Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
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