The Resurgence of Popular French Cinema

The experimental center of French cinema in the mid-1920s came to an end with the coming of sound in the late 1920s. An independent French 1920s cinema was forced by the expenses of the sound film (the United States’ Western Electic and Germany’s Tobis owned all of the global rights to film sound recording equipment) to re-establish the commercial, studio-based industrial structure of the 1900s and the 1910s. In fact, Gaumont and Pathe Freres were briefly re-organized into large conglomerates in the early 1930s. Under this newly commercialized French cinema at the dawn of sound came Under the Roofs of Paris (1929), considered by many film critics to be the first mature sound film.

Thus, as in the case of Japan or Germany, the coming of sound is a nationally specific phenomenon. In France, a certain kind of optimism began to re-assert itself, as the trauma of World War I was gradually healed. This expressed itself in a certain kind of French popular culture (often called populisme, or popular realism). One form that populisme took in the late 1920s was the Parisian, Boulevard Theater, a popular form of musical theater. The former experimental film director, Rene Clair (whose Surrealist Entr’Acte we’ve already studied) began making sound films which harnessed this musical theater to the cinema. The first film in this series was Under the Roofs of Paris.

CLIP: Under the Roofs of Paris (Rene Clair, 1929): Opening (the rehearsal)

Compare these images to those in the contemporaneous German "Street Realist" films, like Pandora’s Box and The Blue Angel. The German films, made in a culture which had not healed the trauma of World War I, and would shortly turn to Fascist simplicity to do so, express a bleak, isolated view of social life. On the other hand, Under the Roofs of Paris shows an active, communal social life, as when the street singers gather to rehearse their optimistic ditties. It is such optimism that would ultimately come to roost in French political life as the Popular Front (1935-1937), the first popularly-elected Leftist government in the history of the world.

Theatricality in Early 1930s French Cinema

As the story of Under the Roofs of Paris begins to indicate, the noteworthy trend in early 1930s French cinema lies in its increased attention to the theater as source material for the cinema. The most famous practitioner of this trend is Marcel Pagnol, a theatrical playwright who formed his own film production company in the south of France to make films out of his plays. His famous trilogy of films–Marius (1931), Fanny (1932), and Cesar (1936), about ordinary street life in Marseilles–is his masterpiece in this regard.

While Pagnol was continuing the tradition of populisme out in the provinces, Jean Renoir was beginning to articulate a less optimistic filmic vision of street life back in Paris, yet still using the theater as its means of expression. His film, La Chienne (1931), tells a gritty tale of a man cuckolded by a prostitute, who eventually murders her with an icepick, framing her boyfriend for the murder. Note how this film uses a theatrical frame to lighten the grity, realist subject matter of its internal story.

CLIP: La Chienne (Jean Renoir, 1931): The Theatrical Frame

A film like La Chienne begins to lay the groundwork for the dominant French cinematic tradition in the late 1930s, poetic realism. The critic Georges Sadoul cointed the term poetic realism to describe the mix of lyrical beauty and gritty realism of French films in the 1930s. Renoir’s La Chienne begins to lay this out, with its use of theatrical artifice mixed with gritty street realism (derived largely from Erich Von Stroheim’s Hollywood, yet thoroughly Germanic, films).  La Chienne really shows how out of step poetic realism was with the populiste early 1930s French culture, as its ending featuring Michel Simon declaring "life is beautiful" seems patently out of step with the film’s gritty murder. Compare this with the American film noir adaptation of La Chienne that we watched previously, Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945), which like German street realism, ends with madness, despair and isolation.

Jean Renoir and Social Class in Early 1930s French Cinema

Jean Renoir would continue to use the combination of lyricism and realism until the last moments of the 1930s. As a leftist, Renoir would use the tools of poetic realism to construct defenses of the proletariat and critiques of the bourgeois and aristocratic insolation and arrogance. As Renoir would proceed through the 1930s, the desperation of the critique of the bourgeois would intensify and the ability of the proletariat to triumph would rapidly dwindle.

1. The Defense of the Proletarian

But in the early 1930s, the triumph of the proletariat was a central concern of Renoir. In his film Boudu Saved From Drowning, Renoir uses the actor Michel Simon (the "optimistic" character of 1930s French culture, as opposed to Jean Gabin, the "pessimistic" character of late 1930s Poetic Realism, to be discussed later) to symbolize this proletarian triumph. The film concerns Boudu, who is saved from drowning by a middle-class bookstore owner. The store owner insists on having the homeless Boudu move in with him, in an attempt to convert him into a bourgeois subject. Boudu will have nothing of it, and proceeds to sleep with both the man’s wife and his mistress, thus exposing the hypocrisy of middle-class life. As the film ends, Boudu strips himself of his bourgeois attire and returns to the Seine for a playful swim, having successfully resisted the button-downed life of stagnant French bourgeois culture. You may know this plot from its aptly Reaganite 1980s Hollywood remake, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, in which Richard Dreyfus plays the bourgeois owner and Nick Nolte plays Boudu.

CLIP: Boudu Saved From Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932): Ending (Boudu rejects bourgeois culture)

2. The Critique of the Bourgeois

In the early 1930s, Renoir also worked to critique bourgeois culture more directly. His adaptation of the great mid-19th century anti-bourgeois novel, Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, is a testament to this.

Jean Renoir and the Impressionist Legacy

At the time he began making movies, Jean Renoir was probably most famous because of his artistic family, his father being Auguste Renoir, the Impressionist painter. Renoir’s films often encapsulate in the cinematic image the French Impressionist tradition that spans from his father’s paintings to the French Impressionist avant garde cinema in the 1920s. Consider in this regard Renoir’s adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s 19^th century short story, "Une Partie de campagne," in which Renoir uses cinematic images of the French natural landscape to tell the story of a failed love relationship between a man and a young girl.

The Rise of the Popular Front

The most significant political development in France during the 1930s was the raging debate between radical forms of political leadership: Fascism on the Right and various forms of Leftism which arose to oppose it. Most of Europe was beseiged by the poison of Fascism in the 1930s, with its simplistic solutions to complex social problems. Unlike Spain, Germany, and Italy, France was able to briefly stave off the Fascist tide. This happened when all of the Leftist factions in France–the socialists, the Communists, etc. (who are notorious for not getting along with one another)–organized together to fight the Fascist tide. In 1935, under Leon Blum, the so-called Popular Front government formed, and by early 1936, was a fully-functioning, popularly-elected Leftist government (the first of its kind, given the Soviet government was bloodily formed via a Revolution).

The film that best expresses the populism of the Popular Front is Renoir’s The Crime of M. Lange (1936). In the film, a greedy, rapacious capitalist, Batala, runs a publishing house. When Batala is presumed dead, M. Lange leads the workers of the publishing house to form a collective. They begin to turn the publishing house into a vibrant place to work. However, Batala is not really dead, and returns to take over his company again. M. Lange, refusing to let the collective be destroyed, murders Batala out of necessity.

CLIP: The Crime of M. Lange (Jean Renoir, 1936): Lange murders Batala

The everyday people in the film, rather than turning in Lange, help him flee to Belgium. In the film’s beautiful ending image, Lange and his girlfriend walk down the beach, a stunning symbol, to freedom and happiness.

CLIP: The Crime of M. Lange: Ending (The lovers flee on the beach)

The Decline of the Popular Front

The Popular Front government engaged in a tremendous series of reforms, limiting the maximum hours to work in a week, establishing mandatory vacations, etc. Because of these radical, pro-worker reforms, most of the business class in France panicked and withdrew their capital out of France. This caused a tremendous amount of economic hardship for the government, and within the span of two years, the government had collapsed. By 1938, the last European resistance to Fascism had thus evaporated, and the dream of France staving off the Fascist tide was gone as well. By this late date, it was clear to most that a progressive Europe lay in ruins, and the physical Europe was not far behind.

Again, no film better captures this pessimism that came with the fall of the Popular Front than Renoir’s poetic realist masterpiece, La Bete humaine. The film is an adaptation of a novel by Emile Zola, the premier French practitioner of Naturalism in late 19^th century France. Naturalism is a literary movement linked to Realism that concerns the fatedness of human beings to carry out their hereditarily and environmentally determined legacy. La Bete humaine is part of a cycle of Naturalist novels, Les Rougon-Macquarts, in which the ancestors of the family committed horrific acts of depravity. The novels then trace the ways in which those originary acts express themselves in subsequent generations of the family. La Bete humaine concerns a train engineer, Jacques Lantier, who is cursed by a sexual mania: every time he becomes sexually aroused, he desires to murder the woman he is with. At the end of the novel, Lantier has overcome his obsession, after murdering his lover. Cured, he begins an affair with the wife of his assistant, Pecqueux. Pecqueux discovers Lantier’s treachery, and they begin fighting with one another while driving a speeding train (which happens to be carrying French soldiers to the front of the Franco-Prussian War, a war in which France was routed in under a month in 1871). The two men are thrown over the train together, and are beheaded, with the train full of patriotically-singing soldiers headed for literal and symbolic disaster at the front.

Renoir’s film version of La Bete humaine changes this utterly pessimistic ending. In the film, Lantier and Pecqueux are perfect representatives of Popular Front solidarity. At the beginning of the film, in one of the most beautiful scenes in any Renoir film, Pecqueux tells Lantier that if he mixes his ham with Lantier’s eggs, they can have an omelette. No better description of the solidarity of Popular Frontists could be forwarded. Lantier is, of course, played by that icon of poetic realist doom, Jean Gabin, so that we know, even at this early moment, that things can’t work out for him. By the film’s end, Lantier has murdered his lover, but no affair with Pecqueux’ wife ensues. Instead, Lantier is eaten up by guilt, and tries to fling himself off of the speeding train to commit suicide. Pecqueux bravely attempts to stop his beloved friend Lantier, but to no avail.

CLIP: La Bete humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938): Ending (Lantier kills himself)

Like Zola's novel, Renoir’s film ends pessimistically, but now that pessimism is directed against the defeat of Popular Front solidarity by forces outside their control. Pecqueux mourns his lost friend, while the representative of the French government tells him to move along quickly so that the trains will run on time.

La Bete humaine Versus American Film Noir

Renoir’s La bete humaine was itself remade as an American film noir by Fritz Lang in 1954. However, the post-World War II American situation produces quite a different film. Now, the trauma of war does not loom in front of the characters (Franco-Prussian War for Zola’s characters; World War II for Renoir’s), but instead, the war is the traumatic backdrop from which the narrative generates. Human Desire begins with the Lantier character (renamed Jeff Warren, played by Glenn Ford) returning from the Korean War. Many jokes are made early in the film that Jeff should have come home with more medals, have been made a General, etc. However, it is clear that Jeff wants to forget the trauma of the Korean quagmire as quickly as possible. Lang’s version also eliminates the sexual psychosis present in both Renoir’s and Zola’s versions. Instead, Jeff is prodded to murder by the film’s femme fatale, a tart played by Gloria Grahame who wants Jeff to murder her neglectful but ultimately harmless husband. At the end of the film, despite being tempted by Grahame’s seductiveness, Jeff refuses. Instead, the husband murders Grahame aboard the very train that Jeff pilots. The last shot of the film features Jeff looking relatively happy with his new found freedom from the femme fatale. But wait: not so fast....

CLIP: Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954): Ending (Warren drives the train)

In the background of that final image, a message on the railroad tressles speaks another interpretation: "The world takes while Trenton makes." Could this activate a pessimism related to, yet distinct from, Zola’s and Renoir’s? For Jeff has given the world something: his time and effort to fight the communist "menace." And, in return, he is offered nothing but war trauma and evil femmes fatales. While it is true that he is rid of Grahame, the film offers no hope that his experience will be any better after the film ends. He is still stuck on those "tracks of desire" that the film so deliberately emphasizes, fated to suffer, alone. At this level, the Lang film has much in common with Renoir’s except the Lang film emerges as even more pessimistic: for at least Renoir’s film had a reason for its fatalism–the impending World War–but Lang’s film doesn’t, for after all, this is the best of times in American culture, the glorious 1950s, isn’t it???

Poetic Realism

By the late 1930s, French culture was awash in the pessimism resulting from the downfall of the Popular Front and the impending disaster of the Second World War. This sentiment came to roost in the odd film style known as poetic realism, part beautiful and lyrical, part sordid and grim. As early as 1934, Jean Vigo was exploring the creation of poetic realist cinema, with his masterpiece, L’Atalante, the story of a young couple who gets married and then works on the barges of the Seine transporting goods. Dita Parlo plays the hapless young woman who finds herself in the middle of this depressing life on the barge. Michel Simon plays the ship’s first mate, a kindhearted drunk who befriends the lonely Parlo. The poetic realist quality of the film is that it suddenly switches from the lyrical presentation of quaint life on the boat (natural landscapes, loving bonds between two people) to horrifically grim violence. In this scene, Parlo is kindly being entertained by Simon when her husband suddenly returns and begins beating her up.

CLIP: L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934): The skipper returns to find Simon and Parlo enjoying themselves

L’Atalante owes much of this lyrical visual style to cinematography by Boris Kaufman, the brother of Dziga Vertov (nee Denis Kaufman).

However, the late 1930s bleak films of Marcel Carne are the heart of French poetic realism. In Quai des brumes (1938), for example, Carne tells the tale of Jean Gabin, fleeing from the French colonial army, who is being hunted down by the authorities. His life is fated for disaster, however, as his hideout in a bar results in him falling in love with a woman. When he can’t leave her, the authorities catch up with him and kill him. In this scene, we can see the poetic realist contradictions in full force. The poet who arrives in the bar describes seeing "crime in a rose," a perfect image of the poetic realist impulse, combining as it does a beautiful lyrical image (the rose) with a gritty brutal act (crime). The visual style of the film itself is poetic realist, making an art out of grim, bleak, desolate places like the underlit bar in which Gabin hides.

CLIP: Quai des brumes (Marcel Carne, 1938): "crime in a rose"

Quai des brumes owes much of its grim proto-existential bleakness to its script, written by the great Surrealist poet, Jacques Prevert.

France on the Eve of World War II

The artistic production of pessimistic angst culminated in Renoir’s immediate pre-war film, The Rules of the Game (1939). This film has often been voted the greatest film of all time for its complex presentation of civilization on the brink of destruction.

An Extended Reading of The Rules of the Game

1. Bedroom Farce: the film does a good job pretending that it is merely a playful comedy in the tradition of the French bedroom farce.

2. The Slaughter of the Animals: But there is horrific violence lurking just below the surface of this aristocratic culture, as this scene with the murder of helpless animals helps allegorize.

3. Robert presents the "Machine": Late in the film, the surface of this aristocratic culture begins to come unglued, as the image of the machine is meant to testify to the glory of civilization, but only human chaos results in its presentation, as the gurgling conflicts between men and men, men and women, begin to return from the repressed.

4. Ending ("everyone has his reasons"):  Finally, Andre Jurieu is murdered, by accident, yes, but nonetheless permanently. Rather than begin to theorize their own culpability in these events, the aristocrats quickly paper over the events, and return to life as usual, a gesture that Renoir indicates will merely result in their own destruction. As a quote from Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1938) indicates, the ironic response to why evil acts are perpetrated--"everyone has his reasons"--will not be enough to stave off the decimation of the culture by the War that is coming.

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This page was last updated on January 8, 2001

Questions or comments? Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theater Arts, Montana State University–Bozeman