The Postwar French Cinema
Georges Sadoul
Georges Sadoul is a widely known film historian and critic. Two of his studies of pioneers in film have appeared in the Hollywood Quarterly.
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The importance of the current crisis in French cinema should not be exaggerated, although its effect on the quality of production is undeniable. The truth is that the French cinema has been in a state of chronic crisis for the last thirty years.
The industry operates on a very narrow basis in France. In a country where half the population lives in the country or in small villages, there are relatively few motion picture theaters, and attendance is limited. For every Frenchman buying one movie ticket, an Englishman buys five or six, an American eight or ten; moreover, the price of admission is three to five times greater in England and America than it is in France.
Before 1914, in spite of its undeveloped home market, France had a quasi-monopoly of international film trade. In 1908, according to George Eastman, founder of the Kodak enterprises, the Pathé Company alone was selling twice as many films in the United States as all the American producers put together. But the young American industry soon dominated its home market, and then eliminated French competition in nearly all foreign countries. In 1920 the big companies in Paris, playing a losing game, liquidated their agencies and studios abroad, and relied on importing American, German, and Swedish films for part of their French revenue.
French production, which had been foremost in quantity and to a certain extent in quality, collapsed after 1914, systematically discouraged by these big firms. By 1928 France was producing only fifty films a year. The industrial policy of the interests that monopolized the industry discouraged the directors grouped around Louis Delluc who wanted to make French cinema an art. At the end of the silentfilm period most of them renounced their ambitions and resigned themselves to producing commercial
The introduction of sound film and the resulting public demand for French-language films stimulated production. It grew in two years from fifty to two hundred films a year, a certain number of them being products of German and American companies. But, aside from those made by René Clair, they remained for the most part wholly mediocre and very much inferior to German and American productions of the same period.
In 1934, René Clair, discouraged by the difficulties he encountered, settled down in England. Jacques Feyder had been in the United States since 1929. The brightest hope of the younger generation, Jean Vigo, died at twenty-nine, exhausted by the struggle he had led. The two largest French firms, Pathé and Gaumont, closed down, and Paramount interrupted its enormous production program in Paris. The depth of the depression had been reached. One might well have believed that the French cinema was doomed. Happily, this was far from true.
The downfall of the big companies had to a certain extent reëstablished free competition. Smaller studios gave opportunities to talents that were still unknown or had been blacklisted by the larger studios. The absence of René Clair was compensated for by the return of Jacques Feyder. The much-criticized efforts of Marcel Pagnol now began to bear fruit. In 1935 a French School was born, grouped around Jacques Feyder, Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, and Julien Duvivier. In foreign capitals it regained for France the artistic position lost twenty years earlier.
The second World War brutally interrupted the renaissance. Renoir, René Clair, and Duvivier were able to reach Hollywood. Feyder had to take refuge in Switzerland. The Propaganda Staffel, organ of Nazi censorship, kept French cinema under rigid control. As an art it was threatened with eclipse. But a certain number of directors emerged who effectively took the place of those who were missing. Discovered or rediscovered were Jean Grémillon, Jacques Becker, Louis Daquin, Robert Bresson, Jean Delannoy, and H. G. Clouzot. Marcel Carné directed Les Visiteurs du soir and Les Enfants du Paradis. In all occupied Europe there was no better cinema than that of France, almost all of whose personnel were active in organizations of the Resistance.
Certain economic factors favored the pursuit of the renaissance of
The foreign share in receipts fell below 10 per cent, and French production, sharply favored, in spite of all the difficulties born of the war, was able to release a total of seventyfive films in 1942, as compared with an average annual output of a hundred and twenty in the years preceding the outbreak of the war.
The Liberation, the fighting, and the heavy bombardment that led up to it, brought film making almost to a standstill in 1944. In a country still virtually without communication and electricity, the studios resumed production with the greatest difficulty in 1945. Nevertheless, they soon had to their credit important artistic achievements and were honored at international festivals in Brussels, Cannes, Venice, and elsewhere.
With the reëstablishment of normal international exchange, foreign competition on the economic plane reappeared. In June, 1946, in Washington, Blum and Byrnes signed motion picture agreements between France and the United States. The prewar film import system—that of "contingency"—limiting to one hundred and twenty the number of American films to be imported each year was replaced by the "quota" system. French theater programs were now to include at least 31 per cent of domestic films, but no limitation was placed on the number of foreign films to be imported. As a result of the agreements the share of the domestic income reserved for French producers, which had been more than 90 per cent during the war, fell below 40 per cent in the first quarter of 1947. Before 1939 it had comprised between 60 and 70 per cent. A wave of panic began to spread. In the winter of 1947–48, eight out of thirteen studios closed their doors. Unemployment mounted to 80 per cent in some branches of the industry. The number of feature films, which had reached ninety-four in 1946, fell back to seventy-four in 1947.
The strong feeling among technicians, artists, and studio workers was shared by a large body of public opinion. Hundreds of thousands ofmoviegoers joined Committees for the Defense of French Cinema. As early as the first months of 1948, Parliament concerned itself with the problem, and the French government denounced the Washington agreements.
They were replaced in October, 1948, by arrangements more favorable to French cinema. The "quota" was increased from 31 to 40 per cent; the number of dubbed films to be imported was reduced to the level of 1938. Finally, a special assistance act was passed which gave the various branches of the industry a subsidy of 2,000,000,000 francs.
These measures, foreshadowed from the beginning of 1948, stimulated French production: ninety-six films were made in 1948, the highest production figure since 1938. However, although new circumstances had been established, new dangers appeared. Since the beginning of 1949 the country has been in a threatening economic crisis. Unemployment and bankruptcies have multiplied. The standard of living, already very low at the time of the Liberation in comparison with that of 1938, continued to decline rapidly from 1946 on. Although the price of admission has increased much less than the general cost of living, theater attendance has fallen sharply. In 1948, attendance in industrial areas fell 25 to 30 per cent from the levels of the preceding year. The first figures reported in 1949 showed a further decline of 20 to 25 per cent from the already very unsatisfactory totals of 1948, when attendance was actually poorer than it was in 1944, a year of bombardments, battles, and shortages of electricity.
Under such conditions, French producers—who are almost always independents without large capital resources—hesitate to undertake films that risk not being able to repay production costs on the domestic market. Yet French films cost little. The average budget for a picture was about 40,000,000 francs, or $100,000 in 1948. A superproduction might cost as much as 80,000,000 francs, but a budget greater than 100,000,000 francs, or $250,000, is considered a real extravagance. In 1948 only two films exceeded, by an insignificant margin, the $250,000 limit. The tendency of French producers to plan in terms of low budgets is not always shrewdly calculated. One of the two films budgeted at more than $250,000 in 1948, H. G. Clouzot's Manon, will very quickly earn large profits for its producer by virtue of its great success in France and abroad, whereas Monsieur de Falindor, a film budgeted at less than $50,000, is likely to lose half the meager capital invested in it.
One of the characteristics of the present situation in the French industry is that the differences in the profitability of films, formerly narrow, are now very considerable, and may vary for films made on identical budgets in a ratio of 1 to 20, and even more. This phenomenon is due to the economic
The French producers who pursue a policy of mediocre production at bottom prices will eventually be proved wrong, but their attitude has had a most undesirable effect on quality. Since the Liberation most of the directors of outstanding talent have made few films, or none, for it was feared that their demands on the budget would be excessive. Jacques Feyder, who returned to France in 1944, had not been assigned one film to direct up to the time of his death in 1948. In five years, Jean Grémillon, author of Lumière d'été and Le Ciel est à vous, directed only one film. The same was true of Jacques Becker, who made Goupi Mains Rouges, Marcel Carné, in spite of the great success of Les Enfants du Paradis and Les Visiteurs du soir, René Clair, and Claude Autant-Lara.
Nevertheless, the development of French cinema continues and its achievements are far from negligible. In the following survey it will not be possible, unfortunately, to take into account whether a given film is already known to the American public.
The absence of Jean Renoir and the loss of Jacques Feyder are deeply felt. But the prewar masters René Clair, Julien Duvivier, Marcel Carné, and Marcel Pagnol have each produced a film in France since 1945.
René Clair was abroad for more than twelve years. Air pur, the film he started in 1939, was interrupted by the declaration of war and will never be finished. Le Silence est d'or was an opportunity for him to rediscover, in the atmosphere of Paris, some of the avant-garde traditions with which he grew up and, more especially, the beloved French cinema before 1914 to which his art owes so much. In Le Silence est d'or, without losing any of his smiling optimism, he shows a certain melancholy, almost bitterness; but the lightness of his touch and the swift precision of his art swept away, at least outwardly, the seriousness that might have clouded the comedy and transformed into querulousness the grumbling charm of this "journal of a fifty-year-old man." The success of Le Silence est d'or was considerable in France and in Europe. But for three years René Clair did not work on another film. In collaboration with the dramatist Armand
After the triumph of his elaborate Les Enfants du Paradis, Marcel Carné had exceptional means at his disposal for Portes de la nuit. The film was to be a fantasy and its hero was a personification of "destiny" as a vagabond. But it was also to be a study of the hard winter that followed the Liberation. The Barbès-Rochechouart metro in Montmartre, the sorry working-class districts on the north side of Paris, the dismal Saint-Martin canal, demolished areas, the main railroad yards, were the locales in which the protagonists, conceived for Carné by his regular screenwriter, Jacques Prevert, moved. Reality, too minutely elaborated, seemed a studio set, especially when the new Italian films were being shown triumphantly on French screens at the same time. In addition, a false poetry, in the manner of the 'twenties and 'thirties, marred the scenes of fantasy. The almost total failure of the film was not its just due, however, for it did contain admirable sections.
Subsequently, Carné began to work on La Fleur de l'âge, a film about penitentiaries for children, written by Jacques Prevert. Shooting was far from complete when the film was abandoned. Carné then spent long months in Italy preparing, from a script by dramatist Jean Anouilh, a modern version of Euridyce, to be played by Michèle Morgan. The project failed. It seems that Carné, whose Quai des Brumes and Le Jour se lève place him among the world's greatest directors, will not soon have a chance to make another film.
Marcel Pagnol, who is very popular in the United States, is far less so in France, for reasons that are not immediately apparent. But the fact is that Pagnol has always mixed the best with the worst in his films, even at the peak of his fame before the war. In comparison with the works of his best period—Angèle, Jofroi, La Femme du boulanger—his La Fille du puisatier (1940) represents a definite decline. His film Naïs, an adaptation from Zola released after the Liberation, was below average in quality.
His last work, La Belle Meunière, is a fictional version of the life of Schubert, interesting only because it experimented with the new, still imperfect, French color process, routcolor. About the film itself the less said the better, for it is totally without merit.
Julien Duvivier reopened his French career with Panique, which was
Among those who proved themselves during the Occupation, Jean Grémillon is certainly one of the most effective and talented. He first appeared in the ranks of the avant-garde soon after 1925, but after one or two commercial failures he was constrained to direct films unworthy of his considerable ability.
On the eve of the war, Jean Grémillon again attracted attention with his L'Etrange Monsieur Victor, magnificently played by Raimu, and Remorques, a film that was to star Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan. He was prevented from completing the latter by the opening of hostilities.
After the success he achieved under the Occupation with Lumière d'été and Le Ciel est à vous, Jean Grémillon undertook a project with a wide social canvas: Le Massacre des innocents, a story of France between 1935 and 1945. The plans did not go through. He then prepared, under the sponsorship of the French government, Le Printemps de la liberté, in commemoration of the Revolution of 1848. Just as the shooting was about to start, the government withdrew its promised support and the film could not be made. This is to be much regretted, for the script, which has been published, proves that Le Printemps de la liberté would certainly have been one of the best postwar French films.
After this setback, Jean Grémillon directed a script by the dramatist Jean Anouilh, Pattes blanches, which was released in France in April, 1949. Here, Grémillon demonstrated full mastery of his talents. He was able to give vivid reality to a story set in a small town in Brittany which opposes a ruined young man, a fishmonger in love, a forlorn girl, a disinherited bastard, and a hunchbacked inn servant. Thanks to Grémillon and his actors, these characters became believable and gripping. But inadequacies in the screenplay are evident, despite the dramatic talent of Jean Anouilh.
Jacques Becker, who became famous with Goupi Mains Rouges, was for many years Jean Renoir's assistant. But the disciple has shown great individuality. Falbalas, which he directed in the last months of the Occupation, is a brilliant painting of the milieu of Parisian haute-couture. But Falbalas did not reach the high perfection of Antoine et Antoinette, a
Georges Rouquier presented in Farrebique a picture, at once homely and lyrical, of the daily life of peasants in southern France. This full-length film owes much to Nanook and Moana, but Georges Rouquier's special merit consists in having portrayed men in their everyday struggle with nature not under exotic skies but in the setting he knows most intimately. The inhabitants of the farm seen in Farrebique, acted by themselves, are close relatives of Rouquier.
René Clément, who worked as a technical director on Cocteau's fantasy, La Belle et la bête, and on Noël-Noël's comedy, Le Père tranquille, worked independently as the director of Les Maudits, a story of a group of Nazis and collaborationists who take refuge in a submarine and roam all over the world in search of a safe place to land. In spite of the somewhat awkward, melodramatic plot, the direction and the performances were outstanding. Clément has not directed another film since Les Maudits, nor has Georges Rouquier since Farrebique, completed in 1946.
Louis Daquin's career began under the Occupation with a picture full of charm and freshness, Nous les gosses, but his following films were disappointing. He has recently reaffirmed a real mastery of the medium in Le Point du jour, which is a picture of a miner's life in the collieries of northern France. Vladimir Pozner wrote a simple and straightforward script for this striking film, the outstanding French production of the 1948–49 season.
Because of Becker, Rouquier, Clément, and Daquin, one may speak of a realistic French school. Following the tradition created before the war by Jean Renoir, in particular, it might rival the new Italian school, if its representatives had more frequent opportunities to direct films.
H. G. Clouzot is one of the figures in French cinema upon whom the highest hopes are based. His talent proved itself under the Occupation with Le Corbeau. The sharp controversy stimulated by the film was constructive rather than destructive to a director of such great talent as Clouzot. In 1947 he won great success with Quai des Orfèvres, a trite enough
Excellent performances were given by Michel Auclair and Cecile Aubry, a young actress whose talent has earned her a contract in Hollywood.
Unhappily, Clouzot demonstrated in Manon that he was not able to cope with large-scale social problems as Renoir did before the war and as the new Italian school does today. A certain extreme romanticism, a complacence with abstractions at points where representing reality directly was called for, a misuse of borrowings from the great film classics, numerous improbabilities, and errors in taste disappointed the most faithful of Clouzot's admirers. Nevertheless the film was well received and has become a popular success.
In the naturalistic and readily pessimistic genre, which Clouzot favors, Yves Allégret, brother of the already well-known Marc Allegret, has directed Dédée d'Anvers and Une si jolie petite plage. This skillful and talented director makes the mistake of basing his work too faithfully on the themes, the characters, and even the bad habits of the prewar French school. One is still waiting for him to produce a truly original work that will go beyond the average successful film.
The work of Claude Autant-Lara also belongs in the category of naturalistic films. Like Grémillon, he is an old member of the avant-garde of 1925 who was restricted for a long time to directing films unworthy of his talent. He was recognized under the Occupation with the release of Le Mariage de chiffon and, especially, Douce, a conventional enough novel out of which Pierre Bost and Jean Aurenche developed an excellent script.
In 1947, with the same collaborators, Claude Autant-Lara adapted a novel by Raymond Radiguet, Le Diable au corps, which had been popular during the First World War. This was a polished work in which Autant-Lara ably directed his talented young actors, one of whom, Gérard Philipe, became a new European sensation. The superior quality and values of Le Diable au corps are beyond question.
During the Occupation, poetic and fantastic films had been almost obligatory for directors who did not want to deal with reality as it existed
Devil in the Flesh/Le Diable au corps (1947), by Claude Autant-Lara, with Gérard Philipe and Micheline Presle
under German control. This genre now seems to be disappearing. Its last expression was Jean Cocteau's brilliant, glacial La Belle et la bête. He tried vainly to repeat its success with Ruy Blas and L'Aigle à deux têtes. However, by filming his best stage play, Les Parents terribles, Cocteau accomplished a remarkable technical feat and produced his best film.
To make our enumeration exhaustive we shall name the often uneven work of talented and prolific directors such as Jean Delannoy (La Symphonie pastorale, Aux yeux du souvenir) and Christian Jaque (Boule de suif, D'homme à hommes).
The French documentary school, in spite of serious difficulties, continues to produce interesting films, among which have been Van Gogh by Alain Resnais,Goemons by Anik Bellon, and Naissance du cinéma by Roger Leenhardt, who produced the wholly fresh and commendable film, Les dernières vacances. To the French documentary school may be added the poetic Noces de sable made in Morocco by Andrès Zvoboda, and Paris 1900 by Nicole Vedres, who succeeded in arranging scattered pieces of pre-1914 film into a sly and charming montage.
Talent is not scarce in the French cinema. Perhaps the assessment must
Nevertheless, we do not believe that the slight hesitation that marks the French school today is due basically to lack of initiative or talent among its film makers. It is, in large measure, the present economic difficulties that limit initiative and narrow the choice of subjects and oblige film makers to return to old subjects rather than seek new and original themes in the life around them.
The vitality of French cinema is incontestable. For fifteen years it has managed to keep alive in spite of the deaths, absences, departures, or exile, of its best practitioners. We believe that, thanks to its rich resources of talent, the French school will continue to be one of the foremost among the various national cinemas for a very long time to come.