5.2 Marcel Carne

 5.2 Marcel Carne

Marcel Carné 

BIRTH 18 Aug 1906

Paris, City of Paris, Île-de-France, France

DEATH 31 Oct 1996 (aged 90)

Clamart, Departement des Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France, France

BURIAL

Cimetiere St. Vincent

Montmartre, City of Paris, Île-de-France, France  Show Map

PLOT Division 4

MEMORIAL ID 7749022 · View Source

Motion Picture Director. He worked as cinematographic critic and writer before began his career in cinema in 1936. He directed films such as "Quai des Brumes" (1938), "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1944), "Thérèse Raquin" (1953), "Terrain Vague" and "La Merveilleuse Visite" (1973).

Bio by: José L Bernabé Tronchoni

Some questions about Carné

When thinking, writing or talking about Marcel Carné, the same questions inevitably arise. Were his films successful because of or in spite of him? Were his films the product of a solitary inspiration, or the rewards of collective input? Why is he not remembered as reverently as his contemporaries Jean Vigo and Jean Renoir? Is he merely an orchestrator, someone who got lucky and was able to work regularly with the monstres sacrés of French classical cinema (Jacques Prévert, Jean Gabin, Alexandre Trauner)? What happened to his career after 1945? Is he still important? Was François Truffaut on to something when he described Carné as “a confused soul” and “an obstinate cineaste”? (2) (Links to an external site.) Nowadays, descriptions of Carné tend to be framed in a highly normative register – he is either a “tidy pessimist and adroit technician”, (3) (Links to an external site.) or someone who “needed his collaborators”, (4) (Links to an external site.) and ended up making “dated, backward-looking [and] grotesquely implausible” films. (5) Link Here.

Embracing Poetic Realism : Le quai des brumes, Hôtel du Nord, Le jour se lève

When I paint a tree, I make everybody ill at ease. That’s because there is something or someone hidden behind that tree. I paint those things hidden behind things. For me, a swimmer has already drowned.

– Robert Le Vigan, in Le quai des brumes

Carné and Prévert’s best work in the 1930s was the diptych Le quai des brumes and Le jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939). These are both exemplars of French Poetic Realism, that “paradoxical blend of minutely detailed realism with symbolic, suggestive effects” (17) (Links to an external site.) that rendered the quotidian in lyrical terms. Poetic Realism, as developed by Carné and Prévert, revolved around such formal properties as “prominent lyrical speech, a pessimistic backdrop, and an exhaustive representation of tangible social situations”, (18) (Links to an external site.) as well as aesthetic additions like stylised lighting and décor, and expressive acting. Carné’s stylised mise en scène was an extension of the German Kammerspielfilm tradition –exemplified by Murnau’s Der Letzte Mann– which also deployed bleak settings and slow camera movements to form distinct visual correlates to narratives of psychological breakdown and despair. The later works of French painter Maurice de Vlaminck also evoke the urban claustrophobia and chiaroscuro lightplay that typify Carné’s Poetic Realist films: Montparnasse Crossroads (1918) is highly cinematic in its use of perspective and a bird’s-eye-view shot of the quartier, while the lithograph illustration for Raymond Radiguet’s book Le Diable au corps (1926) evokes strong memories of Le quai des brumes. (19) (Links to an external site.) What Drôle de drame, Le quai des brumes and Hôtel du Nord clarified was Carné’s total reliance upon built sets – hardly a surprise given Carné’s apprenticeship under Feyder and Clair, two other directors whose fondness for ‘atmosphere’ was best served within the confines of the film studio. These enclosed environments were necessities given the stories Carné wanted to tell, for his visual style relied upon cramped spaces which corresponded to the romantic-fatalist aspect of his narratives.

Pauline Kael labelled Carné’s work in the 1930s as the “definitive example of sensuous, atmospheric moviemaking – you feel that you’re breathing the air that Gabin breathes.” (20) (Links to an external site.) The release of Le quai des brumes in 1938 and Le jour se lève a year later (both starring Jean Gabin) crystallised Carné’s textural style, incorporating doom-laden narratives, moody long shots of disaffected lovers and army deserters, and witty and nostalgic bons mots (witty remarks) penned by Prévert. Le quai des brumes, Carné’s adaptation of a Pierre Mac Orlan short story, (21) (Links to an external site.) starred Gabin in one of his quintessential roles as a deserting soldier who hitches a ride into Le Havre and ends up in a lonely bar on the outskirts of town. He falls in love with Michèle Morgan, falls foul of her lascivious guardian Michel Simon and is eventually killed by local gangster Pierre Brasseur. Carné’s directorial flourishes are exhilarating – he uses symbolic objects such as a ship-in-a-bottle and a translucent raincoat to paraphrase key themes of entrapment and ephemerality. Allen Thiher suggests that several of Carné’s themes recur in the film, most notably the “myth of love as a saving grace” and “the impossibility of love in a world given over to inexorable hostility.” (22) (Links to an external site.) Le quai des brumes remains Carné’s most coldly formal work, bespeaking a more transgressive content to his films than simply pretty sets and star actors. The skewed approach to sexual politics mirrors the relationship issues in Le jour se lève: Morgan is configured at the outset as Brasseur’s ‘girl’, but when that ownership is undermined by Gabin, the end result can only be emasculation for either one or the other man. This triangulation of desire coupled with the funfair bumper car scene – “a metaphoric rendering of France’s chaotic politics” (23) (Links to an external site.) – anticipates the socio-historical contextualisation of Le jour se lève and Carné’s emerging fascination with masculinity, crime, and power hierarchies.

In between Le quai des brumes and Le jour se lève, Carné made Hôtel du Nord, an adaptation by Henri Jeanson of Eugène Dabit’s prize-winning novel. The story charts the comings and goings at the eponymous hotel on the banks of the Canal St. Martin in Paris, and while it may lack Prévert’s acerbic edge, it is a masterpiece of production design and performance, as exemplified by the fidelity of Trauner’s sets and Arletty’s role as the ‘tart with the heart’. Like Le quai des brumes, Hôtel du Nord resonates with themes of imprisonment, disillusionment and the impossibility of escape.

- Ben McCann, Senses of Cinema