Monsieur Ripois et la Némésis (Les Cahiers Rouges) (French Edition)

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History of the French cinema stars, movements, directors Table 2: French theorists of the cinema Table 3 and Figure 1: French prizes Table 9: Jill was one of the finest writers on French cinema; she died at the far too early age of 54 on Friday, 13 July There are now some 45 staff members in universities in the UK alone publishing material on this subject; these and many more also teach French cinema on a regular basis.

Surprisingly, though, there is no single volume that serves as a reasonably comprehensive back- ground for such study. Although there have been many histories of the French cinema, French-specific theorising on the cinema has not to our knowledge formed part of any introduc- tory texts; 'film theory' is seen as a global phenomenon that tends to elide French- specific continuities. There are guidebooks on how to study or write on film, but, again, these are not French-specific. There are no books for students outlining the different types of research in French cinema; this is confined to scattered reviews in learned journals or alluded to in a fragmentary way in scholarly tomes.

Our volume is an attempt to combine all of these strands - history, theory, prac- tice - with the more usual statistics one might expect to find in a student hand- book. We have decided to focus specifically on French, rather than Francophone, cinema. The reader will therefore not find references to French-speaking African cinema, nor to Swiss cinema for example, the films of Alain Tanner , nor, finally, to Belgian cinema.

We have included an annotated Bibliography in addition to the usual References, which will act as 'further reading' for those readers wishing to pursue some of the strands outlined in this volume. Film titles are given in their original French version, without a translation unless this is necessary in the context. A Student's Guide The volume has been written in collaboration; however, there has usually been a main writer for each section. The credits are as follows. We would like to thank Manchester University Press for allowing us to use part of Phil Powrie's volume, Jean-Jacques Beineix b , in one of the sequence analyses, and the Journal of Romance Studies for allowing us to rework a review article by Phil Powrie for the section on 'Practice' Powrie, Particular thanks too to our stu- dents - Abigail Murray, Ellen Parker and John Williams - for allowing us to use their work.

Ever since that date, cinema has occupied a central place in the culture of France, a place the French state, as we shall see, has always been concerned to protect and promote. The Paris Cinematheque, founded by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju in , has remained since then the world's best-known cinematic archive, and there is no city in which it is possible to see a greater range and variety of films than Paris. The cinematic involvement of leading figures from the worlds of literature and theatre, from Sacha Guitry to Marguerite Duras, is another indication of how important a place in French culture cinema holds.

This is largely because between them they permit the division of the field into two conveniently complementary halves. Lumiere allegedly described the cinema as 'a fairground showman's trade', and the brothers, initially at least, saw their short films as valuable publicity for their photographic business. Renoir, Duvivier and Truffaut are among the leading inheritors of this tradition. Melies, on the other hand, was a conjurer and illusionist whose short films now appear as naive precursors of Surrealism. Le Voyage dans la Lune 1 parodies the ambitions of scientists and shows an oddly winsome form of sadism in the scene 3 French Cinema: A Student's Guide where a space rocket lands in one of the moon's 'eyes', causing it to weep.

Le Royaume des fees features a line-up of 'fairies' more reminiscent of dancing showgirls. The fantastique tradition in which Melies' s work is now generally read can be traced through Cocteau and the Surrealists to culminate, in a manner technically at least far more sophisticated, in the extravagant illusionism of a con- temporary film-maker such as Leos Carax.

This binary reading is given further credence by the differing fortunes of the film- makers. Lumiere retained his fortune thanks to a swift move out of film-making into production and, once the market became saturated, concentrated again on the photography business. Melies, bankrupted by changing public tastes and the First World War, wound up living on charity in a home for retired artists.

For one thing, Melies also filmed studio reconstructions of real-life events including the corona- tion of Edward VII. For another, the Lumiere films are not of interest solely as items of documentary record. L'Arroseur arrose of is probably the first cine- matic comedy, with a closely structured symmetrical narrative. For yet a third, the bourgeoisie and money were to make their most serious appearance with the foun- dation of the Pathe Freres company in , followed by Gaumont. Charles Pathe and Leon Gaumont were businessmen, who left the film-making to oth- ers: For Gaumont, it was his erstwhile secretary, Alice Guy, who was the first professional woman director anywhere in the world.

Pathe succeeded where Melies had failed disastrously and Lumiere got out scarcely in time, in becom- ing the first major French cinematic entrepreneur. By the early s, Pathe had branches all over the world, and was particularly well established in the USA; the stu- dios were turning out something like ten films a week. The role of the multi-media conglomerate - Pathe had started out as a phonograph manufacturer - dates back almost as far as the cinematic medium itself.

The interpenetration of realist observa- tion and constructed fantasy, neither readily conceivable without the other, was to prove a guiding principle of that medium and of its major French practitioners. That similarity is all the more obvious when one remembers that these early films, irrespective of who made them, were at first a fairground attraction, literally in the 4 History case of Lumiere, whose films travelled around the country, while Melies showed his films in his theatre, where they gradually supplanted performing magicians.

These early films were very short, and tended to fall into the following types. The first type was what Lumiere called vues, landscapes, buildings, the roads of Paris, official occasions such as royal visits or parades. Similar to this was the dramatisation of news items, such as, for example, the Russian Revolution of A more moralis- ing documentary type, of which Zecca's film on alcoholism, mentioned above, is a good example, is the cautionary tale.

In what was still a religious country, a fourth type was the religious film. But the more frequent type was the comic film, which has remained the most popular French genre to this day. A new development occurred in with the creation of the Societe du Film d'Art. The purpose of this organisation was to lift film out of its popular origins in fairground entertainment, and to give it cultural for which read middle-class respectability. These films, often historical epics, as was the case with the first one, L'Assassinat du Due de Guise, are the forerunners of the tradition de qualite of the s and the heritage film of the s and s.

This expansion of the French cinema marks a high point. French films accounted for something like 60 per cent of the world market. Pathe had built his own filmstock factories, so he was no longer dependent on American filmstock; indeed, there were twice as many Pathe films on the US market as all American-produced films put together. A further example to add to the dominance of the French industry in the pre-war years was that the first global star, established around , was the Gaumont comic Max Linder, arguably the first film star, even before the notion of the film director had taken root. Nevertheless, with hindsight, historians of the French cinema have isolated a number of important directors: Leonce Perret was a realist; Albert Capellani tended to make literary adaptations and historical epics; and, perhaps the most important of these pre-war directors, there was Louis Feuillade, at once a senior executive with Gaumont and an idol of the Surrealists, who found in his bizarrely stylised Fantdmas series and Les Vampires , the dreamlike amalgam of reality and imagination that was their artistic ideal.

Les Vampires' black- tighted femme fatale and mysterious criminal mastermind are precursors of film noir - evidence that the European cinema was to exercise a significant influence over Hollywood as well as the other way round. French dominance was to change dramatically with the First World War, as a result of which the studios lost staff, and the French industry never fully recovered.

The s were, nevertheless, a time when cinema began to interest artists and 5 French Cinema: A Student's Guide intellectuals. As the post-war industry expanded, even if never recovering its hege- mony, film magazines were established and a star system took root. If serials seemed to remain extremely popular, with some 60 of them produced in the first five years of the s, there was an extraordinary variety of films, including the most important development for many French film historians, a film avant-garde, linked to writers and intellectuals.

Along with Soviet cinema and German Expressionism, French Impressionist cinema, as it is usually called, constitutes the major French contribution to the development of cinema as an art, along with Surrealist film, with which it is sometimes linked. Germaine Dulac along with Alice Guy is the best-known woman silent film-maker, whose avant-garde psychodrama La Coquille et le Clergyman aroused controversy little inferior to that provoked by Bunuel's Surrealist classics Un chien andalou and L'Age d'Or a few years later.

Perhaps more powerful now is the explicitly feminist La Souriante Madame Beudet , whose heroine fantasises about killing her oafish bourgeois husband and about love affairs with tennis stars who walk out of the pages of her women's magazine. Jean Epstein made three major films in alone, but his greatest is perhaps the adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, a horror film that still manages to disturb. Abel Gance was, along with Marcel L'Herbier whose U Argent is a virtuoso updating of Emile Zola's novel, the most epically ambitious of the silent directors.

He had made a four-hour epic, La Roue, in But nowhere is his ambition more apparent than in the five-hour Napoleon , whose use of split screen up to three images side by side , superimposition and ultra-rapid montage evince a grandiose ambition often compared to that of the film's subject. Gance provided the film with a soundtrack in , but it was not until Kevin Brownlow restored it to its full length in 1 98 1 that Napoleon could be seen by a contemporary audience as its maker had intended. The heroic populism much in evidence in the film was to make of Gance an ardent supporter of Marshal Petain, and his post-war unpopu- larity was neither aesthetically nor politically surprising.

The advent of sound cinema marks a break for the French industry, but it is impor- tant to recognise that many of the directors who are more familiar from their work in the s, began their careers with sometimes substantial films in the silent period. Jean Renoir's Nana is an adaptation of a Zola novel.

Jacques Feyder, a Belgian, who began his career in , made, amongst others, a silent adaptation of the Carmen story , and an adaptation of another Zola novel, Therese Raquin Rene Clair, best known for his musical comedies Sous les toits de Paris 6 3 - - History and Le Million , began his career with a zany Dada-Surrealist film Entr'acte , but also produced two superb comedies, Un chapeau depaille d'ltalie and Les Deux Timides , a Keatonesque comedy starring the protagonist of Bunuel's Un chien andalou, Pierre Batcheff, a matinee idol who was perhaps the only major star of the 1 s to straddle the divide between avant-garde and com- mercial cinema.

Sound was a mixed blessing, at first viewed with suspicion by the industry because of the costly technological investment it required, all the costlier since France's only home-grown sound system was of poor quality and rapidly taken over by the German Tobis Klangfilm company. On the other hand, the language barrier introduced by sound ensured a viable domestic market for French films, while the standardisation of projection speed and running times imposed by higher overheads ensured that 'the cinema finally became a fully rationalised, mass-pro- duced spectacle' Williams, The modern cinema industry can be said to have been born with the advent of sound.

Yet it is the 'classic' rather than the 'modern' label that seems on the whole more appropriate to the cinema of the s - partly because so many of the French films now thought of as 'classics' date from this period, partly because it was charac- terised by the dominance of the classic industrial model of production. This was nowhere near as closely integrated in France as in the United States; Crisp speaks of 'the atomised and relatively artisanal nature of the film "industry" in France. Any national cinema in this period, however, was to some extent forced to define itself in relation to Hollywood, and the examples of Gaumont and Pathe - still major names in France - illustrate how important a factor the industrialisation of the medium was.

Without the state and governmental support it was to enjoy in later years, this was a difficult period for French cinema.

Sound had a more conservative effect than we might imagine, for the opportunity to transfer literary and theatrical classics to the screen was liberally used, leading to a large number of uninspired journeyman adaptations. Moreover, despite a governmental decree that dubbing of foreign films into French had to be done in 7 French Cinema: A Student's Guide France with French personnel, widespread fears were expressed that 'American cultural colonialism of the world could proceed unimpeded and French screens would be flooded with foreign imports' Crisp, The justification for such fears is nowadays, of course, all too plain to see; but the French film industry, and the French state, have always shown great tenacity in defending what is often known as France's 'cultural exception', and even without large-scale governmental assistance in the s the industry's artisanal structure and largely successful resis- tance to the Depression were to ensure the production of many outstanding films.

Given the other constraints mentioned, however, it is possible to see how a film- maker such as Rene Clair may have been more justified than might now appear in lamenting the loss of the silent cinema's originality and universality. Clair, never- theless, adapted rapidly enough to become the French cinema's first, and apart from Jacques Demy to this day only, leading director of musical comedies.

Sous les toils, de Paris is, as its title suggests, an evocation of the picturesqu'e 'people's Paris' that was to figure importantly in films of the period, culminating in Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange 1 A nous la liberie 1 93 1 satirises the very mass-pro- duction technologies of entertainment that made it possible, with its scenes in a prison and a phonograph factory structurally almost indistinguishable from each other.

Le Million choreographs the frantic search for a missing lottery ticket; even from so apparently Arcadian a world as Clair's, the economy of pleasure is rarely absent. Clair's work may now appear slightly fey and insubstantial, but the visual verve of A nous la liberie in particular, and its satirisation of the nascent modern entertainment industry of which the film is itself an example, do not deserve the neglect into which they have latterly fallen. Jean Vigo made only two films of any length before his death at the age of 29 in Zero de conduite had to be left partially incomplete because his time in the studio ran out, and L'Atalante was not a script of his choosing.

Yet the first film's evocation of a revolt in a boys' boarding school, and the second's tale of life on a canal barge, have nothing of the journeyman about them; cinema as dream - the Surrealists' ideal - here reaches an apotheosis. Zero de conduite was banned by the government virtually on release, perhaps surprisingly considering the innocence of its central characters' uprising they use no weapons more deadly than tiles torn from the school roof.

Yet we should remember that the s was a decade of intense social instability in France, threatened with recession in the after- math of the Wall Street Crash and for much of the decade at risk from German expansionism. The brief interlude of the left-wing Popular Front government, which introduced paid holidays and the hour working week before its downfall, came to stand out in popular memory as a moment of solidarity and togetherness 8 History amid a decade of turmoil. Censorial trigger-happiness, subsequently evidenced in the banning of Renoir's La Regie du jeu, doubtless owed much to this precarious position.

L'Atalante owes much of its impact to the extraordinary performance of Michel Simon as the barge-hand Pere Jules. Simon - Swiss, but at the very antipodes of the anodine cleanliness normally associated with that country - is the great visceral star of classic French cinema.

Even at his most benignly disruptive, as in this film or Renoir's Boudu sauve des eaux , there is something satyr-like and perturbing about him; in Carne's he Quai des brumes , where he plays the monstrous Zabel, driven nearly mad by his quasi-incestuous fascination with his goddaughter, his performance evokes depths of which scarcely any other French actor was capable. L'Atalante is among the most visually striking films of its period, thanks to the superb camerawork of Boris Kaufman in the night-time and dream sequences in particular. It was a comparative failure at the box office, though its classic status is now unquestioned.

Much more of a journeyman than either Clair or Vigo was Julien Duvivier, whose La Belle Equipe features one of the definitive performances from the working-class hero of the time, Jean Gabin, and replicates the debates and uncertainties surrounding the Popular Front government in its two alternative endings - one affirmative of solidarity, the other homicidal and elegiac. Duvivier's artisanal competence and lengthy career, much of it in Hollywood, make of him, as it were, the anti-Vigo, and there has perhaps been a consequent tendency to under- rate his work, which does a film like the Algiers-set drama Pepe le Moko little service.

Pepe le Moko, like La Belle Equipe, stars Gabin, who in the later film dies a violent death as he was so often to do on screen, notably for Carne in Le Quai des brumes and Le Jour se leve The critic Andre Bazin memorably described Gabin as 'Oedipus in a cloth cap' - a reference to his archetypal role as a decent man of modest origins driven to madness and despair by the malignity of fate.

Celebrated for his on-screen outbursts of anger, he was to undergo a class meta- morphosis after the war, featuring significantly thicker-set in more bourgeois roles and thus becoming an icon of social change in France. The relationship between literature and the cinema became an increasingly complex one during this period. Marcel Pagnol not merely adapted many of his own works for the screen such as Cesar, , later to be 'adapted back' into a stage play , he was also to become one of the most important producers of the classic years, and an early practitioner of location filming.

Sacha Guitry's coruscating the- atrical dialogues made his plays natural choices for screen adaptation; the use of 9 French Cinema: A Student's Guide off-screen sound in Le Roman d'un tricheur and his free reworking of French history in Remontons les Champs-Elysees illustrate how his early disdain for the medium gave way to an innovative use of it, by turns frolicsome and sardonic. His career, like a great many others, never fully recovered from his collaboration with the Germans under the Occupation. Jean Cocteau's later interest in cinema was prefigured by Le Sang d'un poete , one of the most celebrated cinematic products of the pre-war avant-garde.

The lit- erary figure whose trace is most perceptible in the s films still watched today, however, never himself directed a film. Jacques Prevert, Surrealist expulsee and Marxist fellow traveller, made his name as a writer of film scripts before becoming even more widely known as a poet in his own right. His best-known work was for Marcel Carne, the apostle of what Andre Bazin was to dub 'poetic realism'. This term relates to an aesthetic that has much in common with the Hollywood genre of film noir, not least in the jadedness and pessimism of the world it evokes.

Jouvet's sardonic, haughty demeanour here perhaps figures his slightly condescending attitude towards the filmic medium, for he had long been renowned as a serious theatre actor, above all in the works of Jean Giraudoux, and came belatedly to the cinema, which he always professed to regard as a commercial rather than an artistic medium.

Le Quai des brumes and Le Jour se live, both starring Gabin, take place on studio sets designed by Alexandre Trauner in which every detail is at once plausible and charged with poetic significance. The mists that cloak the port of Le Havre in the earlier film, like the wardrobe with which Gabin walls himself up in his attic room in Le Jour se leve, suggest a mood of exhaustion and defeat over and above their realistically motivated place in the films.

Gabin's nemesis here is the splendidly yet repulsively oleaginous Jules Berry, star also of Le Crime de M. Lange and Carne' s Les Visiteurs du soir Carne has become a byword for cinematic fatalism, the doomed love so characteristic of his work being associated by Edward Baron Turk with his homosexuality. The three years that separated La Belle Equipe, in its happy ending at least the apotheosis of Gabin triumphant, from the same actor's tragic demise in Le Jour se leve were the years during which France slid from the initial optimism of the Popular Front to the verge of war, a congru- ence of cinema and history that powerfully reinforces the individual fatalism so clearly present in much of Carne's work.

Yet viewing his films is a less uniformly 10 History dispiriting experience than this may suggest, for their dialogues are studded with the mordant wit so characteristic of Prevert. This is still more in evidence in Prevert's only script for Jean Renoir, almost uni- versally regarded as the greatest of French directors.

Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, about a publishing firm whose workers form themselves into a cooperative when their dastardly boss Batala Jules Berry absconds owing money, is both one of Renoir's finest works and the film that most clearly embodies the exhilaration of the early Popular Front period. This shot evokes the sense of community and solidarity that motivates Lange's shooting and, thanks largely to Bazin's masterly analysis of it, has become a classic of political cinema. Renoir's subsequent work may lack the overt ideological edge of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, but as a cinematic anatomy of a society, and a class, on the brink of collapse it is without rival.

La Grande Illusion counterposes the realities of national rivalry between France and Germany with those of class conflict. Set in a German prisoner-of-war camp for officers during the First World War, it strikingly prefigures the conflict that was to erupt two years after its making. The 'illusion' of the tide thus seems to be that national loyalties are more important than those of class, yet the film's setting, and continuing relevance in the Europe of today, suggest that questions of nationhood are not to be so easily discarded. La Marseillaise 1 - designed as the apotheosis of the Popular Front, in fact its artistic swansong - depicts the French Revolution as the achievement of ordinary women and men, in a reaction against the 'great names' school of history that places it at the opposite extreme to Napoleon.

Renoir's filming is characterised by a stylistic openness and a collaborative use of actors that enable him to articulate the social contradictions of his time with remarkable subtlety. Martin O'Shaughnessy's observation that La Marseillaise can be seen as 'the welding together of two conflicting gendered stories' - a 'male nar- rative of coming of age' and one in which 'women are seen to play an assertive, powerful and violent role' O'Shaughnessy, Ethnicity too, notably 11 French Cinema: These potential conflicts, in addition to the pervasive theme of class, help us to understand what Renoir meant when he said of France before the Second World War: An aristocratic country-house party is the setting in which all manner of repressed conflicts - sexual, social, ethnic, class-based - come to the surface.

This happened in the cinema too; riots broke out on the film's first screening in Paris and it was banned successively by the pre-war and by the Vichy and Occupation governments. The savagery with which Renoir anatomises the hypocrisy and bad faith of pre-war French society may take some time for a contemporary audience to appreciate.

Monsieur Ripois et la Némésis

The film features no truly major star Gaston Modot, Julien Carette and even Marcel Dalio were all minor ones at best , relying rather on the group dynamic that, from Le Crime de Monsieur Lange onwards, is so characteristic of Renoir's work. The world it evokes will seem impos- sibly stylised and mannered to most contemporary audiences, for whom elaborate amateur theatricals and the etiquette of pheasant shooting are unlikely to be famil- iar territory. The film's visual verve, however, is apparent at first viewing, notably in the rabbit hunt scene near the beginning and the frantic chase through the cor- ridors of the chateau towards the end, two scenes that echo and mirror each other.

Hunting is a leitmotif of La Regie dujeu, all at once visually as in the two scenes just mentioned , emotionally to the pursuit of game corresponds the pursuit of love, both likely to lead to bloody consequences and in the wider social context the pursuit of territorial ambition was even as Renoir filmed pushing Europe towards war. The film's astonishing unity-in-diversity helps to explain Pierre Billard's judgement that Renoir's 'freedom kills the myth of representation', so that he 'takes his place in the cinema of modernity twenty years ahead of his time' Billard, Neither truly 'classic' - though the summit of the French cinema that generally goes by that name - nor yet 'modern ist ', La Regie dujeu marks the tran- sition par excellence from one kind of cinema to another.

That judgement, of course, is necessarily influenced by the immense historical rupture brought about by the outbreak of war, which makes La Regie dujeu's tran- sitional status only too apparent. It was one of 5 1 French films - along with Le Quai des brumes and Renoir's Zola adaptation La Bete humaine - to be banned by the censor just before war was declared, while the first Cannes festival, due to take place in September , had to be cancelled.

The decade that was ending so omi- nously had nevertheless been a productive one for the cinema. The Conseil superieur du cinema, set up in , had shown the beginnings of state and governmental 12 HISTORY interest in this comparatively new art form, and the founding of the Cinematheque frangaise in went on to reinforce this, providing the institutional context within which generations of young critics and film-makers would get to know not only French, but European and American cinema.

Between 94 and films were produced each year during the decade not counting which, for obvious reasons, was 'incomplete' , and something of the order of admissions were annually recorded. It might have been thought that the social and economic disruption caused by wartime and the Occupation would have a calamitous effect on the nascent industry, but as we shall see that was to be only part of the story. The unavailability of American films meant that the French industry had the field to itself far more than in normal circumstances; a character in Jean-Pierre Melville's Resistance epic L'Armee des ombres says that France will know she is free when it is possible to watch Gone With The Wind on the Champs-Elysees, which poignantly suggests the cultural deprivation of which French film-makers were able to take often against their will advantage.

The Occupation cinema was brought under central - i. German-dominated - control in a way that severely restricted freedom of expression, but also introduced the first system of advances to producers and made the industry much more efficient. If this sounds suspiciously like a variant of 'Mussolini made the trains run on time', it should be borne in mind that many of the structures of post-war state aid to the cinema were modelled on those imposed under the Occupation.

Against this has to be set, of course, the loss of key personnel to the industry. Many of the leading producers, being Jewish, were not permitted to work. Renoir left for the USA where he was thenceforth to spend most of his time; Clair and Duvivier, more briefly, did likewise. Renoir's American work is by common consent less out- standing than his great films of the 1 s, not least because he was working within the constraints of the Hollywood system and had lost the acute sense of French society that makes La Grande Illusion or La Regie dujeu so remarkable.

Even so, the moody evocation of the Deep South in Swamp Water and the black comedy of The Diary of a Chambermaid remain powerful. His work of the s and 1 s, less mordant than that of the pre-war years, is nevertheless recognisably by the same hand. A Student's Guide known at the time as 'glorious Technicolor', feature in more historically remote set- tings - respectively, colonial Peru and belle epoque Montmartre - the stress on the interplay, and ultimate indistinguishability, of theatricality and 'real life' so impor- tant in the earlier works.

Clair enlisted Marlene Dietrich for The Flame of New Orleans , while Duvivier's post-war career reached its height with the sour and misanthropic Void le temps des assassins , starring Jean Gabin. The loss or diminished glory of these figures, and of others, was in a sense replicated on a smaller scale at the Liberation, when such figures as Guitry, Arletty and the actor Robert Le Vigan - a prominent collaborator who was never to work in France again - were tried and briefly imprisoned.

The leading pre-war director to remain in France was Carne, who worked in the Victorine Studios in Nice - thus within the Vichy zone. The first of his two wartime films, both scripted by Prevert, Les Visiteurs du soir, is a surreal medieval fantasy, fea- turing Arletty as the duplicitously androgynous emissary of Jules Berry's camp Devil in knee-breeches. This film, for all its visual extravagance, is alas characterised by some rather listless acting - something that is emphatically not true of Carne's best-known and most ambitious work, Les Enfants du Paradis released in though shot in , set in the Paris theatre world of the s see Figure 1.

Superb performances from such as Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault and Pierre Brasseur have helped to make it probably the best-loved of French film classics, along with the richness of its mise-en-scene of the world of popular entertainment, which owes much to the magnificent sets designed by the Hungarian Jew Alexandre Trauner, working for obvious reasons clandestinely. Its at first tenuous-seeming relationship to the society of its time has of course to do with the omnipresence of censorship, but Edward Baron Turk finds liberating possibilities in its sexual poli- tics: Two of the outstanding film-makers to have made their mark under the Occupation were Jacques Becker whose Goupi Mains Rouges of 1 is an almost Gothic drama of peasant life and Jean Gremillon, for whom Prevert scripted Lumiere d'ete This film, about a Regie dujeu-like tangle of love and class rela- tionships in the Midi, was along with Gremillon's aviation drama Le del est a vous among the few major Occupation films to present a critical view of contem- porary society.

Le del est d vous, indeed, has often been seen as a parable of the solidarity of the Resistance. Gremillon's post-war career was a sorry catalogue of aborted or curtailed projects; he was to make only three feature films between and his death in , and remains an unjustly little-known director. Collaborators, as we have seen, found their careers blighted or destroyed, while the disappearance of the protected domestic market seemed briefly to threaten the very foundations of the French industry.

The Blum-Byrnes agreement of May allowed American films unrestricted access to the French market, but also introduced a quota of French films to be screened - initially 30 per cent, rising to 38 per cent in The agreement, widely denounced at the time as an act of treachery, appears in retrospect not only highly realistic, but premonitory of subsequent French cultural and cinematic relations with the USA, seeking accom- modation of the 'cultural exception' within an American hegemony the French industry could not hope to vanquish.

Along with the nationalisation of large exhibition circuits at the end of the war and the continuation of 'outrageously pro- tectionist' Crisp, The Centre national de la cinematographie CNC was set up in to oversee film finance - a striking example of the readiness the French state has always shown to intervene in cultural matters - and in established a fund to assist French film production and distribution, which has been largely responsible for the indus- try's high international profile ever since.

LE CINEMA DE PAPA The period between and was for long stigmatised as what Truffaut called the cinema de papa 'daddy's cinema' , a sneering reference to the supposed political and aesthetic paralysis of the Fourth Republic; his vitriolic article lambasts a cinema locked into tedious literary adaptations see Truffaut, Squeezed between the heyday of the classic cinema and the burgeoning of the New Wave, it remains, in both senses of the word, largely invisible.

Not a single film by Claude Autant-Lara, Jacques Becker or Christian-Jaque, three of the period's major directors, is available on video in the UK, and only one example of those directors' work - Becker's Casque d'or - has been shown on British television. Such neglect, while comprehensible, is scarcely justifiable. The period in question also marked the beginning, or culmination, of three of the major post-war directorial careers.

Robert Bresson's eschewal of professional actors and refusal of psychological depth in favour of an austerely materialist Catholic spirituality first becomes marked in his Bernanos adaptation Journal d'un cure de campagne Bresson's second feature, Un condamne a mort s'est echappe , details the escape based on real life of a Resistance detainee from Montluc prison in Lyon, presented as a sustained and suspenseful exercise in the operation of grace.

Jacques Tati once said that he would like to work with Bresson - an odd remark considering the conspicuous lack of humour in the latter's films, but less anomalous than it might appear if we bear in mind the meticulously choreographed style and innovatively dislocatory use of sound that characterise Tad's work.

His three fea- tures of the period - Jour de fete , Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Mon oncle - are among the most acute satires of the galloping modernisation that in some 30 years transformed France from a largely rural into a primarily industrial economy. The cults of speed explicitly linked with the USA , the seaside holiday and household gadgets are his targets in the three features; to describe M.

Hulot as a 'reflection of the increased standardization of daily life in France' Ross, Cocteau's two best-known films are La Belle et la bete and Orphee , imbued with the spirit of what, in a doubtless conscious response to Carne and Bazin, he dubbed 'magical realism'. The earlier film's evocation of the world of Dutch painting and Orphee's sumptuous special effects have lasted rather better than the matinee-idol narcissism of Jean Marais in the leading roles.

The 'real objects' in these films may appear to be very far removed from the France of the time at which they were made, but this would be to disregard the strong homosex- ual element in La Belle et la bete's 'love that dare not speak its name', or the allusions to the heavily coded world of the Resistance in Orphee's abundance of seemingly nonsensical passwords. Jean-Pierre Melville in directed by all accounts with considerable interfer- ence from the author the cinematic adaptation of Cocteau's best-known text, Les Enfants terribles.

Melville's place in the history of French cinema, however, rests less on this or his earlier literary adaptation, of Vercors's Le Silence de la mer , than on the influence of Hollywood 'action cinema' on his work. The work of directors such as Howard Hawks and Samuel Fuller, with its stress on laconic, often violent action and its narrative terseness, was to have a major effect on the New Wave film- makers of the succeeding generation - an effect for which Melville was in large part responsible.

He was also the first major French director after Pagnol to set up his own production company, operating artisanally on the fringes of the industry.

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This 17 French Cinema: A Student's Guide enabled him to reconcile financial autonomy - if he and the New Wave directors so admired the 'action cinema' school it was largely because it had been able to produce memorable films often on very low budgets - and a degree of artistic inde- pendence that for his critics verges on the mannered.

Bob le flambeur was the first of his gangster movies, a stylised riposte to the production-line serie noire films, often starring Eddie Constantine, that constituted the French mainstream cinema's first response to the influx of American productions after the war. The film-makers so far mentioned in this section are all in greater or lesser degree atypical of the dominant Fourth Republic cinema.

That cinema's frequent recourse to literary adaptation, its reliance on careful scriptwriting often by the duo of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost , its general air of businesslike professionalism and sup- posed unadventurousness, were all laughed out of fashion by the New Wave, but have in the past decade or so staged a resurgence through the popularity of the 'heritage film'.

The strictures of Truffaut may well have been applicable to the jour- neyman work of such as Jean Delannoy, who signed forgettable adaptations of Cocteau L'Eternel Retour, and Sartre Les Jeux sont faits, , but two film- makers of the period at least display subversive and ironic qualities that should not pass unnoticed. Claude Autant-Lara's move from Communist Party activist after the war to Front National MEP in the mids scarcely did him credit, but the dozen or so films he made under the Fourth Republic often give a mordant por- trayal of the suffocating pettiness and hypocrisy of the time.

Le Diable au corps and Le Ble en herbe , adapted from Radiguet and Colette respectively, both deal with burgeoning adolescent sexuality and caused scandals through their depiction of relationships between a younger man and an older woman. Le Ble en herbe was among the first post-war films to fall foul of the power exercised by French mayors to ban from their cities films that had received the national censor's authorisation.

La Traversee de Paris teamed Gabin and Bourvil in a tale of black-marketeering in occupied Paris - the forerunner of the determinedly unheroic view of the Occupation years that was to come to the fore in the s. More bilious and misanthropic still is the work of Henri-Georges Clouzot, who found himself for a while banished from the industry at the Liberation because of the harshly cynical view of provincial life in his poison-pen drama, Le Corbeau Le Salaire de la peur sustains for more than two and a half hours the suspense of its tale of European expatriates driving lorryloads of nitroglycerine over treacherous Central American roads to quench an oil-rig fire.

Yves Montand, first drawn to public attention in Carne's Les Portes de la nuit 1 , gives one of the defining performances of his career here. Most frightening of all his works perhaps is Les Diaboliques , with Simone Signoret in one of her best-known roles. The 18 History film's sadistic martyrisation of the character played by Vera Clouzot the director's wife becomes even more chilling when we know that she suffered in real life from a weak heart that was not long afterwards to kill her.

The film's ending clearly inspired that, more than 30 years later, of Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction, but in its manipulation of actors and audience alike is surely closer to Hitchcock - a major influence on the New Wave, present here too in what it would be quite unjust to dismiss as cinema de papa. Rene Clement is the other directorial name most often associated with the cinema of this period. Jeux interdits tells of the impact of the war on two young children who create an animals' cemetery before being roughly separated from each other.

The film's view of childhood, while less barbed than that of Vigo, is nevertheless a determinedly unidealised one, a very long way from the Hollywood of the time. Clement's other major work of the period took the form of literary adaptations, from Zola Gervaise of or Marguerite Duras Barrage contre le pacifique of Carne proved unable to sustain his pre-war popularity after the Liberation. Les Pontes de la nuit was severely criticised as dejd vu, the doom-laden Prevert script and heavy fatalism with which it is imbued not suiting the more upbeat expectations of the post-Liberation era.

Thenceforth his career tailed off sadly, the Zola adaptation Therese Raquin being his most successful later film, thanks largely to Simone Signoret's vampish performance in the title role. Becker produced at once his most lyrical and his most doom-laden film with Casque d'or, a reconstruction of the nine- teenth-century Parisian underworld, as well as such realistically observed dramas as Rue de VEstrapade , a forerunner of the New Wave.

Signoret gives what is probably the performance of her life, and Serge Reggiani as her doomed young lover exudes tragic intensity. Becker went on to give Jean Gabin one of his great post-war roles as the portly gangster yearning for retirement in the serie noire Touchez pas au grisbi This director's reputation is less by some way than it deserves to be, for he died prematurely in , just before the release of the prison escape drama Le Trou, which remains among the finest French films of its period.

Industrially and aesthetically alike, the 'Fourth Republic years' were, it is now beginning to be recognised, richer and more complex than might at first appear. Yet - with the handful of exceptions already mentioned - it lacked the innovative verve of earlier and later periods. It was a time of reconstruction and consolidation for the industry, which for most of the period succeeded in attracting more specta- tors to French than to American films.

The seeds of innovation were being sown elsewhere, in the pages of the new cinematic journals that appeared during and after the war. L'Ecran francais began clandestinely in and lasted ten years, 19 French Cinema: A Student's Guide during which it brought to the fore notions of the cinema as a vehicle for ideologi- cal engagement and as a language in its own right. Alexandre Astruc's 'Naissance d'une nouvelle avant-garde' 'Birth of a new avant-garde' inaugurated a mode of writing on the cinema which the journals Positif and Cahiers du cinema were to continue into the s.

Radia Dragievi - 1000 MOVIE STARS - Second draft

It is in a sense provocative to bracket those names together for, in their earlier days at least, the two journals cordially detested each other. Positif was sympathetic to Surrealism and to the French Communist Party, while among the major influences on Cahiers was the existentialist Catholicism of Andre Bazin. Haifa century on, both journals still exist and thrive, albeit with much ideological passion spent. If Cahiers remains to non-French audiences at least much the better known, this is because so many of those who wrote for it went on to direct films in their own right.

Chabrol, Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, Truffaut - the patron saints of the New Wave - all began as Cahiers critics in what remains the most striking mass migration from writing- about to writing-in film history has to offer. Their interest in low-budget American cinema led them to pursue with zeal the politique des auteurs - a pantheonisation of figures such as Howard Hawks and Samuel Fuller, whose individuality in making 'their' films in the teeth of studio-imposed constraints was lauded in a sometimes extravagant manner.

Positif 's favourite sons, such as Otto Preminger and Raoul Walsh, have lasted somewhat less well by comparison. It exemplifies a tendency in French cultural life - illustrated at very much the same time by the work of such 'new novelists' as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute - for critical and theoretical reflection to stimulate and feed through into artistic pro- duction. It illustrates the importance of political loyalties, or their absence, already marked in the cinema of the Popular Front era, in informing aesthetic and cultural debate.

For reasons we shall now explore, was the year in which all these trends converged to inaugurate what was rapidly recognised as a new era for the French cinema. The major intellectual and personal influence on them was the critic Andre Bazin, a passionate advocate of 'realism, mise-en-scene, and deep focus which he saw in opposition to montage ' Monaco, European art-house directors, such as Renoir or Rossellini, had traditionally been treated as the 'authors' of their films, in much the same way as Balzac or Baudelaire were of the literary texts they signed.

The American low-budget cinema, on the other hand, tended to be thought of as a commercial and studio-based product, to which Godard pays homage in his dedication of A bout de souffle to Monogram Pictures. Cahiers' innovation was to treat film-makers such as Hawks or Fuller as the authors of their films in much the same way as their more 'respectable' European counterparts. The New Wave directors, like their Hollywood predecessors, worked individually and creatively within often severe budgetary constraints and the conventions of studio genre.

Their films were frequendy self-referential Godard making a brief Hitchcock-like appearance in his own A bout de souffle, Truffaut's Les Coups containing an obvious visual quotation from Vigo's Zero de conduite , as though to assert the value of film as a form of artistic expression on a par with the novel or the theatre. Allusions to art cinema and Hollywood action film sat side by side in a manner that, nowadays, with the erosion of the barrier between 'high' and 'popular' culture, seems unremarkable, but was extremely innovative at the time.

The literary adaptation and the costly studio set-up were anathema to these film- makers, whose use of hand-held cameras and location filming gave their work a constant charge of the unexpected. They were also greatly helped by the introduc- tion, in , of the avance sur recettes, a system of government loans, granted on the basis of a working script, to enable films to be produced.

One in five French films benefits from this funding, though only one in ten of these has been sufficiently successful at the box office to pay off the loan in full Hayward, The system thus effectively works as a source of subsidy, another reason for the often- remarked thriving independent and experimental sector known as art et essai of the French industry. The influence of Hitchcock is marked in the exchange of roles between the central characters in both films played by Gerard Blain and Jean-Claude Brialy , the latter of whom represents Parisian would-be sophistication against the provincial benightedness of the other.

Chabrol has had a wildly uneven career, often filming neither wisely nor too well, but at his best he is the master denouncer of the hypocrisy and pretentions of the bour- geoisie. Misanthropy and misogyny are other components of his work and both are 21 French Cinema: A Student's Guide plain in Les Bonnes Femmes , about the varying fortunes and ambitions of four young women who work in an electrical shop, an emblem of the modernisation of French society.

Les Biches features a bisexual love triangle in Saint-Tropez, probably the first major French film to deal overtly with lesbianism, albeit in a manner that changes in sexual politics have caused to appear dubious. The year - annus mirabilis of post-war cinema - also saw the feature debuts of Truffaut and Godard. The former's Les Coups remains among the cinema's most touching evocations of a less-then-happy childhood, modelled in many ways on Truffaut's own. This earned an unprecedented standing innovation at the Cannes festival, from which Truffaut had a few years before been banned, and the all-but-envious homage of Renoir.

The homoerotic intensity of the relationship between Jules and Jim, mediated it would be possible to argue through their shared passion for Catherine, now gives the film a strikingly modern feel. Search WorldCat Find items in libraries near you. Advanced Search Find a Library. Your list has reached the maximum number of items.

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