the clean lines of Le Corbusier. 🏗️

The first thing that hits you is the absolute lack of safety gear. Men are just dangling off iron beams stories above the street like it is nothing.

My hands got sweaty just watching a guy casually shovel cement on a tiny wooden plank. It makes you realize how much blood went into these pretty tourist spots.

Then Pierre Chenal—the director—gets very excited about concrete.

He wants us to hate the old, dusty decorative carvings and love the flat, naked walls of Mallet-Stevens. It is funny because today we kind of hate those boring gray blocks, but back then, it was the future.

Unlike some heavy dramas from that era, like A Soul Without Windows, this feels like it wants to break out of stuffy indoor rooms. The camera is constantly looking up at the sky through steel skeletons.

There is this one oddly long shot of a cement mixer spinning.

It goes on for maybe thirty seconds too long, just watching the grey sludge slop around. I kind of loved it though.

The editing has this jumpy, nervous energy. It feels like the cameraman was drinking too much espresso and running around Paris with a heavy tripod.

Some things I wrote down while watching:

• The workers look incredibly cool in their dusty caps, even if they are probably breathing in terrible fumes.
• The music in the version I saw was added later, but it fits the weird mechanical rhythm.
• Concrete has never looked so heroic.

It is not a masterpiece, and honestly, you might get bored after five minutes if you do not care about cranes. But as a quick time capsule? It is pretty neat.