Silent Experiment to Poetic Realism

Having lost its commercial lead during the First World War (Chapter 2), French cinema found a different role in the 1920s and 1930s: it became an art. Writers, painters and young directors treated film as a serious form, tried out ideas in silent films that surprised audiences, and then, with the arrival of sound, produced a series of humane and gloomy dramas now regarded as classics. This chapter follows that development, from the serials of Louis Feuillade to Abel Gance's giant epic, the avant-garde, the first sound comedies, and the poetic realism of the late 1930s, which includes Jean Renoir's two most famous films. Dates and titles are given from general knowledge and flagged where they should be checked.

Feuillade and the Serials

Before the war, and during it, Louis Feuillade made long serial films for Gaumont, released in episodes. Fantômas (1913–14), about a master criminal, and Les Vampires (1915–16), about a gang of criminals (not supernatural vampires despite the title), were enormously popular, and later admired by artists for their strange, dreamlike atmosphere, with masked figures moving across ordinary Paris streets (check the dates). They show a cinema that was popular and that was already finding odd poetry in the everyday.

Abel Gance and Napoléon

Abel Gance made ambitious films that pushed the technique of silent cinema. His war film J'accuse (1919) was a powerful anti-war statement. His biggest project was Napoléon (1927), a very long epic using a hand-held camera, rapid editing and, in its final sequence, three screens side by side, in a process sometimes called Polyvision (check). The film was shown in shortened versions for decades, and later restoration work, led by the British historian Kevin Brownlow, brought back a much longer version that has been shown with live orchestras (check the details). It is a landmark of the silent period and an example of how film history depends on restoration.

Impressionism and the Avant-Garde

In the 1920s a group of film-makers and critics, including Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein and Germaine Dulac, argued that film should be an art in its own right and not a copy of the theatre. The style they developed is usually called French Impressionism, with close-ups, soft focus and rapid or slow motion used to show feelings and states of mind. Dulac, one of the few women directors of the period besides Alice Guy (Chapter 2), made The Smiling Madame Beudet (1923), often described as an early feminist film (check).

The avant-garde went further, often working with painters and poets.

Sound and Early Talkies

Sound arrived in France at the end of the 1920s, as in Germany (see German Film & Television 3). French directors proved quick to find a style for it.

• René Clair. His light musical comedies, Under the Roofs of Paris (1930) and À nous la liberté (1931), were international hits and made use of sound with wit and restraint.
• Marcel Pagnol. A playwright who moved into film and made warm, funny and sad films set in Marseille and Provence, including a trilogy starting with Marius (1931), which became part of French popular culture (check).
• Jean Vigo. A young director who made only a handful of films before he died in 1934 at the age of 29. Zéro de conduite (1933), a rebellious film about a boarding school, was banned for years, and L'Atalante (1934), about a young couple on a river barge, is now regarded as a masterpiece (check).

Poetic Realism

The late 1930s are the high point of the period. The term poetic realism is applied to a group of films, often scripted by the poet Jacques Prévert and directed by Marcel Carné, in which working-class settings, shadowy streets and doomed romances gave ordinary life a melancholy beauty. Jean Gabin was the central star, playing deserters, workers and criminals who cannot escape their fate.

• Marcel Carné. Quai des brumes (1938) and Le Jour se lève (1939) are the best-known examples.
• Julien Duvivier. Pépé le Moko (1937), about a criminal hiding in the Algiers casbah, was a major success.
• The mood. The films are pessimistic, and are often linked to the anxieties of the years before the Second World War, though the link is an interpretation and not proof.

Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir, a son of the painter Auguste Renoir, is regarded as one of the greatest directors in the history of film. His 1930s films cover a wide range.

• La Grande Illusion (1937). A film about French prisoners of war in the First World War, with Jean Gabin and Erich von Stroheim, which treats officers of both sides as members of a class that is passing. It was a major international success and is reported to have been the first foreign-language film nominated for the top American film award (check).
• La Règle du jeu (1939). A comedy of manners at a country house party, in which the upper classes and their servants both behave badly. It was a commercial failure on release, was cut and banned, and was later reconstructed and acclaimed. It now regularly appears near the top of lists of the greatest films (check).

What Happened Next

The mood of this cinema darkened with the political crisis in Europe. In 1939 France went to war, and in 1940 it was defeated and occupied. Chapter 4 follows what became of the film industry and its artists.

Exercises

Next chapter: Occupation, Liberation & the Cinema of Quality, which follows French film through the war and its aftermath.