“A windmill in flames is shocking: fire infuriates around in the air. However, even without a fire there is something about a windmill’ s wings which is sinister and provokes anxiety: the wind powerfully races blindly into its trap; the air twists in violence. The machine fights against nature. The windmills (in Machin) have a falsely domestic appearance, hypocritically familiar; they are never elements of nostalgia. Thanks to their presence, these “little films” acquire an epical aspect; they inspire an air of virtual madness. We are far away from ‘windmill wings (which) protect lovers’. And only in the heart of the city, in La chanson de la Butte, which the windmills (the Moulin Rouge too) seem idyllically rural (French Cancan, Renoir, 1955)! In Machin, the windmill’s wings are used in a completely different way: a jealous husband ‘crucifies’ his rival on them (Le moulin maudit)!
Air – like wind which continually caresses hair and clothes even in the studio scenes – is omnipresent in films of this period, symbolised on every possible occasion and sustained by those ‘beautiful sunsets’; which are rare in Machin – he prefers to cross the sky by aeroplane. We know that he was one of the first to make aerial shots). Then we have fire, which is used to lengthen the culminating moment in drama (L’Or qui brûle, Le secret de l’acier); Water – as the sea as a recurrent visual theme.
It has been said that it is certainly not by chance, that if cinema of this period, which loved clear, precise stories – or at least without psychological frenzies -, was obsessed by images which used the four elements emblematically, the fifth element could perhaps be ‘urban’”. (Eric de Kuyper)