The Oxford History of World Cinema (49 page)

few Paris palaces remained independent: the Salle Marivaux, constructed in 1919 by

Edmond Benoît-Lévy, and the Ciné Max-Linder. Yet even the exhibition sector was not

safe from American intervention. In 1925 Paramount began buying or building luxury

cinemas in half a dozen major cities, culminating in the 2,000-seat Paramount-Palace,

which opened in Paris for the 1927 Christmas season. By that time, the major French

cinemas had long established a programme schedule which featured a single film en

exclusivité along with a serial episode and/or a newsreel or short documentary. The

Paramount-Palace introduced the concept of the double-bill programme. Furthermore, it

was prepared to spend lavishly on advertising; within less than a year it was taking in

nearly 10 per cent of the total cinema receipts in Paris.

Although Delluc abhorred them, serials were a distinctive component of the French

cinema, remaining popular well into the late 1920s. Initially, they followed the pattern

established by Feuillade during the war. In TihMinh ( 1919) and Barrabas ( 1920),

Feuillade himself returned to criminal gangs operating with almost metaphysical power in

a world described by Francis Lacassin as a 'tourist's nightmare of exotic locales'. Volkoff's

adaptation of Jules Mary's La Maison du mystère ('The house of mystery', 1922) focused

instead on a textile industrialist (Ivan Mosjoukine) falsely imprisoned for a crime and

forced to exonerate himself in a series of deadly combats with a devilish rival. Another

pattern began to develop out of films like Diamant-Berger's Les Trois Mousquetaires

('The three musketeers', 1921) and Fescourt's Mathias Sandorf ( 1921): the costume or

historical adventure story which Sapène and Nalpas seized on as the basis for the

Cinéromans serials. War heroes and adventurer-brigands from the period either before or

after the French Revolution were especially popular. Fescourt's Mandrin ( 1924), for

instance, depicted the exploits of a Robin Hood figure (Mathot) against the landowners

and tax collectors of the Dauphiné region, while Leprince's Fanfan la Tulipe ( 1925)

staged one threat after another to an orphan hero (nearly executed in the Bastille) who

finally discovered he was of 'noble blood'. By resurrecting a largely aristocratic society

and celebrating a valiant, oppositional hero, who both belonged to a supposedly glorious

past and figured the transition to a bourgeois era, the Cinéromans serials also played a

significant role, after the war, in addressing a collective ideological demand to restore and

redefine France.

That ideological project also partly determined the industry's heavy investment in

historical films. Here, too, the often nostalgic resurrection of past moments of French

glory -- and tragedy -- contributed to the process of national restoration. Le Miracle des

loups, for instance, returned to the late fifteenth century, when a sense of national unity

was first being forged. Here, the bitter conflict between Louis XI (Charles Dullin) and his

brother Charles the Bold was mediated and resolved, according to legend, by Jeanne

Hachette -- and ultimately by a code of suffering and sacrifice. Espousing a similar code,

Roussel's Violettes impériales ('Imperial violets', 1924) transformed the singer, Raquel

Meller, from a simple flower-seller into a Paris Opéra star and a confidante of Empress

Eugénie, all within the luxurious splendour of the Second Empire.

Later French films tended to focus either on one of two periods of French history or else

on subjects involving tsarist Russia. Some took up the same era favoured by the

Cinéromans serials, as in Les Misérables or Fescourt's remake of Monte Cristo ( 1929).

Others followed the example of Le Miracle des loups, as in Gastyne's La Merveilleuse

Vie de Jeanne d'Arc ('The marvellous life of Joan of Arc', 1928), starring Simone

Genevois, or Renoir's Le Tournoi ('The tournament', 1928). The most impressive of the

French subjects were Napoléon and La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc. In Napoléon, Gance

conceived young Bonaparte ( Albert Dieudonné) as the legendary fulfilment of the

Revolution, a kind of Romantic artist in apotheosis, which others like Léon Moussinac

read as proto-Fascist. Everyone agreed, however, on the audacity of Gance's technical

innovations-the experiments with camera movement and multiple screen formats, most

notably in the famous triptych finale. La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, by contrast, deviated

radically from the genre's conventions. Dreyer focused neither on medieval pageantry nor

on Joan's military exploits, showcased in La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d'Arc, but on the

spiritual and political conflicts marking her last day of life. Based on records of the Rouen

trial, Dreyer's film simultaneously documented Falconetti's ordeal playing Jeanne and

created a symbolic progression of close-up faces, all within an unusually disjunctive

spacetime continuum.

Several of the most successful historical productions, however, permitted the Russian

émigrés to celebrate-and sometimes criticize -- the country from which they had fled.

Michel Strogoff, the Impérial cinema's inaugural film, adapted Jules Verne's adventure

novel about a tsarist courier who successfully carries out a dangerous mission in Siberia.

By contrast, Bernard's Le Joueur d'échecs ('The chess player', 1926), which set box-office

records at the Salle Marivaux, represented the triumph of Polish independence from the

Russian monarchy, just prior to the French Revolution. More fantastical in style than

either was Casanova, one of whose episodic series of adventures had Casanova meet and

befriend Catherine the Great. All three of these films showcased magnificent set décors

and costumes (by either Ivan Lochakoff and Boris Bilinsky or Robert Mallet-Stevens and

Jean Perrier) as well as marvellous location shooting (by L.-H. Burel, J.-P. Mundviller,

and others), whether in Latvia, Poland, or Venice.

The boulevard melodrama continued to serve as an important asset to the industry for

several years after the war. Tristan Bernard's plays, for instance, helped to secure his son

Raymond's initial reputation as a film-maker. The more 'artistically' inclined film-makers

also continued to work within the bourgeois milieu of the domestic melodrama, extending

the advances made during the war, often by means of original scenarios, in what Dulac

was the first to call 'impressionist films'. In J'accuse ('I accuse', 1919) and La Roue ('The

wheel', 1921), Gance experimented further with elliptical point-of-view shot sequences,

different forms of rhythmic montage (including rapid montage), and patterns of rhetorical

figuring through associational editing. Dulac did likewise in a series of films which

focused predominantly on women, from La Cigarette ( 1919) to La Mort du soleil ('The

death of the sun', 1922) and especially La Souriante Madame Beudet ('Smiling Madame

Beudet', 1923), whose central character was inescapably trapped in a provincial bourgeois

marriage. Perhaps the high point of this experimentation came in L'Herbier's 'exotic' El

Dorado ( 1921), which deployed a remarkable range of framing and editing strategies

(along with a specially composed score) to evoke the subjective life of a Spanish cabaret

dancer, Sybilla (Eve Francis), and culminated backstage in a stunning 'dance of death'.

By the middle of the decade, the bases for film melodrama had shifted from the theatre to

fiction, and across several genres. Some followed the path of L'Atlantide, drawn from a

popular Pierre Benoit novel, by adapting either 'exotic' Arabian Nights tales or stories of

romance and adventure in the French colonies, usually in North Africa. The latter were

especially popular in films as diverse as Gastyne's La Châtelaine du Liban ('The

chatelaine of the Lebanon', 1926) and Renoir's Le Bled ('The wasteland', 1929). Others

exploited the French taste for fantasy, particularly after the success of 'Séries Pax' films

such as Poirier's Le Penseur ('The thinker', 1920). These ranged from Mosjoukine's

satirical fable Le Brasier ardent) ('The burning brazier', 1923) or L'Herbier's modernist

fantasy Feu Mathias Pascal ('The late Mathias Pascal', 1925), to refurbished féeries,

Clair's Le Fantôme du Moulin Rouge ('The ghost of the Moulin Rouge', 1925), or tales of

horror, Epstein's La Chute de la maison Usher ('The Fall of the House of Usher', 1928).

The major development in the melodrama genre, however, was the modern studio

spectacular, a product of the cultural internationalism which now characterized the urban

nouveau riche in much of Europe and a new target of French investment in international

co-productions. According to Gérard Talon, these films represented the 'good life' of a

new generation and helped establish what was modern or à la mode in fashion, sport,

dancing, and manners. Perfectly congruent with the ideology of consumer capitalism, this

'good life' was played out in milieux which tended to erase the specificity of French

culture. Elements of the modern studio spectacular can be seen as early as Perret's

Koenigsmark ( 1923), but the defining moment came in 1926 with a return to theatrical

adaptations in L'Herbier's Le Vertige ('Vertigo') and Perret's La Femme nue, with their

fashionable resorts and chic Paris restaurants. Thereafter, the modern studio spectacular

came close to dominating French production. Yet some films cut against the grain of its

pleasures, from L'Herbier's deliberately 'avant-garde' extravaganza, L'Inhumaine ('The

inhuman one', 1924) to his updated adaptation of Zola, L'Argent ('Money', 1928), whose

highly original strategies of camera movement and editing helped to critique its wealthy

characters and milieux. A similar critique marked Epstein's 6½ x 11 ( 1927) and especially

his small-budget film La Glace à trois faces ('The three-sided mirror', 1927), which

intricately embedded four interrelated stories within just three reels.

The 'realist' melodrama, by contrast, sustained its development throughout the decade and

remained decidedly'French'. Two things in particular distinguished these films. First, they

usually celebrated specific landscapes or milieux, as spatial co-ordinates delineating the

'inner life' of one or more characters and, simultaneously, as cultural fields for tourists.

Second, those landscapes or milieux were divided between Paris and the provinces,

privileging the picturesque of certain geographical areas and cultures, often tinged with

nostalgia. The Brittany coast provided the subject for films from L'Herbier's L'Homme du

large ('The man of the high seas', 1920) and Baroncelli's Pêcheur d'Islande ('Iceland

Fisherman', 1924) to Epstein's exquisite 'documentary' Finis terrae ( 1929), and Jean

Grémillon's extraordinarily harrowing Gardiens du phare ('Lighthouse keepers', 1929).

The French Alps dominated Feyder's exceptional Visages d'enfants ('Children's faces',

1924), while the Morvan provided a less imposing backdrop for Duvivier's Poil de carotte

('Ginger', 1926). Barge life on French canals and rivers was lovingly detailed in Epstein's

La Belle Nivernaise ('The beautiful Nivernaise', 1924), Renoir's La Fille de l'eau ('Water

girl', 1925), and Grémillon's Maldone ( 1928). The agricultural areas of western, central,

and southern France were the subject of Feuillade's Vendémiaire ( 1919), Antoine's La

Terre ('The land', 1920), Robert Boudrioz's L'Âtre ('The hearth', 1922), Delluc's

L'Inondation ('The flood', 1924), and Poirier's La Brière ( 1924).

Another group of 'realist' films focused on the 'popular' in the socio-economic margins of

modern urban life in Paris, Marseilles, or elsewhere. Here, for flâneurs of the cinema,

were the iron mills and working-class slums of Pouctal's Travail ('Work', 1919), the

claustrophobic sailor's bar of Delluc's Fièvre ('Fever', 1921), the street markets of Feyder's

Crainquebille ( 1922), and the bistros and cheap amusement parks of Epstein's Cōur fidèle

('Faithful heart', 1923). Although their numbers decreased during the latter half of the

decade, several achieved a remarkable sense of verisimilitude, notably Duvivier's Le

Mariage de Mlle Beulemans ('The marriage of Mlle Beulemans', 1927), shot in Brussels,

and the Benoît-Lévy/Epstein production of Peau de pêche ('Peach-skin', 1928), which

juxtaposed the dank, dirty streets of Montmartre to the healthy air of a Charmont-sur-

Barbuise farm. Perhaps the most 'avantgarde' of these later films were Dmitri Kirsanoff 's

brutally poetic Ménilmontant ( 1925), with Nadia Sibirskaia, and Alberto Cavalcanti's

documentary-like stories of disillusionment and despair, Rien que les heures ('Only the

hours', 1926) and En rade ('Sea fever', 1927).

One last genre, the comedy, also remained solidly grounded in French society. The 1920s

at first seemed no less inauspicious for French film comedy than had the war years. Le

Petit Café ('The little café, 1919), Bernard's adaptation of his father's popular boulevard

comedy, starring Max Linder (recently returned from the USA), was a big success, yet

failed to generate further films. There was Robert Saidreau's series of vaudeville

comedies, of course, and Feuillade's charming adaptation Le Gamin de Paris ('The

Parisian boy', 1923), but not until 1924 did a significant renewal of French film comedy