Journée d’un coolie-pousse [A Rickshaw Driver’s Day] (1925) – Brut and Lejards

6:37, b&w, silent

Production : Pathé Frères

Source : Gaumont-Pathé Archives, CM853

This film purports to show a day-in-the-life of a rickshaw driver in Saigon in the mid-1920s. Travelling shots of the rickshaw driver pulling a European client, presumably taken from a car, are intercut with shots of him eating a bowl of soup at a roadside stall, buying a crushed ice drink in a shop, resting in his rickshaw in the shade of a wall, and interacting with the client. A bizarre close-up shows that he carries the coin paid for his fare in his ear.

An interesting sequence at the end of the film shows the first rickshaw driver handing over the rickshaw to a second young man. The latter then hands over a few coins, suggesting that he is renting the rickshaw from the first driver. After a shot of a group of women washing the rickshaw driver’s clothes, we see him apparently waking up next day, and the final shot is of him again pushing a European client.

In the version in the Gaumont-Pathé Archives, this film does not carry any titles, but it clearly comes from the same body of footage that was shot by Brut and Lejards for À travers la Cochinchine et le Cambodge, released in 1925. Not only are there a certain number of shots in common, but this film too has subtle cross-fades.

Also common to both is the sophistication of the film-language : the narrative keeps cutting back and forth from a shot of the driver pushing the rickshaw to him engaged in other activities, and these are clearly intended to be sequential events in the rickshaw driver’s day. However, this ‘day’ has clearly been constructed in the edit suite, not least because the client in the rickshaw is always the same European man.