The Oxford History of World Cinema (48 page)

stylistic conventions of the domestic melodrama, perhaps most notably in the way

everyday objects, such as a white window curtain or a fallen black veil, took on added

significance through singular framing (or magnification) and associational editing. These

strategies were shared by a related group of 'realist' melodramas which Delluc saw as

influenced by certain Triangle films but which also derived from an indigenous French

tradition. Here, Antoine's adaptations of Le Coupable ( 1917) and Les Travailleurs de la

mer ('Workers of the sea', 1918) were exemplary, especially in their location shooting

(one on the outskirts of Paris, the other on the coast of Brittany). But Delluc also drew

attention to the photogénie of the peasant landscapes in Baroncelli's Le Retour aux

champs ('Return to the fields', 1918) as well as certain factory scenes in Henri Roussel's

L'Âme du bronze ('The bronze soul', 1918), one of Eclair's last films. Both kinds of

melodrama would provide the basis for some of the best French films after the war.

'LES ANNÉES FOLLES': FRENCH CINEMA REVIVED

By the end of the war, the French cinema industry confronted a crisis aptly summed up by

posters advertising Mundus-Film (distributors for Selig, Goldwyn, and First National): a

cannon manned by American infantrymen fired one film title after another into the centre

of a French target. According to La Cinématographie française (which soon became the

leading trade journal), for every 5,000 metres of French films presented weekly in France

there were 25,000 metres of imported films, mostly American. Sometimes French films

made up little more than 10 per cent of what was being screened on Paris cinema

programmes. As Henri Diamant-Berger, the publisher of Le Film, bluntly put it, France

was in danger of becoming a 'cinematographic colony' of the United States. How would

the French cinema survive and, if it did, Delluc asked, how would it be French?

The industry's response to this crisis was decidedly mixed over the course of the next

decade. The production sector underwent a paradoxical series of metamorphoses. The

established companies, for instance, either chose or were forced to beat a retreat. In 1918

Pathé-Frères reorganized as Pathé-Cinéma, which soon shut down SCAGL and sold off

its foreign exchanges, including the American affiliate. Two years later, another

reorganization made Pathé-Cinéma responsible for making and marketing apparatuses

and film stock and set up a new company, Pathé-Consortium (over which Charles Pathé

lost control), which rashly began investing in big-budget 'superproductions' that soon

resulted in staggering financial losses. After briefly underwriting 'Séries Pax' films,

Gaumont gradually withdrew from production, a move that accelerated with Feuillade's

death in 1925. Film d'Art also reduced its production schedule as its chief producers and

directors left to set up their own companies. Only the emergence of a 'cottage industry' of

small production companies during the early 1920s provided a significant counter to this

trend. Joining those film-makers already having quasi-independent companies of their

own, for instance, were Perret (returning from the USA), DiamantBerger, Gance, Feyder,

Delluc, Léon Poirier, Julien Duvivier, René Clair, and Jean Renoir. Even larger companies

were established by Louis Nalpas, who left Film d'Art to construct a studio at Victorine

(near Nice), by Marcel L'Herbier, who left Gaumont to found Cinégraphic as an

alternative atelier for himself and other independents, and by a Russian émigré film

colony which took over Pathé's Montreuil studio, first as Films Ermolieffand then as

Films Albatros. The two other principal producers were the veteran Aubert and a

newcomer, Jean Sapène. Based on an alliance with Film d'Art, Aubert built up a

consortium which, by 1923-4, included half a dozen quasi-independent film-makers.

Sapène, the publicity editor at Le Matin, took over a small company named Cinéromans,

hired Nalpas as his excutive producer, and set up an efficient production schedule of

historical serials to be distributed by Pathé-Consortium. So successful were those serials

that Sapène was able to assume control of and revitalize Pathé-Consortium, with

Cinéromans as its new production base.

Although French production increased to 130 feature films by 1922, that figure was far

below the number produced by either the American or German cinema industries, and

French films still comprised a small percentage of cinema programmes. To improve its

position, the industry embarked on a strategy of co-producing 'international' films,

especially through alliances with Germany. This came after earlier repeated failures to

create alliances with the American cinema industry or to exploit American stars such as

Sessue Hayakawa and Fanny Ward; it was also impelled by Paramount's bold move to

launch its own production schedule in Paris, resulting in such box-office hits as Perret's

'Americanized' version of Madame Sans-Gêne ( 1925), starring Gloria Swanson. Pathé,

for instance, joined a new European consortium financed by the German Hugo Stinnes

and the Russian émigré Vladimir Wengeroff (Vengerov), which initially backed Gance's

proposed six-part film of NapoLéon and, through Ciné-France, managed by Noé Bloch

(formerly of Albatros), underwrote Fescourt's four-part adaptation of Les Misérables

( 1925) and Victor Tourjansky's Michel Strogoff ( 1926). That consortium collapsed,

however, when Stinnes's sudden death exposed an incredible level of debt. Further

French-German alliances were then curtailed by heavy American investment, through the

Dawes Plan, in the German cinema industry. The results of this co-production strategy

were mixed. Although generally profitable, such films required huge budgets which,

coupled with a high rate of inflation in France, reduced the French level of production to

just fifty-five films in 1925 -- drying up funds for small production companies and

driving most independent film-makers into contract work with the dominant French

producers.

During the last half of the decade, every major French production company went through

changes in management and orientation. After losing its Russian émigré base, Albatros

secured the services of Feyder and Clair to direct films (especially comedies) that were

more specifically French in character. Although Aubert himself began to take a less active

role, his company's production level remained strong, especially through contracts with

Film d'Art, Duvivier, and a new film-making team, Jean BenoîtLévy and Marie Epstein.

Cinéromans launched a series of 'Films de France' features (by Dulac and Pierre

Colombier, among others) to complement its serials; but when Sapène himself took over

Nalpas's position as executive producer, the company's output generally began to suffer.

Joining these companies were four others, all either financed by Russian émigré money or

associated with Paramount. In 1923 Jacques Grinieff provided an enormous sum to the

Société des Films Historiques, whose grandiose scheme was 'to render visually the whole

history of France'. Its first production, Raymond Bernard's Le Miracle des loups ('The

miracle of the wolves'), premièred at the Paris Opéra and went on to become the most

popular film of 1924. In 1926-7 Bernard Natan, director of a film-processing company

and publicity agency with connections to Paramount, purchased an Éclair studio at Épinay

and constructed another in Montmartre in order to produce films by Perret, Colombier,

Marco de Gastyne, and others. At the same time, Robert Hurel, a French producer for

Paramount, founded Franco-Film, wooing Perret away from Natan after La Femme hue

('The naked woman', 1926) to deliver a string of hits starring Louise Lagrange, the new

'Princess of the French Cinema'. Finally, out of the ashes of Ciné-France arose the Société

Générale des Films, which drew on Grinieff's immense fortune to complete Gance's

NapoLéon ( 1927) and finance Alexandre Volkoff's Casanova ( 1927) and Carl Dreyer's

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc ('The Passion of Joan of Arc', 1928). Against this tide of

consolidation, a few lone figures maintained a tenacious, but marginal, independence,

among them Jean Epstein and especially Pierre Braunberger (the former publicity director

for Paramount), whose Néo-Film offered a 'laboratory' for young film-makers.

During the 1920s the distribution sector of the industry faced an even more severe

challenge. One after another, the major American companies either set up their own

offices in Paris or strengthened their alliances with French distributors. In 1920 came

Paramount and Fox-Film; in 1921 it was the turn of United Artists and First National; in

1922 they were joined by Universal, Metro, and Goldwyn, the latter two signing

exclusive distribution contracts, respectively, with Aubert and Gaumont. That this could

happen so easily was due not only to the Americans' economic power but also to the

French government's inability either to impose substantial import duties on American

films or to legislate a quota system restricting their numbers vis-à-vis French films. The

American success stood in stark contrast to the French film industry's failure to rebuild its

own export markets lost in the war. In the United States, for instance, no more than a

dozen French films were exhibited annually from 1920 to 1925, and few reached cinemas

outside New York. By the end of the decade, the number had increased only slightly. The

situation was different in Germany, where a good percentage of French production was

distributed between 1923 and 1926, in contrast to the far fewer German films imported

into France. That too changed, however, when ACE began distributing German films in

Paris, bypassing French firms altogether. By 1927 the number of German titles released in

France surpassed the total production of the French cinema industry.

That the French distribution market did not capitulate completely to the Americans and

Germans was due in large part to Pathé-Consortium. Whatever its internal problems and

shifts in production, Pathé served, much as it did before and during the war, as the major

outlet not only for its own product but also for that of smaller companies and independent

producers. Cinéromans serials played a decisive role precisely at the moment when, in

1922-3, fresh from their conquest of the British cinema market and just before their

intervention in Germany, American companies seemed ready to impose a block-booking

system of film distribution within France. According to Fescourt, the serials functioned as

a counter system of block booking in that, for at least nine months, they guaranteed

exhibitors 'a long series of weeks of huge returns from a faithful public hooked on the

formula'. Having taken over the contracts of AGC and negotiated others with Film d'Art

and independents such as Feyder and Baroncelli, by 1924-5 Aubert complemented Pathé

efforts as the second largest French distributor. Yet, even though other companies

emerged, such as Armor (to distribute Albatros films), there were never enough

independent French distributors, nor was there a consortium or network which could

distribute the great number of independent French films. As the decade wore on, the

French resistance to foreign domination began to weaken: Gaumont came under the

control of MGM, while Aubert and Armor gradually moved within the orbit of ACE.

However successful Pathé, Aubert, and others had been, the Americans and Germans

secured a foothold within the French cinema industry at the crucial moment of the

transition to sound films.

Compared to the rest of the industry, the exhibition sector remained relatively secure

throughout the 1920s. The number of cinemas rose from 1,444 at the end of the war to

2,400 just two years later and nearly doubled again to 4,200 by 1929. At the same time,

box-office receipts increased exponentially, even taking into account a short period of

high inflation, going from 85 million francs in 1923 to 230 million in 1929. This occurred

despite the fact that the vast majority of French cinemas were independently, even

individually, owned (the figure was perhaps as high as 80 per cent), few of those had a

capacity of 750 seats or more, and less than half operated on a daily basis. That the

exhibition sector did so well was due partly to the enormous popularity of American

films, from Robin Hood (with Douglas Fairbanks) to Ben-Hur. Yet French films, and not

only the serials, also contributed: Feyder's costly L'Atlatitide ( 1921), for instance, played

at the prestigious Madeleine cinema for a whole year. Equally important, however, the

luxury cinemas or palaces, most of them constructed or renovated by Aubert, Gaumont,

and Pathé as 'flagships' for their circuits, generated an unusually high volume of receipts.

There were Aubert-Palaces in nearly every major French city as well as the 2,000-seat

Tivoli in Paris. As its interests shifted to distribution and exhibition, Gaumont acquired

control of the Madeleine, which, with the Gaumont-Palace, served to anchor its Paris

circuit. Pathé renovated the Pathé-Palace into the Caméo, constructed the Empire and

Impérial, and formed an alliance with a new circuit in the capital, Lutetia-Fournier. Only a