5.1 Poetic Realism in Pre-War France
5.1 Poetic Realism in Pre-War France
POETIC REALISM IN PRE-WAR FRANCE
A "BLEAK" OUTLOOK
Poetic realism’s bleak outlook reflected the waning of Popular Front idealism as fascism began to spread throughout Europe. Carné’s vision was not explicitly political, however. Foreshadowing film noir’s more oblique pessimism and flashback-laden regret, Le jour se lève starred Jean Gabin as working-class everyman François, who murders in the name of love. Still, it was too much for French authorities, who saw the emotional subtext as potentially subversive. The film was banned in December 1939, as war approached, and again under Nazi occupation.
Vital to the realization of Carné’s realist-romantic vision was Alexandre Trauner, the self-proclaimed “artisan” production designer, who had an enormous influence on French cinema in the thirties and who would work with Carné on the classic Children of Paradise (1945). Constructing sets true to working-class milieus while also helping to impart character psychology through careful attention to atmospheric details, Trauner was able to manifest Carné’s twin impulses. It was Trauner who insisted on constructing François’ apartment without movable walls—making filming extremely difficult—and shooting real bullets through them for the film’s finale. And his demands paid off: the claustrophobic, vividly threatening environment perfectly evokes François’ mental state.
- Michael Joshua Rowin
PRE-WAR FRANCE WORKING CONDITIONS
The early 1930s saw widespread demonstrations, riots and strikes across France for worker’s rights (wages had been cut and taxes raised). The Popular Front government of 1936-7 heralded in a fresh optimism for workers and saw improved working conditions to the now-familiar 40 hour work week / 2 weeks holiday (from earlier 14-16 hour days).
NAREMORE'S MORE THAN NIGHT: FILM NOIR IN ITS CONTEXTS
For a more in-depth look at the overarching interconnectedness across oceans and nationalities I highly recommend Naremeore's More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. The following is from the first chapter, "The History of an Idea:"
In one sense the French invented the American film noir, and they did so because local conditions predisposed them to view Hollywood in certain ways. As R. Barton Palmer observes, postwar France possessed a sophisticated film culture, consisting of theaters, journals, and “cineclubs” where movies were treated as art rather than as commercial entertainment. Equally important, the decade after the liberation was characterized by a strong resurgence of Americanism among French directors and critics, many of whom sought to refashion their art cinema along the more “authentic” lines of Hollywood genre movies. A nouvelle vague would eventually grow out of this dialectic between America and Europe, and the so-called film noir—which was visibly indebted to European modernism—became the most important category in French criticism.
The French were also predisposed to invent American noir because it evoked a golden age of their own cinema. They were quick to observe that the new Hollywood thrillers resembled such Popular Front films as Pépé le Moko (1936), Hôtel du Nord (1938), and Le jour se lève (1939)—a group of shadowy melodramas, set in an urban criminal milieu and featuring doomed protagonists who behaved with sangfroid under pressure. The term film noir had in fact been employed by French writers of the late 1930s in discussions of these films. Film historian Charles O’Brien points out that in the years immediately before the war, the word noir often had pejorative connotations and was frequently used by the right-wing French press in their attacks on the “immorality and scandal” of left-wing culture. Noir was nevertheless embraced as a descriptive adjective by several writers on the Left (particularly after the war), and the style favored by the Popular Front, whether it was called “noir” or not, constituted a respectable and quite recognizable type of filmmaking for most critics throughout the world. Thus, when Double Indemnity was released in the United States in 1944, a reviewer for The Hollywood Reporter noted that it was “more than a little reminiscent of the late lamented, excellent French technique.” (To reassure moviegoers, he added, “This is not to say that it is ‘arty’” [24 August 1944].)
- James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts pgs. 13-15
FRENCH POETIC REALISM OVERVIEW
In the mid-1930s the liquidation of the two major film trusts in France, Pathé and Gaumont, meant that the small independent producer could take up pole position. Whereas before 1935, the two majors had dominated production, after 1935 and until 1939 on average 90 per cent of the French films produced were by small independent film companies. This had a fortunate effect on the French film industry. The collapse of the major commercial studios facilitated France’s art cinema. Independent producer-directors were, for a while, free to make their films, and moreover could access the majors’ studios and technical services, as well as their cinema circuits. A small faction of these independents, most famously Yves Allégret, Marcel Carné, Julien Duvivier, Jean Grémillon and Jean Renoir, became loosely banded under the label of the Poetic Realist school. But, despite their small number, they none the less re-established France’s ailing international cinematic reputation which had been on the decline ever since the First World War, by which time the Hollywood majors had completely cornered the international market.
Poetic realism has been seen in relation to its historical context as shadowing the rise and fall of the Popular Front – a consolidated party of the left which eventually came to power in 1936. The party was voted in on a wave of optimism for its platform of social reforms. However, because of the economic climate and the threat of war these were never fully implemented. The party was in power for a thousand days, but after only six months in office it was obvious that little or no change was going to be possible given the political and economic climate. To the optimism of its advance come the filmic echoes of working-class solidarity as exemplified in Renoir’s Le Crime de M. Lange (1935) and the optimistic title of his La Vie est à nous (1936). As markers of the decline of the Popular Front and of the desperation felt at the ineluctability of war come deeply pessimistic films like Marcel Carné’s Quai des brumes (1938), Le Jour se lève (1939) and Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939).
This simplistic reflection needs nuancing however, since not all the films in this grouping necessarily gave this straightforward early-optimism, later-pessimism message. Furthermore, not all the film-makers in this school were sympathetic to the left. At least two 1936 films are undyingly pessimistic in their message. These are Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le Moko and La Belle équipe (both starring the poetic realist fetish star, Jean Gabin). In the first, Pépé dies at his own hands. Wanted by the police, he holes up in the Casbah in Algiers where he is surrounded by an adoring gang and mistress; but all he can dream of is returning to Paris – the price for fulfilling that desire is death. In La Belle équipe male working-class solidarity is exposed for its weakness as it swiftly becomes eroded by the alluring presence of a woman. Duvivier was certainly not a man of the left, which might explain his dark films in this euphoric period of the early Popular Front. However, another film-maker, Jean Grémillon, this time of the left, was making similarly bleak films around the same time. His Gueule d’amour (1937) portrays the destruction of a man who foregoes his duties (as a soldier) for his passion for a ‘heartless’ woman (whom he eventually murders).
In poetic realist films there is a strong emphasis on mise-en-scène: décor, setting and lighting receive minute attention and owe not a little to the influence of German expressionism. Poetic realism is a recreated realism, not the socio-realism of the documentary. In this respect the realism is very studio-bound and stylized. For example, parts of Paris are studiously reproduced in the studio – an almost inauthentic realism. This stylized realism of the mise-en-scène is matched by the poetic symbolism within the narrative. The narrative is heavily imbued with the notion of fatalism. The male protagonist is generally doomed and the film’s diegesis is so constructed as to put the degeneration in his mood on display. This is the mise-en-scène of male suffering par excellence. Setting, gestures, movement (or lack of it), verbal and non-verbal communication are all markers for this degeneration and so too are the lighting effects. To this effect side-lighting, for example, is used on the protagonist’s face, or part lighting of the space in which he finds himself, or highlighting objects that are of symbolic value to him. Indeed objects are endowed with symbolism to quite a degree of abstraction and resonate throughout the film, measuring the state of degeneration as the protagonist responds to their recurrence in the film.
A major reason why all aspects of the film process function so intensely to create this aura of poetic realism is that these films are, in the final analysis, the result of team work. There is the director, but there are also – of major importance – the scriptwriter, the designer for the sets, the lighting expert and the composer of the music soundtrack. Carné for example worked with the poet Jacques Prévert who scripted several of his films, he had Alexander Trauner as his set designer and Joseph Kosma was a frequent composer to his films.
- Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd Ed. Download Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, 2nd Ed. (Links to an external site.)pgs. 149-151
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