BOSTON

PUBLIC
library
 French
*

Cinema

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-
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2018 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

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https://archive.org/details/frenchcinemaOOrich
The
First
Wave,
1915 -

1929
Richard
Abel

PRINCETON
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
Copyright © 1984 by Princeton University Press,
Published by Princeton University Press, 4l William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last
printed page of this book

ISBN 0-691-05408-8 ISBN 0-691-008132 (pbk.)

First Princeton Paperback printing, 1987
Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Paul Mellon Fund
of Princeton University Press
This book has been composed in Linotron Garamond
Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and
binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey
 “When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," For Barbara,
said Piglet at last, “what's the first thing
with love and gratitude
you say to yourself?'’
"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. “What
do you say, Piglet?"
“/ say, l wonder what's going to happen
exciting today?" said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
“It's the same thing," he said.
—A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh (1926)
Introduction xi Contents

Acknowledgments xvii

Note on Terms xxi

I. The French Film Industry

Introduction 5

The War: Collapse and Reconstruction 7

Production: From Independent Artisan to International Consortium 15

Distribution: The Divided Country 38

Exhibition: “We’re in the Money” 49

Silence in the Face of Sound 59

II. The Commercial Narrative Film

Introduction 69

Serials 71

Bourgeois Melodramas 85

Realist Films 94

Fairy Tales, Fables, and Fantasies 138

Arabian Nights and Colonial Dreams 151

Flistorical Reconstructions 160

Modern Studio Spectaculars 205

Comics and Comedies 220

/

III. The Alternate Cinema Network

Introduction 241

The Beginnings of a Film Criticism 241

Film Journals 245

Cine-Clubs 251

Specialized Cinemas 257

Proliferation and Crisis 260

Preservation 272

IV. The Narrative Avant-Garde

Introduction 279
The Alternate Cinema Network, Auteurs, and Genres 282

Stylistics and Subjectivity 286

The Fields of Discourse and Narrative 290

f Accuse (1919) and Rose-Franee (1919) 295

Vll
CONTENTS L’Homme du large (1920) and El Dorado (1921) 305

Fievre (1921) and La Femme de nulle part (1922) 313

La Roue (1922-1923) 326

La Sounante Madame Beudet (1923) and L'lnondation (1924) 340

L’Auberge rouge (1923) and Coeur fidele (1923) 351

Le Brasier ardent (1923) and La Fille de I'eau (1925) 367

Paris qui dort (1924) and Entr’acte (1924) 377

L’lnhumaine (1924) 383

Memlmontant (1926) and Rien que les heures (1926) 395

En rade (1927) and Llnvitation au voyage (1927) 408

Feu Mathias Pascal (1925) and Maldone (1928) 415

Napoleon, vu par Abel Gance (1927) 428

L'lmage (1926), 6V2 X 11 (1927), and La Glace a trois faces (1927) 446

La Chute de la maison Usher (1928) and La Petite Marchande

d’allumettes (1928) 463

La Coquille et le clergyman (1928) and Un Chien andalou (1929) 475

La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) 486

Finis Terrae (1929) and Gardiens de Phare (1929) 500

LArgent (1929) 513

Afterword 527

Notes 531

Bibliography 601

Filmographies 631
Index 641

viii
The discovery of the cinema is as important as the discovery of printing.
—Adolphe Brisson (1914)

Ca, Test du cinema!—Louis Delluc (1921)

It is from the cinema that our era borrows its color, its picturesqueness, and the moral
atmosphere in which it breathes; one lives as a function of the other. . . .
—Albert Valentin (1927)
 To paraphrase Jean Epstein, the book that one writes is never the book that Introduction
one initially conceives. A book that presumes to be a history is especially both
less and more. Less than one had hoped for in all sorts of ways: in the consis¬
tency and comprehensiveness of its design; in the thoroughness of its investi¬
gation of sources; in the articulation of its findings; in the balance of its
mediation between past, present, and future. But also more: for the miscon¬
ceptions corrected (one’s own as well as others), the new questions posed, the
conceptual models considered, the discoveries made in progress, and the ways
found to speak them. The process of writing a history, in fact, can be so
engrossing, stimulating, and open-ended that to close it off seems little more
than arbitrary and expedient.
Any project that aims to reconstruct the past, of course, is fraught with
difficulties. If we tend to iron out ambiguities in the light of more recent
developments and the questions raised by them, as John Berger has noted,1 it
is imperative that we recognize the interests and patterns of thinking that
guide our work. Here, Shoshana Felman’s pedagogical questions may be help¬
ful: “What is the ‘navel’ of my own theoretical dream of understanding? What
is the specificity of my own incomprehension? What is the riddle which I in
effect here pose under the guise of knowledge?’’2 Such questions may keep us
from repeating the fable of a history already agreed upon or from accepting
the illusory idealism of an absolute knowledge (and the mastery it bestows) as
well as allow us to counter the conclusion that all things deeply searched
merely become confusing.

The project for this book had its origin in the summer of 1976. A sabbatical
leave from Drake University permitted me to travel to Paris where I could
continue a study, begun three years earlier, of French films and critical writ¬
ings from the 1920s. At the Cinematheque franchise, Marie Epstein (with the
approval of the late,FIenri Langlois and Mary Meerson) generously agreed to
let me examine closely and repeatedly a large number of French films, espe¬
cially those of her brother, Jean Epstein, on an old, hand-cranked editing
machine in one of the dark, cluttered offices on rue Courcelles. Within a
month, I discovered that my stay chanced to coincide with an extensive ret¬
rospective of early French films—“Eighty years of French cinema (part 2)’’—
mounted, with the then usual lack of publicity, by the Cinematheque fran¬
chise.3 From late July to the middle of September, for three to five hours, five
afternoons a week (with the legendary delays and substitutions of film prints),
I perched uncomfortably on what passed for cushions in the black-walled Pe¬
tite Salle at Chaillot and madly took notes as film after film unreeled in the
darkness and silence. The idea of writing a history of the French cinema of
the 1920s already tempted me, but I preferred first to do a number of studies
of individual filmmakers and film texts before tackling such an immense proj¬
ect. Gradually, after more and more editing-machine sessions and screenings,
conversations with Stuart Liebman (then a graduate student at New York
University), Dugald Williamson (then a graduate student at Griffith Univer¬
sity in Australia), and Peter Cowie (Tantivy Press) made me realize the unique
opportunity at hand. By the time I returned to the United States in December,
1976, I was committed to an historical project that would occupy over five
years of research and writing.

xi
INTRODUCTION During the course of that writing, I came to see that the project actually
covered more than a decade and was marked off by two major disruptions
the halt in French film production (from 1914 to 1915) that resulted from the
outbreak of World War 1 and the slowdown that came from the industry s
belated acceptance of the “sound film revolution’’ in 1929- I also realized that,
to more clearly differentiate between the commercial and avant-garde cinema
during this fifteen-year period, I needed to distribute the work into two major
sections. The first would focus on the dominant film industry and the com¬
mercial feature films that were the staple of its production. The second would
focus on the alternate cinema network which developed in parallel to the
industry and on the narrative and non-narrative avant-garde films that were
determined, in part, by that network.
In effect, this project gradually has grown into a major reassessment and,
if I may presume, a much-needed “revisionist’’ history of the French cinema
during the period, 1915 to 1929. The absence of prior studies—with the
exception of Georges Sadoul’s mammoth yet uneven Histoire generate du cinema
(six volumes) as well as Jean Mitry’s slightly less imposing Histoire du cinema
(now five volumes)—demanded that I give more space than originally planned
to the changing material conditions and policies of the French film industry
and to the (previously unexamined) generic nature of its output of commercial
feature films. Futhermore, the general lack of sustained close analysis of the
narrative avant-garde films (both in French and English) led me to sacrifice
not only the short non-narrative avant-garde works (many of which have re¬
ceived a good deal of attention in the United States) but also the usual auteur-
based study of those films. Instead, I decided to position the theory and prac¬
tice of the narrative avant-garde within the context of the conventions of
narrative film discourse then operating in the French as well as the American
cinema. This somewhat original working definition then provided the frame¬
work for a series of individual textual studies of the narrative avant-garde’s
exploration of the cinema’s systems of signification, the means to what they
saw as a new aesthetic practice.
Some years ago, Jean Mitry defined a proper history of the cinema as,
simultaneously, a history of its industry, its technologies, its systems of expression
(or, more precisely, signification), and its aesthetic structures, all bound to¬
gether by the forces of the economic, psychosocial, and cultural order.4 Writ¬
ing such an inclusive history is perhaps an impossible task. As one French
film historian confessed recently, “It is already too late to write the history of
the silent cinema.’’5 In my case, the received level of knowledge about the
early French cinema (in English) as well as the constraints of time, access to
sources, intellectual acumen, and personal interest have led me to emphasize
certain subjects and lines of inquiry at the expense of others. Still, the purpose
of this history is multiple. First of all, for English-speaking viewers, it pro¬
vides a good deal of “new information’’ about this neglected period of French
film history. That information includes not only data on specific films and
filmmakers, on industry policies and practices, on institutional as well as in¬
dividual relations, on ideological and aesthetic constructs, but also resource
references—as a means of stimulating further inquiry. It also singles out par¬
ticular areas of historical development for special attention, either because of
a lack in prior histories and critical studies or because of serious misconcep-

Xll
tions and misrepresentations. That is why so much space is given over to the INTRODUCTION
industry and its more commercial products and why even more is given to the
narrative avant-garde practice. Finally, it continually raises questions of his¬
torical accuracy, conceptual formulation, and textual reading and interpreta¬
tion in an attempt to offer directions for further research on the French cinema
of the silent period.
May at least some of this work meet the challenge thrown down, in another
context, by Walter Benjamin:

A writer who does not teach other writers teaches nobody. The crucial point, therefore, is
that a writer’s production must have the character of a model: it must be able to
instruct other writers in their production and, secondly, it must be able to place an
improved apparatus at their disposal. This apparatus will be the better, the more
consumers it brings in contact with the production process—in short, the more readers
or spectators it turns into collaborators.6

The American researcher interested in the French cinema of the 1910s and
1920s faces a number of obstacles. Access to existing films and written sources
is severely limited because the best archives are in Europe. The largest repos¬
itory of French silent films is the product of Henri Langlois’s extraordinary,
lifelong passion for film collecting, the Cinematheque franchise in Paris. Until
recently, however, the Cinematheque had shown little interest in (nor could
it probably afford) providing viewing facilities for historians and critics, except
on an irregular, rather personal basis. Specific films had to be “caught” in
their infrequent public screenings at Chaillot or Beaubourg (and previously at
rue d’Ulm). Now that the Cinematheque’s relationships with the French gov¬
ernment and with the state Archives du Film at Bois d’Arcy have stabilized
and become more clear, that attitude has begun to change. Smaller collections
of French silent films are housed at Bois d’Arcy, at the Royal Film Archive of
Belgium in Brussels, at the National Film Archive in London, and at the
Cinematheque de Toulouse. Except for the latter, all provide (at some cost)
excellent viewing facilities for visiting researchers. The most important librar¬
ies for written sources pertaining to the period are also located in Paris: the
Bibliotheque de 1’Arsenal, the Bibliotheque d’IDHEC, the Bibliotheque na¬
tional, and the Bibliotheque de la Cinematheque fran^aise (just recently opened
for the first time to the public). Another valuable collection is housed at the
Cinematheque de Toulouse. For a list of sources consulted for this history, see
the appended bibliography, especially the section on film journals.
In the United States, the most important collection of French silent films
is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During the past few years,
the museum has been adding excellent prints of 1920s French films to its
archives; and, beginning in January, 1983, it included these as well as prints
from other archives in an extensive retrospective of the French cinema.7 Smaller
collections of French silent films are housed at the George Eastman House in
Rochester, at Anthology Film Archives in New York, at the Library of Con¬
gress in Washington, at the UCLA Film Archives in Los Angeles, and at the
State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison. Along with the Museum of
Modern Art, all provide superb viewing facilities for researchers. Written sources
pertaining to the period are less easy to come by. The best collection of ma¬
terial related to the narrative and non-narrative avant-garde films is housed at

Xlll
INTRODUCTION the Museum of Modern Art, while those related to the commercial film in¬
dustry can be found at the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress,
and the University of Southern California. For researchers seriously interested
in the French cinema of the 1910s and 1920s, consequently, it is almost
imperative to arrange to study in Europe.
If access to sources presents a problem, the number and condition of exist¬
ing film prints presents one even more severe. No one seems to know exactly
how many of the several thousand films (excluding newsreels, educational films,
and other short works) produced in France from 1915 to 1929 still exist and
in what condition.8 Raymond Borde recently reported that his queries to some
thirty film archives around the world had turned up only 222 titles of the
approximately 1,400 French films produced just between 1919 and 1929.;
Although most of the films of the narrative avant-garde were diverted from
the industry’s economic cycle of production, exhibition, and destruction
through the action of cine-clubs, specialized cinemas, and private collectors—
the more commercial products usually had less chance of survival. A good
number of important films seem irretrievably-lost—for example, Baroncelli’s
Ramuntcho (1919), Hervil’s Pans (1924), Gremillon’s Tour au large (1927),
Renoir’s Marquitta (1927), Feyder’s Theme Raquin (1928), Bernard’s Taraka¬
nova (1930). Others, though listed as surviving, actually exist in incomplete
or condensed versions—e.g., several of Antoine’s films for Pathe-Consortium;
several of Poirier’s films for Gaumont; Dulac’s ha Mort du soleil (1922); Rous¬
sel’s Les Opprimes (1923), Violettes imperiales (1924), and La Terre promise (1925);
Luitz-Morat’s La Cite foudroyee (1924); Perret’s Madame Sans-Gene (1925); Vol-
koffs Michel Strogoff (1926); Bernard’s Joueur d'echecs (1927). And this list does
not even consider the popular serials, comic shorts, and other lesser films.10
Despite the special attention paid to them, several of the narrative avant-garde
films are also lost or survive in less than complete versions—e.g., Dulac’s La
Pete espagnole (1920), Delluc’s Le Silence (1920), Feyder’s L’lmage (1926) and
Epstein’s Sa Tete (1930).
Added to this destruction and dismemberment is the loss of two features
considered essential to the films’ exhibition. The first to be lost were the
musical arrangements and special scores (for large orchestras, organs, or small
chamber groups) which accompanied the film screenings. These were partic¬
ularly important to the films of Marcel L’Herbier, to Bernard’s Le Miracle des
loups (1924), to Marodon’s Salammho (1925), to Epstein’s La Chute de la maison
Usher (1928), and to others as well. Only recently has any attention been given
to this specialized music, and very few scores have yet been found.11 Perhaps
the most important “reconstruction’’ to come out of this effort has been Clair’s
Entr'acte (1924), meticulously timed to synchronize with Erik Satie’s music.
The second feature to disappear was color. Most French films of the period
were tinted in a half-dozen different colors according to a conventional set of
codes—blue for night scenes and seascapes, mauve for early evening scenes,
light green for daylight exteriors, amber for interiors, red for passionate scenes
or those lit by firelight.12 Some were even toned (in the dark areas of the
frame) as well as tinted (in the light areas), producing a relatively refined two-
color process. In scenes of horror, for instance, the light areas were tinted red
while the dark areas were toned green; in Gance’s Napoleon (1927), the gen¬
eral’s reaction to the burning of the French fleet off Toulon was described in

xiv
a close shot of his face (tinted orange-red) against a background (toned deep INTRODUCTION
blue).13 Certain Pathe films—e.g., from La Sultane de lamour (1919) to Ca¬
sanova (1927)—were even printed in a complicated stencil process that could
accommodate three or four different colors within a single frame.14 Tragically,
very few film prints survive with their original color intact, and it is quite
expensive to reproduce it. I myself have seen only a half-dozen or so original
prints—Gance’s J'Accuse (1919), Pouctal’s Travail (1919-1920), L’Herbier’s El
Dorado (1921), Poirier’s Jocelyn (1922), Le Somptier’s La Dame de Monsoreau
(1923), Epstein’s Pasteur (1922) and Mauprat (1926), and a brief fragment of
Volkoffs Casanova (1927). The loss of these features changes the works dras¬
tically—the parallel to Greek and Roman statues is both presumptuous and
apt. Futhermore, it lessens the impact of those few films that were exhibited
in sepia—e.g., Clair’s Un Chapeau depaille d’ltalie (1928)—and in stark black-
and-white—e.g., Feyder’s Therese Raquin (1928), Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne
d’Arc (1928), and Epstein’s La Chute de la maison Usher (1928) and Finis terrae
(1929)—as well as those that may have included scored moments of silence.
Consequently, writing a history of the French cinema of the 1910s and
1920s is a treacherous operation, somewhat like constructing a work of land¬
scape art over partially visible terrain. Not only is one sometimes cut off from
the “primary evidence’’—the individual film texts—and forced to rely on writ¬
ten documents for description and analysis, but one can rarely view even those
films that survive under conditions of their original projection and as fre¬
quently as one would wish. Nearly all of the films I have selected for extended
analysis are those I have been able to study closely on a viewing machine or
view several times projected on a screen. The section on the narrative avant-
garde is predicated exclusively on the shot-by-shot descriptions that this kind
of study allows. As scrupulous as it may seem, such a method inevitably
produces gaps and misrepresentations. I have tried to keep these to a mini¬
mum; and, whenever discrepancies between archive prints have cropped up, 1
have taken note of them.

January, 1983

In order to reduce the cost of this edition, only a few corrections in spelling,
dating, translated words, and captions have been made in the text.
Other, more extensive corrections which could be made include the following:
1. page xiv: Many of the French film titles listed as lost or incomplete have
been restored now and projected either by the Cinematheque francaise or by
other archives.
2. page 23 ff: The spelling and date of Fescourt’s film should be Mandrin
(1924).
3. page 287 ff: David Bordwell’s dissertation, French Impressionist Cinema,
should have been referenced as published by Arno Press (1980).
4. page 307: L’Herbier’s FI Dorado (1921) has been projected along with its
original musical score (recently rediscovered by Theodore Van Houton) in the
Netherlands several times and at the Salle Gaveau in Paris, on 13 November
1986.
5. pages 269 and 480: The rightist attack at Studio 28 occurred during a
screening of L’Age D’Or (1930) rather than of Un Chien Andalou (1929).

xv
INTRODUCTION Any serious rewriting of the text—stimulated by the Cinematheque fran-
caise’s recent screenings of restored film prints, the publication of Raymond
Chirat’s Catalogue des films firangais de long metrage: films defiction, 1919-1929 (Cin¬
ematheque de Toulouse, 1984), and my own further research in various libraries
and archives—will have to wait until later.

October, 1986

xvi
 Any work of history is collective in its dependence on the generosity, re¬ Acknowledgments
source material, ideas, and constructive criticism of others. This book is no
exception.
Of all those who made this work possible, the most important was Marie
Epstein, the former director of technical services at the Cinematheque fran-
gaise. Without her trust and her devotion to her brother’s films and to the
work of the narrative avant-garde generally (characteristically, she downplays
her own considerable work as a filmmaker), I would not have been able to
make the shot-by-shot descriptions of so many rare films that were essential
to my analysis. She was like a fairy godmother to me during the months I sat
hunched over that ancient “visionneuse” and during our countless conversa¬
tions and more formal interviews. I will forever be indebted to her. At the
Cinematheque franchise, I must also thank the late Henri Langlois, Mary
Meerson, and especially Lucie and Renee Lichtig (who have taken over Marie
Epstein’s position now that she has finally retired) for their generous assistance
in arranging special screenings of particular films.
Other archivists and archives were no less helpful—especially Charles Silver
of the Film Study Center at the Museum of Modern Art; Jeremy Boulton and
Elaine Burrows of the National Film Archive in London; James Card, George
Pratt, and Marshall Deutelbaum, all formerly of the George Eastman House
in Rochester'; Jacques Ledoux of the Royal Film Archive of Belgium in Brus¬
sels; Maxine Fleckner of the Film Archive at the State Historical Society of
Wisconsin in Madison; Patrick Sheehan of the Motion Picture Section of the
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; and Edouard Chamard of the Centre
national du cinema in Paris.
For written sources, I am indebted to the staffs of the Bibliotheque de
1’Arsenal, the Bibliotheque d’IDHEC, and the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris;
the library of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the library of the
University of Iowa in Iowa City; the library of the University of Southern
California in Los Angeles; and the Inter-Library Loan Services of Cowles Li¬
brary at Drake University.
For frame stills and production photographs, I would like to thank Sylvie
de Luze of the Cinematheque franchise, Mary Corliss of the Museum of Modern
Art, Donald Crafton of Yale University, the National Film Archive, the State
Historical Society of Wisconsin, and David Phipps (who prepared many of the
actual stills) of the Educational Media Services Center at Drake University.
Whenever possible, I have tried to use frame stills rather than publicity pho¬
tographs, especially for the narrative avant-garde films, even if that meant
sacrificing image quality. Any gaps and omissions are due either to space
limitations or to the absence or inaccessibility of sources.
I am indebted also to several people who graciously opened their personal
collections of films, photographs, and written materials to my use—Jean Dre-
viile, Gerard Troussier, Kevin Brownlow, Stuart Liebman, Armand Panigel,
Bernard Eisenschitz, and Mme. Ruta Sadoul (who arranged for me to examine
part of the late Georges Sadoul’s private library). Particularly helpful were the
transcripts of interviews that Armand Panigel conducted in 1973 with some
dozen French film celebrities from the silent period.1
Those who read all or part of the manuscript at various stages and made
numerous emendations and provocative suggestions include Kevin Brown-

XVII
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS low, Barry Salt, Kristin Thompson, Rick Altman, Alan Williams, Douglas
Gomery, Donald Crafton, Stuart Liebman, David Bordwell, Dudley Andrew,
and Janet Altman. Others who contributed information and ideas were Ber¬
nard Eisenschitz, Dugald Williamson, Sandy Flitterman, Ernest Callenbach,
Glenn Myrent, Wendy Dozoretz, Phil E. Brown, William Lafferty, Jon Gar-
tenberg, Robert Hammond, Charles Ford, Claude Autant-Lara, and Lotte Eis¬
ner. Whether accepted in toto or not, their responses were valuable in shaping
this book.
At Princeton University Press, I am grateful for Joanna Hitchcock’s enthu¬
siastic and unstinting support for the manuscript as well as her helpful sug¬
gestions and patience during its final revision. I was also delighted to have
Marilyn Campbell’s highly efficient and consistently well-judged assistance in
preparing the manuscript for production.
Support for my research and writing came from several quarters at Drake
University—from Carol J. Guardo (the former Dean of Liberal Arts) and the
English Department, for a partial leave of absence one semester, and from the
Graduate Research Council for several summer grants as well as typing serv¬
ices. In Paris, my efforts to contact various people, conduct interviews, and
do some writing was facilitated by the Bureau d’Accueil des Professeurs
d’Universites Etrangeres (formerly the Centre Universitaire International).

Finally, my deepest appreciation goes to the person who has encouraged me

most throughout this period of writing, who has read and reread, corrected
and commented upon, every version of the manuscript—my best reader and
collaborator, Barbara Hodgdon.

Permission has been granted to reprint portions of this book, which origi¬
nally appeared in different formats, in Quarterly Review of Film Studies 1 (1976)
and 2 (1977); Wide Angle 3 (1979); Film Quarterly 25 (1982); and Cinema
Journal 22 (1983).

xvm
Personal collection of Richard Abel: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, Illustration
18, 19, 23, 29, 32, 35, 45, 47, 48, 55, 56, 62, 63, 64, 68, 69, 70, 72, Acknowledgments
78, 86a, 89, 90, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 109, 111,
113, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135,
136, 138, 140, 147, 150, 151, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 173,
175, 177, 184, 194, 196, 198, 199a-k, 200, 201, 202a-c, 209, 210, 211,
214, 216, 217, 222, 225a, 225c, 233, 234, 239a-f, 240, 241, 242, 243,
244, 245a-d, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250a-c, 251, 252a-b, 253a-b, 254, 255a-
b, 256a-b, 257a-b, 258a-b, 259a-b, 260, 261a-i, 262a-b, 263a-b, 264a-g,
265a-h, 266, 267a-c, 272, 275

Cinematheque franyaise: 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 28, 30, 33, 37, 39, 42, 43, 44,
46, 51, 52, 61, 65, 66, 67, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 81, 83, 86b, 87, 88, 92,
108, 110, 112, 116, 123, 139, 142, 143, 144, 161, 174, 178, 179, 180,
186, 204, 205, 228, 229, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281

State Historical Society of Wisconsin: 53, 54, 93, 124, 125, 126, 163, 164,
l65a-c, 166, I67a-d, 168a-h, 169, 170, 185a-e, 235, 236, 237a-c, 238

National Film Archive: 24, 27, 38, 41, 79, 80, 82, 84, 106, 114, 115, 145,
153, 171, 172, 176, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 206, 207, 208, 212, 219,
268, 269, 271

Museum of Modern Art: 11, 12, 16, 31, 36, 40, 76, 91, 94, 95, 122, 141,
148, 181, 182, 183, 192, 203, 220, 253, 270, 273, 274

Personal collection of Jean Dreville: 5, 137, 146, 213, 215, 221, 223, 225, 226,
230, 231, 232, 282

Personal collection of Stuart Liebman: 34, 133, 154, 193, 195, 197, 276

Yale University Film Stills Collection: 49, 50, 57, 85, 149
/ v
Images Film Archives'. 101, 218, 224, 227a-c

Personal collection of Barry Salt: 58, 59, 60, 152

Personal collection of Donald Crafton: 10

XIX
 In the interests of reading ease, I have translated nearly all of the French Note on Terms
quotations into English; the translations are my own unless otherwise indi¬
cated. In the interests of accuracy, however, I have kept the French titles of
books and essays as well as the original titles of the French films under dis¬
cussion, adding the English translations only when I thought it required or
when reference is made to the American release print of the film. Otherwise,
I have used the original titles of American films and the English titles of
German, Italian, Swedish, and Soviet films, along with their French release
titles when it seemed appropriate.
The date given for each French film is the date of its public release in Paris.
At the end of the war, serials and feature films were presented to the cinema
owners and critics about five weeks prior to their planned release.1 By the
middle twenties, the period between private presentation or preview and pub¬
lic release had been extended to three to six months. And actual production
generally began anywhere from six months to a year before the presentation.
Whenever there was an exception to this pattern, usually a delay of a year or
more, the dates of both production and exhibition are noted.
Occasionally, I call attention to the length of a film—in reels, meters,
minutes, or hours. The standard reel of a French film was approximately 300-
400 meters in length and ran close to fifteen minutes (that is, at 18 frames
per second or fps).2 However, the cranking speeds of silent films increased
gradually during the 1920s so that the screening time of a reel of film became
shorter and shorter. According to Barry Salt, American films were being shot
and projected at the speed of 22 fps by as early as 1924, whereas French films
did not reach that speed until 1929.3 Most French films made at the end of
the decade, consequently, were projected at close to sound film speed and
should be projected at that speed today.
Finally, in the sections of the book devoted to close textual analysis, my
descriptions of specific shots resort to notational acronyms designating camera
distance and angle that have become familiar and necessary in film criticism.
They include the following:

ECU extreme close-up (the shot of an eye, a pair of eyes, or part of a body
or small object)
CU close-up (the shot of a face or object)
MCU middle close-up (the shot of a person from the chest up)
MS middle shot (the shot of a person from the waist up)
FS full shot (the shot of a person from the knees up [American shot] or
from the feet up, or the shot of a large object)
LS long shot (the shot of a full interior space or of a large exterior space)
ELS extreme long shot (the shot of a mammoth interior space or of an
extensive landscape)
HA high angle (a shot taken from above chest level, looking down)
LA low angle (a shot taken from below chest level, looking up)

When a film’s mise-en-scene combines two or more planes of interest within

the frame, I resort to a double acronym—e.g., MS/LS. Only one other acro¬
nym appears frequently—POV—for point-of-view shot.

xxi
 -

\
»
►

• ,
 The
French
Film
Industry
The cinema: two drawers—one marked expenses, the other receipts—and between them
this mysterious little box in which films are filed as index cards. . . .
—Louis Aubert (1923)

The facts do not speak for themselves. . . . {The} historian speaks for them, speaks on
their behalf, and fashions the fragments of the past into a whole whose integrity is—

in its representation—a purely discursive one.

—Hayden White (1976)
 At the outset a question: How was the French film industry structured Introduction
during the period from 1915 to 1929, and how did it function? Like the
cinemas of other advanced industrial societies, by then the French cinema had
become a mass art constituted from a new technological apparatus of percep¬
tion and representation and thus had acquired some degree of cultural impor¬
tance. That importance derived, in part, from its emergence within a number
of already existing social structures, each of which helped shape its organiza¬
tion and operation as an industry. But the shaping of the French film industry
was unique. A good way of grasping that shaping process, Gerard Talon sug¬
gests, “is to put in play once more the series of economic and ideological
mutations that made the French film industry produce the films that it pro¬
duced.”1 To begin reconstructing this period of the French cinema’s history,
therefore, let me sketch a framework of those mutations.2
The years between the beginning of the Great War and the end of the
twenties can be divided politically into four more or less distinct periods. The
war years were dominated nominally by the Radicals, who had controlled the
French legislature and its cabinet ministries since 1899. The real government
leaders, however, were the Moderate Raymond Poincare (in the hitherto cer¬
emonial post of president), who had become the symbol of the “nationalist
revival” just prior to the war, and the aging Tiger, Prime Minister Georges
Clemenceau, who for the last two years of the war turned France into a virtual
civilian dictatorship. In 1919-1920, partly as a result of internal divisions that
wracked the Radicals and the Socialists, a coalition of rightist parties and
Moderates, for the first time since the 1870s, achieved a brief, clear-cut ma¬
jority in the National Assembly. This Bloc national or horizon bleu coalition
soon gravitated into a Moderate-Radical alliance, led most prominently by
Poincare, from 1922 to 1924. It adopted a rather harsh foreign policy, espe¬
cially toward German war reparations, and held strictly conservative domestic
positions. The elections of 1924, however, gave power to a Cartel des gauches
organized by left-leaning Radicals and Socialists. This government reversed its
predecessor’s policies by adopting Aristide Briand’s strategy of rapprochement
with Germany and by half-heartedly advancing Prime Minister Edouard Her-
riot’s program of economic reforms. In 1926, in the face of escalating inflation
and a “capital strike,” partly occasioned by overextended government loans for
reconstruction, a Radical-Moderate coalition, the Union nationale, assumed po¬
litical control of the cabinet ministries. Leading this “restoration of confi¬
dence” once again was Prime Minister Poincare, who quickly reestablished
more conservative positions on internal matters but who also allowed Briand
to continue his foreign policy of rapprochement. This return to an “era of
stability” was formalized in the elections of 1928. Despite these political changes,
which, as we will see, did have a considerable effect on the French cinema
throughout the period, the government’s attitude toward the film industry
was consistently one of benign neglect. As a new industry, like the more
important synthetic textiles industry, for example, it was expected to make
its own way. That attitude was particularly telling in the areas of film pro¬
duction financing and the regulation, or lack of regulation, of film imports.
France’s economic development during this period coincided, in part, with
these political changes. Inflation and unemployment, for instance, were high¬
est in the years immediately following the war, from 1919 to 1921, and in

5
french FILM INDUSTRY the middle of the decade, from 1924 to 1926. At no time, however, did
either reach the disastrous levels experienced in Germany. Furthermore, the
revolutionary dreams of the working-class movement were shattered by the
failure of the 1920 general strike and by the bitter ideological debates that
split the Confederation Generale du Travail and the Socialists and gave rise to
a fledgling Communist Party (and its trade-union arm, the Confederation
Generale du Travail Unitaire). But the seeming stability of the period could
not mask a persistent sense of stagnancy and a fear that the country was on
the verge of bankruptcy. In 1919, for instance, industrial production was no
more than 60 percent of what it had been in 1914, and much of the country s
extensive foreign investments had been lost, particularly in Russia. The fol¬
lowing decade was marked, especially compared to Germany, by the slow
development of key industries—for example, that of hydroelectric power and
the concomitant commercial and domestic uses of electricity. The cautious
reinvestment strategies and the resistance to new production and marketing
strategies that too often characterized this development also showed up in the
French film industry. Although the French tended to be chauvinistic in re¬
sisting the intervention of foreign enterprises—despite the lack of economic
regeneration from within—the French film industry actually encouraged for¬
eign capital and business organizations, almost out of necessity. In the overall
economy, however, the industry was small, capital-deficient, and played a
distinctly minor role (in contrast to its American counterpart, which was, for
some time, among the top forty industries in the United States).3 Also, in
comparison to the Americans, the French film industry’s structure exhibited
much less concentration and vertical integration, and the industry invested
much less of its capital in film production and more in distribution and ex¬
hibition.
Finally, the Great War severely strained the ideological bases of French
society. Instead of celebrating its victory after the Armistice, France evi¬
denced, paradoxically, a national mood of suffering and defeat. “The war played
the role of catalyst,’’ writes Jacques Petat. “It burst the nationalist gut strings.
The uniforms and flamboyant rhetoric could no longer hide the shit of the
trenches. We were disappointed, disgusted. We had been swindled.’’4 Its eco¬
nomic effects, adds Jose Baldizzone, completely undermined “bourgeois mo¬
rality.’’5 Stripped of the ideological trappings that decked out the prewar Belle
Epoque revival, the French nation seemed in search of its own collective iden¬
tity. As a popular spectacle, the French cinema gave representation to this
search or reexamination in an operation that was doubly motivated by the
industry’s own sense of defeat or loss. Before the war, according to then ac¬
cepted, though unreliable statistics, “90 percent of the films exhibited throughout
the world were French films.’’ By 1919, only 10 to 15 percent of the films
projected in Paris alone were French.6 “If the French cinema is stripped of its
glories, it will perish,’’ wrote Mon-Cine, “and we will have to resign ourselves
to being a country that no longer makes good films.’’7 Thus, the industry had
its own related question of identity to confront: What was or should be French
about the French cinema?
Can there be any wonder, then, that, from the beginnings of the Great
War to the end of the 1920s, the French cinema found itself in a state of

6
crisis. Year after year, the epithet echoed through the French press devoted to THE WAR
the cinema.

The crisis preceded the war, which precipitated it rather than being its principal cause.
It was inevitable. . . .—Henri Diamant-Berger, 19198

Cognizant of the pitiful state of our cinema, in both men and material, today we
must demolish these badly lit, enclosed buildings, scrap this obsolete equipment,
banish from the screen all that which admits of the theater or promenade, expel the
cads and the unfit.—Pierre Henry, 19199

The first question posed . . . : what remedies do you recommend for the real crisis of
the cinema?—Rene Jeanne, 192110

The present situation is clear; we are faced with ruin. . . .—Jean Sapene, 192511

It has become banal and even a bit ridiculous to speak of the crisis of the cinema.—
Hubert Revol, 192712

Despite rather steadily growing box office receipts and intermittent reports of
a renaissance of the French cinema, the crisis was perceived as chronic and
persistent, infecting all levels of the film industry from production to exhibi¬
tion. 1. Charles Pathe
What exactly had happened? And was the film industry really as moribund,
disorganized, and second- or even third-rate as was imagined? Or could the
crisis be read as a sign of healthy ferment? To discover more precise answers,
to better understand the French cinema of the period, one can begin by look¬
ing more closely at the double-edged effect of the war.

On the eve of World War I, the French film industry seemed almost as The War: Collapse
consolidated and powerful as was its counterpart in the United States. The and Reconstruction
early artisan-based production-distribution companies of the Lumiere brothers
and of Georges Melies had been superseded by a different kind of company,
modeled on the corporations that were beginning to monopolize other more
important industries. At first, these new companies employed a strategy of
horizontal integration to ensure their success. They sought to control the ma¬
terial conditions of the young industry by manufacturing camera and projector
equipment, producing and developing film stock, and constructing studios.
Soon, however, as the commodity nature of the cinema, with its dependence
on rapid change in consumer interest, was recognized, this strategy gave way
to one of vertical integration. Control was now sought over each stage of film
production, distribution, and exhibition. The company that led this transfor¬
mation and thus came to dominate the industry, both in France and abroad,
was Pathe-Freres.
Under the direction of Charles Pathe, Pathe-Freres had grown out of selling
and exhibiting films (Edison Kinetoscope films, in fact) at traveling fairs in
the French provinces. Backed by loans from the Neyret-Grivolas group of the
Credit Lyonnais, Pathe soon expanded the company’s operations to sell cin¬
ematographic equipment (in alliance with Continsouza, developers of the Maltese
cross device to advance the film in the camera), to produce its own film stock

7
FRENCH film INDUSTRY and films (at Vincennes and Montreuil), to open foreign exchanges for distri¬
bution (in Germany and Russia, it dominated the market until the war), and
to exhibit its product through its own network of cinemas (which were organ¬
ized into six regional circuits whose principal manager was Edmond Benoit-
Levy). In 1907, as part of its vertical integration strategy, Pathe made the
crucial decision to begin renting film prints rather than selling them outright,
as had been the practice—a decision that quickly forced the industry to adopt
international standards of distribution and exhibition. Within a year, through
its exchange in New York and its studio in Jersey City (which became the
center of a French emigre film colony), the company was allegedly distributing
more films in the United States than any of the American film companies.
Even Louis B. Mayer, when he was managing a nickelodeon in Boston around
1912, confessed that he could double his receipts simply by showing Pathe
films. By 1914, in France alone, Pathe-Freres employed 5,000 people. The
company trademark (a crowing red cock) was seen by more audiences through¬
out the world than any other.1
Etablissements Gaumont, founded by Leon Gaumont, quickly followed Pathe s
example by shifting its business from photography to all the different stages
of cinematography. From 1905 to 1907, the company transformed itself from
a family firm into a limited liability corporation, dictated in part by Pierre
Azaria and the Banque Suisse et Frangaise (later the Credit Commercial de
France). Previously, Gaumont’s films had been written and directed almost
exclusively by Alice Guy (perhaps the first woman filmmaker); now film pro¬
duction was turned over to Louis Feuillade—in the world’s largest studio at
Buttes-Chaumont (La Cite-Elge, after Gaumont’s initials). Besides producing
films and cinematographic equipment as well as experimenting with color
processing and sound synchronization, the company expanded into distribu¬
tion and exhibition. It, too, put together a chain of cinemas that included the
grand Gaumont-Palace (the former Hippodrome Theater, remodeled in 1911
to seat close to 6,000 people). By 1914, under the sign of the marguerite (the
tiny white French daisy), Gaumont had 52 agencies and 2,100 employees
around the world.2
Despite their success, Pathe and Gaumont were model French companies in
that they refused to monopolize the film industry by destroying their smaller
competitors.3 Consequently, although other film companies had to limit them¬
selves to one or two areas of operation within the industry, they could compete
almost equally with Pathe and Gaumont within those limitations. Eclipse
(headed by Louis Mercanton), a former British company, and Eclair (headed
by Marcel Vandal) concentrated chiefly on film production, including news¬
reels. Eclair had even set up a second studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey, as well
as a distribution exchange in Germany.4 Another important production com¬
pany was the prestigious Film d’Art, originally founded by the Lafitte brothers
(one of whom was a successful magazine publisher) and then taken over by
Charles Delac [Ben-Kaled}. Film d’Art had an explicit “cultural mission’’—to
elicit original scenarios from Comedie Frangaise dramatists for Comedie Fran¬
chise actors and directors.5 Soon after its debut, the Societe cinematographique
des auteurs et gens des lettres (S.C.A.G.L.) was established by Pierre Decour-
celle and Eugene Guggenheim, from an idea developed by Edmond Benoit-
Levy.6 As a subsidiary company to Pathe-Freres, S.C.A.G.L. produced adap-

8
tations of literary classics, most of them nineteenth-century novels and short THE WAR
stories, directed by Andre Capellani. One of the two major film distribution
rivals to Gaumont and Pathe-Freres was the Agence generale cinematogra-
phique (A.G.C.), which generally handled the films of Eclipse, Eclair, and
Film d’Art.7 The other was Etablissements Aubert, headed by Louis Aubert,
whose operation depended chiefly on film imports. In 1913, Aubert was for¬
tunate enough to distribute the record-breaking Italian film, Quo Vadis?, which
incited him to embark on a major program of cinema construction.8
The French film industry seemed to be in a very lucrative position. It could
produce and market films and equipment almost anywhere in the world through
its own foreign exchange offices, and it could saturate its own markets in
France, thus inhibiting foreign companies from directly distributing their
products. While Pathe and Eclair made and, along with Gaumont, distributed
films profitably in the American market, most American films sold to France
(except those of Vitagraph) initially came through Aubert or Pathe, whose
American exchange, in 1908, had helped set up the Motion Pictures Patents
Company (or simply the Trust).9 Even before 1914, however, this position
had begun to suffer erosion. Pathe left the Trust and soon lost some of its
influence in a bitter rivalry with the Eastman Company over the production
and marketing of film stock in the United States.10 Then, as the financial risks
increased, French banks began to curtail their support for any film production
company.11 The film industries of the United States, Denmark, Sweden, and 2. Leon Gaumont

Italy began to flourish, and French film production dropped to 30 to 35

percent of the world’s total production.12 American film companies such as
Vitagraph (especially) and Biograph (briefly) established distribution offices in
Paris, and many cinemas (e.g., the Tivoli, Colisee, and Cosmograph) began
to exhibit American, Italian, and other foreign films on a regular basis. The
crucial fact was that, although more French films were being made, relatively
fewer were being shown, even in France. In early June, 1914, for instance, of
the 20,000 meters of film being exhibited in Paris, 17,000 meters were for¬
eign films.13 The French position collapsed completely in August, 1914, when
the declaration of war paralyzed the film industry almost overnight.
All branches of the industry immediately closed down. The general mobi¬
lization emptied the studios of directors, actors, and technicians. Even the
French film star, Max Linder, although rejected by the army, left for the front
in his own limousine to deliver military dispatches before eventually going off
to make films in the United States. The deserted spaces of the studios were
requisitioned for military stores and horse barns, and Pathe’s film-stock factory
at Vincennes was transformed into a war plant. The cinemas, along with all
other shows, closed their doors in the national interest. But everyone expected
that the war would be brief and that life would soon resume as before. Soldiers
going off to the front shouted, ‘‘To Berlin!’’ and “Home for Christmas!” It
was not to be.
As the war settled down to a grim, protracted struggle late in the year, the
film industry sought to reestablish itself. In November and December, after
the “race to the sea” had ended in a stalemate and trench warfare began in
earnest, the cinemas (along with some theaters) began to reopen, for the offi¬
cial purpose of maintaining the morale of the people.14 Early in 1915, in order
to supply the cinema owners’ demands for film programs, each of the major

9
FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY companies resumed production, but well below prewar levels. For nearly two
years, most of their work was geared to the war effort. Pathe and Film d’Art
especially felt compelled to propagandize their audiences by producing histor¬
ical and fictional films on patriotic themes connected with the war.15 Two of
the most publicized were Film d’Art’s Alsace (by Henri Pouctal) and Meres
frangaises (by Rene Hervil and Louis Mercanton), the latter of which posed
Sarah Bernhardt at the foot of Jeanne d’Arc’s statue before the ruined cathedral
at Rheims. When the Service photographique et cinematographique de l’armee
was created in February, 1915, each of the four major companies assigned a
cameraman to it—Pathe: Alfred Machin; Gaumont: Edgar Costil; Eclair: Georges
Maurice; Eclipse: Emile Pierre—and together they turned out a weekly news¬
reel on the war, Annales de la Guerre (though they were confined to activity
behind the lines until the summer of 1916).16 The French public soon tired
of all this attention to the fighting and demanded what they had begun to
enjoy just prior to the war. Given the obvious opportunities for cinema exhi¬
bition—compared to some of the other spectacles (particularly the opera and
theater) that remained shut down—the way was prepared for the American
invasion.
Philippe Soupault has written one of the best descriptions of the French
reaction to the new American films and their publicity posters.

We walked the cold and deserted streets seeking an accidental, a sudden, meeting
with life. To distract ourselves we found it necessary to yoke the imagination to
sensational dreams. For a time we found distraction in lurid periodicals—those papers
which are more highly-colored than picture postcards. We scoured the world for them,
and by means of them we participated in marvelous and bloody dramas which illu¬
minated for an instant various parts of the earth.
Then one day we saw hanging on the walls great posters as long as serpents. At
every street-corner a man, his face covered with a red handkerchief, leveled a revolver
at the peaceful passersby. We imagined that we heard galloping hoofs, the roar of
motors, explosions, and cries of death. We rushed into the cinemas, and realized
immediately that everything had changed. On the screen appeared the smile of Pearl
White—that almost ferocious smile which announced the revolution, the beginning
of a new world.,7

It all began during the spring of 1915 when Aubert released the first Mack
Sennett Keystone comedies starring Mabel Normand, Fatty Arbuckle, and
Charlie Chaplin. By the summer and fall, Chaplin or Chariot (his French
nickname) was the rage throughout France. In December, Pathe began dis¬
tributing the first episodes of Les My stem de New York, starring Pearl White,
in conjunction with Pierre Decourcelle’s daily serialization of the film’s story
in the Paris newspaper, Le Msatin. The posters advertising the film publicized
the image of Pearl White to such an extent that they created a fashion out of
the heroine’s costume—a simple skirt, black vest, narrow-brimmed hat, and
white gloves.18 The following year, in addition to the continuing series of
Sennett/Chaplin comedies and Pearl White serials, came the Triangle films
produced by Thomas Ince (especially the westerns of William S. Hart) and
Famous Players’ adaptations directed by Cecil B. De Mille (e.g., The Cheat,
starring Sessue Hayakawa).
Most of the genres specifically developed by the French prior to the war—
the burlesque (Andre Deed, Prince Rigadin, Max Linder), the serial (from

10
Eclair’s Nick Carter series to Gaumont’s Fantomas), the adventure film (Jean the war
Durand and Joe Hamman’s westerns), and the dramatic film or literary adap¬
tation (Film d’Art and S.C.A.G.L. productions)—had been taken over by the
Americans.19 Moreover, technically (in set design, lighting, and editing), the
imported films were consistently superior to the French films, and their acting
style was strikingly more natural and spontaneous.20 “Forfaiture {The Cheat},
Four sauver sa race {The Aryan), Molly, then a hundred other films,” wrote
Jean-Louis Bouquet, “provided the evidence for French technicians. We could
no longer explain away such success as isolated incidents. We were surely in
the presence of superior methods.”21 Given the limited quantity and variety
of French film production, the exhibitors turned increasingly to the highly
popular American films. By 1917, American films comprised over 50 percent
of the cinema programs in Paris.22
The rapid influx of American films and the resumption of French film pro¬
duction wrought immediate changes within the French film industry. Al¬
though established distributors such as Aubert and A.G.C. handled many of
the Triangle and Mutual films, they simply could not accommodate the de¬
mand.23 Several American companies, Jesse Lasky and Adolph Zukor’s Famous
Players, for instance, opened offices in Paris to join Vitagraph in marketing
their films more directly. More importantly, a multitude of European import
companies (Monat-Film, Mundus-Film, Harry, Georges Petit, and especially
Western Imports or Jacques Haik), sprang up to profit from the tide.
At the production end of the industry, the personnel who had been conscripted
into the armed forces or who had gone to the United States—e.g., Maurice
Tourneur and Andre Capeilani transformed the Eclair studio at Fort Lee; Leonce
Perret became a director at Paramount—were replaced by a new generation of
directors, actors, and technicians.24 From the theater came Andre Antoine (to
direct for Pathe), Leon Poirier, Jacques Feyder, and Raymond Bernard (all to
write and direct for Gaumont), Marcel L’Herbier (to write scenarios for Eclipse),
and Abel Gance (to direct for the new production head of Film d’Art, Louis
Nalpas). Several stars and young directors formed their own independent pro¬
duction companies, perhaps in imitation of Camille de Morlhon, whose Va-
letta Films had been a prewar subsidiary of Pathe. Rene Navarre (the star of
Fantomas), Musidora (the star of Les Vampires), and Renee Carl all broke away
from Gaumont to head short-lived production units. Several journalists turned
from writing to directing. Jacques de Baroncelli set up Lumina Films, in
alliance with Film d’Art and A.G.C., and Germaine Albert-Duluc (an inter¬
viewer and critic for the first French feminist magazines, La Fronde and La
Frangaise) founded Film D.-H., in conjunction with her husband and the poet-
scenarist, Irene Hillel-Erlanger. The practice of independent or semi-inde¬
pendent production would become standard during the next decade.
The full impact of the American films did not come until the crucial years
of 1918-1919. By the end of the long, costly, but victorious war, the industry
was faced with a situation aptly summed up by the posters advertising Mun¬
dus-Film (the distributors in France for Selig, Goldwyn, First National, etc.):
a cannon manned by American infantrymen fired film title after film title into
the center of a French target.25 According to the Cinematographs frangaise, for
every 5,000 meters of French films presented weekly in France there were
25,000 meters of imported films, mostly American.26 One of the reasons was

11
 obviously economic. Whereas one meter of film exported to the United States
or England cost the French the equivalent of . 18 to .35 centimes in customs
duties, one meter of film imported into France cost only .02 centimes.27 It
was simply better business to risk a little money on American imports than
to risk a lot more on producing French films. Consequently, by 1918, French
film production had fallen so low that it made up only 20 percent of the Paris
cinema programs. In the words of Henri Diamant-Berger, the publisher of Le
Film, France was in danger of becoming “an American cinematographic col¬
ony.”28 How the industry would respond to that threat was determined in
large part by Charles Pathe.
Early in 1918, perhaps spurred by the recent foundation of UFA in Ger¬
many, Pathe proposed “the organization of a cartel of manufacturers, which
while allowing competition to continue, would enjoin all the French cinemat¬
ographic companies to assure the normal existence of some film producers in
our country.”29 In order to do this, he recommended “the institution of a
3. An early Pathe camera
percentage on cinema receipts as well as a quota system for the importation of
foreign film negative into France.” Although producers such as Louis Nalpas
and Henri Diamant-Berger supported Pathe, most of his colleagues in the film
industry, especially the distributors and exhibitors, opposed the idea, out of
short-sighted self-interest and probably also out of fear that Pathe would turn
such a cartel to his own advantage. After all, ten years earlier he had opposed
a cartel of European production in the United States, only to sign up Pathe-
Exchange as part of the Trust.30 Moreover, early in the war Pathe had realized
that the world banking center had shifted from Paris to New York and that
the New York branch office was now the real source of financial power and
stability for his company.31 It was Pathe-Freres, after all, which, unable to get
much film stock for its own productions, had begun importing Pathe-Ex-
change films (particularly serials such as Les My stem de New York) and had
4. A Debrie camera (circa thus opened the way for the flood of American films into France.32 Louis
1920) Delluc wondered sarcastically if Charles Pathe ever really went to the cinema.33
Pathe’s proposals marked the initial step of a retreat and a reversion to more
conservative business methods.34 Soon after their possibly inevitable rejection,
he embarked on a reorganization of Pathe-Freres to ensure its financial security
(the accumulation of capital) and his own semi-retirement, once the war ended.
In November, 1918, Pathe-Cinema was established according to the tradi¬
tional French principles of limited production, high profit margins, and mar¬
ket-sharing arrangements. Because the French money and material available
for film production seemed paltry compared to the American resources—and
the German as well, since its film industry had expanded greatly due to the
war—and because production had become a financial adventure with unusually
high risks, Pathe-Cinema would concentrate on distribution and exhibition.35
Also, because the French exhibition market was relatively small (2,400 cine¬
mas to 18,000 in the United States, 3,730 in Germany, and 3,000 in Eng¬
land), any French film project the company might finance would have to have
“a sure commercial appeal beyond France itself’—which meant that it should
cater to the interests and tastes of the American or English-speaking public.36
For Pathe, disingenuously, the only crisis facing the French film industry was
a “scenario crisis.” Consequently, Pathe-Cinema cut back production (by 1920,
S.C.A.G.L. had dwindled to financing Andre Antoine’s last films), sold off

12
 5. (left) Germaine Dulac with
a Debrie Parvo camera (1925)

6. (right) Gaumont studio at

its foreign exchanges, and expanded its network of cinemas in France and Buttes Chaumont (circa 1916)
nearby lands.37 To Georges Sadoul, Pathe’s new company was a twentieth-
century version of Count Ugolin, prospering by devouring its own children.38
Most of the other-major film companies accepted Pathe’s analysis and con¬
clusions. “Everything is beginning again, thanks to the Americans,’’ Gaumont
told Leon Poirier. “While our factories produced material for the war, theirs
made films; and they have conquered the market.’’39 Recognizing the superi¬
ority of American film technique (“technique ... is the key to success”) and
the French public taste for American films (“the Gaumont-Palace never made
more money than when it played a Chaplin comedy or a William Flart west¬
ern”), Gaumont also turned increasingly to distributing American film im¬
ports and closed most of the company’s foreign exchange offices.40 Louis Feuil-
lade’s highly profitable serials would be continued, but Gaumont’s prescription
for the rest of his company’s product was simply, “American technique and
French subtitles, that is what must be done now.”41
For its part, Eclair ceased commercial film production and became the So-
ciete frangaise du cinema and then the Societe industrielle cinematographique.
Although it continued to produce the newsreel, Eclair-Journal, and to distrib¬
ute a few films through Union-Eclair, the company sold its moribund foreign
exchange in Germany (which became Erich Pommer’s Decla-Bioskop, soon
part of the UFA system), made its two studios at Epinay-sur-Seine available
on a rental basis, and concentrated on camera equipment and film processing.42
Eclair’s four-lens-turret camera, developed in 1921, together with Debrie’s
“Parvo” camera (with its automatic dissolve facility) competed on a par with

13
I

7. Pathe studio at Vincennes

(circa 1916): notice the waist-
level two-camera setup, with
Pathe cameras
Bell and Howell’s cameras on the world market.43 Eclipse halted production
8. (facing page) Pathe studio entirely and gambled on distributing the films of several stars—Rene Navarre
at Monteuil-sous-bois (circa
(briefly), Rene Creste (the star of Judex), and Suzanne Grandais (perhaps the
1916): notice the waist-level
one-camera setup
most popular French film actress of her day).44 When Suzanne Grandais was
killed in an auto accident in September, 1920, the French cinema lost its
third top film star in less than a year—the music hall star of Mercanton’s
Bouclette (1918) and Pouctal’s Dieu du hasard (1919), Gaby Deslys, had died
the year before; and Max Finder had returned a second time to the United
States."*3 In 1919, Eclipse built a new studio at Boulogne-sur-Seine (short¬
sightedly following the prewar glass window design that primarily used sun¬
light for illumination) and rented it out to the other production companies.
Thus, a wave of pessimism, coinciding with the defeatist mood of the coun¬
try, swept through the French film industry at the crucial moment of its
reconstruction. The lack of capital for film production, the lag in advanced
technological resources (Cine-pour-tous s review of French studio facilities, early
in 1920, was dismal),46 the loss of exhibition markets and of control over even
those in France—all these contributed to the perceived crisis in 1919. And
they would remain more or less unchanged throughout the next decade. Per¬
haps the best way to consider the various ways the industry responded to these
economic and political conditions is to examine separately—since they now
functioned separately—the different phases of the industry’s operation: pro¬
duction, distribution, and exhibition. For one of the chief characteristics of
the French film industry during this period was the fragmentation, decentral¬
ization, and lack of coordination in policy and practice among its constituent
parts. Yet these presumed disadvantages, in part, proved advantageous.

14
 In the production sector, the French film industry underwent a paradoxical Production: From
series of metamorphoses during the 1920s. It found itself reacting to encroach¬ Independent Artisan
ments by foreign companies and financing and, in the process, saw at least to International
one faction—the Russian emigre film colony—turn into a crucial source of Consortium
production. It became dependent, in equal measure, on a cottage industry of
small companies and individual producer-directors, on several big studios, and
on an increasing number of co-production deals with other European countries.
And it created fertile conditions for a range of experimental production strat¬
egies as well as gambling and profit-taking by opportunistic speculators.
When the French fully realized the power and influence of the American
cinema in France at the end of the Great War, one of the first things they did
was attempt to imitate or associate themselves with it. Much like Louis Re¬
nault’s engineers who before the war had studied F. W. Taylor’s management
methods in the American automobile industry,1 a stream of producers and
filmmakers crossed the Atlantic to study the American film industry, partic¬
ularly the methods and techniques of its factory system of production. They
included Charles Pathe, of course, Henri Diamant-Berger, Germaine Dulac,
Abel Gance, Jacques de Baroncelli, Marcel Vandal, and Charles Delac (the
last two having now taken joint control of Film d’Art).
In 1918, with Charles Pathe’s approval, Diamant-Berger launched the first
effort to link up with the Americans. Familiar with Pathe-Exchange’s failure
to sign a contract with Chaplin after he had left Mutual, Diamant-Berger took
as his model instead Louis Mercanton’s production of Queen Elizabeth (1912),
which Adolph Zukor had made such a success in the United States. Zukor
was now president of Paramount Pictures, the new leader (in quantity, at least)

15
FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY of American film production. After extensive talks with Zukor, Otto Kahn
(Paramount’s chief financier), and Adolphe Osso (affiliated with Pathe-Ex-
change), Diamant-Berger proposed an alliance—“an exchange of stars, direc¬
tors, technicians, and a limited common market of exhibition.’’2 Zukor agreed,
and they drew up a plan:

a French-American association based on absolute equality: each will invest one million
dollars and hold 49 percent of the shares of the new company; the remaining 2 percent
will be put at the disposal of the French partners for the first two years, as long as
there are profits; otherwise, the 2 percent will pass to the American partners. . . .3

Although personally uninterested in the plan, Pathe arranged for Diamant-

Berger to secure financial backing from the bankers supporting Edmond Be-
noit-Fevy’s chain of cinemas. Initially enthusiastic, the bankers cooled to the
idea as the postwar inflation began to drive down the value of the French
franc. At his end, Zukor agreed to wait, but the French bankers remained
adamant—the risk was too great.4 The collapse of this project was a sign of
things to come.
Several subsequent French initiatives got much further along, but they, too,
came to naught. In 1919, after returning from the United States, Vandal and
Delac embarked on a series of film projects supposedly made according to
American production methods and calculated to be marketable in the United
States. They hired the American actress, Fanny Ward (who had starred in The
Cheat), and assigned their new “artistic director,’’ Jacques de Baroncelli, to
direct her in two bourgeois melodrama adaptations, La Rafale (1920) and Le
Secret du Lone Star (1920).5 Unfortunately, it turned out, Fanny Ward was no
longer a star in the United States, and not one American distributor agreed
to buy the films. Trying another tack, the two producers attempted to rees¬
tablish a vertically integrated corporation in France. Their plan was to merge
Film d’Art with Eclair, A.G.C., and the circuit of cinemas controlled by
Benoit-Levy, particularly the newly opened Salle Marivaux. This merger, la
Compagnie Generale Frangaise de Cinematographic, lasted but a couple of
months and produced only one film, Jacques de Baroncelli’s Le Reve (1921).6
Another ill-fated venture was the Franco-American Cinematographic Cor¬
poration, launched in the summer of 1920. Initially, this was announced as a
trust, with 300 million francs in capital, that would operate much like the
newly formed UFA in Germany and UCI (Union Cinematografica Italiana) in
Italy.7 Its supporters, financial and otherwise, gave the corporation an aura of
unusual prestige: the banker Idenri de Rothschild, the new auto magnate
Andre Citroen, the Minister of Education, and the director of the Comedie
Franchise. And its scenario department, including the likes of Tristan Bernard,
Albert Carre, and Andre Antoine, showed a good deal of promise. Interest¬
ingly, just three months after an elaborate banquet inauguration, the corpo¬
ration’s young secretary-general, Andre Himmel, was arrested for embezzle¬
ment; and the whole project collapsed, without a single film to its credit.8
Finally, Diamant-Berger made a second effort to exploit his American con¬
nections. On his second trip to the United States, late in 1919, he convinced
Adolphe Osso (who had spent seven years with the Pathe-Exchange) to return
to France and become an independent producer. The two men quickly agreed
on a joint film project, Le Secret de Rosette Lambert (1920). Diamant-Berger

16
would provide the scenario (by Tristan Bernard), the director (Raymond Ber¬ PRODUCTION
nard), and half the financing; Osso would provide the other half as well as the
distribution and the American star. Unfortunately, the star turned out to be
an unknown actress, Lois Meredith, otherwise qualified as Osso’s mistress, and
Osso’s money ran out before the film could be distributed. When Diamant-
Berger had to take over the film’s distribution at the last minute, he resorted
to an American-style publicity campaign, including special poster ads in the
film magazines and widely distributed postcards. Although Le Secret de Rosette
Lambert played at several major Paris cinemas—e.g., the Lutetia, Marivaux,
Tivoli, Colisee, Select—it apparently did not regain the filmmaker’s invest¬
ment.9
With the failure of these joint French-American ventures and the cutbacks
at Pathe-Cinema, Gaumont, Eclair, and Eclipse, the burden of French film
production fell on a diverse group of smaller production companies and inde¬
pendent producers.
The most important opposition to what was seen as a full-scale retreat by
the French film industry came from a loose band of newly independent pro¬
ducers and filmmakers. At least two of these men dreamed of becoming
“American-style producers’’ within the French film industry structure.10 They 9. Louis Nalpas
and their colleagues were convinced that, since the American “superproduc¬
tions’’ now determined the course of world film production, distribution, and
exhibition, the French would have to engage in large-scale productions beyond
the budgets of their serials and conventional feature films in order to survive
even in their home markets.11 Since the median budget for a French film in
1920 was about 100,000 to 200,000 francs (or 20,000 to 40,000 dollars, a
mere 10 to 20 percent of a comparable American film), the French superpro¬
ductions would demand budgets of a half million to one million francs.12
Paradoxically, both of these dreamers received encouragement and financial
support from Charles Pathe.
Perhaps the most important of the two was Louis Nalpas, the former pro¬
duction head of Film d’Art, who, with the financial backing of Pathe and
Serge Sandberg, an important cinema manager for Aubert, set up his own
production company in January, 1919. Films Louis Nalpas was launched with
a superproduction of an exotic Arabian Nights story, La Sultane de Vamour,
which was filmed at the villa Liserb in Nice. Directed by Rene Le Somptier
and Charles Burguet, La Sultane de lamour had a rousing preview in May,
1919, and was a tremendous commercial success when it opened in November,
playing for over two months in several major Paris cinemas. Encouraged,
Nalpas quickly initiated a series of high- and low-budgeted projects, including
Maurice Mariaud’s Tristan et Yseut (1921) {“six songs’’ of 650 meters eachl
and Germaine Dulac’s La Fete espagnole (1920), from a brief Louis Delluc sce¬
nario. Fie and Sandberg also purchased an area west of Nice called Victorme
and constructed an immense studio there for Henri Fescourt’s serial super¬
production of Mathias Sandorf (192 1). Nalpas’s dream was to create a French
version of Hollywood around Victorine. Although Gaumont, Pathe, and the
Societe des Cineromans (Rene Navarre and Jean Durand’s company) had small
studios around Nice, most of the French film production was still done in and
around Paris. But a combination of technological short-sightedness and polit¬
ical resistance (Victorine was only minimally electrified, and the local author-

17
french film industry ities reneged on several promised commercial concessions) dashed Nalpas’s
hopes. In the summer of 1920, while Serge Sandberg assumed control of
Victorine (for Rene Navarre’s Societe des Cineromans), Nalpas took his films
off to the United States in order to sell them there in person.13
The other American-style producer was Henri Diamant-Berger, the former
editor of Le Film and a protege of Charles Pathe. After his first plan for joint
French-American film production fell through, Diamant-Berger set himself up
as an independent “executive producer” in Films Diamant. With a budget of
165,000 francs, personally underwritten by Pathe, he engaged the famous
French comic, Max Linder (just back Irom the United States), to make a film
of Tristan Bernard’s popular boulevard comedy, Le Petit Cafe, at one of Eclair’s
studios in Epinay. From Gaumont, he hired Raymond Bernard (the play¬
wright’s son) to direct the production. Against great odds (only four Paris
cinemas contracted to exhibit it in December, 1919), the film ended up nearly
as successful as La Sultane de lamour—eventually bringing in grosses of over a
million francs. Undermined by Adolphe Osso, Diamant-Berger’s second French-
American project, Le Secret de Rosette Lambert, immediately depleted most of
those profits.14 But his credit was still good, as we shall see, particularly with
Pathe.
Of the established filmmakers who also formed their own production units
at this time (e.g., Luitz-Morat from Gaumont, Louis Mercanton from Eclipse,
Henry Roussel from Film d’Art), perhaps the most promising were Abel Gance
and Jacques Feyder. Gance, it turns out, was also a protege of Pathe. After
making several very successful films during the war for Film d’Art—Mater
Dolorosa (cost: 48,000 francs/receipts: 181,000), La Dixieme Symphonie (cost:
63,000 francs/receipts: 343,000)—Gance began the first of a trilogy of films,
Ecce Homo.15 Film d’Art became alarmed at the film’s costs and closed the
production down, leaving the stranded director with a 50,000-franc debt.
Pathe personally settled that debt and then arranged for Pathe-Cinema to
finance Gance’s war epic superproduction, J'Accuse (1919).16 When that film
proved extraordinarily profitable (3,510,000 francs by 1923),1 the young
filmmaker founded Films Abel Gance (again with Pathe’s backing) in the
summer of 1919. He, too, acted as executive producer for someone else’s film,
Robert Boudrioz’s L'Atre (1920-1923). But his energy went primarily into
writing and directing (with the poet Blaise Cendrars’s assistance) a scenario
originally entitled La Rose du rail. Late in 1919, Gance constructed an on-
location studio in the Gare Saint-Roch railyard outside Nice and began the
unexpected year-long shooting schedule on his film, which would finally end
in the snowy wastes below Mont Blanc. Three years and 3 million francs
later—after the deaths of his leading actor, Severin-Mars, and of his young
wife, Ida Danis—the film opened as La Roue (1922-1923) and soon surpassed
even]'Accuse in popularity.
About the same time in 1919, Jacques Feyder found himself fired at Gau¬
mont, either because of the company’s cutback in production or because of a
dispute over his direction of La Faute d'orthographie (1919) as a comedy. Aware
that Gaumont had turned down an option to produce a film from Pierre
Benoit’s best-seller, LAtlantide, Feyder bought the rights to the novel and
was fortunate enough to borrow 600,000 francs from a rich cousin, Alphonse
Frederix, director of the Banque Thalman. Deciding to shoot the film entirely

18
on location, he and his cast and crew filmed all of the interiors and exteriors PRODUCTION
in various parts of Algeria from March, 1920, to January, 1921. By the time
L'Atlantide, premiered at the Gaumont-Palace on 4 June 1921, its cost had
soared to nearly 2 million francs. Everywhere in Paris, the film’s posters pro¬
claimed Feyder as “One man [who] dared.’’ The risk proved worth it, for
L'Atlantide was a smashing success.18
Another group of independent producers and filmmakers opted for a strat-
egy of production quite different from that of the superproductions. This
strategy found its most radical advocate in Pierre Henry, the editor of Cine-
pour-tons. 19 Since the French could not produce enough quality films to com¬
pete with the large-scale American films, Henry argued, they should instead
produce top quality short films of two to three reels each (600 to 900 meters).
Given the cinema program format of the time, these short films, even made
in quantity, would be guaranteed exhibition as a complement to the serials
and the American or French superproductions. Henry pointed to several short
films then ready for release as worthy examples—Dulac’s La Fete espagnole (for
Fouis Nalpas), Baroncelli’s La Rose and Delluc’s Le Silence (for Film d’Art), and
E. E. Violet’s Le Main (for Aubert). Although none of the smaller film com¬
panies adopted Henry’s idea exclusively, several integrated it into their strat¬ 10. Abel Gance (circa 1917)

egy of producing a varied series of low- and medium-budget films.

As the only major established company to buck the trend toward fewer
films, Film d’Art had the potential in the spring of 1920 to act as the leader
of this group. The failure of the Fanny Ward films, together with the collapse
of the ambitious Compagnie Generale Franchise de Cinematograhie project,
however, seems to have curtailed whatever influence Vandal and Delac may
have exerted. Still, their work, along with that of Louis Nalpas, encouraged
several others to try their hand at film production. In May, 1920, for instance,
Franz Toussaint split away from Films Louis Nalpas to form a company called
Jupiter (Societe Frangaise des Films Artistiques). Besides distributing Italian
film imports and collaborating on several projects with Stoll Films in England,
Jupiter set up a schedule of French film production that resulted in about ten
completed films in little more than a year. Included in its production were
Toussaint’s own Le Destin rouge (1921), Roussel’s Visages voiles . . . ames closes
(1921), and Delluc’s short feature, Fievre (1921).20 About the same time,
Legrand and Tarieux, a pair of producers who took Vandal and Delac as their
model, formed Films Andre Legrand. For several years, they financed and
sometimes wrote scenarios for a number of medium-budget films—Rene Her-
vil’s Blanchette (1921) and Le Crime de Lord Arthur Saville (1922), Severin-
Mars’s Le Coeur magnifique (1921), Dulac’s La Mort du soleil (1922), and Fey-
der’s Crainquehille (1923).21
Almost unnoticed at the time (unlike Diaghilev’s Ballets russes a decade
earlier) a small band of Russian exiles led by Joseph Ermolieff took over an
abandoned studio, once built by Melies and later used by Pathe, at Montreuil-
sous-bois. Ermolieff had controlled one of the three major Russian film pro¬
duction companies prior to the 1917 Revolution, and his films had been dis¬
tributed in Russia by Pathe’s exchange office. Initially based in Moscow, Er¬
molieff had moved to Yalta and then fled to France when the Civil War broke
out in 1918. Now reorganized as Films Ermolieff, his company began turning
out a series of French films for distribution through Pathe-Consortium. The

19
FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY company’s prestige grew quickly as its output increased—Protozanoffs LAn-
goissante Aventure (1920) and L'Ombre du peche (1922), Mosjoukine’s L'Enfant du
carnaval (1921), Tourjansky’s L'Ordonnance (1921) and Les Milles et Une Nutts
(1922), Boudrioz’s Tempetes (1922), and Volkoffs La Matson du mystere (1922).22
While Film d’Art was encountering difficulties in its reorganization, Louis
Aubert was expanding his company’s operations to include film production.
His strategy was to draw a number of independent film producers into his
orbit of influence by offering them partial financial backing as well as a guar¬
anteed outlet for distribution. By June, 1920, Aubert was acting as a consor¬
tium for at least five independent producers: Rene Hervil, Le Somptier’s Ci-
negraphie d’Art, Delluc’s Parisia-Film, Violet’s Films Lucifer, and Pierre Ma-
rodon’s Monte-Carlo Films. Although Hervil soon left the fold to work for
Films Andre Legrand, the rest each had at least one film ready for the fall
season. These included Delluc’s Fumee noire (1920), Violet’s Li-Hang le cruel
(1920), Dulac’s Malencontre (1920), Charles Maudru’s Le Lys rouge (1920), and
Le Somptier’s La Montee vers I’Acropole (1920). What Aubert called his “Artistic
Effort’’ nearly suffered the same fate as Jupiter’s. But just as his production
money was beginning to dry up, in the summer of 1921, he had the foresight
11. Louis Aubert to take over the distribution rights to Feyder’s LAtlantide (1921).23
This upsurge of independent film production, especially in the face of the
continuing flood of American films, even had an effect, momentarily, on Gau-
mont and Pathe-Cinema. Despite cutting back on film production (especially
its series of short comedies), Gaumont was receptive to several strategies. For
instance, he put up 40,000 francs for Marcel L’Herbier’s first film, Rose-France
(1919), a “cantilene’’ on the war which played briefly at just two Paris cinemas
and bombed ignominously.24 More important, he used some of the profits
from Louis Feuillade’s popular series—-Judex (1917), La Nouvelle Mission de
Judex (1918), Tih-Minh (1919), Barrabas (1920), and Les Deux Gamines (1921)—
to initiate a series of medium-budget quality films called “Series Pax.’’25 Edgar
Costil was named the series’ executive producer, and Leon Poirier was elevated
to the position of “artistic director.’’26 Besides himself, Poirier was able to
engage L’Herbier and H. Desfontaines as directors for the series, but Gaumont
refused his request to add Louis Delluc as well. Over the next three years,
Series Pax produced some of the most imaginative and critically successful
French films of the period: Poirier’s Le Penseur (1920) and Jocelyn (1922),
L’Herbier’s L'Homme du large (1920) and El Dorado (1921).
The effect of the independent producers on Pathe-Cinema is more complex.
In September, 1920, Charles Pathe announced a further reorganization of his
enterprises by dividing Pathe-Cinema into two separate companies. Under the
direction of Ferdinand Zecca, Pathe-Cinema would henceforth concern itself
with amateur camera equipment (the 9.5mm Pathe-Baby), film stock, and
film processing. A new company, Pathe-Consortium, was cut loose to manage
the commercial film-stock factory at Vincennes, to rent out the old studios at
Vincennes and Nice, and to concern itself only with the distribution and
exhibition of films. The reason for this division was (and still is) less than
clear. There is some evidence to indicate that, earlier in 1920, S.C.A.G.L.
was replaced by a production unit called the Societe d’Editions Cinematogra-
phiques. This unit seems to have adopted a systematic strategy of producing
long films divided into several episodes or “chapters.’’ That summer, it initi-

20
ated a series of expensive superproductions, including Henri Pouctal’s Gigolette PRODUCTION
(1921), Bernard-Deschamps’s L’Agome des aigles (1921), and Rene Leprince’s
L Empereur des pauvres (1922). Perhaps Pathe wanted to nip this speculative
venture in the bud. Or rather, to protect his investors with the assurance of
growing assets and steady dividends (he was fond of quoting these), he would
limit any high-risk speculation in film production to his own personal re¬
sources (through S.E.C.). Yet, apparently, it was Pathe who immediately
involved Pathe-Consortium in financing an even larger superproduction.27
That superproduction was Les Trois Mousquetaires (1921-1922), to be di¬
rected by Pathe’s young friend, Henri Diamant-Berger. Diamant-Berger adapted
Dumas’s novel as a twelve-hour film divided into hour-long chapters, designed
to be released in consecutive weeks over a three-month period. For this gigan¬
tic serial, Diamant-Berger was allotted an enormous budget of 2Vi million
francs.28 From December, 1920, to September, 1921, the film’s shooting ranged
widely across France and ended in the studios at Vincennes. There Diamant-
Berger installed a battery of mobile ceiling arc lights mounted on rails and
transformed it into one of the earliest electrified studios in France.29 Given an
unprecedented gala premiere that lasted three evenings at the Trocadero, Les
Trois Mousquetaires went on to become one of the most profitable films of the
decade—quickly accumulating an astounding 17 million francs.30 Its success
was aided, to be sure, by an arrangement with United Artists that kept Doug¬
las Fairbanks’s The Three Musketeers (1921) from being distributed in France
and much of Europe.31 Still, the strategy of balancing the high risk of super¬
productions with the low risk of serials (consistently the most profitable films
in France) looked like a sure bonanza. Before the film was even finished, Pathe-
Consortium underwent an important internal transformation that seemed to
put it in a position to exploit Diamant-Berger’s success.
According to Georges Sadoul, Pathe-Consortium was controlled initially by
three major interests: Pathe, the Fyon Banque Bauer et Marchal, and the
Gounouilhou-Bourrageas families of Marseille and Bordeaux. In a surprise move,
shortly after the company’s inauguration, the Gounouilhou-Bourrageas faction
seized power. Besides increasing the cinema circuits under its control, the new
administration, headed by Denis Richaud, decided to invest heavily in super¬
productions similar to Diamant-Berger’s film. In anger over what he took to
be foolhardiness and insubordination (although, ironically, he himself in part
was its cause), Pathe resigned from the board of the company he had created.
Unflinchingly, Richaud and his “artistic director,’’ M. Fourel, drew up plans
to continue the expensive superproductions announced the previous summer.
Bernard-Deschamps’s L'Agome des aigles (1921) was budgeted at two million
francs; Feprince’s L'Empereur des pauvres (1922) at one million; and Diamant-
Berger’s second adaptation of Dumas, Vingt Ans apres (1922-1923), at another
two million. Furthermore, they reaffirmed the company’s support of Abel
Gance’s La Roue, which had then reached the editing stage. The sum of this
capital investment was staggering. Pathe-Consortium’s strategy had all the
appearances of a strong challenge to the American cinema, but it was depend¬
ent on relatively unmodernized technical facilities, dubious scenarios, and di¬
rectors (excepting Gance) whose styles were distinctly old-fashioned. The stage
was set for another fall.32
By 1922, French film production had risen to 130 feature-length films per

21
FRENCH film INDUSTRY year (up from 80 and 100 films during the two years before). Although this
figure was still quite small compared to the production levels of the United
States (706 films) and Germany (474 films), it seemed, given the industry s
severe limitations, a clear sign of health. Below the surface, however, several
of the major production companies were experiencing serious problems and
undergoing drastic reorganizations. By 1924, partly because of these changes,
the annual production figure had fallen to only 68 films. This drop may have
represented a setback for the industry, but it was also a bit deceptive, for the
French films were now “larger” (longer and more highly budgeted) and there
were more production companies making major films.33
All three of the production companies that had survived the war suffered
relapses in 1922. When Jacques de Baroncelli left his position as artistic
director” at Film d’Art, Vandal and Delac did not replace him. Instead, they
themselves assumed the role of independent producers (to make three or four
films per year) and opened negotiations to link Film d’Art with Louis Aubert
for distribution purposes.34 At La Cite Elge, Leon Gaumont quietly folded his
tent in capitulation to the American films. Decision-making power seems to
have passed to Edgar Costil and the company’s financiers, the Compagnie
Generale d’Electricite and the Credit Commercial de France; Gaumont himself
became little more than a board member.35 Production was reduced to Feuil-
lade’s serials and a few low-budget films as the company turned increasingly
to the distribution of American films. With Series Pax halted, Poirier and
L’Herbier were let go as directors. In fact, L’Herbier’s last film for the series,
Don Juan et Faust, was shut down near the end of shooting (after its costs had
soared to 800,000 francs) and was subsequently released in an oddly truncated
form early in 1923.36
At Pathe-Consortium, the superproduction strategy was already in doubt
by the end of 1922. Receipts on the three big films that followed Les Trois
Mousquetaires did not measure up to expectations, especially in the case of
L’Empereur des pauvres (1922). Although the Gounouilhou-Bourrageas faction
retained control, Richaud and his associates were sacked and replaced by Andre
Gounouilhou and Flenri Mege (of the Banque Bauer et Marchal).37 The new
administration quickly adopted a restrictive policy on film production:

The industry is going to its ruin if it continues on the path it has followed. We
do not want to leave anything to chance, to the unexpected, to accident, delay,
negligence, or waste. No film will be undertaken without a precise plan. A French
film costs so much because we squander time and money.38

The policy change hit Diamant-Berger particularly hard. Pathe-Consortium

had earlier agreed to produce a third and final Dumas adaptation, Le Wicomte
de Bragelonne, and Diamant-Berger was busy transforming an abandoned Niepce
airplane hanger in Billancourt into a studio, he says, “the like of which did
not exist in France.”39 Besides baths, a restaurant, and a special foyer for the
actors, “a veritable electric keyboard—a centralized command post for all the
floodlights—would make it the most modern and best-equipped studio in
Europe.” When Pathe-Consortium abruptly canceled production on Le Vicomte,
Diamant-Berger was left with a nearly completed studio and little to do.
Finable to get financing anywhere else, late in 1923, he had to put Studio
Billancourt up for sale to pay his mounting debts.40 Within six months he

22
would escape the disarray at Pathe-Consortium and seek out a new career in PRODUCTION
the United States. Much like Gaumont, for all intents and purposes, Pathe-
Consortium was on the verge of becoming a film distribution company. The
only major films it helped finance now were the serials produced by its new
affiliate, the Societe des Cineromans. In that affiliation lay the company’s
rejuvenation.
Early in 1922, Jean Sapene, publicity editor of the major Paris daily news¬
paper, Le Matin, had taken over the Societe des Cineromans from Rene Na¬
varre and drawn the company into an alliance with Pathe-Consortium and the
Lutetia circuit of cinemas in Paris. Cineromans would produce serials to appear
simultaneously in Pathe-Consortium/Lutetia cinemas and in the cartel of Paris
newspapers headed by Le Matin. Sapene immediately hired Louis Nalpas (freshly
returned from the United States) as his executive producer and put Arthur
Bernede (Feuillade’s former scriptwriter) in charge of his scenario department.
He also began to set up a factory line system of film production and distri¬
bution. As the Cineromans serials, beginning with Henri Fescourt’s Rouleta-
bille chez les bohemiens (1922), steadily increased in number and popularity,
Sapene’s influence within Pathe-Consortium rose. By the end of 1923, with
the active support of the Banque Bauer et Marchal (through Henri Mege) and 12. Jean Sapene
Pathe-Cinema, Sapene was in a position to oust the Gounouilhou-Bourrageas
faction, bring back Charles Pathe, and take control of Pathe-Consortium. Be¬
hind this takeover, suggests Georges Sadoul, was a power struggle between
the cartel of Rightist Paris newspapers (represented by Sapene) and the Right¬
ist provincial newspapers financed by Gounouilhou and Bourrageas. One of
Sapene’s first measures was to expand the company’s production base by buy¬
ing and renovating (electrifying) the Levinsky studio at Joinville-le-pont (built
by Gaumont’s old set designer), turning its five stages into the most modern
in France. By the end of 1924, Sapene had reorganized Pathe-Consortium into
a vertically integrated corporation again, thus making it the most powerful
company in the industry.41
The Cineromans serials—such as Jean Kemm’s L'Enfant-Roi (1922) and Vi-
docq (1923), Gaston Ravel’s Tao (1923), Fescourt’s Mandarin (1923), Le-
prince’s L’Enfant des halles (1924), and Luitz-Morat’s Surcouf (1925)—provided
a solid production base for Pathe-Consortium. Secured by their profits, in
1924, Sapene (much like Gaumont after the war) launched a new series under
the aegis of “Films de France.’’ These films would be shown in a single seance,
or performance, and would have preferred treatment in the Pathe-Consortium
and Lutetia circuit of cinemas. For the 1924-1925 season, Louis Nalpas an¬
nounced no less than ten Films de France, including Luitz-Morat’s La Cite
foudroyee, Fescourt’s Les Grands, and Dulac’s Le Diable dans la villed2
Yet Cineromans was only the most important of several French film pro¬
duction companies that, from 1922 to 1924, attempted to compensate for the
production cutbacks at Pathe-Consortium, Gaumont, and Film d’Art. If “pro¬
duction in abundance is the sign of industrial power,’’ wrote Rene Clair, then
Louis Aubert was certainly next in line.43 In an interview with Andre Lang in
1922, Aubert had offered this famous definition of the cinema: “Two draw¬
ers—one for receipts, the other for expenses, and this little mysterious box in
which films are filed on index cards. . . .’’44 As one of those drawers turned
into a cornucopia of profits, from an expanded circuit of cinemas and from the

23
FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY

13. Cineromans studio at

Joinville-le-pont (late 1920s)

sensational distribution of Feyder’s L’Atlantide, Aubert decided, in his words,

to boldly play “the French film card.’’45 Fie would do his part to revive the
French film industry by investing his fortune in an expanded film production.
After hiring C. F. Tavano as his executive producer, Aubert gathered Rene
Hervil, Louis Mercanton, Rene Le Somptier, E. E. Violet, Donatien, Charles
Maudru, as well as Vandal and Delac of Film d’Art into a loose consortium
to co-produce a series of films.46 This new “French Effort” opened with Mer-
canton’s Phroso (1922), followed by a half dozen other films, including Flervil
and Mercanton’s Sarati-le-Terrible (1923) and Le Somptier’s La Bete traquee
(1923) and La Dame de Monsoreau (1923). By the summer of 1924, Aubert
had more than a dozen films in various stages of production, and Cinea-Cine-
pour-tous devoted a full issue (1 September 1924) to the company’s upcoming
season.
After Cineromans and Aubert, the most important French production com¬
panies were two that developed out of the Russian emigre colony in Paris. In
1922, Joseph Ermolieff left Paris for Berlin and sold Films Ermolieff to his
associates, Alexandre Kamenka and Noe Bloch.47 Kamenka reorganized the
company into Films Albatros and quickly initiated a half-dozen film projects.
Under his direction, Albatros’s production soon shifted to more expensive,
more prestigious films—e.g., Tourjansky’s Le Chant de lamour triomphante (1923),
Volkoffs Kean (1924) and Les Ombres qui passent (1924), Nadejdine’s Le Chif-
fonnier de Paris (1924), and Epstein’s Le Lion des Mogols (1924). Recently, the
scriptwriter, Charles Spaak, described Kamenka, for the consistency of his
work, as perhaps the greatest French producer of the 1920s.48 The second
company was financed by a young Russian emigre in the steel industry by the

24
name of Grinieff. It was founded in 1923 by the popular novelist, Henry PRODUCTION
Dupuy-Mazuel, and by Jean-Jose Frappe, who christened it the Societe des
Films Historiques (S.F.H.).49 The name was apt, for their grandiose scheme,
according to Andre-Paul Antoine, was “to render visually the whole history
of France.”50 The company’s first project dwarfed, in scope and budget, any¬
thing previously attempted by the French film industry. It was an immense
reconstruction of the period of Louis XI (late fifteenth century) and of the
famous legend of Jean Hachette. Directed by Raymond Bernard, Le Miracle
des loups became the most popular film of 1924 and the first film ever to be
premiered at the Paris Opera.
Another sign of the French film industry’s regeneration during this period
was the continued proliferation of independent production units, most of them
small and geared to a particular director. Yet even here there were losses.
Germaine Dulac had managed to sustain Films D.-H. for five years through a
varied selection of film projects and financial arrangements with other produc¬
ers and distributors (Harry, Eclipse, Film d’Art, Louis Nalpas, Aubert, Andre
Legrand).51 In 1921, she dissolved her company and, after a trip to the United
States, tried her hand at free-lance work. When that failed (projects in Ger¬
many and Italy), Vandal and Delac arranged for Film d’Art to finance her
personal production of La Souriante Madame Beudet (1923). Then, through the
intercession of Louis Nalpas and Henri Fescourt, Dulac signed on with Cine- 14. Alexandre Kamenka

romans to direct a serial and one of the first Films de France.52 The young
critic-cineaste, Louis Delluc, worked independently for three years, from 1920
to 1922, through two separate production companies, Parisia Films and then
Alhambra Films—both of which he supported with an inheritance; box office
receipts; money from Elena Sagrary, who was allowed to star in Fievre (1921);
and financial or administrative assistance from his friends, Henri Diamant-
Berger, Louis Nalpas, Jacques de Baroncelli, and Leon Poirier.53 The budgets
for his films were ridiculously low, but the receipts were even lower, so that
La Femme de nulle part (1922) brought him close to bankruptcy.54 He had to
sell Cinea, the important film journal which he had founded, and abandon all
film projects for over a year. Delluc literally worked himself to exhaustion and
died prematurely of pneumonia in April, 1924.
Nearly a dozen other film producers and directors, however, set up produc¬
tion companies in Dulac’s and Delluc’s place. The more successful of these
included several of Delluc’s mentors. Jacques de Baroncelli, for instance, left
Film d’Art to work independently when he was assured production capital
from a Belgian financier, Arthur Mathonet. His consistent success with literary
adaptations—La Legende de Soeur Beatrix (1923), the Prix Goncourt Nine (1924),
and Pecheur d’Islande (1924)—made Films de Baroncelli an unexpectedly re¬
spectable enterprise.55 After leaving Gaumont, Leon Poirier set up Films Leon
Poirier, apparently modeled on Baroncelli’s company, to produce and direct
another Prix Goncourt adaptation, La Bnere (1925). Even the popular dram¬
atist, Tristan Bernard, established his own film production company so that
his son Raymond Bernard, from 1921 to 1923, could direct a series of psy¬
chological and sentimental comedy scenarios.56
While these filmmakers were successful as their own producers, others ex¬
perienced difficulties or unusual risks in deciding to work independently. After
L’Atlantide, Jacques Feyder deliberately turned away from superproductions

25
FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY and approached Andre Legrand to produce a small, realist film adaptation of
Crainquebille (1923) at a fraction of the cost (only 300,000 francs) of his desert
epic.57 In September, 1923, together with the Max Linder, who had returned
a second time from the United States, Feyder announced the formation of
Grands Films Independents, a production company financed by two Lausanne
businessmen, Dimitri de Zoubaloff and Francois Porchet.58 Linder’s stay with
the company was unusually brief, and the venture quickly collapsed when
Feyder and his financiers quarreled over Visages d’enfants (1925), whose editing
and distribution were held up for a year.59 For Julien Duvivier, the means to
film production was Celor Films, a small company he founded in 1922. On
shoestring budgets from diverse sources, Duvivier turned out a variety of films
over a three-year period, including the earliest compilation documentary on
cinema history, La Machine a refaire la vie (1924).60 Although Rene Clair came
to filmmaking through the intercession of others, he, too, got by on paltry
means.61 Early in 1923, Baroncelli read a script by Clair, who was then his
assistant, and sent it on to Henri Diamant-Berger. Still flushed with success
from his two superproduction serials, Diamant-Berger arranged a miniscule
budget to finance Clair’s first film, Laris qui dort (1924). In order to continue
his independent status through another three films, Clair accepted the patron¬
age of Rene Fernand and then Rolf de Mare, publisher of Theatre et Comoedia
15. Marcel L’Herbier lllustre (for whom Clair wrote as a film critic) and owner-manager of the The¬
atre de Champs-Elysees.
Two other young filmmakers were even more lucky than Duvivier or Clair.
On the basis of a surprisingly successful fictionalized documentary film—Pas¬
teur (1922)—and the double recommendation of Louis Nalpas and Abel Gance,
Jean Epstein won an extraordinary ten-year contract with Pathe-Consortium
late in 1922.62 The contract called for Epstein to make four films a year for
Pathe, but he would have complete freedom in his choice of scenarios and in
his manner of filming, within a limited budget. Although this arrangement
lasted for little more than a year, it produced three important small films—
L’Auberge rouge (1923), Coeur fidele (1923), and La Belle Nivernaise (1924). The
most reckless of all the neophytes, Jean Renoir, was also the most wealthy.
In 1923, after seeing Mosjoukine’s Le Brasier ardent, he dropped his work in
ceramics and decided to pursue a career in the cinema. Drawing on an im¬
mense fortune from his father’s paintings, Renoir set up his own production
company and began paying for his apprenticeship as a producer and director
with Catherine {Une Vie sans joie} (1927) and La Lille de l’eau (1925).63
Finally, there was one independent enterprise whose ambitions loomed larger
than any other of the period. This was Cinegraphic, which Marcel L’Herbier
founded (with the help of Jean-Pierre Weller, Latigny, and others) when he
left Gaumont in 1922. L’Herbier’s intention was to create “a kind of workshop
(or atelier] of creativity” as an alternative artisanal or cooperative practice to
what he saw as an exhausted, timid, unimaginative capitalist production sys¬
tem in France. One of L’Herbier’s strategies was to encourage young filmmak¬
ers with their films—Jaque Catelain’s Le Marchand de plaisir (1923) and
La Galerie des monstres (1924) as well as Claude Autant-Lara’s experimental
short, Faits-Divers (1924). Although unsuccessful in convincing his distributor
to back Rene Clair’s script for Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge in 1923, he had
Cinegraphic produce Louis Delluc’s last film, L’lnondation (1924). However,

26
L’Herbier’s own projects were at the center of Cinegraphic’s operation, and PRODUCTION
they were designed to bring together artists and artisans from various disci¬
plines to create special “synthetic” films. Cinegraphic’s offices at 9, rue Boissy
d’Anglais (in a building owned by the literary patron, le Vicomte de Noailles)
became “a school without precedent” where L’Herbier and Philippe Heriat
presided over the study and execution of scenarios, decors, costumes, camera
setups, and editing. The list of films in preparation included adaptations of
Racine’s Phedre, Maurice Barres’s Le Jardin sur I'Onente, Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray, Pierre Mac Orlan’s La CavalTere Elsa, and Leo Tolstoy’s
Resurrection. With the decision to go ahead on Resurrection and then on a Mac
Orlan scenario for La Femme de glace, Cinegraphic helped initiate the first era
of international co-productions.64
The outcome of the French superproduction strategy of 1919-1922 was
decidedly mixed. With the exception of L'Atlantide, as we will see, none of
the big French films made a dent in the large American market. And at home,
they failed to ease the near stranglehold of American films in the cinemas.
Consequently, at the same time that Jean Sapene set out to strengthen the
industry (and his position in it) by revitalizing the serial format, several other
major companies and independent producers embarked on a grander strategy
to challenge the world cinema markets. The strategy was simple: to produce
films that would have international appeal, one must make the basis of their
production international. Writing in Cinemagazine, Paul de la Borie put the
economic basis of this strategy quite bluntly:

the film industry is ruled by economic conditions which do not allow one to treat it
nationally, since no nation—except perhaps America—is in a position—cinemato-
graphically—-to live on its own resources. And because this is so, because all the
European markets (whether it please us or not) are constrained to strict interdepend¬
ence, the conditions of existence for the film industry can be boiled down to this
inflexible formula: it will be international or it will not be at all.65

So although the foreign policies of the Bloc national were still in force and
although the Poincare government had taken the extreme measure of occupy¬
ing the Ruhr in January, 1923 (to force the Germans to make some kind of
war reparations), the French film industry began to seek out alliances with the
Germans and Austrians. From American capital and film techniques, the French
now turned to German capital and/or studio facilities for the co-production of
so-called international films. Although untried by the film industry, this strat¬
egy was not without precedent—before the war, one faction of the French
government had sought a reconciliation with Germany through various fi¬
nancial collaborations.66
This shift in alliances was partly defensive, the result of Paramount’s shock¬
ing—to the French—invasion of the French film industry. Apparently, the
way was prepared by Leonce Perret who, in 1920, had returned from the
United States to France and, with Paramount’s assistance, had made several
independent films under the rubric of Perret Pictures. The most successful of
these, Le Demon de la haine (1922)—shot in Texas, New York, Paris, London,
the French Alps, and along the French-Spanish border—was heralded by Cinea
as the “first international film.” Perret went on (with or without the help of
Paramount is unclear) to set up a new production company for the sole purpose

27
french film industry of directing a major superproduction adapted from Pierre Benoit’s best-seller,
Koenigsmark (1923). Showcasing spectacular sets, Bavarian landscapes and cas¬
tles, and Huguette Duflos in magnificent costumes, Koenigsmark had a success
that rivaled Feyder’s L'Atlantide, breaking all the box office records set previ¬
ously by American films in France. According to Marcel L’Herbier and Leon
Moussinac, it became a new model for French superproductions.67
On the strength of Perret’s success, Paramount opened a new branch office
in Paris in 1922 and named Adolphe Osso its director, with orders to imple¬
ment a policy of film production in France. Osso soon engineered a major
coup by releasing one of the most popular French films of the 1922-1923
season, Flenry Roussel’s Les Opprimes (1923). Although this story of a six¬
teenth-century Flanders peasant girl was shot in France (and Belgium) by a
major French director, employing a French crew and cast (excepting the star,
Spanish singer Raquel Meller), it was produced and distributed entirely by
Paramount.68 That an epic reconstruction of French history should be made
with American money piqued the French qo end. While Roussel went on to
form an important production company, Lutece Films, in order to exploit his
partnership with Raquel Meller in another epic historical reconstruction, Vi-
olettes imperiales (1924), Paramount initiated a second more contemporary co¬
production, Robert Boudrioz’s L'Epervier (1924). When First National an¬
nounced plans, shortly thereafter, to film a co-production of Le Collier de la
reine (with Norma Talmadge) on location at Versailles, the French film press
exploded in rage.69 No French film company had ever been accorded that
privilege. Pride as much as money was at stake.
Paramount’s involvement with a fourth French filmmaker brought grief of
a different sort. In the summer of 1922, Adolphe Osso had asked Marcel
L’Herbier to prepare for Paramount a script on Notre-Dame-de-Paris. When
that project failed to develop properly, Osso agreed to a contract with Cine-
graphic by which Paramount would handle the international distribution of
L’Herbier’s adaptation of Resurrection. When one-fourth of this ambitious film
had been shot at the Epinay studio and on location in Lithuania (at a cost of
300,000 francs), L’Herbier fell ill with typhoid, and the project closed down.
After his recovery, Marcel Lapierre writes, L’Herbier worked tirelessly to put
together 2 million francs and was about to resume shooting on the film. At
that moment, however, Universal reported that it was preparing an American
version of Resurrection on a budget the equivalent of 20 million francs! Para¬
mount promptly reneged on the distribution of L’Herbier’s film, and the Cine-
graphic project collapsed for good. Undaunted by this demonstration of Amer¬
ican power and self-interest, L’Herbier was not to be denied. The following
summer, he signed a contract with the singer-actress, Georgette Leblanc, and
Otto Kahn (the prominent American patron of the arts and Paramount’s
principal banker) to produce a film starring Leblanc that would be destined
for American as well as European audiences. Director and star clashed repeat¬
edly over Pierre Mac Orlan’s scenario—the one wanting to “present a synthesis
of the modern decorative arts,’’ the other demanding more emphasis on her
character and the story. The result was a “modernist fantasy,’’ L'lnhumaine
(1924), whose mixed critical reception and soft returns ended Cinegraphic’s
status as a fully independent production company.70

28
 The conjunction of these film projects with the political tide that was build¬ PRODUCTION
ing to the Cartel des gauches victory in the 1924 elections spurred Aubert and
Pathe-Consortium to seek a rapprochement with the German film industry.
Aubert’s own experience with Franco-American productions gave him added
incentive. In 1923, he repeated Vandal and Delac’s strategy of hiring Amer¬
ican stars for French films. Aubert hired another eclipsed American actor,
Sessue Hayakawa, to star in two major superproductions, Violet’s La Bataille
(1923) and Roger Lion’s J'ai tue (1924). Although the first had considerable
success in Europe, the second flopped badly. The owner of the Fordys cinema
chain made the same mistake by engaging the old serial queen, Pearl White,
for a film entitled Terreur (1924)—with disastrous consequences. In April and
May, 1924, while marketing his films in Germany, Aubert developed a fresh
tack in negotiations with UFA and Erich Pommer. A new German production
company by the name of Vita-Film had constructed a studio in Vienna and
was anxious to collaborate with the French film industry on co-productions.
Aubert and Pommer arranged for the big spectacle film, Salammbo (1925), to
be shot there, with a French director and cast. The path to this co-production
was probably laid down by Jacques Feyder who, after the debacle of Visages
d'enfants, had accepted the position of “artistic director,’’ as well as a three-
film contract, at Vita-Film. Certainly it was Feyder who persuaded Vita-Film
to produce Max Linder’s Le Rot du cirque (1925), which Violet directed and
Aubert distributed. Of the three films in production in Vienna during the
summer of 1924, however, Salammbo and Feyder’s own L'lmage (1926) did
poorly at the box office. Their failure coincided with the fall of the Austrian
currency, and Vita-Film was thrown into bankruptcy. Although the experi¬
ence was anything but fortuitous, Aubert’s alliance with UFA and Pommer
remained intact, momentarily.71
The most spectacular example of this international strategy, however, in¬
volved Pathe-Consortium in an alliance with two new firms in France and
Germany. In 1923, the important German financier, Flugo Stinnes (“the coal
merchant of Miilheim’’), and a wealthy Russian emigre, Vladimir Wengeroff,
conceived the idea of a grand European film consortium. Together, the two
speculators formed the Westi Corporation in Berlin and began setting up
affiliated companies throughout Europe, the most important being Cine-France
in Paris, directed by Noe Bloch, the former associate of Kamenka and Ermo-
lieff. Late in 1923, Pathe-Consortium joined the group and gave its authority
to the strategy. The first contract was between Westi, Pathe-Consortium, and
Films Abel Gance. This was for Gance’s mammoth project, a six-part Napo¬
leon, for which Westi created a separate administrative firm, Wengeroff Films.
Gance’s immediate response was to buy and complete Diamant-Berger’s studio
at Billancourt, where Napoleon s shooting commenced in January, 1925. The
next contract was between Westi and Cine-France for a project announced in
March, 1924, Michel Strogoff (1926), to star Ivan Mosjoukine under the direc¬
tion of Leonce Perret. Another Westi-Cine-France project starring Mosjoukine
was signed and begun the next summer, Le Prince charmant (1925), directed
by Tourjansky. When difficulties cropped up over the production of Michel
Strogoff (Perret signed a contract with Paramount), Tourjansky also agreed to
direct the second film after completing Le Prince charmant at the Billancourt

29
french film industry studio of Abel Gance. Finally, late in 1924, a third Westi-Cine-France project
put Germaine Dulac under contract to direct what would become Ame d'artiste
(1925). Pathe-Consortium agreed to distribute all of these co-productions in
France; for its part, Westi contracted to distribute the Grinieff-fmanced Le
Miracle des loups in Germany and Eastern Europe. The magnitude of this Franco-
German consortium, much of it financed by Russian emigre money and em¬
ploying some of the best French directors and technicians, dwarfed even Au-
bert’s alliance with Erich Pommer and UFA. So much so that the axis of
Pathe-Consortium, Cine-France, and Westi seemed to offer the possibility of
a genuine European challenge to the American film industry’s dominance.72
Yet strong political and economic forces were already in motion to under¬
mine the strategy of these alliances. The rapprochement foreign policy of the
Cartel des gauches government certainly gave sanction to the cooperative enter¬
prises of the French and German film industries. Its economic policies, how¬
ever, had a double-edged effect. The bank capital strike and the high rate of
inflation produced by these policies forced,the industry to look beyond its
national borders for production financing and thus indirectly fostered co-pro-
ductions. But not many French producers were in a position to attract foreign
capital—the major corporations, yes; the smaller firms and independent pro¬
ducers (with an exception or two), no. More and more money was going to
fewer and fewer films. The consequence was that only fifty-five films were
released in 1926, the lowest number until the transition year of 1929.73
Furthermore, the co-production strategy of the major corporations was
thwarted by what was happening in Germany. In the summer of 1924, the
Allies set up what was called the Dawes Plan to stabilize the Deutschmark
(after Germany’s rampant inflation threatened the international financial com¬
munity) and to give the Weimar Republic economic control over all of its
territory (ending French occupation of the Ruhr), both of which were designed
to provide Germany with the means to pay off its reparations debt.74 The
Dawes Plan, in effect, encouraged the investment of American capital in Ger¬
many to shore up most sectors of its economy, including the film industry.75
One by one, the German film companies found themselves indebted to the
Americans, partially absorbed by them, and then systematically robbed of
many of their best personnel.76 By early 1927, according to Feon Moussinac,
75 per cent of German film production was financed by American money.77
Although the Dawes Plan may have helped deflect American film investment
from France to Germany, it also disrupted the French-German efforts to create
a truly European consortium. Consequently, the period from 1925 to 1926
saw a good deal of change in the production sector of the French film industry.
The American influence in French film production grew slowly but steadily.
Under Adolphe Osso’s (sometimes token) stewardship, Paramount’s Paris office
presented the most lavish spectacle film of the 1925-1926 season, Feonce
Perret’s Madame Sans-Gene (1925), starring Gloria Swanson as the legendary
eighteenth-century rags-to-riches duchess. Its 14-million-franc budget clearly
separated the fat from the lean, for a similar sum could have produced ten
French films. To the consternation of the French film industry, Madame Sans-
Gene had a tumultuous reception and was awarded the Jury Grand Prix at the
famous Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs. Released six months earlier, in a
much shortened version, in the United States, however, it drew faint praise

30
and less than expected grosses. Although some in the industry began to ques¬ PRODUCTION
tion the whole strategy of international films, Paramount itself went ahead
with two smaller film projects for the following year.78
Metro-Goldwyn’s alliance with Gaumont countered French film production
in a different way. Its distribution contract of April, 1924, led to even further
reductions in Gaumont’s own filmmaking. When Louis Feuillade died in March,
1925, the company had no other directors or projects and La Cite Elge was
turned into a rental studio. Within six months, Gaumont had become Gau-
mont-Metro-Goldwyn, controlled by the American corporation as an outlet
for MGM films.79
Aubert found itself being co-opted by the Paramount and MGM interests
on another front, in Germany. Although German film production declined
steadily during the first half of the decade (from 646 to 228 films per year)
according to Georges Sadoul, the cost and the quality of its films just as
steadily mounted. What specifically affected Aubert was the unsuccessful at¬
tempt by UFA, Germany’s largest production company, to challenge the growing
American hegemony with a series of monumental films for export—e.g., Lang’s
Nibelungen (1924) and Metropolis (1927), Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924),
Tartuffe (1925), and Faust (1926). This strategy soon had UFA impossibly
overextended-—with vast studio holdings, scarcely any liquid assets, and an
increasing indebtedness to American interests. In a joint agreement, signed in
December, 1925, Paramount and MGM became controlling partners in a re¬
organization of the German firm. Each of the three partners would produce
twenty films annually for distribution through a subsidiary, Parufamet. No
longer its own master, UFA began using its contract with Aubert, as well as
others, merely as one way to fill its production quota of films.80
The alliance between Pathe-Consortium, Cine-France, and Westi suffered
an even greater shock. Early in 1924, Flugo Stinnes died suddenly, and Wen-
geroff was left as sole director of Westi Corporation and its far-flung affiliates.
It was he who had initiated all the projects in France: Gance’s Napoleon and
the three films under Noe Bloch of Cine-France. He had even persuaded Jean
Sapene to let Westi help finance Henri Fescourt’s four-part adaptation of Les
Miserables (1925-1926). Sapene needed the Westi money because Les Miserables
was the biggest film Cineromans had attempted, with a budget of nearly five
million francs and a cast that included fifteen major and fifty minor roles. In
the spring of 1925, however, the Stinnes empire was disclosed to be deeply
in debt. After a quick examination, the German banks decided to liquidate
all the Stinnes companies, among them the Westi Corporation, which was
dissolved in August, 1925. Suddenly bereft of financing, Gance’s Napoleon was
halted in mid-shooting, a shutdown that would last six months. Cineromans’
Les Miserables and Michel Strogoff were also severely cut back near the end of
production. Unable to operate on its own, Cine-France disappeared. The dream
of a European consortium was in ashes.81
For most of the smaller French producers, ironically, the domestic and
foreign policies of the Cartel des gauches also spelled the end of independent
film production.

Considered on the commercial level, [films] must inevitably become a kind of factory
product. More and more, film directors are condemned to bend to the exigencies of

31
FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY companies—there is only one option: to submit or to be sent packing—and it is
because they have not yet been able to replace this system that they support it.82

As their sources of financing dried up, the more commercial independent

filmmakers, such as Julien Duvivier, Henry Roussel, and Jacques de Baron-
celli, moved within the spheres of influence of Aubert/Film d’Art, the Societe
des Films Historiques, or Cineromans. After the Westi collapse, Abel Gance
kept his own company alive in name only. Bled white by his ill-fated Franco-
American productions, Marcel L’Herbier allied Cinegraphic with Films Alba-
tros on a project starring Mosjoukine, Feu Mathias Pascal (1925). Successful
though the film was, Cinegraphic remained in debt, and L’Herbier was forced
to accept a six-film contract with Cineromans. After his Swiss and Austrian
debacles, Jacques Feyder reluctantly signed on with Albatros. He was joined
there by Rene Clair, whose independent productions with Rene Fernand and
Rolf de Mare were commercially unsuccessful. Finally, Jean Renoir’s fortune
began to run out. With Pierre Braunberger, the former director of Para¬
mount’s publicity department in Paris, Renoir arranged to produce a film
adaptation of Nana (1926), in conjunction with a German studio. When the
film failed through a quirk in distribution, much of Renoir’s one-million-franc
investment was lost. Desperate to direct a more commercial project, he ac¬
cepted financing from actress Marie-Louise Iribe (the wife of Pierre Renoir),
who set up Les Artistes Reunis so she could star in Marquitta (1927).83
Against this tide of retreat and consolidation, only a few producers and
filmmakers could pursue their own way. Of the old guard, only Leon Poirier
was fortunate enough to find independent financing. From 28 October 1924
to 26 June 1925, he and Georges Specht documented the Citroen-sponsored
automobile race across Africa (from Morocco to Madagascar) in La Croisiere
noire (1926). After that, however, Poirier was able to complete just one major
fiction film during the last half of the decade, Verdun, vision d’histoire (1928).
In 1925 and again in 1927, Germaine Dulac interrupted her contractual as¬
signments at Cine-France and Cineromans to produce three small films on her
own, none of which received more than scant circulation—Folie des vaillants
(1925), L’lnvitation au voyage (1927) and La Coquille et le clergyman (1928).
Intrigued by his experience of starring in Raymond Bernard’s Le Miracle des
loups (1924) and Joueur d'echecs (1927), the famous Theatre de l’Atelier director
and actor, Charles Dullin, formed his own film production company, Societe
Charles Dullin. The company functioned much like L’Herbier’s Cinegraphic,
gathering together a small group of artists, including the documentary film¬
maker, Jean Gremillon, to make its one and only superproduction, Maldone
(1928).84
Perhaps the most important of the independent production companies were
those of Jean Epstein and Pierre Braunberger. Late in 1925, Epstein left Films
Albatros, where he had directed four films, after breaking his contract at
Pathe-Consortium nearly two years before. Several months later, with the backing
of Marguerite Viel (another Russian emigre) and the indirect support of Abel
Gance, he established Films Jean Epstein and gathered around him a group of
young film enthusiasts as assistants, one of whom was Luis Bunuel.85 His
company produced four major films over the next four years, none of which
had much success except in the limited circuit of specialized cinemas through-

32
out Europe. After the disappointment of Nana, Pierre Braunberger founded PRODUCTION
Neo-Film to both produce and distribute French films. Neo-Film was con¬
ceived even more along the lines of F’Herbier’s earlier Cinegraphic. While
financing major commercial projects by Jean Renoir and Alberto Cavalcanti
(F Herbier’s former assistant and set designer), Braunberger also sponsored
documentaries and experimental short films.86 Much like Epstein’s work, his
productions also (but not exclusively) often appeared in the specialized cine¬
mas. What Braunberger did to support several avant-garde filmmakers of this
period provided a model for his later support of the young New Wave film¬
makers, especially from 1954 to 1958.
The political and economic changes that occurred in France in 1926 reversed
the downslide or slump that was spreading gloom throughout the French film
industry. The Union nationale foreign policy of conciliation continued to en¬
courage international co-productions. But, more important, conservative fiscal
policies finally ended the high rate of inflation and stabilized the value of the
franc. Even the rate of unemployment fell drastically. As more capital became
available again in France, the level of film production rose accordingly—from
fifty-five films in 1926 to seventy-four in 1927 and ninety-four in 1928. Al¬
though the forty-three producers and twenty-five distributors responsible for
those films evidenced much the same fragmentation and disorganization as
before, the future looked bright.87 France seemed embarked on an era of pros¬
perity and the easy life.
The four major production companies all went through changes in manage¬
ment and orientation. Albatros lost most of its Russian emigre base—Mosjou-
kine signed a contract with FJniversal to work in the United States and then
Germany; Tourjansky and Volkoff both transferred to Films Abel Gance and
then to Noe Bloch’s Cine-France. To continue his policy of quality films at
Albatros, Kamenka engaged Jacques Feyder, Rene Clair, and Henri Chomette
(Clair’s older brother and Feyder’s assistant) to direct films that were more
specifically French. His dividend was a series of brilliant comedies, the best
of the decade. By contrast, the Societe des Films Historiques shifted to a non-
French subject by putting a second epic historical reconstruction into produc¬
tion, Raymond Bernard’s Joueur d’echecs (1927). Grinieff held up its shooting
to divert funds to Gance’s stalled Napoleon; and after that risky adventure,
Films Historiques resumed its own orientation. Its last projects included Rous¬
sel’s life of Chopin, Valse de l’adieu (1928), and two historical films by Jean
Renoir, one of which, Le Bled (1929), marked the centennial celebration of
French colonization in Algeria. Fouis Aubert did both more and less. Al¬
though he tried valiantly to sustain the high level of production he had ini¬
tiated in 1924, his 1925-1926 season of films contained some dreadful dis¬
appointments, such as Salammbd. In February, 1926, he ceded administration
of the Aubert cinema chain to a M. Cari and, like Pathe and Gaumont before
him, began to take a less active role in his company’s operations.88 Production
was cut back slightly, but without disturbing the alliance with Vandal and
Delac of Film d’Art. Although the company lost its major director in Rene
Hervil, Aubert himself signed up the new film production team of Jean Be-
noit-Fevy (an educational filmmaker) and Marie Epstein (Jean Epstein’s sister),
and Film d’Art took Julien Duvivier under contract.89
After the collapse of Westi and Cine-France, Jean Sapene’s Cineromans was

33
FRENCH film INDUSTRY left as the central house of production within Pathe-Consortium. The com¬
pany’s announcement for the 1926-1927 season was down a bit from the
previous two years: four serials, of course, but only four new Films de France,
plus a special co-production with Cinegraphic.90 Was Sapene concerned about
this slippage? Did he now believe himself better qualified than Louis Nalpas
to run most phases of Cineromans’ operation? For whatever reasons, “around
1926-1927,” according to Flenri Fescourt, “Sapene personally took charge of
the preparation of all the films his company was going to produce.”91 What
particularly obsessed him was reading and revising all the decoupages, especially
rewriting the intertitles. This intervention even led him to the extreme of
launching a publicity campaign around a series of films to make a star of his
wife, Claudia Victrix (was he thinking of William Randoph Hearst and Mar¬
ion Davies?). In effect, Sapene took over Nalpas’s position as executive pro¬
ducer. Jean-Louis Bouquet concludes that, though audacious in his business
enterprises, Sapene was unusually cautious and even retrograde in his artistic
tastes and that he failed to encourage and promote the best of his young staff
within the company.92 Despite such innovations as a far-ranging campaign to
advertise his film production schedule nearly a year in advance of its release
date, the Cineromans films began to suffer from his lack of taste and judg¬
ment.93 As he himself admitted later, “Having entered the film industry by
error, I remained there out of pride.”94
Coupled with this leveling off or incipient stagnation of the major French
film producers (which, some have argued, provided a climate of security), the
stabilization of the French economy stimulated the development of several new
production companies.95 Besides Pierre Braunberger’s relatively minor Neo-
Film, the two most important firms were Production Natan and Franco-Film,
both of which seem to have developed out of associations with Paramount.
Early in 1926, Bernard Natan, the director of a film processing company and
publicity agency (Rapid-Film and Rapid-Publicite), turned his speculative sights
on the opportunities in film production. First, he arranged distribution rights
through Paramount for a film adaptation of Pierre Benoit’s novel, La Chatelaine
du Lihan (1926). Then, after meeting Henri Diamant-Berger, just back from
two years in the United States, Natan agreed to produce two of his films, one
of which, Education de Prince (1927), was lucky enough to star Edna Purviance.
Based on the success of these films as well as his association with Paramount,
Natan purchased one of the old Eclair studios at Epinay and constructed an¬
other completely modernized one, the Studio Reunis, on rue Francoeur in
Montmartre. From Rene Fernand, he secured the rights to produce Marco de
Gastyne’s Mon coeur an ralenti (1928) and Maurice Gleize’s La Madone des sleep-
ings (1928). Then came his most ambitious project, the popular historical
reconstruction that took two years to complete, Marco de Gastyne’s La Vie
merveilleuse de Jeanne d'Arc (1929). By this time, the Cinematographic frangaise
was calling Natan one of the most important French film producers.96
Early in 1927, Robert Hurel, another French producer at Paramount, formed
a consortium called Franco-Film out of a number of small firms—Films Leonce
Perret, Jacques Haik (Gaston Ravel), and Paris-International (actor-director
Leon Mathot and Italian actress Soava Gallone). Within as many months,
Hurel announced at least six films for the upcoming fall season, headlined by
Perret’s Morgane la sirene (1927). What helped the consortium get under way

34
was Perret’s reputation plus the profits from La Femme nue (1926), which had PRODUCTION
been financed by Natan, perhaps with Paramount’s assistance. By the summer
of 1928, Franco-Film was so prosperous that it took over the former Louis
Nalpas studios at Victorine (which Rex Ingram had been using for several
years). Even though two of its affiliates had close ties to England and Italy,
Franco-Film professed its commitment to “the development of French cine¬
matography’’ with “programs composed of French films.”97 The commitment
was far from empty in the context of international co-productions.
Despite the collapse of the Westi consortium, the costliness of Aubert’s
agreement with UFA, and a number of outcries from within the industry
itself—Rene Clair, for one98—the strategy of international co-productions con¬
tinued in vogue. Georges Sadoul sums it up well:

In the last years of prosperity, the French productions evolved toward huge set pieces
with sumptuous costumes and decors, in hopes of rivaling Hollywood. For these
“prestige” films, the last big French producers resorted, especially after 1925, to
formulas which drew them into associations with various foreign countries, Germany
mainly, but also England, Sweden, sometimes Italy, and more rarely the United
States. For the powerful German cartel UFA, the co-production strategy was a means
of enlarging its position in the French market. Collaborations between Berlin and
Paris developed considerably.99

In fact, international co-productions threatened to monopolize the production

capital and energy of the French film industry.
Much of this investment went into one corporation that emerged from the
ashes of Westi and Cine-France. Late in 1925, Grinieff, the Russian emigre
financier behind the Societe des Films Historiques, along with Henry de Ca-
zotte, founded the Societe Generale des Films (S.G.F.), on whose board sat
none other than Charles Pathe. The occasion of S.G.F.’s formation was Gri¬
nieff s decision to finance the remaining production schedule for Abel Gance’s
Napoleon (1927). Although only Part I of the six-part epic was completed,
S.G.F.’s largesse seemed limitless. By the time Napoleon premiered at the
Opera in April, 1927, it had become the most expensive French film of the
decade—at a cost estimated somewhere between 15 and 19 million francs.
Soon after Napoleon resumed shooting at the Billancourt studio, S.G.F. an¬
nounced a second project, Casanova (1927), which drew most of its personnel
from Albatros and Cine-France: Bloch (producer), Volkoff (director), Lochakoff
(set designer), Bilinsky (costumes), and Mosjoukine (star). Finally, during the
later stages of Napoleon s shooting, S.G.F. offered the Danish filmmaker, Carl
Dreyer (whose Master of the House [1925] had just had a big success in Paris),
the chance to make a film on a famous woman who might complement Napo¬
leon in French history. Dreyer accepted and began work on La Passion de Jeanne
d'Arc (1928), importing his cinematographer and set designers from Ger¬
many. 100
The fascinating thing about S.G.F. was, as Harry Alan Potamkin put it,
that, among the major French corporations, it alone allowed “the director,
and not the fiscal policy, to set the pace” and character of its film produc¬
tion.101 Although restricted to historical reconstruction projects, Grinieff of¬
fered the filmmaker unbelievable conditions: total control over all phases of
production and an almost unlimited budget. Overwhelmed by a screening of

35
FRENCH FILM industry La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, G. W. Pabst confessed that the German film in¬
dustry could never be that experimental with so much money.102 This was
atelier filmmaking raised to a level that even Marcel L’Herbier had not dreamed
possible at Cinegraphic. It was an incredible risk, especially on the eve of the
sound film revolution. Perhaps inevitably, the result of this concentrated be¬
neficence was financial disaster for the company.
International companies and cross-cultural contracts now proliferated in the
place of independent French production units. Henry Roussel’s Lutece Films,
apparently aided by S.G.F., invited Maurice Tourneur back from the United
States for a major French superproduction on the war, L'Equipage (1928).103
For his part Jacques Feyder signed a contract with DEFU-Deutsche First Na¬
tional to direct a French-German cast in a Berlin studio production of Therese
Raquin (1928).104 The Societe des Films Artistiques, SOFAR, which had been
based in Italy and Germany, initiated a series of modern studio spectaculars
directed in France by the Italian director, Augusto Genina.105 By now, how¬
ever, the Russian emigre talent and money were shifting substantially to Ger¬
many. Late in 1927, C i nema to graph te fra nqa ise announced a six-film contract
between UFA and Cine-Alliance, a new company headed again by Noe Bloch.
The first film was a lavish spectacle film, Volkoffs Scheherazade (1928), shot
in UFA’s Berlin studio.106 Besides Volkoff, this project tied up Lochakoff,
Bilinsky, and Nicolas Koline, all formerly of Albatros and Cine-France.
Either out of necessity or speculative desire, the older French majors were
drawn into the international strategy again. In 1927, no less than three Cine-
romans films were co-productions: Robert Wiene’s La Duchesse des Folies-Bergere
(filmed in Vienna, Berlin, and Paris), Gaston Ravel’s Le Roman d’un jeune
homme pauvre (shot in Berlin), and Marcel L’Herbier’s Le Diahle au coeur (made
in conjunction with UFA and Gaumont-British).107 Aubert tried to recover
from Salammbo with another film directed by Wiene, Der Rosenkavalier (1927),
which was shot in Vienna under the baton of Richard Strauss himself.108 Late
in 1927, Vandal and Delac, Aubert, and Wengeroff-Films signed an accord
to produce a series of films jointly.109 The first of their projects was Julien
Duvivier’s Le Tourbillon de Paris (1928). About the same time, Albatros and
Sequana-Films (a production company newly established at the Billancourt
Studio) announced “a French-German-Spanish-Swedish collaboration,” which,
after several comedies, culminated in Cagliostro (1929), with a French-German
cast under the direction of Richard Oswald in Paris.110 And, despite its com¬
mitment to French films, even Franco-Film hired the German director, E. A.
Dupont, to shoot Moulin Rouge (1928) in Paris and London as an Anglo-French
production.111
As older production companies such as Cineromans and Aubert seemed to
mark time, newer companies such as Franco-Film and Natan’s Studio Reunis
grew apace. In February, 1928, Gaumont severed its alliance with MGM, by
common consent, and began developing its optical sound-on-film process for
feature film production.112 The stage was set for the transition to sound films.

At least three conclusions can be drawn at this point about French film
production during this period. First of all, the production sector of the in¬
dustry underwent a kind of compression-explosion that created a multitude of
large-, medium-, and small-scale enterprises. Although Pathe-Consortium,

36
Gaumont, Cineromans, and Aubert (at certain moments) could claim that they PRODUCTION
made more films than any other company, clearly the majority of French films
were produced by small firms and independent producers. In one sense, this
dispersion of film production was a regression from the consolidated system
that had marked the French film industry before World War I. It even looked
archaic compared either to the corporate capitalist structure of the American
film industry (with its model of division of labor and scientific management,
instituted by Thomas Ince, as well as its half-dozen vertically integrated mo¬
nopolies, spurred by Zukor’s Paramount Pictures and perhaps modeled on the
old Pathe-Freres company) or to the state-supported (through favorable legis¬
lation) structure of the German film industry.113 Fleterogeneous and internally
competitive, the French companies were hardly in a position to challenge the
larger, more homogenous, more financially endowed corporations in the United
States and Germany—though they doggedly persisted in doing so. In another
sense, however, this decentralized system of small French production compa¬
nies depended on an unusual degree of entrepreneurial independence and ar¬
tisan- or atelier-based praxis.114 That independence and praxis fostered an at¬
titude of risk-taking, experimentation, and concern for Frenchness, not only
in certain individual filmmakers, but even in such large companies as Alba-
tros, Cinegraphic, Cine-France, S.F.H., and S.G.F. On that basis alone, the
French film industry could be said to rival its competitors in the United States,
Germany, and the Soviet Union.
Second, a good portion of the production sector’s investment came from
outside France. Less came from the United States than one might have ex¬
pected, at least until the last couple of years of the decade. But then, the
British and German film industries and markets offered greater opportunities
for the Americans.113 More came from Germany, after 1924, but gradually
that investment amounted to the use of German capital and studio facilities
for co-productions in Germany. The extraordinary thing was the high inci¬
dence of Russian emigre money in French film production. The heavy French
investment in prewar Russia had not been lost entirely after all. The Russian
emigre money supported a variety of production strategies—from Albatros and
S.F.H.’s commercial quality films to Cine-France’s international co-produc¬
tions, from Abel Gance’s epic Napoleon to Jean Epstein’s narrative experiments.
Without this lavish financing (through Grinieff, Wengeroff, Bloch, and Ka-
menka), the French production efforts of Sapene and Aubert might not have
been sufficient to counter the American and German product. Nearly all of
this foreign investment, however, went directly into individual films. For
modernizing their production base in studios and equipment, the French had
to rely on themselves. Technologically, they tended to lag behind the Amer¬
icans and Germans, from a lack of capital, certainly, but perhaps also from a
lack of industrial research, research that linked investor and entrepreneur.116
Consequently, the work of Debrie and Eclair (on camera equipment) and of
Diamant-Berger and Sapene (on studio facilities), for instance, was all the
more important for the industry’s survival.
Finally, the heady champagne of internationalism, which dominated the
latter half of the decade, failed to strengthen and broaden the industry as had
been hoped. The Americans could not have been more pleased with the results
than if they had concocted the strategy themselves and unashamedly sold the

37
FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY French on it. As modern studio spectaculars began to rival in number the
historical reconstruction films, the French co-productions increasingly mir¬
rored American films, reflecting a modern style of life whose characteristics of
material well-being and conspicuous consumption were basically American.
As early as 1926, an American analyst reported:

The peoples of many countries now consider America as the arbiter of manners, fash¬
ions, sports, customs and standards of living. If it were not for the barrier we have
established, there is no doubt that the American movies would be bringing us a flood
of the immigrants. As it is, in a vast number of instances, the desire to come to this
country is thwarted, and the longing to emigrate is changed into a desire to imitate.117

As Marcel Braunschvig conceded, “film is in the process of Americanizing the

world.”118 Increasingly also, the American and German film companies were
encroaching on French terrain (in 1928, United Artists and First National
joined Paramount as French film producers) or siphoning off its talent (e.g.,
Feyder, Volkoff, Mosjoukine). More and more French resources seemed to be
involved in projects whose profits went to' the Germans or Americans (and
sometimes both together). This encroachment and exploitation were even stronger
in the distribution and exhibition sectors of the French film industry.

Distribution: The If the French government’s attitude toward French film production was
Divided Country strictly laissez-faire, its attitude toward film distribution and exhibition was a
bit more ambiguous. That ambiguity is apparent in the government’s fitful
attention to film censorship and to film imports regulation.
Before the war, according to Paul Leglise, the control of film distribution
J and exhibition, like that of theatrical performances, was in the hands of local
authorities.1 In 1906, the Chamber of Deputies abandoned the system of a
national commission to control spectacles in France and delegated the power
of censorship to local mayors and police chiefs. This system led to a crazy
quilt of standards and wild fluctuations in censorship practices. The southeast
provinces, including Lyon, were especially prone to ban films, and even the
Minister of the Interior would step in occasionally to recommend the censor¬
ship of films “susceptible of provoking demonstrations that might disturb the
public order and tranquility.” The advent of the war brought further crack¬
downs, particularly on the crime serials.
Finally, after continued protests from film distributors and cinema owners,
the Minister of the Interior established a temporary national Commission du
Controle des Films in June, 1916.2 The principal purpose of the commission
was to review the weekly Annales de la guerre, which was produced by the
army’s section on photography and cinematography. The head of that section,
J.-L. Croze, remembers two examples of the commission’s censorship practice.
It banned shots of General Petain grimacing at the taste of the common sol¬
diers’ wine, and, in 1918, it eliminated all references to the approaching
armistice. 3 The commission’s jurisdiction also extended to the rest of the French
film production and even to film imports, thus paralleling the power of local
mayors and police chiefs, which remained in force. Marcel Lapierre has argued
that another reason for the commission’s creation was the popularity of the
crime serials and their supposedly harmful effect on the young who, under

38
lessening parental control, were flocking to the cinemas.4 Yet the commission DISTRIBUTION
allowed most of the serials to pass uncut in Paris, while some provincial
authorities banned the Pearl White serials and even Gaumont’s Judex (which, y
ironically, was quite properly moralistic compared to the previous criminal
celebrations of Les Vampires). What the commission did do, however, was halt
the distribution of such American films as Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and
Intolerance (which was screened privately within the industry in 1917, perhaps
when Griffith himself visited France in May and October), forbid the produc¬
tion of “bloody” dramas such as Othello, and cut from Thomas Ince’s Civili¬
zation Christ’s words to his disciples, “Let peace be with you!”5
In 1917, the Minister of the Interior appointed a committee to recommend
a national regulation system for film distribution and exhibition that could be
instituted after the war. As both Leglise and Diamant-Berger have pointed
out, the primary motivation of the committee was to protect the film industry
from the vicissitudes of local censorship in the provinces. After two years of
wrangling, on 25 July 1919, the government established a central commission
of thirty members, headed by Charles Deloncle and including Charles Pathe,
Leon Gaumont, and even Abel Gance. Henceforth, all films except newsreels
would have to obtain visas from the commission to permit their distribution
in France. The visa system applied equally to French films and imports, and
several films soon came under fire. In 1920, and again in 1921, the Interior
Minister personally banned one of Aubert’s early film productions, Li-Hang le
cruel. In 1920, the exhibition run of Marcel L’Herbier’s L'Homme du large was
interrupted to excise shots of violence and eroticism from several sequences in
the village rafe. Louis Delluc’s Fievre (1921) had to be recut for similar reasons.
Despite the central commission’s status, film bannings continued in the prov¬
inces, again especially in the southeast; and, surprisingly, several court rulings
upheld their legality. Film journals (L'Ecran, Cine-Journal), newspapers (Co-
moedia), as well as filmmakers such as Andre Antoine (who had fought censorship
in the theaters two decades earlier), protested both the national and local forms
of film censorship. However, the industry generally downplayed the issue, and
these protests fell on deaf ears in the National Assembly. Sanctions continued
against such films as L’Herbier’s Don Juan et Faust (1923), Epstein’s Coeur fidele
(1923), Feyder’s L’lmage (1926), and Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926).6
Finally, in 1926, various segments of the film industry, particularly the
distributors and exhibitors, began to agitate for more equitable controls. Their
pressure eventually led to Edouard Herriot’s “Decree of 18 February 1928,”
which strengthened the central commission and limited the power of local
authorities. Individual French filmmakers, however, did not escape further
reprimands—e.g., L’Herbier’s L’Argent (1929), Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne
dArc (1928), Benoit-Levy/Epstein’s Peau de peche (1929). Jacques Feyder had
the most difficult time with Les Nouveaux Messieurs (1929), which was prohib¬
ited because it allegedly insulted the French National Assembly (at one point,
the satirized hero was made up to look like the president). For the commis¬
sion’s second review, the film was presented by Henry Roussel, who had gained
the support of influential friends in the Assembly. In order to save face, the
censors asked Albatros, the film’s producer, to cut just twenty meters of in¬
tertitles during the love affair scenes, and Les Nouveaux Messieurs was ap¬
proved.7

39
french film INDUSTRY However, the primary targets of control were the foreign imports. German
films, beginning as early as 1922, with Lubitsch’s Madame Du Barry, routinely
were re-edited or banned outright—e.g., Pabst’s The Joyless Street and Pandora's
Box, Lang’s Spies, and May’s Asphalt. Even some American films came in for
excisions. Rene Jeanne recalled that Griffith’s Intolerance, for instance, was
shorn of its St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre story (because it depicted an
unpleasant period in French history); and Louis Delluc saw prints of the same
film that had been reduced in length from three hours to a mere one and a
half hours. But the real brunt of French censorship was borne by the Soviet
films. First Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and then Pudovkin’s Mother were
banned, only to circulate widely in special screenings legally organized by the
Cine-Club de France and Les Amis de Spartacus'. After the rightist victory in
the 1928 elections, the ban on Soviet films became total. In 1929, Cinea-Cine-
pour-tous listed six Soviet films which had been forbidden distribution: Kule¬
shov’s Dura Lux, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Wiskousky’s Black Sunday,
Pudovkin’s Mother, Eisenstein’s October, and Pudovkin’s End of St. Petersburg.
As it turned out, the central commission on film censorship operated indirectly
as France’s chief means of limiting film imports.8
During the 1920s, the distribution sector of the French film industry was
determined, to a large extent, less by its own production than by the quantity
and quality of foreign imports. Although imports, primarily from the United
States, comprised 75 percent or more of the films marketed in France by 1918-
1919, most of them were still distributed by French companies (with the
exception of Vitagraph). As the American film industry consolidated into a
half-dozen vertically integrated corporations, it began to intervene directly in
the French film economy. One after another, the major American firms set up
offices in Paris or strengthened their alliances with French distributors. In
1920 came Paramount and Fox-Film, not only with their feature films but
with newsreels as well.9 Jean Mitry recalls the sensation caused by the huge
posters that suddenly materialized everywhere, depicting a tripod and camera
straddling the globe: “It’s a Paramount film!’’10 A year later, they were joined
by Associated Artists (United Artists) and Erka Films (First National).11 In
1922, it was the turn of Universal, which offered a special premiere of Metro’s
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at the Theatre de Vaudeville.12 Meanwhile
Goldwyn and Metro signed exclusive distribution contracts with Gaumont and
Aubert, respectively. By 1923, Cinematographie franqaise was often listing the
weekly releases of Paramount, Universal, and Fox-Film ahead of those of the
French distributors. Even the two largest companies, Pathe-Consortium and
Gaumont, were distributing fewer French films than imports. France had be¬
come a veritable dumping ground for the American film industry. After turn¬
ing a profit in the United States, films could be sold cheaply and easily on the
French market for an added bonus.
At the same time, German films began to appear in the Paris cinemas, for
the first time since before the war. Breaking the barrier of prejudice and
hostility was Robert Wiene’s Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919), which Louis
Delluc arranged to have screened at the Colisee cinema in October, 1921.
Others soon followed in 1922, imported chiefly by Cosmograph and screened
at the Cine-Opera: Lang’s Destiny (1921), Wiene’s Genuine (1920), Pick’s Shat¬
tered (1921) and Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). To oppose this invasion, the Co-

40
mite de defense du film frangais was formed by director Gerard Bourgeois and DISTRIBUTION
actor Jean Toulout, with the support of Germaine Dulac, Rene Le Somptier,
Rene Hervil, Armand Tallier, and others. The National Assembly even tried
to ban Lubitsch’s Madame Du Barry, claiming that it was an insult to French
history. Neither measure was successful. The walls were down, and the pos¬
sibilities of exchange were once more open.13
For their part, the French were attempting to rebuild the foreign markets
they had lost in the war, especially the more lucrative ones in Germany and
the United States. The meager range of their common export market can be
gleaned from Cine-pour-tous s publication of the balance sheet on a moderately
expensive (310,000 francs) Pathe-Consortium film, Pierre Caron’s L’Homme qui
vendait son ame au diable (1921).14 Twenty-five prints had been sold in France,
about twenty in England and its colonies, ten in South America, four in
Eastern Europe, three in the Scandinavian countries, two in Belgium, and one
each in Switzerland, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, and
Japan. None in the United States, Germany, or the Soviet Union. With those
sales, the film barely turned a profit; had it been released just a year or two
later, when the American industry had taken control of the British market, it
would not have done so.
As their first goal, the French distributors blithely took on the herculean
task of breaking back into the American market. Several ambitious efforts
quickly ended in failure: Diamant-Berger’s film with Adolphe Osso, Vandal
and Delac’s films with Fanny Ward, and the embezzled Franco-American Cin¬
ematographic Corporation. Yet some French films seem to have made their
way into the United States just after the war—e.g., Mercanton’s Bouclette
(Eclipse), L’Herbier’s Rose-Franee (Gaumont), and Dulac’s Le Bonheur des autres
(A.G.C.). Unfortunately, it is still unclear whether any were actually screened.
In 1919, for instance, Abel Gance discovered that Pathe-Exchange did have a
print of J Accuse, but they had done little to sell it. Nothing drastic was done
until 1921, when the French heard that German films were being shown with
some success in New York. In October, 1921, Gance finally sold a second
version of JAccuse (for $192,000) to United Artists, who at least exhibited it
in New York and Los Angeles. A month later, Louis Nalpas personally sold
his two biggest films, La Sultane de lamour and Mathias Sandorf, to First
National. After successfully blocking United Artists from showing Douglas
Fairbanks’s The Three Musketeers (1921) in France in order to leave the market
open for his own production, Les Trois Mousquetaires (1921-1922), Henri Dia-
mant-Berger also went to New York and sold his film there in the spring of
1922. On his return, he reported on half a dozen French releases, including
Feyder’s LAtlantide (retitled Missing Husbands), Mercanton’s Miarko and Phroso
(all three exported by Aubert), Poirier’s Narayana (Gaumont), and Ermolieffs
L’Ordonnance (Pathe-Consortium). A year later, Andre Capellani returned to
France and reported on several more—Baroncelli’s Le Reve, Henry Roussel’s La
Faute d'Odette Marechal and Visages voiles . . . ames closes (retitled The Sheik's
Wife).15
In those three years, however, only three films enjoyed any measure of
success in the United States: LAtlantide, Boudrioz’s L’Atre (retitled Tillers of
the Soil), and Feyder’s new film Crainquebille (Old Bill of Paris).16 Simply put,
the French films never really caught on because the French export efforts were

41
FRENCH FILM industry poorly financed, independent of one another and uncoordinated, and because
their American distributors did not push them. As Marcel Lapierre concludes,

The Americans had no intention of establishing a current of exchange. They produced

films in overabundance: therefore, they had no need of ours, even if excellent. They
had no interest, either material or moral, in opening their doors to our film exports.
Of course not, otherwise how can one explain the fact that they mutilated or bowd¬
lerized some of our films which were presented to the American public?17

No more than a dozen French films were exhibited annually from 1920 to
1925, and few reached cinemas outside New York, Los Angeles, and a couple
of other large cities. Even in New York, according to Diamant-Berger, there
were only five or six small cinemas that consistently screened foreign (let alone
exclusively French) films.18
Disillusioned by their repeated failures in the United States, the French
turned their attention to Germany and, almost immediately, were rewarded.
Operating independently, Diamant-Berger made Le Petit Cafe (with Max Lin¬
der) the first successful French film in Germany since before the war. In No¬
vember, 1922, Vandal and Delac of Film d’Art opened talks with Erich Pom-
mer about distributing French films on a regular basis in UFA’s cinema circuit.
The following year, Film d’Art and Aubert films began appearing in German
cinemas—e.g., Feyder’s L’Atlantide, Baroncelli’s Le Reve. By early 1924, Au¬
bert and Film d’Art had a lucrative contract with Pommer and UFA, and
twice as many French films (forty-four) were being shown in Germany as there
were German films (twenty) in France. Although the French figure included
films produced over several years, it still represented a good percentage of
overall French film production. Within a year, according to Tout-Cinema, the
number of French exports (thirty) to German imports (twenty-three) was nearly
reciprocal.19
A similar arrangement also developed about the same time with the Soviet
Union, probably stimulated by the Herriot government’s recognition of the
U.S.S.R. in 1924.20 Little is known yet about this export agreement—who
arranged the sales, the number of film prints that were sold, where and how
often they were shown. According to Russian sources, however, the flow of
French exports to the Soviet Union rivaled and perhaps surpassed those going
to Germany.21 Beginning with just one film, Judex, in 1921, the number
increased to more than fifty by 19 2 5.22 As might be expected, these included
most of the films produced by Films Ermolieff and Films Albatros—the most
interesting entry perhaps was Le Brasier ardent (soon after its release in 1923).
Other important films included La Dixieme Symphonie (in 1922); L’Atlantide
and Don Juan et Faust (in 1923)', J Accuse and Les Trois Mousquetaires (in 1924);
LAtre, Crainquebille, Coeur fidele, La Cite foudroyee, La Briere, and Le Diable
dans la ville (all in 1925). Surprisingly, La Roue is not mentioned as being
imported until 1926. What kind of impact might these particular films have
had on the nascent Soviet cinema?
The question of foreign film imports so divided the French film industry
that it took quite a while to develop any kind of organized effort to control
them. Although producers obviously favored controls, most cinema owners
actually opposed them; and the distributors were somewhere in between. Con¬
sequently, writes Georges Sadoul, it was not until the threatening invasion of

42
German films that a debate over film imports finally surfaced in the National DISTRIBUTION
Assembly. Pressured mainly by Pathe-Consortium and the Confederation Ge¬
nerate du Travail (C.G.T.), Aristide Briand had decreed, early in 1922, an ad
valorem tax of 20 percent on all imported films. So benign was it, however,
that the new tax had little effect, since most French distributors and exhibitors
could still make more money by marketing American films than French ones.
Under continued pressure, in 1922, Marcel Bokanowski, the Minister of Fi¬
nance, included in his budget request to the Assembly a proposal that would
have charged a surtax on cinemas whose programming consisted of more than
80 percent foreign films and that would also have raised the ad valorem tax
to 50 percent. When the budget was rejected and Bokanowski removed, the
original proposal was modified by Taurines in order simply to establish a quota
system that would reserve 33 percent of all cinema programs for French films.
The idea for this quota system had come from the Comite de defense du film
fran^ais, which persuaded some of the distributors (notably Aubert) to accept
a minimum quota of 25 percent. However, another faction of the distributors
(with Gaumont as its spokesman) argued that they would be hard pressed to
fulfill even the lower quota figure. That faction was joined by the national
organization of cinema owners (led by Leon Brezillon) in even more vehement
opposition. In the confused debate of the Assembly’s last days, during which
the Radical party’s fears of creating a new bureaucracy seem to have carried
the day, the Taurines measure went down to defeat. The Comite de defense
du film fran^ais, together with various labor unions and professional groups
(writers, actors, cameramen, etc.), protested in vain.23 French films would
remain unprotected from the flood of American imports. More important, a
schism had opened between two major factions of the French film industry:
Pathe-Consortium and Aubert on one side, Gaumont on the other.
In 1923-1924, either responding to the French threat of import quotas or
taking advantage of the weakness of that threat, several of the American film
/

distributors in Paris made a further incursion into the French industry. Under
Adolphe Osso, Paramount began producing and distributing its own French
films—Roussel’s Les Opprimes (1923), Boudrioz’s L'Epervier (1924), Perret’s
Madame Sans-Gene (1925). Besides, it allied itself with Cinegraphic to distrib¬
ute (and perhaps deliberately undersell?) L’Herbier’s Resurrection (unfinished),
Jaque Catelain’s Le Marchand de plaisir (1923), and, in the United States,
L’Herbier’s L’lnhumaine (released in 1926, finally, as The New Enchantment).
Vitagraph also expanded its distribution practice by releasing Volkoffs Kean
(1924), before its network was bought out by Warner Brothers.24 Although
not directly linked to these transactions, Gaumont moved steadily into the
American orbit, seeking financial security and even survival. In 1922, Leon
Gaumont finally conceded defeat to the American cinema:

The American market is completely closed to us while our screens are cluttered with
American films. We can do nothing about it—it’s a battle between the clay pot and
the iron kettle.25

With the company’s financiers now in control, production was cut back and
contracts signed with Metro, Goldwyn, and others to distribute and exhibit
more American films. In 1924, when even Louis Feuillade’s serials began to
lose their appeal, Gaumont tied itself more closely to Metro-Goldwyn as the

43
FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY new American combine’s exclusive distributor in France.26 Within a year,
however, the larger of the partners easily gained control, and Gaumont became
Gaumont-MGM. In all but appearance, the once French giant was now MGM’s
branch office in Paris.
Throughout the first half of the 1920s, Pathe-Consortium was the bulwark
of opposition to any threat of American hegemony in France. Besides distrib¬
uting its own films, either the superproduction serials or the literary adapta¬
tions of S.C.A.G.L., it was also the major outlet for the smaller firms and
independent producers. From 1921 to 1923, the following producers and film¬
makers channeled their work through Pathe-Consortium: Films Ermolieff, Films
Tristan Bernard, Films Abel Gance, Productions Leonce Perret, Productions
H. Pouctal, Films Andre Legrand, Films Luitz-Morat and Pierre Regnier,
Films Andre Hugon.27 In 1923 and 1924, as the level of French production
dropped, it took the lead in re-releasing older films, especially during the
summer months. Then, as Jean Sapene rose to power with Cineromans, the
company began to consolidate its distribution. Cineromans serials and Films
de France became the single most important source of Pathe-Consortium prod¬
ucts.
The Cineromans serials, particularly, seem to have played an important role
in the French film industry. Their regular, increasingly popular distribution
through Pathe-Consortium came precisely at the moment when, fresh from
their conquest of the British film industry and just before their intervention
in the German industry, the American film companies made an effort to gain
control in France. According to Jean-Louis Bouquet,

The large American firms really wanted to impose a blockbooking system, a kind of
annual programming deal, thanks to which they had already gained control of the
British exhibition market. The serials shattered these attempts at a monopoly. . . .28

His colleague, Henri Fescourt, continues the argument:

the serial episodes offered exhibitors the guarantees of a long series of weeks of huge
returns from a faithful mass public hooked on the formula. Thus assured of a program
base for three-quarters of the year, the cinema owners could resist the foreign film
salesmen. . . ,29

Without the Cineromans serials, French film exhibitors might, like the Brit¬
ish, have turned their screens over entirely to American films. Consequently,
during a crucial period, Pathe-Consortium and Cineromans shored up the
French film industry.
Perhaps anticipating the coming American investment in Germany and def¬
initely encouraged by the Cartel des gauches foreign policy, Sapene began cut¬
ting down the number of American film imports that Pathe-Consortium still
distributed (the company kept its options open) in favor of German imports
and Franco-German productions. In this new strategy, Sapene was following
the lead of the second largest French film distributor, Louis Aubert. In 1921,
Aubert had the foresight to take over the distribution rights to L’Atlantide
when Jacques Feyder’s financiers became alarmed over its soaring costs. The
film made a fortune for him, playing at the prestigious Madeleine Cinema
alone for one year, a record eclipsed only by Ben-Hur in 1927-1928. Within
a year, Aubert had taken over most of the distribution contracts from A.G.C.

44
and formed an alliance with Vandal and Delac of Film d’Art as well as with DISTRIBUTION
Films de Baroncelli. Prospering from these alliances, from an expanded circuit
of cinemas, and now from his own productions, Aubert opened two initiatives
in 1924. One was the agreement with UFA in Germany for a reciprocal ex¬
change of French film exports and German imports—e.g., Violet’s La Bataille
and Hervil’s Paris for Lang’s Niebelungen and Murnau’s The Last Laugh.30
The other initiative complemented Sapene’s serial strategy at Cineromans.
For the 1924-1925 season, Aubert organized what he called “Festivals of French
films,’’ a program of recent and current French releases (primarily Aubert/Film
d’Art productions) to be distributed in the provinces over a two- or three-
month period. According to Aubert’s own publicity sheet, the typical program
ran as follows:

Week 1 Frou-Frou
Week 2 Les Premieres Armes de Rocambole
Week 3 Le Secret de Polichinelle
Week 4 Le Voile du bonheur
Week 5 Le Crime d'une sainte
Week 6 La Sin-Ventura
Week 7 La Bataille
Week 8 La Legende de Soeur Beatrix31

Although Cine-Information-Aubert used several of these festivals for promotional

purposes (Cinema-Palace de Joigny {Yvonne}, Grand-Theatre d’Antibes), their
overall success was apparently mixed.32 For his next season, Aubert seems to
have dropped the idea. Still, this festival concept was important because it
represented one of the few French attempts at a form of blockbooking.
With Pathe-Consortium and Aubert concentrating on their own films, and
the once powerful A.G.C. nearly defunct, the many smaller production com¬
panies and independent producers created a demand for new distributors. In
1924, Kamenka took over the distributor E. Girard, which became Films
Armor, to release his films from Albatros. Soon Armor was being hailed as
the third largest distributor of French films.33 Another new company, Grandes
Productions Cinematographiques (G.P.C.), started out as a production effort
to make French films along the lines of Vandal and Delac and Aubert; but all
it could come up with were small films by Gaston Roudes. In 1924, it turned
to distribution and released a half-dozen films, most of them Cinegraphic
productions.34 Its development was bound up with that of an important re¬
gional producer-distributor, Phocea, in Marseille. On the strength of its box-
office bonanza with the serial, Les Mysteres de Paris (1922), Phocea enjoyed a
momentary prominence, even to the point of opening a foreign exchange of¬
fice.35 By 1926-1927, both Phocea and G.P.C. had become production units
in a small consortium called Interfilm.36 Along with Phocea, which was orig¬
inally formed to distribute American films during the war, several other for¬
eign import companies began releasing French films. Another American im¬
porter, Georges Petit, for instance, distributed most of Julien Duvivier’s early
films; and a German importer, Mappemonde Films, agreed to handle Rene
Clair’s Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge (1925).37
One of the chief distribution problems during this period was the relative
lack of independent distributors and their weak position within the industry.

45
french film industry Although independent producers proliferated, their counterparts in distribu¬
tion grew more slowly. With the exception of Armor, none of them had much
influence in the French exhibition market. Furthermore, they tended to op¬
erate separately and were often at odds with one another. The only one, ap¬
parently, to have sought some kind of power base to coordinate the release of
independent films was Jean de Merly, Henry Roussel’s producer on Les Op-
primes (1923). Somewhat like Aubert, de Merly made a small fortune from
handling a single film, Roussel’s Violettes imperiales (1924).38 The following
year, he sank most of his profits into the distribution of a supposedly balanced
program of half a dozen independent films by Roussel, Feyder, and Gaston
Ravel. When all but one of those films showed a net loss, de Merly’s drive
toward a consortium of independent distribution stalled. In 1926, he was
forced to reorganize his company in association with Fernand Weill.39 All the
other important independent distributors were geared to individual filmmakers
or films. Leon Poirier, for instance, founded the Compagnie universelle cine-
matographique in order to distribute La Briere (1925) as well as Jean Epstein’s
first independent film, Mauprat (1926).40 Eyen smaller distributors were Georges
Loureau (perhaps allied with Mappemonde?) who handled Clair’s Entr'acte (1924)
and Le Voyage imaginaire (1926), and Maurice Rohier, who released several
films by Epstein and Dmitri Kirsanoff.41
In 1927, the French film industry received another shock that spurred re¬
newed efforts to impose some form of import quotas and that led to a further
round of reorganization within the distribution sector. During the middle
1920s, the level of American imports declined steadily as films became big¬
ger—from 589 in 1924 to 368 in 1927.42 However, that decline was offset
by an increase in the level of German imports. From 1924 to 1926, the
number of French exports to German imports had decreased, but not drasti¬
cally, to a level that was just less than reciprocal. Suddenly, in 1927, German
imports tripled, without any corresponding increase in French exports. In fact,
more films were imported from Germany (ninety-one) than were produced by
the entire French film industry (seventy-four). This jump in German imports
might have been foreseen in the spring of 1926, when the Alliance Cinema-
tographique Europeene (A.C.E.) was set up in Paris.43 Although linked to
S.G.F., as the distributor of Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), for
instance, A.C.E. s primary objective was to distribute the films of UFA and
other German firms in France. Bypassing Aubert and Pathe-Consortium, A.C.E.
quickly became the chief French distributor of German films.44 The German
drive (supported by American money) to infiltrate much of the French market
was on the verge of success. Cinematographically, France was in danger of
being colonized a second time over.
The French film export market, by contrast, remained substantially un¬
changed. A good number of films were now being exported, especially to
Germany and the United States, but they were having little impact on either
market. In Germany, although certain titles were quite profitable, the French
films never comprised more than 5 percent of the total distribution market.
The situation was worse in the United States. The number of cinemas exhib¬
iting foreign films, even in New York, was still quite low. And many of the
French films had a limited audience because they were distributed only through
the Film Arts Guild.45 According to George Pratt, Feyder’s Visages d’enfants

46
and Clairs Paris qui dort were shown for one evening only, 29 June 1926, at distribution
the Cameo cinema in New York.46 Moreover, the American distributors some¬
times sabotaged the more commercial French films. The classic example is
Gance s Napoleon. In its shortened triple-screen format, Napoleon was exhibited
in twelve different cities across France and in eight major European capitols
(where, in just twenty-one days, allegedly, it nearly made back its colossal
costs).47 When MGM paid $450,000 for distribution rights to the film in the
United States, Gance was hopeful of a worldwide success.48 But the American
company cut the film drastically (from seventeen to just eight reels), concen¬
trating solely on producing a coherent narrative.49 They reduced the triple¬
screen images to miniatures on a single screen and, according to Kevin Brown-
low, ended the film with the Ghosts of the Convention sequence—including
among the shots of Marat, Danton, and Robespierre, a similar soft-focus insert
of George Washington!50 Ignorant of the film’s origins, exhibitors were baffled
and infuriated.51 Metro’s publicity campaign could not disguise the fact that
they had turned Gance’s powerful epic into a dull period film. Only recently,
therefore, has Napoleon been shown here in anything resembling its original
form.
Yet the French themselves sometimes undermined their own efforts. The
marketing of Fescourt’s Les Miserables (1925-1926) offers a case in point. As¬
suming that the American distributor would automatically exhibit the film in
its four-part format, Pathe-Consortium shipped all twenty-two reels of it (about
six or seven hours) to the United States. “It required eight months of the most
difficult and expensive efforts,’’ wrote Floward Lewis, “to rework and remodel
this product of French studios into a shape suitable for American audiences.’’52
Besides, by the summer of 1928, the American film industry was already
entering the transition period to sound films; silent films could no longer
attract audiences in the large cities where French films would have been shown.
Acutely aware of its continuing import/export imbalance, especially in light
of the now favorable ratio in the general French economy, the film industry
organized an intensive campaign in October, 1927, to protect its film pro¬
duction once and for all through a quota system that would really control film
imports.53 The campaign was led by influential men like Sapene and Aubert,
representing most of the French producers and distributors, and was supported
by the unions and professional groups (including many of the same people as
in 1922-1923). This time they were victorious, if only for a short time, and
the new government adopted the Herriot decree of February, 1928: for every
seven foreign films imported into France (four American, two German, one
British), one French film would be purchased and exhibited overseas. More¬
over, in an effort to indirectly subsidize French film production, a system of
import permits was instituted that favored French distributors at the expense
of the American branch offices in Paris.
The American film industry quickly retaliated by calling a boycott on fur¬
ther distribution contracts in France; and, in an unprecedented move, Will
FI. Hays sailed to Paris to lobby personally for the industry. The boycott
divided the French again, with exhibitors, especially in the provinces, loudly
opposing the new decree. After a series of joint conferences between repre¬
sentatives of the two industries, along with a timely objection from the League
of Nations, within two months, the French capitulated. The seven-to-one

47
FRENCH film INDUSTRY quota system would continue in force, but the import permit subsidy was
dropped. American films could still comprise up to 60 percent of the French
market, while French films exported to the United States would remain at a
level of ten or twelve per year. There were even those, such as Leon Moussinac,
Jean Tedesco, and Hubert Revol, who argued that, since the original Herriot
decree contained enforcement clauses that were clearly unworkable and that
favored the major French producers (including Paramount), it may not have
been in the best interests of all segments of the industry anyway. One year
later, at a most inopportune moment, the French again tried to reduce the
import-export ratio (this time to 3:1), but to no avail. Confronted by another
American boycott, from April to September, 1929, which coincided with a
growing demand for sound films, the government retreated to the seven-to-
one ratio once more.5'4
By the end of the silent film period, the distribution sector of the industry
was divided into three major factions. The American faction, led by Para¬
mount and Gaumont-MGM, controlled probably the largest share of the French
market (certainly in numbers of films released). Included in that number were
more French films than ever before, since First National, Fox-Film, Universal,
and United Artists had all joined Paramount to produce and/or distribute
French projects in 1928-1929. The German faction, headed by A.C.E. and
Luna-Film, had an influence above and beyond its small size. Securely within
its orbit now were two of the largest French companies, Aubert and Armor,
whose programs increasingly were given over to German films. The embattled
French faction still stood its ground. Pathe-Consortium continued to release
more French films than most of the other firms put together. Aubert and
Armor were next in line, but much of their profit now came from German
releases. Jean de Merly and Fernand Weill joined together in a loose consor¬
tium to distribute Marie-Louise Iribe’s Hara-Kiri (1928) as well as some of
the bigger historical reconstruction films at the decade’s end: Bernard’s Joueur
d’echecs (1927), Poirier’s Verdun, visions d’histoire (1928), and Fescourt’s Monte-
Cristo (1929). Another new firm, Jean de Venloo, established itself by first
distributing Le Miracle des loups abroad and then releasing several of Baroncel-
li s films—Pecheur d'lslande (1924), Veille d'armes (1923), Le Reveil (1925)—as
well as a new shortened version of Diamant-Berger’s Les Trois MousquetairesP5
By 1927, de Venloo was in a position to bargain with several important
independent producers: Charles Dullin—Jean Gremillon’s Maldone (1928), the
Societe des Films Historiques—Roussel’s Le Valse de ladieu (1928), and Lutece
Films—Cavalcanti’s Le Capitaine fracasse (1929). Finally, through Neo-Film,
Pierre Braunberger began to interest himself in the distribution of French
avant-garde films (both narrative and non-narrative) in France and abroad.

There is little doubt that the distribution sector, through the efforts of
Pathe-Consortium and Aubert, helped save the French film industry from
complete capitulation to the Americans, especially during the period from
1922 to 1925. However, that sector also proved to be the weakest component
of the industry. It failed to develop a systematic or coordinated pattern of film
booking, other than the serial format, to counter the glut of American films.
It failed to come up with an organized consortium or network to distribute
the large numbers of independent films. And it wavered, divided, in its atti-

48
tilde toward a government system of controls on foreign imports, eventually EXHIBITION
always siding with the exhibitors, whose profits depended on those imports.
The consequence of these failures was that the Americans and Germans had a
secure foothold within the French film industry at the crucial moment of the
transition to sound films.

The French cinema owners often seemed to operate quite separately from Exhibition: “We’re
the other two sectors of the film industry. From the industry’s beginnings, in thie Money’’
most of the cinemas constructed in France were independently, even individ¬
ually, owned (the figure consistently hovered around 80 to 90 percent). Dur¬
ing the war, as American films replaced French films in number and popular¬
ity, imports became the chief source of the exhibitors’ revenues. Because that
condition persisted throughout the 1920s, the exhibitors repeatedly opposed
any form of government control on imported films, especially from the United
States. Their position was strong enough, most importantly with the govern¬
ment, to defeat all proposals offered by the French film producers and distrib¬
utors. Compared to the rest of the industry, furthermore, the exhibition sector
was unusually secure financially. The degree of that security is suggested by
the steady rise in box office receipts, in Paris alone, throughout the decade:
& , ,
1923 85,428,746 francs
1926 145,994,959 francs
1929 230,187,461 francs1

Although the 1926 figure may be deceptive because of the high inflation, the
1929 figure represents an astounding jump in the cinema’s popularity. Despite
this prosperity, sometimes at the expense of the rest of the industry, the
French cinema owners had their share of problems.
The most serious problem, in the minds of the exhibitors, was taxation. If
the French government showed scant concern for film production and distri¬
bution (except on the matter of imports and exports), it quickly included film
exhibition among the sources of added and increased taxes that the war seemed
to have demanded. As audiences flocked to the cinemas during the first year
of the war, the National Assembly debated various proposals to institute a
national tax on spectacles. What was finally agreed to, on 30 December 1916,
imposed a fixed tax rate on theaters and music halls and a progressive tax rate
on the cinemas.

5 percent of monthly receipts under 25,000 francs

10 percent of monthly receipts of 25,000 to 50,000 francs
20 percent of monthly receipts of 50,000 to 100,000 francs
25 percent of monthly receipts over 100,000 francs

This was in addition to the ancient “poor tax,” which was set at 9-5 percent
for all three spectacles. By 1920, the government had grown so used to this
new tax base that it was sanctioned in peacetime as well. Lobbied by the
theaters and music halls, which wanted to reverse the wartime advantages
enjoyed by the cinemas, on June 25, 1920, the National Assembly adopted a
new tax law which reduced their tax rate and increased the rate on the cinemas
even more.

49
FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY 10 percent of monthly receipts under 15,000 francs
15 percent of monthly receipts of 15,000 to 50,000 francs
20 percent of monthly receipts of 50,000 to 100,000 francs
25 percent of monthly receipts over 100,000 francs

The new law also authorized municipalities to levy a local tax on cinema
admissions up to 50 percent of the national tax. After all, the Finance Minister
is reported to have said, "Because of its current vogue, the cinematographe
can bear taxation more easily than any of the other spectacles.’’2
The French exhibitors, especially the smaller owners, were outraged by this
new increase, particularly since it came during a period when high unemploy¬
ment and a general strike threatened to erode their audience. Moreover, they
began to object to the rental rates demanded by the French film distributors,
which they considered draconian compared to the cheap American rates. In
1921, a good number of the smaller cinema owners even threatened to close
their cinemas for the summer. This "strike’’ turned out to be poorly organized,
however, and had little effect. Simultaneously, the larger exhibition circuits
organized a committee (headed by Edmond Benoit-Levy and Edgar Costil) to
work with Marcel Bokanowski in getting the National Assembly at least to
lower the tax. Although Bokanowski’s measure failed, a second proposal to
reduce the national tax was introduced by Taurines and passed (without its
original import quota restrictions) in the National Assembly on 1 July 1923.

6 percent of monthly receipts under 15,000 francs

10 percent of monthly receipts of 15,000 to 30,000 francs
15 percent of monthly receipts of 30,000 to 50,000 francs
20 percent of monthly receipts of 50,000 to 100,000 francs
25 percent of monthly receipts over 100,000 francs

Yet less than a year later, most of these small gains were lost when the Cartel
des gauches government increased the taxes on all spectacles by 20 percent.
Opposition to the tax began to fade, and the exhibitors accepted an overall
tax rate of from 17 percent to 40 percent of gross receipts in Parisian cinemas
and from 15 percent to 31 percent in the provinces. Throughout the 1920s,
the cinemas contributed 50 percent of all spectacle tax revenues in France; by
1930, according to Andre Chevanne, their share had grown to over 300 mil¬
lion francs per year.3
Although the French film exhibitors were financially well-off, in spite of a
heavy tax load, the scope and mode of their operations were quite restrictive
for the production and distribution sectors of the industry. In 1918, according
to Georges Sadoul, there were only 1,444 cinemas in France, nearly 200 of
which were located in Paris.4 By 1920, their number had almost doubled to
2,400. Even so, the French exhibition market still ranked behind England
(3,000), Germany (3,730), and the United States (18,000).5 By 1929, the
number of French cinemas had grown to 4,200, but their position worldwide
was the same as before.6 As if that were not bad enough for French distribu¬
tors, "less than 40 percent operated daily,’’ reported Film Daily Yearbook (1929),
"and only 900 had a capacity of 750 seats or more.’’7 Many of the rest in the
provinces, adds Sadoul, "offered only three or four screenings a week.’’8 The
insufficient number of cinemas, argued Andre Delpeuch, resulted from the
French public’s relative lack of appreciation for the new spectacle.9 And Andre

50
Chevanne s statistics seemed to confirm that: despite the stereotypical notion EXHIBITION
that France is a nation of cinephiles, only 12 percent of the French population
regularly attended the cinema in 1928 (up from 7 percent in 1919), just half
the percentage of regular customers in the United States.10
Yet the French publicity strategies did little to entice that public into the
cinemas to see French films. In 1919, Henri Bousquet writes, only a dozen or
so of the eighty French films produced that year received special advertising
campaigns. Pathe, for instance, devoted an unusual effort to Gance’s J'Accuse
and especially to Pouctal’s Travail, lavishing on the latter a full year of pub¬
licity before its first episode even premiered. Most others, including Feuillade’s
Tih-Minh, oddly enough, were advertised the week of their opening, and that
was all. The situation improved slightly the following year, with the films of
Baroncelli, Poirier, Le Somptier, Mercanton, Hervil, and Roussel singled out
for special attention. In 1921, however, French publicity contracted to focus
on less than a dozen films, including Feyder’s LAtlantide, Diamant-Berger’s
Les Trois Mousquetaires, Bernard-Deschamps’ LAgonie des aigles, and Leprince’s
L’Empereur des pauvresd1 Although much more needs to be known about French
film advertising during this period, it seems consistently to have performed
below the level of American advertising. This may account for the rapid rise
of such men as Robert Hurel, Pierre Braunberger, and Bernard Natan (all
associated with the Paramount publicity office); and it may explain why the
specialized film journals—e.g., Cinea and Cinea-Cine-pour-tous—considered it
so important to sponsor film poster contests.
French film programming practices were determined in part by a system of
film rental contracts which was standardized by the early 1920s. Cinema own¬
ers could rent a new feature film according to one of three basic contracts:

Premiere vision confers on the lessee this privilege—that no other cinema owner can
screen the film before him in a predetermined city or zone. But the premiere vision
rental can be made simultaneously with many cinema owners.
Priorite (or antenonte) grants to the lessee the privilege of screening a film before all
other competing cinemas in a predetermined city or zone, and of designating his
choice of cinema locations.
Exclusivite is understood as a booking strictly reserved to one cinema for a predeter¬
mined zone or period of time, along with the exclusive right of related publicity.12

Although each year after 1921, more and more French films were released en
exclusivite, only a limited number of cinemas in Paris and in the provinces
(Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Nice) could exhibit them.13 In Paris,
these were five of the most prestigious cinemas: the Marivaux, Madeleine,
Aubert-Palace, Max-Linder, and Cameo.14 An exclusivite or priorite film usually
played several weeks to a month in one cinema and then shifted to premiere
vision status for its general run. The majority of films, however, were released
under premiere vision contracts. As early as 1919, this meant a release pattern
of anywhere from several weeks to several months. A film would begin playing
one week at, say, several dozen major cinemas and then, if successful enough,
week by week, would work its way through the smaller urban and rural cin¬
emas.15 Programming schedules for the larger cinemas were prepared from
several months to a year in advance but usually could be juggled to accom¬
modate the exceptionally popular film—e.g., LAtlantide (one year at the Ma-

51
FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY deleine), Mathias Sandorf (six months at the Cirque-Hiver), Ben-Hur (over one
year at the Madeleine). An exception to this practice ruined Renoir’s Nana
(1926). After a surprisingly good late summer run en exclusivite and en pnonte,
it was withdrawn to make way for Aubert s fall season of films.16
The serial and the film a epoques or multipart film provided a unique product
for cinema programming. By 1918, Louis Feuillade had standardized the French
serial format at twelve episodes of about a half-hour each. This meant that a
cinema could run a single serial film title for nearly three months, screening
one episode a week. In 1923, Jean Sapene modified this format when he
ordered the Societe des Cineromans to produce serials of eight episodes each
so that they could be released at two-month intervals, from September to May.
Although Sapene’s format dominated the rest of the decade, public opinion
apparently forced some distributors eventually to market two versions of the
same serial—a “condensed” version for the larger cinemas and a complete
version for the smaller urban and provincial cinemas.18 The unusually sus¬
tained popularity of the serial in France seems to have spawned a peculiar
hybrid form, the film a epoques or multipart film. These films were made up of
two or more parts or “acts” (lasting one or two hours each), none of which,
taken separately, could be accepted as complete; and they were intended to be
screened in single seances or performances over a period of consecutive weeks.
Perhaps the earliest example of this format was Louis Feuillade’s war film,
Vendemiaire, whose two parts of 1,680 and 1,350 meters, respectively, were
released on 17 and 24 January, 1919.19 Several other films were shown simi¬
larly within the next year—e.g., Gance’s J’Accuse (four parts), Gerard Bour¬
geois’s Chnstophe Colomb (two parts), Pouctal’s Travail (eight parts)—and the
format saw rather extensive use throughout the decade, generally for expensive
historical or biographical films.20 Perhaps the most prominent films were Flenri
Diamant-Berger’s Les Trois Mousquetaires and Vingt Ans apres (twelve parts each),
Gance’s La Roue and Napoleon (four parts each), Flenri Fescourt’s Les Miserables
(four parts), and the same director’s 1929 remake of Monte-Cristo (two parts).
Apparently, each part would play just one week in a cinema until the whole
film was recycled for another screening. Here, too, was a fairly successful
strategy that assured the exhibition of French films in the face of the American
film onslaught.
Programming practices were probably determined as well by the location of
cinemas and thus by the clientele they served. Unfortunately, there is no study
yet of early French cinema locations to compare with the rigorous analyses of
early American cinemas performed by Russell Merritt, Douglas Gomery, Rob¬
ert Allen, and Charlotte Herzog.21 However, Andre Antoine offers a place to
begin. In 1921, Antoine did an informal survey of the cinemas in Paris ac¬
cording to the seven or eight quarters (and stereotypes) that comprised the
city.22 The Left Bank cinemas then were frequented by students, teachers,
lawyers, and civil servants who preferred “films marked by the qualities of
dispassionate observation and truthfulness.” The cinemas of Grenelle, on the
other hand, catered to the bourgeois audience that enjoyed the serials and
historical films, which swelled them with pride and respect. The elegant cin¬
emas of Passy, Auteil, and Etoile were becoming social playgrounds for the
idle rich to carry on affairs and talk of affairs. The cinemas of the working-
class quarters (Republique, Bastille, Pointe-Saint-Paul) were thronged by peo-

52
pie who, though passionately interested in the crime serials and in sentimental EXHIBITION
melodramas, could also discern an exceptional film when they saw one. The
new cinemas of the Boulevards were supplanting those around the Place de
Clichy as the center of cinema life,” for they were crowded with shoppers
from the nearby Printemps and Galeries Lafayette, day and night, weekdays
and weekends.23 It was here, where cinema-going was becoming linked to the
consumption patterns of the big department stores, that the industry could
determine how successfully a film could attract the general public. Or whether,
as Andre Delpeuch so blithely put it, a film could satisfy “this need that we
sometimes feel to escape, if only for a brief flight, the conditions of our bour¬
geois existence.”24
A typical French cinema program just after the war, according to Louis
Delluc, looked like a “programme-salade.”25 The recipe consisted of a half-
dozen different kinds of films: a newsreel, a comic short, a serial episode, a
feature-length drama or comedy, and either a travelogue, another serial epi¬
sode, or a second comic short. Here are some examples from Le Journal du
Cine-Club (30 April 1920):

Gaumont-Palace La Fete espagnole (short drama)

La Bretagne pittoresque (cinematographic study)
Barrabas, 9th episode (serial)
Chariot apprenti (comic short)
Les Environs du Caire (documentary in color)
Pathe-Palace Bathe-Journal (newsreel)
Houdini, 10th episode (serial)
Le Secret d’Argeville (police drama)
Fntzigli (comic short)
Le Duel de Max (comic short)
Folies-Dramatiques Dermeres actualites (newsreel)
Barrabas, 9th episode (serial)
Bigorno cireur (comic short)
La Revelation (Rio Jim western)
Les Chansons filmees (film songs)

These were mixed in various combinations and presented en bloc, beginning at

a certain hour of the afternoon or evening, with no indication of exactly when
a specific film would appear or even if it would be repeated. The only thing
one could be certain of was that the course would last from two to three hours,
since the films’ total length usually ran from 3,000 to 3,500 meters.26 The
young Dadaist and Surrealist poets loved the chance encounters this system
created, but people of more regular habits complained.27
Filmmakers and critics complained about this system as well, because ex¬
hibitors exercised a right to alter films to suit their needs. Feature films were
already measured on the bed of Procrustes, according to Antoine, since dis¬
tributors often cut them to a standard length of 1,350 to 1,700 meters each,
whether the story demanded it or not.28 Then the cinema owner could tailor
any film to fit his particular program—cutting out scenes that might displease
his clientele or shortening it in such a way that he could add the special
attraction of an extra film. Even the “enlightened” manager of the Cameo and
Artistic cinemas, Lucien Doublon, defended the exhibitor’s need to heed the
demands of his patrons.

53
FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY When the manager of a “permanent” cinema cuts a film, he knows what he is
doing; he is eliminating useless things, repetitions in a scene, evocations, etc. But, I
must add, he pays the same metrage rate to the distributor. There is not one single
manager of a “permanent” who cannot lighten a program in such a way that the
spectator doesn’t notice it.29

Another irritating exhibitor practice, which was just as common in the United
States, was to project films in the cinemas at faster than their “taking speed”
(initially, 16 to 18 frames per second), presumably to squeeze in an extra daily
program.30 This, along with other factors, tended to slowly increase the “tak¬
ing speed” of films during the decade. Yet the speed of French films, according
to Barry Salt, still lagged behind most others—whereas American films, for
instance, had reached a speed of 22 frames per -second by 1924, the French
films did not reach that speed until 1929.31
By the middle of the decade, programs were being organized around the
exhibition of one feature-length film and a serial, with perhaps the addition
of a newsreel and a short. Now they were.standardized at from two to three
hours in length and were presented regularly according to an announced sched¬
ule. The only change in this format was Paramount’s introduction of double¬
bill programming (which the French also used sparingly) and the same com¬
pany’s 1928 decision to adopt a policy of continuous screenings.32 To suggest
the range of programs, the following examples are drawn from Cinemagazine
(16 March 1928):

Madeleine-Cinema Ben-Hur
Omnia-Pathe Le Chauffeur de Mademoiselle
Sevres L'Esclave blanche
La SIrene des tropiques
Poker d'as, 1st episode (serial)
Hotel-de-ville Princesse Masha
Gribouille veilleur de nuit (comic short)
Imperial Paname nest pas Paris
Paris il y a vingt ans (documentary)

In the provinces, the practice of changing programs twice a week was intro¬
duced; and, in Perpignan, at least, this included reruns of many films released
earlier in the decade.33 Exhibitors everywhere, however, continued to alter
films as they saw fit.
Although most French cinemas were owned and operated independently,
several large circuits controlled important segments of the French market.
Their association with the major film producers and distributors went back to
the industry’s formative years before the war. Nearly fifty cinemas were oper¬
ated by Pathe-Freres/Pathe-Cinema, through six regional circuits—five in France
and Algeria, plus another in Belgium and Holland. Edmond Benoit-Levy had
an administrative interest in four of them. The most important of the com¬
pany’s early Paris cinemas were the Pathe-Palace (600 seats) and the Omnia-
Pathe, “in the purest Louis XIV style” (1,000 seats), the latter of which
probably initiated the exclusivite screening practice in 1916 with The Cheat.
Gaumont controlled the next largest circuit of cinemas in Paris and the prov¬
inces. The flagship of the company was the Gaumont-Palace, formerly the
Hippodrome Theater, on Place Clichy. Under the management of Edgar Cos-

54
 17. Omnia-Pathe interior

til, the huge theater (nearly 6,000 seats) was transformed with a mammoth
moveable screen that was surrounded by “an immense architectural frame in a
Greco-Roman style.’’ The orchestra area was remodeled to seat eighty musi¬
cians, and two great “Aeolian” organs were installed on each side. Opening
in 1911, the Gaumont-Palace became the first French cinema to provide au¬
tomatic projection equipment. Louis Aubert’s circuit was quite small at first,
comprising just five cinemas in Paris. In contrast to the major companies,
however, Aubert was the only one during the war period to construct new
cinemas: the Electric-Palace (500 seats) and the Nouveautes-Aubert-Palace (800
seats), which was laid out in the shape of a drawing compass.34 Consequently,
by the end of the war, despite these few exceptions, the French cinemas were
in lamentably poor condition.35
All that began to change in 1919. While the production and distribution
sectors of the film industry hesitated or reorganized in the face of American
film imports, the exhibition sector embarked on a three-year binge of cinema
construction (nearly doubling the number of cinemas in France). If anyone was
going to make money, it would be cinema owners. They were encouraged in
this boom by the nationwide adoption, in 1919, of an eight-hour workday
and the “English week” (five and a half days of work per week).36 The undi¬
minished growth in cinema attendance fueled the industry’s desire for more
and better cinemas. Pathe-Cinema/Pathe-Consortium expanded its circuit in
the outer districts of Paris and in the provinces, constructing the first grandes

55
18. Gaumont-Palace facade
(left) and Madeleine Cinema
facade (right)

salles in many regions. Aubert continued to expand its circuit with new cin¬
emas in Paris, Lyon, and Brussels. Soon nearly every Parisian quarter had a
1,500- to 2,000-seat cinema.37 However, what most fascinated the French
film press was the marvelous apparition of a half-dozen or more luxurious
“super-cinemas” in Paris.
The center of the cinema district in Paris now was the department store
and theater area of the Right Bank Boulevards, and most of the new super
cinemas were constructed there from 1919 to 1921. The first and grandest of
them all was the Salle Marivaux (1,050 seats), which opened in April, 1919,
with Griffith’s Intolerance,38 Built by the independent Compagnie generale
franchise de cinematographic circuit (whose founder, Benoit-Levy, linked it
briefly with Vandal and Delac’s grand scheme of a vertically integrated French
film company), this new cinema was a peculiarly satisfying blend of sober
lines, comfortable elegance, and ostentatious decor. Much of its atmosphere
was “calculated on the play of light from three ranks of 5,000 lamps.”39 But
its decor was decidedly byzantine:

Side by side with Ionian columns are vaguely Egyptian ornaments, all of which are
illuminated in old rose and ochre, with green and gold motifs. One has the impression

56
 j8il!EH ':i~

19- Salle Marivaux interior

of swimming in a gigantic ice cream mixture of strawberries and vanilla adorned with
pistachios.40

Related in style to the classical hardtop cinemas that were flourishing in the
United States, with generous touches of the atmospheric, the Salle Marivaux
seems an early example of what Dennis Sharp has called the Continental search
for a distinctive and modern architecture in cinema design.41 Under Francis
Aron’s management, it quickly became the most prestigious of all the exclu¬
sivity cinemas in Paris. The Marivaux was soon joined by another luxury cin¬
ema, the Cine Max-Linder (900 seats), which had been a showcase for the
French comic’s own films and for the earliest American film imports during
the war. In 1919, Linder himself spent two million francs to completely ren¬
ovate the cinema in order to exhibit a series of films that he planned to make
in France.42 Although the Cine Max-Linder reopened with the smash hit, Le
Petit Cafe, Linder failed to get a second film project under way. Sold to an
independent circuit, the cinema bearing his name soon became one of the few
exclusivite cinemas in Paris. Another cinema that opened with a bang was the
850-seat Madeleine-Cinema (also financed by Benoit-Levy), which started
L’Atlantide on its way to a worldwide success.43 It, too, became an exclusivite

57
FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY cinema. Finally, Louis Aubert kept expanding his Paris circuit with a half-
dozen cinemas, including the rebuilt 2,000-seat Tivoli-Cinema.
While this construction boom went on, several exhibitors and distributors
experimented with special programming formats. For instance, the only cin¬
ema on the Champs Elysees at the time, the Castilian-owned Colisee, began
to devote its programming regularly to German films, to re-releases, and to
the work of filmmakers such as Delluc, L’Herbier, and their “circle.” The
Mogodor-Palace followed suit with a series of re-releases inaugurated by The
Cheat. The 4,000-seat Trocadero theater had film projection equipment in¬
stalled for several gala presentations by Pathe-Consortium—for Bernard-Des-
champs’s L’Agonie des aigles (April, 1921) and Diamant-Berger’s superproduc¬
tion serial, Les Trots Mousquetaires (September, • 1921).44 This screening of Les
Trots Mousquetaires became the first highly publicized premiere in French cin¬
ema history. It was organized for the benefit of the men wounded and hand¬
icapped by the war, and its presiding hosts were five government ministers
and the war hero, Marshal Foch. Pathe-Consortium even consigned Jean Sa-
pene (then advertising editor of Le Matin) to direct a massive publicity cam¬
paign for the film’s premiere as well as for its general release in sixty cinemas
two months later.45 One year later, on 6 November 1922, Pathe-Consortium
organized a similar special premiere for Diamant-Berger’s Vingt Ans apres at
Rolf de Mare’s Theatre des Champs-Elysees, where the Ballet suedois and
Diaghilev’s Ballets russes performed.46 At the same time, Universal held a spe¬
cial preview for Metro’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at the Theatre de
Vaudeville.47
From 1922 to 1925, the construction of new cinemas in France fell off a
bit. Although construction continued in the provinces—e.g., Aubert-Palaces
in Lille and Marseille—the mushrooming of big new cinemas in Paris ceased.
Instead, the major circuits began to consolidate their holdings. In 1924, Au¬
bert bought the Mogodor theater and converted it into a cinema; Gaumont,
shifting its concern to distribution and exhibition, bought out the Madeleine.
Pathe-Consortium formed an alliance with a new circuit based in Paris, Lu-
tetia-Fournier. The highest-grossing cinemas in Paris, and in France, were
nearly all controlled by one of the major chains: the Salle Marivaux (now 1,400
seats), Gaumont-Palace, Cameo (formerly Pathe-Palace), Aubert-Palace, Max-
Linder, Madeleine, Lutetia-Wagram, Omnia, Palais de Fetes (Brezillon), and
Tivoli-Cinema. Finally, the industry reached a new stage of public acceptance
when the management of the Paris Opera agreed, after several years of debate,
to premiere special French films. The first film to be so honored was Bernard’s
historical epic, Le Miracle des loups, in November, 1924. The premiere became
a national event when the president of the Republic presided over a select
audience of ministers, diplomats, and celebrities in the arts and sciences from
around the world. A year later, the Opera initiated a series of such premieres
with Aubert’s Salammbod8
During the last four years of the decade, the stabilization of the French
economy and the continued high risks of film production led to another round
of super cinema construction, which paralleled a similar expansion in Germany
and slightly preceded an even larger boom in England. Among the French
circuits, Pathe-Consortium opened the era with two new Paris cinemas in

58
1926—the Empire, where it now screened all of its new releases for the ex¬ SILENCE IN THE FACE
hibitors and critics, and the Imperial, which soon became one of the top¬ OF SOUND
grossing Paris houses. Its circuit was augmented further when Lutetia con¬
structed three Paris cinemas in 1927. Aubert kept pace by purchasing the
prestigious Cameo and Artistic cinemas. In September, 1927, the Theatre des
Champs-Elysees became a combination concert stage, music hall, and cinema.
A month later, finally, a new independent super cinema, the Rialto, was
dubiously inaugurated with Jean Sapene’s tribute to Claudia Victrix, La Prin-
cesse Masha.49
All this activity was probably also spurred by Paramount’s decision to in¬
vade the French exhibition market. In 1925, Adolphe Osso approved the
purchase of the Theatre de Vaudeville and its reconstruction as a super cinema.
During the next two years, the American company either built or bought
outright eight major cinemas in the French provinces. And it completed the
Paramount-Palace (2,000 seats), located on the same spot as the old Theatre
de Vaudeville, just in time for the Christmas period of the 1927-1928 film
season. The spacious art deco interior, the unusually comfortable main floor
and loge seating, and the sophisticated underground electrical generating sys¬
tem—all forced the French to admit that the Paramount-Palace was the best
of the super cinemas in Paris. Paramount also knew how to advance its own
cause. It paid for a special supplement in the Cinematographie frangaise (13
August 1927), and it regularly stunned the French distributors and exhibitors
by spending up to one million francs to advertise a single film. By 1928, the
Paramount-Palace accounted for 20 million francs or almost 10 percent of the
total cinema receipts taken in Paris.50
The record grosses taken in by the exhibitors and the publicity given to
this cinema construction boom helped provide the French film industry with
sufficient capital, when the Americans and Germans forced the issue, to make
the transition to sound films.

As the decade began in a state of crisis for the French film industry, so did Silence in the Face
it end in a crisis of a slightly different sort. To the conditions that determined of Sound
the industry’s ambiguous position throughout the 1920s, another was added
to create the crisis of 1928-1929: the failure to encourage industrial research
that could produce a marketable technology for the sound film.
The technology for sound film production and exhibition was developing
very quickly by the early 1920s, particularly in the United States and Ger¬
many, but few perceived or pushed its commercial value.1 In France, Gaumont
had experimented with various synchronized sound systems from 1900 to 1913,
but none of them became marketable for lack of economic and technical fea¬
sibility. By the 1920s, the company was in retreat and projected its occasional
short sound films only as novelties. This lack of commercial foresight and
financing was all too characteristic of the French film industry. Of the basic
technologies forming the cinema’s base, the French bridged the gap between
invention and industrial manufacture and marketing in only a single one with
any kind of consistency—camera and projection equipment. In the case of
electronic sound recording, they faced an added drawback—the slow devel-

59
FRENCH FILM INDUSTRY opment of their electrical industry. Here the United States and Germany had
a distinct advantage. For the incentive to convert to sound film production
came from the powerful new electrical industries.
By early 1928, ERPI (Electrical Research Products Incorporated—a subsid¬
iary of Western Electric) and RCA (an affiliate of General Electric) had ac¬
quired control of the American rights to sound film systems, signed contracts
with the major film producers, and were beginning to push into the European
market.2 Within six months, two large patent groups, Tobis (controlled by
Dutch financiers) and Klangfilm (in the hands of the German electronics in¬
dustry) had emerged to challenge the Americans. The French were caught
completely off guard in this confrontation. Gaumont was the only company
to come up with an alternate sound film system, one developed by two Danish
engineers working in France. Although technically advanced, the Gaumont-
Petersen-Poulsen system proved commercially unfeasible, at least in its initial
format. In March, 1929, Tobis and Klangfilm pooled their assets as a German
corporation, and opened a year-long war with ERPI and RCA over control of
the world market. When an agreement was finally reached in July, 1930,
France officially became an open territory Where the three corporations contin¬
ued to vie for control.
Consequently, the French film industry was ill prepared for the sound film
revolution. To survive, to make the conversion to sound film systems, it would
have to depend on the monopoly of American or German technology. Cinea-
Cine-pour-tous reported that Western Electric was charging up to 600,000 francs
to install its sound projection equipment in a single cinema.3 And that would
be costly, doubly costly, since the money would not circulate back through
the economy. Furthermore, the American boycott of film exports to France
(from April to September, 1929) delayed the installation of sound systems in
the cinemas.4 The industry also found itself strapped by other costs. In 1926,
Pathe sold its film-stock factory at Vincennes to Eastman-Kodak. Although
the sale netted Pathe-Cinema a tidy profit, the French film industry now had
to depend on either Eastman-Kodak or Agfa film stock. Given such bleak
material conditions, the French came through the transition period better than
one might have thought. The sound film turned out to be an unexpected
godsend—for it reintroduced the national barriers of spoken language.
The subject of the new sound films came up in the French press as early as
1926. By 1927, film journals were printing reports on the various formats
that were being tried out in the United States—Paramount’s singing film
shorts with Raquel Meller, Fox-Movietone newsreels (using the ERPI system),
and Warner Brothers’ projected series of “feature-length talkie productions.’’5
They were also debating the relative merits of films sonorises and films parlants
or talkies. The consensus was, according to Marcel Lapierre, that the sonorized
film would eliminate poor orchestral accompaniment (or monstrosities like the
“mechanical brouhaha’’ used for sound effects in the Paris screening of Ben-
Hur) and, therefore, was preferable to the less familiar talkie.6 By 1928, more
and more reports came in, saying that the new sound films, especially the
talkies, were setting box office records in both the United States and England.
While passing through Europe, Rene Clair recalls drolly, Jesse Lasky con¬
firmed the rumors.7 French producers, directors, and scriptwriters immedi¬
ately took off across the Channel to London to study the “savage invention’’

60
firsthand. All complained about the quality of sound reproduction and the silence in the face
static nature of the films, but none could deny that the monster would be OF sound
victorious. For, as one put it, “[if} silence is silver . . . the word is golden.’’8
It was not until late in 1928, two years after Warner Brothers introduced
its Vitaphone sound-on-disc system and just as the entire American film in¬
dustry was deciding to convert to sound, that feature-length sound films began
to appear in Paris.9 Drawing on its long experience and its new optical sound-
on-film process (Petersen-Poulsen), Gaumont was able to present the first French
sound film before any American films could be released in France. The film
was Marcel Vandal’s colonial adventure, L’Eau du Nil, projected at the Cameo
on 19 October 1928. Although the sound track of L’Eau du Nil consisted only
of music and songs, the French press realized a “revolution” was at hand.
Cinematographic frangaise even compared Gaumont’s presentation to the first
public projection of Lumiere’s LArrivee du train and Sortie des usines Lumiere.
A month later, at the Madeleine-Cinema, MGM screened an American sound
film, Ombres blanches (White Shadows by Van Dyke and Flaherty), which used a
Movietone optical sound accompaniment of Hawaiian guitar music. At the
same time, Paramount released a newly sonorized version of Les Ailes (William
Wellman’s Wings). In early January, 1929, at the Cine Max-Linder, Pathe-
Consortium hesitantly joined the advance by releasing Marcel L’Herbier’s
L Argent, accompanied at one point by phonograph recordings of Bourse crowd
noises and an airplane roar. For a few heady weeks or months, it seemed as if
the French film industry was on the cutting edge of the sound film revolution.
But the euphoria proved illusory.
As in the United States, the turning point came with the release of Warner
Brothers’ The Jazz Singer (1927), on 26 January 1929, at the Aubert-Palace.
Although presented in English (with one scene of dialogue) and restricted by
the Vitaphone sound-on-disc recording system, The Jazz Singer was a smash
hit. It played at the Aubert-Palace for almost a full year and doubled the
cinema’s previous year's receipts. In March, at the Theatre de l’Apollo, Tobis-
Klangfilm premiered the first German sound film, a popular music-hall film,
La Revue Nelson, using its excellent optical sound process. At the same time,
Paramount and Fox-Movietone began to exhibit their sound newsreels. In
June, Paramount finally had its first genuine success (using Movietone optical
sound) with Richard Wallace’s A Song of Paris, starring the popular French
singer, Maurice Chevalier. The demand reached the point where French film
producers were forced to initiate sound film projects as a regular feature of
their production schedule. In the process of changeover, the level of French
film production fell steeply from ninety-four films in 1928 to fifty-two in
1929. Taking advantage of the five-month American boycott of film exports,
however, the industry unloaded most of the last big French silent films (to
limited competition) during the spring and summer months and prepared as
best it could for the new fall season.10
Because French studios were still equipped for silent film production only,
the earliest French sound films were simply sonorized in France or made in
England or Germany. The 1929 fall cinema season included a hodgepodge of
French sound films.11 In October, at the Cameo, Aubert screened its first
sound feature, a period film by Gaston Ravel and Tony Lekain, Le Collier de
la reine, whose lone sequence of dialogue—a comic finale between Marat and

61
french film industry Robespierre—was postsynchronized, using the Tobis-Klangfilm process. At
the Marivaux, Natan presented his first talking film, Andre Hugon’s lackluster
re-make of Les Trots Masques, which was recorded (with RCA optical sound)
in England. The real hit of that program, however, was not Charles Mere’s
creaky bourgeois melodrama, but Walt Disney’s energetic cartoon, Mickey vir¬
tuose {Opry House}. Pierre Braunberger contributed La Route est belle, which
Robert Florey also recorded in England. Pathe-Consortium weighed in with
Marcel L’Herbier’s Nutt de princes, which was shot in France and then sonorized
by Sequana Films in Berlin. And Abel Gance was sent to London by the
Societe de l’Ecran d’Art to shoot the sound sequences for his expensive new
project, La Fin du monde.
By the end of the year, French talkies were finally coming out of French
studios.12 Natan led off a series of productions with L’Herbier’s melodrama,
L’Enfant de lamour, and Pierre Colombier’s boulevard comedy, Chique. Tobis-
Klangfilm responded with a series headed by Henri Chomette’s Le Requin and
Rene Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris. In December, Pathe-Journal began to appear
as a sound newsreel. Within a year, the changeover was nearly complete: of
the ninety-four French films produced in 1930, seventy-six were talkies.13 And
most of the others were silent films re-released with awkwardly synchronized
sound tracks. Although silent film production in France did continue almost
to the end of 1929, the transition seemed much sharper than it actually was
because most of those films—e.g., Jean Epstein’s Sa Tete (1930)—were vir¬
tually ignored in the French press.14
The major corporations in the French film industry suffered a crisis of lead¬
ership just before the sound film conversion got under way.15 Charles Pathe
wanted to retire again from Pathe-Cinema and Pathe-Consortium, where he
still wielded some power. Jean Sapene was disillusioned after his personal
intervention at Cineromans, especially by the failure to make his wife a star.
When Louis Nalpas finally quit to organize his own production company once
more, Cineromans seemed to lose momentum. In 1929, after a period of
sporadic activity, Leon Gaumont arranged for Edgar Costil to take over the
directorship of Gaumont. Louis Aubert was elected to the National Assembly
in 1928 and soon began to seek a buyer for his company. After its disastrous
international films, S.G.F. was acquired by Serge Sandberg in the summer of
1928. Although Abel Gance and Carl Dreyer were retained nominally as di¬
rectors, the only film S.G.F. produced (perhaps at Gance’s insistence) was Jean
Epstein’s Finis Terrae (1929). Alexandre Kamenka abandoned Albatros’s studio
in Montreuil and closely allied his company with Sequana Films at Billan-
court. With American and German interests poised to begin dividing up the
French market, several spectacular upheavals seemed to reorder the French film
industry structure completely.
The principal impetus for this upheaval came from Bernard Natan, Robert
Hurel, and Edgar Costil. The leadership crisis at Cineromans and Pathe-Con¬
sortium presented Natan with a speculator’s dream, especially since his own
company apparently was secretly in debt. In February, 1929, he bought out
Pathe’s controlling interest in Pathe-Cinema and had it simply absorb his
debts. With the active support of the Banque Bauer et Marchal, plus that of
the Banque Conti-Gancel, Natan soon had control of Pathe-Consortium as
well. In August, he pulled into his new conglomerate the Lutetia chain of

62
cinemas. The giant consortium that emerged from this systematic takeover, silence in the face
Pathe-Natan, was hailed, with some irony, “as the witness of a renaissance in of sound
the French cinema!” That same summer, Franco-Film picked up the option it
held on Aubert, and Hurel renamed the combined companies Franco-Film-
Aubert, Half a year later, in February, 1930, with the financial backing of
the Credit Industriel et Commercial and the Swiss electrical industry, Gau-
mont absorbed Franco-Film-Aubert. A second consortium was born, Gau-
mont-Franco-Film-Aubert (G.F.F.A.), and Edgar Costil had himself ap¬
pointed its director. According to Henri Diamant-Berger, there was even an
attempt to merge the two giants, but Hurel’s financiers considered Natan a
“primitive” (a racial slur?) unworthy of sitting at the same conference table
with them. Even separate, however, the two looked formidable. As Jean Mitry
remarked, the French film industry seemed to have reconstituted itself as the
powerful force it once was before the war.16 However, the resemblance proved
ironic. In five years, through poor management and speculation, both would
be bankrupt.
By the end of 1929, the French film industry had been pared to a half-
dozen companies with the resources and equipment necessary to begin full-
scale sound film production.17 Immediately after taking over Pathe-Consor-
tium, Bernard Natan enlarged the studios at Joinville-le-pont from four to six
stages, equipped each with RCA sound, and turned them into some of the
best in Europe. Similarly, he also converted his studio at rue Francoeur to
sound. At Paramount, Jesse Lasky and Walter Langer decided to concentrate
their European operations in Paris and named Robert Kane to take over direc¬
tion of their Paris office from Adolphe Osso (who was soon to set up his own
production firm). In a grand splurge, they acquired the old Reservoir studios
in Saint-Maurice and built six new sound stages (using Western Electric
equipment) that surpassed even those at Joinville. Tobis-Klangfilm set up an
affiliate in Paris (under Georges Loureau), purchased the Eclair-Menchen stu¬
dios at Epinay, and converted them with its optical sound system. Jacques
Haik built a new sound studio north of Paris at Courbevoie, while Franco-
Film reequipped the Victorine studios near Nice. For its part, Gaumont con¬
verted its huge studio to sound. Finally, the independent producer Pierre
Braunberger merged Neo-Film with a new production company set up by
Roger Richebe, a regional film distributor in France. Films Braunberger-Ri-
chebe took over the former Abel Gance studios at Billancourt and converted
them with Western Electric sound equipment. The other major companies—
Albatros, S.G.F., S.F.H., Louis Nalpas—were assimilated, reorganized, or
ceased production.
The co-production “internationalism” that so marked the latter half of the
1920s in France carried over into the early practice of sound film production.18
Following the pattern quickly established in the United States (by MGM) as
well as in England and Germany, nearly all the French studios produced not
one but several versions of each film, in the languages of their principal mar¬
kets: French, German, English, and sometimes Spanish and Italian. Occasion¬
ally, translated dialogue was simply postsynchronized, but the standard prac¬
tice at first was to hire a separate cast and director for each different version
of the film. Marcel L’Herbier’s La Femme d’une nuit (1931) was an extreme
case: in French, it was a psychological drama—in Italian, a light comedy—in

63
FRENCH FILM industry German, an operetta! But Paramount, under Robert Kane, was the center,
the fabulous Babel, of multiple-version film production. Beginning in the
spring of 1930, Paramount’s Joinville studio became a veritable ‘‘League of
Nations" of directors, writers, actors, and technicians (including such French
filmmakers as Louis Mercanton, Julien Duvivier, Alberto Cavalcanti, and Claude
Autant-Lara), sometimes operating on a twenty-four-hour factory schedule,
churning out some 100 features and 50 shorts in up to fourteen languages.
This strategy was hopelessly costly, compared to the practice of dubbing and
subtitling, initiated by MGM again, that eventually became standard. Con¬
sequently, after a loss of three million dollars over less than two years, Para¬
mount converted its Joinville studio into Hollywood’s dubbing center for Eu¬
rope. Although the practice of making several complete versions of individual
films disappeared, the American and German production/distribution compa¬
nies retained a strong presence within the French film industry.
A similar form of dependency, attrition, and consolidation marked the ex¬
hibition sector.19 Throughout 1929, French cinema owners experimented with
various kinds of sound film systems (Melovox, Synchronista, Ideal-Sonore),
and those that chose sound-on-disc systems often projected silent films accom¬
panied by their own choice of phonographs, without regard for synchroniza¬
tion. However, most soon followed the Paramount, Madeleine, Cameo, and
other big cinemas in accepting the standardization provided by Western Elec¬
tric, RCA, and, to a lesser extent, Tobis-Klangfilm. Although the major
cinemas in Paris and the larger provincial cities couid afford to make the costly
changeover to sound (and were forced to do so quickly), many of the smaller
cinemas could not. By 1932, sound projection equipment had been installed
in 95 percent of the Paris cinemas but in less than 50 percent of French
cinemas nationwide. The number of small provincial cinemas declined as a
result, and the larger circuits strengthened their hold on the exhibition mar¬
ket. The consortium of Pathe-Natan controlled a total of 166 cinemas (69 in
Paris, 35 in the outer districts of the city, 91 in the provinces, and 2 in
Brussels). G.F.F.A. controlled 46 cinemas (20 in Paris and 26 in the prov¬
inces). Together these two concerns controlled the best cinemas in the country.
‘‘By the end of 1931," according to the figures of Andre Chevanne, ‘‘France
had nineteen different circuits, whose 630 cinemas comprised [the most im¬
portant] 15 percent of the total number of cinemas.’’20
Jacques Feyder, Henri Diamant-Berger, Henri Fescourt, Henry Roussel,
Augusto Genina, and others within the French film industry saw the sound
film revolution as an opportunity, a source of renewal.21 Despite the presence
of Paramount and Tobis-Klangfilm as major French producer-distributors and
the modernization of most French cinemas with RCA and Western Electric
synchronized sound systems, the triumph of the talkies gave the French one
distinct advantage. They could make films in French and about French culture
more easily and more effectively than anyone else. And that was what the
French public was beginning to demand. When Fox Follies 1929 was shown
in English at the Moulin-Rouge-Cinema, in December, 1929, for instance,
the near riot that ensued was a clear sign of that demand.22 So was the high
profit margin (five to six times production costs) on most of the first French
sound films—e.g., Roussel’s La Nuit est a nous (Tobis-de Venloo), Robert
Florey’s La Route est belle (Braunberger-Richebe), Pierre Colombier’s Le Rot de

64
resquilleurs (Pathe-Natan), Julien Duvivier’s David Golder (G.F.F.A.), and Marcel silence in the face
Pagnol’s Marius, directed by Alexander Korda (Paramount).23 The French cin- of sound
ema screens could be theirs again, for the first time since 1914. And they
would be regained, not by any new stratagem of the French film industry,
but by default. Ironically, by promulgating the sound film revolution, the
American film industry divested itself of some of the French market. Further¬
more, the French were helped by the relatively slow reaction of the country’s
economy to the Depression that staggered the United States and Germany. To
the optimists, therefore, the French film industry seemed to have reached a
position analogous to that of the American film industry in 1921—consoli¬
dation into several large corporations that could monopolize the horizon of
their concern. There were differences, of course—less vertical integration, smaller
markets, fewer capital resources, the presence of foreign producers and distrib¬
utors, an approaching Depression. But the French industry appeared to be on
the verge of realizing some of the hopes it had first articulated at the end of
the Great War. It seemed closer to resolving its persistent state of crisis.
Others in the industry, particularly the formerly independent filmmakers,
were pessimistic. After seeing The Jazz Singer, Marcel L’Herbier confessed,
“When the cinematographe said to us all of a sudden: ‘Look here, I, too, am
going to talk,’ I said to myself, ‘So the catastrophe is coming.’ ”24 Gance,
Dulac, Clair, and L’Herbier, at one time or another, all thought it was “the
end of the world.’’ And they had cause for alarm, not about the new technol¬
ogy itself, but, as Clair put it, about “the deplorable use our industrialists
will not fail to make of it.’’25 “We are attending a death or a birth,’’ concluded
Alexandre Arnoux26—but which would it be?
As it turned out, the sound film did not really break with the silent film;
the “perfection’’ of the latter was not entirely lost. But many important people
in the industry and a whole way of filmmaking were adversely affected. The
men who had shaped the industry for fifteen years or more were displaced—
Pathe, Aubert, Sapene, Nalpas, and the unheralded Russian emigres (Ka-
menka, Bloch, Grinieff). For every filmmaker who was able, financially and
technically, to carry on and improve his or her work, there were far more
whose work was abruptly cut off, constrained, or deflected. The reason for this
was simple: the higher costs of film production and increased standardization.
The kind of small- or medium-budget project financed by independent pro¬
ducers quickly became impossible. As a consequence, the entrepreneurial in¬
dependence so characteristic of the 1920s abated, while the debilitating inter¬
est in speculation increased all the more. Ironically, as if still slavishly imitating
the American cinema, a uniformity of style and social vision spread throughout
the industry. As Bernard Eisenschitz has written,

The talkie, by imposing a clumsier, more expensive infrastructure, by putting in

question the narrative modes of silent film, cut short their elan—for it represented a
knockout blow to all the avant-gardists and their advanced practices. . . ,27

Only in the middle and late 1950s would the industry return to the rather
diversified, artisanal conditions of the 1920s. And the New Wave would arise
out of conditions similar to those of the First Wave.28

65
Commercial
Narrative
Film
No, the cinema is not an art. . . . It is chemistry, physics, optics, mechanics,
industry. And, above all, it is commerce.—Jacques de Baroncelli (1923)

Neither an art nor a business, the cinema is a craft.

—Alexandre Arnoux (1945)
 What is the best way to come to grips with the hundreds of commercial Introduction
French narrative films, from 1915 to 1929? That question depends on another,
prior question: What, to the French, exactly was a commercial film? The one
anticipates the answer to the other. To be commercial, paradoxically, a film
need not have been profitable. If profitability were the issue, then Rene Clair’s
Paris qui dort (1924) would be commercial whereas Aubert’s extravaganza,
Salammbo (1925) would not. Similarly, the means of production financing
hardly provided a clear-cut criterion. Many of the films one could include as
part of a narrative avant-garde, for instance, were actually initiated or under¬
written as commercial projects by the major production companies—e.g., Abel
Gance’s La Roue (1922) and Napoleon (1927), Marcel L’Flerbier’s El Dorado
(1921) and L’Argent (1929), Germaine Dulac’s La Souriante Madame Beudet
(1923), Jean Epstein’s Coeur fidele (1923), and even Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de
Jeanne dArc (1928).
Several filmmakers from the period offer a way to resolve these contradic¬
tions. “In cinema jargon,’’ quipped Jean Renoir, “a commercial film is not
one which necessarily makes money, but one which is conceived and executed
according to the principles of businessmen.”1 But what were those principles?
In one of the earliest books on French film, Le Cinema (1919), Henri Diamant-
Berger argued that, first, the producer, not the filmmaker, made the crucial
decisions that determined a film’s production.2 Henri Fescourt, one of Cine-
romans’ most consistently successful directors, agreed: “With few exceptions,
it was not the filmmaker who chose the subject. In most cases, that was the
prerogative of the producer. . . .”3 Second, the essential element of a film, for
the producer, was the scenario or story. In fact, said Diamant-Berger, “it was
the film.”4 And what kinds of stories did he tend to choose? Here is Fescourt
again: “The story most crammed with events or spectacular elements—a story
with a recognizable title, which had already garnered accolades in the theater
or in the bookstalls.”5 Diamant-Berger was more precise. Even if “roughly
[and childishly] defined,” such stories were formulas or genres that could be
duplicated for mass circulation, exactly as were the products in “a grocery or
lingerie shop.”6 As a site of pleasure, therefore, the French cinema seemed to
attract and hold its audience, not with the images of popular stars (which was
much more common in the United States), but with the familiarity or noto¬
riety of a film’s subject or story.7
These statements suggest that the best way to analyze the commercial French
narrative films of the period is to consider them within the framework of a
loosely defined genre system in French film production.8 Such an approach
offers more than the convenience of labeling; it imposes certain questions.
What film genres dominated the French cinema? What were the material
conditions of each genre’s development? What were the privileged conventions
of its form—its fundamental structural components of character, setting, ac¬
tion, style? What was the social or ideological function of its tacit contract
with the audience? Which specific films were most characteristic of a genre,
which were most popular and profitable, and which were especially effective
either in resolving a genre’s representation of cultural conflicts or in changing
its conventions? Finally, which genres in particular provided the context of
accepted conventions within which and against which the narrative avant-
garde tended to position itself?

69
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE The distribution of film genres within the French film industry seems to
FILM have had its origins in the kinds of films produced on a regular basis prior to
the Great War, when the cinema was establishing itself as a form of spectacle
entertainment. According to Georges Sadoul, by 1908 Pathe-Freres had “de¬
fined, classified, organized, and developed” a catalogue of film forms that
would consistently attract a mass clientele. The most important of these were
“the newsreels, ‘dramatic and realist scenes,’ ‘Biblical stories,’ and . . . comic
films with their ‘wild and woolly’ chases.”9 Several others (associated more
with Georges Melies) had already declined in popularity and nearly disap¬
peared—the trick film and the fairy tale or fantasy.10 During this period, two
of Pathe’s products underwent significant changes. The comic film, of course,
came to focus on the misadventures of a single clown or comic type—Andre
Deed, Prince Rigadin, Max Linder. The “dramatic and realist scene,” on the
other hand, became a label for several different kinds of films that reflected
divisions within French society. There were “social” films about the working
classes, “sentimental dramas” about the bourgeoisie, and crime films (“dramas
of passion”) involving either class as well as bands of outsiders.11 These latter
films provided the basis for the rapid emergence of the series film and the
serial. About the same time, one last format was tested successfully—the Film
d’Art and S.C.A.G.L. adaptations of literary classics, especially those from the
theater.
During the war, in the face of competition from the American cinema,
which threatened the viability of much of their production, the French aban¬
doned the comic short almost altogether—to Sennett, Chaplin, Arbuckle, Lloyd,
and Keaton—and concentrated most of their production efforts on the serial
and particular kinds of feature-length films. The popularity of the serial quickly
led to a standardized format of half-hour episodes projected weekly over a
period of several months, a format that could handle stories of crime, senti¬
mental melodrama, and historical adventure and intrigue. In contrast to the
serial, the term grand film designated a film of at least an hour in length,
designed to be shown complete in a single seance or performance. By 1920,
the average French feature was anywhere from four to six reels or 1,200 to
1,800 meters long.12 Since the format encompassed a variety of genres that
shifted in priority as the decade advanced, their development demands more
specific attention.
Prior to the war, the first feature films had been literary adaptations, many
of them drawn from theatrical productions. However, by the war’s end, the
plays that now were turned into film scenarios tended to be modern or con¬
temporary—principally boulevard melodramas—typifying a shift away from
the classic dramas, which had already been pretty well rummaged through.
Simultaneously, a further shift was underway to film adaptations of novels and
short stories, especially nineteenth-century realist fiction. During the early
years of the twenties, therefore, the bourgeois melodrama and the realist film,
followed by minor genres such as the fantasy, the Arabian Nights adventure
story, and the boulevard comedy, had precedence. These were superseded rather
quickly, however, by larger and longer superproductions. After the phenom¬
enal success of Les Trots Mousquetaires (1921-1922), Les Opprimes (1923), and
Koenigsmark (1923), the French turned more and more to large-scale historical
reconstructions, which soon became the “top line” of production. As the na-

70
tion rebuilt the northern provinces devastated by the war, so too did the film SERIALS
industry reimagine and thus give representation to ideologically significant
figures and events in certain periods of French history. This genre was chal¬
lenged in turn, around 1926-1927, by the development of studio spectaculars
in a generalized modern European decor. These films of contemporary life
played out in the new chic restaurants, nightclubs, theaters, and resorts sought
to position the French within an emerging worldwide consumer society. When
the industry finally changed over to talking films, in 1929-1930, the prefer¬
ence for adaptations from fiction ebbed once again in favor of contemporary
theatrical productions.

This brief overview of French film genres provides a point of departure. The
classification schema I offer is obviously tentative, in the absence of much
prior research; and it is perhaps less than consistent—but then my purpose
does not include a theoretical consideration of genre. As Henri Diamant-Ber-
ger confessed, “most of the really successful films prove the instability of any
rigid classification.’’13’ Still, the schema can be valuable if it helps to mark out
areas of intertextual relations among disparate films and to suggest ways that
the films may be read contextually within the structures and processes of
French culture.

In one sense, the serial was simply a transformation or retooling of the Serials
prewar series film. Initially, there were several kinds of series films—some
concocted in imitation of story serializations in the popular magazines, others
drawn from imported dime novels and their French equivalents. They included
westerns (Riffle Bill, Arizona Bill) and burlesque (Onesime, Bout-de-zan), but
the most lasting was the police or criminal series.1 Its period of formation was
1908 to 1914, from Victorin Jasset’s Nick Winter, Le Roi des detectives (Eclair,
1908)—which soon had imitators in Britain, Denmark, and the United States—
to Jasset’s Zigomar (Eclair, 1911), Zigomar contre Nick Winter (Eclair, 1912),
and Zigomar, peau d'anguille (Eclair, 1913); Georges Denola’s Rocambole (Pathe-
Freres, 1913); and Louis Feuillade’s Fantomas (Gaumount, 1913-1914).2 The
criminal heroes of these films were especially popular, which made Arquilliere,
as Zigomar, and Rene Navarre, as Fantomas, early French film stars.
It would be imprecise to call the series film simply a serial in another guise.
Each film in the series format was complete in itself, and the series was re¬
leased, more often than not, in an irregular pattern. For example, Fantomas
was really five separate films involving the same major characters (Fantomas,
Inspector Juve, the journalist Fandor), and they were released over a one-year
period at intervals of two to four months.3 There were exceptions to this
format—the most important probably was Leonce Perret’s L'Enfant de Pans
(Gaumont, 1913)4—but nothing to anticipate the abrupt change that occurred
late in 1915 with the conjunction of two famous films.
First came Feuillade’s Les Vampires (starring Musidora and Edouard Mathe),
which opened at the Gaumont-Palace, 13 November 1915. From then until
30 June 1916, its ten semi-independent parts were released anywhere from
three weeks to two months apart.5 Although quite popular, its success was
quickly superseded by Pathe-Freres’ Les Mysteres de New-York (starring Pearl

71
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

20. An early poster for

Fantomas (1913-1914)

White), which opened three weeks later, on 4 December 1915. This French-
American import caused a sensation not unlike that caused by Eugene Sue’s
novel, Les Mysteres de Paris (1842), from which it slyly drew its title.6 To
distribute the film, Pathe compiled episodes from the first three Pearl White
serials which its New York counterpart, Pathe-Exchange, in partnership with
William Randolph Hearst, had made as part of a popular new trend in Amer¬
ican films.7 Following the American format, Les Mysteres de New York was made
up of linked episodes, twenty-two in number, released in a continuous weekly
series until 29 April 1916. Furthermore, its story was transposed by Pierre
Decourcelle and printed daily, weeks in advance, in one of Paris’s largest
newspapers, Le Matin, as well as in several provincial papers.8 La Renaissance
du livre then published Decourcelle’s novelization, episode by episode, in a
series of “volumes” that together could constitute a book—the first of their
Collection des Romans-Cinemas 9 From that moment on, the French adopted the
practice with enthusiasm, and the series film became the serial, the cine-roman,
or the “film in episodes.”
For nearly four years, the epidemic of serials developed according to the
parameters established by Fantomas, Les Vampires, and Les Mysteres de New-York.
These included a contemporary milieu with many shifts in setting (some ex-

72
otic); a series of ingenious crimes, searches, entrapments, and escapes; and a SERIALS
clutch of characters distinguished by their fascination with (or revulsion from)
evil (sometimes defined sexually) and by their position in a social class or
ethnic group. Nearly every French producer turned out several such films on
crime and/or detection annually, and distributors imported even more from
the United States. In 1916, for instance, Abel Gance made several thrillers
{Les Gaz mortels, Barberousse) for Film d’Art in order to take advantage of
the genre’s popularity. The following year, also for Film d’Art, Henri Pouctal
filmed Arthur Bernede’s patriotic diatribe, Chantecoq, as a serial (published in
Le Petit Parisien); and Germaine Dulac directed Ames de fous (starring Eve
Francis) in six episodes.10 But there were some differences among all these
films, differences which were most apparent in the products of the two major
companies, Gaumont and Pathe-Freres.
Most of the serials made by Pathe-Exchange and imported into France had
women as their central characters. The major heroines were Pearl White—Les
Exploits d’Elaine {The Perils of Pauline), Le Masque aux dents blanches {The Iron
Claw}, Le Courrier de Washington {Pearl of the Army}, La Peine s’ennuie {The
Fatal Ring}—and her chief rival Ruth Roland—Who Pays?, The Red Circle.u
Usually the heroine was the victim or threatened victim of an outlandish
scheme—the assassination of her father, her own murder for inheritance money,
corruption and criminal implication by her fiance—but she was also the one
who tracked down or outwitted the villains and defeated them. Pearl White
especially was a resourceful, agile, intrepid adventuress, willing to take on a
gang of toughs as easily as a cream tart. In her optimistic blend of naivete
and natural strength (in this she resembled another favorite actress of the
French, Mary Pickford), she may have seemed to the war-pressed French pop¬
ulace a kind of modern-day Jeanne d’Arc (her villains often were German
actors or had German names). Francis Lacassin suggests another, darker reason
for the success of her serials and of the others imported by Pathe-Freres. It
was less her triumphs than her persecutions that drew the crowds—persecu¬
tions so often inflicted in subterranean worlds that they reminded Lacassin of
the Marquis de Sade and his notorious chateaux. Was she a kind of Justine
who “fell into the arms of vice all the while believing that she was protecting
herself?”12 It is difficult to decide whether the heroine of these serials is a “new
woman,” a model of emulation, or simply a reconstituted image of the “clas¬
sical” figure of violation.
The serials that Louis Feuillade made for Gaumont during this period shared
a kind of schizoid interest in women characters, but the scandalous success
they acquired came initially from their fascination with crime. The black-clad
criminals of Fantomas and Les Vampires are almost magically adept at manip¬
ulating, to their own advantage, the spaces in and around Paris. In Les Vam¬
pires■, they can commandeer automobiles, scramble about moving trains, dis¬
appear around corners and down manholes, and creep unseen over the rooftops
of the city. They can anesthetize a whole party of wealthy Parisians and rob
them of their jewels or pluck a woman from an apartment window and drop
her into a car waiting below. In the long-take, deep-space, long shots that
characterize these films, Feuillade and his cameraman, Guerin, come close to
celebrating a revolutionary underworld force against society. At the time,
some people were disturbed particularly by the close correlation between Fan-

73
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

21. A publicity photo of the

ballet sequence in the first
episode of Les Vampires (1915-
1916)

tomas or the Vampire gangs’ exploits and the activities of the anarchist Bonnot
band that terrorized Paris in 1912.13
Yet, as Richard Roud has observed, in Les Vampires, “the battle is not only
political and social, but also sexual.’’14 The Vampire gang goes through several
leaders during its twelve episodes—the Grand Vampire, Satanas, and Vene-
nos—but the original French screen femme fatale—Musidora as Irma Vep—
outlasts them all. In episode after episode, this sorceress appears and vanishes
in a different disguise: as a demure family maid, a young male secretary, a
laboratory assistant, a wealthy widow, and a street tough. Gradually, the
reporter hero, Guerande (Edouard Mathe), becomes infatuated with her, es¬
pecially when she helps kidnap his own wife. But Musidora’s end already is
figured in the opening episode when a black bat-winged dancer (Stacia Na-
pierkowska) hovers threateningly over a white-gowned woman, only to col¬
lapse and die of poison. Sure enough, in the final moments of the film, in
another ballet fantastique, the kidnapped wife guns down Musidora in a rescue
attempt, and Guerande lingers longingly over her dead body.
All this is conspicuously absent from Feuillade’s most popular serial, Judex
(1917), and its successor, La Nouvelle Mission de Judex (1918). Perhaps fright¬
ened by the temporary banning of several episodes from Les Vampires, Gaumont
and Feuillade deliberately gave Judex an “uplifting moral tone.’’ Although
Musidora was revived as the villainess, Diana Monti, the real star now was
the detective hero (Rene Creste), whose status was epitomized in the transfor-

74
 SERIALS

22. Rene Creste as Judex in

Judex (1917)

mation of the Vampire gang’s sinister black costumes into Judex’s black cape.
“That majestic cape that he threw over his shoulder in such a noble gesture
. . . was Judex," wrote Bardeche and Brasillach, “the rest was of little impor¬
tance. . . ,’’15 Louis Delluc, despite his admiration for Feuillade’s technical
skill, was considerably less charitable: ‘ Judex [and] La Nouvelle Mission deJudex
. . . are crimes certainly more serious than those which have been condemned
as traitorous by the Military Tribunal.’’16 The only relief came in Marcel Le¬
vesque’s antics as Judex’s confidant, Cocantin.
It is worth pausing a moment on Feuillade’s crime serials. Although they
were less popular in their time than was the police serial, Judex (which did
not protect them, nonetheless, from criticism by the young film critics and
cineastes around Delluc), the crime serials have had their champions—from
the Surrealists in the 1920s to more recent figures as diverse as Alain Resnais
and Annette Michelson. The Surrealists were struck by Feuillade’s vision of “a
defamiliarized reality.’’ The conjunction of fantastic acts in recognizably real
spaces induced, for them, a peculiar state of disorientation, evoking the mar¬
velous. “There is nothing more realistic and, at the same time, more poetic
than the serial,’’ wrote Breton and Aragon, “in Les Mysteres de New-York and
Les Vampires, one discovers a real sense of our century.’’17 For Resnais, con¬
versely, “Feuillade’s cinema is very close to dreams—and therefore . . . per¬
haps the most realistic kind of all.’’18 For Michelson, according to Roud, his
films reveal the architectural structure of bourgeois Paris as everywhere dan-

75
 i
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

23. Suzanne Grandais in

L’Essor (1920)

gerous, threatened with being undermined or subverted.19 I myself wonder if,

in their conjunction of the real and the unreal, the banal and the unexpectedly
terrifying, the films also convey, through displacement, the French experience
of the war—the absurd proximity of normal life to the ghastly horrors of
trench warfare.20
From the beginning, the serial was an easy target for parody. In fact, Jacques
Feyder did his filmmaking apprenticeship on one of the earliest and best of
these parodies, Le Pied qui etreint (1916).21 In this four-episode film, the gang’s
signal of recognition is a raised wriggling foot (ridiculing episode one of Les
Mysteres de Netv-York: “The Clutching Hand’’), and the gang boss is carted
about in a baby carriage. In the fourth episode, he even imitates Chaplin in a
robbery scheme. Finally, the hero and his boy sidekick watch themselves pur¬
sue the gang on a cinema screen, followed by their models—Marcel Levesque,
Suzanne Grandais, Musidora, and Edouard Mathe. Such parodies, however,
only seemed to whet the public appetite for the genre.
From 1919 to 1922, the serial’s continued popularity began to form a
bulwark against the onslaught of American films that threatened to displace
French films from the cinemas. In the process, the formula underwent some
changes. Perhaps these changes came about because, in the postwar society, a
central commission now licensed and thus exercised some control over all
commercial films. Perhaps they paralleled, through imitation or example, the
development of subjects in feature films. Whatever the cause, although the
format had become standardized at a dozen episodes, each from 600 to 900
meters in length, the parameters of the serial shifted and were redistributed
in several different modes.22
As a backdrop to these changes, plenty of films still held to the familiar
formula of the war period. From its New York branch office, Pathe-Cinema
and then Pathe-Consortium continued to import serials starring Pearl White,
Ruth Roland, Marguerite Courtot, Irene Castle, and even Harry Houdini.23
Pathe-Consortium also distributed film adaptations of popular novels by Pierre

76
 SERIALS

24. The Vampire gang leaders

in Tih-Minh (1919)

Decourcelle and Jules Mary: Pouctal’s Gigolette (1921), Burguet’s Baillonnee

(1922), Etievant’s La Pocharde (1921) and La Lille sauvage (1922).24 Through
his own personal company, Societe des Cineromans, Rene Navarre starred in
a half-dozen films of espionage, such as Edouard Violet’s La Nouvelle Aurore
(1919), in which he tried vainly to recapture his old fame as Fantomas.25 For
Phocea, the small Marseille production company, Suzanne Grandais appeared
in several serials, regaining her earlier status as France’s first female star.26 She
was the only French film actress who could rival Pearl White. Even Louis
Delluc admired her: “Oh, how charming she is. Not all of her films may be
good, but she is always good in them, that is to say, smiling and amusing.’’27
In 1920, her career was cut short when, working on a film by Charles Burguet
in Alsace, she was killed in an auto accident. The most promising of these
films, however, was Alexandre Volkoffs La Maison du mystere (1922-1923),
produced by Films Ermolieff. Its chief surprise, according to Jean Mitry, was
the multiple disguises of Ivan Mosjoukine. His “erudite, concise, synthetic’’
acting “contrasted sharply with the exaggeration of most French actors’’ and
made critics compare him favorably with Sessue Hayakawa.28
A real break in the genre, interestingly enough, came in the work of Louis
Feuillade. His first two serials after the war, made in and around the Nice
studio he had taken over for Gaumont, surprisingly returned to the criminal
world. In Tih-Minh (1919), a French explorer (Rene Creste as Jacques d’Athys),
his servant (Biscot as Placide), and an English diplomat (Edouard Mathe as
Sir Francis Gray) are in search of a secret document that will lead them to an
immense war treasure. Their antagonists include a Doctor Gilson (actually the
German agent, Marx, played by Gaston Michel), a Hindu fakir, and the res¬
urrected Vampire gang, who have taken over a villa named Circe along with
its “living dead.’’ Jacques falls in love with an Indochinese princess, Tih-Minh
(Mary Harald), a young woman (and orphan) who has taken refuge with his
family; and the villains kidnap her (several times) in hopes she can direct them
to the treasure.29 Although Francis Lacassin has described the world of Tib-

11
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

25. A kidnapping on the

grounds of the estate in
Barrabas (1920)

Minh as a kind of tourist’s nightmare of exotic locales,30 the schematic narra¬

tive seems most striking for the way it replays the nationalist and imperialist
conflicts of the Great War.
In Barrabas (1920), the criminal gang is even more international in scope,
operating behind the cover of an important banking corporation. Rudolph
Strelitz (Gaston Michel) is the head of this double organization whose main
bank leads directly to a health clinic, a luxury hotel, and a simple guesthouse
on the grounds of a lost chateau—which is really a fantastic universe ruled
over by the mysterious figure of Barrabas. The intrigue develops slowly from
the guillotining of an innocent man to the revelation of Barrabas as an im¬
poster and to his condemnation. For Lacassin, the title suggests the continu¬
ing, ineradicable existence of evil, for it is “the password that allows the gang
members to move back and forth from the world of appearances to the parallel
nightmare world.’’31 Could Barrabas bear comparison with Fritz Lang’s Dr.
Mabuse, der Spieler (1922)?
In 1920, either because Feuillade’s last two serials declined in popularity or
because the Commission du Controle des Films was censoring film violence,
Gaumont decided that the public no longer wanted to see crime serials, no
matter how fantastic, and Feuillade went along with him.32 Where previously
he had shown either a fascination for the criminals or a moralizing interest in
the “dispenser of justice,’’ now, in three straight serials—Les Deux Gamines
(1921), VOrpheline (1921), and Pansette (1922)—Feuillade redirected his at-

78
 SERIALS

26. Rene Clair and Sandra

Milowanoff in Pansette (1922)

tention to the victims, all young women. These victims, however, were a far
cry from the robust, combative characters of Pearl White or Suzanne Grandais.
As embodied in the Russian emigre actress (and former St. Petersburg balle¬
rina), Sandra Milowanoff, they were closer to the exquisite purity and fragile
innocence of a Lillian Gish. 33 To match this usually orphaned ingenue heroine
(doubled in Les Deux Gamines), the figure of the detective gave way to a
“sentimental hero” (one played by Rene Clair).34 The narrative became less an
accumulation of bizarre and baffling intrigues and more a character-oriented,
dramatic structuring of separation, adventure/misfortune, and reunion. The
former exotic or urban settings were replaced by family dwellings, villages,
and convents in the provinces. Older people and children became prominent.
And in the end, the long-suffering characters realized their undying hopes in
marriage. “A simple shift in the poles of attraction,’’ writes Lacassin, “was
sufficient to transform a powerful magnetic field into a pool of tears.”35 In
their frankly romantic and sentimental appeal, Feuillade’s serials had become
lengthy bourgeois melodramas.
Although the few film critics and historians who have seen these melodra¬
matic serials find them much less interesting than Les Vampires, Tih-Minh, and
Barrabas, the French public of the early 1920s, most film reviewers, and
Feuillade’s own friends were delighted. The three films coincided with a wave
of sentimental popular novels that held French readers enthralled just after the
war—Les Deux Gamines even drew its title from two of them, D’Ennery’s Les
Deux Orphelines and Pierre Decourcelle’s Les Deux GossesV6 Often these novels
were stories of orphans, and Feuillade’s new serials were among the first films—
along with Pouctal’s Travail (1919), Bernard’s Le Petit Cafe (1919), Baroncel-
li’s Le Secret du Lone Star (1920), L’Herbier’s El Dorado (1921), and Poirier’s
Jocelyn (1922)—to establish as a dominant subject in the French cinema of the
1920s the situation of the abandoned child or of the lone adult faced with
abandoning or adopting a child/orphan.37 The collective French interest in,
even obsession with, this subject may have a simple historical basis—the ter¬
rible loss of men in the war as well as the decline in marriages and births
during and after the war, both of which perpetuated a situation that was well

79
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

27. Leon Mathot (left) in Le

Comte de Monte-Cristo (1917-
1918)

established by 1900.38 To the film industry, however, Feuillade’s postwar

serials also served as models in their desperate attempts to set off the “French¬
ness,” the cultural superiority or sensibility, of French commercial films from
the American competition. In the words of Aladin,

Ah! how ridiculous and infantile the American serials seem when we attend the pre¬
view of a serial such as Les Deux Gamines. . . . Here, in a word, is no silly story, but
one governed by rational imagination, by logical dramatic development, rigorous,
well-designed, and magisterially executed.39

That concern for Frenchness was equally apparent in the films resulting from
a second shift in the parameters of the serial. This change probably had its
origins in Henri Pouctal’s 1918 version of Alexandre Dumas’s Le Comte de
Monte-Cristo (starring Leon Mathot in his most popular role), produced by
Louis Nalpas at Film d’Art and released in eight episodes.40 Till then, the
serial had been restricted to current cineromans and to the subject of criminal
activity in the modern, mostly urban world. Suddenly it expanded to include
“a pseudo-historical subject, full of costume adventures embroidered with a
facile fabulism.”41 “Monte-Cristo is very good,” wrote the usually reserved Louis
Delluc, “very well conceived in its fabulous action and its dramatic interest.
I have never before seen such fine understanding of just what a popular film
should be like.”42 Georges Sadoul was also complimentary: “The story is sim¬
ple, clear, direct. The editing is concise and intelligent, the lighting advanced
[the cameraman was Guerin] but without an excessive precision. A lovely sense
of natural landscapes gives a poetical quality to many episodes. . . .”43 In due
time, especially after a rerelease late in 1920, the way opened by Le Comte de
Monte-Cristo was seized on by two newly independent producers.
Louis Nalpas had left Film d’Art in 1918 to set up his own production
company in Nice. One of his most ambitious projects was Henri Fescourt’s
Mathias Sandorf (1921), an adaptation of Jules Verne’s transposition of the
same Dumas novel. A story of intrigue and adventure involving a Hungarian
independence hero, Mathias Sandorf was released early in 1921 in nine weekly
episodes. It became so popular, however, that it was recut later in the year

80
and rereleased as a smg\z-seance film that ran for seven months at the Cirque SERIALS
d Hiver.44 Francis Lacassin speaks of it in terms similar to those he used to
praise the Frenchness of Feuillade’s serials:

An adventure film,” certainly, but one that differs from the stale and uneven resale
items that the Americans dispense—because of its strong dramatic structure, the qual¬
ity of its acting based on a well-established psychology, the intelligent choice of
landscapes, and the splendor of its photography. . . ,45

At the same time, an even more ambitious project was initiated by Henri
Diamant-Berger. His plan was to film the most popular French adventure
novel, Dumas’s Les Trois Mousquetaires, complete in twelve unprecedented hour-
long episodes. The role of D’Artagnan was offered first to Douglas Fairbanks,
but Fairbanks refused to work in such a vulgar genre as the serial.46 Stimulated
by the idea, nonetheless, he counteroffered by inviting Diamant-Berger to
Hollywood to direct him in a two-hour American version of the novel. Refus¬
ing to cut his scenario so drastically, and with Charles Pathe’s financial bless¬
ing, Diamant-Berger went ahead with his plan (as did Fairbanks), using an
entirely French cast (Aime Simon-Girard, Edouard de Max, Armand Bernard,
Henri Rollin, Vallee, Charles Dullin) and shooting much of the film on lo¬
cations, particularly in the old fortified city of Perouges in the hills above
Lyon.47 Initially projected for three consecutive gala evenings at the Trocadero
in September, 1921, Les Trois Mousquetaires was shown over a three-month
period all over France, accompanied by its publication in Comoedia and many
provincial newspapers.48 Its phenomenal success—17 million francs against a
cost of 2.5 million—convinced Diamant-Berger and Pathe-Consortium to make
a second adaptation from Dumas, Vingt Ans apres, which was released in ten
episodes late the following year.49 The success of these two films, in fact, also
helped establish the genre of historical reconstructions.
By 1922-1923, the serial had become both an economic strategy and an
umbrella concept covering various kinds of narratives of adventure and in¬
trigue: police (Fescourt’s Rouletabille chez les bohemiens, 1922), criminal (Feuil¬
lade’s Le Fils du flibustier, 1922), sentimental (Feuillade’s Parisette, 1922), cos¬
tume (Burguet’s Les Mysteres de Paris, 1922, starring Huguette Duflos), and,
for want of any better label, a lackluster hodgepodge (Rene Leprince’s L’Em-
pereur des pauvres, 1922).50 There were even more parodies: L’Herbier’s “hu¬
moresque,” Villa Destin (1921), and Mosjoukine’s Le Brasier ardent (1923).
More and more critics and producers realized that the serial had reached a dead
end. There were complaints about the length of time required to see one serial,
about their monopolization of cinema screens to the disadvantage of other
French films, about the stagnation of repeated formulas.51 In 1922, Pathe-
Consortium stopped importing American serials when Pathe-Exchange was
sold to a group of Merrill Lynch investors in New York. In September, trou¬
bled by less than anticipated grosses, the company abandoned its expensive
costume serials.52 In the summer of 1923, after Pathe-Consortium had rere¬
leased Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (a second time) and Gaumont had rereleased
Judex in a reduced, single-seance format, Louis Feuillade admitted to physical
and artistic exhaustion.53 During this period, Cine-Journal, Mon-Cine, and Ci-
nemagazine engaged in a lengthy public debate on the discredited serial format.
Mon-Cine even conducted an extensive survey among its readers and concluded

81
COMMERCIAL narrative that the serial indeed was desperately in need of reform.54 What the public
eilm wanted, wrote Pierre Desclaux, was a serial of six to eight episodes on an
historical subject.55 And that is precisely what they got when Jean Sapene,
the advertising editor of he Matin, turned film producer.
Sapene’s prescription for reviving the genre depended chiefly on organiza¬
tion.56 After taking over the Societe des Cineromans from Rene Navarre in
1922, he built up a double-barreled distribution system of cine-romans that
involved Pathe-Consortium in association with the Lutetia cinema chain and
the major Paris newspaper consortium of he Matin, he Journal, h Echo de Paris,
and he Petit ParisienN His new production team was led by Louis Nalpas
(chief producer or “artistic director’’) and Feuillade’s former scriptwriter, Ar¬
thur Bernede (scenario department head).58 Their task was to engage reputable
directors, scriptwriters, and actors for an annual production schedule of four
serials, standardized in eight episodes, to be released evenly throughout the
year. They were aided in their efforts by a spirited defense of the serial format
by Pierre Gilles in the pages of Le Mating From 1923 to 1927, outside of
an occasional film by Gaumont (Feuillade’s last films), Aubert, Phocea, and
Albatros, the serial became the exclusive property of Sapene’s Cineromans.
The films themselves, beginning with Henri Fescourt and Gaston Leroux’s
Rouletahille chez les bohemiens (1922), adhered basically to the parameters already
established—with one important difference. Some, such as Germaine Dulac’s
Gossette (1923) and Rene Leprince’s h'Enfant des Halles (1924), continued the
pattern of combining elements of the police and sentimental serials. These
still made much of children and orphans. Others exploited the exoticism of
adventures in the colonies—e.g., Le Somptier’s hes Fils du soleil (1924). How¬
ever, they were all outnumbered by costume adventures drawn from original
scenarios rather than from popular literary classics. Now, more often than not,
the hero was an historical figure. War heroes and adventurer-brigands from
the period of 1750 to 1850 were especially popular—e.g., Gaston Ravel’s Tao
(1923), Jean Kemm’s Vidocq (1923) and L'Enfant-Roi (1923), Fescourt’s Man¬
darin (1924), Luitz-Morat’s Surcouf (1925) and Jean Chouan (1926).60 In their
return to a rich French world and an optimistic, valiant hero, both belonging
to a supposedly more glorious past, these latter films can be read as part of a
collective attempt at an ideological restoration or redefinition that is even more
visible in the expensive historical reconstruction films.
At least two of the Cineromans productions survive and allow us more
than a passing glance at the last important serials. Mandarin (1924), one of
the most well-received of Cineromans’ serials, had as its hero a kind of Robin
Hood of tax-collecting (Fairbanks’s Robin Hood had been very popular in France
the year before), whose exploits were based on an historical figure operating
in the Dauphine region around 1750.61 Claude Beylie and Francis Lacassin
describe his particular brand of derring-do:

Declaring himself the enemy of the landowners, attacking their collectors to whom
he sold contraband tobacco in exchange for their cashboxes, benefiting from the com¬
placent indifference of the local gendarmes, Louis Mandarin, in less than three years,
disrupted the French fiscal system and escaped all the soldiers ordered to pursue him.62

Perhaps in anticipation of a sequel, Bernede and Fescourt allowed their hero

to avoid capture and the guillotine, through the intercession of Voltaire, no

82
less (who actually did support him in several writings and letters). Instead of SERIALS
emphasizing complicated intrigues or the sentimentality of suffering, accord¬
ing to Beylie and Lacassin, Mandarin seems to have gone for a deft combina¬
tion of action and atmosphere:

It is a fast, concise film, intercut with spectacular horseback chases and explosive
confrontations. In the exterior shooting, Fescourt has used the ravines and gravel
slopes of the Ni^ois back country to remarkable effect. . . . [It] remains a model of
the French adventure film, full of a sweeping epic inspiration whose secret is perhaps
lost.63

A critic writing at the time of its release, however, was much less enthusiastic:
. the technique of Mandarin—especially that which involves ‘montage’—
is regressive by several years. ... If you wish to follow innovations in the
serial, look again at Gossette and La Maison du mystere."6A
Indeed, Gossette (1923) does differ markedly from Mandarin, but its avant-
garde status is highly suspect. The story that Dulac was assigned to film was
in the tradition of Feuillade’s L’Orpheline or Parisette: the sentimental hero,
who is falsely accused of murder, disappears; the ingenue heroine (already an
orphan) is taken in by the hero’s parents who then are killed, abandoning her
again to misfortune; the hero and heroine team up to discover the “truth”;
the real villain is unmasked; the old parents’ spirits bless the young couple’s
union.65 This tearful tale is complicated by frequent flashbacks (the lack of
intertitles in the only existing print does not help), but several choices that
Dulac makes in the narrative are of interest.66 Most of the film was shot in
the old Pathe studio at Vincennes and then at the Levinsky studio in Joinville-
le-pont, so it eschews the natural landscapes that function so prominently in
Mandarin. Instead, the film relies heavily on close shots (MSs to CUs) of the
characters—often starkly or flatly lit against dark backgrounds (a lighting
technique which had become rather standard practice in French silent films).
It also occasionally uses a subjective montage, including soft-focus images
(e.g., the hero’s hours of half-drunken peregrinations before he is accused of
murder) and a montage of objects (e.g., the narration of the initial murder by
means of a glass, a cigar, hands, and shadows). Fiowever, these supposedly
avant-garde devices are awkwardly integrated into the film, and Dulac herself
felt deceived and unduly compromised by Cineromans after making it.67
It was during this period, also, that one of the best parodies of the genre
appeared in Jean Epstein’s Les Aventures de Robert Macaire (1925), produced by
Albatros. For his scenario, Epstein drew on the legendary character of the
fictional Dauphine highwayman created by Frederick Lemaitre as well as by
the famous series of caricatures by Daumier.68 The narrative reminds one of
Fescourt’s in Mandarin—five separate intrigues and adventures (beginning in
1824) involving Macaire (Jean Angelo), his sidekick Bertrand (Alex Allin),
and a bevy of women and victims.69 Epstein’s concern for atmosphere, how¬
ever, is much more pronounced than Fescourt’s. In fact, the authentic and
sometimes exquisite Corot-like landscapes (photographed by Paul Guichard),
together with the realistic interiors (designed by Lazare Meerson), tend to
counterpoint the adventures and reduce their significance.
But there was method in Epstein’s apparent mama. According to Pierre
Leprohon,

83
28. Alex Allin and Jean
Angelo in Les Aventures de
Robert Macaire (1925-1926)

In choosing this picaresque hero of popular literature, the filmmaker could—by jux¬
taposing the intelligence and cunning of his two comrades Robert and Bertrand with
the stupidities of the other characters—both amuse the general public as well as amuse
himself by parodying the genre that he seemed to serve.'0

Jean Angelo plays Macaire with a blithe hauteur that belies his often well-
worn and changing costumes. He saves aristocratic ladies from death, rescues
good people from the gendarmes, and steals fortunes to set up young couples
in marriage; but he is not above picking Bertrand’s pocket. Bertrand, on the
other hand, fails at nearly everything he tries, but that does not deter him.
Begging for food, he is scared off by a farm family that includes a tough old
woman, a mangy dog, and a boy picking his nose. After Macaire rescues Mile,
de Sermeze (Suzanne Bianchetti) from drowning, Bertrand whistles for her
horse and watches it scamper away. Lovesick over a maid, who keeps reap¬
pearing with a different man, he tries to drown himself in an inches-deep
fountain and, then, with a huge blunderbuss, succeeds only in blasting his
hat. Finally, he is defeated in a duel with the sentimental hero (Nino Costan-

84
 BOURGEOIS MELODRAMAS

29. Sarah Bernhardt in Jeanne

Dore (1915)

tini) and then is beaten up for good measure. Macaire and Bertrand, however,
sometimes do make a good team, as when, in their hilarious robbery of a
farmer’s wife, they disguise themselves as St. Anthony and a half-blind, purse-
snuffling pig. In the end, on a ridge road overlooking a picturesque valley,
they swear to become honest men and stride off over a hill, picking one
another’s pockets.

By 1927-1928, the serial had all but disappeared, as it had even earlier in
Germany and the United States. Its once prominent position in Cineromans’
production schedule had passed to the Films de France series and to the ex¬
pensive spectaculars the company was co-producing with Cine-France and others.
As more and more publicity was given to these bigger films and as American
and German films consolidated their hold on the French public, cinema pro¬
grams increasingly were geared to the single-seance films and even to the Amer¬
ican double-bill format. As a consequence, the serial declined in popularity
and profitability. Flere the history of the French film serial seems to close off.
But the study of that history, despite the fine work of Francis Lacassin and
Francois de la Breteque, has hardly begun.

As the grand film developed into a major production strategy during the Bourgeois
war, it defined itself initially within the tradition of literary adaptations es- Melodramas
tablished by Film d’Art and S.C.A.G.L. Producers at Pathe-Freres, Eclipse,
and Film d’Art could now more easily mobilize the reputable actors of the
Comedie Franchise as well as their slightly less illustrious colleagues from the
boulevard theaters and music halls to lend some measure of respectability
either to their patriotic films or to their condensed versions of the current
theater. Thus, the appeal of these films, for a short time anyway, derived from
the presence of famous stage actresses and personalities. The music hall star,
Mistinguett, for instance, had her greatest success in Fleur de Fans and Chi-

85
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE gnon d’or (both 1915).1 Rejane made one of her rare film appearances in Pouc-
FILM tal’s Alsace (1916), which reprised her prewar theatrical performance and ran
for two consecutive (and unprecedented) weeks at the Gaumont-Palace. Sarah
Bernhardt posed before Jeanne d’Arc’s statue and the ruined Rheims cathedral
in Hervil and Mercanton’s Les Meres frangaises (1917); and in Mercanton’s ad¬
aptation of Tristan Bernard’s Jeanne Dore (1915), she gave an unusually re¬
strained performance that is affecting even today, partly because of her ravaged
face and nearly immobilized body.2 At Pathe-Freres, Gabrielle Robinne, who
had performed in the original version of LAssassinat du due de Guise (1908),
was now starring in her own series of films (most of them directed by Rene
Leprince) in which, according to Rene Jeanne, she did a lot of loving and
suffering, with dignity.3 In 1918, she was still representative enough for Louis
Delluc to hold up her mannered style of acting for ridicule against the robust
spontaneity of Pearl White.4
Most of these early feature films were drawn from a particular form of
drama, the popular melodrama. There had been instances of the genre in the
prewar cinema, say, in Pathe-Freres’ adaptations of several Henri Bernstein
plays.5 But the genre did not come into its own until after 1916, once the
ground had been prepared by the Italian melodramas starring Francesca Bertini
and by De Mille’s The Cheat with Sessue Hayakawa (whose success, in part,
depended on its French bourgeois melodrama origins).6 The bourgeois melo¬
drama had long been the favorite of the houlevardiers, whose life revolved around
the theaters, nightclubs, and cafes on the Grand Boulevards of Belle Epoque
Paris. Motivated perhaps by the war restrictions on theater performances in
Paris, the film industry eagerly expropriated the genre to itself and began to
expand its audience with a new clientele.
The bourgeois melodrama film generally took its subject from the socioeco¬
nomic context of the high and middle bourgeoisie.7 The houlevardiers and
Opera-season ticket-holders could find familiar settings here: Renaissance din¬
ing rooms, Louis XV bedrooms, and Empire offices.8 There were the familiar
plots, full of lurid intrigue and violent action usually predicated on the “eter¬
nal love triangle.’’ And at the center was the question of a woman’s loyalty or
social function as wife and mother as well as the consequent affirmation of the
family as the locus of moral and spiritual value and, hence, of social stability.9
The attraction of the bourgeois melodrama, according to Jean Mitry, was that
it produced the world of “a society drawn from the theater . . . not the
reflection of the actual bourgeoisie, but the image of the privileges that they
no longer enjoyed except in the fictions that were made for them and which
they greedily devoured.’’10
Several films preserved at the Cinematheque fran^aise provide a good index
of the early feature-length bourgeois melodrama. Camille de Morlhon’s Maryse
(1917) tells the story of a young woman (Maryse Dauvray, Eclair’s star) who
accepts a brief liaison with a doctor in order to keep up an apartment for her
mother.11 Later she becomes the model and mistress of an up-and-coming
young painter, who just happens to be the doctor’s son. The climax comes in
a recognition scene between the two men; the painter attempts suicide, un¬
successfully, and father and son are reconciled. Yet the last shot is of the
young woman alone once more. The narrative sacrifices passion for family
harmony (between father and son), but the surviving print makes it uncertain

86
whether the woman is an immoral temptress or the real victim. Maryse uses a bourgeois melodramas
limited number of flatly lit sets (several apartments, the painter’s studio, the
Opera) but divides up many of its scenes, in the manner of American conti¬
nuity editing, into a range of shots from LS to ECU (with most of them failing
between FS and MCU). However, the rhythm of the editing is not always
smoothly paced; and the acting, though quite restrained for a French film of
that time, relies on theatrical cliches at highly emotional moments. In com¬
parison, Jacques Feyder’s early two-reeler about a double love triangle, Tetes
de femmes, femmes de tete (1916), looks even more restrained and original—it is
played out almost entirely in MSs.12
Abel Gance’s Le Droit a la vie (1917) tells a similar, though less ambiguous,
story. A young woman (Andree Brabant) is in love with a stockbroker (Feon
Mathot) but is forced to marry an older financier (Paul Vermoyel) to pay the
debts of her dying mother. The financier discovers the young couple’s love
and then an embezzlement by one of his assistants. When the assistant shoots
and wounds him, the enraged financier pins the blame on Mathot. Finally, in
the midst of a heated trial, he confesses Mathot’s innocence and, soon after,
conveniently dies so the young couple can be reunited. Gance’s film is distin¬
guished from Maryse by much more sophisticated lighting and editing, both
of which probably derive (as does some of the story) from The Cheat M In
several key sequences, the characters are isolated in close shots and sculpted
by side lighting against black backgrounds. This technique, mastered by Gance’s
young cameraman, F.-H. Burel, also appears in other bourgeois melodramas
such as Aubert’s Notre Fatble Coeur (1916) and Germaine Dulac’s Venus victrix
(1917).14 Significantly, the moral and psychological condition of the central
characters (but only the men) is emphasized through several subjective images.
The suspense of the shooting climax is heightened by a strategy of parallel
editing (using crude wipes) between the confrontation of men in one room
and a progressively more unrestrained masked ball in another.15 The trial is
articulated almost entirely in MCUs that depend on eyeline matches and shot/
reverse shots; in fact, the film as a whole is marked, even more than is Maryse,
by frequent MCUs and CUs. Finally, there is one fascinating fetishistic gesture
whose repetition almost turns it into a rhetorical figure. In linked sequences,
Mathot lovingly caresses the young woman’s hair, and then the financier dreams
of caressing her in the same way as he prepares his marriage plan. After the
wedding, however, as she stands by the bedroom window, the young woman
refuses to let him touch her.
The potential of the bourgeois melodrama is probably most clearly dem¬
onstrated in Gance’s Mater Dolorosa (1917), said to be the most popular French
film of the 1917-1918 season.16 Although an original scenario, Mater Dolorosa
follows the dramas of Paul Hervieu, Henri Bernstein, Charles Mere, and,
perhaps more specifically, Henri Kistemaecker’s L’lnstinctd1 Much like Le Droit
a la vie, it also owes a good deal to The Cheat. The narrative is predicated on
a love triangle involving Dr. Gilles Berliac (Firmin Gemier), a pediatrician,
his wife Marthe (Emmy Fynn), and her lover, his brother Claude (Armand
Tallier).18 Overcome with guilt for her affair, Marthe tries to commit suicide
and, in a struggle with Claude, accidentally shoots him. When Gilles is in¬
formed of his brother’s death (through a humpbacked blackmailer!), he be¬
lieves Marthe guilty of murder and leaves her, taking their young son with

87
30. (left) Emmy Lynn and
Armand Tallier in Mater
Dolorosa (1917)

31. (right) Emmy Lynn

at the window him. Uncertain of his fatherhood, Giiles agonizes over caring for the boy when
suddenly the latter falls ill. Finally, a letter comes that exonerates Marthe,
and Giiles recognizes her suffering. The couple is reunited; the son, restored
to health. As in the other films belonging to the genre, the emphasis through¬
out this narrative is on the psychological condition and moral state of the two
central characters. But here, quite clearly, the health of the individual as well
as the society literally depends on the health of the family or the condition of
a marriage.
Besides the social or ideological implications of its narrative, Mater Dolorosa
exhibits most of the stylistic conventions of the bourgeois melodrama. The
settings are confined to the lover’s study, several rooms in the couple’s com¬
fortable parkside house, the hospital ward, the doctor’s apartment (only these
last two deviate a bit from convention—the hospital ward, for instance is
unusually realistic in its detail) and a few exterior shots. The range of shots
used in the film’s dozen or so segments—from LSs to CUs, from straight-on
shots to various angled shots—is not all that different from Maryse or Le Droit
a la vie. Nor is the number of shots deployed uncommon. Most of the se¬
quences are composed of many separate shots, yet they do not add up to the
nearly “400 shots’’ in Andre Antoine’s comparable crime melodrama, Le Cou-
pable (1917).19 In Gance’s film, however, the cutting within and between
sequences is exceptionally clear and economical, the more so since there are
quite a number of inserts, short flashbacks, and brief subjective sequences,
along with several sequences of parallel action. By contrast, Maryse and Le
Coupable, the latter of which tries to narrate a past story within the context of
a trial, display much less economy, smoothness, and clarity.
Yet Mater Dolorosa transcends its genre conventions in several ways. Com¬
menting on its mise-en-scene, Jean Mitry neatly sums up the judgment of
French film historians:

Mater Dolorosa . . . surprises, astonishes, by means of lighting effects, the knowing

use of light and shadow to intensify dramatic scenes, the intimate fidelity of the
decors, singling out particular details, and a thousand unusual qualities for a French
film.20

88
Gance and Burel used a good deal of sidelighting and low-key spot lighting bourgeois melodramas
on faces and parts of figures against dark backgrounds, creating even softer
images than in The Cheat or Le Droit a la vie. Here the effect serves not only
to model the characters in a three-dimensional space but also to heighten their
emotional expressiveness. Figures are framed in silhouettes at windows and
behind curtains—a technique that owes a debt not only to The Cheat but to
earlier French films such as Leonce Perret’s fascinating L’Enfant de Paris (1913),
photographed by Georges Specht.21 As Colette first noted, the film also evi¬
dences “a new use of the still life, the poignant use of props, as in the fall of
a veil to the floor.”22 The slightest movements within the frame resonate
metaphorically: Emmy Lynn backing off into the darkness after the shooting,
a single window opening outwards (with no person visible) in a LS of the
apartment building, a MS of the doctor behind a curtain as he touches his
wife’s veil, which echoes the earlier CU of the same veil falling beside the
window through which she watches him leave the house. More obvious met¬
aphors are evoked in a shattered mirror (in the sequence of doubted fatherhood)
and in a painting of the mater dolorosa which provides the prior image or figure
recognized by the doctor and replicated in his wife’s suffering. Here, in em¬
bryo, is the possibility of a sustained pattern of rhetorical figuring.
Film adaptations of the bourgeois melodrama continued to be an important
asset to the French film industry into the early 1920s. Especially popular were
the plays of Bernstein, Kistemaecker, and Mere. When Gaumont, for in¬
stance, wanted Marcel L’Herbier to prove himself commercially after the total
failure of Rose-Trance (1919), he told him to consider the success that Louis
Mercanton and Gaby Deslys had made of his previous scenario for Bouclette
(1918); and he assigned him to direct Bernstein’s Le Bercail (1919). L’Herbier
agreed, as he put it, “to practice his scales.”23 The result was that Gaumont
made a tidy profit and L’Herbier could go on making films. Film d’Art pro¬
duced several more melodramas starring Emmy Lynn, that “victim of passion
and mother love”: Gance’s La Dixieme Symphonie (1918) and Henry Roussel’s
La Faute d’Odette Marechal (1920).24 When the company determined to make
films marketable in both France and the United States, it chose as its first
projects Bernstein’s La Rafale (1920) and Kistemaecker’s Le Secret du Lone Star
(1920), both directed by Jacques de Baroncelli and starring the American
actress, Fanny Ward, and Gabriel Signoret of the Comedie Fran^aise. Despite
risking most of its capital on expensive serials and multipart films, Pathe-
Consortium also distributed popular melodramas such as Henry Krauss’s ad¬
aptation of a Mere play, Les Trois Masques (1921).
However, much like the serial, the genre was under a great deal of pressure
that was pushing it in several different directions at once. Abel Gance, for
instance, was reshaping it with his technical experimentation as well as his
philosophical pretentions. His original scenario for La Dixieme Symphonie (1918)
tried to transform a bourgois melodrama plot of marital fidelity by posing the
problem of artistic creation—an idea, Kevin Brownlow writes, that was in¬
spired by a quotation from Berlioz: “I am about to start a great symphony in
which my great sufferings will be portrayed.”25 The composer Enric Damor
(Severin-Mars), a widower with a grown daughter, Claire (Elisabeth Nizan),
marries Eve Dinant (Emmy Lynn), who has an untold, compromised past—
she is being blackmailed by a former lover, Frederic Ryce (Jean Toulout) for

89
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE accidentally killing his sister. When Ryce courts Claire and Eve opposes their
FILM announced marriage (without explanation), Damor believes his wife is secretly
in love with the suitor. In despair, he writes and performs his symphony, and
Eve prepares to sacrifice her own happiness if Ryce will leave Claire alone.
Claire discovers what is happening, and, after a flurry of threats and counter¬
threats, Ryce shoots himself. Claire defends Eve to her father (without telling
all), and Damor relents and forgives. Two years later, Andre Hugon would
rework this dual problem of marital fidelity and artistic inspiration, with
Severin-Mars as a poet cursed by alcoholism, in a much more conventional
melodrama, Jacques Landauze (1920).26
What is admirable in La Dixieme Symphonie extends the techniques of Mater
Dolorosa: the mysterious elliptical opening of the past accidental shooting, the
repetition of gestures for psychological effect, the lighting and placement/
movement of characters, the rhythmic clarity of the action. But Gance’s at¬
tempts to relate his artistic intentions to the classics (e.g., comparing Eve to
the Winged Victory of Samothrace, citing numerous literary quotations) and
to represent the act of artistic creation itself (for Damor’s performance, he
films an “Isadora Duncan’’ dancer [Ariane Hugon of the Opera] in a series of
natural settings, masked by a horizontal vignette of Greek vase designs) pro¬
voked critics to misleadingly brand the film “inaccessible to the public.’’27
Today, these moments merely seem embarrassingly simplistic. Furthermore,
Eve’s suffering is much greater, ironically, than that of her composer husband,
and Damor never discovers the full extent of her discontent.
J'Accuse (1919), Gance’s first superproduction for Pathe-Cinema, trans¬
formed the genre almost completely by thrusting the melodrama plot into the
disturbing context of the war. Here, even more than in La Dixieme Symphonie,
the love triangle intrigue is but a pretext for a fiercely emotional personal
statement and for further cinematic experimentation. Paradoxically pacifistic
and nationalistic at the same time, J Accuse was a stunning commercial success,
especially considering its release several months after the Armistice. As will
be demonstrated in Part IV, it was also technically and rhetorically much in
advance of any other French film of 1919. The same blend of family melo¬
drama, personal statement, and experimentation would also mark Gance’s next
epic, La Roue (1922-1923).
In contrast to Gance’s “epic symphonies,” Raymond Bernard, a protege of
Jacques Feyder, oriented the genre toward the “chamber music” of a more
intimate drama. Drawing primarily on a series of plays and scenarios by his
famous father, Bernard concentrated on the psychological possibilities of the
bourgeois melodrama—in Le Secret de Rosette Lambert (1920), La Maison vide
(1921), and Triplepatte (1922). The subject of Le Secret de Rosette Lambert was a
conventionally “cruel and violent story,” adapted from Tristan Bernard’s Coeur
de Lilas,28 In it, a businessman sets a trap for the wife of his partner in order
to ruin him. When the villain dies, his proxy keeps up the intrigue, only to
be unmasked by a family friend of the victims. Unlike previous bourgeois
melodramas, however, this film situated its story in quite modern decors de¬
signed by the young master architect, Robert Mallet-Stevens. Mallet-Stevens’s
sets simply and starkly validated Bernard’s psychological interest as well as
creating a suitable atmosphere for informal dancing (which was then undergo¬
ing a new wave of popularity in Paris).29 For the first time, apparently, mod-

90
 BOURGEOIS MELODRAMAS

32. A Robert Mallet-Stevens

decor for Tnplepatte (1922)

ern interiors were constructed specifically for a film and not merely chosen
from the stock of traditional studio decors.30 Despite fine acting from Henri
Debain, Sylviane Grey, and Charles Dullin (in debut), the film was compro¬
mised by its star, an unknown American actress, Lois Meredith.31 Still, Ber¬
nard’s direction, according to Louis Delluc, resulted in “one of the most splen¬
did manifestations of photogenic plasticity in the cinema.’’32
La Maison vide, the first film to come out of Bernard’s own independent
production company, was an original scenario that he devised from a banal
love story. In his unpublished memoirs, Bernard has confessed that his ambition
in the film was to make the audience aware of subtle mental states of which
the characters themselves were not always conscious.33 Henri Fescourt remem¬
bers the film vividly:

An impalpable story of grays. Hesitations, subtle nuances, slight incidents. A timid

entomologist, suspended over his precious collections, falls in love with his secretary.
Scarcely anything happens. A bouquet on a table, displaced by an angry kick, falls to
the floor. A microscope that reveals darkened images. Is it the fault of the lens? No,
the eye that observes, an eye darkened by a tear. ... No hands clutching the breast,
no long sighs. Very few mtertitles. It was enough to watch the images and Henri
Debain.34

Unfortunately, Bernard’s choice of a title, La Maison vide, failed to attract

audiences to the cinema, and the film ended up appealing to only a few

91
33. (left) Eve Francis, Jean
Toulout, and Gaston Modot
in La Fete espagnole (1920)
\

34. (right) Ginette Darnys in

Le Silence (1920)

filmmakers and critics.35 In Tnplepatte, Bernard fared much better by retreat¬

ing to one of his father’s stock of well-known plays, which allowed Henri
Debain to mildly satirize a similar “hero of indolence and indecision.’’36
Bernard was not alone in creating “chamber music’’ films during this pe¬
riod, for the analogy (it is Henri Fescourt’s) also fits a small group of films
produced by filmmakers involved in the narrative avant-garde. Several of Louis
Delluc’s earliest films, for instance, develop a refined psychological irony from
rather conventional bourgeois melodrama plots. Le Silence (1920) can serve as
an example, even though it survives only in the form of a published, decep¬
tively simple scenario.37 Pierre (Signoret) is awaiting his lover Susie (Eve Fran¬
cis) alone in his rooms. Suddenly, in a chance comparison of letters, he realizes
that she was responsible for an anonymous letter in the past that inflamed his
jealousy and incited him blindly to kill his young wife. When Susie finally
arrives late, Pierre is dead in his chair, the victim of the same revolver with
which he shot his wife. Since the action takes place almost entirely within
Pierre’s consciousness, Le Silence has been aptly described as “a monologue in
images.’’38 The “dramatic theme’’ (to use Delluc’s own phrase) unfolds through
the alternation of Pierre’s memories and his perception of certain key objects
in his possession. Elliptical and full of ironic twists, this alternation seems to
have been, in contrast to the usual bourgeois melodrama, more intellectual
than emotional in its effect.
Germaine Dulac shared Delluc’s interest in the psychological states of char¬
acters, and not only in their collaborative film, La Fete espagnole (1920)—where
two suitors kill one another over a bored Spanish lady (Eve Francis again) who
ignores them and, drunkenly awakened to life once more in a festival dance,
gives herself to a third man.39 The rather dense narrative structure of this
short film will be discussed later; for now it is worth mentioning that Eve
Francis’s costume was one of the first designed specifically for film.40 La Mort
du soleil (1922) is perhaps more characteristic because its scenario, written by
Andre Legrand, resembles that of Mater Dolorosa. While it celebrates the struggle

92
of Doctor Lucien Faivre (Andre Nox) against tuberculosis—epitomized in re¬
curring shots of supplicating diseased children in some barren place—it also
focuses on the conflict dividing Marthe Voisin (Denise Lorys), who is dedicated
to helping Faivre but is equally devoted to her family, especially her young
daughter.41 Given this scenario, Dulac wanted in her words, “to describe the
inner workings of the mind or soul, within the theme of the action.”42 Con¬
sequently, she uses her plot, with its several misunderstandings, to explore
the subjective life of both the woman and the doctor, separately and in com¬
bination. The most unusual of these moments is a strange conjunction of the
two characters as the doctor lies near death early on in the film. Images of
Faivre’s delirium and of Marthe’s inner thoughts are intercut to produce a
“communion of souls’’ whose significance oscillates between escape, shared
passion, and awakening dedication to a scientific discipline. Unfortunately,
according to Charles Ford, “this eminently cinematographic scene was cut in
nearly all the cinemas [because] the spectators [and the exhibitors] would not
let the action of a film be encumbered with psychological notations.’’43
By 1922, the bourgeois molodrama had been so transformed—and separated
from its theatrical origins—that it no longer existed as a distinct genre. Per¬
haps this transformation was due to an apparent rivalry (or lack of cooperation)
between the cinema and theater as much as it was to the pressure of the
interests of the narrative avant-garde.44 Perhaps, too, Charles Pathe’s warning
about adaptations from the theater had proved true:

. . . the author and director should consider not only the title of the play they want
to adapt, or the intensity or violence of the series of well-linked actions, but also—
and this is not current practice—the nature of the emotions that are expressed. The
extreme plot situations of prominent playwrights, unless substantially amended, will
fail to pass censorship, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon countries. . . . The audiences
of these countries will not appreciate the spicy, risque plots that Bernstein and, preem¬
inently, Bataille have established as the norm.45
35. Three shots from the
In any case, this change was actively supported by a new film journal, Mon-
delirium sequence of Doctor
Cine. Within months of its appearance in February, 1922, Mon-Cine embarked Faivre (Andre Nox) in La
on an educational campaign to encourage the development of a “cinema of Mort du soleil (1922)
quality” in France. Its purpose was twofold and implicitly ideological: to forge
a link between film and fiction and to dignify the cinema by displacing the
serial or cineroman, in the popular taste, with the roman-cine or something very
much like the bourgeois melodrama.46 To that end, each issue of Mon-Cine
was devoted to a serialized novel and to the novelization of a current “serious”
film, which novelization soon became as important as the film itself. Largely
ignoring the work of the narrative avant-garde as well as the serials, Mon-Cine
singled out for praise such filmmakers as Bernard, Roussel, Feyder, Fescourt,
Robert Boudrioz, and Leon Poirier.48 Their films, and especially Poirier’s Jocelyn
(1922) and Genevieve (1923), came closest to realizing what Maurice Roelens
has identified as an “aesthetic of emotion”—“a [logical] series of naturally
melodramatic situations, apt to arouse emotion and especially ‘the voluptu¬
ousness of compassion’ that one usually associates with melodrama.”49 Al¬
though terminologically vague—and thus capable of infusing various genres,
as we shall see—this was one answer to the question of what was peculiarly
French about the French cinema.

93
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE In the course of Mon-Cine s polemic, most of the filmmakers who had come
FILM into the cinema from the theater before or during the war turned exclusively
to adapting fiction or writing their own scenarios. And those theatrical mel¬
odramas that did become films were usually subsumed in one of several other
genres.50 Some, such as Rene Hervil’s Blanchette (1921) or Fescourt’s Les Grands
(1924), evoke the atmosphere and ambience of natural location shooting and
are best seen as realist films. Others, such as L’Herbier’s “melodrama,” El
Dorado (1921), or Julien Duvivier’s Maman Colibri (1929), became part of the
cycle of exotic or colonial films. Still others, such as Dulac’s Ame d'artiste
(1925), L’Herbier’s Le Vertige (1926), or Perret’s La Femme nue (1926), create
elaborate sets and an international milieu that make them early examples of
the modern studio spectacular. Otherwise, the .only truly theatrical adaptation
to replace the bourgeois melodrama in the 1920s was the boulevard comedy,
especially as represented by the plays of Labiche and company. But the boul¬
evard comedy is important enought to be treated separately.
The exceptions to these changes were few and far between. Germaine Du¬
lac’s Antoinette Sabrier (1927), produced by Cineromans from a play by Romain
Coelus, which Rejane had made popular, is one of the sole surviving exam¬
ples.51 Its subject is a busy industrialist (Gabriel Gabrio) who cannot decide
which of two women he loves, his wife (Eve Francis, who had not made a film
in four years) or a younger woman “whom he believes to be the incarnation of
Love’’ (Yvette Armel).52 According to Charles Ford and Rene Jeanne, the film
was too close to being a Comedie Franchise production.53 Julien Bayart pin¬
pointed one of the reasons: “the decors . . . produce an impression of artifi¬
ciality, an impression of coldness accentuated even more by the way they are
lit. ...” Antoinette Sabrier, he concluded, “is a theatrical, a terribly theatrical
. . . story. . . .”54 The genre had come back to its origins.

Realist Films As the Great War drew to a close, a number of French films appeared—
Andre Antoine’s Le Coupable (1917) and Les Travailleurs de la mer (1918), Louis
Feuillade’s Vendemiaire (1919), and Jacques de Baroncelli’s Ramuntcho (1919)—
all of which challenged the prominence of the class-conscious, studio-bound
evasions of the bourgeois melodrama. These films mark the beginning of a
broad genre of feature films that developed in the French cinema of the late
1910s and early 1920s. At the time, they were identified in the press under
different labels—^e.g., “simple dramas,” “atmosphere films,” or just “plein air
films.” Despite the problematics of the term, let me call them realist films,
for the designation seems to have some historical basis.
First of all, these films were not without precedents in France. Before the
war, after all, as a counteraction to the Film d’Art literary adaptations, Louis
Feuillade had produced a series of sixteen short films under the high-sounding
title, La Vie telle quelle est (Life as It Is). In a statement introducing the series,
in April, 1911, Feuillade spoke of his films as “slices of life”—“they eschew
any fantasy and represent men and things as they are, not as they should be.”1
As Francis Lacassin has shown, despite Feuillade’s invocation of Zola and Mau¬
passant, most of these sketches were violent, intimate melodramas, stripped
down to a handful of characters in a few simple, stereotypical settings.2 An¬
other, perhaps unlikely, precedent can be seen in some of the prewar crime

94
films and serials. Leonce Perret’s L'Enfant de Paris (1913) and Georges Denola’s realist films
La Jeunesse de Racombale (1913), for instance, already exhibited the same sen¬
sitivity to natural light and open air that would characterize the later films.3
Like several of Perret’s early films, L’Enfant de Pans was shot on location (by
Georges Specht), in the back streets of the Paris faubourgs as well as in and
around a villa above Nice.4 In these early serials, however, the conjunction of
fantastic crimes and deceptions with recognizably real spaces induces a pecul¬
iar state of disorientation or dislocation that differed radically from the effect
of the postwar realist films.
Georges Sadoul has argued that Feuillade and his colleagues at Gaumont
were influenced in these efforts by the Vitagraph films then being imported
into France and by the verism that characterized French literary naturalism.5
Even more marked by that verism, however, were similar films by Victorin
Jasset and Maurice Tourneur at Eclair and by some of their colleagues at
S.C.A.G.L.6 The best of Jasset’s Les Batailles de la vie series, Au pays des tenebres
(1912)—inspired by Zola’s Germinal—was no less melodramatic and conform¬
ist in its moralism than were the Feuillade films. But it did seem to have a
surface verisimilitude as a result of being shot in the northern coal-mining
regions.7 At S.C.A.G.L., Zecca assigned Rene Leprince and Camille de Morl-
hon to produce a comparable series, Scenes de la vie cruellef but the company’s
major realist productions were two early feature-length films. The first was
Andre Capellani’s adaptation of Hugo’s Les Miserables (1912), which Antoine
later cited as one of “the first accurate realizations of the cinema.”9 The second
was Gerard Bourgeois’s remake of Les Victimes de I’alcool (1911), based on Zola’s
L’Assomoir. This film stuck more closely to Zola than did any of the others,
although it depicted alcoholism as an individual vice rather than as a social
phenomenon. Its real interest, however, according to Sadoul, lay in its mise-
en-scene.10 Each sequence was filmed in the old-fashioned style of the tableau
(and in studio decors), yet the movements of the actors often carried them
from LS to MS within the space of a single take. Here was one of the earliest
sustained instances of a realism based on deep space.
The man probably responsible for this initial influx of verism into the French
cinema was none other than Andre Antoine. His work in translating the aes¬
thetics of naturalism from fiction to theater—through the Theatre Libre (1887-
1896) and then the Theatre Antoine (1897-1906)—had provided an incentive,
particularly for the filmmakers at S.C.A.G.L.11 This should not be surprising
since some of them—Tourneur, Capellani, Desfontaines, Denola, and Krauss—
originally had been members of his theater companies. In 1914, Antoine’s
position of influence increased dramatically when, out of financial exigency,
he accepted a contract to direct films for S.C.A.G.L.12 Apparently, he thought,
as did Charles Pathe for a time, that he might transform the French cinema
the same way he had the French theater a generation before. Although that
mission proved unsuccessful—and his age (sixty), abrasiveness, cantankerous
nature, and sense of self-importance alienated many of his colleagues—Antoine
did articulate ideas and institute practices that were fundamental to the emer¬
gence of the French realist film.
The first thing Antoine insisted on was shooting on location. As early as
1917, in response to a question on the crisis in the French cinema, he argued
that

93
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE The cinema would make real progress if it abandoned the studios to work in nature
FILM just as the Impressionists did. Instead of improvising an artificial milieu for the cam¬
era, we should transport the cameraman and his instruments into real buildings and
interiors, as well as develop mobile electric generators for lighting.1^

In part, these words were provoked by the economic and material conditions
of the wartime French film industry. The studios were operating at less than
full capacity, and they were clearly now inferior to the American studios,
especially in lighting and set design. Furthermore, neither Pathe nor Gaumont
seemed willing or able to provide the capital needed to renovate their facilities.
So filming on location was a viable response to the industry’s limitations.
Antoine s own production of Les TyuvuiIUuys dc la mcy (1918) seems to have set
a precedent. Within two years, many of the French film companies, particu¬
larly the independents, had dispersed into the countryside, using mobile or
on-location studios for their productions.
More important to the specific development of the realist film was Antoine’s
concept of location shooting and the new acting style that it demanded. When
motion pictures first appeared, Antoine was fascinated by the filmed docu¬
ments and then by the newsreels.14 What struck him was the plasticity of
these images, the natural landscapes and real figures in those landscapes, ren¬
dered in relief through natural gestures and movements as well as through the
direction, intensity, and texture of natural light. For his naturalistic theatrical
productions, it should be remembered, Antoine had often taken photographs
of their alleged locations, photographs which his set designer then used as an
index of verisimilitude. Now the cinema seemed to offer the possibility of
enacting and recording the story or scenario in those very locations. Just as he
opposed the painted sets and reusable decors of the studios, so did he object
to good theater actors becoming grimacing film stars: “these performers must
be exclusively plastic. . . .”15 Because of the difference between theater and
film, Antoine also advocated the formation of a special troupe of actors who
would work only in the cinema.16 And he suggested that, wherever possible
on location, “real types’’ among the local inhabitants enact the smaller roles—
in effect, play themselves. Finally, he had the novel idea that, instead of
making the actors play to the camera (which was usually immobile), the cam¬
era should be free to follow the actors. “{It} should follow them step by step,
to surprise their looks, from whichever angle they present themselves.”17
The last thing Antoine stressed was the importance of the scenario, the
subject of the film. Despite his interest in the plasticity of the film image and
in what he called “impressionistic tableaux,” he believed that “photography
was no more than a means.”18 The principal factor in a film’s appeal and
success was its subject. For Antoine, the best subject was either an existing
realist or naturalistic work of fiction or an original scenario by a like-minded
contemporary novelist. This would allow the narrative cinema to represent life
“as it really was,” to hold up a window or mirror for the spectator. Antoine’s
own choice of scenarios is significant. Those that he chose, rather than those
he was assigned, were stories of peasants and working-class people, adapted
from major nineteenth-century narrative poems and novels. His production of
Hugo’s Les TYavailleuYS de la meY (1918) and his decision, in 1919, to film
Zola’s La TeYYe (1921) established precedents for representing something other

96
than the life of the French bourgeoisie in Paris or in the southern coastal realist films
playgrounds.
Thus, in its exploration of geographical areas and provincial cultures, the
French realist film developed a mode of representation which differed some¬
what from that of realist and naturalistic fiction. The critical, even fatalistic,
representation of the social order so crucial to that fiction was tempered in the
realist film by several influences, among them French landscape painting,
reaching from the Impressionists back to Millet, his more conventional con¬
temporaries, and even Corot. Instead of analyzing the relationships among
individuals or groups in the social order, the realist film tended “to record the
verities of nature en plein air" and to celebrate natural landscapes as a presence
that encompassed and affected the characters, usually with a sense of gentle
melancholy.19 The genre seemed to subordinate social analysis to a concern for
the pictorial and even the picturesque. Were these French landscapes displayed
as so many scenes or documents for the disinterested aesthetic pleasure of a
spectator, a touring bourgeois spectator, for whom, in John Berger’s words,
“the landscape [was] his view, the splendor of it his reward”?20 Or was that
pleasure perhaps more than disinterested—did such landscapes accurately rep¬
resent a France that was still predominantly rural (until 193 l)21 or did they
deflect attention from the harrowing reality of the war-devastated regions of
northeastern France? Whichever, in contrast to the serial and the bourgeois
melodrama—whose love triangle plots it sometimes shared—the realist film
tended to invest less in narrative and more in description. More precisely, it
emphasized the emotional and connotative relationship between landscape and
character, sometimes to the point where a particular landscape or milieu be¬
came the central character of the film.
It is tempting to characterize the realist film as having two broadly different
subjects. The distinction is a simple one—life in the city, usually Paris, and
life in the country. Something of the deep social/ideological division in France
between Paris and the provinces, between a bourgeois society dependent on a
state apparatus, industry, and a proletariat (as well as the unemployed) and
one dependent on the land and a peasant class of farmers and artisans, between
the locus of the “modern” and the locus of the “traditional,” does seem to
undergird the genre. Yet the division is perhaps less significant than one that
distributes the more numerous films set in the provinces according to different
landscapes and regions—the seacoasts, the mountains, the rivers and canals,
the agricultural plains. Along with the modern urban milieu, each of these
regions and their local customs is represented by some haif-dozen films in the
early 1920s. Interestingly, they correlate somewhat with the regions that had
been the subject of a folklorist concern of the nineteenth-century Realist art,
what Linda Nochlin calls, “picturesque regional genre painting”—e.g., Pro¬
vence, the Pyrenees, and especially Brittany.22 Whatever the geographical area
or culture, however, the realist films, much like their forerunners in painting,
tended to turn to the past or to more traditional ways of life in presenting
positive images of France and of the French social order.

One of the earliest areas to be explored was the coastal region of Brittany.
After making Les Freres corses (1916) and Le Coupable (1917), Antoine refused

97
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE to shoot another film in Paris. Deliberately, he chose to adapt Victor Hugo’s
FILM Les Travailleurs de la mer (1918) so that he, his assistant Georges Denola, and
cameraman Paul Castanet could work almost entirely on the western tip of
Brittany.23 Recently, his son talked about the production:

Antoine had a villa at Camaret. He loved that spot very much. It is there that he
shot the essential parts of the film ... it was an occasion to photograph the sea. For
the real character of the film is the Sea.24

The stills that remain of Antoine’s film evidence his obvious love for the
“filmed document . . . this quality of ubiquity and presence, of the cinema’s
omnipotence.”25 Yet the film did not always achieve the naturalness that An¬
toine desired. Delluc criticized its scenario (for which trick shots had to be
used in a climactic battle between the hero and an octopus!) and pointed to
the contradiction of Comedie Franchise actors (Romauld Joube, Armand Tal-
lier, Andree Brabant) playing Breton fisherfolk in the midst of the real thing.26

Ah, how I wish he had a story of his own, a scenario that was alive, new, modern.
Say, a story about workers or, even better, about peasants. . . . Perhaps the characters
could be acted by their real-life counterparts. I would like a peasant to be played by
a peasant.27

That was a practice, however, which S.C.A.G.L. apparently refused to let

Antoine indulge in. Still, Les Travailleurs de la mer was unusually popular—
the readers of Comoedia, for instance, voted it one of the top five films of the
decade—and it seems to have stimulated the production of a number of coastal
realist films.28
Two of the most interesting of these early films were Marcel L’Herbier’s
L’Homme du large (1920) and Louis Mercanton’s L’Appel du sang (1920). Mer-
canton, in collaboration with Rene Hervil, had directed L’Herbier’s first sce¬
nario, Le Torrent (1918), whose theme, L’Herbier says, was “a raging river in
the middle of France, in a village at the water’s edge, with thickets of little
dramas that are nourished by the torrent.”29 Their strategy, however, was to
film it with Comedie Franchise actors, such as Henry Roussel and Gabriel
Signoret (with Jaque Catelain in debut), against the rather tame gorge of the
Loup river on the Cote d’Azur.30 Although Leon Gaumont thought highly of
the film when it previewed at the Cine-Opera in November, 1917, L’Herbier
himself did not even recognize his story and characters in Mercanton and
Hervil’s images.31 Three years later, the young cineaste returned to the theme
of Le Torrent with a Breton film that caused a brief scandal.
L’Homme du large (1920) was a rather free adaptation of a short philosophical
story by Balzac, Un Drame au bord de la mer.32 Following his habit of desig¬
nating the genre of his films, L’Herbier christened it “a seascape.” The nar¬
rative, told in a long flashback, caused a stir by contrasting two children of a
Breton fisherman (Roger Karl)—the daughter Djenna (Marcelle Pradot) is pious
and obedient; the son Michel (Jaque Catelain) is profligate and afraid of the
sea.33 Infatuated with a new singer in a local cafe and egged on by his friends
(including young Charles Boyer), Michel refuses to attend his dying mother
and, in a drunken fight, stabs the singer’s lover. Then he tries to steal the
money which his mother has entrusted to Djenna—he threatens both his sister
and father with a knife but is entangled in a fishing net as he attempts to

98
 36. (left) Roger Karl and
Jaque Catelain in L’Homme du
large (1920)

37. (right) The cabaret singer

escape through a window. The father punishes him by putting him, bound
and alone, into a small boat and pushing it off into the sea. Then he and
Djenna separately take vows of silence—the one living in a sea cave, the other
becoming a nun. Michel survives the ordeal and, one year later, returns a
changed man; and in turn his father and sister are freed from their vows.
Another kind of notoriety attached to the film, soon after it opened in Paris
on 3 December 1920,34 when several sequences in the rough cafe were censored
as excessively violent and sexually provocative.
Much of L’Homme du large was shot by Georges Lucas and Jean Letort in
the early summer along the southern coast of Brittany, from Quiberon to
Penmarch.35 Like Antoine, L’Herbier’s intention was to have “the sea as a
protagonist.’’ As he himself wrote of the experience, “the awesome subject of
elementary forces, when they reach a high level of pure expressiveness, has
been, is, and will be the privileged subject of the cinematographe.”36 However,
just as in Les Travailleurs de la mer, there is an obvious contradiction in the
film between the overwhelming images of the seacoast and village and those
of the actors, who simply are not convincing as a Breton family. More sur¬
prising is the artificial nature of the frequent wipes, irises, superimpositions,
and stylized intertitles supered over shots of the sea—taken at the time as a
sign of L’Herbier’s concerns as a literary aesthete, carried over from Rose-France
(1919) and Le Carnaval de verites (1920).37 Despite these real and apparent
limitations, L’Homme du large does succeed sometimes in creating an atmos¬
phere that is both convincing and aptly connotative—through its choice of
seascapes and village landscapes (with Djenna’s white figure, in LS, gliding
along the dark walls and across the rocks), its low-key interior lighting (es¬
pecially during the mother’s death and during Michel’s pathetic theft), its
views of actual Breton life, and its exotic seething cafe (where L’Herbier first
seems to have used a juxtaposition of soft and sharp focus within a single

99
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

38. Gabriel de Gravone,

Phyllis Terry, Le Bargy, and
Ivor Novello (background) in
L'Appel du sang (1920)

shot). Perhaps Juan Arroy sums up the film best: “It produced exceptional
visual harmonies, through the alternation of great waves of images, animated
and aerated by the sea, and the feverish rhythm emanating from a sailors’
cafe.”38
After Antoine abandoned film production in 1921, the leading proponent
of a realist cinema in France, according to Rene Jeanne, was Louis Mercan-
ton.39 Mercanton had been one of the first filmmakers, after Antoine, to adopt
location shooting in earnest. By 1919, he had developed a model mobile
studio “of four motorized trucks and two trailers (carrying a generator capable
of producing 12,000 amps) along with eighty lamps of all sorts. . . .”40 With
this newly devised equipment, he shot several films in England and France;
for one, he even ventured out across the Mediterranean. L Appel du sang (1920),
adapted from a Robert Hitchens novel, tells a story similar to L’Homme du
large, but with a different class of characters, in a very different locale—the
dry rocky shores of Sicily. It also combines a lot more narrative complications
with a much less exciting visual style. The film was a resounding commercial
and critical success—Cine-pour-tous judged it one of the three best French films
of the 1919-1920 season.41 Even Louis Delluc, who appreciated “the open air”
of Mercanton’s films, found it more than the usual “remarkable album of
photographs” and praised the acting of its international cast.42
The narrative (articulated in frequent intertitles) begins with Hermione Les¬
ter (Phyllis Neilson Terry), an Englishwoman who lives in Rome, deciding to
marry a younger man, Maurice Delarey (Ivor Novello), unaware that her good
friend, the novelist Emile Artois (Le Bargy), is deeply in love with her.43 The

100
couple go to live at Hermione’s villa in Sicily, and Maurice takes a liking to realist films
her servant, Gaspare (Gabriel de Gravone). Enchanted by the culture and by
the sea (his grandmother was Sicilian), he is soon drawn into an affair with an
island siren, Maddelena (Desdemona Mazza). Her fisherman father, Salvatore
(Fortunio Lo Turco), begins to blackmail him; and when Maurice decides to
break off the affair, the old man kills him and throws his body in the sea.
Hermione discovers what has happened only when she confronts Maddelena
grieving at her husband’s grave. Released from his promise of silence to Mau¬
rice, Gaspare tries to take revenge on Salvatore; their struggle in his island
cottage is interrupted by a knock at the door, and the old man accidentally
shoots his own daughter. Hermione finally realizes Emile’s love for her, and
the two are engaged to marry—even though the novelist priggishly repri¬
mands her for transferring some of the flowers from Maurice’s to Maddelena’s
grave.
Viewed today, L Appel du sang looks more like a slightly exotic bourgeois
melodrama than a realist film. Although it was shot by Emile Pierre entirely
on location, the images rarely suggest the ambience of life in Sicily. Many
shots of the characters posed against the Sicilian hillside or seacoast look as if
they could just as easily have been filmed on the Cote d’Azur or even in
Southern California. Only occasionally is there an inkling of what attracts
Maurice to the culture—the men dancing the “Pastorale”; the torchlight fish¬
ing (perhaps one of the earliest sequences of location shooting at night); the
village festival, which ends in a huge fireworks display (culminating in a
superimposed image of a flaming religious icon, smokestacks, wheel frames,
and tiny silhouetted human figures). Maddelena, on the other hand, is at first
more Aldonza than Dulcinea, but she gradually earns our attention and even
our sympathy (she really does love the bloody Englishman). For brief mo¬
ments, both Maurice and Emile are given subjective images, yet none captures
the emotional state of the characters as well as do either the shots silhouetting
the illicit lovers in a small boat (framed by a sea cave) and, later, against the
fireworks display (framed by a hotel room balcony) or the shot of the sea and
rocky shore where Hermione first catches sight of Maurice’s body in the dis¬
tance. Overall, the film seems more interested in clarity of action than in the
evocation of an atmosphere or in the representation of emotional states. Yet
despite its conclusion in a proper bourgeois marriage, L Appel du sang remains
ambiguously drawn to the tragic passion that Sicily awakens in its unfortunate
hero.
Mercanton also seems to have initiated a short-lived vogue for films shot in
the region of Arles and the Camargue in southern France.44 There, in the early
summer of 1920, he filmed Miarka, la fille a Course (1920), with the famous
actress Rejane, Ivor Novello, and Charles Vanel.45 Although the technical
facilities of the on-location production work were not the best, Miarka seems
to have been quite successful—largely because of Rejane’s understated, ago¬
nizing performance which exacerbated her illness and led to her death just two
weeks after the shooting ended.46 Soon after, Andre Hugon directed a string
of low-budget films with Jean Toulout and Claude Merelle in the Camargue—
Le Rot de Camargue (1921), Diamant noir (1922), and Notre Dame d'amour (1922).47
Even Antoine agreed to shoot his last film there, an adaptation of Alphonse
Daudet’s novel (not the popular play), LArlesienne (1922).48 His interest was

101
commercial narrative less in the story of passion and its attendant action on horseback than in the
FILM landscapes of flat marshes and huge skies. But one decision directed audience
attention elsewhere. The legendary Arles girl would actually be seen on the
screen, played by Fabris, a famous nude dancer at the Casino de Paris!49 Some
colleagues and critics were aghast, but L’Arlesienne proved to be one of An¬
toine’s more profitable films.50

Another series of landscapes to be explored by the realist film was, first, the
mountains of the Pyrenees and then, the French Alps. After at least one suc¬
cessful film set in the provinces—Le Retour aux champs (1918)—Jacques de
Baroncelli seems to have made the first of the cycle of mountain films with
his adaptation of Pierre Loti’s 1897 novel, Ramuntcho (1919). The film was
shot by Alphonse Gibory in the Basque region of the Pyrenees, in the area
where the action of the novel was located. There, the engagement between
Ramuntcho (Rene Lorsay) and Gracieuse (Yvonne Annie) is broken when he
is sent off to Indochina to do his military sendee; subsequently, she enters a
convent. When he eventually returns, in a final encounter, Gracieuse rejects
her vows in order to renew their engagement.51 Henri Fescourt was especially
struck by Ramuntcho when he returned from the war to begin working for
Films Louis Nalpas.52 But Louis Delluc was even more enthusiastic: the film
was successful precisely in the way that, unfortunately, Antoine’s films were
not.

Here is a metteur-en-scene who has perceived the harmony between things and living
creatures, the sensibility of a landscape, the distinctive light of a sky that is at once
awesome and finely nuanced.53

Baroncelli has taken a great leap forward. Perhaps the entire French cinema will
take that leap forward with the same conviction. We approach here that animated
impressionism which will be, I believe, the unique property of the French cinema—
the day when the French cinema will fully merit being called French.54

If the terms impressionist or impressionism meant anything to Delluc and his

colleagues in the French cinema in 1919, they defined the emerging realist
film. And if the French cinema was going to distinguish itself from the Amer¬
ican cinema that threatened to overwhelm it, here was one way to do so.
Delluc himself attempted to follow Baroncelli’s example in Le Chemin d'Ernoa
(1921), whose narrative of criminal intrigue becomes secondary to a documen¬
tarylike description of hauntingly empty Basque landscapes.55
But Ramuntcho alone was not enough to interest the French in their moun¬
tain regions. That took the appearance of several Swedish landscape films, such
as Sjostrom’s Les Proscrits (1918) and Stiller’s Tresor d'Arne (1919) and Dans les
remous (1919)—all shown in Paris during the 1919-1920 season—which much
impressed them with the evocative power of their snowscapes.56 As a conse¬
quence, several filmmakers began to explore the mountainous regions of the
French Alps, apparently unaware of the early German mountain films—e.g.,
those of Arnold Frank, who would become Leni Riefenstahl’s mentor. In Jo¬
celyn (1922), one of the first French films to be shot in the Alps, Leon Poirier
took advantage of the snowy wastes around Mont Pelat for a number of dra¬
matic and rhetorical effects.57 Although Henri Fescourt called Jocelyn merely
“an illustration’’ of the famous Lamartine poem of the same title,58 and its

102
 REALIST FILMS

39- Mile. Myrga and a

mountain village in Genevieve
(1923)

story is set in the period of the French Revolution, the film is firmly rooted
in the realist genre. Its narrative depends upon an unequal opposition between
the revolutionary turbulence of Paris and the tranquil solitude of a mountain
retreat, which allows for “a dramatic scherzo,” as Poirier conceived it, with
“a largo responding in echo.”59 In a mountain cavern, Jocelyn (Armand Tal-
lier), who has fled the Terror, gives refuge to an orphaned boy, whom he later
discovers is a disguised young woman (this Mary Pickford type is played by
Mile. Myrga). He falls in love, but that love is denied him by his religious
superiors. Thinking she has been abandoned, the young woman throws herself
into a life of pleasure in the Paris of Napoleon, as a way of forgetting Jocelyn.
Years later, their separation is recapitulated in a single poignant encounter.

Under her windows, the hero espies the woman he no longer is permitted to love;
she appears on her balcony, leans there a moment and drops a rose which falls in the
pebbled stream at Jocelyn’s feet; he reaches for it, but the flower is carried off by the
current, escapes the hand that pursues it.60

When she finally returns to the mountains, exhausted, to die with Jocelyn at
her side, in Poirier’s delicate tableaux, their souls are joined as one in his
simple room and then in adjacent graves on a high mountainside.
Impressed by Jocelyns commercial and critical success (the conservative So-
ciete des Auteurs des Films voted it the Best French film of 1922), Gaumont
asked Poirier to put together another film based on Lamartine.61 Drawn from
a lesser-known novel, Genevieve (1923) was even more clearly a realist film.
Uncommonly, unrelentingly pessimistic, the narrative is little more than a

103
COMMERCIAL narrative series of episodes that chronicles the life of a pious orphan girl (Mile. Myrga).62
FILM She is refused in marriage; raises her sister only to have her die in childbirth;
is unjustly imprisoned for abandoning the child; wanders in the mountains as
a beggar; becomes the servant of her old fiance, who then dies in an epidemic;
is restored by Jocelyn; and finally becomes head of a hospital where she redis¬
covers her sister’s grown child. For the four months of location shooting in
the region of Dauphine, Poirier used nonactors consistently in the secondary
roles.63 He also seems to have aimed for a painterly quality in his exterior and
interior tableaux, which reviewers much remarked on at the time. “Betrothed,
Genevieve looks like a Sargent; as a servant, a Holbein; as a traveler entering
the village, a Millet.’’64 The overall effect, wrote Cinemagazine, was to produce
a Corot-like “study of Nature’s magnificence: .wooded landscapes, fields, and
mountains’’ that tempered the tragic experience of “the poor peasant girl.’’65
Leon Moussinac, usually a harsh critic of Poirier’s films, found in Genevieve,

a unity of direction, a very successful equilibrium. . . . Certain passages are remark¬

able: the mother’s death in the beginning . .'. the story of the [abandoned] child and
the servant’s wanderings in the snow, among the most terrible landscapes imagina¬
ble.66

As an “atmosphere film,’’ Genevieve may bear comparison with Henri Fescourt’s

Mandarin, also shot in the Dauphine region several months before, as well as
his Les Grands (1924), which documented the life of several schoolboys aban¬
doned to their own devices during a vacation period in Aix-en-Provence.67
The best of these mountain films, and arguably one of the best realist films
of the decade, was Jacques Feyder’s Visages d'enfants (1925). As I mentioned
earlier, this film was the victim of production disagreements and distribution
caprice that caused a delay of two years in its release and hence a limited
commercial run of scant success.68 “Simple, intimate, lacking any special at¬
tractions, stars, or prestigious sets,’’ to quote Georges Sadoul,69 it deftly, even
subtly, narrated a well-acted story of sustained emotional poignancy. French
critics generally thought highly of it, and Feyder proudly noted, in his slim
autobiography, that, in 1926, the Japanese press called it the best European
film of the year.70
Visages d’enfants was Feyder’s first original scenario since his apprenticeship
days at Gaumont during the war. He wrote it specifically to use the talents of
Jean Forest, the young actor he had discovered for Crainquebille (1923), as well
as the location of the Haut Valois region of Switzerland. Basically the scenario
integrates the character study of a young boy who must learn to accept a new
stepmother and stepsister with the social study of an isolated Catholic com¬
munity’s rituals and customs, in a landscape that alternately separates, endan¬
gers, and forces people closer together.71 In the village of Saint-Luc, in the
Haut Valois, the mayor’s wife (Suzy Vernon) dies unexpectedly, leaving her
husband, Amsler (Victor Vina), with two young children, Jean (Jean Forest)
and Pierrette (Pierrette Houyez). Jean is especially affected by his mother’s
death, and, when his father marries a widow (Rachel Devirys) with a daughter
his age, Arlette (Arlette Peyran), he bitterly opposes their presence in the
house. One day, while the family is returning home in the sleigh, no one
notices as Jean maliciously tosses Arlette’s favorite doll into the snow. When
the girl goes to search for it alone in the evening, a sudden spring avalanche

104
 REALIST FILMS

40. Jean Forest and Victor

Vina in the village cemetery
in Visages d'enfants (1925)

buries her in a tiny mountain chapel. Although she is rescued, Jean is beside
himself with remorse. He writes a note to his father and goes off to drown
himself in the nearby river. Reading the note, Arlette tells her mother, who
catches him just as he is about to be swept over a waterfall. Recognizing their
concern and love for him, Jean finally relents and accepts his stepmother and
stepsister.
The first thing that, even now, impresses one about Visages d’enfants is the
unusual authenticity of its natural and social milieu. It has one of the most
beautiful and most efficient film openings of the decade. Several ELSs intro¬
duce the village, nestled beside a waterfall in a boulder-strewn mountain val¬
ley. There is an LS of the mayor’s long house, constructed of hewn logs and
ornately-carved dark wood, and then several shots of villagers walking up to
it. In the large central room, the major characters are singled out (Amsler,
Jean, Pierrette), and the occasion is finally identified—the funeral of the may¬
or’s wife. Her coffin is carried down a flight of wooden stairs (a CU of shoes
on the steps conveys the difficulty), and a HA shot describes its shadow pass¬
ing across the bare wooden floor. Outside, the funeral procession (the men and
women are in separate groups; Jean and his father precede the priest) moves
slowly down the narrow, stone-cobbled streets, past rows of log buildings
whose first stories begin at the height of the winter snows. The cemetery is
in a grove of trees some distance away, but several LSs there situate the village
clearly in the background against the mountains. So consistent is the texture
of the lighting and decor here (the cameraman was L.-H. Burel), it is difficult
to distinguish the studio from the location footage. Smoothly, succinctly, and

105
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE in some detail, the sequence establishes a particular natural landscape, a social
FILM community drawn together in an important ritual, a family in that commu¬
nity, and, as we now see, one figure who is already given some psychological
depth.
The only thing missing from this description is Jean’s subjective experience
of the funeral. As soon as he is introduced, the sequence singles him out by
linking his figure with POV shots and with various optical effects. Before the
coffin even appears, a shot of his morose face is followed by a MS that blurs
in as it tilts up to reveal his father. Other shots also seem to be his POV: that
of his little sister blowing bubbles, the CU of shoes descending the stairs. In
the HA shot of the coffin’s shadow, he is the one who follows its path across
the floor. Even the procession through the street is described in several han¬
dheld moving shots that either take his POV or dolly ahead of him. Finally,
at the cemetery, when they start to fill in the grave, he is isolated in several
CUs until a brief series of rapidly cut swish pans erupt. At the end, he faints,
and his father has to carry him back to the house unconscious. This judicious
pattern of subjectivity quickly determines Jean as the film’s central character
and his acute sensitivity to his mother’s death—his inability to cope with her
loss—as the film’s primary subject.
The overall narrative structure of the film is a model of rigor and balance.
It divides into four major segments of alternating sequences, connected by
transitions, all of which produce a narrative line that ascends steadily through
two sets of complications to a doubled climax. The first segment of alternation
separates father and son. At Amsler’s request, the village curate takes Jean
41. Arlette Peyran in Visages over the mountains (in a series of breathtaking shots) to Voissay in the next
d’enfants (1925) valley. In the meantime, Saint-Luc celebrates Amsler’s wedding with a ritual
dance. Finally, at the end of several alternating sequences, while the two rake
hay one late afternoon, the curate tells the boy about the marriage. The mag¬
nificent mountain spaces, through which Jean first seemed to move harmoni¬
ously, now offer little solace. The mountains now stand as a barrier, dividing
him from his family and community, and the lush hayfields of Voissay lie
open to the sun in mute contrast to his misery. He is out of place, in both
society and nature.
As Jean returns alone now to Saint-Fuc, the sequences that had narrated his
father’s wedding shift focus to the stepmother and stepsister Arlette. Here the
pattern of alternation juxtaposes Jean and the two intruding women (the father
is deemphasized) in different parts of the house. Jean soon finds himself dis¬
placed in his own home—Arlette uses his crayons and takes over his room.
While she and her mother go about their work, Jean spends his time clinging
to his mother’s memory through such things as a portrait and some clothing
stored in the attic. Jean’s hostility to Arlette grows until it climaxes in the
avalanche segment. After the sleigh ride, Arlette runs out into the snow to
look for her lost doll while Jean turns restlessly in bed. The avalanche now
separates her from the family/community, replicating the mountain barrier
that had cut off Jean earlier. As Jean and Arlette, separately, pray to figures
of the Madonna, the villagers search the darkness with lanterns and discover
the chapel’s cross projecting from the snow. This miraculous conjunction,
across distant spaces, restores Arlette, but Jean still considers himself an out¬
cast for his “criminal” act.

106
 Three short sequences with all the characters together in the large central realist films
room serve as a bridge from this first climax to the concluding one. The
distance that still separates Jean from the family is articulated in several HA/
LA shots, with the boy looking down from the top of the stairs to the others
around the table. As he prepares to do away with himself, the final segment
of alternation begins, intercutting the stepmother milking cows on the hill¬
side, Amsler driving off in a cart to the local lumber mill, and Jean saying
goodbye to Arlette and asking her to give the note to his father. Appropri-
ately, Jean heads for the stream, to drown himself in the run-off from the
snow that buried Arlette earlier. When he reaches his destination, the alter¬
nation shifts to exclude first his father and then Arlette. In a final paroxysm
of rapid cutting, Jean falls from a tree limb, and his stepmother wades into
the swollen current above the waterfall to snatch him up as he is carried by.
The final image of Jean and his stepmother, restoring the lost mother-son
relation, is prepared for in an interesting pattern of rhetorical figuring. That
figuring associates Jean with a number of objects, as if forcing him to come
to grips with reality. His dead mother’s possessions especially obsess him,
either as a means of sustaining his closeness to her or as a sign of his separa¬
tion. At first, the most important of these is the portrait of his mother, which
he takes into his new room and to which he prays daily. Early on, her image
had even seemed to smile down on him momentarily. Then, over Sunday
dinner, during the stepmother’s first week in the house, Jean notices a brooch
at her neck. When he breaks down crying, his father (even more ignorant
than we are) orders him out of the house. Only as he lies in the fields do we
understand the threat literalized in this object—a single subjective CU of the
brooch tilts up to reveal his mother’s face. Several days later, Jean tries to
revive the presence of his mother through one of her dresses which he finds in
the attic. In a brief, eerie scene (LS, FS, MCU), he literally fetishizes the
dress, draping it over a chest of drawers against the wall, caressing it, and
finally laying his head in its lap. When the stepmother finds the same dress
and makes plans to use it for smaller articles of clothing, Jean savagely hacks
it to pieces. Again the father shows surprising insensitivity and orders him
out of the house. Either this lack on the father’s part is so exaggerated as to
be a projection of the son’s (consistent with the Oedipal relation at the center
of the film) or it raises disturbing questions about his actual feelings and
attitudes.
Jean’s destruction of the fetish, to deny the transfer of desire, raises the
possibility of his doing actual violence to one of the intruding women or even
to himself. This comes to pass through another object that appears just prior
to the mother’s dress—Arlette’s doll. Arlette takes the doll with her whenever
she tends goats on the hillside. One day, when Jean brings her some lunch,
he grabs the doll and attaches it to the horns of one of the goats, which begins
to prance about wildly. His teasing has a disturbing edge—with the doll
serving as a metaphorical substitute for Arlette, it raises the specter of vio¬
lence, even rape. The conjunction of this action with the fetishization of the
dress that follows produces an extraordinary mirror image—of desire for the
mother versus repression of desire (through violence) for either the stepmother
or daughter who would replace her. Several days later, to punish Arlette for
reporting his cutting of the dress to her mother, Jean throws away the doll,

107
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE as if to erase her image, her presence. The avalanche then literalizes the met¬
FILM aphor by burying Arlette with her doll. Suddenly pushed to the extreme, the
sexual symbolic of this rhetorical figuring is resolved, or displaced, by a reli¬
gious one. That displacement is articulated in the miraculous conjunction that
restores Arlette. At that moment, Jean exchanges one mother for another, as
the object of his praying. From the faded portrait of his dead mother, he turns
to a small statue of the Madonna in his room. The disturbing sexual antago¬
nism within the family is suppressed, even in Jean’s decision to commit sui¬
cide. For there in the stream the stepmother appears as a dens ex machina, the
Madonna come to life and made flesh. The transformation is complete. In the
raging waters, Jean is baptized and born again. Nature, the community, and
the family are in harmony once more. And the portrait of the dead mother
smiles down on them in the end, blessing the restoration.
Feyder’s achievement in Visages d’enfants was diminished by its commercial
failure and then almost obliterated by another provincial realist film very much
like it which was highly successful less than a year later. That film was Julien
Duvivier’s Poll de carotte (1926), whose scenario was adapted from a Jules
Renard novel—ironically, by Jacques Feyder.72 Because it was a small produc¬
tion for Phocea, Duvivier shot the film in the Morvan mountains of central
France rather than in the Hautes-Alps (which lessened the impact of the land¬
scape considerably).73 The narrative is complicated, focusing not only on a
young misunderstood boy, Carrot-Top (Andre Heuze), but on his deceitful
brother (Fabian Haziza), his frightful stepmother (Charlotte Barbier-Krauss),
his rather ignorant father (Henry Krauss), a cabaret singer who seduces the
brother, and a family maid who befriends the outcast.74 Greed, cruelty, ug¬
liness, and a hypocritical piety are concentrated in this most stereotypical of
stepmothers, one of the most offensive images of women in the French cinema
of the decade. Furthermore, the film’s resolution is oddly fractured: father and
son are reunited, as are the stepmother and stepson; yet the reunions are
separate, and the family does not seem to be restored. Despite all the conflicts
and contradictions, this narrative is located in a rather detailed village setting,
so that Duvivier is at least partially correct in calling Poll de carotte an “at¬
mosphere film.”73 And, in 1932, he had the commercial acumen to make a
sound film version of his scenario that was even more popular.

The last two geographical areas to be represented by the realist film genre
may well have been initiated by one of Louis Feuillade’s more original works,
Vendemiaire (1919). It starred two of his chief serial actors, Rene Creste and
Edouard Mathe, in a contemporary story divided into a “prologue and three
parts (the vineyard, the vat, and the new wine)”.76 The narrative is predicated
on the displacement of refugees (with two disguised German spies among
them) from the war zone to the vineyards of Bas-Languedoc. The film stresses
the allegorical, almost Biblical, elements of this narrative and operates accord¬
ing to an alternation of sequences that obsessively juxtapose war and peace.
Yet, at times, it is surprisingly realistic, even lyrical—perhaps, as Francis
Lacassin suggests, because Feuillade chose to set the film in the landscape of
his own childhood.77 Particularly moving are the prologue that follows a boat
of refugees down the Rhone river and a documentarylike sequence on the sense
of community that develops among the peasants during the grape harvest.

108
 REALIST FILMS

42. A frame still from La

Terre (1921)

These two sequences seem to lead into two fairly distinct sets of realist films—
the peasant film and the river or canal film.
The many peasant films that were produced in the early 1920s tended to
cultivate a feeling for landscape in the agricultural regions of western, central,
and southern France (the north and east having been destroyed by the war).
Most of these films narrated rather simple stories and tried to document as
economically and authentically as possible the land-holding bourgeois and peasant
milieu.78
Once again it was Baronceiii and Antoine who spearheaded the effort. Ba-
roncelli seems to have initiated this cycle of films with Le Retour aux champs
(1918), which Delluc praised for bringing to the screen the peasant and the
“truth” of his way of life with a characteristic “impressionism.”79 The follow¬
ing year, Antoine decided to film an adaptation of Zola’s La Terre (1921).
This time Antoine was uncompromising. As was his practice, he and L.-H.
Burel shot the film entirely on location, in the Beauce region below Chartres
(presumably, in the summer and winter of 1919). The results Paul de la Borie
described as meticulously painterly, almost Millet-like, in their realism.80 There
were repeated HALSs which literally positioned the peasants as part of the
earth, carefully composed “deep space” LSs sensitive to natural and man-made
patterns in the fields and pastures, and many CUs of animals and farmyard
machines and objects that gave the film a material weight. Although Comedie
Franchise actors once again played the principal roles, the acting was uniformly
excellent, with Armand Bour particularly effective as Old Fouan. Above all,
Antoine refused to dilute the unrelenting pessimism of Zola’s story of greed

109
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

43. A publicity photo of the

threshing sequence in Nine
(1924)

and deception among small landowners. An old farmer, Old Fouan, is slowly
robbed of his land, his farmhouse, and his money by his own sons, “Bureau”
(Jean Herve) and Hyacinthe (Milo). At the same time, a young newlywed
neighbor woman, Franchise (Germaine Rouer), whose sister Lise (Jeanne Briey)
has married “Buteau,” discovers the plot against Fouan and is brutally at¬
tacked one day in the fields. In the final sequence, these stories come together
in a cross-cut series of grimly poignant images. In a bitter snowstorm, Fouan
drags himself across the parched earth that was once his until he collapses,
while Franchise dies alone in her simple husband’s house, without denouncing
or implicating anyone.
Rene Hervil contributed two of his best films to the genre, both shot by
Amedee Morin, L’Ami Fritz (1920) and Blanchette (1921), the latter adapted
from a play by Eugene Brieux.81 L’Ami Fritz told the story of Fritz Kobus
(Leon Mathot), a rich and propertied Alsatian, who falls in love with the
daughter (Fluguette Duflos) of one of his tenant farmers (de Max). Set in his
bachelor ways, Fritz, after a long struggle, grudgingly relents to marriage.
Disturbed by all the attention to what he considered a poorly crafted film
(there was no electrical illumination and scant time to film), Hervil himself
preferred Blanchette,82 According to Fescourt, Blanchette combined impressive
winter landscapes and unusually natural acting (by Maurice de Feraudy, Leon
Mathot, Pauline Johnson, and Therese Kolb) with a reactionary subject—“the
danger to a peasant family that comes from giving their daughter an education
above their social level.”83 Much like his mentors, Antoine and Mercanton,
however, Hervil was criticized for a rather monotonous mise-en-scene, an ab-

110
sence of rhythm in the editing, and a gaping discrepancy between the intrigue realist films
and “the depiction of a way of life.”84
Several other peasant films seem to have avoided these shortcomings. One
is only marginally about peasant life—Louis Delluc’s L’lnondation (1924)—and
its rhetorical and narrative complexity carrv it well beyond the conventions of
the genre. Others include Protazanoffs L'Ombre du peche (1922) and a recent
rediscovery that has yet to be fully reappraised—Rene Le Somptier’s La Bete
traquee (1923), adapted by Michel Carre from Adrien Chabot’s novel, Marielle
Thibaut,85 The best known, at least at the time, was Baroncelli’s Nine (1924),
probably because it was drawn from a Prix Goncourt novel by Ernest Perro-
chon.86 In it, Sandra Milowanoff played a peasant girl who cares for the house
and two children of a widowed farmer named Corbier (Van Daele). Threatened
by a jealous hired hand, a scheming village seamstress (France Dhelia), the
drunken vengeance of her own brother Jean (Gaston Modot), and the blind
egoism of her master, Nene is finally told to leave the farm; and, heartbroken,
she tries to drown herself in a stream. Corbier rescues her and comes to his
senses, accepting the woman whom his children now consider their mother.
Some of the best moments in Nine depend on well-chosen natural locations.
Having searched out the most suitable landscapes in the Vendee region of
western France, Baroncelli lodged his cast and crew (including cameraman
Louis Chaix) for a month of shooting in a tiny hamlet, “in the midst of actual
peasants,” where they took “their meals in a communal house.”87 The results
were remarkable, especially in the hay-baling sequence (where Jean loses an
arm in the threshing machine) and in several dramatic encounters in the re¬
gion’s vast wheatfields and pastures. And they were complemented by interior
night scenes of minimal lighting and by poignant exchanges of looks in CU.
Here, as in Ramuntcho, Baroncelli seems to have produced the synthesis of
realism and impressionism that so marks the genre.
Perhaps the best of these peasant films was L’Atre (1923), an almost for¬
gotten work by Robert Boudrioz, who had once worked before the war as a
scriptwriter for Maurice Tourneur.88 With the financial backing of Abel Gance’s
new production company, Boudrioz (and his cameramen, Gaston Brun and
Maurice Arnou) shot the film during the spring and summer months of 1920.89
However, the edited film was withheld from distribution for almost three
years, perhaps because of the double whammy strategy of serials and super¬
productions which then gripped Pathe-Consortium.90 Although L’Atre was
only marginally successful commercially, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous s readers in¬
cluded it among the ten best films of 1923-91
The scenario for the film was drawn from La Chevauchee nocturne, a “peasant
tragedy” written by Alexandre Arnoux.92 The story begins with a desperate
young woman who, on Christmas Eve, abandons her baby girl at the farm¬
house window of an old peasant couple (they already have two grandsons to
raise) and then drowns herself in a nearby stream. Several years pass. The
younger boy gives the girl one of his whittled wooden dolls, and the two boys
fight over her on their way to school. Days later, all three watch puzzled and
terrified as their grandmother (Renee Doums) dies in her chair. Again time
passes. The elder son, Bernard (Charles Vanel), now does most of the work on
the farm while his brother Jean (Jacques de Feraudy) loafs about and carves
clay sculptures—for instance, an ugly bust of the cruel, oafish servant boy.

Ill
44. (left) Maurice Schutz and
Renee Dounis in L’Atre
(1923)

45. (right) A landscape

publicity photo
Jean has fallen in love with Arlette (another Mary Pickford type played by
Renee Tandil), and Bernard watches them sullenly at a village dance. When
Bernard threatens to leave the farm, his grandfather (Maurice Shutz) suddenly
decides to make him his principal heir and marry him to Arlette; then he
orders Jean off the farm. Heartbroken, Jean goes off to the city, where his
sculptures eventually win acclaim at an exhibition. Arlette reluctantly agrees
to marry Bernard, and the couple takes over the farm when the grandfather
dies. However, Arlette’s continuing love for Jean enflames Bernard’s jealousy,
and the two fight bitterly one day when he discovers that she has written to
his brother. Learning that Jean is returning to the farm, Bernard spirits Ar¬
lette away to an abandoned mill. On reaching the farm, Jean threatens the
servant boy (who has sided with Bernard earlier) and, when he rides off toward
the mill, is shot in the back. He struggles into the mill just as Arlette is
about to turn a knife against herself. Bernard’s fury dissolves into shame at
the sight of his brother’s condition, and Jean “remarries” Arlette to his con¬
trite rival with his dying breath.
Viewed today, in a 35mm nitrate print at the Cinematheque frangaise,
L’Atre is something of a revelation. “Simplicity,” wrote Rene Clair, “that is
the quality, the chief quality of the best parts of L’Atre. ”93 Indeed, its lovingly
composed images (often framed in oval or arched iris masks) have a meditative,
lyrical power that remind one of Tourneur as well as of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise
(1927) and City Girl (1929). At the beginning of the third time period of the
film, for instance, the grandfather admires his farm in a slow montage of
images that ends with shots of a bullock plowing a field (including a CU of
the plow slicing through the soil) intercut with shots of the old man picking
up a clod of earth to hold in his hands. Just before he turns the farm over to
Bernard, they move to the farmhouse window—where his vision becomes Ber¬
nard’s—and the transfer is sealed in a CU of their clasped hands. This natural
relationship between the peasant and the land even marks the sequence of the
grandmother’s death (handled in a few restrained shots of her sitting by the

112
window, the children standing in the doorway, and the grandfather called realist films
back from walking across the fields and into a wood). Her funeral procession
is described in just one long-take LS—stretched out along a country road, it
is silhouetted against an immense sky as well as reflected in the still waters of
a marsh. Jean s relationship to the land is strangely one of ignorance—even
though he reworks the earth for his sculptures. Only when he is forced to
leave does he really seem to see it—in one shot, he looks out sadly (from some
trees in the foreground) over an unplowed field stretching off into the distance.
But the image he carries with him and which finally inspires his art is a LS
of Arlette, as she crosses the stream on a wooden bridge, carrying a water jar
on her shoulder. Significantly, the figure seems to derive more from classical
sculpture than it does from his life on the farm.
Indeed, the most moving moments in the film are those articulating a sense
of loss or tragic confrontation. The sequence that follows Jean’s expulsion from
the farm is particularly eerie. From the barn Jean longingly watches Arlette
at her bedroom window, and his hand twists and retwists a rope at his side.
When her light goes out, he puts a ladder against the house and climbs up
and inside. The servant boy spots him and tells Bernard, who steals up the
inside stairs and opens the bedroom door to see Jean crouched over Arlette
(what was he going to do?). Stealthily they pull knives and face one another
across her bed. When she moves in her sleep, they stare at her; the tension
ebbs, and they go off silently to argue downstairs. At least two later sequences
involve the poignant conjunction of separate characters’ heightened emotional
states. At the precise moment, for instance, when Jean is inspired in his work
by the memory of Arlette carrying the water jar, she is looking through a
storage drawer filled with the wooden figures he carved as a boy. The sight
seems to rekindle her love; but when Bernard discovers her, he angrily tosses
the figures into the hearth fire and, in CU, crushes one under his boot. After
their fight in the kitchen (the staging is surprisingly brutal), Bernard leaves
Arlette and walks out to the stream. For the first time, we begin to share his
dejection as he sits (with his back to us in HALS), tearing up her letter to
Jean and dropping it in the water. Simultaneously, Arlette writes another
letter to Jean and starts when a cat suddenly appears in the doorway. Their
separate miseries are ironically matched in back-to-back shots: a HALS of
Bernard slouched beside the stream; a HALS of Arlette going through an arch
in the village street, on her way to post the letter.
Despite its power, the resolution of L’Atre is less than satisfying. “The
sculptor hesitates’’ / “The farmer never does’’ / “The earth remains most sig¬
nificant”—so read the final intertitles. But the opposition has not been that
simple. Jean and Arlette’s passion for one another has been less responsible for
the tragic chain of events than has Bernard’s and his grandfather’s blind ad¬
herence to the land and to its possession. In fact, the earth that feeds and
protects the peasant also produces the blind passion that divides and destroys.
The hearth fire that brings the children together in the beginning (where the
boys replace the Christmas manger doll with Arlette) also serves later to shat¬
ter the bonds that join them. Although the film attempts to celebrate the
earth and its bounty, it gives more attention to the loss and sacrifice that
precludes its continued sustenance. Boudrioz once said in an interview that
“the ideal purpose of the cinema” for him, was “to record as simply as possible

113
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE the simplest, yet most powerful things.”94 In L’Atre, he achieved that sim¬
FILM plicity with a degree of artistry that renders it darkly ambiguous.

The landscapes and peoples of the French rivers and canals were the last to
be explored by the provincial realist film. Less than a year after Feuillade’s
Vendemiaire, Antoine conceived the idea for a film devoted entirely to the life
of the boatmen on the canals. His friend, Gustave Grillet, was persuaded to
write a scenario, L'Hirondelle et la mesange, which simply ‘‘followed the journey
of a barge,” from the canals of Flanders all the way to Paris.95 In the winter
of 1920-1921, Antoine finally got permission from S.C.A.G.L. to film the
scenario in Belgium, integrating his main actors, Henry Krauss and Pierre
Alcover, with the crews of two canal barges..96 In an interview with Andre
Lang, he gave this account of the experience:

We left on our barge from Anvers and went up the Escaut to Bruges. . . . Magnifi¬
cent! . . . Since everything was shot during the trip, all the footage was in sharp
contrasts. . . . The story was solid ... a very simple drama ... it ended with a
man sinking out of sight in the cargo hold one night . . . and the next morning the
barge threaded its way up river, quietly, in the sunlight and silence. ... It was very
beautiful. . . .”97

Yet the film was never released—for one of two reasons. Antoine told his son
that the new directors of Pathe-Consortium were indignant over the footage
and refused to let him finish editing the film for distribution.98 Grillet’s son,
however, reports that, because of the constant fog and rain that hampered
shooting, Antoine was not satisfied with the lighting—it was he who refused
its release.99 Whatever the case, Antoine’s son concludes, L'Hirondelle et la
mesange was to have been ‘‘a poem in images.”100
Several years later, a number of films more or less fulfilled Antoine’s am¬
bitions. In Le Carillon de minuit (1923), Baroncelli also went to Belgium to
document the milieu of a canal town and its religious mission work. Rene
Jeanne and Charles Ford especially praised Baroncelli’s half-tone and gray mon¬
ochrome images for the way they perfectly complemented the story’s discreet
feeling of resignation.101 In La Lille de lean (1923), Jean Renoir used the banks
of the Loing river near Montigny to provide a painterly context for the begin¬
ning and ending of a picaresque series of wild adventures involving Catherine
Hessling. But Renoir’s film was much more than a realist film, and its exu¬
berant experimentation demands further discussion later. The most sustained
evocation of barge life on the canals occurs in Jean Epstein’s La Belle Nivernaise
(1924).
This charming film was adapted from Alphonse Daudet’s popular 1886
novella—a simple, even banal, staccato-styled tale of an orphan boy adopted
by a river barge family. In his scenario, Epstein updated the story to the
present, altered the narrative structure a bit, added some dramatic conflict at
one point, and generally “poeticized” his material.102 Here, in brief, is his
version of the plot. On one of his biannual runs to Paris, Louveau (Pierre Hot)
finds an abandoned child and, with police consent, takes him back to his
barge, “La Belle Nivernaise,” and his unsuspecting wife and daughter. Ten
years later, the boy, Victor (Maurice Touze), has become “Pere Louveau’s right
arm” on the barge and is close to being in love with his daughter Clara

114
 0 REALIST FILMS

46. The benediction ceremony

at the end of La Belle
Nivernaise (1924)

(Blanche Montel). Called to Paris by the authorities, Louveau discovers that

Victor is actually the son of Maugendre (David Evremont), one of his charcoal
shippers on the Nivernaise canal (connecting the Loire and Seine rivers in
central France). Sometime later, as he and his wife make arrangements to
return the boy, Victor defends Clara from an attack by the barge mate (who
has become jealous of his position) and barely saves the barge from crashing
into a lock. Maugendre sends him off to a lycee—“to make something of
him”—but Victor pines away from loneliness. Recognizing his error, Mau¬
gendre reverses his decision and offers Victor and Clara a river barge of their
own, “La Nouvelle Nivernaise.”
Unfortunately, La Belle Nivernaise had only a modest success with the French
public and disappointed many critics who were expecting to see some spectac¬
ular moments of rapid cutting which Epstein had become known for.103 Wrong¬
headed though that expectation may have been, there was reason for disap¬
pointment. For instance, the sequence that depends most on rapid cutting
turns out to be one of the least effective in the film. This is the moment when
the barge mate attacks Clara and the barge drifts dangerously close to a canal
lock. Yet the motivation for this attack is hardly plausible, and the rapid
cutting does little more than sustain suspense. Perhaps the sequence would
work halfway effectively if projected with the music intended to accompany
it; but, as is, the moment seems expanded to an exhausting length, to the
point where discrepancies between the position of the barge in different shots
are surprisingly obvious.

115
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE When La Belle Nivernaise does work effectively, which indeed is much of
FILM the time, it does so by refining the conventions of the realist film genre. Of
all Epstein’s early narrative films, it most privileges description over narrative,
as if it were simply documenting a way of life or a character’s emotional state
in the context of a particular space and time. One sign of this is the frequency
with which Epstein and his cameraman Paul Guichard employ LSs. Nearly all
of the sequences on the barge include them, either positioning the characters
in a deep space stretching from stern to bow or in a somewhat flattened space
(shot from a 90° angle) as they walk along the barge edge. As a young boy,
Victor is initially defined in LSs—as he walks back and forth in front of an
epicerie or sits by a lamppost in a narrow street (where Louveau happens on
him). The best of these moments is a marvelous long-take ELS of an empty
square with a small central park of bare trees, through which the boy slowly
meanders in the early morning air, as if wavering between fear and awe. The
combination of wide stretches of river and grassy fields, in the area where
Maugendre lives, have a very different ambience in LS. Repeatedly, the char¬
acters come and go through the high grass, moving in harmony with its
undulations. When Maugendre decides t<3 return Victor to the Louveaus, the
sequence of their agreement concludes in a magisterial LS of the group on the
barge silhouetted against the fields and sky. The film finally ends in the same
area with a benediction ceremony for "La Nouvelle Nivernaise,’’ which in¬
cludes the implication of Victor and Clara’s marriage as well (a bird cage passes
from one to the other to be hung in a small arbor of vines and flowers). A
HALS of the barge and surrounding countryside, as a priest comes on board,
produces an image of harmony that is almost paradisiac.
As early as Bonjour Cinema (1921), Epstein had echoed Delluc and others in
writing, "A landscape can embody a state of mind. Especially a state of re¬
pose.’’104 La Belle Nivernaise gave him the chance to capture the spirit of one
particular landscape—the Seine river between Paris and Rouen. This section
of the river, along which most of the film was shot (in the late summer months
of 1923), Epstein later described as "the greatest actor, the strongest person¬
ality that I have known intimately.’’105 There can be little doubt that "the
heart and soul—the living axis and artistic center’’ of the film, in the words
of Paul Ramain, is the Seine.106 Its languid current provides the "landscape
dance’’ on which the film’s slow, limpid rhythm depends. It is a rhythm
accentuated by the LSs, by the gentle landscapes and character movements,
by the dissolves and graphic match cuts (e.g., a short sequence in the fog),
but principally by a host of smooth tracking shots, taken from a camera mounted
on the barge or on one close by moving parallel to it. Fixed and flowing at
the same time, this camera movement has a descriptive rather than a narrative
function, operating as an extension of the river itself. Those critics who ini¬
tially praised La Belle Nivernaise noted the rhythmic fluidity generated by its
landscape and mediated by Epstein’s camera; and they compared it favorably
with the early masterworks of the Swedish cinema.107 Ten years later, a similar
landscape and rhythm, much inspired by it, would animate Jean Vigo’s L’A-
talante (1933).
Despite the peaceful harmony of the film’s ending, the river’s presence is
not without some ambiguity. In the beginning, for instance, it seems a rather
neutral backdrop to the quarreling that initially marks the Louveau family.

116
Briefly, in the fog sequence, it even poses a physical threat. Perhaps the best realist films
evidence of this ambiguity, and of the hypnotic shifting perspective so char¬
acteristic of Epstein’s films, is the first subjective sequence in the film, the
family’s departure from Paris after Louveau has learned of Victor’s identity.
The sequence opens with a fluid series of tracking shots from the barge (linked
by dissolves): the river’s edge, smokestacks, trees, cottages among the trees.
Then comes another series (linked by dissolves again): a shot of open water, a
CU of Victor’s face, a MS of Victor at the tiller, a LS of Louveau (from behind)
walking toward the barge bow, and a tracking shot (from the bow) of the
river ahead. This measured pattern of movement seems to elide the time pass¬
ing and produce a continuous moment interrelating man and nature, with
Victor easily controlling the barge in the river’s current—except for one thing.
Between the two series of shots comes an intertitle describing Louveau’s emo¬
tional state: “Troubled, Louveau had hastened his departure from Paris.’’ The
intertitle makes the shots problematic. Are they Victor’s POV shots (juxta¬
posing a visual to a verbal subjectivity) or an omniscient description which
gradually becomes anchored in Louveau? Or are they both? Victor’s relation
to the river turns ambiguous—he is both subject and object, ironically una¬
ware that his movement on the river will separate him from it. As shots of
the prow and water now alternate with shots of Louveau in the bow, the latter
wavers between duty and love (in an intertitle): to give the boy up or keep
him as his adopted son. He turns to look at Victor and Clara, who has joined
him, and the backward-looking POV shots suddenly look almost like memory
shots (since they echo the first images of the young couple together). When
he turns once more to face the poplar-lined river ahead, he turns away from
an image that is already past (it is the last he will see of Victor until the end).
Although Louveau’s look seems to dominate the sequence (as his choice seems
to determine Victor’s destiny), he, too, is determined—by the knowledge he
bears and by the very motion of the barge and the river. His subordinate
position within a larger design is confirmed in the final shots of the sequence:
a LS of the barge bow, with Louveau as a small figure (frame right), and a LS
of the barge mate (who has just written to Maugendre), squatting by the rail.
As in Jean Renoir’s films, the lovely, seductive rhythm of the river sometimes
carries with it an ominous undercurrent.

By 1924, the realist provincial film reached a kind of apotheosis in two

large-scale productions which combined the Lrench love for the ambience of
river or canal landscapes with their interest in the culture of Brittany. One
was Leon Poirier’s La Briere (1925), which was adapted from a recent Prix
Goncourt novel by Alphonse de Chateaubriand and starred two of his popular
actors from Gaumont, Armand Tallier and Mile. Myrga. Although an inde¬
pendent production, its commercial status was confirmed by an exclusive month¬
long run (following L’Herbier’s L'lnhumaine) at the prestigious Madeleine-Ci-
nema.108 Yet the narrative was predicated on a bitter dispute over whether or
not to drain marshland for a brick factory in La Briere, a famous salt marsh
at the mouth of the Loire river in lower Brittany. Poirier shot most of the
film around Saint-Joachim in the Briere region over a period of several months
and chose an obscure actor named Jose Davert—who had appeared opposite
Rene Navarre in La Nouvelle Aurore (1919)—for his central character, Aoustin,

117
47. (left) Jose Davert in La
Briere (1925)

48. (right) A landscape

publicity photo

the old watchman of the marshes, who opposes the drainage plan.109 The result
was a solemn, impeccably crafted, but somewhat uneven film which had a
very successful run.
For the most part, La Briere’s rhythm is slow, magisterial, in correspond¬
ence with the calm, flat landscape of the salt marsh and the lives of its rustic
inhabitants. With his large solid physique and expressionless weathered face,
Aoustin becomes an icon of the people’s determined resistance to change. His
quiet, stolid figure is in perfect harmony with the serene marsh landscape he
slowly poles his skiff across; and his silence intensifies the conflicts he has with
his less obstinate wife and daughter, Theotiste, and her peasant fiance, Jeanin.
At the film’s preview in August, 1924, one viewer was heard to remark,
“Doesn’t it seem that you can actually see the silence.’’110 This documentary¬
like diegesis, as well as the film’s technical facility, is disturbed, however, by
several misplaced rhetorical conventions. For example, there is one sequence
of accelerating montage to bring the daughter and fiance together (by means
of a stampeding horse) and another to intensify the stalking climax between
Aoustin and Jeanin. At three points, the film also abruptly inserts into the
narrative a strange young woman (a variation on the Arles’s girl?) in order to
give support to Aoustin. In the end, as Leon Moussinac argues, the basic
conflict underlying the film is simplified into a nostalgic contrast between
“modern mechanics’’ and a “rough mysticism.’’111 The socioeconomic conflict
is displaced almost completely into the family, where it is resolved tragically
in a romantic, moralistic plot that turns the old man’s rebellious vision into
a form of blindness. Theotiste bears a dead child illegitimately; Aoustin loses
a hand that is replaced by a wooden one; the salt marsh turns into bricks—
all because a daughter won’t obey her father.
 49. (left) Charles Vanel in
Pecheur d'lslande (1924)

50. (right) Sandra Milowanoff

Even more prestigious than La Briere was Jacques de Baroncelli’s Pecheur

d'lslande (1924), which preceded Raymond Bernard’s Le Miracle des loups at the
Salle Marivaux and then continued for another month at the new Mogodor
cinema.112 Pierre Loti’s novel had been set in Paimpol on the northern coast
of Brittany, and Baroncelli took his cast and crew there (again his cameraman
was Louis Chaix) for several months of shooting in the spring and summer of
1924.113 Lor a while, the sailing ship Marie became a veritable studio in the
harbor and on the seas; and the people of Paimpol joined the production to
enact the story of what they considered to be their book. The story is a simple
one. Gaud Mevel (Sandra Milowanoff), a young woman from Paimpol, falls in
love with a fisherman, Yann Gaos (Charles Vanel), who is wary of reciprocat¬
ing her love. Only after she is orphaned in poverty does he relent and marry
her, just days before he must sail on the Marie for a summer of fishing in the
North Atlantic. Gaud waits for him into the late autumn; but the ship never
returns.
Jean Mitry remembers Pecheur d'lslande merely as “an album of photo¬
graphs.”114 But Henri Lescourt recalls images—“the crucifixes on the hills,
the crosses in the cemeteries, the slopes of heather, the low fishermen’s houses
under sad cloudscapes, a vast horizon of waves”—which embody “a particular
kind of sensibility as well as the social customs of the epoch when the novel
was written that have persisted up to the beginning of the twentieth cen¬
tury.”115 Lrame stills taken from the few surviving prints (which are all I have
seen of the film) confirm its “carefully composed photography of the Breton
coast and its affectionately observed details of the customs of Brittany. . . 416
Several critics at the time wrote of its psychological acumen in depicting the
characters, especially through the performance of Charles Vanel; while another
was struck by the omnipresence of the sea, which, even more than in L’Homme
du large, actually seemed to be the film’s central character.117 Baroncelli him¬
self saw the film as “the story of a fisherman and not the collective drama of
all fishermen,” acted out before “the deep enveloping backdrop” of the sea.118

119
commercial NARRATIVE His words describing Loti’s novel aptly describe his own film: “the views, the
film visions that follow one another like waves, are bound up, commingled, mul¬
tiplied in a ‘simultaneism,’ that expresses a profound psychological and mental
truth. . . .”119 Much like Visages d’enfants and La Bnere, this film was a quasi¬
documentary of a remote French society as well as a slowly accumulating,
impressionistic tableau of character and landscape co-existing in harmony.
So popular was Pecheur d'lslande that the readers of Cinea-Cine-pour-tous voted
it the second best film of 1924.120 This success led Baroncelli to embark on a
cycle of film adaptations of sea stories—Veille d’armes (1925), Nitchevo (1926),
Feu (1927)—that one critic personified as “the various faces of the sea.’’121 But
these latter are no longer realist films. Feu was a sea adventure about a gunboat
captain during the recently ended colonial war against the Rifains in Morocco.
And Nitchevo was a drama about men trapped in a submarine off the French
naval base at Bizerte, Tunisia. As Baroncelli shifted away from the genre of
the realist film, he found himself working on films set up to advance the
careers of young actresses as well as relying on the facilities of Cineromans
new studios. The representation of Brittany’s seacoasts and the life of its fish¬
ermen was left to younger filmmakers such as Jean Epstein and Jean Gremil-
lon.

On the basis of this survey of the genre so far, the French realist film offers
an interesting contrast to the realist cinema that developed in Germany about
the same time. Perhaps because the German film industry modernized its
studios more quickly and on a grander scale than did the French, their films
tended to be shot in studio sets that reproduced reality. There were exceptions,
of course—Lulu Pick’s Shattered (1921), for example, and Gerhard Lemprecht’s
Children of No Importance (1926)—but nearly all, whether shot on location or
in the studio, gave representation to a distinctly urban milieu.122 Influenced
by Kammerspiel theater, perhaps especially through Carl Mayer, and to a much
lesser extent by Expressionist art, architecture, and drama, these realist films
created city spaces that were enclosed, intimate, and sometimes claustropho¬
bic.123 Their preoccupation with rendering Stimmung (mood) seems to have
depended heavily on the use of artificial light.124 By contrast, the French films
tended to open out into expansive (if no less deterministic) landscape spaces
and to rely on recording the nuances of natural light. The German realist films
were tied more to the lower and middle classes of the city (often a limited
number of characters living in an everyday ambience), which gradually led to
an important subgenre of street films during the last half of the decade.125 The
French realist films, on the other hand, found their locus more often in the
natural landscapes and villages of the provinces and in their bourgeois, peas¬
ant, and artisan classes.
This does not mean that there were no French realist films whose environ¬
ment was the city, but they were less numerous and, with a few exceptions,
not as popular as the provincial realist films. Toward the end of the war, at
least three films grounded the genre in the milieu of the city, in the modern.
The earliest of these was Antoine’s Le Coupable, which was interrupted in its
shooting by the battle of the Somme (during the summer of 1916) and then
not released until 1917.126 Because the surviving print of the film lacks inter¬
titles, its complicated narrative, which alternates a court trial with a past story

120
 REALIST FILMS

51. A frame still from Le

Coupable (1917)

in which an abandoned woman (a flower girl) bears a child and later turns to
crime, is now close to incomprehensible.127 Yet Le Coupable still holds some
interest for its grim images of wartime Paris (the cameraman was Paul Cas-
tenet) and for its deliberate contrast of the bourgeois and little-known prole¬
tarian milieux. Rene Predal, in fact, calls it “the first authentic [film} docu¬
ment about Paris.’’128
Another quasi-realist film set in the newly built industrial belt around Paris
was Henry Roussel’s adaptation of a propagandistic war novel, L’Ame du bronze
(1917). According to Georges Sadoul and others, most of the film was “an
abominable melodrama.’’129 Harry Bauer played an engineer who let a rival
fall to his death in a crucible of molten bronze. After the metal is forged into
a cannon, the engineer is called to serve in the war; there he is forced to use
the very same cannon in a climactic battle. Despite this heavy-handed irony,
the film’s initial sequences created a sensation. They were shot entirely in a
huge ironworks factory, by Paul Castenet again, in an almost documentary
fashion. Louis Delluc was particularly struck by the evocative authenticity of
this setting:

The most powerful character in L’Ame du bronze is not an actor; it is a factory.

Astonishing images reveal to us the modern marvels of metallurgy. It is as beautiful
as a page of Verhaeren. Here is a real poetry, the best that the cinema can aim
for. . . ,!3°

Probably the most important of these early city films was Henri Pouctal’s
eight-part adaptation of Zola’s Travail, the most publicized and probably the
most successful French film of the 1919-1920 season.131 According to Jean

121
52. Leon Mathot in a factory
location in Travail (1919-
1920)

Galtier-Boissiere, Pouctal smoothly resolved the problem of integrating two

different film modes—‘‘the documentary and the scripted or dramatic film.”132
The workers looked and acted like workers, whether in the factory or in the
bistros and poorly paved streets surrounding it. And the chief actors (Leon
Mathot and Huguette Duflos) seemed to blend in with them. Most impressive
was the factory itself, where much of the film was shot by Louis Chaix:

the factory in action, with its tall smoking chimneys, with its pulsating entrails . . .
the blast furnaces, the streams of incandescent iron, the blind steam pistons, all this
gigantic machinery, around which scurry, sometimes illuminated by the light of a
purple flame, the human pygmies, the galley slaves of industry.133

Jean Mitry argues that,

with its well-composed images, its detailed atmosphere, its relative authenticity, Tra¬
vail helped orient the French cinema toward subjects inspired by everyday life, illus¬
trating the social problems of the proletariat as opposed to the pleasures of an idle
class.134

122
Viewed today, at least in the well-preserved tinted print of chapter one, Tra- realist films
vail s tableaux sequences of human figures struggling to achieve parity in an
industrial landscape are still impressive.135 Yet the film’s explicit though muted
class conflict and resolution (already sentimentalized in the manner of Lang’s
Metropolis [1927]) is masked by the melodramatic story of a victimized young
woman, an orphan, and her eventual marriage into wealth. Reformist through¬
out in its ideology, Marcel Oms writes, Travail articulates its sense of national
reconciliation, capitalist-worker accord, and social justice in the context of a
moral rejuvenation. An even more simplified ideology marked Rene Le Somp-
tier’s La Croisade (1920), in which a “reborn” factory owner (a returning war
veteran) was pitted against an anarchist worker who conveniently goes mad at
the end.136
On the strength of Travail's success, several producers tried to turn other
works of nineteenth-century urban fiction into profitable realist films. After
its American-style productions failed to find American distribution in 1920,
Film d’Art assigned Baroncelli to direct an adaptation of Balzac’s Pere Goriot
(starring Signoret), which was released in 1921. Although some critics praised
Pere Goriot for its detailed reconstruction of the shabby Vauqier pension, the
scenario did not allow Baroncelli to exercise his sensitivity to natural land¬
scapes.137 The film was but the first of a series of studio-bound adaptations of
Balzac that included Gaston Ravel’s Ferragus (1923), Jacques Robert’s Cousin
Pons (1924), and Max de Rieux’s Cousine Bette (1924).138 Even less distin¬
guished film adaptations were made of several Zola novels—Bernard-Des-
champs’s La Nuit du 11 septembre (1920) and Marsan and Maudru’s L’Assommoir
(1920).139 Yet the latter, Louis Aubert confessed to Andre Lang, was one of
his most profitable films that year.140
Several realist films from this period actually straddle the distinction I have
been making between the provincial and urban environments by locating their
stories in a major city in the provinces. Louis Delluc’s Fievre (1921) and Jean
Epstein’s Coeur fidele (1923), for instance, are both set in the down-and-out
waterfront sections of old Marseille. Drawn from original scenarios, both have
simple, rather melodramatic narratives, predicated on love triangles; and both
make much of the atmosphere of their milieu, though by different means.
Delluc was confined to a Gaumont studio but had a finely detailed set designed
by Robert Gamier. Epstein was able to film in several deserted areas of the
Marseille harbor and created a famous sequence of rapid cutting out of a local
carnival. In rhetorical complexity, however, the two films deviate quite a bit
from the standard realist film.
Certainly the most impressive of these genre deviations was Abel Gance’s
La Roue (1922-1923). The scenario was inspired initially by Pierre Hamp’s
working-class novel, Le Rail, but it soon took off from its source in several
different directions. At first glance, La Roue seems like an epic, highly mel¬
odramatic modernization of the Oedipus story. Its subject is a locomotive
engineer named Sisif (Severin-Mars) who falls in love with his adopted daugh¬
ter, Norma (Ivy Close), whom he had rescued as a girl from a train wreck in
Nice. To protect her from his obsession, and even from his son Elie (Gabriel
de Gravone), he marries her to a wealthy railroad inspector. Still maddened
by guilt, he fails in several attempts to commit suicide and then is blinded

123
53. (left) Gabriel de Gravone
and Ivy Close in the railyard
house in La Roue (1922-1923)

54. (right) Severin-Mars

by an accidental blast of steam from his own locomotive. Demoted to running

the funicular railway on Mont Blanc, the aging man is confined with his son
to a mountain cabin. When Norma and her husband visit a nearby resort, Elie
is drawn into a fight with the husband, and both are killed. After blaming
her for his son’s death, Sisif finally relents and allows Norma to live with him.
In the end, while she joins in the peasants’ spring dance in the snows, Sisif
dies peacefully at his cabin window.
There are several features which distinguish La Roue—its moments of sub¬
jectivity, its techniques of rapid cutting or accelerating montage and their
multiple function, its patterns of rhetorical figuring, its doubled narrative
structure—all of which carry it well beyond the standard French film. But one
feature is of particular interest here. That is the hybrid form of its realism,
combining elements of both the urban and provincial realist films. In the first
part of the film, this realism stems largely from the location shooting in the
Gare Saint Roch railyards near Nice, in which Gance tries to reproduce the
proletarian ambience of the railway workers’ milieu. In the final section, how¬
ever, that realism depends on the location shooting in the French Alps. Here,
the mountain landscape, which initially dwarfs Sisif and accentuates his suf¬
fering, is finally transformed in the peasants’ dance in the vast expanse of the
snow fields. Somewhat as in Jocelyn, a human community has become one with
a natural landscape.
Most of the commercial urban realist films, however, were different from
La Roue. For one, they focused exclusively on the French capital of Paris. In
some, the idea of documenting the daily life of the city became as important
as narrating the story. Leon Poirier had wanted to make just such a film as
early as 1921. “I dreamed of a great symphony about Paris, modern Paris, the
magnetic pole, the human crucible which produced both geniuses and crimi¬
nals. The subject was vast.”141 Poirier’s prologue had already been shot when
Gaumont decided that he could not release two films with the same title—

124
 55. A street scene publicity
photo for Pans (1924)

and Louis Feuillade’s Parisette would certainly make more money. Perhaps the
first film to actually employ the city’s name alone in its title was Rene Hervil’s
Paris (1924), which was based on an original scenario by Pierre Hamp. Ac¬
cording to Cinea-Cine-pour-tous, Hamp’s scenario constituted a sort of “synthe¬
sis of modern Paris, the city of work as well as the city of amusement.’’142 It
followed several different characters—a dressmaker’s assistant, a fruit-seller, a
mechanic, an industrial magnate, a music hall star, a fashionable young woman,
and an inventor—as they circulated around Paris.143 “The cinema too often
forgets its real goal,’’ Hamp said during its production, “which is life itself
and the reproduction of life.’’144 Unfortunately, though quite profitable in
Aubert’s cinemas, Hervil’s film seems to have sacrificed its documentary mode
and exaggerated its plot that called for the hero (Alibert) to foil the theft of
the inventor’s designs for a new locomotive and then to convalesce side by side
with his fiancee (Dolly Davis). H5
By 1925, the urban realist film, much like its provincial counterparts, was
undergoing a transformation. The change becomes clear if one examines several

125
56. (left) Jean Forest in
Cra i nquebille (1923)

57. (right) Maurice de

Feraudy

films directed by Jacques Feyder and Jean Epstein—Crainquebille (1923), L’Af-

fiche (1925), and Gribiche (1926).
With Crainquebille, Feyder was taking more than the risk of independent
financing for a small film. The film trade press considered the classic Anatole
France story on which it was based too interiorized, too subjective, for the
cinema; and they thought that audiences would remember only too well Lu-
cien Guitry’s popular performance of the old man’s role in its theatrical ad¬
aptation.146 Crainquebille is “a simple human story” (says the American version
of the film) about an old vegetable cart vendor (Maurice de Feraudy) who has
worked the rue Saint-Antoine area of Paris for nearly forty years.147 One day,
a gendarme misunderstands the old man and arrests him, thinking he has
been insulted. Powerless in court, Crainquebille is sentenced to several weeks
in jail, which he quickly adapts to—as he does to most things. After his
release, however, his old customers (petit-bourgeois shopkeepers) reject him,
and he takes to drinking. Finally, one rainy night, when on the point of
throwing himself in the Seine, the old man is befriended by ‘‘The Mouse”
(Jean Forest), a young orphan who lives in an abandoned shed near the river.
This is a neat reversal of the conventional orphan plot denouement—the plucky
kid (lighting a cigarette butt at the end) saves the old man from suicide and
restores his desire to live.
Crainquebille opened in March, 1923, and, despite the odds, soon was suc¬
cessful—worldwide—and even influential.148 For instance, it helped persuade
Albatros to produce a modern adaptation of Le Chiffonnier de Pans (1924),
starring the Russian emigre actor, Nicolas Koline, in one of his best roles as
Pere Jean (a role that Frederick Lemaitre had made famous in 1847).149 No
doubt Crainquebille s success depended to a great extent on the performances
of Feraudy and Forest, who was making his acting debut. When the film was
previewed for a special audience of vendors from Les Flalles, Lucien Doublon
exclaimed, ‘‘That’s Crainquebille himselP.”170 Even the vendors acknowledged

126
the authenticity the two actors gave to their characters. But Crainquebille was REALIST films
exceptional, too, in L.-H. Burel’s location shooting around Les Halles and in
the Marais (then still one of the oldest communities in Paris).151 Particularly
evocative of this milieu are the sequences of Feraudy pushing his cart through
the narrow streets, an early one of the boy selling newspapers, and another of
the old man drinking at a cafe while outside the door vendors gather in the
huge market area. In the film’s opening and closing, some of the shooting was
done at night—for the sequence of market wagons rolling into the city and
for Crainquebille’s suicide attempt. This combination of naturalistic acting
and location shooting gives Feyder’s film adaptation of the story a significance
that synthesizes the social and psychological—the naivete and supposed infe¬
riority of the main character balances the indifference and inhumanity of the
social order that victimizes him.
Some film historians have accepted Crainquebille as an avant-garde film,
because, in several sequences, it resorts to subjective fantasy in depicting the
old man’s victimization. Although these moments deviate from the film’s
dominant mode of representation, they do so in a way which is somewhat
different from the narrative avant-garde film practice. Both moments occur
during sequences when Crainquebille is in unfamiliar surroundings—in the
courtroom and in jail. There is some logic and consistency, consequently, in
the fact that they are set off from the representation of his everyday life. The
first moment represents his perception of the trial—articulated through blurred,
distorted shots (of the judge and prosecutor), multiple exposures (of a gigantic
gendarme and a tiny defense witness), mise-en-scene tricks (a statue bust turns
to look down on him), and camera movement (an erratic dolly shot through
the courtroom crowd). The second moment represents a nightmare that as¬
saults him after he has been convicted. Though the rhythm of its editing is
ragged, this sequence is quite unique since it includes not only slow-motion
shots and superimpositions of the tiny defense witness and judges (who leap
down from their benches) but also negative images (of the chief judge) and a
brief flurry of rapid cutting. There is some question whether this second se¬
quence actually was part of the original film.152 Even if it was, however, the
nightmare serves little function in the film’s narrative. It simply repeats, in
different images, the terror Crainquebille experienced during the trial, and it
has absolutely no effect on nor parallel with any later sequence in the film.
The subjective moments of the trial may function with slightly more justifi¬
cation. Yet they serve less to reveal something about Crainquebille (his igno¬
rance of the legal system and his terror before “superior beings’’) than to
narrate the course of the trial by aggrandizing one side at the expense of the
other (even across social lines—for instance, the defense witness is a gentle¬
man). Consequently, both sequences seem roughly imposed on the film.
All in all, however, Crainquebille is probably the best of the 1920s realist
films about the French capital. Upon seeing it in New York, D. W. Griffith
is said to have remarked, “I have seen a film which, for me, precisely sym¬
bolizes Paris.”153
A different kind of near tragedy and amalgam of modes marks Epstein’s
L'Affiche (1925), which was drawn from a rather sentimental scenario by his
sister, Marie.154 Albatros was pleased enough with its success to ask the pair
to duplicate their efforts six months later in Le Double Amour (1925).155 L’A/-

127
58. (left) Nathalie Lissenko in
the opening of L'Affiche
(1925)

59. (right) The riverside

cabaret
fiche tells the story of Marie, a Paris flower girl (Natalie Lissenko), who is
disturbed to realize that her youth is passing and so spends the night with a
young man (Genica Missirio) she meets one evening at a riverfront cabaret.
He turns out to be a rich playboy who disappears the next morning, leaving
her pregnant. Once her child is born, she is desperate for money and enters
its photo in a real estate company’s contest for Paris’s “most beautiful baby.’’
She wins the 15,000 francs prize, but, soon after, the baby sickens and dies.
Her grief becomes all the more poignant when an advertising campaign covers
the walls of Paris with thousands of posters of her baby. Once the company
director (Camille Bardou) recognizes her plight, it is revealed that the man
who abandoned her is none other than his son, who now realizes his “sacred
debt of love’’ and proposes marriage.
Compared to Crainquebille, L'Affiche integrates the subjective experience of
its central character into its diegetic flow almost effortlessly. The opening
creates a simple emblem of Marie’s desire: a series of superimpositions in
which she lifts her arms (in FS) through a revolving floral design and then (in
CU) looks at something just off-screen and starts. Thereafter, the subjective
appears at crucial moments, as in the distorted shots of a cross when she visits
her child’s gravesite;156 but the most effective moments occur when she con¬
fronts the multiple images of her dead child, from which the film derives its
title. In these sequences, Marie’s own memory becomes visible, concrete; and
her inner torment literally echoes, as in a nightmare, throughout the real
world of Paris’s streets.
Even more crucial, however, to the development of the realist film genre is
the vivid, if facile, dichotomy that LAffiche sets up between proletarian and
bourgeois milieux. The one is characterized by the simple decors of Marie’s
workplace and apartment and, especially, by the riverfront cabaret. For there,
in a leisurely montage of LSs, natural landscape and social community seem
to co-exist in harmony.157 The other is characterized by stark, spacious offices,
restaurants, and townhouse interiors. For these interiors, Boris Bilinsky’s black-

128
 60. (left) Lochakov’s
office decor for L'Affuhe
(1925)

61. (right) Jean Forest in a

and-white decors, which are echoed in the repeated motif of checkerboard mten°r m
floors, seem cold and sterile, almost antagonistic. Yet it is here that the nar¬
rative is resolved, in a highly conventional fashion, exactly as in the senti¬
mental serial or bourgeois melodrama. Could Epstein be concocting a delib¬
erately false happy ending?
A similar dichotomy marks Feyder’s Gribiche, which opened en exclusivite at
the Aubert-Palace in late March, 1926, and which soon became even more
popular than Crainquebille in France.158 This time, the film belongs almost
entirely to Jean Forest, whom one viewer described as a French synthesis of
Charles Ray and Jackie Coogan.159 The narrative, based on a short story by
Frederic Boutet, is an interesting variation on the orphan subject.160 A young
boy accepts adoption by a rich American woman (Fran^oise Rosay) so that his
working-class mother (widowed in the war) can remarry. Puzzled and intim¬
idated by his new environment, and then repulsed by it, the boy escapes
during the Bastille Day festivities and wanders through Paris at night to his
old apartment, where he is discovered and reunited with his mother and her
new husband. Somewhat facilely, the film juxtaposes the working class and
the wealthy, the French and the American—and clearly celebrates the one at
the expense of the other. The most effective articulation of this idle fantasy
comes in the story of the boy’s returning the American woman’s lost purse,
which sets up the adoption. The woman tells the story several times to differ¬
ent friends, and each time (presented in flashback) it becomes more exagger¬
ated, more melodramatic, until finally the boy is dressed in rags, and his
mother is nearly dying of starvation in a garret!
Many film critics praised the film’s sensitivity in conveying the boy’s aware¬
ness of his own and his mother’s situation.161 Except for one awkward section
of rapid montage in a fairground sequence (imitating the carnival sequence in
Epstein’s Coeur fidele), the initial and concluding parts of Gribiche, shot mainly
on location, still confirm that judgment. The sensitivity falters, and the ide¬
ological contrast is nearly reversed, in the long middle half of the film, which

129
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE is played out in the modern decor of the wealthy American’s apartment, de¬
FILM signed by Lazare Meerson. As photographed by Maurice Forster and Maurice
Desfassiaux, that decor is both sumptuous and sterile, fascinating and off-
putting. The reason seems to lie in an apparent contradiction between the
mise-en-scene and the narrative. Although the film celebrates Meerson’s craft
(its release coincided with the famous architectural designs at the Paris Ex¬
position des Arts Decoratifs), it also condemns the fictional world his decors
represent. In its heavy reliance on studio sets rather than on location shooting,
Gribiche, even more than LAfficbe, clearly evidences the enervation of the ur¬
ban realist film in the face of growing interest in the modern studio spectac¬
ular.

After 1925, the simple realist film nearly disappeared from the French cin¬
ema programs. Adaptations from nineteenth-century fiction continued to be
made, of course, but now they assumed a different form. Some, such as Jean
Renoir’s adaptation of Zola’s Nana (1926), were expensive, finely detailed
historical reconstruction films as well as examples of the growing pattern of
French-German co-productions. Others, such as Marcel L’Herbier’s L Argent
(1929) and Julien Duvivier’s An bonheur des dames (1929), both contemporary
adaptations of Zola novels, were important films in the new cycle of modern
studio spectaculars. Several films, however, despite their conception as large-
scale productions, attempted to maintain some degree of simplicity and some
attention to either natural landscapes or bourgeois and proletarian or peasant
milieux. The most prestigious of these was Cineromans’ big film for the 1925-
1926 season, Henri Fescourt’s adaptation of Les Miserables.
Initially, Cineromans wanted to reduce Victor Hugo’s novel to a single film
like the rest of its Films de France series. But Fescourt, who had been assigned
to direct it, fought determinedly to win acceptance of his own adaptation “in
four parts, each of which would correspond to a complete film.’’162 Those four
parts closely followed the divisions of the novel: “L’Evasion de Jean Valjean,’’
“Fantine et Cosette,’’ “Marius,’’ and “L’Epoque de la rue Saint-Denis.” Fes¬
court was also allowed complete freedom in choosing his large cast. The only
difficulty arose when he selected a rather unknown actor, Gabriel Gabrio, for
the leading role. However, Gabrio proved to be “an excellent peasant at heart,”
wrote Fescourt, “he was Jean Valjean, Jean Valjean completely. . . . Victor
Hugo would have been pleased.”163 Finally, Cineromans budgeted the project
at the considerable sum of six million francs, which allowed Fescourt to shoot
much of the film on location.164 Four months into the shooting, however, the
sudden bankruptcy of the German company, Westi, led to a serious curtail¬
ment in finances. In order to finish the film, Cineromans frantically cut corners
everywhere, which is why, according to Fescourt, certain sequences in the last
two parts seem sketchy. “Authentic town centers, authentic streets were to
have served as a frame for the riot scenes: we recreated them in the studio! . . .
That is the reason for the inequalities in the film.”165 Most audiences did not
seem to mind, for its success, which was worldwide, exceeded all expectations;
and it won a 1926 Gold Medal from Cinemagazine s Amis du Cinema.166
The narrative of Les Miserables covers almost a twenty-year period, from the
end of Napoleon’s reign to the Paris insurrection of 1832.167 During that time,
Jean Valjean, a peasant and convicted thief in Provence, becomes a small

130
textile factory owner and the mayor (by changing his name to Madeleine) of realist films
the northern town of Montreuil-sur-Mer, and then is exposed and reduced to
factory work and thievery again in Paris. Paralleling his story is that of Fantine
(Sandra Milowanoff) who, abandoned with a child after the battle of Waterloo,
has to turn to factory work and, eventually, to prostitution in order to pay
the money-grubbing Thenardiers (Georges Saillard and Renee Carl) to raise
her daughter Cosette (Andree Rolanne). Once she dies, Cosette is protected
and supported by Valjean until she grows into a young woman (Sandra Mi¬
lowanoff again) who falls in love with Marius (Francois Rozet) and is taken
into his aristocratic family. Valjean’s chief antagonist during much of this
time is the grim soldier-turned-lawyer, Javert (Jean Toulout), while his spir¬
itual benefactor is Monseigneur Myriel (Paul Jorge), a priest in Digne who
inspires him initially to renounce his criminal past.
In contrast to most previous realist films, Les Miserables is concerned pri¬
marily with the slowly building action of its narrative and with the conflicts
that logically determine its course. “For Fescourt,” write Beylie and Lacassin,
“the cinema remained essentially the art of narrative; all the embellishments
(the decors, the photogenic quality of the actor, the montage) should only
serve, and never supersede, the narration.’’168 As a consequence, the film’s
mise-en-scene (decors, costumes, lighting) is consistently simple, even prim¬
itive, in design. Interiors (whether they be the priest’s rectory, Javert’s office,
or Marius’s townhouse) are spare and unadorned; the lighting tends to be full
and even. The editing relies heavily on a conventional continuity system of
establishing shots and then closer shots of the characters’ interactions. Long
shots and full shots predominate, while middle shots and close-ups are reserved
for moments of tension or conflict and for individual character reactions (as
when Madeleine/Valjean saves Fantine from arrest by Javert). For such a lengthy
film, Fescourt keeps the narrative under rather tight control, which is one
reason Jean Mitry still thinks highly of it.169 For instance, Fantine’s descent
in Montreuil-sur-Mer closely parallels Valjean’s systematic rejection by the
townspeople of Digne after he gets out of prison; and her rescue by Madeleine
echoes Valjean’s rescue earlier by Monseigneur Myriel. Even in the flashbacks,
which economically narrate certain stages of Valjean’s life, actions are paral¬
leled: Valjean frees a mired wagon in the prison rock quarry; later as mayor
he lifts a wagon that has tipped over on a man. Finally, in the climactic last
reels, Fescourt and his editor, Jean-Louis Bouquet, intercut several different
actions together as Valjean’s story merges with the Paris insurrection: the
fighting at the barricades (including the death of a boy named Gavroche and
the wounding of Marius), the arrest of Javert as an Orleanist spy, and Valjean’s
flight through the Paris sewers with the injured Marius on his back.170
Despite the primacy of its narrative, Les Miserables does evidence some con¬
cern for atmosphere and for the evocative power of certain landscapes. The
opening sequence functions much like a documentary of a quiet, peaceful
southern French provincial town. But when Valjean first appears, he is framed
against bare trees that are “bowed down and splitting like the weight of his
own past.’’171 Ironically, the town rejects him, and, after he has stolen from
the priest and been forgiven, he is sent back out into the same mountain
landscape to redeem himself. Sitting by a gnarled tree on a mountain top, he
undergoes a long night of penance. If natural landscapes provide a simple

131
62. (left) A street in
Monteuil-sur-mer in Les
Miserables (1925-1926)

63. (right) Gabriel Gabrio

in the opening of connotative context for significant moments of Valjean’s life as well as Fan-
Les Miserables tine’s later on, another strategy marks the last trying moments of Javert’s
existence. Finally struck by remorse, after Valjean secretly has released him
from execution as a spy, Javert undergoes an agony of conscience in his office.
That agony is articulated in MCUs and CUs of his face, intercut appropriately
with subjective intertitles that increase in size: Authority, Law, Duty, Justice.
As the latter word suddenly shrinks in size, Javert looks straight at the camera,
and Goodness and then God expand to fill the screen. In the very next
sequence (deluded by his own judgment?), he throws himself from a bridge
into the Seine.
Although apparently critical of Restoration France and empathetic for the
victims of its social inequities and injustices, Fescourt’s film is ultimately quite
conservative or at least contradictory. While it celebrates the people manning
the barricades against Louis Philippe’s loyal troops, it also turns the battle
into a sewer of blood and offal through which Valjean must struggle with his
ward’s fiance. By saving Marius, he restores an aristocratic family, and allows
Cosette to return to the class from which her mother had fallen years before.
Only as he is dying does the couple learn of his sacrifice (the identity of
Marius’s savior was unknown), and Monseigneur Myriel (in a subjective insert)
seems to bless Valjean on his deathbed. Victor Flugo may not have been
pleased with such a reactionary happy ending.
Another commercial project that subordinated atmosphere to the brutal
demands of its narrative was Jacques Feyder’s Carmen (1926).172 Its source was
Prosper Merimee’s novel, and Feyder went to a lot of trouble to recreate the
1830 period of Spanish Seville. Some of the best sequences of the film were

132
 REALIST FILMS

64. Raquel Meller in Carmen

(1926)

shot on location by Maurice Desfassiaux: the tobacco factory of women em¬

ployees, the climactic bullfight (staged according to the different bullfighting
practices of the early nineteenth century), the gypsy bandits’ flight through
the desert, the gypsy mountain camp (especially in ELSs taken at night).173
The interiors by Lazare Meerson were designed with an exacting sense of detail
to complement the authenticity of the location shooting.174 The best example
is the cafe where Carmen and Don Jose meet, which has an ambience similar
to the saloons of American westerns and to the bars of other French films such
as Fievre and Coeur fidele.
Unfortunately, the presence of Raquel Meller as Carmen (and the unknown
Louis Lerch as Don Jose) guaranteed her supremacy over both atmosphere and
story. Feyder complained after the film’s completion that Albatros was only
interested “in making something with Raquel Meller in Carmen”—as with
Gloria Swanson’s Madame Sans-Gene (1925), the film was primarily a vehicle
for the star.175 Furthermore, his star was not at all well disposed toward her
character.

[Since] Raquel Meller intended to play only completely sympathetic characters . . .

[she] deplored the immorality of the bohemian girl. She rejected her “bad ways,’’ her
amorous glances, refusing any shameless kiss on the mouth, and, through safeguards
in her contract, so discouraged the director that he grew accustomed to little more
than a rough idea of the lover of robbers, soldiers, and bullfighters.176

The result was a film oddly lacking in spirit (what Feyder needed was an
actress such as Pola Negri in Lubitsch’s Carmen [1918]), and with a rhythm

133
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

65. A street scene in Therese

Raquin (1928)

that slackened too often into monotony. When it opened at the Salle Mari¬
vaux, in November, 1926, Feyder’s film had the misfortune to follow Douglas
Fairbanks’s swashbuckler, The Black Pirate.177 Needless to say, Carmen was
Raquel Meller’s first commercial flop.
The most successful of these big films to reconcile atmosphere, narrative,
and star apparently was Feyder’s Therese Raquin (1928), which opened at the
Cine Max-Linder in September, 19 2 8.178 The film was produced by DEFU-
First National and put together entirely in DEFU’s Berlin studios. But Feyder
made it truly a French-German collaboration with a contract that allowed him
to rewrite the prepared scenario adaptation from Zola’s novel and to use a half-
French, half-German cast: Gina Manes (Therese), Jeanne-Marie Laurent (the
mother), Wolfgang Zilzer (Camille), and Flans-Adalbert von Schlettow (Lau¬
rent). 179
Feyder chose a structure, according to Leon Moussinac, that allowed him

in the first half, to create an atmosphere, to resurrect, while critiquing it, the milieu
where the heroine is formed, to evoke the daily life that thoroughly conveys the petit-
bourgeois spirit against which Therese is in continual revolt. . . .180

This sordid, oppressive atmosphere was chiefly the work of Andre Andrejew,
a Russian emigre set designer (who would later do Pabst’s Three Penny Opera),
and the German cameramen, Frederick Fugelsang and Flans Scheib.181 In the
stills that remain of the film, the ExpressionisttKammerspiel elements of the
decor and lighting are carefully blended according to an overriding concern

134
 66. (left) Gina Manes and
Wolfgang Zilzer in Theme
Raquin (1928)

67. (right) The domino party,

with Jeanne-Marie Laurent in
for the ambience of a certain social environment. Marcel Lapierre remembers the center
several striking sequences and images:

the dimly lit Pont-Neuf bridge; the Raquin apartment, the domino parties on Tues¬
days, solemn meetings whose ennui is analyzed by a high angle camera; the languid
life of Therese compared to the slow hopeless turnings of a goldfish in a glass bowl. . . .182

And Victor Bachy describes “a strange black and white symphony” in the
bridal bedroom:

Black: the dressers, the bedboard—and most sinister—the husband’s nightgown. White:
the wife’s makeup table, the veil, the crown of orange blossoms, the bed sheets and
the handkerchief with which Therese moistens her husband’s forehead.
Several vials of medication are arranged on the bedstand; and the light plays with
stunning, morbid reflections on the polished black wood and the icy satin of her
dress.183

These images were all the more striking because Therese Raquin was one of the
few French films in the 1920s to be printed exclusively on black-and-white
rather than on color-tinted filmstock.184
In the second part of the film, wrote Moussinac, ‘‘Feyder comes to the
melodramatic action, without trying to falsify and reduce the odious and cruel
nature of the characters.”185 According to Charles Ford, “the spectator ac¬
cepted everything that could be repulsive in the manner of this woman because
Feyder had placed her so precisely in the milieu which explained her ac¬
tions.”186 And Gina Manes made the character all the more credible by giving
one of the best acting performances of the decade—wrote Pierre Leprohon,
“This is what is called living a role.”187 For Jean Mitry, “the culminating
scene [was] the one where Therese and Laurent, after the murder, experience
the faint beginnings of anguish and remorse as they face the silent accusation
of the old infirm mother.”188 The characteristic motif of Andrejew’s decor now
became the dirty windows covering the passageway between the flower shop

135
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

68. Le Petit Jimmy imitating

Maurice Chevalier in Peau de
Peche (1929)

and the tiny apartment. In this unhealthy greenhouse, this “sort of glass jar
... a trio of petit bourgeoisie festered and decomposed.’’189
As a work of sustained power that depended on a synthesis of much of the
narrative avant-garde practice, Therese Raquin was one of the more uncompro¬
mising of the realist films and, for some, a masterpiece of the French silent
cinema.190 Yet the critics as well as the public were far from unanimous (the
film was a commercial failure in France).191 Some, such as Moussinac, re¬
proached Feyder with showing “nearly too much elegance in a theme which
demanded, it seemed, less circumspection and a more willingly developed
vulgarity.’’192 The social criticism, he argued, was muted and tamed in an
artful period piece, as if within its own glass jar. Others, such as Jean Dreville,
praised Feyder for transposing Zola “according to the principle of an accu¬
mulation of psychological details.”193 For them, the film was a relentless,
totally plausible, psychological study. Unfortunately, we may never be able
to decide for certain because, despite the high praise it won from both cine-
philes and cineastes, Therese Raquin remains one of the most famous of lost
films.

Bucking this trend toward large-scale productions were a few scattered low-
budget films. There was Fescourt’s adaptation of La Glu (1927), set in “a
milieu of rough Breton fishermen” and shot in a freakish month of sunshine
around the Pointe de Croisie (just west of La Briere).194 There was Duvivier’s
Le Mariage de Mademoiselle Beulemans (1927), which apparently achieved some
degree of atmosphere through location shooting in the streets of Brussels.195

136
Perhaps the most interesting of these small films, however, were done by the realist films
new writer-director team of Marie Epstein and Jean Benoit-Levy.
Ames d’enfants (1928) and Peau de peche (1929), both produced by Aubert,
followed the format of films about children developed by Feyder and Duvivier.
The more successful of the two was Peau de peche, which opened at the Electric-
Cinema in March, 1929.196 It is a rather conventional moral tale about a
Poulbot orphan from the streets of Montmartre whose natural generosity is
allowed to flourish in the open air of the French countryside.197 As a reward
for returning a necklace that she lost on her wedding day, Mme. Defleures
(Denise Lorys) sends Peau de peche (petit Jimmy) out to her cousin’s farm in
Charmont-sur-Barbuise where he grows up to fall in love with his “cousin”
Lucie (Simone Mareuil). But his best friend, La Ficelle (who once saved him
from drowning), seems to desire Lucie as well, and Peau de peche (now Mau¬
rice Touze) sacrifices his love and returns to Paris. Once she learns of his
despair, Mme. Defleures counsels the young man and arranges his marriage to
Lucie. Cinea-Cine-pour-tous found Peau de peche quite refreshing:

Finally, here is a film that leaves behind the stifling, miserable limits of the studio,
with its conventional decors and illusory techniques, a film where one can breathe the
vigorous outside air ... a film where there are no dance clubs, music halls, or worldly
salons, but where, by contrast, there are admirable and restful perspectives of fields,
of lovely rivers, and farm houses, so marvelously peopled that one would like to
remain there the rest of one’s days.198

More specifically, the film’s charm is suggested in the sequence where petit
Jimmy does a classic Maurice Chevalier imitation, in a circle of delighted
village children (the film’s only color tinting appears here in a slight reddening
of the boy’s cheeks—hence the name, “Peachskin”). And its poignant evoca¬
tion of desire is evidenced in the opening wedding ceremony (emphasizing the
impression the bridal veil makes on the boy) and in the sequence where the
spring run-off fills the dry river bed of the village and where Lucie’s image,
reflected on the water’s surface, comes between the two young men. Several
years later, the emotional poignance, economical storytelling, and generally
“poeticized” discourse that so marks Peau de peche would return in Epstein and
Benoit-Levy’s highly acclaimed La Maternelle (1933).
Otherwise, the simple realist film survived, interestingly enough, in the
work of the narrative avant-garde. And there it flourished in a series of major
works to be examined later—Dmitri Kirsanoffs Menilmontant (1926), Alberto
Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926) and En rade (1927), Jean Gremillon’s
Tour au large (1927) and Gardiens de phare (1929), and Jean Epstein’s Finis
Terrae (1929). Most of these films, however, were scarcely seen outside the
network of specialized cinemas and cine-clubs.

Based on this survey of the genre, the French realist films of the 1920s can
be seen to have a significance that rivals that of the more highly budgeted
genres of the historical reconstruction and the modern studio spectacular. For
one thing, they provided the basis for the more publicized achievements in
the genre in the 1930s. Their concern for the ambience of working-class Paris
and for the relationship between environment and character fed into the im¬
portant cycle of city films by Clair, Gremillon, Duvivier, Renoir, and Carne-

137
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE Prevert. Their interest in the different milieux of the provinces and in the
FILM relationship between landscape and character was resurrected in such films as
Jean Epstein’s L'Or des mers (1932) and Chanson d'amour (1934) and Jean Re¬
noir’s Toni (1934) and Une Partie de campagne (1936) as well as transformed in
the enormously popular films of Bas- and Haut-Provence by the Marseille
dramatist, Marcel Pagnol.
But the 1920s realist films were more than precursors, either to the French
films of “poetic realism’’ or to the Italian “neo-realist’’ films after World War
II. For the genre produced a body of work that constitutes a unique achieve¬
ment on its own terms. It was the earliest consistent attempt to ground film
art in reality, an attempt unfairly neglected by nearly all cinema histories,
perhaps because it was superseded by the seemingly more radical concept of
reality in the Soviet films later in the decade. Furthermore, the realist genre
provided the context for most of the work of the French narrative avant-garde.
Delluc, Epstein, Kirsanoff, Cavalcanti, and Gremillon—all have their roots in
the genre. And Gance, L’Herbier, Feyder, and Renoir produce some of their
most interesting or successful films from within it. That work, as will become
clear in Part IV, consisted of extending the genre parameters, especially through
experiments at the rhetorical and narrative levels of film discourse.

Fairy Tales, Fables, In contrast to the realist film, the feerie—the fairy tale or fantasy—had been
and Fantasies one of the earliest and most popular of French narrative films. Around 1900,
Georges Melies virtually created the genre with his magic shows, trick films,
fantastic adventures “a la Jules Verne,” and adaptations of classical and not-
so-classical fables. Melies’s films were widely copied and imitated, not only in
France but also in England and the United States. Their chief characteristic
was the creation of an other world by means of uniquely cinematic techniques
(superimposition, stop motion, fast motion, reverse motion, etc.) used in con-
juction with deliberately unreal, often mobile sets. This was a world of the
marvelous or the uncanny, in Tzvetan Todorov’s terms, usually distinct from
but connected to reality, a world whose laws were often determined by the
camera apparatus itself.1 Although interest in the genre soon waned, in com¬
parison to the comic shorts, police and crime series, and literary adaptations,
it never disappeared entirely in France.2 When the war ended, the fantasy
returned as a minor genre, but transformed in several different ways. Although
the industry generally considered it “demode” and unpopular in the 1920s,
the fantasy is at least important for providing a point of departure for several
filmmakers involved in the narrative avant-garde.
From 1918 to 1922, most of the French fantasy films were produced at
Gaumont, especially in its Series Pax, where they coincided briefly with Feuil-
lade’s exotic and fantastic serials, Tih-Minh (1919) and Barrabas (1920). Most
of the Series Pax fantasy films were predicated on the juxtaposition of two
different worlds, usually a real world and an imaginary one or sometimes an
imaginary world and one even more imaginary. And they tended to be marked
either by a Symbolist aesthetic or by the attempt to represent an individual
character’s mental or hallucinatory experience.
Gaumont’s major successes in the genre seem to have been the films of Feon
Poirier. One of the most discussed French films of 1920, for instance, was

138
Poirier s Le Penseur, “a story of the fantastic,’’ based on an original scenario by FAIRY TALES,
the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise writer, Edmond Fleg.3 Cine-pour-tous, in fact, voted FABLES, AND
it one of the top three French films of the year.4 The scenario was inspired by FANTASIES
the cult that was then forming around Auguste Rodin’s famous statue. Pierre
Dartigue (Andre Nox) is an artist who, one day meditating beside The Thinker,
discovers a means of seeing into people’s souls. Soon this leads him to develop
a method by which he can paint the inner states of his models. “But that
which he apprehends and represents,’’ writes Henri Fescourt, “shocks him
deeply, forces him into isolation, and finally drives him completely mad.
Having discovered the universal deceptiveness of appearances, he dies in his
studio, paralyzed in the posture of The Thinker. ”5 According to various critics,
Poirier compensated for the inherently static nature of his subject with a great
number of dissolves and superimpositions, with superbly composed images
that involved a seductive play of light and shadow (the work of his cameraman,
Specht), and with finely nuanced acting from Andre Nox.6 However simplistic
its irony, Le Penseur did seem to develop useful strategies for representing and
integrating several different modes of perception.
Poirier followed Le Penseur with a more realistic fantasy film, L'Ombre dechiree
(1921), in which a mother (Suzanne Despres), “who foresees what would be¬
come of her sick daughter if she committed suicide,” is tormented by conflict¬
ing desires/ Jocelyn (1922) also continued this pattern, but in a different
framework, with astonishing commercial success (as discussed previously). Here
the other world is an historical past of opposites—the upheavals of the Revo¬
lution and the peaceful solitude of the mountains.8 These opposites are me¬
diated by the repeated image of Jocelyn’s deathbed (a visual motif not unlike
the rocking cradle in Intolerance) and resolved in a secret mountain cavern, if
only temporarily. The whole film is tied rather conventionally to Lamartine’s
poem, on which the scenario is based, and to the figure of the poet himself,
who sits reading Jocelyn’s memoirs beside the deathbed.9 It is as if the artist
in Le Penseur had been replaced by Lamartine, and the earlier frightening
images of duplicity and suffering had given way to images of a spiritual od¬
yssey toward eternal peace.
There were other more obviously symbolic fantasy films, ranging from the
sublime to the ridiculous. One was a lost experimental work, Le Lys de la vie
(1920), directed by Gabrielle Sorere and Loi'e Fuller, the famous though aging
dancer who was best known for her illuminated fire-dance. Leon Moussinac
called their film “the first attempt to transpose a poem to the screen.”10 In
this fairy-tale ballet of a princess and a marvelous lily, Fuller employed the
magical lighting techniques she had developed on stage with an original con¬
junction of such cinematic techniques as slow motion and the alternation of
tinted positive and negative images.11 Another sort of transposition was Rene
Le Somptier’s La Montee vers lAcropole (1920), one of Louis Aubert’s first major
film productions.12 Le Somptier’s story seemed overtly political: a socialist
journalist by the name of Lesieur (Van Daele) contests and defeats a reactionary
bourgeois politician, Labrousse (Andre Nox). And the French censors were
offended enough to force Le Somptier to delete any mention of “the proletar¬
iat” or “the working class.”13 Drawing its title from Renan’s famous Priere sur
I’Acropole, the film sought to dramatize, in Marcel Oms’s words, “the conflict
between generations in the succession of political power.”14 The overall effect,

139
69- (left) Philippe Heriat and
Vanni Marcoux in Autant-
Lara’s costumes for Don Juan
et Faust (1923)

70. (right) Marcelle Pradot

however, came across as pseudophilosophical: “the Parthenon looked down,
from the heights of eternity, at several smartly dressed French film actors at
its feet {including a miscast France Dhelia].”15 Henri Fescourt summed up its
mongrel nature well: it was “ambitious, psychological, sometimes boring,
seething with lighting effects, and clotted with what seemed to be an infinite
number of intertitles.’’16 Besides being out of step politically in 1920, La Montee
vers I’Acropole was overly static and pretentious (the cameraman was Amedee
Morin), and Le Somptier turned to direct less controversial films.
Several of Marcel L’Herbier’s early films for Gaumont oscillated wildly be¬
tween these extremes, at least according to his boss. Anticipating Loi'e Fuller,
whom he much admired, L’Herbier conceived his first film, Rose-France (1919),
as a poetic work and subtitled it “a cantilena in black and white.’’17 Rose-
France has a narrative that is as slight as it is highly symbolic: a young man
(Jaque Catelain) discovers that the pure French woman he loves (Aisse) has
been writing poems of passionate love to someone else. Finally, she reveals
that her love is for France, menaced by the war. The film’s discourse, however,
is marked by a strange combination of effete actors and decadent decors, col¬
lages of optical effects, verse intertities signed by Charles d’Orleans and Charles
Peguy, and experimental forms of narrative simultaneity. The combination
proved a commercial disaster, and L’Herbier’s third film for Gaumont, Le
Carnaval des verites (1920), was much more conventional.18 He called it a
“realistic fantasy,’’ since it combined a Symbolist mask drama with a melo¬
dramatic intrigue enacted in the Villa Madone on the Basque coast.19 In order
to reverse their financial losses, the Comtesse Della (Suzanne Despres) and her

140
lover (Paul Capellani) attempt to seduce and blackmail a rich neighbor, Jean FAIRY TALES,
(Jaque Catelain), who is in love with a naive young friend of theirs, Clarisse FABLES, AND
(Claude France). The plot ultimately fails; the Comtesse commits suicide; and FANTASIES
her lover re-covers her face with its mask. The Symbolist drama was carried
out by means of superimpositions and color contrasts as well as Claude Autant-
Lara s decors, especially a fantasmagorical garden where the masked ball is
held. Louis Delluc appreciated it all the same: “The paradoxical charm, both
deft and deep, that enlivens this modern fresco, so audacious in its halftones,
pleases me no end.’’20
L’Herbier’s Don Juan et Faust (1923) was the most ambitious of these films.
This was no literary adaptation but an original scenario of two juxtaposed
stories and conflicting symbolic forces. Faust (Vanni Marcoux) and Don Juan
(Jaque Catelain)—the opposed figures of libido sciendi and libido sentiendi—vie
with one another over Dona Anna (Marcelle Pradot), the daugher of the Com¬
mandant of Castille.21 With the help of his devilish servant, Wagner (Philippe
Heriat), Faust carries off Dona Anna to his castle while Don Juan is tricked
into a duel with her father whom he finally wounds mortally. Unable to locate
Dona Anna, Don Juan and his sidekick Colochon (Lerner) embark on a quick
series of adventures in which he returns to his old ways, seducing nuns, servant
girls, and aristocratic brides. Meanwhile, Dona Anna is locked in some kind
of time warp with Faust until, with the assistance of Wagner (who by now is
disappointed in his master’s scientific endeavors), she stabs him to death and
returns to her dying father. At the end, in the midst of an orgy he has
arranged for all his women, Don Juan is attacked en masse by their husbands,
lovers, and assorted male relatives. But Dona Anna saves him, and together
they repent and take vows of humility and chastity within the church.
This juxtaposition of contending forces determines, in part, the visual style
of the film, which L’Herbier himself has described as a meeting of “Velasquez
and the Gothic.”22 The interiors for Faust’s castle (designed by Robert Gamier)
and the costumes for Faust and Wagner (designed by Autant-Lara) were marked
by a peculiar mixture of Cubism and “Caligarism”—a rare instance of the
German film’s influence in the French cinema.23 Yet the other costumes and
interiors as well as the location exteriors were straight out of the Spanish
period of Philip II, and they were often composed (by cameraman Georges
Lucas) in ensemble tableaux inspired by the classical school of Spanish paint¬
ing.24 The friction between these modern and historical styles, though ad¬
mired by critics such as Canudo and Clair,25 proved disconcerting to French
film audiences, and still does today, partly because the conflict is resolved so
easily by the elimination of Faust’s world and then by a pat religious conver¬
sion. But there may be another, simpler reason. The version of Don Juan et
Faust released by Gaumont was incomplete and rather obviously patched to¬
gether near the end; as a consequence, L’Herbier apparently had his name
removed from the credits. Furthermore, the company delayed the film’s pre¬
views until October, 1922, and then downplayed its exhibition run early in
1923.26
Despite its flaws, let alone its commercial and critical failure, Don Juan et
Faust is still provocative on at least one point. Once Don Juan learns that
Dona Anna is with Faust, he sets out to prey on the nuns in the convent
where he has gone to seek her. To seduce one, interestingly, he uses the letter

141
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE and medallion (from Wagner) which has just convinced him that Dona Anna
FILM went off willingly with Faust. To intensify the perverseness of this moment,
L’Herbier alternates shots of Don Juan seducing the nun in a country inn with
those of Faust hypnotizing Dona Anna (apparently in an alchemist’s attempt
to produce gold). While Faust seems to invest Don Juan’s passion with a
magical power, reciprocally, Don Juan seems to invest Faust’s passion with
sexual malice. The alternation concludes in the convent courtyard with a
dreamlike sequence of softly-focused, eyeline-matched MSs and CUs, in which
Don Juan and Dona Anna seem to gaze longingly at one another—as if they
have emerged from parallel dark recesses. Do lust and passion merely mask a
transcendent pure desire? As if in answer, a similar transformation occurs at
the film’s climax when Dona Anna rescues Don Juan. The threatened orgy of
female bodies around one man quickly changes into a formal ceremony in
which the same man confirms his faith in the company of veiled nuns. As Don
Juan finally recognizes Dona Anna, through an intercutting of CUs that echo
the earlier dream sequence, the film ends in a chaste coupling that is, if in no
other way, at least aesthetically satisfying.
When Gaumont reorganized its production in 1922, the genre lost its pri¬
mary support within the industry. For the next several years most of the
French fantasy films—excepting the short puppet animation films produced
independently by the Russian emigre, Ladislas Starevich27—can be attributed
to four men: L’Herbier, Jaque Catelain, Jean-Louis Bouquet, and Ivan Mos-
joukine.
L’Herbier’s Cinegraphic briefly provided a haven for the genre with two
radically different films. Le Marchand de plaisir (1923), Jaque Catelain’s first
film for his mentor’s company, was a fable that owed less to previous French
fantasy films than it did to Chaplin and Griffith.28 Its schematic story brought
together Mary-Ange (Marcelle Pradot), a wealthy young woman staying at a
seaside resort, and Gosta (Catelain), a simple “seller of novelties,’’ who lives
with his poor family in a shack in the sand dunes. Gosta’s love, however, is
no match for Mary-Ange’s engagement to a young adventurer named Donald
(also played by Catelain); and it is compromised by a plot perpetrated by his
drunken father (Philippe Heriat), who robs Mary-Ange and incriminates his
own son. The climax is brutal—Gosta has to kill his father as the latter is
trying to strangle his mother. Arrested and then released (when his sanity is
questioned), in the end, he and his mother are sent off on a train. Compared
to such films as The Vagabond and Broken Blossoms, Le Marchand de plaisir,
unfortunately, is overlong and lacks an emotional center (Catelain is no Chap¬
lin or even a Richard Barthelmess); and in style, it combines, all too predict¬
ably, American continuity editing, simple subjective superimpositions, and
unmotivated moments of rapid cutting.
L Herbier himself was much more ambitious in L’lnhumaine (1924), an early
science fiction film that juxtaposes two worlds much more successfully than
did Don Juan et Faust.29 The infamous singer, Claire Lescaut (Georgette Le¬
blanc) lives in an ultramodern mansion (designed by Mallet-Stevens) that in¬
cludes a cavernous, geometrically furnished, moat-encircled banquet hall and
a winter garden of Melies-like artificial plants. Einar Norsen (Jaque Catelain)
has a spacious scientific laboratory (designed by Fernard Leger) with an exper¬
imental television system and an elaborate process for resurrecting the dead.

142
Both places seem to lie on the outskirts of Paris, overlooking the city from FAIRY TALES,
the vantage point of the near future. The narrative builds to Einar’s apparent FABLES, AND
suicide (out of unrequited love for Claire) and his resurrection, which is then FANTASIES
replicated inversely with Claire’s apparent murder and her resurrection. The
final climactic sequence of the film, in which Einar brings Claire back to life,
employs a barrage of cinematic techniques (superimpositions, rapid montage,
brief flashes of pure color film stock) to represent the impossible as possible.
Here the display of technical virtuosity is so awesome as well as self-reflexive
that it places L'lnhumaine well beyond the limits of the conventional fantasy
film.
Jean-Louis Bouquet was an architecture student who came to the cinema as
a scriptwriter, editor, and critic.30 His first scenario was directed by Luitz-
Morat for Pathe-Consortium, as La Cite foudroyee (1924), which, simultane¬
ously with L'lnhumaine, created a different kind of ancestor for the science
fiction film.31 Its narrative involves a young engineer, Richard Gallee (Daniel
Mendaille) who hopes to win the hand of his cousin, Huguette Vrecourt (Jane
Marguenet).32 Her father has been ruined financially, and Richard concocts a
plan to reverse his misfortunes. He makes a pact with the neighborhood “Bad
Man,’’ who then constructs a strange factory on his property. The project turns
out to be an elaborate scheme by a master criminal who threatens the destruc¬
tion of Paris unless he is paid a huge ransom. In the end, Richard publishes
his confession as a successful novel (the strange factory is a printing press) and
marries Huguette. But what about Paris and its apparent destruction? The
film depicts the apocalyptic disaster in several sequences and stages, and Rob¬
ert Gys’s miniatures and Daniau-Johnson’s slow-motion cinematography pro¬
duced quite believable effects for the period—all the major Paris monuments,
including the Eiffel Tower, collapse in varying stages of ruin. The irony of
the film is that, through the delay of information as well as through the cross¬
cutting of real and fictional action, the audience is deceived into thinking that
the novel (and its images) is a confession of something that has already hap¬
pened in the past—that the engineer who goes about his publishing scheme
is really the master criminal! In La Cite foudroyee, therefore, fantasy and reality
are ambiguously, bafflingly intertwined. Bouquet attempted a similar confu¬
sion of the real and the fantastic for satirical effect in his scenario, Le Diable
dans la ville (1925), but Cineromans persuaded Germaine Dulac to change its
setting from the modern world to the fifteenth century.33 The change resulted
in a considerable loss of force, since the film’s uncanny events now had a
simple explanation in witchcraft.
Ivan Mosjoukine, Albatros’s principal star, also dabbled in the genre, for
instance, in his scenario for Protozanov’s L’Angoissante Aventure (1920),34 like¬
wise for purposes of irony and satire. His eccentric film, Le Brasier ardent
(1923), engages the fantastic at several crucial points.35 Its opening is a stun¬
ner—an inexplicable adventure of violence and eroticism in which a woman
(Natalie Lissenko) flees a man (Mosjoukine) through a half-dozen very different
settings, only to encounter him each time in a different guise. An abrupt cut
to a bedroom sequence reveals that this strange journey into the marvelous
has been a nightmare, inspired by a detective novel. This shift from the fan¬
tastic to the comic announces the general drift of the film, and these nightmare
episodes provide a loose framework for the narrative that follows. Later, the

143
 THE CONSORTIUM CIN
===DI(/TRIBUTEUR POUR LA FRANCE==~«

|pft

|l#tfc'J

71. (left) A poster for La Cite

foudroyee (1924)

72. (right) Ivan Mosjoukine

doubled in Feu Mathias Pascal
(1925)
nightmare is even reenacted as comedy when the woman is chased by her
husband (Nicolas Koline), who literally falls into a detective agency where he,
too, meets Mosjoukine and ironically hires him to investigate his wife. From
there on, the fantastic disappears, and the narrative turns to satirize other
genres—e.g., the police serial and the bourgeois melodrama. For its mixture
of styles and genres alone, Le Bras ter ardent is worth considering separately.
Late in 1924, L’FIerbier and Mosjoukine teamed up to make perhaps the
biggest fantasy film of the decade and the first film adaptation of a work by
the Italian writer, Luigi Pirandello—Feu Mathias Pascal (1925). In comparison
to the two men’s previous films, Feu Mathias Pascal reversed the shift from
the fantastic to the comic in Le Brasier ardent and anchored the fantastic in the
narrative much more securely than did L’Inhumaine. L’FIerbier himself called
it “a fantasmagoria with a realistic premise.”36 The narrative premise is clearly
Pirandellean: a falsely reported death seems to free the central character Pascal
(Mosjoukine) from a dull married life in the provinces for a second life of
adventure and romance in Rome. Some of the film’s fascination, as in Le
Brasier ardent and L'lnhumaine, comes from its fanciful play with settings,
especially the interiors designed by Cavalcanti—from the dark, cluttered rooms
of the provincial home to the hallucinatory open spaces of an apartment build-

144
ing in Rome. It is here that the fantastic finally becomes dominant. In a long FAIRY TALES,
imaginary sequence that includes several abrupt shifts, Pascal contends not FABLES, AND
only with a rival and his brother but also with a gigantic double of himself. FANTASIES
The disconcerting uncertainty and ironic twists that characterize this second
half of the film place Feu Mathias Pascal as well beyond the limits of the
conventional fantasy film.
After Feu Mathias Pascal, Mosjoukine and L’Herbier were caught up in the
tide of expensive period films and modern studio spectaculars, and the fantasy
genre was left momentarily to one man—Rene Clair. Clair was opposed to
what he saw as aesthetic pretension in Poirier and L’Herbier, among others.
Instead, he saw his first films as a conscious renewal of the early French comic
shorts and of Melies fantasy films. Although independent productions, they
were certainly conceived as commercial projects.
Paris qui dort (1924), which was released in the wake of La Cite foudroyee
and L’lnhumaine, makes an interesting contrast to them.37 It, too, is an ances¬
tor of the science fiction film. But where the other two films opt for spectacular
effects and rhetorical or narrative complexity, Clair’s film chooses the simple
and direct (also partly, of course, because of budget limitations). His scientist’s
laboratory looks like a cardboard set for a Keystone comedy. The shot explain¬
ing how the airplane passengers and the Eiffel Tower watchman escape the
scientist’s invisible, immobilizing rays is the most rudimentary animation
imaginable. Yet for the crucial idea of a paralyzed city, Clair’s simple strate¬
gies of slow-motion footage, deserted streets, and frozen human figures are
remarkably effective. Besides being a comedy of manners and situations, Pans
qui dort opens onto another, marvelous world. The stillness of the city strangely
sets off the slightest movement of the six characters who wander through it.
And their movement seems to reproduce that magical moment when photo¬
graphs first “came to life’’ in the movies.
In Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge (1925), which followed L’lnhumaine and La
Briere at the Madeleine-Cinema, Clair was inspired even more directly by
Melies: “Trick shots amused me, interested me, a lot during that period.’’38
The original scenario allowed him and his cameraman Louis Chaix a great deal
of play with superimpositions—which eventually does get repetitious. Through
a misunderstanding, Julien Boissel (Georges Vaultier) believes that his fiancee,
Yvonne (Sandra Milowanoff), no longer loves him—actually, her father (Mau¬
rice Schutz) is being blackmailed by a rival (Jose Davert). In despair he gives
himself over to a doctor (Paul Olivier) who is experimenting with a “Cartesian
machine’’ that separates the spirit from the body. The experiment works, and
Julien cavorts about Paris as a disembodied apparition, invisible to all but the
doctor (and the audience). He plays tricks on people on the streets (lining up
top hats beside a lamppost), at the Moulin Rouge (stealing coats), and at the
Louvre (painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa—in homage to Marcel Du¬
champ). Finally, he refuses to come back to his body and takes up residence
at the Moulin Rouge and at a cafe with a distinctly Cubist decor. Then comes
the ironic twist. Suddenly made aware that Yvonne really does love him,
Julien discovers that the doctor has been jailed for murder and that his own
body has been confiscated for an autopsy. There ensues a frantic race to release
the doctor (only he can reunite body and spirit) before the fatal operation.
Success comes at the last moment. Julien’s body revives in front of the aston-

145
73. (left) Sandra Milowanoff
and Georges Vaultier in Le
Fantome du Moulin Rouge
(1925)

74. (right) Albert Prejean and

ished doctors; he clears up the intrigue; he and Yvonne are reconciled. The
Jim Gerald in Robert Gys’s
real world proves a safer, more pleasant place after all.
fairyland set for Le Voyage
imaginaire (1926) As a metaphysical fantasy, Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge exhibits a mood and
style characteristic of the French films which contrast quite neatly with those
of their German genre counterparts.39 In The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919),
Destiny (1921), Nosferatu (1922), or The Hand of Orlac (1924), the phantom is
a creature of menace, ultimately threatening death. Here, he is a mischievous
character whose gaiety compensates for a deep-seated sadness and whose con¬
dition of freedom and power ironically turns illusory. In the German films,
the settings tend to be shadow-laden with tension, claustrophobic, palpably
ominous. Here, the sets (interiors by Robert Gys) are light and simple, open
to Julien’s playfulness as well as blandly normal in their indifference to his
suffering. The overall style is lighthearted, exuberant in its technical facility,
and given to rapid shifts and ironic twists. Perhaps the only thing lacking, as
Leon Moussinac first observed, is “an emotional center . . . the sense of a
director attentive to express that which is humanly poignant in the simplest
and most banal of our actions, just as in the greatest dramas.’’40 More pre¬
cisely, whereas the central character of Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge achieves a
balance of sorts—the union of body and spirit—the narrative resolution seems
to contradict the film’s free-wheeling, exuberant discourse.
Clair’s next film, Le Voyage imaginaire (1926), was written expressly for Jean
Borlin, the leading dancer of the Ballet suedois, whom Rolf de Mare wanted
to star in a film (he had already appeared in Clair-Picabia’s Entr’acte, 1924).41
Jean Mitry has argued that its subject was influenced by Harold Lloyd’s Grand-

146
ma’s Boy (1922)—a long dream miraculously invests a timid hero with the FAIRY TALES,
strength and courage to win his love.42 But the imaginary voyage itself is FABLES, AND
clearly inspired by Melies. If the film as a whole is only half successful, the FANTASIES
fault may lie not in the scenario but in some of the acting (especially Borlin’s)
and in the limited budget that forced skimping on some of Robert Gys’s sets
as well as Amedee Morin’s camerawork.43
Jean (Borlin), Albert (Prejean), and Auguste (Jim Gerard) are all clerks in
love with their typist, Lucie (Dolly Davis). One afternoon, while everyone in
the office is napping, Jean dreams of rescuing an old woman from two toughs.
She tells him that his kiss has restored her powers; and she leads him down
an Alice-in-Wonderland tunnel, through castrating doors of jagged teeth, over
the ceiling of a room (done with an upside-down set), and into a fairyland.
This fairyland, however, is no ordinary place. It’s a rest home for old fairies
(no one believes in them anymore), and the set is appropriately “demode”: a
tawdry baroque collection of seashells, serpents, coral reefs, bijoux, and papier-
mache flowers—an outright parody of Melies’s fairy kingdom sets. With his
special kiss, Jean transforms all the old hags into lovely young women (an apt
metaphor for Clair’s own transformation of the genre); but, unfortunately, the
decors change scarcely at all. The grateful fairies bring Lucie to their world so
Jean will be happy, but an evil fairy (a racist stereotype in blackface) compli¬
cates matters by bringing Albert and Auguste as well. Intrigues develop—
Lucie turns into a white mouse and is chased by Puss-in-Boots (a tongue-in-
cheek play on sexual appetite), and the fairies give Jean one of their store of
wishing rings so that he and Lucie can return safely to the real world. All four
characters somehow materialize on the towers of Notre Dame, where Jean
promptly gets himself changed into Lucie’s pet bulldog (an ironic twist on
the sexual chase), and the other two men fight over the ring. The struggle
carries over into the Musee Grevin, where Lucie recognizes Jean among the
mannequins and falls over in a faint. At night, the Revolutionary mannequins
put both of them on trial, threatening the guillotine (a mannequin hand gets
chopped off and the bulldog begins chewing it up); but just then a deus ex
machina intervenes—in the form of Charlie Chaplin and the Kid! Jean and
Lucie are freed; Albert and Auguste are dismissed; and Jean is restored—end
of dream. Now bursting wdth self-confidence, Jean breaks through Lucie’s
resistance, and he sharply heels her dog as they walk off down the street
together—in a parodistic image of the petit-bourgeois couple. Placed in the
service of bourgeois conventionality, the marvelous simply empties that con¬
ventionality of substance.
Neither Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge nor Le Voyage imaginaire fared very well
with the French public so Clair, much like his predecessors, turned away from
the fantasy genre to more assuredly commercial projects. His first film for
Albatros, La Proie du vent (1927), contained elements of fantasy, but they were
embedded in an adventure narrative based on a popular novel, Armand Mer-
cier’s L’Aventure amoureuse de Pierre Vignal, which could have been done just as
easily as a serial.44 An airplane pilot (Charles Vanel) loses his way and crash-
lands near a mysterious castle where a madwoman (Sandra Milowanoff) and a
suspected spy (Lillian Hall Davis) involve him in an intricate series of puz¬
zling, half-developed intrigues.45 Critics and historians praised the film’s tech¬
nical facility in creating a finely detailed atmosphere (this was the first collab-

147
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE oration between Clair and set designer Lazare Meerson) and a light, balanced
FILM rhythm overall. However, subordinating the fantasy to an almost American-
style adventure was what apparently made La Proie du vent Clair s most prof¬
itable silent film.46
As the French film industry turned almost exclusively to period films and
modern studio spectaculars, often in co-productions, the genre of fantasy films
passed largely into the hands of the narrative avant-garde as an alternative to
the realist film. They, too, would account for some of the uniquely French
films produced during the latter half of the decade. For instance, Jean Renoir’s
Charleston (1926) and La Petite Marchande d'allumettes (1928) carry on Clair’s
interest in a Melies-style fantasy. Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la maison Usher
(1928) transforms the genre according to an eccentric fantastic mode and a
very personal form of pantheism. Germaine Dulac’s La Coquille et le clergyman
(1928) and Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien andalou (1929) revolutionize it according
to the Surrealist aesthetic. All three of these latter films are remarkable in
creating a fantastic world whose events .cannot be explained naturally. But
more about them later.
Only two of these filmmakers could be said to have worked commercially
as well as experimentally in the fantasy film genre. Jean Epstein did so in the
first film he made for his own production company. Mauprat (1926), loosely
adapted from a Georges Sand novel, is a curious blend of generic elements.47
Its subject is a mysterious intrigue among the eighteenth-century provincial
aristocracy in the upper valley of the Creuse River, on the northern edge of
the Massif Centrale.48 Epstein shot his exteriors there around several different
chateaux, especially the ruins at Chateaubrun. Some of this footage has a
freshness and charm undeniable even today: for example, the deft rapid mon¬
tage of Bernard’s flight into the woods after being confined in the civilizing
chateau; a MS of the train of Edmee’s gown gliding across tiny wildflowers by
a pond; a LS, after she has been wounded (shot while on a hunting party), of
Bernard proclaiming his innocence to his friend under a huge arching tree.
Marie Epstein has even called the film “a forest ode.”49 The interiors are
strikingly different: the Mauprat chateau is soberly conventional, but the Roche
Mauprat ruins contain immense dark spaces with a rich gothic atmosphere. In
the sets for these latter spaces, Epstein and his designer, Pierre Kefer, relied
heavily on a limited number of arc lights: for instance, in one shot, the motif
of ‘‘two converging pencils of light concentrate attention on a strange canopy
bed.”50 This obvious concern for natural landscape links Mauprat closely to
the provincial realist film, but the film also works as a modest historical
reconstruction, faithfully rendering the surface of eighteenth-century pro¬
vincial life.
The narrative, however, along with the gothic atmosphere, situate Mauprat
within the fantastic. It is predicated on a simple but rather interesting di¬
chotomy. The Mauprat family has two branches, a good one and bad one.
That the one darkly mirrors the other is clear in the decision to have Maurice
Schutz play both fathers, Tristan and Hubert. Bernard (Nino Constantini) is
the bad family son who is awakened by the beauty of Edmee (Sandra Milo-
wanoff), the good family daughter. In exchange for helping her escape his
treacherous family (as in a fairy tale, she loses her way and simply wanders
in), she promises to give herself to no one but him (the sexual sense here is

148
 75. Alex Allin and Nino
Constantini in the forest in
Mauprat (1926)

as strong as the marital). After falling in love with Edmee, Bernard is taken
from his original family, civilized, humiliated (she reinterprets her promise),
honored (through service in the army), accused of trying to kill her, and finally
exonerated when a trial reveals that his evil father, Tristan, actually uses Ber¬
nard’s gun to perpetrate the deed. Edmee recovers and eventually admits her
love for Bernard, and the two are united at last.
This dichotomy of families and fathers that converges in the double-natured
son creates a curious psychoanalytic fable. Is the conflict one of fathers over
possession of the son? It would seem so, if one considers the flashback sequence
where, beside the strange bed that holds the corpse of his mother, the or¬
phaned boy moves back and forth between the two brothers, only to be wrapped
in Tristan’s huge cloak and spirited off. Or is the conflict an interior one,
involving a son who does not really know his nature? Aligned with one family,
he means to rape and destroy a woman; aligned with the other, he falls in
love and is repeatedly denied her. Can the repression of love so easily produce
the return, displaced through the father, of the son’s murderous desire? The

149
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE tinal shots seem to evade an answer with a conventional ending: the young
FILM couple, by a window, look out on a pair ol swans on a pond. \ et the pre\ious
sequence demands to be read in conjunction with it. Bernard s triend, deter¬
mined to do away with Tristan "with his own hands, journeys to the ruined
chateau only to watch the old man cavort about the heights and finally walk
out onto a rock outcropping over a lake and, with a wave, dissolve away. It a
different figure ot desire still exists repressed and dispersed in nature, can that
pond ot swans really be so idyllic? An abyss gapes in T1auprat, just as it does,
even more disturbingly, in Murnau s Nosferatu (1922).
Germaine Dulac also worked both sides of the fantasy genre. Two of her
films were produced independently and were consciously organized as \isual
ballets or musical compositions. La Folie des vail hints (19251 was adapted from
a Maxim Gorky story about a wandering violinist and Bohemian woman with
whom he falls in love. According to Charles Ford, their story was paralleled
throughout by the Russian fairy tale of the eagle and the snaked1 Still, Harry
Alan Potamkin found it full of a “sentimental poesie2 s2 Limitation an voyage
(1927), on the other hand, was based on just a few lines from the famous
Baudelaire poem. In a sailor's bar, a woman seems on the threshold of a dream
romance until her “inviting'' officer notices that she is married. Most of the
film's attention is focused on the milieu of the bar and on the imaginary
escape, each of which is articulated in a contrasting montage of visual motifs.
Its rhetorical complexity will warrant further scrutiny later.
Dulac's third film in the genre was a commercial venture for Alex Nalpas
and Louis Aubert. The fantasy in La Princesse Mandane (1928). adapted from
a Pierre Benoit novel, sounds similar to that of the Arabian Nights world of
Sala/nmho (1925)d; But the subject and sprint of the film are closer to Clair's
Li Voyage imaginaire (and perhaps also to Keaton's Sherlock Jr. [192-4]). Dulac
herself summarizes the story this way:

In my film. Benoit's hero became a victim ot the cinema. An obsession with all the
glories ot the screen persuades him to abandon his peaceful life and seek through the
world. He thinks, at one point, that he is transported into a wonderful country, a
marvelous kingdom over which a fairy princess reigns.'4

As in the Clair film, this fantasy kingdom is enveloped, Dulac continues, “in
a fine web ot comedy; a constant obsession with adorning the ways ot reality
in dream is interwoven with a wish to transform the gravity ot any conflict
with laughter. Despite Clair’s failure with Jean Borlin, Dulac chose to
emphasize the ethereal balletic quality ot this fantasy by also starring dancers
in two ot the film's leading roles: Ernest Van Duren and Edmonde Guy.
However, L.i Princesst Mandane ends with “a moral" that has none ot Clair's
irony: “After his many adventures, my hero chooses to find happiness in sim¬
ple things.’ The conservative, self-congratulatory ending, Charles Ford con¬
cludes. helped to make the film a profitable one for Aubert at the end ot the
1928 election year.

Throughout the next decade, the French film industry continued to refuse
to exploit the fantasy genre. There were exceptions, ot course. L Herbier re¬
turned to the realist fantasy tor one ot his best early sound films. Le Parfum
Je la dame en noir (1931). but it was little more than a romantic idyll. Clair,

150
of course, used a fantasy format for one of his best social satires, A nous la ARABIAN NIGHTS
liberte (1931). And, if the Surrealist fantasy culminated in Luis Bunuel’s L’Age AND COLONIAL
dor (1930), it was also conventionalized, mythified, in Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang DREAMS
d un poete (1930-1932). Only the adverse conditions of the German occupation
during World War II forced the French to revive, and to see the advantages
of reviving, the genre once more—and on a much larger scale.

Throughout the 1920s, in at least one important genre, the French cinema Arabian Nights and
displaced its concern with its own culture through fictional adventures in a Colonial Dreams
different kind of other world—one outside France, especially in North Africa
and in the eastern Mediterranean. At first, the genre drew on the conte arabe
tradition of A Thousand and One Nights, recently made fashionable, for in¬
stance, by Diaghilev’s Ballets russes, especially by his Scheherazade (1910). It
also drew on Biblical stories, which had fascinated many French writers of the
nineteenth century. Exotic tales of romance and adventure offered an accept¬
able escape from the economic and ideological problems wracking postwar
French society. But the French colonies of North Africa (especially the well-
settled territories of Tunisia and Algeria), according to Pierre Boulanger, pro¬
vided appropriate settings for similar “stories of bloody conflicts, sensual pleas¬
ure, and mystery.’’1 The genre quickly reoriented itself, and a number of
melodramas and romances that could just as easily have been set in France
instead took advantage of the local color and exoticism of North Africa.
The earliest successful adaptation of the conte arabe originated with Louis
Nalpas, one of the men who later sustained the French production of serials.
This is less than surprising when one considers that the producer had been
born and raised in Smyrna. When Nalpas established his own film production
company in Nice in 1918, according to Henri Fescourt, “he thought of the
‘Thousand and One Nights’ stories [and decided] to make a film that would
resurrect a fabulous Orient.”2 The result was La Sultane de lamour (1919),
directed by Rene Le Somptier and Charles Burguet from a scenario by the
French translator of Omar Khayyam, Franz Toussaint. After a sensational spring
preview, the film’s fall release was extremely successful. So popular was Nal-
pas’s first production that Pathe-Consortium included it among its re-releases
in 1923.3
The distribution of stereotypical characters in La Sultane de Lamour suggests
that the film may have been a hybrid outgrowth of the bourgeois melodrama,
the serial, and the exotic “Arabian Nights” tales. For there was “Marcel Le¬
vesque with his comic finesse; Gaston Modot whose strong features took on a
ferocious character under his [soldier’s] helmet; Sylvo de Pedrelli, the lovesick
Emir, imposing and handsome; France Dhelia, the fiery sultaness; [and] Ver-
moyal with his pathetic glances.”4 Louis Delluc called it “the best French film”
of the season—“a remarkable synthesis . . . because the film is composed of
many films and its diversity [including documentary inserts as well as magical
trick shots] could just as well be called complexity.”5 The film’s technical
limitations—it was shot without any artificial lighting at the Villa Liserb
outside Nice, using painted sets (by Marco de Gastyne) and a large diorama
with miniatures in order to represent vast expanses—were obviously out¬
weighed by the gusto of the acting (especially the athletic prowess of Modot),

151
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE the complicated intrigue, and the unusual decision to use the stencil-color
FILM Pathe process (which was normally reserved for newsreels) in the final prints.6
Capitalizing on Nalpas’s success, Leon Poirier produced a series of Oriental
films (also set in Persia, or farther east, and shot in Nice) for Series Pax at
Gaumont: Ames d'orient (1919), Narayana (1920), and Le Coffret de jade (1921).
All three films narrated tales of brutal, mysterious, tragic passion; and the
Oriental woman was consistently typecast as the deadly seductress. Le Coffret
de jade, according to Rene Jeanne, affirmed the dubious maxim: “Life is a
rosebush, and woman is the thorn.”7 Narayana (a transcription of Balzac’s La
Lean de chagrin) Louis Delluc described as “an enticing dream—more sugges¬
tive than complete.”8 To the genre’s racial and sexual misogyny, here religious
idolatry was added in a sequence where a shot of the hero (Van Daele) kissing
the neck of the Oriental seductress (Marcelle Souty) is followed by another of
a Buddha statue over which a skull is superimposed.9 What fascinated French
audiences as much as these tales of forbidden, destructive desire, however,
wrote Fescourt, was the “exotic luxury” of Poirier’s “Persian ‘tapestries.’ . . .
They oohed and aahed over the composition of the decors, the arrangements
of the furniture, the wallpaper, the knickknacks, the paintings.”10 The sets
for these films, designed by Robert Jules Gamier, were obviously an advance
over La Sultane de lamour, but the genre quickly passed on to the real thing.11
The popularity of Nalpas’s and Poirier’s films encouraged the Russian emigre
colony that had settled in Paris and begun to produce films. The first major
success for Films Ermolieff, in fact, was Tourjansky’s Les Contes des milles et une
nuits (1922).12 In this three-part film, the Princess Goul-y-mar (Natalie Ko-
vanko) is traveling to the neighboring palace of her sister when she is captured
by barbarians and carried off. Accused of heresy, she is prepared for torture
by Prince Soleiman (Nicolas Rimsky), who instead falls in love with her.
Together they survive a number of misadventures in his land and eventually
return to the princess’s father’s kingdom where the prince is accepted as the
sultan’s legitimate heir. In contrast to the earlier films, Kovanko’s Oriental
woman exhibits a benevolent power that transforms uncivilized barbarians.
Yet, as before, what apparently appealed to French audiences was the location
shooting (done in Tunisia by Bourgassov and Toporkov) as well as the rich,
coordinated decors (created by Ivan Lochakoff) and costumes (designed by
Tourjansky himself). Cinemagazine, for instance, was mesmerized by “images
that evoke the lush splendor that we imagine must constitute the mysterious
world of Islam.”13 Two years later, for Films Albatros, Tourjansky returned
to his version of the conte arahe formula with Le Chant de I’amour tnomphante
(1923), again starring Natalie Kovanko (as Valeria) with Jean Angelo, Nicolas
Koline, and Jean d’Yd.14 Here Lochakoffs decors were even more stunning,
especially during the sequence of Valeria’s dream.
The success of these films led to Tourjansky’s first big film for Cine-France,
Le Prince charmant (1925).13 Although set in the present or recent past, the
narrative basically offered a pretext to explore (or fabricate) the exotic and
sinister world of the Orient. A European prince (Jaque Catelain) and his fi¬
ancee (Claude France) are sailing a yacht through Middle Eastern waters when
they witness the shooting of a young man trying to reach a high window in
the local caliph’s palace. The prince soon discovers a beautiful young woman
(Natalie Kovanko) hidden in the palace and falls in love with her. Through a

152
chain of intrigues and counterintrigues, the prince and his servant (Nicolas ARABIAN NIGHTS
Koline) succeed in freeing the young woman. Returning to his own country AND COLONIAL
(where his father has died), the prince ascends to the throne, and defies pro¬ DREAMS
tocol by taking his new-found love for his bride. Again love conquers all—
with the aid of brute force and treachery in the Orient and civilized diplomacy
in Europe. Since most of the narrative takes place in the Middle East, Lo-
chakoffs spectacular decors for the caliph’s palace, especially the huge recep¬
tion hall, are the film’s chief showcases.16 Cinea-Cine-pour-tous praised them
unequivocally for creating “a marvelously consistent world of complete fan¬
tasy.”17
The crown jewel of these conte arabe films was to have been Aubert’s Sa-
lammbo, which premiered at the Paris Opera on 22 October 1925.18 This was
the most expensive of the productions that Aubert had arranged to make,
during the heady early days of international production strategies, in the film
studios of Vienna.19 Pierre Marodon was assigned to direct, but soon discov¬
ered that he had to serve as scriptwriter, set decorator, costume designer, and
God knows what else.20 Despite his problems, Marodon continued to be re¬
spectful of his author; his express purpose, he said, was, “to illustrate Flau¬
bert’s novel.”21 Perhaps recalling the formula of Quo Vadis? Aubert encouraged
him to turn his scenario into a Biblical film in the Italian operatic manner.
Consequently, the tragic story of the Carthaginian princess, Salammbo (Jeanne
de Balzac), her father King Hamilcar (Victor Vina), and her two rivals, Matho
(Rolla Norman) and Narr’Havas (Raphael Lievin), apparently was narrated
almost exclusively in LSs that focused on mammoth decors (both exteriors and
interiors) and on great masses of people. The central narrative action—Matho’s
attempt to seize Salammbo, which ends in death for them both—seems to
have gotten lost in an endless series of marches, battles, and celebrations.22
“Though shorn of any poetry,” Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford write, “Maro-
don’s formula did achieve, at moments, a sort of wild grandeur that one could
not find in the Italian films, even in Cabiria. . . .”23 Flaubert, of course,
would have been appalled by all of this (given his distaste for “illustrations,”
if nothing else), but Aubert probably believed that he was righting a wrong
done the novel during the war by an Italian film adaptation, in which Matho
succeeds in marrying Salammbo at the end.24 Critics generally were not kind
to the film, and some even suggested that only Florent Schmitt’s specially
composed score saved it from being an absolute disaster.25 Its luster consid¬
erably tarnished, Salammbo marked an end rather than a beginning. Thereafter,
the French abandoned ancient history and the Middle East to the Americans—
e.g., Ben-Hur (1926) and King of Kings (1927).
The initial success of the conte arabe film stimulated several different varia¬
tions in the genre. The first might be called the Spanish film, which enjoyed
a brief vogue in the early 1920s.26 Fouis Nalpas again produced the first of
these, Germaine Dulac’s La Fete espagnole (1920), from a Fouis Delluc scenario
about a femme fatale (Eve Francis). Others included Musidora’s Pour Don Car¬
los (1921) and Dal-Film’s L’lnfante a la rose (192 1).27 But the cycle peaked in
Gaumont’s production of FI Dorado (1921), by Marcel L’Herbier, which pro¬
voked an outburst of praise and outrage. While critics unanimously accepted
FI Dorado as “an advance” in film art, some viewers booed what they took to
be virtuoso technical effects.28 Yet its poignant tale of fatalistic love (in which

153
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE Eve Francis commits suicide behind the stage curtain of a cabaret), its vivid
FILM use of tinted film stock, and its location shooting within the famous Alhambra
(previously off-limits to filmmakers)—all won for it a considerable audience
and big box-office grosses, at least in France. After 1922, however, especially
after the commercial failure of L’Herbier’s symbolic fantasy set in Spain, Don
Juan et Faust (1923), the Spanish film—with the exception of Feyder’s Carmen
(1926)—nearly disappeared.
The other variant was much more important, for it led to a redefinition of
the genre into something best called the colonial film. The key film in this
transformation was Jacques Feyder’s LAtlantide (1921).
At least one film sparked Feyder’s initial interest in North Africa—Luitz-
Morat’s Les Cinqs Gentlemen maudits (1919), which was produced independently
from a scenario by journalist Andre Heuze.29 The subject was a mixture of
sleuthing, adventure, and the occult. One of five French tourists visiting Tunis
tears the veil from a young woman’s face, and a beggar accompanying her
prophesies their deaths within a month. One by one, four do disappear, but
the last discovers that the beggar is actually a bandit plotting to acquire his
fortune. With the villain punished, the hero can fall in love with the niece of
a colonist. Although Luitz-Morat did not insist on an oriental touch, accord¬
ing to Pierre Boulanger, he shot most of the film on location in Tunis. Costing
but 137,000 francs, Le Cinq Gentlemen maudits brought in more than a million,
enough to impress Feyder and several others.30
Early in 1919, Pierre Benoit had published a novel which rapidly became
the first best-seller in modern French literature. L’Atlantide described the lost
paradise of a beautiful Circe-like queen in the Sahara Desert, where she took
European explorers as her lovers and then turned them into golden statues.
After the success of Ames d’orient, Leon Poirier got Benoit’s permission to adapt
his best-seller for film. But Gaurnont refused Poirier’s stipulation to shoot on
location in the Sahara—Fontainebleau had been good enough for Feuillade,
and besides, what about all that sand?31 Feyder then snapped up the rights to
the book (with only a vague notion of how he would adapt it), just weeks
before Leonce Perret tried to buy it for Paramount in Hollywood.32 After
securing independent financing (which had to be resecured time and again),
early in 1920, Feyder marched his crew and cast—Stacia Napierkowska (An-
tinea), Jean Angelo (Capitaine Morhange), Georges Melchior (Lieutenant Saint-
Vit), Mary-Louise Iribe (Tanit Zerga)—into Algeria for eight months of shoot¬
ing around Touggourt, in the Aures Mountains, and finally at Djidjelli, on
the Mediterranean coast. Instead of returning to Paris for interior shooting,
he had the Italian painter Manuel Orazi improvise a huge tent studio at Ba-
bel-Oued just outside Algiers.33 The production’s ordeal was well publicized in
the press; and when all 4,000 meters of the completed film were previewed at
the Gaumont-Palace, in June, 1921, it caused a sensation. Released in Octo¬
ber en exclusivite first at the Gaumont-Palace and then at Aubert’s newly opened
Madeleine-Cinema, LAtlantide ran for a full year and was shown around the
world.34 Rereleased by Aubert in 1928, perhaps because of Andre Delpeuch’s
accolades to it in his survey of the French film industry, the film had a similar
success.33 Jean Mitry has called it “the first really successful postwar French
film.’’36
The femme fatale figure, the idealistic passionate Frenchman (or his stand-

154
 76. (left) Georges Melchior
and Napierkowska in
L’Atlantide (1921)

77. (right) Antinea’s robe

displayed in front of a poster
in), the narrative of desire that leads to death—LAtlantide shares all this with
for L'Atlantide, both designed
films such as Poirier’s earlier Persian tapestries. There is even a short sequence by Manuel Orazi
that echoes Narayana: a shot of Saint-Vit dissolves into a gong over which, as
it is struck, are superimposed first the face of Morhange, then a cheetah (An¬
tinea), and finally a skull. What L'Atlantide adds is a sense of nature not found
within France itself (or in its studio properties). “It began with a sense of
torpid heat and rhythm that was lacking in La Sultane de lamour," Delluc
pointed out.37 “Here,” wrote another critic, “the Aures mountains provided
unusual rock formations and wind-eroded foothills; and, even more strikingly,
the desert offered the slow undulation of its rippled dunes.”38 “The one central
character in LAtlantide " Delluc concluded, “was the desert sand,” which
“spoke with [an] undisguised eloquence. . . .”39 In contrast to the harmony
of character and landscape in the realist film, in LAtlantide, the desert be¬
comes the locus of a test. The infernal sun, the expanse, the solitude provoke
an encounter with pure beauty, mystery, and death. Before this landscape, the
colonized North Africans vanish like a mirage, only to reappear transformed
in a perverted paradise in order to measure the power and idealism of the
French. The testing produces a guilt to be expiated (maddened by Antinea,
Saint-Vit kills his friend, Morhange) through suffering (he wanders in the
desert with his rescuer, Tanit Zerga) and revenge (in the final shot, he returns
to the desert in search of Antinea and her kingdom). As the first important
colonial film, LAtlantide establishes the landscape of North Africa as a special

155
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE site for the resolution of specifically French crises of the individual, of com¬
FILM rades-in-arms, and, later, of the family.
Viewed today, L'Atlantide retains some of its fascination.40 The early se¬
quences of the caravan traveling across the desert and entering Timbuktu, the
exploration of caves in the mountain canyons of the Hoggar, a corridor se¬
quence during the Frenchmen’s first night in Antinea’s kingdom—these still
hold one’s interest in their choice of location, their composition, their light¬
ing, their ambience (much of this is due to the chief cameraman, Georges
Specht). However, the film seems even longer and more slowly paced now
than it did then. Its rhythm is steady, even monotonous, interrupted only by
a few sequences with frequent intertitles. Feyder structures the film to narrate
the story of Antinea in a long flashback which ends in such a way (emphasizing
Saint-Vit’s powerlessness and suffering) that the final sequence of his imme¬
diate return to the desert loses much of its credibility and force. The sets for
Antinea’s palace, in the words of Georges Sadoul, are a puzzling concoction
of styles—“Carthaginian, Black African, President Fallieres, and Kaiser Wil¬
helm IT ’41—as if someone had visited ftn-de-siecle France and Germany and
then reproduced them from a nightmare twenty years later. Although most of
the acting is more than acceptable—even quite good, especially given the
shooting conditions—Napierkowska’s Antinea nearly ruins the film. An inter¬
nationally known dancer and actress before the war, Napierkowska had been
imposed on Feyder by his financiers (he himself had wanted Musidora).42 Un¬
fortunately, no one realized that she had gained thirty pounds; and, instead
of diminishing her appetite, as Feyder hoped, the Sahara whetted it all the
more.43 Consequently, in contrast to her pet cheetah, Antinea lounges around
much like a comfortable, extremely well-fed tabby.
Out of L’Atlantide s phenomenal success, which was complemented by Val¬
entino’s romp in The Sheik (1921), came a whole series of French films that
were shot in Tunisia, Algeria, and even Morocco.44 In Franz Toussaint’s Inch’
Allah (1922), directed by another Italian painter, Marco de Gastyne, Napier¬
kowska appeared as the desirable dancing daughter of a sultan, for whom a
suitor kills the requisite number of seven rivals.45 In Luitz-Morat’s Le Sang
d’Allah (1922), Gaston Modot plays a Frenchman who rescues Yasmina, the
rebellious wife of a sultan, and then is saved by her suicide in the desert
(Yasmina seems a reformed version of Antinea).46 In Andre Hugon’s Yasmina
(1926), a French doctor (Leon Mathot) returns the favor by saving a Tunisian
(half-French) princess (Huguette Duflos) from the horror of marrying a rich
old Moslem.47 Jean Vignaud, editor of the tabloid, Cine-Miroir, specialized in
whipping up popular romances set in the colonies: Mercanton and Hervil’s
Sarati-le-Terrihle (1923), Fescourt’s La Mahon du Maltais (1927), and Mercan-
ton’s “a la mode’’ Venus (1929).48 Finally, Pierre Benoit tried to repeat LAt-
lantides success with an adaptation of La Chatelaine du Liban (1926), an inter¬
national co-production, directed by Marco de Gastyne and starring Arlette
Marchal, for Bernard Natan and Paramount.49
Even the subject of the bourgeois melodrama began to infiltrate the genre.
In Dmitri Kirsanoffs Sables (1927), a separated husband and wife (Van Daele
and Gina Manes) are reconciled over the sickbed of their daughter (Nadia
Sibirskaia), who has driven alone across the Tunisian desert in a sandstorm to
find them.50 Kirsanoff himself condemned his film as “terrible, childish, stu-

156
pid, merely amusing ... an imbecile wrote the story.”51 In Julien Duvivier’s ARABIAN NIGHTS
adaptation of Henri Bataille’s old sex play, A\aman Colibri (1929), an unhap¬ AND COLONIAL
pily married woman (Maria Jacobini) falls in love with the best friend of her DREAMS
eldest son, a young lieutenant of the Spahi. After following him to sunny
Algeria, where he abandons her for a younger woman, she returns, chastened,
to snowbound Paris, to be pardoned.52 La Revue du cinema called it “a senile
platitude, an absolute void of thought and feeling, a total incomprehension of
cinema.”53
In this catalogue of mayhem, villainy, suffering, and sentiment, at least
two films made slightly more serious attempts to understand the largely Is¬
lamic Arab population. Visages voilees . . . ames closes (1921), written and di¬
rected by Henry Roussel and partly shot in Algeria, had the honor of being
shown to the French Chamber of Deputies as an official example of national
film production. The daughter of a high colonial administrator (Emmy Lynn)
and a mighty caliph (Marcel Vibert) fall passionately in love, but their cultures
separate them. One critic wrote:

Here is one of the best psychological studies that I have seen on the very different
mores of the Europeans and the Arabs. Besides the intimate scenes between the prin¬
cipal characters, there are the beautiful frescoes of the nomadic life of the southern
Algerian tribes. They remind one of masterful paintings, of the picturesque frescoes
of our best orientalists. Harka’s attack on the French fort and his defeat particularly
recalls Horace Vernet’s famous painting, the capture of the family of Abd-El-Kader.54

The Arab culture is unable to escape French stereotypes, however, for, as

another critic wrote, “where love, for us, logically should triumph, there the
Koran triumphs over it” (an opposition that conveniently ignores one of the
medieval origins of romantic passion).55 By articulating “the irreducible an¬
tagonism that exists between the Orient and the Occident,” in Pierre Boulan¬
ger’s words, Visages voilees . . . ames closes easily assents to French superiority.56
Henri Fescourt’s ill-fated L'Occident (1928), based on Henri Kistemaecker’s
scenario for his own play, reverses the characters in a story of love between a
young Moroccan woman (Claudia Victrix) and a French naval officer (Jaque
Catelain). Here, the subject is doubled: Can an Oriental woman become an
Occidental? And will the officer’s passion or duty triumph in the end?57 The
first question is undermined by the fact that the Moroccan woman is already
a French actress (and a bad one at that). The second is resolved against love
once again, but the rulebook that thwarts it this time is hardly the Koran.
Complaining of “the fundamental banality of L’Occident,” On Tourne also re¬
marked “that the characters confirm our hypocrisy.”58 In the climactic battle
between the French legions and the rebellious Chleuhs—filmed “in the best
western style”—the leader of the legionnaire extras even complimented the
director: “Monsieur Fescourt, your manner of treating the Berbers has done a
good deal for their pacification.”59 Years later, Fescourt realized that

the idea never occurred to any of the directors of this warlike spectacle that, among
the crowd of retreating Moroccans, perhaps there were some who were angry at the
role that we asked them to play. . . .60

The genre would not begin to redeem itself until Marie Epstein and Jean
Benoit-Levy’s Itto (1934).

157
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE An interesting feature of the colonial film in the 1920s was its general lack
FILM of attention to the French foreign legion and the Moroccan war, which con¬
cluded with the surrender of the Riftains in 1926.61 Perhaps the negative
public reaction to the war, which provoked increasingly frequent demonstra¬
tions in the middle 1920s, made the film producers wary of the subject—as
happened to the American film industry during the Vietnam War. In any
case, an American film, Beau Geste (1926), became the first film devoted en¬
tirely to the legion, and the Americans devoted more films to the subject than
did the French, even into the 1930s.62 Except for L’Occident, the French seemed
more drawn to the sea dramas associated with the Moroccan war, as in Ba-
roncelli’s Feu (1927) and Nitchevo (1926). However, it was in a film recon¬
structing an earlier period of the Moroccan war that the subject of individual
redemption in the North African colonies was first articulated. The film was
one of Cineromans’s more lavish serials, Rene Le Somptier’s Les Fils du soleil
(1924), which turned the Moroccan independence fighters into a particularly
villainous Emir and his hordes, who team up with an unscrupulous French
financier. One of its plots involved a young man falsely accused of theft who
is exonerated through service in the legion,63 Despite so-called documentary
sequences of Moroccan life and its major festivities, Les Fils du soleil celebrated
“France and its sons as friends come to collaborate in a great civilizing mis¬
sion.’’64 The subject of redemption comes to the fore again in Rene Hervil’s
Le Prince Jean (1927), adapted from a Charles Mere play, which was set in the
milieu of aristocratic gamblers.65 But it assumes its clearest expression in Jean
Renoir’s Le Bled, which had a prestigious opening at the Salle Marivaux in
June, 1929.66
Produced by the Societe des Films Historiques, Le Bled (1929) was com¬
missioned for the French government’s centennial celebration of the conquest
or pacification of Algeria. Its purpose was to encourage tourists and immi¬
grants by propagandizing “the productive energy of Algeria in all its manifes¬
tations as well as the beauty of its landscapes.’’67 With the Algerian govern¬
ment’s full cooperation, Renoir’s crew filmed in some of the country’s principal
tourist and commercial centers: the port of Algiers, the Bardo Gardens, the
Mitidja Plains, a model farm at Staoueli, and the desert around Sidi Ferruch.68
In fact, Le Bled opens with a documentary prologue of brief sequences (each
tinted differently) depicting tourist sites, industrial plants, and various agri¬
cultural lands before focusing on Algiers, where the hero and heroine arrive
on a ship from France.69 The exploration of a large coastal farm allows an
imaginary re-creation of the French colonization process: beginning with the
1830 landing of troops, who dissolve into marching soldiers in more and more
modern uniforms (done in-camera with tracking shots), who in turn become
plows and finally tractors that cover the fields (and overrun the camera) in a
choreography of machines quite similar to that in Eisenstein’s The General Line
(1929).70 This civilizing process is not complete, for the later sections of the
film document the archaic but exciting falcon-hunting practices of the no¬
madic Arabs.
The scenario, written by Henri Dupuy-Mazel and Andre Jaeger-Schmidt,
narrates the healthful (and economically enriching) effect of the country on a
dissolute young Frenchman. Having dissipated his inheritance and his health
in Paris, Pierre Hoffer (Enrique de Rivero) comes to Algeria to borrow money

158
 ARABIAN NIGHTS
AND COLONIAL
DREAMS

78. Arquilliere and Enrique

de Rivero in Le Bled (1929)

from an uncle (Arquilliere) who has made a fortune in farming. The money is
promised on the condition that Pierre work the farm for six months. Claudie
Duvernet (Jackie Monnier), a young woman Pierre meets on the boat, simul¬
taneously collects an inheritance, only to fall victim to a plot by her envious,
perfidious cousins (Manuel Raabi and Diana Hart). Pierre rescues her; they
marry and plan to remain in Algeria. As in L'Atlantide, the desert becomes
the locus of an ideological testing: the technical skills of French industry and
commerce and the moral/physical measure of the individual Frenchman. The
indigenous Arab population conventionally makes up part of the decor, with
two exceptions. Pierre’s closest friend is Zoubier (Berardi Ai'ssa), an Algerian
he knew in the army; and in order to finally rescue Claudie, Pierre has to
resort to nomadic falconers whose birds blind the camel on which Manuel is
fleeing.71 Although the villains are not Algerian, but lazy, disgruntled French¬
men, the Algerians in the film all assent to this best-of-all-possible French
worlds. Yet, in 1929, the struggle for Algerian independence was but a few
years away.
There is a tongue-in-cheek quality about Le Bled that disconcerted some
critics at the time—and perhaps some audiences, for its success was only
moderate—a quality that now makes the film a bit interesting. Pierre is set
off from his uncle’s milieu by a comedy of costumes: while everyone else sits
down to dinner in peasant garb, he comes down in Parisian evening clothes;
for a tour of the farm, he dresses in a sporting jacket, jodhpurs, and tie.
Through the simple juxtaposition of a ladle of mush and a cocktail shaker, he

159
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE is even associated with the villainous cousins. His romantic involvement with
FILM Claudie is as comic as it is serious. On the way to his uncle’s farm, Pierre is
nearly hit by Claudie’s car—the accident throws them together in a kind of
parodic embrace. Their actual discovery of mutual love is handled just as
unconventionally. It happens out in the fields one day when, suddenly drenched
by ram, they take shelter in a hut with several Algerian shepherds. Jacques
Rivette has spoken of this moment as if it were already glistening with drop¬
lets from Renoir’s later film, The River (195 1),72 but the realistic detail (and
the allusion to Dido and Aeneas) creates, for me at least, a peculiar balance of
the lyrical and the farcical. In the climactic chase, done with all the verve of
American action films (and lots of tracking shots), the pursuit uses up cars,
horses, camels, and finally falcons; and Pierre is.miraculously transformed into
an athletic Douglas Fairbanks. Then he and the villain flail about absurdly
over the fainted Claudie much like McTeague and Marcus over the dead horse
and the money at the end of Stroheim’s Greed (1922). The grotesquerie turns
to comedy again when a shot of a horizontal bar swaying back and forth near
the rear end of a horse is cut into the final sequence, where hero and heroine
sit together coyly on a barn swing. One could argue that Le Bled is just as
much satire as celebration.

Although several of these films attempted to illustrate or undermine the

division between cultures in the North African colonies, generally, the colonial
film was ideologically quite comforting. As Pierre Boulanger has argued, the
rigid hierarchy and repressive contradictions of the French social order were
replaced by a fictional society simplified into “a caste of masters (large or small)
and ... a multitude of lesser men”73—who were either villains or just part
of the decor. Here was a world where the dropout or prodigal son (who would
become the dominant hero of the genre) could find ‘‘the magic ladder of
assistance that would permit him to climb back into the social hierarchy that
had been hostile or inhospitable to him in the metropolis.”74 Even in battles
or intrigues with the villainous natives, a Frenchman could still find some
measure of glory (which the Great War had obliterated with ghastly irony in
France itself). By the end of the decade, the subject of the colonial film had
coalesced into the ‘‘myth of redemption.”73 That myth would find its apoth¬
eosis in French films of the 1930s—films such as Feyder’s Le GrandJeu (1934)
and Duvivier’s La Bandera (1935).

Historical One might expect that the French, with their rich legacy of history and
Reconstructions many extant chateaux, along with their achievements in the genre of historical
painting, would be pioneers in the development of period spectacle films or
historical reconstructions. But such was not the case. In comparison to other
national cinemas, in fact, the French came rather late to the genre.
Before the war the French had made just one briefly sustained attempt to
develop a genre of historical reconstruction films. That was between 1910 and
1912, when Film d’Art, Film biblique, and S.C.A.G.L. (the latter two affil¬
iates of Pathe-Freres) produced a small number of feature-length, tableau-style
period films among their literary adaptations. Three of the most successful of
these exploited crucial periods in French history: the late medieval period—

160
Andreani’s Siege de Calais (1911); the French Revolution—Pouctal’s Camille HISTORICAL
Desmoulins (1912); and the mid-nineteenth century—Capellani’s Les Miserables RECONSTRUCTIONS
(1912).1 The most famous, however, had a non-French subject—Desfontaines
and Mercanton’s Queen Elizabeth (1912), starring Sarah Bernhardt, for which
Adolph Zukor and Edwin S. Porter raised sufficient money to distribute it
widely across the United States.2 Perhaps because its share of the world market
was declining, the French film industry had already begun to scale back this
kind of production when the war broke out in 1914 and curtailed it alto¬
gether.
It was the Italian cinema which virtually created and then dominated the
historical reconstruction film genre before the war, with the earliest feature-
length films that resurrected the exploits of ancient heroes against the back¬
drop of mass crowd movements and mammoth, elaborately constructed sets.
Especially notable were De Liguoro’s Inferno (1909), Guazzoni’s Quo vadis?
(1912), and Pastrone’s Cabiria (1913), with its hero, the giant Maciste.3 Un¬
der the influence of these films (as well as several of the French), the American
cinema took up the genre in such films as Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) and De
Mille’s Joan the Woman (1917) and The Woman God Forgot (1917). Under the
same Italian influence, as well as that of Max Reinhardt’s theatrical stagings,
the German cinema produced a flood of historical films from 1919 to 1923-
19249 Especially prominent were Lubitsch’s Kostumfilmen: Madame Du Barry
(1919), Sumurun (1919), and Anna Boleyn (1920). All of these genre examples
finally began to stimulate French interest again by 1919-1920. Cabiria and
its sequels had an extended run in Paris after the original version opened at
the Vaudeville Theatre in 1915 ;5 Intolerance was shown in Paris in the spring
of 1919; in the United States, the German films were seen and remarked on
by visiting French producers and filmmakers. The French interest, however,
took a course rather different from that of the German and American.
There seem to have been at least two major reasons for what eventually
became a heavy French investment of energy and capital in the historical
reconstruction genre. One was frankly economic. Most of the prominent fig¬
ures in the film industry were quickly convinced by the end of the war that
the American superproductions now determined the course of world film pro¬
duction, distribution, and exhibition. In order to survive, even in their own
cinema circuits, the French would have to engage as much as possible in large-
scale productions—they would have to go beyond the budgets of their serials,
bourgeois melodramas, and realist films. Such large-scale productions might
also create the breakthrough that would allow them to reenter the lucrative
American exhibition market. In his typically blunt fashion, Charles Pathe
summed up the challenge: “the Americans will accept nothing from Europe
but costume films, historical films.’’6 And according to a Cinemagazine story
(early in 1922), the success of the German historical films in breaking into
the American market provided the French with a model.7
The other reason was ideological. Much like the realist film, but to an even
greater degree, the historical reconstruction answered a postwar collective French
need. If I may simplify matters, the v/ar had brutally divested France of its
ideological trappings, and the country found itself questioning its own collec¬
tive identity.8 By resurrecting past historical moments of French glory, and
tragedy, the historical reconstruction film contributed to the process of na-

161
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE tional restoration and redefinition. The effect, as one might expect, was deeply
FILM nostalgic and often escapist. As Marc Silberman has argued with regard to the
German costume film, the dominant tendency of these films was toward a
mass spectacle that displaced the contemporary historical process.9 This escap¬
ism did not sit easily with some in the narrative avant-garde wing of the
French film industry. But for most, the period spectacle film provided an
answer to the question, first raised by Louis Delluc, of what was peculiarly
French about the French cinema. The fact that most French films in the genre
were about French historical subjects clearly distinquished them from the more
international subjects of their German and American counterparts.
When the first French period spectacle films appeared after the war, how¬
ever, this was not yet apparent. Gerard Bourgeois’s Chnstophe Colomb, for
instance, which began production in 1916, was done in imitation of the Ital¬
ian films. Shot mostly in Spain, supposedly using 40,000 extras (is that pos¬
sible?) and costing 800,000 francs, it was finally released in two parts during
the summer of 1919—and found a rather indifferent reception.10 Louis Nal-
pas’s six-part Tristan et Yseult (1920), directed by Maurice Mariaud from a
Franz Toussaint scenario, met a similar response.11 But, then, Nalpas had
simply dispensed with the Atlantic mists and the oaks and granite of Cornwall
and done it in the Italian manner on the Cote d’Azur.12 The only major film
with a French subject was Pouctal’s serial adaptation of Dumas’s Le Comte de
Monte-Cristo (1918), which Film d’Art had been ready to put into production
when the war intervened. Four years later, the project was revived and com¬
pleted (with Leon Mathot starring) to become the most popular French film
of the 1918-1919 season. Two years later, it was re-released to similar ac¬
claim.13 By 1921, then, partly because of the success of Monte-Cristo, the
French film industry began to settle on specifically French historical recon¬
structions.
Two films that year established some standards for the genre. They were
Dominique Bernard-Deschamps’s L’Agonie des aigles and Henri Diamant-Ber-
ger’s Les Trois Mousquetaires (the latter, though distributed as a serial, was
premiered as three separate, sequential four-hour films). Both were produced
by Pathe-Consortium, at unusually high budgets of two and two-and-a-half
million francs, respectively. And both were given special gala premieres at the
Salle de Trocadero (which could hold 4,000 people), with high government
officials in attendance. The publicity for and national sanction of these pre¬
mieres were unprecedented in the French cinema. Moreover, Denis Richaud,
the new director of Pathe-Consortium, boasted that these films would serve as
an important instrument of education and socialization. “How excited we are
to represent our history cinematographically, to reconstruct each period’s ar¬
chitecture, costumes and manners, and, at the same time, recall the high
points of our National Unity.’’14
Accordingly, L’Agonie des aigles was an explicitly political film. Adapted
from the novel, Demi-Solde, by Georges d’Esparbes (who was the chief curator
at Fontainebleau), it espoused the cause of Napoleon’s followers in a conspiracy
to restore his son as the Emperor of France (and as ruler of most of Europe).15
The first half of the film narrates a secret meeting between the conspirators,
led by Colonel Montander (Severin-Mars), and Napoleon’s son, the “Eaglet,”
in Austria, where the latter is confined. This meeting prompts a long flashback

162
 79- A publicity photo of
Napoleon’s farewell at
Fontainebleau in L’Agonie des
aigles (1921)

chronicling the last reigning years of Napoleon (also played by Severin-Mars),

which focuses on his farewell address to loyal troops at Fontainebleau. The
second half narrates the betrayal of the conspiracy by an actress who has caught
Montander’s eye (Gaby Morlay, in one of her first major screen roles). In the
end, the conspirators go proudly to their execution by a firing squad.
There are at least two points worth making about L’Agonie des aigles. One
involves its royalist, ultra-conservative ideology which was attacked by the
Socialist and Communist press and by some film journals, with justification,
for at least two of Pathe-Consortium’s financiers at the time were Bloc national
members in the Chamber of Deputies.16 But the ideology of the film’s narra¬
tive is most interesting in the context of France’s victory in World War I. In
the film, the authority figure responsible for Napoleon’s son’s confinement is
the German minister, Metternich. And the French fail to liberate him (once
more, a woman is the traitor), to restore him as a symbol of the national spirit
(historically, the boy wanted only to die in peace).17 All the conspirators can

163
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE do is die nobly, defiantly—one combs his hair at the last moment, another
FILM blows his nose nonchalantly, a third turns to the wall so that his face (once
kissed by the emperor) won’t be disfigured. It is as if the conflicts of the Great
War had been transposed a hundred years earlier, and the victory turned into
a defeat. The old heroic gestures, rendered absurd by the real war, return in
this reconstruction of past suffering (Henri Fescourt remembers this finale as
very moving at the time).18 L'Agonie des aigles, therefore, seems to represent,
through a kind of displacement, the French mood of defeatism after the war.
And it indirectly supported the Poincare government’s intransigent policy to¬
ward Germany, epitomized in the empty slogan: “Germany will pay!’’
The second point concerns the film’s discourse. Much of L'Agonie des aigles
seems to have been shot in Pathe-Cinema’s old studio at Vincennes. In contrast
to later historical reconstruction films, the studio work here is undistin¬
guished, probably because of inadequate facilities. The sets are skimpy and
uniform; the arc lighting is simple and disposed according to rather static
character positions (for instance, Gance’s Mater Dolorosa {1917} is much more
sophisticated). In fact, the most interesting sequences are those shot on loca¬
tion—the farewell at Fontainebleau (involving mass troop movements before
the famous chateau), the almost realistic executions at the end. Overall, the
film has a repetitious, monotonous rhythm in which images often illustrate
the frequent and lengthy intertitles, which actually produce most of the nar¬
rative. Sequences rely heavily on long shots—even extreme long shots—cre¬
ating a static, tableau style of representation that evidences few of the advances
made in filmmaking (even in France) during the previous five years. Cutting
to and between medium shots and (rarely) close-ups is done without regard
for consistent matches in eyeline or even in character position. Conventional
literary symbols provide the film’s only use of metaphor: the fallen eagle for
Napoleon’s defeat, a crashing oak tree for his death. In contrast to the other
French film genres, consequently, the historical reconstruction seems quite
regressive, at least initially, in its deployment of narrative film discourse.
At least one shot, however, raises a question about the conventions that
then marked imaginary or subjective sequences. As Napoleon’s son pores over
a map of the world and dreams, there is a fade to a negative image of a group
of cavalry riding across a plain. Finally, in the battery of fades, irises, and
masks that mark off many shots and sequences, one moment at the end stands
out: on the execution wall, above the heads of the conspirators, there appears
the superimposition of a cavalry charge led by Napoleon—a reversal of the
famous shot in Gance’s 1919 J Accuse, where (on the screen’s top half) the
French army marches through the Arc de Triomphe while (on the bottom half)
the dead rise up from the battlefield in anger. Here, the soldiers in the firing
squad hesitate at this apparition, and then put down their muskets; ironically,
the Swiss Guard is ordered up to perform the executions. The gesture will
reappear, in a very different conflict, in Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1925).
Les Trois Mousquetaires offered another form of national inspiration and eva¬
sion with the mock-heroic rapiers of d’Artagnan and his companions. For three
long months during the winter of 1921-1922, as this mammoth serial of
seventeenth-century adventures swept through the country, the French could
divert themselves from their mounting unemployment and inflation and from
their government’s constant bickering with England and the United States

164
 HISTORICAL
RECONSTRUCTIONS

80. Martinelli, Aime Simon-

Girard, Henri Rollan, and
Marcel Vallee (left to right) in
Les Trots Mousquetaires (1921-
1922)

about German reparations.19 For the development of the period spectacle film,
neither the serial format nor the staid, monotonous rhythm and theatrical mis-
en-scene of Diamant-Berger’s film (which complemented L’Agonie des aigles
only too well) was particularly crucial. Slightly more important were its nar¬
rative of intrigue piled upon intrigue and its well-chosen cast: Aime Simon-
Girard (D’Artagnan), Armand Bernard (Planchet), Henri Rollin (Athos), Mar¬
tinelli (Porthos), Marcel Vallee (Aramis), Edouard de Max (Cardinal Riche¬
lieu), Charles Dullin (Pere Joseph), Claude Merelle (Milady de Winter). How¬
ever, Les Trots Mousquetaires differed sharply from its sister production in at
least two ways—ways that would much affect the genre.
As if he were following the precepts of Antoine, Mercanton, Delluc, and
others, Diamant-Berger decided to shoot most of his film on location.20 In the
once-fortified city of Perouges, near Lyon, he and his cameraman Maurice
Desfassiaux found streets and alleys that could represent old Paris. The cha¬
teaux of Perigueux, Chenonceau, Azay-le-Rideau, and Chissay served as royal
quarters for the English and French. The church at Montbazon held the wed¬
ding of Milady and Athos; Chartres cathedral provided the backdrop for a
major duel; and the port of Coisic functioned as both Boulogne and Dover.
Finally, on a tract of land near Pathe-Cinema’s studio at Vincennes, Diamant-
Berger constructed Richelieu’s camp at La Rochelle and the fortifications of
Saint-Gervais. The result was that Les Trois Mousquetaires gained, along with
the picturesqueness of its landscapes, some measure of authenticity that turned
it into a gigantic pageant celebrating seventeenth-century France. The effect
would not be lost on later filmmakers. Furthermore, Diamant-Berger assigned

165
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE Robert Mallet-Stevens—“the uncontested master of the young school of French
FILM architecture”—to construct decors and costumes for the interior shooting at
the Vincennes studio.21 Diamant-Berger himself remembers that

Mallet-Stevens . . . was enthusiastic about the Musketeers; we stylized the decors and
costumes, deciding on a clean, simple, unadorned figure, quite the opposite of the
Louis XIII style, which was rather well known and “unappetizing.” For the court
costumes, we used furniture velour because its stiffness gave them an imposing look.22

All this was designed to be spectacular and also to allow for some fast-paced
action. There were those, of course, who were not impressed. Ricciotto Ca-
nudo, for one, ridiculed the film as a travesty of “four swaggering petty officers
caught up in drunken revelries, badly mounted horseback rides, and an un¬
speakable naval battle allegedly before La Rochelle but actually filmed in the
pools of the Luxembourg Gardens!”23
In his second adaptation from Dumas, Vingt Ans apres (1922),24 Diamant-
Berger added a new element to this combination of exterior and interior shoot¬
ing, again with Desfassiaux and Mallet-Sxevens. This was an enormous set
construction outside the studio, of which the filmmaker is still immensely
proud.

In the huge Niepce and Fetterer factory yard at Billancourt, which furnished us ply¬
wood for the decors, we “constructed” the facade of Notre-Dame de Paris, up to the
height of the King’s Gallery. . . .
I was going to film the Te Deum given by the queen in honor of the battle at Lens;
on the occasion of this ceremony, the Paris mutineers tried to disrupt the royal cortege
in order to seize the King. ... I collected 3,000 extras [for the scene]. ... I placed
ten cameras along the course. A telephone system allowed me, while perched on a
platform, from which I could control the action, to order in sequence the different
groups of demonstrators to shout and throw rocks . . . made of cork.25

From the technical point of view, Diamant-Berger told Andre Lang, Vingt Ans
apres was even better than Les Trois Mousquetaires.26 But both films were im¬
portant. In their emphasis on numerous location sites, on expensive breath¬
taking set constructions and costumes, on ritualistic pageantry involving great
masses of people, on intrigues or conflicts that could be resolved in the action
of battle, they laid the foundations of the French historical reconstruction film
genre.
Still, the French film industry hesitated to commit itself completely. Small-
scale adaptations of classic nineteenth-century fiction continued in favor. Pathe-
Consortium, for instance, assigned Antoine to film an adaptation of a Jules
Sandeau novel, Mile, de la Seigliere (1921), starring Fluguette Duflos, Ro-
mauld Joube, and Charles Lamy.27 His son says that Antoine accepted only
because he was interested in re-creating, in a chateau near Paris, “a sense of
daily life in the eighteenth century in a certain [aristocratic] milieu.”28 Cine-
magazine found the result meticulously accurate in its details, certainly lovely
to look at, but rather static and old-fashioned in style.29 Film d’Art, likewise,
assigned Baroncelli to direct low-budget films drawn from Zola and Balzac
novels. Antoine roundly condemned Le Reve (1921) because Film d’Art con¬
structed a cheap cathedral facade for Baroncelli rather than let him shoot on
location.30 But Le Reve was unusually popular—it played for almost a year in
and around Paris—and briefly made Andree Brabant a star.31 Less successful

166
was Baroncelli’s Pere Gonot (1921), starring Signoret. Still, Georges Sadoul HISTORICAL
remembers that it reconstructed quite accurately the novel’s shabby Vauquier RECONSTRUCTIONS
pension. '’2 As I mentioned earlier, Baroncelli’s film was the first of a series of
low-budget adaptations of Balzac novels. Of these, one deviates radically enough
from its genre conventions to be set aside for later discussion—Jean Epstein’s
LAuberge rouge (1923).
Perhaps the reason for what seemed to be industry hesitation lay in the
internal changes that forced the scaling back of film production at both Film
d’Art and Pathe-Consortium in 1922. Certainly one direct consequence was
that Diamant-Berger’s third adaptation of Dumas never got beyond the prep¬
aration stage. But other companies quickly took up the slack, and at least two
films seem to have convinced the industry to pursue the large-scale production
of period spectacle films. Both were released early in 1923, in conjunction
with the Paris premiere of Douglas Fairbanks’s Robin Hood (with its magnifi¬
cent sets by Wilfred Buckland), and that film’s extraordinary popularity in
France must have confirmed the industry’s commitment.33
When Aubert plunged into film production in 1922, his company’s biggest
project was Rene Fe Somptier’s La Dame de Monsoreau (1923).34 This six-part
adaptation of yet another Dumas novel was calculated to exploit the interest
generated by Diamant-Berger’s two films. It was released close on the heels of
Vingt Ans apres and received an unusual publicity buildup that included a full
issue of Cinemagazine,35 Furthermore, it was distributed in a stencil-tinted
version that often processed two or three colors within a single frame. The
print of La Dame de Monsoreau that survives at the Cinematheque frangaise is
a revelation—it is both breathtakingly gorgeous and incredibly dull.36 Fe
Somptier and his cameraman Amedee Morin rely heavily on FSs of landscapes,
chateau exteriors and interiors, and a parade of costumes to produce one spec¬
tacular tableau after another. And he sustains the tableaux with a simple
continuity editing similar to that in LAgonie des aigles. Finally, he tells his
story almost completely in the intertitles, and their absence in the surviving
print quickly renders the film incomprehensible—Genevieve Felix, Gina Manes,
Jean d’Yd, and the other actors become so many mannequins drifting about
in a brightly colored museum. Story and spectacle are kept strictly separate;
the latter does not merely illustrate the former, sometimes it literally over¬
powers it with a nostalgic resurrection of the genre of historical painting.
Even more crucial in spurring the industry’s commitment to historical re¬
constructions was a Paramount production, Henry Roussel’s Les Opprimes, one
of the most popular films of the 1922-1923 season.37 Roussel’s story of a
spunky sixteenth-century Flanders girl apparently was not unlike opera, with
flamboyant gestures, elaborate costumes, and passionate characters placed in
schematic oppositions.38 Wrote Canudo,

The austerity and implacable arrogance of the Duke of Albe; the goodness of the
provost marshal whose daughter, Conception, falls in love with Philippe de Hornes,
a young Flemish patriot; the diplomatic generosity of Don Luis de Zuniga, the King’s
ambassador and suitor to Conception, who in the end marries her to the young pa¬
triot—all are worked skillfully into an intrigue of persecution and passion embroidered
onto a background of suffering and thundering revolt by an oppressed people.39

The film’s real surprise, however, was the Spanish singer-actress, Raquel Meller,

167
81. Huguette Duflos in a
Boue Soeurs gown in
Koenigsmark (1923)

whose performance as Conception made her an immediate star, almost on the

level of an Asta Nielsen. According to the French film journals, Les Opprimes
was a magisterial reconstruction of Flanders during the reign of Philip II and
demonstrated to the world that the French, too, could make successful large-
scale films.40 Still, that it should be made with American money piqued the
French a bit. Besides, its appearance also happened to coincide with the be¬
lated release in France of Lubitsch’s “scandalous” treatment of French history
in Madame Du Barry (1919).41
Within a year, the French film industry produced no less than three major
films that consolidated the conventions and confirmed the new status of the
historical reconstruction genre. The appearance of these films coincided with
Cineromans’ revival of the costume adventure serial that celebrated historical
figures as their heroes. However, the characteristics of the historical recon¬
struction films set them off distinctly from the smaller-budgeted Cineromans’
productions. Those characteristics can be summarized as follows: 1) a subject
calling for the reconstruction of an historical period (usually French and aris¬
tocratic); 2) elaborate, sumptuous, authentic decors and costumes; 3) a narra¬
tive that emphasizes climactic set pieces—of dazzling tableaux and/or sensa¬
tional sweeping action; and 4) major stars in the leading roles.

168
 .*M**&y:

82. Jaque Catelain and

Huguette Duflos in a
Menessier interior in
Koemgsmark (1923)

The most successful of these films was Leonce Perret’s Koenigsmark (1923).
An independent production (though Paramount may have been involved in its
financing behind the scenes), Koenigsmark was a very calculated project.42 Per-
ret capitalized on the success of L’Atlantide by adapting his scenario from
another best-selling novel by Pierre Benoit which had just been translated into
several languages. At the film’s premiere at the Salle Marivaux, in December,
1923, he predicted confidently that it would have a worldwide success—and
it did.43 The subject was a tragic French-German romance between a young
poet-tutor, Vignerte (Jaque Catelain), and Princesse Aurore (Huguette Duflos)
in a small German court on the eve of World War I (displaced slightly by
involving the Austrian, not the Prussian, aristocracy). After discovering a
mysterious crime committed by the grand duke (her father) years before, the
couple flee to France where Vignerte enlists as a pilot in the war and is killed
in combat. Perret carefully suppressed all the later war scenes in the novel, in
order to emphasize the prewar court spectacle and intrigue and to allow for a
bittersweet epilogue at the French tomb of the unknown soldier, where Prin¬
cesse Aurore (with “six drops of glycerine on the edge of her eyelids’’) could
whisper, “Perhaps it is he!’’44
Although certain elements align it with another film genre, the emerging

169
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

83- Raquel Meller in Violettes

impertales (1924)

modern studio spectacular, Koenigsmark is principally an historical reconstruc¬

tion, intent on recreating an aristocratic period that had just been obliterated
by the war. Much of the film was shot on location in Bavaria, taking advantage
of “the romantic decor of a feudal chateau’’; but Perret and his set designer,
Henri Menessier, also used Levinsky’s new Joinville studio to create several
lavish interiors.4^ Baldly put, the film was nothing less than a showcase for
grand spectacle (the discovery of the skeleton in the gothic fireplace, the burn¬
ing of the chateau, the Court Ball, the hunt, the marriage banquet on Mont¬
martre); extravagant costumes by the Boue Soeurs (demonstrating that Paris
was indeed the capital of fashion); and France’s number-one star at the time,
Huguette Duflos.46 As Leon Moussinac admitted, along with Aubert’s naval
epic starring Sessue Hayakawa, La Bataille (1923), Koenigsmark provided the
industry with a model for French superproductions:

Such successes are encouraging not only for the producers of French films but also for
the investors. Certainly these are super-films worthy of the name [they can say}. . . .
They will re-invigorate [the industry] and give us mastery of the whole world.47

The readers of Cinemagazine confirmed its stature by naming Koenigsmark the

best film, by far, of 1923.48

170
 Following Koenigsmark's three-month run at the Salle Marivaux came Henry HISTORICAL
Roussel’s second big film with Raquel Meller, Violettes impenales (1924).49 Also RECONSTRUCTIONS
independently produced, it, too, was a cleverly calculated operetta-style proj¬
ect, much like Les Opprimes. At the time, “Raquel Meller had made a popular
song, ‘Violettera,’ so much her own that the mass public no longer saw her
as anything but a melodious flower girl.”''0 So Roussel’s scenario contrived to
place the singer as a simple flower-seller named Violetta in the period of the
Second Empire.51 In Seville, Violetta is rescued from a life of petty thievery
by Eugenie de Montijo de Guzman (Suzanne Bianchetti), who, three years
later, marries Napoleon III. Taken to Paris and given a career at the Opera,
Violetta falls in love with Count Saint-Affremond (Andre Roanne) but must
abandon her suitor to save Eugenie from scandal in a court intrigue. Later,
she learns that her brother Manuel (San-Juana) has become part of a plot to
blackmail and kill the empress. Refusing to betray him and unable to divert
Eugenie, Violetta employs a ruse to take her place in the royal carriage and
sacrifices herself instead.
A narrative of regeneration and of almost Comedian sacrifice, Violettes im¬
penales was also a nostalgic return to a milieu of luxury and splendor long
since past. The location shooting took Roussel, Jules Kruger (his chief cam¬
eraman), and his cast from the sun-drenched streets and peasant dwellings of
Seville to the magnificent ceremonial receptions at Compiegne and in the
Tuilleries. Critics were especially impressed with the scrupulous reconstruction
of the pageantry:

. . . the scenes that the filmmaker has shot in the actual locations, inspired at one
moment by a famous painting by Winterhalter, are full of such freshness that they
can be counted among the most gracious tableaux that we have been privileged to
admire on the screen.52

“But beyond these photogenic seductions,” added Henri Fescourt, “the lu¬
minescence that emanated from the film . . . derived above all from the pres¬
ence of Raquel Meller.”53
The third film was an expensive production from Films Albatros, the com¬
pany organized around the Russian emigre film colony in Paris. Previously,
Albatros had been known for its serials, Arabian Nights fantasies, and satirical
comedies. Now came Alexandre Volkoffs Kean, released in February, 1924.54
Its subject was the last years of Edmund Kean, the illustrious English Shake¬
spearean actor, and the historical period was 1830 London. The star was one
of the more popular French film actors at the time, Ivan Mosjoukine. A mer¬
curial actor, Mosjoukine made Kean one of his most successful film roles,
playing him as a multifaceted character who envisioned and lived life-as-thea-
ter. Like most French film historians, Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford consider
this film “the high point of the collaboration between Volkoff and Mosjoukine
[and cameraman J.-P. Mundviller] as well as of the Albatros productions.”55
Cinea-Cine-pour-tous s readers agreed by voting it the third best film of 1924,
just ahead of Violettes impenales.56
The scenario for Kean was adapted from Dumas pere’s play, written for the
famous French actor, Frederick Femaitre, just three years after Kean’s death;
unlike its source, however, it ends in tragedy or, more accurately, in bathos.57
In the opening sequences, during a performance of Romeo and Juliet, Kean falls

171
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

84. Nicolas Koline and Ivan

Mosjoukine in the Coaly Hole
tavern in Kean (1924)

in love with one of his admirers, the Countess de Koeleld (Natalie Lissenko),
the wife of the Danish ambassador to England. But he is in no condition to
carry on such a love affair. Hounded by creditors, Kean and Solomon (Nicolas
Koline), his good friend and servant, have to disguise themselves as a sailor
boy and his mother (after Solomon has done a neat turn as a tiger) in order to
escape to Hyde Park (where the countess rides by on horseback and says,
tauntingly, she prefers him as Romeo). At the Coaly Hole tavern, the two
men drink themselves silly, burn up the floor with several jigs and dances,
and fall asleep until morning. Soon after, in back-to-back intrigues, Kean has
to save the reputation of a young woman, Anna Damby (Mary Odette), who
is infatuated with him, and then has to suffer an apparent rejection (of his
roses) by the countess, while he is carousing at a men’s club. When his rival
for her love, the Prince de Galles (Otto Detlefren), appears with the count
and countess in the theater box one night, Kean becomes enraged and breaks
off his performance in Hamlet to insult them. The count protects his wife (and
keeps her from reaching the actor), and when the crowd boos and yells at him,
Kean collapses on stage. In a long coda, he retires from the theater, ill and
penniless, holes up in Solomon’s run-down cottage on the outskirts of London,
and wastes away. There, of course, the countess comes to confess her love just
before he dies.
From its opening, Kean displays an especially effective classical continuity
style of editing—the admiring glances of more than a half-dozen women in
the theater audience are integrated clearly into the space of Kean’s performance
in Romeo and Juliet. And the performances of Mosjoukine, Koline, Lissenko,

172
 HISTORICAL
RECONSTRUCTIONS

85. Ivan Mosjoukine as Kean

dying in Kean (1924)

and Odette are strong and affecting throughout. It is surprising, therefore,

that the film’s handling of the two Shakespeare plays is so mundane. So un¬
distinguished are these moments that an intertitle has to tell us that Kean
(and Mosjoukine) is a marvelous Hamlet. But the choice of the plays per¬
formed resonates aptly in the narrative. The actor first sees the countess—an
exchange of privileged looks initiate his tragic desire—during the balcony
scene between the star-crossed lovers. And he breaks down, mad with envy
and grief, during Hamlet’s tirade to Ophelia on marriage. What seems to
have struck the French reviewers and audiences most about these moments,
however, was the illusion of being in the old Drury Lane Theater. This, one
of the major spectacles of the film, owed much to the work of Albatros’s chief
set designer, Ivan Lochakoff. In the old Montreuil studio, Lochakoff meticu¬
lously reconstructed the interior of the Drury Lane Theater (from designs and
photographs he found in the Bibliotheque nationale).58 “Its dimensions {were}
enormous,’’ wrote Cinemagazine, “twelve meters high, and twenty-five meters
long. It {was} perfectly furnished: loges, boxes, plush seats; nothing was
missing. ”59
The moments accepted as classic set pieces by the cine-clubs, however, were
the final sequence of Kean’s death and the night-long carousing in the Coaly
Hole tavern.60 Viewed today, Kean’s dying seems to go on interminably—
much like Hernani’s, Jeanne and Ford confess.61 Only Mosjoukine’s restrained
acting in MCU and CU, as well as the intercut exterior shot of several frail
trees whipped about in the wind, save the sequence from falling completely
into bathos. The Coaly Hole sequence is something else again. Kean’s drunken
dancing is described in ensemble shots (where several black sailors are prom¬
inent), hand-held CUs, shots of a dog and cat backing off, swish pans, all of
which are edited together in a rhythmic montage that changes according to
his emotional state, accelerating at several points into short bursts of rapid
cutting. At the end, a pattern of subjective inserts culminates in several su¬
perimpositions of the countess on horseback riding (almost threateningly) to¬
ward him. Later, in a parallel sequence at the men’s club, Kean’s hallucina-

173
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE tions reach a feverish climax. Told of the countess’s rejection (the long-take
FILM CU of his reaction is marvelously poignant), he drunkenly imagines a distorted
version in which his gift of roses is scorned and crushed, and then he is
confronted by superimpositions of his rival and the countess (culminating in
ECUs of her mouth) that seem to fill the room. If anything in Kean deviates
from the conventions of the historical reconstruction genre, it is certainly these
sequences in the Coaly Hole and the men’s club.
The impressive interior decors of Koenigsmark and Kean raise an intriguing
point about the development of the historical reconstruction film in France.
Its elevation to prominence in French film production coincides with and
probably derives from a major change in set design. According to Leon Bar-
sacq, it was not until about 1922 that a technical evolution in film scenery
freed the set decorators from trompe-d’oeil painting and other conventions of
fin-de-siecle theater so that a new group of architect-designers could enter the
profession. "In general,” Barsacq adds, "through their exacting demands and
their achievements, the Russian designers [especially] contributed to raising
the status of film designers to one of close collaboration with directors.”62
Interestingly, the newcomers were not employed by the older production com¬
panies of Pathe-Consortium, Gaumont, Aubert, and Film d’Art. Instead they
were made important members of recently established, often independent
companies: Diamant Films had Mallet-Stevens; Films Albatros had Lochakoff,
Boris Bilinsky, and later Lazare Meerson; the Societe des Films Historiques
also had Mallet-Stevens. One can argue, I think, that the work of these ar¬
chitect-designers was a key factor in the success of the historical reconstruction
genre, as it would be later in that of the modern studio spectacular.
This change in set design, among other things, clearly differentiates the
two major period films of the 1924-1925 season: Raymond Bernard’s Le Mi¬
racle des loups (1924) and Germaine Dulac’s Le Diable dans la ville (1925). Both,
interestingly enough, are set in the fifteenth century.
The source for Le Diable dans la ville was an original scenario by Jean-Louis
Bouquet, entitled La Ville des fous.6i

The story involved a case of sudden terror that seized an entire village. . . . This
contagious fear was provoked by inexplicable phenomena that superstition soon attrib¬
uted to the devil. The mystery was explained by the presence of a happy band of
robbers who, haunting the underground caverns of the old town, duped the inhabit¬
ants in their houses at nightfall ... for their own profit.64

Initially, the setting and time were to have been unspecified (yet modern),
but the Cineromans producers convinced Dulac that a fifteenth-century French
village would provide a properly plausible context. Because it was a moder¬
ately budgeted Films de France production at Cineromans, the film was shot
by an undistinguished cameraman, Stuckert, entirely in the studio, using
rather old-fashioned stock sets and costumes by Pathe-Consortium’s chief set
designer, Quenu.63 The resulting "demode” look fails to mesh with Dulac’s
emphasis on cinematic rhythm (sometimes to the point of abstraction), and
both vitiate the narrative’s satire and social criticism. In fact, one could argue,
as Dulac herself did, that Le Diable dans la ville is really not a period spectacle
film at all.66
By contrast, the Russian-emigre-financed Societe de Films Historiques de-

174
cided to make Le Miracle des loups the most expensive historical reconstruction HISTORICAL
ever mounted by the French film industry. The director, Raymond Bernard, RECONSTRUCTIONS
confessed that he was stunned by the project:“I had the possibility of employ¬
ing means that had never been used up to that time in France.”67 For example,
in the newly renovated Levinsky studios at Joinville-le-pont, he and Mallet-
Stevens reconstructed the spectacle of a medieval mystery play with “more
than a thousand extras.”68 For the siege of Beauvais, actually filmed in the
fortified city of Carcassonne (which Andre Antoine apparently convinced the
producers to use rather than studio decors),69 Bernard said,

every morning I had four thousand people ready in costumes; I had hundreds of horses
in period harnesses; I shot with fourteen or fifteen cameras and usually one of my
assistants [including Maurice Forster and Daniau-Johnson] was behind each cam¬
era. ... I myself remained above the battlefield ... in the place where I could see
everything.67

Le Miracle des loups became a national event when the producers arranged for
its premiere, along with a special orchestral accompaniment composed by Henri
Rabaud, at the Paris Opera, on 13 November 1924.71 Presiding over the event
was the president of the Republic, and in the audience were his ministers, the
diplomatic corps, and celebrities in the arts and sciences from around the
world. It was “a stunning success,” wrote one film journal, “a veritable official
consecration of the cinematographe.”72 Within two weeks, the film opened a
three-and-a-half month exclusivite run at the Salle Marivaux.73 One year later,
the readers of Cinea-Cine-pour-tous voted it the best film of 1925 (topping
Chaplin’s The Pilgrim, Fairbanks’s Thief of Bagdad, and De Mille’s The Ten
Commandmentr).74
The subject of Le Miracle des loups, adapted by Andre-Paul Antoine from
Henry Dupuy-Mazuel’s novel, took French audiences back to a period when
their own national unity was being forged.75 The time was 1461-1472, the
historic years of conflict between Louis XI (played by the famous Atelier actor,
Charles Dullin) and his brother, the Duke of Bourgogne, Charles le Temeraire
(Vanni Marcoux)—a conflict that was mediated and resolved, according to
legend, by the figure of Jeanne Hachette (Yvonne Sergyl) and “the miracle of
the wolves.” The film opens with an epigraph from Michelet: “History is a
resurrection” (written in a stylized medieval script, as are most of the inter¬
titles). Then a prologue establishes Charles’s desire for the crown and the
mutual love between Jeanne and one of Charles’s noblemen, Robert Cottereau
(Romauld Joube). However, another of his retinue, de Lau (Gaston Modot),
is also enamored of Jeanne and plots her abduction during the performance of
the mystery play. Louis XI foils the plot and wins Jeanne’s allegiance, but
Charles breaks off with him, and Robert dutifully has to follow his master.
This antagonism between brothers leads to an indecisive battle at Montlhery
(during which Robert saves Charles from death) and an uneasy truce. Soon,
however, Charles comes to believe that Louis is guilty of inciting an insurrec¬
tion against him at Liege and makes him a virtual prisoner at Perrone. Jeanne
and her father set out to help Louis (with a document proving his innocence);
but de Lau pursues them, kills the old man, and chases Jeanne through the
snowbound mountains into a pack of wolves, who miraculously ignore her and
attack him and his men. Upon reaching Perrone, she and Robert stay Charles

175
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

86. The siege of Beauvais in

Le Miracle des loups (1924)

176
from ordering Louis’s death. Several years later, Charles’s army, led by Robert HISTORICAL
and de Lau (who alone survived the wolves), attacks the city of Beauvais where RECONSTRUCTIONS
Jeanne is now living. She rallies the peasants and townspeople, but they are
driven back into the cathedral tower, which is set afire. Robert unknowingly
wounds Jeanne and then defends her against de Lau in a duel that takes them
to the tower ramparts, where de Lau falls to his death. Remembering Robert’s
service to him in the past, Charles refuses to kill the reunited couple, and
Louis’s army finally arrives to put him to flight. Louis, at last, is undisputed
king.
The legend of Jeanne Hachette bears a striking resemblance to that of Jeanne
d’Arc (even Louis here corresponds to Charles VII, his father), and the film’s
phenomenal success probably inspired the production of two later historical
reconstructions: Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne dArc (1928) and Marco de
Gastyne’s La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne dArc (1929). However, here the char¬
acters are probably more interesting in the context of earlier films such as
LAgonie des aigles and Violettes imperiales. Except for his inadvertent foiling of
de Lau’s plot and his brief leadership during the battle of Montlhery, Louis is
a strangely passive, meditative king, not at all like the ruthless, prevaricating
historical figure. In one of the best film performances of the decade, Charles
Dullin plays him like an older, laid-back Hamlet or a milder, gentler Richard
II (in two sequences with Charles, he adopts a mocking half-supercilious, half¬
subservient attitude, and he is fascinated by objects of power and by his own
powerlessness).76 Much like Napoleon’s son in LAgonie des aigles, his function
in the film is not to restore but to be restored. Three times, Robert and
Jeanne, separately and then together, save him from defeat and death. Even
more than Louis perhaps, Jeanne at Beauvais incarnates the spirit of France—
a feminine replication of Jeanne d’Arc or of Delacroix’s goddess of liberty
during the Revolution. But she, too, must be saved twice, first by a kind of
divine intervention in the miracle of the wolves and then by her lover-antag¬
onist. No conflict of nations, of classes, here. Instead, a civil conflict of brother
against brother, of fiance against fiancee, that is resolved by the code of suf¬
fering and sacrifice. If this is the French equivalent of the American Birth of
a Nation, the royalist conclusion is unexpectedly muted, but historically pre¬
scient. Sitting alone before a chessboard, Louis grabs the king, impulsively
sweeps all the other pieces away, and, smiling, plumps his piece down in the
center of the board. But his final gesture is to raise one hand anxiously to his
neck as his face takes on a quizzical, disturbed expression. Does he know where
the monarchy will end?
Much like Koenigsmark and Violettes imperiales, Bernard’s film was a showcase
for spectacle. But here, I would argue, it is integrated even more effectively
into the narrative. The first battle of Montlhery is brief but shockingly real¬
istic—and looks ahead to Gance’s Napoleon (1927), Orson Welles’s Chimes at
Midnight (1966), and Kevin Brownlow’s Winstanley (1976). In a succession of
graphic shots, the film catalogues nearly a dozen different ways that the ar¬
mored horsemen and foot soldiers are wounded or killed. Its effect is registered
immediately by Louis’s hasty signing of the treaty. Although slightly extended
in length, the attack of the wolves is also presented in realistic detail—with
MCUs and CUs of the wolves gripping and tearing at the men’s bloody necks
and faces. Henri Fescourt, for one, criticized the sequence for failing to convey

177
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

87. Mallet-Stevens’s interior

for the Beauvais Cathedral
tower in Le Miracle des loups
(1924)

the moment of grace; and the means are rather mechanical: horizontal frame
maskings simply shift from black to white.77 But there is a rhetorical rightness
at the end in the juxtaposition of a CU of de Lau’s bloody face (the predator
has become prey) and an ELS of Jeanne running off across a vast snow-covered
valley.
The climactic siege of Beauvais is a set piece of spectacular action, staged
on a scale clearly reminiscent of the Babylon section of Intolerance. The se¬
quence is orchestrated clearly, vividly, using an unusual variety of shots (from
ELSs, looking past the defenders on the wall toward the attackers swarming
over a small hill, to MCUs of a cannon firing or a woman protecting her
child); and it shifts the narrative focus smoothly from army versus army, to
small group versus small group, to Robert versus Jeanne, then to Robert
versus de Lau (all the while intercutting Charles’s soldiers pillaging the town
as well as Louis’s soldiers advancing). For the interiors of Louis’s court, of
Charles’s rooms at Perrone, of Beauvais’s cathedral tower, “Mallet-Stevens
eliminated all unnecessary details: splendid, shiny floors and high fireplaces
are the only visually rich areas.”78 The effect was to create a regal but almost
monastic space for Louis and, in the Beauvais cathedral, to conjure up a kind
of magical emblem—a LS of two armored knights poised over the wounded
Jeanne in a high-ceilinged, shimmering, debris-filled chamber.
The film employs metaphor sparingly but effectively—as in Louis’s swift,
then suddenly hesitant, gestures over the chessboard at the end or in his
paradoxical behavior at the beginning—greeting Charles with open brother-

178
liness and then teasingly shooting a crossbow arrow into the shield of his coat HISTORICAL
of arms. The most extended sequence that relies on metaphor is that of the RECONSTRUCTIONS
elaborately staged early mystery play, The Game of Adam (strangely reminiscent
of a Melies fantasy film). As the stage serpent seduces Eve who seduces Adam
with the apple (and their clothes drop off), in a side room, Charles sends de
Lau outside to bring Jeanne to him. Nimble, cavorting devils push Adam and
Eve to the huge dragon mouth of hell, and Jeanne stands before Charles, who
orders her to go with de Lau. As she struggles to resist, the king’s crown
which is nearby falls to the floor, and Louis (who has also been watching the
play) suddenly enters the side room. In an economical, measured, dramatically
charged montage of shots, Louis looks at de Lau, at the crown, at Charles,
and then seizes the crown before his brother can reach it. As he does so, one
of his retinue pulls back a curtain, and the crowd stands to face this new side
stage that has displaced the mystery play. Slowly, pointedly, the king ad¬
dresses his antagonist (in an intertitle): “Crowns are like women.’’ And as
Charles kneels obediently before him, Louis mischievously raises the crown to
his brother’s head, only to grab it back. Thoughtfully, he rubs one of the
jewels and laughs: “It’s cracked!’’ Charles stares, and the people realize that
war is at hand. It is a marvelous moment, worthy of the Shakespeare it echoes—
Richard II (Act IV, scene i)—and suggests perhaps better than any other se¬
quence how effectively Le Miracle des loups works even today.

After 1924, the genre of historical reconstruction seems to have developed

along two different lines. In part, these developments were linked to the Cartel
des gauches policies which encouraged the strategy of international co-produc-
tions. But they were also determined by rival groups within the Lrench film
industry. One group had its base in the Paramount production center in Paris.
It included Leonce Perret and Henry Roussel (producer-directors who had
already worked for Paramount), Robert Hurel (a former Paramount producer
who founded Pranco-Lilm with Perret), and Bernard Natan (an ambitious spec¬
ulator with ties to Paramount, who built his own studio and eventually took
over Pathe-Consortium). Most of the period spectacle films this group pro¬
duced had one thing in common—they focused on a major historical figure in
the period just before or after the Lrench Revolution.
The first of these films was Perret’s second blockbuster, Madame Sans-Gene
(1925), which opened at the Salle Marivaux in December, 1925.79 This Par¬
amount production was made, during the winter of 1924-1925, largely be¬
cause of Gloria Swanson. The central role of the famous Sardou play, written
originally for Rejane, appealed greatly to the American actress.80 She enlisted
the aid of film critic Andre Daven to persuade the Lrench film industry and
government to accept the project, whose support in turn convinced Paramount
to accept her wishes. Ostensibly, the subject of the film was not unlike that
of Violettes imperiales: a woman’s ascent from washerwoman to marshal’s wife
and finally to duchess. Actually, write Rene Jeanne and Charles Lord, Para¬
mount gave Perret a 14-million-franc budget to “Americanize” the play and
make “something appropriately gorgeous for Gloria Swanson.”81 A good per¬
centage of that money went to the nouveau-riche costumes designed by Rene
Hubert and to a month of location shooting at Compiegne and Lontaine-
bleau.82

179
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE All of France with its artistic and historical resources was mobilized to serve the star.
FILM Having at his disposal the huge Henri II gallery at the Fontainebleau palace, how
could Leonce Perret resist the temptation to add a cortege of five hundred extras in
court regalia and set off a fireworks display over a pool of carp, since they were there,
awaiting the pleasure of the cameraman? . . . Here the rich, intricately balanced work
of Victorien Sardou disappeared under a mass of ornaments. . . ,83

Yet Madame Sans-Gene received a tumultuous reception at its Paris premiere;

it won the Jury Grand Prix at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs; and
Gloria Swanson still considers it one of the best films in which she appeared.84
Although some French critics denigrated Perret’s work as no more than “a
charming armchair fantasy,” others described it as the first great film of the
French-American collaboration.85 Their reaction was complicated by the fact
that the shortened American version of the film was released six months earlier
than the French and received far less glowing reviews.86
Another quite similar historical tableau was Madame Recamier (1928), which
Gaston Ravel directed for Franco-Film. To mount the story of the most bril¬
liant salon hostess of the early Napoleonic years as well as of the Restoration
period, Ravel took his large cast and crew to the actual historical sites of the
action: the Folie de Saint-James park, the Coppet chateau, and, of course,
Fountainebleau.87 The story begins during the Terror of 1793, when Juliette
Bernard (Marie Bell) becomes the young wife of the wealthy M. Recamier
(Victor Vina).88 The marriage is a chaste one because Recamier is actually
Juliette’s father who has decided to atone for his past affair with her mother
(Madeleine Rodriguez). Mme. de Stael (Franchise Rosay) soon becomes a good
friend of Mme. Recamier and spirits her off to Germany when Napoleon and
his minister Fouche (Van Daele) threaten her life. There she falls in love with
a Prussian prince (Francois Rozet); but, when her aging husband refuses a
divorce, she sacrifices her love and returns dutifully to him. This whole story
is a long flashback, framed by an evening late in the life of Mme. Recamier
(Nelly Corman) as she discreetly explains to her close friend, Chateaubriand
(Charles de Bargy), why she cannot marry him. Rene Jeanne remembers Ra¬
vel’s film as respectful, tasteful, but, unfortunately, not particularly satisfy¬
ing.89
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Madame Recamier was its source
and the timing of its production. Ravel drew his adaptation from a biography
by Edouard Herriot, the prominent leader of the Radical-Socialist party, for¬
mer prime minister (in 1924), and current minister of art and education. Shot
late in 1927, Madame Recamier was premiered at the Opera, on 12 June 1928,
just after the spring national elections—which the Radical-Socialists lost.90 It
also followed the Herriot Decree (in February), which adopted a very weak
quota system for the importation of films into France. This conjunction of
events raises some interesting questions. Did either Herriot or Franco-Film
consider the film as a political instrument before the elections? Was Franco-
Film soliciting the minister’s favor, for themselves or for the film industry in
general? Whatever, the film was successful enough for Ravel to nearly repeat
its subject in a celebrated, but mediocre, sonorized version of Dumas’s Le
Collier de la reine the following year.91
‘‘The mystery of the queen’s necklace” was also the subject of Cagliostro
(1929), an Albatros-Wengeroff (French-German) production based on Dumas’s

180
 88. Gloria Swanson in a
Fontainebleau interior in
Madame Sans-Gene (1925)

novel, Joseph Balsamo.92 Jules Kruger and Jean Dreville shot the film in Paris,
under the direction of the German metteur-en-scene, Richard Oswald.93 In it,
Cagliostro (Hans Stiiwe) was an Italian doctor at the court of Louis XVI (Van
Daele) and Marie-Antoinette (Suzanne Bianchetti). Implicated in the cele¬
brated affair with the Prince de Rohar (Alfred Abel), he was not exiled in the
film, as Raymond Villette complained, but transformed into “the architect of
the French Revolution.’’94 This was a blatant example of rewriting history in
the service of film industry internationalism. Perhaps as a consequence, the
film’s great number of decors (some forty in all), designed by Lazare Meerson
and Firenzi, were notable for their sobriety and balance. In style, they were
much closer to the simple clarity of Mallet-Stevens than to the extravagances
of Lochakoff and Bilinsky.95 Cagliostro was rushed into release in late June,
1929, and had the dubious fortune to share a double bill at the Paramount-
Palace with the new talkie hit, A Song of Paris (starring Maurice Chevalier).96
The most successful period spectacle films, however, came from a second
group within the French film industry. Their common denominator was a

181
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE loose network of financiers, producers, directors, and set designers whose cen¬
FILM ter was the Russian emigre colony in France and Germany. One faction in¬
cluded the directors (Tourjansky and Volkoff) and set designers (Lochakoff and
Bilinsky) initially associated with Alexandre Kamenka at Films Albatros and
then with Noe Bloch at Cine-France (financed by Stinnes and Wengeroff) and
the Societe Generate des Films (financed by Grinieff). The other was the So-
ciete des Films Historiques (also financed by Grinieff), whose major director
was Raymond Bernard. The films that these two factions produced tended, at
least initially, to look outside France for their subjects—to eighteenth-century
Italy and especially to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia. Although
generally ignored in film histories (partly because only incomplete prints seem
to have survived), they deserve some attention. And not only because their
assured direction, magnificent sets and costumes, and fine acting (led by Mos-
joukine and Dullin) made them quite successful in France and the interna¬
tional market, but because they created benchmarks of spectacular action and
sumptuous tableaux in the genre that provided a context for the work of
Gance, Dreyer, and others in the late 1920s. And, perhaps equally important,
they allowed the Russian emigre colony to celebrate—and criticize in their
own way—the country and society from which they had fled when the Bol¬
sheviks set about transforming Russia into the Soviet Union.
The first of these films was Tourjansky’s Michel Strogoff, an epic Cine-France-
Westi production which, after delays in financing, premiered at the Imperial
Cinema in December, 1926.97 The scenario was drawn from the Jules Verne
adventure novel about a czarist courier who carries out a dangerous mission in
Siberia.98 The Tartars, aided by several Russian rebels, are threatening czarist
control of the area between Omsk and Irkutsk in south central Siberia. From
Moscow, Czar Alexander II (Gaidaroff) sends Strogoff (Mosjoukine), because
he was born in the region, to order the Irkutsk governor to seize the rebel
commander Ogolieff (Chakatouny) and rout the Tartars. Coincidental with
this mission, two journalists, Blount and Joulivet (Henri Debain and Gabriel
de Gravonne), decide to journey through Siberia to Irkutsk. As their path
continually intersects with Strogoffs, they provide some comic relief (which
may not be all that necessary) to the narrative. On his way down the Volga
river, Strogoff befriends a woman by the name of Nadia (Natalie Kovenko),
only to lose her to a Tartar band which seizes their boat, wounds him, and
dumps him overboard. After his escape and recovery, Strogoff disobeys orders
and visits the chateau of his mother (Jeanne Brindeau) near Omsk. Inadvert¬
ently, she betrays his presence to the rebels, and both of them are seized
separately and taken to the Tartar encampment at Enofer, where a major
festival is in progress and where Nadia is also held captive. When both mother
and son continue to deny one another’s identity, the Tartars temporarily blind
Strogoff with a red-hot sword, and his mother dies from the shock. After the
Tartars depart, Nadia and Strogoff struggle through the snowbound moun¬
tains to Irkutsk, only to discover that Ogolieff is impersonating the courier in
the palace. Confronting him alone, Strogoff suddenly regains his sight and
defeats his rival in a hand-to-hand combat. He then proves his identity to the
governor and helps repulse the Tartars who have begun to attack the city.
Returning to Moscow, he is rewarded by the czar and marries Nadia, his
“dearest prize,’’ in a richly detailed Russian Orthodox ceremony.

182
 89- (left) Ivan Mosjoukine in
Michel Strogoff (1926)

90. (right) The Tartar

encampment
Although the ideology this narrative serves is quite regressive—a Russia
ruled by the czar and by the Russian Orthodox Church, in which a heroic
individual such as Strogoff can perform herculean tasks and be rewarded in
kind—Tourjansky’s film is much more interesting than it may seem. Most of
the production was filmed in Latvia and Norway by Bourgassov, Toporkov,
and chief cameraman L.-H. Burel, who had just finished shooting Feyder’s
two films in Switzerland and Austria, Visages d’enfants (1925) and L'lmage
(1926)." The skirmish on the river boat, the Tartar attack on Omsk (with a
magnificent HAELS of hundreds of white-robed soldiers rising en masse and
charging up and over the slope of a hill), Strogoff s escape from Omsk (shot
quite skillfully at night), the arduous mountain journey—all gain a natural¬
ness and rough immediacy from the authentic location shooting. Given the
conditions and the mode of the narrative, Lochakoff s sets, especially the Tartar
village at Enofer, are unusually restrained, almost realistic. Perhaps the prox¬
imity to their homeland curbed the Russian emigres’ penchant for the fantas¬
tic, which usually characterized their films. Whatever the reason, even in the
three-reel 9-5mm Pathescope version that alone seems to survive, the sober
cinematography and swift, economical rhythm of Michel Strogoff are quite im¬
pressive.
Both Tourjansky and Burel came to Michel Strogoff fresh from several months
of work on the early stages of Abel Gance’s Napoleon. That experience was
partly responsible for the range of technical effects in the film, especially the
use of unconventional camera movement. The most sustained example of tech¬
niques usually associated with the narrative avant-garde occurs in the opening

183
91. The wedding ceremony at
the end of Michel Strogoff
(1926)

sequence of a grand ball at the czar’s palace in Moscow. The Pathescope version
of the film opens with a HALS looking straight down on the dancers and then
a long dolly out from the orchestra box perched over the ballroom floor. The
major set piece of the sequence, however, is a subjective moment involving
the czar, after he has spoken with one of his generals about the Irkutsk crisis
in a room adjacent to the ballroom. Alone now, he pores over a map, and a
series of shots depicts the Tartar horsemen sweeping across the landscape (in
several swift tracks and dollies) and rampaging through a village. Suddenly,
to the intercutting between a MS of the worried czar and various shots of the
Tartars is added LA shots of the ballroom dancers’ feet and CUs of the cymbals
in the orchestra. The rhythm accelerates into rapid cutting, and the sounds of
the dance ironically seem to impress the Tartar threat on the czar’s conscious¬
ness. The moment leads immediately to his decision to send off Strogoff on
his mission. A similar moment occurs later to Strogoff at a way station when

184
a blustering Russian officer seizes the horses that have been reserved for his HISTORICAL
use. The camera dollies swiftly into a MS of their confrontation; then, after RECONSTRUCTIONS
the officer strikes Strogoff, there is a LA dolly in from LS to MS on the czar
as he stands in the shadows of his study. The subjective insert (in which one
camera movement parallels the other) keeps Strogoff from returning the blow
and perhaps revealing his identity.
Compared to Michel Strogoff, Volkoff s Casanova, which also premiered at
the Imperial, in September, 1927, is much less tightly constructed and much
more fantastical in style.100 Its narrative is drawn from Casanova’s Memoirs and
is little more than an episodic series of adventures, oscillating from comedy
to tragedy, from melodrama to satire. It begins in Venice with Casanova
(Mosjoukine) threatened by a bailiff who has come to take possession of his
house. With a bit of phony magic, he delays the threat and then arranges a
rendezvous with the Baroness Stormont (Olga Day). The baron surprises them,
however, and takes his case to the governing council of Venice, which orders
Casanova’s arrest. When a trap to capture him on the Rio San Traverse Bridge
fails (the prey makes a spectacular dive into the canal), Casanova enjoys a night
of love with the baroness (while the baron sleeps peacefully in the next room).
Sometime later, Casanova organizes a dinner for the famous Venetian dancer,
Corticelli (Rina de Liguoro). An uninvited guest, the Russian Count Orloff
(Paul Guide), tries to gain her attention (as he tosses roses at her, Casanova
spears them neatly, one by one, with his rapier), and Casanova challenges him
to a duel. After he has won easily, Corticelli joins their hands in friendship,
and the orgy, presumably, continues. Still pestered by the council, Casanova
escapes to Austria in the company of a black boy servant whom the baroness
has given him. One night in an inn, he rescues a young woman, Carlotta
(Jenny Jugo), whose mother has sold her to a rich brute of a man. However,
the rescue proves ineffectual—the man’s henchmen simply follow them and
take her back again. Now penniless, Casanova meets the royal dressmaker of
Paris, on his way to the court of Peter III in Russia. The adventurer promptly
steals his papers, money, and clothes and goes off in his place. In St. Peters¬
burg, he meets Orloff again, who protects him from the emperor when he
shows some interest in the Empress Catherine (Suzanne Bianchetti). After the
coronation of Catherine (Peter is assassinated mysteriously), Casanova wavers
in his affection between Catherine and Bianca (Diana Karenne), newly arrived
with her father from Venice. Finally, he flees with Bianca for a brief tryst in
her carriage (interrupted by soldiers) and leaves Catherine his black servant
(which apparently pleases her). Returning to Venice at the time of the Carnival,
Casanova finds Bianca among the revelers and spends the night with her in a
covered gondola. The next morning, awakened by the screams of a young
woman, he rescues Carlotta all over again. Pursued by the bailiff (who appears
out of nowhere) and Carlotta’s husband, Casanova hesitates between the two
young women. When he chooses Carlotta, Bianca shoots and wounds him.
From prison, he is forced to watch her execution. Just before he, too, is to
die, Carlotta and several of his friends help him to escape and set off to sea
on a sailing ship. At the last moment, he almost cannot resist taking a young
gypsy woman with him.
The character of Casanova was well suited to Mosjoukine. It allowed him
to exploit his penchant for multiple personalities through disguises and play-

185
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE acting, and he gave perhaps the best performance of his career, equaling his

FILM portrayal of Strogoff and even Edmund Kean. All in all, he plays Casanova
like a Douglas Fairbanks adventurer, with more sophistication, irony, and cool
sexual presence. His disguises range from the fantastical magician who de¬
ceives the bailiff early on (parodying the magicians in several German films—
e.g., The Golem {1920], Waxworks {1924}) to the clown and sailor costumes
he uses to escape at the film’s end. When disguised as the royal dressmaker
in Russia, he even indulges in a bit of drag comedy, dressing up for Catherine
in a wide floppy hat, corset, bustle, and fan. The character’s sexual exploits
also provide the film with several voyeuristic sequences that are rather unusual
for the period. To check the bailiff s bluff of a threat, for instance, Casanova
lets him gaze on Corticelli half-naked against the fine, cascading drapery of
her couch. Later, at the dinner he arranges for'her, she and a dozen other
women perform a nude dance—described mostly in silhouette against a set of
windows. The erotic nature of the dance is suggested in Corticelli’s gestures
and facial expressions (in MCU), intercut with Casanova’s, in a shot of the
men staring forward as the women’s shawls descend over them, in another
shot of them handing over their rapiers to- the outstretched women’s hands,
in the silhouetted figures of the women dancing in pairs and playing with the
rapiers. At the climax, Casanova carries Corticelli naked through the group of
men and sets her like a draped statue on the steps above them.
With its concern for spectacle and sometimes heroic adventure, Casanova
also exploits some of the strategies and techniques associated with the narrative
avant-garde film practice. The film opens, for instance, with a brief subjective
shot. A HALS of swirling women dancers and a LS of a Venice palace are
superimposed over a CU of Casanova’s sleeping face—as a dream site of pleas¬
ures. Near the end, a similar subjective moment appears more ominously. In
a MCU of the gondola interior, Bianca leans over to kiss him awake, and her
image dissolves briefly into the image of Carlotta. Other sequences are marked
(the cameramen were Bourgassov and Toporkov) by deformations, unusual
camera angles, and esoteric lighting effects. In one, the magician is made
grotesquely mammoth in several distorted shots and then deflates like a punc¬
tured balloon (cf. the balloon travelers on the metro in Clair’s Entr'acte {1924}).
In another, Casanova and the Baroness Stormont are bathed in the most ro¬
mantic of lights. The CU of their kiss (she on the left, he on the right) floods
her face with a key light from the right, while his is nearly silhouetted (still
dripping beads of water from the canal) with a back light from the left. When
they part later, it is in a FS of a highly decorative grille, sharply etched with
a single light from the right rear.
There is even an effective sequence of rapid cutting that employs several
unusual CUs. The sequence occurs as Casanova paces his quarters in the Aus¬
trian inn and hears a struggle in the next room. Intercut with CUs of Casanova
listening and looking one way and then another, before he leaps to the door,
are a series of dimly lit shots—an ECU of a mouth opening, a CU of a
woman’s white shoes backing off to the right, a CU of a man’s hands reaching
in from the left, a HAMCU of shadows on the floor and then a woman’s shoes
crossing to the left, a CU of her hands clawing at a wood panel, a CU of boots
pausing and then moving to the right, a CU of an arm struggling in a flash
of white cloth, and an ECU of a hand coming away from the open mouth.

186
 92. (left) Olga Day and Ivan
Mosjoukine in Bilinsky’s
costumes in Casanova (1927)

93- (tight) The Petersburg

Although these shots never last less than a second or two, they are perfectly palace exterior
selected to describe the near rape and, simultaneously, to evoke Casanova’s
subjective experience. The sequence operates more effectively perhaps than
does a similarly experienced attack in L’Herbier’s Feu Mathias Pascal (1925),
where Mosjoukine is in a similar position.
More than anything else, however, Casanova is a showcase for the spectacle
of Lochakoffs decors, Bilinsky’s costumes, and Venice itself. According to
Barsacq, “Lochakoff and Bilinsky directed their efforts toward the spectacular
aspect of scenery, toward an overall effect rather than atmosphere or the search
for exact detail.’’101 An important element in Lochakoffs decors was the ma-
quetteplastique, an intricate scale model, usually representing the upper portion
of the filmed image. He employed this latest technique from the German film
studios in conjunction with sets constructed according to the designs of sev¬
enteenth- and eighteenth-century Italian operas.102 The Venice and St. Peters¬
burg settings, consequently, took on the decorativeness of a Diaghilev ballet.
Complementing these fabulous decors were Bilinsky’s rich variety of costumes.
Compared favorably with Bakst’s work for Diaghilev, Bilinsky’s costumes be¬
came the major attraction at the second Exposition du cinema (Galerie d’Art
de la Grande Maison de Blanc) organized by the Cine-Club de France in the
spring of 1927.103 Finally, both sets and costumes were embellished by an
exquisite stencil-color process that included as many as three or four sharply
distinguished colors in a single frame.104
The most stunning effects were carefully withheld until the last two major

187
94. The bedchamber of
Catherine II in Casanova
(1927)

episodes of the film—the sequences in Catherine’s court and the Carnival of

Venice. The principal exterior for St. Petersburg was a vast snowy expanse in
front of the palace, produced by means of a maquette plastique and a simply
decorated snow-covered landscape. It is here that Casanova’s carriage collides
with that of the Count, and he and Bianca can use the ensuing chaos to flee
together. The best sets, however, are the interiors: the throne room where
Catherine sits under the golden emblem of the czars and an immense white
dome with statues projecting from the columns, the cavernous main hall where
the banquet and the coronation ball are held (with the guests dressed in blue-
greens, light reds, and golds). For her ascent to the throne, Catherine wears
the most fabulous of Bilinsky’s costumes. In a HAELS of the throne room,
with people lining both side walls in an arching curve, she enters from the
bottom of the frame, trailing a magnificent dark cloak (was it deep blue in
the original?) emblazoned with the gold patterns of the czar’s emblem. As she
moves farther into the frame, the cloak stretches longer and longer behind

188
 95. Casanova’s gondola at the
end of the Carnival sequence
in Casanova (1927)

her, supported by as many as two dozen servants, until it nearly fills the entire
floor space of the room.
The climactic sequences of the Carnival in Venice were apparently even
more spectacular than these. Cinea-Cine-pour-tous waxed ecstatic over the finale:

The Carnival of Venice is, in one sense, the culmination of this historical and
artistic reconstruction. It is also one of the masterpieces of set design in world film
production. Jewels glittering everywhere, brilliant red costumes, gondolas passing
rhythmically over the still canal waters, everything encompassed in the magnificent
orderly movement of the seething crowd.105

Even Jean Dreville was impressed with “this remarkable ensemble of images—
remarkable for its movement and the rhythm of that movement.’’106 Unfor¬
tunately, the only surviving print of Casanova in the United States has suffered
some radical recutting (probably for its distribution here), especially in the
final reel. The Carnival is reduced to little more than a sketch, and Casanova’s

189
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE escape from prison is a bit of a jumble. Perhaps the sequence that still works
FILM most effectively is the execution of Bianca (even despite a confusion in the
plot). The sequence alternates MCUs of Casanova behind the bars of his cell
and LSs of Bianca with the executioner and a priest silhouetted on a raised
plaza in front of an immense arch. In the foreground of the LSs is the blurred
silhouette of a bar pattern, which, together with Casanova’s anguished face,
pressed to the cell bars, makes her death shockingly poignant. A similar mo¬
ment would be utterly transformed a year later in Dreyer’s La Pass/on de Jeanne
d''Arc.
Much like Casanova, Raymond Bernard’s second film for the Societe des
Films Historiques, which cost six million francs and opened to box office
records at the Salle Marivaux in January, 1927, also tended more to the dec¬
orative and spectacular.107 Its title, Joueur d’echecs (1927), could be seen as a
clever takeoff on the final sequence of Le Miracle des loups, but the subject was
an intrigue involving legendary independence fighters in Poland and Russia
in 1776. The narrative is worth summarizing.108 Two young Polish aristocrats
in Vilno, Boleslas Vorowski (Pierre Blanchar) and Sophie Vorowska (Edith
Jehanne), are pupils of the Baron de Kempelen (Charles Dullin), an inventor
of life-size mechanical mannequins. Although both are leaders of the inde¬
pendence movement and Boleslas loves Sophie, she is attracted to Serge Ob-
lonoff (Pierre Batcheff), a young officer in charge of the Russian forces in
Poland. When Boleslas is wounded in a spontaneous insurrection in Vilno,
she elects to stay by his side—even though he has a price on his head. Kem¬
pelen comes up with a stratagem to hide him in a new chess-player mannequin
which he sends to the Polish court at Warsaw; but a Major Nicolaieff (Camille
Bert), who recognizes Boleslas’s chess moves, diverts the mannequin to St.
Petersburg. There, Catherine II (Mme. Charles Dullin) challenges the man¬
nequin, is accused of cheating, and promptly orders it shot. With Oblonoffs
assistance (for he now realizes Boleslas’s greater love for Sophie), Kempelen
substitutes himself in his own mechanical creation and dies in Boleslas’s place.
Struck by the young couple’s love, Catherine allows them to return to Vilno,
where they are pursued by Nicolaieff. When he steals into Kempelen’s house
at night, suddenly the doors lock, and he is methodically dispatched by a
small army of sword-bearing mannequins. The prophecy of an old gypsy thus
comes true—Poland’s freedom will come in the shape of a woman. Sophie and
Boleslas unfurl the flag of the Polish eagle and (according to an intertitle) “go
off bearing high once more the colors of Polish history.”109
Since only certain parts of Joueur d’echecs could be shot on location in Poland
(using the Polish army for the Vilno insurrection), the scenario demanded that
Bernard’s set designers, Mallet-Stevens and Jean Perrier, and his chief cam¬
eraman J.-P. Mundviller construct a number of mammoth decors at Joinville:

the gallery of the palace of Catherine II . . . the streets and squares of Vilno and
Warsaw, and the grandiose court of the Winter Palace [at St. Petersburg], which
alone covered an area of 8,800 square meters. . . .uo

There were thirty-five decors in all, and the Winter Palace set was described
at the time, by G.-Michel Coissac, as one of the three largest ever constructed
for the cinema worldwide.111 Perhaps the most interesting feature of Perrier’s
work, according to Barsacq, was that he “developed a rational concept of film

190
 HISTORICAL
RECONSTRUCTIONS

96. The Russian patrol in

Vilno at the opening of Joueur
d’echecs (1927)

set design as a function of the position of the camera and the lenses. . . . The
movements of the camera and actors [could be} determined in advance. . . .112
The result was a “complicated labyrinth of multiple sets, with passageways
behind the decors, in which one set sometimes served as a frame for the
previous one, with intersections of all sorts that formed a welter of de¬
tails. . . .”113 Consequently, Joueur d'echecs is full of spectacular effects: “the
uprising in the streets of Vilno, the battle of encirclement [where in one LS,
scores of cannon camouflaged on a hillside fire simultaneously}, the masked
ball in the court of Catherine II, the night celebration at Vorowski’s. ”114 But,
as in Le Miracle des loups, these are integrated smoothly into the narrative.
Despite all the spectacle, Bernard’s film is marked by an extremely concise
form of editing. The opening sequence, for instance, establishes the conflict
between the Russians and Poles in a tense, economical pattern of intercutting.
While Russian horsemen patrol the night streets of Vilno, members of the
Polish resistance meet in a nearby chateau. The Russians are introduced as
huge shadows gliding over the city walls, then in MCUs of the horses’ hooves,
and in dolly shots describing their slow methodical progress. One horseman
nonchalantly raises a whip, and an old woman crouched by the wall spins
around and collapses from its lash. Inside the chateau, the Poles pause in their
singing, waiting for the patrol to pass. Boleslas reaches across the piano to
take Sophie’s hand, but she looks at him askance. Later, in a much-admired

191
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

97. Charles Dullin and the

chessplayer mannequin in
Joueur d'echecs (1927)

sequence, she imagines the insurrection is victorious as she sings the national
anthem at the same piano.115 As the camera dollies in on her, a superimposi¬
tion dissolves in of horsemen charging off to the right. Again the camera
dollies in on her, and the horsemen seem to sweep out of her hands across the
piano top toward the left background. As her excitement fades, Sophie gazes
at the necklace Oblonoff had recently bestowed on her, and a subjective image
of him is cut in momentarily. She looks up and seems to see the next shot of
Boleslas falling wounded in the rocks of the battlefield. Abruptly she rips the
necklace from her neck and, in MCU, lets it fall from her hand. Cognizant
now of the insurrection’s failure, her choice is made—her love will be sacri¬
ficed to her duty to her country and its freedom.
The film’s celebration of Polish independence from the Russian monarchy
in a period just prior to the French Revolution tempts one to read it as a
displacement of the one onto the other. With a few exceptions—e.g., Gance’s
Napoleon—the French cinema generally avoided its country’s own revolution,
just as the American cinema has avoided its period of revolution. Both stand
in marked contrast to the Soviet cinema of the 1920s, which functioned as a
major collective ritual in celebrating (sometimes also by displacement) the
construction of a new society. Joueur d'echecs thus seems to affirm the spirit of
independence and revolution (and sacrifice) by safely packing it away to an¬
other land. The figure of the Baron de Kempelen, however, introduces a cu¬
rious disruption. He is really half-mad—this teacher, this substitute father—

192
 98. The mannequin attack at
the end of Joueur d'echecs
(1927)

a genius who lords it over his own fictional empire. But history intervenes to
give his mannequins a double purpose. There is a rather fascinating meta¬
phorical schema operating in the transformation of this man into a mechanical
chess-player, after which the rest of his mannequins change briefly into men.
The master takes on the role of one of his subjects and sacrifices himself so
other subjects can live. He loses one game so they can win another. The
creator/teacher dies so his children can be born. But when they come to life,
they take revenge; they destroy a master (albeit a different one) all over again.
Does this revenge of the mannequin men substitute for the victorious revolu¬
tion of the children? And can this be a revolution—this bizarre, half-Chris¬
tian, half-Oedipal fable of sacrifice and revenge?
Bernard’s last silent film epic, Tarakanova (1930), returned to the world of
Catherine II’s court to narrate the tragic end of Elizabeth Tarakanova (Edith
Jehanne), a young pretender to the throne, and her lover Prince Orloff (Olaf
Fjord), Catherine’s court favorite. Wishing only to punish Orloff by separating
him from Tarakanova, the Empress inadvertently sends him off to die with
his love.116 Shooting on the film (the cameramen were Kruger and Lucas) was

193
99. (left) A production photo,
with maquette plastique, for
Monte-Cristo (1929); (right) an
interior shot produced by the
maquette plastique completed in February, 1929, but the editing was delayed so it could be
released in a sonorized version during the summer of 1930. The delay pushed
the cost of the film to almost seven million francs.117 Bernard once told Kevin
Brownlow that he himself considered Tarakanova his best film by far, but no
print has been rediscovered to confirm or deny his judgment.118
The success of these big films by Tourjansky, Volkoff, and Bernard prompted
several other producers to try to capitalize on these genre subjects, but with
less satisfying results. Henry Roussel, for instance, took a less active French-
Polish subject, and in a rather different mode, in La Valse de Vadieu (1928).
Subtitled “A page in the life of Frederic Chopin,” this was a biography, wrote
one critic, ‘‘more spiritual than chronological.”119 Roussel tried to make Cho¬
pin into a symbolic figure, wrote another: ‘‘In the desperate youth and sublime
death of a musician {was} the story of a misunderstood genius destroyed on
the calvary of a love that was both passion and Passion.”120 The result, most
agreed, was a ponderous, sentimental film whose only saving grace was the
acting of Pierre Blanchar and Marie Bell. Jean Sapene tried another, more
obvious tack by hiring Henri Kistemaecker to compose an original scenario
about an intrigue among the Russian aristocracy on the eve of the revolution.
La Princesse Masha (1927) was adapted expressly for Sapene’s wife, Claudia
Victrix, whom he desperately wished to make a star; and it was given, ac¬
cording to Sapene’s publicity, a lavish budget for set reconstructions ‘‘of the
Russian revolution, palaces and Chinese gardens, sumptuous interiors, pictur¬
esque snow scenes, and innumerable crowds.”121 However, Sapene did not
have a set designer at Cineromans of Lochakoff or Bilinsky’s caliber; and Rene
Leprince’s mediocre direction, together with Victrix’s frightful acting, merely
produced a bowdlerized imitation. Even an inaugural premiere at the new Rialto
Cinema, in October, 1927, could not save it from derision.122
By contrast, one of Sapene’s associates, Louis Nalpas, succeeded simply by
hiring the Russians to work for him. After losing production control at Cine¬
romans in 1927, Nalpas formed his own production company again and de¬
cided to remake Monte-Cristo on a mammoth scale—with Jean Angelo (Ed¬
mond Dantes), Lil Dagover (Mercedes), Bernhard Goetzke (Abbe Faria), Pierre

194
Batcheff (Albert de Morcerf), Jean Toulout (Villefort), Henri Debain (Cade- HISTORICAL
rousse), Mary Glory (Valentine), and Gaston Modot (Fernand Mondego).123 RECONSTRUCTIONS
His production team was headed by an incongruous trio: the sober, story-
oriented Henri Fescourt as director, the spectacle-minded Boris Bilinsky as set
designer, and Daniau-Johnson as technical director.124 The combination ap¬
parently gelled, for most French film historians agree that Monte-Cristo (1929)
was one of the best historical reconstructions of the decade. According to
Barsacq,

In the winter palace set . . . Bilinsky re-created a vision of the palace as it might
have been conceived by Italian opera designers of the eighteenth century, by Bibiena
or Piranesi, with a monumental stairway, colonnades, arcades, and balconies; but it
was a constructed set, at least up to a certain height: the upper part consisted of a
scale model and the base was painted in trompe-d’oeil.125

Fescourt himself remembers with pleasure how he and Bilinsky used this same
process to film an 1815 sailing ship entering “the old port of Marseille on a
busy day in 1929 without the public’s noticing the least bit of contempora¬
neous movement on the quay or in the harbor. . . .”126 Wrote Cinemagazine,

In the set pieces such as the evening at the Opera or the Count’s celebration, [Fescourt
produced] a charming evocation of the aristocratic life in 1845; the crinolines, the
tasteless men’s fashions, the decorum that reigned at these ceremonies gave to the
images a sort of vapid grace. . . .12?

The dominant characteristic of this Monte-Cristo, however, seems to have been

a sense of movement that, even more than in Casanova, evoked the ballet.
Unfortunately for Nalpas, the film was released in October, 1929, just as the
first French talkies were hitting the cinemas.128
The biggest of the French historical reconstruction films sponsored by the
Russian emigre money, of course, was Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927). Beside
it, Henry Roussel’s much heralded Destinee (1926), an opportunistic but com¬
paratively tepid, lifeless look at Napoleon during the Revolution, has paled
into oblivion.129 Gance’s project, initially, was colossal in scope—six separate
films on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. Yet only the first film of the project
actually was completed; and its enormous expense (15 to 19 million francs)
and epic length (six hours) quickly dispelled the commercial hopes of Gance’s
financiers.130 Moreover, the film turned out to be profoundly personal and
highly experimental, and the filmmaker had the audacity to title it Napoleon,
vu par Abel Gance. The version that premiered at the Opera, on 7 April 1927,
was a condensed film of close to 5,000 meters (including several tryptich
sequences).131 The following October, the complete version of 12,000 meters
(but without the tryptichs) opened en exclusivite at the Salle Marivaux and ran
for nearly three months.132 This full-length film was not widely shown, how¬
ever, and, according to Kevin Brownlow, the three-hour condensed version
was generally released throughout France and the rest of Europe.133
Whatever its variations and excesses, Napoleon fulfills all the conventions of
the historical reconstruction film. With Alexandre Benois (Diaghilev’s chief
set designer) and the Russian-born architect Schildknecht,134 Gance meticu¬
lously recreated the period of Napoleon’s boyhood at Brienne and his young
manhood in Corsica, the period of the Revolution in Paris and of his courting

195
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE and marriage to Josephine de Beauharnais, and the period of the Italian cam¬
FILM paign. Much of the film was shot on location (Corsica, Brian^on, Toulon,
Nice), but most (even the sea journey from Corsica and the night battle in
the ram at Toulon) was done in the huge new Billancourt studio which Dia-
mant-Berger, with Mallet-Stevens, had built in 1923. Gance’s team of assist¬
ant directors (including Volkoff, Tourjansky, and Henry Krauss) and camera¬
men (Jules Kruger, L.-H. Burel, J.-P. Mundviller, Roger Hubert, Emile
Pierre, and Lucas) produced enough spectacle for a half-dozen films: the snow¬
ball and dormitory fights at Brienne, the escape from the army in Corsica, the
Marseillaise sequence in the Club des Cordeliers, the long night battle for
Toulon, the Victims’ Ball, Napoleon’s confrontation with the dead heroes of
the Revolution. And, of course, there were the famous tryptich sequences of
the Double Tempest (at sea and in the Convention in Paris), the military
descent over the mountains into Italy, and the climactic victory at Monte-
notte. Besides this, Napoleon had some forty major roles for what seemed to
be half the number of available French actors. They included Albert Dieu¬
donne (Bonaparte), Vladimir Roudenko (Bonaparte enfant), Antonin Artaud
(Marat), Edmond Van Daele (Robespierre), - Alexandre Koubitsky (Danton),
Pierre Batcheff (Hoche), Maxudian (Barras), Nicholas Koline (Tristan Fleuri),
Armand Bernard (Jean-Jean), Philippe Heriat (Salicetti), Chakatouny (Pozzo
de Borgo), Gina Manes (Josephine de Beauharnais), Annabella (Violine Fleuri),
Eugenie Buffet (Letitia Bonaparte), Suzanne Bianchetti (Marie-Antoinette),
100. Vladimir Roudenko and Marguerite Gance (Charlotte Corday), Suzy Vernon (Madame Recamier), Damia
Albert Dieudonne in Napoleon (La “Marseillaise”), and Gance himself (Saint-Just).135
vu par Abel Gance (1927)
The complete version of Napoleon was a grandiose paradox. Gance once said
that he made the film because Napoleon was “a paroxysm in a period which
was itself a paroxysm in time.”136 Conceived in the ideological ferment of the
early 1920s, his rhapsodic celebration of a single, powerful leader or mover of
history (a sort of Gallicized Hegelian ideal) seemed anachronistic, chauvinistic,
and even dangerous. Rewriting history, the film depicted Bonaparte as the
legendary fulfillment of the French Revolution—“the soul of the Revolution.”
For Gance, the French hero (much like himself) must have seemed the Ro¬
mantic artist in apotheosis, a towering figure who made the real world, not
an imaginary one, his own province of action. For others, such as Leon Mous-
sinac, this figure was the embodiment “of military dictatorship,” frighteningly
close to the image of the emperor then held by political groups of the extreme
right.137 Moreover, the film’s conclusion in political and military triumph, in
victory (admittedly, a result of the project’s incompleteness), went against the
French pattern of suffering and sacrifice that so marked even the historical
reconstruction genre. Yet Gance’s technical innovations alone—e.g., the range
of camera movements and the multiple screen formats—influenced French
filmmakers for the rest of the decade. Time and time again, as we shall see
later, his imaginative handling of both the spectacular and the intimate tran¬
scended the conventions of the genre.
The difference between period spectacle films produced by the two rival
groups in the French film industry are probably no more blatant than in the
two films that mounted the story of Jeanne d’Arc in the late 1920s. The maid
of Orleans had been the subject of several books after the declaration of her
sainthood in 1920, and her life seemed a logical “property” for a French film,

196
 101. The Convention Hall in
Napoleon vu par Abel Gance
(1927)

especially after the success of Le Miracle des loups, with its celebration of Jeanne
Hachette. The more conventional and decidedly more commercial of the two
was produced by Bernard Natan—Marco de Gastyne’s La Merveilleuse Vie de
Jeanne d’Arc. This ambitious project took nearly two years to shoot (at a cost
of between eight and nine million francs), finally premiered at the Opera late
in 1928, and was showcased at the Paramount-Palace in April, 1929.138 Jeanne
was played by a well-known tomboy actress, Simone Genevois, supported by
expert villains such as Philippe Heriat as Gilles de Rais and Gaston Modot as
Glasdell. The scenario, by Jean-Jose Frappa, traced Jeanne’s story from 1428,
when she first had her visions in Domremy (visualized in a circle of white-
robed women dancing in slow motion, superimposed over a tolling tower
bell), to 1430, when she was burned at the stake in Rouen. Gastyne’s interest
lay primarily in moments of grand spectacle—the coronation of Charles VII
at Notre Dame, the capture of Jeanne at Compiegne, and especially her suc¬
cessful siege of Orleans. The latter was filmed almost entirely on location at

197
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

102. (left) Simone Genevois

in La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne
D'Arc (1929)

103. (right) Falconetti in La

Passion de Jeanne D’Arc (1928)

Carcassonne and was staged on a scale that rivaled the similar siege in Le
Miracle des loups. The action is brisk and clear, punctuated by LA shots of
horsemen crashing over a line of barricades and by a LAFS of Jeanne halfway
up a scaling ladder as she is struck by an arrow. But Gastyne did not ignore
other more poignant moments of Jeanne’s solitude—a MCU of her praying,
after the Orleans siege, between a dead soldier’s head and a wooden post from
which is suspended a heavy iron chain; a HALS of her alone, head bowed, on
a small stool in the empty space of the trial chamber. Although Simone Ge-
nevois’s Jeanne is angry enough to accuse her interrogators in Rouen’s public
square, she is also plainly afraid to suffer burning at the stake.
The other film, of course, was Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc,
which opened in Paris at the Salle Marivaux on 25 October 1928.139 Appar¬
ently, the Societe Generale des Films engaged the young Danish filmmaker to
make a vast fresco that would complement its production of Napoleon. If Dreyer
is to be believed, the choice of Jeanne d’Arc as the film’s subject was decided
in a match draw—ironically, because he picked the headless match.140 As early
as May, 1927, Cinemagazine quoted one of the project’s financial backers, the
due d’Ayen, as saying, “We want to reproduce the most accurate and the most
poignant events in the life of Jeanne d’Arc, the heroic emblem and mirror of
the people.’’141 Despite an extraordinary budget of over seven million francs,
two mammoth set constructions (one of great white interiors near the Billan-
court studio, the other a reconstruction of the medieval village of Rouen),142
and major actors (Rene Jeanne Falconetti as Jeanne, Eugene Silvain as Cau-
chon, Maurice Schutz as Loyseleur, Antonin Artaud as Massieu), La Passion de
Jeanne d’Arc was also a deeply personal, experimental film, some of whose
uniqueness comes from its deliberate inversion of the genre conventions. It is
clearly an anti-historical reconstruction. Dreyer’s scenario focuses neither on
the pageantry of the times nor on Jeanne’s military and political successes, but
on her spiritual journey during the last day of her life (the time of her trial
and execution is condensed into what seems a single day). Based closely on

198
 HISTORICAL
RECONSTRUCTIONS

104. The jousting tournament

in Le Tournoi (1929)

the records of the trial at Rouen, the film is simultaneously a documentary of

Falconetti’s ordeal as Jeanne and a symbolic progression of faces within an
unusually disjunctive space-time continuum. As we shall see later, La Passion
de Jeanne d’Arc was one of the crowning achievements of the French narrative
avant-garde.
Finally, two period films fall somewhat outside these two camps of produc¬
tion, but both more or less counter the conventions of the genre, although
quite differently than does Dreyer’s film. The more conventional of the two is
another production of the Societe des Films Historiques, Jean Renoir’s Le
Tournoi, which opened at the Salle Marivaux in February, 1929.143 Set in the
court of Charles IX and Catherine de Medici, the scenario by Dupuy-Mazuel
is predicated on the Protestant/Catholic conflict of the period, which is re¬
solved here in a tournament. The exteriors were shot by Marcel Lucien and
Maurice Desfassiaux in Carcassonne (again) during “the Bimillennial celebra¬
tions,’’ and the tournament was staged specially for the occasion.144 Mallet-
Stevens’s interiors and Georges Bargier’s costumes were noted for their au¬
thenticity; and the presence of a former world fencing champion, Aldo Nadi,
in the leading role corroborated this impression. In fact, despite the intrigue
between the Protestant Francois de Baynes (Nadi) and Catholic Flenri de Ro-
gier (Enrique de Rivero) over the favor of Isabelle Ginori (Jackie Monnier) and
the consequent jousting combat that deteriorates into swordplay and mace-
swings, Le Tournoi seems to have been marked by an unusual degree of realism.

199
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE As one of the few film critics recently to have seen the film, Raymond Durgnat
FILM was struck by the weight and feel of the weapons and banquet ware, by the
detailed cumbersomeness of the knights on horseback, and by the presence of
a blacksmith watching over the lovers—a shot that “locates their idyll in an
everyday society.”145 Andre Bazin remembered the violence and cruelty of the
duels—“the blood from the sword wiped on Lucrece’s hair [de Baynes’s mis¬
tress}.”146 Perhaps most disturbing was the ambiguity of de Baynes’s charac¬
ter—highly skilled in combat and thoroughly profligate, perfidious and yet
finally noble in death. As in Le Bled, the hero seems to mock the genre from
within. Although Renoir himself considered the project little more than an
exercise in technique (e.g., the construction of an overhead dolly shot down
the length of a long banquet table),147 Le Tournoi can be seen as one more
instance of a general pattern of genre subversion in his work.
That subversion is even more apparent in Renoir’s earlier Nana, an ambi¬
tious film that got out of hand. Aubert released the film in the summer of
1926 (it premiered at the Aubert-Palace) to good reviews and large audiences
and then shelved it to make way for its fill releases.148 When the company
tried to redistribute a slightly shortened version in December, interest in the
film had passed.149 That sabotaging of Nanas commercial success contrasts
with a different kind of sabotaging within the film itself.150
Before making Nana (with his wife, Catherine Hessling, in the starring
role), Renoir had discovered Stroheim’s Foolish Wives and had engaged in a
study of French gestures in the paintings of his father and others of his gen¬
eration.151 In adapting Zola’s novel, he determined to produce his own study
of a society through a combination of strategies. First, Renoir eliminated most
of the first half of the novel and concentrated on Nana’s life in the theater and
her affairs with three men: Count Muffat (Werner Krauss), Count Vandeuvres
(Jean Angelo), and Georges Flugon (Raymond Guerin).152 The narrative opens
comically, with Nana’s last successful theatrical performances, gradually dark¬
ens, and ends with her death from smallpox. Renoir also conceived of a unique
juxtaposition of the decors and the characters. Much of the film’s million-franc
budget, in fact, went for the construction of elaborate sets that resurrected
the final years of the Second Empire: the giant staircase, drawing room, bed¬
chamber, and dressing room in Count Muffat’s townhouse; the racetrack stands
at Longchamps; the Variety Theater; the Mabille dance hall (all designed by
Claude Autant-Lara at the Gaumont studio in Paris and then reconstructed in
Berlin).153 Yet Renoir deliberately consigned these decors to secondary impor¬
tance in the film itself. And he underlined their “demode” quality by having
Autant-Lara design rather Impressionist costumes according to the later fash¬
ions of 187 1 and after.154 Moreover he emphasized the acting of his three main
characters (in contrast to what he considered a weakness in the French cinema
of the time) to the point of “constantly shooting them in American-style two-
shots”—a strategy that effectively eliminated the decors.155
His most important strategy, however, was to have the actors employ quite
divergent acting styles.156 Werner Krauss (the star of Caligari) plays Count
Muffat in a humorless, ponderous, pathetic German manner—almost an aris¬
tocratic variation on Emil Janning’s hotel doorman in Murnau’s The Last Laugh
(1924). By contrast, Jean Angelo plays Count Vandeuvres in a suave detached
manner, as if he has just stepped out of an Oscar Wilde comedy. And Ray-

200
 105. (left) The central
staircase in Count Muffet’s
townhouse in Nana (1926)

106. (right) A publicity

mond Guerin plays Georges Hugon with such a self-effacing, drooping timid- Photo of Catherine Hesslmg

ity that his character scarcely exists. As Nana, Catherine Hessling clearly
dominates the film. No sensuous blonde seductress (as in Zola), she plays Nana
as a sulky, cajoling, irrational child-woman who reverses the class- and male-
dominated patterns of her time. Hessling developed a strange style of acting,
derived from pantomime, for the role: syncopated rhythms and crisp, mechan¬
ical gestures, like those of an automaton or an animated doll.157 She fascinates
and upstages her men just as all of them, seconded by a couple of silent
voyeuristic servants (Harbacher and Valeska Gert), upstage the period decors.
In this stylized character study, a whole society is revealed in the process of
self-destruction.
Some years ago Noel Burch called Nana “a key him in the development of
a cinematic language” because its “entire visual construction depends on the
existence ... of a [fluctuating] off-screen space.”158 Nana was the first him,
according to Burch, to exploit the structural use of that off-screen space sys¬
tematically. Along with Alexander Sesonske, I am afraid I cannot agree. Ac¬
tually, Burch is less interested in proclaiming Nana’s originality than in using
the him to exemplify the various ways that off-screen space can be dehned and
be said to function. There are many earlier instances of off-screen space func¬
tioning signihcantly in the diegetic process of a him. Sesonske cites D. W.
Griffith’s hlms, specifically, The Lonedale Operator (1911); but one could go
back as early as The Lonely Villa (1909) as well.159 Furthermore, as Sesonske
argues, off-screen space is not all that influential in Nana. And Burch tacitly
admits this in his later writings on the French cinema of the 1920s by avoid¬
ing any mention of the him.160 Sesonske, in fact, suggests something of much

201
COMMERCIAL narrative more importance which operates structurally in Nana—the enactment of the-
film atrical performances at crucial moments of the narrative. Specifically, there is
Nana’s comically sensual performance of Venus in the opening sequence, the
opening night flop of Muffat’s production of La Petite Duchesse, her star turn
at Longchamps, and, near the end, her hysterical abandon and collapse at the
Bal Mabille. As the fiction that has been her life fails, writes Sesonske, Nana
“turns to art, a spectacle, a performance, as a refuge from, and ... a solution
to, life’s problems.”161 Within this satirical inversion of the historical recon¬
struction film lies the germ of an idea for Renoir—performance as an act of
mediation and resolution.

There is one other subgenre of the historical reconstruction film that bears
mentioning—the war film, or the reconstruction of World War I. After Abel
Gance’s J’Accuse (1919)—which will be discussed in Part IV—the Great War
vanished from French films except for brief references (e.g., La Croisade, Koe-
nigsmark), as if there were a tacit taboo on the subject. But in 1927, several
films appeared to break the silence. Their immediate inspiration probably was
the extraordinary success of King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), released in
France early in 1927. But also approaching was the tenth anniversary of the
Armistice (11 November 1928). In advance of the anniversary, the association
of war veterans put together two documentaries from the war footage stored
at the Archives d’Art et 1’Histoire: Pour la paix du monde and Verdun.162 Several
fictional films with the war as their setting were initiated; of these, the most
important was Maurice Tourneur’s adaptation of a Joseph Kessel novel, L’E-
quipage (1928), which premiered at the Imperial Cinema in April, 1928.163
Even though produced by the Societe Generale des Films and released by
A.C.E., L’Equipage was called a Franco-American production because Tour¬
neur and his leading actress, Claire de Lorez, were considered American while
the rest of the cast was French (Jean Dax, Daniel Mendaille, Georges Charlia,
Camille Bert, Pierre de Guingand).164 Its story revolved around the friendship
of two pilots near the end of the war, the one unaware that his mistress is
married to, but separated from, the other. When he is killed in combat, the
friend forgives his wife, and they resume their life together.

This tragedy of the war has none of the habitual faults of the films that evoke mem¬
ories of those terrible years and contemplate the struggle of millions of combatants.
Here is a truly cinematic production where the image is master and where all the
effects are visual.165

Interestingly, Tourneur’s film focused on the air war, just as did William
Wellman’s Wings (1927), which was released almost simultaneously in the
United States. Both undoubtedly drew on the interest generated by Charles
Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic. Although the French film press
considered L’Equipage one of the more beautiful films of the 1927-1928 season,
the French public was less impressed. They remembered that Tourneur had
not returned to France for the actual war, and (according to Kevin Brownlow)
his return to re-enact it created such a hullabaloo that he beat a retreat to
Germany.166
The major historical reconstruction film on the war, however, was Leon
Poirier’s Verdun, visions d’histoire, whose premiere at the Opera, 10-18 Novem-

202
 HISTORICAL
RECONSTRUCTIONS

107. A symbolic tableau in

Verdun, Visions D'Histoire
(1928)

ber 1928, was timed to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Armi¬
stice. 167 The following summer, it was released for an exclusive run at the
Imperial Cinema.168 At first, Poirier had the patronage of the French govern¬
ment to reconstruct the strategic but costly defense of Verdun in the spring
of 1916. Although that patronage was eventually withdrawn either for finan¬
cial or political reasons (the 1928 elections), the government gave its com¬
plete, though unofficial, support by allowing Poirier to film on the actual
battlefields and to use documentary footage from the Archives d’Art et l’His-
toire. With an eerie concern for authenticity, Poirier recalled soldiers who had
survived the war to re-create some of the major battles. For instance,

the survivors of the Driant Huntsmen themselves participated in the reconstruction of

those terrible days from 21 to 25 February, where, after having been pounded by a
twenty-four-hour bombardment, they were assaulted by a mass of soldiers ten times
their number who finally gained the position after four days of battle and the death
of Colonel Driant, and penetrated the Verdun defenses like a wedge as far as the fort
of Douaumont.169

Their almost incomprehensible willingness to undergo the horror of that ex¬

perience, again and again, testifies to the importance for the French of that
historic moment at Verdun. Even German soldiers volunteered for the re¬
enactment. Wrote one, “Your film will do much to promote peace by bring¬
ing together France and Germany because we both need to better understand
the spectacle of our common suffering.’’170
Poirier’s scenario integrated a chronological progression of documentary footage

203
COMMERCIAL narrative with re-enacted sequences of battles and of various individuals engaged in or
FILM affected by the war. Instead of following a single continuous storyline in the
re-enacted sequences, he chose to focus on “symbolic characters’’—the French
soldier (Albert Prejean), the German soldier (Hans Brausewetter), the peasant
(Jose Davert), the son (Pierre Nay), the husband (Daniel Mendaille), the young
man (Jean Dehelly), the intellectual (Antonin Artaud), the chaplain (Andre
Nox), the German officer (Tommy Bourdelle), the old marshal (Maurice Schutz),
the wife (Suzanne Bianchetti), the mother (Jeanne-Marie Laurent)—who, ac¬
cording to Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, “would enlarge the scope of the
battle, transform it into tragedy. . . .”171 “Here,’’ Poirier added, “there would
be no story, no rousing or extravagant adventure, no sentimental or easily
edifying intrigue. ”172 The film’s three parts—“La Force, L’Enfer, Le Destin”—
would be a tribute to the collective suffering of the French people.173
Although critics and historians generally praise the smoothness of this in¬
tegration of the dramatic and the documentary as well as the carefully re¬
strained use of symbolic figures, the 1932 sonorized and re-edited version of
the film (which is the only print I have seen) looks rather rough and uneven
(Poirier himself preferred the silent version).174 The changes from re-enactment
footage to authentic documentary footage (or vice versa) are sometimes ob¬
vious; some sequences are unusually brief and others verge on incoherence; the
overall rhythm of physical movement and narrative seems lax and uncertain.
Still, there are stunning and poignant moments: the realistic detail and concise
cutting in the initial German attack, a grisly night encounter in “no man’s
land,’’ the final image of seed-sowing in the devastated earth. Much more
technically conventional than Napoleon, say, Verdun, visions d’histoire was also
more ideologically suited in subject to the French public of 1928—and it was
no less popular. The French spirit was defined in terms of suffering, sacrifice,
respect for one’s enemies, and a desire to return peacefully to the past (where
it still might be possible to cultivate one’s garden). As Close Up suggested in
1929, taken as a work of propaganda or ideological statement, if not as an
achievement, Verdun clearly bears comparison with Eisenstein’s October (1927)
and Pudovkin’s The End of St. Petersburg (1927).175

For the French film industry, the genre of period spectacle films or historical
reconstructions was clearly the most prestigious of the decade. Year after year,
its films were among the finest commercial productions: Les Trois Mousquetaires
(1921-1922), Les Opprimes (1923), Koenigsmark (1923), Violettes impmales (1924),
Kean (1924), Le Miracle des loups (1924), Michel Strogoff (1926), Joueur d'echecs
(1927), Casanova (1927), Verdun, vision d'histoire (1928), Monte-Cnsto (1929).
And, until Madame Sans-Gene (which was more American than French), Napo¬
leon, and La Passion de Jeanne dArc (which both deviated sharply from the
norm), the genre was also consistently profitable, justifying, at least finan¬
cially, its high percentage of capital investment. Moreover, except for the
earlier films, almost all were produced and/or financed by Russian emigres.
The significance of the Russian contribution to the French cinema of the 1920s
is perhaps nowhere more evident than here. These 1920s films set the basic
conventions for the genre and defined its standards. In the 1930s, the genre’s
prestige declined slightly as many earlier films were re-made as talkies, though
not as well: Diamant-Berger’s Les Trois Mousquetaires (1932), Richebe’s LA-

204
gome des aigles (1933), Gance’s Napoleon Bonaparte (1934) and J’Accuse (1937), MODERN STUDIO
Tourneur’s Koenigsmark (1935), Baroncelli’s Michel Strogoff (1937). But there SPECTACULARS
were at least two clear successes within the conventions: Bernard’s reconstruc¬
tion of the Great War in Croix des hois (1932) and Feyder’s reconstruction of
seventeenth-century Flanders (with a distinctly collaborationist plot) in La
Kermesse hero'ique (1935). Besides, in Grande Illusion (1937) and in La Marseillaise
(1938), Jean Renoir continued to subvert the genre, to turn it to other ends.
Two decades later, a survey of the French public’s preferences in film would
show that the popularity of the historical reconstruction genre had continued
unabated.176

During the latter half of the 1920s, the French film industry discovered a Modern Studio
new genre to invest in that soon challenged the priority of the historical Spectaculars
reconstruction film. Perhaps more than previous genres, the modern studio
spectacular had quite definite political, economic, and cultural origins. The
modern studio spectacular was a product of the cultural internationalism which
by then characterized urban life in most of the industrialized countries of
Europe. Its development in France coincided with the shift in historical re¬
constructions after 1924 and also can be attributed in part to the French film
industry’s increasing involvement in international co-productions. In order to
reach as many exhibition outlets as possible, especially the American market,
the industry sought formats and subjects beyond those of the period films,
that would appeal not just to French audiences but also to Americans and
other Europeans. The American craze that was sweeping France by the mid¬
twenties offered a kind of model. While American tourists flocked to the new
casinos, dance halls, and beach resorts, the French stood in line to see Amer¬
ican jazz musicians, singers, and dance troupes.1 At La Revue Negre in the
Theatre des Champs-Elysees, for instance, they gaped at Josephine Baker,
“The Nefertiti of Now,’’ performing a “stomach dance’’ before “pink drops
with cornucopias of hams and watermelons.’’2 The modern studio spectacular
was designed to exploit such “cross-cultural’’ exchanges. And it was encour¬
aged by the success of the American “flapper” films—e.g., Flaming Youth
(1923), The Masked Bride (1925), and Dancing Mothers (1926)—and that of the
studio spectaculars produced by Paramount and UFA.3
The parameters of the genre were clearly fixed by 1926-1927. The milieu
was the key ingredient for this genre of the Parisian nouveau riche, especially
younger men and women, who sported and played at the newest nightclubs,
restaurants, dance halls, resorts, or at their own art deco mansions. According
to Gerard Talon, these films pictured the good life of a new generation and
helped define what was modern and “a la mode” in fashions, sports, dancing,
and manners generally.4 Instead of looking to the past and to venerated tra¬
ditions, or to some other land or culture, the studio spectacular looked to the
present and the future. But this present or future was not particularly French.
For the genre tended to produce either a picturesque image of contemporary
France according to American stereotypes or a kind of generalized milieu that
was socially and aesthetically neutral.5 Stylish set designs and costumes (some¬
times as elaborate as those in the period films) were showcased in sensational
set pieces. International casts were common, but they were natural to this

205
108. Messenier’s Montmartre
restaurant set for Koenigsmark
(1923)

kind of neutral decor where actors could easily replace one another as types.
The overall effect of the genre was a fantasy of internationalism that denied
the specificity of French culture and acceded to the hegemony of the American
cinema and the new ideology of consumer capitalism or conspicuous consump¬
tion.6 The modern studio spectacular, therefore, was probably the least French
of all the genres deployed by the French film industry.

Isolated elements of the genre can be found in the French cinema at least
as early as Perret’s Koenigsmark (1923) and Mosjoukine’s Le Brasier ardent (1923).
Perhaps the major set piece of Koenigsmark was the wedding-night celebration
in a lavish Montmartre restaurant constructed by Henri Menessier at the new
Levinsky studio in Joinville-le-pont. Menessier’s work in the United States for
Maurice Tourneur and then Metro Pictures^—he had just returned to France
with Pearl White for Terreur (1924)—led him to design the Montmartre set
specifically as “an amusing attraction with a little color for America!’’7 Its
central pool-enclosed dance floor and art nouveau/deco walls provided the pro¬
totype of an essential setting for the modern studio spectacular. Besides, sev-

206
eral of Huguette Duflos’s costumes, designed by Boue Soeurs, were advertised MODERN STUDIO
as the latest in fashionable elegance.8 A shorter but similar sequence occurs in SPECTACULARS
Le Brasier ardent. Designed by Lochakoff on a smaller scale at Albatros’s Mon-
treuil studio, its setting is an underground Parisian cafe where Mosjoukine
incites a group of chorus girls to a marathon contest of faster and faster danc¬
ing.9
The genre almost gelled in Robert Boudrioz’s L’Epervier (1924) and, more
importantly, in Marcel L’Herbier’s L’lnhumaine (1924). A Paramount produc¬
tion based on a popular melodrama by Francois de Croisset, L’Epervier told the
"tragic” yarn of a card-sharping Hungarian couple in Rome, who separate
when the wife falls in love with a diplomat.10 Unfortunately, Boudrioz’s cast
of Sylvio de Pedrelli and Nilda du Piessy was almost unknown (in contrast to
L’Herbier’s 1933 version, starring Charles Boyer), and the film had little im¬
pact. L'lnhumaine, which premiered at the Madeleine-Cinema in late Novem¬
ber, 1924, on the other hand, caused a sensation, but an unfavorable one.11
Produced independently by Cinegraphic and financed almost entirely by American
money through its star, Georgette Leblanc, L’Herbier’s film was deliberately
designed to showcase the most modern French painting, sculpture, architec¬
ture, costume design, and music (as well as cinema) to the American public.12
The milieu was contemporary Paris—more specifically, art deco mansions (ex¬
teriors by Mallet-Stevens, interiors by Autant-Lara and Cavalcanti), the The¬
atre des Champs-Elysees (with the Ballet suedois), and a scientific laboratory
(designed by Fernand Leger). All these sets were constructed at the new Le-
vinsky studio, with an airy lightness that contrasted sharply with the dark
decors of conventional films.13 The characters included the famous singer,
Claire Lescot (Georgette Leblanc), and a cosmopolitan group of men attracted
to her—Einar Norsen (Jaque Catelain), Maharajah Djorah (Philippe Heriat),
Frank Mahler (Kellerman), and Tarsky (L. V. Terval)—whose offers of love
and wealth she accepts with glacial, impartial indifference. The first part of
the film narrates Einar’s apparent death (by suicide) and "resurrection,” which
almost breaks Claire’s composure. The second part narrates her actual death
(from a viper hidden by the jealous Djorah) and her miraculous resurrection
in Einar’s laboratory, which causes her to admit her love for him at last.
Most of the genre elements come together in L’lnhumaine: the milieu, the
ultramodern decors (although they are quite specifically French), the cosmo¬
politan characters (and cast), the narrative of a modern woman who is cele¬
brated, defeated, and transformed. However, there was both too little and too
much in the film for 1924. The “demode” nature of the narrative—it is not
much different from some of Feuillade’s and Pearl White’s wartime serials—
blatantly contradicts the ultramodern settings.14 And the decors themselves
seem to exist independently of one another (almost in separate fictions), never
quite producing contingent spaces (one could argue that they were never meant
to). Besides, just as in L’Atlantide, the aging figure of Georgette Leblanc
makes a rather unconvincing Circe-like seductress, a very problematic object
of desire, even for the spectator.15 Yet L’Herbier also used the project to
deploy and experiment with all the technical devices of film discourse then
available to him—that is, various forms of montage, including accelerated
montage; various forms of masking; superimpositions; brief flashes of solid-
color film stock; the fragmentation of objects. The result is a film that, some-

207
 is mmm

4QUS0* ?*«>$
—

109- (left) Georgette Leblanc

in L'Inhumame (1924)

110. (right) Bilinsky’s poster

for Le Lion des Mogols (1924)
what like Gance’s La Roue, was as outdated as it was avant-garde. And the
combination was not commercially advantageous.
Another film which opened, at the Mogodor-Palace, about the same time
as L’Inhumame combined fewer elements of the genre somewhat more conven¬
tionally and with a rather cool facility. That was Albatros’s Le Lion des Mogols
(1924), directed by Jean Epstein from a Mosjoukine scenario, with sets by
Lochakoff and costumes by Bilinsky.16 The scenario juxtaposes a fantastical
Arabian Nights palace and modern Jazz Age Paris, neatly mediated by the
presence of a film production company. As a consequence, Mosjoukine gets to
play the rebellious son of the Grand Khan, a mysterious naive celebrity in
Paris, and a movie actor in various heroic roles. More than half of the film
takes place in Paris, and two major set pieces there develop the prototypical
sequences from Koemgsmark and Le Brasier ardent. These are a night of drunk¬
enness at the popular Jockey Bar (also reminiscent of the Coaly Hole sequence
in Kean—the chief cameraman again is Mundviller) and a climactic masked
ball at the fashionable Hotel Olympic. The film’s attitude toward this final
sequence is not exactly fashionable: the masked ball itself masks a murder in
the rooms above, and it finally serves to unmask the real nature of the hero

208
and heroine (brother and sister), who return to the country of their origin and MODERN STUDIO
to the fantasy palace. SPECTACULARS
Henry Roussel’s La Terre promise (1925), which opened at the Cine Max-
Linder in January 1925, was much more serious in its juxtaposition of old and
new worlds.17 It had a seriousness that was acknowledged by most film critics
and even honored by official bodies such as the Comite fran^ais du cinema.
And it became the subject of the first issue of La Petite Illustration (4 April
1925), a deluxe variant of the popular magazine novelizations, published by
the prestigious biweekly, Illustration.18 For the film’s subject was unique: the
conflicts within a Jewish family, with one branch in London and the other in
a ghetto village in Poland.
The story begins in the Polish village of Scaravaloff on the eve of the war,
as Moise Sigoulim (Maxudian), a London financier, makes his annual pilgrim¬
age to celebrate Passover with his brother, Rabbi Samuel (Bras), and his two
daughters, Lia and Ester. A business deal ensues—an arrangement to drill oil
on the land of the provincial governor, Count Orlinsky—and Moise invites
Lia and Ester to London where they can receive a suitable education. Ten years
later, Moise has become a millionaire oil baron; Lia (Raquel Meller) has taken
a degree in engineering; and Ester (Tina de Yzarduy) has become a vain co¬
quette. On a visit to London, the count’s son, Andre Orlinsky (Andre Roanne),
finds himself attracted to Lia over Ester, despite his antipathy, as a Christian,
toward the Jews. In Scaravaloff, meanwhile, Count Orlinsky, who now man¬
ages Moise’s oil holdings, has decided to lay off many of the Jewish workers;
and Samuel travels to London to appeal directly to Moise on their behalf.
When they all return to Scaravaloff, the family conflicts intensify: Ester vows
to avenge Andre’s rejection of her love, and Moise asks to marry Lia, who
reluctantly agrees, even though she loves Andre. On the day of the wedding,
however, the Christian workers threaten to attack the oil wells, fearing that
the Jews are about to be hired in their place (a rumor started by Ester). Lia
and Andre find themselves jointly trying to calm the workers and, then, with
the help of Samuel’s assistant David (Pierre Blanchar), saving the oil wells
from a fiery destruction. In the end, Moise and Ester admit their errors and
ask for forgiveness, while Lia and Andre recognize their mutual love and plan
to marry.
At least two points could be made about this audacious film. Although the
set decors for the London townhouse sequences, especially Moise’s Friday eve¬
ning reception dinners, were as lavish as any that had yet been constructed for
a French film, critics were particularly astonished by the detailed evocation of
the Jewish ghetto milieu.19 And the film’s attitude toward this juxtaposition
of milieux was intriguingly ambiguous. Moise’s London world is roundly con¬
demned—through Ester’s addiction to it as well as Samuel’s disapproval of the
risque costumes, jazzband music, and dancing couples. But the Scavaraloff
ghetto scarcely draws unequivocal praise—Samuel is willing to accept an in¬
cestuous marriage, and he apparently refuses to bless the marriage of Lia and
Andre at the end. This ambiguity raises questions that are central to the film,
for it seems unusually concerned with the representation of religious, ethnic,
and class differences and their resolution. Moise’s seeming denial of his ethnic
and religious heritage pits him against his brother, while Samuel’s rigid ad-

209
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE herence to that heritage brings him into conflict with his daughter. At the
FILM same time, the two brothers are separated by class tensions that threaten to
destroy their family as well as the larger community. The distribution of these
conflicts reaches a point where the contradictions seem irresolvable, except
through the displacement common to melodrama—a climax of near catastro¬
phe and individual heroic action. Created by the vengeful jealousy of one
woman, this catastrophe is dispelled by the love and self-sacrifice of her sister,
abetted by the man who loves her. In Lia and Andre, then, all conflicts and
contradictions seem to be mediated and resolved, much as they will be two
years later in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But here the mediation remains momen¬
tary, even suspect, as Samuel’s recalcitrance attests.
Despite its critical and commercial success, La Terre promise did not put in
play all of the elements that were coming together to constitute the modern
studio spectacular. That honor probably goes to Cine-France-Westi’s Ame d’artiste
(1925), which premiered at the Salle Marivaux in July, 19 2 5.20 Directed by
Germaine Dulac, it was adapted by the director and Alexandre Volkoff from
a contemporary Danish play by Christian Molbeck. The cosmopolitan nature
of the production—its financing was French^ German, and Russian emigre—
also extended to the cast, which included English, French, and Russian emigre
actors. Dulac’s way of handling this diverse group was quite opposite Renoir’s
in Nana and may well have set a precedent for the genre: she imposed a
uniform style of acting which effectively neutralized any cultural differences
among them. Ame d’artiste was set in modern London, in the milieu of the
theater, probably, as Charles Ford suggests, in order to capitalize on the suc¬
cess of Kean from the previous year.21 However, this image of London was
created almost entirely in the studio with Lochakoff designing the sets and
Jules Kruger doing the camerawork. There was a complete theater set (as in
Kean), a huge hotel set for a masked ball (as in Le Lion des Mogols), a luxurious
townhouse (as in La Terre promise), a simple cottage on the city’s outskirts
(again as in Kean), and a cheap hotel and bar. And there were elegant costumes
for the two principal actresses and for nearly everyone at the masked ball. Yet,
except for the names and exterior shots designating London, all these settings
could just as easily have been French or American.
The melodramatic narrative of Ame d’artiste has some affinity to L’lnhumaine
but also has the advantage of being more plausible and more emotionally
authentic.22 The film opens rather cleverly in a series of FSs and CUs: a do¬
mestic quarrel between a husband and wife (with two children in the back¬
ground) climaxes with her picking up a knife to stab him. Suddenly, an ELS
reveals the previous action to be a play, a play whose dramatic conflict ironi¬
cally sets up expectations quite opposite to what actually happens in the film.
For a while thereafter, the narrative develops rather conventionally through
contrasts between the frivolous life of a famous actress, Helen Taylor (Mabel
Poulton), and her lenient father (Nicolas Koline) and the rather sedate life of
the Campbells—Herbert (Ivan Petrovich), an aspiring dramatist, his wife
Edith (Yvette Andreyor), and her mother (who owns the cottage they live in);
between the power of the rich theater-owner, Lord Stamford (Henry Houry),
and the naivete of Herbert, who falls in love with Helen. However, the masked
ball sequence, in which Stamford discovers Herbert and Helen embracing, has
several nice touches: Herbert is disguised as a clown, and Stamford’s falling

210
 MODERN STUDIO
SPECTACULARS

111. Ivan Petrovich in the

bar sequence in Ame d'artiste
(1925)

cigar ash is intercut with the confetti that descends over the lovers. The se¬
quence in which Herbert asks Edith for a divorce is unusually poignant: it
ends with a LS of Herbert going out the front gate into an empty street and
then a MCU of Edith closing the door to simply stand there waiting. The
sequence between Helen and Edith has a similar poignance, but its narrative
function is stronger: Edith brings her Herbert’s supposedly lost play, and they
consider who loves him most.
The climax of the film comes in a melodramatic but quite effective alter¬
nation between Helen’s performance of Herbert’s play, Ame d’artiste (with
Edith in the audience) and Herbert’s attempted suicide in a cheap hotel room
(he believes Helen has gone back to Stamford). The alternation is complicated
and intensified by subjective shots of Herbert’s delirium, and his rescue by
Edith is delayed until the final shots of the film. Thus, the subject ultimately
is sacrifice: that of Edith for her husband’s career as a playwright and that of
Helen, who, transformed by Edith’s action, yields Herbert to her while also
advancing her career. In the end, Helen has her career, Edith has her love,
and Herbert has both love and career—through the sacrifice of the two women.
The “artist’s spirit” transcends her milieu to articulate a typically French theme,
one in which Dulac must have taken little pleasure.
In one major aspect, however, Ame d'artiste differed from most of the mod¬
ern studio spectaculars that followed—beyond the fact that it is still quite
watchable even today. Its milieu depends on the theater rather than on the

211
112. A production photo of
L’Herbier (right of camera)
and his crew in Mallet-
Stevens’s restaurant set for Le
Vertige (1926)
1920s phenomenon of nightclub restaurants, dancing, and automobile tour¬
ing. In the next two years, through several big films released by three of the
top French film production companies, the genre anchored itself securely in
these modish settings and activities.
The first of these was Cineromans’ Films de France production of Le Vertige
(1926), adapted by L’Herbier from a celebrated boulevard melodrama by Charles
Mere.23 The film’s popularity so unnerved L’Herbier, who had given much
more of himself to L’lnhumaine and Feu Mathias Pascal, that he avoided further
film projects for several months.24 According to Jaque Catelain, Le Vertige was
a rather simplistic drama in which Countess Svirski (Emmy Lynn) escapes her
tyrannical and—just for good measure—criminal husband (Roger Karl) through
the intervention of the hero (Catelain himself).25 In record time, L’Herbier
shot the exteriors at the fashionable resorts of Eden-Roc and Eze on the Cote
d’Azur.26 More time was taken for the interiors—especially an ultramodern
house for Catelain and a late night restaurant—designed by Mallet-Stevens
and furnished by Jacques Manuel.27 L’Herbier even got Robert and Sonya

212
Delaunay to donate several of their large canvases to decorate the house, and MODERN STUDIO
the set was so striking that Cineromans used it as a set piece in one of their SPECTACULARS
current serials, Rene Le Somptier’s chic, sporty Le P’tit Parigot (1926).28 Now
that the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs had legitimized the art
deco style, these interiors were “a la mode.” Despite L’Herbier’s own reser¬
vations, several critics at the time accepted Le Vertige as ‘‘a prodigious synthe¬
sis” of the avant-garde and the commercial.29 Even Cinea-Cine-pour-touss read¬
ers voted it fourth on the 1926-1927 list of best films shown in Paris.30
When L’Herbier had recovered sufficiently from the experience, Cineromans
naturally asked him to repeat Le Vertige s success, this time in a joint produc¬
tion with Gaumont-British. The result was Le Diable au coeur (1928), starring
Betty Balfour and Jaque Catelain in another “marvelous decor for dancing.”31
L’Herbier himself remembers it only as his first exposure to panchromatic film
stock—which, in the shift from interior to exterior scenes, led to peculiar
changes in his star’s eyes and costumes.32
Despite the relative failure of Boudrioz’s L’Fpervier (1924), Paramount also
did its part in establishing the genre by backing its chief French director,
Leonce Perret, in an adaptation of one of Henry Bataille’s best sex plays, La
Femme nue (1926). Updated to the twenties, the film told the story of a young
painter who, once having achieved success, abandons his wife and model who,
in turn, tries to commit suicide and is rescued by a friend. The subject allowed
Perret to pose his stars, Louise Lagrange and Ivan Petrovich, against a series
of chic Parisian tableaux, such as Montmartre cafes and Sacre-Coeur. Despite
his reservations about its theatricality, Jean Dreville considered La Femme nue
Perret’s best film; and Cinea-Cine-pour-tous devoted nearly half an issue to the
film when it opened at the Madeleine-Cinema, in December, 1926.33 Later
the magazine’s readers agreed with all that attention by voting it ninth on
their list of 1926-1927 top films.34 Just over a year later, Perret repeated the
combination in La Danseuse orchidee (1928) for Franco-Film.35 Both films were
instrumental in elevating Louise Lagrange to the position of “Princess of the
French cinema” in 1929.36 Another co-production (by SOFAR) very similar in
format to these two films was Augusto Genina’s L’Fsclave blanche (1927)—in
the words of Dreville, “one of the better commercial productions from which
the artistic sense has not been completely excluded.”37
The third company to invest heavily in the genre was Aubert, with Julien
Duvivier’s adaptation of a popular Pierre Frondaie novel, L’Homme a LHispano,
which opened at the Salle Marivaux, in January, 1927.38 Raymond Chirat
sums up the film’s narrative quite aptly:

It is a common story where the old theme of the handsome knight, pure and
invincible, who frees the captive princess, is adapted to the decors of luxury hotels,
chateaux set in large gardens, and vast estates. A young and charming woman, badly
married to an English lord, is attracted to an emotional young man, the owner of a
new sportscar, and, after a good number of incidents of middling interest, finds herself
passionately, happily, in love.39

According to Aubert’s publicity, Duvivier took advantage of the new resorts

in “the loveliest spots along the Cote d’Argent and in the Basque country” to
shoot his exteriors, and Aubert himself bragged about spending a million
francs on the interiors of the Oswill villa.40 In fact, Aubert was so impressed

213
113- (left) Jaque Catelain in a
Mallet-Stevens’s interior in Le
Vertige (1926)

114. (right) Louise Lagrange

and Ivan Petrovich in La with the him—or worried about its costs—that he told an interviewer, “Here’s
Femme nue (1926) the first French him which makes me want to sail to America just to show
the Americans what we are capable of doing. . . . ”41 Julien Bayart was less
ecstatic: it was “a good narrative him’’ which at least included a dandy race
between a train and the famous Hispano, with some exciting, nicely edited
tracking shots.42 Along with Bernard Natan, Aubert also helped Diamant-
Berger dabble in the genre in one of his hrst hlms after returning from two
years of hlmmaking in the United States.43 Education de Prince (1927) was
apparently an awkward synthesis of sentimental melodrama, American-style
adventure, and studio spectacular. Only the presence of Edna Purviance in the
starring role kept it from falling apart completely.44
By 1927, the modern studio spectacular was so popular that, when several
hlmmakers associated with the narrative avant-garde wanted or needed to make
a him with supposedly commercial appeal, they turned to the new genre. Jean
Epstein, for instance, placed his doubled story of lost love, 6V2 X 11 (1927),
in the milieu of the Theatre des Champs-Elysees (singers, chorus girls, and
clowns) as well as the spacious winter residences on the Cote d’Azur. Yet
today, the sequences in the theater seem almost irrelevant to the hlm’s fasci¬
nating rhetorical and narrative experimentation. Similarly, Jean Gremillon
situated much of the second half of Maldone (1928) in the plush hotels and
casinos of the Cote d’Azur. Yet his purpose was to convey the sterile conven¬
tions of this noveau riche milieu in contrast to the natural simplicity of the
vagabond barge life that his central character (Charles Dullin) had previously
enjoyed and to which he returns. Maldone, much like 6V2 X 11, was marked
by unusual rhetorical and narrative strategies; and neither film did all that
well commercially. Apparently the only film in this group to be successful

214
with the public was Jean Renoir’s Marquitta (1927), which premiered at the MODERN STUDIO
Aubert-Palace, in July, 1927.45 SPECTACULARS
Taking its title from a currently popular song, Marquitta s scenario by Pierre
Lestringuez conceived a Pygmalion story with suitably French and American
twists. Among the reviews and reminiscences on this lost film, there is a
curious lack of agreement about what exactly happened in it; but the main
lines of the narrative seem clear enough.46 Marquitta (Marie-Louise Iribe) is a
young street singer in the working-class district of Paris. One day she is
discovered by a foreign prince, Vlasco (Jean Angelo), whom she christens
Coco; they become lovers, and she scandalizes the casino society of Cannes
with her vulgar behavior. Her father, however, steals an enormous sapphire
from Vlasco; Marquitta is accused and thrown out—with a bit of money. She
goes on to become a star in the luxurious new nightclubs performing the same
tunes she once sang on street corners, while Vlasco loses his money and prop¬
erty in a revolution and degenerates into a Russian dancer in a Nice cabaret.47
There she finds him in a sequence with a neat comic reversal: “She invites him
to dine, and the audiences cracked up when they saw the prince throw himself
like a dog on a leg of chicken . . . while Marquitta, very properly, delicately,
peeled a pear.’’48 When Vlasco tries to commit suicide in a taxi driven by his
former valet-secretary (Henri Debain), Marquitta and her 22CV Renault save
him after a long chase along the cliff roads above the Mediterranean. The
sapphire is recovered; the couple restored. More amicable than tongue-in-
cheek or caustic in tone, Marquitta was probably just the kind of “high life
daydream fairy tale,’’ to quote Raymond Durgnat, that epitomized the genre.49
Renoir himself best remembers the opening sequence, where he had a large-
scale model of the Barbes metro station reflected in a huge mirror with small
unsilvered areas behind which several actors were deployed (a technique that
was similar to the Shufftan process).50 The film’s success, however, seems to
have spurred Marie-Louise Iribe to direct her own exotic melodrama variation
on the genre, the recently rediscovered Hara-Kiri (1928).51
About the same time, one of Renoir’s close friends, Alberto Cavalcanti,
made a very different studio spectacular, with a correspondingly opposite au¬
dience response. Produced by Pierre Braunberger, who was using the genre’s
popularity to shift from short film to feature film production, Yvette (1928)
was a contemporary adaptation of a Maupassant story enacted by a half-French,
half-British cast.52 The narrative is unusually slight. Yvette (Catherine Hess-
ling), a young woman known for her skill as a dancer, falls in love with a
shallow young man of her own class, Jean de Servigny (Walter Butler). When
she realizes that he does not mean to marry her and is just as interested in her
mother (lea de Lenkeffy), Yvette tries to commit suicide. She is found in time;
Jean seems to pledge his love; and her mother nonchalantly returns to her
lover, Jean’s friend Saval (Clifford McLaglen).
In one sense, Yvette is a vehicle for Catherine Hessling, who gets to exhibit
several different dance numbers (including one in a Black African mask for a
West Indian Night party, which prefigures Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus),
do a half-dozen imitations, and die in a lovely full-length white gown in a
luxurious bedroom. However, she is far more subdued here than in her pre¬
vious films, perhaps because just as much attention seems to be given to Eric
Aes’s incomparably suave set constructions: a large sunken-floor room for danc-

215
115. Catherine Hessling in
Yvette (1928)

ing and dinners, an art deco house exterior, and a spacious bar with an elevated
dance floor.53 The opening sequence juxtaposes rather too obviously the old
and the new: an afternoon tea for the queen of England and then a modern
evening party of club sandwiches, drinks, and dancing. Thereafter, each se¬
quence seems to document another aspect of the modish good life, from swim¬
ming at an exclusive pool to trying out every new form of dancing. The film’s
attitude toward all this is anything but sympathetic and goes directly against
the genre’s expectations. Yet the overall effect is not really disturbing; in fact,
it is rather distasteful and numbing. The pathos of the central character and
the sometimes acute social and psychological observations are gradually sub¬
merged and neutralized in an impeccably American mise-en-scene and mon¬
tage whose unvaried rhythm finally proves wearyingly monotonous. By imi¬
tating the style of American studio spectaculars to a fault, Cavalcanti seems
to have found a consistent means of satirizing the boredom and emptiness of
this milieu; but that very consistency enervates the film itself. Audiences seem
to have responded to Yvette s cool, humorless cynicism with a reciprocal cool¬
ness. Today, its air of elegant sterility reminds one a little of Feyder’s Gribiche.
Full-scale exploitation of the modern studio spectacular was underway just
before the French film industry changed to sound films. After a couple of
mediocre period spectacle films, Paramount committed its whole French film
production to the genre. In 1928, it released Maurice Gleize’s adaptation of a
Dekorba novel, La Madone des sleeping.s (with Claude France and Olaf Fjord).54
In 1929 came contemporary adaptations of two more Henry Bataille plays—
Fuitz-Morat’s La Vierge folle (starring Emmy Fynn, Jean Angelo, and Suzy
Vernon) and Andre Hugon’s La Marche nuptiale (starring Fouise Fagrange and
Pierre Blanchar)—and Roger Lion’s short JJne Heure au cocktail bar, which sim-

216
ply used a modern bar decor, writes Gerard Talon, to intermingle "a complete MODERN STUDIO
set ofstereotyped characters. ”55 The same year, SOFAR, an Italian-German-French SPECTACULARS
company, mounted two big productions by Augusto Genina: Quartier Latin
from another Dekorba scenario (starring Carmen Boni, Ivan Petrovich, and
Gina Manes) and Prix de beaute from a Rene Clair scenario (starring Louise
Brooks).56 At the same time, Cineromans devoted a good portion of its pro¬
duction budget to Henry Roussel’s Paris-Girls (with Suzy Vernon) and, espe¬
cially, to L’Herbier’s L'Argent. Aubert invested perhaps more heavily in the
genre than anyone else. In 1928, the company released Rene Hervil’s Minuit
. . . Place Pigalle (starring Nicolas Rimsky and Renee Heribel) and H. Etie-
vant’s La SIrene des tropiques, from another Dekorba scenario (Josephine Baker
in debut, with Pierre Batcheff).57 It also helped produce two major films by
Julien Duvivier: Le Tourbillon de Paris in 1928 (with Lil Dagover) and Au
bonheur des dames in 1929. At least two films from this extensive “catalogue”
survive and offer quite different transformations of Zola novels into the modern
studio spectacular.
Duvivier’s Au bonheur des dames (1929) is much the less costly and more
conventional of the two films.58 Its narrative is predicated on the inexorable
movement of progress and the unequal conflict between an old-fashioned cloth¬
ing shop and a new department store (which Zola had based on the Bon
Marche, then the world’s largest department store),59 conveniently located on
the same street opposite one another. From the provinces, Denise (Dita Parlo)
comes to Paris to work for her uncle Baudu (Armand Bour), only to find his
once prosperous shop nearly abandoned. Baudu’s competitor, Octave Mouret
(Pierre de Guingand), hires her for his department store across the street, and
they fall in love. After several secondary intrigues involving Mouret’s mistress,
Mme. Desforges (Germaine Rouer), Denise’s cousin Jouve (Albert Bras), who
runs off with a model (Ginette Maddie), and another cousin Genevieve (Nadia
Sibirskaia), who dies abandoned by her fiance—after all this, Baudu goes ber¬
serk and charges into the department store with a gun. After shooting at
Mouret, the store manager, and several women customers as well, he tries to
return to his shop and is promptly run over (accidentally) by one of Mouret’s
delivery trucks. Mouret has to sell his business, and both he and Denise end
up in the now deserted old shop.
Perhaps because of the Zola source, Au bonheur des dames is much more
critical of the modern milieu than are either of Duvivier’s earlier films in the
genre. But the overall tone is less antagonistic than pathetic and nostalgic—
the tragic deaths, the desolation of the shop (increased by the demolition of
buildings on either side), the disappearance not only of the family business
but of the family itself. Despite itself, the film also cannot control its admiring
attention to the department store (designed by Christian Jacque, later to be¬
come an important commercial filmmaker), the modeling and shopping that
are its chief activities, and the vacation resort of L’Isle-Adam (with a bathing-
suit contest) in the then fashionable Seine-et-Oise district north of Paris. Bau¬
du’s ineffectual attack and demise become an apt metaphor for the film’s own
compromised critical position. Distinctly German, American, and French ele¬
ments combine here in a way quite characteristic of the genre. “The street
scenes,” writes Raymond Chirat, “nicely echo the German films of the era.”60
The attention to crowd scenes in the street and in the department store, with

217
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE
FILM

116. Pierre Alcover and

Brigitte Helm in a Lazare
Meerson interior in L'Argent
(1929)

one serving as the context for the violent climax (as in a misguided western),
imitated American films whose crowd scenes the French took as standards of
veracity and authenticity.61 Peculiarly French, however, were the numerous
and often elaborate tracking shots, employed usually in long takes rather than
in short clusters of shots or in isolated moments. Denise’s movement into
Paris and through the streets to her uncle’s boutique is marked with tracking
shots, as is Baudu’s assault on the department store and his withdrawal. The
film thus exhibits quite well the synthetic nature of the modern studio spec¬
tacular.
The Cineromans-Cinemondial production of L’Argent (1929), with its budget
of nearly five million francs, was one of the biggest French films of the 1928-
1929 season.62 It was immediately embroiled in controversy when, at the start
of the production, Andre Antoine reported that L’Herbier’s transposition of
the narrative from 1868 to 1928 would betray and disfigure Zola’s novel.63
Antoine’s argument hinged on locating the real, the authentic, in the source
text, which would have produced a period atmosphere film such as Therese
Raquin. But L’Herbier was interested in the overwhelming power of money or
capital in contemporary society and so used Zola’s novel basically as a pre-

218
text.64 In one sense, however, the question of verisimilitude or authenticity MODERN STUDIO
was germane, for L’Argent was much more an international production than SPECTACULARS
was An bonheur des dames. Although its narrative was situated clearly in Paris,
the characters were generalized types (played by a French-German-English
cast) that did not really represent French society. Nicolas Saccard (Pierre Al-
cover) looks like a stolid, ambitious German who has acquired an American
sense of mental and physical quickness. His rival in financial speculation is a
coldly calculating reclusive German, Gunderman (Alfred Abel), and his part¬
ner-betrayer is the equally cool blonde Baroness Sandorf (Brigitte Helm). The
aviator hero, Jacques Hamelin (Henry Victor) and his threatened wife, Line
Hamelin (Mary Glory), act like innocent foreigners (American or English)
caught up mistakenly in Saccard’s schemes. This form of character typing
makes L Argent an exemplary film in the genre of modern studio spectaculars.
But it also raises the question, first expressed by Jean Lenauer, about whether
the dramatic conflict between Saccard and Gunderman distracts an audience
from the insidious power of money at the base of that conflict.65
There were other exemplary features as well. During the three days of Pen¬
tecost in 1928, L’Herbier was allowed into the Paris Bourse (the first film¬
maker accorded that privilege) to shoot several spectacular set pieces for the
film.66 For one night, he also electrified the Place de l’Opera in order to shoot
crowd scenes that would later be intercut with Hamelin’s record-breaking solo
flight from Paris to Cayenne, French Guyana. Lazare Meerson and Andre Bar-
sacq constructed several magnificent interiors, including an enormous bank
interior, several banquet and party halls, and an unusual circular room deco¬
rated with a wall-size world map. Apparently, L’Herbier intended LArgent to
be critical of all these sumptuous fashionable images, more critical than was
Marquitta or even Yvette. However, there is some question as to which is more
pronounced—the critique of the milieux or the celebration of the set decors
and what they represent. The film seems much more effective in creating
patterns of disruption in the genre by means of several highly original formal
strategies. Perhaps no other commercial narrative film seems so conspicuously
marked by camera movement—of all kinds. And that insistent movement is
paralleled by unconventional editing patterns that are no less striking.67 The
result is a peculiarly uncommercial, experimental work that, very much like
La Passion de Jeanne dArc, presents itself as a major text of the French narrative
avant-garde.

From his analysis of the French cinema in 1928, and especially the genre
of the modern studio spectacular, Gerard Talon concludes that “the ambition
to make French films no longer existed in France.”68 Ideologically and tech¬
nically, the French film industry was bent on reproducing the studio spectac¬
ular of the United States and Germany. By presenting on the screen, “under
the guise of a universal spectacle, a reality that was no longer specifically
theirs,” writes Talon, the French were admitting implicitly to failure—an
economic failure to challenge the American cinema’s hegemony and an ideo¬
logical failure to reconstitute a sense of national identity.69 The argument is
harsh but generally persuasive. The attitude of many French studio spectacu¬
lars toward the modern good life they showed may have been ambiguous, but
the alternative they usually offered was nostalgia for the past. There were

219
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE exceptions, to be sure, almost exclusively in the films of Epstein, Cavalcanti,
FILM Gremillon, and L’Herbier; but none of these (with perhaps the exception of
L’Argent) were commercially successful. The coming of sound—and French
voices, French speech—tended to reverse this pattern and gradually returned
the genre to a more distinctly French base, but with its own stereotypes.
During the first years of the sound film period, the genre sustained its prom¬
inence in films such as L’Herbier’s L'Enfant de lamour (1930) and Le Mystere
de la chambre jaune (1930), Pierre Colombier’s Le Rot des resqmlleurs (1930),
Duvivier’s Alio Berlin . . . ici Pans (1931), and Rene Guissart’s Tu seras du-
chesse (1931).70 Together with the boulevard melodrama, and often in con¬
junction with it, the modern studio spectacular soon came to dominate French
film production.

Comics and Before the Great War, when the French film industry was not turning its
Comedies national literary heritage into solemn celluloid tableaux, it was usually falling
all over itself, anticipating Arthur Freed’s credo, "Make ’em laugh, make ’em
laugh, make ’em laugh!” As most film historians agree, it was the French who
almost singlehandedly created film comedy. From 1906 to 1914, according to
Francis Facassin, more than fifty series of short comic films were produced in
France, most of them by Pathe-Freres and Gaumont.1 Their one-reel comiques
used teams of vaudeville clowns and circus acrobats often to stage one kind of
chase or another which usually ended in a triumphant, destructive furor. But
soon each film had at its center a single comedian who, throughout the series,
developed a singular comic type. Outside the particular skills of comedians,
directors, and scenario writers, the only difference between the two rival com¬
panies’ productions was Gaumont’s preference for shooting location films—in
order to keep the tricks and gags cheap.
The period between 1911 and 1914 was especially productive. At Pathe,
Andre Deed (the first major French film comic) had returned from Italy to
resume his Boireau series about a comical idiot, with an unruly shock of hair,
who resorted to gags based on mechanical effects.2 In the United States, he
was dubbed Foolshead. The Varietes actor, Prince (Charles Seigneur), was
appearing in the popular Rigadin series about “a comic simpleton.”3 Rigadin
was a plump, hapless Pierrot with a lugubrious clown face and upturned nose
who was hopelessly in love and at odds with everything.4 The top-liner at
Pathe, however, was the Max series with Max Linder. In contrast to his pred¬
ecessors and rivals, who were basically clowns, Max was a trimly turned out
bon vivant whose nuanced acting made him the first real star of the French
cinema.5 "A proper young man, impeccably dressed,” writes Georges Sadoul,
"Max lived in fine apartments, was served by domestics, frequented salons,
but never worked.”6 His adventures often were prompted by the women he
was infatuated with or bound to, and thus his actions were psychologically (if
simply) motivated and frequently involved self-mockery. But his comedy was
predicated chiefly on the contrast between his dapper figure and an unusual or
unexpected situation.
When Linder’s assets all came together in a scenario of cleverly structured
gags, his one-reel comic shorts could be the equal of any short Chaplin film.
In Max, victime du quinquina (1911), for instance, Max gets high on an overdose

220
of quinine he has taken for an illness.7 In rapid succession, he gets into a COMICS AND
quarrel with the Paris police chief, an ambassador, and the war minister, each COMEDIES
of whom presents a calling card and challenges him to a duel. With equal
speed, a succession of policemen try to arrest him for drunkenness; but when
Max blithely produces a card, they respectfully escort him in turn to the homes
of the police chief, the ambassador, and finally to bed with the minister’s
wife. In each case, his puppetlike behavior is misperceived, and he is carried
off like an overgrown baby or an expensive piece of luggage. In the end, the
minister returns and tosses Max out a bedroom window and onto the street,
where he lands on top of all three policemen. Simultaneously, they snap to
attention, but, once recognized, he is tossed about like a bundle of laundry.
Here, a vaudeville routine, assorted visual gags (Max is pinned to a lamppost
when he puts on his topcoat while leaning against it), and a series of obses¬
sively repeated situations are skillfuly woven into an economical social satire.
As with Chaplin, writes Sadoul, everything for Linder depends “on the sce¬
nario, the play within the scene, the gags and the comic timing. The film
technique, which remains secondary, is as simple as possible.’’8
At Gaumont, even more filmmakers were caught up in the rage of comic
shorts. Leonce Perret was developing a series after a character named Leonce,
which he himself played:

He was a jolly fat fellow, full of good spirits, less intelligent than Max Linder and
possessed of a short temper (whose aptness kept him from being imbecilic), not very
forward with women (whom he could not give time to anyway), and who, after
walking about a little, concluded that he was better off than most: a sympathetic type
of ordinary Frenchman—more bourgeois than Max—who had a good chance of pleas¬
ing the masses.9

Much like the American comic, John Bunny (Vitagraph Films), Leonce was
usually married, so most of the series’ comedy grew out of domestic squabbles
117. Max Linder
with his wife. Louis Feuillade was writing and directing two different series
for Gaumont. One was Bout-de-Zan, the most popular of the comic shorts
centered on the antics of a precocious child. As Bout-de-Zan, Rene Poyen was
a real enfant terrible who terrorized his parents, nurses, and anyone else who
ventured near. W. C. Fields would have crossed the street to avoid him. The
other series was called La Vie drole and starred Marcel Levesque, a new co¬
median who had made a name for himself in the boulevard comedies of Tristan
Bernard.10
The most interesting Gaumont comedies, however, were those done by Jean
Durand. Durand created his best comic shorts in the Onesime series, which
starred Ernest Bourbon, an outrageously costumed, acrobatic Auguste. One¬
sime was usually a hard-pressed buffoon who got his way through hare-brained
schemes or luck. But the real fascination of these films, according to Sadoul,
was the accelerating rhythms of their gags and “the imperturbably logical
development of an absurd situation.’’11 Onesime horloger (1912), for example,
presents Onesime with the problem of collecting an inheritance his uncle has
stipulated cannot be distributed for twenty years.12 He merely rewires the
main clock in the Paris Central Bureau, and undercranking or pixilation takes
care of the rest: studies, marriage, children, a new house, a seat at the Opera
and at the Cafe de la Paix. By the end of the reel, Onesime has the inheritance

221
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE as well as more than his share of responsibilities and ways to spend it. As
FILM Bardeche and Brasillach first noted, Onesime horloger may be the germ of
Rene Clair’s Paris qm dort (1924).13
The war nearly killed off French film comedy. Several of the comics, such
as Deed and Linder, volunteered for military service. Perret and then Linder
accepted offers to make films in the United States, and Deed went back to
Italy. Alone, Prince continued the Rigadin series for Pathe, but his character
was becoming tiresome. While Feuillade regularly ground out Bout-de-Zans
until his actor outgrew the role, Durand turned to literary adaptations and
patriotic films. By the close of 1916, Gaumont’s only regular comic short was
Feuillade’s retitled series, Pour remonter le moral de larnere, with Marcel Le¬
vesque.14 The flood of imported American comic films starring Charlie Chaplin
or “Chariot,” Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, and Flarold Lloyd quickly
filled the vacuum. Outside of Levesque and the aging Prince, there were no
French comics who could even begin to challenge them—and there was pre¬
cious little money to do it with. Besides, the war made it difficult for the
French to laugh at themselves, at least in the ways they used to. It was easier
for someone else to provide the slapstick and’the embarrassing situations; and
the American films had a level of zest, inventiveness, and cinematic construc¬
tion that created a new standard in film comedy. Perhaps the French comic
short would have been superseded by Chariot and company anyway, but the
war eliminated any chance that the genre could have been sustained and re¬
vitalized.
After the war, there were a few feeble attempts to resurrect the one- and
two-reel comic films. At Gaumont, Durand directed a short-lived series with
Marcel Levesque called Serpentin (1919-1920). This series found favor with the
critics (even Louis Delluc); but, denied distribution beyond the small French
market, it could not generate enough profits.15 After Serpentin was dropped,
Feuillade built a series called Belle Humeur (1920-1922) around another vau¬
deville actor, Georges Biscot. Flowever, in the words of Lacassin, “replacing
the calm immobility of Levesque with the tremblings [of Biscot} produced
{occasional} guffaws rather than [sustained} laughter.”16 At Pathe, the Rigadin
series wound down slowly until it was finally halted in the company’s reor¬
ganization in 1920. Max Linder returned briefly from the United States (by
way of a Swiss sanitarium, after convalescing from double pleurisy) and al¬
lowed Diamant-Berger to re-make one of his earlier one-reelers as Le Feu sacre
(1920).17 Nothing seemed to work. After 1922, the French comic short simply
disappeared except for an occasional sortie by one of the narrative avant-garde
filmmakers, none of which had more than limited distribution: Gance’s Au
secours! (1923) with Max Linder, Clair’s Entr'acte (1924), Renoir’s Charleston
(1926), Cavalcanti’s La P’tite Lily (1927) and Le Petit Chaperon rouge (1929).
The death of the comic short, however, did not mean the end of French
film comedy. For two things happened during the decade after 1915 to re¬
position it. One was the integration of the comics into the police serial, the
Arabian Nights film, and the historical reconstruction. Louis Feuillade and
Marcei Levesque were instrumental in this transformation. For both Judex
(1917) and La Nouvelle Mission de Judex (1918), Levesque developed a character
named Cocantin who served as a comic foil and befuddled assistant to the
hero. In Tih-Minh (1919) and Barrabas (1920), Feuillade gave a similar role

222
to Biscot who, in one, was even called, ironically, Placide. It was Levesque COMICS AND
who carried the comic role into feature films in Louis Nalpas’s production of COMEDIES
La Sultane de lamour (1919). And it was Armand Bernard who made the role
a viable part of the historical reconstruction film in his reluctant performance
of Planchet,-d’Artagnan’s valet, in Diamant-Berger’s Les Trois Mousquetaires
(192 1-1922).18 Thereafter, the comic confidant, usually a male sidekick, be¬
came a prominent fixture in the French cinema of the early 1920s. Along with
Levesque and Bernard, certain actors became identified with the type: Lucien
Tramel, Henri Debain, Nicolas Koline, Alex Allin.19
The other strategy to transform the comic short was the attempt to produce
a feature-length film comedy. Apparently, the idea originated with Diamant-
Berger who, in 1919, had just returned from studying, at Pathe’s insistence,
production and distribution techniques in the United States.20 Caught up in
the dream of restoring the French cinema to international status, Diamant-
Berger got Pathe’s consent to film a sure-fire property with an international
star. He chose Tristan Bernard’s most popular boulevard comedy, Le Petit Cafe
(which had played over a year at the Palais-Royal), and asked Max Linder
(whom the French now considered an American) to head its cast.21 For a
director, he took a chance on Raymond Bernard, the playwright’s son, who
had been Feyder’s assistant at Gaumont and who had directed a number of
short films based on his father’s scenarios.22 Max Linder, writes Sadoul,
fe . /

was perfectly cast in the role of the cafe waiter who, on suddenly becoming a million¬
aire, was still bound by contract to the bistro and so passed his evenings as a pleasure-
seeker and his days as a mere gar^on.23

Henri Debain also made an auspicious debut as a cafe dishwasher in the kind
of secondary comic role that would become his trademark.24 As for Raymond
Bernard, he knew full well the spirit of his father’s work, according to Ric-
ciotto Canudo, and “the slight but quite funny comedy was translated intact
onto the screen, with its characters and situations, its ironies and gaiety.’’25
Le Petit Cafe seemed to have just the right blend of physical, social, and
psychological comedy.
Everything went smoothly until the completed film was shown to a group
of distributors—and no one wanted it. Diamant-Berger complains, perhaps
disingenuously,

the exhibitors were unanimous! A Max Linder without fast chases, without slapstick,
a comedy that lasts as long as a drama . . , how could one hope to spark the audience’s
laughter and sustain it for such an unusual length of time?26

Only four cinemas agreed to open Le Petit Cafe, in December, 1919: the
Omnia-Pathe, Tivoli, Colisee, and Cine Max-Linder, which the star was then
in the process of selling.27 Against all odds, the film was a smash and soon
was playing everywhere in Paris, in the provinces, and across Europe. In Ger¬
many, it was the first French film to receive acclaim after the war. Costing
just 160,000 francs, it accumulated over a million in grosses.28
Astonishingly, nothing came of this success. All of the principals went on
to other things—Diamant-Berger began preparations for Les Trois Mousque¬
taires,; Linder returned to the United States to do a parody of Fairbanks in The
Three Must-Get-Theres\ Bernard became engaged in a series of psychological

223
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE “chamber music’’ films scripted by his father—and no one else in the industry
FILM seems to have had the courage or desire to make another Petit Cafe. This is all
the more puzzling since the French theater at the time was in the midst of a
popular revival of boulevard comedy.29 Why did this happen? Was there a
rivalry between the theater and the cinema which restricted the chances of
presenting a comedy simultaneously on stage and on film? Were the theatrical
comedies so verbally oriented that it was difficult to adapt them to the visual
film medium? Was the industry so overwhelmed by the American film comics
and so despairing of its own comic actors?
Whatever the exact combination of reasons, the feature-length film comedy
developed fitfully over the next several years. The most consistent formula was
also the most retrograde: Robert Saidreau’s series of vaudeville comedies, a
dozen of which were released from 1920 to 1925. The least interesting were
Feuillade’s uninspired adaptations of boulevard comedies such as Bayard and
Vanderbuch’s Le Gamin de Pans (1923) and Labiche’s La Fille bien gardk (1924),
both of which starred a grown-up Bout-de-Zan.30 Much more promising were
two sets of films that were closed off by untimely deaths. Pathe-Consortium
seemed to have given the go-ahead to a series of comedies, starring Lucien
Tramel, based on the Bouif character of de la Fouchardiere: Le Crime du Bouif
(1922) and La Resurrection du Bouif (1922).31 But the director of the series,
Henri Pouctal, died suddenly early in 1922. Several years later, Aubert launched
Max Linder’s last film, Le Roi du cirque (1925), a French-Austrian production
which was shot by E. Violet at the Vita-Film studios in Vienna.32 The subject,
a succession of amusing episodes loosely organized around the circus arena,
foreshadowed and may have influenced Chaplin’s more tightly structured film,
The Circus (1927). But Linder’s suicide, in late October, 1925, unfortunately
closed off what promised to be a series of fine comedies and a new stage in his
career.33 The most important effort of all, as it turned out, had little to do
with either the boulevard comedy, the vaudeville, or the circus. Instead, it
represented an original synthesis of American film comedy and earlier French
fantasy films, interpolated with parodic elements from other film genres. Two
writer-directors were principally involved in this strategy: Ivan Mosjoukine
and Rene Clair.
Ironically, it was the young Aibatros company formed of Russian emigres
that initiated this renewal of French film comedy. Apparently, their model of
comedy construction was the story of a naive provincial fellow come to the
sophisticated city, which suggests a parallel to the company members’ own
transposition from Russia to France and Paris. This juxtaposition was the basis
for linking together all sorts of mocking episodes in different milieux. For
instance, in Tourjansky’s Ce Cochon de Morin (1924), adapted from a Maupas¬
sant story, Morin (Nicolas Rimsky), a lawyer from La Rochelle, has a series
of drunken adventures in Paris that carry him from a jazzband dance hall to
court. Perhaps overstating the case, Jean Pascal saw the film as “high comedy’’
in contrast to “the heavy-handed burlesque too often employed in American
comedies.’’34 An even better film was Volkoffs Les Ombres qui passent (1924),
from a scenario by Mosjoukine.35 Louis Barclay (Mosjoukine) and his young
wife Alice (Andree Brabant) live simply and sanely in Happyland, the country
estate of Louis’s father, Professor Barclay (Henry Krauss). In order to collect
an inheritance of several million francs, the young innocents travel to Paris,

224
where Louis is quickly seduced by the vamp Jacqueline (Natalie Lissenko) and COMICS AND
becomes the victim of numerous misadventures. Les Ombres qui passent seems COMEDIES
to have been a fantastic tale, a pastiche parodying various genres, from Grif¬
fith’s sentimental country melodramas to the French bourgeois melodrama.
Mosjoukine’s most interesting contribution, however, was Le Brasier ardent
(1923), which he wrote, directed, and performed in as the leading character.
Although not all that successful commercially, Le Brasier ardent was unques¬
tionably one of the most bizarre films of the decade. Cinemagazine called the
film a labyrinth whose every turn opened onto a different genre.36 Some of the
comedy comes from LochakofFs strange set designs—e.g., the detective agency,
which the husband literally falls into, or the woman’s bedroom, which oper¬
ates much like a Mack Sennett set. But most of it is produced by Mosjoukine’s
conception of the detective, who rapidly regresses from his initial heroic image
through a shifting parody of disguises to a mama’s boy who lives with his
adoring mother and her pet bulldog. Mosjoukine was never again to be more
mockingly exuberant than in this film. Within a year, stardom had tamed
him into respectability.
Just as Le Brasier ardent was being previewed for the critics and exhibitors,
Rene Clair was engaged in a similar attempt to revive French film comedy.
His first project, based on an original scenario, Baris qui dort (1924), was an
unexpected commercial success, despite a certain roughness in its mise-en-
scene and editing.37 Here Clair quite consciously wanted “to revert to the
prewar tradition, that is to say, the tradition of the first French comic shorts
. . . films [that] address directly the greatest number of spectators.”38 His
narrative was predicated on the inverse of Durand’s Onesime horloger. An
angry scientist invents an invisible-ray machine which he uses to stop time
and immobilize all Paris. The only people not affected are the scientist him¬
self, his daughter, a planeload of five people from Marseille, and the caretaker
atop the Eiffel Tower. Paris becomes simultaneously an immense waxworks
museum and a rich, ripe world for the six characters to wander through—and
plunder. Their wanderings are both comic and magical. A whole society of
manners, character types, public and domestic situations lies exposed to their
scrutiny and ridicule. They themselves, however, repeat those gestures and
actions by taking whatever they desire and by cavorting and then fighting
among themselves while suspended over the city on the Eiffel Tower. The
exuberant, mocking spirit of playfulness in Paris qui dort, along with that in
Le Brasier ardent and Clair’s second film, Entr’acte (1924), carry all three films
well beyond the conventions of the commercial cinema.
Although Clair’s next few films do not really renounce this comic renewal,
they tend more and more to experiments in fantasy. Le Voyage imaginaire (1926)
probably most exhibits his continued interest in comedy. Much of the comedy
here evokes Le Brasier ardent and Clair’s first films. It opens, for instance, with
the hero being chased by a bulldog who in turn is being chased by its master;
and its long fantasy section ends with the hero transformed into a toy bulldog
before the eyes of the disappointed heroine. Early on, the film also includes
some effective satire of French bureaucracy—especially in the way a bouquet
of flowers passes round and round a small town bank office, in order to define
all of the characters and their relations with one another. However, Le Voyage
imaginaire was no more a commercial success than was Le Brasier ardent,39 The

225
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE Mosjoukine-Clair renewal seemed little more than a minuscule eddy in the
FILM stream of profitable period films and emerging modern studio spectaculars.
After Mosjoukine moved on to lavish spectacle films, Albatros turned to
Nicolas Rimsky to sustain its film comedy projects. Rimsky was not a major
comic actor; in fact, he looked and acted like a milquetoast version of Marcel
Levesque. His films, done in collaboration with Pierre Colombier and Roger
Lion, depended heavily on comic situations and on wholesale borrowings from
other films, both French and American. One of the first of these films, Co-
lombier’s Paris en cinq jours (1926), revives the story of provincial characters
in the city, but in a new format.40 Here Rimsky is teamed with Dolly Davis
as a New York couple (he loves The Three Musketeers \ she is a swimmer) who
win $10,000 in a contest, get engaged, and set sail for Paris. This sets the
stage for five days of comic adventures. In later films, such as Le Chasseur de
Chez Maxim’s (1927)—which originally was to have starred Max Linder—
Cinea-Cine-pour-tous argued that Rimsky was able to transpose completely
“American methods—gags, touches of imaginative detail, comic gestures drawn
from Chaplin and Lloyd—into an atmosphere of French gaiety.”41
Jim la Roulette, roi des voleurs (1926), the only one of these films that I have
seen, illustrates how well, and not so well, this actually worked.42 Rimsky
plays Jacques Morton, the lowly secretary to a popular novelist, Brettoneau,
whose daughter Pauline (Gaby Morlay) he loves madly. Much like a latter-day
Orlando, he writes anonymous poems to her and attaches them to lamp shades
around the Brettoneau’s chic ultramodern villa. Brettoneau’s agent, an Amer-
ican-style advertising maniac, conceives a plan to reverse the slumping sales
of his books—throw a party and have Jim la Houlette, a Fantomas-like char¬
acter who has terrorized Europe for ten years, steal his latest manuscript.
Morton is bamboozled into disguising himself as Jim (Pauline says she could
love such a man), but the real thief appears and leaves him to take the rap.
In the court triaj (a kind of parody of Crainquehille), Brettoneau and his agent
testify against their own duped accomplice—the publicity campaign has worked;
the new novel is a best-seller. But when Pauline confesses that she loves him,
Morton proudly accepts his criminal name. At the last moment, his lawyer
(who turns out to be the real Jim) allows him to escape from prison. On a
train bound for the lawyer’s country estate, Morton disguises himself as a
priest and performs a few routines imitating Chaplin in The Pilgrim. The
lawyer invites Brettoneau to his estate, and Morton pretends to haunt him
(once more disguised, as a ten-foot-tall figure perched invisibly on a servant’s
shoulders). Pauline shows up unexpectedly, just as her father (threatened with
disclosure) has made out a blank check for 500,000 francs. Suddenly, the
police arrive. The lawyer and his wife go off in one underground tunnel;
Morton and Pauline go off (with the check) in another. There the film ends,
as improbably as a serial, as she sums up her love: “The things I loved in Jim,
I love in you—bravery and daring; but besides you are kind and honest.” So
it goes, indeed.
After the success of Max Linder’s Le Roi du cirque (1925), Aubert decided
to revive the Bouif character in a series of films starring Lucien Tramel. Ac¬
cording to Cinea-Cine-pour-tous, the most important of these was the six-part
serial, Le Bouif errant (1926): “Sly and naturally optimistic, without overzeal-
ous outbursts, without theatrical effects, Tramel provokes laughter through

226
the aptness of his gestures and expressions to the situation of the scenario.”43 COMICS AND
His production team was also quite supportive: an original scenario from de COMEDIES
la Fouchardiere, competent direction by Rene Hervil, and solid comic acting
by Albert Prejean and Jim Gerald. Aubert’s attempt to exploit Tramel in a
double role in Duvivier’s Le Mystere de la Tour Eiffel (1927), however, frittered
away a chance to sustain momentum.44 Clearly, one problem in most of these
films was an enervating tendency to exploit sumptuous modern decors, as if
comic appeal were not enough to generate public interest. That tendency was
so marked in Aubert’s Les Transatlantiques (1928), directed by Diamant-Berger
and Colombier, that a satire of Yankee tourists became little more than a puff
of charming pleasantries in the chic milieux of Paris and Deauville.45 Much
like the modern studio spectacular, the French film comedy seemed on the
verge of losing even the remotest connection with its own national identity,
its own social structures.46
In the last two years of the decade, the genre suddenly flowered in a quick
succession of films, most of them produced by Albatros. Unlike the previous
films, they were deft adaptations of classic or current boulevard comedies.
These films were grounded solidly in French society, and they consistently
subordinated fantasy and psychological responses to it, integrating them into
the representation of a specific milieu. They also announced a new generation
of comic actors: Albert Prejean, Pierre Batcheff, Michel Simon. The first two
films to begin the cycle were directed by the filmmaking brothers, Henri
Chomette and Rene Clair.
Le Chauffeur de Mademoiselle (1928), which opened at the Omnia-Palace in
April, 1928, seems to have been a carefully calculated project written for
Dolly Davis and Albert Prejean.47 Chomette himself freely admitted this, but
distinguished this, his first feature film, from the then current “league of
nations” productions:

In the Chauffeur de Mademoiselle, a film that I made in full knowledge of the commer¬
cial concessions I decided were acceptable, I have tried to achieve a homogeneity by
using French elements only.48

Among others, Jean Dreville remarked on the comedy’s singularity:

Ah yes, a charming film, full of good taste and balance, and according to the French
formula. For once, the formula seems to me excellent. Le Chauffeur de Mademoiselle is
indeed a French film; the publicity is not lying.49

Although the film seems to have been modestly profitable, most film historians
have accepted the critic’s disappointment at Chomette’s failure to carry over
the array of techniques manifested in his few short experimental films, Jeux
des reflets et de la vitesse (1925) and Cinq Minutes du cinema pur (1926). Rene
Jeanne and Charles Ford, for instance, conclude that, in Le Chauffeur de Ma¬
demoiselle, “Chomette was no more than a good craftsman.”50 Dreville, how¬
ever, valued the film precisely for this restraint and notes several images which
suggest that the film was more than hack work: “It is definitely interesting to
study; the design produces some striking dissolves between disparate images,
a sky that progressively ‘eats’ half a tree in the background, etc.”51 The decou-
page of one sequence published in Cinegraphie also reveals a rather effective use
of multiple exposures or split-screen framing for comic effect: a couple’s tele-

227
118. (left) Albert Prejean,
Olga Tschekowa, and Vital
Geymond in Un Chapeau de
Faille d’ltalie (1928)

119- (right) Jim Gerald and

Albert Prejean
phone conversation (“Don’t come yet. I haven’t dared break the news of our
marriage to my aunt’’) is gradually overheard by a half-dozen people listening
in on the party line.52 The moment has a Lubitsch-like touch that combines
the technical facility of Gance’s Napoleon and a typical gag from the prewar
French comic shorts. Unfortunately, no print of the film seems to have sur¬
vived so that we could resolve these critical contradictions.
Rene Clair’s Un Chapeau de paille d’ltalie (1928) presents no such problem.
It was Alexandre Kamenka who bought the rights of this clever Labiche play
from Marcel L’Herbier and then asked Clair to adapt and direct it for Alba-
tros.53 The film pleased the critics more than it did French audiences (an
exclusive run at the Omnia-Palace, early in 1928, lasted only three weeks),
but it was just successful enough—and without a single major star.54 Clair’s
adaptation was brilliant in at least two crucial ways. The play’s early Second
Empire setting (1851) was transposed to that of the Belle Epoque bourgeoisie
(1895), specifically, to the Charenton suburb of Paris bordering on the Bois
de Vincennes. Keeping the Second Empire setting, reasoned Clair, would have
created a period film of nostalgic beauty; to produce properly ridiculous cos¬
tumes and decors for a 1928 audience, the fin-de-siecle period was perfect. Sepia
film stock provided an appropriate period color-tone (the chief cameraman was
Maurice Desfassiaux); and Lazare Meerson’s interiors, with their ornamental
Elenri II funishings, caricatured early Pathe film sets.55 Thus the society which
enjoyed Labiche’s play is itself satirized in the film. Furthermore, Clair per¬
ceived that Labiche’s verbal comedy was based on a comedy of situations, a
burlesque of movement. His task was to drop the verbal comedy and graft

228
onto this “burlesque intrigue . . . , transposed cinematically and treated like COMICS AND
a ballet, ... a series of striking visual observations.’’56 The result, although COMEDIES
perhaps indebted to Lubitsch and Chaplin, was a truly French film comedy—
without a single comic caption. At its summer preview, Edmond Epardaud
dubbed it a “comedy of observation.’’57
The narrative of Un Chapeau de paille d’ltalie intermeshes two simple plots
in a delightful web of complications. On the afternoon of his marriage to
Helene Nonancourt (Marise Maia), Fadinard (Albert Prejean) crosses the Bois
de Vincennes to inspect his new apartment and nuptial chamber. On the way,
his horse nonchalantly munches on a lady’s hat in a bush; from behind the
bush quickly come Anais de Beauperthuis (Olga Tschekowa) and her lover,
Lieutenant Tavernier (Vital Geymond). In a rage, Tavernier orders Fadinard
to find another Italian straw hat exactly like the half-eaten one or he will
destroy his apartment. For the lady is married and must return home “intact.”
Throughout the day, as he anxiously goes through the series of social cere¬
monies, Fadinard and his servant Felix (Alex Allin) pursue the elusive dupli¬
cate hat. Tipped off by a saleswoman, he finally goes to the home of Beau¬
perthuis (Jim Gerald) and explains his predicament, only to discover the man
is Anais’s husband. When the hat eventually shows up, aptly enough, it has
been there all along—the first of the bride’s wedding presents. After a final
ballet of circulating objects, running figures, and desperate glances, Anais
returns safely to her own bedroom and husband, while Fadinard sends Taver¬
nier off and goes to Helene in the nuptial chamber.
The marvelous play of visual observation which this narrative accrues makes
for an unrelenting attack on the society of the Belle Epoque bourgeoisie.
Clair’s method is clearly an extension of the bureaucratic satire in Le Voyage
imaginaire. The characters are all recognizable types with different objects to
define them, and they behave like marionettes going through the motions of
social interchange. Tavernier is all strutting uniform, with a ridiculously ob¬
solete sense of decorum and gallantry. Nonancourt, the bride’s squat father
(Yvonneck), is stuffed into a new shirt front and boots that pinch. Tall, thin
cousin Bobin (Pre fils) is at loose ends over a lost glove. Uncle Vesinet (Paul
Olivier) has a blocked earhorn and cannot hear or see anything that is going
on. Felix, on the other hand, sees entirely too much. At one point, every time
he peeks into Fadinard’s sitting room, the lovely but powerless Anais is in a
different man’s arms. When the huge blustering Beauperthuis is finally intro¬
duced, his feet are soaking in a pan of hot water, which at last allows Non¬
ancourt to pilfer some comfortable footwear.
Each social ceremony is undermined by a parody of conventions. The may¬
or’s speech to the wedding party, for instance, is interrupted by a loose tie—
everyone straightens his own, including the mayor, until finally an uncle dis¬
covers that it was his tie that initiated the ricocheting comedy.58 Then the
mayor is cut off in the middle when the increasingly nervous Fadinard inter¬
prets his lifted arms as a sign of conclusion and leads the whole family off past
the astonished officials. Later, while a drunken Nonancourt delivers his homily
on marriage to Helene and the family in what he thinks to be the new apart¬
ment, Fadinard is in the next room unwittingly revealing to Beauperthuis
Anais’s affair with Tavernier. Even the objects gain an importance of their
own as possessions, an importance that is ridiculed in several wedding gift

229
120. (left) The final recovery
of the hat in Un Chapeau de
paille d’ltalie (1928)

121. (right) Pierre Batcheff as

the defense lawyer fantasizing
exchanges. Momentarily mystified, Tavernier accepts the present of a clock,
in Les Deux Timides (1929) which turns out to be a replica of one in the bedroom; just as the prim couple
who offered it prepare to drive off in their carriage, the clock sails through
the second-floor window and smashes on the sidewalk beside them. When the
exasperated Nonancourt tries to annul the marriage at the end, the relatives
immediately attack Felix and grab their gifts back—inadvertently exposing
the hat, the source and resolution of all the troubles.
Un Chapeau de paille d’ltalie neatly sets in opposition the reality and illusion,
the emptiness and hypocrisy, of the French bourgeois marriage. Although
initially juxtaposed to the newlyweds, the adulterous couple soon literally
replaces them. It is they who occupy the new apartment and who finally hole
up in the nuptial chamber (although nothing untoward happens). While the
relatives come bearing gifts to adorn the apartment, Tavernier methodically
destroys some of the things that are already there. In a brief sequence (using
wild camera movement, slow motion, and fast motion), Fadinard even imag¬
ines a whole set of furniture disappearing. But Tavernier and Anais only pre¬
pare for the pattern of doubling that succinctly closes the film. While Taver¬
nier runs off to rescue the hat, first from the police and then from an
inconveniently placed lamppost (its last resting place), Helene hides Anais
behind her full wedding dress and Fadinard blocks Beauperthuis’s vision with
a raised umbrella. In their attempt to preserve a marriage, the newlyweds
provide an innocent front for deception. The implication is clear—it is only a
matter of time before that deception is embodied in them. The final images

230
confirm it. While Anais smiles in her sleep, Beauperthuis sits bewildered in COMICS AND
his bedroom chair, gazing at her hat (actually Helene’s). Because the hat seems COMEDIES
intact, is she really in his possession? This illusory emblem of “the proper
marriage’’ (fitting woman to man) is then matched by its corollary—the floral
wedding wreath placed on the bedroom mantel and preserved by a glass cover.
How soon will Helene find her Tavernier?
After Un Chapeau de paille d’ltalie, Clair had wanted to direct a realist film
based on a recent criminal case; but early in 1928, Chiappe, the new prefet de
police in Paris, began to concern himself with cinema exhibition (e.g., Les
Amis de Spartacus), and Clair abandoned the idea.59 Since Albatros had a
contract with Maurice de Feraudy, he decided to use him in another adaptation
of a Labiche play. Les Deux Timides (1929) was less successful than its prede¬
cessor, perhaps because its release coincided with the first sound films late in
1928 and early in 1929-60 But the film itself was rather different, and critics
have been divided on its merits ever since.61 La Revue du cinema, for instance,
found it deftly charming in its caricature, but not really ferocious enough.62
The two timid characters are Fremission (Pierre Batcheff), a young pro¬
vincial lawyer, and an old landowner, Thibaudier (Maurice de Feraudy), whose
daughter Cecile (Vera Flory) is the object of Fremission’s inept courting.63 His
rival, Garadoux (Jim Gerald), is a former wife-beater (which no one knows,
since he has resettled) whom Fremission had defended in his first court case
several years before. After a multiplication of misunderstandings that culmi¬
nate in a near siege of the Thibaudier estate, plus another court trial, Fre¬
mission and Cecile are married.
Several things distinguish Les Deux Timides from Clair’s earlier films. This
is the first film in which Clair shot exteriors outside Paris, and several se¬
quences—for example, the young lovers meeting in an open pasture—have a
charm and freshness usually associated with the provincial realist film.64 The
interiors, again by Meerson, were designed to complement the authenticity of
the location shooting and emphasized exact details—such as the old sewing
machine in Garadoux’s first apartment, the mixture of comfortable and uncom¬
fortable chairs in Thibaudier’s drawing room. A comedy of situations struc¬
tures this film as well, but the comedy is less socially determined and more
interior, that is, focused on the psychology of character types—harmonizing
with the more realistic decors.65 In the opening trial sequence, for instance, a
mouse interrupts the proceedings much as did the loose tie at the wedding
ceremony in Un Chapeau\ but here the effect is to so unhinge Fremission that
he becomes a blathering fool who condemns his own client, Garadoux. When
the young suitor calls on Thibaudier to broach the subject of marriage, the
two men are so afraid to speak that three hours later, when Cecile enters the
room to turn on a light, she startles them both out of a sound sleep. Batcheff s
stylized but finely nuanced performance as Fremission (his shy courting and
frantic avoidance of danger are clearly modeled on Chaplin) is just right for
this psychological comedy, but the other principal characters either shade off
toward naturalism (Thibaudier) or broad caricature (Garadoux and his family
who come to visit Thibaudier).66 In fact, as Jean Mitry argues, the caricature
and physical comedy—which are strongest in the final sequences, especially in
the siege and second trial—do tend to throw the film slightly out of balance.67
Finally, Les Deux Timides contains several inventive gags that ridicule the

231
122. The final triptych
sequence in Les Deux Timides
(1929)

mental state of its characters, using optical effects and the split-screen concept
Henri Chomette had recently exploited in Le Chauffeur de Mademoiselle. The
film opens with shots of Garadoux cruelly beating his wife, which are suddenly
revealed to be the representation of the prosecutor’s speech at the beginning
of the trial (this seems to cleverly incorporate Clair’s original plan for a realist
crime film). In contrast, Fremission’s defense envisions a gentle, generous
Garadoux and culminates in five overwhelmingly sentimental images within
one shot. After the mouse wreaks havoc in the courtroom, however, Fremis-
sion becomes flustered. And his lapses are conveyed in shots of Garadoux and
his wife that slow and freeze, then speed up and freeze again, then reverse;
finally, when the lawyer’s mind fails, Harry Alan Potamkin writes, “the do¬
mestic scene explodes [in a spiral] from the screen leaving it blank.”68 In
another sequence, after they have recognized one another outside Thibaudier’s
house, the two rivals go through a mock battle in separate rooms—each vic¬
torious within his half of a split screen. The final shot is a delightful parody
of Gance’s triple-screen in Napoleon. Fremission and Cecile are in bed in the
center panel, flanked by Garadoux and Thibaudier, separately in theirs. The
two lovers embrace and look shyly off to the left and right. Thibaudier duti¬
fully turns off his light; they embrace again and turn off their overhead light;
Garadoux looks startled and angrily throws down his lamp. Simultaneously,
the center light pops on, and a much vexed Fremission bolts upright and pulls
down a shade in front of the camera.
The last silent film comedy produced by Albatros was Jacques Feyder’s Les
Nouveaux Messieurs (1929), adapted from a current play by Robert de Flers and
Francis de Coisset.69 Both the play and the Charles Spaak/Feyder scenario were

232
 COMICS AND
COMEDIES

123- Gaby Morlay and Albert

Prejean in Les Nouveaux
Messieurs (1929)

overtly political, which made the film rather unique in the French cinema of
the 1920s. Jean Gaillac (Albert Prejean), chief electrician at the Paris Opera
and an important labor union official, is interested in Suzanne Verrier (Gaby
Morlay), a prima ballerina at the Opera and mistress of Comte de Montoire-
Grandpre (Henry Roussel). Jean is elected to run for the Chamber of Deputies
and, in a left landslide, defeats his opponent, Montoire-Grandpre. Suzanne
becomes his mistress, and soon he has accepted all the trappings of authority
and power. When the government is overturned in a crisis, Jean accepts a
diplomatic post in the colonies (arranged by his rival), and Suzanne reluctantly
returns to Montoire-Grandpre. The French government responded to this sub¬
ject by refusing Albatros a license to distribute the film. Their objection was
not to the narrative, which seemed to satirize the labor union movement (a
topical subject after the left lost the elections of 1928), but to the disrespectful
depiction of the Chamber of Deputies and its members.70 After months of
haggling and several brief cuts, the film was exhibited at the Paramount-
Palace, in April, 1929, with its basic satirical structure intact.71 Perhaps be¬
cause of its notoriety, Feyder’s film was quite successful. The readers of Cinea-
Cine-pour-tous even voted it second to The Jazz Singer as the best film of 1929.72
Les Nouveaux Messieurs can be described as a sentimental romance or melo¬
drama in a comic mode that synthesizes many previous film comedies. On the
one hand, it continues the pattern of most Albatros and Aubert comedies of
1926-1927. There are several large decors (again by Meerson) straight out of
the modern studio spectacular: a detailed set reconstruction of the Chamber of
Deputies and a sumptuous modern townhouse for the Comte de Montoire-
Grandpre. Moreover, the heroine is a star and has the role of a dancer at the

233
COMMERCIAL narrative Opera, where the film’s long opening sequence of a rehearsal takes place.
FILM However, the light comic observations are closely modeled on Clair. The count
is first defined by his lapel pin, his monocle, his coat and cane, and the overall
image reflected in his chauffeured car. Jean becomes what he opposes by using
the same poster design as his opponent and by blithely donning a top hat and
tails. And, like Clair, Feyder and his cameramen, Georges Perinal and Maurice
Desfassiaux, also employ technical devices for comic effect. The dedication of
a workers’ city ends in a Sennett-like fast-motion parade and speech so Jean
can return to the crisis-wracked capital.73 In the Chamber itself, the Minister
of Art falls asleep and dreams his colleagues have been transformed into bal¬
lerinas in tutti. On the crucial vote of confidence for the government, a soft
focus area keeps moving back and forth over the chamber, signaling the ca¬
pricious shifts in voting.
The comedy, as one can see, is not quite the equal of Clair’s, and the film
does drag in some sequences.74 Perhaps it is most effective in the way the
overall mode shifts from romantic comedy to ironic, or even tragic, satire.75
The ultimate subject of the satire is not the'blindness and corruption of the
working class or labor union movement but rather the social and political
system that remains unchanged and easily co-opts them. Jean and Suzanne
enjoy a brief idyll on the morning of the leftist victory—driving along the
Seine (with the Billancourt factories behind them and the Eiffel Tower off to
the side) and impulsively going for a swim—but the rest of the film reveals
the moment to be an illusion. Perhaps the real victim of the film and its
central character is Suzanne. She only accepts Montoire-Grandpre’s favors be¬
cause it is the “right thing’’ to do. Although she genuinely likes Jean, he pays
little attention to her once he is launched on a career. It is she who suffers on
his politicking trips: struggling with the baggage while he is greeted cere¬
moniously at the station, sleeping away the afternoon in a cheap hotel room,
finding dirt in her luncheon coffee cup. In order to enjoy even a bit of the
good life, Suzanne seems to have no other choice than to go back to Montoire-
Grandpre. For her, too, “the new masters’’ are no different from the others.
That Moussinac and his Socialist-Communist friends defended Feyder’s film
against the government’s censorship made perfect sense.
There was one more French film comedy of a very different sort—Jean
Renoir’s most underrated silent film, Tire au flanc (1928).76 Although an in¬
dependent production, financed by Pierre Braunberger, Tire au flanc was defi¬
nitely a commercial project, predicated on the appeal of Mouezy-Eon and
Sylvanie’s vaudeville comedy about army barracks life, which had played at
the same Paris theater for twenty years.77 According to Alexander Sesonske,
Renoir added a new character to the play, the big-hearted, bumbling servant
set off against a blithely assured, self-centered master.78 As in Nana, the con¬
trast between the two central characters was established by divergent acting
styles: the smooth grace of dancer Georges Pomies versus the awkward, gro¬
tesque fumblings of Michel Simon. And here, in a comedy, it worked perhaps
even more effectively.
Jean Dubois d’Ombelles (Pomies), a naive, pacifist poet, is about to be
conscripted into the army, along with his servant Joseph (Simon), who, alleg¬
edly, is going to protect him. A dinner party given by Jean’s aunt, Mme.
Blandin (Maryanne)—to pull a few strings for him—goes awry; and the guests,

234
Colonel Brochard (Felix Oudart) and Lieutenant Daumel (Jean Storm), leave COMICS AND
convinced that he is an idiot. Once at Casserone, Joseph makes himself at COMEDIES
home while Jean quickly becomes the “Sad Sack” butt of the barracks pranks
led by Muflot (Zellas). Both men’s fiancees visit Casserone, with predictable
results. Mme. Blandin’s maid, Georgette (Fridette Fatton), becomes the whole
barrack’s sweetheart and causes a near-riot that sends Jean and Muflot to prison.
Fler daughter, Solange (Jeanne Helbling), to Jean’s chagrin, falls in love with
Daumel. But he soon discovers Solange’s sister Lily (Kitty Dorlay), who has
loved him all along. Promising to reform, Jean is released from prison and
performs with Joseph at the colonel’s annual barracks party. When a fire breaks
out, he proves himself a hero at last, by capturing the arsonist, Muflot. In the
end, there is a triple wedding celebration—Mme. Blandin and Colonel Bro¬
chard toast Jean and Lily as well as Daumel and Solange in the dining room,
while several enlisted men revel with Joseph and Georgette in the kitchen.
Tire au flanc was shot rapidly in the early summer of 1928, just before the
opening of the Carcassonne festival that would provide the locations for Le
Tournoi (1929).79 Even more than in La Lille de Lean (1925), this was a co¬
operative enterprise that established the model of community filmmaking for
much of Renoir’s work in the 1930s. Renoir stuck to simple, realistic sets
designed by Eric Aes, and he and his cast and crew apparently improvised a
great deal. Following the tendency of several French films made in the wake
of Gance’s Napoleon, some of this improvisation took the form of extensive and
elaborate camera movements. Their peculiarly rough, erratic nature may be
explained by a curious story Renoir once told Kevin Brownlow:

I had an electrician [Louis Nee}. He used to tell me what to do. He had some very
good ideas. So I gave him a handheld camera and I let him stand by the main camera
[Jean Bachelet] and shoot the scene however he liked. And I used a lot of his material.
He became a famous cameraman.80

Complementing this camera movement (which included all manner of tracks,

dollies, and pans) is a pattern of foreground/background juxtapositions (of
characters and parts of the decor), both of which recur prominently in Renoir’s
1930s films—e.g., Boudu sauve des eaux (1932).81 The episodic narrative, the
carefree acting, the “wild” camerawork, the seemingly slapdash editing—all
gave Tire au flanc an unruly look and an unbridled, off-balance rhythm that
set it apart from Clair and Feyder’s smoothly crafted films.82 At the time of
its premiere at the Electric Cinema, in December, 1928, the vaudeville com¬
edy source did indeed guarantee the film’s success; and later its playful exu¬
berance much impressed the French New Wave filmmakers.83
There are several levels of comedy operating in Tire au flanc. Physical com¬
edy dominates the satire on barracks life, in short mock-documentary sketches
that made Francois Truffaut compare Renoir’s film to Jean Vigo’s satire on
boarding school life in Zero de conduite (1933).84 Arriving at Casserone, for
instance, Jean walks from his chauffeured car with a briefcase and a respect¬
fully raised hat only to be immediately pummeled by his fellow soldiers—not
once, but twice. At bayonet practice, he gently pokes the enemy dummy
until, prodded suddenly from behind, he hysterically attacks everything and
everybody in sight. Then, on maneuvers one day, the recruits don gas masks
in response to an imaginary attack. While their leader struts off confidently

235
124. (left) The “gas attack”
in Tire au flanc (1928)
>

125. (right) The opening shot

of Michel Simon and Fridette
Fatton
in one direction, they stagger off in the other, stumbling about the woods
like blind men using their rifles as canes. Finally, they all roll down a long
hill and, like frightening (and frightened) prehistoric monsters, scatter a class
of schoolchildren on a nature study outing. All this is a bit daring because
Renoir dressed his soldiers, not in the usual silly Belle Epoque uniforms, but
in World War I blue.85
The sexual comedy involving both masters and servants, which is even more
important, depends on ironies of situation and juxtaposition. Perhaps its high
point comes during Jean’s incarceration, in several variations on a “midsum¬
mer night’s dream.’’ Outside the barracks one night, Joseph and Colonel Bro-
chard circle in and out of a clump of trees—in a clockwork pattern, each
ignorant of the other—awaiting their lovers. When Georgette and Mme. Fle-
chois appear, they mesh with the wrong men. While the Colonel presents a
poem to the startled maid, Joseph realizes the error, although Mme. Flechois
seems not to mind. Georgette simply pockets the poem, finds Joseph, and
pulls him off. Another master has become a poet, ergo, an idiot. The night
before, however, had seen a more bittersweet encounter. Daumel and Solange
are strolling through a “forest’’ of drying men’s shirts just outside the barracks
prison. From a bush beside Jean’s cell window, he plucks a rose and they kiss.
Noticing the hand mysteriously appear in the moonlight, Jean is drawn to
the high window, where he watches in despair, his body spread-eagled against
the wall (in Andre Bazin’s phrase) “like a great nailed bird.’’86 As Sesonske
points out, this supposedly Stroheim-like moment is quickly reversed four
short sequences later.87 Smuggled into the barracks, Lily tosses pebbles at
Jean’s prison window, which he ignores (he is reading a book on how to be
audacious!). Finally, she stands on a cart to get his attention, and Jean again
pulls himself up to the bars, but joyfully, to a very different apparition. When
the guard comes to release him at that moment, Jean reaches for a rose; and,
while Lily watches, he dances merrily out of the cell, presenting the rose to

236
 COMICS AND
COMEDIES

126. Michel Simon as an

angel in Tire au flanc (1928)

his captor. Jean’s character has finally undergone the change necessary for both
his survival and happiness.
For all its roughness and exuberance, Tire au flanc exhibits a remarkable
symmetry in its structure.88 The end circles back to the beginning in a series
of clever reversals on master-servant relations. In the initial dinner sequence,
the characters of master and servant are neatly juxtaposed. The first shot opens
on a Daumier print depicting a fat gentleman kneeling eagerly before a young
buxom woman whose hand is daintily touching his balding head. The camera
dollies out and over the dinner table as Joseph and Georgette arrange the linen
(a toss of the cloth momentarily whitens the frame completely) and pause to
stretch over it and kiss. After the camera dollies back into the Daumier print,
the second shot repeats the movement of the first, only now Jean is standing
at the head of the table, practicing his speech for Solange, who seems less
than interested—the image will be echoed and transformed in the cell window
encounter between Lily and Jean. A third shot extends the contrast by having
Joseph and Georgette reenter the dining room and kiss, shocking Jean, who
orders them out. The formal parallels set master against servant, movement
against immobility, overt affection against repression, action against words.89
The arranged dinner quickly deteriorates into chaos when Joseph drops the
meat off the platter, drips sauce on the Colonel’s precious uniform, and then
casually tosses a glass of Benzine (brought out to clean the uniform, but which
the Colonel mistakenly drinks instead) into the fireplace. The resulting roar
of flames drives everyone into the hall, where the guests try respectfully to
take their leave.
At the barracks party, master and servant play ironically reversed roles. Jean
now is an exuberant satyr, scampering about in a short fur piece and a crown
of laurel, piping on a flute. Joseph, however, is a large, gangling, bemused
angel, dressed in a full white dress with flimsy paper wings. He is dropped,
wriggling, from the flies just as Nana was in Renoir’s earlier film. When this

237
COMMERCIAL NARRATIVE ballet is disrupted by a fire set deliberately backstage, it is Jean who manfully
FILM douses it with a water hose (some satyr) and who now pummels the arsonist,
his prankster nemesis, Muflot. Unlike Nana, Jean both proves and discovers
himself in this performance. An epilogue of just a half-dozen shots carries the
reversal one step further. Joseph leaves his wedding banquet in one room to
serve at the banquet of his superiors in the next. Yet both tables are decorated
with the same castle cake. And the final tracking shot comes to rest on Jean
and Lily kissing below the table (he has dropped something again)—echoing
Joseph and Georgette in the beginning of the film. Tire au flanc is more than
a tuneup for such films as Boudu sauve des eaux and La Regie du jeu (1939); it
is a first-rate social satire on a favorite Renoir theme—the comic interaction
of masters and servants.

By the end of the decade, the French film industry evidenced little concern
for producing French films, except in the genre of film comedy. The period
spectacle film generally was reconstructing historical eras elsewhere; the mod¬
ern studio spectacular was producing a luxurious “no man’s land” milieu;
while the realist film and the fantasy film had been abandoned to the narrative
avant-garde. Only the comedy presented the French as they saw themselves—
through mockery. With the development of the sound film, the genre gained
added prominence. Some films—such as Jean Choux’s Jean de la lune (1932),
starring Michel Simon and Rene Lefevre; Marc Allegret’s Mam’zelle Nitouche
(1931), with Raimu; and Renoir’s On purge Bebe (1931), with Simon and Fer-
nandel—merely imitated the conventions established by the Aubert and Al-
batros films of the middle 1920s. Others, however—such as Rene Clair’s Le
Million (1931), with Lefevre, and A nous la liberte (1931); Renoir’s Boudu sauve
des eaux (1932), with Simon; and Jean Vigo’s Zero de conduite (1933)—all
extended the biting and caustic mockery of the late 1920s comedies. It was
through these films, like it or not, that the film industry began to regain its
Frenchness.

238
Alternate
Cinema
Network
We are witnessing the birth of an extraordinary art. The only truly modern art
perhaps, assured already of its place and one day of astonishing glory, because it is
simultaneously ... the child of technology and of human ideals.
—Louis Delluc (1918)

People are only barely beginning to realize that an unforeseen art has come into being.
One that is absolutely new. We must understand what this means.
—-Jean Epstein (1921)
 The dominant faction of the French film industry, from 1915 to 1929, Introduction
defined the cinema as a spectacle entertainment—a commercial product in the
system of economic exchange. Certain kinds of films or genres, particular stars,
certain methods of production and exhibition were developed to gain profits
within that system of exchange. Another smaller, but quite articulate, seg¬
ment of the industry conceived of cinema differently. For it, the cinema was
a cultural product, an art—or something that could become an art—and the
individuals and organizations who believed so considered themselves engaged
in the avant-garde of its creation. Some thought of the avant-garde chiefly
within the context of a narrative cinema; others thought of it as a “pure
cinema’’; still others thought of it in terms of documentary. Yet whatever the
mode or theoretical base, their efforts depended on an alternate means of
exchange. As Jean Tedesco succinctly put it:

The actual exhibition market of the film industry ... is almost completely closed
to one category of films. We have called them avant-garde films only for the purpose
of better distinguishing them from the current production and not because of any
preconceived idea of a chapel or school. . . .
We must extend the marketplace of the intellectual cinema in Paris for such films.1

That marketplace depended on a specific material base—an interrelated net¬

work of film critics, cinema journals, cine-clubs, and specialized cinemas, all
somewhat independent of the major companies in the industry. It was this
alternate, essentially cooperative system of cultural exchange, often diametri¬
cally opposed to that of the dominant industry, which provided much of the
impetus for the alternate cinema that was the French avant-garde.

The first area of struggle for an alternate cinema was located in the press— The Beginnings of a
in the newspapers, literary magazines, and specialized film journals. The key Film Criticism
figure in conceiving and promoting such a cinema was Louis Delluc.
The major journals that provided professional information and publicity
about the French film industry during this period were launched either before
or during the war, at the moment when the industry was being forced to
adapt to the interests of the American cinema. They included Cine-Journal
and Filma (both of which published the earliest annual summaries of
cinema activity in France), Le Courrier cinematographique, Cineopse (whose editor,
G.-M. Coissac, had founded the first popular industry organ, Le Fascinateur,
in 1903), and, finally, the most important of all, La Cinematographie frangaise.1
Among this group was a small but influential weekly journal published by
Henri Diamant-Berger, beginning in 1916, Le Film.2 In its pages the concept
of an alternate cinema seems to have had its beginnings.
The significance of Le Film lies in its nurturing of an autonomous film
criticism, a criticism that assumed film could be a form of art and that began
the attempt to isolate its specific features in order to analyze and evaluate
individual works. Most film historians attribute this new practice initially to
Louis Delluc, who had been a poet, novelist, dramatist, and drama critic for
Comoedia lllustre before becoming editor-in-chief of Le Film in June, 1917.3
But Delluc had an important precursor in another young French writer, Co¬
lette.

241
ALTERNATE CINEMA It was Colette who started the “Critique des films” column for Le Film, on
NETWORK 28 May 1917. Diamant-Berger had asked her to write for his journal, not
only as a friend but because she had a keen interest in the cinema and had
connections in the industry.4 Colette was a close associate of Musidora, the
famous villainess of Les Vampires (1915), and the two women had just collab¬
orated on a film shot in Rome early in 1917, La Vagabonde. Besides, she had
already written several film reviews for the Paris daily newspapers. One of
these, in Excelsior (7 August 1916), was crucial, according to Delluc, in pro¬
claiming the “artistic merits” of Cecil B. De Mille’s Forfaiture [The Cheat}
(1915), starring Sessue Hayakawa.5 Within eight days of its opening, Forfai¬
ture was elevated to exclusivite status at the Omnia-Pathe cinema.6 That one
film persuaded Delluc and Marcel L’Herbier, respectively, to become a film
critic and a filmmaker; and it heavily influenced Abel Gance’s first artistic
success, Mater Dolorosa (1917). In Colette’s own words, The Cheat was a veri¬
table art school to which writers, painters and dramatists came nightly like
students. It offered “the profound, if less than crystal clear, pleasure of seeing
the crude ‘cine’ groping toward perfection, the pleasure of divining exactly
what the future of the cinema must be when its makers would want that
future. . . . ”7
Seven of Colette’s columns appeared regularly in Le Film, from 28 May to
21 July 1917, and most were devoted to American films, especially the Tri¬
angle films of Thomas Ince. When she quit the journal—“because there was
no money in it”8—Louis Delluc was already acting as editor-in-chief and was
publishing, concurrently with her column, his own articles on particular films.
From his first column (25 June 1917),9 Delluc perpetuated Colette’s interest
in American films at the expense of French serials and literary adaptations,
and he began to proselytize for a truly French cinema art. His witty, acerbic,
trenchant pieces won a small but enthusiastic following among young writers
and artists suddenly awakened to the cinema’s potential. Within a year or so,
the members of this “circle” had expanded and had begun to function on their
own.
In the summer of 1918, Delluc ceased publishing his own critical work in
Le Film (with a couple of exceptions) but continued functioning as editor-in-
chief, a post he held until 1919 when Diamant-Berger sold the journal to
Georges Quellian and went into film production. Throughout this period, Le
Film became a forum for several other young writers to take up Delluc’s chal¬
lenge. In April, 1918, he published the full text of L’Herbier’s “Hermes et le
Silence,” a philosophical rhapsody on the cinema’s paradoxical ability to doc¬
ument life with acuity and exactitude (e.g., the war newsreels) and, at the
same time, to create a “new symphony” of landscape, gesture, light and shadow.10
In September, he introduced Louis Aragon’s provocative essay, “Du Decor,”
which celebrated the cinema’s transformation of reality through magnification/
isolation (e.g., the close-up) and through the subordination of set/landscape
to character (e.g., Chaplin).11 “It is indispensable,” wrote Aragon, “that film
take a place in the preoccupations of the artistic avant-gardes.”12 In December,
Delluc persuaded his friend Leon Moussinac (they had spent schooldays to¬
gether at the Lycee Charlemagne), to begin writing on the cinema.13
All this was possible in part because Delluc had been able to satisfy his own
desire for an even larger reading audience.

242
 He succeeded in convincing Leon Parsons that the time had come for a major FILM CRITICISM
newspaper to provide its readers with a serious cinematographic criticism alongside
its dramatic criticism and, on 1 June 1918, he gave Paris-Midi his first article devoted
to Douglas Fairbanks.14

Paris-Midi was not the first Paris newspaper to publicize or report on the
cinema. Beginning in 1908, Comoedia and, later, he Journal once a week had
listed cinema programs in the capital and occasionally carried brief reviews
and articles (as did others, such as Excelsior). Then, late in 1916, Le Temps had
begun to publish a biweekly film review column by its music critic, Emile
Vuillermoz.15 In fact, before it accepted Delluc’s work, Paris-Midi had been
printing, since January, 1918, a sometimes weekly, sometimes biweekly col¬
umn, “Les Spectacles,” by Jan de Merry. But Delluc’s column, ‘‘Cinema et
cie,” was the first critical appraisal of the cinema as art to appear weekly, on
a regular basis. After January, 1919, it became a daily event. For a full year
or more, Delluc was the single most important voice in the cinema market¬
place. And he consolidated that position by publishing two collections of his Wrl ^s
film criticism (the earliest in France): Cinma et cie (1919) and Photogenie (1920). 127. Louis Delluc by Be^an
Delluc’s early film criticism was certainly not systematic or highly theoret¬
ical, but his columns and books were more than ‘‘mere bouquets of impres¬
sions,” as he ironically described them.16 The significance of his writings be-
comes evident when compared to Henri Diamant-Berger’s concurrent survey
of the cinema as a craft in Le Cinema (1919).17 As an admirer of American
films as well as a protege of Charles Pathe, Diamant-Berger advocated a film
practice in France based on the production methods and aesthetic conventions
of the American cinema. No less an enthusiast of American films, Delluc,
however, sketched out, through repeated insights and ideas, a framework for
an alternate French cinema.18 For one, he singled out certain French films and
filmmakers who were developing a form of film discourse in parallel with, but
differing from, the Americans: Jacques de Baroncelli’s Ramuntcho (released Feb¬
ruary, 1919), Abel Gance’s J’Accuse (released April, 1919), Marcel L’Herbier’s
Rose-France (released July, 1919), and Germaine Dulac’s La Fete espagnole (re¬
leased May, 1920). For another, he advocated a different concept of filmmak¬
ing. The filmmaker should be the auteur of the ideas and stories he films rather
than, as Diamant-Berger and Andre Antoine would have it, the metteur-en-scene
of a scenario developed by a recognized writer.19 And those ideas and stories
should originate in the real world of contemporary life rather than be adapted
from the theater or from fiction.20 Finally, he suggested the possibility of
alternate methods of film distribution and exhibition. Attacking the then cur¬
rent ‘‘salad” of cinema programs (which he compared to an uncoordinated
jumble of skits, excerpts, and one-act plays in a theater), Delluc asked for
programs of separate individual screenings, at definite times.21 More impor¬
tant, in opposition to the industry’s initial reluctance to re-release films, he
began to consider the idea of a repertory of significant films that could be
collected for repeated screening.
Within three years of Delluc’s pioneering efforts in the pages of Paris-Midi,
the concept of a regular film review column was adopted by all of the major
Paris daily newspapers. Andre Antoine’s clarion call—‘‘it is necessary to create
a veritable, independent screen criticism, as now exists for the theater”—

243
ALTERNATE CINEMA seemed to announce the capitulation.2 Following Le Temps (Vuillermoz) and
NETWORK Comoedia (J.-L. Croze), most of the Paris newspapers had inaugurated a weekly
film column or page by the autumn of 1921: L’Information (Lucien Wahl,
editor of Eclair-Journal newsreels), Le Matin (Jean Gallois), Le Journal (Jean
Chastaigner), Le Petit Pansien (J.-L. Croze), L’Intransigeant (Boisyvon), and
L’Humanite (Leon Moussinac).23 However, the most important of these, be¬
cause it brought together a circle of writers and filmmakers, probably was Le
Petit Journal. In addition to his own column there, Rene Jeanne printed a
series of articles by Diamant-Berger, Gance, Delluc, Ricciotto Canudo, Leon
Poirier, and the art critic, Charles Leger. By 1922, the cinema was accepted
as a permanent form of popular spectacle by the press, and certain critics
(Vuillermoz, Wahl, Jeanne, Moussinac) were writing as if it were an autono¬
mous art.
Delluc’s example also had an impact on the literary magazines of Paris.
Before the war, Guillaume Apollinaire’s avant-garde monthly, Les Soirees de
Pans, had expanded its provocations with a regular film review column by
Maurice Raynal—which culminated in the whimsical “Societe des amis du
Fantomas,” based on the famous Louis Feuillade serial. Two small journals
founded during the war—Pierre Albert-Birot’s SIC and Pierre Reverdy’s Nord-
Sud—tried to sustain and extend Apollinaire’s interest with a few notes, es¬
says, and interviews.24 In 1919, however, three literary magazines that would
128. Ricciotto Canudo
have some influence in the 1920s instituted regular essays and/or review col¬
umns on the cinema. One was Litterature, an irreverent new magazine edited
by the young poets, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault.
Their interest coincided with Delluc’s, but it led to a series of playful “cine¬
matographic poems,’’ based especially on Chaplin and William S. Hart films.
Another highly polemical, but more long-lived magazine was Le Crapouillot,
edited by the robust eccentric, Jean Galtier-Boissiere.25 As early as 1919,
Galtier-Boissiere published a seminal essay on film by the painter, Marcel
Gromaire; and, in March of 1920 and 1923, he devoted special issues exclu¬
sively to the cinema.26 Between those dates, Le Crapouillot emerged as an
important forum for film criticism, especially when Leon Moussinac became
its regular film reviewer in September, 1921. Before writing for Le Crapouillot,
as well as for L’Humanite (the Communist Party newspaper), however, Mous¬
sinac had joined the staff of Le Mercure de France. For six years, beginning in
May, 1920, this prestigious literary magazine published Moussinac’s trimonthly
film review column along with early articles by young writers such as Jean
Epstein and Alexandre Arnoux.27 In one of his first reviews, Moussinac pro¬
phesied:

A new art is born, develops, discovers one by one its own laws, progresses toward
perfection, an art which will be the expression—bold, powerful, original—of the ideal
of a new age.28

The most flamboyant prophet of the new art was Ricciotto Canudo. In Paris
before the war, this polemical Italian writer had published Montjoie!, a small
review devoted to modern tendencies in the arts, and had actively encouraged
filmmakers to join his circle of artist contributors.29 To that end, he had
written one of the first credos on the cinema—“Manifesto of the Sixth Art’’
(1911).30 After being demobilized from the French army, Canudo founded a

244
second journal, La Gazette des sept arts, consecrated more specifically to the FILM JOURNALS
aesthetics of the cinema.31 The purpose of this journal was twofold:

—the conquest of intellectual and artistic milieux, until now recalcitrant to the cin¬
ema;—the amelioration of the quality of film production.32

Canudo’s connections in the arts world were even more extensive than Del-
luc’s, and La Gazette des sept arts (which appeared irregularly until its founder’s
death in late 1923) included a host of important articles by writers (e.g.,
Alexandre Arnoux, Jean Cocteau), painters (e.g., Fernand Leger, Robert Mal-
let-Stevens, Marcel Gromaire), musicians (e.g., Arthur Honegger on his score
for selections from Gance’s La Roue), filmmakers (e.g., Jean Epstein on shoot¬
ing his first film, Pasteur), and critics (e.g., Moussinac). To advance his ideas
on a more regular basis, beginning in October, 1922, Canudo also initiated a
film review column in the new literary weekly, Les Nouvelles litteraires. This
“missionary of poetry in the cinema,” as Jean Epstein later called Canudo,
like Delluc, proselytized the idea of the filmmaker as an auteur or ecranist.33
And, more consistently than any other writer, he articulated an expressive or
Symbolist theory of the cinema, emphasizing the film image’s evocation of the
filmmaker’s as well as of a character’s feeling, imagination, or state of mind.34
Soon other magazines began opening their pages to the cinema—some,
appropriately, to Delluc himself. One of Le Mercure de Prances chief rivals, La
Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, initiated the practice of publishing film scenarios
as literary works, the most famous of which was Jules Romains’s “Donogoo-
Tonka” (November and December, 1919).35 Another avant-garde journal, Le
Corbusier and Ozenfant’s L’Esprit nouveau, from 1920 to 1922, published three
Delluc pieces championing the cinema (one of them devoted to Chaplin).36
During the same period, the journal also accepted an early essay on the aes¬
thetics of cinema by B. Tokine, a second piece on Chaplin by the art historian
Elie Faure, and one of Jean Epstein’s first essays on current French films.37 Les
Choses de theatre (first issue) and Le Monde nouveau published important essays
by Delluc which were to form the basis for a book tentatively titled “Les
Cineastes,” but which he left unfinished at his death.38 Finally, two monthly
review journals established short-lived, but influential columns. One was Paris -
Journal which, in 1923, began printing the reviews of Georges Charensol and
the young Surrealist poet, Robert Desnos.39 The other was the deluxe Theatre
et Comoedia lllustre, now published by Rolf de Mare, who also managed the
Theatre des Champs-Elysees where the famous Ballet suedois performed.40 For
over a year and a half (from December, 1922), Theatre et Comoedia lllustre
included a special film supplement in which Rene Clair wrote a comprehensive
review of the month’s films in Paris while twenty-year-old Jean Mitry (in
between assignments as a publicity poster artist) transcribed some half-dozen
interviews with major French filmmakers.41

The Paris newspapers were now providing information and increasingly so¬ Film Journals
phisticated film reviews to the public, and certain literary magazines were
educating their elite audiences to the value of the cinema. Could there be a
publication format, a form of organization, to bridge the gap between these
two—to create a popular movement which could put pressure on the French

245
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Journal du Cine-Club
film industry and influence the direction of its operations, or which (failing
that) could establish an alternative to it? To this task, Louis Delluc and several
other writers now turned their efforts.
On 15 June 1919, a new film journal appeared with a masthead which
proposed all Paris for its audience. Edited by Pierre Henry, Cine-pour-tous ran
eight tabloid-sized pages and cost but twenty centimes (old currency). Each
fortnightly issue included a list of French films in production, notes on current
releases, a half page of credits and reviews on a selected film (usually French),
a two- or three-page essay on a film star (usually American), information on a
particular area of the film industry, letters from readers, and an editorial by
Henry. In Paris-Midi, Delluc drew attention to the journal by devoting a full
column to it.

The “grand public”—which loves the cinema and which gives it life—wants someone
to address it. I have always thought that would happen one day. So it begins with
Cine-pour-tous, a biweekly review which is not content to address the public occa¬
sionally but wants to address it exclusively. This ambition pleases me. Everything in
it has intelligence, taste, precision, force. Sadly, the pages are limited. But it will grow,
and you will find again, by waiting, all that you want to know about films, about
actors, about the present and sometimes the future of the cinema.1

According to Jean Mitry, who began his cinema education by surreptitiously

246
reading Cine-pour-tous at school and then became one of its writers, words FILM JOURNALS
cannot do justice to “the role that it played, the influence that it had on the
formation of young minds and the first cinephiles.”2
Cine-pour-tous undoubtedly spurred Delluc’s own interest in publishing a
magazine for the growing number of film enthusiasts. With the help of friends
such as Charles de Vesme, Georges Denola, and Leon Moussinac, he prepared
a weekly film magazine whose first issue appeared on 14 January 1920.3 Its
title, Le Journal du Cine-Club, was more prophetic than accurate. Actually
there was no cine-club or formal organization of cinephiles. Le Journal du Cine-
Club was essentially a magazine whose purpose was “[to help build} relations
between the public and the ‘cinematographistes,’ [to support} the work of all
the young filmmakers” and “[to organize} lectures accompanied by projected
film clips, dealing with the history of the cinema, its achievements, its artistic
nature, [and} its social and educational ends. . . . ”4 Through its readers, wrote
Charles de Vesme, “in an epoch in which the masses played such a large role
and exerted on all things such a great influence, [Delluc hoped} to mobilize a
cadre of the elite and the professional, together with an army constituted of
the vast public who were passionate about the cinema.”5 Published twice as
often as Cine-pour-tous, Le Journal du Cine-Club also included more pages (twelve)
and more information: complete listings of cinema programs in Paris, the
suburbs, and even some of the provinces; brief reviews of all the new Paris
releases of the week; and articles on filmmakers as well as film stars.
Despite their intentions, neither Cine-pour-tous nor Le Journal du Cine-Club
ever appealed to more than a small elite of the French film audience, much
like the elite readers of the literary and art magazines. A truly popular film
magazine did not emerge until January, 1921, when Jean Pascal and Adrien
Maitre launched Cinemagazine. This one-franc weekly journal of some fifty
pages aligned itself quite closely with the commercial film industry and ca¬
tered to the tastes of the mass cinema audience.6 Cinemagazine served as a major
publicity outlet for the French and American film producers and distributors
by reviewing the week’s new releases and previews, doing several articles in
each issue on popular stars, publishing episodes from a filmed serial or novel,
printing a great number of publicity stills and advertisements, and providing
a gossipy information column. So quickly did it become popular that, within
eight months of its founding, Cinemagazine had its own correspondent in the
United States, a former assistant to Louis Feuillade, Robert Florey. But Pascal
and Maitre did make some effort to bridge the gap between the masses and
the elite, between the dominant industry and the alternate cinema advocates.
Important critics such as Moussinac, Jeanne, Wahl, and Vuillermoz were printed
frequently enough in the magazine; and independent French filmmakers often
reported on their production or distribution activities and problems. Cinema¬
gazine also did tend to single out independent narrative films for their artistic
value.
Cinemagazines success quickly generated some rivals. Within two years, at
least two more popular weekly film magazines became available in Paris: Mon-
Cine and Cine-Miroir (published by Le Petit Parisien).1 Both of these proto-fan
magazines concentrated on stories about stars, filmmakers, and particular film
productions, as well as novelizations of current films, at the expense of actual
film reviews and cinema program listings.8 The simultaneous release of a film

247
 CE NUMErO CONTIENT DEUX PEACE-?
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131. (left) The cover of

Cinemagazine

132. (right) The cover of

Cinea\ Rio Jim poster by

Be<^an and its novelization in a newspaper or popular film magazine had become so
profitable by 1922 that several publications—e.g., the weekly Le Film Complet
and the biweekly Les Grands Films—did nothing but package recits of current
films.9 The most expensive of these—Cinema-Bibliotheque (published by Jules
Tallandier)—appeared actually as a small booklet, with inserted specially printed
sheets of production and frame stills.10 All of these magazines now constitute
an important, if approximate, record of lost and incomplete films; at the time,
however, they served as little more than organs of the industry.
The most influential alternate film journal had its origins in Louis Delluc’s
last critical venture. In April, 1920, Delluc turned over the editorship of Le
Journal du Cine-Club to Georges Denola when he himself became involved in
directing films. When the journal was forced to cease publication one year
after its inception, Delluc persuaded Arkady Roumanoff (a Russian emigre
collector and amateur artist) to finance a deluxe weekly review, Cinea, which
would be for the cinema what Comoedia lllustre was for the theater.11 Director¬
ship of the new journal was first shared by Delluc and Roumanoff and then
handled by Delluc alone; but there were many collaborators: critics (Moussi-
nac, Wahl, Vuillermoz, and especially Lionel Landry), poets (Canudo, Jean

248
Epstein, and Ivan Goll), filmmakers (L’Herbier, Baroncelli, Poirier, Louis Nalpas, FILM JOURNALS
Henry Roussel, and Alberto Cavalcanti), actors (Philippe Heriat and Andre
Daven, and graphic artists (Serge and Be^an).12 For nearly two years after its
first issue (6 May 1921), Cinea would be the most consistent, outspoken de-
nigrator of the commercial French cinema and advocate of a national cinema
art.
In Cinea, Delluc and his colleagues began to sketch out a loose set of criteria
for determining film art. Chief among them was the elusive term, photogenie,
which Delluc used to point to the sometimes artless, sometimes artful, trans¬
forming power of film in relation to reality, but which became a kind of
“floating signifier” that recurred frequently throughout the 1920s.13 Delluc
himself came to focus on the filmmaker’s “composition” of a central idea or
theme, described sometimes in terms of an analogy then current, that of mu¬
sical orchestration, which he used to define “cinegraphic rhythm.”14 Although
the musical analogy was quite prominent in early French film theory (e.g.,
Canudo, Gance, Dulac, and even Epstein),15 another formulation probably
would be more precise—“poetic composition.” For the process was similar to
that of rhetorical and rhythmic patterning in poetry, a kind of poeticization
of the process of representation. On a more practical level, Delluc’s analyses
of individual films, along with those of Moussinac, Vuillermoz, and Clair,
became models of an informed film criticism.16 Delluc also became more in- 133. The cover of Bonjour
* / '

Cinema (1921)
sistent in promoting the re-release of older films and the exhibition of inno¬
vative new films, especially those from Sweden and Germany. He was now
sketching the outlines of a history of cinema art that was both national and
international. A library or repertory of significant films was needed, he argued,
not only to preserve but to promulgate the idea of cinema art and to educate
cinema audiences in order to support further innovations and the cinema’s
eventual achievements.
Of the contributors to Cinea, the one who developed the implications of
Delluc’s work most thoroughly and imaginatively was the young poet and
essayist, Jean Epstein, whom Jean Mitry recently admitted was “the first real
theoretician of the cinema.”17 Epstein’s ideas emerged full-blown in a peculiar
blend of poetic and scientific language, in the last chapter of his first book,
La Poesie d'aujourd’hui: un nouvei etat d’intelligence (1921), and especially in
Bonjour Cinema (1921). In its original design format, Bonjour Cinema was a
witty parody of a film program. It included poster photographs of film stars,
134. Jean Epstein
adulatory “fan” poems, a serial episode, and several “features”—the essays,
“Le Sens 1 bis,” “Grossissement,” and “Cine-Mystique.”18 More important
was the book’s correlation to the work done by Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars,
and even the Dadaists during the war and the postwar period. It combined a
variety of different materials—three major essays, a half-dozen poems printed
in free typography, photographs and posters of several American stars, and
Cubist-style paintings and drawings. In a sense, Epstein was already playing
with the idea of “editing” together the diverse strands of modern life into
something analogous to a film. And in his essays was the germ—or quantum
theory, if you will—of a cinema of discontinuity or, rather, of a continuity
quite different from that developed by the American cinema.
Delluc’s own film practice during these years—especially Fievre (1921) and
La Femme de nulle part (1922)—cut short his work as a film critic and editor.

249
ALTERNATE CINEMA Nile 8Srl» N* 47. 18 OCTOBBK 1838
Prl* . 1 FRANC BO

NETWORK

135. The cover of Cinea-Cine-

pour-tow. Arlette Marchal

After the commercial failure of La Femme de nulle part, in October, 1922,

Delluc sold his interest in Cinea to Jean Tedesco (a young editor of women’s
magazines) and gradually yielded the editorship to him. A year later, Tedesco
bought out Cine-pour-tous, which was in financial trouble due to the prolifer¬
ation of film magazines, and the two journals merged. In November, 1923,
Cinea-Cine-pour-tous appeared in a glossy, beautifully laid out, thirty-six-to-
forty-four-page format that boasted a special section of tastefully mounted
photographs. Under Tedesco’s editorial control, the new journal included re¬
views and articles by Edmond Epardaud, Pierre Porte, Dr. Paul Ramain,
Pierre Henry, Juan Arroy, Rene Jeanne, and Leon Moussinac as well as state¬
ments by such filmmakers as L’Herbier, Epstein, Henri Chomette, Fritz Lang,
and Lulu Pick. It had an immediate and lasting impact. Throughout 1924,
Tedesco and others, such as Jeanne and Moussinac, agitated for Delluc’s idea
of a repertory cinema; and both Cinea-Cine-pour-tous and Cinemagazine gave
extensive coverage to the special lectures and exhibitions such filmmakers as

250
L’Herbier, Dulac, Epstein, and Clair were beginning to give. In a short time, CINE-CLUBS
especially through the writings of Epstein, Porte, Ramain, and Tedesco him¬
self, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous became the principal forum for the theories and ar¬
guments that engaged the French avant-garde.19

This broadly sustained development of independent cinema journals and an Cine-Clubs

embryonic him theory/criticism were unique to France. Nothing much like this
existed in the United States or Germany, let alone Great Britain, Italy, or the
Scandinavian countries. Only the revolutionary society of the Soviet Union
had a somewhat comparable phenomenon. But the Soviet writings came slightly
later and developed quite differently. There, filmmakers such as Lev Kuleshov,
Dziga Vertov, and Sergei Eisenstein were the ones to initiate discussions of
him theory and practice in Kino-fop Kino-Gazeta, and especially LEF (1923-
1925).1 Within a couple of years, in the pages of Novy LEF (1927) and in
several books, most notably The Poetics of Cinema (1927), the Russian Formalist
literary theorists and critics (Boris Eikhenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky, S. Tre-
tyankov, and Yuri Tynyanov) then took up the aesthetics of the cinema, the
practice of him criticism, and even scriptwriting.2 In France, the movement
had a broadly based constituency (crossing several classes and professions), but
it was more exclusively cultural than political (as the critics saw it) and more
oriented (at least initially) toward a conception of cinema based on the hlm-
viewing process rather than on hlmmaking. Its purpose was to encourage, hrst
of all, an informed audience that would support advances in him art and, only
secondarily, real social change. Whereas Soviet him theory and practice were
stimulated by an exhibition system that included mobile agit-trains and
steamers,3 the French development was supported by the unprecedented rise
of cine-clubs and special him lectures and exhibitions in Paris. Again Delluc,
along with Canudo, Moussinac, and a few others, were crucial instigators.
The idea of a cine-club or an organization of cinephiles dedicated to the
advancement of cinema art seems to have occurred simultaneously to Delluc
and Canudo. Although Delluc coined the term cine-club in 1919 (from the
groups called Touring-Clubs, according to Sadoul)4 and published Le Journal
du Cine-Club, he never really organized any club or circle that would meet
regularly and engage in concerted activity. Instead, he tried out several ideas
which would later become standard practice in the cine-club movement. The
hrst was a conference or special program that would provide a retrospective look
at the work of a particular hlmmaker. Under the rubric of Le Journal du Cine-
Club, on 12 June 1920, at the Pepiniere-Cinema, Delluc organized a special
program devoted to the animator, Emile Cohl (most of whose short French
hlms had been made between 1907 and 1912), and to the theater director
turned hlmmaker, Andre Antoine, whose lecture on “The cinema of yesterday,
today, and tomorrow” was illustrated with him clips.5 Soon after, Antoine
broached the idea of redirecting the programming of one particular cinema in
Paris for the clientele of cinephiles—to have a kind of “Vieux-Colombier of
the cinema.”6 Delluc’s second idea was to present an unreleased him (the work
of a cineaste) to a limited audience. Now under the rubric of Cinea, on 14
November 1921, at the Colisee cinema, Delluc organized a charity matinee
screening for “Tout-Paris.” The him shown was a shock—The Cabinet of Doctor

251
ALTERNATE CINEMA Caligari (1919).7 It was the first German film to be seen in France since before
NETWORK the war, and the director of the small Cine-Opera cinema was interested enough
by it to arrange an exhibition of German films the following year. Two months
later (22 January 1922), again at the Colisee, Delluc hosted a matinee session
for an art circle, “Ideal et Realite.” The program brought together the twin
interests of the young cinephiles into sharp juxtaposition: while he himself
spoke on “Cinema, the popular art,” L’Herbier screened his short experimental
film, Promethee . . . banquier, as a kind of entr’acte.8 Once having tested his ideas,
however, Delluc seems to have pursued them no further—either out of a deep
commitment to his film practice or, more likely, because of financial and
emotional difficulties (e.g., his marriage to Eve Francis).9 But his friends would
not let those ideas drop.
The first actual cine-club seems to have grown out of the informal gather¬
ings of artists, writers, and professional filmmakers at the Cafe Napolitain in
1920. At their head was Ricciotto Canudo who, by April, 1921, had dubbed
the group C.A.S.A., “Club des amis du septieme art.”10 Its members included
some of the most prominent of the avant-garde in the arts: filmmakers (Delluc,
Dulac, Poirier, L’Herbier, Cavalcanti, Epstein), critics (Moussinac, Wahl,
Landry, Jeanne, Pierre Seize), writers (Faure, Arnoux, Cendrars, Cocteau),
artists (Gromaire, Mallet-Stevens, Leger), musicians (Honegger, Ravel, Ro-
land-Manuel, Maurice Jaubert), and actors (Eve Francis, Jaque Catelain, Jean
Toulout, Harry Bauer, Gaston Modot).11 This was a cine-club that fulfilled
Deiluc’s expectations.
The principal activity of C.A.S.A., at first, involved little more than dinner
speeches and discussions, at the Poccardi restaurant or at Canudo’s spacious
apartment, 12 rue du Quatre-Septembre, much in the manner of the famous
Belle Epoque banquet celebrations before the war.12 However, C.A.S.A. mem¬
bers were the major contributors to Canudo’s La Gazette des sept arts; and
several filmmakers associated with the group (Gance, Dulac, Nalpas, Rene Le
Somptier) took part in a series of lectures on the cinema given early in 1921.13
Canudo himself published an important manifesto for C.A.S.A. in the second
issue of Cinea (13 May 1921). Several of the principles laid down there were
harbingers of the future:

b. To raise the intellectual standard of French cinematic productions, for aesthetic as

well as commercial ends. . . .
d. To consider as urgent the establishment of a “hierarchy” of cinemas such as exists
in the theater: popular cinemas and elite cinemas. . . .
f. To agitate, by every propagandistic means, so that equitable laws and reasonable
supports be provided by the State to the “Art of the Screen,” in the same measure
at least as they are accorded the “Art of the Stage.”
g. To attract public attention to the origins and evolution of the Cinema in France,
through the organization of a first French Cinematic Festival.14

Apparently, Canudo organized several private film screenings for C.A.S.A.

in the hall of the “Syndicate de la Grange-sur-Belles” (about the same time
Delluc was presenting Doctor Caligari at the Colisee).15 But his real coup,
achieved with the aid of Moussinac, was to persuade the president of the
prestigious Salon d’Automne, Franz Jourdain, to hold a special exposition of

252
film screenings in 1921 and again in 1922 and 1923.16 At the first exposition, CINE-CLUBS
following an address by Jacques de Baroncelli (read by the actor, Signoret),
Canudo arranged the screening of “a selection of films by Baroncelli, Feyder,
Roger Lion, Henry Roussel, [and Edouard] Violet ... as well as several
fragments from La Roue. . . . ”17 Two years later, he selected excerpts from
the best films of the year which drew attention to what he considered to be
the major cinematographic styles: “1. Realism, 2. Expressionism, 3. ‘Essays’
in cinematic rhythm, 4. Pictorial Cinema.’’18 Canudo’s film programs were
particularly significant because they represented the first attempt, in Jean Ep¬
stein’s words, “to present to the public specifically chosen film sequences, to
constitute an anthology of cinema.’’19 These expositions thus marked the ear¬
liest semi-official recognition of the cinema as art. To cap this work, just
before his death in November, 1923, Canudo also arranged for a similar pro¬
gram of screenings in Lyon (the birthplace of the Lumiere brothers).20
In the words of Henri Fescourt,

Ricciotto Canudo’s influence was decisive for the recruitment and education of cu¬
rious, newly fascinated spectators everywhere. His propagandizing effort had a special,
courageous character since it tried no less than to build a bridge of communication
and sympathy between the traditional arts and the young, unruly, but promising
savage that was the cinema. That effort bore fruit.21 136. Leon Moussinac

Alongside the dinners and private screenings of C.A.S.A., which continued

into 1922 and 1923, there appeared a number of other clubs and special
events. In imitation of Canudo’s club, in December, 1921, the editors of
Cinemagazine created an informal group called simply “Amis du cinema.’’22
Throughout the next two years, the group held monthly lunches and occa¬
sional lectures, including sessions with Bernard-Deschamps and Diamant-Ber-
ger.23 In June, 1923, Marcel L’Herbier was invited by Robert Aron to speak
to the Students’ International Circle at the College de France.24 His speech,
“Le Cinematographe eontre l’art,” was in such demand that he repeated it
during the next few months in Geneva, La Haye, and Lausanne.25 Inspired by
this mushrooming activity, young Georges Sadoul invited Jean Epstein to give
a lecture at Paris-Nancy, in December that same year, a lecture which Epstein
then repeated a month later at Montpelier.26
The most important new organization to emerge from this wave of interest
was started by Leon Moussinac, either late in 1922 or early in 1923.27 The
“Club fran^ais du cinema’’ was a semi-professional organization which seems
to have formalized and recharged the loose circle of people Delluc had brought
together around Le Journal du Cine-Club and Cinea. Directed by Leon Poirier,
who along with L’Herbier had just been fired at Gaumont, its agenda was set
up explicitly to defend filmmakers as artists (or cineastes, to use Delluc’s term)
and to attack the restrictions of the commercial industry. They demanded

1) that film writers and directors enjoy the benefits of artistic copyright; 2) that they
cease being at the mercy of production companies who too often ignore the subjects
of their films or, at least, distort them; 3) that film writers and directors, like their
actors, have contact with public opinion, by means of an independent criticism, such
as exists for the theater, literature, or painting. . . ,28

Toward these ends the club organized a number of evening screenings of both

233
ALTERNATE CINEMA French and other European films, in order to “unleash new initiatives, fervent
NETWORK convictions, creative energies—elans even—which, by breaking the restrictions
of mercantilism and routine, will propel the art of silence to the heights of its
predecessors. ”29 These screenings included Delluc s ha Femme de nulle part (1922),
Epstein’s ha Coeurfidele (1923), Lulu Pick’s Sylvester or New Years Eve (1923),
the earliest Soviet feature film, Polikouchka (1919), and a new version of Gances
ha Roued0 The drive for an alternate cinema was reaching a new stage of
militancy.
That drive seemed to accelerate rather than dimmish after both Canudo and
Delluc died suddenly within five months of one another (November, 1923,
and March, 1924). For one, the Amis du cinema group expanded its activity.
Affiliated clubs were organized in several provincial French cities.31 In May,
at the Artistic cinema, the Paris club sponsored a special preview of Jaque
Catelain’s second film, ha Galene des monstres (1924); and in November, at the
Colisee cinema, it sponsored major lectures by Germaine Dulac and Rene
Clair.32 For another, C.A.S.A. itself underwent a transformation. Early in
March, 1924, at the club’s first meeting since its founder’s death, Rene Blum
proposed the revival of the weekly members-only dinners and, more impor¬
tant, the sponsorship of regular public film screenings and lectures.33 With
the help of Moussinac, Tedesco, and others, Blum organized a biweekly series
of evening film programs at Raymond Duncan’s dance studio on the rue Co¬
lisee.34 The first program, on 11 April, was dedicated to Delluc. Blum read
an homage (prepared by Dulac) introducing a rescreening of Fievre, and then
Jean Epstein projected his short montage film, Photogenies, edited specially for
the occasion.35 Two weeks later, C.A.S.A rescreened Epstein’s controversial
film, Coeur fidele, along with what Tedesco called “Selections Symbolistes’’—
selected fragments from ha Roue and Mosjoukine’s he Brasier ardent,36 For its
third program, the club took the risk of presenting Dmitri Kirsanoffs first
film, h’lronie du destin (1924), which had received scant commercial distribu¬
tion.37
Although this series of special C.A.S.A. screenings was something iess than
an unmitigated success with the public, it seems to have encouraged several
different lines of activity. Tedesco’s selection of film excerpts and Epstein’s
Photogenies most likely helped stimulate the avant-garde production of short
non-narrative films—e.g., Leger’s Ballet mecanique (1924), Clair’s Entr'acte (1924),
Autant-Lara’s Fait-Divers (1924), and Chomette’s Jeux de reflets et de vitesse (1925).
More certainly, the weekly exhibition strategy convinced Tedesco to begin
looking around for a permanent cinema to provide continuous programming
in the fall. Meanwhile, Blum and Moussinac turned their attention to an
upcoming exposition.
In the winter of 1923-1924, Moussinac had pulled off a major coup at the
Musee Galliera. The Galliera’s director, Henri Clouzot, had become a member
of the Club fran^ais du cinema, and Moussinac persuaded him to form a
commission in order to mount a full-scale exhibition devoted to the cinema—
in effect, realizing one of Canudo’s dreams.18 On that commission were Louis
Lumiere, Gaumont, Pathe, Gance, L’Herbier, Mallet-Stevens, Jean Benoit-
Levy, Vuillermoz, and Moussinac himself. The resultant “L’Exposition de Part
dans le cinema frangais’’ extended from May through October and included
displays of film stills and scripts from particular filmmakers, animation draw-

254
ings, examples of film titles and credits, set design models and sketches, cine-clubs
costumes, posters, film books and periodicals. It also boasted two series of
lectures, one lasting a month (May through June), the other in October. The
first amounted to a veritable seminar of ten lecture-presentations on the cinema
as art.

Tuesday May 27
M. G.-Michel Coissac: The history of the cinema—prophets, precursors, filmmakers.
Friday May 30
M. Leon Moussinac: The characteristics of this new art—modern, popular, interna¬
tional. The styles of cinema. Descriptive cinema and the cinegraphic poem. Genres.
Relations between cinema and the other arts.
Tuesday June 3
M. Leon Moussinac: The visual idea, its specific character, its development in the
scenario (adaptations). The importance of scriptwriting and mise-en-scene—elemen¬
tary techniques. Cinegraphic rhythm and balance.
Friday June 6
M. Marcel L’Herbier: Photogenie. The important role of light, interior and exterior
lighting methods.
Tuesday June 10
M. Jaque Catelain: The interior rhythm of images. Acting—expression, movement,
makeup.
Friday June 13
M. Mallet-Stevens: Decors. Costumes. Props. The cinema—the means of popularizing
the modern forms. Intertitles and posters.
Tuesday June 17
M. Jean Epstein: The expressive techniques of the cinema—the function of different
shot distances and angles. Dissolves. Lap dissolves. Superimpositions. Soft focus.
Deformations. Animation.
Friday June 20
M. Lionel Landry: French cinema; its characteristics, its aesthetic development. For¬
eign influences. The function of the critic.
Tuesday June 24
M. Rene Blum: Cinema and music. Composers. Orchestra conductors. Synchronizing
machines.
Friday June 27
M. Luchaire: French film industry-—its impact on French ideas worldwide.39

Substituting for Epstein, Germaine Dulac wrote one of her most persuasive
essays of the decade on the possibilities of a subjective cinema.40 If the cine-
club movement still exerted less influence on the industry and on the mass
French audience than it would like, it was well on the way to establishing
film as an equal in the world of the arts.
The consequences of the Galliera exhibition were twofold. For one, early in
1925, it led to the merger of C.A.S.A. and Moussinac’s Club frangais du
cinema into one body, the “Cine-Club de France.’’41 At the core of the new
group were Moussinac, Blum, Poirier, Feyder, and Henri Clouzot. According
to its charter, the Cine-Club de France sought

... to advocate the study, development, and defense of the cinema as Art.
... to coordinate all the intellectual, artistic, technical, and economic structures
capable of enriching the international landscape of the cinema with films.
... to encourage the sincere effort of artists from all countries, whatever their

255
ALTERNATE CINEMA tendency or style, and to further, by any means possible, that which provides special
NETWORK publicity to the manifestations of its activity."*2

With Moussinac providing much of the impetus, the new club embarked on
an extensive schedule of monthly public film screenings first at the Colisee
and then at the Artistic cinemas—especially with the aim of reviving older
films unjustly ignored (e.g., Stiller’s The Legend of Gosta Berling) and preview¬
ing completed films (e.g., Feyder’s L’lmage, Leger’s Ballet mecamque), frag¬
ments (e.g., L’Herbier’s Resurrection), and films rejected by the commercial
distributors or by the censors (e.g., Eisenstein’s Potemkin).43 Under Dulac’s
guidance (with support from Epstein and L’Herbier), in the winter of 1925-
1926, the club also organized another major series of conferences at Jean Tedes-
co’s new Theatre du Vieux-Colombier.44 Entitled “The Creation of a World
through the Cinema,’’ the announced twelve lecture-presentations, from 28
November to 20 February, complemented those at the Musee Galliera the year
before:

1. The meaning of the cinema . Leon Pierre-Quint

2. Photogenie of the machine world Pierre Hamp
3. The psychological value of the image Docteur Allendy
4. The external world as revealed by sunlight Jean Epstein
5. Human emotion Charles Dullin
6. Fantasy and humor Pierre Mac Orlan
7. The comic Andre Beucler
8. Cinema and time Jean Tedesco
9. The formation of sensibility Lionel Landry
10. The shackles of the cinema Germaine Dulac
11. Photogenie of the animal world Colette
12. The cinema in modern life Andre Maurois45

Although there were changes in this program (e.g., L’Herbier seems to have
137. Charles Leger substituted for Colette), the series was so successful that the Cine-Club de
France added several Friday evening lectures which lasted at least into March.46
The Cine-Club de France’s emergence out of the Galliera experience im¬
pelled a second group to form around Charles Leger—“Le Tribune libre du
cinema.” Here was a younger generation of cinephiles, including Marcel Carne,
Jean Dreville, Edmond T. Greville, Bernard Brunius, Robert de Jarville, Jean
Mitry, Jean Arroy, and Jean-Georges Auriol.47 Jean Dreville tells me that the
Tribune libre had its origins in a number of meetings and discussions in a
hall on the Avenue Rapp, late in 1924.48 Soon after, the group established a
biweekly series of public film screenings.49 One of Charles Leger’s first and
most difficult accomplishments was to organize (with Moussinac’s assistance)
an even larger cinema exhibition for the famous Paris Exposition des Arts
Decoratifs et Industries Modernes in the summer and autumn months of 1925.50
The highlight of the exhibition, at “La Maison des artistes,” was a series of
screenings of selected French films with each filmmaker present for individual
discussion sessions.

So Mme. Germaine Dulac’s last film project, La Fohe des vaillants, Rene Clair’s Pans
qm dort, Entr'acte, and Le Fantome du Mouhn-Rouge, Lulu Pick’s Shattered, Louis Del-
luc’s Fievre, Jean Epstein’s L'Affche, etc. . . . received an enthusiastic response from
a mass cosmopolitan public.

256
 The film programs changed every Thursday, and for the inauguration of each new SPECIALIZED CINEMAS
film, at a gala seance on Thursday evening, the filmmaker himself spoke about his
film—his intentions and ideas; after the screening, the filmmaker solicited the opinion
of opponents, and debates ensued, directed and animated by Charles Leger, the de¬
lighted program organizer. There one could finally see drawn together, discussing the
same subject, the artisans of the cinema, men of letters, painters, sculptors, archi¬
tects. . . .51

After this astonishing success, Tribune libre immediately set up a second

season of biweekly public film screenings at the Salle des Ingenieurs civils and
then at the Salle Adyar, Square Rapp.52 Following the format developed at
the Exposition, Leger applied the combination of short lecture, projection (of
excerpts or a complete film), and public discussions on a systematic basis.53
This strategy quickly opened up the cine-club movement to a wider audience.

This upsurge of cine-club activity coincided with the institution of the first Specialized Cinemas
specialized cinema in Paris. The man to implement Delluc’s original idea of a
repertory of films, perhaps naturally enough, was Jean Tedesco. In his search
for some nook or cranny to project films on a permanent basis, late in Septem¬
ber, 1924, Tedesco discovered to his surprise (did he remember Antoine’s
suggestion of three years earlier?) that Jacques Copeau’s famous but recently
abandoned Theatre du Vieux-Colombier was available for rent. Initially, ac¬
cording to Andre Brunelin, he and an entrepreneur by the name of Simon
Gantillon concocted a scheme to use the Vieux-Colombier for alternate eve¬
nings of theater performances and avant-garde film screenings.1 Gantillon soon
pulled out of the venture, but Tedesco persisted. Although Copeau himself
disdained the cinema, he was sufficiently interested (apparently Gantillon
smoothed the way) to give the young madman a year’s lease on the 500-seat
auditorium.2 In less than a month, Tedesco and his friends transformed the
theater—installing a projection booth and screen, repainting the facade and
interior, printing posters and invitations. Since Copeau, in his retreat to Bour¬
gogne, had taken along the original pair of Florentine doves which marked
the theater’s entrance, Tedesco was in need of a new emblem. One day by
chance he found just what he wanted—the simple circular design of the ap¬
erture shutter in a film projector.3 On 14 November 1924, the Vieux-Co¬
lombier finally opened its doors as the beacon of cinema art.
On the posters and advertisements announcing his new cinema, Tedesco set
forth a few simple principles. The Vieux-Colombier’s programs would be com¬
prised of avant-garde works and a film repertory. In that repertory would be
included “quality films that the commercial industry had not allowed the
majority of the public to see’’ as well as “films of such value that they merit
a second screening under the title of Cinema Classics.’’4 The first week’s pro¬
gram established a format for those that followed: Andre Sauvage’s La Traverse
du Crepon (a documentary on mountain-climbing), Marcel Silver’s L’Horloge (an
experimental film without intertitles), and Chaplin’s short feature, Sunnyside
(1921).5 The films were projected nightly and ran for one week. And they
were accompanied by a secluded chamber orchestra of just three or four in¬
struments whose musicians prepared the music specially for each program.6
For seven months, until the first week of June, 1925, the Vieux-Colombier

257
ALTERNATE CINEMA fulfilled its mission of a full season of film screenings. Most of the films shown
NETWORK were revivals—from the United States (Chaplin’s shorts, Griffith’s Way Down
East, Fairbanks’s The Mark of Zorro), Sweden (Sjostrom’s The Phantom Coach
[in a new print], Stiller’s Tresor d’Arne), Germany (Wiene’s Doctor Caligari,
Lulu Pick’s Shattered, Lang’s Destiny), and France (Feyder’s Crainquehille, Ep¬
stein’s Coeur fidele, and Roussel’s Les Opprimes).1 But there were also several new
films—Carl Grune’s The Street (1923) and the Soviet feature, Polikouchka—and
excerpts projected as set pieces of the narrative avant-garde film practice: “Se¬
lections de rythmes’’ from La Roue, “Etude d’Expressions’’ from LAffiche, and
fragments of accelerating montage (from La Roue, Coeur fidele, and Kean).8
Although Tedesco sometimes organized a double bill of feature films or a
selection of excerpts, his programs almost always included a short film, usually
a documentary.9 At first, “Tout-Paris” came to the little cinema out of curi¬
osity, but the public interest waned, particularly after Tedesco tried to screen
Arthur Robinson’s Warning Shadows.10 Perhaps a more serious problem for him
was a lack of publicity. Except for his own announcements in Cinea-Cine-pour-
tous, a diatribe from Moussinac in defense of the Vieux-Colombier in L’Hu-
manite, and a brief reference by Emile Vuillermoz in Le Temps, the Paris news¬
papers and film magazines either ignored or took little interest in Tedesco’s
operation.11 By the end of the first season, the Vieux-Colombier was in danger
of closing down once again.
Yet Tedesco continued to believe in his exhibition strategy, and he con¬
vinced Copeau to extend his lease on the Vieux-Colombier for one more year.
Several factors were now in his favor. The Exposition des Arts Decoratifs had
excited, both among the masses and the elite, a wider interest in cinema art.
Following the Exposition, with the support of the Cine-Club de France and
the literary magazine, Les Cahiers du mois, Tedesco hosted a series of lectures
and screenings on the “Creation of a world through the cinema’’—each Sat¬
urday afternoon, at 4:30, from 28 November 1925 to 20 February 1926.12
The speakers included writers Pierre Mac Orlan and Pierre Flamp, critics
Lionel Landry and Tedesco himself, filmmakers Dulac and Epstein, and the
actor Charles Dullin. For Pierre Hamp’s lecture, Jean Gremillon even pro¬
jected a short film, Photogenie mecanique, comprised of excerpts from his docu¬
mentaries, apparently edited in the manner of Epstein’s Photogenies and Leger’s
Ballet mecaniqueM This lecture series provided the Vieux-Colombier with a
good deal of prestige. Futhermore, the opening film in Tedesco’s second season
of programs played upon the interest generated by the series and was an im¬
mediate sell-out. The film was Dmitri Kirsanoffs Menilmontant (originally en¬
titled Les Cent Pas), which the commercial distributors had offered to him
because they did not know what to do with it.14 Its success was assured, in
part, by Vuillermoz’s enthusiastic one-column review in Le Temps and by its
co-billing with Chaplin’s The Pilgrim (which Cinea-Cine-pour-tous readers had
voted the second best film of 1925).15 Finally, Tedesco added to his schedule
a Monday matinee screening for students in the Latin Quarter.16 This, too,
proved a success, and the students became passionate defenders of the Vieux-
Col.
Inspired by Tedesco but independent of him, another cinephile nurtured
the dream of opening a specialized cinema to show films unlike the others.17
Armand Tallier was a well-known actor who had worked with Copeau at the

258
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Colombier

139- (right) Armand Tallier

in Jocelyn (1922)
Vieux-Colombier and who, with Myrga, his constant companion, had starred
in several Gaumont films, the most important being Poirier’s Jocelyn (1922).
In the summer of 1925, the two found a small (300-seat) cinema for rent
behind the Pantheon and prepared to finance a season of film programs with
what they called “a light truck, . . . some money left over from an African
tour, certain trinkets which would fetch a little money on the flea market,
and ... for the rest, admission tickets. . . .”18 On 21 January 1926, the
Studio des Ursulines opened its doors with this profession of faith:

We propose to enlist our audience from the elite of writers, artists, and intellectuals
in the Latin Quarter and from those, ever increasing in number, whom the poverty
of commercial film production has driven from the cinemas. Our programs will be
composed of diverse tastes, styles, and schools: anything which represents originality,
value, effort will find a place on our screen.19

Like the Theatre du Vieux-Colombier, the Studio des Ursulines had a se¬
cluded chamber orchestra of just a few instruments.20 But the new cinema was
quite different in its programming: “twenty minutes of prewar cinema, twenty
minutes of avant-garde cinema, and an unreleased film of a more accessible

259
ALTERNATE CINEMA character and aesthetic.”21 Tallier and Myrga’s first program included Leonce
NETWORK Perret’s comic Mimosa la derniere grisette (1906), Rene Clair’s reedited version
of Entr’acte (1924), and G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (with Asta Nielsen and
Greta Garbo). The latter film was an immediate sensation, especially after
Tallier provoked the audience with an inserted intertitle—“The images that
you should see here have been cut by order of the censors”—which forced the
attending minister of education to beat a hasty retreat from the cinema.22 Two
months later, Tallier’s second program revived Clair’s Le Voyage imaginaire
(1926) and then a third presented the first Japanese film in France, Musume,
along with Claude Autant-Lara’s short, Fait-Divers (19 2 4).23 In just a few
months the Studio des Ursulines was astonishingly ‘‘a la mode,” and the cine-
philes were rubbing elbows with the young nouveaux riches.

Proliferation and By 1925 or 1926, a network of film critics, cinema journals, cine-club
Crisis lectures and exhibitions, and specialized cinemas was well established in Paris.
This loose cooperative system of cultural exchange and persuasion had staked
out several areas of concern. It was promoting the production of formally
radical, modern films by its own members (Delluc, Gance, L’Herbier, Dulac,
Epstein, Feyder, Clair), both within the French film industry and on its mar¬
gins. As a corollary, it was educating and expanding the audience for such
films. It was also articulating key issues in the attempt to define an aesthetics
of film and produce a sophisticated critical practice. And it was taking the
first steps to preserve older films and establish a tradition of cinema art. The
last five years of the decade were marked by a proliferation of these efforts and
a number of significant crises.
In 1925, several books were published in Paris which clearly revealed the
divisions that had developed between the dominant industry and the various
advocates of an alternate cinema. Against G.-M. Coissac’s Histoire du cinema¬
tographies which surveyed the technological and industrial evolution of the film
industry, Leon Moussinac’s Naissance du cinema contended that a new narrative
art had been created.1 In a polemical but clearly reasoned analysis, Moussinac
summed up the argument for a film aesthetics based on a conjunction of plastic
and rhythmic elements (the mise-en-scene, framing, and editing of a cinematic
discourse) and then sketched the stages of development in each of the major
national cinemas (American, Swedish, German, and French). And like Delluc
before him, he reiterated the belief that ‘‘the cinema will be popular or it will
not be at all.”2 Against the polemical essays advocating a ‘‘pure cinema,”
published principally in Cinea-Cine-pour-tous, Flenri Fescourt and Jean-Louis
Bouquet’s L'Idee et I’ecran: opinions sur le cinema (1925-1926) defended an up¬
dated and more sophisticated concept of the commercial narrative film.3 Al¬
though admitting the value of lighting and rhythm, for instance, Fescourt
and Bouquet contended that the principal basis of film art was its subject,
meaning the logical development of a story.4 Along with the publicity gen¬
erated by the film exhibitions at the Musee Galliera and the Exposition des
Arts Decoratifs, these books stimulated the publication of other works over the
next several years.
In 1926, Les Ecrivains reunis alone published two books on the cinema. In
one, a slim volume entitled Le Cinematographe vu d’Etna, Jean Epstein collected

260
several of his lectures together with a new theoretical essay. In the title essay, proliferation and
Epstein developed a concept of the cinema apparatus as a machine of the crisis
Imagination, producing its own epiphanies of revelation—“one of the most
powerful forces of the cinema is its animism.’’5 In another, however, he called
for ‘a new avant-garde’’ and a mode of filmic construction that would direct
the polysemic play of associations in a chain of images. That play, as rhetorical
figuring, could be controlled through patterns of simultaneity and alternation
(or, more generally, through paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations), in what
Stuart Liebman has called a “thematic montage of associations.”6 In the second
book, L'ABC du cinema, Blaise Cendrars, the idiosyncratic poet who had helped
Abel Gance shoot and edit La Roue, finally published the full text of his essay
on the modernity of the cinema.7 In his elliptical, telegraphic prose style,
Cendrars argued that film’s fragmentation of reality gave the viewer an inten¬
sified experience of the simultaneous flux of life and that the worldwide ex¬
hibition of a film created a kind of “global village” of simultaneous audience
participation.
The following year, a Geneva publisher collected many of Ricciotto Canu-
do’s published and unpublished essays into L’Usine aux images (1927). The
most important of these, “Reflexions sur la septieme art,” which articulated
Canudo’s expressive theory of film, seems to have been written in 1921, while
the reviews of film genres and individual films that complete the book date
from 1922-1923. As the decade drew to a close and the silent cinema to an
end, several books attempted to sum up the historical development of the era:
Moussinac’s own Panoramique du cinema (1929), Alexandre Arnoux’s Cinema
(1929), Georges Charensol’s Panorama du cinema (1929), and Henri Fescourt’s
Le Cinema des origines a nos jours (1932).
There was even more activity among the film journals and literary maga¬
zines. Several literary magazines, such as La Revue nouvelle, followed Le Mercure
de France in establishing film review columns; but the most important phe¬
nomenon was the increase in special issues, modeled after Le Crapouillot. Les
Cahiers du mois put out the most significant of these. In 1925, it devoted two
special book-length issues to the cinema: #12 on scenarios, #16/17 on film
aesthetics and criticism. The latter included essays—some from the Cine-Club
de France lectures at the Vieux-Colombier—by most of the critics, filmmak¬
ers, artists, and writers associated with the cine-club movement. There were
major statements by Epstein, L’Herbier, Clair, and Dulac, as well as summary
critical pieces by Tedesco, Vuillermoz, Charensol, Henry, and Moussinac.
Two other literary magazines came out with important special issues—La
Revue federaliste (November, 1927) and Le Rouge et le noir (July, 1928)—both
of which focused more on the cinema itself as an art than on its relation to
literature.8 In 1926, Rene Jeanne convinced the Librairie Felix Alcan to pub¬
lish and market a special collection of essays on the cinema in a serial format,
much like the issues of a magazine.9 LArt cinematographique (1926-1929) ran
to six book-length volumes and collected most of the lectures given at the
Vieux-Colombier in 1925-1926, along with additional pieces by Gance,
L’Herbier, Vuillermoz, and others. Several are notable as summary or original
statements: Dulac’s “Les Esthetiques, les entraves, la cinegraphie integrate, ”
Landry’s “Formation de la sensibilite,” Moussinac’s “Cinema: expression so-
ciale,” and Andre Levinson’s “Pour une poetique du film.”

261
ALTERNATE CINEMA This phenomenon of special issues was paralleled by the emergence of sev¬
NETWORK eral specialized, rather deluxe film journals, all of them edited by filmmakers
and cine-club leaders. Although none lasted more than a few years, they were
important organs for the exchange of ideas on an alternate cinema. Germaine
Dulac’s Schemas (1927), which appeared but once, was envisioned as a theo¬
retical journal modeled after Les Cahiers du mots (#16/17). That one issue
contained a cross-section of critical debate (and no photographs): Hans Richter
and Dulac herself advocating a “pure cinema’’ analogous to music, Henri Fes-
court and Jean-Louis Bouquet again defending the narrative cinema, Dr. Paul
Ramain celebrating the “oneiric incoherence’’ of film, Dr. Commandon ex¬
plaining the value of scientific films, and Jules Romains rhapsodizing in a
poetic epilogue. Jean Dreville edited no less than three film journals over a
two-year period: Photo-Cine (1927), Cinegraphie (1927-1928), and On Tourne
(1928). Of these, Cinegraphie, which ran only five issues, had the most impact.
Printed in a folio-sized format, it was the most deluxe film journal of the
decade, reproducing large-scale stills from major films along with Dreville’s
own exquisite landscape and portrait photographs. It was also the only film
journal to publish excerpts from actual shooting scripts: Dulac’s La Folie des
vaillants (1925) and Epstein’s 6V2 X 11 (1927).10 In Switzerland, Kenneth
140. The cover of Cinegraphie McPherson edited a monthly English-language film journal, Close Up (1927-
1930), which provided continuing coverage of the avant-garde French cinema
through Jean Lenauer. Finally, there was the monthly La Revue du cinema
(1928-193 1), edited by Jean-Georges Auriol and addressed to the elite clien¬
tele of Gallimard and the Nouvelle Revue Franpaise.11 Besides the comprehensive
film criticism by Paul Gilson, Louis Chavance, Bernard Brunius, and himself,
Auriol published several of Robert Desnos’s scenarios as well as Bunuel and
Dali’s scenario for Un Chien andalou (1929).12 Although large (forty to eighty
pages) and rather expensive, La Revue du cinema took consistently leftist polit¬
ical positions, especially after Janine Bouissounouse and Robert Aron joined the
editorial staff. It was the only film journal, for instance, which, following
Moussinac, envisioned an alternate cinema in political as well as aesthetic
terms.
Coincident with the first issue of La Revue du cinema, late in 1928, the field
of popular film journals expanded with the appearance of two new rivals to
Cinemagazine and Cinea-Cine-pour-tous. The first was Cinemonde, edited by Gas¬
ton Thierry, a slim twenty-page folio-format weekly. Cinemonde s attention was
focused on the major commercial films then in release or in production, and
it was filled with publicity photographs, sometimes artfully arranged accord¬
ing to the whims of an imaginative graphics designer. Although it defended
the work of several filmmakers associated with the narrative avant-garde, their
work and that of the avant-garde generally received even more attention in
the other new magazine, Pour Vous. Pour Vous was edited by Alexandre Ar-
noux, who hoped to make it an inexpensive, independent film journal: “In
this magazine, our readers will find not a single line of film industry publicity,
whether blatant or disguised (as is too often the case).’’13 To that end, Pour
Vous used a newspaper-size format of only sixteen pages (much like Cine-
miroir). And Arnoux and his writers—e.g., Wahl, Charensol, Roger Regent,
Nino Frank, Jean Lenauer, and Lucie Derain—devoted a good deal of space
not only to industry matters and the latest commercial films but to the broad

262
range of avant-garde film practice as well as to the exhibition activities of the proliferation and
cine-clubs and specialized cinemas. Although it could not sustain the level of CRISIS
independence that Arnoux initially desired, Pour Vous survived, along with
Cinemagazine and Cinemonde, to become the major weekly film journals of the
1930s.
For all that Delluc, Canudo, Moussinac, and others had done to create a
specialized/popular press devoted to the cinema and, in the words of Harry
Alan Potamkin, “a body of critics, as authentic and authoritative as the critics
of the other arts,”14 their legal status was less than clearly defined. To the
industry, the press served as a kind of publicity department extension; to the
critics, it served as an educational forum, an arena of exchange on aesthetic
values and on the social function of the cinema. These conflicting attitudes
came to a head in March, 1928, when a state court finally handed down a
decision on a suit that Jean Sapene and Cineromans had brought against Mous¬
sinac for one of his columns in L’Humanite (26 September 1926). The charge
was that he had maligned a film they were then distributing,/^ le Harponneur
[The Sea Beast, starring John Barrymorel, as “the perfect example of a bad
American film or, simply, a bad film.”15 Incredibly (or perhaps not—given
the results of the recent national elections), the court decided against Mous¬
sinac and accepted Cineromans’s demand of 100,000 francs in damages.16
Moussinac and L’Humanite appealed the verdict, but it was not until 12 De¬
cember 1930 that the Court of Appeals overturned the lower court’s decision
and, in effect, granted the film critics freedom of expression.17 After more
than a decade of struggle, film critics could finally enjoy the same legal rights
as their colleagues in literary, theater, and art criticism.

Moussinac found himself at the center of an even more important struggle

in the cine-club movement in 1928.
The success of the Cine-Club de France and the Tribune libre had been
phenomenal. Early in 1927, alongside its regular public film screenings, the
Cine-Club de France organized, for the College libre des sciences sociales, a
series of lectures called “The Cinema in modern life and thought”:

January 7: M. Charensol—The state of the cinema

January 14: M. A. Berge-—Literature and cinema
January 21: M. A. Obey—Music and cinema
January 28: M. Moussinac-—The social expression of the cinema
February 4: M. Levinson
February 11: M. Jean Laran—The documentary and instructional cinema
February 18: M. Rene Clair—The cinematographe vesus intelligence
February 25: M. M. L’Herbier—The cinematographe as a cosmic medium.18

A month later, it sponsored a second “Exposition du cinema” for the Galerie

d’Art de la Grande Maison de Blanc.19 And during the commercial exhibition
of Gance’s Napoleon at the Madeleine-Cinema, the club held a special screening
of the triptych sequences that had been cut from the film.20 Meanwhile, the
Tribune libre opened its third season of weekly public film screenings with
Kirsanoff s Menilmontant.21 In April, it sponsored Robert de Jarville’s series of
avant-garde film screenings and lectures, held on Saturday afternoons at the
Theatre de Chateau d’Eau.22 Later that same year, for the Salon d’Automne,

263
ALTERNATE CINEMA Jarville also delivered a lecture on “Images du monde’ and screened several
NETWORK undistributed Soviet films.23 Finally, for its fourth season, the Tribune libre
began with what it called “the most characteristic specimens of each country’s
production”: Feyder’s L’lmage (France), Lulu Pick’s Sylvester (Germany), Sjo-
strom’s L’Epreuve du feu (Sweden), and Kuleshov’s Dura Lux (Soviet Union).24
All of this activity soon had repercussions throughout France and the rest
of Europe. In Paris itself, a host of small cine-clubs grew up—with names
like Club de 1’Ecran (Pierre Ramelot), Phare tournant (Raymond Villette),
Regards, Le Lanterne magique, L’Effort, Les Spectateurs d’Avant-Garde.25
Outside the capital, as early as 1925, Dr. Paul Ramain had organized the first
provincial cine-club at Montpelier.26 Over the next few years, others were
started in Agen, Lyon, Reims, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Chalons, Lille, Tours,
Grenoble, and Marseille—Jean Vigo’s Amis du cinema, Cine-Club d’Avant-
Garde.27 In London, in 1925, there was the Film Society organized by Ivor
Montagu and Hugh Miller and run by Iris Barry; in Lausanne and Geneva, in
1926, the “Cine d’Art,” partly sponsored by the Vieux-Colombier.28 The most
active cine-club outside France, yet still associated with the French groups,
was in Brussels. Organized by Albert Valentin in 1925, as “Cinegraphie Fri¬
days” at the Cabinet Maldoror, the Brussels cine-club soon changed its name
to “Visions fortis” and held an extensive series of lecture-presentations late in
1926 at the Salle de L’Union Coloniaie.29 The list of speakers reads like a
directory of the French avant-garde: Dulac, L’Herbier, Epstein, Gance, Poi¬
rier, Clair, Feyder, Chomette, Kirsanoff, Dr. Comandon, Moussinac, Vuil-
lermoz. By 1927, the film critic Carl Vincent, who took over from Valentin,
had transformed the group into the “Club du cinema,” which held weekly
screenings at Sever House both Friday and Saturday evenings.30
By the end of the decade, the cine-club movement had proliferated to such
an extent that it climaxed in two major international events. In September,
1929, Robert Aron and Janine Bouissounouse organized a ten-day Interna¬
tional Congress on the Independent Cinema at the Chateau de La Sarraz in
Switzerland.31 The congress gathered together filmmakers and critics from
France (Aron, Bouissounouse, Auriol, Cavalcanti, and Moussinac), Germany
(Hans Richter and Walter Ruttman), England (Ivor Montagu and Isaacs),
Austria (Bela Balazs and Fritz Rosenfeld), Holland (H. K. Franken), Italy
(Enrico Prampolini and Alberto Sartoris), Spain (Gimenez Caballero), Switz¬
erland (Robert Guye, Arnold Kohler, Georg Schmidt, Alfred Masset, and jean
Lenauer), the United States (Montgomery Evans), and the Soviet Union (Sergei
Eisenstein, Edward Tisse, and Gregory Alexandrov). Two months later, in
Paris, Germaine Dulac, Charles Leger, and Robert de Jarville organized a
Congress of Cine-Clubs, out of which emerged the first international Federa¬
tion des Cine-Clubs.32
Despite this expansion, the cine-club movement remained basically elitist,
appealing to a restricted number of artists, intellectuals, cinephiles, and (to
use an unflattering label from the period) “boisterous snobs.”33 But there was
one exception—“Les Amis de Spartacus.” Two events in 1926 and 1927 finally
led Moussinac and several of his Communist friends to wed their interest in
an alternate cinema with their political ideology. On 13 November 1926, at
the Artistic-Cinema, Moussinac and Dulac arranged a Cine-Club de France
screening of the banned Eisenstein film, The Battleship Potemkin (1925).34 It

264
was one of the most successful of all their programs and aroused a keen interest proliferation and
among some Parisians to see more Soviet films. Then, in 1927, a workers’ crisis
cooperative took over the Bellevilloise, a popular cinema in the 20th arron-
dissement, to screen “exceptional films considered ‘uncommercial’ by the major¬
ity of cinema owners.”35 By the early 1930s, the Bellevilloise would become
an important outlet for workers’ newsreels.36 Its early success convinced Mous-
sinac to attempt a similar venture in the form of a cine-club.
In July, 1927, along with Jean Lods, Francis Jourdain, Paul Vaillant-Cour-
turier, and Georges Marrane, Moussinac organized the “Club des Amis de
Spartacus” with the purpose of creating a mass cinema movement.37 Their first
step was to acquire the Cinema du Casino de Crenelle, the largest cinema in
the 15 th arrondissement.38 The second step was to arrange for the rights to
project a series of provocative films. The third was to publicize their princi¬
ples:

To the public that loves and understands the cinema, that foresees its destiny, there
remains only a single means of battling this dictatorship of money: to band together.
Henceforth, it is the purpose of “Amis de Spartacus,’’ through the organizaiton of
restricted screenings, to assure the distribution of major works of the French, German,
American, and Soviet cinema.
The future of the cinematographe is entirely in the hands of the public.
It is indispensable that every film advocate work against commercial publicity,
against French protectionism, against American colonization.39

The cinema would be conceived, not as an end in itself, but as a means of

combat and of social liberation.
Finally, on 15 March 1928, the Casino de Grenelle cinema opened with
the first of six months of weekly programs. Four thousand people reportedly
showed up to vie for the 2,000 available seats.40 “We couldn’t believe our
eyes,” said Jean Lods, “when we found ourselves with a few thousand members
after several weeks; we didn’t know what to do.”41 One strategy they tried
was scheduling simultaneous screenings at the Bellevilloise as well as at the
Casino de Grenelle. Within three months, membership in Les Amis de Spar¬
tacus had swelled to at least ten thousand.42 Soon the club was organizing
efforts in the suburbs and provinces until, within another couple of months,
the membership had quadrupled.43 Just what films was the group exhibiting
that could cause this phenomenon? Older film classics, such as Delluc’s Fievre
and Stiiler’s Tre'sor d’Arne, recent popular films, such as Flaherty’s Moana and
the Swedish film, Charles XII, and, most important of all, three banned Soviet
films—Eisenstein’s Potemkin and Pudovkin’s Mother (1926) and The End of St.
Petersburg (1927).44 According to Jean Lods, as many as twenty-five to thirty
thousand people saw Potemkin alone.45 What was the group planning for its
fall season in 1928? Series of French, American, and German films, and, in
honor of the tenth anniversary of the Soviet revolution, Eisenstein’s new film,
October (1927).46
Les Amis de Spartacus was the one overtly political organization in the
French cine-club movement of the 1920s. And it was the only organization
to come close to making that movement a mass movement, to lay the ground¬
work for a truly popular alternate cinema which could confront the dominant
industry with any degree of force. As long as the cine-clubs and specialized

265
ALTERNATE CINEMA cinemas were restricted to small audiences, the industry could ignore them or

NETWORK even offer mild encouragement. But when a club could compete on a par with
the largest commercial cinemas in Paris, that was another matter. Les Amis
de Spartacus was also making a mockery of the government practice of per¬
mitting officially censored films to be projected privately in the cine-clubs but
forbidding them in the commercial cinemas.47 That most of these films were
Soviet in origin made them a highly visible target of the political attacks on
French Communists that reached a peak in 1928. In September, Jean Chiappe,
the dapper, devious Paris chief of police, called Jean Lods into his office and
told him the Spartacus group was on a collision course with his duty to protect
the public order. He even threatened to have his agents (who had infiltrated
the group) disrupt any further Soviet film screenings at either the Casino de
Grenelle or the Bellevilloise.48 Given Chiappe’s power, Moussinac and Lods
had no legal recourse. By October, Les Amis de Spartacus was disbanded, and
the energy that had gone into the organization dispersed among the other film
groups and into other political activities. Although the Spartacus group never
reached the point of engaging in film production, the Soviet films it exhibited
had a decided impact on a number of French avant-garde filmmakers.

Another crisis of sorts occurred among the specialized cinemas as they ex¬
panded in number and scope to the point of threatening the apparent unity of
the alternate cinema network. Jean Tedesco steadily continued to build up a
film repertory at the Vieux-Colombier and promoted his effort in the pages of
Cinea-Cine-pour-tous,49 For the most part, his programming consisted of re¬
screening films, whether successful (e.g., L’Herbier’s Feu Mathias Pascal, Lang’s
Siegfried) or unsuccessful (e.g., Murnau’s The Last Laugh, initially booed at the
Aubert-Palace),50 which had contributed to the development of film art. His
choice of films struck a fairly equal balance among the American, German,
and French cinemas. In the second and third seasons, however, Tedesco began
to introduce new films as well (e.g., Menilmontant, Cavalcanti’s En rade)dl
Most of these were documentaries—by Sauvage, Boge, Chaumel, and Jean
Gremillon—a preference that soon distinguished the Vieux-Colombier from
the other specialized cinemas in Paris.52 That preference seems to have coin¬
cided with, and possibly fed, a growing public interest in documentary films—
e.g., Poirier’s La Croisiere noire at the Salle Marivaux (April, 1926), Cooper
and Schoedsack’s Grass at the Madeleine (June, 1926), and Flaherty’s Moana
at the Electric (August, 1926).53 In November, 1926, Tedesco offered a spe¬
cial screening of Moana, which had to be rescheduled twice to meet audience
demands.54 In early 1927, he presented Andre Gide and Marc Allegret’s film
on central Africa, Voyage au Congo, and then Gremillon’s Tour au large, a lyrical
celebration of trawler fishing off the Brittany coast.55 For the latter, Gremillon
himself constructed an experimental sound synchronization system using Ple-
yela player piano rolls. The popularity of the Vieux-Colombier persuaded Te¬
desco, early in 1927, to lease the first floor of a building on the Right Bank
of Paris, the Pavilion de Hanovre. There, at the Pavilion du cinema, until the
summer of 1928, he could screen films that had been programmed at the
Vieux-Colombier one or two weeks before.56
Tedesco’s example and the expanding activity of the Tribune libre led to
the transformation of a small cinema near the Mouffetard area in the same year

266
the Pavilion opened. This was the 300-seat Cine-Latin, owned by Jose Miguel proliferation and
Duran, whose model for programming strategy was Charles Leger.57 Much crisis
like the Vieux-Colombier, the Cine-Latin specialized in repertory programs,
but its emphasis was on the French cinema. In February, 1928, for instance,
following the exclusive run of Napoleon, Duran rescreened Gance’s early war
epic, J’Accuse^8 In March, he devoted several weeks to a retrospective of films
by Rene Clair; in June, he persuaded Marcel L’Herbier to project, along with
L'Inhumaine, his incomplete version of Resurrection.59 The Cine-Latin is even
credited with rediscovering, and so preserving, Louis Delluc’s La Femme de
nulle part and L’lnondation as well as Max Linder’s L’Etroit Mousquetaire.60 Just
as did the Tribune libre, Duran scheduled discussions, every Thursday eve¬
ning, for the spectators to debate the films shown during the past week.61 The
audience of the Cine-Latin guaranteed a lively dialogue, for it was comprised
equally of students and working-class people from the neighborhood. Paul de
la Borie reports on one of the summer programs:

Seated side by side, intellectuals and workers fraternize in front of the screen. I cannot
say that the films they are watching produce the same impression on one and the
other. They are not, evidently, in the same state of receptivity. The comic film pre¬
ceding the piece de resistance provokes among the common people of the audience a
hilarious outburst in which the university students do not share. Instead, the students
amuse themselves over the naive delight of their neighbors. But the second part of
the program begins, and soon there is a silence that is absolute. The entire audience
follows the unfolding of the images and the development of ideas with unfailing
attention. But, in general, the common people applaud very little. They are trying
too hard to understand. And the fact is that they do understand for they don’t get
annoyed. . . . And they come back for more.62

Much like the Bellevilloise cinema across Paris, then, the Cine-Latin served as
a precedent for Moussinac’s Les Amis de Spartacus.
The Studio des Ursulines flourished even more than did its two companion
cinemas. By late 1927,, Tallier told the Cinematographic frangaise, his cinema
had drawn 23,000 to 25,000 people to its programs.63 His programming
format of prewar films, avant-garde films, and unreleased films distinguished
it from both the Vieux-Colombier and the Cine-Latin. And Tallier’s choice of
newly released German and American films, along with French experimental
shorts, catered to the snobs of his audience. Ironically, that snobism affirmed
the very status quo the alternate cinema movement was trying to combat: that
the French cinema merely existed on the margins of the American and German
cinema. An unspoken rivalry seems to have arisen between Tallier and Te-
desco, perhaps because the latter saw himself as a founder or father confronted
by a usurper.64 The rivalry is implicit in Cinea-Cine-pour-tous s relative neglect
of the Studio des Ursulines in its pages and perhaps explicit in Tedesco’s
abandonment of a joint exhibition of G. W. Pabst’s Secrets of a Soul (1926),
planned for May, 1927.65 In its second and, especially, its third season, the
Studio des Ursulines shifted its programming to include more and more new
French films—but with no letup in the rivalry. In the fall of 1926, Tailler
had countered Tedesco’s screening of Moana by being the first in Paris to
exhibit Cavalcanti’s semi-documentary, Rien que les heures (1926).66 Late in
1927, he countered Le Voyage au Congo and Tour au large at the Vieux-Co¬
lombier with Leon Poirier’s new documentary on Africa, Amours exotiques. That

267
ALTERNATE cinema same year, Tallier scored another coup by offering en exclusivite two of Jean
NETWORK Epstein’s independently produced films, 6V2 X 11 and La Glace a trois faces.
The latter had an exceptionally successful run, for a French film, of nearly
three months.67
What really made the Ursulines distinctive, however, was short avant-garde
films. It was the single Paris cinema to consistently offer an outlet for young
independent filmmakers. By exhibiting Clair’s Entr'acte, Autant-Lara’s Fait-
Divers, and Leger’s Ballet mecanique on its earliest programs, the Ursulines built
up a loose corpus of short experimental films which were first projected pub¬
licly on its screen. Besides those mentioned, they included Chomette’s Jeux
des reflets et de la Vitesse (1925) and Cinq Minutes du cinema pur (1926), Du¬
champ’s Anemic cinema (1926), Cavalcanti’s La P'tite Lily (1927), Clair’s La
Tour (1928), and Man Ray’s Emak Bakia (1927) and L'Etoile de mer (1928).68
Tallier even made room in this corpus for several short documentaries: Georges
Lacombe’s striking study of the ragpickers of the Clignancourt flea market, La
Zone (1928), Marcel Carne’s Nogent, Eldorado du dimanche (1930) and Jean
Vigo’s A propos de Nice (1930).69 At least one of his selections, however, em¬
broiled the Ursulines in considerable controversy. This was La Coquille et le
clergyman, which Cine-Club de France had screened privately as early as Oc¬
tober, 1927.70 Thinking that Antonin Artaud (the author of the scenario) had
denounced Germaine Dulac’s production of the film, the Surrealists provoked
a near-riot when the film was shown in February, 1928.71 The so-called scan¬
dal demeaned La Coquille et le clergyman at the time, but so marked it histor¬
ically as to create continued interest in it.
During the last two years of the decade, at least four more specialized
cinemas sprang up in Paris. The popularity of the Ursulines’s programming
convinced a M. Querel, late in 1928, to open another little cinema, the 550-
seat Salle des Agriculteurs.72 According to Jean Dreville, Autour de 1'argent,
his short documentary (and montage study) on the making of L’Herbier’s
L’Argent (1929), was the main attraction of the inaugural program—even more
than Ralph Ince’s Shanghaied (19 2 7).73 For its first half year, the Agriculteurs
had a shaky existence. La Revue du cinema alternately praised and damned its
programming—they especially supported an early festival of Cavalcanti films.74
In May, 1929, Tallier and Myrga announced that they were going to take
over management of the cinema, and for the next six months or so they seem
to have run the Agriculteurs successfully as a repertory cinema.75 Even more
successful than the Agriculteurs was Jean Vallee’s L’Oeil de Paris, located near
the Place de l’Etoile. Although less luxurious than some of the other cinemas,
L’Oeil de Paris had a chic Argentinian decor and was conveniently inexpen¬
sive.76 Its inaugural program, in May, 1929, was modeled on the Ursulines—
Dulac’s Arabesques, Robert Florey’s Life and Death of a Hollywood Extra, ex¬
cerpts from the old serial Les Mysteres de New-York, and Jean Epstein’s new
film, Finis Terrae.77 Within months, L’Oeil de Paris had become the meeting
place for the biweekly sessions of the Club de l’Ecran.78 The only specialized
cinema to fail during this period was the Studio Diamant. Ever the opportun¬
ist, Henri Diamant-Berger conceived this cinema as part of an ambitious art
center for the avant-garde.79 All he completed, however, was the 160-seat
cinema and an adjacent bar. Perhaps because of his former position in the
commercial industry, his rather unfocused programming included very few

268
French films.80 Although Diamant-Berger says that his mismanagement of the proliferation and
bar caused him to close the Studio Diamant, Harry Alan Potamkin suggests crisis
another reason (besides the programming): it was so designed (with steel stalls,
a leveled or stairlike ceiling, and a distant screen) as to distract and trouble
one’s vision.81
The last major specialized cinema was Jean Mauclaire’s Studio 28. Mauclaire
opened his 337-seat cinema in January, 1928, not on the Left Bank, but
halfway up the hill of Montmartre.82 His programming format aligned the
Studio 28 closely with the Ursulines: unreleased or newly released features
plus short prewar and avant-garde films. The inaugural program he put to¬
gether—a documentary on the making of Gance’s Napoleon and a new Soviet
film, Abram Room’s Bed and Sofa (1927)—was so successful that it ran for
five weeks.83 That summer, Studio 28 featured Epstein’s new film, La Chute
de la maison Usher, en exclusivity with similar success.84 Like the L’Oeil de
Paris, it, too, became a favorite meeting place for several cine-clubs.85 From
the beginning, Mauclaire’s ambition was to equal or surpass the prestige of
the Vieux-Colombier and the Ursulines. To that end, according to Potamkin,
before each program he projected color slides on the cinema’s silver-toned walls
and then accompanied each film with “an arranged selection of music from a
mechanical piano.’’86 Within a short time, Studio 28 was acknowledged as the
most attractive fc and “a la mode’’ small cinema in Paris.
On one occasion, however, Maucliare’s programming actually endangered
his own cinema. In April, 1929, at the Ursulines, the Surrealists had arranged
a private screening of the unknown Un Chien andalou, along with Man Ray’s
Les Mysteres du chateau du De'.87 Initially skeptical, they came away enthusiastic
advocates of the Buhuel-Dali film. When Mauclaire agreed to premiere Un
Chien andalou at Studio 28 the following autumn, Andre Breton decided to
make it a gala event, with a foyer exhibition of paintings by Masson, Miro,
Ernst, Man Ray, and others.88 Rumor and the usual polemical publicity led
to an ugly confrontation at the early November premiere. Members of the
right-wing Jeunesse patriote and Camelots du Roi stormed into the cinema,
attacked the film, and retreated, slashing some of the paintings. This scandal
assured Un Chien andalou s success, and for nine months at Studio 28 it played
off and on to capacity crowds whose responses oscillated wildly from outrage
to enthusiasm and hysterical laughter.89 Cyril Connolly, for instance, reports
that

The picture was received with shouts and boos and when a pale young man tried to
make a speech, hats and sticks were flung at the screen. In one corner a woman was
chanting, “Salopes, salopes, salopes!’’ and soon the audience began to join in.90

As the cine-clubs and specialized cinemas multiplied in the second half of

the decade, there was a reciprocal increase in the demand for avant-garde films.
The problem was how could the production and distribution of more and more
French films be financed? The production of a short silent film was not all
that expensive—Carne’s Nogent, Eldorado du dimanche (1929) reportedly cost
but 5,000 francs—but that was beyond the means of most avant-garde film¬
makers.91 One source of capital was a wealthy patron whose interest in the
cinema made him susceptible to dabbling in the new art. Rolf de Mare, for
instance, financed Clair’s Entr'acte as an interlude for one of the 1924 Ballet

269
ALTERNATE cinema suedois programs at his Theatre de Champs-Elysees. To compete with de Mare,
NETWORK the following year, the Comte de Beaumont asked Henri Chomette to make
several short films for his famous ballet productions, Soirees de Paris. 92
Perhaps through his indirect involvement in L’Herbier’s Cinegraphic com¬
pany, the Vicomte de Noailles became enamored of the cinema and hit upon
the idea of producing one film each year as a gift to his wife: Man Ray’s Les
Mysteres du chateau du De (1929), Luis Bunuel’s L’Age d’or (1930), and Jean
Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poete (1930-1932).93 But the whole French production
of avant-garde films could hardly depend on the whim and largess of a couple
of latter-day Maecenases.
In contrast to Germany, where both UFA and the state helped finance short
avant-garde films,94 capital was not forthcoming from the French commercial
film industry, especially after the tight money conditions of 1925. Perhaps
inevitably, the specialized cinemas began to venture into film production. As
early as 1926, Jean Tedesco turned the loft above his cinema into the “Labo-
ratoire du Vieux-Colombier” for the production of short scientific films—e.g.,
Etoiles et fleurs de mer, Papillons et chrysalides.9% A year later, Jean Renoir’s pro¬
duction team joined Tedesco to expand the laboratory’s meager facilities for
their fantasy film, based on a Hans Christian Andersen fable, La Petite Mar-
chande d’allumettes (1928).96 The atelier now had its own electrical generator,
specially built reflector lamps (for panchromatic film stock), wooden tanks and
an old Pathe camera (for processing the negative and making the initial posi¬
tive prints).97 After more than six months of work, La Petite Marchande d’al¬
lumettes was projected in the very place of its creation, in June, 1928.98 Un¬
fortunately, the film’s exhibition and distribution was halted almost immediately
by Maurice Rostand (the author of a 1914 operatic adaptation of the same
fable), who charged Renoir and Tedesco with plagiarism.99 Although the film¬
makers won their case, it was in litigation for more than a year; and Tedesco
was unable to develop the Vieux-Colombier laboratory into the major produc¬
tion facility he had envisioned.100 Still, it was used occasionally, at least until
1930, when the Hungarian animator, Berthold Bartosch, worked there on his
film version of a book of woodcuts, Une Idee (1934).101 Besides these few studio
films, Tedesco also seems to have helped finance Kirsanoffs short experimental
sound film, Brumes d’automne (1928), and Epstein’s short documentary, Le Pas
de la mule (1930).102
The Ursulines and L’Oeil de Paris also sponsored several short films, notably
the abstract experiments of Germaine Dulac—Themes et variations (1928) and
Arabesques (1929). But the most assiduous practicioner of independent film
production financing was Jean Mauclaire of Studio 28. Even before he opened
his cinema on Montmartre, Mauclaire had signed a contract with Abel Gance
that gave him exclusive exhibition rights to several short triptych films.103 In
May, 1928, Dreville identified three of these works (which have since disap¬
peared) as Galop, Danses and Marine—the last of which, he said, was “with
Tour au large, the most beautiful poem that has been created about the sea.”104
During the next two years, Mauclaire provided financing to several young
filmmakers for their first films: Henri d’Arche and Georges Hugnet’s La Perle
(1929), Lucie Derain’s Harmonies de Paris (1929), Eugene Deslaw’s Marche des
machines (1928) and Nuits electriques (1929), and A. Sandy’s Lumieres et ombres

270
(1929) and Pretexte (1929). According to one source, he also partially under- proliferation AND
wrote Epstein’s La Chute de la maison Usher as well as his last silent film, Sa crisis
Tete (1929).105
Just as they were forced into film production, the Vieux-Colombier and
Ursulines both found themselves involved very quickly in film distribution.
By 1926, Tedesco was shipping films off to Switzerland and Belgium to pro¬
vide current programs for outpost cinemas and cine-clubs. Tallier soon fol¬
lowed his example, and, by the summer of 1928, he was advertising that the
Ursulines could supply a program of films, a projector, and a projectionist to
any provincial cinema on payment of costs and a moderate fee.106 The two
primary distribution agencies for young avant-garde filmmakers, however, were
set up independently of Tedesco and Tallier. One was the “Cooperative du
Film,’’ directed by Robert Aron, a newly appointed editor for La Revue du
cinema.101 The other was run by Pierre Braunberger. Braunberger’s production
company, Neo-Film, had already financed short films by Renoir and Caval¬
canti—e.g., Charleston (1926) and La P’tite Lily (1927)—as well as the latter’s
feature film, En rade (1927).108 In May, 1929, he announced the formation of
Studio-Film to distribute and sell “all the films of artistic quality (experimen¬
tal films, documentary films, films called ‘Avant-Garde’).’’109 In just a few
months, Braunberger had compiled a list of available films that summed up
much of the current French and foreign avant-garde film practice:

A. Cavalcanti—En rade, Rien que les heures, La P'tite Lily.

Man Ray—L’Etoile de mer, Emak Bakia, Les Mysteres du chateau du De.
E. Deslav—La Nuit electnque, La marche des machines, Montparnasse.
D. Kirsanoff—Brumes d’automne.
E. Deslav—La Nuit electnque, La marche des Machines, Montparnasse.
L. Bunuel—Le Chien andalou.
G. Lacombe—La Zone.
Rene Clair—Le Voyage imaginaire.
Henri d’Arche—La Perle.
J. Renoir—La Fille de I’eau.
C. Lambert—Void Paris, Void Marseille.
J. de Casembroot—Ernest et Amelie.
R. Landau—Rhythmes d’une cathedrale.
S. Silka—Le Male mort de Canart.
Duhamel—Paris express.
O. Blakeston—I Do Love To Be beside the Seaside.
P. Sichel—Bithulite.
C. Heymann—Vie heureuse.
Gide et Allegret—Voyage au Congo.
Allegret—Les Troglodytes.
V. Blum—Wasser.
A. Strasser—Partie de campagne.
Robert Florey—-Symphonie des gratte-ciels.
Kenneth Macpherson—Monkeys, Moon.
Michel Gorel—Bateaux parisiens.
Pierre Chenal—Un Coup de de.
C. Autant-Lara—Construire un feu.
Jean Lods et Boris Kaufmann—Aujourd’huiM0

271
ALTERNATE CINEMA Even Pathe-Cinema inadvertently became part of this alternate cinema distri¬
NETWORK bution circuit through its sale of 9-5mm copies of films to collectors and the
smaller cine-clubs.111 Unfortunately, this distribution effort was quickly un¬
dermined and diverted by the sound revolution sweeping the film industry.

Preservation The change to sound films in France, from 1929 to 1930, had a disrupting
effect on two crucial areas of the alternate cinema network—production and
exhibition. The proliferation of independent avant-garde film production was
halted and reversed by the expense and inaccessibility of material and equip¬
ment. Only a few filmmakers were able to work briefly—and independently—
in sound: Bunuel’s LAge d’or, screened at Studio 28 for several weeks before
it was banned on 11 December 1930; Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d'un poete, made
in 1930, but not screened until 20 January 1932, at the Vieux-Colombier;
and Jean Vigo’s banned Zero de conduite (1933), which was screened only once
publicly at the Artistic cinema. Epstein tried to maintain his independence
with a little-known three-reel semi-documentary on Brittany fisherman, Mor-
Vran (1930), but he had no control over its .musical soundtrack. Most film¬
makers were soon forced to join the dominant industry to work on commercial
feature films (L’Herbier and Gremillon at Natan-Pathe, Clair and Chomette
at Tobis-Klangfilm, Cavalcanti at Paramount, Renoir at Braunberger-Richebe)
or newsreels (Dulac for Gaumont) or singing interlude films (Epstein for Syn¬
chro-Cine)- Of the specialized cinemas, only two survived beyond 1930. Te-
desco sonorized the Vieux-Colombier with an eccentric system, Equipment
Synchronista, and kept the cinema open until 1932 with his repertory films
plus a few new foreign releases.2 Tallier also sonorized the Ursulines in 1930
and was lucky enough to premiere Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (with Marlene
Dietrich), which played for a record fourteen months.3 When his staple of
German films dried up by 1934, the Ursulines reverted to a repertory program
that alternated with the usual commercial releases.
The cine-clubs also changed their orientation. Where before they had fo¬
cused on educating film viewers and supporting independent filmmakers, they
now became sanctuaries for the masterpieces of the Belle Epoque of silence.
For some, a period of nostalgia set in. For others, more serious, the impulse
to establish a heritage of cinema art and to preserve a body of films from the
economic cycle of production and destruction (negative film stock melted down
for chemical extractions) or from blind neglect (negative and positive prints
thrown away or stored haphazardly and carelessly) suddenly became para¬
mount. A precedent of sorts had been set by the educator, Victor Perret, in
establishing an educational cinema library, the Cinematheque de la ville de
Paris, in 1925.4 The repertory film concept of Tedesco, Leger, Clouzot, and
others had yielded a small collection of films of widely varying conditions.
Cinephiles such as Jean Mitry and Jean Mauclaire agitated among filmmakers
and critics for a national cinematheque, not for educational, technical, or
military purposes, but to honor the cinema itself.5 As evidence of his concern,
Mauclaire managed to organize a retrospective of Louis Delluc’s films (April,
1929) and, with Jean-Georges Auriol of La Revue du cinema, sponsored a special
program devoted to Georges Melies, with eight newly reconstructed, tinted
prints (16 December 1929).6 In his book, Ranoramique de cinema (1929), Mous-

272
sinac joined in to argue at length for an international bibliotheque and cinema¬ PRESER V ATION
theque.1
According to Raymond Borde, however, it was not until 1933 that a Cine¬
matheque nationale was established and installed in the old Trocadero palace.8
The impetus came not only from cine-club lobbying (Maurice Bessy, for in¬
stance) but from the public outcry in the press over the loss of films. Mous-
sinac recounts the story well.

A number of cinema owners, in effect, faced with the lamentable mediocrity of the
talkies available to them, still resist reequipping their cinemas and, in order to offer
“silent” programs, specifically seek out quality films released during the past five or six
years. Their interest leads them to compose a kind of program sharply different from
that of their competitors and thus serves to maintain an existing clientele. Certain
other cinema owners, even though equipped for sound, continue to screen silent films
from time to time, preferring to schedule an interesting nontalkie rather than an
imbecilic talkie.
Such actions cannot agree with the interests of the large companies which need to
circulate their production schedules through the greatest possible number of cinemas
in order to write off, at least, the cost of the films.
Hence, the recent offensive which translates itself into the sabotage of the good
silent films that still exist.
We have already mentioned that, for a great number of these films, the distributors
are resisting any rentals and that, if a rental is allowed, the prints provided are so
scratched, spliced, and deteriorated, that a public screening provokes the ire of spec¬
tators. In that way, the masters of the international film industry hope they can force
all the “rebellious” cinema owners—if they want to avoid closing down—to screen
“their” programs of sound films, however mediocre they may be.
They are going so far—and even the bourgeois press is scandalized, for appearance’s
sake—to destroy certain works which truly deserve preservation for the history of the
cinema.9

Unfortunately, the Cinematheque nationale proved little more than a name

since it lacked any funding. To rectify its inaction, two years later, Mitry,
Georges Franju, and Henri Langlois organized the Cinematheque fran^aise
under the nominal direction of Paul-Auguste Harle, a top administrator of La
Cinematographie frangaised0 Thus did the cine-clubs and the few cinephiles who
collected films, along with key industry figures such as Alexandre Kamenka
and Germaine Dulac as well as second-hand film distributors, become the
primary sources for what has been preserved of the French silent cinema art.

The French movement to establish an alternate cinema in the 1920s seems

to have gone through three fairly distinct stages. The first can be marked off
by Louis Delluc’s assumption of the editorship of Le Film in 1917 and by the
deaths of Canudo and Delluc, respectively, in 1923 and 1924. Those six or
seven years saw the founding of independent film journals, regular newspaper
film review columns, and the earliest cine-club organizations. From the writ¬
ings and conversations of Delluc, Canudo, Moussinac, Vuillermoz, and others
emerged the theory and praxis of an embryonic film criticism and the concep¬
tualization of an alternate cinema. The second period can be marked off from
1924 to 1926 or 1927. For two or three years, a loose network of cine-clubs,
specialized cinemas, and film journals seemed to present a united front in
actively promoting an alternate cinema. Popular exhibitions at the Musee Gal-

273
ALTERNATE CINEMA liera and the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, lectures at the Vieux-Colombier,
NETWORK and regular public screenings by the Cine-Club de France and the Tribune
libre—all these activities encouraged independent filmmakers in their work,
built up a permanent audience, and began to articulate a history of cinema
art. The third and final period can be marked off from 1927 to 1930. In these
three or four years, the proliferation of organizations and the intensification of
activity had two major consequences. With the founding of Les Amis de
Spartacus, the cooperative system supporting an alternate cinema verged on
becoming a mass political/socioeconomic movement. The threat was grave
enough to the dominant industry and the state that the Paris police reacted
quickly to dissolve and disperse its force. Simultaneously, the alternate exhi¬
bition system established by the cine-clubs and specialized cinemas expanded
to include film production and distribution. This, too, was swiftly curtailed
by the industry’s transformation to sound films. Stymied by political and
economic conditions, what was left of the alternate cinema system redirected
its energies into the cinematheque movement and into limited subversion from
within the industry itself—e.g., the films of Clair, Renoir, Dulac, Vigo, and
Jacques Prevert.
This history of an alternate cinema structure in France also reveals certain
internal contradictions or oppositions which the movement failed to resolve.
What was conceived as a mass movement, a popular cinema, consistently
functioned as an elitist operation. Despite Delluc and Canudo’s expressed wishes,
their journals and clubs (and Delluc’s films, for that matter) attracted only a
small cultured audience. Leger’s Tribune libre and Moussinac’s Les Amis de
Spartacus came closest to fulfilling those initial dreams, but their work was
outweighed by the elite-oriented programs of the Ursulines, Studio 28, and
even the Vieux-Colombier. The “a la mode’’ audiences of the Ursulines and
Studio 28, especially, led to repeated charges that the French avant-garde
merely provided excitement and entertainment for snobs. The elitism of the
alternate cinema structure also depended in part on its overriding interest in
aesthetic and even epistemological questions raised by the new medium of
film. The debates that animated the pages of Cinea-Cine-pour-tous, Les Cahiers
du mois, Cinegraphie, and others often revolved around the possibility of a “pure
cinema’’ or a non-representational cinema, the definition of cinematic specific¬
ity and cinematic rhythm, the relationship between cinema and the other arts,
especially music. At their best, they explored the ways that film could expand
human perception and knowledge. Only Moussinac, and Clair to a lesser ex¬
tent, consistently argued in writing that an alternate cinema had to be con¬
ceived politically and economically. It would depend on a strong alternative
to or a transformation of the dominant industry. That did not, and perhaps
could not, happen in the French society of the late 1920s.
Moussinac’s bitter conclusion has some validity: “because it envisioned the
problem according to the point of view of aesthetics only, because it wanted
to ignore the economic laws which determined it, the avant-garde is dead.’’11
Yet the avant-garde did not really die. If it failed to sustain a lasting cultural
revolution on the scale it had hoped for, its counterpart in the Soviet Union
was hardly more successful in its mission. One should not forget that, even
with all of its contradictions, the French alternate cinema movement produced
a good deal of valuable work, in theory and practice, that has not been without

274
descendants. Its heritage is visible in the British documentary movement of PRESERVATION
the 1930s, in the film theory and criticism of Andre Bazin and Jean Mitry
(though unacknowledged and somewhat obscured), in the American avant-
garde that finally developed after World War II, and in the French film activ¬
ity in the 1950s that eventually became known as the New Wave. In this
current period of rediscovery and reinterpretation, may that heritage once more
make a useful intervention.

275
TJ
N arrative
Avant-Garde
One does not make films according to theories; one constructs theories after the films.
—Jean Epstein (1924)

As far as signs are concerned, man is always mobilizing many more of them than he
knows.
—Jacques Lacan (1978)
 The “First Avant-Garde’’ or the “Impressionist Cinema”—these are the la- Introduction
bels that have long been attached to the French narrative avant-garde films of
the 1920s. Yet unless one is interested in a rather limited number of film¬
makers and films, neither term seems appropriate to cover the extent and
diversity of the narrative avant-garde film practice. Nor is either all that useful
in understanding the significance of that practice. As P. Adam Sitney has
suggested, these labels represent an “insidious distinction . . . {that] has helped
to perpetuate a distorted picture of this period.”1 Let me try to explain why.
The First Avant-Garde is a term that began to emerge as early as the 1930s,
when Germaine Dulac wrote probably the earliest historical sketch of avant-
garde French filmmaking.2 Since then, historians and critics have used it to
distinguish one group or “wave” of filmmakers and their films from several
other later ones.3 That group usually includes Abel Gance, Marcel L’Herbier,
Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, and sometimes Jean Epstein, all of whom
made feature-length narrative films within or on the margins of the commer¬
cial film industry between 1919 and 1924. As Emile Vuillermoz put it, this
was the first generation to “think spontaneously in animated images.”4 They
are to be distinguished from a Second Avant-Garde of Pure Cinema advocates
and Dada/Surrealist films as well as from a Third Avant-Garde of documen¬
taries. All of these supposedly are shorter non-narrative films produced outside
the industry, from 1924 to 1929. When history gets this neat, you suspect
something may be wrong with the terms and categories.
When Jean Epstein called for “a new avant-garde,” late in 1924, neither
he nor his colleagues meant that they were giving up on a narrative cinema.5
Independent production companies within the dominant industry may have
shrunk in number, but avant-garde narrative films did not vanish when the
short non-narrative films first appeared, in 1923-1924. In fact, one can argue,
they continued to flourish in the form of both short and feature-length works
until the end of the decade. Moreover, they were made not only by members
of the so-called First Avant-Garde but by others as well: e.g., Dmitri Kirsa-
noff, Alberto Cavalcanti, Jean Renoir, Jean Gremillon, and Carl Dreyer. As a
critical term, therefore, the First Avant-Garde may be limited; but at least it
is relatively neutral. That is hardly the case with its more prominent synonym,
*

the Impressionist Cinema.

“Impressionism” and “Impressionist” are terms that some of the filmmakers
themselves used to describe certain kinds of films during the 1920s. But look
at the way they used them, the way their meaning shifted. As I have already
indicated, these terms first came into parlance near the end of the war to
describe the early French realist films set in the provinces, particularly the
way they represented or evoked a landscape or milieu’s atmosphere through a
series of visual “impressions.” Through its emphasis on the contemporary, the
pictorial, and the natural harmony of characters and landscapes, wrote Louis
Delluc, “the impressionism of the cinema parallels in its blossoming that
astonishing period of painting {French Impressionism].”6 For his part, Marcel
L’Herbier made a somewhat different association, between the “musicality of
the image {as rhythmic discourse]” and musical Impressionism.7 By 1925-
1926, however, the terms were being used to define a particular kind of film
and a specific stage in the development of French film art. According to Ger-

279
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE maine Dulac, the Impressionist era commenced about 1920 and was charac¬
terized by the “psychological film,” which placed a “character in a particular
situation ... in order to penetrate into the secret domain of his inner life. . . ,”8

Impressionism made us see nature and its objects as elements concurrent with the
action. A shadow, a light, a flower had, above all, a meaning, as the reflection of a
mental state or an emotional situation, then, little by little, became a necessary com¬
plement, having an intrinsic value of its own. We experimented with making things
move through the science of optics, tried to transform figures according to the logic
of a state of mind.9

From then on, even though Dulac is speaking about her own films perhaps
more than those of her colleagues, Impressionism became linked indissolubly
with the concept of a subjective cinema. Through Henri Langlois and Georges
Sadoul, principally, the term has come into conventional historical parlance.
The way we understand, and judge, this so-called French Impressionism,
however, also seems to depend on a broader context, on a specific moment or
shift in the history of art, especially French art. Briefly, that moment is marked
by the divergent transformations of the aesthetic imperative of nineteenth-
century Realism—to be truthful to one’s individual perception of the physical
or social world. According to Linda Nochlin, the initial transformation pro¬
vided the impetus for both Impressionism and Symbolism (in painting and
literature). Here the emphasis shifted to “the demands of one’s inner ‘subjec¬
tive’ feelings or imagination” over and above the demands of external reality.10
The latent subjectivity implied in the Realist concept of nature as viewed
through a temperament or personality became overt, privileging the unique
perception or transcendent imagination of the individual. Subsequently, a sec¬
ond transformation led to what has become a chief tenet of Modernism. There
the emphasis fell on “the reality of the pictorial means at the expense of the
reality of the external world depicted by . . . these means.”11 The nature or
specificity of the material (e.g., in painting, the flat surface and the substance
and technique of application) became the proper subject of art. While Impres¬
sionism and Symbolism seemed to maintain a position within the context of
a system of representation and narration, Modernism seemed to adopt a more
advanced position that advocated a system of pure presentation and formal
construction which was both anti-illusionist and anti-narrative. Dubiously ap¬
propriated to describe the French avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, it is this
apparent difference that has determined the choice of most film historians to
celebrate the “Modernist” non-narrative films at the expense of the “Impres¬
sionist” narrative films.
To some extent, the theoretical and critical writings of the period support
this simple opposition and abet the elevation of one term (and group of films)
over the other. But if one looks at the actual avant-garde film practice, the
matter is less clear-cut. For the diversity of that practice raises questions not
only about these labels but about exactly what was avant-garde in the French
narrative cinema. If Impressionism as a critical concept is misleading or even
suspect, that comes less from its instability as a term of definition than from
its failure to encompass the range of French narrative avant-garde film practice.
Defining the narrative avant-garde, as I would prefer to call it, solely as an
attempt to create a subjective cinema, through so-called Impressionist tech-

280
niques or devices, greatly simplifies or excludes much of what is going on in INTRODUCTION
the discourse and narrative processes of the major films.12 To cite just a few
instances here, there were experiments in developing a mixture of styles or
modes, different systems of continuity, “plastic harmonies,’’ patterns of rhe¬
torical figuring, and complex narrative structures. Besides, what was taken for
subjectivity in some films is not at all an individual character’s state of mind
or inner life, but something else—either a kind of collective consciousness, an
interrelation of several characters’ perceptions and feelings, a shifting exper¬
iential flow of the subjective and the omniscient, or, in Fredric Jameson’s
broad reframing of Impressionism, “the exercise of perception and the percep¬
tual recombination of sense data as an end in itself.”13 Furthermore, as Ian
Christie has noted, and I have described in detail, the infrastructure that was
developed in conjunction with the early avant-garde narrative films provided
a basis for all subsequent avant-garde film practice.14 Consequently, many of
the films usually associated with the later avant-garde groups actually depend
on strategies and systems of signification that they share with the narrative
avant-garde films. Films such as Entr’acte, Rien que les heures, La Coquille et le
clergyman, Un Chien andalou, and perhaps even Ballet mecanique can be read
quite profitably within the context of narrative avant-garde film practice.
It is my contention that the French narrative avant-garde’s contribution
throughout the decade to what Bernard Eisenschitz has called the search for
“a new artistic practice” in the cinema has been much misunderstood and
undervalued.15 In choosing to rethink the significance of that contribution, I
do so, not only because I agree with Jameson that “the all-informing process
of narrative” can be taken as “the central function or instance of the human
mind,”16 but because that contribution has been undermined and eclipsed by
a rather uncritical acceptance of a narrowly defined Modernism. Accordingly,
the following pages are devoted to an assessment of several critical perspectives
on the French narrative avant-garde filmmakers and their films, to a new
working definition of narrative avant-garde film practice that challenges the
narrow confines of Impressionism, and to a series of close readings of what I
consider to be the major film texts of that practice. The short non-narrative
French films are excluded from analysis here, except for those instances when
they can be linked closely to or realigned with the narrative avant-garde films.
Most of these films, I assume, already have claimed a good deal of attention
in English-language histories and critical studies—because of their obvious
historical value, their unique connection to the visual arts, and their long
availability in the United States.17 By contrast, the film practice of the nar¬
rative avant-garde, I contend, cries out for a critical reevaluation. As Noel
Burch realized, more than ten years ago.

Obscured by the great national cinemas of the silent period (the German, the Russian,
the Scandinavian, the American, even the Italian), the French movement in the twen¬
ties ... is today, incontestably, the most misunderstood, the most scorned—by crit¬
ics, historians, and cineastes.18

By reexamining at some length the practice of only those filmmakers who

chose to work within the various forms of narrative cinema, I hope to correct
an imbalance, to recover something lost.

281
The Alternate During the 1920s, the alternate cinema network of film critics, film jour¬
Cinema Network, nals, cine-clubs, and specialized cinemas certainly provided the most visible
Genres, and Auteurs means of constituting the French narrative avant-garde. If a commercial film¬
maker was an active member of several cine-clubs or lectured frequently, he
or she was perceived as a leader or model for the French avant-garde. If a
narrative film became part of the Vieux-Colombier’s repertory or was shown
at one of the other specialized cinemas, and if it was judged by Leon Moussinac
or some other major critic to be an advance in film art or even a masterpiece,
that was a sign of its status as an avant-garde work. Although inconsistencies
abounded in this personally engaged, fluctuating process of defining the nar¬
rative avant-garde, the judgments passed and selections made during the 1920s
influenced the number and quality of film texts that have come down to us as
well as the kinds of readings performed on them in film histories. Conse¬
quently, it is worth drawing some conclusions from this process in order to
recover some sense of that historical record. .
Who were the independent or commercial filmmakers most deeply involved
in the cine-club movement of the 1920s? Although men such as Abel Gance,
Jacques Feyder, Robert Boudrioz, Rene Clair, Alberto Cavalcanti, and others
took part in the movement, none played anything like a major role. That was
left to a handful of filmmakers: Louis Delluc, Leon Poirier, Marcel L’Herbier,
Jean Epstein, and Germaine Dulac. Delluc’s involvement, together with that
of Ricciotto Canudo, of course, was crucial in initiating and developing the
whole concept of a cine-club. Leon Poirier provided leadership for both the
Club fran^ais du cinema and the Cine-Club de France in their early stages.
Marcel L’Herbier and Jean Epstein lectured and projected excerpts from their
work quite frequently in all sorts of conferences and special screenings. Germaine
Dulac’s commitment was perhaps the strongest and certainly the most long-
lasting of all. An original member of Delluc’s first informal cine-club and a
frequent lecturer herself, Dulac presided over the Cine-Club de France for
several years and was instrumental in establishing the first international Fe¬
deration des Cine-Clubs in 1929. Because of their committed cine-club work,
all five filmmakers, at one time or another, were considered prominent figures
in the narrative avant-garde.
Which French narrative films were privileged by repertory screenings or
premieres at the specialized cinemas in Paris? The most extensive repertory
was built up at Jean Tedesco’s Theatre de Vieux-Colombier, from 1924 to
1930. Although Tedesco’s principal interest was in documentary films—e.g.,
Gremillon’s Tour an large (1927), Allegret’s Voyage an Congo (1926)—the Vieux-
Colombier collected and screened a good number of French narrative films.
On the poster announcing the Vieux-Colombier’s first season, that repertory
included the following:

Robert Boudrioz, L’Atre, 1923

Abel Gance, La Roue (short version), 1923
Louis Delluc, Fievre, 1921
Jean Epstein, Coeur fidele, 1923
Marcel L’Herbier, El Dorado, 1921
Ivan Mosjoukine, Le Brasier ardent, 1923
Marcel L’Herbier, Don Juan et Faust, 1923
Leon Poirier, Le Penseur, 1920

282
Abel Gance, Mater Dolorosa, 1917 AUTEURS AND GENRES
Leon Poirier, Jocelyn, 1922
Henry Roussel, Les Opprimes, 19231

Four years later, the number of narrative films had more than doubled to
include:

Germaine Dulac, La Souriante Madame Beudet, 1923

Jean Epstein, La Belle Nivernaise, 1924
Jean Epstein, L'Affiche, 1925
Jacques Feyder, Crainquehille, 1923
Jacques Feyder, Visages d'enfants, 1925
Jacques Feyder, L'lmage, 1926
Alexandre Volkoff, Kean, 1924
Jacques de Baroncelli, Pecheur d'lslande, 1924
Rene Clair, Pans qui dort, 1924
Marcel Silver, L’Horloge, 1924
Marcel L’Herbier, Feu Mathias Pascal, 1925
Dmitri Kirsanoff, L’lronie du destin, 1924
Dmitri Kirsanoff, Menilmontant, 1926
Alberto Cavalcanti, Le Train sans yeux, 1926
Alberto Cavalcanti, En rade, 1927
Jean Renoir, La Petite Marchande d’allumettes, 19282

The bewildering variety of this collection is probably due to Tedesco’s rather

catholic tastes as well as to the availability of film prints. At the Studio des
Ursulines, Armand Tallier and Myrga screened fewer French narrative films
for their “a la mode” audiences, but most of them were premieres rather than
revivals. These included, chronologically:

Rene Clair, Le Voyage imaginaire, 1926 (revival)

Alberto Cavalcanti, Rien que les heures, 1926
Jean Epstein, 674 X 11, 1927
Jean Epstein, La Glace a tYois faces, 1927
Leon Poirier, Amours exotiques, 1927
Jean Epstein, La Chute de la maison Usher, 1928
Germaine Dulac, La Coquille et le clergyman, 19283

For a while, Ursulines even provided an exclusive exhibition outlet for Jean
Epstein’s films; then Studio 28 and L’Oeil de Paris assumed that status—for
La Chute de la maison Usher (1928), Finis Terrae (1929) and Sa Fete (1929).
During the last half of the decade, several filmmakers were also honored
with retrospective screenings in the cine-clubs and cinemas. Louis Delluc’s
films were repeatedly revived: Fievre at the 1925 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs
and at Les Amis de Spartacus, La Femme de nulle part and L'lnondation at the
Cine-Latin, and all three films at Studio 28. Several of Jean Epstein’s films
were similarly rescreened: LAffiche at the 1925 Exposition, Coeur fidele at the
Cine-Latin, and La Belle Nivernaise and 6V2 X 11 at the Cine-Club de France.
Rene Clair’s early films—Paris qui dort, Entr'acte, Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge,
and Le Voyage imaginaire—were also exhibited at the 1925 Exposition or at
the Cine-Latin. Several of Jacques Feyder’s films—Visages d’enfants and L'lmage—
were projected for the Tribune libre and the Cine-Club de France. Other
retrospective screenings included L’Herbier’s L'lnhumaine and Dulac’s La Folie

283
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE des vaillants at the 1925 Exposition, Poirier’s La Bnere for the Cine-Club de
France, and Kirsanoffs Menilmontant for the Tribune libre. All of these films
were being lifted out of the cycle of commercial cinema distribution for the
purpose of educating audiences to the possibilities of film art, establishing a
tradition or history of that art, critiquing that tradition, and stimulating
further explorations.
Going by these screenings alone, one can conclude that, by the end of the
silent film period, Jean Epstein was the most prominent, and controversial,
filmmaker in the French narrative avant-garde. And Louis Delluc was already
being celebrated as a kind of progenitor as well as a prophet. Also interesting
was the attention accorded Clair and Feyder. For various reasons (more com¬
mercial work, fewer films), Gance, L’Herbier, and Dulac had all fallen from
their once prominent positions in the early 1920s. Apparently replacing them,
Clair and Feyder had been elevated to the point where certain critics consid¬
ered them the best, if not the most advanced, filmmakers in France. Several
books published during the period reflected this shift clearly. Moussinac’s
Naissance du cinema (1925) singled out the following French narrative films as
benchmarks in the development of film art: %

Delluc-Dulac’s La Fete espagnole, 1920

Delluc’s Fievre, 1921
L’Herbier’s El Dorado, 1921
Gance’s La Roue, 1922-1923
Epstein’s Coeur fidele, 19234

Two years later, in La Crapouillot, he added Clair’s Entr'acte (1924) and Fey-
der’s L'lmage (1926) to that list.5 And in his Panoramique du cinema (1929),
Moussinac selected four new French films for extensive, generally positive re¬
views:

Gance’s Napoleon, 1927

Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, 1928
Feyder’s Therese Raquin, 1928
Clair’s Un Chapeau de paille d'ltalie, 19286

In his own Panorama du cinema (1929), Georges Charensol basically supported

Moussinac’s judgment by drawing special attention to the films of Delluc,
Gance, L’Herbier, Epstein, Clair, and Feyder.7
To some extent, the privileging of these particular filmmakers and films
also depended implicitly on a 1920s version of the politique des auteurs. As early
as 1918, in opposition to Charles Pathe, Henri Diamant-Berger, and Andre
Antoine, Louis Delluc had made a distinction between filmmakers {auteurs)
who wrote scenarios for the films they directed and those (metteurs-en-scene) who
adapted other writers’ work for their films.8 Supposedly, auteurs were thus able
(or could attempt) to exercise greater control over their films and to approxi¬
mate more closely the Romantic concept of the individually unique artist,
using the medium of his choosing for his own personal expression. Although
the idea was never developed into a theory or isolated as a major criterion of
evaluation during the period,9 Delluc’s distinction, in fact, does tend to sep¬
arate members of the French narrative avant-garde from the commercial film¬
makers.

284
 Because the commercial film industry was predicated so heavily on literary auteurs and genres
adaptations, especially from fiction, filmmakers were generally discouraged
from writing original scenarios.10 Consequently, all the important commercial
filmmakers were principally metteurs-en-scene: Jacques de Baroncelli, Henri Fes-
court, Henry Roussel, Leonce Perret, Raymond Bernard, Henry Diamant-
Berger, Alexandre Volkoff, Victor Tourjansky, Julien Duvivier, Andre An¬
toine, Louis Mercanton, Rene Hervil, Rene Le Somptier, and others. Those
filmmakers who wrote their own scenarios were the exception. Louis Delluc,
for instance, wrote the scenarios for all but one of his films, consistently
working variations on a single theme: the effect of past desires and actions on
the present condition of one or more characters. This obsession led him to
some rather complex forms of narrative construction and rhetorical figuring.
Abel Gance, though often inspired by books for his film projects, always wrote
his own scenarios about the moral dilemmas or philosophical problems that
passionately concerned him at the moment. From J’Accuse on, his films also
revealed a constant interest in achieving ever more striking effects with various
technical innovations. Jean Epstein also conceived several of his own films—
Coeur fidele, Finis Terrae, Sa Tete—and wrote an equal number in collaboration
with his sister, Marie Epstein—LAffiche, Le Double Amour, 6V2 X 11. More¬
over, all but one of his other films were based on his own adaptations. Much
like Gance, Epstein was fascinated by the technical side of filmmaking, but
he turned that fascination either into epistemological explorations or, like
Delluc, into experiments in narrative construction and rhetorical figuring.
Both Marcel L’Herbier and Rene Clair composed the scenarios of their early
films and usually wrote their own adaptations, but their personal interests
were diametrically opposed. L’Herbier also showed an interest in unusual forms
of narrative construction and in experiments with various technical innova¬
tions, sometimes for their own sake. Clair, on the other hand, subordinated
his technical facility to a coolly satirical social vision.
Although a politique des auteurs may set Delluc, Gance, Epstein, L’Herbier,
and Clair somewhat apart from the commercial mainstream of French film-
making, it leaves many others in a kind of limbo. Germaine Dulac, for in¬
stance, ran the gamut from directing production-line serials or personal sce¬
narios by others (Irene Hillel-Erlanger, Louis Delluc, Andre Obey, Jean-Louis
Bouquet, and Antonin Artaud) to writing adaptations and even several of her
own scenarios—Ames de fous, La Cigarette, L’lnvitation au voyage. Yet a good
number of her films, despite their differing sources, consistently examine the
suffering and frustration of women in various social conditions as well as ex¬
hibit an interest in technical innovations. Some filmmakers, such as Jean Re¬
noir, Alberto Cavalcanti, and Dmitri Kirsanoff, started out writing a scenario
or two and then were forced to become, more and less, metteurs-en-scene. Others,
like Jacques Feyder and Leon Poirier, were known chiefly for their excellent
adaptations, but each wrote at least one important scenario of his own—Visages
d’enfants and Verdun, visions de Lhistoire. Ivan Mosjoukine presents a more sin¬
gular case: an actor who wrote scenarios and who also directed several himself,
the most important being Le Brasier ardent. Finally, the distinction between
auteurs and metteurs-en-scene is complicated by the fact that several commercial
directors—e.g., Bernard, Roussel, Duvivier—also dabbled in writing their
own scenarios.

285
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE If a politique des auteurs offers an important, if limited, method of privileging
certain films and filmmakers, the study of film genres offers another just as
important. In Part II, I have already suggested that the film genres popular
during and after the war established a significant context for positioning the
narrative avant-garde film practice. One characteristic of that practice was the
consistency with which filmmakers worked within certain genres in their ex¬
perimentation with the nature and limits of film discourse. Early on, the
bourgeois melodrama and the realist film provided a basis for advances by
Gance, L’Herbier, Dulac, and Delluc. Particularly important were explora¬
tions of psychological or subjective experience in the bourgeois melodrama and
of relations between landscape or decor (including specific objects) and char¬
acter or action in the realist film. Throughout the decade, the realist film
continued to function as a conceptual base, particularly in the work of Epstein,
Feyder, Renoir, Kirsanoff, Cavalcanti, and Gremillon. But other genres also
became important: the fantasy and comedy, especially for Poirier, L’Herbier,
Mosjoukine, Dulac, Clair, Feyder, and Renoir.
Besides extending and redefining the parameters of film discourse, the nar¬
rative avant-garde filmmakers also tended to undermine or subvert the con¬
ventions within particular genres. This critique took the form of either de¬
nying the conventions and expectations of a genre or undermining their
signification. The genre most critiqued was the dominant one, the historical
reconstruction film; and the most extreme cases of its subversion were Renoir’s
Nana (1926), Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne dArc (1928), and perhaps even
Gance’s Napoleon (1927). Many of the other genres also suffered attacks from
within: the serial—Epstein’s Les Aventures de Robert Macaire (1925); the colonial
film—Renoir’s Le Bled (1929); the fantasy film—Dulac’s La Coquille et le cler¬
gyman (1927) and Bunuel’s Un Chien andalou (1929); the modern studio spec¬
tacular—Gremillon’s Maldone (1928) and L’Herbier’s LArgent (1929). Signif¬
icantly, this practice of subversion was most pronounced after 1924, when
economic conditions and industry consolidations forced many of the narrative
avant-garde filmmakers to forfeit independent film production and work for
the major companies.

Stylistics and Until recently, most film historians have defined the French narrative avant-
Subjectivity garde almost exclusively in terms of style or stylistics. According to this view,
an overriding concern for cinematic essence, specifically an interest in certain
features or formal techniques unique to the cinema, seemed to determine what
was advanced in film practice and to separate the avant-garde filmmakers from
their more commercial colleagues. Originating in various reviews and critical
writings of the 1920s, especially in Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet’s
pseudo-Socratic attack on the "new aesthetic’’ in L'ldee et I’ecran (1925-1926)1,
this conception of an avant-garde has been widely accepted. For instance, in
his personal history of the French cinema, Jacques Brunius uses a catalogue of
such techniques to disparage the work of Germaine Dulac, Abel Gance, Jean
Epstein, Marcel L’Herbier, and Carl Dreyer.2 In his eclectic study of experi¬
mental cinema, Jean Mitry is more kind, but he limits the value of their work
to a ‘‘search for a rhythmic structure significant in and of itself, that is, a pure
rhythm.’’3 In their large-scale histories, both Mitry and Georges Sadoul also

286
depend on this conception and its assumptions, often implicitly, as a means STYLISTICS AND
of constituting the narrative avant-garde. In the United States, these assump¬ SUBJECTIVITY
tions inform the most comprehensive study of the French narrative avant-garde
film practice—David Bordwell’s doctoral dissertation, “French Impressionist
Cinema” (University of Iowa, 1974).4
What exactly are these formal techniques? It would be tempting to try to
answer this question by pointing to a series of innovations and experiments in
French film technology. Both Marcel L’FIerbier and Abel Gance have given
credence to this view. In a recent interview, for instance, L’Herbier joked
about how, in 1926, the industry expected him to “do something” with the
new panchromatic film stock. They said to themselves: “L’Herbier will be our
guinea pig!’’5 Gance, on the other hand, has always been quite serious about
his role as an innovator.

As for me, I loved the cinema that way. ... It was a joy, you know, we were excited
about going to see the rushes, to see what we had done. We went as if to a magic
show, because it had never been done before. . . . That’s what the cinema should be!
It should be reinvented each moment.6

In fact, his insatiable appetite for new discoveries makes one of the strongest
arguments for Gance’s inclusion in the French narrative avant-garde.
There are two problems, however, with such a link between technology and
film practice. One is that a comprehensive history of French film technology
remains to be written. Although both Sadoul and Mitry, in their voluminous
histories, provide information on the changes made in the various components
of the cinematic apparatus in France, their accounts are too sketchy, enumer-
ative, and atomistic. Neither has the thoroughness that characterizes, for in¬
stance, Barry Salt’s ongoing research into the relationship between film tech¬
nology and film style, primarily in the American cinema and secondarily in
the German, Soviet, French, and British cinemas.7 The second problem is
that, given what is known, the French narrative avant-garde filmmakers seem
to have been working with the same basic technology that other filmmakers
were using. In fact, if anything, the French industry lagged behind the Amer¬
ican industry in technology and thus put the French filmmakers at a disad¬
vantage. The question for them became: what could they do differently with
what they had?
The best definition of a stylistics of formal techniques and of their function
in French narrative avant-garde films still comes from David Bordwell. Put
simply, Bordwell defines those techniques within the context of Impression¬
ism, particularly as conceived by Dulac, Langlois, Sadoul, and Mitry. Thus,
the French narrative avant-garde film practice becomes a paradigm of marked
elements or privileged features serving one principal function—the expression
or representation of subjectivity or subjective experience.8 Through the trans¬
formation of recorded reality, certain privileged elements of film discourse can
evoke, in Canudo’s words, “the feelings that envelop things” or convey an
individual character’s psychological state.9 A story, consequently, merely pro¬
vides the basis for expressing—intermittently, momentarily—a subjective ex¬
perience or vision. As Bordwell argues, this expressive theory and its concern
for the fleeting impression, the oblique suggestion, the sentient process of
consciousness reveals as implicit debt to a Symbolist aesthetic as well as to

287
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE Impressionist art.10 This basically idealist conception of film can validate either
a heightened degree of consciousness (defined variously) or individual percep¬
tions and feelings as a special kind of truth.
Bordwell’s analysis has two major components—one synchronic, the other
diachronic. His initial aim is to establish a paradigm of stylistic features (based
on a family-resemblance model) that can encompass all the French narrative
avant-garde films. In that paradigm, he includes the following specific fea¬
tures:

1) Camerawork Use of close-ups as synecdoches and symbols

Use of close-ups as subjective images
Use of camera angles to indicate optical subjectivity
Camera movement independent of the subject
Camera movement for purely graphic effects
Camera movement representing a character’s point of view
2) Mise-en-scene Single light-source
Shadows indicating off-screen actions
Variety of lighting situations
Variety of decor styles, usually undistorted and naturalistic
Some interplay of foreground and background arrangement and
movement of figures in space
3) Optical As transitions
devices As magical effects
As emphasizing significant details
As pictorial decoration
As conveyors of abstract meanings
As indications of subjectivity
4) Editing Temporal relations between shots:
Flashbacks or fantasy
Spatial relations:
Occasional synthetic building up of space from specific de¬
tail
Glance-object editing
Crosscutting
Rhythmic relations between shots:
To convey psychological and physiological states.11

Valuable as this paradigm is in directing attention to the texture of French

narrative avant-garde films, it has some problems which keep me from em¬
ploying it as a model for this study.
First of all, Bordwell tends to assume a narrative avant-garde stylistics and
then posit a conventional cinema style through negation or opposition rather
than perform the reverse operation. It now seems more likely, as his later
work testifies, that the narrative avant-garde film practice was a loosely related
series of extensions of, variations on, and deviations from an existing paradigm
of conventions.12 Secondly, the Bordwell paradigm is atomistic, far from ex¬
clusive of conventional film practice, and unclear on the question of perti¬
nence. Thirdly, it depends heavily on the assumption that these formal tech¬
niques primarily serve the cause of subjectivity. Although subjectivity may be
an important tenet, it is only one of several in the full range of French nar¬
rative avant-garde film practice. Even though the paradigm offers evidence of

288
particular features serving other functions—the abstract, the decorative, and STYLISTICS AND
the symbolic—it fails to account for them except insofar as they tend toward SUBJECTIVITY
“pure cinema.” Finally, Bordwell does not attempt to analyze how these sty¬
listic features function in the construction of film narrative, how the avant-
garde practice operates structurally within the diegetic and narrative processes
of specific film texts.
The second, diachronic component of Bordwell’s analysis, though more ten¬
tative, is perhaps more useful. Here, he postulates a periodization scheme for
the French narrative avant-garde’s development of certain stylistic features.
The scheme he comes up with is a definite advance on the simple, sometimes
imprecise divisions offered previously—by Dulac, Langlois, Sadoul, and Mi-
try—and it also avoids the eccentric compartmentalization erected by Brunius.
Bordwell’s framework divides into three distinct periods. The first, from 1918
to 1922, was marked by what he calls pictorialism. Recurrent pictorial tech¬
niques were used to suggest a character’s perceptions and psychological states.13
The second period, beginning in 1923, was marked by the proliferation of a
rapid-cutting form of rhythmic montage, whose immediate source was Gance’s
La Roue (1922-1923).14 By 1923, the repertory of narrative avant-garde sty¬
listics had crystallized and, according to such disparate figures as Jean Epstein
and Rene Clair, had even begun to appear excessive, repetitious, or cliched.15
The third period, therefore, from 1926 to 1929, was marked by stylistic
diffusion.16 Certain filmmakers pursued new techniques—the handheld cam¬
era, long tracking shots, widescreen formats, the absence of intertitles—while
others continued to work with the existing stylistics. Finally, avant-garde
filmmaking began to diverge into distinct but interrelated modes—documen¬
tary, abstract, Surrealist.
This periodization scheme bears an interesting correlation to already estab¬
lished patterns within the French film industry, both in the development of
film genres and in the cine-club and specialized cinema movement. The first
period of pictorialism, for instance, corresponds to the years when certain
industry figures—e.g., Pathe, Gaumont, Nalpas—were supporting original or
experimental work and when the bourgeois melodrama and the realist film
were prominent as genres. It was also stimulated by the critical writings of
Delluc, Canudo, Moussinac, Vuillermoz, and others. The second period was
sustained, in part, by conditions that allowed independent and semi-inde¬
pendent film production to thrive and by the appearance of a new exhibition
outlet through the first cine-clubs and specialized cinemas. It also coincides
with an increased interest in the renewal of several different film genres, the
fantasy and comedy. The third period of what Bordwell calls “stylistic diffu¬
sion” corresponds to the years of industry consolidation, which, although cur¬
tailing large-scale independent production (with a few exceptions), led to nar¬
rative avant-garde work in nearly all the existing film genres. It was also
sustained by the phenomenal growth of cine-clubs and specialized cinemas,
which created a viable network of small-scale independent film production,
distribution, and exhibition.

289
The Fields of Recent film studies, in France especially, provide a different way of posi¬
Discourse and tioning the narrative avant-garde film practice of the 1920s. To describe the
Narrative avant-garde in terms of a stylistics serving one or even several principal func¬
tions tends to produce a reductive analysis, simplifying the diverse strands of
theory and practice during the period. To describe it, instead, as an explora¬
tion of the processes of representation and signification in narrative film dis¬
course seems to offer both a more precise and a more inclusive strategy. Using
the methodologies developed by recent structuralist, semiotic, and ideological
studies, Noel Burch, in particular, has sketched out a schema for repositioning
and reevaluating the French narrative avant-garde.
In a major essay first published in Cahiers du cinema (1968), Burch and Jean-
Andre Fieschi rethink the First Avant-Garde film practice in terms of its
similarity to, rather than its difference from, the theory and practice of the
Second Avant-Garde.1 Accordingly, they single out for discussion the work of
Jean Epstein, Marcel L’Herbier, Germaine Dulac, and, to a lesser extent, Louis
Delluc. Against Fescourt and Bouquet’s defense of a representational cinema
dominated by the story or narrative (of which the prime example was the
American cinema),2 Epstein, L’Herbier, and Dulac all advocated some form of
an alternate cinema whose subject and mode was quite different. Specifically,
Burch and Fieschi isolate and extend L’Herbier’s remark on the practice he
considered most common among his colleagues: “None of us—Dulac, Epstein,
Delluc or myself—had the same aesthetic outlook. But we had a common
interest, which was the investigation of that famous cinematic specificity. On this
we agreed completely.’’3 Quoting Epstein on L’Herbier’s L’lnhumaine (1924),
they interpret that investigation as an attempt to redefine the very subject of
film as art: “a subject thus conceived as a ‘bass clef,’ permitting the construc¬
tion of plastic harmonies.’’4 Or, as Bernard Eisenschitz put it, a bit differently,
“a destruction of the taboo of the image as a transparent, total, inviolable
reflection of the world, and the construction of a distinctly filmic space-time.’’5
For the French narrative avant-garde, in other words, the story served as a
means or framework, not only to discover the “supposedly unique visual and
kinetic aspects of cinema,’’6 or to explore the so-called expressive capabilities
of film, but to investigate what we could call broadly the signifying processes
of film as a discourse. Thus, in parallel with, rather than in opposition to, the
Modernist impulse in the visual arts, literature, and even the Pure Cinema
movement, the material of narrative film discourse, as a “language” or system
of signification, often became the actual subject of avant-garde film practice.
At its furthest advance, that practice involved some form of self-reflexivity.
As David Bordwell has argued, the Burch-Fieschi essay is “a critical rather
than an historical study and lacks both concreteness and documentation”; but
that is scant grounds for dismissing it.7 The essay’s major problem is that it
sacrifices a precise, consistent, thorough analysis for a highly polemical state¬
ment. As Burch and Fieschi admit, the essay has “no other ambition but to
pose several points so as to give to this movement more than mere historical
dignity. . . .”8 What they hypothesize is a broad functional definition of the
narrative avant-garde film practice (in an historical context) and a consequent
network of relations among several filmmakers, their theoretical writings, and
their films. Jean Epstein is described as the theoretician who speaks to them
most directly and to their interest in the signifying process of film. L’Herbier,

290
Epstein, and, to a lesser extent, Dulac, are singled out as the filmmakers most DISCOURSE AND
committed to the concept of a formal renewal of film discourse, based on the NARRATIVE
redefinition of the subject of film. The most sustained, coherent examples of
that renewal are L’Herbier’s LArgent (1929) and Epstein’s La Glace a trois faces
(1927)—the latter, they argue, is “rhythmically, compositionally, structur¬
ally, dramatically, one of the best films of the silent period, and not only in
France.”9
Six years later, in a longer essay in Afterimage (1974), Burch and Jorge Dana
rework this definition within a broader, but more detailed, ideological analysis
of film practice. First they begin with a tentative paradigm of conventional
film practice, well established by 1918-1919 (in both the American and Eu¬
ropean cinemas), according to the codes of representation (e.g., contiguity,
continuity, the illusion of spatial depth) and of narrativity (e.g., the subor¬
dination of objects to characters, the verisimilitude of acting, the stylistic
homogeneity of costuming, the linearity of the narrative).10 Then they hy¬
pothesize a taxonomy of variations on or reactions to that practice:

A. Films totally accounted for and informed at all levels by the dominant codes . . .
B. Films totally accounted for by the codes, but in which this fact is masked by a
stylistic (which the dominant ideology describes as ‘form’) . . .
C. Films which intermittently escape the ideological determination of the codes . . .
D. Films which are informed by a constant designation/deconstruction of the codes
which, however ideologically determined at the strictly diegetic level, implicitly
question this determination by the way they situate the codes and play upon
them.11

According to this taxonomy, Burch and Dana single out only two French films
which intermittently escape these conventions. About La Passion de Jeanne
dArc (1928), they write,

by doing away entirely with the pro-filmic frame of reference and using the eye-line
match almost to the exclusion of any other type, Dreyer brings to the fore the flat
image as such, creating a filmic space which designates itself as a succession of shot-
frames, as a fictional and “autonomous chain.’’12

In LArgent (1929), they assert, L’Flerbier is the first filmmaker “to divert
camera movement away from the universal functions (‘descriptive,’ ‘subjec¬
tive,’ ‘dramatic,’ ‘revelatory,’ etc.) ... as alternatives to syntagms of mon¬
tage. . . .”13 By implication, the rest of the French narrative avant-garde films
would seem to be no more than instances of mere formal stylistics. Yet Burch
and Dana do not discuss the French cinema of the 1920s in anything but the
most marginal way.

In the following pages, I want to formulate a slightly different taxonomy

as a means of contextualizing the French narrative avant-garde film practice.
In my view, that practice can be seen as a series of breaks with, additions to,
and reconstitutions of the parameters of conventional narrative film discourse.
“[It is} an effort of work on cinematographic language,” as Jacques Petat puts
it. “It tends to be a critique, a redistribution of the elements of that lan¬
guage. . . .”14 That redistribution Barthelemy Amengual sees as an attempt
“to analyze or fragment reality, reconstruct the fragments into quasi-hiero-

291
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE glyphs, and organize these ideograms into systems of signs and graphic-rhythmic
structures.”15 To sketch out those parameters and their redistribution more
clearly, I propose a schema that focuses on several different levels of narrative
film discourse: referentiality, narration, syntactical continuity, rhetorical fig¬
uring, and narrative structure.16 In each of these five selected areas, I will note
some of the conventions of that discourse, as they were established by 1918,
and the French narrative avant-garde deviations from and reconstitutions of
those conventions. Although buttressed by statements from Jean Epstein and
others, this schema does not depend on a comprehensive synthesis of the the¬
oretical writings of the period. As Bordwell discovered, the bewildering and
contradictory variety of those writings makes difficult any attempt to turn
them into a systematic account of film either as a medium or an art.17 This
may be because, as Stuart Liebman argues, the French ‘‘understood theory as
a speculative instrument” whose function was ‘‘to generate hypotheses for the
sake of argument and investigation. . . . ”18 For them, theory was closely tied
to praxis, and, according to Epstein, the actual film practice of the French
narrative avant-garde was often in advance of their theoretical writings. Nor
does this schema pretend to be all-inclusive. Its purpose is simply to provide
a rough framework for encompassing the rich diversity of French narrative
avant-garde film practice.19

Referentiality
Referentiality was determined conventionally by literary texts (either from
theater or fiction), and by particular genres of texts at that—the bourgeois
melodrama, the realist or naturalist novel, the historical epic, and so on.
Against this practice, the narrative avant-garde adopted several major strate¬
gies. One was the attempt to substitute reality, actual contemporary life (either
in documentaries or original scripts), for literature as the principal ground of
referentiality. As Louis Delluc once admonished his colleagues: “So you have
nothing to say? Walk about, look around you, really look. The street, the
subway, the streetcars, the shops are filled with a thousand dramas, a thousand
good and original stories.”20 The question, of course, is how was this reality
conceived and represented? A favorite answer was the concept that Delluc
himself introduced, that free-floating signifier, photogenie, which seemed to
mysteriously animate certain images.21 For some, such as Marcel Gromaire
and Canudo, photogenie was an expression on film of the affective, creative
imagination of the filmmaker.22 For Epstein and others, sometimes it became
a sign of the uncanny or a core of enigmatic mystery in the natural world
provoked by a quasi-epistemological quest.23 Wrote Epstein at one point,

the camera lens ... is an eye endowed with inhuman analytical properties ... an
eye without prejudice, without morality, free of influences, and it sees in the human
face and gestures traits that we, burdened with sympathies and antipathies, habits
and inhibitions, no longer know how to see.24

Another strategy was to deemphasize the story or narrative as the principal

referent and foreground the elements of film discourse as referents unto them¬
selves. “The decomposition of an event into its photogenic elements,” wrote
Epstein again, “is the first law of film, its grammar, its algebra, its order.”25
At its extreme, this could become either a nonrepresentational spectacle of

292
plastic forms in movement, a visual symphony analogous to music, or a playful DISCOURSE AND
critique of the process of representation itself.26 One further strategy, much NARRATIVE
less radical than the others, was the effort to rehabilitate “demode” genres
such as the fantasy or feerie.

Narration and representation

Here the conventional source of the narrative was the intertitles.27 Further¬
more, an uninterrupted, clear, direct, narrative flow, in which all elements
were diegeticized, resulted in a so-called objective focus on the action of the
narrative. To counter these conventions, the narrative avant-garde developed
a number of strategies of reorientation and disruption. One was the privileging
of the image and image relations as the exclusive source of the diegesis and
narrative. As Epstein and others believed, “the cinema is made to narrate with
images and not with words.”28 This led to attempts to produce films with few
or no intertitles. A major strategy, of course, involved privileging one or more
characters’ subjectivity, by means of a variety of techniques, reorienting the
diegetic flow from the action to perception, feeling, and thinking.29 But that
shift soon expanded to include what Gerard Genette would call “narrative
focalization” that depended on more than a single character’s consciousness.
In one form, Epstein’s “objective and subjective” combined in such a way as
to dissolve the differences and multiply the connections between one or more
individuals and, say, the surrounding natural world.30 A related strategy in¬
volved privileging description over narrative (already prominent in the realist
film genre) or, in Roland Barthes’s terms, the semic code (including character
and landscape) over the proairetic. Other disruptions came from generally
emphasizing the nondiegetic elements of the discourse and from making prob¬
lematic the narrating position of the text.

Syntactical continuity
The principal convention was linearity or sequentiality, predicated on a
logic of causal relations, using the “classical” spatial-temporal continuity style
of editing that had developed primarily in the American cinema.31 Against
this convention, the narrative avant-garde developed a variety of syntactical
systems of continuity that could be deployed either in some sort of coherence
or in playful incoherence. They were certainly interested in what Leon Mous-
sinac called “visual rhythm” or patterns of rhythmic relations within and be¬
tween shots,32 and they especially favored syntactical forms of both conjunctive
and disjunctive simultaneity. The latter involved alternations not only be¬
tween actions in different spaces or periods of time, between reality and either
memory or fantasy, but also between multiple image chains—in paradigmatic
relation. “The quick, jagged succession” of rapid montage, for instance, came
close to fulfilling one of Epstein’s dreams: “the perfect circle of an impossible
simultaneity.”33 Marcel L’Herbier was more graphic: “everything blended in
a vast rainbow of vitality—a cocktail of powerful forces. . . . ”34 Generally,
the narrative avant-garde developed patterns of continuity that depended on a
combination of graphic, rhythmic, and associative or connotative relations.
We have found a “visual language” wrote Epstein, that “juxtaposes and com¬
bines the simplest images according to rhythmic variations, cross-cuttings,
repetitions, and {other] layers to produce meaning.”35

293
narrative avant-garde Rhetorical figuring
Conventional film discourse borrowed most of its rhetorical figures from
verbal language and literature. Against this practice, the narrative avant-garde
explored the connotative possibilities of photogenie in networks of motifs and
metonymical/metaphorical associations.36 “[We were] interested in telling a
story,” wrote Alberto Cavalcanti, “by using to the maximum, with a liberty
which the public considered revolutionary, the cinematic means of expression
and by going to extremes in the choice of analogies, comparisons, and meta¬
phors.”37 “The image is a sign, complex and precise, like that of the Chinese
alphabet,”38 concluded Epstein; its meaning depended on its shifting context
among other images. In the films themselves, this can perhaps best be de¬
scribed as the articulation of a rhetorical figuring that involved privileged
elements of the mise-en-scene (especially ordinary objects and parts of the
body) as well as patterns of framing, camera movement, and editing. This
figuring depended on such textual operations as repetition and variation, con¬
densation and displacement, metonomy and metaphor.39 Through these proc¬
esses, the narrative avant-garde sometimes sought to produce a system of con¬
notative or symbolic relations paralleling and intersecting with the narrative.

Narrative structure
Finally, the narrative avant-garde experimented with various narrative struc¬
tures which could synthesize these deviations from conventional film discourse
or could play them off against one another. These structures seem to have
taken at least five principal forms: 1) a sequential or linear structure of seg¬
ments, each of which was determined by a different stylistics or set of genre
conventions;40 2) a basically paradigmatic structure of past/present narrative
relations; 3) a doubled narrative structure, in which the actions of the second
half paralleled or recapitulated those of the first half; 4) a “dream” structure
modeled on (but not reproducing) the vaguely perceived structures and oper¬
ations of the unconscious; and 5) a structure predicated, in Burch’s words, on
“a dialectization of the principal modes of spatio-temporal continuity.”41

With this schema or taxonomy providing an initial frame of reference, what

follows is a series of close readings of those films I consider the major texts of
the French narrative avant-garde film practice. At appropriate junctures, cer¬
tain films are tied to or inscribed by specific theoretical writings, but the focus
throughout is on the actual discursive and narrative operations of the film
texts. Although the organization of these readings is generally chronological,
I have isolated, paired, and otherwise combined films in such a way as to
emphasize the most pertinent patterns and strategies of that practice. While
some readings tend to analyze the texts so as to chart the development of those
strategies; others focus on the particular textual significance of discontinuity,
incoherence, or excess; and still others take up particular patterns of textual
synthesis and coherence within an interpretative framework. It is essential, I
believe, to encompass both the homogeneity and heterogeneity of this film
practice, as articulated in specific texts, in order to reposition and hence re¬
cuperate the French narrative avant-garde in cinema history. v

294
 Some years ago, Henri Langlois argued that Abel Gance’s short film, La J’Accuse
Folie du Docteur Tube, which Film d’Art allegedly refused to release in 1915, and Rose-France
was the first French avant-garde film.1 Many film historians have accepted this
view, and even Gance himself has defended the film for its supposed intro¬
duction of subjectivity into the French cinema. As Jean Mitry and Kevin
Brownlow attest, it probably did nothing of the kind.2 Nor was it particularly
advanced. Gance’s story of a mad scientist (Albert Dieudonne looking some¬
thing like Prince Rigadin), who discovers a powder that changes the appear¬
ance of people and things—first his dog, his black boy assistant, and himself,
then two young women next door, and finally two men who call on them—
and who reluctantly agrees to change them all back to normal, is merely the
premise for a lighthearted, rather mediocre comedy of camera tricks.3 Ac¬
tually, the changes are all achieved by means of distorting mirrors.4 More than
anything, Docteur Tube tries to re-create the magical world of Georges Melies
or Onesime and looks ahead feebly to Rene Clair’s Paris qui dort (1924).
Although some might argue, with more validity, that Gance’s Mater Dolo¬
rosa (1917) or possibly even La Dixieme Symphonie (1918) mark its beginning,
the French narrative avant-garde does not really develop in earnest until after
the Great War. From the start, however, its interests and strategies are already
multiple. By 1917, according to Sophie Daria, Abel Gance was pressing Louis
Nalpas at Film d’Art to let him make "psychological films, where he could
express emotions or a state of consciousness rather than merely lay out facts.’’5
"We need to make something more interesting,’’ Brownlow quotes Gance as
telling Nalpas. "We’ll make real dramas about real feelings. That’s the sort
of thing that will catch the public’s imagination.”6 At the same time, Marcel
L’Herbier was arguing that the distinctive feature of the cinema was its me¬
chanical reproduction of reality—especially as evidenced in the newsreels—
while he was also advocating the transformation of that reality—in a "new
symphony composed of leitmotifs of landscapes, counterpoints of gestures,
fugues of shadow. . . .”7 Unmediated documentary versus stylized system of
"musical” signs—these were the twin poles that would preoccupy L’Herbier,
as well as others, for the rest of the decade. As Jean Epstein rather bluntly
put it,

French films seemed destined to be no more than albums of poses and catalogues of
decors, when the first major works of Gance, then L’Herbier, and then Delluc revealed
a new tendency which accepted the lesson of American realism, perhaps too hastily
and to an excess, in order to submit it to personal interpretations, to deformations,
but also to artistic standards, to all sorts of unconscious indelible traces of high cul¬
ture.8

The extent to which Gance’s and L’Herbier’s work began to redefine the pa¬
rameters of narrative film discourse can be seen in the films they released
immediately after the war: J Accuse (1919) and Rose-France (1919).

The trade press advertisement for Gance’s film featured a four-page-wide

fold-out of a black background against which the title stood out in blood-red
letters that oozed heavy white drops.9 The film itself provided the basis for
this design, beginning with the HAELS of thousands of French soldiers in an
open field spelling out the title in mammoth letters—-JAccuse.10 The allusion

295
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

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to Emile Zola’s famous attack on the court-martial that condemned Dreyfus

some twenty years before was brilliant as well as a bit presumptuous. It an¬
nounced a provocative film treatment of the war, completely different from
the propagandistic and pacifist films previously seen in such abundance. And
it did so with the assistance of the French Army. YetJ Accuse could hardly be
described as radical or rabble-rousing, at least ideologically. In fact, it caught
rather well the mood of the French public just after the war and was a huge
success. First released in four parts (of approximately 1,200 meters each), the
film was re-edited into several s'mg\t-seance versions from 1919 to 1921 (Gance
loved to correct his work).11 Apparently, prints of these shorter versions are
the only ones preserved.12
Gance began writing the scenario for J Accuse in the summer of 1917, under
several different influences. One was Henri Barbusse’s devastating novel on
the war, Le Feu, Journal d'une escouade (1916), which had just won the popular
Prix Goncourt.13 Another even stronger was the desperate rage he felt at the
deaths of so many of his friends in the trenches (nine out of ten, he would say
later).14 And finally, there was the creative and competitive surge he experi¬
enced at seeing Griffith’s Intolerance (privately in Paris, in 1917) and at know¬
ing that Griffith was then at work on his own film about the war, Hearts of
the World (1918).15 This combination of anger and ambition produced a con¬
fused, poignant, and absurdly grandiloquent narrative. Edith (Maryse Dau-
vray) is married to a paradoxically violent yet tender man, Francois (Severin-

296
Mars), but she is loved by the poet, Jean Diaz (Romauld Joube). Both men J ACCUSE AND
are mobilized for the war and serve in the same battalion, where they are ROSE-FRANCE
reconciled and agree to let Edith choose between them. Jean returns home on
leave to his dying mother, and Edith (sent to Francois’s parents home in the
Ardennes) returns from German captivity with a child—the result of rape. On
his return, Francois attacks Jean in a jealous rage until Edith intervenes to
explain. For vengeance, both men go back to the front, where Francois is
killed and Jean is shellshocked into madness. Back home again, Jean invokes
the war dead and calls forth a vision of phantom soldiers rising up and con¬
fronting the startled villagers. Then he, too, dies, re-reading his prewar poems,
Les Pacifiques, after accusing even the sun for its complicity in the war’s de¬
struction.
Although this mixture of the epic, the melodramatic, and the didactic
sometimes threatens to disintegrate, much of Accuses very real power comes
from moments of intense feeling produced by means of several different strat¬
egies that Gance worked out with his chief cameraman, F.-FT Burel. One
extends the practice of his previous two films, Mater Dolorosa and La Dixieme
Symphonie, and is predicated on the perceptual, emotional, and mental activity
of certain characters. Early in the film, for instance, Jean reads to his mother
from one of his poems, “Hymn du Soleil,’’ and his words are replaced by a
“cinematographic poem,’’ a slow montage of pastoral drawings and shots of a
sunrise over the sea, all tinted in yellows and blues. Though still quite deriv¬
ative and simplistic, the sequence works more effectively than does the musical
performance in La Dixieme Symphonie because the images not only join the two
characters in a shared feeling (that will be obliterated by the war) but also
make the audience experience something like that feeling as well. Later, when
Edith is forced to defend Jean from her husband and reveal the paternity of
her child, the experience of her rape by a German soldier is suggested in just
three flashback images (a restrained variation on current propaganda posters):16
the shadow of a helmet, the shadow of a pair of hands reaching out, and
finally that of a man’s shape filling the room. More simply, our allegiance to
Edith is marked from the very beginning. When Francois first appears, he
throws the carcass of a deer across the kitchen table and, grabbing his hound,
tries to make it lick the dripping blood. There is a cut to a POV shot of
Edith, who, from her seat at the window, turns and flinches. From that mo¬
ment on, as Kevin Brownlow notes, the spectator sees Francois as Edith sees
him.17 Gance even plays with the shock effect of the POV shot when he has
Francois discover Edith and Jean together in the woods. After a shot of Fran¬
cois raising his shotgun, there is a shot looking down the gun barrel, which
is aimed directly at the couple. In a reverse shot, Francois fires—cut to a bird
falling dead at Jean’s feet. The forced spectator identification with the villain
and the deliberate ellipsis of the gun’s movement away from the couple startle
us far more than the metaphorical threat of the dead bird. Much later, when
Frangois has returned home on leave from the war, he is a changed man. And
the film shifts our attention and sympathy to his awkward attempts to be
reconciled with his wife. His puzzlement over the child living with Jean
culminates in a sequence at his own house that reminds one of Mater Dolorosa.
In a series of POV shots, he discovers what he reads as a sign of Edith’s guilt
in several ordinary objects: a child’s doll and then (in CU) a pair of tiny shoes.

297
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE A second strategy that recurs in J'Accuse, and which may have been inspired
by Intolerance, works by means of a shocking or ironic juxtaposition of narrative
actions, sometimes articulated in alternation. One of the earliest of these mo¬
ments, which comes just as Jean finishes reading his poem, condenses two
extreme figures of sentimental melodrama. Intercut with the peaceful scene
between mother and son, which is generated by the “high art’’ of poetry, are
several charged images of sexual brutality: a woman lies half-naked on the
floor beside a bed; Francois gloats over a pair of panties in his hand; the woman
is revealed as Edith (in MCU), her hair clutched by Francois’s other hand and
her breast bared. After this sexual threat has been shifted to the Germans—
in the three-shot flashback of Edith’s rape—a more complicated juxtaposition
occurs as Jean and Francois return to the front. In the departure scene, the
conflict between the two men seems resolved when Francois notices Jean and
Edith’s clasped hands (in MCU) and orders them to embrace. Instead of cut¬
ting immediately to the battlefield, where the superimposed figure of Char¬
lemagne seems to stalk ahead of the troops that Jean exhorts to victory, a very
different representation of the war is inserted. Here the village children put a
German helmet on Edith’s child and a wooden gun in his hand, then begin
to taunt him, and finally beat him to the ground. The playful intolerance of
their action, which surprisingly echoes the earlier attacks on Edith herself,
subverts the subsequent heroic images of battle and gives a raw edge to the
conventional melodramatic figure of suffering mother and child.
In certain key sequences, a third strategy is visible—rhythmic montage
marked by extensive camera movement. Sometimes this functions much like
the fast cutting in Griffith’s films, especially Intolerance: it plunges us into the
action, to make us participants, as Gance would say later. The most sustained
instance of this strategy occurs in the last major battle, in which Francois is
wounded. The daylight fighting progresses through shots of Jean laughing
madly at the letters that he will never send and an alternation of cannon fire
and troops massing to attack; and it crescendos in huge explosions, smoke-
blurred images, fast cutting, and wild tracking shots. The night battle that
follows shifts to a rough rhythmic pattern of blinding flashes from artillery
shells in the dark and ends in a single shot of a body thrown back into a
trench and then a slow tilt down from a cathedral window to bodies heaped
in its crypt. Besides evoking something like a collective consciousness of trench
warfare, Gance’s strategy also functions at least once in a moment of subjective
hallucination—when Francois maliciously tells Edith that her child has drowned.
There a short montage of dolly shots of her running, intercut with brief water
images, intensifies her fear and anxiety until she reaches the bank of the stream
where Jean and the child are peacefully reading.
In other sequences of JAccuse, however, rhythmic montage operates quite
differently. The film opens, for instance, in the midst of a provincial festival
where the villagers are dancing a farandole in the central square. Here, a social
ambiance builds up before the major characters are introduced and the narra¬
tive begins. The movement of the dancers, the red firelight reflected on their
faces, and the rhythmic intercutting of separate figures and groups suggest a
society whose rituals already verge on belligerence. Not long after, news of
the war prompts a short documentarylike sequence that brings the villagers
together again, one by one, from their shops and houses to celebrate the

298
 142. A publicity photo from
a battle sequence in J'Accuse
(1919)

mobilization order. That celebration shifts presciently at the end in two simple
shots: a FS of a young woman leaning against a wall (her husband has just
left) and a MS of an older woman slumped and staring forward silently in the
crowd. This sequence is followed by a series of symbolic contrasts and dis¬
placements—children are shown playing in some rubble, skeletons dance, even
Saint Severin rejoices, and a scythe dissolves in, replacing the book of poems
in Jean’s hands. Then, the men’s departure is narrated in a simple synecdochal
montage of hands—packing a bag, clasped together, raising a last cup of wine,
praying before candles, an old man’s grasping a child’s. In contrast to the
earlier derivative cinematographic poem, in this slow montage the film pro¬
duces a poignant figure of metaphorical condensation.
Here, J’Accuse approaches a form of collage similar to that marking the
Modernist painting (e.g., the Cubists, Leger, Delaunay) and poetry of Gance’s
contemporaries.18 The collage text produced order, not so much by sequen¬
tiality or succession, but by simultaneity. At first, particularly in the work of
the Futurist painters and poets, a succession of events, often objects in motion,

299
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

143- Jean reads to his mother

on her deathbed in J'Accuse
(1919)

was telescoped into a kind of overlay, into paradigm. In the more advanced
poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, however, simultaneity
reached the point of assimilating, into a continuous present, quite divergent
events and images, both objective and subjective, either through the represen¬
tation of a single consciousness or through simple presentation.19 In Gance’s
film, this simultaneity is still relatively simple—a rhythmic montage of only
slightly heterogeneous elements or dislocated moments—e.g., the opening
farandole, the montage of hands. But the cutting here is already determined
less by the diegetic process or narrative progression than by the description of
what Ricciotto Canudo called “the collective body acting as a single individual’’20
and by a play of similarities and differences—e.g., graphic matches, meta¬
phorical relations—in the material features of each shot. Since Canudo and
Cendrars were close friends of Gance at the time and since Cendrars acted as
his assistant director on ]’Accuse, it is hardly surprising that the film evidences
what Standish Lawder has called “the post-war aesthetic of kaleidoscopic im¬
agery.’’21 Was it this film that led Jean Epstein to conclude that, within five
years, “we will compose cinematographic poems: 150 meters and 100 images
like beads on a thread whose movement imitates the flow of intelligence’’?22
For all its disparate discursive strategies and its abrupt, almost incoherent,
melodramatic narrative twists, ] Accuse gains a loose form of coherence through
several patterns of rhetorical figuring. One such pattern is initiated by the
montage sequence of hands (in CU), which sums up a set of simple human
activities, a way of life, that is about to be abandoned. The motif of hands
returns in another departure scene in the middle of the film, when Francois
seems to bless the relationship between Jean and Edith. And it returns a last
time when the two men are hospitalized side by side after the climactic battle.

300
 144. Blaise Cendrars leads the
“resurrection” of the dead
soldiers in J’Accuse (1919)

Just before he dies, Francois reaches out to grasp Jean’s hand, as a final gesture
of friendship and reconciliation. And the sequence ends with a CU of their
hands whose clasp a doctor is unable to break. Another pattern of rhetorical
figuring undergoes a very different semantic shift. It begins with Jean’s “Hymn
du soleil,’’ whose accompanying images mark the sentimental nature of his
vision as well as the harmony between mother and son. Later, on her deathbed,
she asks him to read from his poetry again, but now the sequence of images
that accompany his words are of painted landscapes over which Edith is su¬
perimposed. Artificial and distanced, they close on a conventionally desolate
snowscape. Here they seem to mark his sense of loss, of both women as well
as of his poetic vision. In the end, Jean returns to his mother’s house and
rediscovers the “Hymn du soleil.’’ As he reads it a last time before a window
through which the sunlight streams, he turns to cursing the sun’s silence and
the deceptive source of his inspiration. The accompanying images change from
a pastoral landscape to a battlefield of corpses and then to a peaceful valley
over which the sun sets and then rises again. In this ironically charged simple
image, everything is still latent. Nothing has changed, and Jean is martyred
before an apparently indifferent natural order of things.

301
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE This ending rhetorical tableau, which shifts the blame for the war onto
nature in an impotent protest, is preceded by another more dramatic and no
less ironic attempt to resolve the question of accusation. For J’Accuse climaxes
in a famous sequence that transforms Jean’s personal vision into a symbolic
confrontation for the entire village, and for all France. Here, the film’s strat¬
egies of subjectivity and simultaneity intersect in a passionate, paradoxical
protest. A protest all the more moving for Gance’s knowledge that the hun¬
dreds of soldiers he had recruited for the scene would be returning to Verdun,
a place from which, they knew well, few of them might come back alive.23
Returning half-mad from the trenches after Francois’s death, Jean gathers the
villagers together in the fire’s red light (an echo of the film’s opening) and
reads them his letter of accusation. His words give way now to an ELS of a
flat, barren landscape under a superimposed darkening sky—a battleground
covered with crosses and hundreds of soldiers. As if responding to Jean’s cries,
first one (Blaise Cendrars, with his amputated left arm), then another, and
finally all the dead rise up and slowly begin to march forward. After another
intertitle, the screen splits horizontally to .boldly juxtapose this ‘‘Resurrection
of the Dead” with a documentary shot (from a similar angle, on the same
direction of movement) of the Armistice Victory Parade through the Arc de
Triomphe.24 The relentless march of the dead (depicted in tracking shots,
superimpositions, various kinds of masks, and funereal purple toning) finally
reaches the village, where, overwhelmed by the horror, the people beg their
forgiveness and affirm their sacrifice. Their deaths apparently now justified,
given significance, the dead regroup, move off into the distance, and disap¬
pear.
Thus, in its attempt to expose the horrors of war and to accuse those re¬
sponsible, Gance’s film does not avoid a conventional moralizing and a certain
chauvinism. ‘‘It is less the war that is denounced,” concludes Marcel Oms,
‘‘than the pleasure, cupidity, and immorality of the living as opposed to the
nobility of the dead soldiers who have known true valor.”25 Seemingly critical
of a patriotism that blindly ignores the death it causes, J Accuse ends up cele¬
brating the dead’s sacrifice as a form of patriotism.

Rose-Franee was as great a financial catastrophe as J’Accuse was a success.

With the French army’s blessing, in 1918, L’Herbier set to work on a scenario
which would raise the people’s morale during the war. Unfortunately, the
Armistice was signed before the film could be finished, and it was no longer
exactly relevant.26 But there were other reasons for its commercial failure.
Although it exhibits an even more extravagant patriotism than J Accuse, Rose-
France breaks even more sharply with the conventions of a film discourse that
privileged narrative action. As L’Herbier himself wrote, on the eve of the
film’s second release:

. . . the cinegraphic representation of a succession of actions and reactions, that is of

dramatic gestures and of images representing the dreams or reflections that those
gestures would provoke in the hero of the drama—this representation, I say, which
will combine together and nearly simultaneously, the active and passive visage of
life—exquisite sensibilities in black and white—will be one of the best modes of
realization in French film poetics.27

302
 J’ACCUSE AND
ROSE-FRANCE

145. Jaque Catelain and Mile.

Aisse in Rose-France (1919)

Most film critics accepted L’Herbier’s attempt to constitute cinematographi-

cally the “mental or psychological states” of characters, but objected to the
film’s preciosity and air of decadence.28 Yet, even if the film depended exces¬
sively on “fin-de-siecle banalities,” writes Noel Burch, Rose-France “opens out
towards us” by producing “a series of symbolic actions which converse with
the intertitles and non-diegetic inserts [in] ... a ‘music of images.’ ”29
What strikes one initially about Rose-France is its pyrotechnical display of
optical devices (the cameraman was Thiberville, who had worked, interest¬
ingly enough, on Melies’s early films). At various times, these function to
simulate subjective states or to divide the frame into two or three images for
symbolic conjunctions and juxtapositions.30 Like Gance in J’Accuse, L’Herbier
early on deploys a poem and a montage of the visual images it evokes to join
his two central characters, a young French poetess, Francine Roy (Mile. Aisse),
and a young American who has been demobilized because of his health, Lauris
Dudley Gold (Jaque Catelain). This sequence is marked by the transformation
of natural images through dissolves, superimpositions, and unusual masks, all
of which culminate in a literal sign of interiorization. In the next-to-last shot
of the sequence, as the lovers kiss, there is a quick dissolve into negative. The
shot fades, only to iris in on a CU of them kissing, now framed in a dark
star-shaped mask, itself superimposed with small glittering stars. This senti¬
mental transformation places the lovers among the stars, creating a kind of
privileged microcosm for two within the universe.
Given the European naivete about the United States, Lauris has a savage
companion, Tigre-Prince (Francis-Byron Kuhn), whom he must have picked
up during his cavalry days in the Far West (although the West Indies seem
more likely) and through whom he learns that Francine apparently loves an¬
other. Sometime later, when Lauris discovers an inscription which seems to
confirm his suspicions in Francine’s book of poems, a subjective insert of the
earlier shot of the couple together grows blurred and is followed by a super¬
imposition of her figure crossing the lawn to him (as earlier), which now meets
with his horrifying gesture of rejection. This period of seeming loss and mel-

303
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE ancholy culminates in a subjective triptych shot of a smoky white panel masked
on each side by black. In the central panel, a blurred image of Lauris and
Francine dissolves in, followed by images of Francine on the left and Lauris
on the right, each turned away from the other. The central image dissolves to
white, and then so do the separate side images. Clearly, this deployment of
iris masks and vignettes for subjective and symbolic effects differs radically
from the pictorial and narrative conventions established earlier by such film¬
makers as Maurice Tourneur and D. W. Griffith.31
More important than these moments, however, are several extended seg¬
ments that narrate simultaneously two lines of action or associations, one usu¬
ally real and the other subjective or imaginary. Perhaps the most complex of
these is the one that begins with Lauris discovering the poetry inscription.
The entire segment is predicated on an alternation between Lauris’s and Fran-
cine’s separate actions after she swears she loves none but him. While he paces
about his house and garden, she returns to her house, visits a bookseller (to
discover he has purchased her book of poems), and writes him a letter. Cut
into this alternating series, however, are subjective inserts for each of the two
characters as well as several generalized symbolic images. This makes the seg¬
ment quite demanding to read, as it shifts quickly and often from one line of
action to the other, and from the diegetic to the nondiegetic. Rather than the
simultaneity of divergent actions in a continuous present, as in J'Accuse, Rose-
France thus produces a simultaneity of “the active and passive visage of life’’
in a doubly paradigmatic narrative structure. As we shall see, this is probably
the film’s most original contribution to the narrative avant-garde film practice.
Another form of paradigmatic structuring depends on a pattern of rhetorical
figuring that is curiously similar to the motif of hands in J'Accuse. Early in
Rose-France there is an enigmatic CU of a woman’s hand taking a rose from
another hand that is missing three fingers and part of the palm. Inserted in
the opening sequence between Lauris and Tigre-Prince, and before Francine
arrives, its only reference is an intertitle: “And at the same moment in a
nearby park a mutilated hand. ...” After Lauris and Francine embrace, a rose
drops from her dress, and he asks her if she is wearing it in hopes that the
war will end soon. Who gave it to her?—“I don’t remember.” The shot of
the rose and hands returns, and from then on, Lauris jealously begins to
suspect a rival. The rose/hands figure recurs in a different conjunction after
Lauris discovers the poetry inscription: a CU of Francine bending over the rose
on her table is followed by a CU of Lauris closing his eyes with his hands.
The next day Lauris meets two soldiers on the road, trails one along a wall,
and notices his disfigured hand as the soldier follows a woman through a gate.
When he finally reads Francine’s letter, which explains that her inscription
and poems are dedicated to “the Spirit, the Art, the Past and the Air itself—
in short, the Genius of France!” (quoting the fifteenth-century poet, Charles
d’Orleans), there is a MCU of him looking up, followed by an insert of.the
soldier passing through the gate (now blurred), and then a MCU of him
tearing up the letter against a background of flower-patterned cloth. In a bold
condemnation of his jealousy, the shot fades out on his own contorted hands.
After their reconciliation, Francine gives Lauris “this Rose-de-France”; there
is a repetition of the original giving of the rose (now in LS to reveal the soldier
and Francine); and now as they kiss, the rose is superimposed between them.

304
 146. (left) The title shot from
L'Homme du large (1920)

147. (right) An intertitle

In the context of Rose-France s slight narrative structure, this rhetorical fig¬

uring has a crucial function. The initial rose/hands figure raises the enigma
that the film’s narrative has to answer, and it proceeds to do so through a
rather simple investigation, much as in a detective story (it is almost impos¬
sible not to compare this with the similar, more overt, yet more complicated
function of the Rosebud/glass ball motif in Citizen Kane). And once the enigma
is solved (in a simple change of camera position), the motif seems to be relo¬
cated as a sign of the couple’s love. Yet something is not quite right here.
French critics who reviewed the film, such as Jean Galtier-Boissiere, were
deeply offended by the image of the mutilated hand, reading it as a grotesque
magnification of French suffering during the war.32 Although the ostensible
reason for their offense seems greatly exaggerated and prejudiced, they may be
right in pointing to the grotesquerie. So powerful is the film’s fascination with
the hand, giving image to a disfigurement considered taboo and linking it
metonymically with Lauris’s love, that its metaphorical connections with the
rose function rather ambiguously even today. Rather than marking a reciprocal
healing through sacrifice and devotion, the rose/hands motif seems to cast a
pall over the lovers, almost calling the whole romance into question.

When he first saw Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Homme du large (1920) at a cine- L’Homme du large
club screening in the late 1920s, Flenri Langlois called it ‘‘the first example and El Dorado
of cinematic writing.”1 That epithet might surprise those who found and still
find the theatrical acting styles of Henry Krauss and especially Jaque Catelain
(as the antagonistic father and son) at odds with the Brittany seascapes as well
as finding the representation of a Breton community a bit fabricated and un¬
realistically polarized.2 No doubt the film is more than interesting—for its
camerawork and mise-en-scene (e.g., the low-key lighting, foreground/back¬
ground contrasts, unusual wipes and masks), its incorporation of documen¬
tarylike footage into the fiction (much like J'Accuse, it begins by building up
a milieu, an atmosphere), and its exploration and uneasy resolution of cultural

305
narrative avant-garde extremes (self-denial and profligation). Yet J’Accuse and Rose-Franee clearly can
be seen as prior texts of “cinematic writing.’’
Although Langlois’s judgment demands a good deal of qualification now,
there is something to what he says. At least two forms of experimentation
seem to be operating in the film, and both involve a double process of signi¬
fication at the level of the discourse. First, unlike, say, Pouctal’s and Feuil-
lade’s films, as Langlois notes, L’Homme du large does not merely narrate a
series of events, connected and explained by intertitles.3 It combines the im¬
ages and intertitles in a unique way—instead of taking the place of the images
or duplicating them, the intertitles sometimes are superimposed over them.
Langlois speculates that this obvious stylization functions as a form of under¬
lining, to fix the image in the memory.4 It makes more sense, I think, to see
it instead as an early, misguided attempt to produce a “film language’’ of
hieroglyphs or ideograms. Second, as Noel Burch suggests, there are occasional
sequences (as in the confrontation between father and son) where the montage
clearly serves a double function—as a vehicle for the narrative and as a stylized
rhythmic structure determined by the mise-en-scene and framing as well
as the rhythm of shot transitions.5 While the progression of shots nar¬
rates, it also presents itself as a formal construction or, in L’Herbier’s terms,
a “musical composition.’’ On this basis, although the point could be con¬
tested, L’Homme du large seems to me still a problematical film text in the
French narrative avant-garde film practice.6
There is no question, however, that another of L’FIerbier’s films from this
period synthesizes the early narrative avant-garde film practice into its first
masterwork—El Dorado (1921). L’FIerbier himself considered El Dorado “the
culmination of the five films in which {he} had experimented with a certain
number of effects.’’7 Flenry Fescourt called its first public screening at the
Gaumont-Palace, on 7 July 1921, one of the three most important film
premieres in France between 1916 and 1929.8 After that premiere, Lionel
Landry wrote:

When the language of the Cinema will have stabilized and when historians look,
retrospectively, for someone who is owed some merit, nothing will detract from the
startling role that M. Marcel L’Herbier played in the formulation of its vocabulary.9

The simplest yet most memorable reaction was Louis Delluc’s famous cry,
“There, that’s cinematic!’’10
L’Herbier deliberately subtitled El Dorado “a cinematographic melodrama,’’
making explicit the popular origins it shared with the other early narrative
avant-garde films.11 Like the Dulac-Delluc La Fete espagnole (1920), it was set
in Spain during a holiday, specifically in Granada during Holy Week, and
featured Eve Francis dancing in a cabaret. Although she is the star performer
at the cabaret (a hellhole ironically dubbed El Dorado), Sybilla is obsessed
with the poor health of her young son, the offspring of an earlier affair with
Estiria, a wealthy impresario in the city. After her renewed pleas to him are
spurned, she considers blackmailing him with her knowledge of the secret
love between his daughter (Marcelle Pradot) and a Swedish painter (Jaque
Catelain) for whom Sybilla has posed in the Alhambra. Shocked by their dis¬
covery of Estiria’s villainy, the young couple break with him and persuade
Sybilla to let them take the boy to be raised in the country by the painter’s

306
 L’HOMME DU LARGE
AND EL DORADO

148. Sybilla (center) among

the cabaret dancers at the
beginning of El Dorado (1921)

mother. Cut off from her son, probably forever (almost cruelly, at the last
minute, the painter tells her his mother will soon be leaving Spain), and
menaced by the drunken types who frequent the cabaret, particularly the piano
player (Philippe Heriat), Sybilla finally commits suicide behind the stage back¬
drop.
Needless to say, not all spectators shared Delluc and Fescourt’s enthusiasm
for El Dorado, especially when it was released to the public in October, 1921.12
Particularly offensive were the many visual deformations (various distortions and
soft focus shots), which were done in collaboration with his chief cameraman,
Georges Lucas, and which soon made the film famous. At the first company
screening, in fact, Leon Gaumont, the producer, was much annoyed and kept
yelling at the projectionist, ‘‘Fix the focus!” Flowever, singling out such de¬
formations to the exclusion of all else distorts the work of the film consider¬
ably. For El Dorado simulates subjective experience through a wide range of
strategies, and it does much more. It was probably the first French feature
film to have an original musical score, composed by Maurius-Fran^ois Gail-
lard, synchronized to accompany its projection. Although the complete score
now seems lost,13 L’Herbier has said that the music was essential to the rhythm
of his montage and to the emotional states and interactions of the characters.
So important was it that he referred to El Dorado as a ‘‘musical drama” and
linked it to “Impressionist music.” The film also employed a sophisticated
orchestration of tinted film stocks (strikingly preserved in the Cinematheque
franchise print), of which L’Herbier was the narrative avant-garde’s most de¬
voted proponent. Extending his work in Rose-Eranee, it also deployed editing

307
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE patterns involving a degree of spatial-temporal discontinuity as well as patterns
of rhetorical figuring. Finally, it used a narrative structure that synthesized a
melange of discourse modes—including the documentary, the decorative, and
the subjective—a structure predicated on parallels and juxtapositions even more
than on narrative continuity. The best measure of the him s synthesis of nar¬
rative avant-garde him practice can be gleaned from examining the him reel
by reel.
The hrst reel of El Dorado immediately intrigues the spectator with the
subjective life of Sybilla’s character, in L’Herbier’s words, through “a dialectic
that combines the real and the unreal.”14 After a series of shots (tinted yellow)
that suggest the milieu of the cabaret, Sybilla is introduced as an enigma, an
absence—at the center of a FS of several dancers seated on the cabaret stage,
her hgure alone is blurred out of focus. Mote of the cabaret milieu is de¬
scribed—some musicians, a flower girl, a woman suckling a baby, distorted
shots of drinkers and of a hand fondling a woman’s blouse. Sybilla now appears
in MCU, again blurred slightly out of focus. As the other women prod her to
dance, in FS, her hgure comes into sharp focus; and she gets up to perform,
but without much enthusiasm. Why is she,‘‘not there,” or only partly there,
in the space of the cabaret? What is she thinking? The answer comes at the
end of a series of alternations between shots that sum up the ignorant world
of the cabaret and shots of an isolated room where a boy lies ill in bed. The
transition shots shift from a blind man to some women laughing to a blurred
CU of Sybilla—it is the boy she is thinking of, her son. After accepting the
excited applause of the cabaret clientele, she goes backstage, past the shadow
of clapping hands on the stage backdrop (tinted rose), to what we discover is
the upstairs room (black/white) where she and her son live.
The sequence that follows makes us share and come to understand Sybilla’s
condition through a progression of gestures and objects, subjective inserts,
memory flashbacks, and a sequence of cross-cutting that involves some rhythmic
montage. Once in the room, where she cradles the boy in her arms, there is
an immediate cut to a shot of the curtain blowing at the window. In MS and
then CU, Sybilla discovers a broken pane through which the wind is howling.
This prompts a LS of the city (tinted green) and then another which blurs in
distortion—a supposed POV shot turns subjective, as if an imaginary wind
were leveling the world—and Sybilla stuffs part of the curtain into the gaping
hole. An alternation now begins between the bedroom and the cabaret below,
where the piano player is dancing clumsily, wildly on stage. As Sybilla gazes
down on her son and her eyes widen in fear, several quick shots of the cabaret
dancing and revelry are cut in for dramatic contrast. When she goes to the
fire across the room and blows on the coals (tinted rose), the contrast turns
cruelly ironic in a cut to a HALS of the activity in the cabaret as it grows
more frenzied, followed by several quick shots from unusual angles of the
whirling dancer, his mouth gaping wide. Into this alternation, two short
flashbacks are also intercut. The first is prompted by a title (now missing)
which, through a perfect example of classical continuity editing (an ELS of
the city, a LS of a mansion, a LS of an interior with a man at a desk, a MS of
the man reading a letter), introduces Estiria as he coolly responds to Sybilla’s
plea for help. The second flashback is strikingly different:

308
 149- (left) The painter’s initial
view of an Alhambra interior
in El Dorado and (right) the
painter’s transformed image of
the same Alhambra interior
Fade to black.
Wipe in a MCU of Estiria (younger) speaking angrily to Sybilla (her back to the
camera) in front of him.
Wipe in a MS of Estiria smoking and reading a letter at his desk.
Wipe in a FS (blurred) of Estiria at his desk; Sybilla enters the frame and embraces
him.
Wipe in a MS of Estiria sealing his letter and sending it off with a servant.
Wipe to black.
Fade in.

This remarkable segment of parallel montage playing off a chronological pres¬

ent against a reversed chronological past briefly summarizes the relation be¬
tween Sybilla and Estiria, but its discontinuity (accentuated by the wipes)
emphasizes the disturbing contrast between his once enflamed passion and his
now cold behavior.15 Furthermore, since the cabaret sequence between these
two flashbacks singles out the piano player (who desires Sybilla), a parallel is
suggested between the two men—as if the latter were acting out a vulgar
replication of the former’s earlier passion. After the piano player is jeered off
stage, the crowd sends him off to beg Sybilla to perform again. In her room
he tries to kiss her (in contrasting CUs and HAMCUs) but is repulsed. Then,
just before going on stage, she receives the impresario’s letter (we assume),
rejecting her and the boy, as he must have done several times before. The
sequence ends as it opened, with Sybilla beginning her dance slightly out of
focus. Her figure comes into sharp focus, slows, and then, after a shot of the
boy calling out, her face blurs into featurelessness—suggesting a pain so great
that it obliterates all expression.16
The next reel is marked by a dramatic shift from the active, brutal world
of the cabaret to the peaceful, static world of the Alhambra, from Sybilla to
the Swedish painter, from the subjective to the decorative, from color contrasts
to black/white contrasts. The painter is introduced (in a dolly shot) at his
mother’s house, looking through a packet of photographs of the Alhambra’s

309
narrative AVANT-GARDE architecture. As the sequence alternates shots of him looking and POV shots
of individual photographs, each photograph distorts slightly, assuming the
elongated, broken lines of a Delaunay painting (e.g., “Saint Severin, La
Tour Eiffel”). Thus does his perception seem to transform the world around
him. This playful prelude to creation is interrupted by a nondistorting pho¬
tograph and then by a subjective insert of an unknown woman dressed in
white (Estiria’s daughter, it turns out), in which she dissolves in between
fountain jets of water in a courtyard garden. The double shift seems to remind
the painter of a rendezvous he has at the Alhambra, but the woman he meets
there is Sybilla, his model. In a strange parallel to the previous subjective
insert, the black figure of Sybilla appears on the grounds of the Alhambra
against a background which metamorphosizes through several lap dissolves but
which does not affect her continuous advance in the slightest (and here the
dissolves seem without subjective motivation).
As the two move from place to place in the palace gardens (the transitions
marked by wipes using silhouetted grillework panels), the painter is distracted
twice more by superimpositions of the imaginary woman passing near the
fountains and columns. Finally, he gives up .his work; but as Sybilla is leaving,
she notices the woman in white enter the grounds and then follows her unseen
to her rendezvous with the painter. There follows a hypnotic sequence of fig¬
ures drifting through the arches and colonnades of the Alhambra, composed
in sharply etched areas of light and shadow, one figure slowly, stealthily pur¬
suing the other two. As Noel Burch has written,

Here the diversity of camera angles and spaces, the foreground/background juxtapo¬
sitions, the entrances into and exits from the frame represent an already assured affir¬
mation of an attitude which, progressively, even at the heart of a dramatic cinema,
distances L’Herbier from the “mise-en-scene,” and aligns him with that which he has
called the “mise-en-film.”. . .17

These plastic or compositional harmonies, which nearly float free of the nar¬
rative, herald the hallucinatory perambulations and poses of later narrative as
well as non-narrative avant-garde films. As Sybilla leaves the Alhambra (in a
slow reverse dolly shot), she is haunted by juxtaposed images—a LS of her son
surrounded by darkness and a FS of the lovers (do they remind her of herself
and Estiria in the past?) slowly gliding out of the sunlight into shadow.
The third reel shifts abruptly, but easily, from the decorative to the docu¬
mentary, from fantasy to reality, returning to the pathos of Sybiila’s current
position. Sometime later, Sybilla decides to confront her former lover in per¬
son; but her way to his mansion is blocked by a religious procession of the
Virgin. This improvised sequence (shot during an actual ritual that year) is
transformed rhetorically into a series of ironic juxtapositions.18 On the one
hand, Sybilla is a lone figure separate from and moving in the opposite di¬
rection from the religious procession; on the other hand, she is trying to save
her son in the midst of a community celebrating the mother of Christ. The
people’s happiness and well-being (even wealth) exist apart from and are blind
to her suffering, exactly in the way the revelries of the cabaret crowd are. As
the statue of the Virgin on its elaborate, elevated platform stops momentarily
beside Sybilla, the two mother figures (and images of adoration) mirror one
another inversely (in a series of CUs)—the one seeing but unseen, the other

310
 150. (left) Sybilla and the
long, towering white wall in
El Dorado (1921)

151. (right) The piano player

seen but unseeing. The moment passes, and Sybilla passes by. After she is Henat) attacks
thrown out of Estiria’s house (for disturbing his party guests) and the glass
doors to the house close, Sybilla wanders through the now empty city in a
sequence that culminates in one of the most famous shots of the film. In
contrast to the earlier sequence of the procession, the LSs of her wandering
now alternate with a progression of subjective and perceptual inserts, con¬
densing the despair and anger of her emotional state: a LS of her son in bed,
lit by a single, small light; a LS of bells tolling in a church tower; a blurred
LS of the lovers together in the Alhambra garden. The last shot is of a high
white wall running diagonally from the right foreground into the distant left
background, where the tiny black figure of Sybilla comes forward slowly. As
she moves along the wall (and we realize there will be no further inserts), its
looming whiteness metaphorically takes on all the suffering she has experi¬
enced. She pauses, nearly overwhelmed, and then continues forward until her
face fills the screen. Displaced into the wall, which is itself now displaced, all
that suffering rushes metonymically into the final, fading CU of her pained
face.
The final reel of El Dorado repeats the opening with tragic effect.19 In green-
tinted shots of the cabaret’s entrance, Sybilla’s son goes off with the young
couple on horseback, leaving her standing beside the old blind man who
lightly strums a banjo. In the bedroom, absence lingers; Sybilla distractedly
repeats some of her gestures from the initial sequence, and certain emotionally
charged objects recur—the empty bed, the boy’s clothing, the broken window
pane. Cross-cut with this sequence (paralleling the earlier flashbacks of Estiria)
is a series of shots (tinted green) narrating the boy’s progress through the city
and into the mountains. But the second shot among them is a flashback of all
four characters at the cabaret’s entrance. The series shifts from the omniscient
to the subjective and then wavers in between. The piano player again comes
up from the cabaret, but this time he attacks Sybilla in a flurry of CUs (tinted

311
152. (left) Backstage, Sybilla
staggers against the cabaret
backdrop

153. (right) The final shot in

El Dorado (1921) blue-green) that dissolve into an elongated distortion of him lying on top of
her. After she repulses him once more and briefly performs on stage (tinted
yellow), Sybilla stops in the backstage area (tinted rose) behind the backdrop
and writes a short note as the silhouettes of clapping hands are replaced by
the huge lunging shadow of the piano player dancing.
Before this “interior screen,’’ which reduces the cabaret revelry to a shadow-
puppet play and condenses her despair and suffering much as did the great
white wall earlier, Sybilla stands out sharply, realistically, as she performs her
final act.20 Drawing a dagger from her dress, she plunges it into her neck,

MS Sybilla writhes slowly, her blood flowing from the wound and smearing her dress
and face.
FS Sybilla staggers backwards (almost in slow motion) into silhouette against the
backdrop, her figure joined with but separate from the piano player’s dancing shadow.
FS The piano player dances on stage as the backdrop buckles and bulges slightly from
the unseen Sybilla’s weight.
MS Sybilla flails against the backdrop.
FS of the piano player dancing.
FS of Sybilla against the backdrop.
CU of an old woman asleep (sitting off to the side, backstage).
FS of Sybilla staggering forward from the backdrop and collapsing.
MCU of a woman laughing as she suckles a baby.
FS of Sybilla on the floor.
CU of the old woman awakening with a start.

This “dance of death’’ stunningly sums up both the gulf between Sybilla and
the world around her as well her struggle with that world. And in this image
of a man and woman conjoined as silhouettes through a screen—the one per¬
forming for an audience, the other in the throes of death—the nature of the
struggle becomes violently, even perversely, sexual. An ironic peace comes at
last in the final shots. In a FS of the backstage area (now in black/white),

312
Sybilla is laid out on the table, her head resting on a tambourine, before a FIEVRE AND LA FEMME
group of mourners—the piano player, the old blind man, the old woman, and DE NULLE PART
several other dancers. As the shot changes to MS, they all dissolve out and
the word ELDORADO dissolves in, wavering in a ghostly arc over Sybilla, whose
body finally fades out, leaving only the word—emptied out, marking the site
of specific absence and, now, absolute loss.

In J Accuse, Rose-France, perhaps L’Homme du large, and certainly El Dorado, Fievre and La
Gance and L’Herbier had marked out a number of ways to break with and Femme de nulle part
reconstitute the conventions of narrative film discourse. Quickly, other film¬
makers, notably Germaine Dulac and Louis Delluc, seized on their advances.
Dulac’s interest at this point seems to have been restricted to strategies that
could prolong or displace the narrative action by redirecting its focus to the
characters’ inner experience. In La Cigarette (1919), for instance, according to
Charles Ford, she had already “enveloped the protagonist {Signoret} in a po¬
etic, unreal atmosphere of soft-focus images whose delicacy of touch stunned
all the cinephiles {in the audience].’’1 In La Mort du soleil (1922), as I have
shown, Dulac expressly wanted “to describe the inner workings of the mind
or soul, within the theme of the action.’’2 There she explored the subjective
life of her two central characters, an aging doctor (Andre Nox) and his female
research assistant (Denise Lorys), both separately and in conjunction with one
another. The work of Louis Delluc, however, was even more innovative.
As evidenced by his film criticism during this period, Delluc was pushing
the concept of photogenie toward a sketchy theory of cinematic denotation and
connotation. Film was “a median term between stylization and reality;’’3 the
film image functioned simultaneously on several levels of signification—it was
both iconic and symbolic, transparent and transformed. The shaping of that
signification came from its sequential “composition’’ with other images, or¬
ganized according to a central idea. Like his colleagues, Gance, L’Herbier,
and Dulac, Delluc was later fond of describing this composition by means of
an analogy then current, that of musical orchestration. Yet his own film prac¬
tice, which became the chief means to explore and validate his ideas, reveals
instead an interest in what might be called lyrical composition, similar to
metaphorical patterning in poetry. As one might expect, his films also evi¬
dence a fascination with the dramatic construction of the decoupage. For Delluc,
the recurrent idea structuring his work was “that confrontation between the
present and the past, between reality and memory, articulated in images.’’4
Much impressed by the alternation of parallel stories in Griffith’s Intolerance,
which he reviewed a half-dozen times in May and June of 1919, Delluc, like
Gance, seems to have come up with the idea of intercutting antithetical or
opposing stories (or lines of action) for other than strictly narrative purposes.5
Noting their simple, modest appearance, film historians and even his fellow
filmmakers have tended to write patronizingly of Delluc’s films: they reveal a
superb scenarist but “not a man of the camera lens” (Georges Franju); they
represent the “sketch of a cinematic oeuvre which he had neither the time nor
the means to complete” (Rene Clair); they are “much inferior to that which
he would have been able to realize, had he lived” (Georges Sadoul).6 Yet
despite their faults, Delluc’s few films represent a major effort in the narrative

313
 I

narrative AVANT-GARDE avant-garde film practice, and the highly original narrative structures of his
scenarios constitute one of the most important syntheses of that practice. For
Jean Epstein, “they represented perhaps the most original tendency in French
cinema. ”7

Although he praised both J’Accuse and Rose-France in his 1919 Paris-Midi

reviews, Delluc was troubled by the didacticism and technical lapses in Gance’s
film and by the longeurs and hesitations of the narrative in L’Herbier’s.8 Perhaps
as a consequence, his first two short films (only two reels each) were quite
different. His scenario for La Fete espagnole (1920), actually directed by Dulac,
was brief, spare, unsentimental, and even brutal.9 Two men in love with a
bored young woman (Eve Francis) kill one another in a duel, while she gets
caught up in the dancing of a local festival and, rejuvenated, impulsively gives
herself to a third. At least two salient points can be gathered from the pub¬
lished scenario and the incomplete print of La Fete espagnole that survives.10
First of all, from its beginning, much as in J Accuse, the film works to docu¬
ment the ambiance of a particular milieu, -a Spanish village on holiday; so that
when the main characters are introduced,. in Delluc’s words, they seem “less
presented than incorporated into the flow of picturesque events.’’11 Had they
been able to shoot on location in Spain as planned rather than in Nice, he,
Dulac, and cameraman Paul Parguel would have turned the scenario into even
more of a documentary: the woman’s story would have been merely “one
component of the Spanish festival, a sudden change in character without the
least bit of prominence.’’12 Secondly, the film interweaves a half-dozen differ¬
ent lines of action, setting up a rather complex paradigmatic narrative struc¬
ture, somewhat akin to that of Rose-France.13 In the end, the two major lines
of action come to a climax simultaneously as the film intercuts the woman’s
ever more exhilarated dancing with the knife fight between her two suitors.
In a stunning rhetorical conjunction, one fever seems to enflame the other in
an ironic juxtaposition of “resurrection’’ and death. As Delluc himself noted,
these “final images especially, in which the scenes of passion and pleasure
alternate so rapidly with those of blood and death, [are] a strikingly successful
example of the ‘relative synchronism’ offered by the cinema.’’14
Delluc’s second film, Le Silence (1920), has not survived; but its published
scenario suggests that it deserves a quick glance.15 Its story may owe some¬
thing to Jacques de Baroncelli’s Le Rot de la mer (1918) which Delluc praised
as an “interior story that never left a shipowner’s office.’’16 Here Pierre (Si-
gnoret) is alone in his apartment, awaiting his lover (Eve Francis). Suddenly,
a chance comparison of letters makes him realize that, several years before,
she was responsible for an anonymous letter that incited him to shoot his
young wife, Aimee, (Ginette Darnys) and kill her. When the lover arrives,
Pierre is dead in his chair, a victim of the same revolver. Unlike La Fete
espagnole, the salient features of this film are a metamorphosizing pattern of
rhetorical figuring and an unusually disjunctive narrative structure. The “dra¬
matic theme” unfolds through the alternation of Pierre’s memories and his
perceptions of certain key objects in his possession—a revolver, a bed, two
photographs, and several letters. These objects are isolated and intensified,
especially through CUs (the cameraman was Louis Chaix), somewhat like the
details in JAccuse and Rose-France; but their significance shifts in conjunction

314
with the series of memory flashbacks. For instance, the revolver turns into an F1EVRE AND LA FEMME
instrument of self-destruction when it emerges from a kind of memory store, DE NULLE PART
the same drawer that produced Aimee’s photograph and letters. As Jean Ep¬
stein wrote of this, his favorite Delluc film, “. . . the lens . . . discovers in
the simplest and most unlikely things a new dimension of inner dynamism,
of symbolic truth, of dramatic conspiracy with the action.”17
If Delluc’s choice of objects and their melodramatic significance may be
dated, the intricacy of the scenario’s narrative structure still seems original.
The eight flashbacks or imaginary sequences, most of them concentrated in
the first two-thirds of the scenario, are organized in an achronological order
that withholds the key revelatory moments from the past until the end. Fur¬
thermore, several of those sequences are themselves organized in a highly dis¬
continuous manner. The second flashback, as it appears in the scenario, can
stand as representative:

28 Present—Pierre in front of a bed.

29 Past1—FS of Pierre sick in the same bed, now in disorder.
30 Present—Pierre asks himself why he was there.
31 Past3—FS of Aimee ill in the same bed.
Intertitle—“Aimee”
32 Past3—MCU of Aimee ill in bed.
33 Past5—FS of Pierre and Aimee leaving a church in wedding clothes and laughing.
34 Past4—FS of Pierre and Aimee embracing at the rail of a ship on their honeymoon.
35 Past2—FS of Aimee dead in the same bed; Pierre kneels at the bedside.
36 Past2—MS of Pierre mad with grief, restrained by some doctors.
37 Present—Pierre smiles at the clock pendulum.18

In just eight (planned) shots, the film presents flackback within flashback
within flashback, summarizing Pierre’s life with Aimee by layering over their
happiness with several different moments of loss and grief. As may be gathered
from this brief excerpt, the elliptical, achronological organization within and
between sequences in Le Silence seems astonishing for 1920. It turns what
could be the exploration of a single character’s psychological condition into an
intellectual puzzle, a tightly knit narrative of knowing, a narrative of bitter
revelations and ironic reversals.

Because no prints have survived intact, La Fete espagnole and Le Silence remain
problematical film texts within the narrative avant-garde film practice. There
is no question, however, about the position of Delluc’s first nearly feature-
length film, Fievre (1921).19 Fievre was made from an original scenario, but it
drew heavily on several sources: on Antoine’s theatre of naturalism and on a
number of the cineaste’s favorite American films—particularly William S. Hart’s
westerns (the saloon became a waterfront bistro; the hero was called ‘‘the man
with clear eyes”; HALs were used to encompass the full decor of the bistro)
and D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (the Oriental character, the waterfront
milieu).20 Delluc had wanted to shoot the film on location in Marseille, but
lack of money confined him to Gaumont’s Paris studio, where Leon Poirier
was lucky to wrangle him an eight-day production schedule, in February,
1921.21 The first four days were devoted to rehearsing and constructing the
bistro set (designed by the young painter, Francis Jourdain); only the last four
days were given to shooting (with Gibory and Lucas, L’Herbier’s chief cam-

315
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

/3mac\

154. Behan’s poster for Fievre

(1921)

eraman). Unable to afford enough professional actors, he let one of the film’s
sponsors, Elena Sagrary, play a major role and called on his friends for the
secondary parts—Footit (the famous clown, who died two weeks later), Leon
Moussinac and his wife, Noemi Seize, and others.22 When previewed for the
critics, Fievre was accompanied by a much touted piano score—“lively, rhythmic,
by turns tender and passionate’’—improvised by another friend, young Jean
Wiener.23 Unfortunately, when the film was finally released in November,
1921, more conventional music was used instead.
Fievre s apparent subject can be gathered from its original title, La Boue
(dregs or lower depths), which offended the censors. All the action takes place
within a few hours one evening in a rundown waterfront bistro in old Mar¬
seille. After the local inhabitants of the bistro have been situated, a group of
sailors just back from the Far East come in, among them Militis (Van Daele),
whose former fiancee, Sarah (Eve Francis), is now wife and barmaid to the
bistro owner, Topinelli (Gaston Modot). With him is an Oriental woman
(Elena Sagrary), whom he married after she helped him recover from a long
illness. The old passion between Militis and Sarah is rekindled as they dance
together; but it arouses the jealousy of a petty clerk who loves her and who
has been humiliated earlier. He alerts Topinelli, and a fight breaks out be-

316
 155. (left) The opening shot
of the harbor in Fievre (1921)

156. (right) The opening shot

of the bistro interior
tween the sailor and barowner. While Militis is overpowering Topinelli, the
clerk knocks him out with a bottle, after which Topinelli finishes him off by
stepping on his neck. The other sailors attack the two men and carry off
Topinelli before the police arrive. Sarah, ironically, is accused of Militis’s
death, and the Oriental woman is left alone by the bar with a flower which
had earlier captivated her. Only now does she discover it is artificial—a crucial
irony that is almost lost in the titleless American print of the film.
Film critics at the time were struck by the sympathetic, even loving, atten¬
tion to the milieu, the atmosphere, in Fievre. Perhaps Leon Moussinac sums
up this attitude best:
/

Fievre, which develops in a unique decor—a sailor’s bar in Marseille, whose character
is revealed in a series of quick shots—proves that to make “cinema” it is not indis¬
pensable that one carry a camera to extraordinary places and that, from faces and
gestures, from expressive movements in a completely integrated decor, one can pro¬
duce emotional effects of real power . . . even poetry. . . ,24

Despite its studio production, the film works from the beginning to create a
realistic image of the Marseille waterfront and of the kinds of people who
inhabit it, at first simply by intercutting documentary shots of the harbor
with sequences of the studio-constructed bistro. Once within the bistro itself,
however, a series of slice-of-life sketches introduce the characters and their
attitudes succinctly—the play of looks among the men over a game of cards,
Sarah’s resigned exhaustion as she cleans up the bartop, the petty clerk’s timid
desire in following her to the wine cellar. Through this process of accumula¬
tion, the romantic intrigue seems to evolve out of the milieu itself. The de¬
velopment of the intrigue, however, as in the Kammerspiel scenarios of Carl
Mayer—Lulu Pick’s Shattered (1921) and Sylvester (1923)—of which Delluc was
unaware, is more complex than one might at first expect.25
On one hand, the film pits the powerful against the powerless, the ignoble
(those tied to a petit-bourgeois psychology of possession and jealousy) against

317
157. (left) Patience (Solange
Rugiens) and the flower on
the bar

158. (right) Sarah (Eve

Francis) on the other side of
the noble (those invested with subjectivity and the feelings of desire)—with
the bar
predictable results. On the other hand, it relies on a schematic series of struc¬
tural repetitions and displacements, on a configuration of looks and subjective
inserts (articulating the course of desire), and on a related pattern of associa¬
tions between certain characters and metonymized/metaphorized elements of
the decor.26 The latter two are especially worth examining closely together for
they constitute an important effort to poeticize, to comment on, and, ulti¬
mately, to critique the narrative.
From its opening shots, Fievre puts two spaces in juxtaposition, the harbor
exterior and the bistro interior, in a series of alternating sequences. Within
the closed, settled interior world, a diegetic process begins to develop. The
character of Sarah is described as the object of Topinelli’s gaze, a gaze defined
(in an intertitle) as possession. Sarah’s own look, which does not return his
(instead she pours herself a shot of gin), is isolated, in stasis, neither desiring
not desired, yet denying possession. While she remains at the bar, several
other objects of the decor, besides the gin bottle and glass, come into associ¬
ation with her. Behind her on the wall are several posters with pictures of
ships, advertising voyages to foreign lands (Brazil, Indochina). The posters
confirm the position of the bistro within the space of the harbor, but they also
function as corollaries of that other, exterior world. The second object is a
single white flower in a vase sitting on the bar. Sarah sniffs at if briefly and
then dismisses it with a gesture of scorn—what is the significance that her
gestures give and then take away? The connotation of the posters and the
enigma of the flower are placed in conjunction with the figure of Sarah and
perhaps in opposition to the enclosed male group at the card table.
The alternating series of exterior/interior sequences begins to shift through
the entrance of a young woman, Patience (Solange Rugiens), who is connected
(through the editing and through her momentary placement outside) to that
other world of the harbor. Positioned across the bar from Sarah, with the white

318
flower between them, Patience speaks of waiting for her sailor lover to return. FIEVRE AND LA FEMME
Her gaze off, past Sarah, is a look of desire without an object—or, rather, a DE NULLE PART
look of desire awaiting its object to materialize, to be fulfilled. Through its
repeated privileged position in the CUs of Patience, the flower becomes a
metonymic extension of her condition and acquires its first definite connota¬
tion, which, read backwards, places Sarah clearly in the same paradigm as her
opposite. She who desires and she who denies desire (as well as possession) face
one another across the flower that conjoins them.
Patience’s appearance produces two further changes in the series of exterior/
interior alternations. Two tracking shots of the harbor (previously described
in stationary shots—like the posters) yield to a third shot of a ship moving
over the water. The last shot arouses the expectation of an arrival; and, coming
as it does after a CU of Patience and her intertitle on waiting, it raises ques¬
tions about return, restoration, and fulfillment of her desire. The following
shots—a CU of Sarah, an intertitle cynically remarking on her own past love,
and a subjective insert—form an exact parallel with Patience’s, but with an
important difference. Though her gestures and the intertitle would seem to
deny it, Sarah’s past desire erupts, unexpectedly materializing in an image of
herself and a sailor lover—a look, a touch, and an abundance of flowers. The
exterior world of the harbor and this memory of past desire are linked in a
simple equation or displacement. As the subject of desire shifts from Patience
to Sarah, the shot of the ship, read backwards, raises a new possibility: is it
perhaps Sarah’s denial that will be answered with the return of the once de¬
sired? In the paradigmatic relations between a memory, a ship’s movement in
the harbor, two women’s looks, and a flower, the subject of desire—and its
object, somewhere in the harbor or beyond—has become active in the bistro
world.27
From here on, the exterior and interior worlds begin to converge. After a
brief sequence of docking and arrival, the sailors enter the bistro, soon fol¬
lowed by a group of prostitutes. In HALSs, the sailors and prostitutes take
over the foreground area and begin to interact, while beyond them the bistro
regulars continue their ritual—except for Patience, who has left, and Sarah,
who has gone to fetch wine from the cellar. The separateness of these two
worlds, which has pervaded the film from the start, is now inscribed in the
distinction between foreground and background groups, setting up a tension
within the room.
The development of that tension into conflict is articulated in several dif¬
ferent ways. One simply extends the foreground/background distinctions to an
extreme (perhaps as an expedient answer to the question of how to film such
a large number of actors, on a single set, within such a short shooting sched¬
ule). As Georges Sadoul first noted,28 the film employs the HALS as a means
of allowing two or more simultaneous actions in different planes to unfold
independently, whether in conjunction or in juxtaposition. The tension reaches
its climax in the sequence where four separate actions are going on simulta¬
neously in the depth of the frame: the sailors and prostitutes dancing, the
cardplayer’s drunken desire for the Oriental, Sarah and Militis’s awakening
love (in their movement from the foregound table to the dance floor), and the
clerk’s entreaties to the pipe woman and then his betrayal of the lovers to
Topinelli. The gradual accumulation of spatial continuity and character rela-

319
159- (left) Militis (Van Daele)
sitting at a table

160. (right) The Oriental

woman (Elena Sagrary) and
the flower at the end of Fievre
(1921)
tions reaches a visual density here that parallels the dramatic tension. Each
breaks when the fight erupts into two major conflicts—Militis versus Topinelli
and then Sarah and the prostitutes versus the Oriental (the latter fight was
reduced in the final print by the censors)—each of which is resolved in sepa¬
rate, but intercut, areas of the bistro.
A second articulation of this conflict appears in a further subjective erup¬
tion. After the former lovers recognize one another, Sarah moves away until
the sailors and prostitutes begin to dance; then she returns to Militis, who has
remained seated alone at the foreground table (though the Oriental is visible
below the table to the left). To her accusation, “We loved one another, I
waited for you,’’ he seems to make no response; but then, bracketed by a
MCU and punctuated by fades, comes a subjective insert that parallels Sarah’s.
Now it is Militis’s past desire which erupts—in the same flower-laden space,
he reaches out and embraces her. As he tells her of his fever in the Orient, a
series of flashbacks narrate his illness (and loss of desire), his recovery attended
by the Oriental, and his subsequent marriage to her, a marriage of sacrifice
and repayment. The return of his past desire (for Sarah) is balanced, even
outweighed, by the memory of its loss and a subsequent indebtedness (to the
Oriental). This conflict is incorporated into the diegesis of the bistro as the
sequence cuts steadily away from a MCU to a HALS of Militis positioned
between the Oriental and Sarah. Despite his proximity to the Oriental, he
decides against her, leaving the table to dance with Sarah. In the bistro mi¬
lieu—with both lovers married to others—how can this reawakened desire be
fulfilled?
The final articulation is primarily rhetorical and involves the Oriental in
relation to Sarah and the flower on the bar. The Oriental enters the film doubly
marked. On the one hand, her appearance, briefly noticed when the sailors
take over the bistro’s foreground table, coincides with Patience’s departure.
Her displacement of Patience, the film’s initial subject of desire, is thus pre-

320
figured from the start. On the other hand, she is introduced as the last of the FIEVRE AND LA FEMME
booty, a standard racial stereotype. Although identified as Militis’s wife, she DE NULLE PART
is an object of possession, and her placement echoes Sarah’s initial introduc¬
tion. She, too, is in stasis, neither desiring nor desired, and seeming to deny
possession. Her relation to Sarah, as rival and double, can also be read in the
figure of the French woman’s reawakening desire. When Sarah positioned her¬
self unknowingly behind Militis, she had dressed herself in a robe and parasol
from among the sailor’s exotic possessions. The shock of recognizing Militis
makes her drop that guise and back away to position herself at the bar in a
new replication of the image of Patience beside the flower. This transformation
of one figure into another—emphasized by the repeated tight placement of
Sarah next to the flower and close to the background voyage posters—throws
her poetic status into relief and makes it seem more real.
Although introduced as the last in a series of objects, the Oriental woman,
in the next sequence, is suddenly privileged with subjectivity; and her look
now reorders the space of the bistro. In a new series of alternations, the bistro
regulars become pitiable and insignificant objects under her gaze. But at the
end of the series comes an iris-masked image of the flower on the bar, and her
face brightens. The flower, which has been linked metonymically to Patience
and Sarah (as subjects of desire), now itself becomes the object of desire (for
the Oriental). Thus in the flower is a circle of desire, the recurrence of subject
and object, doubly inscribed. A double trajectory of desire—the one meta¬
phorically parallel to the other—has erupted into the world of the bistro and
threatens to subvert or escape it. Although the sequence ends with a rhetorical
question, “What is this flower?’’ the intertitle opening the next sequence
augurs an answer: “Drunkenness.’’ The fever of desire—is it really so different
from the fever of drunkenness?
In the final sequence of Fievre, that other drunkenness emerges from several
points within the room as a counterthreat. Steadily, through intercutting
and placement within the frame, the bistro regulars encroach upon the Ori¬
ental’s movement toward the flower as well as upon the lovers’ embrace and
plan to escape. Here, admittedly, the film becomes awkward. In order to
balance these parallel lines of action or the relationship between a diegetic and
metaphoric space/time,29 the Oriental’s progress has to be delayed. As a con¬
sequence, she is reduced to crawling so slowly across the floor that the meta¬
phorical function of her movement is almost compromised. Eventually, in an
ironic juxtaposition, Militis leaves Sarah to protect the Oriental from the drun¬
ken advances of a cardplayer, and Topinelli steps in to confront him—masking
his jealousy of Sarah with an accusation of Militis’s brutality toward women.
After the fight that ensues, Sarah is left kneeling over the dead Militis while,
behind her, the dazed Oriental finally reaches the flower at the bar.
In the final shots, the parallel trajectories of the two women converge in a
double negation. As Sarah gazes down on Militis, so does the Oriental gaze
down at the flower in her hands. Two looks are placed in conjunction—a look
of rediscovered loss and a look of discovery (of what?). The Oriental and flower
now assume a foregrounded position as the police lead Sarah off—her head
down, her figure framed in a background window. The more primary, narra¬
tive trajectory of desire fades away to leave the secondary, the metaphorical.
The intertitle, “Nothing but an artificial flower,’’ closes off the signification

321
161. (left) Began’s poster for
La Femme de nulle part (1922)

162. (right) Eve Francis on

the road

of the flower as the Oriental lowers it in disillusionment (her position by the

bar repeats, in reverse, the earlier positions of Patience and Sarah). Although
the narrative seems to argue that desire is negated by the milieu, this final
figure suggests something more. Not only does the flower function as a false
or deceptive object, but metonymically it attaches that falseness to the desiring
subject as well. As a final statement of the discourse, the figure of the Oriental
and flower thus produces an ironic critique. Working and reworking the image
of the flower through the looks and positions of three women, Fievre has
transformed the eruption of desire into loss, into absence, and placed desire
itself in question. The film’s strategy is complete—to diegeticize and critique
the circle of desire.

After Fievre gained some critical notoriety in France, if not much financial
remuneration, Delluc determined to get even closer to real life by shooting
his next film on location. Le Chemin d’Ernoa (1921) gave him the opportunity
to work in a landscape he loved and considered ideal for filming, the border
country of the Lower Pyrenees, where Jacques de Baroncelli had filmed Ra-
muntcho (1919). The scenario is a bit complicated.30 The main plot involves
Etchegor (Durec) and his relations with an American couple in Ernoa: he
reluctantly escorts the husband (who is wanted for a bank robbery) across the
border and later has to watch the wife (Eve Francis) cross over as well, after
she has refused to stay behind with him. In conjunction with this intrigue,
Etchegor also protects two Spanish refugees (a sister and brother) who have

322
worked for the Americans and who are unjustly implicated in the robbery. FIEVRE AND LA FEMME
Here Delluc returned to the original plans he had conceived for La Fete espa- DE NULLE PART
gnole—to deemphasize the complicated narrative and give prominence to de¬
scribing and celebrating “the countryside, nature, by giving it the dominant
role.’’31 Although he himself considered the film a failure (perhaps because of
its miniscule budget and his inexperience at location shooting), certain se¬
quences attest to his skill (and that of his cameraman Gibory) in creating some
kind of accord or resonance between character and landscape.32 Especially no¬
table are the opening sequence of Etchegor’s walk through the village and the
ending diminuendo into separate long-shot tableaux: the wife walking alone
on the road, Etchegor standing alone beside his car, the refugees waiting at a
tiny train station, a horse cart (into which the wife has stepped) traveling away
from the camera along a river road, and Etchegor and the refugees walking
slowly back through the empty village street.
Delluc’s next-to-last film was much more successful in the way its narrative
structure deftly and consistently conjoined landscape and character, the doc¬
umentary and the subjective, the present and the past. But the aesthetic in¬
tegration came at a heavy cost. Previewed in the spring and again in the
summer of 1922, La Femme de nulle part had such a poor distribution during
the fall season that its commercial failure crippled Delluc financially.33
Although set in the plains above Genoa in northern Italy, La Femme de nulle
part was shot (by Gibory and Lucas again) in the region of Arles and the
Camargue, where several provincial realist films had been produced the year
before. The title is a homage to William S. Hart—L’Homme de nulle part (The
Silent Stranger, 1915).34 As in the American film, the main character comes
out of a barren landscape, encounters a human dilemma, tries to resolve it,
suffers, and returns whence she came. Delluc himself wrote of it:

A ravaged older woman, near the end of her life, makes a last pilgrimage to the house
that she left, to her misfortune, thirty years before; she discovers there a young woman
in the same situation that she had been in as well as the memory of her happiest
moments, and she does not regret having paid so harshly for such fleeting happiness.35

But that is only half the story. The older woman, “L’Inconnue” (Eve Francis),
arrives at the villa one morning just as the present man of the house (Roger
Karl) is leaving on an overnight business trip to Genoa. His young wife (Gine
Avril) meets her lover (Andre Daven) that evening and must decide by morn¬
ing whether or not to leave her husband and small child. Reveling in her
memories of past love in the gardens, the older woman persuades the younger
to escape as she once did. But at the last moment, the wife hesitates over her
child and stays to greet her husband’s return, while the older woman goes off
instead, saddened and alone.
In contrast to Fievre, La Femme de nulle part situates its characters, not so
much in a social milieu, but in a natural, unpeopled landscape (much like the
Swedish films and American westerns Delluc so admired). Besides investing
the diegesis with a kind of realism, the landscape articulates certain opposi¬
tions in the narrative which produce “a deep accord . . . between characters
and actors.’’ Particular images sum up this opposition quite clearly. When the
older woman approaches the villa, she comes as a lone black figure on a white
stone road that stretches away across flat, barren fields under a bleak sky. As

323
narrative AVANT-GARDE in the famous white wall shot in El Dorado, the bleakness and loneliness of
the landscape are projected onto the central character. In the harsh morning
light, the open grounds and large empty house produce similar conditions and
seem to threaten the young family she visits. The night sequences in the
gardens, however, suggest an escape from or possible transformation of those
conditions. The soft hazy light, the trees and small pavilion, the figures of
the lovers (both present and past)—all conspire to produce a fragile image of
an oasis or paradise. Yet the image is ever so slightly undermined by shots of
the older woman walking beside a stagnant pool or past huge plane trees as
the wind blows dry leaves along the ground. In the final sequences, the harsh
light of day returns, and the older woman departs into the same monotonous
landscape, unable—contra Chaplin—to transcend her despair. The last shot
(filmed from the same distance and angle) confirms the unchanged nature of
her psychological or mental condition.
La Femme du nulle part relies much more on this pattern of landscape jux¬
tapositions than on the multiple signification of privileged objects, as in Le
Silence and Fievre. Yet Delluc does not abandon the latter practice, as evidenced
in the use of objects associated with the child. After establishing shots of the
road and house, an interior shot of the gate introduces the first movement in
the film—a large inflated ball rolls past the camera and toward the gate, which
the child quickly follows. This movement is repeated a short time later and
brings the child to the gate just as the older woman arrives. At first, the ball
is merely a charming detail; but it also introduces that movement toward the
gate and beyond which will define the older woman’s past action as well as
the younger woman’s present desire. In fact, at the end the child will run to
the gate after her mother and bring her back to the house in a poignant echo
of the way she leads the older woman up the path to the house in the begin¬
ning. Just before leaving, the older woman faces the child again (separated
from the others, they are intercut several times), but now she is holding a
puppet given to her by her father. As an unobtrusive replacement for the ball,
the puppet is rhetorically suggestive, but ambiguous. Stationary, inanimate,
yet “humanized,” does it comment on the child (who has just saved her mother
and preserved the family), does it foreshadow a second child to come, or does
it suggest the young woman’s acceptance of her condition?
As in Delluc’s previous films, memory serves both as a psychological mo¬
tivation for the central character and as a major force structuring the narrative.
Since the older woman alone is privileged with memory (except for two shots
assigned to the young wife), we experience the major portion of the film as
determined by her presence, which is itself determined by her past.36 When
she first arrives at the villa and explores its rooms, brief images from her past
life well up—the house as it once was, her enigmatic meeting and going off
with a man. When, from the window of her second-floor bedroom, she sees
the young woman reading a letter stealthily plucked from the garden steps,
suddenly she remembers—a furtive man glimpsed earlier near the road and an
image of herself reading a similar letter of passion at that very table. That
evening she warns the young woman not to go away foolishly as she once did.
But in the garden at night, her memories of past happiness there overwhelm
her, climaxing in a shot of the two lovers that dissolves into one of herself
and her lover in the same position and place thirty years before. Delirious with

324
her rediscovered passion, in the morning she presses the young woman “to FIEVRE AND LA FEMME
seize the happiness that life offers. . . . What does sadness matter, if one has DE NULLE PART
experienced a moment of infinite joy? ...” When the young woman decides
to stay, the older woman’s passion ebbs and her images of the past cease
altogether.
In terms of its orchestration of simultaneous action in different spaces and
times, La Femme de nulle part also seems closer to La Fete espagnole than it does
to either Le Silence or Fievre. The family and the two outsider characters who
will act on the young wife are introduced succinctly and intercut smoothly.
Before the older woman has even reached the villa, the film has suggested the
gulf between husband and wife, not only through slight gestures, but by
cutting from the husband alone packing in his bedroom to the older woman
on the road as she notices the waiting lover. After the husband has left, the
two women are presented in a series of alternating sequences that begin to
establish their parallel stories. During the long night section of the film, the
intercutting becomes rather complex as the film integrates at least four differ¬
ent lines of action, both in conjunction and opposition: the young wife’s ren¬
dezvous in the garden and return to her room, the older woman’s wanderings
in the garden and return to her room, the memory of her own rendezvous
with her lover in the past, and the husband’s activities in the port of Genoa.
The Genoa sequences produce a fascinating counterpoint to the other three,
the more so because they do not appear in the published scenario. At the
moment the older woman goes to leave her room and the two lovers embrace
in the garden, the husband rows out (on business) to a freighter in the harbor
(reversing the connotation of the harbor in Fievre). After the older woman has
returned to the house and found the wife and child asleep, the husband is
shown walking alone down a steep alley and into a crowded cafe where a party
is going on. As the older woman debates whether to awaken the young woman,
the husband angrily rejects a woman who has approached him at the bar, and
he goes off alone down the alley. Immediately thereafter, the older woman is
shown still dreaming of her former love and deciding to help the young woman
flee. This counterpoint may at first seem morally conventional (the self-deny¬
ing man versus the indulgent woman), but the mise-en-scene of the shots
(natural decor, lighting, and framing) suggests something quite different. The
LS of the small boat in the open water before the huge dark freighter, the LS
of the narrow alley down which the husband walks between sharply etched
blocks of buildings, and especially the LALS of clothes drying high up in a
courtyard—all have overtones of emptiness and loneliness. Since these are being
projected onto the character of the husband, his emotional state is not unlike
that of the older woman at the beginning.
If these sequences draw attention to the husband in a way that is dramati¬
cally unsatisfied at the end—he returns home to find matters already de¬
cided—that is because the rhetorical function of their description is more
pertinent.37 In this, the Genoa sequences are similar to those with the Oriental
and flower in Fievre. By re-creating a human condition represented initially by
the older woman, they undermine or call into question the reality or validity
of the parallel garden sequences. Are these paradisical images (whether actual
or memory) no more than delusions or fantasies? Like Fievre, the film seems
to raise the specter of love and fulfilled desire, only to deny its possibility.

325
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE But here that denial is articulated quietly, simply, emphasizing the rhetorical
over the narrative, but integrating them together smoothly. After the young
woman turns back to her child, there is little in the mise-en-scene, gestures,
or dialogue to suggest any change in her relationship with her husband. Is she
really any more happy or secure than if she had gone away? The last shots
nearly repeat the beginning as the family stands reunited in front of the house
while the lover and the older woman depart simultaneously but separately.
The irony is almost cruel—instead of having the joy of seeing the two lovers
re-create her story, she must herself repeat her past escape into a landscape of
permanent exile, now more than ever fixed in her own loneliness and despair.

La Roue Perched on a chair in the Spartan surroundings of the Centre Universitaire

International in Paris, Jean Dreville grew more and more animated as he
recalled the 1922 premiere of Abel Gance’s La Roue. The entire film took
three days to be projected, three consecutive Thursday mornings in December.
Seven thousand people had been invited,' and the nearly 6,000 seats at the
Gaumont-Palace were jampacked. At the .end of the third day, the audience
burst into applause and rose from their seats in a wave. The applause went on
and on. No one wanted to leave even though the huge cinema was none too
comfortable—one could still catch the odor of horse droppings from the time
when it had been a circus. Finally, a man came on stage carrying a megaphone
and ordered the last reel to be projected again. The lights went down, and
the rapt audience relived Sisifs death and the peasant’s spring dance in the
mountain snowfields. Once more the applause broke out. That had never hap¬
pened before and never did again, said Dreville. “It was like a thunderclap!’’1
Dreville’s excitement, across nearly sixty years, is marvelous evidence of the
response that La Roue provoked in its time. No film since De Mille’s The
Cheat, not even L’Herbier’s El Dorado, had so stunned the French filmmakers,
critics, and cinephiles. Jean Cocteau supposedly even went so far as to mark
off “a cinema before and after La Roue."2 Such superlatives are not easy for us
to understand now—for several reasons. Nor can we accept them, I think,
without some qualifications. Whatever those qualifications, however, Gance’s
film still fascinates us, almost as much as it did that Paris audience sixty years
ago. But our fascination is held now by the film’s contradictions, by the
conflicting demands of representation and expression that push the text toward
incoherence, and by the structural designs that shape it, even roughly, into
coherence.
In Emile Vuillermoz’s words, “La Roue begins in the tragic melancholy of
the coal dust and smoke and [in the end] attains the peace and purity of eternal
snows.’’3 Between these two sites and conditions, however, sprawls a lamen¬
tably melodramatic “shaggy dog’’ story. Sisif (Severin-Mars) is a top locomo¬
tive engineer headquartered in Nice; he is widowed, with a young son, Elie
(Gabriel de Gravone), and “daughter,’’ Norma (Ivy Close), an orphaned girl
he found in a train wreck. The children grow up unaware of their real relation,
and Sisif falls in love with his grown “daughter.’’ To rid himself of temptation
and guilt (once he tries to commit suicide), he finally agrees to let one of the
rich railway administrators, Hersan (Pierre Magnier), marry Norma, even though
she dislikes him. On the way to the wedding, Sisif becomes obsessed and tries

326
to kill himself and Norma by wrecking the train; but his fireman, Machefer LA ROUE
(George Teroff), averts the accident. Elie (now a violin-maker) discovers the
truth about Norma and accuses his father of destroying his own love for her.
Shortly after, Sisif is nearly blinded in a locomotive steam-valve accident, and
he tries to kill himself again by wrecking his locomotive. He survives, how¬
ever, and is reduced to driving the funicular railway on Mont Blanc. Elie joins
him and one day sees Norma at a nearby resort (where one of his violins is
being used in a concert). His passion rekindled, Elie sends her a love letter,
which Hersan discovers. He challenges Elie, and the two men fight in the
mountains: Hersan is shot, and Elie falls to his death just as Norma runs up
to the rocky point from which he is suspended. Alone now in his mountain
cabin, Sisif goes completely blind, and Norma moves in with him, although
she keeps her presence secret from him for a while. Peace finally comes to
them, and one spring evening the local people invite Norma to join their
annual farandole for the festival of Saint Jean. Sitting in the window, Sisif
dies quietly, listening to the dancers circling in the snow.
One of our difficulties with La Roue is that, like Gance’s Napoleon (at least
until recently), it has come down to us in shortened, mutilated versions. At
its premiere and general release (in February, 1923), the film was thirty-two
reels long, or 10,500 to 11,000 meters, and ran for almost nine hours.4 It
was divided into a prologue and three parts: “Un Crepuscule ecarlate,” “La
Rose du Rail,’’ “La Mort du Norma Compound,’’ and “La Tragedie de Sisif.’’5
Although this complete print no longer exists, the Soviet filmmakers (Eisen-
stein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Ekk), according to Kevin Brownlow, told Gance
that they had learned their craft by studying it at the Moscow Academy.6
Apparently, Charles Pathe also asked Gance to edit a condensed version of the
film, in fourteen reels or 4,200 meters, which premiered at the Colisee cinema
in February, 1924, and then was distributed elsewhere.7 Four years later,
Pathe-Consortium re-released this condensed version or perhaps even a third
version, following the European triumph of Napoleon.8 These shorter versions,
as well as the 17.5mm copy produced by Pathe-Baby, seem to explain why
there are very different prints preserved in the Cinematheque franchise (Georges
Sadoul says their print was acquired in 1937), the Museum of Modern Art in
New York (their print is drawn from the National Film Archive print), the
George Eastman House, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, and Em
Gee Film Library.9
Another difficulty for us is that a significant personal context, well-known
at the time, has long since been forgotten. For La Roue was completed against
great odds, in the face of personal tragedy. While preparing the film, Gance
learned that his young wife, Ida Danis, after surviving the influenza epidemic
in Paris that followed the war, had contracted tuberculosis. So that she could
have the advantage of the Mediterranean climate, Gance changed his film’s
setting from Paris to Nice and then rewrote the scenario again to move his
crew to the French Alps, when doctors disclosed that her only chance of re¬
covery was in the rarefied mountain air. There was no hope, however, and she
died the very day Gance finished shooting the film, 9 April 1921. During the
shooting, Severin-Mars, his chief actor and close friend, also became seriously
ill, though he kept working. He, too, died shortly after the film was edited.
Probably because of these personal losses, the film seems literally obsessed with

327
narrative AVANT-GARDE death. During this period, Gance has confessed, two other close friends sus¬
tained him—Blaise Cendrars, who again worked as an assistant director, and
Arthur Honegger, who arranged the film’s musical score.10 Whether it was
the suffering Gance endured or the internal problems wracking Pathe-Consor-
tium that kept the film from being released for over a year is still not clear.
But for French audiences in 1922-1923, La Roues ending was taken as an
indirect tribute to Gance’s young wife (through Norma’s assimilation into the
dance in the snow) and as a literal record of Severin-Mars’s dying.
Despite La Roues immediate acceptance, in France, as a benchmark in the
history of the cinema, nearly everyone found some fault with the sprawling
epic. Leon Moussinac drew up a list of “all that ... is insupportable or even
odious: the confusion of symbols, the exaggeration of effects, the forced excess
of the images, the literary intertitles which did not work in the context of the
visual eruptions, the extreme bad taste. . . .”n Most film reviewers, such as
Rene Clair and Vuillermoz, reduced these, reproaches to 1) an overly melo¬
dramatic scenario with “long, slow passages,” a “superficial psychology,” and
“ridiculous puppet figures”; and 2) “chapter” quotations drawn from a bewil¬
dering variety of literary texts: Sophocles, Omar Khayyam, Pascal, Chamfort,
Shelley, Byron, Baudelaire, Hugo, Kipling, Zola, D’Annunzio, Claudel, Pierre
Hamp, Cendrars, and Canudo.12 Commercial considerations—the need to make
a popular film—were responsible for the first, they thought; the second was
merely a misguided attempt at high seriousness. Yet in an interview with Jean
Mitry, in 1924, Gance defended himself and the film on both counts—they
were personal choices.13 Whatever the case, separating the melodramatic story
from spectacular climaxes and extraordinary lyrical moments—as was done at
the time and is usually done still in film histories and auteur studies—does
little more than simplify La Roue’s contradictions. The matter is a bit more
complex if one looks at the textual operation of the film from a number of
different perspectives.

To begin with, La Roue is predicated on not one but several competing

conceptions of film then emerging in France. In part, it depends on a half-
sketched realist film aesthetic developed, just after the war, by Andre Antoine,
Louis Delluc, and others. Perhaps the closest Gance comes to producing this
kind of realism is in the early segments of the film, shot by his favorite
cameraman, L. H. Burel, in the Gare Saint Roch railyards near Nice.14 Sisifs
house, for instance, is squeezed into a tiny, fenced-in plot between a main rail
line and several switching tracks, so that locomotives are either constantly
steaming past (and rustling the window curtains) or being worked on in the
background. The figures of Sisif, Norma, Elie, and others seem small and
vulnerable, especially in long shots, in a barren habitat more suited to the
huge mechanical creatures and their cargoes. Norma and Elie’s play takes them
over the coal piles, around the tenders, and into the repair pits—where once,
to Elie’s horror, Norma ducks down at the last minute as a locomotive passes
over her. As he ponders what to do with his adopted daughter, Sisif wanders
off more and more frequently alone, his sadness projected into the empty
spaces of the yards and the long lines of the rails.
Pushed to an extreme, certain of these moments seem to realize in practice
a very different aesthetic, the embryonic aesthetic of a pure cinema, first ar-

328
 163- (left) Sisifs house and
garden in the railyards of La
Roue (1922-1923)

164. (right) The railway

ticulated in France by Leopold Survage, Marcel Gromaire, and others.15 In workers’bistro
brief, this aesthetic privileged the film medium’s graphic and rhythmic rela-
fe
tions and the formal strategies that might structure those relations. Sometimes
in La Roue, the machines of the railyards—the locomotives, their dials and
levers, their pistons and wheels and blasts of steam, the control shack instru¬
ments, the rail switches and signals—almost seemed animated with a life of
their own. Orchestrated across a montage of shots, the rhythm of these me¬
chanical elements produced what Fernand Leger (in a famous essay based on the
first part of the film) called “plastic compositions’’ more or less independent
of the diegesis.16 In other words, they were ruptures of nonrepresentational
patterning in the film’s more conventional representational discourse. “For the
first time on the screen,’’ wrote Moussinac,

we have seen an artist, with original and essentially cinematographic means, mold a
new material whose photogenic qualities are clearly apparent: the mechanical world of
iron and steam, of rails and smoke, of wheels and manometers, of connecting rods
and regulators, of signals and switches, order and accuracy, desire and love.17

To cinephiles, such as Leger, Riccioto Canudo, Jean Tedesco, Germaine Du-

lac, Rene Clair, and others, these were the most interesting passages of the
film. And they were singled out for projection in excerpt form—as “La Chan¬
son du Rail’’ and “La Danse des Roues’’—at the 1923 Salon d’Automne ex¬
hibition and at a special C.A.S.A. public screening in April, 1924.18 As I
noted earlier, this selection of excerpts from La Roue, along with Jean Epstein’s
Photogenies, helped stimulate the avant-garde production of short non-narrative
films—e.g., Leger’s Ballet mecanique (1924), Clair’s Entr’acte (1924), Autant-
Lara’s Fait-Divers (1924), and Chomette’s Jeaux de reflets et de la vitesse (1923).
Besides this concern for documenting real spaces and for constructing “plas¬
tic compositions,’’ the film also drew on Pierre Hamp’s Le Rail (the proletarian
novel on which Gance based part of his scenario) to produce a realism that
depended on the social ambiance of the railway workers’ world.19 Probably the

329
165. (left to right) Norma
(Ivy Close) framed in the
doorway [between Elie and
Hersan] in La Roue (1922-
1923); Hersan framed by
imaginary images of wealth; best example of this proletarian milieu is the engineers’ cafe, “L’Horloge des
Norma framed in the mirror gueules noirs” (The Coal Miners’ Clock). Their world is summed up in the
after shutting the door on first shot of the cafe interior—a long dolly shot that begins on Sisif sleeping
Hersan
in a corner and draws back along the length of the bar to a number of tables
where the men, all of them begrimed with dirt and coal dust, are drinking
and playing cards. The engineers and stokers who frequent the cafe make an
odd mixture of types and caricatures, quite similar to those in Eisenstein’s
early films. There is a quiet, mousey runt, in a rumpled suit and crushed hat
(with a scraggly beard, one blind eye, and tiny spectacles), who keeps a record
of the men’s drinking habits for the railway company. Opposite him is the
enormous, chubby-cheeked bartender who crawls out of a trapdoor in the floor
(knocking over a man sleeping on a chair) with a half-dozen wine bottles in
his huge arms. His equal is the jolly giant of an engineer who swills mugs of
beer while prancing nimbly around the cafe tables. There is a long-faced,
balding old man who can hardly see anymore, but who reads the men’s palms.
Then there is the brutish, smooth-faced fellow who cheats at cards and who
ridicules Sisif, now sitting dazedly in the corner, as a barroom Christ (because
of the light from a window glowing behind his head). Finally, there is Ma-
chefer, Sisifs wiry little stoker, who, in between pulls on his wine bottle,
keeps reading at La Vierge du trottoir. To make certain that this part of the
film was as authentic as possible, despite this typecasting, Gance had it pro¬
jected, in rough cut, to special audiences of the Federation des cheminots and
then made several revisions, according to their reactions.20
Even more prominent than this social realism, however, is a concern.for the
subjective or psychological, a commitment to the aesthetic that sought to
represent and celebrate the inner life of characters. Perhaps unexpectedly, this
offers one of the best measures of La Roue’s paradoxical nature. Frankly, some¬
times Gance’s handling of the subjective is nothing short of pedestrian. Elie,
for instance, envisions an imaginary world for himself and Norma that looks
strangely like a prewar cliche: a medieval cottage where he prospers making

330
musical instruments and a nearby garden where she walks among doves and la roue
roses. Much later, at a window in the mountain cabin, Norma appears to him
as a superimposition from which he recoils in horror. Unfortunately, we accept
her image, not as an object of desire or temptation, but as an image of suf¬
fering; and his gesture appalls. A very different superimposition of Norma
appears earlier, after she has married Hersan. To compensate for her loss, Sisif
names his locomotive after her (tacking up her nameplate in the cab), and
Norma’s smiling face races, unblemished, in the smoke streaming from its
stack.
Yet, at other times, the subjective is articulated, as Gance himself believed,
with freshness and psychological nuance.21 The sequence where Norma and
Elie play in the railyards, for instance, ends with him pulling her about on a
coal shovel. The joy she can find in this oppressive life is conveyed in several
dollying shots of her, crouched on the moving shovel, waving and laughing
as if she were speeding along on a snowsled. Later her dilemma of choosing
between Elie and Hersan is intensified by positioning her (strongly backlit) in
a doorframe. She looks off to the left foreground, and there is a cut to Elie
munching on bread and water as he toils over a violin. As she turns to look
back through the door, there is a cut to Hersan seen from behind—and images
of jewelry, cars, clothes, money, and rich foods fade in around him in a
dazzling halo. She turns again and leans back, closing the door; and the quiet
despair in her face is reflected in the fragment of a broken mirror (frame left).
In the mountain cabin, Norma’s near-starvation is even more simply conveyed
in the alternation of just two shots—a close-up of her gaunt, bedraggled face
and another close-up of her hands reaching hesitantly for a crust of bread. In
contrast, Sisif s memory of Elie’s death (related to Machefer, who has come to
visit him) still evidences his trauma—its sequence of brief shots is dizzyingly
interrupted by swish pans. Finally, the injury to his eyes prompts a tour-de-
force sequence of out-of-focus shots, when Sisif returns to the cabin after hav¬
ing his eyes checked a last time in the resort village. A slow montage of close-
ups and extreme close-ups of his face and eyes, intercut with blurred point-
of-view shots of table objects, the pipe in his hand, a wall clock, his face in a
mirror, and the distant mountains through a window, ends in a fade to white
as his eyesight fails utterly. This sequence of simple objects, fading into noth¬
ingness, contrasts poignantly with the earlier sequences of railyard machines
and instruments over which Sisif once exercised control.
From this series of perspectives, La Roue may indeed seem an incoherent
text, in which the demands of various aesthetics clash uneasily. Incoherence,
of course, need not be condemned per se. Overriding the conventional notion
of coherence here may be a principle of play for its own sake, a form of playing
that involves a melange of aesthetic modes. That would not be unusual given
the varying degrees of success L’Herbier had already had with a mixture of
styles in El Dorado and Don Juan et Faust. But it is more likely, I think, that
there are structural designs that set coordinates for such play, that shape it
into a more or less coherent network of narrative and rhetorical relations.
Let me point the way toward sensing some coherence by focusing on the
innovations for which La Roue has best become known—the new form of
continuity editing which Gance created through a rhythmic montage of rapid
cutting and accelerating montage. Actually this was less a breakthrough than

331
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

166. The first shot of the

locomotive wheel in La Roue

the culmination of one line of technical experimentation he had begun in

J’Accuse and which some of his colleagues were also exploring—e.g., Marcel
L’Herbier in El Dorado.22 Gance has said often enough that these forms of
montage were based on an analogy with music. As late as 1972, he was telling
Armand Panigel

. . . that the images had syncopations, accelerating movements, pauses, simultanei¬

ties, all of which produced, ultimately ... [a form of} musical writing. ... In La
Roue, I constructed my montage without any aids, without an editing machine . . .
and I cut absolutely as if one image was a violin, another was a flute, a third an oboe,
that’s to say, everything was organized in my head according to this concept of the
musicality of light.23

However essential this analogy may have been in the actual process of editing
the film as well as to the developing concept of pure cinema, it is less than
helpful in getting at the narrative significance of Gance’s innovations. For, in
the sequences where it appears, the technique of rapid cutting seems to func¬
tion in more ways than one and sometimes in several ways simultaneously.
Rather than expressing an individual character’s psychological state (as most
critics have assumed), it tends to integrate or synthesize an individual’s per¬
ceptions and feelings into a larger design.24
For Ricciotto Canudo, the film's larger design represented “the collective
human body as well as the powerful mechanical forces of which man remains
both creator and victim. . . ,’’25 No better words could introduce the extraor¬
dinary opening sequence of La Roue, which synthesizes machines, a seething
mass of people, and two central characters into a titleless visual paroxysm.
The sequence begins in medias res, with a speeding locomotive. A masked
forward-tracking shot of a single rail opens up to include a set of rails slashing
through several cross-points, then a tracking shot beside the locomotive dis¬
solves nearer and nearer to a close-up of the huge wheels and drive rods in
motion. The smooth, consistently paced movement of this short sequence

332
 167. (top left) Rescuers in the
opening train wreck in La
Roue; (top right) survivors;
(bottom left) the dead woman
suddenly breaks with the brief long shot of an unexpected train wreck. The hanging from the window;
next minute or two literally explodes with images (apparently tinted red in (bottom right) Sisif (Severin-
Mars) trying to move the
the original print)26—cars tilted in the air, people caught in the wreckage or
locomotive wheel blocking
struggling along the tracks or over an embankment, billowing smoke, lights the switch
flashing across the control shack, figures in silhouette before a flaming car, a
woman hanging lifeless from a window, another collapsing beside a squalling
baby, a hand grasping out of twisted metal, locomotive wheels lying about, a
close-up of a rose lying against a rock, and a begrimed, staring Sisif holding
a little girl (Norma). All of these shots are intercut so rapidly and jarringly
that it is difficult to take them in. The simultaneous presentation of so many
disparate images is almost kinesthetic, disorienting enough that one seems to
be undergoing the experience oneself.27
Suddenly, a second catastrophe threatens. One signal has not changed, and
another train is fast approaching. Sisif moves Norma to safety and then rushes
over to try to lift a set of wheels blocking the main switch. The sequence

333
168. (top left) Norma in the
train compartment; (top
right) Sisif in the locomotive
cab; (bottom left) a tracking
shot of the rails; (bottom
alternates shots of him straining at the wheel, the train coming on (several
right) a tracking shot of the
shots looking ahead over its cab), the engineer hanging out his side window,
locomotive smokestack;
and a wrecked car with people looking up anxiously—accelerating to shots of
a half-second or less in length. Just in time (in a quick series of shots), the
switch mechanism smoothly changes the signal, and the engineer reacts by
slowing and stopping his train. The final shot is of the rock and the rose,
which irises out and in to reveal Norma (“La Rose du Rail’’) huddled on the
ground. Here the story of Sisif s heroism and discovery of Norma (whom he
soon adopts) is first set against and then integrated into a tragic collective
experience. The subjective merges with the objective, to use Jean Epstein’s
terms, in a landscape dance or, more precisely, a symphony of machine move¬
ment.28
In contrast to the deliberately ragged, discordant rhythm of this opening
accident, the sequence of Sisifs attempt to wreck his own locomotive (as it

334
 (cont.) (top left) A tracking
shot of the locomotive wheels;
(top right) a tracking shot of
a single rail; (bottom left) the
locomotive speedometer;
carries Norma to her wedding) moves smoothly, unswervingly, to a climax of
(bottom right) a dolly shot
suspense. It comes close to embodying the Purist concept, then held by Cen-
of the landscape ahead of the
drars and Leger, of an aesthetic order animated by the “geometric spirit.’’29 locomotive cab
The sequence begins by orchestrating four basic shots (in various combina¬
tions)—the train wheels revolving, Sisif on the left side of the cab, Machefer
on the right, and Norma seated in her first-class compartment. Soon after Sisif
opens the throttle, and Machefer takes a swig of wine, a new shot is intro¬
duced—a close-up of the speedometer needle rising. Then another shot joins
the alternation—a forward-tracking shot of a single rail, masked on each side
into a vertical strip. When the needle hits 120 (kilometers per hour) and
Norma begins to glance out her window, three more shots break in—a shot
past the cab to the landscape into which the locomotive is racing, a tracking
shot of the rails from the side as they blur by, and a shot of smoke billowing
from the stack. At this point, a regular series of shots is repeated five times,

335
narrative AVANT-GARDE and each time the shot lengths become shorter and shorter—from eighteen to
nine to six to four frames each. This accelerating montage culminates in a
longer shot of the wheels jumping and blurring (because of the speed) until,
suddenly, Machefer discovers the open throttle and slows the train down. This
sequence may work as a projection of Sisif s desire as well as a mesmerizing
montage of simultaneous objects and actions. But its overall effect is to sub¬
merge both Sisifs and Norma’s subjective states in the machine “dance of
death’’ that Sisif has set in motion.
Sisifs final suicide attempt is constructed according to a similar form of
accelerating montage. Only this time, he is alone in his locomotive, Norma
Compound, as they hurtle through the station and onto the rail siding. Be¬
cause of its limited focus, the cutting is simpler, more concentrated, more
orderly in its rhythm, and perhaps less interesting. The shot lengths decrease
at regular intervals by units of four frames—“I could make the images,” Gance
boasted, “alternate like verses.”30 At the climax, the alternation is between
close-ups of Sisif s staring face and close-ups of the driving wheels (“8-4, 8-4,
8-4, 4-2, 4-2 . . .”). Man and machine, become one in a headlong rush of
agony. The locomotive smashes into an embankment, but Sisif survives, bathed
suddenly in a strong sidelighting of sunshine. He crawls to the front of his
locomotive to find it deep in a bed of flowers. Even more clearly than the
others, this sequence organizes itself around Sisifs desire. But it, too, places
the subjective within a larger context—a miraculous intervention that ends in
a rather simplistic symbolic tableau.
The last major sequence of accelerated montage, “La Mort d’Elie,” also
differs from the others. This, too, is a moment of suspense, as were the two
suicide attempts, but it lacks any machine images and at first seems conven¬
tionally tied to a single character’s subjective state. The sequence begins with
Elie clinging to a shrub on the side of a cliff, after his duel with Hersan, and
Norma trying desperately to reach him. The intercutting between them fo¬
cuses on Elie’s face and hand (in a gray oval iris) and on Norma (in a black
circular iris) running ahead of Sisif (who is left behind). The regular alterna¬
tion of close-ups of Elie and Norma quickens (from two seconds to a half-
second each), and then the rhythm slackens ever so slightly in a final oval-
masked long shot of the cliff above the village and valley (fifteen frames) and
a circular-masked close-up of Elie (twelve frames). As he opens his mouth to
scream, the film seems to erupt in a rush of images. The shot alternates with
a myriad of midshots and close-ups of Norma in the past—in her old scrub¬
bing clothes, in her medieval costume, in tights, in a little girl’s dress, in her
wedding gown and veil, or simply with her face backlit (and the rhythm
quickens from four or five frames to two or three frames per shot). At the end
of this alternation, there is another brief pause as the past shots of Norma turn
into an extreme close-up of her eyes. Then the climax comes in a single-frame
montage—the shot of Elie alternating with shots of Norma in her medieval
headdress, of her face backlit, and of just her eyes. A three-frame shot of Elie
screaming (in a gray oval iris again) jars that rhythm slightly just before he
falls (in long shot). As she reaches the cliff edge, Norma’s face is now framed
(in close-ups) in a blurred circular mask that changes from gray to white. The
sheer speed and density of this accelerating montage clearly functions as a
representation of Elie’s last moments of consciousness, as he remembers images

336
of Norma from various periods of her life. Yet the very rapidity of the cutting la roue
(making the two characters synonymous), the pause on her eyes, and the shift¬
ing association of the several masking devices seem to include her changing
emotional state as well. Through this interchange of shots, Elie’s love and
pain seem to coalesce magically in Norma. Their subjective states become so
intermeshed that they literally seem wedded in an expanded instant just before
the moment of his death. Face to face with this image of a woman, which
almost seems to break free of the diegesis in a paroxysm of fragmentation,
Eiie’s cry seems to ring with Gance’s own personal cry of suffering and loss.

No matter how extraordinary one considers these epiphanies of simultane¬

ity, in which opposites are dissolved and/or transformed, they provide but one
of several patterns shaping La Roue into coherence. The classical myths of
Oedipus and Ixion, for instance, offer another—the figure of a hero who
undergoes a long period of suffering for a forbidden desire. Sisif is just such a
figure, and his forbidden desire constitutes the melodramatic crux of the film.
For what drives La Roues narrative is Sisifs “incestuous” passion for Norma
and his desperate attempts to repress that passion. The clearest sign of this
comes in the confession he blurts out one night to Hersan. In the last of
several explanatory flashbacks, Sisif looks up from his workbench to see Norma
rocking back and forth on the flower-garlanded swing in the front yard. In
the alternation between the two, Sisifs POV shots focus on her skirt and legs,
and, in despair, he closes the window and then draws the curtain across it.
The sequence ends with a close-up of him holding onto the curtain as if it
were her skirt and sobbing into it. Yet, if Sisif s passion seems unnatural, his
repression is even more so, for it rests on the perpetuation of a falsely consti¬
tuted family (after the train wreck, instead of returning Norma to relatives,
he destroyed a letter identifying her and her dead mother and then made her
his own). The more he asserts the “law of the father” and tries to maintain
Norma’s false identity, at the expense of any other possibility (to the point of
marrying her off to Flersan instead of his own son), the more he suffers. And
his suffering engenders psychological conflicts that infect the other characters.
As a consequence, in order to preserve the relation of father to “daughter”
and, by extension, the Oedipal bonds within the family, the repression he
imposes on himself perversely almost destroys them.
For all its peculiar contradictions, the relationship between Sisif and Norma
does come to a resolution. On the one hand, it forms the paradigm of a
narrative transformation that joins and then separates a man and a woman, in
a doubled fictional structure whose second part replicates the first through
inversion and displacement. By means of substitutions, this even includes the
repetition of specific narrative actions—e.g., Sisif undertakes a funeral march
after the destruction of Norma Compound and then another after the death of
Elie; he attempts to separate Elie and Norma when she listens to the music of
his violin, and later Hersan does likewise. On the other hand, even more
intriguingly, especially in such a massive film, their relationship is bound up
with a system of rhetorical figuring that marks a major advance over Gance’s
previous work—e.g., Mater Dolorosa and ]’Accuse. Although remarked on at
the time, this rhetorical figuring has largely been forgotten, perhaps because
the existing prints are in such mutilated condition.

337
169- (left) Sisif framed in the
cabin window at the end of
La Roue (1922-1923)

170. (right) One of the

groups of peasant dancers At least two major interrelated patterns of rhetorical figuring govern the
circling in the snowfields
shape of La Roue, and both are initially articulated in the opening sequences.
In a bold stroke of vision, they wed the Modernist to the sentimental or
melodramatic. Here, again, the paradoxical nature of the film becomes clear.
The first pattern can be summed up in one of the intertitles—"La Rose et le
rail.’’ In the opening train wreck, Norma is introduced in conjunction with a
rose blossom, juxtaposed beside the rocks and rails. Two elements are set in a
rather conventional opposition, and Sisif seems to offer the one protection from
the other. Several other sequences continue this nexus of relations—the vision
of Norma in Elie’s fantasy, the moments when she sits by the flower-garlanded
well. But then, suddenly, the distribution shifts when Sisif gazes at her,
surrounded by flowers, swinging against the background of rails and steaming
locomotives. The one-time protector turns potential violator, as threatening
as the engines he is supposed to control. Later, after Elie has learned that his
sister was adopted, Sisif shouts at him that there will be no more flowers
beneath the rails. But when he wrecks Norma Compound, the embankment
it comes to rest on is literally covered with them. The tragic irony of his
action—overcome by guilt, he destroys Norma again, in the form of his en¬
gine—is neatly reversed by this exaggerated pastoral symbolism. The flowers
create a kind of natural funeral bier for the engine and protect him—or force
him to go on with his guilty existence—as if the "Rose” he had saved in the
beginning has multiplied to repay the debt.
The last part of La Roue would seem to offer poor ground for this pattern
of rhetorical figuring to flourish. Yet two major sequences draw it out further.
The prominent shadow of the dying locomotive on the flower bank echoes in
the frequent shadows of the cross Sisif carries up the mountain to Elie’s grave
on the anniversary of his death. The parallel suggests that the cross bears
metaphorically the weight of Sisif s guilt in separating and destroying his son
and adopted daughter. At the gravesite, Norma scatters flowers over the rocky
point and kneels on them at Sisifs feet. But he denies her, so locked is he in la roue
his own blind suffering. Only in the final sequences do the flowers reappear,
to mark the end of his penance. On the day of the peasants’ spring dance, he
takes up some pampas grass plumes and shakes them to create a dreamlike
snowfall filling the cabin. It is a magical moment of transformation, like the
moment when the room fills with pillow feathers in Chaplin’s The Gold Rush
(1925). Norma goes off with his blessing, and Sisif dies seated at the window,
framed by the locomotive model he holds in his hands and by the backlit
pampas grass plumes. In the double displacement, “La rose et le rail’’ seem to
bless his passage to peace.
The other pattern of rhetorical figuring is tied to the film’s central meta¬
phor—“la roue,’’ the tragic wheel of fate. If the metaphor smacks a bit too
much of Gance’s literary pretensions and sometimes grows clotted with sig¬
nification, it is boldly envisioned, marvelously sustained, and strikingly mul¬
tiple.31 On one level, it operates simply as a visual motif in the recurring
image of the locomotive wheels. Inert, lifeless, they mark the opening cata¬
clysm; and, until Sisif struggles with one set blocking a switch, they threaten
a second catastrophe. Whereas in one brief montage they seem to convey his
love of his work, in another they carry him rapidly toward the death he so
desires. And it is the steam that drives them that causes his blindness. At the
end of his last day at the roundhouse, after he has watched the Norma Com¬
pound being broken up for scrap, the wheel appears transposed in a shot of
his resigned figure, set against the background of a 360° pan of the silent
engines. On another level, it functions as the locus of symbolic reference. The
Victor Hugo quotation that opens the film points the way: “Creation is a
Great Wheel which does not move without crushing someone.’’ The chariot
wheel that Ixion was tied to (for desiring Hera) becomes the locomotive wheel
that Sisif is bound to, first out of love and then as a form of punishment. It
is this crushing punishment that the film hammers out, over and over, in
repeated sequences of suffering, separation, and loss. In fact, the wheel even
seems to become a figure for the film itself. As a series of structural variations
on the initial tragedy, the narrative acts exactly like a wheel revolving round
and round in a great circle or spiral.
“The first cinematographic symbol,’’ Jean Epstein christened this great wheel
of La Roue.

On predestined tracks of fortune that bode less good than ill, the wheel rolls on while
one heart yet beats. The cycle of life to death has become so painful that it has to be
forged lest it be broken. Hope radiates from the center, a prisoner.32

At the end, that hope breaks forth as the metaphor undergoes a transforma¬
tion. Separation turns into union; loss, into gain. The circle of suffering is
replaced by a circle of joy as the peasants dance round and round in the rocks
and snow fields. The once barren mountains no longer seem threatening. Norma
is drawn into a human community that is one with nature. And Sisif can die
in peace—“the man of the rails’’ positioned in the midst of light and flowers.
Against a last panning shot of the mountain clouds, in superimposed negative
images, gigantic locomotive wheels seem to roll across the sky. All “Pursue
their pattern as before / But reconciled among the stars.’’

339
La Souriante Madame La R ones spectacular premiere in December, 1922, marked another break
Beudet and with and reconstitution of the parameters of narrative avant-garde film prac¬
L’lnondation tice. Two years later, Jean Epstein could still call it “the formidable cinematic
monument in whose shadow all French cinematic art lives and believes.’’1
However, not all French filmmakers immediately leaped at the chance to ape
Gance’s advance. Two who did not, interestingly enough, were Germaine
Dulac and Louis Delluc. One of Dulac’s best films, La Souriante Madame Beudet
(1923), offers a good point of departure.
Despite her own enthusiasm for La Roue, Dulac conceived and executed La
Souriante Madame Beudet much more in line with her previous work, especially
La Mort du soleil. It was already surprisingly short for a narrative film released
in late 1923—barely 800 meters or thirty-five minutes in length.2 As if re¬
stricting, condensing, and refining the subject of La Mort du soleil, La Souriante
Madame Beudet focused exclusively on a provincial woman trapped in an un¬
satisfying bourgeois marriage. To articulate Madame Beudet’s condition and
her response to it, Dulac eschewed those techniques that had given La Roue
its notoriety—any form of rapid cutting, and accelerating montage—and de¬
pended instead on patterns of subjectivity and rhetorical figuring like those
developed in her earlier films and in those by Delluc and L’Herbier. Introduc¬
ing the film at the Musee Galliera, on 17 June 1924, she spoke of the con¬
ceptual basis of her strategy, singling out the editing or montage.

The shot is an image isolated for its expressive value, emphasized by the frame of the
camera lens. . . . The shot is at once space, action, thought. Each different image
juxtaposed to another is named: shot. The shot is a fragment of drama; it is a nuance
which converges on the conclusion. It is the keyboard on which we play. It is the
single means that we have to create, in a progression, an inkling of a character’s inner
life.3

As Dulac herself admitted, La Souriante Madame Beudet engaged her personally,

passionately, and that engagement shows in the film’s masterful simplicity
and ironic poignancy.4
Unlike the other films so far singled out, La Souriante Madame Beudet was
based on a stage play. However, this particular play, by Andre Obey and
Denys Amiel, already differed from the standard bourgeois melodrama adapted
for the cinema. This was a contemporary work, a psychological drama written
according to “the theory of silence,’’ according to principles that seem to have
paralleled those of Dulac and her avant-garde colleagues in the cinema as well
as those of the German Kammerspiel? Within two years after having been first
performed in 1921 by an avant-garde theatrical group, the Canard Sauvage,
it had won the Paul Hervieu Prize, had been staged at the Odeon, and had
become a modern classic.6 The narrative, basically unchanged in the film, is
unusually simple. Madame Beudet (Germaine Dermoz) is a cultured, out¬
wardly happy woman who is suffering from ennui as the wife of a provincial
clothing merchant (Arquilliere). One evening, overwhelmed by M. Beudet’s
insensitivity and lack of understanding (his idea of a joke is to put an unloaded
revolver to his head and pretend suicide), she surreptitiously puts several shells
in the chamber. The next morning, he aims it playfully at her, unawares, fires
and misses. The shock makes him suddenly realize her state—but not her
intention—and promise to renew their marriage. Today, this uneventful nar-

340
rative sounds like a stripped down, muted version of Hedda Gabler or Madame LA SOURIANTE
Bovary, with an ambiguous ending. MADAME BEUDET
Dulac and Obey’s adaptation altered the play in at least one significant way. AND L’INONDATION
That alteration did not involve an opening out into the real world through
location shooting, for all but a couple of sequences were shot by Paul Parguel
and Maurice Forster in Film d’Art’s Neuilly studio (in this, the film resembles
Fievre). Rather, it took the form of an opening inward, a sustained exploration
of the inner life or the subjective experience of Madame Beudet. Through the
character’s perceptions and imaginings, the spectator is made to identify and
empathize with a sensitive, remorseful woman whom her husband utterly fails
to comprehend, even at the end. Here is a bourgeois marriage criticized from
within, from the perspective of its most unwilling victim.7
To set up this critique, the film actually provides each of the major char¬
acters a degree of subjectivity. For instance, M. and Mme. Lebas, who initiate
the narrative by inviting the Beudets to a performance of Gounod’s Faust,
define themselves as stereotypical bourgeois by imagining the clothes they will
wear that evening. M. Beudet’s first subjective shot likewise defines him through
his image of the opera: a MS of Marguerite set off against a group of singers.
This conventional male fantasy (later he dreams of her ankle or foot) is juxta¬
posed to Madame Beudet’s subjective image of the opera: a MCU of Mephi-
stopheles (frame foreground left) singing at Marguerite (frame background
right), who holds up a hand to her face in horror. The hidden misogyny of
the woman-as-fetish is suddenly, succinctly, explicit. Even the maid is given
a brief, ambiguous subjectivity as the figure of her fiance dissolves in at her
shoulder when she asks Madame Beudet to be let off for the evening. Is
Madame’s reluctant assent a sign of envy (the maid can escape the house with
another) or of disquiet (will the maid’s marriage be any better than her own)?
Not long into the film, however, Madame Beudet is privileged with entire
sequences of subjective shots articulated through a wide range of technical
effects—dissolves, distorted lenses, double exposures, slow motion, handheld
camera movement—and unusual patterns of continuity editing. After refusing
to accompany M. Beudet to the opera, for instance, Madame Beudet reads a
magazine that has just arrived in the mail. Glancing several times at her irate
husband, who is muttering and pounding his desk across the room (conveyed
in separate CUs and MSs of the two, intercut through the eyeline matches),
she looks at a photo of a champion tennis player who suddenly, in slow motion
superimposition, breaks out of a serving stance. As if acting out her desires,
this imaginary figure moves slowly behind the husband’s desk and begins
choking a supered double of him, then lifts him up and carries him off toward
a background window. At the end of this imaginary attack and displacement
(as if revenging the victimization in Faust), there is a HACU from behind her
head as she leans back slightly sideways and laughs. The unexpected camera
angle that frames her gesture is disorienting, disturbing; and the threat sud¬
denly seems more than fanciful. In response to this laughter, M. Beudet takes
an empty revolver out of his desk and jokingly threatens suicide—“a simple
and often repeated pleasantry,’’ says one of the film’s few intertitles. As in Le
Silence, one wonders how this key object will eventually be used.
The privileged degree of Madame Beudet’s inner life and its difference from
that of the other characters clearly establishes one dimension of the film’s

341
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE central conflict or opposition. But that conflict is articulated from the very
beginning through several patterns of rhetorical figuring as well. In her lecture
at the Musee Galliera in 1924, Dulac offered a rare close analysis of the film’s
opening.8 After several LSs of Chartres—“Observations of melancholy in the
empty streets, in the quaint, tiny human figures. The province . . —a CU
in split screen: “two hands playing a piano and two hands feeling the weight
of a silver knife. Two characters. Contrary ideals . . . different dreams, we
already know it; and without seeing a single person.” There follow several
shots associating Madame Beudet with the piano, a piece of sheet music (De¬
bussy’s “Piano a deux mains,” on which she writes her name), a vase of flow¬
ers, and an imaginary image of (to return to Dulac’s language) “the sunlight
playing on the water among the reeds ... a book . . . Intellectualism. ” Then
comes a sequence of shots associating M. Beudet with money, a clothing shop
counter, a desk, a calendar, and “a clutch of clothing samples . . . Material¬
ism . ” A series of metonymical relations has become charged metaphorically. When
M. Beudet enters the room where Madame is reading, Dulac writes,

the characters have already been established 'through images isolating their different
gestures, sharply outlined and put in opposition. All of a sudden, a long shot of the
room brings them together but in a deep space of foreground/background distinctions.
Abruptly, all the disparity of a marriage is revealed.

The cutting, framing, mise-en-scene, and choice of objects have all conspired
to produce a clearly defined network of cultural oppositions, and sexual dif¬
ferences, within the marriage.
Like Le Silence and Fievre, then, Dulac’s film relies heavily on the multiple
signification of selected objects. The vase of flowers, for instance, plays a
central role in depicting the habitual discord between M. and Mme. Beudet.
The flowers are first linked to Madame’s piano playing and reading, where
their prominent position in the margin of the frame parallels the way she
places the vase near the edge of the table (as if for an Impressionist still life).
This off-center arrangement bothers M. Beudet no end, for he repeatedly moves
the flowers to the table’s center, as if this small gesture will produce order in
his home. Conversely, while Madame is alone on the evening of the opera,
she discovers that her husband has locked up the piano, denying her one of
her few pleasures. The clocks associated with his work now begin to bother
her, monopolizing her attention, so that they seem to be placed wherever she
turns. Her entrapment, in time as well as space, is finally summed up in a
single image: a MS of her mirrored figure (frame left) as she rests her head on
a clock cover (frame right).
All these patterns of subjectivity and rhetorical figuring culminate in Ma¬
dame Beudet’s decision to retaliate and her consequent remorse. Deprived of
her piano for the evening, she begins reading a poem from Baudelaire’s Fleurs
du mal—“La Mort des amants.” For each line that she reads, a corresponding
shot of imagined objects in the house undermines the words and yet reinforces
the title.

“We have beds suffused with delicate odors”

FS of Beudet’s empty bed.
“Divans deep as tombs”
MS of two stacked, unused pillows.

342
 171. (left) Madame Beudet
(Germaine Dermoz) reflected
in her dresser mirror in La
Sounante Madame Beudet
“And strange flowers on the shelves’’ (1923)

CU (masked) of the contested vase of flowers. 172. (right) Monsieur

(Arquilliere) and Madame
After sending away the maid, she finds herself suspended in a spatial-temporal
Beudet at the end of La
limbo. Caught between mirrors and clocks, she looks out the window: (inter¬ Sounante Madame Beudet
titles) “Always the same horizons”—the “Courthouse and Prison.” Across the
street, an actual prison facade mirrors her metaphorical one. To escape, she
turns inward, imagining the blurred figure of a man coming through the
window with his arms open (as if completing the earlier tennis-champion
fantasy). Glancing at a photograph of M. Beudet and impetuously casting off
her wedding ring, she suddenly finds her imaginary lover displaced by
M. Beudet, who climbs through the window in slow motion, his huge ugly
grin blurred and distorted dn several MCUs. Denied escape now even through
her imagination, she goes behind the desk and gets out the revolver; the
sequence fades out as she reaches into a second drawer (where the bullets are
stored). The trap is set. Her impotence has given her husband an ironic po¬
tency.
The next morning, Madame Beudet’s agitated state verges on delirium.
Appropriately, M. Beudet has come in late and fallen asleep on a bedroom
chair. Tossing and turning on the bed, Madame awakens to several intercut
shots which suggest the sounds she is hearing—a MS of shoes passing on the
street, a CU of a clock ticking.9 This sequence shifts to fantasy in a LS of the
bedroom over which a superimposition of a pendulum (in CU) moves back
and forth in slow motion. As she looks down at the pillow beside her, the
figure of her husband dissolves in and out, only to be replaced by a subjective
insert of the threatening courthouse. With economical precision, this stream-
of-consciousness sequence condenses the experience of the night before and
foreshadows what may come. As Madame starts in fear and moves to the edge
of the bed, M. Beudet awakens, and she lies back again. Abruptly, the level
of narration turns omniscient, and several exterior shots of the streets mark a
transition to a slightly later time. After M. Beudet goes downstairs for break¬
fast, Madame sits before her dressing mirror, combing her hair. Fragmented

343
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE into three reflected images, she looks at herself and combs more and more
slowly and finally stops. Self wars against self in the tense calm of immobile
replicated faces. Will M. Beudet play his suicide joke now? Will he find the
revolver loaded? Should she try to reach the revolver first and unload it? Should
she confess her guilt?
As the film moves toward the climactic gunshot, both M. and Mme. Beu-
det’s actions contribute to the suspense. While searching for a misplaced in¬
voice, M. Beudet pauses to ridicule his wife’s taste in music and pounds the
piano in exasperation. Growing more and more vexed, he turns his anger
against all women (“Women: Do you know what’s to be done with them?
. . .”) and seizes a doll from one of the bookshelves. Almost without realizing
it, he crushes its head with his fist. This unexpected violence raises a fright¬
ening possibility—will the gun be turned on Madame Beudet?—a possibility
underscored by a cut to his wife, now dressed in the bedroom. As she decides
to go downstairs, subjectivity returns in an unusual HA shot looking down
the stairs, a handheld POV shot (with an anamorphic lens) that wavers back
and forth and moves forward slightly. She reaches the room with the desk
only to be interrupted by M. Lebas, by the maid, and finally by M. Beudet
himself. As he works on his accounts, she sits nervously in her chair nearby;
when he pulls out the revolver, suddenly he appears in POV shots—distorted
FSs of him pointing the revolver at his head and then straight ahead. In an
irised CU the revolver fires, followed by a masked shot of the flower vase
falling over. Released at last, the violence remains rhetorical.
The film ends differently, and quite consciously, from Obey and Amiel’s
play. As M. Beudet tries to comfort his wife—mistakenly thinking that she
wanted to kill herself—she simply stares off straight ahead, expressionless.
Side by side, in MS, their separate figures parallel the opening split-screen
image of opposing hands. To emphasize this lack of reconciliation (a bit crudely
perhaps), Dulac adds a further shot of the Beudets with a puppet couple
behind them in a picture frame or stagelike mirror. In a parody of the bour¬
geois melodrama happy ending, the puppets hug and wave gaily, and a curtain
with THEATRE emblazoned on it drops in front of them. The film’s first in¬
tertitle reappears, “In the provinces ...,’’ with an added phrase, “Joined by
habit ...,’’ confirming the return of the Beudets’ initial relationship. In a
LS of a gray, deserted street, M. and Mme. Beudet greet a priest whom they
pass and then walk slowly off, side by side but separate, their backs to the
camera. In this extraordinarily concise juxtaposition, genre is played off against
genre, convention against reality, theater against cinema. And the final starkly
realistic image closes off our identification with Madame Beudet and defines
her condition—in a provincial, sexist, church-oriented, bourgeois society—as
unchanging, without future and without escape.

Another provincial realist film that, like La Souriante Madame Beudet,, es¬
chewed the technical effects of La Roue, was Louis Deiluc’s last film, L'lnon-
dation (1924). Contrary to his usual practice, Delluc adapted the scenario for
L'lnondation from a contemporary novella by Andre Corthis, a fact which,
unfortunately, led most French film critics and historians to give it scant
attention.10 Although released just weeks after the filmmaker’s untimely death,

344
L'lnondation came close to disappearing altogether.11 Both the film and the LA SOURIANTE
filmmaker deserved better. MADAME BEUDET
What probably inspired Delluc to film this particular work was a Swedish AND L’INONDATION
film by Victor Sjostrom, which he had reviewed in Cinea two years earlier.

-Karen, Daughter of Ingmar (1920) is a film whose principal character is a river.

The river is so powerful that it floods the country—and it has so much talent that
it overwhelms the film.12

From Sjostrom’s example and Corthis’s material, writes Marcel Tariol, Delluc
produced a true “peasant drama integrated into a natural field . . . where the
lelements erupt with destructive force.”13
The story involves four main characters in an unspecified village in the
Vaucluse: Alban (Philippe Heriat), the principal farmer in the district; his
fiancee Margot (Ginette Maddie); Broc (Van Daele), the aging secretary to the
mayor; and his grown daughter, Germaine (Eve Francis), whom he has not
seen since her mother left him for another man many years before. Germaine’s
appearance in the village revives her father’s spirit and attracts the attention
of Alban. She, too, is attracted, but Margot forces Alban to reject her. Stunned,
Germaine falls ill just as the flooding Rhone River engulfs the countryside.
Margot disappears; and when the waters recede, her body is found at the river’s
edge. Alban is accused by his dead fiancee’s mother, but Broc finally confesses
to the murder, first to Germaine and then to the police.
Because Delluc and Gibory shot the film mainly on location on the lower
Rhone River, L’lnondation has an unusually authentic physical surface.14 At
least a fifth of the film’s footage is given over to describing the Vaucluse
countryside, the village center, a local festival dance (held inside because of
the rain), the flood (shot at the last minute under actual conditions), and the
search for Margot’s body. The interiors are rich in details of the commonest
sort—from the airy spaciousness of Alban’s kitchen to the rough Spartan com¬
fort of Broc’s small cottage. To emphasize the realism, Delluc employs partic¬
ular lighting effects—lighting Broc’s room at night from the fireplace, fram¬
ing the dance through the doorway and lighting the scene almost entirely
from within (an effect which is repeated ironically when Margot’s body is laid
in a nearby room by her mother), lighting the search for Margot with lanterns
in the trees and on the water. For the same reason, apparently, he also uses
several tracking shots for the first time, and not without a certain technical
awkwardness. In the beginning, there is a relatively long HALS dollying into
the busy village square, followed shortly by shots slowly tracking the rows of
market stalls. Similar shots occur at the beginning of the flood sequence: a
HALS dollying forward through crowds of men in the square and a tracking
shot that parallels the water lapping the edge of a street. The structural par¬
allelism between these two series of documentary shots simply and clearly
articulates one dimension of the film’s initial narrative condition and its re¬
versal.
The main characters come to the fore unobtrusively within this milieu, and
the action evolves gradually as they become more fully defined. To facilitate
this integration of character and milieu, Delluc asked each of his four actors
to play against the type they had become associated with in French films.15 In

345
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

173. Germaine (Eve Francis)

resting near Alban’s
farmhouse in L'Inondation
(1924)

the opening market sequence, several villagers are congratulating Alban and
Margot while Broc walks alone through the streets to the mayor’s office. Ger¬
maine enters the village much the same way the older woman came to the
house in La Femme de nulle part. An insignificant figure in a dreary landscape,
Germaine’s isolation is at first more physical and social than psychological.
This is confirmed when Alban notices her resting in a doorway and invites her
into his kitchen for bread and soup. In a series of CUs and MSs, she observes
the objects on the table and stove and by the hearth, all of which succinctly
convey both his ample way of life and her alienation from it. Falling asleep at
the table, she is rudely awakened by Margot’s humiliating laughter. Broc’s
situation is no better—“The people of the village treat [him] with ridicule,’’
and his house is furnished with the barest essentials. The first objects we see
are a bed and mirror, a fireplace, a bowl and water jar, and a photograph of
Germaine as a child. His life is suggested in the simplest of gestures—after
looking at the photograph, he removes a speck of dirt from the water.
This socioeconomic contrast is uncommon in Delluc’s work and perhaps
may be traced to Corthis’s novel. Even so, the class conflict is far from extra¬
neous. In fact, it operates in parallel with the romantic intrigue, providing a
second motive for Margot’s attitude toward her rival. The conflict is developed
most explicitly, however, in connection with Germaine’s character. Alban at¬
tracts her, but so does his way of life as represented by his possessions. She
becomes acutely conscious of her own drab clothes and, while looking at the
store window full of posters and magazine covers, fantasizes herself (through
superimposition) into the costume on one. After having to sew her own dress
and scarf, she tries them on before the fire and Broc’s old mirror. The CU of
Germaine looking at her reflection in its dull fogged surface is a perfect syn¬
thesis of physical object and inner being. And it follows quickly and inevitably
on its corollary—a LS of her scrubbing the floor and turning to gaze out the
window. Window and mirror both frame her desire to escape her condition.
For such a simple story, L'Inondation s narrative structure is as complex as

346
 nything else Delluc wrote. That complexity depends, in part, on some half- LA SOURIANTE
lozen flashbacks and subjective sequences positioned at crucial junctures in MADAME BEUDET
he film. Their operation, both internally and as a part of the overall narrative AND L'INONDATION
tructure, is unusually varied. Of the four main characters, only Germaine and
3roc, as the underclass, are privileged with subjectivity. Perhaps the most
itartling sequences are those associated with Germaine. Here Delluc returns
:o the pattern of achronology that he first employed in Le Silence. When Ger¬
maine returns to the cottage, in stunned disbelief after being rejected by
Alban, she goes up to the mirror before which she had dressed herself earlier.
Following an intertitle, “An attack of fever,” a quick series of shots erupts,
[repeating previous shots of Margot, Alban, and herself, but in reverse chro¬
nology and moving from MS to LS. Then, just as abruptly, the sequence
changes chronology and distance once more with a cut to the FS of Alban
rejecting her and then to a shot of the river. Germaine’s face returns, in MCU,
only to be transformed by a series of dissolves (CU, ECU, CU); and finally,
in FS, she collapses out of the frame onto the floor. The moment may be
"melodramatic, but the order and rhythm of shots effectively equates our per¬
ception with the flow, no, the rush of Germaine’s consciousness.
A similar moment erupts for Germaine just before Broc follows Margot off
as she passes the cottage. Here, however, the sequence of subjective images
-shifts unexpectedly from memory to fantasy.

MS (from the side) of Germaine in bed; she raises herself up, leans against the wall,
and falls back. Fade
FS of Germaine in her new dress, embraced by Alban. Cut
MS (straight on) of Germaine in bed; she sits up and looks around. Fade
MS of Germaine and Alban; he disengages his hand and pushes her away. Fade
CU of Germaine in agony; she falls back in bed. Cut
FS of Germaine and Alban dancing at the festival. Cut
MS of Germaine and Alban dancing. Cut
FS of Germaine and Alban dancing. Cut
MCU of Germaine sitting up again in bed; she lifts her arms as if to ward off some¬
thing and falls back, calmed. Suddenly she struggles up again, only to fall back.

This shift, together with Germaine’s repeated movement, rising and falling,
produces a hypnotic, suspended sense of disorientation. That disorientation is
doubled by a curious pattern in the transitions between shots. The first shift
from present to past is marked by a fade while the return to the present comes
with a cut. The second shift to the past is also marked by a fade, but so now
is the return to the present. The third shift is to fantasy; it comes with a cut,
but so now do the transitions between shots in the fantasy. Although the fade
retains its consistent transitional function throughout, the cut functions in
three different ways. By midway through the sequence, we don’t know, with
a cut, what kind of time shift to expect. Consequently, by disrupting the then
conventional codes of transition, the sequence seems to heighten the distortion
of Germaine’s condition.16
Although less striking initially, Broc’s subjective sequences are even more
crucial to the narrative. The first comes when Germaine introduces herself as
his daughter. A brief flashback informs us of Broc’s past life and how the two
were separated: in the foreground of a spacious, comfortable room, Broc plays

347
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE with a child while his wife greets a man in the background. The next sequence
occurs as Broc sits in his cottage, just out of the firelight, after he has found
Germaine ill and put her to bed.

MS of Broc seated frame center, with the fireplace in the left background.
FS of Alban walking through a crowd of men clustered by the archway to the dance
hall.
MS of Margot chatting with her girlfriends.
FS of Broc and Germaine meeting Alban in front of a cafe.
LS of Alban and Margot walking away down an alley toward the square.
CU of Margot laughing.
LS tracking to the right past flooded fields and farm buildings.
LS tracking to the right past a flooded farm.
MS of Broc; he moves slightly and puts down his head.

This sequence is interesting because it is composed of shots used earlier in the

film, only one of which has been associated with Broc. The order is chrono¬
logical until the CU of Margot, which comes from a time much earlier when
Germaine was awakened in Alban’s kitchvn by her laughter. Then, rather than
cutting back to Broc immediately, the sequence ends with two tracking shots
of the flooded river. The effect of all this seems less psychological (cf. the
delirium sequences of Germaine that soon follow) than analytical. The se¬
quence stresses Broc’s conclusion (based on what he has learned from Ger¬
maine?) that Margot is responsible for her illness, but it also links Margot
metonymically with the river at its destructive flood stage. That association
will prove crucial.
The last subjective sequence is also Broc’s, when he finally confesses his
guilt to Germaine. His delayed narration of Margot’s murder consists of a
flashback of just a dozen shots. Mist or fog obscures the action, deemphasizing
the suspense, as do shots like the LALS of the road and guardrail posts (from
the side) as the characters’ feet cross the top of the frame. When the murder
does come, its quick, elliptical cutting echoes the Temptation sequence in
Jean Epstein’s L’Auberge rouge (1923) and looks ahead to the murder that opens
Dmitri Kirsanoffs Menilmontant (1926).

CU of Broc’s face.
“. . . And . . . driven by your despair ...”
MS of Broc (frame left) holding out his hand toward Margot’s back (frame right); river
and sky in soft focus in the background.
Shot of the river surface, the current flowing to the right.
MS of Broc pushing Margot.
MS of Margot (from the front) falling feet first.
Shot of the river surface.
FS of Broc standing by a guard post, looking down toward the right background.
MCU of Germaine and Broc facing forward.
CU of Germaine showing signs of suffering; she closes her eyes.

The alternation suggests how, to Broc’s mind, eliminating Margot allows

Germaine to recover and live again. As the sequence shifts focus to Germaine,
emphasizing the effect of Broc’s action on her condition, Alban is restored to
her (an intertitle suggests), but at the expense of her father and, of course,
Margot.

348
 LA SOURIANTE
MADAME BEUDET
AND L’INONDATION

174. A publicity photo of

Margot (Ginette Maddie) and
Broc near the bridge in
L’lnondation (1924)

The real achievement of Llnondation comes from what Delluc would have
called its lyrical composition, the intricate pattern of signification that arises
from the association of all four characters and the waters of the Rhone. This
association is precisely what critics seized on to attack the film when it was
released. William Bernard put the argument almost contemptuously, writing
in La Tribune de Geneve:

. . . the drama has no direct connection with the cataclysm which forms the basic
theme of the visual poem. For the unleashed elements have nothing to do with the
murder of the coquettish Margot—it could have been accomplished just as well with¬
out them. There is always, I think, enough water in the Rhone to drown a little
girl.17

Only Marcel Tariol has perceived the flooding river differently:

. . . its true function is more poetic than dramatic: the slow, crafty inundation, which
invades everything little by little, which insidiously suppresses all trace of life, is the
backdrop—a funereal accompaniment of the voices of nature to the tragedy of the
heart.18

Its function is indeed poetic, but hardly as the literary convention of a lament
by nature over human suffering. Instead, the river serves as the coordinate of
a network of metonymic/metaphorical relations.
One of the principal associations is prepared for early on in at least two
sequences. The first occurs when Broc looks at the photograph of Germaine
(who is not yet identified) and notices some dirt in his cup of water. The
subtle link between Germaine and water (and Broc’s discovery of something
in it that disturbs him) is marked by a CU and MCU, the only ones in the
sequence. The second occurs when Broc tries to retrieve Germaine’s letter (also
unidentified until she arrives) which the postman drops before his cottage. In
a series of shots, the wind blows it along the road and Broc follows it to the
edge overlooking the river. The letter blows off and is carried away by the

349
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE current (anticipating Germaine’s delirium), but the sequence is shot and cut
much like the later murder sequence.

FS of the road edge, with the river below and beyond, as the letter blows off.
FS of the letter falling in the air.
FS of the road edge, with the river below and beyond, as Broc comes in from the left.
MS of Broc, looking toward the right background and holding out his arms.
FS of the river surface as the letter is carried off to the right.
MS of Broc, resigned, looking toward the right background.
FS of the river surface, with the current flowing to the right.

In retrospect, the river is functioning here already as a metaphorical extension

of Margot, eliminating the sign of Germaine’s presence and identity.
This oblique association finally becomes explicit in the sequence that si¬
multaneously narrates the river flooding and Germaine’s illness. Just as she
collapses after Alban’s rejection, the film cuts to a church bell (ironically)
sounding the alarm and then to a series of shots of men gathering, dam gates *
opening, and water engulfing the countryside. Thereafter, Broc’s discovery of
his daughter and his attendance on her. is intercut with shots of the flood
waters as they reach their peak. While sustaining the analogical properties of
these alternating images, the sequence also equates their connotative signifi¬
cance. The flood becomes a metaphorical corollary to the fever of grief and
sadness that engulfs Germaine, and her gestures of delirium become those of
one drowning.
A second major association is introduced even earlier, in the sole exception
to the film’s pattern of subjectivity. As he stands on the village bridge span¬
ning the river, Alban imagines a CU of Margot superimposed on the water’s
surface. This conventional romantic image soon shifts, however, into a very
different metonymic equation which only gradually accumulates significance.
Traced over a series of sequences—the letter sequence, Broc’s subjective se¬
quence by the firelight, the rendezvous with her cousin by the bridge, the
sequence where her body is carried up from the river’s edge—Margot’s asso¬
ciation with the river culminates in Broc’s confession of her murder. Whereas
earlier Broc had watched helplessly as Germaine’s letter was carried off, now
at flood crest and on the same spot he pushes Margot into the river. The
elliptical cutting that alternates between Margot and the river, denoting her
death by obliteration, also completes the metonymic equation between the
two. That equation simply and succinctly inverts the initial romantic super¬
imposition.
Margot’s disappearance, doubly narrated in the film, first releases Germaine
from her illness and then frees Alban of misplaced guilt. Their embrace in the
final shots is quite muted, however, for visual and emotional dominance is
given to Broc’s separation from her. Whereas in the preceding confession the
two had been repeatedly shown side by side in MS, now they are separated,
first by foreground/background differences within the same shot and then by
intercutting. The two LSs of Broc going off between the gendarmes, stopping
to look back toward the camera, and then continuing away along the muddy
road, overpower both the MS of Alban taking his place beside Germaine and
the intertitle, “The two of us will save him. ...” Germaine continues to
look off to the right, deflecting our attention from her and Alban, while Broc’s

350
movement directs our attention deep into the center of the frame and then L'AJJBERGE ROUGE AND
reflects it backwards in his gaze. That gaze is all the more poignant because COEUR FIDELE
he has not once looked at Germaine since beginning his confession, and he
now breaks the look in turning away. The distance, the look, the emotional
paradox, all are echoed, probably unconsciously, in the final shots of separation
in Claude Chabrol’s La Femme infidele (1968).

When Jean Epstein began making films, he had two masters as mentors— L’Auberge rouge
Louis Delluc and Abel Gance. His first fiction film, L’Auberge rouge (1923), and Coeur fidele
was conceived more along the lines of Delluc’s film practice. The main link
between Epstein’s work and, say, Le Silence or La Femme de nulle part, is in the
construction of the scenario, which presents a complicated narrative structure
simply and economically.1 More precisely, that narrative structure is predi¬
cated on a confrontation between the past and the present, between fiction
and reality, between one world and another. It is this kind of structure, along
with particular syntactical patterns and rhetorical figurings, that makes the
film much more than the adaptation of a minor literary classic. Pathe-Consor-
tium, however, simply dropped it among its summer re-releases, in August,
1923.2
The subject of L’Auberge rouge comes from the novella of the same title by
Balzac. The novella already provides the structure of a double narrative—“two
overlapping stories that progress in parallel to a conclusion in which the epi¬
logue of the past story constitutes the end of the present story.”3 In Epstein’s
version of LAuberge rouge, the double narrative runs as follows. In 1825, a
Paris banker gives a dinner for his son Andre (Jacques Christiany) and his
fiancee, Victorine, accompanied by her uncle, Jean Frederic Taillefer (David
Evremont), a former supply contractor for the French imperial army. Among
the guests is an important merchant named Hermann, who tells a story about
two young doctors who, one rainy October night in 1799, had to put up at
an inn in Alsace. One of them, Prosper Magnan (Leon Mathot), becomes
interested in the inn’s maidservant (Gina Manes). The innkeeper (Pierre Hot)
intervenes but soon attends to a new arrival, a Dutch aristocrat, who turns
out to be a diamond broker (in Balzac, he is a French pin manufacturer,
carrying gold and diamonds). Next morning the aristocrat is found murdered
and his diamonds missing; the other doctor has vanished, and Magnan is
arrested. He is tried, convicted, and finally executed, despite the testimony
and pleas of the maidservant, who asks a traveler to take a last letter from
Magnan to his mother. Hermann, it turns out, was that traveler (in Balzac,
he is Magnan’s temporary jailer). Over a card game after dinner, Andre (Bal¬
zac’s primary narrator) confronts Taillefer, who had become increasingly nerv¬
ous during Hermann’s story. Through a series of quick maneuvers, Taillefer
is unmasked as the other doctor at the inn, the one who perpetrated the crime
and then left his friend to die for his guilt.
Epstein’s distinctive manner of introducing his characters and the spaces of
their action is already apparent in LAuberge rouge. Nearly a dozen shots occur
before several intertitles identify the characters and period of the 1825 story.4
These shots describe a half-dozen or more people in a drawing room and an
adjacent dining room (beyond the brilliantly lit table, ail else is dark) at the

351
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

175. A production photo of

Jean Epstein shooting the first
sequence in L'Auberge rouge
(1923). Notice the old Pathe
camera and the primitive
dolly which is steadied by the
weight of Epstein and three of
his crew

moment when a butler calls them to dinner. A young couple remains separate
from the others in the drawing room, and in a soft-focus CU, the young man
gently tries to kiss his fiancee. As they enter the dining room, a woman,
already seated at the table, looks up, and the fiancee glides forward in a dolly-
back CU. After the four major characters have been identified (the couple
comes last), a tracking MS begins to slowly circle the table. As it moves from
Hermann to the banker, an intertitle requests that he tell a story that will
make them all shudder, and a reverse track circles back to him. The formal
costumes and decor, “the splendor of the jewelry, the candles, the crystal,
sharply outlined against the black backgrounds,’’5 the smooth movement of
the figures and camera, the seamless editing, all produce an almost idyllic
milieu of bourgeois elegance, family harmony, and discreet romance. The only
disturbing element is the initial shot—an enigmatic white-masked CU of Leon
Mathot, unidentified and unintegrated into the sequence that follows.6 Who
is he and how will he affect this world, especially, perhaps, the anticipated
marriage of the young couple?
Hermann’s story is introduced quite differently. After an intertitle—“20
October 1799, two young doctors proceed in short daily advances to their
posts in Alsace”—two horsemen seem to explode from the screen.

FS dolly back before two horsemen riding in the rain.

LAMS of the horses as they pass on a diagonal.
CU of the hooves splashing through the mud (diagonally).

The last two shots are quite brief and immediately give way to a LS of the
interior of the inn where several soldiers and women sit among the tables
while the innkeeper paces back and forth. This juxtaposition of exterior and

352
 L’AUBERGE ROUGE AND
COEUR FIDELE

176. (left) The 1825 dinner

table setting in L'Auberge
rouge (1923)

177. (above) The opening

CU of Prosper Magnan
(Leon Mathot)

interior is repeated with more rapidly cut shots of the horses and then closer
shots of the various soldiers and women at the inn (much as in Fievre). When
the horsemen reach the inn, the innkeeper tells them there is nowhere to sit—
the camera pans over the tables, following his hand, in MCU, as it points out
I all the people. No intertitles identify the horsemen (but we recognize one as
I
Leon Mathot); instead, several shots single out one’s wet coat and boots and,
after some coins are offered, his boots and hands are stretched out to the fire.
The foul weather, “the inn’s cramped space swarming noisily with the usual
types,’’ the open antagonism between the characters, the abrupt juxtapositions
between shots—all produce a milieu that contrasts sharply with that of the
1825 dinner.7 That contrast was heightened, according to Pierre Leprohon,
by “tinting contrasts’’ which are not present in the surviving prints.8 Several
conflicts are already set in paradigmatic relation. Will the horsemen (with
their energy and desperate condition) threaten or disrupt the world of the inn
or, instead, will they be threatened? Will the conflict emerging in the 1799
Alsatian inn somehow7 threaten or disrupt the ambiance of the 1825 Paris
dinner? Finally, do these oppositions in some way parallel the opening juxta¬
position of Leon Mathot (in CU) and the 1825 milieu?
About two dozen sequences alternating between these two different milieux
form the narrative structure of L’Auberge rouge. Until the final ten minutes of
the film, the narration of the past story and its tragic mystery dominates.
Instead of developing Magnan’s story conventionally through dramatic con¬
frontations with the diamond broker, the authorities, and innkeeper, or the

353
narrative AVANT-GARDE maidservant, Epstein emphasizes simple patterns of rhetorical figuring and
several ambiguous sequences of privileged subjectivity.
One pattern of rhetorical figuring arises from an old woman and a deck of
cards at the inn (absent in Balzac). When Magnan agrees, without much
interest, to have his fortune told, she begins shuffling the cards, an action
intercut with shots of an accordionist playing nearby and a young woman
swaying to his music, all of which are slowed slightly to produce a mesmer¬
izing rhythm of movement (amplified by the editing). This rhythm carries
over into the fortunetelling, presented primarily in CUs of Magnan, the old
woman, and her hands turning the cards. The sequential order of the turned-
up cards metaphorically narrates the story to come: the ace of diamonds (“Gold”),
the seven of clubs (“Crime”), and the ten of clubs (“Death”), the last of which
is followed by a blurred CU of a cloaked skull. At key moments in the story,
thereafter, each of these three cards recurs as if to confirm what is already
determined. When the diamond broker displays his jewels, for instance, the
ace of diamonds dissolves in and out over an ECU of one large diamond,
linking Magnan to it, even though he does not seem to be one of the rapt
onlookers. Then, when Magnan discovers blood on his hands and the broker’s
dead body nearby, the seven of clubs dissolves in and out over a CU of his
terror-stricken face. Finally, after the judge pronounces sentence, the ten of
clubs dissolves in and out over a blurred CU of Magnan’s face. And as he is
led outside the courtroom and past the maidservant, a last CU of his face
dissolves into the blurred CU of the skull. Instead of representing Magnan’s
subjective experience, this pattern of rhetorical figuring somewhat convention¬
ally suggests a fatalistic force beyond the control of any character; but it does
not determine the story, nor is it beyond the characters’ manipulation.
Throughout the first four segments of the past story, subjectivity is distrib¬
uted among almost all of the major characters, but only in the form of POV
shots. In the fifth segment, however, marked off by the intertitle, “Tempta¬
tion,” Magnan undergoes a remarkable nightmare experience of nearly killing
the diamond broker. The segment opens with a series of rhythmically cut
exterior shots (long shots and closer shots) of wind and rain sweeping the tree-
shrouded inn. Cut into this rhythmic “drumming” are CUs of the diamonds
and then CUs of Magnan awakening, as if he were being roused simultane¬
ously by the sound of the rain and by the diamonds glistening in a dream
image. Shots of the inn’s exterior lashed by the storm continue to alternate
throughout the segment as Magnan looks about the crowded guestroom, spots
the Dutch gentleman, imagines the diamonds once more, and then from his
pouch slowly draws a scalpel. We anticipate a violation, the slashing of one
body, the opening of another, to extract the jewels. Instead, unable to act,
Magnan backs away toward the door in a shot that is interrupted repeatedly
by quick fades, producing a kind of hallucinatory strobe-light effect. In effect,
his own body seems slashed by light in the darkness. In a LS of the inn’s
central room, he crosses to a window; there, in MCU, his face, through the
window, seems beaten and streaked by rain. As if roused again, he returns to
the guestroom, resolved to carry out his murderous intentions. This time an
intertitle halts him as he is about to strike: “Ele hears something like a voice
within and realizes the horror of his action.” Again Magnan backs away—in
a chain of CUs and MCUs of his face drifting and blurring within the frame,

354
 178. (left) Prosper Magnan
backs away through the
doorway in the “Temptation”
sequence in L'Auberge rouge

accentuated by a slow reverse dolly—the shots alternating with images of the (1923)

storm-lashed inn exterior. Finally, in a rhythmic "drumming” of long and 179- (tight) The recurring
close shots (that echo the opening shots), he leans, head in hands, against the HACU of the table
centerpiece
outside wall of the inn and lets the rain wash over him. The last shots return
him to the inn—a MCU of his head (shot from behind) dollies toward the
door, and once inside he collapses.
No doubt this segment is organized to convey the different stages of Mag-
nan’s heightened emotional condition. A number of cinematic devices combine
to articulate those stages—the chain of MSs and CUs of Magnan’s face (first
irised in white, then sharply defined and later blurred against the darkness),
a chain of MSs and CUs that changes in accordance with the CUs of objects
(imagined and real), the quick slashing faces at one point, and the hallucina¬
tory camera dollies.9 However, what is even more interesting is the pattern of
rhetorical figuring produced by the repeated shots of the storm elements in¬
tercut with Magnan’s gestures and movements. Here is the earliest instance
in Epstein’s films of what he had envisioned, in Bonjour Cinema (1921), as
“the linking together [or merging] of the objective and the subjective.”10 The
significance of one shifts in relation to the other, for the images of the rain¬
storm carry a contradictory or paradoxical charge. Initially, the storm serves
to rouse Magnan to his murderous desires—even producing, it seems, the
dream image of the diamonds. Yet twice the lightning drives him back in
horror from enacting his desire. Again the storm seems to goad him on, as he
stares out the rain-streaked window. In the end, however, that same rain
washes over him, almost as a sign of penitence. Or is it a sign of his destiny
as a victim? In the beginning, after all, it was the storm that forced him to
put up at the inn.
The segment that narrates Magnan’s execution, which concludes the past
story, involves a different form of simultaneity, a doubled conjunction of "the
objective and the subjective.” The sequence leading up to the execution raises
the possibility of rescue or reprieve. Shots of Magnan’s progress to the stake
(these shots change gradually from LSs to MSs) alternate with shots of the
maidservant’s journey across the bare autumn fields to the prison. But the fact

355
narrative AVANT-GARDE that her progress changes inversely to Magnan’s—from MSs, including one
shot of her feet coming through the mud, to an ELS—dissipates the possibil¬
ity. The execution is narrated in a simple metonymic series: a CU of Magnan s
face, soldiers in a diagonal line, lowered rifles, a drum roll, an officer s sword
falling. Instead of returning to a shot of Magnan, however, the editing pattern
is disrupted by the reintroduction of the maidservant.

FS of the maidservant (in profile) at the prison gate.

CU of her face.
FS of leafless trees silhouetted against the sky. Dissolve to
FS of leafless trees silhouetted against the sky, tilt up.
MS of Magnan lying on the ground near the stake.
CU of the maidservant’s face.
FS as she turns away from the prison gate.

Spatially, temporally, these shots are ambiguous. Does the maidservant see
the execution, merely hear the presumed gunshots, or arrive at the gate too
late? Whichever the case, the moment of Magnan’s death, metonymically
prepared for, is displaced metaphorically in the shots of the trees and sky
(echoing the night of his temptation in the inn). Now, as the maidservant
slowly returns across the same fields, the shots of her lone figure alternate with
those of the silhouetted trees. But the latter are marked by up-and-down
wipes, and her movements within the frame are masked off into a narrow
vertical space. This series of transformations or displacements—from one facial
CU to another, from one alternation to another, from metonymy to metaphor
(and back?)—this double linking of “the objective and the subjective,’’ seems
to function as an uncanny moment of communion and exchange. The tragic
suffering of one character shifts onto the other. As in the “Temptation” seg¬
ment, this transposition occurs within and is mediated by a natural landscape.
The human drama of the film’s past story seems circumscribed within some
larger, strangly ambiguous, natural design.
As it progresses, this past story impinges, at first imperceptibly, on the
1825 dinner guests. A visual motif (somewhat like the image of the rocking
cradle in Intolerance) repeatedly marks the transition between the two stories—
a HACU of candles and wine glasses around a glass fruit bowl on the dinner
table. Here is one of Epstein’s earliest and purest examples of photogenie in a
single shot—the unusual camera angle renders the image both literal and
transformed.11 Besides denoting the passage of time (the candles burn down),
the recurrence of this shot connotes a sense of permanence and stability, as if
this single image of light, glass, and decorative food summed up the 1825
bourgeois world. But that permanence and stability prove illusory.
After the first segment of the past story, the present story returns in a HAFS
of the dinner guests, a shot whose slight disorientation registers as a vague
disturbance. Andre and Victorine look at one another and, in CU, his hand
moves away from hers and clenches. Not until after the second segment does
Hermann finally give his hero a name, Prosper Magnan, and Victorine inno¬
cently asks her uncle (who has downed some water and put his hand to his
head) if he is feeling ill. In the brief sequence that follows the segment in¬
troducing the diamond broker, Taillefer turns down the diamond ring on his
finger (in CU), a small movement which Andre seems to notice. While the

356
■past story links Magnan to the diamonds (through the ace of diamonds), the l’AUBERGE rouge and
Ipresent story sets up a different, as yet ambiguous, association. Prior to the coeur fidele
[“Temptation” sequence, Hermann confesses that he cannot remember the name
[of the second doctor in his story; only after the murder is narrated does it
[spring unconsciously to his lips—Frederic. The sudden emergence of the name
I (as if called up by the act itself) produces another link between Taillefer and
It the past. But it already has been planted in the brief sequence that bridges
l Magnan’s temptation and the discovery of the murder. That sequence has only
i three shots: a MS of Taillefer with his hands over his face, a CU of Hermann
talking, and a HACU of the candles and fruit bowl. Here, at the precise point
| where the past crime is elided, the present story implicates the real culprit.
Yet we may not notice it, so wrapped up have we been in Magnan’s night¬
mare. Throughout the narration of Magnan’s trial and execution, the intercut
I sequences of the dinner continue to focus on Taillefer as he grows more anxious
I (and finally runs out of water); but none of the characters seem as suspicious
of him as we in the audience may be. That is delayed until the final segment
of the film.
When Hermann’s story ends, so ends the dinner (only one old man, ignor¬
ing the story, seems to have eaten anything at all), and the guests retire to
the drawing room. Victorine and her uncle walk arm in arm, followed by
Andre. Suddenly, although it has been prepared for, subjectivity is invested
in Andre.

MCU of Andre looking forward.

MCU of Victorine from behind. Dissolve
CU of her face.
MCU of a drink in her hand.
CU of a necklace circling the back of her neck.
CU of Andre’s face.

An intertitle even reveals his thoughts—“Was he going to marry the niece of

a criminal?’’ Victorine has now become suspect in his eyes, the source of her
status and wealth uncertain. Yet the subjective level of narration and the CUs
of faces and selected objects here form a curious parallel to the sequence of
Magnan’s temptation. That parallel reinforces the structural relationship that
has developed between the two men and the women they love. Andre and
Victorine’s near embrace in the film’s opening, for instance, is replicated in
Magnan and the maidservant’s embrace in the inn, just before everyone goes
to sleep. The two opposing objects of Magnan’s past desire are fused here
paradoxically in Andre’s image of Victorine with the jewels that seem to mark
her with guilt. Victorine’s position becomes even more ambiguous when she
keeps Andre from approaching her uncle but then herself asks him if he was
once in Alsace. At that point, Andre invites Taillefer to a game of cards, and
they settle down for the denouement.
The metaphorical pattern of the cards returns, but manipulated now for a
very different purpose. Andre points to Taillefer’s diamond ring—“That ring
is rather large and turns easily’’—and begins to deal. As if by magic, the three
cards that once came to Magnan now turn up for Taillefer. As he looks at the
fatal cards, Magnan’s eyes dissolve in over them, and then a shot of the old
fortuneteller is cut in. Taillefer stands up, staggers, and falls (the camera,

357
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

180. Magnan’s eyes dissolve

in over Taillefer’s card hand
at the end of L'Auberge rouge
(1923)

behind him, dollies forward and tilts down on his movement), as if, across
twenty-five years, repeating Magnan’s collapse. Instead of “consuming” Her¬
mann’s story (it seems to replace the dinner) and forgetting it, Andre engages
in an “interpretation” which he puts to use. In a sense, he reinvents the story
to reveal what was repressed and to define himself and his situation more
clearly. But the film does not allow him to determine its end, at least without
a touch of ambiguity. Victorine leans on a man’s shoulder until Andre comes
over beside her; then, in a MCU, her head shifts over to his shoulder. Is this
the embrace which was denied and delayed in the beginning? The ambiguity
is heightened by the final shot—a HACU of the fruit bowl and candles, now
burned down to nothing. Besides the story, what else has ended? What will
now begin?
At this early stage of French film history, L’Auberge rouge is quite unusual
for the way it intercuts two stories from different periods of time. The simul¬
taneous narration of separate stories was not itself unusual—Antoine’s Le Cou-
pable (1917), as well as other films by Baroncelli and Delluc, had employed
the strategy several years before. But in Epstein’s film, the two stories interact
with one another, changing the audience’s response to each; and the real enigma
of one is neatly resolved in the denouement of the other. Moreover, the dis¬
course of the film does more than set in opposition two different stories and
milieux. Its mixture of styles seems to free certain discursive elements to play
off one another in a rich variety of combinations. That play is organized or
controlled within a chain of signification, through structures of simultaneity
or alternation, to produce ambiguous patterns of rhetorical figuring. Besides,
L’Auberge rouge is interesting as an ideological construction, for the way it
juxtaposes one historical period against another. As Epstein articulates it, this
is less an historical juxtaposition—of the Bourbon Restoration versus the Rev¬
olutionary Directory—than a socioeconomic one—of a bourgeois society versus
a society of aristocrats, soldiers, and peasants (almost a pre-Revolutionary world).
The peace and prosperity of the bourgeois world rest on the wealth and power
gained from a past violent crime—against an aristocrat (is this a displaced

358
reenactment of the Revolution in miniature?). Through an act of betrayal, the L’AUBERGE rouge and
guilt for that crime is displaced and repressed. The film, therefore, seems to COEUR fidele
out-Balzac Balzac, by unmasking the violence and deceit on which the French
bourgeois society is predicated. That it ends so ambiguously may suggest
Epstein’s own uncertain attitude, or that of his contemporary society, toward
that unmasking and its consequences.

Epstein’s second film, Coeur fidele (1923), was conceived, much more than
was L'Auberge rouge, in the wake of Abel Gance’s film practice, specifically La
Roue. Gance’s film had appealed to Epstein for personal as well as formal
reasons. As a young poet and friend of Blaise Cendrars, he had visited Gance
several times during the years of its shooting and editing; and when Epstein
produced his first film, Pasteur (1922), a fictionalized documentary marking
the centenary of the famous doctor’s birth, Gance had encouraged him with
suggestions about how to handle the editing.12 Although Epstein had reser¬
vations about Gance’s work, he was enthusiastic about La Roue, especially its
rapid cutting and its creation of “the first cinematographic symbol’’—the Wheel.
“If I had not seen it,’’ he later wrote, “I undoubtedly would have conceived
. . . Coeur fidele differently.’’13 Coeur fidele also quickly became famous for its
sequences of rapid cutting and accelerating montage, as witness the carnival
sequence which was anthologized by the C.A.S.A. cine-club. This notoriety,
however, did not keep Epstein’s film from being an unmitigated commercial
failure. Its exclusive run at the Salle Marivaux was halted after just three days
because of the fights that broke out between factions in the cinema—a re¬
sponse that pleased Epstein immensely.14 Even at the Theatre du Vieux-Co-
lombier, late in 1924, the film played to fewer and fewer spectators until, on
the last night, there was just one bewildered man, on whom Tedesco and
Epstein took pity and refunded his ticket.15 To his detriment as a commercial
filmmaker, Epstein was no mere imitator. Coeur fidele not only deployed Gance’s
new editing techniques in an original manner, it synthesized most of the then
current narrative avant-garde film practice.
At the time of its release, Coeur fidele seems to have been accepted as a
realist film.16 Its story involved marginal workers, down-and-out types, in the
milieu of cheap bistros, piers, and dilapidated apartment buildings on the old
Marseille waterfront. Following the practice then standard for the genre, Ep¬
stein and his chief cameraman Paul Guichard shot much of the film on location
in Marseille in May, 1923. By doing so, he accomplished what Louis Delluc
had wanted so badly to do in Fievre. In fact, at first glance, Coeur fidele seems
to resemble Delluc’s film quite closely. It opens in a waterfront bistro with
the heroine working as a barmaid, and she is in love with a man linked with
the sea. It also quickly accumulates a sense of atmosphere, of place—“this
poetry of the waterfront and misery, this rather sordid realism’’—out of which
the narrative seems to evolve naturally.17 Together, these two films established
what became a subgenre of the so-called poetic realist film over the next fifteen
years: it would include Cavalcanti’s En rade (1927), Gremillon’s La Petite Lise
(1930), Feyder’s Le Grand Jeu (1934), Duvivier’s Pepe le moko (1936), and
Carne’s Quai des brumes (1938).18
Epstein, however, conceived of Coeur fidele as a simple melodrama, and he
confessed to a group of students at Montpelier, in January, 1924, that he had

339
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE written its scenario in a single night.19 The story is certainly simple and
extreme in its conflicts. Marie (Gina Manes) is trying to escape from her job
and also from her lover, an unemployed drunk named Paul (Van Daele); her
dream is to go off with another man, a dockworker named Jean (Leon Mathot).
The two men quarrel in the bistro where Marie works and again at a local
carnival, but Paul retains control over her. Sometime later, Marie has a baby
who falls ill. Jean and a crippled neighbor woman (Marie Epstein) try to aid
the child, but Paul, in a stupor, nearly causes its death. In a final struggle,
the crippled woman seizes Paul’s gun and shoots him dead.
Why indeed did Epstein choose to film such a banal, brutal tale? For two
reasons, he said.

First of all, to win the confidence of those, still so numerous, who believe that only
the lowest melodrama can interest the public. . . .
The second reason which decided me on this story is that, on the whole, I would
be able to conceive a melodrama so stripped of all the conventions ordinarily attached
to the genre, so sober, so simple, that it might approach the nobility and excellence
of tragedy. And in fact, by means of an insistent, studied, concentrated banality, I
have made a rather strange film that is a melodrama in appearance only.20

This sounds strangely similar to Gustave Flaubert’s position just before he

began work on Madame Bovary (1857). There, to represent contemporary life
in all its banality, ugliness, and mediocrity undistorted, he shifted his aes¬
thetic interest from what was represented to the means of representation.21 In
a famous letter to Louise Colet (16 January 1852), Flaubert wrote,

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing,
a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal
strength of its style ... a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in
which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing were possible. . . .
It is for this reason that there are no noble subjects or ignoble subjects; from the
standpoint of pure Art one might almost establish the axiom that there is no such
thing as subject—style in itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.22

For Epstein, according to Pierre Leprohon, style owed

everything to those essential features of a cinema discovered through the study of its
materials and means: the expressive value of the image through the systematic use of
CIJs, the rhythmic rapport of images through a rigorous montage, in which the
mobility of camera angles intervenes as a dynamic element, which is likewise always
orchestrated and significant.23

In other words, as Leprohon continues, in Coeur fidele, “the melodrama served

as the pretext for an experimental film.’’24 Although Epstein may not have
achieved the perfect fusion of the popular and the experimental that he so
envied in El Dorado and La Roue, Coeur fidele certainly justifies Leon Moussinac’s
designation—“a considerable . . . advance.’’25
The opening sequence of Coeur fidele is nearly as striking as that of La Roue,
but its mode is different—understated and intimate. The sequence introduces
the waterfront bistro and Marie’s position there in a series of alternating CUs
that deviate rather sharply from the conventional patterns of continuity edit¬
ing.

360
HACU of a table surface as a hand clears it of a plate and a cigarette and then wipes L'AUBERGE ROUGE AND
it with a rag. COEUR FIDELE
ECU of Marie’s face (45° angle).
MCU of a hand picking up a glass and bottle while another hand wipes the edge of
the table.
CU of Marie’s face (straight on).
MCU of wine being poured from a bottle into a glass, beside which a hand rests on
the table.
CU of Marie’s face looking down.
MS of Marie pouring wine for a man seated at the table; she corks the bottle, and he
lights a cigarette; he begins talking to her.
LS of the bistro interior: Marie and the man are at a table in the right background,
behind a couple at another table, while the edge of the bar is in the left foreground.
The bistro owner pushes Marie toward the man at the table and then exits (fore¬
ground left); his wife enters (foreground left) and shakes her head at Marie, who
comes over to the bar with a paper in her hand.

If, as Epstein wrote two years earlier, in Bonjour Cinema, “the close-up, the
keystone of the cinema, is the maximum expression of [the] photogeny of
movement ... is drama in high gear ... ,” what “drama” is already in
motion here?26 Isolated and magnified, this face, this hand, this table surface,
this bottle and glass take on unusual importance. In fragmentary images, a
world of mundane objects comes into existence (is Epstein constructing some¬
thing like the early Cubist paintings?). A hand works among these objects,
its action seemingly at their service—cleaning, rearranging them. And then
there is Marie’s face, inhabiting its own space, detached from the action but
dominated by it (her face is intercut in brief shots of fifteen, twenty, and
twenty-four frames each). What is she thinking? Or can she be thinking?
With extraordinary economy, the film presents Marie as a divided character—
her doing separate from her seeing, her body separate from her consciousness.
She is both in the world and other. Yet that otherness is circumscribed in the
editing chain of alternation (the quick cutting) and in the ever-widening space
of the frame. Her subservience to objects is redefined as subservience to the
proprietors of the bistro.
Marie’s otherness, her consciousness, quickly finds expression, however, as
she walks over to the bistro door. The following sequence of shots is decep¬
tively simple:

MCU/LS past Marie’s blurred head and door frame onto the harbor.
CU of Marie’s face (straight on) aslant in the window. Dissolve
LS of the harbor where a ship is coming forward. Dissolve
LS of a ship at dock. Dissolve
FS of smoke. Dissolve
LS of a truck coming along the dock. Dissolve
LS of a truck going off the other way. Dissolve
MS of flotsam in the harbor water. Dissolve to
CU of Marie’s face (straight on) through the window.

The alternation of the initial shots prepares us to see what Marie sees outside
the bistro, perhaps something quite different from the world she seems
trapped in. We expect, as in Fievre, a contrasting description of that harbor

361
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

181. Marie’s face (Gina

Manes) dissolves in over the
harbor flotsam in the opening
of Coeur fidele (1923)

world; yet the exterior space turns out to be no less constricting than the
interior one. Moreover, the harbor shots suggest the beginning of narrative.
The sequence of shots arouses an expectation of arrival (the ship approaching,
the ship docked, the truck approaching)—is someone coming to Marie from
the sea? But the possibility fades as the truck moves away and is replaced by
the flotsam. Finally, the dissolves seem to signal a shift to subjective fantasy,
and the first dissolve suggests that the harbor world also functions as a corol¬
lary to her consciousness, as an expression of desire. Instead of a fantasy of
escape (connoted by the ships), however, we infer from these images that her
mind is so resigned, so paralyzed by her environment, that she can imagine
nothing other. The possibility of escape turns into residue, waste—the image
of flotsam superimposed briefly over her expressionless face. In the final shot,
as Marie seems to awaken and look directly at the camera, we are both iden¬
tified with her and separate, bound up in an ambiguous conjunction of “the
objective and the subjective.’’
The narrative that seemed on the verge of development erupts in the next
sequence. After the CU of Marie’s face at the window, as if by magic, comes
a FS of Paul (from Marie’s POV) walking directly toward the bistro door.
Instead of someone who might free her, take her away, the harbor world
produces the major character who will oppress her. The sequence alternates
shots of Marie backing away into the bistro interior and of Paul coming through
the door and advancing on her (in 180° shot/reverse shots). Once again she is
circumscribed within the bistro world. Rhyming with the opening shots of
the film, the sequence closes off, ironically, with CUs of Paul’s arm across
Marie’s back and finally of his fist on the bar top. Much like Fievre and La
Souriante Madame Beudet, Coeur fidele succinctly defines its heroine’s position in
society.
Only in the second major segment of the film is Marie offered any kind of
alternative to her life with Paul in the bistro. Here, as toward the end of
L'Auberge rouge, the focus is on a doubled conjunction of “the objective and

362
I he subjective,” but with some important differences. Excusing herself to get L’Mjberge rouge and
■more wine, Marie leaves the bistro to meet Jean on one of the harbor quays. coeur fidele
IDn the way there, she stops on a bridge to fix her hair, looking at her reflec-
l:ion in a scarred fragment of mirror (an echo of La Roue). Dissolves link the
l our shots of this brief sequence, underscoring its subjective nature. And the
[ECU of her roughened mirror image isolates and magnifies her eyes, empha-
|sizing her desire, in rhyming contrast to the earlier CU of her “dead” face
I superimposed with flotsam. When she and Jean finally embrace on the harbor
[rocks, their shared emotional state is briefly suspended in time and space.
[Particular elements of the discourse come to the fore—long lap dissolves,
psuperimpositions, slow wipes, white iris fades, reversed camera angles, and
graphic textures (of the calm, open sea surface). Instead of enacting a transfer
or exchange, this moment of communion is transformed into a “plastic com-
bposition” that almost floats free of the narrative. Soon after, when Jean is left
.alone by the sea, multiple images of Marie perform a hypnotic “stream-of-
xonsciousness” ballet. Marie’s face drifts slowly back and forth, dissolving in
and out, over the surface of the water, which alternately seems to support and
suppress her image. Here, too, the sea, it seems, carries a paradoxical charge.27
Just as in La Roue, the set pieces of rapid cutting in Coeur fidele never
function in exactly the same way. Besides the celebrated carnival segment,
there are several other sequences that rely heavily on this technique. One
depicts the initial confrontation between the two men when Jean follows Marie
back to the bistro only to find himself facing Paul and three of his friends.
The confrontation is presented entirely in CUs of faces (including Marie and
the proprietor) and hands/fists. Instead of using an accelerating montage to
build suspense, Epstein produces a fairly regular pattern of longer and shorter
shots (3:1 or 4:1) but shifts their reference.28 The sequence begins with several
alternating shots of Paul and Jean (of nearly equal length), then shortens the
shots of Jean (to four to ten frames each), and alternates them with shots of
the other characters (twenty-two to twenty-five frames each). The effect is
similar to the film’s opening shots, subordinating Jean to a numerically su¬
perior force. Suddenly the shorter shots shift reference to Paul and his friends
and alternate with longer shots of their hands and fists.29 Only now does the
rhythm of alternation break and signal the climax:

CU of a hand going into a pocket (twenty-three frames).

ECU of Marie, her hand to her mouth (twenty-one frames).
CU of a fist (twelve frames).
ECU of a fist (twelve frames).
ECU of Marie (twenty-seven frames).
FS of the group, looking past Paul to Jean, who moves slightly forward, speaks
to Paul, and walks off into the background.

The threat of violence dissipates, for the moment, but not before its target
has shifted from Jean to Marie. In a way, then, the sequence repeats Paul’s
initial attack on Marie; it is she, not Jean, who remains trapped in the bistro.
The carnival segment, which concludes the first half of the film, is more
sustained and much more complex in its operation. So unusual was it, in fact,
that it, more than any other sequence, provoked uncomprehending boos from
the audience at the Salle Marivaux.30 The germ of its conception can be traced

363
 to a passage in Bonjour Cinema'. “I long for a drama about a merry-go-round
or, more modern yet, with airplanes. The carnival below and its surroundings
would be progressively confounded. Centrifuged in this way, and adding ver¬
tigo and rotation to it, the tragedy would increase its photogenic quality
tenfold.”31
The segment begins as an alternation between Paul forcing Marie up the
road to the carnival and Jean asking a drunken old woman at the bistro where
they have gone. This basic alternation between the couple and Jean continues
throughout the segment until Jean also reaches the carnival, when the two
sequences merge into one. The carnival itself is introduced in a series of rapidly
cut shots (with a general rhythm of 2:1).

CU of a mechanical organ music card looping upward (forty frames).

MCU of a merry-go-round horse head moving against a blurred background (thirty
frames).
FS of the merry-go-round circling (forty-eight frames).
FS of the merry-go-round ceiling circling (twenty-three frames).
CU of the music card looping downward (twenty-two frames).
FS of a swing set whirling (forty-eight frames).

Once the atmosphere and general rhythm of the carnival are established, CUs
of Marie and Paul are cut in, and a LS finally situates them in front of the
airplane ride. Paul tries to persuade Marie to go on the ride—in the midst of
LAFSs of the circling planes, HALSs of the carnival crowd, and CUs of objects
and parts of the carnival decor in motion. This pattern of editing parallels
that of the film’s opening, and its function is similar. It clearly places the
actions and desires of the characters within the multiple rhythms of a larger
design. This initial sequence is complicated, however, by the fact that it is
framed by blurred shots of the old woman laughing. Presented as her narra¬
tion, apparently, the motion of the carnival takes on the connotations of a
drunken frenzy. The couple’s experience is submerged in what Rene Clair has
described as a “beautiful visual intoxication, an emotional dance in space.”32
As with the symbol of the wheel in La Roue, however, the syntactical design
governing this vertiginous dance has ominous implications. The continual
circling movement of the planes, the often-repeated shots, the mechanically
produced “sound”—all set up a regularized, almost machinelike rhythm that
is sustained through numerous variations. One such variation, foreshadowing
Renoir’s La Regie du jeu (1939), is a sequence of CUs and ECUs of tiny carved
musicians on a calliope. It is followed by shots of the circling planes and then
Marie and Paul seated in one, its streamers blowing in the wind. The two
characters react quite differently to the carnival’s pleasure machines. While
Paul expresses interest and delight in almost everything, Marie is expression¬
less, withdrawn, even sullen. Their opposing attitudes and behavior suggest
that the carnival is a metaphorical extension of the bistro world and a sharp
contrast (especially the plane as it slashes through a glittering confettilike
stream of people on the ground) to the seascapes that once joined Jean and
Marie. Gradually, as the segment progresses, the carnival turns into a me¬
182. A strip of film from the chanical amusement prison.
carnival sequence in Coeur While the couple is confined in the circling plane, the cutting begins to
fidele (1923) accelerate—to shots of six, seven, and eight frames each—simulating the in-

364
creasing speed of the ride. Suddenly Paul tries to kiss Marie, but all we see L’AUBERGE rouge and
are quick swish pans of the ground, of the plane ride’s central support pole, coeur fidele
of the merry-go-round. The double function of the segment intensifies, goad¬
ing Paul on and impinging more and more on Marie. Just before Jean reaches
the carnival, the shots of Paul and Marie tilt at a 30° angle, and the cutting
accelerates again—to four-frame and finally two-frame shots. In the midst of
this barrage, Paul finally kisses Marie; and the segment pauses ironically on a
sign of their union—a CU of a baker’s hand spelling “Amour” on a pig-shaped
pastry. At that moment, Jean appears near the merry-go-round. Now, not
two, but three separate characters—two of them paired (one against her will)—
are encompassed within the intoxicating dance of the carnival. The cutting
shifts into an erratic rhythm of irregular shot lengths and threatens to disin¬
tegrate—until the plane ride slows and Paul and Marie descend (in a marvel¬
ous long-take track). Jean finally recognizes Marie from a distance, and there
is a final burst of rapid cutting:

MCU of Jean yelling.

CU of Jean yelling (thirty frames).
CU of the music card looping downward (nine frames).
LAFS of the circling planes (twelve frames).
CU of the drum (fifteen frames).
CU of the face of the mechanical organ (fifteen frames).
FS of the swing set whirling (ten frames).

At the moment of their anticipated reunion, the mechanical movements and

“sounds” of the carnival erupt as a substitution, a quick suppression. And
with that last burst of drunken frenzy (echoing the first carnival images), the
segment closes off. In effect, the centrifugal montage of the carnival has ac¬
tually enforced the conjunction of one couple at the expense of the other.
Nothing has changed.
The final sequence of Coeur Fidele seems to recapitulate the editing patterns
that concluded the carnival segment, but with Jean and Marie now reunited.
Yet several unusual juxtapositions and ellipses make the “happy ending” a bit
unsettling. The final image of Paul, for instance, is a horrible CU of his dead
face lying in the crib beside the sick child.33 This is followed by a night shot
of a fountain brightly spotlit and then by a MS of Jean and Marie in the same
plane ride at the carnival. Marie smiles for almost the first time in the film,
but now Jean is curiously expressionless. The last image of the crippled neigh¬
bor woman is a FS, as she cradles Marie’s child on the apartment stairs. Cut
into the shots of Marie and Jean on the plane ride, its significance is puzzling
(How has she escaped punishment? Has she taken the child permanently or
just for the day?). The sequence ends with a barrage of technical effects—a LS
of fireworks bursting over the carnival crowd, superimposed faintly with drift¬
ing flowers; a kaleidoscope image of a superimposed pair of eyes dissolving in
and out; a CU of Marie and Jean with “forever” superimposed across their
faces, which dissolves out, leaving the word alone (an echo of El Dorado).
Because of the questions and associations that precede it, this conclusion is
not entirely persuasive.
The parallel between the conclusion of the carnival segment and the final
sequence of Coeur Fidele caps a whole range of paradigmatic relations that point

365
183. (left) Marie is kissed by
Paul (Van Daele) on the
airplane ride in the carnival
sequence

184. (right) The crippled

woman (Marie Epstein) and
Paul (Leon Mathot) on the
apartment building stairs near
the end of Coeur fidele (1923)

to the doubled nature of the film’s narrative structure. Like La Roue, in fact,
V

Epstein’s film divides rather neatly into two equal parts. Accorded different
spaces (bistro, quay, carnival/bistro, street, apartment), each part works several
variations on the melodrama conflict indigenous to the love triangle plot.
Indeed, the second half of the film seems to begin all over again, at least a
year later. The first part limits itself almost entirely to the three central char¬
acters, focusing on Marie’s entrapment and desire to escape. It develops a
number of patterns of simultaneity and rhetorical figuring, articulating the
inner life of the individual within the context of an oppressively determined
social world. The second part introduces several more characters—the sick
child to burden Marie (almost as a metaphorical extension of her relationship
with Paul) and two different women to aid/hinder the opposing male charac¬
ters. If anything, it focuses more now on Paul and Jean, giving a greater
degree of subjectivity, strangely enough, to Paul—is Epstein trying, unsuc¬
cessfully, to humanize his villain? The patterns of simultaneity, subjectivity,
and rhetorical figuring seem diminished and less complex in this second half;
and the melodramatic conflict between the characters is much more pro¬
nounced and drawn out.34
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the film’s climax and resolution is
that the villain is destroyed (with his own gun), not by the hero, but by the
crippled woman. The internal division that had marked Marie’s character from
the beginning now seems redistributed in these two women. It is as if all of
her suffering were projected onto the crippled woman, who then assumes all
the guilt of revenge—of the oppressed against the oppressor, of woman against
man. Through this schematic displacement, Marie is free to be positioned in
the fiction of the romantic couple. The schematic division, along with the
disturbing resonances, makes Coeur Fidele seem to waver at the end, question¬
ing, much like L’Auberge rouge, the certainty of that romance.

366
 A very different film made in the wake of La Roue was Ivan Mosjoukine’s Le Brasier ardent
Le Brasier ardent (1923). In the Russian emigre film colony in Paris, Mosjou- and ha Fille de Beau
kine was a versatile figure, writing scenarios and performing as an actor—and
rapidly becoming a major French star. When Films Ermolieff was reorganized
as Films Albatros, Mosjoukine convinced Alexandre Kamenka to let him direct
a scenario of his own as one of the company’s first productions. The result was
Le Brasier ardent, his only major work as a film director, which opened at the
Salle Marivaux, in August, 1923.1 Perhaps the rough, uneven quality of the
film, together with its bizarre plot and tonal shifts, antagonized cinema au¬
diences, for it was a quick commercial failure. Yet Mosjoukine’s work in¬
trigued French critics and cinephiles, who puzzled over exactly what kind of
complicated concoction they had before them. Jean Renoir, for one, was ab¬
solutely dazzled by it.

One day at the Colisee cinema, I saw Le Brasier ardent, directed and acted in by
Ivan Mosjoukine and produced by the courageous Alexandre Kamenka of Albatros
Films. The audience howled and whistled, shocked by a film so different from their
usual fodder. I was ecstatic. Finally, I had before me a good French film.2

Ricciotto Canudo found the film as “stunning as the first ballets of Dia-
ghilev. ”3
Mosjoukine’s original scenario for Le Brasier ardent may seem slapdash and
wildly inconsistent, a recipe of oddly contradictory ingredients that do not
really blend. But it was written, in part, as a vehicle for his own mercurial
presence as an actor. His penchant for eccentric fantasy and comedy made him
a Protean master of disguise, a synthesis of character types. Here is a brief
synopsis.4 A woman, named simple “Elle’’ (Nathalie Lissenko), and her hus¬
band, a wealthy industrialist (Nicholas Koline), are not on the best of terms.
While she enjoys the way he caters to her every whim, she wonders whether
he really loves her. He, on the other hand, torments himself by imagining
rivals. One morning she awakens from a nightmare in which she has been
pursued by a man in various guises (Mosjoukine), who turns out to be the
famous Detective Z, whose memoirs she has been reading. When she and her
husband quarrel over leaving Paris permanently for a country estate, he goes
to the “Trouve Tout’’ Agency and hires, of all people, Detective Z, to win
back her affection. She promptly steals their marriage contract. Z tracks down
the document and is nearly seduced in the process, but he resists her and
returns to the comforts of home, his adoring mother, and a pet bulldog. In a
chic restaurant one evening, she challenges him to a dancing duel, which he
wins. After her confession of love, he goes home with a toothache. The con¬
tract is returned, the married couple plan to go away on a trip—all is ending
as it should. Suddenly, she runs off to Z’s home where his mother accepts her
and Z himself jumps for joy. The husband, meanwhile, sails off alone, relish¬
ing his freedom. Not the “usual fodder,’’ indeed.
Among French films of the 1920s, Le Brasier ardent certainly has the most
extravagant mixture of styles or modes prior to Marcel L’Herbier’s L’lnhumaine
(1924). That is due, in part, to Mosjoukine’s performance as nearly a dozen
different characters. In the opening nightmare alone, he plays a heretic burn¬
ing at the stake, an elegant gentleman, a bishop, and a beggar. In the rest of
the film, he shifts among a series of contradictory personae—a brilliant detec-

367
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE tive, a silly buffoon, a cruel dancing master, a shy lover, and a mama’s boy.
The decors, designed by Lochakoff (assisted by Schildknecht and Bilinsky),
also change radically to complement these and other character shifts. The
nightmare city is transformed in a simple cut from a realistic space into a
Caligan-style street. The woman’s bedroom looks like a Mack Sennett set—a
small makeup table descends from the ceiling to rest in front of her, breakfast
trays pop out of the walls on either side of the bed, a circular dish of puppies
is carried in by the maid, and her husband is stashed conveniently behind a
Leonardo da Vinci portrait. The detective agency, which the husband literally
falls into, is a labyrinth of revolving doors, conveyer-belt corridors, and rooms,
one of which, the chamber of ‘‘Missing spouses,’’ metamorphoses along with
its disguised detectives (who materialize as twelve informed psychologists!).
The restaurant interior, on the other hand, is a stark, sober prototype of the
dancing decors of the modern studio spectacle films. No wonder critics like
Leon Moussinac could not figure out what to call this film—‘‘a dramatic com¬
edy? a fantasy? a fantastic comedy?”5 Jean Tedesco even dubbed it a ‘‘psycho¬
logical dream.”6 Now, perhaps, it is much easier to read Le Brasier ardent as
a conscious synthesis of current French, American, and German films as well
as a send-up of several major French film genres—the serial, bourgeois melo¬
drama, and fantasy.
In some ways, Mosjoukine’s film operates conventionally enough. It is heav¬
ily titled, so that words produce much of the narrative. Like Crainquebille
(1923), it has few subjective sequences, and, with only a couple of exceptions,
these are uncomplicated and rather awkwardly inserted in the narrative. Also,
like Crainquebille, but in reverse, it integrates several documentary-style se¬
quences uncertainly into its predominant fantasy. Although the narrative is
hardly predicated on a logic of causal relations, it is largely sequential; those
instances of simultaneity simply propel the narrative forward, alternating two
actions in different spaces. However, the film does develop several structural
relations (semantic and syntactic rather than rhetorical) which give its discon¬
tinuous discourse some degree of unity.
There are at least two segments of the film which are strikingly original in
conception and execution. One is a short subjective sequence, the morning
after the nightmare, in which the woman remembers (in intertitle) ‘‘her tragic
past and the first sight of her future husband.” She is a young peasant woman
being attacked by a man in a small fishing boat. Her husband-to-be is taking
photographs with a camera in a boat nearby, and he rescues her when she
leaps overboard. In just five shots, separated by fades, the sequence narrates
their meeting and marriage—a MS of them inside a carriage as they embrace
and look fondly at one another, a FS of her in the midst of a half-dozen women
tailoring an outfit to suit her, a FS of her answering the questions of two
teachers at opposite ends of a desk, a MCU of the couple kissing after they
have exchanged wedding vows, and a FS/LS of them standing before the Place
de la Concorde in Paris. What makes this sequence particularly interesting is
the way it is framed. The woman is looking at photograph negatives in bed,
and the sequence begins with a negative image of her and a man in the fishing
boat. The still negative turns into a moving negative image of them fighting
which then dissolves into a positive image. The sequence ends by reversing
the process. A MCU/LS of her standing alone before the Place de la Concorde

368
 ountain turns into a negative image, and then that image freezes into a still LE BRASIER ARDENT
I negative. Here is a rags-to-riches story, summed up in two simple images, AND LA FILLE
[whose unreality calls attention to its fictional nature. The discourse is highly DE LEAD
[reflexive here, a point which is underscored by the presence of the husband’s
[camera within the diegesis of the past story.7
The other segment is much more sustained and establishes several major
[structural patterns for the whole film. This is the opening nightmare sequence,
I which is as stunning, in its way, as the initial train wreck in La Roue and
[which looks forward to the murder sequence that opens Dmitri Kirsanoffs
YMenilmontant (1926). After a FS of a darkened room (a veil covers a lamp in
the right center background), where a woman lies writhing in bed, an inter¬
title announces, ‘‘The woman tries vainly to escape the grip of a frightening
nightmare.” Although the intertitle directs our expectation, it scarcely pre-
j pares us for the barrage of rapid cutting and bold lighting contrasts that
Mosjoukine and his cameraman, J.-P. Mundviller, fire at us. At first, the
sequence alternates shots of glaring eyes (masked by darkness), then it shifts
to CUs of Mosjoukine’s savage face (staring slightly toward the right fore¬
ground) and Lissenko’s face (looking slightly toward the left foreground) in a
flickering light. Finally, there is a FS establishing the implied space: Mosjou-
kine naked to the waist and tied to a stake (frame left) in the middle of a
blazing fire, Lissenko standing in a diaphanous white dress (frame right), and
Koline—also naked to the waist—crouched (frame center, in the background),
blowing on the flames. Again the faces alternate; Lissenko glances down al¬
most in fascination, and there is a cut to a MS of the flames licking up to
Mosjoukine’s feet. His hands reach across the smoke (in MCU); more shots of
their faces are intercut, and then (in MCU), their hands touch. Suddenly, she
screams and (in MCU) puts her hands to her head, and each of Mosjoukine’s
hands (in MCU) grips a strand of her hair. The sequence integrates more and
more shots with the previous ones and accelerates in rhythm—to shots of a
half-second to a second each. There are MSs of his hands gripping her hair as
she flails about wildly, MCUs of her feet near the flame, MCUs of Koline
puffing excitedly, FSs of the threesome as Lissenko is drawn toward Mosjou¬
kine and the flames. Suddenly (in MCU), her hair breaks in his hands, and
she escapes (in FS) and runs off in a halo of top back lighting.
The rest of the nightmare sequence works a number of variations on this
initial encounter, but without the rapid cutting. As Lissenko (now dressed in
black) wanders a city street at night, she sees two prostitutes in the company
of men. In one instance, the CU of a man’s hazy profile is followed by a MCU
of the prostitute’s leg as a cane unrolls her stocking. In the other, a woman
leaves a fat gentleman in a taxi, and then (in consecutive MCUs) her hand
reaches toward his jewel-encrusted fingers resting on a cane—and he passes
her a wad of francs. As Lissenko passes a beggar (Koline) near a flight of stairs,
he seizes the dark veil from her neck. Running off through a stark, unpeopled
street, she comes face to face with a blank wall; and Mosjoukine approaches
her out of the darkness as a coldly staring gentleman in top hat and tails. The
wall opens in a zigzag slash and she squirms through into the light, then
under a heavy curtain, and finds herself in an opium den (a HACU of a hand
lighting an opium pipe) among a group of scantily clad women lounging
about some low tables. The curtain now bursts into flames at the bottom and

369
185. (left to right) Ivan
Mosjoukine as the burning
heretic in the opening
sequence of Le Braster ardent
(1923); Nathalie Lissenko wipes upward, revealing Mosjoukine (in FS) on a slightly raised stage. The
stares at Mosjoukine (off);
women—young and old, European, African, and Oriental—crawl toward him,
Mosjoukine reaches down
from the burning stake (left)
but he passes through them and stands over Lissenko. As he leans down to
to pull Lissenko’s hair as kiss her (in MCU), the women form a semicircle (in FS) before them. Suddenly
Nicolas Koline (right (in FS), Lissenko comes out of a doorway and walks forward in the darkness,
background) blows on the now cloaked in black. Just as suddenly, she is in a cathedral (in ELS) as the
flames; Lissenko’s feet are
bishop (Mosjoukine) and his attendants turn from the altar to face the sup¬
drawn toward the flames;
Lissenko escapes and runs off
pliants. Her face is intercut with the bishop’s and she lifts her veil (in MCU)
over a rocky landscape to kiss his outstretched hand. He blesses her and orders her out into the foyer,
where (in LS) a beggar (Mosjoukine again) accosts her. He asks her for love,
not money (in MS), and when she rejects him, he stabs himself in the heart.
In horror, she faints (in LS) and falls into the arms of the first beggar (Koline).
Dissolve to Lissenko alone writhing in the same position in her bed.
Although this marvelous nightmare is immediately explained as a harmless
fantasy, the explanation proves illusory. The woman looks about her and con¬
cludes that she has simply transformed several objects in her room: a heavy
curtain before the window with light slitting the middle and edging the
bottom, a statuette of a savage squatting before an incense cup, Detective Z’s
memoirs that contain photographs of him in several disguises. The nightmare
sequence, however, is no rude shock which is quickly over and forgotten. Z
does appear in the body of the film, and he does pursue her, for one purpose,
while she pursues him, for another. In fact, the nightmare sketches out in
paradigm what will occur at certain moments later in the real story. It pro¬
vides a rough structure of actions and relations for the narrative that follows.
For instance, the husband’s appearance in the detective agency replicates, in
part, the sequence in the opium den. Here the husband undergoes a kind of
assault—he is tossed about by masked men in black tights, his head is stuffed
through windows where he sees a myriad of eyes and ears in the darkness
(through multiple exposure) as well as a diagonal line of hands poised over
typewriters. Mosjoukine appears, not as the master of a harem of women, but

370
as the best of a dozen detectives. Because of the nightmare, the husband’s
choice of him as the pursuer is ironically portentious. The dancing duel in the
restaurant, in a different way, also replicates the opium den sequence. Here
the woman’s dancing arouses the men’s desire, reversing the relation between
Mosjoukine and his den of women. Z challenges her power by organizing a
competition among the restaurant women—3,000 francs for the one who can
outlast the others. As he plays the piano, accelerating the rhythm, the speed
of the dancers increases—in fast motion shots and rapid cutting (although the
rhythm of the editing is a bit rough). When the last dancer collapses, Z has
to save the woman from an attack by the crowd of men. Finally, in the
sequence where Z discovers the marriage contract hidden under the woman’s
bed (where else?), several actions and images are repeated from the stake¬
burning and city street sequences. When the woman sees his legs sticking out
from under the bed, she takes a cane and begins whipping him, reversing the
provocative act in the nightmare. Instead of hands struggling over flames and
strands of hair, here, ironically, they struggle over a briefcase containing the
contract.
The main function of the nightmare—“positioned structurally in the film
much like the thematic prelude to a symphony,’’ as Canudo says8—is to es¬
tablish a nexus of semantic relations for the narrative to play with. It is an
explicitly sexual fantasy, articulating both the fascination for and fear of sexual
desire, a fable of eruption and suppression. Whether she abandons herself to
desire (at the stake-burning, on the street, or in an opium den) or seeks
atonement in the church (is this a typical Catholic story?), it positions the
woman as the threatened object of man’s desire and power. The real story of
the narrative seems to reverse this relation between the sexes. The woman
lords it over her husband. She arouses desire in the detective, which he tries
vainly to suppress. Yet her power is tenuous, illusory. It is her husband who
is the source of money and social status (she was just a peasant fisherwoman).
It is he who possesses the law and who is its subject (e.g., the marriage

371
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

186. Mosjoukine confronts

Lissenko before the zig-zag
slash door in the Caligari-
style street in the opening
sequence of Le Brasier ardent
(1923)

contract that she steals). And it is the detective whose money bests her in the
dancing duel. Thus, the film narrates her oscillation between two conditions,
as a wife and a free woman, neither of which is much different from the other.
Eventually, however, her story is subordinated to the detective’s. She will
end up serving one man or another. Whereas the nightmare defined Z as a
figure of daemonic power, in reality he is a sexual naif. His encounters with
the woman are fraught with suppression and evasion. The horror of the night¬
mare turns to comedy—the whipping, the guilty return of the briefcase, his
boyish mannerisms, his toothache (which the bulldog shares), his love for
mother. Only indirectly can he exercise power over the woman. In the restau¬
rant, his money controls the dancers, and his detective’s revolver protects (but
does not threaten) her. For him, the ending is a comic resolution to an ap¬
parently long-delayed Oedipal crisis. He is asleep beside his mother on the
couch when the woman arrives. Quietly, one woman simply replaces the other.
Awakening, Z leaps about in a frenzy of delight, overjoyed to discover that
he can have both mother and lover at the same time. The new relationship is
summed up in the last bit of mockery. Before the final kiss, the woman takes
her coat off and coyly buttons up his jacket to the neck. What did the Sur¬
realists think of this outrageous parody of l’amour foul
Le Brasier ardent may begin in the cauldron of savage passion, but it ends
on the couch of domestic inhibition and motherly love. So much for scorching
fires. A woman’s nightmare has been transformed into a man’s fantasy. Trag¬
edy has been turned into comedy. If the resolution seems contrived and un¬
convincing, the point seems deliberate. For there is one short sequence left—

372
 he husband sailing off on his cruise. On deck he notices a woman alone at LE BRAS1ER ARDENT
he rail. As he sidles closer to her, the boat whistle sounds (as if in alarm); he AND LA FILLE
ooks up and sees a life preserver emblazoned with libertL (and the sign of DE L’EAU
:he C.G.T.). In a FS/LS, he walks quickly off down the deck, and the woman
it the rail turns to the camera and laughs. Who indeed has the last laugh?
This is not a film that resolves its conflicts smoothly or that closes off by
asking its contradictions. Just the opposite—they are all left dangling openly
it the end.

To hear Jean Renoir tell it, La Lille de lean (1925) was the offspring of a
oizarre coupling, in the summer of 1924, between his young wife, Catherine
Hessling, and the forest of Fountainebleau.9 At times in the film, Renoir
seems to have been working in the shadow of his famous father, Pierre Auguste
Renoir. Catherine had been the painter’s last model, and Renoir admits that
his initial interest was to explore, with his cameraman Jean Bachelet, “the
plastic qualities” of her face and figure. The locations chosen for the exterior
shooting, on Cezanne’s old estate at Marlotte (where Jean had a house) and
along the river Loing near Montigny, also echoed some of his father’s paint¬
ings. Yet Renoir’s cinematic interests really lay elsewhere.
The scenario for La Lille de Leau was an original one, written in collabora¬
tion with his friend, Pierre Lestringuez. It was a slapdash affair, much like Le
Brasier ardent, concocted from fairy tales, American serials and comedies, French
melodramas and realist films.10 When her father, a canal bargeman, drowns
accidentally, Virginia (Catherine Hessling) comes under the brutal care of her
Uncle Jeff (Pierre Philippe, alias Lestringuez) who soon drinks away what little
inheritance there is, including the barge. After he tries to rape her one morn¬
ing, she runs off and joins a young poacher, nicknamed “The Ferret” (Maurice
Touze), who undertakes her education and brings her to live with his mother
in a gypsy encampment. One day they antagonize a wealthy farmer, Justin
Crepoix (Pierre Campagne)* and are protected by Georges Raynal (Harold
Livingston), the college-educated son of an eccentric landowner in the neigh¬
borhood (he has a passion for motor cars). The conflict flares up again, how-
i ever, until one night the local farmers burn the gypsy wagons. Virginia es¬
capes, only to fall into a quarry, where Georges finds her and takes her to a
miller’s cottage to convalesce. Later, Jeff turns up and demands money from
her, which she is forced to steal from her benefactor. Georges overhears her
arguing with Jeff, leaps over a wall to do battle, and throws him into the
river. Since the family is being sent to Algeria, for business reasons, he asks
Virginia to join them.
According to Renoir and Lestringuez, this nonsensical story was of little
importance. “It was no more than a pretext for shots of a purely visual value.”11
At the time, Renoir considered himself quite an courant in his conception of
film art. Later, he would change his position radically, but the change would
not affect his perception of La Lille de Leau. If the film was of interest at all,
it was only for his fascination with certain technical effects—besides what he
learned from its production about filmmaking. Although the results of this
fascination do indeed place La Lille de Leau in the context of the narrative
avant-garde film practice, they are not the only elements of the film that do
so.

373
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

187. Catherine Hessling and

Harold Livingston in La Lille
de I’eau (1925)

La Lille de Leau was released just as Jean Epstein was announcing that
certain “strategies of cinematic expression’’ were becoming cliched, that is,
part of conventional French film practice.12 One of these techniques was rapid
montage, which was now appearing in such commercial films as Volkoffs Kean
(1924) and Epstein’s own Le Lion des Mogols (1924). Renoir was obviously
fascinated by it, for La Lille de Lean contains two sequences of rapid montage
clearly derived from Gance’s La Roue, Mosjoukine’s Le Brasier ardent, and Ep¬
stein’s La Belle Nivernaise (1924).13 Neither mark an advance in the function
of the technique, but they work effectively enough. The first is used to de¬
scribe Jeffs attack on Virginia in the cabin of the barge. That montage gets
down to six to eight frames per shot at one point and includes CUs of Jeff
and Virginia, high angle shots of her crying for help at a window, and inter¬
spersed shots of a barking dog tied on deck as well as of a clock alarm going
off. If this sequence is chiefly omniscient in its narration, incorporating a
number of separate actions simultaneously, the second is completely subjec¬
tive. In a state of shock after her fall into the quarry, Virginia hallucinates
back to the attack on the gypsy camp. Shots of a wagon burning (from differ¬
ent distances and angles) alternate rapidly with shots of Crepoix and the other
farmers (who seem to loom out of the darkness and flames) and of her own
face in a wagon window.14 The alternation changes very little in rhythm or
choice of shots, however; and the sequence simply ends with Virginia stum¬
bling off, her hair flaring out in a daemonic halo.
Certain in-camera optical effects apparently enchanted Renoir even more
than did rapid montage.15 He was especially taken with various kinds of mul¬
tiple exposure and slow motion shots. In the parody of a heroic battle at the
end, for instance, Georges is nearly knocked unconscious (rendered in several

374
 188. (left) Catherine Hessling
asleep at the beginning of the
dream sequence in La Lille de
I'eau (1925)

out-of-focus shots and double exposures) before he tosses Jeff into the river. 189- (right) Catherine
The major display of these techniques, however, comes in Virginia’s fantasy Hessling falls through the sky
at the end of the dream
the night after she falls into the quarry. Much like the nightmare that opens
sequence
Le Brasier ardent, this fantasy undergoes a series of startling ruptures and trans¬
formations. Their effect is to turn it into an overtly sexual version of Alice in
Wonderland.
At the beginning, against the trunk of a large tree, Virginia is asleep in
the rain, dressed mysteriously in a diaphanous gown whose overexposed white¬
ness contrasts sharply with the darkness around her. In superimposition, she
rises to discover Jeff suspended from a rope in the tree. Suddenly he is alive
beside her, the noose becomes a snake coiled around his neck, and she backs
away in slow motion. Now the fantasy begins again with her double image
leaping backwards onto a tree limb (in reverse slow motion) where Jeff and
Crepoix dissolve in menacingly beside her. When Crepoix slowly swings under
the limb like an animal, Virginia leaps down and bounds off. A series of
dissolves takes her through a landscape of rocks and bare stunted trees to a
large hall with huge phallic pillars lying about on their sides. The two men
reappear, along with a lumbering dragon (a magnified chameleon with ab¬
surdly tiny wings) that crawls among the pillars. Seemingly pursued by mon¬
strous beasts threatening rape, Virginia runs toward a wall opening, and sev¬
eral handheld tracking shots heighten her desperate flight. Suddenly back at
the tree, the fantasy resumes for a third and last time as Georges appears
astride a galloping white horse with Virginia beside him. Through a series of
slow-motion tracking shots (actually 360° pans within a black cylindrical set
at Gaumont studios),16 supered over silhouetted trees and clouds, the pair race
off into the heavens. The threatened rape turns into an ecstatic seduction.
There, Virginia slips off the horse and falls gently through the air, the veil of
her white gown billowing about her. Dissolve to the figure by the tree and
fade out. It was this magical, almost surrealistic sequence which, one week in
1925, Jean Tedesco screened at the Vieux-Colombier in a program of extracts
from recent French films. The night Renoir and Catherine Hessling attended,

375
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE the audience was so enthusiastic that the piano accompaniment was eventually
drowned out by their applause. “For the first time,’’ wrote Renoir later, “I
experienced the intoxication of success.’’17
There is more to La Fille de lean than these set pieces of technique, how¬
ever. Despite Renoir’s disclaimer, its narrative construction is interesting and
bears some similarity to that of other narrative avant-garde films. There are
crucial moments of ellipsis, for instance, as in Epstein’s films. The death of
Virginia’s father occurs in a LS of the barge (we can barely see someone fall)
and a shot of a splash, some bubbles, then stillness on the water. The theft
of Georges’s money is described in a single shot (marked off by fades)—a CU
of Virginia’s hand passing francs to Jeff s, seen against a dusty road surface
crisscrossed by the shadows of tree limbs. There are also segments organized
in alternating sequences. The most surprising of these occurs in the beginning
of the film as, first, Virginia’s “family’’ and, then, the Raynals are introduced.
When Georges and his father appear alongside the canal, we expect the alter¬
nation to bring them together. But it doesn’t. That is delayed until almost
midway through the film, and the alternation instead juxtaposes two classes,
two ways of life. Both are treated somewhat comically: the megaphone Vir¬
ginia uses to talk with her father while she cooks leaves a black circle around
her mouth (Hessling’s spunkiness here reminds one of Mary Pickford);
M. Raynal trundles his car off in a cloud of smoke to search for botanical speci¬
mens along the canal. The alternation suddenly turns tragic and mocking
when Virginia’s father drowns. At the precise moment that happens, Georges
is taking a photograph of the canal with a box camera. Because of the juxta¬
position, his ignorance of the accident becomes metaphorical—a stigma of
blind complacency attaches to him and his class. Since Renoir’s own socio¬
economic position was much like Georges’s at the time, the sequence looks
like a very conscious attempt to separate his own personal vision from that of
his fictional character.
La Fille de lean also shares with several other narrative avant-garde films an
eclectic combination of film styles or modes. Like Le Brasier ardent, it leaps
and oscillates from one extreme to another. Documentary-style realism is jux¬
taposed to comic caricature; bourgeois melodrama to wild flights of fantasy.
An early reviewer called special attention to these shifts:

. . . the alternating cadence of its tableaux, where the limpid freshness of the streams
and canals is opposed to visions of nocturnal horror in which the water is no longer
the mirror of a clear sky but the somber shroud of the drowned, where the calm
existence of a little provincial village contrasts with the ravings of a mob drunk on
vengeance, where the feverish sleep of a child turns into a whirling nightmare that
ends in a fantastic horseback ride through a stormy sky and over the twisted tops of
blackened trees. . . ,18

These stylistic oscillations all seem determined by a particular axis of opposi¬

tion: a surface texture of social harmony or natural beauty that masks conflict¬
ing forces and the threat of violence. The forces continually disrupting the
placid calm of the characters and their environment are clearly socioeconomic,
racial, and sexual in nature. But their distribution across the film is ambigu¬
ous, even contradictory.19 The Ferret, for instance, provides Virginia with a
natural environment for love and play, yet he and his mother desert her. The

376
Raynals are bumbling fools, yet Georges gains the physical strength and gen¬ PARIS QUI DORT
erosity of spirit to protect her. Strangely, the peasant farmers and craftsmen AND ENTR’ACTE
are unequivocally vilified. Jeff and Crepoix are the real villains. As the most
broadly caricatured figure—almost like an Eisenstein villain, notes Raymond
Durgnat20—Crepoix, particularly, is the locus of every kind of threat. Angered
by Ferret’s playful disrespect and poaching on his land, Crepoix punishes him,
and their conflict escalates into a vengeful conflagration in which the Ferret
sets Crepoix’s haystacks ablaze and the band of farmers burns the gypsy camp.
Ending this sequence is a FS of one bullheaded farmer (Pierre Renoir) silhou¬
etted against the flames, holding out a pitchfork as if it were a weapon (aimed
at Virginia?). Condensing all the forces of violence into a single shot, this is
probably the most frightening image in the film.
This ideological matrix of oppositions would concern Renoir for most of his
film career. How far away he still is from clearly defining these conflicts and
resolving them in a satisfactory form can be gathered from La Lille de Leans
conclusion. Despite his blindness at the beginning, Georges turns into the
sentimental hero—love allows him to hear and see. Jeff is exposed and de¬
feated, but he swims away in the river, as if only temporarily repressed (Renoir
will redefine the character and action radically in Boudu sauve des eaux, 1932).
Crepoix and the farmers, on the other hand, are simply forgotten. With all
the disreputable attributes of her class sloughed off (in Jeff s disappearance),
Virginia can be accepted into the Raynal family, conventionally resolving the
sexual and socioeconomic conflicts. Lumpen wanderer and landed gentry achieve
an illusory form of harmony, camaraderie, and freedom. And yet the film
seems acutely conscious of its implausibility, for the whole family is quickly
packed off to Algeria. Either the conflicts, once resolved, can exist only in an
exotic other world or they will be exported intact in a colonial adventure.

Like Le Brasier ardent, Rene Clair’s first film, Laris qui dort (1924), is a Paris qui dort and
comic fantasy which synthesizes much of the then current narrative avant- Entr’acte
garde film practice. Clair’s shooting schedule, from June to September, 1923,
coincided exactly with the premiere and general release dates of Mosjoukine’s
film.1 The actual shooting, mostly on location in Paris, came in bits and
pieces, however, because there were frequent interruptions whenever producer
Henri Diamant-Berger could not provide enough money.2 These production
conditions show clearly in the relatively simple cinematography (by Maurice
Desfassiaux and Paul Guichard) and rough continuity editing of the released
film, which unaccountably was withheld from exhibition until late 1924.3 The
most circulated American print, which Clair has disowned, in fact looks like
it has been overextended to feature-length.4 Yet Clair himself considered Paris
qui dort little more than an apprentice film. Its roughness testified to his desire
to revive “the prewar tradition, that is, the tradition of the French comic
shorts’’ and of Melies’s feeries? Although he shared the narrative avant-garde
filmmakers’ fascination with “the cinematograhic machine,” Clair disapproved
of what he believed to be their excessive aestheticism and redirected the ap¬
paratus toward different ends. In Paris qui dort, consequently, the narrative
avant-garde film practice is placed explicitly in the service of an amusing
fantasy and a wittily satirical social vision.

377
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE The scenario for Paris qui dort is an original one, cleverly exploiting the
cinematic production of movement as the crux of its narrative.6 One morning,
Albert (Henri Rollan), the night watchman on the Eiffel Tower, awakens to
discover nothing at all moving in the city below. In some places, the streets
are completely empty; in others people and vehicles seem frozen in a state of
immobility. As he is about to despair of this mystery, a carload of five people
pulls up—a pilot (Albert Prejean), a “woman of means’’ (Madeleine Rodrigue),
an industrialist (Stacquet), a detective (Pre fils), and his prisoner, a thief (Mar¬
cel Vallee). All have just arrived by plane from Marseille. The six characters
wander about Paris together, gradually deciding that they can simply take
anything they want; but, as a precaution, they continue to live on top of the
Eiffel Tower. One day, a radio S.O.S. directs them to a house where a young
woman (Myla Seller) is trapped. Her father is a-scientist (Martinelli), who has
invented a ray machine that can paralyze the whole world. And that is just
what he has done. The group of survivors surprises the scientist and forces
him to return the world to normal. However, all is not well. When he tries
to court the scientist’s daughter, Albert discovers that he has no money left.
Surreptitiously, the two use the ray machine to immobilize the world again
and then set off to acquire some. The scientist notices what has happened,
reverses the process, and Albert and the daughter are promptly arrested. When
they try to explain, the police toss them in with the other five mad characters
who have preceded them to the station. Quickly abandoning their obsession
with telling the truth, all seven are released. While the scientist waits on a
park bench below, Albert and the daughter go to the top of the Eiffel Tower,
where he finds a pearl ring (the only souvenir of their adventure) and slips it
on her finger.
None of the characters in this story is more than a type. “Each assumes a
pure essence," writes Barthelemy Amengual, “that is represented perfectly with
neither ambiguity nor bravura.’’7 Except for hero and heroine, each has a
particular tic or trait. The pilot carefully lowers a ladder and then jumps out
of his plane in a leather jacket, goggles, and tastefully disheveled hair; on the
Eiffel Tower, he goes off by himself and performs gymnastics on the steel
beams. The woman lounges about like a nonchalant fashion model, once even
posing like Delacroix’s figure of liberty against the cityscape (in one of the
few lovingly photographed images of the film). The industrialist is a short-
tempered, compact little man, who runs in quick, short steps; he is solely
concerned to find his mistress Lisette (who turns out to be with another man).
The detective is thin, long-faced, with a drooping mustache; he is, of course,
the slowest of all of them to catch on to anything. The thief, on the other
hand, is an exuberant, quick-witted, generous fellow, who cannot keep his
hands off playing cards, money, or precious objects. It is he who turns out to
be the most useful member of the group—picking locks to get into houses,
demonstrating how to get what one wants in a restaurant, and topping their
festivities with speeches.
The thief s changed status in this “paradise’’ is but one of a series of ironic
reversals whose interrelation seems to provide some structure to the film. A
rich, ripe Aladdin’s Cave of a world lies open to plunder, and all six characters
become thieves in order to survive—and prosper. Although a whole society of
manners, mores, and public and private situations lies exposed to their scru-

378
 190. (left) Albert Prejean on
the Eiffel Tower in Parts qui
dort (1924)

191. (right) Madeleine

Jtiny and ridicule, they find themselves reproducing that society on the Eiffel Rodrique and Henri Rollan
Tower. Albert and the woman stroll around the platforms in chic white sport¬ on the Eiffel Tower
ing outfits, like advertisements of the modern good life. The others play poker
ior rummage through the hockshop of goods they have carried up from below.
Soon the easy life bores them—the woman idly tosses pearls off the Tower,
and the pilot sails paper airplanes cut out of thousand-franc notes. Finally,
the men begin quarreling after they realize there is only one woman left on
earth. When these "masters of the world" reenter normal society, they find
themselves threatened on every side. A gendarme tickets the car they have
been driving; a tiny old lady attendant forces Albert and the scientist’s daugh¬
ter out of some park chairs, and a flower girl pursues them along a walk.
When the authorities finally hear their story, they promptly lock them up as
madmen—in a comic variation on the conclusion of Caligari. Only by denying
their difference from society (which has turned out to be no difference at all)
are they accepted into the world again. And the pearl that has symbolized
both their greed and boredom concludes the film as a not-so-innocent token
of love.
Like some of its predecessors, Paris qui dort concocts a mixture of the real
and the unreal, of reality and fantasy. Its combination of the two, however,
is quite unlike that of L’Herbier’s, Epstein’s, or Dulac’s films. And it involves
nothing like the complexity of rhetorical figuring or syntactical relations that
characterize their work. Much of Clair’s film is documentary footage of Paris—
of its famous monuments, of the inhabitants and vehicles traveling its streets.
There are even several brief, awkward attempts to record the elevator’s move¬
ment up and down the Eiffel Tower, a subject Clair would return to in his
short documentary on the celebrated steel structure, La Tour (1928). However,
the function of these shots and sequences, whether realistic or fantastical,
depends entirely on their placement in the narrative discourse. Occasionally,
there are moments when the two modes are peculiarly fused. For instance, an

379
narrative AVANT-GARDE obviously fictional space is produced by intercutting several HAFSs of Albert
(looking in three different directions on the Pont Alexandre III) with shots of
the Place de la Concorde, the Madeleine, and the Champs-Elysees. The same
is true of certain stylistic elements. Tracking shots, fast-motion shots, and
rapid cutting—all are associated with both the real and the fantastic. When
Albert remembers the past unparalyzed city (he assumes the position of Ro¬
din’s statue, in a deliberate parody of Poirier’s Le Penseur [1920]), there is a
short subjective sequence of tracking shots among the vehicles on the streets.
When the men begin to quarrel on the Tower, several fast-motion shots of
their fighting produce a little minimalist film of a repeated kick in the pants.
In contrast to these moments, when the scientist argues near the end with one
of his colleagues about his experiment’s success—and they cause the machine
accidentally to go haywire—a sequence of rapidly cut, fast-motion tracking
shots erupts, describing a totally different world on the brink of physical
catastrophe. It is as if the accelerating train sequence in La Roue had been
expanded to include the entire world (or all of Paris, at least).
The primary visual opposition in Parts qui dort, however, is not between
reality and fantasy or between one stylistic and another. Rather, it is simply
between immobility and movement, between stasis and motion, between the
still and moving image.

It was probably because I was interested in the movement produced by the cine¬
matographic machine that I tried to demonstrate the value of that movement through
the absurd, that is, to paralyze Paris in order to emphasize how different was Paris,
animated and alive.8

For the crucial concept of a paralyzed city, Clair’s simple strategies are re¬
markably effective—shots of deserted streets, shots that metamorphose from
freeze frames to moving images (and vice versa), shots of inanimate human
figures juxtaposed in the same frame with animate ones. The stillness of the
city strangely sets off the slightest movement of the six characters who wander
through it—shades of Pirandello.9 This new world is like a Musee Gravin of
photographs—especially Atget’s vacant Paris spaces, as Annette Michelson has
noted10—whose reference has been redirected from the past to the present and
future, a space that opens into another time. In reproducing that first moment
when photographs “came to life,” Paris qui dort recovers the magic of the
cinema with a simplicity that reminds one of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr.
(1924). Though its scientific laboratory looks like a cardboard set even Mack
Sennett would reject, its magic nearly rivals the panache of Marcel L’Herbier’s
L’lnhumaine (1924). For all of its longueurs and flaws of execution, Clair’s film
offers a truly fresh vision of an other, marvelous world.

Clair’s second film, Entr'acte (1924), is a comic fantasy of a different order.

As Clair himself has said, there were two versions of this film which was
hastily shot (by Jimmy Berliet) and assembled in October, 1924.11 The first
played an integral part in Francis Picabia’s ballet Reldche, which, performed
by Jean Borlin’s Ballet suedois, premiered at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees
on 4 December 1924.12 The performance opened with a short film prologue
that featured Picabia and the ballet’s composer, Erik Satie, descending from
the sky in slow motion to load a cannon. The cannon shot signaled the begin-

380
 192. A “still life” from Paris
qui dort (1924)

I rung of the ballet on stage. At the entr’acte, the rest of Clair’s film was pro¬
jected—to a rising storm of boos, whistles, howls of disgust, and scattered
I applause. In the end, a character breaks through the “End" title (in slow
motion), and Rolf de Mare, the Theatre des Champs-Elysees manager, kicks
him back through—to signal the beginning of the ballet’s second act. Just
one year later, these two parts were combined into a twenty-two minute film
for the opening of the Studio des Ursulines.13 This second version of the film
now exists in general circulation, and it has recently been legitimized by the
synchronized recording (under Clair’s supervision) of Satie’s original score.14
Most critics accept Entr’acte as possessing two loosely related parts of equal
length. The first half owes most to Picabia’s single-page scenario or sketch,
allegedly dashed off one night at Maxim’s. It is virtually plotless, except
perhaps for the shooting (by Picabia) of the hunter figure (Jean Borlin). De¬
nying logical connections and diegetic continuity, the images offer instead a
continuity of graphic and rhythmic relations as well as a stream of comically
provocative associations. The lights of a Paris nightscape blur into a pair of
boxing gloves (in negative) that rapidly spar with one another until one seems
to punch out the camera. A chess game played by Marcel Duchamp and Man
Ray suddenly dissolves into the Place de la Concorde and is immediately awash
in water. A paper boat begins tossing and turning against a panning shot of
the Paris rooftops. A ballerina, photographed in slow motion from below
through glass, is transformed into an opening and closing flower, matching
the inflating/deflating balloon heads of some dolls in a shooting gallery. The
hunter shoots an artificial egg suspended in a jet of water, and, in its place, a
pigeon flies off. Animating this series of colliding, metamorphosing, dispar¬
ate visual elements is a Dadaist spirit of intentional mystification and mocking
provocation.
The second half of the film, however, owes more to Clair’s improvisation
with narrative. A Mack Sennett-like chase involving a vast crowd of funeral
mourners (perhaps for the hunter) and a camel-drawn hearse, it is organized
like a whimsical study of cinematic movement and a celebration of motion

381
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE over stasis.15 The funeral procession begins in slow motion with a long line of
mourners following the hearse in marvelous leaps. When the hearse escapes
the camel (or vice versa), it quickly draws these single-minded figures into a
vortex of ever-increasing speed. The climax comes in an accelerating montage
of fast-motion tracking shots of the streets filled with racing cars, of trees
streaking by overhead, and finally of a vertiginous rollercoaster ride. When
the coffin spills out and comes to rest in a field, a magician (Jean Borlin again)
pops out and makes the few remaining mourners and himself disappear, one
by one. The brilliant tour de force of rhythmic cutting in this sequence gives
a wry parodic twist to the famous accelerating montage set pieces (of suicide)
in Gance’s La Roue and L’Herbier’s L’lnhumaine,16
Several critics, however, have interpreted Entr’acte as an integral whole. For
Noel Carroll, the film is “a coherent, purposively directed assault” on the
social practices and beliefs, the rationality, of the French bourgeois culture.17
It affronts high art, for example, by burlesquing ballet. ‘‘The repeated crotch
shots of the ballerina suggest a well-known pornographic interest in the art,”
while the substitution of a rather greasy and unattractive man for an ideal
image of female beauty is ‘‘akin to drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa.”
The solemnity of a funeral turns into farce—a carnival air hose on the doorstep
lifts the skirt of each grieving woman. Paris itself turns pejoratively meta¬
phoric—as a boxing match, a chess game, a turbulent sea. Finally, Clair
emphasizes the velocity of the climactic game, the chase, seeming to suck the
whole city into pursuit of the hearse. Ultimately, that chase becomes self¬
destructive, a kind of ironical death race, ‘‘that breaks up society under the
pressure of its own reckless propulsion.”
For Paul Sandro, more plausibly, this assault is set in the context of ‘‘an
extensive parody of cinematic reality [and] cinematic discourses.”18 The first
part of Entr'acte teases us with the possibility of diegetic continuity and caus¬
ality through several pairs of eyes—those of the man who scratches his head
(igniting matches), those superimposed on a water surface, and those of the
balloon-head dolls. But these multiple POVs prove unstable, just as the chess
game gets out of control and the ‘‘drunken boat” seems to go nowhere or
around in circles. We are caught up in an interplay of deceptions. The second
part of the film finally produces a linear action, but diegetic space-time con¬
tinues to be parodied. The hearse as well as its pursuers change screen direc¬
tions frequently. Shots of the ballerina are cut into the chase, as disruptive
excess. Furthermore, the film parodies its own production of narrative. Picabia
himself performs the act of violence to initiate the chase and then has his and
Satie’s initials put on the vehicle that will propel it to a climax. As undertakers
behind the scenes, as proprietors in absentia of the (narrative) vehicle, they
embalm their characters in the diegetic space-time of the story. And, in the
end, the narrative corpus, like the corpse in the story, refuses to be put away
and must suffer one last repetition and reversal.
If Picabia believed that Entr’acte respected nothing except ‘‘the desire to
burst out laughing,”19 Clair seems to have had more in mind. For all its
debunking and denunciation, Entr’acte is a narrative text of pleasure, in San¬
dro’s words, ‘‘one that celebrates old forms and reinscribes them in a ludic
space.”20 The magical, marvelous world of Pans qui dort is turned inside out
here in a witty, audacious, slapdash thrill ride.

382
 L’INHUMAINE

193. Strips of film from

Entr'acte, from the cover
of Theatre et
Comoedia 11lustre

Marcel L’Herbier’s L’lnhumaine (1924) is one of the more disreputable for¬ LTnhumaine
gotten films of the 1920s. For reasons that are still unclear, L’Herbier chose
not to submit his film to the usual previews for exhibitors in the summer of
1924.1 Instead, L’lnhumaine opened cold at the Madeleine-Cinema, in Novem¬
ber, in the midst of Le Miracle des loups, Pecheur d’Islande and The Ten Com¬
mandments.2 The response was overwhelmingly negative: “The audience whis¬
tled and yelled . . . and at certain screenings some people even broke up their
seats. . . .”3 A financial catastrophe in France, the film only recouped a good
portion of its costs after a year or more in worldwide distribution.
Most film historians and critics have ridiculed LTnhumaine as a disastrously
misguided attempt to celebrate film as art or to reconcile the popular and the
elitist.

The adventure that it narrates in images under the name of Pierre Mac Orlan is
unusually ordinary, simply standard fare. It could just as easily be signed Jules Mary,
Pierre Decourcelle, Jean de la Hire.4

If the action of L’lnhumaine is situated in 1950, the characters are situated in some¬
thing more like 1910, in a rapturous world where the Italian “divas” . . . and other
“belles dames sans merci” live.5

Glossing an imitation modernism over a cock-and-bull story in which Georgette Leb¬

lanc and Jaque Catelain are rivals in guile and artifice, this film, which must be the
end of the end of art for art’s sake and today is nothing short of ridiculous, was then
no more than the ultimate expression of vanity in the midst of falsehood envisaged
through a welter of resemblances.6

383
narrative avant-garde As Noel Burch suggests, the film "does not merit such scornful excess.’’7
Like La Roue, the scenario for Llnhumaine was paradoxically "demode.”
Even L’Herbier admits it was not very prestigious. The original version, writ¬
ten in collaboration with Pierre Mac Orlan, was entitled La Femme de glace.
But it had to be radically revised and custom-tailored for the American singer-
actress, Georgette Leblanc, on whom the project’s financing and distribution
hopes depended. What the film might have been like had another more ac¬
complished, less inflexible actress been available (L’Herbier later remarked that
Brigitte Helm would have been perfect for the role)8 is difficult to surmise.
As it is, the film’s narrative does seem a concession—condescension may be
closer to the mark—to popular taste. The celebrated singer, Claire Lescaut
(Georgette Leblanc), is engaged to marry a wealthy American entrepreneur,
Frank Mahler (Fred Kellerman). At an evening salon in her spacious mansion
outside Paris, she suddenly rejects Mahler as well as the attention of several
other international guests who have come to court her: a Russian prince,
Tarsky (L. V. Terval), the Maharajah Djorah (Philippe Heriat), and finally a
Swedish inventor, Einar Norsen (Jaque C'atelain)—"A young engineer in love
with machines, sports, and the magic of modern science.” Told that she will
go off on a world tour unless "something” happens, Einar threatens suicide.
As he leaves the salon early, she coolly drops a tiny knife in his hand. Later
that night, he is apparently killed when his sports car goes over a cliff. A
peasant woman (Marcelle Pradot) reports the accident to Claire, who shows
little emotion at all. The next day, she is called to identify the body—after
successfully countering the efforts of the other three men to disrupt her per¬
formance at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. When she breaks down and prays
before the corpse, Einar miraculously revives (he had faked the death), and
Claire reluctantly admits her love for him. They tour his laboratory, and she
returns to the Theatre. Jealous of her new fascination for the inventor, Djorah
disguises himself as a chauffeur and concocts a plan to kill her with a viper
hidden in a basket of flowers. The plan succeeds, and he cruelly deposits her
body in front of Einar’s laboratory. There, in an agony of passion, Einar un¬
dertakes several dangerous experiments and restores her to life . . . and love.
For L’Herbier, however, this serial-style science fiction adventure romance
(aptly subtitled a "fairy tale”) was of little consequence. What concerned him
was how it was narrated—or not narrated. He used the scenario, he told Jean-
Andre Fieschi,

... a little like composers use what they call the bass clef. On this bass clef, I
constructed chords, plastic chords, and what was important for me was not the hori¬
zontal parade of events but vertical plastic harmonies.9

Very much like Coeur fidele, then, the scenario of Llnhumaine serves as a pretext
for an experimental film. What marks it most conspicuously is a barrage of
ruptures or breaks with the conventions of narrative film discourse. These
ruptures advance, retard, suspend, and even deflect the narrative systemati¬
cally, in a variety of ways. As a consequence, they produce a narrative structure
that is organized paradigmatically rather than syntagmatically. Equally im¬
portant, they call attention to the materials of film discourse and to their
graphic, rhythmic, and connotative relations.
The systematic nature of Llnhumaine s break with conventional narrative

384
I dm discourse justifies L’Herbier’s repeated description of the film as his most
deliberately synthetic work. The adjective fits aptly in more ways than one.
fiom the production’s inception in the summer of 1923, as a French showcase
pr the American market, L’Herbier and his colleagues at Cinegraphic planned
o make it “a sort of summary, a provisional summary, of all that was artis-
L’INHUMAINE

| ically advanced in France two years before the famous Exposition des Arts
Decoratifs. ”10 This included the work of (besides Pierre Mac Orlan) the painter
"ernand Leger, the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens, the composer Darius Mil-
.naud, the furniture designer Pierre Chareau, the fashion designer Paul Poiret,
he young set designers Alberto Cavalcanti and Claude Autant-Lara, and, of
[course, his new chief cameraman, Georges Specht.11 Through this conjunction
of artistic activity, L’Herbier also made his most ambitious (but not entirely
luccessful) attempt to produce a narrative structure guided by one particular
itrategy of the narrative avant-garde film practice—the mixture of film styles
or modes.12 In this, L'lnhumaine represented the culmination of a whole line
of films that included El Dorado, Don Juan et Faust, La Roue, Le Brasier ardent,
and even L'Auberge rouge. Finally, like El Dorado and Coeur fidele, L’FIerbier’s
film synthesized most of the techniques then current in the narrative avant-
garde film practice. In the final climactic moments of the film, in fact, those
techniques were pushed to a kind of cinematic apotheosis.
A good measure of L'lnhumaine s deviation from conventional narrative film
discourse can be gathered from its opening. The subject is perfectly normal—
the description of a place and several major characters—but the manner of
presentation is highly unusual. The titles begin it with a Leger machine draw¬
ing (including a revolving disk, upper frame right) against which the elegant
white letters of L'lnhumaine glide across from right to left. What kind of
[conjunctions and juxtapositions are condensed here? The first shot (perhaps
echoing La Roue) is a rapid tracking shot of a roadside slope which tilts up
^slightly to reveal, far below in the background, a river and bridge and city
beyond. Already the camera track, unattached to any character, calls more
attention to the frame and the speed and direction of its movement than to
the space it is moving through. As the slope rises and blots out the view, the
sshot cuts (the effect is like a wipe) to a simple De Stijl-style painting of an
ultramodern house. This blatant juxtaposition of the three-dimensional and
the two-dimensional, the documentary and the fictional, the real and the ar¬
tificial, is bridged by the intertitle, “Dominating the city.’’ The next shot is
a HAELS of the same city which slowly pans left until the river begins glint¬
ing in the sunlight. Suddenly the movement turns into a swish pan, and an
invisible cut carries the pan left to a model of the house with all of its windows
lit. Again there is the juxtaposition, the gap, that is “healed’’ now by a
cinematic device which calls attention to its compression or literal blurring of
space and time. Here lives Claire Lescaut, another intertitle narrates, and a
series of dissolves takes us closer to the house until the model gives way to a
full-scale set as several cars drive up and their passengers disembark. Before
we even see her, the central character has been defined in a position of domi¬
nance, on the side of the geometrical, the static, and the artificial. Who will
be defined as her opposite? And how will the machine world of the title
drawing be bound up in that opposition?
Once inside, the first shot is a soft-focus LS of several men standing before

385
narrative AVANT-GARDE an archway. A wipe removes the soft focus, and the men move off to the
side—as if prompted by the device. Several soft-focus transitions fix them in
MS, looking at a poster of Claire Lescaut. Again, she is defined as a two-
dimensional, artificial figure, this time as the object of men’s looks. As the
first three rivals for her affection are introduced (Einar is absent, delayed), in
a series of shots (FSs, MSs, MCUs) and intertitles, the sequence does not so
much define them in a three-dimensional space, related by looks and move¬
ment, as it spreads them out in a kind of abstract mosaic. Instead of estab¬
lishing a realistic space, the sequence constructs a nonreferential space (delim¬
ited by the frame) and positions and repositions the men within it. Only after
Djorah is introduced does this pattern change:

MCU of Djorah starting forward.

HALS of the room, with men gathered (frame left); detaching themselves from them,
Tarsky and Mahler go over to take a poster from a bearded man (frame right).
MCU of Djorah; he looks around and starts to move forward.
HALS of the room; Mahler and the bearded men exit right; Djorah enters from the
left and goes to Tarsky, takes the poster, "looks at it, and hands it to another man;
all of them drift off toward the right.

The abrupt shifts in camera distance and angle single out Djorah as a special
character but curiously provide little more sense of a referential space. Finally,
just before Claire appears, a HAELS reveals an immense banquet hall—whose
center is a geometrically designed black-and-white marble platform sur¬
rounded by a moat of water. The men are but small figures (frame left), and
Claire is visible in a strongly lit arched area (at the focal point of the center
background), as if she were already at the head of the table. With this shot,
the sequence’s construction of space climaxes in spectacle. The next shot con¬
tinues the effect—a FS of a half-dozen butlers clustered in the center, who,
after a white dove flies into the frame and out, spring apart to reveal Claire
on a kind of throne. And each butler has on an identical white mask: Do they
suggest the symbolic position of the men—anonymous replications of one
another and subservient to her wishes? Finally, there is the inevitable slightly
soft-focus CU of Claire, smiling against a dark background. As the center of
the spectacle, she is both its most desirable object and its subject, its govern¬
ing figure.
The sequence that finally introduces Einar Norsen defines him as both Claire’s
equal and her opposite. His house, which is similar to Claire’s, suggests a
parallel to her; but the sports car he roars off in, inscribing the machine world
of the opening title, produces a crucial contrast. A brief series of camera and
figure movements extends this initial ambiguity.

HALS of the sports car traveling left along a curved road on a hill above the river
beyond.
HAFS of the banquet table; pan right from Claire to the guests on the right side of
the table and then pan left back to her.
FS dolly ahead of the sports car traveling rapidly along a wet road.

Einar moves into the same space as described in the beginning of the film,
which seems to position him on the opposite side of the paradigm from Claire.
The lateral camera movement in the second shot, however, which first sets

386
 L’INHUMAINE

194. Alberto Cavalcanti’s set

for Claire Lescaut’s banquet
hall in L’lnhumaine (1924)

her apart from him, also places her in the direction of his movement. Suddenly
the tracking shots of his sports car turn subjective: a HAELS track left above
the river bridge, which turns into a swish pan, and then a rapid forward dolly
shot, past Einar’s head (in MCU), to the road ahead—conveyed by a split
image of trees whipping by on the left and right. As his head dissolves out
and the trees continue to whip by, the shot seems to shift (as if following the
Futurist aesthetic) into a pure experience of speed and unrelenting change. The
model house reappears, with all of its windows lit; and a series of forward
dolly shots, with repeated quick pans to the right, seem to carry Einar to it.
The POV tracking shots single out Einar as a potential subject opposite Claire,
but they also replicate the omniscient description of the film’s beginning. This
replication puts Einar on the verge of shifting into the position of controlling
the narrative, a position he will occupy at crucial points later. By fusing the
omniscient and the subjective, it also foregrounds the speed and direction of
the frame’s movement and propels them into a vertiginous visual rhythm, a
cinematic dance. Two forms of spectacle, two film styles, have been set in
opposition—the one static and artificial, the other dynamic and natural.
This systematic privileging of paradigmatic relations and the materials of
film discourse gives L’lnhumaine a decidedly operatic quality. The sharply dif¬
ferent decors and styles of acting confirm this impression. Mallet-Stevens’s
house exteriors, in De Stijl ultramodern, mask contrasting interiors. Cavalcan-

387
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE ti’s geometric banquet hall—where jugglers, fire-eaters, musicians, and even
Claire herself perform—and Autant-Lara’s winter garden of fantastical plants
are both linked to the Theatre des Champs-Elysees.13 These are the decadent
kingdoms of the solitary “Princess.” Leger’s laboratory (perhaps influenced by
Friedrich Kiesler’s sets for R.U.R.)14—where men and machines work in tan¬
dem—is linked to the natural world by means of an experimental television
system and the sports car’s passage through the natural landscapes. These are
the realms, embodying the Purist ideal of science and nature in harmony,15 of
the solitary “Prince.” As neutral areas, Cavalcanti’s dark underground vault
(where Einar reappears) and stark monumental hall (where Claire is resur¬
rected) become spaces that resolve their opposition. Against the smiling, cold¬
blooded capriciousness of Claire’s mezzo-soprano vie the nimble calculations
and nervous energy of Einar’s tenor and the murderous, single-minded passion
of Djorah’s basso (this is no conventional kalian opera). Heriat’s tall hulking
figure and heavy face with large staring eyes, complemented by his appearance
several times as a foreground silhouette (as in a shadow play), make him a
perfect embodiment of the stock villain.46 But Georgette Leblanc is too old
and unskilled as an actress to project the proper luminance as Claire, and Jaque
Catelain is a bit lightweight and too youthful opposite her. The acting, un¬
fortunately, is much less effectively synthesized than are the decors. It is a
weakness that, coupled with the absurdities of the plot, indeed does dissipate
the film’s power.
Perhaps, as Noel Burch suggests, Darius Milhaud’s score for L’lnhumaine
may have given the characters more consistency and force.17 We may never
know, for, like most other scores for 1920s French films, it seems to have
disappeared. Even the special revival screening of the film (November, 1976)
for the Paris “Cinquantenaire,” celebrating the 1925 Exposition, lacked it.
Apparently, however, just as a different score had been for El Dorado, the
music of Milhaud was essential to the rhythm and structure of the film. This
was especially so for the sequences of rapid cutting and accelerating montage
which probably were L’lnhumaine s most noted feature at the time and which
still work surprisingly well, even silent. These sequences were much more
than tour-de-force set pieces of technique. Like similar sequences in La Roue,
L’Auberge rouge, and Coeur fidele, they functioned as major structural compo¬
nents of the film’s narrative.
The first such sequence narrates Einar’s apparent death in the car accident.
It is remarkable for its variety of tracking shots—dollying in front of the sports
car, looking forward through the windshield, looking at the trees streak by
and at the river below, focusing on the spinning tires and on the jittering
steering wheel—and for its superimpositions—a double image of his profile
(in CU) buffeted by the wind, tracking shots of the foliage overhead (distorted
by the speed) over a straight-on CU of his determined face. This is the most
subjective sequence so far in the film, and it plunges us into the experience
with an exhilaration that is matched by its threat of danger. What is more
remarkable, however, is that this flight is but one-half of an alternating se¬
quence. The other narrates the last performance of the evening at Claire’s
mansion—one of her own songs. Intercut with the subjective shots of Einar’s
movement are MSs and CUs of her singing (what is the song?). The alternation
turns her into a kind of modern-day siren whose extraordinary voice seems to

388
 195. (left) Maharajah Djorah
(Philippe Heriat) in Claude
Autant-Lara’s “winter garden’’
in L’lnhumaine (1924)

I ure the traveler to his death. As the butler brings her Einar’s note (written 196. (right) Fernand Leger
xs he left), the shots of his flight begin to change. She takes the note in her anc* hls laboratory set
oands, and now there are HALSs of the sports car speeding along the curving
cliff road. Suddenly, at the shot of a strummed guitar (does a different musical
-hythm take over here?), the cutting accelerates to a crescendo, alternating
z>etween LSs and FSs of the car and MCUs of Claire holding the note—twelve,
Twelve, twelve, ten, nine, seven, six, frames each. The rhythm slackens on
several shots tracking toward and over the cliff, and then a half-second image
of Claire precedes the sports car’s long fall to the river. Only then does she
"ead what he has written. As the focus of the sequence shifts near the end to
Claire, it articulates the cruel nonchalance, even ignorance, of her power.
The second major sequence which involves rapid cutting is the one that
most satisfied L’Herbier himself “at the plastic and poetic level.”18 Here Claire
comes to the vault wherein the body lies and finds that Einar is alive. The
sequence begins with HALSs down a long narrow corridor of stairs as Claire
descends, spreading her cape against the high backlight. Entering the room,
in LS (frame right), she discovers (in a niche frame left) the corpse covered by
sa white sheet and set off against a black curtain. A brief interchange of closer
shots isolate the two in separate indeterminate spaces. A sudden pan right
from the corpse to a MS of Claire (at a 45° angle) then introduces an alterna¬
tion between CUs of a phonograph playing and Claire looking about in won¬
der. How nicely ironic if this song were the one she had sung when Einar’s
car crashed. As the corpse is reintegrated into the alternation, the cutting
accelerates—twenty-three, thirteen, eleven, six, fifteen, seven, thirteen, nine¬
teen frames each—and Claire rushes back to the stairs. Again she approaches
the corpse and, when the sheet begins to move, comes closer still. Two su¬
perimposed CUs of Einar’s blood-stained face against the black curtain signal
a further change, this time in the intercutting between the two figures. The

389
narrative avant-garde MCU of Claire and the CU of the sheet over the corpse’s face are taken from
angles that deny any subject-POV shot organization. What Burch calls the
discrepancy in camera angles and the differences in frame space”19 here seem
to serve a double function. They obviously represent Claire’s subjective expe¬
rience, verging on an hallucinatory trance in which she is positioned as sub¬
ordinate, submissive—the very antithesis of her position in the opening se¬
quence in her mansion. At this point, suddenly (in LS), Einar glides down
the stairs (frame right background) and stops at the bottom, framed starkly
in the doorway. L’Herbier himself sums up the odd tone of the sequence better
than 1 can: ‘‘After a silent, rather pathetic dialogue, they both ascend the
stairs toward a kind of gibbet or guillotine. . . . That’s the moment I love.”20
These two sequences constitute the major turning points in the first half of
the film. In one, the heroine (as villainess) destroys the hero; in the other, she
seems to restore him. Einar briefly takes over the position of the narrator,
however, and explains, in flashback, that his death was a ruse. The real change,
we see now, has been in Claire—from villainess to heroine. He has revived
her humanity, her capacity for feeling. 'This highly symmetrical, overt (and
sentimental) pattern of reversal is replicated exactly in the second half of the
film. Only now it is the villain who apparently destroys the heroine, and the
hero must once more restore her, this time to life. Again the turning points
are marked by sequences of rapid cutting.
The first of these doubled sequences narrates Claire’s death from the viper.
This occurs in the back seat of her touring car as Djorah drives it along the
same cliff road (but in the opposite direction) where Einar had crashed his
sports car. The sequence reminds one of Sisifs first attempt to destroy his
train in La Roue. Some dozen or more shots are repeated with variations: a
dolly before the car, tracks of the landscape and trees streaking by, a MS of
Claire (frame left background) and Djorah (frame right foreground), CUs of
each, a CU of the flowers, a CU of her hand, a track of the road under the
car from near one of the wheels, a HA track of the road surface (from the
briefly opened car door), a HALS of the car speeding along the cliff road
(panning to the right until it tilts at an angle), and finally a dolly behind the
car. The cutting accelerates to a climax, with shots of only a half-second each,
just before Claire tries to open the door and then slumps back paralyzed. Less
regular than in the sequence in La Roue, the pattern of repetition here—the
same shots recur but constantly shift their order—is closer to that of the
carnival sequence in Coeur fidele. The characters’ actions and inner life are
subsumed in a larger design. Although Claire’s subjectivity is emphasized, she
is an object as well, enmeshed in the pulsating rhythm that Djorah has set in
motion. Caught up in this whirlwind of camera movement and cutting, their
juxtaposed faces—in which agony contends wildly with a malicious glee—
create an extravagant operatic duet. Could Milhaud have scored it that way?
In the final climactic sequence of Claire’s resurrection, L'lnhumaine presents
a stunning synthesis of narrative avant-garde film practice. Einar lays her body
on a raised platform of massive blocks, with symmetrically placed zig-zag
lighting fixtures on either side. It is like some monumental altar to science
or, more specifically, to electricity and electronics. Rushing into the labora¬
tory—a labyrinthine forest of machines and bold geometrical forms—he dons
a helmet and white coat, stands over the control switchboard (posted with the

390
 L’INHUMAINE

197. Einar Norsen (Jaque

Catelain) on the stairs leading
down to the vault in
L’lnhumaine (1924)
'

warning “Danger of death’’), and directs several technicians (like metallurgical

workers) encased in shiny black uniforms. Once, twice, “The huge laboratory
pulses with activity.’’ The first attempt to revive Claire is cautious, brief. It
is marked by flashes of light, blurring LSs of Claire, MCUs of Einar and the
technicians, and several CUs of the switchboard and revolving machine discs.
The second attempt is longer and more dangerous. It is marked by LSs and
FSs of the activity in the laboratory (now including electrical sparks and smoke),
.•closer shots of the technicians’ quick gestures (their hands flipping levers,
pouring liquids {of course], immersed in flares of light), CUs of Einar’s frantic
looks, and rapid shifts in camera distance and angle. The cutting accelerates
in two separate crescendos—the one (seven, nine, three, three frames) involv¬
ing Einar, the technicians, and his switchboard; the other (seventeen, five,
two, ten, two, eight, fourteen, seventeen frames), the “Danger’’ sign, Einar,
Claire, and several flashes of light. But Claire remains still. A third and even
more risky experiment is needed.
This last attempt produces, in L’Herbier’s own words, “a series of explo¬
sions, an over-revving of the machines.’’21 Milhaud apparently scored the se¬
quence for percussion instruments only, and the montage was geared to that
rhythm. The effect still seemed insufficient to L’Herbier, so he decided to add
color, but in a novel way.

391
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

198. Einer and Claire

(Georgette Leblanc) in the
“resurrection” hall at the end
of L’Inhumaine (1924)

. . . what you no longer see in the prints now was not only a film stock tinted red,
but something else. At certain moments of excitement, I inserted fragments of film
stock of different colors, so that suddenly you seemed struck by flashes of pure white,
and two seconds later, flashes of red, or blue, before the image reappeared. . . .22

Even deprived of this rhythmic interplay of music and color, the sequence
retains much of its power. At the beginning, several separate shots of Einar
and the technicians end with the brief flash of a superimposed dial gauge.
Then in a LS of the laboratory, a pendulum dissolves in, swinging slowly
forward and away, as the background space alternately brightens and dims. In
rapidly cut shots, Einar dashes around from one machine to another, and
several quick CUs of the pendulum, discs, and revolving arm levers appear.
The shots of machine parts begin to blur, white out, and dissolve into one
another; and the cutting rhythm accelerates to one-second and half-second
shots and finally to shots of just two to eight frames apiece. Into this chore¬
ographed vertigo of machine movement, punctuated by two-frame flashes of
color, shots of Claire (in MS and CU) and Einar (in ECU) are integrated. Einar
begins to laugh, and (in a single shot) Claire’s face smiles. Now the sequence
shifts entirely to shots of the pendulum, the dial gauge, the “Danger” sign
flashing, bursts of color, and a spiral which begins to blur and finally con¬
cludes the montage. Einar rushes to Claire; she moves her head and looks up
at him. In the words of the German film critic, Alfred Loos, this finale made
L’lnhumaine “the only film for which Tristan’s cry makes sense: I hear the
light!”23

392
 Noel Burch argues that this famous sequence is based on an erroneous con¬ L’INHUMAINE
cept of montage:

. . to render movement, to create “visual rhythms” by means of the strictly musical

assemblage of very short shots representing inanimate objects, depends ultimately, it
| eems to me, on the belief that the duration of a static shot must be pure, and thus
j omparable to the length of a musical note.24

sts flaw is that it is not an “organic articulation of organic movement.” In-

ttead, Burch continues, “. . . in Roue and L’lnhumaine, the mechanical
ugidity of the shots, even in their movement and despite wild accelerations,
nds in a strained stasis that is now almost insufferable.” My own analysis
uggests that Burch’s argument is overly simplistic and leads me to several
different conclusions. If one examines this sequence according to its diegetic
md nondiegetic functions, an important transformation emerges. The narra-
ive function of the sequence is, of course, to represent Claire’s resurrection,
o present the impossible as possible. Because the display of technical virtu¬
osity is so awesome, however, that function seems to get lost or more pre¬
cisely, it gives way to a nondiegetic function, a “poetic” one, foregrounding
:he graphic and rhythmic materials of the discourse. In this cinematic dance,
:he locus of the marvelous shifts from the representational level to the presen-
rational, and, by analogy, to the cinematic apparatus itself. The laboratory
:hat resurrects becomes a metaphor for the cinema, the machine that repro¬
duces, that re-animates life. L’lnhumaine, therefore, ends up producing a met¬
aphor to celebrate the apparatus of its own production. This act of self-reflex-
ivity, however, unlike that of Clair’s Paris qui dort, continues to uphold the
magic and mystification of the cinematic machine.
If one examines the sequence as an ideological construction, however, as the
ulmination of the whole film’s operation, something quite different emerges.
More than poor acting and absurd plotting are regressive, even grotesque, in
L’lnhumaine. Although the characterization of Djorah (the dark-skinned colo¬
nized non-European as an exotic figure of evil) raises questions about racial
and geopolitical myths, the film’s principal grotesquerie lies in its characteri¬
zation of Claire in relation to Einar. Its misogyny, like that in serials such as
The Perils of Pauline, is monstrously excessive. Reversing the conventional re¬
lations of power between men and women, she becomes a modern Circe, an
international “belle dame sans merci,” whose profession serves to attract men
in order to subjugate or destroy them. She must be punished for this, specif¬
ically for causing the hero’s death. When that death turns out to be false, it
doubly inscribes the hero’s power over her. That power extends even to a
measure of control over her profession, her singing. While Claire can enchant
.crowds at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, Einar has invented a television
>system that can send her voice and image around the world.25 In a demon¬
stration sequence (presented by means of back projection or matting), it doc¬
uments her appearance at the Folies-Bergere while people (in different parts of
the world) listen to her voice on radios. The last image, in fact, is of a sick
woman who responds to the song, in ironic parallel to the sequence of Einar’s
“restoration” as well as to Claire’s own position at the end of the film. This
sequence gives image to Blaise Cendrars’s concept of the cinema as a revolu¬
tionary technology of simultaneity, producing “a new synthesis of the human

393
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE spirit ... in all the worlds’ capitals, millions of hearts stop beating at the
same instant, and in the remotest villages, bursts of laughter shatter the coun¬
tryside.”26 But that technology also serves to subordinate woman to man, the
human to the machine, as well as the rest of humanity to Europe and the
civilized world. Claire’s humanization and subjugation is not complete, how¬
ever, for she must be punished further by undergoing the destruction or era¬
sure that she herself was accused (falsely) of committing. Only in the condition
of lifelessness can she be re-formed, re-created anew. Like a modern god or
Doctor Frankenstein, Einar literally charges her with life. Man produces woman,
as if reversing childbirth, in an operation with strangely necrophilic under¬
tones. Reinventing her image, he turns her absence into presence. To be
human, L’Inhumaine concludes, woman must be positioned in the proper re¬
lation to man.

A brief note on Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet mecanique (1924).
According to Standish Lawder, the idea for this short non-narrative film oc¬
curred shortly after a specially arranged Georges Antheil concert at the Theatre
des Champs-Elysees, on 4 October 1923, which was recorded by L’Herbier for
the near riot at Claire Lescaut’s performance in L’Inhumaine.21 Made sometime
between the winter and summer of 1924, Ballet mecanique had its premiere in
late September or early October, in Vienna at Friedrich Kiesler’s Internationale
Ausstellung Neuer Theatertechnik.28 Thereafter, it was shown in Berlin (3
May 1925), then simultaneously in London and New York (14 March 1926),
and soon became a much-circulated film on the cine-club and specialized cin¬
ema circuit.29 Strangely, its public screening in France did not come until the
late spring or summer of 1926, when it followed Clair’s Entr’acte, Chomette’s
Les Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse and Cinq Minutes de cinema pur, Autant-Lara’s
Fait-Divers, and Ruttman’s Film ahsolu at the newly opened Studio des Ursu-
lines.30 Jean Tedesco, much to his later chagrin, actually saw the film with
Leger shortly before the Vieux-Colombier opened, on 14 November 1924, but
decided not to include it in his programming.31 Perhaps the rejection so an¬
gered Leger that he refused to consider its screening in Paris for some time.
Ballet mecanique deserves mention here for several reasons. First, its study of
motion and speed, both cinematic and extra-cinematic, makes it a good com¬
panion piece to Clair’s Entr’acte. In this film, however, the analysis is more
purely “plastic” (though consistently representational in its use of everyday
objects) and eschews any social critique. Even more than Clair, Leger cele¬
brates openly the kinetic activity, the pulsating dynamism, of modern urban
life.32 More importantly, though one of the earliest French non-narrative films,
Ballet mecanique clearly derives from the then current narrative avant-garde film
practice. The germ of its conception, as Lawder has demonstrated, can be seen
in Leger’s analysis of Gance’s La Roue, where he focuses on the sequences of
machine movement and “the intrinsic plastic value of the object.”33 Several of
those sequences, in fact, were projected by C.A.S.A. (of which Leger was a
member), on 25 April 1924, during the time when Ballet mecanique was being
shot and edited.34 Leger also had the example (executed simultaneously with
or just prior to his film) of the final resurrection sequence in L’Inhumaine,
which used machine parts and elements of the laboratory decor that he had
constructed for L’Herbier. Finally, Jean Epstein’s theoretical writings, espe-

394
 I ally his emphasis on the close-up and photogeny of movement, in Bonjour MENILMONTANT AND
inema (1921), coincided with Leger’s own ideas, as Epstein himself suggested RIEN QUE LES HEURES
131 an astute essay on the painter in Les Feuilles libres (1923).35 Besides the
[arnival segment in Coeur fidele, another of Epstein’s films provided Leger with
model—the lost Photogenies, compiled for a special screening organized by
i.A.S.A., on 11 April 1924.36 Consequently, through Ballet mecanique and
ntr’acte, the French non-narrative avant-garde films owe more to the narrative
| vant-garde than generally has been acknowledged.

The urban milieu of the working class and unemployed had provided the Menilmontant and
>asis for several early narrative avant-garde films—Delluc’s Fievre, Epstein’s Rien que les heures
loeur fidele, and, some might add, Feyder’s Crainquebille. In the middle of the
lecade, while most of the leading filmmakers (e.g., Gance, L’Herbier, Dulac,
dpstein) were being compromised by the film industry’s consolidation and
iingle-minded investment in historical reconstruction films and modern studio
pectaculars, two young filmmakers chose to explore that same milieu (in
^aris) in their first films. The films were Dimitri Kirsanoffs Menilmontant
1926) and Alberto Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures (1926).
To be accurate, Menilmontant was actually Kirsanoffs second film. From
1921 to 1922, while performing in the orchestras of several cinemas (the
luny, the Artistic, and the Danton), the young Russian emigre had managed
:o shoot a short feature film, L’lronie du destin, with the help of Arnou (the
cameraman who had filmed Boudrioz’s L’Atre) and Nadia Sibirskaia (his wife
who was the principal actress).1 L’lronie du destin (no print survives) had a
simple subject “which is none other than life,” wrote Cinea-Cine-pour-tous—a
double story of love lost and regained.

The story is that of a child who becomes a woman after having known her first
suffering, then a lone woman who falls in love, finally a broken old creature. And
that is all. A young man, similarly, is the plaything of an undeserved love for a
prostitute; he experiences all the despair possible, even to the point of doubting
himself. He, too, becomes an old man, and, on a common park bench, he rediscovers
the old woman who had once been young and beautiful and who always has loved
ihim secretly. They retell their story without forced irony—sad destiny dictated by
chance and unmarked by marvelous interventions. This story is the film.2

Refused distribution for nearly a year, the film finally played in just three
Paris cinemas and failed to recoup even the modest amount it had cost.3 But
^several things about the film caught Jean Tedesco’s eye—Sibirskaia’s subtle
acting, the Paris location shooting (there were scarcely any interior decors),
the simplicity of the narrative, and the film’s complete lack of intertitles
(perhaps the first such French film).4 Tedesco was impressed enough to feature
L’lronie du destin in the biweekly series of Friday film programs organized by
C.A.S.A. in April and May of 1924. When the Paris distributors rejected
Kirsanoffs next film, initially entitled Les Cents Pas, Tedesco snapped it up,
in January, 1926, to open his second season of film programming at the
Vieux-Colombier. Menilmontant, as it came to be called, helped assure the
success of the Vieux-Colombier and soon became a major film on the cine-
club and specialized cinema circuit.5
Like L’lronie du destin, Menilmontant tells its story entirely in images. There

395
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE are no intertitles. But the story it narrates is complicated and ambiguous.6
After the unexplained murder of their parents, two sisters leave their pro¬
vincial village and move to Menilmontant on the eastern edge of Paris, one of
the poorer working-class districts in the 20th arrondissement. Although they
work together at first in the flower market, the older sister (Yolande Beaulieu)
soon turns to prostitution and goes off on her own. The younger (Sibirskaia)
falls in love with a young man (Guy Belmore) who quickly abandons her and
eventually takes up with her sister. Burdened with an illegitimate baby and
nearly starving, she comes close to drowning both the child and herself in the
Seine. Finally, one night on the street, she rediscovers her sister, who has
grown relatively rich in her profession, and the two are reunited. At the same
time, the young man who had deserted her is killed in a street mugging by
another woman and a male accomplice.
This brutal, melodramatic story reminds one of Delluc and Epstein’s work
in several ways. Kirsanoff shot most of the film himself on location in Me¬
nilmontant during the winter of 1924-1925.7 The narrow blackened streets,
the cheap hotels, the deserted parks, the beckoning water of the Seine (or is
it the Canal St. Martin?)—all produce.the realistic ambiance of a wretched
milieu, out of which the story (or at least part of the story) seems to evolve
naturally. One brief sequence will suffice to note the detail of the film’s de¬
scription. It opens with a LS down a drab alley where a woman stands waiting
in the distance. In a closer HA shot, water flows forward over the rough
cobblestones along a low curb. A young man comes up the alley alone and
stops; in MS, he raises one foot to polish his shoe on the back of his other
pant leg. The two sisters get off the metro (reflected in its glass doors); Sibir¬
skaia follows her older sister up the alley and, from around the corner in LS,
watches her go off with the man. However, Menilmontant is much more than
a realistic ‘‘slice of life.” As in Coeur fidele, the banality of its story seems to
serve Kirsanoff as a pretext for experimentation. The flow of images, as Rene
Jeanne and Charles Ford suggest, reminds one of a Baudelaire prose poem, say
‘‘Le Spleen de Paris.”8
Like several other narrative avant-garde films, Menilmontant is marked by a
mixture of styles or modes, a pastiche of techniques. There are sequences of
violence in rapid montage, of dreamlike multiple superimpositions and lap
dissolves (all done in camera), of documentarylike impressions (e.g., a descrip¬
tion of the neighborhood around the sisters’ apartment on a quiet Sunday
morning), of classical continuity editing (e.g., the poignant moment in the
park when an old man silently puts down beside him on the bench a piece of
bread for Sibirskaia, sniffling and teary-eyed from the cold, to pick up and
eat—echoing a moment in La Roue when Norma first comes at night to Sisif s
mountain cabin), and, unfortunately, of exaggerated sentiment (e.g., the two
sisters excitedly jumping up and down on their bed, incongruously imitating
Griffith’s stereotype of little Southern belles). At first, this melange, especially
in such a short film (of only thirty-five minutes), may appear to break down
into isolated, loosely related fragments—as if it were already an anthology of
avant-garde set pieces. The narrative, after all, has a number of puzzling gaps,
and its beginning and ending seem separate from the rest.9 Yet, as Noel Burch
has written, Menilmontant can be seen as a systematic and sophisticated attempt
‘‘to refine existing codes of decoupage to a point where it becomes possible to

396
Ilispense with the disrupting titles and yet maintain the control of the flow of
signification. . . .”10 Specifically, I would argue, the film achieves its coherence
hrough a strategy of structural parallels and repetitions.
Along with the opening minutes of La Roue and Le Brasier ardent, the first
sequence of Menilmontant is one of the most startling and disorienting in 1920s
MENILMONTANT AND
RIEN QUE LES HEURES

^rench cinema. It begins in medias res, without warning or preparation. A CU

of a lace curtain which suddenly moves; a MS of the curtain (now clearly
hrough a door window) as a man rips it aside and gestures frantically (a
woman and another man are glimpsed briefly behind him); a CU of the door-
mob twisting; another brief CU of the curtain “wiping" away to reveal a
woman’s face as a hand yanks her hair from behind; a MS of the door opening
is the first man struggles out, yelling, followed by the woman. In little more
:han a minute, in a montage of some thirty shots (of faces, upper torsos, and
arms), the second man pursues the two others, seizes a nearby hatchet, and,
in a rage, kills them. As his arm strikes down through the frame one last
time, the shot holds momentarily on a line of bare trees blurred in the back¬
ground. Cut to a HAFS of a shallow mud puddle—the hatchet drops in it.
So the sequence ends. This opening is unusually striking for its lack of estab¬
lishing shots, its spatial ambiguity, its almost subjective shot/reverse shots
whose immediacy forces our involvement with unidentified characters, and its
shocking elimination of those characters. Lacking a context in space and time,
the rapid montage transforms the specificity of the CUs and MCUs into a kind
:>f generalized dance of death that both fascinates and appalls. The violence
seems senseless and is never explained—the murderer disappears from the film
iltogether. At most, the sequence implies that this is a world of sexual dis¬
trust, deception, and jealousy, and, consequently, of brutal victimization.
In the next few sequences, the film’s diegetic flow is redirected toward
Sibirskaia’s character, only to shift and diverge in peculiar ways. Juxtaposed
sharply to the murder is a sequence in which, outfitted in simple short white
dresses, the two girls (in imitation of the Gish sisters?) are playing in a park.
A.s they run forward gaily, the sequence cuts to a MS of workers in a semicir-
:le, all looking down (presumably at the bodies). Suddenly, the camera focuses
)n Sibirskaia alone, stopped in MS and staring forward. Four quick jump cuts
of her face, moving in from MS to ECU, simulate the shock of her recognition
of what has previously been shown us but is here elided. In this relocation of
the subjective, our knowledge becomes hers. After another quick cut to MS,
she turns in fright and runs off down a park path. In the village cemetery,
sometime later, dissolves link shots of the two girls, of a cross and a wreath
(one each for a father and mother), of a low fence chain, of the two girls’ faces
superimposed together in CU like a Janus head. This shared subjectivity in
mourning carries over, across another ellipsis in time—a brief description of
the overgrown cemetery—to the young women’s departure. They walk off,
hand in hand, down a bleak poplar-lined lane, their black figures diminishing
in a series of lap dissolves that seem to hold them back momentarily as well
as propel them on their way.
The rest of Menilmontant works a number of variations on this pattern of
loss or separation (through sexual deception and victimization) followed by
some kind of replacement. For a while, the two sisters are equally, if ambig¬
uously, the center of attention, even though their paths begin to diverge.

397
199. Selected frames from the
murder sequence that opens
the existing print of Menilmon-
tant (1926)—read each page
across, from left to right, be¬
ginning with the top left frame
still

Another juxtaposition introduces Paris: instead of slow lap dissolves of a coun¬

try lane, there are several rapid tracking shots of fast-moving cars, then still
shots of the flower girls and a CU of the two sisters among them (an intriguing
parallel to the opening of Epstein’s L’Affiche). Are these tracking shots omnis¬
cient cliches of the city or imaginary images suggesting something of the
women’s desires? After Sibirskaia has met, several times in a park, the young
man who claims to love her, she reluctantly agrees to spend the night with
him in a hotel. In a haunting ELS, they come forward together down a grimly
glistening alley and then, in MCU, pause in the narrow hotel doorway almost
in silhouette.
The two interrelated sequences that follow are among the most ambiguous
in the film. The first begins with a HALS, as the couple enters the hotel
room. A dissolve leads to a HAMCU looking over the man’s shoulder to
Sibirskaia. The camera angles and dissolves both conspire to force the young
man on her. In CU (eye-line match cuts), however, she refuses him; the camera
cuts back to MS, as she pushes him away, and to HALS again, as he pursues
her and is granted a kiss before she runs to the window and stops. The se¬
quence ends in this same HALS, with the man now in bed and Sibirskaia
standing by the door. A dissolve shifts her across the room to kiss his head,
and another shifts her back to the doorway through which she exits. Instead
of compromising her, as before, the dissolve now bestows her blessing. In the
middle of this sequence, however, another is interpolated, simultaneous with
it, of Sibirskaia’s sister asleep in bed. A slow montage of shots ensues: a clock,
a book she has been reading, a cat prowling down some stairs, a CU of feet

398
| walking along an alley, car wheels passing. These seem to be simply descrip¬
tive shots until a MS of the sleeping woman blurs into a series of dissolving
multiple superimpositions: tracking shots of cars and tires on the streets, poin-
itillistic light and shadow patterns, the clock, and the naked torso of a woman
lying in different positions. The montage ends in a MS of the sister as she
turns over in her sleep, and the shot pans right to reveal an empty pillow
(apparently Sibirskaia’s ). Is this onmiscient description, an autonomous chain
of graphic and rhythmic patterns, or a semiconscious imagining of the sis¬
ter’s?11 And, if the latter only, does it convey her own repressed desire or her
apprehension over Sibirskaia? The significance is all the more puzzling because
it clearly substitutes for the couple’s love-making. Why should the film dis¬
rupt the diegesis or shift into the sister’s consciousness precisely at this mo¬
ment, expecially since she disappears soon after from the narrative? Would
such a “dream” stand in opposition to a lack on Sibirskaia’s part? Is the
sequence somehow articulating the difference that separates them?
Until nearly the film’s end, the diegetic flow now focuses on Sibirskaia.
After leaving the hotel room, she pauses on the Pont Neuf. A CU of her
lovely, delicate face (framed within the curving brim of a soft hat) is followed
by a shot of spinning trees and then shots of her playing as a child in a wooded
park. This brief eruption of memory condenses two earlier moments in the
film: her innocent play at the time of her parents’ death and her pensive look
in the cemetery. In ELS, the child pauses at a shaded shallow pond deep in
the woods and then runs off (another echo), her image doubled on the water
surface as if emerging from a dazzling burst of sunlight. At the end of this

399
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

200. The alley leading to the

hotel in Menilmontant (1926)

rearticulation of loss, Sibirskaia starts down the steps to the Seine and stops;
in CU, her feet turn and ascend out of the frame. The water, repeatedly
associated with death, now seems to strangely draw her. After another ellipsis,
in which her baby is born, Sibirskaia walks along the Seine (in a long tracking
CU of her desperate, tear-stained face). Again she pauses on a bridge (the same
one?), and over a slow panning shot of the water surface is superimposed a
CU of her face—echoing the shot of Gina Manes early in Coeur fidele. Her
baby cries and prompts her to continue walking. A montage of superimposi¬
201. Nadia Sibirskaia on
the Pont Neuf in tion and tracking shots leave her standing on the same steps leading down to
Menilmontant (1926) the Seine. There she sits, facing the river in a HAFS, and leans against the
iron and stone railing. What keeps her from committing suidice? As if in
answer, the young man who deserted her is shown sitting on a park bench.
He gets up to leave, and Sibirskaia and her baby dissolve in, sitting next to
the spot he has just left. Is this an imaginary image, suggesting her final
recognition of his abandonment, or an ironic condensation of time, creating a
near meeting and reconciliation that never occur? Whatever, the young man’s
place on the bench is quickly occupied by an old man with a cane. This
stranger who replaces him discreetly offers her part of his lunch—in a series
of CUs, bread passes from one to the other. Though they briefly acknowledge
one another’s presence, the two remain separate in their cold, lonely spaces.
The final sequences of Menilmontant resolve the narrative in a series of dis¬
turbing and disorienting repetitions. At night, a man and woman enter the
familiar hotel. From the doorway they enter, the shot tilts up to the HOTEL
sign and to a lighted window; then it tilts down to catch the young man
going in the door. An elliptical montage of shots sets up a curious parallel

400
 202. (left to right) The old
man on the bench; the crust
of bread that he places on the
bench; Sibirskaia tearfully eats
ioid an expectation. First comes a CU of coins in a hand, then a shot of a
the bread
1 Oman, never seen before, at the street-level window. In MCU, a pair of hands
j loves stealthily among the wine bottles, crusts of bread, and cigarette butts
< n a table. The last shot shows the woman quickly drinking from a nearly
empty bottle. Like Sibirskaia, this woman seems on the verge of starving;
nlike her, however, she lives from what she can steal. If she has seen the
oung man’s money, what will she do? Again the subjective is being relocated.
Meanwhile, Sibirskaia is crouched with her baby in the darkness under a
ridge. Glancing off, she spots her sister in LS, pacing back and forth in a
ill-length fur coat. A MCU of her legs mercilessly describes her high heels
I moving awkwardly about in a thin layer of mud. When Sibirskaia comes up,
tie adds to her sister’s surprise (in shot/reverse shots) by offering her the baby,
ust then, the young man appears at a distant corner (has he come to pick up
he sister?). From his point of view, the two women embrace and go off
ogether. Through a redistribution of the three characters, this reconciliation
heals” the split between the women, first announced in the alley sequence
vhen Sibirskaia watched her sister go off with the same young man. Circum-
cribed within his glance, the diegetic flow shifts one last time.
The sequence of the young man’s death forms a close parallel to the opening
pf the film, with a difference.12 Flere, the triangle is inverted, and the couple
attacks the single man in an action that erupts without warning and is soon
over. CUs of the young man coming up an alley are intercut with CUs of the
itarving woman creeping forward down another. Their confrontation ironically
“choes his first meeting with Sibirskaia’s sister. As they begin to struggle—
over money? Idas she known him before? Is she another woman he has de¬
ceived?—he tries to escape through a nearby door that suddenly shuts. Quickly,
l second man comes up to assist the woman. In a brief flurry of shots (of faces,

upper torsos, and arms), which expand the moment and prolong the horror,
tihe picks up a loose cobblestone and bashes in his head. The two then drag
lis body around a corner, and the sequence ends as abruptly as it began.
Several shots here almost literally repeat those of the initial murder—the wom¬
an’s arms striking down, the man’s head falling back. And the image of hands
kicking up the cobblestone produces an ironic parallel to the hands passing
oread on the park bench. This is poetic justice with a vengeance. More im-
oortant, the editing, as in the initial murder, is almost subjective. We in the
audience are implicated, not on the side of the victim, but on that of the

401
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE murderers. It is as if our desire for punishment is being enacted. After all,
the young man has not only deceived Sibirskaia; he has broken our identifi¬
cation with her and robbed us of our pleasure. In this cycle of betrayal and
violence, our gaze is caught up and compromised.
Perhaps Menilmontant's ending may be read as a gloss on Epstein’s Coeur
fidele. The starving woman replaces Sibirskaia, taking on her suffering and the
guilt of vengeance, just as the crippled woman replaced Marie in the earlier
film. But here, the outcome is quite different. The young man has been
eliminated, but has the attitude that motivated him (whether displaced onto
us or not)? Besides, Sibirskaia still has an unwanted child, and her sister is
still a prostitute. The system of sexual exchange and deception remains in
place. Menilmontant thus breaks off in such a way that the audience is disturb¬
ingly suspended. The conclusion resolves nothing and seems to return to the
beginning. The final shots are enigmatic; several images of gaslights and bridges
at night, a swish pan to the hands of the girls making flowers, then a swish
pan to blackness. Has Sibirskaia gone back to being a flower girl? Or is the
same story about to begin again, in yet another guise? Against the ending of
Coeur fidele, as well as L’Affiche—where the expected romantic convention pro¬
duces the loving couple—Menilmontant aligns itself with Delluc’s Fievre and
the critique of that convention.

“Rien que les heures was an accident,” Alberto Cavalcanti told Elizabeth Sus¬
sex recently.13 A very fortunate accident. After working as Marcel L’Herbier’s
chief set designer for Cinegraphic—on Resurrection (unfinished), L’lnhumaine
(1924), and Feu Mathais Rascal (1925)—the Brazilian-born Cavalcanti wanted
to try his hand at directing. His first film, he Train sans yeux (from an old
scenario by Louis Delluc), which he took over from Julien Duvivier, was shot
in Germany and then withheld from distribution because the producers could
not pay their bills.14 To make sure that he would have a film released by the
end of the year, Cavalcanti says that he got together with a few friends to
concoct the script for Rien que les heures. They worked quickly, shooting all
their footage on location in the streets of Paris and assembling it into a short
film of just 600 meters in length.15 The cost: a mere 35,000 francs. In Oc¬
tober, 1926, Rien que les heures premiered at the Studio des Ursulines.16 Within
a year or two, it was making the rounds of the cine-club and specialized
cinema circuit; and, at a 1928 Film Society screening in London, it had a
considerable impact on, among others, John Grierson.17
Rien que les heures is a peculiar hybrid of a film, combining the fictional and
the factual in several fascinating ways. As early as 1922, Cavalcanti was en¬
gaged in an attempt to integrate what he simplified into the two poles of
French film theory—Delluc’s interest in the real (with its “pragmatic” or
denotative value) and L’Herbier’s interest in the ideal (with its “lyrical” or
connotative value).18 Curiously, in his own filmmaking, he chose to emphasize
the realistic, the documentary, as if in reaction against his previous work with
L’Herbier on what were primarily fantasy films. Above all, Rien que les heures
has become known as one of the first films to document systematically the
daily life of a modern city. “This film does not need a story,” reads the
opening intertitle, “it is no more than a series of impressions on time pass¬
ing. . . . ”19 As in Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin (1927), which was made some

402
 203- (left) The newspaper
woman in Rien que les heures
(1926)
Imonths later but screened earlier in England and the United States, those
204. (right) The pimp
I mpressions follow a dawn-to-dusk pattern of organization, albeit somewhat (Philippe Heriat) waits while
Loosely. After a prologue (more on that in a minute), daybreak reveals several the prostitute dances with the
Late revelers coming home drunk in a limousine as well as the earliest work¬ sailor

ers—a water truck spraying the streets, mice nibbling some refuse, and a man
opening the gates of the metro. Later in the morning, a shopowner opens the
I shutters on his window, a woman selling brooms and feather dusters walks up
La street, and a man washes some clothes in the river. At noon, ragged men
I stand in line for a bowl of soup while a proper young gentleman in an elegant
I restaurant polishes off a beefsteak. In the evening, the factory machines stop,
a. concierge sits down with her cat, and men congregate in a cafe to drink and
hplay cards. Later at night, couples flock to the cinemas, amusement parks,
-and dance halls. Throughout, clochards continue to sleep in niches along the
walls of the buildings. At irregular intervals in this “flow of life,’’ CUs of a
clock face are inserted, indicating the change of hours.
Despite the opening intertitle, Rien que les heures does produce a narrative
of sorts. Out of a milieu much like that of Menilmontant, a diegetic process
evolves, yet much more slowly and schematically than in previous realist films.
In the morning, along with the water truck and mice, a prostitute (Blanche
Bernis) is introduced already walking the streets. At noon, after several shots
of a shanty town of unemployed men (one of whom “plays” a stringless violin),
a pimp (Philippe Heriat) awakens and steps out on a tenement balcony. In
the evening, another woman appears hawking newspapers on a street corner
(in one brief sequence of accelerating montage, a tracking shot of her running
along the street is intercut with the spinning titles of her papers). Shortly
thereafter, a sailor (Clifford MacLaglen) meets a small boyishly tailored woman
at an amusement park. Only now, nearly two-thirds of the way through the
film, does a story develop out of the interaction between these characters. The
newspaper woman has her fortune told by a gypsy woman and receives a death
card. Then the pimp and prostitute briefly meet and kiss in an alley, and he
sends her off. Later that night at a dance hall, the prostitute dances with the
sailor (their figures multiplied in superimpositions) while the pimp waits pa¬
tiently in the doorway. Afterwards, the pimp tells the prostitute to act as a

403
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE lookout while he waylays the newspaper woman. At this point, the fictional
discourse of Rien que les beures shifts into prominence, the factual slips into the
background, and the few intertitles disappear altogether.20
This sudden conflict forms the climax of the film, articulated in several
different modes of representation. The pimp’s attack on the newspaper woman
closely parallels the murder at the end of Menilmontant. As he confronts her at
the corner of an alley, the discourse shifts abruptly into a rapid montage of
eyeline match cuts.

CU of the woman’s face moving away.

ECU of her mouth opening.
CU of the pimp’s face.
CU of the woman’s face.
CU of the pimp’s face.
ECU of the woman’s mouth biting his hand.
CU of the pimp’s face in pain.
FS of the woman stepping back.

Just then, the prostitute sees the sailor coming toward her up another alley,
and she leaves her post to divert his attention. The CUs of the pimp and
newspaper woman return, and he begins to beat her brutally. As she loses
consciousness, the CU of her face blurs and splits into two shots that alternate
rapidly at half-second intervals. A swish pan of newspaper titles is superim¬
posed across one while the surface of the other is increasingly scratched and
daubed. At the moment of her death, the film image itself literally begins to
deteriorate. Signified and signifier undergo a simultaneous disintegration.
After the prostitute has gone off with the sailor and the pimp has stolen
some money from the dead woman, the story ends with two ironic juxtapo¬
sitions. A black cat looking down from a wall is intercut with the woman’s
body; then two gendarmes pedal up on bicycles in LS, look briefly over a
railing into a sunken alley, and ride off. After another shot of the dead woman,
the prostitute and sailor (with obvious relish) prepare to go to bed together.
This sequence is articulated in just four shot setups that alternate in such a
way as to produce a concise model of spatial-temporal contiguity. Eyeline
match cuts link a CU of the sailor and a CU of the prostitute as she, one by
one, takes off her hat and coat and dress. Intercut now with the CU of the
smiling sailor is a FS of a bed, then a CU of one of her boots as it is untied
and slipped off. In CU, the prostitute winks and turns, and her look positions
the bed just behind her and to the left. The alternation ends with a CU of
the sailor beaming and glancing off to the right—cut to a shot of the bed.
Though perhaps too broadly played, this sequence is doubly disturbing. Not
only does it jarringly follow the newspaper woman’s death, but its mode of
subjectivity parallels the near subjectivity of the attack. Thus does the murder
coldly infect the couple’s gaze and compromise their desire. In this “best of
all possible worlds,’’ the poor prey blindly, it seems, on their own kind.
Throughout the film, a lame old woman appears as a fifth character, isolated
from the others, often in single shots.21 This pathetic creature is introduced
in a EIALS, just before the morning segment, moving slowly up a narrow
alley that runs vertically between two buildings. Next she is seen in a closer
HALS, dragging herself from left to right along the same route. Later, in LS,

404
 MENILMONTANT AND
RIEN QUE LES HEURES

205. The old woman in the

construction or dumping site
in Run que les
heures (1926)

tie staggers away from the camera along a wall and down another twisting
Hey. By this time (just prior to the pimp’s appearance), she alone among the
..arious people in the film is beginning to arouse some expectations—where is
he going and will she get there? Is there a story emerging, even if it is one
t only for a Samuel Beckett fiction? Or is she some symbolic figure of hopeless
nisery and isolation, suturing together the different strands of the film as does
ihe figure of Lilian Gish rocking the cradle in Intolerance? As the pimp and
orostitute’s story begins, the old woman reaches a construction site or storage/
lump area near the Seine river, where she collapses in the shade of a wooden
scaffolding. Once there—“indifferent to time passing,” reads an intertitle—
ter role in the film seems to shift. With scraggly white hair obscuring her
;ace, she sits numb and exhausted in a MS that links the sequence at the dance
lall to the sequence of the attack and murder. Then, between the shot of the
gendarmes leaving and the shot of the dead body that precedes the sequence
of seduction, there is a final CU of her head nodding back and forth slowly,
enigmatically. In the alternations of the narrative’s climax, she seems to have
oecome an ironic figure of fate, seeing and not seeing, knowing and yet unable
co do a thing. A National Film Theater screening several years back gives
credence to this reading. Juxtaposed with an incongruous accompaniment of
light Parisian songs, which Cavalcanti himself selected, according to Elizabeth
Sussex, the old woman emerged as a bizarre, almost comical character.22

405
narrative AVANT-GARDE Such contrasts and shifts in perception and signification are evident from
the very opening of Rien que les heures. It is important to realize that the
prologue operates as a whimsically reflective discourse on image-making and
representation. After an intertitle saying, All cities would be alike if their
monuments did not distinguish them, the discourse presents a toy replica of
the Eiffel Tower (with a thermometer inlaid), a shot of the Madeleine super¬
imposed within a glass ball, and a map of Paris so blurred that it looks like a
cloudy complex molecule. A normal shot of the Place de la Concorde appears
(an audience may sigh in relief, in recognition), only to be obliterated by a
hand soaping over the camera lens! With these cliche images removed, what
will we see of the city? Not the fashionable, elegant life, says another in-
tertitle. A FS of impeccably costumed women (on the steps of the Opera?)
suddenly turns into a photograph which is torn to pieces by a pair of hands
and then scattered, along with other fragments, on the sidewalk. Gone, too,
now are a certain socioeconomic class, a kind of woman (a kind of cinema?),
and another image of the advertising age. Instead, we will see . . . the
common life of the lowly, the downtrodden ; and the shot of a limousine
dissolves into a donkey cart which is slowly driven off.
The discourse of Rien que les heures thus situates itself consciously in the
context of representational images already present in French society. Later,
appropriately, when various cinema posters are reproduced, they are all of
adventure films and serials. The film’s strategy will be to allow other images
to emerge that have been masked or repressed by those already dominant.
Instead of going directly to the representation of actual life, however, the
discourse offers an interlude of various paintings of Paris streets (e.g., Chagall,
Delaunay). At first, we might take these as models of representation, but they
are followed by a shot of some two dozen eyes in rows of little oval irises
(opening and closing like a bed of tiny clams) and then an intertitle, "...
only a succession of images can reconstitute life for us.’’ Although painting
reproduces spaces and things, only the cinema reproduces movement and the
illusion of life. An old and dubious argument, at best; but there is more. This
discourse is not content merely to give image and movement to the oppressed.
For the succession of images that constitutes the film keeps shifting between
the contiguous or coherent and the apparently fragmentary or incoherent. Con¬
sistently, however, what at first seems incoherent turns out not to be—through
various patterns of juxtaposition and unexpected conjunction. Thus does the
film oscillate between the real and the surreal, between the simple represen¬
tation of a wretched milieu and the production of a reality constituted of
multiple maskings and juxtapositions.
One such pattern of juxtaposition involves the production and consumption
of food. In the morning segment, for instance, one sequence describes the
array of produce in the markets. In the middle of this description, a series of
crude wipes (back and forth, from left to right) alternates between shots of
vegetables and fruits in their display cases and shots of market refuse in gar¬
bage cans and boxes. Lettuce, cauliflower, onions, beans, pears, currants, ba¬
nanas—each turns into refuse, which immediately turns into something fresh
again. The effect is ambiguous. Does the juxtaposition critique a systematic
wastefulness in the midst of want? Or is this a sardonic sign of the inevitable
decay hidden in the image of all living things? A later sequence is more clear-

406
cut. The “noon meal’’ intertitle is followed by the shot of a limousine parked MENILMONTANT AND
in front of a poster advertising the Tasserre restaurant. Suddenly, the car pulls RIEN QUE LES HEURES
away, revealing a meter man who is sitting on the curb and munching on
some sausage and bread. One image of privileged sustenance masks another
less proper. This unmasking is followed by another. A young gentleman (in
CU) is eating a steak (HACU of his plate). Suddenly, the steak is displaced
by a soft iris image—a LS of a side of beef being butchered. Cut to the
gentleman chewing contentedly, then back to the butchering going on “be¬
hind” his plate. Here the film jokingly reveals an interrelationship to which
the character is oblivious. This simple ironic critique of his ignorance (and of
his class?) is similar to, yet nowhere as complex as that of a similar sequence
in Vertov’s Kino-Eye (1924), where the meat in a market (through the tech¬
nique of extended reverse motion) is turned back into a bull and returned to
its pasture—to emphasize the physical and socioeconomic process of food pro¬
duction and distribution.
Another pattern involves shifts in perception on the subject of sexual desire.
Near the end of the morning segment, a series of CUs seems to set up a
mildly erotic scene.

CU of a woman’s leg sheathed in stocking and garter.

CU of a sleek-haired man’s face looking down and to the right.
CU of the woman’s leg, a man’s hand brushes by.
CU of the man’s face, impassive yet intent.

But this voyeuristic moment proves deceptive when a MS of the woman’s legs
tilts up to reveal that her body is a mannequin. The man’s hands are arranging
a new outfit for sale. Cut to a LS of the man standing before several manne¬
quins in the display window of a boutique. This witty unmasking presents
the erotic as a construction of looks (of subject and object); the sequence
simply reverses the process that functions in advertising, where the customer’s
look would replace that of the window dresser. A further deconstruction of
sexuality occurs just after the newspaper woman has her fortune told. This
sequence, in which the sailor first appears, is loosely organized around a bizarre
alternation between various couples and foods. The foods include an ECU of
absinthe poured over some sugar into a glass, chestnuts boiling in a street-
corner tub, potatoes cooking in a pot, and a platter of baked fish. The couples
shift from a silhouette of a man and woman kissing to the sailor and his girl
at the amusement park, a woman and a man who must stand on tiptoe to kiss
her, a Rodin sculpture of lovers, and the pimp and prostitute meeting in an
alley. If the potatoes and fish are not enough to demystify the Rodin, then
the pimp and prostitute clinch it. Consequently, the final seduction sequence
between the sailor and prostitute caps a whole series of perceptual deceptions
and demystifications.
Rien que les heures may seem to end with a rather lame epilogue. A couple
of intertitles produce a conventional conclusion: “We can fix a point in space,
stop a moment in time . . . . but space and time both elude our grasp.”
The discourse of images, however, presents a rough challenge to an audience’s
perception and understanding. Cliches abound—a simple globe of the world
(singling out Paris and Peking), an aerial shot of the Arc de Triomphe, several
snapshots of pagodas, a French mother and child before a white curtain, a

407
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE man chasing a woman before an abstract Cubist screen (the action comically
repeated several times). Why should we accept these images per se any more
than those at the film’s beginning? For a film that has examined, whimsically
as well as coldly, both a wide range of images and the image-making process,
such an epilogue would be patently silly as a transparent succession of images.
It is not, I would argue. As the final shots divide and fragment (through
multiple exposure, mattes, and camera movement), the work of deconstruction
that the film has engaged in is shifted onto the audience. Flow will we now
perceive the representational images of our culture all around us?

En rade and Cavalcanti s second film to be released in France, En rade (1927), differs
L’Invitation au markedly from Rien que les heures. For one, commercial considerations played
voyage a role in its production. The producer was Neo-Film, Pierre Braunberger’s
fledgling semi-independent company. The "cast included several prominent film
actors: Nathalie Lissenko, Philippe Heriat-, and Catherine Hessling. The sce¬
nario, written by Cavalcanti in collaboration with Claude Heymann (one of
Jean Renoir’s assistants), was more exclusively narrative in mode.1 Unlike his
earlier film, En rade was first distributed commercially by Super-Film, in Sep¬
tember, 1927, and then was quickly picked up by the specialized cinemas,
beginning with the Vieux-Colombier, in November, 1927.2 Apparently, there
was some discrepancy between the commercial and Vieux-Colombier versions
of the film—“numerous cuts, in effect, were made’’ in the latter—but the
print preserved at the Cinematheque franchise is presumably complete.3
The story that En rade tells is familiar, so familiar that one critic lumped
it together with the “junk of the old naturalist scrap heap.’’4 It is a simple,
melancholy story of failed romance and yearning for adventure in a seaport
slum. Bored with his life in the old port of Marseille, and chafing at the
possessiveness of his laundress mother (Lissenko), a young man (George Char-
lia) dreams of going to sea as a sailor. He befriends a retarded old man who
inhabits the docks (Heriat) and, through him, meets and falls in love with a
local cafe waitress (an unusually restrained Hessling). The couple make plans
to elope, but Lissenko discovers her son’s hidden seaman’s kit and boat ticket.
Thereafter, everything goes awry. In the cafe, one stormy night, Charlia is
strangely provoked into trying to seduce Hessling; shocked, she repulses him
and sends him away. He returns to his mother, and Hessling stays on in the
cafe. In a small rowboat, Heriat alone sets off to sea, only to drown.
Indeed, why should Cavalcanti have chosen such a banal tale? Surely not,
like Epstein and Kirsanoff before him, as a pretext for experimentation. No,
what impresses one about En rade is its sustained sense of atmosphere, the deft
balance of its narrative structure, and the simplicity and poignancy of its
rhetorical figuring. In this, Cavalcanti seems (as Feyder does, one could argue,
in Visages denfants) to be consolidating some of the strategies of previous films,
especially Fibre, Coeur fidele, and L’Inondation. “Nothing and everything,’’ wrote
Jean Dreville, “its development and technique are clear and accessible to all.”5
En rade is simply, plainly, poetry, on the order of a folk ballad.
Dissolving out of a blurred shot of swirling water, the title of En rade
( Moored or Aground at low tide”) appears as a sign washed by rain. Just
the right touch to evoke this film’s atmosphere of despair, false hopes, and

408
evasion. For the sake of authenticity, Cavalcanti had Jimmy Rogers shoot all EN RADE AND
of the exteriors on panchromatic film stock in the Old Port area of Marseille.6 L’INVITATION AU VOYAGE
And the interiors, constructed with the assistance of Eric Aes, he designed
meticulously to blend in with the location footage. As in Fievre, the opening
shots of En rade succinctly set two spaces in opposition—a ELS (blurred) of
ships in the harbor and a LS of Lissenko’s apartment, with drying shirts and
sheets hung from the ceiling like castoff sails. Located in the one cramped,
cluttered world, the laundress, in MCU, looks off frame left. In the other
open world, near a dock crane that obscures an ocean liner and tug, Charlia,
in MS, looks off frame right. Though separate, the two characters are inter¬
related, through the alternation of shots and the direction of their looks. A
suggestive shot follows the boy’s gaze—the doors to a nearby warehouse close
shut. Soon after, the mother’s position (as authority and provider) is confirmed
in a few brief shots in the apartment, as Charlia sits at the table.

MCU of Lissenko giving a stern silent look.

HAMCU of Charlia looking up slowly.
MCU of Lissenko as before.
HAMCU of Charlia glancing down and chewing on a piece of bread.

Before this, however, a third space is established—the run-down cafe where

Hessling waits on sailors and dockworkers and cleans up after them. The cafe
is a long, bare, narrow room (holding perhaps a half-dozen rough tables), with
a grubby service and storage area at the back (up two steps), where a window
in one wall opens onto the kitchen. The big woman who owns the cafe and
runs the kitchen is rarely visible except for a huge arm that pounds the win¬
dow ledge. While Hessling (dressed in a dirty sweater and skirt) is washing
some plates, Heriat comes into the cafe. There is an exchange of looks between
them, and he sits down at a table near the door. Already parallels are form¬
ing—between the apartment and the cafe, as closed worlds opposite the harbor
and sea, and between the two pairs of characters.
To sustain the ambiance of old Marseille, En rade is unusually restrained in
its deployment of technical effects. It relies, instead, on the mise-en-scene
(decors, lighting, and actors), a slow rhythm of editing, and, in Dreville’s
words, “the skillful choice of camera angles to delimit the frame space.’’7 The
latter, which also characterizes Jean Epstein’s later films, is particularly evident
in an extended morning segment that, almost without intertitles, develops
the relationship between mother and son. While walking down to the harbor,
for instance, Charlia stops before a shop window that is displaying a model
ocean liner. The cutting here is a bit unusual: from HAELS to MCU and back
to HALS. Also, dividing the MCU in two is a brief double exposure of Charlia
and the boat, which suggests his desire to become one with it, to project
himself into a fantasy voyage.8 As he moves on, the reality of the harbor area
stands in mute contrast to his fantasy. The direction of his movement coun¬
terpoints that of the freighters and ocean liners, and (in ELS and HAELS) his
figure is diminished before the huge ships. Returning to the apartment, Char¬
lia stops in the street to speak briefly with his mother who is on a second-
floor balcony. Again the cutting is unusual: a LALS of Lissenko standing
beside the drying wash, a CU of her looking down, a HALS of Charlia looking
up, a closer shot as he opens a bag of something he has bought, then an ECU

409
206. (left) Nathalie Lissenko
on the apartment balcony in
En rade (1927)

207. (right) Philippe Heriat of several utensils from the bag in his hand. Lissenko’s position and look, in
and Georges Charlia on the conjunction with the shot that reveals the hidden objects, subtly articulates
dock
her control over her son. Her curiosity piqued (as is ours), she soon goes into
the curtained-off corner which serves as Charlia’s bedroom and rummages through
a sack. There she “discovers his secret’’—a sailor’s mess kit. Although her
guilty intrusion advances the narrative (and gives us knowledge), does she
realize not only her son’s desire to leave, but also his need to sustain himself
independently (literally, to feed himself)? And what is her need that demands
such close watch over him?
After this discovery, the first major break in the narrative occurs, altering
this pattern of alternating spaces and characters. One day, while Charlia is
leaning on an anchor cable, watching a crane load a freighter, Heriat sits down
near him on the dock. Curious, he goes over to the cable to follow his gaze.
In a brief intercutting of CUs and MCUs, Charlia says, “And you, too, would
like to leave.’’ Although Heriat makes no reply, the boy’s words seem to
project his dream onto him. Still silent, he soon goes off, in LS, beneath the
spidery legs of the crane, leaving the boy, in ELS, again posed before a tug
shepherding an ocean liner out to sea. Whether imagined or actual, Charlia
now has an accomplice. After another sequence in the cafe, where Hessling is
nearly attacked by one of the dockworkers (in a series of CUs and camera
dollies that remind one of the opening of Coeur fidele), Charlia goes to find
Heriat among the men working on the docks. Suddenly, his mother appears
and separates them (does she fear that he is arranging boat passage?). The next
Sunday, Charlia follows Heriat through the slum streets and alleys to the cafe
(in one LALS, as if still dogged by his mother, they pass under some washing

410
hung out to dry). There, they sit and watch the next table where a dockworker en rade and
has asked Hessling to have a glass of wine with him. In a frank exchange of l invitation AU voyage
MCUs and CUs, Hessling stares at Charlia, who hesitantly stares back. When
she gets up to set a table for a family that comes in, the sequence ends with
a MCU of him bathed in the sunlight falling through the door. Even nature
seems to bless their meeting. In this turn of events, Heriat has acted as a
mediator, linking the different worlds of the diegesis and leading Charlia to
do the same. And, perhaps without knowing it, in exchange for the dream,
he seems to have given Charlia his place near Hessling in the cafe. Will the
love suggested here in their looks conflict with this dream or will it release
her, too, from servitude and confinement?
According to the next two sequences, the answer seems assured. Sometime
later, Charlia takes Hessling down to the docks, where she now replaces Heriat
as his accomplice. Nervous about their attraction to one another, they stand
awkwardly beside some unloaded bags of coffee beans. While Charlia picks at
the burlap on one of the sacks, Hessling shyly turns up the brim of her hat
and leans back against it. Finally, he touches her hair, and the label revealed
on the side of the sack neatly substitutes for his words: “Constanzia.” How
poignant is this gentle foreshadowing of cafe au lait in the morning after love-
making. Here the romantic is reimagined in the commonest things.9 Yet there
is an edge to these images. What does it mean to have the romantic articulated
so clearly by commodities in the system of economic exchange? The next time
the lovers meet on the waterfront, Hessling arrives early, walking in the same
area Charlia has walked before, linking herself with the ships and the sea.
Among the timbers beneath one of the docks, they plan their departure (a
boat ticket and letter—of employment?); then she kisses him and runs off.
Are they really on the verge of escaping, and where and to what?
At this crucial moment, Lissenko once more searches Charlia’s corner and
discovers the boat ticket and letter. Her action now sets up the second major
break in the narrative, which reverses the previous process of mediation and
exchange. In a sequence marked off from the rest by long tracking shots, she
searches the waterfront area at night for her son. At one point, she stops close
by the raised piece of canvas on which he lies sleeping (an ironic parallel to
the apartment with its drying sheets and curtained-off corner). A strong wind
suddenly comes up, as if provoked by her efforts, and she shivers and walks
off, in LS, past the tall dock cranes. Instead of one sleeper, she finds another—
Heriat asleep in an alley. The displacements are beginning. Dazed by her
questions (they have told him nothing of their plans), he is beaten, madly,
savagely, in the first instance of rapid montage in the film. Then, just as
suddenly, Lissenko stops, stunned, and slowly walks off. The effect of this
attack on Heriat is ambiguous. In a LS marked by gusts of wind, he runs up
to the cafe—cut to a strange HAFS (through the top of the door frame) of
Hessling down on her knees scrubbing the floor. Has he come to protect or
threaten her? Just then, Charlia comes up, and the two men glance briefly at
one another—what passes between them? Charlia goes inside to Hessling, and
they sit on a table to embrace, rocking back and forth, and sing softly to¬
gether. Outside, Heriat watches them through the doorway—what does it
mean for us to see them through his eyes? In CU, his face moves toward the

411
narrative AVANT-GARDE door and stops (paralleling Lissenko earlier?); in a reverse angle LS, he stands
resigned for a moment, buffeted by the wind in front of the cafe, and then
lopes off. As if on cue, in a flurry of CUs and ECUs, Charlia leaps at Hessling.
There is something uncanny about this apparently unmotivated act. Has
Charlia realized that he is not really going to leave, that he will never go to
sea? Is his attack, then, an act of frustration or desperation? Perhaps so, but
the discourse of the film at this point provides no such psychological expla¬
nation. Instead, it foregrounds a series of narrative displacements in conjunc¬
tion with a curiously inverted form of rhetorical figuring. In separate inci¬
dents, one of the initial pairs of characters attacks the other:

Lissenko-—_____ ___—-—-Charlia
Hessling ~~*^Heriat

The mediation that previously realigned them (substituting Charlia for Heriat
and Hessling for Lissenko) is reversed by. the victim of that realignment, the
abandoned mother. And her agent, strangely enough, is the initial mediator,
Heriat. Relayed through Heriat, Lissenko's fear and rage flare up paradoxi¬
cally, self-destructively, in Charlia. As if by magic, his love turns villainous.
Through this series of displacements, a mother’s possessiveness effectively de¬
stroys her son and those around him. Even the wind seems to serve as her
agent. Touching first one then another, moving from the harbor to the cafe,
it finally coincides with (and provokes?) Charlia’s madness. In this instance, a
metonymical relation turns into metaphor, and the wind seems to generate its
own literal human storm.
The final images of En rade, like those of Fievre, shift into tableaux. Charlia
and Hessling are once more juxtaposed in their separate worlds. He is posed
on the dock, watching a ship (in ELS) leave the harbor westward toward the
setting sun. She is sitting (in MS) on the steps near the back of the cafe,
filling her scrub bucket from a wall faucet. Yet the images of water and light,
which once seemed to unite them, now coalesce again into a form of corre¬
spondence. The sea glitters with the reflected light of the sun, while the cafe
tap water glows strangely (even Hessling gazes at it) like a long candle flame.
Although the dream still seems alive, the next sequence confirms its decep¬
tiveness. From a cliff overlooking the sea, Charlia watches Heriat push off in
the rowboat. In the final HALS of him rowing away across an empty expanse
of sea, the water has turned ominous, the light deathly pale. Charlia returns
to his mother’s apartment and, ignoring the meai she has prepared, goes
immediately to his corner. She stands at the curtain and looks in one last time
as he sobs into a pillow. The sequence ends in two dolly shots, moving away
from the curtain to the window across the room, a transition which leads us
to see what Lissenko does not.

FS of Heriat s body washing up slowly on a beach.

ELS of the sea and beach.
LS of rowboat overturned on the beach.
LS of the sun setting.

As a consequence of enacting Charlia’s dream, Heriat demonstrates its futility,

its inevitable end. He drowns in the sea which supposedly would have given
him new life. Yet his death metaphorically parallels Charlia’s condition, con-

412
 EN RADE AND
L’INVITATION AU VOYAGE

208. Catherine Hessling at

the end of En rade (1927)

fined now to live in a world of poverty and constriction. Unlike Fievre, En

rade has no need of an intertitle such as "Disillusion” to close off its circle of
signification.

Germaine Dulac’s L’Invitation an voyage (1927) makes a strangely apt com¬

panion work to En rade. It takes up the same subject of evasion or ressentiment,
but in a very different mode and context. Whereas Cavalcanti’s film was shot,
in part, on location and enjoyed reasonably adequate financing, Dulac’s film
was shot quickly on a shoestring budget (by Paul Guichard), with minor actors
in rather tacky studio decors. Perhaps that was inevitable, for it was a short
film (about thirty minutes) produced independently, along with La Coquille et
le clergyman (1928), between commercial assignments—somewhat like Renoir’s
Charleston (1926) and Cavalcanti’s La P’tite Lily (1927).10 Despite its produc¬
tion base, Dulac and her assistant, Marie-Anne Malleville, arranged for a lim¬
ited distribution commercially. But the film’s length apparently gave exhibi¬
tors the option of screening or not screening it as part of their programs—and
they tended not to.11 Within a year, like En rade, it, too, found its way into
the circuit of specialized cinemas and cine-clubs.12
Ostensibly, as Charles Ford has written, L’Invitation an voyage is a free,
visual adaptation of the Baudelaire poem of the same title, especially the lines,

Mon enfant, ma soeur,

Songe a la douceur,
D’aller vivre ensemble.13

Yet the film’s narrative as well as its discourse actually owes almost nothing

413
narrative AVANT-GARDE to Baudelaire.14 Leaving her husband and child one evening, a married woman
(Emmy Gynt) adventures into a rather stylized cabaret (the locale is not spec¬
ified) frequented by marine officers and chic young women. There she catches
the eye of a young officer (Raymond Dubreil); and after they dance together,
he tells her of his tropical sea voyages. Just as they are about to go off together,
he notices that she is married. Another woman leads him off to dance, and
the married woman—her dreams dashed returns stealthily home.
Despite their admiration for Dulac’s writings and lectures as well as for
some of her previous films, French critics were not very kind to L’Invitation
au voyage. One complained that “its images convey a concept of evasion more
worthy of Monsieur Paul Geraldy and the Comedie Frangaise. ”15 Another charged
the film itself with an evasion of sorts, particularly in comparison to the
straightforwardness of En rade: “we have the constant impression, at each and
every moment, that it conjures away (quite easily) its principal subject.’’16
There is something to these objections, no doubt, but I am not sure the film
can be dismissed so easily. Could a feminist and socialist of Dulac’s position
suffer such a failure of imagination or mistaken concession to popular taste
that she would seriously endorse this “pale bourgeois nostalgia’’?
Partly out of budgetary limitations and partly out of Dulac’s own interests
in montage, L’Invitation au voyage relies heavily on a visual orchestration of
looks, gestures, and objects, in relatively close shots, with few intertitles. That
orchestration apparently once depended on a musical accompaniment, which
the cabaret provided diegetically—a sailor singing and playing an accordion,
a violinist, a small jazz combo.17 Because of its absence now, the rhythm of
the film seems a bit rough and ragged in the surviving prints. As in Dulac’s
previous films, L’Invitation au voyage gives special emphasis to the representa¬
tion of subjective moments. None of these, at least initially and separately, is
particularly original. A flashback early on briefly defines the woman’s position
in marriage—her husband goes out each evening on a business appointment;
much like Madame Beudet, she sits knitting in her chair, listens to the clock,
and looks out the window. The sequence of dancing, although geared to the
jazz combo more than to her, follows a well-established model of intoxica-
* tion—accelerating montage, superimpositions, quick pans and tracks, out-of-
focus shots, and fast motion. From this comes a dream sequence in which the
officer opens a porthole in an imaginary space, a miniature ship “comes to
life” in the surf, and she joins him on board. Her look (like that of the
Oriental in Fievre) alternates briefly between the surf and what has now become
“refuse” in the cabaret. Finally, as the violinist comes to play by their table,
the real and the imaginary interweave to produce a double trajectory of de¬
sire—she sees the surf, the blurred sails, and clouds; he reaches out to caress
her hand.
Two things mark the discourse of L’Invitation au voyage from this point on
and disturb a conventional reading of the ending. One is a shift in the locus
of the subjective, from the woman to the officer, or, more precisely, to a
juxtaposition of the two. When the woman leaves the cabaret, there is an
exchange of looks between her and the officer. Then he is left alone at the bar
before some roses which he looks at and touches (the end of Fievre returns
reimagined). As he imagines the two of them on the ship of her fantasy, her
figure dissolves away. In her absence, her fantasy has become his. A few brief

414
shots follow, succinctly placing the woman at home before her husband’s ar¬ FEU MATHIAS PASCAL
rival (his foot enters a door, his hat is placed on a rack). The final image in AND MALDONE
this series shows her drawing a blanket up over her in bed. How much is she
hiding from her husband and how much is she burying herself and her vision?
The film ends with a last brief sequence back in the cabaret. The officer puts
the roses aside, looks at the locket he has taken from her (an ECU of her
photograph), and closes it. Finally, his gaze falls on a toy boat. Why should
the officer be given this final act of seeing?
This conjunction of objects concludes an important pattern of rhetorical
figuring that marks the later sections of the film. The locket is the crucial
object which reveals the woman’s status to the officer. Its appearance coincides
with that of a tray of toy boats which a woman is selling in the cabaret. As
the married woman reaches out to take one of the boats, the locket falls from
her bracelet into the officer’s hand. He examines it closely while she gazes at
the boat. When she reaches for his other hand now, he moves it away. Thus,
simultaneously, two images suffer a reduction and transformation—the fantasy
sailing ship becomes an easily purchased toy, and the woman becomes a tiny
enclosed photograph (an object of possession?). And the oval of the locket
frame is neatly juxtaposed to the image of the porthole offered for her vision.
On such simple economies the narrative turns.
The ending merely confirms what has already changed. But what does it
mean for the officer’s look and gestures to circumscribe these objects—the
rose, the locket and photograph, the toy boat? Does the knowledge of his gaze
render the married woman’s dream of escape ridiculous? Does the film then
satirize the “pale bourgeois nostalgia” it has been accused of embracing? Or
does the officer’s look reaffirm the primacy of the male vision? Is the woman-
as-subject, and the desire she looses, doubly contained—in both the opening
of the porthole as well as the closing of the locket? After all, what stimulates
her imagining but the sailor’s song, the violinist’s music, and the officer’s
stories. Is this woman trapped, not only in a social space, but in a way of
seeing, a way of imagining?

In L’lnhumaine, Marcel L’Herbier had transformed an admittedly “demode” Feu Mathias Pascal
scenario into an original, if uneven, experimental film. In Feu Mathias Pascal and Maldone
(1925), he took a step sideways, adapting a modern novel into a slightly more
conventional, more consistent work. At the time of its premiere at the Salle
Marivaux, in September, 1925, L’Herbier’s film was considered avant-garde
by some simply because of its source, an early Luigi Pirandello novel, The Late
Matthew Pascal (1904).1 Pirandello’s plays were then the rage of “Tout-Paris”,
thanks to the productions staged by Pitoeff and Dullin.2 What made the film
a financial and critical success, however, was undoubtedly the presence of Ivan
Mosjoukine in the title role. One of the most popular actors in the French
cinema at the time, Mosjoukine became available when Films Albatros agreed
to co-produce the project with Cinegraphic. His performance here has much
in common with his Protean character in Le Brasier ardent, and L’Herbier takes
advantage of (and even indulges sometimes) his actor’s penchant for eccentric
behavior.
Most film historians consider Feu Mathias Pascal, after El Dorado, L’Her-

415
narrative AVANT-GARDE bier’s best realized film, and even Pirandello seems to have thought highly of
it.3 That judgment, Noel Burch argues, only means that the film is retro¬
grade, compared to L Inhuwiaine, since it places [the] mise-en-scene in the
service of a story.”4 Burch’s argument may be overly polemical, yet, within
the context of the narrative avant-garde film practice, certainly the film is
much more a work of synthesis than one of experimentation. L’Herbier himself
called it “a fantasmagoria with a realistic premise.”5
The premise of Feu Mathias Pascal is clearly Pirandellian (although L’Her¬
bier admits to an autobiographical basis);6 a falsely reported death seems to
free the central character for a second life. Pirandello’s novel provides the basic
structure for the narrative, and L’Herbier’s adaptation follows its source quite
closely. Only at the end does he deviate considerably from the novel, which
has Pascal return to his old life (but not his wife) and to his job at the library,
where he writes the memoirs that constitute the book.7
In the film, Mathias Pascal (Mosjoukine) is an eccentric dreamer, dabbling
at writing The History of Liberty. Suddenly, he is forced to make his own way
in the world when his mother naively loses the family estate to an unscrupu¬
lous lawyer. Asked by his timid friend Pomino (Michel Simon) to court a
young woman, Romide (Marcelle Pradot), by proxy, Mathias ends up marry¬
ing her instead. Circumstances force them to live with her tyrannical mother
in a cramped house in Miragno, and Mathias goes to work at the little-used
town library. After the sudden deaths of his mother and baby daughter, he
flees to Monte Carlo, where a run of luck at roulette wins him a small fortune.
Reading a newspaper report of his own suicide (a body found on his former
family estate has been identified as his), he leaps at this chance for freedom
and embarks on a new life in Rome. Calling himself Adrien, he moves into
an apartment building and soon falls in love with Adrienne Paleari (Lois Moran),
the daughter of his spiritualism-obsessed landlord. She is engaged, however,
to an odious archeologist, Terence Papiano (Jean Herve), whose brother Sci-
pion (Pierre Batcheff in debut) steals his money during a rigged seance. Unable
to seek help from the police, Mathias agrees to let the brothers off if they
leave Rome. Cognizant of his lack of freedom again, he himself returns to
Miragno. There he discovers that Romide has already remarried his old friend
Pomino. Mathias decides to leave the couple in peace (with the mother-law
and a new baby) and return as Adrien to Rome and Adrienne. ‘‘To live hap-
pily,” the film concludes, ‘‘it is necessary to live in concealment. ...”
Feu Mathias Pascal is particularly successful in its balanced mixture of styles.
As in L’lnhumaine, this depends largely on the decors, both natural and con¬
structed—the latter by Cavalcanti and Lazare Meerson, with the assistance of
Eric Aes.8 Miragno’s stagnant provinciality is defined by two particular sets.
One is the house interior which Noel Burch aptly describes as “Kammerspiel
rural. ) It is a crowded split-level space with a tiny unprivate bedroom for the
young married couple. The other is the library, housed in an abandoned church,
a huge Gothic chamber full of dust, disorderly piles of books everywhere, and
mice nibbling the pages. Mathias takes a puppeteer’s delight in tossing leashed
cats at them. The only exception to this oppressive atmosphere is an evening
festival (shot documentary-style by Paul Guichard against the white medieval
walls and towers of San Gimignano),10 where, on a grotto beach, Mathias
courts Romide. Against these decors are ranged the ultramodern Monte Carlo

416
 209- (left) Ivan Mosjoukine in
the church library in Feu
Mathias Pascal (1925)

210. (right) A publicity

casino (with its elegant frenzy) and the otherworldly streets and interiors of photo of Michel Simon in the
Rome. Mathias first sees Adrienne at the train station and then follows her hallway of the Pascal house
through a city that is largely empty. Their journey is described in a series of
HALs and LALs across terraces, down flights of steps, and past piazza foun¬
tains. Spotted by a gendarme, Mathias checks into an expensive hotel and
immediately ducks out a window. In a series of dissolves, he makes a mirac¬
ulous descent down a long flight of steps to find Adrienne again and follow
her home (MCUs and dolly shots now intensify his interest). The Paleari
apartment building has a hallucinatory sense of space produced by a wide,
deep, strangely arched corridor which nearly replicates the main spiraling
stairwell. Its large bare rooms are also reminiscent of Mathias’s mother’s estate,
and the parallel suggests that the film’s resolution will somehow repeat its
beginning.
The smooth, even progress of Feu Mathias Pascal is disrupted at certain
moments when Mathias is most aware of his potential for freedom and hap¬
piness or of his lack of both. These moments of subjective hallucination hap¬
pen to be crucial turning points in the narrative—near the end of the first
story in Miragno and at the climax of the second story in Rome. Together
they underscore the doubled structure of the film.
The first of these turning points resonates in several ways as it draws to¬
gether a series of sequences in a nexus of structured relations. It is perhaps the
closest the film comes to a sustained pattern of rhetorical figuring. The first
sequence involves Mathias’s reaction to the simultaneous deaths of his mother
and his child. He has visited his dying mother one evening and is returning
to his house after having promised to let her see the child once more. His
disoriented state of mind is conveyed in a series of panning and dollying shots
(connected by dissolves) through the village streets. There he discovers his

417
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE own child deathly ill, and he wanders distractedly about the small courtyard
as the doctor leaves. Instead of going in, he moves to a window and gazes in
at the child's dark room as the shadows of tree limbs crisscross his face. Sud¬
denly, a light appears inside, illuminating a woman kneeling by the crib and
another coming to close the window curtain, and Mathias s face backs off into
deep shadow. When Mathias does reenter the room, his near hysteria makes
him imagine the child is alive (a slight movement). In LS, he carries the body,
trailing a long veil from the crib, past the silhouettes of the women and out
into the night. A series of alternating shots (leaves blowing in the wind, a
MCU dolly in front of him) describe his fantastic night journey, bearing the
corpse to his mother’s house. In an eerie HAMS/LS, he moves through a group
of mourning women gathered around her bed and places the body in his dead
mother’s arms. In so doing, he unconsciously produces a shocking image of
his double loss. Simultaneously, paternal and filial love are denied him.11 And
the image of the dead mother and child concisely evokes his own feeling of
entrapment and approaching “death.’’
The second moment of disturbance occurs shortly thereafter, in Monte Carlo.
Here two sequences are juxtaposed—the night in the casino and the following
morning in the train station post office. At the casino, Mathias wins a fortune
while the man who gave him his lucky tip shoots himself in the casino garden.
Shots of the revolving roulette wheel alternate with those of the croupier, until
he announces Mathias the winner. Then the alternation shifts to a CU of hands
counting out money along with shots (progressing from CU to FS) of the man
in the garden shooting himself in the head. Again a death seems to prefigure
Mathias’s own. But his ignorance of the man’s suicide, in the midst of his
good fortune, contrasts disconcertingly with his earlier reaction to his mother
and child. This contradiction deepens when, in the very next sequence, he
decides not to send a telegram to Romide about the mistaken newspaper report
of his own suicide in Miragno. After an intertitle, “To be dead was to be
free” the shadow of the post office window grating (echoing the shadows at
his own child’s death) suddenly disappears from his face, and LIBERTY in
waving block letters spreads across the screen. How are we to read Mathias, a
character whose sensibility seems so paradoxical and whose freedom depends
perversely on others’ deaths?
The most extended moment, of course, occurs just before the narrative
climax of the film, in Mathias’s confrontation with Papiano and Scipion. Ma¬
thias discovers that a drunken spiritualist who lives in the apartment building
has convinced Paleari to marry his daughter to Papiano against her will. De¬
prived of identity and doubtful of his position, Mathias has a fantasy about
Adrienne that quickly turns into nightmare. The sequence, in effect, inverts
the sexual fantasy that opened Le Brasier anient. When Adrienne materializes
in Mathias s room, he kisses her hand, only to be interrupted by a double of
himself which dissolves in, laughing at him. As he struggles with the image,
grown twice his size, against a black void, the figure seems to retreat and blur
out. Suddenly, Mathias, with revolver drawn, is advancing on an elevated
door marked Two Witnesses.’’ As he rips a white paper cover off the door,
several superimpositions of his double reappear to threaten him, and (in LAMCU)
he finds himself framed by an arch marked “marriage.’ The futility of his

418
action is underscored by a series of shots that have alternated with this ellip¬ FEU MATHIAS PASCAL
tical fantasy—a white horse drawing a carriage, inside of which Adrienne sits AND MALDONE
smiling at Papiano. Now Mathias faces an image of Papiano in profile: the
latter is smoking a cigar and repeatedly whipping down his raised arm. Against
a corridor background that replicates the spiraling stairwell, he seems to slam
a door in Mathias’s face. Within the fantasy of Mathias’s life in Rome, a
second parallel fantasy metamorphoses into a nightmare of entrapment and
impotence.
Although the following sequences bring Mathias closer to Adrienne, they
also confirm his powerlessness and lack of freedom. Through the window shut¬
ters of his room (in several angled MSs), he listens to Papiano talking with
the drunken spiritualist about himself and Adrienne (in Pirandello’s novel, the
whole sequence is narrated from Mathias’s limited point of view).12 When the
young woman is brought to her fiance and seems to be attacked, Mathias
springs through the shutters to her rescue. But Papiano is ingratiating, offer¬
ing a cigar, and inviting him to Paleari’s spiritualist seance. All Mathias can
do is fantasize himself leaping (in slow motion) on Papiano and strangling
him. Again his fantasy turns against him. In a series of shots that blur in and
out of focus, now Adrienne bursts into laughter, and two gendarmes suddenly
appear and take him off when he cannot produce identification papers. The
seance that immediately follows is also treated like a fantasy: the soft single¬
source lighting from the table produces silhouetted figures and singles out
faces and hands against the darkness. The many HALSs and HAFSs, intercut
with MSs and CUs, heighten the sense of unreality. Both hero and antagonist
undermine the seance’s alleged purpose—to find out if Adrienne will be happy.
While Mathias uses the darkness to show his affection for Adrienne—kissing
her hand, interlocking his fingers comically with hers—Papiano sends Scipion
off to steal his money./ After the seance is disrupted, Mathias again realizes
his inability to act and accepts the loss of his money in exchange for Adrienne’s
freedom. The magical exchange reverses the narrative operation in the Monte
Carlo sequence and leaves Mathias with nothing but a false identity and the
option of dying once more.
As a doubled narrative of loss, powerlessness, and deception, Feu Mathias
Pascal proves quite fascinating.13 The hero’s fantastical second life replicates
his first—with important differences. In the beginning, Mathias suffers a loss
of money and status and gains a woman’s love through deception. The result
is his own subjugation, especially to a tyrannical mother-in-law. He escapes
this condition by another deception—his apparent suicide. But that death or
absence coincides with the chance acquisition of money, allowing him to es¬
tablish a second life, representing himself in a status similar to that which he
had in the beginning. His freedom to define himself, however, seems inti¬
mately bound up with an escape from mortality (at the expense of others) and
with a miraculous gift of money. In place of a threatening mother-daughter
duo, he now finds a father and daughter threatened (as his mother had been)
by an arch-deceiver, Papiano (who parallels the lawyer). To save them, he
accepts another loss of money, which threatens to expose his deceptive iden¬
tity. Although he has gained the daughter’s love, and an “ideal family,” he is
an imposter and no longer himself free. The freedom he has so desired (even

419
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

211. A publicity photo of the

spiritualist sequence in Feu
Mathias Pascal

more than the woman or family?) remains elusive and perhaps illusory. Ma¬
thias seems unable to free himself from a condition of either powerlessness/
impotence or deception.
The film’s attitude toward Mathias’s search and his unchanging condition
is confusingly ambiguous. Is this simply an evasion—an escape from real social
conditions through fantasy (Miragno versus Rome)? Is it an analysis of the
problematic condition of psychological wholeness and integrity? Or is it a
contradictory ideological construction which questions the role of mortality
and money (capital) in a definition of the self in society and then blithely
forgets it? The final sequences detail that ambiguity in a series of repressions.
The question of money vanishes completely, and Mathias somehow returns to
Miragno like a ghost or spirit come back to revenge himself on his enemies.
Briefly, he considers resuming his legal right as Romide’s husband, but, on
seeing her child by Pomino, he relents. Does he withdraw out of graciousness
or does he leave them to live out guiltily their own deceptive existence? Before
departing from the village, however, he visits the lawyer, who is preparing a
campaign speech for the mayorial election. In a mocking, metaphorical rever¬
sal of the film’s opening, Mathias lashes him to a chair and takes his place
before a large crowd in the piazza, giving a short impromptu speech that wins
their enthusiastic approval. The sequence celebrates Mathias’s new-found pow¬
ers of impersonation, on which his life will now be based; and, by extension,
it celebrates the actor Mosjoukine (not the cinematic apparatus, as in L’lnbu-
maine). Before the spectacle of a double impersonation, a double audience

420
applauds. Mathias now pays his respects to his own gravestone and walks away FEU MATHIAS PASCAL
a free man. But what other graves—other deaths—are conspicuous by their AND MALDONE
absence? Framed within a “Souvenirs’’ booklet, a photograph of Mathias and
Adrienne in wedding costume comes to life and closes off the narrative in a
final spectacle of deception. The film’s conclusion thus neatly represses, one
by one, all its disturbing contradictions.

Another doubled narrative film, Jean Gremillon’s Maldone (1928), makes

an interesting contrast to Feu Mathias Pascal. The project that led to Maldone
was conceived by the actor Charles Dullin for his newly formed film company
early in 1927. Dullin would be the star, of course, the film’s major commercial
asset. But he took a considerable risk by engaging inexperienced, though
talented, newcomers to head the team responsible for the film.14 The original
script was written by one of Dullin’s friends, the poet and playwright, Alex¬
andre Arnoux, who had done the scenario for Boudrioz’s L’Atre (1923). The
film’s direction was given to Jean Gremillon, a young documentary filmmaker,
some of whose short poetic works Jean Tedesco had screened at the Vieux-
Colombier. His assistant was Georges Lacombe, who had been assistant direc¬
tor on most of Rene Clair’s film. The cinematography, using the new pan¬
chromatic film stock, was handled by Gremillon’s principal cameraman, Georges
Perinal, assisted by Christian Matras. The set decors were constructed by Andre
Barsacq, a young set designer at Dullin’s 1’Atelier Theatre. And the music
was compiled from pieces by Debussy, Jaubert, Satie, Milhaud, Honegger,
and Gremillon himself (an accomplished violinist who had played in several
cinema orchestras—e.g., the Max-Linder and the Parisiana). The production
team of Maldone thus resembled an apprenticeship school.
Although Dullin’s expensive gamble did not pay off very well financially,
the film was a major critical success. There is some discrepancy about the
precise basis of that success, however, for the film was projected in two dif¬
ferent versions. First previewed at the Salle Pleyel, on 29 February 1928, it
ran to 3,800 meters in length.15 Responding to criticism that the film had
“an awkward montage and unbearable dull passages,” the distributor, J.-P.
de Venloo, with Dullin and Gremillon’s permission, had the film shortened
to 2,800 meters and re-cut considerably, for a second preview in June.16 It is
this second version of Maldone, opening at the Omnia-Palace in October, which
survives in a few copies today.17
Arnoux’s scenario was about a character in whom “two men co-existed . . .
the savage and the civilized, the free man and the submissive.”18 This double
character has a striking affinity to Mathias Pascal and to Bernard Mauprat in
Jean Epstein’s Mauprat (1926). The older son of a wealthy landowner, Olivier
Maldone (Dullin) has renounced his inheritance many years before to enjoy the
life of a vagabond and itinerant worker along the rivers and canals of France.
While towing a barge one day, he meets a young gypsy woman, Zita (Genica
Athanasiou), whose image gradually charms him and who seems to reciprocate
his interest. About the same time, Olivier’s brother is killed in an accident,
and an old servant, Leonard (Georges Seroff), is dispatched to inform the
prodigal that he must now manage the family estate. Leonard finds him one
evening at a village dance, where he is playing the accordion and laying claim
to Zita by winning a fight. The news stuns Olivier, and Zita slips away.

421
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

212. A publicity photo of

the opening sequence of
Mai done (1928)

Three years pass (five years in the script). Olivier has now settled into a com¬
fortable bourgeois life with a young wife, Flora (Annabella), and her father,
Levigne (Roger Karl). Restless and dissatisfied, he embarks with his wife on
a voyage, which the family hopes will distract and cure him. On the Cote
d’Azur, however, he again meets Zita, who has become a prominent music-
hall dancer. They have dinner together, but she tells him she now has her
own life and leaves with a young man. Saddened, he and Flora return home,
where he slowly goes mad with longing for his former life. Finally, breaking
with his wife and father-in-law, Olivier dons his old vagabond’s outfit and
gallops off across the fields toward the canals he loves.
In 1928, French film critics most praised in Maldone those moments which
epitomized the ambiance of a natural landscape or which overpowered them
with displays of technical virtuosity. The opening sequences offer probably the
best examples of Gremillon and Perinal’s eye for documentary-style filming on
location. One reviewer described these images as “sometimes like etching,
sometimes like engravings, often strangely recalling the texture of two-color

422
gelatine photographs. . . .”19 The subject is the Canal de Briare (connecting FEU MATHIAS PASCAL
the Loire and Loing rivers in central France) on a hot summer afternoon, AND MALDONE
strongly reminiscent of the canal milieux that opened La Belle Nivernaise and
La Lille de lean. The first shots are all LSs—of the still canal water, the narrow
white towpath flanked by a line of poplars, a small barge being pulled slowly
along by a plodding horse, a wagon pausing at a crossroads near the flat, sun¬
drenched fields of a farm. Into this peaceful, almost sleepy, landscape, Mal-
done is introduced (in MS), walking beside the tow horse, followed by a man
poling the barge (in FS) and then Zita alone (in CU, superimposed, a bit
conventionally, with playing cards), her image associated with the wagon as
it approaches the canal. As the wagon passes over a bridge and Zita gets out,
this slow, steady alternation of shots leads to a silent encounter, an exchange
of looks. There is a shot past Zita to the horse moving off down the towpath,
an interchange of HA and LA shots between her and Maldone as she moves
off the bridge, a shot of the barge moving off down the canal, and a MCU of
Zita as she looks back and then turns to follow the wagon off down the road.
The narrative emerges out of this milieu in a simple, momentary conjunction.
Maldone’s look is curious, admiring, raising the possibility of desire, and so
does hers as she glances back in the last fading shot.
The ripple of narrative expectation carries through the next sequence of
shots, which dissolve together as in a dream—the barge coming forward down
the canal, a woman chopping vegetables on deck, a dog sleeping, a smokestack
emitting steam, a child sitting at the barge edge, the prow slicing through
the canal water, tree limbs drifting by overhead, reflected light and leaves
shimmering on the water surface—and ending in a CU of Maldone’s face.
Will the relation that promises to develop between them disturb this vision
of a harmonious relationship between man and nature or can the two be in¬
tegrated? And how does this vision compare with the later sequence where
Leonard gets off the train (which puffs away under an immense sky) and
pauses, in LS, at a crossroads gravesite to orient himself in an incredibly flat
landscape?
The moment most singled out as “an astonishing demonstration of [Gre-
millon’s] virtuosity’’20 was the Grand Ball (21 July 1928, says a poster) in the
bargemen’s bistro. Not only is it one of the best film dance sequences of the
decade (perhaps even better than the Coaly Hole dance in Kean), borrowing
several techniques from Gance’s Napoleon, but it embodies perfectly an idea of
Jean Epstein’s, first articulated in Bonjour Cinema (1921):

I would like to see a dance shot successively from the four cardinal directions. Then,
with strokes of a pan shot or of a turning foot, the room as it is seen by the dancing
couple. An intelligent decoupage will reconstitute the double life of the dance linking
together, if I may say so, the viewpoints of the spectator and the dancer, objective
and subjective.21

In contrast to the usual practice, here as elsewhere in the film, Andre Barsacq
designed the decors as a full four-walled set.22 This allowed Gremillon much
more freedom in positioning his camera and his actors. As one reviewer wrote,
in terms of “the camera position and angles . . . never have we seen such
diversity.’’23 In fact, much of the narrative avant-garde film practice is deftly
drawn into this kinaesthetic synthesis of narrative and spectacle.

423
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

213- Production photos of the

Grand Ball sequence in
Maldone (1928)

In the beginning, there are HALSs, through paper streamers hung from the
ceiling and through the railing of an inner balcony, of a multitude of couples
crowding the dance floor that takes up most of the bistro. Maldone is identi¬
fied, in a HAMCU, drinking at one of the tables along the wall. In a dolly-
back shot, several dancers drag him to a small raised platform, where he begins
playing the accordion, and the camera dollies back in among the dancers, its
handheld movement paralleling their quickened rhythm. The alternation of
HALSs, close shots of the dancers, and LAMSs of Maldone smiling above their
heads synthesizes the omniscient and the subjective (doubly inscribed) in a
marvelous spectacle of simultaneity. Zita is introduced first as a silhouette at
the window, then from outside looking in at the dancers (much like Chaplin
outside the dance hall in The Gold Rush); and a backward dolly shot finally
brings her into the bistro. This last shot alternates with a close shot of Mal¬
done, and then a HAELS of the bistro merges the two into the crowd—as the
narrative is subsumed in the spectacle, the subjective in the omniscient. A
farandole is announced, and Maldone leads the long line of dancers up several
flights of stairs, around the balcony, and down onto the dance floor again.
This is a stunning moment—conveyed in slightly HALSs, in a HALS directly
above the stairs that tilts and pivots to follow the dancers along the balcony,
and in shots from a handheld camera moving “freely” with the dancers. It
positions Maldone clearly as the subject of the spectacle (like a Pied Piper
directing its rhythm) and ends with Zita its central object as she dances before
him in a circle the other dancers have made for her. At that moment, in a
HALS, Leonard enters the bistro, and a young man asks Zita to dance with
two different characters threaten to disrupt the union produced by the
spectacle. As Maldone begins to speed up his playing, the shots shift to MCUs
and CUs and the cutting accelerates. There are circling HA and LA shots of
the couple dancing, 360° pans (changing to swish pans) of their legs, their
shoulders, all of which blend smoothly into one continuous movement, even
when alternating with CUs of the accordion expanding and compressing and
with CUs of Maldone s grinning face—as if he is relishing this maelstrom of

424
motion. In this double inscription of the subjective (Maldone’s and the danc¬ FEU MATHIAS PASCAL
ing couple’s), the narrative threat is, simultaneously, intensified and sup¬ AND MALDONE
pressed—and thus suspended. The rhythm slows and pauses, allowing the man
to kiss Zita, and Maldone stops playing (in HALS) and advances on them. A
tossed glass of wine leads to a fight between the two men, erupting in a second
montage of confused handheld camera shots and swish pans. The confusion
ends with Maldone triumphantly carried back to his platform and accordion.
But not for long. Sitting now at a table, he and Zita are interrupted by
Leonard, who shows him a photograph of his dead brother. The short union
with Zita is unexpectedly broken by this intervention of the familial past.
After all the frenzy of movement, which Maldone seemed able to control, the
break is described quietly in a simple CU of separating hands. All in all, this
“Grand Ball’’ sequence is one Jean Epstein would have been proud of.
Although most critics were intrigued by Maldone s story, they found fault
with its lack of originality and its awkward construction. They particularly
objected to the three-year break which divided the film into equal parts and
to the comparative banality of the second part—which, admittedly, is over-
long and perhaps overly static.24 Marc Allegret, for instance, wanted to know
how and why Maldone had let himself be ensnared in such a monotonous
life.25 This objection has some validity, if one’s primary interest in narrative
is the psychological development of character. But it ignores the structural
relations (semantic, syntactical, rhetorical) between the two parts of the nar¬
rative. The second part does more than set up an opposite image of Maldone,
developing the other half of his character. Like La Roue, Coeur fidele, and
L’lnhumaine, it works a number of interesting variations or structural rhymes,
on the space and action of the first half of the film.
First of all, there is the contrast of decors, classes, and ways of life. As
vagabond characters, lone figures on the margins of French society, Maldone
and Zita live in harmony with the provincial milieu of canals, farms, and
village bistros and inns. While the canals and fields are constantly open to the
sun and air, the bistro interiors are comfortably rough-hewn and worn and,
in the case of the Grand Ball, bursting with movement. It is a milieu which
supports their ceaseless wandering (even allowing Zita to poach chickens from
the farms) and which encourages the eruption of emotion. Their “free’’ life is
thus defined very much in the tradition of a Romantic individualism. Both
characters, however, move into a different world in the second half of the film.
Maldone is now a wealthy landowner, a settled family man, living uneasily at
a respectable socioeconomic level of French society. His home is defined as a
dark closed space with the family seated around a central, well-lighted table
(echoing the 1825 dinner setting in L’Auberge rouge). This is a sober, orderly
space which lacks movement (except for a system of dolly shots that open and
close sequences) and suppresses any kind of emotion. The only place where he
feels happy is out in the fields or among the farmhands and threshing ma¬
chines—e.g., in a brief documentary sequence of men and machines working
in an air thick with dust and chaff. This milieu also includes the elegant
modern hotels and restaurants on the Cote d’Azur; but here, too, where he
finds Zita, the decors are closed, self-contained, inhibiting his movement and
his rekindled desire. Zita seems quite different, at ease in this new world,
perfectly accommodated to it. If money alone has raised up Maldone but left

425
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE him unchanged, how and why has she changed? Was she never really part of
the natural landscapes the way Maldone was? But the film is not interested in
the story of her transformation, except to set up her image as a slightly dis¬
reputable opposite to Maldone.
This structural rhyming, through similarity and difference, includes several
major actions in the two halves of A\aldone. The Grand Ball sequence, for
instance, recurs—with a number of reversals in the restaurant sequence. The
latter begins, and ends, as a displaced extension of the former. Maldone and
Zita are seated at a table, their hands clasped together, talking and looking
at the dancers. As before, a young man asks Zita to dance, but Maldone now
merely sits and watches them, his face angry and then anguished. Long after
she, along with the other dancers, has gone, he walks slowly across the empty
restaurant (in a HALS), through layers of confetti (echoing the paper streamers
before) that cover the dance floor. Although abrupt shifts in camera position
and angle carry over from the Grand Ball sequence, there is neither rapid
cutting nor camera movement here; and all the subjective experience is fo¬
cused, confined, in Maldone.
The other rhymed sequences involve horses at full gallop. While riding
across the family estate, Maldone’s younger brother is killed when his horse
brushes him against a tree limb. This is described in several short sequences
of rapid cutting and tracking shots, which alternate with sequences in the
bistro where Maldone and Zita’s family seem to agree on the couple’s be¬
trothal. After the disastrous voyage, much later, Maldone rides one of the
horses bearing the carriage and Flora back home, in a sequence whose cutting
accelerates into CUs of the horses’ heads and hooves, jiggling handheld shots
of the carriage, multiple exposures of the horses, and fast tracking shots before
and beside the horses and carriage. The sequence resonates with the threat of
danger to both characters and, echoing the techniques of the Grand Ball, with
the likelihood of the couple’s separation. Later, Maldone rides out alone into
the hills overlooking the valley estate, much as his brother had done before.
His action not only evokes the threat of danger once again but also suggests
the possibility that his madness will drive him to suicide. It even reflects
backwards, raising the question of whether the younger brother also felt Mal¬
done’s desire to escape. Coupled with Zita’s mother’s remark to Maldone,
“Your enemy is yourself,” the brother’s ride foreshadows his own possible
tragic end.
If, in the first half of Maldone, the world of the bourgeois family intervenes,
through the intercutting, to pluck Maldone from his relaxed life along the
canals; in the second half, that intervention is reversed. The means are an
extended series of subjective images, brief flashbacks, as Maldone’s past life
erupts into the present. The strategy is not unlike that of Delluc’s Fievre and
La Femme de nulle part. These eruptions begin when Maldone encounters Zita
again. Along with several shots of Flora waiting alone in a hotel room, they
punctuate the restaurant sequence, retelling the past story in a few succinct
images a CU of Zita s face superimposed over a shot of water dripping from
blades of grass, a HALS of the barge in the canal, and several shots from the
Grand Ball dance and fight. Maldone realizes that the past is repeating itself
in the restaurant milieu, but now he can do nothing. In the carriage ride
home, again the past erupts. First comes an image of the restaurant encounter

426
 214. (left) Zita (Genica
Athanasiou) and her family
negotiate with Maldone
. r ....... . r ’-F- , , . , . , . (Charles Dullin) in the canal
and then shots or his initial vision or Zita and their betrothal agreement in bistro in Maldone
the cafe. It is this achronologicai flashback, emphasizing his loss, which pro¬
vokes the accelerating montage of the carriage ride. That night, as he sits with ^right^ The 5;°te Azur
. r .. , , , . , . . . rr / , . 11 casino bar in Maldone (1928)
the family around the table and Flora brings him coffee (the shots are marked
now by frequent pans, tilts, and dollies), more images of his past life on the
barge return. When Flora comes over and gently puts her arm around his
neck, it is Zita he sees—in a CU of her face and then an ECU of her mouth.
He closes his eyes (in ECU) and tears himself (in FS) from her embrace. The
shot pans right to follow him out the door and then pans back to Flora,
terrified, and her father. Just as his brother’s death propelled Maldone away
from Zita and back to the family, so does the (recognized) loss of Zita propel
him away from the family and back to his old life. But the reversal reverberates
with a poignant dissonance. The image of the past that most provokes him to
act is the one he can not return to, and his anguish is echoed in the family,
especially in Flora, who is given no chance to understand him.
Maldone’s decision to return to nature and a vagabond’s life is marked by
further anguish—a confrontation with Levigne, in which he raises a whip
against him, and a later HALS of his doubled-up figure pausing on the spiral
staircase to the attic. The juxtaposition of past and present, itinerant work
and bourgeois wealth, reaches a climax in the sequence in the attic. As Mal¬
done looks at himself in an old floor-length mirror, the image of his former

427
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

216. Maldone on the attic

stairs

self dissolves in, spitting and raising a whip to him. Maldone searches a trunk
nearby for his old clothes, and as he dresses, shots of the barge and canal are
intercut. Finally, in a reversal of images, dressed in his vagabond’s outfit, he
faces his bourgeois figure in the mirror. Suddenly he pulls a gun from his
pocket and shoots, shattering the glass. The duality is resolved, at the level
of the individual, by simple elimination. As he flees the house for the second
time, the shots of his speeding horse and tense face give way to shots of
swirling water, billowing clouds, and finally, repeating the beginning, to an
image of calm water. The clouds and calm water come as a relief, smoothing
the agitation into a continuous motion that ends in a state of rest. Does it
metaphorically represent Maldone’s psychological condition, articulating his
success in finding peace of mind? Or does it operate deceptively? Can Maldone
ever be the same as he was in the beginning, enjoying the same harmony with
the canal landscape? If not, the calm water surface simply erases, submerges,
all that he has lost or abandoned. And this becomes another resolution that
masks profound dissonances.

Napoleon vu par The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 14 March 1980. Looking
Abel Gance much like the third phase of the Sphinx’s riddle to Oedipus, a small, stooped
figure, his eyes twinkling under a swept-back thatch of white hair, introduces
the Midwest premiere of Kevin Brownlow’s meticulous reconstruction of Napo-

428
I eon (1927). It is the film’s maker, Abel Gance. “Why would anyone want to napoleon vu par
spend a whole evening watching an old movie?’’ he begins. Suddenly spotting ABEL gance
a KCTA cameraman recording the event, Gance brandishes his cane like a
rapier and charges the camera with a spryness that belies his ninety-year-old
frame. Then he backs away in feigned defeat, accepting the power of a machine
whose ancestor he did so much to develop. Delighted by an enthusiastic,
admiring crowd, he builds his oration, phrase by lofty phrase—“I am alive
because I think always and only of the future’’— and ends by dancing a jig
to mime his pleasure. He refuses to leave—“there are too many beautiful
women in the audience.” But eventually he is persuaded, and the special
screening begins. Nearly six hours later, the famous triptychs (in perfect syn¬
chronization) draw to a climax that yields to a wave of applause and bravos.
Rarely have I seen a film audience so charged, so “high.”1
To see this new reconstruction of Napoleon is nothing less than a revelation.
That has been said before, I know, of other versions of the film. In 1955, at
the Studio 28 cinema in Paris, Francois Truffaut and his colleagues at Cahiers
du cinema discovered Gance’s two-hour sound version of Napoleon (1934), which
integrated new footage with postsynchonized portions of the silent version,
including a brief sequence of the final triptychs.2 Some years later, the Cine¬
matheque fran^aise revealed Marie Epstein’s painstaking reconstruction of the
silent version of Napoleon, which, though far from complete (absent were much
of the opening snowball fight, the sequences with Violine, the triptychs),
included nearly all of the major sequences.3 Then, on the occasion of Bona¬
parte’s Bicentennial (with financial assistance from Andre Malraux and Claude
Lelouch), Gance came up with a four-hour version (again mixing old and new
footage), Bonaparte et la revolution (1971).4 For this last project, Marie Epstein
discovered, to her horror, Gance blithely set about re-cutting some of an
original positive print that the Cinematheque frangaise had returned to him.5
Now comes Kevin Brownlow’s reconstruction, some twenty years in the mak¬
ing, drawn from a dozen archive and private prints (especially those of the
Cinematheque franchise, C. K. Elliot, and MGM).6 Inevitably, there are dis¬
tortions and gaps: the image quality is sometimes inconsistent (due to sections
of enlarged 17.5mm footage), the extensive tinting and toning of the original
prints is gone, and nearly a half hour of the total footage is still missing.7 But
Brownlow’s reconstruction is unquestionably marvelous—the most complete
version yet assembled and the first to include the full final reel of triptychs.8
To be accurate, there are two versions of Brownlow’s work—a complete ver¬
sion (projected at 20 fps), produced by the British Film Institute and Images
Film Archives in association with Thames Television, and a slightly shortened
version (projected at 24 fps) sponsored by Francis Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios.9
Although the “Coppola” Napoleon has been widely screened in the United
States, I have used the longer, more authentic version as the basis for this
analysis.
Impressive as Brownlow’s reconstruction is, Gance’s initial plans for the
project were even more colossal in scope. As early as 1924, he had sketched
out no less than six separate films on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. The first
film was envisaged in three parts: “La Jeunesse de Bonaparte,” “Bonaparte et
la Terreur,” and “La Campagne d’ltalie.” The other five were to be titled
D’Arcole a Marengo, Du 18 brumaire a Austerlitz, DAusterlitz aux cent-jours,

429
narrative AVANT-GARDE Waterloo, and Saint-Helene.10 1 hrough a consortium of French-German com¬
panies and later the Societe Generale des Films (both financed largely by Rus¬
sian emigre money), Gance commenced shooting the first stage of his project
early in 1925 and finally finished eighteen months later. Because of its enor¬
mous expense (15 to 19 million francs) and epic length (six hours), only the
first film was actually completed, and even then, its third part had to be
condensed.11 On 7 April 1927, a three-hour version of the film, audaciously
titled Napoleon vu par Abel Gance and highlighted by several triptych se¬
quences, premiered at the Paris Opera with an orchestral score composed by
Arthur Honegger.12 The following October, the complete six-hour version
(apparently programmed in two consecutive segments, but without the trip-
tychs) opened at the prestigious Salle Marivaux and ran for three months. This
full-length version was not widely shown, but the three-hour condensed ver¬
sion was released selectively throughout France and the rest of Europe.13 In a
sense, then, by integrating these two different films into a single spectacle,
Brownlow not only re-creates but enlarges Gance’s vision. As Bernard Eisen-
schitz notes, Brownlow’s work has produced both a literal and an ideal recon¬
struction of the film.14
In order to situate the analysis that follows, let me summarize the narrative
of Napoleon briefly, sketching the major plot lines and the distribution of
characters. As a pupil at the military college of Brienne, young Napoleon is
persecuted as an outsider by the teachers and other students.15 His only friends
during his tribulations and first triumph (in a snowfort battle) are the cook,
Tristan Fleuri, and a pet eagle. Some ten years later, in 1789, during the
early days of the Revolution in Paris, Napoleon is little more than a marginal
character, listening with interest to Rouget de Lisle’s “Marseillaise” sung at
the Club de Cordeliers but troubled by the lynch mobs roaming the streets.
By the time of his return to his family home in Corsica, in the summer of
1793, however, he has become a supporter of the Revolution and an opponent
of the Corsican patriot Paoli and his secretary, Pozzo de Borge, who have
concocted a plan to annex the island to England. Their plan succeeds, and
Napoleon is forced to flee by rowboat in a storm (and eventually on the good
ship Le Hasard) to France. Assigned to the French army laying siege to Toulon
(which is controlled by the English), Napoleon reencounters Tristan Fleuri,
whose daughter Violine is “bewitched” by him. General Dugommier makes
him commander of the artillery, and Napoleon leads several assaults on the
larger English army and finally is victorious in a battle fought at night in a
torrential rainstorm. In Paris, the Reign of Terror begins. Marat is murdered
in his bath by Charlotte Corday; Danton, Robespierre, and Saint-Just are all
condemned to the guillotine.16 Accused by Salicetti, a fellow Corsican, and
imprisoned, Napoleon is miraculously saved—Tristan Fleuri, imitating his
friend La Bussiere, literally eats the decree that condemns him. After refusing
several posts with the army, Napoleon is finally called by General Barras to
take command of the defense of Paris against the Royalist Rebellion. The
rebellion is put down, and celebrations break out all over the city. At the
Victims Ball, Napoleon is mesmerized by Josephine de Beauharnais and wins
her away from his friend, General Hoche. The whirlwind courtship ends in
marriage, after Barras makes him commander of the Army of the Alps. Buoyed
by a vision of the ghosts of the Revolution, Napoleon assumes command of a

430
 217. (left) A publicity photo
of “La Marseillaise”
superimposed over the
Convention Hall in Napoleon
(1927)
bedraggled army at Albenga and quickly inspires the soldiers to victory at
Montenotte. So the narrative ends as (an intertitle says) “Napoleon laughingly 218. (right) A publicity
photo of Napoleon (Albert
opens the gates of Italy.”
Dieudonne), Violine
As this summary suggests, Napoleon is, first of all, a grand example of the (Annabella), and Tristan
French historical reconstruction film, the most popular film genre in France Fleuri (Nicolas Koline)
during the 1920s. Although a good part of the film was shot on location singing the “Marseillaise”
(Corsica, Briangon, Toulon, Nice), most was done in the brand-new studio at
Billancourt, on the outskirts of Paris. There, with Alexandre Benois (Diaghi-
lev’s chief set designer), the Russian-born architect Schildknecht, and Ivan
Lochakoff, Gance meticulously (for the most part) re-created the period decor
and costumes of the late eighteenth century—e.g., the school at Brienne, the
Club des Cordeliers and the Convention Hall in Paris, the battleground at
Toulon. Together with an unusually talented team of assistant directors (Al¬
exandre Volkoff, Victor Tourjansky, Henry Krauss, Henri Andreani, Marius
Nalpas, Anatole Litvak) and cameramen (Jules Kruger, L.-H. Burel, J.-P.
Mundviller, Bourgassov, Lucas, Roger Hubert, Emile Pierre), he produced
enough moments of spectacle for a half-dozen films. The acting was consis¬
tently first-rate and sometimes inspired. Albert Dieudonne played Napoleon
as a lean, active, decisive strategist, sometimes given to public posturing but
also blindly naive in love. Gina Manes brought to Josephine’s opportunistic
character a matronly assurance and quick intelligence that made her behavior
with Napoleon and his rivals fascinatingly ambiguous. The “Three Gods of
the Revolution” were perfectly cast. Alexandre Koubitsky was a fiery, volua-
ble, plump Danton; Antonin Artaud made Marat a sullen ascetic with a bril¬
liant, mad stare; Van Daele was utterly transformed as the slouching pock¬
marked Robespierre, his eyes mere slits above tightly drawn lips. And Gance
used his own sense of self-importance ironically by casting himself as the cold,
cruel, slightly effeminate theoretician Saint-Just. Yet, all in all, like Carl
Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), which the Societe Generale des
Films also produced as a complement to it, Napoleon was much more than a
well-crafted, well-acted costume film.

431
narrative AVANT-GARDE At the time of its original release, the French film critics reviews of Napo¬
leon corresponded closely to their reactions to Gance s earlier epic, La Roue.
The film was a monumental paradox—conventional yet unorthodox, anachro¬
nistic yet radically advanced. Again the critics objected, with reason, to the
number and mode of the film’s intertitles, which included countless quotations
from historical sources—a misguided attempt to invoke the mantle of author¬
ity—which merely labeled and affirmed, as if on parchment, what was pre¬
sented in images.17 The intertitles were also full of rhetorical declamations,
especially Saint-Just’s discourse on the Revolution, which critics found remi¬
niscent of Edmond Rostand and literary pretension.18 Once more the critics
objected to irrelevant, uneven sequences and to “dissembling tirades’’ of “rep¬
etitions, redundancies, and overprolonged effects.’’19 And they were aghast at
the way Gance rewrote history, depicting Napoleon as the legendary fulfill¬
ment of the French Revolution—a nationalistic messiah who saved France from
the Revolution’s destructive excesses and then provided his countrymen with
a kind of Manifest Destiny to “liberate’’ (read “conquer’’) Europe.20 Harry Alan
Potamkin called Gance simply a “Hugo without Hugo’s vision.’’21 To a man,
however, the critics heaped praise on the cinematic qualities of the film. “The
unrepentant lyricism, the vertiginous technical strategies, the generous aban¬
don, the photogenic delicacies, the acting in certain roles’’—all more than
made up for the film’s numerous faults.22 Specifically singled out, of course,
was the innovation of the triptychs, the Polyvision triple-screen system, which
produced a concluding visual symphony of extraordinary power. Perhaps Leon
Moussinac summed up the critical reaction best. If Gance’s subject and sce¬
nario were presumptuous, sometime ridiculous, and dangerously chauvinistic,

From the cinematic point of view, Napoleon was the occasion ... to put in play
original ideas that succeeded in enlarging the resources of cinematography, in sum,
an incontestable advance: a date in the history of the technical development of the
cinema.23

The contradictions in Napoleon are, if anything, now even more apparent.

But their locus and distribution seem to have shifted. Take the most cele¬
brated feature of the film—its technical innovations and achievements. It is
clear that, from the beginning, Gance was preoccupied with questions of cin¬
ematic technique. For instance, Alexandre Volkoff, one of his assistant direc¬
tors for a time, was astonished to find that

he was continually haunted by the idea of doing more and then more again, of sur¬
passing himself and all others. Incessantly, he tried out cinematic innovations, com¬
bining new technical methods. He strove to go ever farther and higher.24

This effort is clearly evident even now in the remarkable film record of the
production which Gance instigated, preserved under the title, Autour de Napo¬
leon N But how successful, exactly, was Gance with his innovations? One of
the earliest segments to be filmed, the snowfort battle at Brienne, provides an
ambiguous answer.
Like the opening train wreck of La Roue, this sequence was orchestrated, in
Gance s words, “to make the otherwise passive spectator an actor. He would
not only look at but participate in the action.”26 In La Roue, he had relied on
the rapid cutting of many disparate images to simulate the aftereffects of the

432
 NAPOLEON VU PAR
ABEL GANCE

219- A production photo of

Jules Kruger (center left) and
Abel Gance (dark glasses)
with the sled-mounted camera
for filming the opening
sequence in Napoleon

crash, to integrate Sisifs perceptions and feelings into a larger conceptual

design. Here, he privileges the character of young Bonaparte—-to the point of
making the flow of images his subjective experience—but reduces the number
of disparate images and multiplies the technical strategies of combination and
intensification. Initially, Gance superimposes a CU of young Bonaparte over
shots of his battling cohorts, to convey the passion and force of his counter¬
attack (after the boy is bloodied by a snowball with a rock inside). To this,
Gance then adds an unconventionally mobile camera. He had Jules Kruger
(with a hand-cranked camera) sit on a sled that was pushed rapidly toward
one of the two snow forts. Then at Gance’s insistence, Kruger also ran into
the thick of the fighting with another hand-cranked camera strapped to his
chest and supported by a brace around his waist.27 The only thing he did not
do was what legend has attributed to him—throw the camera about like a
snowball.28 Finally, Gance resorts to a form of rapid cutting—wildly fast
tracks, dollies, and swish pans—in conjunction with a repeated static CU of
young Bonaparte. At the climax, the cutting accelerates to a rush of single
frames, with the boy’s smiling face appearing every four frames.
Despite the novelty of handheld mobile camera shots in alliance with the
by-then conventional technique of rapid montage, this sequence is less than
astonishing. In part, if I may presume, the problem lies in its conception.
Compared to the opening of La Roue, this sequence seems regressive—it limits
itself to the representation of a single character’s subjective state. More im¬
portant, perhaps, the representation of that state, organizing the world around
Bonaparte, is relatively simplistic (his enemies, Philippeaux and Peccaduc, are
cruel buffoons; the counterattack is easily carried out). The single-minded
diegetic flow of the images quickly becomes repetitive, wearyingly so, as the
action is expanded in time. The longer the sequence goes on, the more exces¬
sive and empty it becomes. What could have been an exciting, riveting open¬
ing, in which the spectator shares young Bonaparte’s intoxicating discovery of
his skill and ambition as a leader, comes close to lapsing into bombastic cliche.
At least two conclusions can be drawn from such close analysis of the tech-

433
narrative AVANT-GARDE nical innovations in Napoleon. First of all, they tend to improve in quality and
effectiveness as the film progresses. The combination of fast tracks, dollies,
and swish pans, for instance, is much more controlled in the later sequence of
Napoleon’s journey to Albenga to join the Italian Campaign army. Here, even
more than before, some of the camera movements deliberately call attention
to themselves. The opening LS of the road down which Napoleon’s coach and
flanked horsemen race away suddenly turns into a following dolly shot; the
movement allows for a smooth cut to a tracking shot of the countryside which
then pans 60° to become a dolly shot following the advance horsemen. The
spectator is caught up, quite deliberately, in the diegetic process. After Napo¬
leon has issued a number of orders, sent off a letter to Josephine, and changed
to horseback, the sequence ends with a series of rapid dollying shots ahead of
his pounding white horse, each of which becomes shorter and shorter as it is
punctuated by quick swish pans. Here, the camera movement (in conjunction
with the rapid cutting) functions less to convey Napoleon’s subjective experi¬
ence of the journey than to equate, through the accelerating rhythm, his
driving ambition with the “flow of history’’ and, at this point, with the light¬
ning speed of the narrative. This combination of camera movements will reach
a climax in the final segment of the triptychs.
Secondly, Gance’s technical achievements, for me at least, often depend on
a striking economy and symmetry of articulation. The school dormitory battle,
for instance, produces a visual assault even more effective than the opening
snowfort battle. One snowy night, Philippeaux and Peccaduc vengefully re¬
lease Bonaparte’s pet eagle, and he storms into the dormitory to find the
culprits.

LS dolly back ahead of Napoleon as he enters the room.

MCU dolly forward past one boy shaking his head, then a second, and a third.
LS dolly forward behind Napoleon as he speaks to one boy after another.
MCU dolly forward past a boy yawning and then another shaking his head.
LS Napoleon stops at the end of the room, turns, and throws a pile of boys’ clothes.
MCU Napoleon shouts.
Intertitle: “So all of you are guilty!’’
FS dolly back ahead of Napoleon as he attacks one boy after another, systematically;
they come out and surround him.
FS dolly forward behind Napoleon and the boys as they begin to fight—pillows and
feathers fly about.
Four split-screen images of the fighting.
Nine split-screen images of the fighting.
A half-dozen superimpositions of the fighting.

What is interesting about this sequence is how succinctly it works through

repetition and variation. The first series of movements, rhythmically matched,
end in Bonaparte’s angry gesture and accusation. The second series begins to
repeat the first and then oscillates quickly into a crescendo of simultaneous
multiple images. Bonaparte’s fury, metaphorically, tears the boys to pieces
(clothes-pillows-feathers) and transforms the room into a dense cloud of feath¬
ers and white-robed figures/9 It is as if the snowball fight is recapitulated in
miniature.
Still, whatever one thinks of these “highlights,’’ an exclusive focus on Gance’s
technical innovations and achievements can be misleading. It tempts one to

434
conclude, as do Jean Mitry and most film historians, that Napoleon is inco¬ NAPOLEON VU PAR
herent, “a chaos traversed by lightning flashes.”30 To my mind, however, that ABEL GANCE
supposed incoherence actually provides a basis for the film’s appeal. In fact,
in terms of narrative structure and syntactical continuity, it may not be in¬
coherence at all. Let us admit, for instance, that the film deploys, throughout
its narrative, a cacophony of styles or modes of representation. There are pos¬
turing “theatrical” characters such as Paoli and Salicetti, “naturalistic” char¬
acters such as Josephine and General Hoche, comic buffoons such as the re¬
curring Tristan Fleuri, and bold caricatures such as L’Oeil-Vert (the one-eyed
master of the guillotine lists) and Couthon (a decrepit old man who creeps
about in a wheelchair with a white rabbit in his lap). There are reproductions
of famous mass spectacle paintings of the Revolution and its aftermath, doc¬
umentary moments (such as a bread line of women and children in a snow-
covered street), American-style chases on horseback, an oddly anachronistic
moment of modern dancing at the Victims’ Ball (including a line of flappers
and shots of naked breasts and buttocks), and highly subjective visions artic¬
ulated in a barrage of cinematic techniques. This kind of mixture we have
seen before—in such diverse films as L’Herbier’s exquisite melodrama, El Do¬
rado; Mosjoukine’s satirical comedy, Le Brasier ardent; Kirsanoffs poetic “slice-
of-life,” Menilmontant; and Cavalcanti’s cruelly witty documentary, Rien que les
heures. If the cacophony in Napoleon seems deliberate, then perhaps overriding
the usual conventions of coherence is a principle of play for its own sake, a
playing that involves a melange of styles. Or, even more likely, perhaps there
is in the film, as there was in La Roue, a conception of structural unity that
sets coordinates for this play, that shapes it into a coherent network of narra¬
tive relations.
Similarly, throughout its length, Napoleon deploys a variety of syntactical
systems. In the Victims’ Ball, for instance, Gance relies basically on the “clas¬
sical” style of editing that creates a spatial-temporal continuity to ensure a
dear chain of character action. At several points, this involves a subtle alter¬
nation of eye-line matches between Napoleon, Josephine, and Hoche—when
they first meet and when Napoleon takes Hoche’s queen in a chess game. In
a dramatic sequence during the Royalist Rebellion (as well as in other se¬
quences), however, Gance sets up a different form of spatial continuity, shift¬
ing back and forth between matched and “mismatched” shots that define the
relations between Barras, Napoleon, and a Captain Murat. Finally, in Napo¬
leon’s journey to Albenga, as has been noted, the spatial-temporal continuity
is sacrificed in order to emphasize a system of graphic, rhythmic, and conno-
tative relations. Because of its inconsistent adherence to the “classical” conti¬
nuity system developed by the American cinema, Noel Burch, among others,
has called Napoleon a “primitive” film.31 Even if Burch means to reverse the
pejorative sense of the word (to celebrate early film practice), the label seems,
to me, inappropriate. For what Gance and his colleagues in the narrative
avant-garde seem to have developed and/or accepted was a discourse that was
deliberately plural. At his disposal for Napoleon were several different or alter¬
native systems of syntactical continuity. Again, the question is, do they sim¬
ply provide another means for play or are there patterns to the deployment of
these syntactical systems that coalesce into coherence?
Let me point the way toward grasping the film’s integration of these modes

435
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE of representation and continuity systems by focusing on that portion devoted
to the relationship between Napoleon, Josephine, and her maid Violine. At
the time of Napoleons release, critics tended to ignore this part of the film,
presumably on the grounds that it was a sentimental digression. That attitude
still persists for most of the cuts in the “Coppola” version now circulating in
the United States are made here.32 That is unfortunate, because these se¬
quences achieve a high degree of rhetorical complexity and emotional poign-
ance and, in the process, reveal a nexus of coherence in the midst of inco¬
herence. Furthermore, they introduce a disturbing note of discord, another
level of contradiction, into the text of Napoleon.
The courtship between Napoleon and Josephine is marked by a mixture of
high and low comedy until one day Napoleon calls unexpectedly at her tiny
chateau. While her son and daughter chat with the awkward suitor in an
antechamber, Josephine tarries in the bedroom with Barras (whose mistress
she has been and may still be), receiving his permission to marry. The children
engage Napoleon in a game of blindman’s bluff; and as he fumbles about,
blindfolded, Barras escapes by tiptoeing past him and out the door. Napoleon
is caught up in the game (articulated in an accelerating montage of fast pan¬
ning CUs) until Josephine sneaks up behind him and allows herself to be
captured. Instead of taking off the blindfold, however, he tells her that he has
no need of eyes to know whom she really loves in her heart. At this she does
a warily slow double take, as if suddenly fearful that he may realize her actual
feelings and motives and the extent of her duplicity. This sequence is remark¬
able in several ways. The accelerating montage sets up an implausible conti¬
nuity, the subjective vision (all are POV shots) of a character who is blind¬
folded. Yet the function of that implausibility is to call into question Napoleon’s
ability to see and hence to know. The subsequent series of shots reinforce that
questioning by juxtaposing (in matched CUs) the blinded lover and his all-
too-seeing-and-knowing beloved. In the context of his skill as a military strat¬
egist and his inheritance of the visionary principles of the Revolution (which
he accepts immediately after the wedding), Napoleon’s blindness here takes
on disturbingly grand proportions. If his love for Josephine can be mocked so
cruelly and easily, can his devotion to the Revolution be any less of a delusion?
The wedding ceremony introduces a further sense of questioning and dis¬
turbance. In contrast to several brief sequences where the couple stroll in the
gardens around her chateau (photographed in exquisitely glowing images that
soften at the edges), the wedding is a lackluster affair of waiting (Napoleon
arrives late) in a tacky civil chamber (the spotlighting on the walls is even
blatantly inconsistent). Intriguingly, however, this ceremony is almost dis¬
placed by the wedding (identified as such in an intertitle) that Violine stages
for herself. This young woman has appeared repeatedly in the second half of
the film—in the Convention as Robespierre and Saint-Just are condemned, in
the bread line of women in the snow, at the Victims’ Ball as a coat-check girl.
She becomes infatuated with Napoleon (at one point buying a wooden statu¬
ette of him that is hawked in the streets of Paris) and finally arranges her hair
like Josephine s and gets herself hired as one of her maids. On the evening of
the marriage, Violine dresses herself in white before a mirror in her room,
then slowly gets up onto her bed and kneels in a position of prayer. In place
of a headboard is a small cabinet that she opens, revealing a tiny altar to

436
Napoleon that includes the statuette, some flowers, several candles, and one NAPOLEON VU PAR
of his white gloves.33 The sequence then cuts to Napoleon and Josephine in ABEL GANCE
their bridal chamber. For a moment he stands alone by the bed, which is
thinly veiled by a full-length curtain, and then she comes to the opposite side
and touches one of the garlands encircling the curtain. He joins her, and they
kiss (in CU) as veil after veil falls diagonally across their faces until the image
fades to white. The sequence then returns to Violine, who has left her bed to
stand by the wall. The left portion of the frame, which has been blurred out
of focus, suddenly clears, revealing the statuette on a small table. Violine’s
hand moves the figure slightly and its enlarged shadow appears on the wall.
In a final MS, she moves to the projected shadow and presses her lips to it.
This double wedding transpires in a mysterious world, half real, half fan¬
tasy. In its startling white-on-white mise-en-scene, Moussinac writes, Violine
often seems “to fade away into the gray mists of a magical background.’’34
Yet the sequence is also unusually perverse, pushing passion and sentimental¬
ity to excess. Something like this had occurred earlier when Napoleon was
taking lessons in courtship. At the end of that sequence, he faced a globe of
the world and imagined Josephine’s face superimposed inside it. When he
moved to kiss her, she turned away; turning the globe brought her back again.
But as Napoleon covered her face with his and seemed to caress her hair,
Josephine’s look was reluctant, even resistant. Here, in Violine’s chamber, the
situation is reversed. A woman produces her own image of the man she loves
(or the image her society offers her) and manipulates that image for her own
ends. But the man is absent, the manipulation a delusion. What does this
suggest, not only about the “mad’’ character of Violine, but about perception
and power in sexual relations? Does Violine’s passion parallel and reflect on
Napoleon’s relation to Josephine? And does her fetishistic projection make us
even more conscious of the film’s representation of Napoleon?
The motif of testing that marks these sequences of courtship and marriage
provides, I would argue, a basis of coherence for the film as a whole. The
scope of Napoleon may be too large for its disparate parts to be organized into
anything like the tightly-fitted, Chinese box-like construction of a short work
such as Jean Epstein’s La Glace a trois faces (1927). Yet there does seem to be
an overall design that depends on more than the chronology of historical events
(which already has suffered several major shifts and lacunae). To grasp that
design is to see Napoleon propelled through a double series of increasingly
more crucial tests and confrontations whose paradigmatic relations are as im¬
portant as their syntagmatic progress. For in the reversals and transformations
of those tests, the character of Napoleon undergoes a kind of deconstruction.
The first half of Napoleon introduces the motif of the test or confrontation
at the outset, in the snowfort battle which is then recapitulated in the dor¬
mitory pillow fight. That segment ends in an image which condenses elements
of the previous action and presages what is to come. Young Napoleon is alone
in an empty storeroom, sitting on an old cannon, when his pet eagle returns
through an open window from the snowy night to join him. This rhetorical
form of closure—the lone figure, the imperial eagle, the military hardware,
the glittering particles in the air—establishes a pattern that will recur at
several key moments in the film. The next segments, during the onset of the
Revolution, delay any further test. The retreat to Corsica, however, sets up a

437
narrative AVANT-GARDE confrontation between the island factions, especially between Napoleon and
Paoli, who has sided with England. The confrontation begins in a local cafe
(articulated in a slow montage of marvelous faces in CU), builds to a face-off
in front of the actual Bonaparte family home (photographed with a special
"brachyscope” lens to make up for space limitations), and then to a horseback
chase that ends in his escape by sea. All of this culminates in two major
tests—the storm at sea and the siege of Toulon which climax the first half
of the film. Both demand close scrutiny.
The first of the two begins with a stunning image that transcends cliche.
In a small boat Napoleon has taken to escape the Corsican gendarmes, he
attaches to the mast the huge French flag he has seized from Paoli and unfurls
it as a sail. With one hand grasping the flag and the other guiding the tiller,
he quickly puts out to sea—for France. This image culminates a series of
simple similes in the film: young Bonaparte and the eagle, Danton and the
flames of a blacksmith’s forge, Pozzo and a snake (which, as in a prewar serial,
incongruously coils about his shoulder). But it also marks the transition to an
even grander simile. Apparently inspired by Victor Hugo’s line, "To be a
member of the Convention is like being a wave of the ocean,” Gance concludes
the Corsican period with a sequence that intercuts Napoleon’s storm-tossed
boat and the surging melee of the Convention—hence its title, the Double
Tempest.35 Following Moussinac, Mitry has argued that this sequence is flawed
because it simply visualizes a preexisting idea—a mere literary symbol, no
more.36 However, the tumult of the Revolutionary assembly in Paris is not
only paralleled to but transformed by the turbulent sea through which Napo¬
leon navigates to his "destiny.” The point of the charged equation, it seems
to me, is to suggest that the Convention will soon test Napoleon as well and
that he will survive it just as he survives the storm at sea. He will triumph
over forces both cosmic and human, natural and political. In fact, the latter
forces are diminished, and almost obliterated, by the former in this rhetorical
process of mystification.37
The significance of the Double Tempest depends, in part, on its use of the
celebrated Polyvision triple screen or triptych system. As originally conceived,
this system was intended simply to record panoramas several times wider than
the normal frame area. Gance had Andre Debrie mount three identical Parvo-
Debrie cameras on top of one another, aim the top and bottom ones to record
the fields adjacent to that recorded by the middle camera, and synchronize all
three to run automatically.38 Despite a slight parallax problem in joining the
three images, the results were so stunning that Gance used the technique
several times in Napoleon, not only for panoramas near the end (as initially
planned) but for other effects as well. Here, in the Double Tempest, the shots
of the Convention are marked by the vertiginous movements of pendulum
camera shots—"the camera was placed at the end of a metal rod some ten
meters long, which oscillated like a gigantic pendulum, imparting to the lens
a forward and backward movement, similar to some sort of swing’s rising and
falling. 39 Similarly, the shots of the storm are marked by wildly tilting im¬
ages of the boat as it is deluged with water, CUs of Napoleon’s bloody hands,
and both positive and negative images of enormous roiling waves (photo¬
graphed from a glass box submerged in the surf). According to Gance, the
sequence crescendoed in a rhythmic montage involving all three panels of the

438
 NAPOLEON VU PAR
ABEL GANCE

mm ■

liiii!

220. Napoleon and his

Tricolor sail at sea

triptych, along with an increasing number of superimpositions, until it cli¬

maxed in sixteen images spaced across the triple screen.40 Even in its present
fragmentary form, one can see here the recapitulation of the earlier snowball
and pillow fights literally enlarged to epic proportions.
The siege of Toulon extends the epic mode of this testing, but it also
introduces the earliest discordant note of ambiguity. The first assault begins
at midnight, and all the fighting thereafter is conducted at night. Further¬
more, it begins in a downpour of rain that persists unrelentingly throughout
the fighting. Together these conditions produce a shifting combination of
“heroic” and “unheroic” images, in conjunction with which Napoleon is both
larger-than-life leader and sharer of the suffering. Early on, especially, close
shots of his face are intercut with the attacking soldiers and artillery firing.
And in the climactic moments, several shots are divided into a miniature
triptych, with Napoleon in the center panel seeming to direct the fighting at
his sides. But the battle is also unusually brutal. In the first assault, a soldier
is blown up in a water-filled ditch and a second soldier falls in dead after him;
a third is wounded in the head, while a fourth has his foot run over by a
cannon.41 In the second assault, two soldiers struggle in a sea of mud until
one drowns the other—the last image is that of an arm reaching up desper¬
ately, futilely, out of the murky water. In the aftermath of the siege, in several
EIALSs, Napoleon stands hunched in the rain on a mound surrounded by
scores of dead soldiers in the mud. Yet the last shots condense and transform
these elements from the battle, along with some from Brienne and Corsica.

439
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

221. The Parvo-Debrie

cameras set up to record a
triptych panorama. Albert
Dieudonne is in costume
(right foreground)

The master shot is a LS of a hill on which sit a house (frame right) and a low
wall (frame left), near which, under a bare tree, Napoleon falls asleep on a
drumhead. As smoke rises from the right foreground, the dawn light of the
sun breaks in from the left background. On General Dugommier’s orders,
soldiers cover Napoleon with several French flags, and an eagle alights in the
tree overhead. All these tests thus climax in a heavily symbolic tableau that
“resolves” any sense of contradiction.
The second half of Napoleon is constructed somewhat like the first; there are
a number of confrontations early on and then another more important series
at the end. The beginning segment covers the period of the Reign of Terror,
during which Napoleon again is a marginal character, especially during the
time when the “Three Gods of the Revolution” disappear. But when the
Royalist Rebellion breaks out, Barras calls him to the Convention to take
command of Paris’s defense. With a few words, Napoleon distributes arms to
the citizens, and the rebellion is quickly crushed. As the segment climaxes in
a moment of spectacle at the Convention—in a series of huge shot/reverse
shots that will be echoed in the film’s final reel—Napoleon announces to the
cheering throng, “I am the Revolution!” Yet this expected triumph is torn by
contradictions. On the one hand, it recapitulates and transforms the sequence

440
of the Double Tempest. The new storm that threatens the Convention has NAPOLEON VU PAR
been stilled—in place of tumult, there is stasis and order; in place of several ABEL GANCE
squabbling leaders, there is now a single figure of authority. On the other
hand, Napoleon’s position is even more ambiguous than at the siege of Tou¬
lon. As savior of the Revolution, he has turned into its dictator, its new God.
In the Convention Hall, whether fully lit or silhouetted, he is an overdeter¬
mined subject—the focal point of framing and editing, the source of powerful
words (e.g., “Justice” hangs over him in the air). Before taking command,
however, for one long moment, his shadow falls ominously over “The Decla¬
ration of the Rights of Man.” And in the Convention’s aftermath, his body is
disguised and then fetishized in statuettes hawked in the streets. Oscillating
between Great Man of History, puppet, and menacing shadow, the figure of
Napoleon has become plural, paradoxical.
If this Convention triumph displays an ever increasing sense of discord, the
sequences of courtship and marriage that follow push the character of Napo¬
leon to the brink of incoherence. There, a different form of testing, involving
the dynamics of sexual politics and degrees of knowledge, raises disturbing
questions about the Napoleonic hero and his position as subject in the narra¬
tive and in history. At the point of dissolution, the film suddenly backs off
and recovers a form of coherence by displacing its questions and contradictions
in the mystification of spectacle. The shift occurs in the long (and sometimes
tedious) sequence in the now empty Convention Hall where, before going off
to Albenga, Napoleon faces the dead heroes of the Revolution (in a series of
superimpositions). Their interrogation turns into a warped, simplistic affir¬
mation (read “betrayal”) of the Revolution, and the dead begin to sing the
“Marseillaise,” echoing the film’s very first moments in the Club de Corde¬
liers. The sequence modulates into an even montage of MCUs, commingling
both leaders and common people in one continuous image that blurs all dis¬
tinctions. The final shot is a masterpiece of condensation through superim¬
position. It begins with a LACU of Napoleon listening intently (against the
darkness of the hall); a superimposition of the wind-whipped tricolor (echoing
the Double Tempest) dissolves in behind him; then a canted LAFS of La Mar¬
seillaise (in place of Josephine?) dissolves in, replacing Napoleon—she calls off
to the right and then points left into a strong wind that billows her garments;
finally, the initial image of Napoleon dissolves back in but replaces the flag
behind her. Thus does the film, in an incredible stereoptic deception, equate
Napoleon with the spirit of the Revolution, placing him at the still center of
its swirling, dynamic charge. Now the challenges of Brienne, Corsica, Toulon,
and the Convention can reach their apotheosis in the final reel, in a stunning
series of triptych effects, all of them geared to Napoleon as the uncontested
narrative and rhetorical subject par excellence.42
The final reel opens at the Albenga encampment (a crater surrounded by
rock walls and crowned by a ruined castle) with a series of sequences edited
primarily according to the “classical” continuity system. Several panorama
shots establish the location as Napoleon rides his white horse back and forth
among the troops, his movement linking the massed units of soldiers as well
as the three panels of the triptych. His first brief speech to them confirms his
dominance—an intertitle in the central panel is followed by a MCU of Napo¬
leon, flanked by hundreds of soldiers in each side panel, and then by several

441
222. (top) Napoleon overlooks
the Albenga encampment (in
panorama triptych)

223. (bottom) A publicity

photo of the reverse shot of panorama shots as he leads them forward and off-screen (the horses flash by
the Albenga encampment impressively in MS). The following morning that dominance is reestablished
with a triptych MCU of Napoleon against dark clouds moving across the sky
and a triptych LS of the troops arising (the panorama shot tilts up to include
soldiers appearing on the castle walls above the rock face). Throughout his
main speech to the army, the sequence generally alternates triptych MCUs of
Napoleon with LSs of the soldiers responding to his words and gestures (in
eyeline-matched shots). But the pattern varies to include gigantic shot/reverse
shots as well as FSs of the soldiers and MCUs of Napoleon flanked by LSs of
the massed army. And the speech climaxes in a series of reverse panorama
shots, with a CU of Napoleon’s look serving as the pivot of control and direc¬
224. The central panel of a tion, iinking the French army to the other side of the mountain with its “rich
triptych, in which Napoleon provinces and great towns’’ spread over the fertile Italian plains. In the deep
gazes down on his troops at space of the final shot, the soldiers charge forward (from ELS to MS) en masse.
Albenga
For the descent into Italy that follows, the film shifts to a “musical’’ con¬
tinuity that stresses graphic and rhythmic relations as much as the represen¬
tational. Leaving the Albenga encampment, the army divides (in triptych) into
three different lines of troops that march forward past ruined castle walls and
through a valley of vast fields. As the central panel changes to dollying FSs of
the marching soldiers and wagons, the left and right panels (inversions of one
another) describe, in LSs, the advancing infantry, cavalry, and cannon. At
Montenotte, a ‘classical’’ continuity returns in conjunction with a split screen
of connotative parallels. In several panorama shots, the army descends a hill

442
 225. Triptychs of the descent
from Albenga: the central
panel of the second triptych
includes a CU of Josephine
to attack and capture the town; while in gigantic reverse shots, a CU of (Gina Manes) and a silhouette
Napoleon is flanked first by parallel tracking shots of the cavalry and then by of Napoleon superimposed
ELSs as they race forward across the plains. The battle is quickly dispatched, over a map of Italy

and Napoleon is propelled ahead of his army and then, in a brief shot echoing
the Double Tempest, is joined with the wildly applauding Convention crowds
in Paris—by means of an intertitle that explodes across the triple screen:
“Hearing of / this sudden entry / into Italy // the Parisians / burst the bounds /
of their enthusiasm.”
In its final minutes, the film shifts once again into a continuity system that
is graphic, rhythmic, and highly connotative. Recapitulating the beginning
as well as all the other moments of testing, this climax enacts the ultimate
transformation and mystification of Napoleon’s vision. It begins with Napo¬
leon stalking the heights of Montezemolo, inscribing “in the Italian sky all
his desires and all his victories.” As he looks out over the mountains and
valleys, three separate sequences erupt simultaneously onto the triple screen,
the images metamorphosing through superimpositions, dissolves, and iris
masks that shift back and forth from panel to panel in what Mitry has called

443
226. (top) The Convention
crowd in Paris (one image in
triplicate)

227. A triptych from the final

sequence of Napoleon (1927)
“a fuguelike movement of dizzying rhythms.”43 Initially, they include a FS of
Napoleon, LSs of the army attacking across the plains, a LS of his white horse,
and a suspended CU of Josephine. Soon, in addition, appear the revolving
globe, LSs of the valleys and mountains, maps of Italy and England, insignia,
cannon fire, and attacking cavalry. Finally, the sequences shift into rapid mon¬
tage, drawing together closer and closer shots of the victorious marching sol¬
diers, CUs of Napoleon as a boy and man, ECUs of his eyes, blurred shots of
the Revolutionary leaders, a beating drum, flashes, cloud rifts, streaming water,
and waves exploding in sunlight. Suddenly, the vanguard of the army sees the
shadow of a bird preceding them on the road, and there is a head-on FS of a
soaring eagle extending its wings across the triple screen. The sequence shifts
to CUs and ECUs of Napoleon again, and the film ends in a rush of images—
blurred figures, swish pans, ECUs of Napoleon’s eyes, and streams of light.
Then, in a last twist, the panels of streaming light turn red, white, and blue,
transforming the final triptych into a gigantic French tricolor. Although
Napoleon is the apparent subject or source of this whirlwind of resonant im¬
ages, this projection of the “Revolutionary spirit,” he becomes, in fact, the
object or figure restored by its charge. For what begins as his vision shifts
deceptively into an omniscient barrage that “devours” its subject and, through
that deception, subsumes the paradoxical nature of his character and all the
contradictions of his seeing and knowing. Consequently, this celebratory res¬
toration of Napoleon’s power can be seen as the product of a cinematic spec¬
tacle whose operation renders its own resolution problematic.
What position can one take toward this rhapsodic celebration of a single

444
powerful leader, a sort of Gallicized Hegelian ideal of the hero in history— NAPOLEON vu PAR
anachronistic, chauvinistic, and perhaps even fascistic? For Gance, his hero ABEL GANCE
must have seemed the Romantic artist in apotheosis—as he saw himself—a
towering figure who made the real world, not an imaginary one, his province
of action.44 For his contemporary, the critic Moussinac, this figure was the
embodiment of military dictatorship, frighteningly close to the image of the
Emperor then held by political groups of the extreme right.45 On these grounds,
some argue, Napoleon could join the ranks of such films as Griffith’s Birth of a
Nation (1915) and Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1934) for the way it weds
a pernicious ideology to an innovative and/or masterfully persuasive dis¬
course.46 Yet, ironically, in its structural repetition of narrative and rhetorical
motifs, the film works much like Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1925-1926)—culmi¬
nating in a rush of images in which past, present, and future implode and
seem to burst the bounds of the screen. And in the wake of that rush, for the
spectator turned analyst, wash a welter of contradictions. Or, in other words,
there remain several textual levels of incoherence suspended in a deceptive
form of coherence. The overall effect of Napoleon may be mystification on a
grand scale, but the text goes a long way toward producing the basis of its
own critique.

To Gance’s despair, the impact of his technological advances in Napoleon

was severely curtailed by circumstances beyond his control. Soon after the
film’s release, the American film industry determined to back the sound film
revolution at the expense of other innovations. Because Gance’s Poly vision
process required special screening facilities and because many of his other
innovations were costly in time and money, neither he nor the French film
industry were in a position to promote them or carry them further. Some years
later, in fact, in a fit of depression, Gance destroyed all but one reel of the
original triptych negatives.47 Yet his Polyvision concept was the most impor¬
tant forerunner of the Cinerama format that the American film industry finally
began to exploit in the 1950s. It was also a precursor of the split-screen
techniques developed worldwide in the 1960s. According to Brownlow, Gance
and L.-H. Burel even experimented with a color 3-D process one day while
shooting some of the panorama triptychs.48 The only thing that kept Gance
from using the 3-D footage was that it attracted too much attention to itself
and did not seem to support the graphic and rhythmic patterns he had estab¬
lished in the film.
Despite the industry’s implicit rejection of Gance’s work, several narrative
avant-garde filmmakers did try to adapt and extend his experimentation. Only
one, however, Claude Autant-Lara, worked on a variant of the Polyvision
process. That process, called Hypergonar, was quite different from Polyvision,
since it used an anamorphic lens (a wide-angle viewfinder invented for World
War I tank drivers) which Henri Chretien adapted to an optical printer soon
after he had seen Napoleon.49 The fate of Autant-Lara’s short film, Construire
un feu (1928-1930), and the Hypergonar process were as ignominious as Napo¬
leons. More than a year after the film’s completion, Autant-Lara still had not
found an exhibition outlet in Paris beyond several private screenings.50 Dis¬
couraged, he signed a contract with MGM to work in Hollywood. Once there,
in 1930, he writes,

445
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE I rushed to the front office and submitted to them the new process (then still called
“Hypergonar” for wide screen). . . . After six months, the “Research Department]”
of MGM gave me the answer: “This process is of no interest.”51

Ironically, that very Hypergonar lens is rumored to have been used years later
to shoot Twentieth-Century Fox’s The Robe (1953), which gave birth to Cin¬
emascope.52 While Autant-Lara remained in Hollywood to direct the French
versions of some MGM talkies, in December, 1930, the manager of the small
Studio de Paris cinema in Montparnasse finally decided to risk screening Con-
struire un feu53 After an irregular three-month run, the National Syndicate of
Exhibitors forced him to halt its projection because they considered the new
optical process “unfair competition.”54 Soon after, because Autant-Lara’s debts
remained unpaid and a letter never reached him in the United States, the
laboratory in France destroyed the film negative.55
As a precursor of the wide-screen processes finally developed by the Amer¬
ican film industry in the early 1950s, the historical importance of Construire
un feu is assured. Yet the few stills that remain of the film, as well as one
published page of the decoupage, reveal that Autant-Lara was doing some un¬
usual things with his anamorphic lens.56 Not only was he squeezing the image
from the sides; he was also squeezing it from the top and bottom—as if
experimenting with the best method of recording and projecting the image.
Furthermore, although some frames were composed of a single image, others
were split into two or three separate images of varying sizes, sometimes ar¬
ranged vertically as well as horizontally. The existing split-screen frames in¬
clude juxtapositions of full shots and close-ups and of shot/reverse shots, as
well as of interior and exterior shots. Because of its complexity in screen format
changes and in image connections, Construire un feu may have presented an
even greater challenge to narrative filmmaking and film viewing than did
Napoleon.

Vintage, 6V2 x 11, For two years after leaving Pathe-Consortium, Jean Epstein made a string
and La Glace a trois of successful commercial films for Films Albatros—Le Lion des Mogols (1924),
faces LAjfiche (1925), Le Double Amour (1925), and Les Aventures de Robert Macaire
(1925-1926).1 Even when his own production company was formed early in
1926, he continued in that mode with his first independent film, an adapta¬
tion of Mauprat (1926). Only then did he hazard a return to the level of
experimentation that had marked his earliest films. That experimentation was
still somewhat hesitant in 6V2 X 11 (1927) and then much bolder in La Glace
a trois faces (1927). Although there were probably a number of reasons for this
resurgence of creativity in Epstein’s work, part of the impetus must have come
from a film much admired at the time—Jacques Feyder’s L’lmage (1926).2
L Image was based on an original scenario by the well-known writer, Jules
Romains, who saw the cinema as a new medium in w'hich to express the tenets
of his belief in unanimism. Its subject was almost Pirandellian:

. . . four men differing in circumstances, scruples, and intellect—a painter, an en¬

gineer, a diamond merchant, and an ex-seminarian—fall in love with a woman they
have never seen and of whom they know only “The Image” exhibited in a photo¬
graph.3

446
 228. (left) The photographer’s
multiple images of the
woman in L’lmage (1926)

Obsessed with what they take to be an image of the ideal woman, each, (Arlette^Marchal) alone in the
unknown to the others, abandons his profession to seek her. While the painter solitude of the Bakony plains
reproduces his own vision of her image in a large portrait, the other three go
off searching through the world. Chance leads them simultaneously to an inn
on the Bakony plains of Hungary. Not far away, in a manor surrounded by
vast open pastures and marshes, lives a woman whom her husband, his spinster
sisters, and his vivacious cousin do not understand—the woman of the pho¬
tograph (Arlette Marchal). That evening, as the men converse and discover
that not only are they rivals but that each of their visions of the woman is
different, she happens to stop briefly outside the inn and then pass on. The
next morning, the men go their separate ways—“one to his death, another
into meditation, the third to wander across the world.’’4 And the woman
continues to live out her lonely, unsatisfied existence.
Some critics faulted Romains’s scenario for L’lmage for being too literary,
too schematically constructed, which caused it to fail completely at the box
office. But all were impressed by the simple purity and lyrical continuity of
the film’s images (again, Feyder’s cameraman was L.-H. Burel).5 The high
points of the film come in the sequences where the woman is defined in
relation to this expansive landscape. Her emotional state draws its meaning,
in part, from the mesmerizing effect of the plains and, in Henri Fescourt’s
words, “its horizons at dusk, its nostalgic atmosphere, its returning cattle
herds, its flights of birds, its marshes, its pale tonalities of light. . . .”6 But
this image of a lone figure in the solitude and plenitude of nature draws its
power in turn from at least two other sets of contrasting images. One set
includes the stylized images of the woman that the men produce, epitomized
in the painter’s vision of an elevated figure, the worshipped object of out¬
stretched male hands. The other set, however, describes the stereotypical ba¬
nality of provincial bourgeois family life. In other words, the film not only

447
narrative AVANT-GARDE interweaves several converging lines of action; it also juxtaposes three different
forms of representation and degrees of perception and desire.
Jq thg final sequence, the woman remains in her natural landscape, but the
meaning of her image has now changed. Jean Mitry has described this moment
with uncharacteristic rapture:

And this end of all beauty; this end that does not end—which will never end. . . .
On the Bakony plateau, against a horizon of oak trees at the top of a moor, close to
a sheepfold and a shepherd who sings while cutting himself some bread, a perfectly
beautiful woman, somberly dressed, looks off into the distance behind her, as if she
is waiting.7

The subject of a paradoxical charge, the woman of L'Image is both part of

nature and apart, deflecting and dissipating its unanimism into longing.
Moreover, as the figure to be looked at and fetishized (yet who is unseen by
the other characters) and as the bearer of the look (yet who bears an unfulfilled
desire), almost fatalistically it seems, she marks the site of some sort of lack
or absence at the center of things. And this is exactly what links L’Image to
Jean Epstein’s two films—the crucial object of a woman’s photograph, the
narrative situation of several characters vying for the attention of another, and
this shared sense of melancholy, of a lack or absence.

In Le Cinematographe vu de l’Etna (1926), Epstein had written,

One of the greatest powers of the cinema is its animism. On the screen, there is
no still life. Objects assume attitudes. Trees gesticulate. Mountains, as well as this
Etna, signify. Every property becomes a character. The decors fragment and each of
the pieces takes on a singular significance. An astonishing pantheism is reborn in the
world and fills it to bursting.8

At least one critic quoted this passage back to Epstein, in order to say that he
saw “nothing, absolutely nothing’’ of that power or pantheism in 6V2 X 11
(1927).9 Today that conclusion seems oddly obtuse, but not exactly wrong¬
headed. For, while the film does have a singular power, it also has an uncan¬
nily cool air about it, a rigorously measured rhythm, almost as if it were an
exquisite, finely tuned machine. Perhaps Jean Dreville sums up best the sheer
amazement and intense irritation most critics experienced when it was released
in September, 1927. Although certainly Epstein’s most interesting work yet
as a filmmaker, unmatched in technical virtuosity, 6V2 X 11 seemed to him
“a kind of laboratory film ... a film which played too much on our cerebral
faculties to touch our sensibility. . . .’’10 Yet, as Dreville suggested, that
simply meant it was even less conventional and more advanced than other
narrative avant-garde films.
The scenario for 6V2 X 11 was first developed by Marie Epstein, Jean’s
sister.11 The idea came from a simple visual image. Two years before, the
image around which Marie had organized the scenario of L'Affiche was a Bebe
Cadum poster that one day mysteriously seemed to speak to her—“but you
know that this baby is dead!’’ This time it was “a photo in a developing bath
. . . [and she] found a dramatic situation to surround the face that little by
little appeared there. . . .”12 Hence the title—the dimensions of the Kodak
print (since Kodak refused to allow its name in the title). The scenario she

448
and Jean then worked into a decoupage was little more than a fait divers. Jean L’lMAGE, 6V2 X 11, AND
(Nino Costantini), the younger brother of a prominent doctor, Jerome de Ners LA GLACE A TROIS FACES
(Van Daele), is naively infatuated with Mary Winter (Suzy Pierson), a singer
at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees. For their “Palace of Love,” he buys a
magnificent modern chateau on the Cote d’Azur. When she soon ditches him
for a dance man at the Theatre, Larry Gold (Rene Ferte), Jean commits sui¬
cide. Unaware of what has happened to his brother, Jerome now becomes
infatuated with the singer, after treating her for a minor illness at the Theatre.
She, too, is ignorant, at first, of the relation between the two men. One day,
he receives word that Jean is not dead but has disappeared under an assumed
name. Jerome goes to the chateau to claim his possessions, and Mary follows
him, dreading what may happen. There he finds the negatives of some pho¬
tographs Jean had taken, develops them, and discovers the bitterly ironic
truth. Elere, the film’s principal distributor asked Epstein to produce a happy
ending—Jean returns and is reunited with his brother. For the version screened
at the Studio des Ursulines (and preserved at the Cinematheque franchise),
Epstein provided his original ending—Jerome simply leaves Mary, sick with
remorse, in a room with her dance man, Gold.13
Several elements of this story are clearly concessions to the then growing
taste in France for film showcases of the new good life of consumer capitalism.
The chateau and gardens on the Cote d’Azur, the open speeding sports cars,
the performances and behind-the-scenes activity at the Theatre des Champs-
Elysees—all of these were modern and “a la mode.’’ Today, some of these
sequences seem dated and almost irrelevant. Epstein himself found them dis¬
tasteful—too reminiscent, he admitted, of Pierre Frondaie melodramas.14 Elis
real interest is startlingly clear in the very first sequence of the film—just four
shots, linked by slow dissolves, of the two brothers in a cemetery.

LS of a wall with several crosses projecting above it (in the bottom third of the frame),
silhouetted against a foggy sky.
FS of two men, their backs to the camera at a 45° angle, standing before a simple
tomb.
MCU of the two (full face), framed against a grave triptych behind them.
FS of the slanting, oddly convex, marble tomb surface, with a cross sculpted on it (in
the bottom half of the frame), against a foggy sky obscuring the sun. Fade out.

The original decoupage, published in Cinegraphie, described this differently (a

shot of flowers, a superimposition of a smiling face), preceded it by a sequence
of their mother dying, and followed it with an intertitle—“Two years later.’’15
As changed in the film (there is no intertitle at all), the sequence seems
suspended in time, elliptical, and strangely evocative. We may assume the
death of a parent, but the fog and the massive marble block are mysteriously
ominous—their reference redirected from the past to the future. They give us
premonitions of other losses to come—the brothers’ own deaths, the loss of
something important to them? So oppressive is this opening that it casts a
pall over the first sequences in the de Ners’s Paris townhouse (the first inter¬
title begins to focus on Jean—“Monsieur Jean has not yet returned”) and over
the whole “a la mode” milieu that soon becomes dominant. Somewhat like
Cavalcanti’s Yvette (1928), 6V2 X 11 thus undermines the genre of the modern
studio spectacular from within.

449
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

230. The cemetery tomb in

the opening sequence of 6V2
X 11 (1927)

This opening sequence also makes one quickly aware of the film’s stunning
visual quality, which does indeed give things and spaces “a singular signifi¬
cance.” Of that quality, which is unusually sustained throughout, Dreville
said to Epstein, . . you hold the cinema in your hands.”16 6V2 X 77 is
narrated almost entirely by images (there are only about two dozen intertitles,
posters, and letters scattered over its length), and those images are among the
first in France to be recorded on panchromatic film stock (Epstein’s cameraman
was Georges Perinal, the documentary cameraman for Jean Gremillon). The
CUs of objects seem tangibly luminous (e.g., the jewels and crystal associated
with Jean and Mary); and HALSs of the de Ners’s rooms shade off into fine
dark grays in the backgrounds and edges of the frame. The long lap dissolves,
superimpositions, and image deformations, all done in-camera, are marvel¬
ously assured. The last shot describing Jean and Mary’s journey to the Cote
d’Azur chateau, for instance, begins as a rapid tracking shot from in front of
the sports car; a supered LS of waves moving in toward some shore rocks
dissolves in at the bottom of the frame; a supered CU of Jean and Mary (veiled)
dissolves in above—they kiss; both car and couple then dissolve out, and, in
the LS that remains, the waves crash on the rocks. Later, in a slightly HAELS,
Larry Gold’s sports car drives off down a straight country highway whose thick
bordering woods are blurred a soft gray at the center and far edges, creating
a kind of flattened hourglass-shaped frame of road and sky. There are prescient
asymmetrical compositions—e.g., a LS of Mary’s bedroom as Jean opens the
long window curtains (frame right background) just before he discovers her
empty bed (out of the frame in the left foreground). There are unusual camera
angles and abrupt, elliptical shifts in the spatial continuity of the editing.
The only thing conspicuously absent are sequences of rapid montage or sus¬
tained camera movement.
Pierre Leprohon has described the style Epstein reinvents for 6V2 X 7 7:

. . . as devoid of sentimental emotion as of plastic “delights,” [the film} essentially

hinged on the vigor of its rhythms, on the resemblances among the images, and thus,

450
to a great extent, depended on the succinctness of the montage and on the images’ L’lMAGE, 6V2 X 11, AND
power of evocation.17 LA GLACE A TROIS FACES

This style should not be taken simply as an autonomous formal construction,

however; its significance arises as a function of the film’s peculiarly schematic
narrative structure. Like Coeur fidele, L’lnhumaine, Feu Mathias Pascal, and others,
6V2 X 11 is a doubled narrative film in which the second part replicates much
of what has happened in the first. It is almost perfectly symmetrical (three
reels for the first part, three reels for the second) and quite deliberate in its
replication—substituting one brother for the other in the same love triangle,
setting the climax of both parts in the same place, and developing a nexus of
image relations which define the characters and are repeated across the two
halves of the film. This last pattern of replicated structural relations is crucial.
Here, in a dense pattern of rhetorical figuring that is repeated, varied, and
inverted to the point of reflexivity, lies the film’s chief concern.
At the center of this pattern of rhetorical figuring are several forms of light
and the photographic process of image reflection and representation. As Ep¬
stein himself once said, “the sun and a Kodak figured in the film’s origins.’’18
Through them, nature seems to make an ambiguous and “perpetual interven¬
tion,’’ one critic wrote, defining the relationships among the characters and
determining “the progress of the film.”19 The first major instance of rhetorical
figuring occurs in a series of three sequences which describe the incipient
breakdown between Jean and Mary. On one of their shopping trips to town,
Jean stops before an optics shop to buy a camera. In the display window, an
ad (in CU) promises that “this spring will last longer with a Kodak photo”—
dissolve to a shot through the window past a cardboard figure of a woman to
several shelves of cameras. In FS, Jean stands for a moment before the window,
where two large painted eyes are now prominent. In this conventional com¬
mercial representation of the human body, the woman’s figure and the man’s
eyes, the couple is positioned metaphorically. And their subject-object relation
is already suspect—the cardboard, the painted glass. At a restaurant later,
where several couples are dancing the Charleston, Jean examines the camera
he has just bought, and Mary tells him, “I hate photography. . . . That
sudden flash of magnesium gives me a shock. ...” While Jean is preoccupied
(frame left), a man comes up behind Mary (frame right) and begins talking to
her. Suddenly (in MS), the latter two are illuminated by a flash of light, and
they turn to look off toward the left foreground. The artificial illumination,
Mary’s lack of anxiety, and the shots of the dancing couples that follow—all
suggest that the man is a rival (much later he will be identified as Larry Gold).
The camera flash, however, turns out not to be Jean’s (as we might have
expected), for he turns to be introduced only after Mary has talked with the
man for a while. Ironically, his interest in the camera blinds him to her
interest in the other.
The last of the three sequences, which immediately follows, sums up this
initial pattern of rhetorical figuring succinctly. Mary leads Jean into the cha¬
teau gardens where he can photograph her posing on a bench beside a pool.
As Jean tries to get her to look in a particular direction, several shots are cut
in of the sun glaring through the slowly waving branches of the garden’s
cypress trees. Mary seems restless, disturbed—by the sunlight (in opposition

451
narrative AVANT-GARDE to the magnesium flash before) or by the photographic process itself? Does she
fear the camera will expose her “real attitude?

MCU of Jean as he steps into the frame from the left foreground (blurred out of focus
at first) and stops to adjust the camera in his hands.
ECU of the camera viewfinder, with Mary’s image framed in it.
MCU of Jean looking up from the camera and off to the left foreground.
ECU of his finger clicking the lever beside the camera lens.
LS of the sun glaring through the cypress trees.
ECU of his finger clicking the lever again; the camera then moves up and off to the
left.
MCU of Jean looking at the camera face.
LS of Mary going off to the right through the cypress trees.
MCU of Jean looking up and off to the left foreground; a look of displeasure crosses
his face. Fade out.

Again the couple is positioned metaphorically—his eyes replaced by the cam¬

era lens, his hand controlling its operation, her figure framed as the object of
vision and reflection. But Jean’s gaze is different from the camera’s, his control
illusory. Although this is the last time he will see her (the next morning she
will be gone), Jean does not realize that both eye and body, subject and object,
are marked by deception, are not what they seem. Ironically, he is a blind
subject in the film’s system of representation.
The next major instance of this rhetorical figuring climaxes the first half of
the film. As Jean prepares to leave the chateau, writing a note and packing
his bags, he goes into Mary’s bedroom for the last time. There he sits at her
dressing table and looks at his reflection in the mirror (in MCU/MS). Slowly
a CU of Mary’s face dissolves in (only half lit from the side), followed by an
ECU of her eyes, and finally a smaller image of her face drifting in from the
left. Is the deception in the image any clearer now or is the subject-object
relation shifting position? Her face provokes him to pick up a powder puff
and sniff it lightly, as if to recall her through the fetish of scent. He goes to
her bed and strokes the curtain beside it and then picks up his camera. As he
gazes at the lens, a smile crosses his face, and he unexpectedly pulls a revolver
from his coat pocket.

MS of Jean reflected in the mirror; he raises the revolver and fires. Dissolve to
CU of the hole and crack in the mirror, in which Jean’s image is reflected in MCU.
CU of the revolver as it turns to point at Jean’s body.
MCU of Jean’s face; his mouth opens; his eyes stare wide and then close.
LS of Jean slumped on the bed.
MCU of Jean s face as he looks up. Dissolve in a supered camera face on the right. A
CU of a camera lens wipes in from the left. Another camera lens dissolves in in the
center. All three suddenly flare and fade out one by one.
LS of Jean slumped on the bed; he falls to the floor. Iris out.

The magnesium flash and the sunlight’s glare reverberate in the revolver’s flash
of fire and in the supered flares of the cameras. All come together in a moment
of subjective recognition as Jean destroys himself both as the subject and
object of the process of reflection. For him, self-reflection leads to a tragic
awareness of deception. But the first part of the film does not end there. In a
playful ironic twist, the sequence cuts to a MCU of a hand reaching under a

452
desk to pick up a photograph—of Jean. It is Jerome’s hand, we discover, and L’lMAGE, 6V2 X 11, AND
he looks at the empty space on the wall from where it has fallen. The analogy LA GLACE A TROIS FACES
renders Jean’s tragedy almost ridiculous. But it also suggests an uncanny cor¬
respondence between things and sets up the figure of Jerome searching for his
brother through the image of a photograph.
In the second half of the film, the rhetorical figuring returns with the
reappearance of that particular photograph. The pattern resembles the reap¬
pearance of the playing cards in L’Auberge rouge, but is here transformed into
a more complicated, more consciously cinematic mode. Mary has come to
Jerome’s townhouse one evening shortly after her illness. Led into a room by
the butler, she is left alone, applying powder to her face, when she suddenly
discovers Jean’s photograph on a nearby table. As she stares, a CU of the
photograph dissolves in, blurs, and nearly whites out. The powder, sunlight,
revolver flash, and camera flares—all echo again in that whiteness. She moves
away from the table nervously, and Jerome comes in. The sequence ends in
an off-balanced FS of the two sitting in separate chairs (frame left and center),
which irises out on the table with the photograph (frame right). Although
Jerome has replaced Jean in the position of the infatuated lover, he is disturb¬
ingly ignorant, even more so than was Jean of his rival. When he next sees
Mary in her dressing room at the Theatre, that disturbance resonates in the
prominent mirrors and in the alternating shots of women dancing on the stage
below. To these visual echoes of his brother’s story, he is, of course, blind.
After Jerome receives the note about Jean’s disappearance, he takes a train
south to the Cote d’Azur. Mary follows and finds him at the chateau, sitting
before a box of Jean’s possessions and looking at his camera. The rhythm of
the cutting (and shifts in camera distance and angle) becomes nervous, disrup¬
tive, evoking the psychological tension of both characters—the one puzzling
slowly, anxiously, over the camera (“for a woman ... a little love . . . sud¬
denly a death . . .’’); the other fearful of the secret that it may hold. The
sequence shifts almost imperceptibly from one room to another and then back,
as if the situation were being played out again and again in the same space.
Finally, in an ECU, Jerome’s fingers open the camera case, revealing a label,
“My dear M . . . 12/2/26.” She moves away from him to stand by the box
once more, and her shoes (in ECU) step on a piece of paper dropped on the
floor. It is an ad for Kodak, of which only a few words are visible—“Don’t
forget vacations . . . that vanish without ... 11.” Suddenly (in FS), he is
sitting on the bed, almost exactly in the position Jean was in when he shot
himself, and (in CU) his raised fist falls on the camera. Jerome and Mary are
slowly being drawn into a doubled replication of Jean’s coming to conscious¬
ness.
The process reaches an initial climax in the next sequence (tinted red in the
original),20 as Jerome develops the film he has found in the camera. The room
is dark except for a rectangular viewing screen, emitting a faint light above
the developing trays. When Mary comes in, she asks, hopefully, whether
undeveloped film deteriorates after six months, but Jerome says simply that it
can last up to a year. The revelation of the double deception now looms in a
series of marvelously lit CUs and MCUs.

MS of Jerome as he runs back to look at the filmstrip.

453
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

231. (left) A publicity photo

of Nino Constantini, Rene
Ferte, and Suzy Pierson in
6V2 X 11 (1927)

232. (right) A publicity

photo of Suzy Pierson at the
chateau bedroom window
near the end of 6V2 X 11

ECU of Mary’s eyes wide in the dark; they close, and her head leans back slightly.
CU of Jerome’s face, barely lit from the right side, with a pinpoint of light in the
right eye.
CU of the filmstrip moving upward, against the light, revealing a woman clearly in
three frames.
MCU of Jerome staring at the filmstrip, turning it over and back.
MCU of Mary and Jerome as he holds up the filmstrip in front of her and between
them.
CU of the filmstrip against the light.
LAMS of Mary as she staggers to a chair.
MS of Jerome coming over to her.
LS of the room, with the photographic light and table (frame left), Jerome and Mary
(frame right); he helps her up, and she goes to the door (frame center background)
and opens it.

The process that Jean unconsciously had begun in the garden months before
is nearly complete. The image of Mary framed in the camera’s viewfinder
reappears, like a return of the repressed, in the filmstrip negative Jerome holds
in his hands. In the artificial light of the developing room, the camera’s “truth"
begins to separate the second couple and destroy the basis of their relationship.
Thus, the photographic process, in a highly reflexive manner, is made to serve
the narrative of the film.
But Epstein cannot leave the matter there, and he draws out the film’s
resolution in an extraordinary sequence, where the photographic/cinematic process
of reflection/representation becomes literally equivalent to the process of self¬
reflection. As Jerome walks out into the dawn, Mary watches at her bedroom
window, in a LS that replicates exactly Jean’s position in the room just before

454
he discovered her empty bed. She rushes out as if to follow him, but Jerome L’lMAGE, 6V2 X 11, AND
reaches a garden pavilion alone and sits down to look through the developed LA GLACE A TROIS FACES
photographs. Suddenly, Mary is revealed laboring slowly forward on a rough
beach of sand and rock—on the same beach where before she used to sing to
herself (the gardener had told Jerome)—in a HAELS (framed in a gray iris)
that ironically echoes those of the stage at the Theatre. At this crucial point,
the sequence begins to alternate between Mary and Jerome. When she looks
up (in a MCU with the same gray iris), the alternation shifts to introduce a
LALS of a cypress tree with a pale sun poised at its tip. Like the cemetery sun
of the opening sequence (as opposed to the sunlight of the garden), this cold
dawn light seems to strike her like an agent of revenge. Immediately, the
alternation shifts back to Mary and Jerome and brings them to an incredible
confrontation.

MCU of Jerome from behind, looking down at an unseen photograph.

HALS of Mary coming forward on the beach.
MCU of Jerome as he begins to turn around.
CU of Mary with her hand to her head, looking as if she is about to faint.
MCU of Jerome now turned around.
CU of Mary.
MCU of Jerome beginning to come forward.
CU of Mary beginning to fall back.
HALS of Mary falling back on the beach.
MCU of Jerome coming forward, his face twisted in anguish.
LS of Mary’s bedroom; Jerome enters from a door (frame right background), looks at
her empty bed.

Despite the apparent distance between the beach and the pavilion, the move¬
ment of the figures and the direction of their looks creates the illusion of a
contiguous abstract space and a dramatic conjunction. The alternation works
amazingly like the famous telepathic exchange between Nina and Nosferatu,
separated by half of Europe, in Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). But here, the effect
of the alternation is multiple, combining the objective and the subjective in
a stunning simultaneous revelation. With Mary as subject, they act out a
drama of agonized pleading and rejection. With Jerome as subject, however,
her image suddenly substitutes for the unseen photograph in his hands. Light
matches “light," recalling the light that created the original negative. And
together, the two experience the same subjective moment of anguish in a brief
cinematic dance. Mary’s anguished face is replicated in Jerome’s. Her falling
back (diminished, almost suppressed, in the vast space of the beach) is mir¬
rored in his movement forward. The revelation of this double deception thus
ends in a double tragedy. The process of self-reflection, instigated by Jean’s
camera, leads to isolation and the consciousness of a lack. And nature, as in
the beginning, seems to sanction this suffering, this separation, and this near
paralysis.
In conclusion, 6V2 X 11 offers a cold indictment of the deception marking
human relations, especially sexual relations. Although the woman and, by
association, the good life of consumer capitalism are made the principal sources
of this deception, the film also approaches a critique of the subject-object
positioning at the basis of sexual representation. Yet it ends up celebrating
the disturbingly ambiguous power of nature in conjunction with the new

455
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE 1 machine eye of photography and, by extension, cinematography. Unlike
L’Inhumaine, however, here that power is disturbing because its revelations
seem more destructive than constructive, at least given the milieu and char¬
acters of the film’s narrative.

At first, La Glace a trots faces (1927) may seem to mark a change in Epstein’s
work. As far as I can tell, it premiered at the Studio des Ursulines, in No¬
vember, 1927, and then was distributed within the circuit of specialized cin¬
emas and cine-clubs in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and England.21 This
makes it, along with Dulac’s L'lnvitation an voyage (1927), one of the first
narrative films produced exclusively for the alternate cinema network that had
originated in France and spread across Europe. It is also an unusually short
film, of only three reels or 900 meters, which is comparable to the length of
one episode in a serial or to the early films of, say, Louis Delluc e.g., La
Fete espagnole, Fievre. In that short length, however, La Glace a trois faces man¬
ages to narrate seven different stories in’ the most complicated film narrative
structure of the decade. It does this with a minimum of intertitles except
for numbers, character names, newspapers, signs, and telegrams, there are
only ten in all. And it employs a compendium of all that Epstein had devel¬
oped in the way of strategies and techniques over his five years of filmmaking.
Consequently, as Noel Burch and Jean-Andre Fieschi have argued, La Glace a
trois faces represents a culmination of much of the narrative avant-garde film
practice.
Epstein drew the scenario for La Glace a trois faces from a mildly erotic short
story in L’Europe galante (1922), by Paul Morand.22 The scenario neatly inverts
the narrative situation in Feyder’s L'Image. Here, three different women are in
love, simultaneously, with the same man. Pearl (Olga Day) is “an eccentric
Englishwoman’’ who enjoys the luxury of the modern good life. Athalia (Suzy
Pierson) is a Russian sculptress whose work is admired by “the Paris snobs.’’
And Lucie (Jeanne Helbling) is a young working-class woman whose simplic¬
ity and naivete set her apart from the other two. All three have scheduled
rendezvous with a young, unnamed financier and playboy (Rene Ferte, a strained,
unlikable actor) who casually ignores them in order to drive his new sports
car to the fashionable beaches of Deauville, “alone and free.’’ On the way,
however, a swallow darts from a telephone line into the path of the car and
strikes him, slashing its beak across his forehead. In an instant, he loses con¬
trol of the car, crashes, and dies. Put this way, the story seems little more
than a banal fait divers, with a touch of poetic justice, much as in Menilmon-
tant. But Epstein transforms it into a highly original, Pirandellian narrative
structure (remarked on at the time)/3 both on the general level of relations
between the separate stories and on the specific level of syntactical and rhetor¬
ical relations within and between sequences. Epstein himself dubbed it a “new
formula for the cinematic scenario.’’24 As several critics have pointed out, it
clearly anticipates the later films of Alain Resnais.25
La Glace a trois faces divides neatly into four parts whose titles (“1,” “2,’’
3, and lui, {him}) refer to the three women and the unnamed hero who
are the films principal characters.26 The opening intertitle—“Three women
love a man. But does he love one of them? is set off from 1 and thus acts
as a prologue to pose an enigma, an initial question, involving these charac-

456
 233. (left) A publicity photo
of the car crash at the end of
La Glace a trois faces (1927)

234. (right) A publicity

ters. The final intertitle—“Thus did I realize suddenly that the messages re- photo of Olga Day and Rene
ceived by the three women came from one man only and that man was he”— Ferte
and a shot of a three-sided mirror (hence the film’s title) are also set off as an
epilogue from the fourth part, entitled “lui.” Although this intertitle does
not answer the initial question posed in the prologue (in fact, it merely con¬
firms what we already know), the shot of the mirror, as we shall see, does—
and more.
In each of the four major sections of the film, the discourse produces a
separate narrative. The fourth narrative, however, begins in conjunction with
the first, progresses simultaneously (but briefly) with those of sections “2“ and
“3,” and is developed and resolved in the “lui” section. Furthermore, the first
three sections also contain embedded stories, narrated by each of the women,
about their past experiences with the hero. The relationships among all these
seven stories can be summarized as follows. In “1,” the hero and the English¬
woman, Pearl, separate angrily at a pavilion restaurant, and she tells a fawning
old man the story of her exasperating past life with the hero as his mistress.
That past story advances to the point where the separation took place, and the
hero sets off in his new sports car from a multilevel parking garage—after
sending Pearl a telegram. In “2,” the second woman, Athalia, also tells an
old man (but not the same one) the story of her encounters with the hero, first
in the Bois de Boulogne (where he rescues, of all things, her escaped pet
monkey) and later in her apartment. Meanwhile, the hero continues his jour-

457
235. (left) A frame from the
tracking shot in the
multilevel garage in La Glace
a trois faces (1927)
ney through a small village (where, in ironic contrast to the sculptress, a
236. (right) A shot from the
woman is trimming cabbages in a street cart), but he is abandoning Athalia
boating sequence
as well—and sends her a telegram. In “3,” the third woman, Lucie, tells an
old neighbor woman the story of how she first met the hero—she had been
hired to sew some buttons on one of his coats. Then alone, she remembers a
boating trip they took together, ending in the fashionable L’Isle-Adam park
restaurant (where her lack of proper manners began to irritate him). In “lui,”
the hero stops in a second village and sends off a third telegram—to Lucie.
Briefly, he acts the tourist, wandering about a local festival that is in progress,
and then heads off again in his sports car. As he speeds along the highway,
the swallow swoops down, causing the accident that costs him his life.
One of the first things that strikes one about this narrative structure is the
way it allows Epstein to play with a rich mixture of styles and modes of
representation, in perhaps the most daring concoction since Le Brasier ardent
and Llnhumaine. Each of the film’s separate parts constitutes a different mi¬
lieu, determined by genre and class, with its own types of characters. The
first, set in the financier’s art deco lodgings and in a chic pavilion restaurant,
reproduces, in miniature, the ultramodern milieu of the modern studio spec¬
taculars. The jewelry and crystal associated with Pearl, in fact, remind one of
Mary Winter in 6V2 X 11. The second part, set in the grotesque artifice of
the Russian sculptress’s studio and the Bois de Boulogne, parodies the demode
ambiance and pretentious characters of the conventional bourgeois melodrama.
The parody looks like a tamer version of Le Brasier ardent or an ironic revision
of Epstein’s own Le Lion des Mogols (both Albatros films). The third part, set
in the streets of Paris’s outskirts, in Lucie’s working-class apartment, and in
the L Isle-Adam riverside park, updates the realist urban milieu of Coeur fidele.
The initial meeting between Lucie and the hero is narrated in a surprising
sequence of reverse chronology (each shot separated by flashes of gray), as if in
allusion to Delluc s L Inondation. And the boat ride they take on the river
evokes the peaceful atmosphere of the provincial realist films, especially those

458
like La Belle Nivernaise documenting life on the canals.27 The fourth part, L’lMAGE, 6V2 X 11, AND
depicting the hero’s fatal journey, includes a brief “pure cinema’’ passage of LA GLACE A TROIS FACES
sustained camera movement (in a single long take) as the sports car descends
from the multilevel parking garage, a short documentary-style sequence on
the local village festival, and a tour de force of accelerating montage that ends
in a car crash. La Glace a trois faces thus juxtaposes genre to genre, style to
style, and class to class, in a multifaceted, Chinese box construction.
Another prominent feature of the film is the concise way its discourse op¬
erates in patterns of syntactical and rhetorical relations. The patterns may not
be as concentrated or as sustained as those in 6V2 X 11, but they are no less
complex. Their operation is particularly evident in the opening section with
its two parallel stories and one embedded story. The section is not without
simple metaphorical and synecdochal relations within shots. The jewel and
ring that are appropriately Pearl’s, the fur coat which she drops as she leaves
the pavilion restaurant, the Finance newspaper behind which the hero disap¬
pears as he is driven away from the restaurant—all are marks of a certain social
class. Pearl’s name, as well as her ring and jewel, also mark her status as a
possession. Two playing cards (a three of hearts in the foreground and a joker
further back) strewn among the papers on the hero’s desk, “as if by chance,’’
even offer the flicker of an answer to the initial enigma of loving. However,
what is more pronounced than these metaphorical connections are rhetorical
relations between shots and sequences whose significance becomes multiple
through the alternation of associative image chains.
One example must suffice—from the embedded story of the hero and Pearl’s
past life together.28 They are in his art deco study, apparently getting ready
to go out for the evening.

MS of the hero sitting behind his desk, looking toward the left foreground and folding
his hands.
MS of Pearl as she stands by a chair and puts on a dress over her head.
MS of the hero looking toward the left foreground.
LS multiple exposure of telephone lines, and then a train crossing an empty landscape
from the right foreground toward the left background.
MS of the hero, leaning back in his chair, his eyes mere slits.
CU of Pearl’s face as she puts her mouth to a jewel.
MS of the hero as before.
LALS double exposure of telephone lines and a train crossing an embankment from
the right background toward the left foreground.
MS of the hero as before.
MS of Pearl as she lifts her hands to the back of her head, turns around and moves
off toward the left background.
HAMCU of the hero touching a ring on his finger.

The beginning of the sequence establishes a pattern of alternation between

Pearl and the hero, the one being the apparent object of the other’s gaze. The
multiple exposure shot of telephone lines and speeding train functions as a
subjective vision of the hero’s and as an opposite pole of attraction from Pearl.
Thus the alternation produces a choice between business and romance, with
the added opposition between the pleasures of speed and those of sexual sat¬
isfaction (the hero watches Pearl undress and dress).29 As befits the film’s
initial question, the hero’s look is enigmatic—is he fascinated, dissatisfied,

459
237. (left to right) Rene Ferte
“caught” between opposite
attractions: the ring he has
given Pearl and the train and
telephone lines that suggest
his business dealings.
indifferent? And well it might be, for his choices are not unalloyed—in the
repeated image of the train and telephone lines lies a buried clash of conno¬
tation. For while the train will soon be displaced by the sports car that takes
the hero away from Pearl (and the other women), the telephone lines will
eventually offer the swallow as the antithesis to the hero’s ecstasy in his speed¬
ing “plaything.” Within the imaginary of the embedded past story, the future
is metonymically latent. Epstein’s own words describe the sequence well—
“among memories the future breaks forth.”30
Perhaps even more important than either this mixture of modes or rhetorical
figuring is the way the overall narrative structure works variations on a para¬
digm of character relations and functions. In the first three sections of the
film, each of the women narrates her own meeting with the hero. The dis¬
course of the fourth story, simultaneously with the other three, positions the
hero as separate from the three women, and that separation is confirmed by
the words of his telegram. Each woman’s narration of meeting, therefore, is
juxtaposed to the hero’s words of separation. Instead of moving simply from
presence to absence, from forming a couple to being absent or alone, the hero
forms another couple of sorts. The women are displaced by the sports car (not
a vehicle for business, but a chic new “plaything”). This new paradigm of
relations, sustained through “1,” “2,” and “lui,” is altered or broken by the
sudden intervention of the swallow. What had occurred through one character
replacing another, in Coeur fidele and Menilmontant, here transpires through a
poetic displacement. Associated with the telegrams (through the telephone
lines it flies from), the swallow functions in place of a response from the
women. The discourse elides them and offers the swallow as a metaphorical
agent of revenge, of punishment, very much like the dawn light in 6V2 X
11 • By breaking contact with not one but three women (excess through rep¬
etition), the hero is made to suffer the ultimate absence—death (excess through
degree). His lack of a name is perfectly apt.
In the final shot of the film, the discourse reinvents and reflects on the
schema of the hero’s circulation in the narrative. This shot of the three-sided
mirror functions metaphorically, in a double operation. As a metaphor of
linearity, the hero’s image moves forward in the mirror and dissolves away,
reenacting his movement from presence to absence in each of the three stories
and from life to death in the final story. As a metaphor of simultaneity,

460
 L’lMAGE, 6V2 X 11, AND
LA GLACE A TROIS FACES

238. The final shot of the

three-paneled mirror in La
Glace a trots faces (1927)

however, the mirror itself represents, in paradigm, the three stories narrated
by the women. The fact that the hero, but none of the women, appears in
each panel and that he appears as a reflection (his body is not visible within
the space of the room) suggests an answer to the initial question raised in the
film. The hero never was really present to the women; they served only as
mirrors for his own self-enjoyment. Like Narcissus, he loved none but himself.
One final and crucial point. From the very beginning, La Glace a trois faces
seems highly reflexive about the alternation and displacement that produces
its narrative. For, in that production, the spectator is positioned as subject in
an unusually conscious operation. The first dozen shots of the film (after the
initial intertitle) demand a full description.

1. A dark, indistinct image with vague lights in the distance.

2. MS of several men who, from the foreground, go back to some shrubbery and
look off toward the left background (the whole background is dark); one man
laughs briefly.
3. Another dark, indistinct image; the lights are closer, fuller (an amusement park?);
the camera seems to be moving to the left and slightly forward.
4. Continuation of shot 2 as another man enters from the foreground, speaks to the
men curtly, and they all begin to exit.
Intertitle: “Nervous tears.’’
5. LS of the gate to a pavilion restaurant with two cars in the foreground left and
right; a woman comes out the gate, daubing her eyes; the door of the car to the
left is opened for her; she hesitates and drops the fur coat from her shoulders.
6. MS of the woman as she walks forward and exits to the right foreground; behind
her a waiter picks up her coat.
Intertitle: “Pearl.’’
7. LS of the woman entering the frame from the left foreground and walking diag¬
onally toward the right background, in the setting of a park; as she passes an old
gentleman in top hat and tails, in the center foreground, he turns to look after
her and starts to follow.
8. FS/LS as the woman comes from the park background to a bench in the left
foreground; the old man follows and sits beside her.

461
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE 9. FS of the interior of the pavilion restaurant, lattice forming a wall in the back¬
ground; a man (frame center) looks to the left and then forward and begins to
walk toward the left foreground—much later he will be identified as a rival.
10. LS of several men talking among the restaurant tables; from the background, the
man comes forward and speaks to them.
11. LAFS between two cars at the gate to the restaurant; three men race forward and
exit to the left; a fourth man, a gentleman in top hat and tails, walks forward
slowly, coolly smoothing his white gloves, and follows them off.
12. MS through the side windows of a car to the other side where the gentleman
steps in through the open door—he will become the hero of the film.

We read this alternation in shots 1-4 as unidentifiable observers and some¬

thing they are looking at (the direction of their gaze, the camera movement).
This alternation gives way to another that specifies a milieu and indirectly
identifies the observers as waiters. It also identifies and emphasizes Pearl as
separate from the unidentified men. By displacing the opening shots of the
observers and of something seen but unknown, Pearl becomes both the antic¬
ipated subject and object of the expected narrative. But the old man who
follows her initiates her gradual shift into the latter position. The men, on
the other hand, seem clearly positioned as subjects of scrutiny. Their lack of
identity, of difference even, of relation to Pearl—all pose an enigma. Thus
the enigma of the discourse has become the enigma of the narrative. And we
are there, too, in the transformation. The waiters’ initial position in the frame,
facing away from the camera/screen and looking excitedly at something off in
the background, metaphorically, but explicitly, places the spectator as subject
in the film’s discourse. The dark, indecipherable images double the darkened
cinema screen before us. Their looks double our looks. Their desire directs
ours. Out of the darkness comes light, out of absence comes presence, out of
enigma comes narrative. Consciously positioned as subjects, we become, si¬
multaneously, seekers after enigma—ultimately the uncertain identity and de¬
sire of the hero—and observers of the swift, economical production of narra¬
tive.
Reflecting on its own initial production of narrative, La Glace a trois faces
returns in the end to an equally reflexive resolution. The moment that meta¬
phorically conjoined syntagmatic and paradigmatic elements within the film,
its various pasts and presents, now severs film and spectator. The figure in the
mirror who moves and disappears, the hero’s several selves which are resolved
into . . . absence. Whose reflection, whose double, is this? Is it not each one
of us as (male) spectators? The reflection of a look and an absent body positions
us at the breaking point, both inside and outside the film (simultaneously,
the subject of enunciating and the subject of the enunciation).31 In a crisis of
recognition, the enigma of the hero’s identity and desire shifts onto us. Re¬
positioning us as subjects, now present in absence before the screen/mirror of
our own divided selves, the discourse of La Glace a trois faces produces a re¬
flection on the deceptive nature of our desire.

462
 When it premiered at Studio 28, in June, 1928, the French film critics La Chute de la
immediately hailed Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la maison Usher as a masterpiece maison Usher and La
of silent film art. For Jean Dreville, it confirmed Epstein’s position as “the Petite Marchande
true master of the modern cinema, the most intuitive as well as the most d’allumettes
serious as an artist.’’1 Henri Langlois remembers the film in connection with
La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc: “They provoked the same enthusiasms, the same
critiques . . . most of the critics adopted them without reservation; they were
truly not only the ultimate expression of ten years of experimentation but
their justification.’’2 Because of this high praise as well as the Edgar Allan Poe
story that provided a familiar literary subject, Epstein’s film soon became a
popular feature on the circuit of specialized cinemas. And its acclaim had not
slackened, twenty years later, in 1950, when it was specially rescreened at
Studio 28.3 This continuing popularity may account for the film’s ready avail¬
ability, even here in the United States.4
Even so, Usher has sometimes been misperceived and misunderstood. At the
time of its initial release, many French critics detected a German influence in
the film-—an Expressionist (even Caligari-like) style and an atmosphere of mor¬
bid fantasy.5 And they focused on Epstein’s evident fascination with slow
motion as “a new, purely psychological, perspective’’—“I know nothing ab¬
solutely more moving than a face, freeing itself of an expression, in slow
motion.’’6 Accordingly, too many historians have tended to pigeonhole Usher
as a work of exquisite Gothic atmosphere and technical experimentation.7 But
this surely misses much of the real importance of the film. In this last film
for his own production company, Epstein turns away from the contemporary
world of his previous two films and reverts to period material, as in Mauprat\
but here the mode of representation is very different. Although its narrative
structure may be less complex (though no less interesting) than that of La
Glace a trois faces, the articulation of its discourse—syntactically, rhetorically—
is as unconventional as ever and unusually sophisticated. While it may rep¬
resent a kind of culmination in Epstein’s work, Usher also marks the beginning
of a change in his aesthetic commitment.
Pierre Leprohon and Marie Epstein have pointed out that Usher is less an
adaptation than an amalgam of several Edgar Allan Poe stories: the title story,
of course, but also “Ligeia,” “Berenice,’’ “Silence,’’ “The Man of the Crowd,”
and especially “The Oval Portrait.”8 It works much like a theme-and-variation
composition “according to the motifs of Edgar A. Poe,” and Epstein himself
said it was “[his] general impression of Poe.”9 Synthesizing this material,
Epstein made several changes in the title story: Roderick Usher is a painter;
he and Madeleine are husband and wife (rather than brother and sister); and
his visiting friend is both hard of hearing and terribly nearsighted. Perhaps
the most important structural change eliminated the first-person narrator for
a strangely fluctuating omniscient narration.
The film opens with a stranger (Charles Lamy) stopping at a country inn to
ask directions to the Usher chateau; he has come to visit his old friend, Rod-
eiick Usher (Jean Debucourt), whose young wife, Madeleine (Marguerite Gance),
appears to be dying. He finds Roderick painting a huge portrait of her with
a feverish disregard for her health. There is a doctor in residence, baffled by
Madeleine’s illness. Soon she collapses and dies, but Roderick, believing she
may be still alive, tries to keep the doctor and his friend from interring her

463
narrative AVANT-GARDE body. After she is finally buried in a grotto at some distance from the chateau,
Roderick sinks into an existence of torpor and monotony; yet, paradoxically,
his senses sharpen to a frustrating acuteness. One night, a sudden storm erupts
with terrific force. Roderick watches and listens intently at a window, and
Madeleine slowly arises from the grotto and comes to him, while, simultane¬
ously, lightning strikes the chateau and sets it afire. Just before it is consumed
completely, she leads Roderick and his friend out of the inferno to safety.10
Despite Epstein’s remark that he avoided "any plastic effects,’’ in order to
achieve a simplicity of style that matched Poe’s own,11 Usher strikes one as a
rich film visually, especially in comparison, say, to La Coquille et le clergyman
(1928) and Un Chien andalou (1929). The delicately textured natural land¬
scapes (shot by Georges Lucas in the marshes and forests of Sologne, in Feb¬
ruary and March, 1928), are saturated with an eerie light that wavers between
cold and soft, icy and moist, making the land seem, simultaneously, barren
and bounteous.12 The few interiors—Usher’s two large central halls (with their
marvelous deep spaces) and a long upper hallway, the inn, the grotto—are lit
similarly. But in each, a deep rich blackness surrounds almost everything,
often masking off the lighted spaces into narrow rectangles or multiple frames
within the frame. And the objects thus singled out—the glasses on a long
table, the huge stand of candles, the elaborate frame of the portrait, a full suit
of armor, the mammoth fireplace (with its gargoyles hanging from the man¬
tel)—seem to possess a peculiarly effusive glow.13 The lack of tinting in the
exhibition prints (drawn from an orthochromatic negative) must have empha¬
sized this eerie quality of the lighting.14 This obvious concern for the texture
of the image was complemented by complex superimpositions at certain mo¬
ments—as Madeleine collapses (in overlays of both positive and negative im¬
ages) and as the men begin to carry her coffin across the estate (seemingly
through aisles of candles and slowly drifting leaves)—and by sequences using
slow motion in conjunction with camera tracks and dollies, especially during
the latter two-thirds of the film. Still, this "calligraphy,’’ as Epstein called it,
was unimportant in and of itself. "The image is a sign, complex and precise,”
he wrote at the time of production—its shifting signification depended on its
relation to other images and to the overall design of the film.15 And in Usher
the relation between images is indeed complex.
The opening sequence of Usher seems lifted out of a Dracula story, e.g.,
Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). In the inn, the stranger’s request for a carriage is
met by stillness, stares, repeated mutterings—"Usher?” "Usher”—and then a
final Usher (filling the frame), which, like a thunderclap, signals the shift
to the chateau. But the diegetic process, the form of spatial-temporal conti-
nuity, peculiar to the film is evident from the start. The sequence is articulated
in fragments, Keith Cohen argues, that either coalesce into a continuity viewed
from an unusual perspective or remain free or isolated through slight ellipses
and gaps.16 The stranger, for instance, is introduced as a small figure (in LS)
struggling in the landscape of gray fields and white sky, a pair of legs and
bags (stopping in MS), and a pair of gloved hands (in CU) flexing before a
thick coat and scarf. He approaches the inn (described in one LS) by walking
forward past a puddle of muddy water (in HAFS) and immediately knocks at
a door (in a MS taken at a 60° angle from the back). Inside, again he is
described in a MS of legs and bags, followed by a MS and MCU (from the

464
back) as his head turns around halfway (so he can read a letter from Roderick, LA CHUTE DE LA
it turns out). These shots alternate with several MSs of the men in the inn MAISON USHER AND
looking up from their tables, in a curious reversal and denial of POV expec¬ LA PETITE MARCHANDE
tations (their seeing discovers almost nothing about him). The space within DALLUMETTES
the inn is no less fragmented and ambiguous. There is no establishing shot,
and we must guess the relationship between two separate tables and the area
near the door from the eyeline-matched looks of the innkeeper, who comes up
to the stranger. But where is the lantern-lit hallway and door through which,
after offering him tea, a woman (the innkeeper’s wife or daughter?) disappears?
As Cohen says, these shots of the inn form just so many isolated spaces in
which the characters seem to float or drift, under the threat of being swallowed
up or obliterated.17
This opening also begins to establish significant patterns of alternation and
repetition. John Hagan argues that they help elicit a sense of mystery and
expected revelation but that the revelation (and even the subject of the mys¬
tery) is continually denied or deflected.18 The repeated progression from longer
to closer shots reveals little about the stranger, either to the men in the inn
or to the spectator. When he examines the letter, for instance, he has to use
a magnifying glass; and only the words “malade” and “Madeleine” waver
distinctly across its surface. Though providing the hint of a motivation for his
appearance, the linked words also mask the fact that Roderick is actually
describing himself as “malade.” In fact, the final shots of the sequence shift
our attention to the enigmatic woman who, as the stranger departs, apparently
watches from a window. In a shot of the inn exterior (which is encrusted with
a weblike network of leafless vines), she appears first in one window (frame
right) and then at another (extreme frame left) whose edge barely intrudes into
the frame. Finally, a MCU of the vines and window restricts her face to a
small area (frame right); and her twisted neck, wide eyes, and open mouth
give her a painfully contorted look. The sequence reveals as much about the
inn as about the stranger—to us, not to him (besides the magnifying glass,
he also resorts to an earhorn). And what we seem to discover is a world whose
principal horror is entrapment.
The first sequence in the chateau is organized even more tightly according
to an alternation that foregrounds patterns of repetition and difference. An
intertitle quickly establishes the Usher couple’s relationship: “In this menac¬
ing ruined manor, Sir Roderick holds his wife Madeleine in a strange seclu¬
sion, dominating her with his tyrannical irritability.” The next two dozen
shots simply articulate the precise form of Roderick’s tyranny, his malady,
and its effect on Madeleine. Here a clear pattern of rhetorical figuring begins
to emerge, involving isolated objects and parts of bodies, the inanimate and
the animate. Epstein found confirmation for such links among the images in
one of Poe’s own lines—“. . . there exist, undoubtedly, combinations of very
simple and natural things which loose the power to move us. . . .”19 Several
schema of associated shots (mostly in CU and MCU)—Roderick’s hands and a
painter’s palette; his look and a large, obscurely lighted painted image; his
look and Madeleine—are placed in paradigm. Even before an intertitle (much
later) reveals the hereditary nature of his action, Roderick’s affliction is enun¬
ciated here in terms of the desire to paint. A second set of schema—Roderick’s
hands and Madeleine, his look and Madeleine—seems to shift the significance

465
239- (top, left to right) The
hands of Roderick Usher; the
painter’s palette; the portrait
of Madeleine, (bottom, left to
of that desire. Through repeated alternation, his nervously clenching hands
right) The obsessive gaze of
Roderick (Jean Debucourt); (displacing his look) suggest a “blind” compulsion that seems to threaten her.
Roderick’s clenched hands; When he picks up the palette at the conclusion of these shots, the act of
the pained look of Madeleine painting is now charged metaphorically—it involves a transfer of and thus an
(Marguerite Gance) in Usher
attack on Madeleine.
(1928)
This alternation between Roderick and Madeleine, as subject and object, is
disturbed briefly by their opposing movements within the frame. Roderick
moves left with the palette (toward the painting off-screen) while Madeleine
turns to move away from him (into the right background). As he turns to
look after her, she stops and turns back (her image caught, metaphorically,
within the frame of a harp, which parallels the frame of his painting and also
echoes the woman’s entrapment at the inn). The final set of schema completes
the anticipated action, with a startling effect. In a new alternation, a paint¬
brush displaces both Roderick’s hands and his look so that the schema of
hands/palette is condensed into a single shot of paintbrush touching palette
while the schema of look/painted image is condensed into a shot of brush
touching canvas. The two acts of touching and painting, through metonomy
and metaphor, articulate a transfer from one object to another; adding to the
painted image subtracts from Madeleine. As the paintbrush strokes the canvas,
Madeleine reacts as if struck, as if her face were being taken away. Roderick’s
desire is being defined as a compulsion to transfer life to the painted image—
to give life to artifice—at the expense of life itself. To enclose Madeleine living
within the frame of the painting is to imprison her, to destroy her, to place
her in a kind of coffin.20

466
 240. (left) The central hall in
the Usher chateau

241. (right) The veil flowing

With extraordinary succinctness, this initial sequence in the chateau con¬ from Madeleine’s coffin

structs a paradigm for the narrative action in the first half of the film. Roderick
transfers Madeleine (as an object of value) from reality to artifice, from a
condition of freedom to one of imprisonment, from a condition of living to
that of “life-in-death.” This transubstantiation of Madeleine—is it actually a
misogynist form of denial? Here, it seems to me, is the essential horror of
Usher’s world. But the horror is countered by something else. In the second
half of the film, this narrative action is reversed, with an important difference.
And the transition from one to the other occurs in the sequence of Madeleine’s
burial.
When the pallbearers (Roderick, his friend, the doctor, and a butler) reach
their destination, the grotto is depicted in a single establishing shot as a
double chamber framed by a glass matte of obviously painted rocks and col¬
umns (in the manner of a Melies fantasy film). The grotto thus suggests itself
as analogous to the painting that Roderick has done. Through a series of
metaphorical parallels—hinging on the butler’s hands hammering nails into
the coffin lid in place of Roderick’s paintbrush stroking the canvas—the place¬
ment of Madeleine’s body in the grotto becomes at once the logical outcome
of his compulsion and its reenactment. This reenactment is offset, however,
by a strange enchantment. “An astonishing pantheism,” to use Epstein’s own
words from Le Cinematographe vu d'Etna (1926), emerges to set the reversal in
motion. Because of the grotto’s distance from Usher, the funeral becomes a
kind of processional through nature. The men cross a river or tarn at one
point, and a long series of alternating shots (in slow motion) track them down
a grassy slope and under a succession of tree branches drifting across the sky.21
Superimposed over many of these shots are slowly falling leaves and tall flam¬
ing candles that create a kind of path or aisle through which the processional
moves. Because Madeleine’s burial clothes are much like a bridal costume and
a long veil trails like a train behind the coffin, the journey seems to be as
much wedding march as funeral—one action masks another metaphorical one.
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

242. (top left) A shot from

the funeral procession

243. (bottom left) The

mating toads in the grotto
sequence

244. (right) Madeleine returns

in Usher in the storm

It is as if nature, in its “mourning,” was offering some secret cause for cele¬
bration.
Midway through the burial sequence, this metaphorical undercurrent comes
to the fore in an uncanny pattern of rhetorical figuring. When Roderick is
finally sent out of the grotto by his friend, an unexpected change occurs in
the alternation that has organized the sequence (the butler nailing the coffin
lid/Roderick reacting in pain). Instead of cutting back to a CU of the ham¬
mering, the discourse suddenly interjects a shot of a toad on wet stony ground
(completely free of any POV shot). A shot of the hammering recurs, followed
by another shot of the toad, only this time a second toad is on the back of
the first in mating position. Given the spatial ambiguity of this association,
the visual continuity produces a schema of metaphorical opposition: an en¬
tombing of the dead versus an impregnating of life.22 Through this bizarre,
almost Surrealist rhetorical figure, the discourse introduces an antidote to Rod¬
erick’s compulsion. A second unexpected displacement produces a strange tri¬
plet or triadic pattern of alternation. Instead of returning to Roderick and his
friend outside the grotto, the discourse interjects a negative (or high contrast)
image against a black background, of an owl in a white web of branches.
Again the spatial continuity is ambiguous. This repeated pattern shifts briefly
into rapid montage (the shots of the toads and owl last but two seconds each)
until the CU of hammering gives way to a shot of the sealed coffin lid and
then to a shot of the doctor and butler ascending the grotto stairs. The re-

468
peated contiguity of the toads and owl suggests their parallel function in LA CHUTE DE LA
opposition to the nailing of the coffin. To this unusual figure of fertility, what MAISON USHER AND
does the image of the owl bring? Is it the sign of the “white goddess,’’ con¬ LA PETITE MARCHANDE
firming the grotto as the site of life-in-death and as the potential site of D’ALLUMETTES
resurrection?23 Is it the sign of some “natural’’ wedding or union? Whatever
the precise correlations within this uncanny rhetorical figure, Madeleine’s bur¬
ial seems to function, simultaneously, as a withdrawal from life and as an
insemination, a renewal.
The figure of metaphorical associations constructed in this sequence is cru¬
cial to the operation of the film’s conclusion. The enchantment grows into a
devastating conjunction of the animate and the inanimate. The storm wind
rises one night against Usher, and, in fast tracks and slow motion shots, the
curtains begin to billow and the leaves to blow about the interior hallway
while lightning flashes in the exterior shots of the tower (and its slowly tolling
bell). As Roderick drags his uncomprehending friend to the window to see,
the discourse interjects that same shot of the owl in wind-whipped tree branches,
followed by a LS of the exterior landscape as fire and smoke begin to appear
around the chateau. Through a simple instance of contiguity (emphasized by
the spatial as well ^s temporal discontinuity), the owl and storm are placed in
conjunction; the figure of fertilizing and renewal is equated with the storm’s
destructive force. Shots of the logs burning and smoking in Usher’s huge
fireplace alternate with shots of Madeleine’s coffin moving in the dark and
then falling off its support. A shot of candle flames igniting a curtain is
intercut with Madeleine’s veil unfurling from the grotto entrance. As the
chateau is engulfed in flames, Madeleine’s white figure appears in the doorway
(in MS), as if suspended in the air, revolving in slow motion. This magical
reversal, mediated by the mating toads, the owl, and the storm, transforms
her into a figure of salvation. While the storm destroys Usher (the portrait,
too, is consumed by fire), Madeleine rescues Roderick from a kind of death-
in-life (imprisoned within the chateau, he, too, has become the victim of his
own compulsion). Whereas he had denied her life by transferring her into a
painted image, into artifice, she reverses the process. Inverting the Orpheus-
Eurydice myth, she restores him to life by plucking him from Usher and
releasing him into the reality of the natural world.24
Like all narratives of the fantastic, Usher depends on a sustained epistemic
ambiguity.25 Seeing and knowing remain uncertain to the end. Does Made¬
leine really die and does Roderick then imagine her resurrection and rescue?
Or does she merely sleep until natural or unnatural forces uncannily awaken
her and direct her mission? This narrative uncertainty is paralleled by uncer¬
tainties in the film’s discourse, not only in its spatial-temporal continuity, but
even in the function of its rhythm and rhetorical figuring. At two crucial
points, the discourse reaches a particularly high level of indeterminacy. Both
focus on Roderick’s sensibility and, in so doing, render problematic the strange
animism that emerges in the film. Moreover, since the film’s score is lost, that
lack of diegetic music and sound prominent in both sequences makes for an
added mystification.26
The first of these, “Roderick’s Song,’’ immediately precedes the sequence of
Madeleine’s collapse. Intercut with MSs of Roderick and his friend seated at a
table in the central room are several LSs of the upper hallway—its curtains

469
narrative AVANT-GARDE waver and leaves blow in across the floor. As Roderick picks up a guitar
(substituting for the harp that once framed Madeleine?) and begins to play,
the sequence alternates LSs of the hallway with CUs of his fingers (in slow
motion) plucking the strings. Does the intrusion of the wind and leaves com¬
pel him to play or does he initiate the song as a means of resistance or control?
After the butler announces that Madeleine’s illness will prevent her from join¬
ing them, Roderick leaves the table; and the sequence begins to alternate
MCUs of his hands on the guitar strings with shots of natural landscapes—a
wavering water surface, misty trees, branches blurred against the sky. Accel¬
erating quickly from shots of two seconds to one second to a half second each,
the alternation suddenly shifts into a set of four shots (beginning with the CU
of his fingers) repeated four times according to a strict tempo—ten, ten, ten,
and twenty-five frames each. As David Bordwell discovered, this sequence
operates “musically”—besides repeating shots exactly, it varies a motif from
one set to another (shot four in one set becomes shot three in the next).27 The
fifth and last set ends with a longer shot (fifty frames) of a horizon and dark¬
ening sky, and then Roderick turns (in MS) to look at his painting. In Poe’s
story, a similar song recounted the former glory of the Usher ancestral home;
here, however, the shots (lacking music) are highly ambiguous. It is uncertain
whether they are a subjective projection (excluding the friend and butler) or
an omniscient montage of association. Are they imagined by Roderick, in
conjunction with the music, as a means of escape from the chateau?28 Are they
images of the environment around Usher which his sensibility orders and
controls through song? Are they signs of a world that also suffers, correspond¬
ingly, from his destructive, melancholy affliction? Or are they a kind of re¬
generative presence from which he draws strength and nourishment? Whatever
the case, the experience seems to stimulate him, and Roderick turns from the
guitar and these images of nature to work one last time on his fatal portrait.
The second of the sequences, paralleling the first, follows closely on Ma¬
deleine’s burial. It begins with a slow montage of natural landscape shots, some
of which are repeated from the earlier sequence. Then it shifts to shots of
Usher’s hallway where again a wind begins to move the curtains, especially
around a suit of armor and a large grandfather clock (several CUs focus on its
slowly swinging pendulum). Time is already protracted—as if by some un¬
canny natural force—when Roderick is introduced (“His nerves completely
taut . . . the least noise exasperates him”), sitting in the central hall while
his friend reads at a table across the room. A shot of his clasped hands is
intercut with that of the guitar lying on the floor, but he seems traumatized
(as immobile as the armor), unable to reach for it as he did before (or as he
reached even earlier for the palette). Into this alternation of shots (including a
MS of Roderick and a FS of his friend, who is engrossed in reading the story
of Ethelred and the dragon) comes the CU of the oscillating pendulum, a
repeated ECU of the clock gears and then a LS of the room which suddenly
doubles and wavers. An uncertain animism grips the interior of these spaces
and things, but is it subjective (visual correlatives for acutely perceived sounds)
or natural, menacing or promising?29 The guitar now quivers; the room glows
with a strange light at its center; the clock gears stop; from the clock bell
eerily fall particles of dust. The tension culminates as a tiny hammer finally
strikes the bell, a guitar string snaps, and Roderick rises out of the chair and

470
 245. Selected shots from the
second “fantastic” montage
sequence near the end of
Usher (1928)
moves toward the portrait. But, as his friend looks up from his book, he turns
away, not daring (in an intertitle) to give in to his mad desire again. Do all
these images and sounds represent Roderick’s insight into the mystery, the
profound animism, at the heart of things?30 Or do they evoke unknown natural
forces which he can no longer control and which now verge on controlling
him? And by enveloping the MS “portrait” of him (his arms beginning to
lift), do the shots of the breaking strings suggest his degeneration or his
liberation?31 Perhaps the music or sound effects that originally accompanied
these images would resolve the ambiguity, but what if they were projected in
silence—what if the spectator was forced, while seeing, to share the friend’s
lack of hearing?32 Is it significant that the gap between perceiving, knowing,
and acting looms largest at the point where Roderick’s compulsion seems to
be broken?
In the representation of Roderick’s compulsion to paint, Usher seems to put
in question a certain aesthetic and way of seeing. Roderick is the inverse of a
Pygmalion. His inherited/ unexamined compulsion transfers value from the
living or from reality to fiction or artifice. It seems a particularly decadent
form of “art for art’s sake,” cut off from the real and turned in upon itself.
And it denies a woman’s existence, by replacing her with a painted image, in
an unnatural form of union and exchange. There is something in this, the film
suggests, that is blind, perverse, and ultimately self-destructive. And nature
itself seems to revolt against it. Usher’s destruction may deny the value of the
artificial and fictional (a point emphasized by the obviously miniature set of
the chateau’s exterior), and a “tree” of stars (but is this any less artificial?) may
“bless” the space of the disavowal. But how will Roderick see and what will
he do, as an artist, in the real world of nature? And what will be his relation
to Madeleine? Given the fantastic mode of the film, can the real, the natural,
be anything but problematical? Although Usher seems to announce a break in
Epstein’s aesthetic commitment, the effect of that break remains unarticu¬
lated.

Another film that aligns itself with La Chute de la maison Usher is Jean
Renoir’s La Petite Marchande d’allumettes (1928). The history of its production
is well known, although the sequence of events has often been confused. In
the summer of 1927, Renoir and Tedesco began work on the film in the small
studio or atelier they had built in the loft of the Vieux-Colombier.33 Given
such artisanlike conditions, their decision to use panchromatic film stock

471
246. (left) Catherine Hessling
peers through the restaurant
window in La Petite
Marchande d’allumettes (1928)

247. (right) Catherine

throughout (it was then usually reserved for exterior filming) was extremely
Hessling and the toy soldier risky. Shooting went slowly, in piecemeal fashion, but was completed suc¬
officer cessfully within six months. This pace and the corresponding attention to
detail allowed Jean Bachelet (the cameraman) and Eric Aes (the set designer)
to produce images of a texture similar to Epstein’s in Usher.
Renoir and Tedesco had a rough cut of the film ready by the end of March,
1928, when the latter was invited to give a special screening for the cine-club
in Geneva.34 But Tedesco delayed its premiere at the Vieux-Colombier until
June so that the film could conclude his 1927-1928 season.35 That initial Paris
screening was abruptly cut short when the film was impounded as the result
of a lawsuit brought by Maurice Rostand (charging plagiarisms of his 1914
operatic adaptation of the same title).36 By the time the courts had decided in
Tedesco and Renoir’s favor, one year later, the sound film revolution was in
full swing.37 For financial reasons, presumably, both men were forced to give
up any rights they may have had to the film’s distribution. When La Petite
Marchande d'allumettes was finally released commercially by SOFAR, in Feb¬
ruary, 1930, it had lost several hundred meters in length and gained a number
of intertitles as well as, in Renoir’s words, a “truly ridiculous’’ music track (a
mixture of Strauss, Mendelssohn, and Wagner).38 Unfortunately, the original
silent version (which supposedly ran eighty minutes) has been lost; the short¬
ened version (minus its score) is preserved in several film archives.39
As in several previous films, La Petite Marchande d'allumettes describes the
condition of a woman’s entrapment in a hostile or indifferent milieu, her
dream of escape, and the failure of that dream. But it eschews the more
common modes of representation of either the bourgeois melodrama or the
realist film for another quite similar to Usher s. For this is a highly stylized
fantasy whose simple scenario is drawn from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy
tale. On a cold, snowy night, around Christmas time, in an unidentified
northern city, a poor girl dressed in rags and tatters (Catherine Hessling)
leaves her dilapidated shanty to peddle her wares—boxes of matches—to shop¬
pers and passers-by. Unable to sell even one, she wanders in the streets, afraid
to go home, and finally settles down near a fence under the temporary shelter

472
of a plank. There she dreams of cavorting through the snow and into a toy LA CHUTE DE LA
shop window which earlier she had passed by under the watchful eyes of a MAI SON USHER AND
policeman. The officer (Jean Storm) of a platoon of wooden soldiers befriends LA PETITE MARCHANDE
her; and, when Death (Manuel Raabi) suddenly appears as a Jack-in-the-box, DALLUMETTES
they race off into the sky on his horse. Death pursues them, however, defeats
the officer, and bears the unconscious girl away. In the morning, several peo¬
ple discover her lifeless snow-covered body by the fence and wonder stupidly
how she would have expected matches to keep her warm.
La Petite Marchande d’allumettes divides into two distinct segments—one
depicting the reality of the girl’s condition; the other, her fantasy—but the
distinction between them is not as sharp as one might expect.40 Renoir has
described the film overall as “an attempt at a purely exterior nonrealism.41
This is as true of the street scenes as it is of the girl’s dream. Her wanderings
are described quite differently from those, say, in either Menilmontant or En
rade, partly because of the studio as opposed to location shooting. The girl’s
look and gestures, the way her rags fit—all suggest the coldness of the night
as well as her despair with an economy that reminds one of Chaplin—a “Char¬
iot in skirts.’M2 Indeed, there are explicit echoes here of the hungry bum in
A Dog’s Life (the exhausted girl going to sleep by the fence) and the lost
prospector in The Gold Rush (the lone figure in the street, scraping the ice
from a window to look in on a waitress serving food to a lady and gentle¬
man).43 As in Chaplin films, too, the decors are minimal, often just a few
props—a simple storefront, a window frame, the tray of matches. But this
film consistently keeps the characters separate, in MSs and CUs; and their
glances, opening into off-screen spaces, provide the primary means of spatial
continuity. Thus does the girl seem to move through a world defined princi¬
pally by just two elements—darkness and snow. The tone of this first segment
is delicately ambiguous. The darkness threatens in the background and off¬
screen. Yet the soft light and falling snow seem to transform Hessling, as if
there were a magical agent already present in the world.
The dream segment of the film reenacts the street segment in several ways,
producing a variation on the now familiar doubled narrative form. The toy
shop window reappears as a carnival with huge balls, a merry-go-round, a host
of animals (a dog, a pig, a bear, a rabbit), mechanical dolls, a ballerina,
wooden soldiers, and trains. The snowfall turns into the white clouds and mist
through which the officer and girl are pursued by Death. More complicated
(as well as technically competent) than the flight fantasy in La Fille de I’eau,
this chase and struggle resemble the fairy-tale adventures of a Lotte Reiniger
silhouette film—e.g., Les Aventures de Prince Ahmed (1925).44 Instead of black
figures sharply etched against white backgrounds, however, here the figures
are diaphanous superimpositions, and their actions are choreographed in a slow
motion ballet. Characters also recur, but in a fabulous guise. Jean Storm, who
earlier tried to buy some matches from the girl, now plays the officer who
falls in love with her and offers her protection. Manuel Raabi, the policeman
who had pointed out the toy window and then told her to go home, now
becomes the Jack-in-the-box figure of Death.
The white magic of soft lighting and snow seems to open up the possibility
of escape for Hessling, especially in a series of transformations that mark the
last half of the film.45 The shift to dream, like that in La Fille de I’eau, is

473
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

248. Catherine Hessling at

the end of La Petite Marchande
d’allumettes (1928)

articulated through a darkening of the background and through several super¬

impositions. As Hessling dances, she reaches out for snowflakes that turn into
balls which she catches in her hat and then juggles in the air. The snow turns
into a gauze curtain that swirls in slow motion and through which she passes
to jump down into the carnival of life-size toy figures. Once the officer declares
his love to Hessling, he becomes the magician of the narrative. The back¬
ground changes again, and she finds herself in a simplified pastoral setting—
a single tree and a toy sheep, whose eyes move in CU when her hand caresses
its head. When she signals her hunger, the officer waves his hand, and the
sheep turns into a table filled with food and drink.46 Suddenly Death appears
and threatens to take control of and reverse the transformations. The ballerina
collapses, the dolls’ heads drop, the rabbit pops back into its sack, all the
soldiers fall—and Death stalks over them.47 When, high on the city walls,
the officer changes the background to sky, and the couple flees on horseback,
Death merely has his own horse materialize (dissolve in) beside him. The two
male figures thus struggle, not only for possession of Hessling, but for control
of the delirious world they inhabit and of the magic that governs it.
If Death is the victor in this unequal struggle, his dominion is completed
in the final transformations—in a mysteriously simple pattern of rhetorical
figuring. In LS, carrying Hessling in his arms, Death walks out of the clouds
(left background) and lays her body down on a flat stone beside a cross (iower
right foreground). In a ritual gesture that strangely becomes an act of insem¬
ination, much as in Usher, he tosses a lock of her hair to the wind. The cross
turns into a rosebush, which begins slowly to grow (as trees will, coming up
through stage floors), and he walks toward and seems to dissolve into it.
Death, the creator, thus becomes part of his creation. As a CU of Hessling’s
face alternates with a CU of the rosebush, its petals dissolve into snowflakes.
We are back to reality. This hypnotic transition—from death to life to death
again articulates rhetorically the cyclical, illusory nature of the narrative.
The dream restores Hessling, lets her relive her desires, only to repeat them—
from lack to love to lack once more—and so come to the end she has evaded.
Raymond Durgnat s phrase for La Petite Marchande d'allumettes is perceptive—

474
“at once fairy tale and film noir.”48 The darkness and snow become one. As LA COQUILLE ET LE
the rose petals of love turn into the snow flowers that kill, once again there is CLERGYMAN AND UN
that disturbing echo, masked over and ignored by the passers-by, of the bitter CHIEN ANDALOU
conclusion to Fievre—the end of desire. But the magic of this fantasy proves
gently, almost regretfully, deceptive.

Probably the best known and most widely circulated of the later French La Coquille et le
narrative avant-garde films, at least in the United States, are two short works clergyman and
released within a year of one another. They are Dulac’s La Coquille et le cler¬ Un Chien andalou
gyman (1928), from a scenario by Antonin Artaud, and Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien
andalou (1929), co-authored with Salvador Dali. Besides their familiarity, there
are several good reasons for examining them together. Along with Man Ray’s
L’Etoile de mer (1928) and Bunuel’s first sound feature, L’Age d’or (1930), they
are often singled out as the major Surrealist films of the period. And both
were the subject of demonstrations which, intent on preventing their exhibi¬
tion, actually gave them even greater notoriety. Moreover, both have been
described, somewhat erroneously and simplistically, as oneiric fantasies or fic¬
tions in which a seemingly arbitrary flow of images is determined by an acute
sensibility or by the mechanisms of the unconscious. What concerns me prin¬
cipally is their differences, as much as their similarities, particularly as to how
they structure their narratives (or deconstruct them) and how they deviate from
conventional narrative discourse.

Few films have been as encrusted or distorted by historical error, superficial

criticism, and “scrambled” prints as the three reels of La Coquille et le clergy¬
man9 The so-called scandal of its premiere at Armand Tallier’s Studio des
Ursulines is a legend still perpetuated in most film histories. Artaud is alleged
to have denounced Dulac for betraying his scenario and then to have led the
Surrealists in a violent demonstration against the film’s exhibition. Alain Vir-
maux long ago concluded otherwise.
The origins of the collaboration between Dulac and Artaud on La Coquille
et le clergyman remain unclear.2 Although Artaud at first may have wanted to
direct his own scenario, he accepted Dulac’s artistic control as director of the
film’s production. Given the differences in their temperaments and in their
concepts of cinema, the relations between the two were actually quite cordial
during most of the production period, from June to September, 1927.3 He
was willing to make concessions in the scenario, and she accepted some of his
added ideas for shooting. But Dulac began to perceive his increasingly per¬
sistent queries as interference and carefully excluded Artaud from the shooting
and editing process (he had already been excluded from the cast). Only when
he discovered this did he become angry and anxious. When first screened, for
the Cine-Club de France (on 25 October 1927), the film was announced as
the “Dream of Antonin Artaud, Visual Composition by Germaine Dulac.”4
The publication of the first draft of the scenario in the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise
(November, 1927) coincided with this screening; and Artaud added to it a
preface objecting to such “an exclusively oneiric interpretation”: “This scenario
is not the reproduction of a dream and should not be considered as such.”5
For the film’s exhibition at the Ursulines (on 9 February 1928), Dulac, to her

475
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE credit, had the opening titles changed to Script by Antonin Artaud, Produc
tion by Germaine Dulac.” But Artaud was said to have harbored some disa¬
greement still, apparently over the filmmaker s reliance on so-called softening
technical effects (although some were already present in the scenario).6 Con¬
vinced that their prodigal member had been maligned (after a year of estrange¬
ment, Artaud was momentarily back in the Surrealists’ good graces), Andre
Breton led his friends to clamor against La Coquille et le clergyman and against
Dulac, in particular.7 And their judgment of the film became history. Pri¬
vately, Breton apologized to Tallier the next day; and years later, Georges
Sadoul (who took part, mistakenly thinking he was attacking Artaud) con¬
fessed to the injustice they unwittingly had perpetrated.8 Artaud himself,
however, did not let these experiences color his view of the film as "the first
of its genre and a precursor.’’9
Much like L’Invitation au voyage, La Coquille et le clergyman was an inde¬
249. Attacked by the pendent production whose budgetary limitations show much too obviously in
clergyman, the face of the its skimpy decors and sometimes awkwardly executed "special effects’’ (by Paul
general/priest (Lucien Bataille) Parguel).” But a certain roughness cannot detract from the bizarre disconti¬
splits in two, in La Coquille et
nuity of its narrative and from the disorienting strategies of its discourse.
le clergyman (1928)
Artaud conceived of La Coquille et le clergyman (the only one of his half-dozen
scenarios to be filmed) in terms that must have intrigued Dulac—it was to be
"a film of pure images,” developing "a series of states of mind which are
derived from one another just as one thought is derived from another, without
the process producing a reasonable sequence of events.”10 And he was proud
of the scenario’s "obvious incoherence” and "merciless cruelty.”11 From this,
one might expect a film without any narrative at all, a serial composition of
singular visions, a series of bafflingly connected merveilles, as if produced by a
demonic (as opposed to the usual Surrealist euphoric) psychic automatism.12
Yet there is a narrative in La Coquille et le clergyman, if only a minimal one,
a narrative that has undergone a sort of deconstruction. Three characters recur
and interact through a number of spaces, several of which are repeated. There
is the odd little man in black, the clergyman (Alex Allin), who is the primary
subject and agent of the action. His antagonist is a stereotype of convention
and authority—a fierce-looking, pompous, heavily-decorated general (Lucien
Bataille); and the persistent object of his desire is a lovely, full-gowned lady
(Genica Athanasiou) who seems allied with the general. In the opening se¬
quence, the general discovers the clergyman in a kind of alchemist’s labora¬
tory, pouring a clear liquid from a large seashell into flasks and then shattering
them on the floor. After his shell is smashed by the general’s saber (as if in
punishment), the clergyman follows him and the woman to a city church
where they go into the confessional. Attacked by the clergyman, the general
turns into a priest and is tossed into the sea; then the clergyman seizes a
talisman or trophy, a double seashell that covers the woman’s breasts. Again
he confronts the general and woman in a ballroom of dancing couples. After
he brandishes the double seashell, they vanish; when she reappears dressed in
white, he drops the shell, and his coattails grow to enormous lengths. Even¬
tually, he chases the woman along a country road and into a room where he
seems to capture and enclose her head in a large glass globe. Stalking the
corridors like a jailer, the clergyman comes upon the couple once more and
gives pursuit. In a ship s cabin, while the general receives the woman’s kiss

476
in a corner, the clergyman fantasizes strangling her; but out of his hands
emerge stalactite islands, water, mist, and a tiny sailing ship. Finally, he and
the woman (in a bridal gown) enter a room occupied by servants bustling
around the glass globe, in which his head is now enclosed. Everything vanishes
except for the clergyman and the globe, which he then shatters on the floor.
Placing the head on a large seashell, he puts it to his lips and drinks.
The discourse of this narrative works more consistently perhaps than any
other prior to it to produce a sense of spatial and temporal disorientation.
Following the scenario, the film eschews all intertitles, a stratagem that forces
the images alone to provide patterns of continuity and that, correspondingly,
opens up the shots and sequences to ambiguity. For instance, while the film
uses a conventional punctuation system of fades to mark off the first four
sections of the narrative, they suddenly disappear during the middle sections.
And when the system returns near the end, the fades now operate within as
well as between sequences. More important, the film rarely adheres to the
continuity editing of conventional film discourse. Instead, it works to create
a different kind of continuity through discontinuity. Shots shift “erratically"
from normal to high angle, from in front of characters to beside or behind
them, from CU to FS (without recourse to a POV system), from one fragmen¬
tary image to another—in a montage of associations and disassociations. The
sequence in the church, for instance, at one point turns into a series of alter¬
nating frontal CUs of the three characters. Representational space dissolves
through the lack of eye-line matches, and time is negated through the para¬
doxical alternation of anger and bliss on the general-priest’s face. When night
falls abruptly, the faces of the woman and the general revolve from left to 250. Three shots from the
right; as in a serial composition, the movements are then repeated in reverse. “strangling/creation” sequence
in La Coquille et le clergyman
Sometimes, as here, the flow of images is marked by an excess of repetition
that borders on the obsessive. The clergyman’s progress in the street, for
instance, is described in a half-dozen contiguous subjective dolly shots and
about the same number showing him going around corners (all linked by lap
dissolves). And he pursues the woman along the country road in an alternating
sequence of some twenty repeated dolly shots. This obsessive repetition is
quite apt, it turns out, for the desire that drives the film’s narrative.
As the title suggests, this is the clergyman’s story. In contrast to Dulac’s
previous films, however, where the representation of the subjective was given
special emphasis, here the very concept of the subjective is called into question
and the narrative subject put into crisis. The clergyman may be the subject of
most of the looking in the film and have several explicit fantasies—e.g., when
he imagines strangling the woman and a “world" emerges from his hands.
But the usual differences between the omniscient and the subjective are con¬
tinually being dissolved. The very first shot that dollies toward a half-open
door—is this omniscient description or the general’s POV (he soon peeps in
on the clergyman)? When the clergyman beckons to the camera to approach
the glass globe, are we to assume the POV of the woman, who seems to be
caressed and then seized (invisibly) and whose head then appears superimposed
in the globe? More generally, the technical effects which, by 1927, were
commonly used to mark off subjective sequences—soft-focus shots, distor¬
tions, superimpositions, dissolves, rapid montage, camera movement, slow
motion—here occur with an undifferentiated frequency, in a continuous, dis-

477
251. (left) The woman
(Genica Athanasiou)
transformed in La Coquille et
le clergyman (1928)

252. (center) The clergyman’s

orienting flow of images. Distributed throughout the discourse of the film,
hand of desire and violation; they disperse the subjective into its opposite and vice versa, producing a world
(right) The seashell covering that is both other and the same. Thus the film ends aptly in a doubled image,
the woman’s breasts with the clergyman’s own face both the subject and object of his seeing.
If the subjective is dispersed and the seeing subject turned back on itself in
La Coquille et le clergyman, the sexual subject undergoes a similar deconstruc¬
tion. For the clergyman is also the subject of a repeatedly thwarted desire and
a deflected fulfillment. The sexual symbolic of the narrative, however, can be
read in several ways. On the one hand, the clergyman, the general, and the
woman seem to act out, through a series of displacements, an Oedipal situa¬
tion. Repressed by the “father,” the “son” attacks and destroys him, freeing
the “mother” for his pleasure and. possession. But the “son” is forced to reenact
this conflict again and again until, in exasperation, his desire turns destruc¬
tive. The expected resolution—a death, a union, an escape—never comes, and
the “son” is left face to face with his own desire, and perhaps his own violently
ambiguous narcissism. On the other hand, as Sandy Flitterman argues, the
film seems

to reproduce the actual production process of desire—its evanescent, fleeting quality

as it circulates (“ceaselessly different in [its] repeated metamorphoses”) from represen¬
tation to representation. By emphasizing the fantasmatic nature of this image of the
woman as an imaginary production, with the capacity of simulacrum, of memory,
of vision—the female figure in Seashell touches on something . . . fundamental in the
operations of the cinematic apparatus. ... 13

Free of the constraining conventions of narrative, desire circulates as a “lure,”

inviting the spectator’s own participation in the production-process of mean¬
ing.
Although Artaud told Dulac that his scenario was devoid of psychoanalytical
(as well as metaphysical or human) meaning, it is difficult not to read it or
see the film as other than deeply personal.14 The clergyman’s shifting relations
with the general and the woman closely parallel what little is known of Ar¬
taud s attitudes toward his own father and mother.13 Furthermore, the parts
of the clergyman and the woman were written specifically for Artaud himself
and Genica Athanasiou, whom he had loved (oscillating similarly between

478
 253. (left to right) The
clerrgyman carries a globe/
head somewhere between the
ship and the ballroom; the
hysterical rage and desperate need) ever since their performances together in clergyman’s face lies among
the fragments of the glass
Charles Dullin’s Atelier Theatre—in a sense, this was their story as parable.16
globe on the floor; the head of
Dulac’s choice of Alex Allin in place of Artaud for the central character, the clergyman (Alex Allin) in
therefore, was crucial. Instead of possessing Artaud’s virile, intense, even erotic the seashell at the end of La
presence, the clergyman is invested with Allin’s awkward comic pathos. His Coquille et le clergyman (1928)
expressions and gestures make his desire seem absurd, and the character comes
close to being an adolescent. Dulac’s substitution, as Wendy Dozoretz has
suggested, does support a reading of the film as a feminist critique of a fetish-
izing male vision.17
Given these oscillations of eruption and repression, of disruption and reso¬
lution, what gives La Coquille et le clergyman a sense of coherence, as much as
anything else, is the pattern of rhetorical figuring that devolves from the
seashell of its title. In the opening sequence, the seashell seems the source of
a fascinating clear liquid (which, paradoxically, is tossed away), a source which
the general’s saber shatters. Later it recurs doubled as a protective carapace
which the clergyman seizes in order to expose the woman’s breasts (are we to
associate, metaphorically, one liquid for another?). Brandished high in the air
by the clergyman, this second seashell becomes a kind of magical talisman or
fetish (its waving movement seems to generate the swinging chandelier in the
ballroom). When the woman appears transformed in a white dress, the dropped
seashell is engulfed in flames on the floor, and the clergyman, much agitated
in a LAFS (filmed through glass), clutches his crotch (is the gesture mastur-
batory or suppressive?), only to have his coattails expand to gigantic propor¬
tions. At the end, when the glass globe shatters (what accounts for the reversal
of heads therein?), the original seashell reappears to cradle the image of his
face that lies among the fragments on the floor. The face is transformed into
liquid (are we to assume it is blood?); and now, in CU and ECU, it pours
darkly glistening from the raised seashell into his mouth. Is this an image of
purification, of self-transformation, or of narcissistic perversity? Or do the
connotations of self-consumption and self-generation perhaps condense the whole
film and its flow of images here into a single source or point of origin? The
initial figure of seashell, liquid, and shattering glass has returned, but re¬
versed, transformed, and no less ambiguous. While this circular pattern of
rhetorical figuring neatly closes off the disruptive and disturbing narrative, its

479
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE significance remains enigmatic and multiple. Is this part of what Artaud meant,
and Dulac would have agreed with, when he spoke of the him s organizing
current” as “a kind of intellectual music ?18

Xo the question, what is Un Chien andalou, there are a number of answers.

The first really successful Surrealist him to be exhibited in Paris. The means
by which two Spaniards, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, first became visible
and recognized in the world of French artists and intellectuals. The culmina¬
tion of three years of work by Bunuel within and on the margins of the French
him industry. The one him from the French cinema of the 1920s that has
generated more criticism, in English, at least, than has any other.19 And,
despite the overlays of that criticism, a him whose savage poetry to use
Jean Vigo’s phrase20—apparently still shocks, puzzles, delights, and liberates
audiences as much now as it did when hrst screened.
The known production history of Un Chien andalou can be summarized
briefly. After immigrating to Paris from Spain in 1925, Bunuel had worked
as an assistant director in the French him industry (principally for Jean Ep¬
stein) and as a him critic for an important Spanish literary magazine, all the
while trying unsuccessfully to make a him of his own—one project, perhaps
influenced by Cavalcanti’s Rien que les heures, which Bunuel admired, was “a
reportage on the bric-a-brac contents of a typical magazine.”21 Finally, in
January, 1929, Bunuel and Dali conceived and wrote, in their words, a “stu¬
pendous scenario” based on an irrational series of gags and “dream-residues”
and labeled with the appropriately illogical title—Un Chien andalou.11 Two
months later, Bunuel shot the him quickly and cheaply (with money from his
mother); and, by April, 1929, it was edited for a special preview arranged for
the Surrealists at the Studio des Ursulines.22 Expecting to denounce “a shame¬
ful usurpation,” Breton and his comrades came away instead proclaiming it a
genuine Surrealist him.24 Their enthusiasm led to a gala premiere, with a
complementary exhibition of paintings, at the Studio 28 cinema in early No¬
vember.25 When the cinema and exhibit were physically attacked by right-
wing groups, Bunuel was dumbfounded.26 Then came another surprise—Dali
had arranged on his own to have the scenario published, coincidentally, in ha
Revue du cinema (15 November 1929). Indignant, Bunuel broke with his friend,
and the scenario was published a second time, in Ua Revolution surrealiste (De¬
cember, 1929), with his authority and endorsement.27 By then, Bunuel had
embraced the Surrealists and gleefully accepted the film’s notoriety and was
arguing that its object was to offend, to provoke both revulsion and attraction
in the spectator.^8 In a moment of excess, he even called it “a desperate and
passionate appeal to murder. The provocation paid off, for Un Chien andalou
ran nine consecutive months at Studio 28, and Bunuel was soon able to secure
independent financing for his next project, L’Age d’or (1930).30
Un Chien andalou exhibits a rough, even awkward, simplicity in its execu¬
tion that aligns it superficially with Ua Coquille et le clergyman. But there are
more substantial connections between the two films. Like Artaud before him,
Bunuel argued that his film did not merely reproduce a dream. Rather, it
deliberately sought a narrative incoherence, a lack of logical associations, through
the mechanism of an unconscious psychic automatism,” drawing on the “free
association of uninhibited compulsions.31 What principally links the two films,

480
 258. (left) Bunuel in the
opening sequence of Un Chien
ancbzlou\ (right) Mareuil’s eye
about to be sliced by Buriuel’s

mentary and contrapuntal music, Batcheff, Mareuil, and Batcheffs doubles

and rivals enact a sexual symbolic of desire, repression, and displacement.
Some may still want to read this symbolic in terms of a “primitive” Freudian
psychoanalysis—as a celebration of the sexual drive and its tragicomic trans¬
formations under the pressure of psychological and social constraints.^9 More
recent critiques, however, conceive the process as a deconstruction of the sex¬
ual subject—an opening up of the contradictions of desire, in the circulation
of looks and fetishized objects and parts of bodies.40 Dismemberment and
disintegration mark the film at all levels—in the bodies of the characters that
multiply and fragment, in the body of a narrative that fails to resolve itself,
in the body of meanings that refuse to cohere, in the body of the viewing
subject whose desire is engaged and unfulfilled.41
In the end, there is the beginning. The notorious prologue to Un Chien
andalou is both a thematic overture and an exercise in syntactical and rhetorical
repositioning.42 The alternation of objects and faces, in MCU and CU, re¬
minds one of an Epstein film; only here the ambiguities are even more dis¬
turbing. The shots of the man smoking and the razor being stropped—are
they to be read diegetically as parts of the same space or in metaphorical
association (the result of “incorrect” eyeline matching)? The CU of the wom¬
an’s face—is she sitting on the balcony beside the man or is she an imaginary
image he conjures up? The ECU of the eye-slashing are we to notice the
punning trick of cutting (substituting another eye) or accept it as a violent
assault on the woman? The trauma of this initial sequence has a paradoxical
effect. Attacked and disfigured by the man (an act heightened by the fact that
Bunuel himself performs it), the woman nonetheless will return unharmed and
unchanged in the rest of the film. The man, however, disappears from the
text (the filmmaker from his film) to be replaced by his opposite, Batcheff as
the cyclist (and his striped tie will reappear in Batcheffs striped box). The
spectator s position in all this is compromised. Led to identify with Bunuel s
gaze (in POV shots), the spectator is confronted unexpectedly with the wom¬
an’s face, at once the desired object of the look and the mirror image of his
own gaze. As a narcissistic act of self-destruction, the eye-slashing sets in

485
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE
motion an unending cycle of repeated ruptures. In the final rupture (the “happy
ending”), effigies of a man and woman are framed in a grim still life—im¬
mobile, paralyzed, castrated. This final gag makes explicit what they have
been all along, the fetish objects of the spectator as voyeur.^
How apt is Vigo’s epithet, “An Andalusian dog howls—who then is deadA4^

La Passion de After Gance’s Napoleon (1927), Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc

Jeanne d’Arc (1928) was, without question, the most expensive experimental French film
of the decade. The young Danish director had been hired by the Societe Ge¬
nerate des Films apparently to make a historical reconstruction film that would
complement Napoleon. Once the subject of Jeanne d Arc was agreed on, in
October, 1926, S.G.F. budgeted Dreyer’s film at seven million francs and
gave him almost complete autonomy over its production.1 “I had a free hand,”
he said later, “I did absolutely what I wanted.”2 Instead of a vast fresco of
fifteenth-century France, which the producers expected, Dreyer set about mak¬
ing an intimate, psychological film—in an attempt to document the experi¬
ence of the mystic.3 To do so, wrote Leon Moussinac, Dreyer “cast aside or
deviated from the normal modes of cinematic creation.”4
With this extraordinary freedom, Dreyer assembled an international crew,
a fact which made the production somewhat of an anomaly among the narra¬
tive avant-garde films. For his technical collaborators, he chose several crafts¬
men who, like himself, came from outside France. Rudolf Mate, who had
assisted Karl Freund on several UFA films in Germany—notably Dreyer’s own
Mikhel (1924), was the chief cameraman. Hermann Warm, who had con¬
structed the decors for several major German films—e.g., The Cabinet of Doctor
Caligari (1919), Spiders (1919), Destiny (1921)—was the chief set designer.
Warm’s assistant was Jean Hugo, whose wife, the Surrealist Valentine Hugo,
then designed the rough, simple, slightly stylized costumes. For his cast,
Dreyer stuck with French actors, but here, too, his choices were unusual.5 A
seventy-year-old veteran of the Comedie Franchise, Eugene Silvain (who had
never acted in the cinema), portrayed the chief trial judge, Bishop Cauchon.
The Surrealist actor-playwright, Antonin Artaud, played Jeanne’s young sup¬
porter, Brother Massieu. And an ordinary cafe owner became the English
general, Warwick. The strangest casting of all was for Jeanne—Renee Jeanne
Falconetti, a young Comedie Franchise actress, who was renowned for her rotes
in light boulevard comedy. Without the makeup, she was a different woman,
Dreyer realized—“I found on her face exactly what I had been seeking for Joan
of Arc: a rustic woman, very sincere, who was also a woman of suffering.”6
Falconetti’s inspired performance (her only appearance on film) became one of
the high points of this consistently well-acted film.
At S.G.F. s request, the initial scenario for the project was written by
Joseph Delteil, based on his popular, and sentimental, biography, La Vie de
Jeanne d’Arc (1925).7 Dreyer, however, was drawn to Pierre Champion’s recent
edition of the transcript of Jeanne’s trial at Rouen, which he studied closely.8
Discarding Delteil’s scenario, he wrote his own script, compressing the five
months and twenty-nine sessions of the actual trial into what seems to be a
single day of five separate interrogations. As David Bordwell writes,

486
Many of the issues in the trial—Jeanne’s alleged witchcraft, the magical powers of her LA PASSION DE
ring, the question of her virginity—are eliminated from the film so that Dreyer fo- JEANNE D’ARC
cused on the principal charge leveled against her: that her persistent belief in the
sanctity of her visions and the holiness of her mission constituted a refusal to submit
to the authority of the Church.9

The narrative thus constitutes a double struggle—between Jeanne and her

captors (the English army and the French clergy) as well as within Jeanne
herself. In the opening section, Jeanne is brought into the Rouen court for an
initial interrogation by Cauchon, Loyseleur (Maurice Schutz), d’Estivet (Andre
Berley), and others (including Michel Simon as Jean Lemaitre), with Warwick
and his soldiers in the background. Returned to her cell, she is ridiculed by
her jailers and then deceptively interrogated again. Her answers confound
Cauchon and Beaupere (Ravet), who has taken over the questioning, and the
judges take another tack—threatening her with torture and then tempting her
with communion. When she turns their accusations back on them, they lead
her out into the graveyard for execution. There she wavers, out of fear and a
desire to aid France, and finally signs a recantation. Sentenced to life in prison,
she is forced to have her head shaved and suddenly realizes that she has denied
herself and her spiritual mission. Recalled, the judges reluctantly order her to
be burned at the stake, and Massieu gives her a final communion. As Jeanne
goes to her death in the public square, the crowd of French peasants becomes
restless and is attacked by the English soldiers. Her spiritual mission turns
out to have its political effect.
Nearly a full year after shooting first began, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc was
previewed in late April, 1928, first in Copenhagen and then in Paris, where
it was hailed by the film critics and severely attacked by the Archbishop of
the city.10 According to Moussinac, under threat of censure, the Archbishop
forced S.G.F. and A.C.E. (its distributor) to re-cut the film, without Dreyer’s
consent.11 As a consequence, its exclusive run at the Salle Marivaux did not
begin until 25 October 1928.12 This censorship, along with the film’s lack of
commercial success, led to a broken contract and finally to an unfortunate
lawsuit between Dreyer and S.G.F.

The cuts and changes . . . were so serious [wrote Moussinac] that the public could
only see an annoying, Catholic film in which the Rouen tribunal had become almost
sympathetic and the trial was reduced to a theological discussion without any dramatic
advance.13

Ironically, this recut version was the one released generally in France, whereas
the original version, apparently, was exported. The latter, for instance, seems
to have been exhibited in New York in March, 1929, but it was also specially
screened (without musical accompaniment) at the Studio des Ursulines, in
May, 1929.14 Bordwell concludes that the currently available, nearly complete
prints of the film (2,200 of its original 2,400 meters) probably derive from
several sources.15 One print certainly comes from a negative of the exported
version, which was given to the Cinematheque franchise in 195 1 (and from
which Lo Duca, in 1952, made a "mutilated” sound version for Gaumont).16
And my own research confirms Bordwell’s findings—there are substantial dif¬
ferences between this print version (collected in several American film archives)

487
narrative AVANT-GARDE and other versions, say, the print at the National Film Archive in London.
Like the differences in the various archive prints of La Rous, these discrepancies
in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc demand further study.
In 1964, Dreyer told Georges Sadoul that he conceived La Passion de Jeanne
d’Arc as a documentary. It was a literal transcription of the trial record—“All
the words pronounced {in the film} were drawn from history. So keen was
his interest in the authenticity of these words that his original intent had been
to make a talking film.19 But no French studio was equipped with sound
recording systems in 1926-1927 (what made Dreyer think they were?), and
none wanted to risk the investment, so he had to resort to other means of
authenticity. One of his strategies was to turn the shooting process itself into
a grueling reproduction of history. The cast and crew spent five months nearly
living in the court and prison sets constructed in an empty Renault assembly
shop next to the Billancourt studios and in the replica of medieval Rouen
erected on the southern outskirts of Paris. The process of the trial was shot
strictly in sequence, and the actors spoke only the words of the transcript
(there was no improvisation).20 All makeup was forbidden so that the new
panchromatic film stock could record the confrontation of naked faces. “The
elimination of makeup,” wrote Moussinac, “gave to the faces a strange, awe¬
some power which openly revealed the inner play of feelings and thoughts of
the characters.”21 For the bloodletting sequence that follows Jeanne’s fainting
in the torture chamber, Dreyer even had a doctor actually draw blood. Fal-
conetti, especially, gave herself up to Jeanne’s dilemma, undergoing unusual
physical and psychological hardship. In the climactic sequence of head-shav¬
ing, her agony was shared by the entire cast and crew.

In the silence of an operating room, in the pale light of the morning of the execution,
Dreyer had Falconetti’s head shaved. . . . We were moved as if the infamous mark
were being made there, in reality. The electricians and technicians held their breaths
and their eyes filled with tears. Falconetti wept real tears. Then the director slowly
approached her, gathered up some of her tears in his fingers, and carried them to his
lips.22

An assistant director summed up the whole shooting experience best—“We

were not making a film, we were living Jeanne’s drama, and we often wanted
to intervene to save her.”23
But La Passion de Jeanne dArc is more than the record of a pro-filmic drama,
a documentary whose realism is the product of indexical signs. Much like
Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1925-1926), which Dreyer confessed to being haunted
by in the early stages of his preparation, it is a discourse on history—in the
form of a poeticized narrative of oppositions.24 Much has been written about
the operation of the narrative discourse in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. David
Bordwell, in an early essay, argues that the film constitutes a unique distil¬
lation of the concrete and the abstract as well as an extraordinary “implosion”
of internal contradictions (as opposed to the “explosion” of “realistic” space in
Eisenstein s silent films).25 Paul Willemen sees it, within the context of com¬
mercial narrative films, as possessing a “tentative emphasis ... on the poetic
function of discursive practice.”26 More precisely, Noel Burch singles out the
fact that it breaks with the conventions of “illusionist representation . . .
creating a filmic space which designates itself as a succession of shot-frames,

488
 259. (left) A frame from the
tracking shot that opens La
Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928);

I
(right) the judges before the
as a fictional and ‘autonomous’ chain.”27 In his recent book on Dreyer, Bord- white wall and irregular
well analyzes the film’s contradictions—both spatial and representational—and windows in the opening trail
sequence
I its tendency to ‘‘bring space forward” through the strategies of emphasizing
the face and interrogating the representation of tableaux.28 At the risk of
underestimating the film’s willful gaps and dislocations, my own analysis sit¬
uates La Passion de Jeanne d''Arc within the context of the French narrative
avant-garde film practice and interprets its strategies and techniques within a
reading of its narrative framework.
A complex of strategies ds at work in the film, but all seem to function,
more or less, for the purpose of compressing and intensifying the narrative.
Their operation occurs at several levels—in the construction of a space-time
continuum, in the orientation of the narrative flow, and in the systematic
articulation of rhetorical figuring. The diegetic process they produce is unique,
to say the least. The construction of space in La Passion de Jeanne dArc is
strikingly antithetical to the conventions of the historical reconstruction film.
‘‘For the construction of the decors,” Dreyer himself wrote, ‘‘1 broke with
tradition.”29 Instead of sumptuous tableaux, full of eye-opening period detail
and teeming with movement (even as in Napoleon), here the images are stark
and simple, to the point of abstraction. For the decors, Hermann Warm claimed,
were modeled on medieval miniatures.

In a Parisian library I found the story of Jeanne d’Arc illustrated by a miniature-

painter from the Middle Ages. The simple reproduction of the buildings, landscapes,
and the people, the naive lines and incorrect perspective provided ideas for the film’s
sets.30

And the starkness and simplicity of those sets were heightened by the absence
of any color tinting in the release prints. In this, La Passion de Jeanne dArc,
like La Chute de la maison Usher and Theme Raquin, stood out among the late
1920s French films for its exhibition in black-and-white.
Except for the Rouen exteriors, which are rarely seen in the film and are

489
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

260. Jeanne d’Arc (Falconetti)

in the opening trial sequence

never seen whole (much to the dismay of the producers), Dreyer reduced the
sets to the barest essentials. As Harry Alan Potamkin remarked, “There is no
extraneous detail in the film.”31 In the opening sequence, for instance, the
wall behind the judges’ slightly raised platform is a flat white expanse with
three simple windows (without stained glass) whose height decreases rapidly
from right to left, but with no attempt to produce an illusion of perspective.
The opposite wall is quite similar (although the windows are unevenly scat¬
tered), and the floor is a simple design of light stone slabs. The only props
are the soldiers’ spears, several large Bibles and links of chain, and a wooden
stool which one soldier places in the center of the floor for Jeanne. This space
is described initially in a single shot—a HAMS/LS tracking to the right,
parallel to the silhouettes of the judges (in the foreground) and to the soldiers
standing about in groups on the floor. The simplicity of this design—the same
neutral walls and floors—carries over into Jeanne’s cell (which has a single
window and a simple cross on one wall) and even into the torture chamber
(where the torture instruments comprise no more than a revolving spiked
wheel, a hook and chain, and one table of smaller devices—although a raised
stool also momentarily looks threatening). Even the doorways and arches are
unornamented, and the doors are of dark wooden planks or bars (as in the
cell). The overall effect of this set design, in conjunction with the low camera
angles, the black-and-white film stock, and the consistently full, even light¬
ing, is to foreground the characters, especially their faces, in what Peter Brook
has called a ‘delocalized space.’’12 Their figures seem positioned in a dimen¬
sionless, gravity-free world, a kind of void or limbo of whiteness. Conse¬
quently, the interrelationships among the characters and between them and
certain details of the decor are transformed into what Bordwell once wrote is
a unique dialectic of specificity and generality, of [the] concrete and [the]
abstract,’’ of the physical and the spiritual.33
This is the story of Jeanne’s passion, and she is at the center of the film as

490
its primary subject. Yet, instead of privileging her with subjectivity, the LA PASSION DE
discourse locates the subjective among several characters (through a variety of JEANNE D ARC
techniques) and only gradually restricts it to Jeanne. In the opening interro¬
gation, for instance, there is a play of looks and POV shots which distributes
the characters into opposite camps. The second shot of the sequence dollies in
from a LAFS to a LAMS of Cauchon reading the charges and is followed by a
LAMS of Massieu (crossing the frame from right background to left fore¬
ground), whom Jeanne then follows at a distance (both of them looking off to
the left foreground). As the alternation shifts to shots of Cauchon and her, the
subjective shifts from Massieu to Jeanne—and foreshadows his eventual align¬
ment with her against Cauchon. When Warwick enters the room, he is linked
to Loyseleur by an eyeline match cut; later, their conspiratorial bond (the
French clergy fronts for the English army) is suggested again in a tilt-pan
from one to the other.34 As Cauchon begins the interrogation, the tension
between the judges and Jeanne is articulated in a series of shock cuts and
sudden movements. His question, “Who taught you [the Lord’s Prayer}?’’ is
followed by a one-second shot of his face that seems to stun her. The reverse
happens after her reluctant answer, “My mother.’’ Just before she responds to
the question, “You pretend you are sent by God?’’ there is a two-second
LAMCU of two judges leaning toward one another as a third stands up behind
them (a quick dolly out pushes the shot toward vertigo). This technique seems
an alternative to the abrupt changes in the scale of intertitle letters, which
was then current in French films and was most developed by Soviet filmmak¬
ers.35 When Jeanne says the English will be driven from France, except for
those who die there, a soldier yells angrily in a shot that dollies in and out
rapidly several times, from MCU to CU (like a rhythmic zoom). When she
says that her mission is “the salvation of my soul,’’ d’Estivet attacks her in
the first outbreak of actual physical violence. In a brief moment of rapid
cutting involving several unbalanced shots (LACUs of his mammoth face and
ECUs of her frightened eyes), his pursing lips seem to explode in the spittle
that spatters against her cheek. Finally, when one monk, de Houppeville,
turns to defend her, a nod from Loyseleur leads to his expulsion (and possible
execution) by the soldiers. But this brief action is observed from the point of
view of an old white-haired judge—in close shots of Warwick, a messenger,
Loyseleur, the soldiers’ spear points filing out the door. When he tries to
protest, Cauchon (in an ECU) grimly silences him. Oscillating between the
omniscient and the subjective as well as between different characters’ points
of view and sometimes overlapping radically opposed subjective positions, this
opening sequence scales down the most grandiose effects of a film such as
Napoleon and integrates them into a series of profoundly intimate exchanges.
If the first interrogation is marked by a wide range of conflicts and by
abrupt shifts in subjectivity, in which Jeanne is but one of several major
participants, the rest are organized much more centrally around her. In the
second interrogation, for instance, the spatial continuity and placement of the
characters in Jeanne’s cell is fractured and reorganized according to her spir¬
itual condition. That reorganization is articulated in a system of looks in
which the direction of her look becomes dominant. It is Loyseleur who first
enters the cell, through the immense arch of a door, and whose look sets up
the spatial arrangement of the characters. In the opening sequence, his inter-

491
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

261. Selected shots from the

first interrogation sequence in
Jeanne’s cell

492
 LA PASSION DE
JEANNE D ARC

262. (left) The revolving

spiked wheel in the torture
chamber; (right) Jeanne
collapses in terror

vention between the English soldier and Jeanne had seemed to offer her sup¬
port. Now he looks to the left (in CU)—cut to Jeanne gazing toward the left
foreground (as a forged letter from Charles VII is read to her); then he looks
off to the right—cut to Cauchon spying on his trickery. Eyeline match cutting
positions Loyseleur between Jeanne and Cauchon, as a deceptive mediator,
while a system of graphic matching aligns his look to the left with hers. After
the other judges enter the cell (from the right background) and position them¬
selves looking toward the left foreground, Jeanne (in CU) turns to look toward
the right foreground. Now the eyeline match cutting of CUs sets up a clear
opposition between her on the left and Beaupere, who has taken over the
interrogation, on the right. As the questioning proceeds, she turns to look
toward the left (as if for advice), and there is a cut to Loyseleur also looking
toward the left foreground and nodding. She turns back to the right fore¬
ground, smiling and seemingly confident in her answers. The direction of her
look has now become the pivot point of the sequence and places Loyseleur
opposite the other judges as her friend and counselor, even though the direc¬
tion of his look makes this problematic. It becomes even more problematic
when several FSs reveal him standing prominently behind Cauchon. Two dif¬
ferent spaces are being constructed simultaneously—whereas one locates the
characters physically, the other distributes them psychologically or spiritually,
according to Jeanne’s vision.
The climax of the interrogation comes in a series of disruptions and re¬
orientations. Suddenly, when Jeanne is asked if she is already saved, Massieu
intervenes (in MS) from the left background and assumes the direction of her
look toward the right. But he backs off when Cauchon rises and angrily rep¬
rimands him. Asked finally if she is in a state of grace, Jeanne looks again
toward the left for advice, and the cut to Loyseleur now reveals him turned
slightly to the right (in CU), looking up in tight-lipped silence. His denial
and deception are shockingly clear. Yet when Jeanne turns to gaze straight
ahead and slightly upwards, an uncanny moment of peace seems to pass across
her open face. Several shots of the judges, and of Cauchon in particular, de¬
scribe them looking straight at the camera and backing away stunned. Shock
follows shock as their looks mirror ours. As Cauchon and Loyseleur huddle
together (it is the latter who orders her to be tortured), Massieu speaks to

493
narrative AVANT-GARDE Jeanne at last, assuming the position off-frame left which Loyseleur had aban¬
doned. In a double articulation, Jeanne s look the sign of her soul has
triumphed over the judges machinations and revealed the real distribution of
the characters.
The other interrogation sequences are marked by different kinds of spatial
continuity and discontinuity. In the torture chamber, Jeanne is fixed as if
paralyzed by fear—in a senes of graphically matched CUs, whether shot from
the left or right at a low angle or straight on. The interrogators, by contrast,
are shown in a variety of deliberately mismatched and unbalanced shots in
LACUs, in profile, in straight-on CUs, in extreme LACUs, in ECUs of trem¬
bling lips, in tracking MSs that move swiftly from one to another, in MSs
where one figure leaves the frame to the side as another enters from the bot¬
tom. Their frantic efforts burst and ebb around her like the surf pounding a
lone rock outcropping. Only when she is brought before the revolving spiked
wheel (linked by association to Cauchon’s looming face), does Jeanne’s position
in space fragment, become multiple and contradictory—and she collapses.
In the fourth interrogation, just after the bloodletting, the spatial conti¬
nuity is organized much like that of the first sequence in her cell, with several
important differences. This sequence begins with Cauchon entering the cell
(in a shot that frames him between her bedpost in the foreground and the
immense arch over the doorway) to gaze at Jeanne sleeping. The scale of their
faces indicates his initial dominance—a CU of him looking down toward the
right foreground and a corresponding HAMCU of her looking up toward the
left foreground, but from the lower right corner of the frame (as if trapped
there by the heavy diagonal bedpost). Yet his position to her left implies that
he, like Loyseleur, now may show some compassion for her. When Jeanne
awakens, too weak to rise (her head, in CU now, remains tilted at a 30°
angle), she requests of Cauchon that her body be buried in holy ground. He
seems to agree, in CU, and even smiles; but then, in MS, he clumsily pulls
away when her hand reaches up from the lower right corner of the frame to
grasp weakly at him. Massieu and several other priests file in with a commun¬
ion table, and Jeanne (in CU) turns to gaze off expectantly toward the right
foreground. At the precise moment when she is about to receive the host,
however, one of the judges enters and seems to take the priest’s place, offering
instead the recantation. What Jeanne had imagined (both left and right) to be
areas of compassion and community abruptly turn threatening as Cauchon
ironically tells her not to reject “the body of the Church.’’ When she refuses
once more to recant, Cauchon brusquely orders the host and communion table
taken away. Her hands cover her tilted face, in CU, and she cries out, “I love
God! I love him with all my heart!”
Suddenly (through intercutting), she seems surrounded by priests, shouting
her down as “the devil’s instrument.” In a slow alternation of faces, she looks
stunned at each one of them; her look shifts counterclockwise from the left
and right foreground to the upper right and left, and the corners of the frame
seem to function like the four points of a compass. Then, in a slightly closer
shot (intercut with several fast 180° pans [to the right] across the assembled
priests blank faces), she stares off to the left foreground and softly, but de¬
fiantly, turns the charge back upon them—“It’s you who have been sent to
make me suffer. The alternation of faces returns with the same counterclock-

494
 LA PASSION DE
JEANNE D’ARC

263. (left) Massieu (Antonin

Artaud); (right) Jeanne d’Arc
(Falconetti)

wise movement of her look, but now her eyes are glistening through her tears;
and, in quick shots, the priests fall back astonished. In an abrupt FS track,
Cauchon orders her execution; in another FS, the priests leave the room, di¬
minished in scale (in the lower left corner of the frame); and the sequence ends
with a CU of Jeanne sobbing almost hysterically. Cauchon may control the
narrative at this point, but Jeanne’s centrality to the spatial continuity of the
sequence suggests that her spirit remains unbroken and that she will ulti¬
mately triumph.
Finally, in the sequence where Jeanne denies her recantation, all the framing
and editing patterns, which before had operated disruptively, “repair” or “heal”
the film’s spatial continuity, with Jeanne securely positioned at its center.
When Cauchon enters Jeanne’s cell for the last time, the scale of their faces is
now reversed in a simple alternation of eyeline matches—in CU, she looks off
toward the right foreground while he looks off to the left, from the lower
right corner of an otherwise empty frame. “So you believe you are a messenger
from God?” he says almost meekly. Several of the other judges, in CU, assume
Cauchon’s position, their faces now subdued and even sorrowful; then all of
them turn and file out to the right through the arching cell door. Jeanne calls
back Massieu, however, and her look to the left repositions him in the space
of psychological and spiritual support. In another simple alternation of eyeline
matches, Massieu questions her sincerely, seriously, trying to understand her
spiritual mission. Her eyes radiant through her tears, Jeanne finds her answer:
“And the great victory?” “It will be my martyrdom.” “And your deliverance?”
“Death.” In a sense, the whole film has been working toward this simple,
almost naked, confession and communion of faces. The spatial discontinuities
of the previous sequences have functioned primarily to set it off as the climax
of Jeanne’s spiritual journey. And the uncanny intensity both Artaud and
Falconetti bring to their characters makes their confrontation a uniquely priv¬
ileged moment. Pierre Audard said it well: “[Falconetti and Artaud] are im¬
mobile figures at the center of things, a look fixed on an invisible point, a
hand stretched out toward the unknown. ”36
Jeanne’s passion, however, is articulated further in an important series of
metonymic and metaphorical associations which help bring the film to clo¬
sure.37 Several patterns of rhetorical figuring, for instance, distribute the char-

495
264. (top, left to right)
Jeanne with the straw crown
in her cell; Jeanne (her head
shaven); Jeanne and the
crucifix at the stake, (center,
left to right) The church
dome cross; Jeanne yearns
toward . . . the crucifix that
Massieu holds up to her.
(bottom) The final image of
the cross and stake at the end
of ha Passion de Jeanne d'Arc

acters into opposite camps. Most of the priests, throughout, are marked by
semicircular, close-fitting caps. Those without caps are conspicuously bald,
and the shiny domes of their heads, fringed with hair, produce a similar effect.
This semicircular shape is echoed in the arching doorways of the church build¬
ings which repeatedly frame the priests’ entrances and exits. Together, these
images become a material sign of the Church itself as an institution, a sign
which designates its representatives and confers on them the illusion of power.
The pattern culminates in the final sequence, linking the domes of the church
with the wall towers from which, on Warwick’s command, maces and other
weapons are dropped to the soldiers. By contrast, Jeanne, as well as Massieu,
is “unadorned.’ Instead, she is marked, at one point, by a simple cord-work
crown and, especially, by the sign of the cross. The cross first appears in her
cell as a faint shadow cast by the window bars, and Loyseleur treads on it as

496
 265. (top, left to right)
Jeanne’s feet bound in chains;
the Bible bound in chains;
Warwick in the opening trial
sequence, (center, left to
right) Jeanne’s bound feet as
she goes to the stake; the link
chain that separates the
peasants and townspeople
from the square and stake;
Warwick and his soldiers at
the execution, (bottom, left
■T to right) The judges behind
bars at the execution; a mace
is dropped from the tower

he comes to play Judas to her. It reappears as a rough wooden frame beside

the doorway when she enters the torture chamber and then as a simple cross
on the cell wall after she has denied the recantation and had her head shaved.
When she reaches the stake, the executioner presents her with a smoothly
carved dark crucifix; while around a cross topping the highest church dome in
the square, a flock of doves settles and then (in a progression of shots) flies off
higher and higher into the sky.38 As Jeanne presses the crucifix to her bosom
in prayer, there is a cross-cut to a baby suckling at the breast of a peasant
woman in the crowd. The earthly sustenance of one image parallels the spir¬
itual regeneration of the other. As the fire begins to engulf her, Massieu holds
up the crucifix through the smoke so Jeanne may gaze on it one last time.
Thus newly charged with meaning, the unadorned “risen" cross must be part
of the film’s final image—while the top of the blackened stake smoulders in

497
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE the foreground, in the background (separated from the church on which it
sits) a cross stands out gleaming bone white.
Another pattern of rhetorical figuring binds protagonist to antagonist as
well as forges a link between the beginning and ending of the film. Our first
image of Jeanne is a tracking HAMCU of her feet bound together by a single
heavy chain. Four shots later, a parallel tracking HACU introduces the Bible
on which she will “swear to tell the truth’’ it, too, is weighted down with a
chain. When Warwick appears, he is wearing a similar strand of chain draped
smartly around his shoulders, like a decorative remnant of chain mail. Even
before the interrogation reveals his power and control, the chain images sug¬
gest concisely who and what is oppressed by whom. At the beginning of the
final sequence of execution, again Jeanne is introduced in a tracking CU of
her bound feet descending a few steps. Now her movement is paralleled by a
shot of running peasants and townspeople, across the space of which a length
of chain (hastily put up by the soldiers) hangs prominently in the foreground,
creating a barrier or enclosure. Above the action, Warwick sits rigidly, like a
gang warlord, fingering his long loose chain (behind him his soldiers form a
phalanx of helmets). Even the once powerful priests now sit on a platform
behind bars, protected from the populace, but also seemingly trapped by their
own illusory decision-making. When Warwick orders weapons for his soldiers,
the maces dropped from the towers (described in quick pendulumlike in-and-
out camera movements) neatly condense the oppressive images of chain and
spiked wheel. From this condition of enchaining or being chained, Jeanne’s
death by fire acts as a form of release. Or does it?
As the narrative of Jeanne’s spiritual journey nears its climax, it engenders
a second parallel narrative which pits Warwick’s army against the French
peasants and townspeople. The relationship between the one narrative and the
other is a paradoxical one, for they are resolved ambiguously, unlike the nar¬
rative of Eisenstein’s Potemkin, which apparently so influenced Dreyer at the
time. The peasants make their first appearance in the film during the cemetery
sequence, where they are held back by Warwick’s soldiers. After Jeanne re¬
cants and is led away, one man in the crowd yells out, “Long live Jeanne!’’
For this political heresy, several soldiers seize him, tie his hands behind his
back, and toss him into a pond. Their action, however, is described in a single
FS reflected upside down on the water’s surface. Fience, the shock is doubled
by this body that seems to break the smooth plane of both water and frame.
From this brutal, disruptive dispatch, the film cuts to snips of Jeanne’s hair
falling on the cell floor. Ironically, this one peasant’s death is juxtaposed to
her “salvation.’’ And the irony seems to be sustained through a further jux¬
taposition, alternating shots of Jeanne’s head being shaved (do the priests
think they can rob her, like Samson, of her power so easily?) and of the
peasants and townspeople entertaining themselves outside the town walls. Yet
the long tracking shots that describe this spectacle reveal a grotesquerie of
contorted mimes, acrobats, sword-swallowers, and clowns on display. This
festive make-believe agony, this mockery of torture, throws Jeanne’s submis¬
sion and suffering into relief.39 As she watches the barber sweep her hair up
into a dust pan and then with it her cord-work crown, she suddenly realizes
that in choosing to recant, in choosing life, she has been shorn of grace. Like
the peasants, she, too, has been turned into a grotesque. By choosing death

498
 LA PASSION DE
JEANNE D ARC

266. Jeanne’s immolation and

transubstantiation

and martyrdom now, she will take their place in the square and enact a dif¬
ferent kind of spectacle.
That spectacle literally ignites the political conflict of the second parallel
narrative. Throughout this final sequence, Jeanne’s martyrdom functions as a
fixed point of reference. As she catches fire, her body is fragmented, obscured,
and finally obliterated. The spectacle of her body being broken is transformed
into a sacrificial offering, an emblem enflaming the people. The shock waves
emanating from this transformation reverse the vector of forces which climaxed
the torture chamber sequence, and rebellion breaks out. Preceded by a band
of soldiers, the peasants burst into the town in several HA upside-down shots
that tilt 120° or more to follow them through a high gate. These disruptive
shots seem to repeat, in reverse and in multiple, the earlier shot of the soldiers
tossing the bound peasant into the pond. As the cross-cutting associates the
crowd (especially the women) more and more closely with Jeanne’s suffering
at the stake, again one of the peasants cries out, ‘‘You have burned a saint!”
Suddenly, Warwick orders his soldiers to attack, and the conflagration ex¬
plodes into mass violence. In CUs (e.g., a stone breaking a church window,
an arm throwing a spear, the feet of a young child running up to its mother
lying dead on the cobblestones), in HA and LA shots (e.g., leaping figures
pursued by others flailing maces), in an editing rhythm that approaches rapid
montage, the soldiers brutally overpower the peasants and push them out of
the town. There, spread over a hillside, topped by a gibbeted figure in the
distance, they watch the drawbridge rise up, cutting them off as if exiled.
The rebellion fails. Having broken Jeanne’s body, Warwick’s army besieges
the “body” of the people. They, too, are broken and driven from the place of
her transubstantiation, now a perversion of paradise. Thus, despite Jeanne’s
act of sacrifice and transcendence, the forces of oppression and death still
govern the world.
For Dreyer, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc was a ‘‘hymn to the triumph of the
soul over life.”40 Jeanne’s vision of God leads her to self-fulfillment; her love
consumes and transforms her. Thus does she become the first of Dreyer’s pos¬
sessed, inspired, daemonic figures. Yet, as the narrative of an insurgency, the
film is unusually bleak and straightforward, especially compared to its ‘‘sister”
historical reconstruction films—Bernard’s Le Miracle des loups and Joueur dechecs
or even Gastyne’s La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne dArc. Here, the conflicts divid-

499
267. (left to right) The
peasants rush into the town
through the gate; the soldiers
attack the peasants and
townspeople; the peasants and ing the characters remain unresolved through the ideological convention of
townspeople are driven French suffering and sacrifice. Instead, 'Jeanne’s catching fire delineates more
outside the town walls at the
sharply the friction between nations, classes, and political groups. Further¬
end of La Passion de Jeanne
d'An
more, as the story of a woman whose body and soul are besieged by men, for
the purpose of submission and even erasure, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc operates
as a symbolic narrative par excellence.41 Is Jeanne’s death by fire the proper
end for the woman who refuses to submit? Such a representation of the posi¬
tion of women, in relation to men, may be read as the culmination of a long
line of French narrative avant-garde films that includes Delluc’s Fievre, Gance’s
La Roue, Dulac’s La Souriante Madame Beudet, Epstein’s Coeur fidele, L’FIerbier’s
L’lnhumaine, Kirsanoffs Menilmontant, Dulac’s L’lnvitation au voyage, and Ep¬
stein’s La Glace a trois faces and La Chute de la maison Usher.

Finis Terrae and The transformation that concludes La Chute de la maison Usher—the destruc¬
Gardiens de phare tion of the chateau and Roderick’s release into the real world—parallels a
change in Jean Epstein’s own life and career as a filmmaker. Faced with the
demise of his own production company, disgusted with the falseness of studio
filmmaking, and disappointed by the slow technical development of the French
film industry, Epstein left Paris, in the early summer of 1928, for Land’s End,
the most westward reaches of Brittany jutting into the Atlantic.1 This break,
this seeming retreat, was actually both a renewal and a means of advance. Not
only did it allow him to renew his experience of spaces for which he had long
nurtured a love, but it returned him to the origins of his own filmmaking, in
fictionalized documentary.2 Rather than abandon the theory and practice he
had developed and refined, particularly in his previous three films, he extended
it into new territory. Simply put, Epstein placed his vision and his cinemat-
ographic machine in the service of an unusual community of people and the
natural world in which they lived. The result, after he returned to Paris in
late autumn, was Finis Terrae (1929), a film unlike any he had done before.
Film critics praised the new work highly, when it inaugurated the specialized
cinema, L Oeil de Paris (in May, 1929), as well as later when it opened a
series of French films in London (in October, 1929).3 But since then, Epstein’s
film has suffered an unjust neglect.
I believe, wrote Epstein in announcing the film, “that we must concern

500
ourselves, more and more, with such natural actors, in all countries, in all F1N1S TERRAE AND
classes of society, in all professions; that we must use natural decors, true GARDIENS DE PHARE
scenarios, authentic spaces.”4 In one sense, then, Finis Terrae represents a
culmination of the realist aesthetics articulated by Antoine, Delluc, and others
ten years before. Its subject was discovered in the preparatory stages of pro¬
duction, and that discovery determined, to an extent, its mode of production.
Specifically, the scenario developed out of several exploratory voyages that
Epstein took to the islands of Bannec and Balanec, west of Ouessant, islands
that were inhabited only in the summer months by small teams of kelp-
gatherers. And it was written in collaboration with the islanders themselves,
drawing on one particular story in their oral tradition.5 Then Epstein and his
miniscule crew (including Joseph Barth, Joseph Kottula, and Louis Nee) were
able to execute the shooting entirely on the islands and the sea of Iroise.6
There were no constructed sets; and all but two or three brief sequences (the
interiors of an island hut and a village house) were filmed in the open air, at
the mercy of the elements. Most important of all, Epstein refused to import
any professional actors for his cast. All were selected from among the inhab¬
itants of Ouessant; they used no makeup and wore their own clothes as cos¬
tumes.7 The two central characters, in fact, were played by young men who
had never even seen a film before and whose families, for a while, actually
believed they had been kidnapped and sold to the gypsies or to the devil.8
But they and their fellow islanders adapted quickly to Epstein’s few directions
and gave performances of a simplicity and naturalness that distinguished Finis
Terrae from most other films of the period.
The story Finis Terrae enacts is a simple one, a fait divers of sorts, yet one
that sums up a good deal about the islanders’ culture. On the island of Bannec,
a dispute erupts between two young men when one accidentally breaks a bottle
of wine and the other accuses him of stealing his knife. Ambroise has cut his
thumb on a glass fragment and soon falls ill, though he keeps the injury to
himself; when he stops working, Jean-Marie and the other two men on the
island, out of anger, ignore him. Eventually, Jean-Marie finds his knife on
the beach, recognizes his friend’s infection, and sets out with him for Ouessant
in a small sailboat, despite an unusually becalmed sea. On Ouessant, mean¬
while, a lighthouse-keeper notices the lack of activity on Bannec; and the
villagers, particularly the young men’s mothers, prompt the local doctor, Le-
senin, and several sailors to venture out in a rowboat to find out what is wrong.
A dense fog materializes at sea, but the two boats miraculously find one an¬
other, and Lesenin immediately lances Ambroise’s wound. Through the night,
the two mothers keep vigil on the rocks above the harbor cove; and at dawn,
having outlasted a squall, the overcrowded rowboat struggles back to Oues¬
sant. The men are safe; the families reconciled.
The subject—“this mystery of men devoted to a land that is nothing but
rock, to a sea that is nothing but foam, to a harsh and perilous task”—and
the simplicity and directness with which it is presented may remind one su¬
perficially of Robert Flaherty’s early documentaries, especially Man of Aran
(1933), which Epstein’s film predates by several years.9 But Finis Terrae is
actually closer to several Soviet films, such as Kuleshov’s Dura Lux (1926) and
Pudovkin’s Mother (1926), as well as Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne dArc, all of
which Epstein probably saw just before leaving Paris for the islands off Brit-

301
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

268. The kelp burning in

Finis Terrae (1929)

tany.10 Although emphasizing the factual nature, the authenticity, of his film,
Epstein also insisted that it was a psychological documentary. It focused on
“the material and spiritual reality of the island life,” including the characters’
subjective experience of their interaction with their environment.11 Its mode
of representation employs techniques quite common to the narrative avant-
garde film practice—blurred and distorted shots, extreme camera angles, rapid
montage, unusual tracking shots—but with much more restraint than in Ep¬
stein’s previous films. In fact, strangely enough, the most prominent, the most
consistently used of these techniques is slow motion. Instead of recording
certain sequences at speeds three to six times the norm, as in Usher, here
Epstein consistently had the camera overcranked just slightly, from thirty to
forty frames per second. Even this slightly slowed motion was “magical” for
him—“sincere expressions and natural gestures were thus diverted, singled
out, prolonged, ‘held,’ and stylized.”12 This concept may now sound naive,
but Epstein did not apply it naively. Slow motion described not only the
actions of the central characters but also the dynamic flux of nature around
them, especially the movement of the sea. The technique seemed to suggest,
then, an unusual correspondence, an underlying harmony, between men and
nature. For Epstein, the film became the work of a Magus.
The magical power that Epstein and his camera brought to the people of
these islands, however, is not the only form of magic in the film. If its story
is simple, the telling is hardly so. Its mystery is articulated in the strange
transformations that mark the structure of the narrative as well as in the
system of parallels and oppositions that mark the discourse.
The film seems to open conventionally enough, with a series of descriptive

502
 FINIS TERRAE AND
GARDIENS DE PHARE

269- Jean-Marie and

Ambroise confront one
another in the opening
sequence of Finis Terrae

shots of a seacoast landscape and an intertitle that identifies Bannec and then
mentions two teams of two men each gathering kelp there during the summer.
Abruptly, the focus shifts to two of them, one of whom sends the other off to
get their last bottle of wine, and (within a little more than a dozen shots, half
of them involving fast tracks or dollies, as they try to pass the bottle on the
run) the accident occurs that determines the rest of the narrative.13 Unlike the
pattern of Epstein’s earlier films, here the sudden rupture and resultant discord
are strangely subsumed in the rest of the film’s first reel. Two more intertitles
appear, but they describe the kelp-gathering process and the lack of water on
the island as if the accident had never happened. Furthermore, the conflict
between the two young men almost subsides in descriptive sequences of the
teams first burning the kelp in piles (only once do they raise their fists at one
another) and then separately eating potatoes and bread for supper. The film
seems to have turned into a documentary, and the accident is forgotten or
masked over in the daily round of their lives. Yet something faintly disturbing
remains, particularly in a number of isolated CUs of simple objects. There is
the distant association between a shot of the wine soaking into the sand and
the ECU of blood on Ambroise’s thumb. There is also a menacing miniature
still life—the ECU of a glass fragment framing a tiny daisy among the rocks.
Finally, there is a series of CUs intercut, much like a musical motif (free of
POV shots) within the sequence of eating—an empty wooden bowl, that once
held the potatoes, is caught in the incoming tide, overturned, and submerged.
What kind of threat does this elusive pattern of rhetorical figuring portend,
these disappearances into the ground or underwater that are both seen and
unseen? And, what should we make of this rhetorical parallel to the “sub¬
merging” of the narrative?
At the beginning of the second reel, suddenly, time becomes specific—it is
Friday, 16 August (the date is crossed off a calendar)-and the two men are
finally identified in separate brief sequences. Yet, except for a single remark
on Ambroise’s loss of strength in one arm, the intertitles as well as the images
in the next several sequences continue to foreground the activity of gathering

503
narrative AVANT-GARDE and drying the kelp. Only in the evening, ironically, during the moment of
relaxation, does the conflict between the two resume. Jean-MAne comes upon
Ambroise (who is now experiencing some pain) soaking his hand in the water
bucket and yells at him for using the drinking water so foolishly. Ambroise
gets a small shallow pan for his wound, and an echo of the earlier wooden
bowl emerges:

CU of Ambroise’s hand in the pan water.

LS of the sea surf (slow motion).
CU of the pan nearly empty of water (its bottom is dirty and rough).

In this conjunction of the pure and the contaminated, of movement and still¬
ness, of presence and absence, the tension between a sense of harmony and
menace increases.
The next day Ambroise, now half-delirious from the infection, refuses to
work; and his companion quits him to work for Jean-Marie. While the inter-
titles chronicle the companion’s disgust with his “laziness” and the men’s
concern over the dangerously low level of drinking water (telling their side of
the story), the images shift into another mode altogether, focusing on Am¬
broise. As he sits alone like a maddened animal shivering in the hut, the
discourse slowly turns into a subjective experience of his hallucinations. The
sequence alternates MSs and MCUs of him with shots of the sea and coastal
rocks, as the latter change and multiply into shots of his diseased arm, a
lighthouse (from which a ring of light seems to expand and contract repeat¬
edly, filling and then fading from the image), clouds blotting out the sun,
the incoming surf, Jean-Marie’s face (upside down), bottle fragments in the
rocks, a clenched fist. These are edited into a brief sequence of rapid mon¬
tage—the shot lengths based musically on units of half seconds—that culmi¬
nates in three quick jump-cut shots of Ambroise’s hand shaking and clutching
and then a series of swaying and tilting shots that match cut his movement
to the apparent animation of the lighthouse. Despite its apparent subjectivity,
there is something about the rigorously organized rhythm and plasticity of
this sequence, its “laconic dryness,” to use Philippe Haudiquet’s phrase, that
keeps us at a distance from Ambroise’s experience.14 Again the discourse seems
intent on drawing together disparate images (now even more spatially and
temporally discontinuous), but this time even the sense of harmony of the
associative parallels becomes threatening. The imagined distant object of ap¬
peal—the lighthouse as a secular guardian of perception and protection—turns
into a projected image that doubles and mirrors the collapsing self.15
Initially, these shifts and discontinuities that mark the first third of Finis
Terrae seem puzzling. One wonders if they are calling attention to the narra¬
tive process itself in order to establish a reflexive play on narration similar to
that which characterized La Glace a trois faces. But the shift from Bannec to
Ouessant—just as the narrative conflict on the island approaches a climax
(Ambroise tries to set off alone in a boat and collapses on the beach while the
others silently pass him by to eat their lunch)—suggests something else. In
this sudden break lies an important contiguity. The first shot of Ouessant
includes a church spire in the distance (revealed in a slight boom camera
movement), and the second depicts its tolling bell (in slow motion). Repeated
several times in the sequence, the bell, of course, functions to bring the vil-

504
lagers together. But it also seems to respond, across the great expanse of sea finis TERRAE and
(emphasized in an intertitle), to Ambroise’s distress. It is as if his nightmare gardiens de phare
vision of the lighthouse has been transformed, in the ellipsis, into the keeper’s
sight (the hallucination is even echoed in a swaying dolly LS of the lighthouse)
and then the sound of the bell. The conjunction resembles the storm’s rising
and Madeleine’s awakening (which also sets off a tolling bell), in Usher, in
order to save Roderick from a condition of which his friend is ignorant. In
the ambiguously charged natural world of the island, the men’s isolation,
made dangerous by their silence and their blind disregard for one another, is
countered miraculously by a sense of community, communication, and mutual
concern on Ouessant. The horrors of solitude, as Pierre Leprohon puts it, are
answered by the solidarity of the people.16 But in its narrative juxtaposition,
is not the film also suggesting that subjectivity, and the concept of the indi¬
vidual, literally depends, for its health and very existence, on this larger com¬
munity? In Finis Terrae, then, the conjunction of the subjective and the om¬
niscient that Epstein had postulated nearly ten years before in Bonjour Cinema
seems to assume a new, more socially determined articulation.
From this point on in the film, the narrative gells into a long continuous
series of alternating sequences. The resolution of the conflict between Jean-
Marie and Ambroise is quickly resolved and subordinated to the focus on Jean-
Marie and Lesenin as, simultaneously, they depart from their separate islands
and edge out upon the sea toward one another. The climax of their encounter
is one of the simplest and most effective passages in any of Epstein’s films. Its
articulation depends on a series of sub-sequences, each of which is marked by
repetition and a different set of alternations. Shots of Jean-Marie and Ambroise
become slightly blurred, and a EIALS reveals white fog pools floating on the
sea. Then a number of quick tracking shots (alternating to the right and left)
of rocky outcroppings in the fog heighten the sense of danger, and an ELS
reveals the sailboat, surrounded by fog, coming forward in the distance. The
sequence shifts to Lesenin’s rowboat where a montage of MSs and MCUs de¬
scribes all four men rowing while they pass around a jug of water. These quick
shots (lasting about two seconds each) are match-cut to the forward and back¬
ward movement of the men and their oars within the frame. While the rhythm
heightens the suspense, it also describes the smoothness of their teamwork and
the ease with which they spell one another. As a LS of the rowboat includes a
speck on the horizon ahead, the sequence shifts again to an alternation based
on camera angle and distance. A LAMS of Jean-Marie, now rowing and turn¬
ing to look off to the right foreground, is intercut with a HALS of the rowboat
coming forward slowly (from the right) across the foggy sea surface. The rec¬
ognition comes in a marvelous series of shots that pushes this juxtaposition to
the extreme and then collapses it.
MCU of Jean-Marie looking off (to the right foreground) and calling.
LS of the rowboat, now in clear view, coming forward.
LAECU of Jean-Marie’s hands cupped at his open mouth.
LAMCU of a sailor and Lesenin, the latter pointing off to the left.
LAECU of Jean-Marie’s hands cupped at his open mouth.
HAELS of the rowboat (frame right) moving slowly to the left; the sailboat (frame
left) becomes faintly visible in the fog.
LAECU of Jean-Marie’s hands cupped at his open mouth.

505
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE HAELS of the boats; the rowboat (frame right) continues to move to the left.
CU (blurred) of the doctor calling and then listening.
LAECU of Jean-Marie calling.
CU of the doctor nodding, as if in reply and recognition.
FS of Jean-Marie in the sailboat, standing and waving his arms.
FS of Lesenin in the rowboat, standing and waving his arms.

Across the expanse of space—and the juxtaposition between shots the inti¬
mation of sound mediates, reducing difference to sameness, distance to close¬
ness.17 The sequence both echoes and transforms the sequence of Ambroise’s
desperate hallucination on Bannec. The doubled image of one sequence par¬
allels the doubled image of the other, but now ship mirrors ship and man
mirrors man in a common effort. Discord and menace have turned into a vision
of mysterious harmony.
The last reel of Finis Terrae closes off in a diminuendo that seems to confirm
this miracle. The final images edge into peaceful tableaux. There is a FS of a
hallway framing the room into which Ambroise is carried and where he sleeps,
with Jean-Marie dozing beside him. And then a LS of a doorway, where the
women gather quietly, protectively, in silhouette, to frame the kitchen area
where Lesenin pauses to eat and rest. But his rest is interrupted, in a curious
narrative shift. A boy comes for the doctor—an old man is ill on the other
end of the island—and they go off together. In the final shot, they are walking
up and over a grassy hill, silhouetted (in LALS) against a huge white sky.
This emphasis on Lesenin at the end suggests that, in this secular parable of
near-death and resurrection, the doctor plays a crucial mediating role. As a
figure of knowledge, power, and caritas, he exercises a measure of control over
nature and its “illnesses" and functions as a benevolent “father" who sacrifices
himself for the women (defined principally as mothers) and the young men
(who become little more than children). Is there something of Louis Pasteur,
the subject of Epstein’s first film, in this model modern hero?18 And does
Epstein see his own work as a filmmaker within the islanders’ culture as anal¬
ogous to the doctor’s—a mediation, in the face of sickness and death, that
reveals, in Epstein’s own words, “the angel in man like the butterfly in the
chrysalis’’?19
Yet this celebration of the doctor is not entirely persuasive. For the opti¬
mistic conclusion to Finis Terrae rests ultimately on the benevolence of the
sea. The mothers’ night vigil displaces the men’s struggles at sea in squall
conditions. Foggy shots of the turbulent surf alternate with shots of the two
women huddled together under a single shawl on the harbor cove’s rockface
(Ambroise’s mother even holds her right arm much as her son held his earlier).
The juxtaposition seems to favor the mothers when shots of the slowly revolv-
ing lighthouse beacon (echoing Ambroise’s hallucinations) are associated with
them. But the sequence concludes with mesmerizing ominousness—magnifi¬
cent slow-motion shots of huge waves crashing over the coastal rocks. The
miraculous emergence of the overcrowded rowboat in the dawn thus both
preserves the rhetorical emphasis of the recognition scene and seems to answer
the patterns of submerging" that were articulated in the early sequences of
the film. But the dark side" of nature’s mystery—and man’s—merely seems
in momentary abeyance. In the others of Epstein’s cycle of films set in Brit-

506
 FINIS TERRAE AND
GARDIENS DE PHARE

270. The mothers await their

sons near the end of Finis
terrae

tany—Mor-Vran (1930), L’Or des mers (1932), and Le Tempestaire (1947)—the

darkness of that mystery becomes more evident and almost overpowering.

Just as Finis Terrae was premiering at the L’Oeil de Paris, a second film set
in Brittany was nearing completion—Jean Gremillon’s second feature film,
Gardiens de phare (1929). Although similar to Epstein’s film in subject and
style, Gardiens de phare was very different in origin and production. The sce¬
nario was a literary adaptation, drawn from an existing play by Autier and
Cloquemont, a successful work in the Grand Guignol repertory.20 That Jacques
Feyder did the adaptation (and may have intended to direct it himself, before
he left to work in Hollywood) probably helped secure the film’s independent
financing. Despite Gremillon’s background in documentary filmmaking, much
of this film was shot, during the winter and spring of 1929, in Gaumont’s
Paris studio in simple decors designed by Andre Barsacq.21 Exteriors were shot
around Saint-Guenole on the Penmarch Peninsula in Brittany, probably in the
late summer of 1928 but perhaps also in the early summer of 1929 (sources
are unclear about this).22 Finally, the production enlisted a professional cast
to perform the major roles. When Gardiens de phare was ready for release,
through Films Armor, it premiered at the Cine Max-Finder, in late Septem¬
ber, 1929. Tout-Cinema (1930) suggests that the film may have been sonorized
for its exhibition, but no other reference source confirms this.23 In any case,
the only copies of the film that I have seen are silent.24
Much like Finis Terrae, Gardiens de phare narrates a story of illness on a
remote island. Instead of the former’s optimistic resolution, however, it ends
in a brutal, tragic death. The film opens as Yvon (Geymond Vital) and his
father (Fromet) leave the mainland for a month-long stay at the lighthouse on
Saint-Guenole. Yvon has just been wed to Marie (Genica Athanasiou) and is
reluctant to leave his young wife with her mother (Mme. Fontan). That day,
a neighbor by the name of Old Francois takes his dog to the local veterinarian
and discovers it has rabies. At the lighthouse, Yvon is bothered by a wound
on his right arm and tells his father that several days before, as he and Marie

507
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

271. Yvon (Geymond Vital)

and his father (Fromet) at the
lighthouse table in Gardiens de
phare (1929)

were walking among the sand dunes, Francois’s dog attacked them and bit
him. Drowsy but unable to eat or sleep, Yvon stands watch the first night
and fantasizes a reunion with Marie. The next day he is irritable and seems
ill, but he refuses to let his father send a distress signal. Several days later,
the dog is dead, and Marie and her mother learn of the rabies threat. A storm
has come up, making any rescue impossible; and that evening, as a ship
flounders off the coast, Yvon attacks his father before they can ignite the
lighthouse beacon. In their struggle, Yvon falls to his death.
Although slightly longer than Finis Terrae, Gardiens de phare seems shorter
and more consistently paced. In part, that comes from the scenario’s tight
dramatic structure which, quite unlike Gremillon’s first film, Maldone, moves
relentlessly toward the tragic climax. But its effectiveness also depends on
shifts and contrasts in the circulation of knowledge among the characters and
the spectator. The dog, for instance, first emerges from beneath a tarp in Old
Francois s cart, as Marie and her mother return home after Yvon’s departure.
Its snarling presence is enigmatic until we (and Francois) are told it is rabid.
So, when Yvon tells his father of the past attack, we know his danger (as they
do not) and we worry even more over their growing suspicions. But, because
Marie, too, has seen the dog, we half expect and hope that somehow she will
be informed of its rabidness in time. To our discomfort, however, the narrative
keeps her ignorant until the last minutes of the film. Father and son gradually
come to realize what we already know, and the film climaxes in a number of
ironic twists. The battered ship appears, but again we alone are informed of
its presence. Marie and her mother read the village mayor’s order to examine
all dog-attack victims (actually, a visiting pastor reads the announcement from

508
 FINIS TERRAE AND
GARDIENS DE PHARE

272. (left) Genica Athanasiou

as Marie in Gardiens de phare

273- (right) Yvon checks the

lighthouse beacon

a local newspaper), and they hasten to the cottage window, aghast to see the
lighthouse beacon unlit. Yvon’s father suddenly hears the ship’s distress signal,
but he is attacked before he can do anything about it. And when the beacon
finally comes on, it resolves the narrative with a contradictory signal. The
father realizes that he has killed his son. Marie and her mother rejoice, think¬
ing that all is well at the lighthouse. Appalled by this cruelly ironic gap, we
suddenly discover that even we do not know, with certainty, what has hap¬
pened to the ship. In this stunning, deftly crafted denouement, knowledge
and communication break down irreparably.
The irony is all the more apparent because of Georges Perinal’s marvelous
cinematography in the film.25 The interiors of the cottage are deeply shadowed
and strongly side-lit (as if from the hearth fire); those of the lighthouse focus
on the glass-enclosed beacon (which sometimes deforms the figures) and es¬
pecially the two circular rooms below it, connected by spiral stairs and lit
either by the revolving lamp (through the shadow of its blades) or by the
sunlight falling in a pointillist pattern on the walls. Although shot mostly
within the range of FS to CU, there is a strong sense of deep space to these
interior images. Low angle shots abound, sometimes interspersed with high
angle shots, and the frame often contains an object or part of a figure in focus
in the foreground with an integral connection to something or someone in
focus in the background. The bars of the spiral stairs are particularly promi¬
nent toward the end, in the entrapment of both Yvon and his father. This
deep space is even more pronounced in the exterior sequences. The opening,
in fact, establishes the concept almost immediately. After several LSs and ELSs
describing the rocky coast and village, a panning LS of a wave breaking into
white foam on the beach cuts to an enigmatic CU of a hand waving a white
handkerchief. After another panning LS, the contrast of long and close shots
is integrated within the frame of three striking shots that reveal indirectly
what is happening.

MS/ELS of an arm (right foreground) waving a handkerchief toward a land mass (left
background.

309
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE CU/ELS of the back of a woman’s head (frame left) as she waves her arm (frame right),
as the arm falls, it reveals a departing sailboat and dinghy (right background).
FS/ELS of a sail (frame left) and a man waving his arm (frame right) toward a land
mass (center background); the dinghy is visible behind the stern of the sailboat.
LAMS of two women looking off to the left foreground; the younger one on the left
waves.

This pattern is repeated when Yvon and his father reach the lighthouse, but
now the alternation includes LA shots of the island rock and the stairs to the
lighthouse as well as HA shots of the dinghy approaching a rock cove. As the
two men climb the stairs, Yvon pauses to look out at the departing sailboat
(in CU/ELS) and then joins his father (in a HAMS/LS and a reverse LALS).
Thereafter, in the lighthouse sequences, these extreme camera angles help
articulate not only Yvon’s delirium but his father’s fear as well as the conflict
that engulfs them.
Although Gardiens de phare lacks the complex patterns of rhetorical figuring
that characterize Epstein’s and others’ films, it does employ what Henri Agel
has called leitmotifs in a kind of musical composition.26 Perhaps the most
important of these is the recurrence of the rabid dog. Its introduction—pop¬
ping up almost like a puppet, in two dolly CUs—disrupts the smooth flow of
the opening sequences, and its blackness contrasts sharply, threateningly, with
the whiteness of the waving handkerchief. In Yvon’s story to his father, the
dog is again disruptive—a FS of the couple sitting quietly on a sand dune is
suddenly interrupted by a one-second shot of the dog running forward through
the dune grass and then by a half-second CU of it lunging forward. The attack
is described in rapid montage until Francois runs up, and Yvon and Marie (in
LAMCU) examine his arm. This eruption of the past into the present is then
repeated as the dog invades Yvon’s fantasy of Marie. Although expected, the
threat is even more frightening for its inevitability. It attacks now as a shadow
on the sand, as a snarling face (in multiple-exposed CU), and as a relentlessly
loping figure (in a slow motion HAFS backward dolly).27 The last times the
dog appears, the threat has changed. It is the day of the storm, and in the
veterinarian’s office the dog is quiet now (in ECU) behind bars. In the next
sequence, Yvon paces restlessly by the lighthouse stairs and, when he sits on
a step, he is unable to drink the cup of water he thirsts for. A single FS reveals
the dog lying dead in some straw (it is so “frostily” side-lit that the image
looks like a negative). Fade to a slightly blurred CU of Yvon’s head behind
the bars of the stairs as he asks, “And if one of us kills the other, Father?”28
If the diseased animal seems a simplistic figure of a horror inherent in nature,
its recurrence works effectively as a motif—as a fatalistic double of the hu-
man—infecting Yvon through the cross-cutting and presaging his end.
The clear-cut spatial-temporal continuity that marks Gardiens de phare dis¬
solves, at two crucial points, into a disorienting series of images that lead to
mysterious subjective interrelations. Yvon’s fantasy of Marie initiates this process
of dissolution. It begins with blurred shots of the revolving beacon, followed
by a quick montage of reverse CUs of Yvon (alternating his upward look from
right to left and vice versa). The room in which he sits is transformed by a
bubblelike pattern of lights drifting about the walls and floor. In an interpo¬
lated LS of a beach, Marie (dressed in her white wedding dress and traditional
conical hat) picks up a large conch shell and suddenly (in a simple cut) de-

510
scends the spiral stairs to circle around her husband. As she puts the shell to finis TERRAE and
her mouth (in CU), the sequence turns into a kind of shadow play—hands gardiens de phare
clasping against the beach sand and then the couple kissing. At this point the
dog’s shadow intervenes, and the sequence shifts into a montage of alternating
shots—the couple running on the beach, their hands clasping, and the mul¬
tiply-exposed dog’s face. At the end, shots of the dog alternate briefly with
shots of incoming waves (do we read them in conjunction—as a sign of inevi¬
tability—or in opposition?). When the shot of the mnning dog awakens Yvon,
he calls out, “Marie!”; and the sequence cuts to a LS of the kelp-drying racks
outside their cottage and then to a MCU of Marie turning in her bed and
looking off. The intertitle—the sound of her name—miraculously elides the
distance between them; but unlike similar sequences in Usher and Finis Terrae,
the poignant cross-cutting does not lead to an exchange. This is a world that
denies such magical correspondences and transformations.
The second instance of dissolution follows almost immediately, but this
time Yvon’s father is at its center. The older man has put on his son’s fur coat
when he replaced him on the night watch, and now he recalls (in three brief
shots) the story Yvon told him. It is as if the coat itself wrapped him in the
memories. The next morning, the father climbs up to the beacon and looks
out at the darkening sky and sea. He reimagines the departure from the main¬
land in a single image, and then his memory suddenly changes to the wedding
celebration of Yvon and Marie. The sequence begins with images punctuated
by fades and then shifts to a continuous montage as the wedding procession
comes out of the church (with its ringing tower bells) to dance in a circle on
the beach. MCUs and CUs of Yvon’s father are intercut throughout in such a
way that gradually his position becomes ambiguous—is he still on the light¬
house or watching on the beach? As the camera begins to pick up the move¬
ment of the dancers (a 360° pan left on Marie turns into a swish pan as the
dancers change direction), shots of Yvon abruptly intervene.

CU of Yvon’s father looking off right.

HALS of the frothy sea at the base of the lighthouse; in the lower left foreground,
Yvon gazes down from the catwalk.
LAMS (blurred) of Yvon looking down, framed by the lighthouse behind him.
MS swish pan on the dancers moving right.
CU of the father (but slightly behind him) as he looks off to the right and smiles.
HA wild camera shot of the sea and rocks below.
CU of the father suddenly turning, startled, to look off to the right foreground.
HAMS of Yvon (from behind) leaning over the edge of a railing, the frothy sea below
him.
CU of the father coming off and down (right foreground).

Initially, an omniscient interruption of the father’s reverie, the HA shot of

the sea suddenly turns subjective. It is as if Yvon’s stare has redirected his
father’s look, and the latter telepathically experiences the vertigo that has
seized his son. The delirium of the wedding celebration (echoing that of the
country dance in Maldone) is shockingly transformed into a delirium of mad¬
ness and death.
These patterns of cross-cutting culminate in a climax that, for rhythmic
intensity and emotional power, rivals any other done during the decade. And,
as in Usher and Finis Terrae, the intimation of sound is integral to its opera-

511
274. (left) The mainland
church and wedding
procession that Yvon’s father
conjures up in memory

275. (right) The cottage tion. Three different spaces alternate initially—the lighthouse (where Yvon
interior near the end of confronts his father in a series of tense shot/reverse shots and deep space MCU/
Gardiens de phare FSs), the cottage (where the two women and the pastor are positioned in a
number of diagonal and triangular compositions until the news of the rabies
threat separates them into individual MCUs), and the ship (where LSs give
way to closer shots of the captain and sailors drenched with spray). These
alternations end in three separate shots—of the women at the window (the
pastor is in CU in the background), the father on the stairs, and the captain
at the ship’s wheel as he gives the order, “Sound the siren!’’ Now the sequence
shifts quickly to shots of the siren blasts intercut with shots of the startled
father, and the sound seems to propel him up the stairs and, ironically, into
the conflict with Yvon. Father pushes son through a door and outside onto
the catwalk (in MS), and their struggle is alternately concealed and revealed
by the swinging door. A sudden shot of a circular whirling image and then
of waves on the rocks elides Yvon’s fall, and the father remains on the catwalk
(in MCU) with the door flapping behind him. Shots of the ship and its crew
return, but Yvon’s father dazedly reaches down to pick up his son’s shirt.
Again the siren blasts intervene (more insistently, in doubled and quadrupled
shots), and the old man puts his hands to his ears. For a moment, the siren
becomes a metaphorical extension of his own unbearable pain.29
In contrast to the Double Tempest sequence in Napoleon, this climactic
struggle ends in a tragic loss. Although Yvon’s father recovers himself enough
to climb the ladder to the beacon, on shore the women and the pastor misread
its illumination. The irony (doubled by the possibility of a displaced rejoicing
on the ship) deepens the poignancy of the final images:

CU of Yvon s shirt on a chair, the shadows of the beacon blades passing over it.

512
CU of the father’s face (tilted diagonally and lit strongly from the upper left); the LARGENT
shadows also pass over him as he cries.
CU of the shirt on the chair.

This alternation of light and shadow echoes the earliest images of Yvon in
that room as well as the representation of the father-and-son struggle (the
door’s concealing and revealing). And it resonates with the pattern of black/
white juxtapositions that have animated the film. Reversing the handkerchief s
sign of departure and promised return at the beginning, the simple image of
the shirt marks a profound sense of absence and permanent separation. In
contrast to the amazing grace of human and natural communion in Finis Ter-
rae, Gardiens de phare closes with an agonizing lack. The tragic death of a son
at the hands of a father either has terrible consequences—the possible destruc¬
tion of the ship at sea—or articulates an unexpected horror at the center of
things.

Napoleon provided Marcel L’Herbier an example of sorts for his last impor¬ L’Argent
tant film of the 1920s, L'Argent (1929). Choosing one of his idols, an historical
figure whom he admired and adored, Gance had made an impressive, yet
profoundly personal film. Could L’Herbier do likewise, but with something
that he hated, that he detested above all else?1 The subject he chose would be
one only too familiar to cineastes, one that had plagued him insidiously
throughout his career—money, or capital.2 L’Herbier found a context for his
hatred in Zola’s novel of the same title, about the 1868 crisis on the Paris
Stock Exchange. Instead of reconstructing French society during the Second
Empire, however, as some critics, particularly Andre Antoine, vociferously
wished he had done, L’Herbier updated the novel’s narrative to the present.3
He would respect the spirit of Zola—“money . . . it’s the dung that sustains
life’’—but he wanted to depict the ideological power of capital in contempo¬
rary terms.4 It would be omnipresent but also repressed. It would animate the
characters, marking their dialogue incessantly, but never once would it be
seen.5 As it turned out, this representation of effects—of luxury spaces and
devious, high-risk speculation—caught rather accurately, and fortuitously, the
condition of western capitalist society on the brink of the Great Depression.
LArgent was previewed for the critics, in early December, 1928, as a film
of 200 minutes, divided into two parts by a short intermission.6 Much to
L’Herbier’s surprise, when it opened at the Cine Max-Linder, on 9 January
1929, the film had been re-edited considerably and was reduced by more than
half an hour.7 This sabotage was the result of a personal feud between L’Her¬
bier and Jean Sapene, the head of Cineromans, a feud which apparently started
when an exchange of insults so enraged the patron that he tried to throttle
the filmmaker in his office. Despite pressure from the Societe des Auteurs as
well as the Paris film critics, Sapene refused to relent; and the truncated
version went into general release in April, 1929.8 Although it cost nearly five
million francs, LArgent seems to have done well commercially, especially in
Germany;9 but its critical reception was mixed, to say the least. The judgment
that persisted for almost forty years, in fact, was that the film represented

513
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE L’Herbier’s “cold cerebrality to a fault (Jeanne and Ford) it was the ulti¬
mate expression of vanity in the midst of falsehood (Mitry), a romantic
intrigue, in luxurious modern decors . . . where portable cameras enacted a
kind of ritual dance ...” (Sadoul).10 However, now that the Archives du
Film at Bois d’Arcy (with L’Herbier’s assistance) has reconstructed the original
version of the film and LAvant-Scene du cinema has published the complete
decoupage (1 June 1978), our critical sense of UArgent is changing radically.11
Noel Burch, who first championed a reevaluation of L’Herbier’s work, has
even called it “an absolute masterpiece, one of the great films in cinema his¬
tory, and, at least, the most modern of all the silent films. . . .”12
Unlike L’lnhumaine, L’Argent offers more than a bass clef upon which the
filmmaker can play with plastic harmonies and ultimately celebrate the cine¬
matic apparatus. This is one of the few French films of the 1920s to explicitly
represent the capitalist economic system that determines its actual production.
Part of the film’s distinctiveness, therefore, comes from the way that system
and the conflicts inherent therein are represented—in other words, how the
film confronts and critiques advanced capitalist society. Eschewing a straight¬
forward political or ideological analysis (which was not L’Herbier’s forte), the
film instead engages in a rhetorical critique, in a subversion of narrative and
discursive strategies. In the articulation of its narrative, compared to Feu Ma¬
thias Pascal, for instance, L’Argent does much more than synthesize current
narrative avant-garde film practice. Here, as Burch has argued, there is a more
or less systematic pattern of ruptures or breaks with the conventions of the
diegetic process in narrative film discourse,13 especially within the context of
the modern studio spectacular genre. Furthermore, the film deploys a pattern
of rhetorical figuring that links the sexual and the economic through fetishi-
zation and that depends, to some degree, on reflexivity. These interrelated
disruptions and disturbances—putting in question both the mode of represen¬
tation and what is represented—make LArgent perhaps as subversive and/or
experimental as La Glace a trois faces, La Passion de Jeanne dArc, La Coquille et
le clergyman, or Un Chien andalou.
The narrative of LArgent seems to focus on Nicolas Saccard (Pierre Alcover),
a powerful financier consumed by the desire to accumulate more capital than
his competitors. In the beginning, Saccard is humiliated by his chief rival,
Alphonse Gunderman (Alfred Abel), when some mysterious maneuvering at
the Bourse, promulgated by Massias (Mihalesco) and La Mechain (Yvette Guil-
bert), nearly undermines his Banque Universelle. To recoup his iosses, Sac¬
card, together with his secretary Mazaud (Antonin Artaud) and the journalist
Huret (Jules Berry in debut), craftily concocts a scheme that involves the
French aviator hero, Jacques Hamelin (Henry Victor), in a daring solo flight
from Paris to Cayenne, French Guyana, where the financier has extensive oil¬
field holdings. Hamelin’s young wife Line (Mary Glory in debut) helps secure
his unwitting agreement after Saccard plays upon her fascination for him and
the trappings of wealth. According to plan, when Hamelin’s plane is reported
(falsely) to have crashed, Saccard manipulates the sale of his own bank’s stock
at the Bourse. His attempt to blackmail Line into silence fails, however, and
she comes close to shooting him at his celebration party. Shamed by her
complicity and encouraged by Saccard’s former mistress (now Gunderman’s
ally), the enigmatic Baroness Sandorf (Brigitte Helm), Line initiates a stock-

514
selling spree that collapses his empire and leads to his arrest, as well as her L’ARGENT
husband’s. In the ensuing trial, Gunderman discreetly intervenes to free Ham-
elin, and Saccard alone goes unrepentant to prison.
In its broad outlines, this narrative seems a conventional enough indictment
of ambition and overreaching. Saccard is a “bad’’ capitalist whose appetite
exceeds all bounds—he is vulgar, devious, ruthless, and immoral. Ultimately,
he sacrifices everything to his desire for Vargent. Prominent on his desk in the
beginning sequences is a black statuette of Napoleon (the ironic reverse of
Gance’s hero), as if to invoke the suspect grandeur of Saccard’s passion and
ambition. And Alcover’s stocky, solid physique, together with his heavy, round,
yet hatchet-featured face, seem to fulfill our expectations of the stereotypical
villain. But the film undermines such an easy reading in several ways. The
distribution of character traits makes Saccard’s antagonist no less villainous
than he. Alfred Abel turns Gunderman into a tall, thin, tight-lipped elderly
gentleman whose presence exudes a sinister calm. Introduced at breakfast, he
cradles a white Pomeranian (which rarely leaves his arms throughout the film)
and daintily pecks at a soft-boiled egg. His cold, sterile, repressive manner
contrasts markedly with Saccard’s impulsive and energetic behavior. For all
his deceptive rapaciousness, Saccard, of the two, is the much more appealing
figure. Furthermore, despite these differences, Gunderman is no less a schemer
in his speculations. He uses the Hamelins for his own ends, for instance, just
as his rival does. Perhaps most important of all, as Burch notes, is the role of
deus ex machina which the film allows Gunderman to play.14 By acquiring the
majority of stock in the Banque Universelle, he can simply dismiss the charges
against Hamelin and allow the case against Saccard to proceed. In effect, the
court is displaced by the “good’’ capitalist as a compassionate and supposedly
dispassionate judge.
The relationship between these two rival capitalists, consequently, raises
questions about the film’s apparent happy ending. Will Jacques Hamelin’s
genius be able to fulfill itself under the tutelage of a “good master,’’ as one
critic wrote,15 or has he been duped again? Does justice really triumph in
Saccard’s imprisonment or is it irreparably compromised by the fact that he
will be released in six months and, even more, by the demonstration of Gun-
derman’s power? If Gunderman is as representative as Saccard, if not more so,
of the capitalist system of speculation and accumulation, then the fall of the
lesser of the two leaves that system unchallenged and intact. With this excep¬
tion. By not completely repressing the story of Gunderman’s maneuverings,
in favor of exposing Saccard’s, the narrative unmasks the ideological basis of
its repression and thus challenges that system indirectly from within.
If the conflict between Saccard and Gunderman seems primary to L’Argent,
there is a second story that parallels and intersects with it—the story of Jacques
and Line Hamelin. Their story comes into conflict with the other in two ways.
First is the conflict, in L’Herbier’s terms, between “the materiality of capital
and the power of heroism.’’16 Jacques is the modern Romantic hero par excel¬
lence—the lone adventurer who challenges the elements and the unknown
with his flying machines.17 Dangerous solo flights test his mettle, as acts of
purification; and his inventions contribute to that twentieth-century ideal,
technological progress. But he has little chance of exercising his heroic nature
without recourse to money. Out of necessity, and love for Line, Jacques ac-

515
276. (left) A publicity photo
of Saccard (Pierre Alcover)
and Mazaud (Antonin Artaud)
in L'Argent (1929)

277. (right) Gunderman cepts an association with Saccard in the world of high finance and speculation
(Alfred Abel) and Massias that he scorns. As if in punishment, he is nearly blinded at the end of his
(Mihalesco) flight to Guyana (he does lose an eye); and, as a consequence, he signs over
financial responsibility for his wife to Saccard. Although prison eludes him,
Gunderman’s generosity hardly frees him from a compromised existence. In
the end, Jacques is not unlike Baudelaire’s albatross—“Exiled to the ground
amid the jeering pack.’’ Furthermore, because of L’Herbier’s personal com¬
mitment to the film, there is every reason to believe that we are to assume an
analogy here between the aviator hero and the filmmaker as artist. Jacques’s
uneasy, compromised relation to the world of finance parallels that of the
narrative avant-garde filmmaker in the French film industry. Fike Daedulus
or, more precisely, Icarus, neither can escape the labyrinth of capitalist spec¬
ulation that supports their efforts.
The second conflict involving the Hamelins is what L’Herbier called “life
versus capital’’ or, more precisely, love versus money.18 Jacques and Fine are
introduced as a rather stereotypical romantic couple—the sentimental hero and
heroine of a modern fairy tale. Both are flawed, however (the one by his love,
the other by her newly aroused desires); and both thus play naively into Sac¬
card s hands. As their status and integrity are compromised, the narrative sets
up corresponding expectations—for Saccard’s fall and the couple’s reconcilia¬
tion and restoration. The way this is articulated, however, is through an ironic
repetition. The couple now plays even more naively into Gunderman and
Sandorfs hands. It is these two speculators, after all, who restore the Hamelins
by using them to eliminate their rival. Furthermore, the film undermines the

516
final image of the reunited lovers. They may leave the courtroom arm in arm, L’ARGENT
but in the background of a shot that frames them between the contented
foreground figures of Sandorf and La Mechain. Thus is the concept of the
romantic couple, as well as the ideal of the hero, compromised and questioned,
even more so than in L’Herbier’s earlier Rose-France and Feu Mathias Rascal.
The interrelation of these two stories depends primarily on the relationship
between Line and Saccard, and here the film develops a fascinating rhetorical
nexus of economic and sexual connections. The introduction of Line and Jacques
Hamelin establishes a schematic juxtaposition against which her affair with
Saccard will play off. They are seated before a large map, their hands (in CU)
tracing the line of a flight he must make—for money to support them. After
she tells him she is afraid of the risk he is taking, the sequence closes by
alternating MCUs of them kissing (their heads revolve in the frame, in the
manner of the late Hitchcock) with MCUs of their clasped hands slipping off
the map. This rhetorical figure of romance contrasts sharply with the voyeur¬
istic POV shots which link Line and Saccard. They first see one another at the
Restaurant Champy where Huret arranges the meeting that will lead to the
Guyana flight scheme. Sitting at a separate table, Saccard notices Line in a
sequence that alternates his steady, smiling gaze with shots that tilt down to
her legs under the table, show her kicking Jacques lightly, and then tilt up
to reveal her eyes glancing down. When she finally returns his look, only to
drop her eyes and lift them again, Saccard gazes knowingly at her. This pat¬
tern of POV shots is repeated, with a difference, when Saccard comes to the
Hamelin apartment to consider the Guyana flight plans. There, for a brief
moment, they are alone together, sitting across from one another over a low
table of maps. Line crosses the room to offer him a drink and cigarette, as he
watches her intently. Returning, she stumbles slightly—cut to a MS of her
legs (she smoothes a rough spot in the carpet), a shot which then tracks her
legs to the table and tilts up to show Saccard accepting the drink. When he
leans forward (almost leeringly) to refuse the cigarette and take out his own
cigar, Line goes back across the room; and Saccard smiles at the MS of her
legs as she pauses again to tap the carpet. Here, while revealing her interest
in better room furnishings, Line becomes both the fetishized object of Sac-
card’s gaze and the servant of his appetite (soon she will deliver Jacques to
him); and his position is emphasized at the beginning of the scene, by the
way his hands are placed on the map they have been examining.
To this figure of fetishization another is added that begins to epitomize
Line’s function and also raise questions about the spectator’s position with
respect to her. Immediately after the young couple’s introduction, Line and
Jacques are described against a window. Isolated in MCU, Line looks at the
reflection of herself in a wall mirror, and her image seems doubly inscribed in
glass. Transfixed by her own self-image, she turns to cajole Jacques into ac¬
cepting Huret’s offer. Later, at a stockholder’s meeting (where Saccard pro¬
poses Jacques for a vice-presidency in his bank), this image returns with a
vengeance. Again Line has persuaded her husband to accept the financier’s
scheme, and they watch the proceedings from behind a glass door. When
Saccard announces the condition of Jacques’s acceptance—“He will remain an
aviator and embark on a long-distance flight’’—her shock and pain are regis¬
tered in an isolated MCU, and her hand reaches out to touch the glass (the

517
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

278. Line (Mary Glory)

screen?). The gesture, curiously, poignantly, suggests a character entrapped as

an image. A short while later, the image returns once more, to be circum¬
scribed within Saccard’s gaze. Line has left the banquet hall at the bank to
look through the windows of an upper-story office, fascinated by the crowds
gathered at night on the Place de l’Opera to hear the news of Jacques’s flight.
The sequence initially alternates shots of Saccard at the banquet, MSs and CUs
of Line (again pressed to the glass), and panoramas of the people in the street.
When Saccard discovers her, he is mesmerized by her thinly clad figure half
revealed in the light that streams through the glass. A series of rapid tracking
shots of the crowd seems to impel him across the room and then prompt him
to caress her bare shoulder. The visual energy of the camera movement in
conjunction with the crowds’ excitement (generated by Jacques’s heroism and
Saccard’s capital) seem to arouse and charge his desire.19 When Line bursts
into laughter and applause, this climax neatly masks and delays the expected
seduction and speculation coup.
The patina of romance briefly surrounds these two. But it depends on Line’s
ignorance—the film has her sleep through the radio report of Jacques’s plane
crash, audaciously intercutting fragments of the news with shots of her dream¬
ing, smiling face. When she does learn of it, Line rushes to Saccard’s office
and, in quick succession, discovers that Jacques is alive and that they have
gained a fortune. Saccard has restored her husband, with interest. She collapses
in a chair—out of joy, amazement, and horror—and lets him kneel chival¬
rously before her and take her hand. When Saccard puts his lips to her fingers
and smiles in surprise, she ambiguously caresses his other hand. The figure of
romance returns, but as the sign of a very different kind of coupling, ironically
juxtaposed to the sequence of Jacques going blind in the tropics. This ro¬
mance, of course, is a momentary illusion that masks their real relation. Hav¬
ing fed his desires, Line is rewarded—and kept as “The patron’s new con¬
quest. The next time she appears, she has a chic new outfit, and Saccard
apparently has arranged her move into a larger apartment. There he gives her
a bracelet (costing 125,000 francs) as well as a checkbook drawn on his ac¬
count. But his attention is caught by one of Line’s slips which is draped over

518
a suitcase. In an alternation of shots, Saccard stares at the silken garment, L’ARGENT
slowly caresses it, and a superimposition dissolves in of her reclining nude
figure.20 This unusually explicit fetishizing condenses his attitude toward woman
and capital—the touch of possession and mastery “slips” over an imagined
body.21 When Saccard later returns to Line’s apartment, he tries again to
seduce her—in a rapid montage of his hands pawing her twisting body—and
ends up kneeling to kiss the hem of her dress. But she resists him now, racing
off (in a fast forward dolly) through several rooms to open the front door; and
their final confrontation comes at his celebration party. There Line appears for
the last time as a figure reflected in glass, the object of contention between
Saccard and the intervening character of the Baroness Sandorf.
Sandorf performs an interesting function in this nexus of relations.22 For all
their striking differences (the one, a childishly naive brunette; the other, a
coolly sensual blonde, sleekly costumed and coiffured), she acts as a double
for the younger woman—a role that confirms Line’s change of masters and her
subservience to Gunderman. Sandorfs first appearance in the film comes im¬
mediately after Saccard’s initial financial loss. It is his image of her—a single
memory shot of her stretched out on a couch receiving the gift of a bracelet
from him. This figure of the mistress will be echoed later when Line assumes
her position. The two women are implicitly paralleled in a brief series of shots
that follow the Banque Universelle banquet and the Place de l’Opera celebra¬
tion. The first shot is rather ambiguous—it begins on a CU of the front page
of Le Matin falling from someone’s hand, rack focuses to reveal a white line
drawing of a nude couple on glass (echoing the previous glass images of Line
and pointing ahead to Saccard’s fetishizing of her slip), and then pans slightly
to include Sandorf (in MS) as she leans back seductively on a couch. Instead
of an eyeline-match shot of the person holding the paper, the next shot is a
MCU of Line, her hair spread out on a pillow, dozing on a couch in her
apartment. The third shot returns to Sandorf as she smiles (as if in response
to a statement or look) and moves toward a phone built into the back wall,
on which the shadows of aquarium fish drift about. A fade to Saccard dozing
at his office desk, newspapers and telephones (plus a small statue of a
hippopotamus) spread out before him, suggests that the unseen person in
Sandorfs apartment is none other than Gunderman.23 In this play of “jungle”
spaces, of looks (unidentified and deflected), of fetishized women, of conscious¬
ness and unconsciousness, the positions of these four characters are succinctly
defined. Controlled by an off-screen presence, Sandorf, through her glance,
seems to control the sleeping Line. How will this doubled and deceptive
seeing/desiring/knowing come into conflict with that of Saccard?
This pattern of doubling and difference, of economic and sexual condensa¬
tion, comes to a climax in the second half of the film. The stage is set in the
sequence where Saccard confronts Sandorf in the stylized jungle luxury of her
apartment. It opens on a MCU of a heavily jewelled hand and arm (Sandorf s,
of course) taking up a deck of cards on a casino table. While some of her
friends engross themselves in a card game, setting up the context of high risk
gambling, Sandorf goes to talk with Saccard in an adjacent sunken room.
There, another related context—“a decor open to variations of fraudulent sex¬
uality”—is set up by several prominent zebra-skinned couches and the shadows
of fish (just off camera) that drift about the walls.24 As he kisses her hand,

519
279- (left) A publicity photo
of Saccard and Sandorf
(Brigitte Helm) in her
apartment

280. (right) One of Lazare Saccard eyes the new bracelet Sandorf flaunts before him and soon discovers
Meerson and Andre Barsacq’s
that she is now working for Gunderman (confirming his presence in the earlier
set decors for the Banque
Universelle in L'Argent sequence). His reaction is swift and brutal—he moves to strangle her. The
action is choreographed almost sensuously around the two couches—in three
different shifts of character position (depending on who is standing over whom),
several fast tracks, and a short burst of rapid montage—with interpolated shots
of the cardplayers’ shadows on the ceiling. In this highly metaphorical space,
this jungle clearing of combat, Saccard’s revenge is thwarted by his fear of
scandal—the other “players” may see and recognize him. In the very next
sequence, Line becomes the object of a similar attack when Saccard tries to
seduce her. There the space lacks almost any decor—it is Line who acts like a
frightened mad animal—but Saccard is thwarted by his own sudden compas¬
sion for her.
By the time of the celebration party, Sandorf has visited Line, discovered
her knowledge of Saccard’s “grave irregularities,” and won her confidence. At
the party, Line appears in a sort of waiting room as a still figure in a wall
mirror, pointedly associated with a small statue of a child (a cupid?) grasping
a dolphin. Sandorf and Saccard alternate going to see this nearly immobile
femme de glace, whose representation seems to sum up, metaphorically, her

520
relation to him.25 First Sandorf, also as a reflection, approaches her, hesitantly, L’ARGENT
and withdraws. Then Saccard enters, and they struggle over the check that
will pay off her debts and, reciprocally, demand a different kind of repayment.
As he forceably kisses her, the shot is framed in such a way that the statue
blocks Line from view, displaces her, in fact—in a perverse culmination of his
fetishizing. Still she resists, and Saccard retreats into the main room where
the legs of several women dancers are intercut ironically with his movements.
By now Line has drawn a revolver from her purse and waits by the statue,
driven to the point of accepting her own destruction if only she can destroy
Saccard and the grip he has on her. It is Sandorf who sees this change in Line
but who realizes that she and Gunderman can gain more from Saccard if he is
kept alive and in ignorance. When he next appears before Line, Sandorf is
there to control the reverberations of this mirror image, suppressing the
threatened gunshot for a later, more damaging (and profitable) discharge.
Sandorf s shift of allegiance, from Saccard to Gunderman, is now repeated
by Line. As a result of this maneuvering, Line goes to meet Gunderman, in a
circular room whose entire wall length is covered by a world map—as if the
earth itself had been turned inside out. There she divulges information about
Jacques’s discoveries in Guyana and his inventions—in exchange for his free¬
dom. This image of two bargaining figures before a gigantic enclosing map of
the world stands in marked contrast to the initial romantic shots of Jacques
and Line. When Gunderman escorts her to an invisible door in the wall, they
vanish, one after the other, into his “world."
If L'Argent disrupts and throws into question the conventional expectations
of its narrative (along with their ideological bases), if it deploys a complex
pattern of rhetorical figuring that deliberately borders on the perverse, it also
seems to call attention, to the process of its own “writing," to the diegetic
process of its discourse. Although perhaps not always consistent or systematic,
these “stylistic" breaks with convention occur in several interrelated ways. One
immediately recognizable feature of the film (particularly for a work based on
Zola) is the way the mise-en-scene, together with lens choices and camera
placements, undermines the usual appeal to verisimilitude.26
Decors in the genre of the modern studio spectacular tended to be large,
but those in L’Argent are positively immense, even monumental.27 Part of this
effect is due to the actual locations selected—the central chamber of the Bourse
(rented out to L’Herbier and his 1,500 actors and over a dozen cameramen for
the three-day Pentecost holiday) and the Place de l’Opera (specially lighted for
one long night of shooting).28 But it also depends on the studio sets con¬
structed at Studios Francoeur by Lazare Meerson and Andre Barsacq—the huge
room in his house which Saccard makes over for the celebration party, the
prison corridor with its “Piranesi-like perspectives,”29 and especially the in¬
terior of the Banque Universalle which, one critic argued (unconscious of his
aptness), might just as well be “a department store."30 Most of these spaces
have smooth, polished surfaces and are streamlined to the point of exhibiting
little more than walls, ceilings, and floors. So upset was one critic by the stark
simplicity of Saccard’s party, for instance, that he complained about the lack
of a buffet for the guests!31
Given the deliberate immensity of these decors, what next strikes one is
how they are transformed by an uncommon dynamism. Some of that dyna-

521
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

281. A high angle long shot

from the Bourse sequence

mism come from the secondary characters that continually traverse the frame.32
Crowds throng the Bourse, the Banque Universelle, the Restaurant Champy,
the Bourget airport, the Place de l’Opera, and Saccard’s party—all of them
driven here and there by a passion for money and status. In order to accentuate
their every movement, L’Herbier had Jules Kruger film many of these crowd
sequences in HA and LA shots. This is particularly evident when Saccard’s
clients panic in his bank and when the stock prices twice change radically at
the Bourse. L’Herbier himself described his crowds as “pygmies who, driven
by their desire, teem as in an immense anthill.’’33 That dynamism also de¬
pends, somewhat like that in Maldone and Gardiens de phare, on a deep-space
mise-en-scene that juxtaposes characters and/or parts of the decor.34 The
Banque Universelle, for example, is usually described in HALSs, some of
which include, in the foreground, a section of the balcony outside Saccard’s
office, an office typewriter, or the top of the tall bank-teller windows. In other
HA shots, characters in the foreground are set off from those in the back¬
ground or vice versa—as in the confrontation between Gunderman’s spy, Sol¬
omon Massias, and the ineffectual Baron Defrance (Pierre Juvenet) in the open¬
ing sequence or in the clash between Saccard and his bank clients (after his
first loss to Gunderman). Kruger accentuates this deep-space mise-en-scene
even more by often resorting to wide angle lenses, including the brachyscope
lens used for Napoleon.35 This combination of stylized space and movement
produces a world that complements perfectly the narrative conflict between
the larger-than-life capitalists.
What most distinguishes L'Argent, however, is another kind of dynamism—
what Burch has called “a mobile camera strategy absolutely without precedent,

522
/
quantitatively, certainly, but especially qualitatively.”36 At first, one may be L’ARGENT
struck, as in Napoleon, by the virtuosity of the camera movements. At the
Bourse and the Banque Universelle, for instance, cameramen were strapped to
low-slung carts and pushed or pulled rapidly among and alongside the crowds.
At Saccard’s party, camera and operator glided back and forth over the per¬
formers and guests on a platform suspended from the ceiling. Finally, at the
moment of Jacques Hamelin’s departure, the frenzied activity at the Bourse
was recorded by an automatic camera descending on a cable from the dome
toward the central bargaining ring. All these Jean Dreville has documented
in detail in his exquisite short film, Autour de L’Argent (1928). Yet this vir¬
tuosity alone hardly suffices to mark the film off from others in the late 1920s.
What is peculiar to L Argent is the high visibility of these camera movements
and the ambiguity of their function. That visibility depends less on their
frequency and the extent of their duration—Burch has estimated that only 20
percent of the shots actually include some movement of the apparatus37—than
on when and how they occur.
The opening sequences of the film offer a good range of its mobile camera
strategies and effects. Some of the camera movements here do fall within the
conventions of narrative film discourse. Several tracks and dollies, for instance,
simply describe Saccard’s movement from the iron gates surrounding the Bourse
(which already seem to imprison him) to the entrance of the Restaurant Champy.
Many others deviate from convention, however, some to the point of estab¬
lishing alternatives to a strictly spatial-temporal continuity. The back-to-back
sequences describing Saccard’s and then Gunderman’s offices, for instance, are
marked by different kinds of camera movement. In the one, there are short
dollies out and in, along with combination pan-tracks; in the other, a series
of smooth forward dollies continually follow a servant’s progress toward Gun-
derman. Encoded here are a restless, anxious energy juxtaposed to a placid,
undisturbed command. Another kind of structural difference marks the de¬
scription of the Bourse area where Massias challenges Defrance for control of
one of Saccard’s subsidiaries. The second shot of the sequence dollies forward
up the aisle, from a LS of the hall to a FS of Defrance and several associates
at a table. The second-to-last shot of the sequence repeats the movement, but
at a much more rapid pace, leading to the climactic FS of Massias as he votes
against Defrance’s motion. This repetition and startlingly abrupt shift acts
very much in the manner of a musical closure. Finally, instead of adjusting to
the movement of characters, in order to reposition them in the frame, here
the camera itself does the repositioning. The most unusual instance of this
occurs in Gunderman’s office. In the background of one LS (just before he
reaches the financier), the servant moves across the room (from left to right)
as the camera tracks slowly left (while also panning slightly to the right), in
order to produce a strangely drifting yet anchored space that accentuates his
movement. A half-dozen shots later, Massias stands (in FS) in the circular map
room as the camera performs a 180° track around him to reveal a servant
opening the invisible door in the wall, through which he disappears. The
world literally seems to revolve around him—at Gunderman’s command, we
discover by the end. In LArgent, largely because of these unusual camera
movements, space oscillates uncannily between the fixed and the fluid.
These mobile camera strategies, together with some unconventional editing

523
NARRATIVE AVANT-GARDE

282. A production photo of

Mihalesco and Jules Kruger in
Gunderman’s circular map
room

patterns, produce a particularly effective choreography of space and movement

in two very different sequences. The first occurs just after Saccard has decided
to go ahead with the Hamelin flight scheme. It begins with a forward dolly
(matching the backward dolly on Saccard, as he leaves his office at the end of
the previous sequence) from a LS of Gunderman’s office to a HAFS of a rapa¬
cious-looking Sandorf seated across from him at his desk. The matching dollies
quickly set us up for a confrontation. That confrontation is played out, how¬
ever, in a spacious corridor adjacent to the office, aptly covered by a marble
floor of black-and-white squares. The initial LS of this space positions Saccard
(in FS, frame center left, with his back to the camera) on the edge of a couple
of steps leading off and down in the foreground. A servant comes from across
the floor to greet him while another crosses from right to left to join a fourth
man seated in the left background. The right-angled direction of these move¬
ments act as a figural prelude to the “dance” that ensues.

FS/LS of the same space. As Gunderman and Sandorf come through a door in the
right background, the camera dollies in to a closer shot of Saccard and the man
who has greeted him. Simultaneously, Gunderman stops in the center background;
Sandorf comes forward on the right; on the left Saccard starts to walk toward
Gunderman; the man exits toward the lower right foreground. As Sandorf and
Saccard pass one another, he turns to glance at her.
FS of Sandorf and Saccard passing one another; she takes a few steps to the left and
stops, turning her back to the camera, and gazes back to the right, while Saccard
continues walking and exits frame right. Sandorf stands looking for a moment, and
then the two previously seated men cross the frame from right to left in the back¬
ground.
FS/LS of Sandorf (frame right) watching Saccard join Gunderman (in the center back¬
ground). She sidles across the frame from right to left and stops, continuing to
watch the two men who move toward the door in the right background.
MS of Sandorf (frame right) gazing off right. As a bearded man enters from the lower
area in the left background, the camera dollies out to a FS of him meeting a second
man on the steps (frame left). Sandorf then turns and flounces off from right to
left, exiting behind the two men, in the left background.

524
The camera movements that begin and end this series of shots seem to mark LARGENT
off a shift in attention from Saccard to Sandorf. Yet each movement, though
focused on the still figure in the foreground, is prompted by a movement in
the background—either Gunderman’s or that of one of his assistants (the bearded
man). Sandorfs surprise and her pause to wonder about Saccard’s intentions is
also strangely accentuated by the 90° shift in camera position that describes a
180° rotation of her body and glance (from front to back, from left to right).
And in each of the last three shots, she moves laterally across the frame from
right to left, her pauses disrupted by the movement of the camera as well as
by that of pairs of men. Thus does a simple crossing of paths and an exchange
of looks become a serial melody of movement and a game of counters or chess
pieces, all within the context of Gunderman’s “stage.”
The second sequence comes at the moment of Jacques Hamelin’s departure,
near the conclusion of the first half of the film. Here, LArgent’s deviation from
conventional film discourse is complemented and briefly extended by sound.
The sequence is predicated on the counterpoint of cross-cutting, a pattern of
editing that is quite prominent in the film. What is peculiar about this in¬
stance, however, is that the relations between shots work primarily according
to a metaphorical1 plan.38 In effect, the sequence operates much like the se¬
quence of Einar’s supposed death in L’lnhumaine or the Double Tempest in
Napoleon. It begins by alternating shots of the hectic trading at the Bourse,
Jacques’s plane taking off, and Line again standing at a window (in the upper
story office at Bourget). This alternation is “the central pivot” of the film,
according to L’Herbier—“the airplane which races into the sky after a miracle
and the spectators below who bet on that miracle.”39 And Line, pressed against
the glass (as if mirroring us) is caught between them. At the precise moment
of takeoff, the sequence intercuts shots of the plane’s ascent with aerial shots
plunging dizzily toward the Bourse bargaining ring. In these juxtaposed
movements, the mass tumult of speculation seems to threaten Jacques’s flight—
to drag it down—through a literal “montage of attractions.”40 In the original
screening, moreover, this attraction was emphasized by sound recordings of
“the crowd noises at the Bourse and the motorized roar of the plane.”41 Instead
of being kept distinct, by synchronizing them according to the alternation of
shots, these sounds were overlaid one on top of the other, blurring their
differences, in one continuous simultaneous flux. Although nowhere near ex¬
emplifying the contrapuntal use of sound advocated by Eisenstein, Pudovkin,
and Alexandrov (in 1928),42 this brief segment of image-sound montage in
LArgent is one of the earliest practices of something other than a simple
“naturalistic” synchronization.

As an instance of LArgent’s originality, Noel Burch has argued that the

singularity of its camera movements lies principally in “their arbitrariness.”43
By operating as a systematic “intervention” (because visible and artificial), they
function “to justify the arbitrary, to critique the ‘naturalness’ ” of narrative
film discourse as standardized, particularly in American filmsA4 There is no
doubt of the latter. But to conceive of the arbitrary as the opposite of the
conventional seems a bit simplistic—a point which Burch himself may now
admit. Besides, it would seem to give primacy, implicitly, to the hegemony
of the American cinema. Consequently, although the camera movements and

525
narrative AVANT-GARDE editing patterns in L Argent may seem arbitrary in the context of a conven¬
tional film discourse, it seems to me that one should stress instead their in¬
tegral function as part of an alternate system—or systems—of film “writing”
as developed by the French narrative avant-garde. Even those instances that
seem most arbitrary (and even incompetent) in the film—the joining of stable
shots, each of which concludes with a slight jarring camera movement—are
repeated with a consistency that leads one to accept them as an alternate
system of continuity. Cumulatively, all of these patterns foreground the film’s
discursive process of signification in a way that reflects on the narrative and
its articulation. As Burch avers, echoing Roland Barthes, the pleasure of this
text was, and still remains, impure.45

526
“Is that the end of the story?" asked Christopher Robin. “That’s the end of that one. Afterword
There are others. ”
—A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh (1926)

This space is usually reserved for a summary statement or closing speech.

Here, the writer, and especially the historian, takes stock of his findings and
rehearses once more the main lines of his narrative, his analyses and argu¬
ments. His last persuasive act often depends on the strategy of recapitulating,
simplifying, and thus overdetermining his work’s coherence. Instead, I would
like to offer a kind of blueprint for further work. Let me explore, if only
briefly, several areas of activity, sets of questions, and possible narratives, all
involving the French cinema (1915-1929), that demand to be taken up as the
subjects of further research and analysis. And in the process, let me lay out
the assumptions of an autocritique.
One thing this book has done is to point up the need for further research
on the technological base and industrial organization of the French cinema
during this period. There is a surprising lack of basic information on the
development and impact of film technology in France. Was the old Pathe
camera, for instance, so widely used throughout the 1910s as to merit the
claim that every cameraman (almost anywhere in the world) began his career
with one? Were the Eclair and Debrie cameras really competitive with, say,
the Bell and Howell cameras in the 1920s? And if so, what features gave them
an advantage? How, specifically, did the various color and sound film processes
developed by Pathe and Gaumont work; how extensively were they used; how
were they encouraged or inhibited by both aesthetic and socioeconomic forces;
and how did they compare with the color and sound film processes developed,
say, in Germany and the United States? More generally, what changes took
place in the design and use of film studios (especially in set decoration, light¬
ing, and shooting methods) and in the techniques of editing? Finally, in light
of Barry Salt’s work,1 what effect did the French technical developments have
on the forms and styles of films produced and marketed by the industry?
Similarly, much more detailed information could be gathered about the
organizational structures and the operational systems within the French film
industry of this period. What kinds of production units and schedules, for
instance, were standard in France, and how did that standard and the major
deviations from it change, say, from 1915 to 1920 to 1925 to 1929? Fur¬
thermore, how did the French system compare with the American system, as
delineated recently by Janet Staiger?2 What was the full range of film distri¬
bution patterns in France, and were those patterns different for French and,
say, American films.3 How exactly were films publicized, how much propor¬
tionately was spent on film publicity, and were there differences between the
publicity for French and American films? What specific changes occurred in
the exhibition of films, both in Paris and the provinces, and what particular
socioeconomic groups constituted the cinema audience and how did that au¬
dience’s composition change over time? Was the French system of film exhi¬
bition very different from the early American system, as established by Doug¬
las Gomery and Robert Allen?4 Finally, what networks of socioeconomic relations
connected the various film companies as well as linked them with certain
banks, newspapers and magazines, department stores, theaters, and other in-

527
AFTERWORD stitutions? Answers to some of these questions might arise through the study
of one particular company—such as Pathe-Consortium, Film d’Art, Films Au-
bert, Films Albatros—or even a single individual—such as Louis Aubert, Louis
Nalpas, Jean Sapene, or Alexandre Kamenka.5
Recent studies in England and the United States have demonstrated that a
system of representation or spatial-temporal continuity was well established in
the American cinema by the late 1910s.6 Although 1 have assumed so, it is
less than certain that this system was accepted and imitated by the French
film industry. It would be useful to know, through an extensive viewing of
existing film prints, if and when this system became accepted as the norm in
France and just what kinds of French films were marked by it. It would also
be useful to know if there was a coherent prewar or wartime system of repre¬
sentation that the French drew upon as an alternative to the American system.
This would help determine whether, by the early 1920s, there was a single
dominant system of representation or several alternatives. Whatever the num¬
ber of systems over time, it would be ’useful as well to trace the changing
function of such features as intertitles and musical accompaniment, and to
know whether the French normally accepted such things as spatial-temporal
discontinuities and patterns of rhetorical figuring. All this is important not
only to provide a context for the French narrative avant-garde film practice
but to contextualize the French narrative cinema generally as a national cin¬
ema.
My own work has shown that several film genres came into prominence in
the French cinema of the 1910s and 1920s. But it also points to areas of
uncertainty in the development of those genres especially during the period of
the war. The serial, for instance, demands a much more thorough investiga¬
tion, both as a narrative form and as a marketing strategy. The bourgeois
melodrama, if defined differently (perhaps more closely aligned with the thea¬
ter?), might be seen as a conceptual center around which several groups of
films (some of which I have ignored or assigned to other genres) could be
clustered as variations. The realist film could be more narrowly defined and
then compared to the so-called realist films of later periods as well as to those
of other national cinemas. The modern studio spectacular could be subsumed,
as Kristin Thompson suggests, in the context of the international co-produc¬
tions that characterized European and even American film production in the
late 1920s. Finally, attention needs to be given to several film genres and
modes that I have not even considered here—e.g., newsreels, documentary
films, scientific films, educational films, animated films.7 Moreover, most of
these film genres as well as many of the narrative avant-garde film texts could
benefit from a more fully developed ideological analysis than I have provided,
whether based on a Marxist model as used by Noel Burch or on a somewhat
eclectic “cultural studies’’ model as used by Rick Altman and Thomas Schatz.8
The French film genres also offer a context for defining the narrative avant-
garde somewhat differently that I have done. Briefly, I have argued that the
discourse and narrative conventions of such genres as the bourgeois melodrama
and realist film were crucial to the development of a “deviant’’ narrative avant-
garde film practice. However, it might be argued that the strategy of subver¬
sion in general—whether latently inherent in a genre such as the comedy or
deliberately practiced against the conventions of certain genres—could define

528
what is crucial to narrative avant-garde film practice. Actually I have incor¬ AFTERWORD
porated this strategy in my analyses of several film texts—e.g., Le Brasier
ardent, Baris qui dort, Entr'acte, Rien que les heures, Napoleon, 6V2 X 11, Mal-
done, La Passion de Jeanne d''Arc, L'Argent. But it might also be used to defend
Clair’s Un Chapeau de paille d’ltalie and Les Deux Timides as avant-garde works.
And it could provide grounds for defending much of Renoir’s early work as
avant-garde—La Fille de Beau, Nana, Tire au flanc, Le Tournoi, and Le Bled.
Another context for defining the French narrative avant-garde might be
provided by recent studies in psychoanalysis. Here, one would need to set up
a methodology that could account for more than the explicitly Dada-Surrealist
films of Clair, Man Ray, Dulac-Artaud, and Bunuel-Dali. Crucial to such a
methodology would be the construction of the subject, as both narrative agent
and bearer of the look, and the related construction of spectator position.
Could one then distinguish a body of French film texts in which this construc¬
tion of the subject was undermined, subverted, or otherwise made problema¬
tic? As a corollary, could Jean Epstein’s appeal to the unconscious in his
theoretical writings (recently examined by Paul Willemen)9 have a parallel in
the representation and interrogation of unconscious process in his film texts?
And could similar processes of representation and interrogation mark other
film texts—e.g., those of L’Herbier, Dulac, Kirsanoff? In a similar vein, could
certain French narrative avant-garde film texts, especially those of Epstein,
provide a fertile ground for testing and extending Christian Metz’s recent
systematic analysis of rhetorical figuring in film or, more specifically, the
operations of metonymy/metaphor?10
However one defines the French narrative avant-garde, what is badly needed
at this moment is a critical history (along with English translations) of French
film theory and criticism during this period. Stuart Liebman’s recent hypoth¬
esis of a French Ur-theory', from 1910 to 1921, provides an excellent begin¬
ning.11 But much more work needs to be done. On the one hand, there is the
subject of intellectual currents that intersected both the writings on film and
those on the other arts, in France and elsewhere. On the other, there is the
relationship between the theoretical writings of the 1920s and the actual film
practice. Of the latter, it would be good to confirm or counter Epstein’s
dictum that practice preceded theory and thus was usually in advance of most
theoretical positions.
Once some of this work has been accomplished and these questions have
been addressed more thoroughly, we will be in an even more secure position
to take up important comparative studies. Then it will be time, for instance,
to examine more accurately and insightfully the relationship between the French
cinema of the 1920s and the 1930s. Did the sound film “revolution” produce
a rupture that divided these decades into separate periods or did it merely
mask their real similarities? No doubt the technology of film changed, but
how different was the industry of the 1930s (in structure and operation) from
that of the 1920s? Would our sense of the French film genres be any different
if the analyses I have initiated were fully extended for another decade? With
the addition of sound, did the continuity systems used by the French change
that much, and in what ways? And exactly what strategies and features of the
narrative avant-garde film practice continued to operate in the 1930s film
texts, and how were they amended by the political developments of the dec-

529
AFTERWORD ade? Likewise, it will be time to compare at some length the film theory and
practice of the French and the Soviet cinemas of the 1920s. And to analyze
the impact of French films in Germany and the Soviet Union, and vice versa.
Finally, it will be time to extend Bernard Eisenschitz’s brief comparison of
this First Wave of the French cinema and the period of the French New Wave
(circa 1955-1965).12 Are the suggestive correlations between the two pe¬
riods—e.g., the impact of American films, the extensive film theory and crit¬
icism activities, the independent film production methods (most specifically,
in Pierre Braunberger’s work as a producer), the “deviant” film practice—as
significant as they seem? If so, the two periods of film writing and filmmaking
could be played off one another to clarify the chief attributes and accomplish¬
ments of each. And, more important, their parallels could provide an organ¬
izational strategy for giving a different sense of coherence to the overall history
of the French cinema.

530
Introduction Notes
1. John Berger, The Look of Things (New York: Viking, 1974), 146.
2. Shoshana Felman, “Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Intermina¬
ble,” Yale French Studies 63 (1982), 44.
3. A similar retrospective, organized by Georges Franju, was mounted by the Cinematheque
frangaise in the summer of 1980.
4. Jean Mitry, “De quelques problemes d’histoire et d’esthetique du cinema,” 115.
5. “Table ronde sur Fhistoire du cinema [Claude Beylie, Patrick Brion, Raymond Chirat,
Francis Courtade, Jean-Claude Romer],” 11.
6. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer [1934],” Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna
Bostock (London: NLB, 1973), 98.
7. “Rediscovering the French Cinema: Part II,” which Stephen Harvey organized for the
Museum of Modern Art, includes some fifty French feature films as well as a dozen shorts, from
the period of 1910 to 1929- All but about a half dozen of the feature film titles have been
singled out for major attention in Parts II and IV of this history.
8. Roger Icart and Raymond Chirat are preparing a catalogue of French feature-length nar¬
rative films from the 1920s, to be published by the Cinematheque de Toulouse, which should
go a long way toward determining the number of films actually produced, how many survive,
and perhaps in w^hat condition. For comparison, see Raymond Chirat, Catalogue des films frangais
de long metrage: films sonores de fiction, 1929-1939 (Brussels: Cinematheque royale de Belgique,
1975).
9- Raymond Borde, “La Gazette des Cahiers,” Cahiers de la cinematheque 30-31 (Summer-
Autumn, 1980), xii. ft
10. The number of lost films may have risen once more because of the disastrous fire at a
Cinematheque franchise storage facility in August, 1980.
11. This conclusion is based on the research done by Glenn Myrent in various Paris archives
and personal collections, from 1975 to 1976. Currently, Myrent is writing a biography of
Henri Langlois, in association with Langlois’s brother.
12. Henri Diamant-Berger, Le Cinema, 102; Ernest Coustet, Le Cinema, 161.
13. Mitry, “De quelques problemes d’histoire et d’esthetique du cinema,” 120.
14. Coustet, Le Cinema, 162-163.

Acknowledgments '
1. These interviews formed the basis of a tw'elve-part “Histoire du cinema” series that Ar-
mand Panigel produced for Antenne II in Paris. For some reason, the first two parts on the
films of the silent period were not included in the original broadcast on French television in
1973-1974, but they were shown in a repeat of the series in 1981. Both are available through
F.A.C.S.E.A., the French-American Cultural Services and Educational Aid in New York.

Note on Terms
1. Henri Diamant-Berger, Le Cinema, 221.
2. Ibid., 12.
3. Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (forthcoming). Kevin Brownlow
generally agrees with Salt’s conclusion, but he also finds a consistent pattern of films being
projected at speeds slightly faster than their “taking” speeds as well as numerous exceptions to
a gradual increase in projection speed—“Silent Films: What Was the Right Speed?” Sight and
Sound 49 (Summer, 1980), 164-167.

Part I, The French Film Industry: Introduction

1. Gerard Talon, “Cinema fran^ais: la crise de 1928,” 105.
2. This framework is based on the following historical studies: Jacques Chastenet, Histoire de
la Troisieme Republique: les annees d'illusions, 1918-1931; D. W. Brogan, The Development of Modern
France, 1870-1939, Vol. 2; Donald Harvey, France since the Revolution-, David S. Landes, The
Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1730
to the Present; Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-1943, Vols. 1 and 2; Gordon Wright, France in
Modern Times; Jose Baldizzone, “Des Historiens evoquent les Annees Folles,” 34-40.

531
NOTES 3. Despite the fact that the Hays Office tried to argue that the film industry was the fifth
largest United States industry, Douglas Gomery’s research indicates that even at its peak it was
never higher than thirty-fifth. Letter from Douglas Gomery, 14 May 1979-
4. Jacques Petat, “L’Avant-garde fran^aise des annees vingt, 22.
5. Baldizzone, “Des Historiens evoquent les Annees Folles,” 35.
6. Leon Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929], in L Age ingrat du cinema, 238, Georges
Sadoul, Histone generate du cinema, 4, 51. For convenience in these notes, the first number
following the title of Sadoul’s multi-volume history will refer to the volume number.
7. Mon-Cine 34 (12 October 1922), 22, quoted in Maurice Roelens, "Mon-Cine (1922-1924)
et le melodrame,” 202.
8. Henri Diamant-Berger, Le Cinema, 275.
9. Pierre Henry, “Les Films de France,” Cine-pour-tous 12 (22 October 1919), 2.
10. Rene Jeanne,“La Crise du cinema,” Cinemagazine 2 (21 October 1921), 14.
11 Jean Sapene, “La Politique du cinema fran^ais,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 34 (1 April 1925),
7.
12. Hubert Revol, “La corporation du cinema,” Cinegraphie 4 (15 December 1927), 64.

The War: Collapse and Reconstruction

1. G.-Michel Coissac, Histone du cinematographe, des ongines jusqu'd nos jours, 350-351, 359,
465-475, 482; Andre Delpeuch, Le Cinema, 212-220; Georges Sadoul, Histone generate du cine¬
ma, 2, 241-255; Georges Sadoul, Histone generate du cinema, 3, 50-51; Pierre Leprohon, Histone
du cinema, 1, 229-231; Georges Sadoul, Le Cinema fran^ais, 218; Paul Leglise, Histone de la
politique du cinema fran^ais: le cinema et la IIIe Republique, 36-37; Henri Diamant-Berger, // eta it
une fois le cinema, 44.
2. Coissac, Histone du cinematographe, 452-455; Delpeuch, Le Cinema, 207-211; Sadoul, His¬
tone generate du cinema, 2, 359-360; Leprohon, Histone du cinema, 1, 231-232; Sadoul, Le Cinema
franyais, 182; Francis Lacassin, “Alice Guy, la premiere realisatrice de films du monde,” in Pour
une contre histoire du cinema, 13-16; Jean Mitry, “De quelques problemes d’histoire et d’esthetique
du cinema,” 126.
3. Wright, France in Modern Times, 279-280.
4. Coissac, Histoire du cinematographe, 502-504; Sadoul, Histone generate du cinema, 2, 361,
363.
5. Coissac, Histoire du cinematographe, 498-501; Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire ency-
clopedique du cinema, 1, 114-123; Rene Jeanne, Cinema 1900, 84-85. For convenience in these
notes, the first number following the title of Jeanne and Ford’s multi-volume history will refer
to the volume number.
6. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 113-114; Sadoul, Histoire generate du
cinema, 2, 350; Sadoul, Histone generate du cinema, 3, 253-254; Diamant-Berger, // etait une fois
le cinema, 16-17; Jeanne, Cinema 1900, 104-105. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Paris vu par
le cinema, 11-13.
7. Coissac, Histone du cinematographe, 505-506.
8. Ibid., 492-495.
9. Sadoul, Le Cinema frangais, 218; Tino Balio, “Struggles for Control: 1908-1930,” in The
American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio, 103; Jeanne Thomas Allen, “The Decay of the Motion
Picture Patents Company,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Balio, 120-123- Jon Gartenberg’s
research on Vitagraph demonstrates that the American company distributed much of its own
film product in Paris, from 1907 to 1914. Letter Irom Jon Gartenberg, 23 May 1983-
10. Charles Pathe, “De Pathe Freres a Pathe Cinema,” 73-77.
11. Sadoul, Histone generate du cinema, 2, 567-571.
12. Petat, “L’Avant-garde fran^aise,” 22.
13- “Le Film frangais,” Le Film (24 J une 1914)—reprinted in Intelligence du cinematographe,
ed. Marcel L Herbier (Paris: Correa, 1946), 433- Cf. V. Guillaume Danvers, Cacophonic!” La
Cinematographic fran^aise 21 (29 March 1919), 9; Pierre Henry, “Le Film frangais,” Cahiers du
mois 16/17 (1925), 202; Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 3, 10.
M. Marcel Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 123; Henri Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes,
137.

532
 15. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 4, 38-39; Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclope- NOTES
dique du cinema, 164.
16. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 123-124; Rene Predal, La Soctete francaise (1914-
1945) a travers le cinema, 49-51.
17. Philippe Soupault, The American Influence in France, 13-14.
18. Louis Delluc, “Cinema et cie: cine-romans,” Paris-Midi (8 June 1918), 3; Rene Jeanne
and Charles Ford, Le Cinema et la presse, 1895-1960, 141-143.
19- Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 3, 327-357; Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 146;
Bernard Eisenschitz, “Histoires de l’histoire (deux periodes du cinema frangais: le muet—le
generation de 58),” 24; Claude Beylie and Francis Lacassin, “A la recherche d’un cinema perdu:
entretien avec Jean-Louis Bouquet, Flenri Fescourt, Joe Hamman, Gaston Modot,” 14-15, 22-
25.
20. Louis Delluc, Cinema et cie, 44-46; Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 144-146.
21. Jean-Louis Bouquet, “Le Cinema en France apres la guerre,” in Le Cinema des origines a
nos jours, ed. Henri Fescourt, 250.
22. Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 4, 51.
23. Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 139- For convenience in these notes, the first number
following the title of Mitry’s multi-volume history will refer to the volume number.
24. Annuaire general ck la cinematographie (1917), 44, 48, 50, 53, 55, 58-60, 73, 75, 78, 81, 83-
85, 125, 135. Henri Diamant-Berger, “Nouvelles d’Amerique,” Le Film 148 (15 January 1919),
7. For an account of Tourneur’s work in the United States, see Richard Koszarski, “Maurice
Tourneur: The First of the Visual Stylists,” Film Comment 9 (March-April, 1973), 24-31, and
Kevin Brownlow, “Ben Carre,” Sight and Sound 49 (Winter, 1979-1980), 46-50.
25. Advertisements, Cinematographie fran^aise 9 (4 January 1919); Lapierre, Les Cent Visages
du cinema, 143.
26. Cinematographie franyaise 26 (3 May 1919), 4.
27. Cinematographie franyaise 24 (19 April 1919), 14.
28. Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 4, 45. During the first three months of 1919, the
French position improved slightly, and French films made up 29 percent of the Paris releases.—
V. Guillaume Danvers, “L’Entente industrielle, artistique, et commerciale,” La Cinematographie
franqaise 32 (14 June 1919), 9.
29- Charles Pathe, Souvenirs et conseils d’un parvenu (1926), as quoted in Mitry, Histoire du
cinema, 2, 139- See also Charles Pathe, “Etude sur revolution de l’industrie cinematographique
fran^aise [1918],” Intelligence du cinematographe, ed. Marcel L’Herbier (Paris: Correa, 1946), 213-
228; Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 177-184; Marc Silberman, “Film and Ideology: The
Structure of the German Film Industry and Films of the 1920s” (Paper delivered to the Fourth
Annual Purdue Film Conference, West Lafayette, Indiana, 22 March 1979), 10.
30. Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 140.
31. Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 4, 35.
32. Pathe, “De Pathe Freres a Pathe Cinema,” 84; Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 140.
33. Louis Delluc, “Cinema et cie: Questions,” Paris-Midi (27 July 1918), 3.
34. Wright, France in Modern Times, 369-
35. Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 140; Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 4, 52; Pathe, “De
Pathe Freres a Pathe Cinema,” 94; Charles Moraze, The French and the Republic, 74.
36. Pathe, “Etude sur 1’evolution de l’industrie cinematographique frangaise [1918],” 215-
217. See also “Echos et information,” Le journal du Cine-Club 57 (11 February 1921), 3;
Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 179-183; Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 4, 46.
37. “Du studio a l’ecran,” Cine-pour-tous 43 (25 June 1920), 2; “Echos,” Cinemagazine 1 (21-
28 January 1921), 24; Pathe, “De Pathe Freres a Pathe Cinema,” 99-
38. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 6, 312-313. Henri Diamant-Berger offers a
more personal explanation for this shocking retreat: Pathe was convinced that he had cancer of
the throat, a condition which “miraculously” disappeared once he stopped wearing high collars
that buttoned over the larynx! Diamant-Berger, // eta it une fois le cinema, 48.
39. Leon Poirier, Vingt-quatre images a la seconde, 40.
40. Ibid., 41; Pathe, “De Pathe Freres a Pathe Cinema,” 94.
41. Poirier, Vingt-quatre images d la seconde, 42.
42. “Production du film fran<;ais,” Tout-Cinema (1922), 349-351; V.-Guillaume Danvers,

533
NOTES “Le Cinematographe en France de 1915 a 1920,” 28. Sadoul, His tom generate du cinema, 5, 31,
4 i 3.
43. Coissac, Histoire du cinematographe, 504. A.-P. Richard, Les Tendances modernes de la
cinematographic,” 28-29; Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis.
44. Danvers, ‘‘Le Cinematographe en France de 1915 a 1920,” 28.
45. Jeanne and Ford, Paris vu par le cinema, 186; Jaque Catelain, Marcel L’Herbier, 29-
46. ‘‘Nos Studios,” Cine-pour-tous 26 (18 February 1920), 3; Howard T. Lewis, The Motion
Picture Industry, 395.

Production: From Independent Artisan to International Consortium

1 Maurice Levy-Leboyer, ‘‘Innovation and Business Strategies in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-
Century France,” in Enterprise and Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France, ed.
Edward C. Carter II et al., 116-117.
2. Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 60.
3. Ibid., 60-61.
4. Ibid., 61.
5. Cine-pour-tous 33 (17 April 1920), 8; Cine-pour-tous 37 (15 May 1920), 8; Fescourt, La
Foi et les montagnes, 328.
6. ‘‘Le Monde du cinema,” Cine-pour-tous 33 (17 April 1920), 2; Coissac, Histoire du cinema¬
tographe, 502; Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 328.
7. ‘‘Les Faits,” Cine-pour-tous 32 (10 April 1920), 3; “Un formidable trust franco-americaine,”
Le Journal du Cine-Club 34 (3 September 1920), 4-5; Steven Neale, ‘‘Art Cinema as Institution,”
21, 25.
8. Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5, 10-11.
9. Cine-pour-tous 51 (22 October 1920), 8; Cine-pour-tous 53 (19 November 1920), 6; Dia¬
mant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 74-78.
10. See Henri Diamant-Berger’s laudatory description of such a producer in Le Cinema, 72-
78.
11. Bouquet, ‘‘Le Cinema en France apres la guerre,” 254. Jean Girard, Le Lexique frangais
du cinema, des origines a 1930, 191.
12. These figures are based on the average length of 1,800 meters for a feature film—Ernest
Coustet, Le Cinema, 100. Chastenet, Histoire de la Troisieme Republique, 215; Sadoul, Histoire
generate du cinema, 5, 8-9-
13. Louis Delluc, ‘‘Cinema,” Paris-Midi (31 January 1919) 2. ‘‘Au pays des milles et une
nuits,” L’Illustration (15 March 1919), 305-309; Cine-pour-tous 10 (8 November 1919), 4, 8;
“Le Monde du cinema,” Cine-pour-tous 19 (10 January 1920), 2; “Le Monde du cinema,” Cine-
pour-tous 22 (31 January 1920), 2; Cine-pour-tous 35 (1 May 1920), 4-5, 6; “Echos et informa¬
tions,” Le Journal du Cine-Club 32 (20 August 1920), 5-6; Cine-pour-tous 56 (31 December
1920), 4; Louis Nalpas folder, Bibliotheque de FArsenal; Louis Nalpas, “Lettre,” Cinematogra-
phie fran^aise 463 (10 September 1927), 21; Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 201; Sadoul,
Histoire generate du cinema, 4, 486.
14. Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 53-67.
15. Jean Arroy, “Abel Gance: sa vie et son oeuvre,” 6.
16. Sophie Daria, Abel Gance, hier et dernain, 59; Kevin Brownlow, The Parade s Gone By,
613-614.
17. “Echos,” Cinemagazine 3 (3 August 1923), 170.
18. Georges Dureau, “L’Atlantide,” Cine-Journal 15 (11 June 1921), 3; Rene Clair, “Films
passes,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 13 (January, 1923), [n.p.]; Charles Ford, Jacques Feyder, 16-
17; Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 270-271; Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5, 170.
19- Pierre Henry, “Les Idees—Petits Films,” Cine-pour-tous 32 (10 April 1920), 2.
20. “Du Studio a l’ecran,” Cine-pour-tous 39 (29 May 1920), 2; Jupiter folder, Bibliotheque
de 1’Arsenal.
21. Du Studio a 1 ecran,” Cine-pour-tous 43 (25 June 1920), 2; “Du Studio a l’ecran,” Cine-
pour-tous 49 (24 September 1920), 2. “Informations,” Cinemagazine 1 (20-26 May 1921), 27;
Le Film fran^ais production,” Tout-Cinema (1922), 322-323. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes,
354.
22. Jay Leyda, Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (New York: Macmillan, I960),

534
 116; Jean Mitry, ‘Ivan Mosjoukine,” 425; Richard Taylor, The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, NOTES
1917-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 11, 16, 23-
23. “Du Studio a l’ecran,” Cine-pour-tous 37 (15 May 1920), 2; “Du Studio a l’ecran,” Cine-
pour-tous 42 (19 June 1920), 2; “Louis Delluc presente Parisia-Film,” Cine-pour-tous 42 (19 June
1920), 4-5; Les Nouveautes Aubert 1 (September, 1920), 1; Les Nouveautes Aubert 4 (November,
1920), 1; Les Nouveautes Aubert 19 (August, 1921), 1.
24. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Marcel L’Herbier (1973). Marcel
L’Herbier, La Tete qui tourne, 32-33.
25. “Du Studio a l’ecran,” Cine-pour-tous 42 (19 June 1920), 2; Andre Lang, Deplacements et
Villegiatures litteraires et suivi de la promenade de royaume des images ou entretiens cinematographiques,
158; Poirier, Vingt-quatre images a la seconde, 45 Catelain, Marcel L'Herbier, 41.
26. Poirier, Vingt-quatre images a la seconde, 45.
27. “Les Faits,” Cine-pour-tous 32 (10 April 1920), 3; “Du Studio a l’ecran,” Cine-pour-tous
43 (25 June 1920), 2; “Du Studio a l’ecran,” Cine-pour-tous 46 (30 July 1920), 2; “Echos et
informations,” Le Journal du Cine-Club 37 (24 September 1920), 5; “La grande polemique au
sujet de rapport de M. Charles Pathe,” Le Journal du Cine-Club 40 (15 October 1920), 2-3;
Coissac, Histone du cinematographe, 476-478; Pathe, “De Pathe Freres a Pathe Cinema,” 99-101;
Philippe Esnault, “Entretiens avec Andre-Paul Antoine,” 8; Mitry, Histone du cinema, 2, 361.
Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 12-13; Gerald McKee, Film Collecting, 73; Francois de la
Breteque, “Le Film en tranches, les mutations du film a episodes,” 91, 97.
28. Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 83. Sadoul gives the figure as three million
francs.
29- Robert Florey, ’Filmland (Paris: Cinemagazine, 1923), 257; Diamant-Berger, II etait une
fois le cinema, 114. The first electrified studio in France seems to have been the Studio de Saint-
Maurice, rue des Reservoirs, Joinville, constructed in 1920—Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes,
150.
30. Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 69-90, 113-
31. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 17.
32. Coissac, Histoire du cinematographe, 478; Sadoul, Histone generale du cinema, 5, 15-18.
33. “Le Marche europeen en 1929,” Tout-Cinema (1930), 211. Predal, La Societe frangaise
(1914-1945) a travers le cinema, 114. Sadoul, Histone generale du cinema, 5, 27.
34. Annuane general de la cinmatographe (1928), 566-567.
35. Jeanne, Cinema 1900, 162; Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 26-27.
36. Catelain, Marcel L’Herbier, 64-65; Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 263. Claude Beylie
and Michel Marie, “Entretien avec Marcel L’FIerbier,” 34/viii.
37. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 23-
38. Ibid., 24.
39. Diamant-Berger, 11 etait une fois le cinema, 113-114.
40. Ibid., 119-120.
41. “Ce que l’on dit . . . ,” Cinemagazine 2 (2 June 1922), 316; Pathe-Journal (1 September
1924), 5-8; Pathe-Journal (15 November 1924), 9; Pathe-Journal (15 December 1924), 1; Cois¬
sac, Histone du cinematographe, 479; Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 76, 356, 358; Claude
Beylie and Francis Lacassin, “Henri Fescourt,” L’Avant-Scene du cinema 71 (June, 1967), 291;
Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 32-34; Diamant-Berger, ll etait une fois le cinema, 121;
Breteque, “Le Film en tranches, les mutations du film a episodes,” 98-99; Jean-Louis Bouquet,
“Panorama de l’activite frangaise, 1916-1928,” 62-63.
42. “Echos,” Cinemagazine 4 (25 January 1924), 153; Pathe-Journal (15 October 1924), 5;
Pathe-Journal (15 December 1924), 5; Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 360; Bouquet, “Pano¬
rama de 1’activite franqaise, 1916-1928,” 63-64.
--s=> 43. Rene Clair, “Les Films du mois,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 22 (November, 1923),
fn.p.}.
44. Lang, Deplacements et Villegiatures litteraires, 159-
45. Cine-Information-Aubert 26 (1 September 1925), 1.
46. Coissac, Histoire du cinematographe, 502; Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 356.
47. Mitry, “Ivan Mosjoukine,” 426; “Les projets de Films Albatros,” Mon-Cine (24 January
1924), 20.
48. Transcript of an interview by Armand Pamgel with Charles Spaak (1973).
49. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 314; Sadoul, Histone generale du cinema, 5, 158.

535
NOTES 50. Andre-Paul Antoine, Antoine, pere et fils (Paris: Rene Julliard, 1962), 211.
51. Andre Bencey, “Germaine Albert-Dulac,” 233-234.
52. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 296-297; Charles Ford, Germaine Dulac, 20.
53. “Le Monde du cinema,” Cine-pour-tous 23 (7 February 1920), 2; “Louis Delluc presente
Parisia-Film,” 4-5; “Du Studio a l’ecran,” Cine-pour-tous 47 (13 August 1920), 2; Poirier, Vingt-
quatre images a la seconde, 45; Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 65, Transcript of an interview
by Armand Panigel with Eve Francis (1973).
54. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Eve Francis (1973). Sadoul, Histoire
generate du cinema, 5, 76-77.
55. Jean de Mirbal, “Jacques de Baroncelli,” 117; Jean Mitry, “Jacques de Baroncelli,”
[n.p.]. Albert Bonneau, “L’Effort fran^ais en 1924,” Annuaire general de la cinematographic (1925),
82. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 328.
56. Almanach du cinema (1923), 18; Lang, Deplacements et villegiatures litteraires, 176; Fescourt,
Les Cent Visages du cinema, 192.
57. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 273.
58. “Echos,” Cinemagazine 3 (7 September 1923), 346; Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 3,
371.
59- Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5, 184.
60. “La Machine a refaire la vie,” Mon-Cine (24 April 1924), 14. Raymond Chirat, “Julien
Duvivier,” 5-6, 122.
61. “Actualites,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 19 (July, 1923), [n.p.]. Fescourt, La Foi et les
montagnes, 282. Catherine de la Roche, Rene Clair, 10; Jean Mitry, Rene Clair, 182; Transcript
of an interview by Armand Panigel with Rene Clair (1973).
62. Lang, Deplacements et villegiatures litteraires, 177; Delpeuch, Le Cinema, 251. Pierre Le-
prohon, Jean Epstein, 33-
63. Bernard Chardere, ed., “Jean Renoir,” 9; Andre Bazin, Jean Renoir, 202-204; Jean
Renoir, Ma Vie et mes films, 77-78.
64. Catelain, Marcel L'Herbier, 71-73, 80-81. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel
with Marcel L’Herbier (1973); Beylie and Marie, “Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier,” 34/viii.
65. Paul de la Borie, “Le Film europeen,” Cinemagazine 5 (9 January 1925), 63. Cf. Lapierre,
Les Cent Visages du cinema, 192.
66. Wright, France in Modern Times, 314.
67. Advertisement, Cinea 48 (7 April 1922), 17; Lucien Wahl, “Le Demon de la haine,” 7;
Leonce Perret, “Comment j’ai tourne Koenigsmark,” 329-332; Moussinac, “La Naissance du
cinema [1925],” 132-134; G.-Michel Coissac, “L’Evolution du cinematographe et la realisation
de quelques grands films,” 22. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Marcel
L’Herbier (1973).
68. Gaston Tournier, “Les projets de nos metteurs en scene,” Cinemagazine 2 (8 September
1922) , 289.
69- Rene Clair, “L’Affaire du Collier de la Reine,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre, 24 (December,
1923) , [n.p.]; Jeanne and Ford, Le Cinema et la presse, 137-138.
70. “Ce que l’on dit . . . ,” Cinemagazine 2 (4 August 1922), ,142; “Actualites,” Theatre et
Comoedia lllustre 14 (February, 1923), [n.p.]; “Actualites,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 22 (Oc¬
tober, 1923), [n.p.]; Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 188; Catelain, Marcel L'Herbier, 72-
73, 76-77; Fescourt, Lm Foi et les montagnes, 264; Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 98;
Beylie and Marie, “Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier,” 34/viii.
71. Paul de la Borie, “Une Sentence de boycottage,” Cinematographic frangaise 246 (21 July
1923), 1-3; “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 9 (15 January 1924), 28; -“L’Ac¬
tivite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 14 (1 June 1924), 26; “L’Activite cinegraphique,”
Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 15 (15 June 1924), 23. Paul de la Borie, “Le Film europeen,” 63. Jean
Mitry, Max Linder,” in Anthologie du cinema, 2 (Paris: L’Avant-Scene du cinema, 1967), 311.
Victor Bachy, Jacques Feyder,” in Anthologie du cinema, 2, 416-417; Sadoul, Histoire generale
du cinema, 5, 34, 36, 433.
72. L Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 8 (1 March 1924), 28; Albert Bonneau,
M. Tourjansky tourne Le Prince charmant,” Cinemagazine 4 (3 October 1924), 12-14; “Echos,”
Cinemagazine 4 (21 November 1924), 345; “Echos,” Cinemagazine 5 (9 January 1925), 90;
Echos, Cinemagazine 5 (23 January 1925), 190; Mitry, “Ivan Mosjoukine,” 429; Brownlow,

536
The Parades Gone By, 613; Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5, 157, 432-433; R. T., “Le NOTES
nouveau film de Mme Germaine Dulac,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 28 (1 January 1925), 4-5.
73. “Le Marche europeen en 1929,” Tout-Cinema (1930), 211.
74. Chastenet, Histoire de la Troisieme Republique, 124-125. Brogan, The Development of Modern
France, 581-582. Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5, 422-426.
75. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, 363.
76. Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5, 438-440.
77. Leon Moussinac, “La Foire du cinema est ouverte,” Le Crapouillot (May, 1928), 55.
78. “Leonce Perret regoit un grand prix aux Arts Decoratifs pour Madame Sans-Gene,” 28;
Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 224-225; Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes,
100; Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5,41; Gloria Swanson, Swanson on Swanson, 214-216,
222, 269, 278-279.
79- “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 13 (15 May 1924), 28; Sadoul, Histoire
generate du cinema, 5, 32, 39-40.
80. Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5, 435-440; Silberman, “Film and Ideology: The
Structure of the German Film Industry and Films of the 1920s,” 2la-22; Letter from Kristin
Thompson, 22 February 1980.
81. Rathe-Journal (15 October 1924), 5; Coissac, “L’Evolution de cinematographe et la rea¬
lisation de quelques grands films,” 25; Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 162. Fescourt, La
Foi et les montagnes, 344; Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5, 433.
82. Henri Poullaille, “L’Age ingrat du cinema,” 59-
83. “Echos,” Cinemagazine 4 (10 October 1924), 69; “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-
pour-tous 37 (15 May L925), 23'; “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 46 (1 October
1925) , 30; “Echos et communiques,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 51 (15 December 1925), 34; “L’Ac¬
tivite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 54 (1 February 1926), 25; “Films presentes en France,”
Tout-Cinema (1928), 933-940. Catelain, Marcel L’Herbier, 91; Chirat, “Julien Duvivier,” 122.
Barthelemy Amengual, Rene Clair, 175. Pierre Leprohon, Jean Renoir, 33; Renoir, Ma Vie et
mesfilms, 72-75, 77-78.
84. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 88 (1 July 1927), 26; “L’Activite cine¬
graphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 89 (15 July 1927), 25. Pierre Billard, “Jean Gremillon,” An-
thologie du cinema, 2, 526-528.
85. “Echos et communiques,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 60 (1 May 1926), 26; Interview with
Marie Epstein, 14 August and 13 November 1976.
86. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 80 (1 March 1927), 26; Jean Dreville,
“Films,” Cinegraphie 2 (15 October 1927), 37; Elizabeth Sussex, “Cavalcanti in England,” 207.
87. Marcel Colin, “En 1927,” Cinematographic frangaise 480 (14 January 1928), 11; “Le
Marche europeen en 1929,” Tout-Cinema (1930), 211; Andre Chevanne, L'lndustne du cinema:
le cinema sonore, 49; Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 191.
88. Cine-Information-Aubert 37 (1 March 1926), 1.
89. Cine-Information-Aubert 41(1 May 1926), 1; Advertisement for Aubert, Cinemagazine 6
(21 May 1926), 368; “M. Louis Aubert nous parle de sa nouvelle production,” Cinea-Cine-pour-
tous 92 (1 September 1927), 31.
90. “Pathe-Consortium-Cinema: la saison prochaine,” Pathe-Journa! (9 April 1926), 12.
91. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 361-362.
92. Bouquet, “Panorama de l’activite fran^aise, 1916-1928,” 64-65.
93. Harle, “L’Effort fran^ais,” Cinematographic fran^aise 482 (28 January 1928), 9-
94. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 362.
95. Bouquet, “Le Cinema en France apres la guerre,” 264; Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes,
363; Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 6, 315.
96. Film Daily Yearbook, 1922-1923 (New York: Film Daily, 1923), 413-414; “L’Activite
cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 54 (1 February 1926), 25, 28; Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-
pour-tous 60 (1 May 1926), 4; “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 66 (31 July
1926) , 24; “L’Inauguration du Studio Natan,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 78 (1 February 1927), 26;
“Les Studios Reunis,” Cinematographic fran^aise 467 (15 October 1927), 18; “Les Notabilites du
cinema,” Cinematographic fran^aise 479 (7 January 1928), 13; Diamant-Berger, 11 etait une fois le
cinema, 148-150.
97. “Echos et communiques,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 55 (15 February 1926), 22; Advertise¬
ment, Cinemagazine 21 (17 June 1927); “Les Projets de la Franco-Film,” Cinematographic frangaise

537
NOTES 453 (9 July 1927), 18; Robert Trevise, “Les Presentations,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 89 (15 July
1927), 33; “L’Activite cinegraphique, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 94 (1 October 1927), 23, Mitry,
Histoire du cinema, 2, 365.
98. Rene Clair, “Millions,” Le Rouge et le non, special issue (July, 1928), 46-47. Cf. Pierre
Desclaux, “Les grands films de 1927-1928, Almanack de Mon-Cine (1929), 11-12.
99- Sadoul, Histone generate du cinema, 6, 315.
100. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 52 (1 January 1926), 22; “L’Activite
cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 72 (1 November 1926), 25. Juan Arroy, “La Technique
de Napoleon,” 9. “Apres Napoleon, Jeanne d’Arc,” Cinematographie frangaise 455 (20 July 1927),
1; David Bordwell, Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, 14; Sadoul, Histone generate du cinema,
6’, 319, 382.
101. Lewis Jacobs, ed. The Compound Cinema: The Film-Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin, 287.
102. H. D., “An Appreciation,” Close Up 4 (March, 1929), 57.
103. “Actualites,” Cinemagazine 8 (16 March 1928), 469; Desclaux, “Les grands films de
1927-1928,” 13.
104. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 96 (1 November 1927), 27; Ford, Jacques
Feyder, 28-31.
105. “Courrier des studios,” Cinematographic frangaise 472 (9 November 1927), 49; SOFAR
folder, Bibliotheque de 1’Arsenal.
106. “Les Films Cine-Alliance U.F.A.,” Cinematographic frangaise 468 (22 October, 1927),
24.
107. Pathe-Journal (27 August 1926), 8-9; “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous
73 (15 November 1926), 17; Catelain, Marcel L’Herbier, 99-100.
108. Robert Trevise, “Les Presentations,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 89 (15 July 1927), 33. Cate¬
lain, Marcel L’Herbier, 92-93.
109. “Accords Franco-Allemands,” Cinematographie frangaise 478 (31 December 1927), 8.
110. “La Production d’Albatros,” Cinematographie frangaise 462 (7 September 1927), 4; Gil¬
bert Flamand, “On tourne Cagliostro,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 124 (1 January 1929), 21; Adver¬
tisement, Tout-Cinema (1929), 619.
111. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 111 (25 June 1928), 6; Desclaux, “Les grands
films de 1927-1928,” 14.
112. Cinematographique frangaise 484 (11 February 1928); Pierre Henry, “Le film sonore—les
dates,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 130 (1 April 1929), 8.
113. Brogan, The Development of Modern France, 520. Balio, “Struggles for Control: 1908-
1930,” 114. Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5, 413-416. Janet Staiger, “Dividing Labor and
Production Control: Thomas Ince and the Rise of the Studio System,” 16-25.
114. Jacobs, ed., The Compound Cinema, 287; Henri Mercillon, “Industries du cinema et
analyse economique,” Economie et cinema 1 (January-February, 1955), 9; Levy-Leboyer, “Inno¬
vation and Business Strategies in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century France,” 128-129; Letter
from Jean Dreville, 5 July 1978.
115. Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry, 397.
116. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, 482.
117. James True, Printer’s Ink (4 February 1926), quoted in Charles Eckert, “The Carole
Lombard in Macy’s Window,” 4-5.
118. Marcel Braunschvig, La Vie Amencaine (Paris: Armand Colin, 1931), 356.

Distribution: The Divided Country

1. Leglise, Histoire de la politique du cinema frangais, 27-28, 30-32.
2. Jeanne and Ford, Le Cinema et la presse, 201-202; Leglise, Histoire de la politique du cinema
frangais, 33; Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5, 45.
3- Jeanne and Ford, Le Cinema et la presse, 202-203.
4. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 139-
5. Louis Delluc, Cinema,” Paris-Midi (12 May 1919), 2; Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (18
May 1919), 2. Diamant-Berger, Le Cinema, 247-248; Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 240.
Kevin Brownlow, The War, the West, and the Wilderness (New York: Knopf, 1979), 144-149-
6. Andre Antoine, “Tripatouillages,” 5-6; “Censure des Films,” Tout-Cinema (1922), 613.

338
Coissac, Histoire du cinematographe, 436; Catelain, Marcel L'Her bier, 45; Leglise, Histoire de la NOTES
politique du cinema frangais, 10, 61-67; Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 45-48; Sussex,
“Cavalcanti in England,” 207.
7. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 125 (15 January 1929), 22; Marcel Carne,
“Censures . . . ,” Cinemagazine 9 (20 September 1929), 415-418; Leglise, Histoire de la politique
du cinema frangais, 67-70; Predal, La Societe frangaise (1914-1945) a travers le cinema, 205; Mitry,
Histoire du cinema, 3, 376-377; Paul Monaco, Cinema and Society: France and Germany during the
Twenties, 51; Letter from Jean Dreville, 5 July 1978.
8. Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (12 May 1919), 2; Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (18 May
1919), 2. “Lilms russes interdits,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 132 (1 May 1929), 6; Lescourt, La Foi
et les montagnes, 224. Brogan, The Development of Modern France, 645; Leglise, Histoire de la
politique du cinema frangais, 67; Predal, La Societe frangaise (1914-1945) a travers le cinema, 103-
104; Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 401-403; Monaco, Cinema and Society, 51-52; Dia-
mant-Berger, 11 etait une fois le cinema, 153-154; Jeanne, Cinema 1900, 243-
9- Advertisements, Le Film 170 (April, 1920); Advertisements, Almanach du cinema (1922),
6-7.
10. Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 361.
11. Advertisements, Cinemagazine 1 (28 October 1921).
12. Advertisements, Cinemagazine 2 (3 March 1922); Film Daily Yearbook, 1922-1923, 413-
414.
13. “Le Cabinet du Docteur Caligari,” Cinea 27 (11 November 1921), 8; Lionel Landry, “Le
Rail," Cinea 59-60 (23 June 1922), 5; Louis Delluc, “Les Cineastes,” 43. Jean Pascal, “L’lnva-
sion du film allemand/’ Cinemagazine 2 (22 September 1922), 351; Jean Galtier-Boissiere, “Une
seance d’art muet,” Le Crapouillot (1 January 1923), 20-21; Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema,
5, 29-30.
14. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 9-10.
15. Louis Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (5 April 1919), 2. “Abel Gance nous revient de
New York,” Cinemagazine 2 (4 October 1921), 28. “On nous ecrit de New York,” Cinemagazine
2 (4 November 1921), 33. Robert Llorey, “Echos de Los Angeles,” Cinemagazine 2 (13 January
1922), 52. Henri Diamant-Berger, “La legon d’Amerique,” Cinemagazine 2 (12 May 1922),
192. Albert Bonneau, “Un Entretien avec Albert Capellani,” Cinemagazine 3 (20 April 1923),
113- Film Daily Yearbook, 1922-1923, 55, 57, 63, 84, 86. Poulaille, “L’Age ingrat du cinema,”
63. Catelain, Marcel L’Herbier,, 29. Daria, Abel Gance, 86. Brownlow, The Parades Gone By,
623-624. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Abel Gance (1973). Sadoul,
Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 43. Pierre Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 61.
16. “Ce que Ton dit . . . ,” Cinemagazine 3 (27 April 1923), 167; A. T., “Cinemagazine a
New York,” Cinemagazine 3 (28 September 1923), 454; Film Daily Yearbook (New York: Pilm
Daily, 1924), 55; Lescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 274.
17. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 150.
18. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 28. Diamant-Berger, 11 etait une fois le cinema, 107.
19- “Le Marche europeen en 1929,” Tout-Cinema (1930), 210-211. Sadoul, Histoire generale
du cinema, 5, 36, 433- Diamant-Berger, 11 etait une fois le cinema, 67.
20. Wright, France in Modern Times, 360.
21. “Lrantsuzskie nemye fil ‘my v sovetskom prokate {Trench silent films in Soviet distri¬
bution},” Kino: vremia 4 (1965), 348-379- Vance and Betty Kepley drew my attention to this
source in their “Poreign films on Soviet Screens, 1922-1931, ” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 4
(1979), 431.
22. The number of films imported into the U.S.S.R. from Germany and the United States
was even higher: respectively, 41 and 7 (1922), 137 and 101 (1923), 94 and 231 (1924), and
53 and 241 (1925). Kepley, “Poreign Lilms on Soviet Screens,” 431.
23. Brogan, The Development of Modern France, 588. Leglise, Histoire de la politique du cinema
frangais, 55-56. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 28-31.
24. Advertisement, Cinemagazine 4 (8 Pebruary 1924). Albert Bonneau, “L’Effort frangais en
1924,” 82. “Nos echo",” Mon-Cine (24 January 1924), 20.
25. Poirier, Vingt-quatre images a la seconde, 57.
26. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 39-41.
27. “Pathe-Consortium-Cinema: les grandes productions franchises, ” Tout-Cinema (1922), 68-

539
NOTES 69, 322-323. V.-Guillaume Danvers, “La Cinematographic en France en 1922,” Almanack du
cinema (1923), 55-58, 60-67. Delpeuch, Le Cinema, 105.
28. Bouquet, “Le Cinema en France apres la guerre,” 263- Also see Delpeuch, Le Cinema,
96-97.
29. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 359-
30. Les Nouveautes Aubert 21 (October 1921), 1; Les Nouveautes Aubert 23 (November, 1921),
3; Les Nouveautes Aubert 27 (April, 1921), 1; Cine-Information-Aubert 8 (1 December 1924), 1;
Cine-lnformation-Aubert 18 (1 May 1925), 1. Coissac, Histone du cinematographe, 496-497. Cois-
sac, “L’Evolution du cinematographe et la realisation de quelques grands films,” 14. Sadoul,
Histone generate du cinema, 5, 36-37. Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 38.
31. Cine-lnformation-Aubert 12 (1 February 1925), 1.
32. Cine-lnformation-Aubert 8(1 December 1924), T. .
33. Albatros brochures, Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal. Bonneau, “L’Effort frangais en 1924,”
73-74.
34. Advertisement, Almanack du cinema (1923), 24-25. Bonneau, “L’Effort fran^ais en 1924,”
76. Roger Weil-Lorac, Cinquante ans de cinema actif (Paris: Dujarric, 1977), 11.
35. Coissac, Histone du cinematographe, 508-513. Delpeuch, Le Cinema, 98, 222. Fescourt,
La Foi et les montagnes, 99.
36. Advertisement, Annuaire general de la cinematographic (1928), 516.
37. Bonneau, “L’Effort frangais en 1924,” 79.
38. “Presentations speciales de l’annee 1924,” Annuaire general de la cinematographic (1925),
118.
39. “Edition-Location,” Tout-Cinema (1926), 355. Advertisements, Tout-Cinema (1928), 492-
583.
40. Advertisement, Tout-Cinema (1928), 550.
41. Advertisements, Tout-Cinema (1926), 364, and Tout-Cinema (1928), 573-
42. “Le marche europeen en 1929,” Tout-Cinema (1930), 210-211. Chevanne, L'Industrie du
cinema, 105.
43. Advertisement, Cinemagazine 6 (21 May 1926), 375-376. Film Daily reported that many
of these German films were accepted as reparation payments—Film Daily Yearbook (New York;
Film Daily, 1929), 1021.
44. “Le Marche europeen en 1929,” Tout-Cinema (1930), 210-211.
45. Film Daily Yearbook (1928), 511-512; Film Daily Yearbook (1929), 31.
46. George Pratt, ed., Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Cinema (Greenwich,
Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 382.
47. Daria, Abel Gance, 116-117. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Abel Gance, 52.
48. Brownlow, The Parades Gone By, 631.
49. Ibid., 647.
50. Letter from Kevin Brownlow, 25 August 1979-
51. Daria, Abel Gance, 118. Brownlow, The Parades Gone By, 650.
52. Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry, 408.
53. Andre Delpeuch, “Le Decret est publie,” La Cinematographic frangaise (25 February 1928)—
reprinted in Intelligence du cinematographe, ed. L’FIerbier, 456-460. Moussinac, “La Foire du
cinema est ouverte,” 54. Film Daily Yearbook (1928), 957. Bouquet, “Le Cinema en France
apres la guerre,” 266, 271. Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry, 404, 408. Harvey, France Since
the Revolution, 220-230.
54. Jean Tedesco, “Le Decret de M. Herriot,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 104 (1 March 1928), 9-
10; Moussinac, ‘La Foire du cinema est ouverte,” 55; Hubert Revol, “Le Cinema, spectacle
forain, On Tourne (July, 1928), 1; J. Vidal, “ ‘Lock-out,’ on dit les Americains, pour faire
echec au contingentement,” Pour Vous 22 (18 April 1929), 2; Alexandre Arnoux, “Contingente-
ment: Dernier Bulletin,” Pour Vous 43 (12 September 1929), 2; Film Daily Yearbook (1930),
571, 1015; Film Daily Yearbook (1929), 1021; Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry, 404, 407,
410; Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York:
Random House, 1975), 222; Janet Staiger and Douglas Gomery, “The History of World Cin¬
ema. Models for Economic Analysis,” 39. Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1976), 204-205.
55. “Echos et informations,” Cinemagazine 7 (24 June 1927), 624; Pierre Heuze, “Un Ani¬
mates du film fran^ais: P. J. de Venloo,” Cinemonde 15 (31 January 1929), 286.

540
Exhibition: “We’re in the Money” NOTES
1. “Echos et communiques,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 109 (15 May 1928), 27; Chevanne, L’ln-
dustrie du cinema, 77. In 1920, the rate of exchange was about 15 francs to a dollar; in 1925,
it was more than 25 francs to a dollar—Chastenet, Les Annees d’illusions, 215.
2. “Echos-Information,” Le Journal du Cine-Club 16 (30 April 1920), 2. Coissac, Histoire du
cinematographe, 437-438. Leglise, Histoire de la politique du cinema frangais, 51-58.
3. Coissac, Histoire du cinematographe, 438-439- Bouquet, “Le Cinema en France apres la
guerre,” 257. Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry, 412. Chevanne, L’lndustrie du cinema, 81.
Leglise, Histoire de la politique du cinema frangais, 55-56. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5,
8. Bouquet, “Panorama de l’activite frangais, 1916-1928,” 60.
4. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 4, 491.
5. “Echos et informations,” Le Journal du Cine-Club, 57 (11 February 1921), 9- Taylor, The
Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 80. There were only 1,500 to 1,800 cinemas in the U.S.S.R.
6. Chevanne, L'Industrie du cinema, 72.
7. Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry, 412.
8. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 6, 315.
9- Delpeuch, Le Cinema, 99.
10. Chevanne, L'lndustne du cinema, 82. Cf. Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry, 412.
11. Plenri Bousquet, “Economie et publicite cinematographique dans 1’immediat apres-guerre,”
67-75.
12. G.-Michel Coissac, Les Coulisses du cinema, 198. These contracts are quite similar to the
“Reglement des usages de location des films cinematographiques,” published by the Chambre
Syndicale de Cinematographic Frangaise in Cinematographie frangaise 17 (1 March 1919), 16-18.
13- Chevanne, L’lndustrie du cinema, 72.
14. “Cinemas,” Tout-Cinema (1926), 107-120.
15. Diamant-Berger, Le Cinema, 221-222. “La Representation—la vie du film,” Cine-pour-
tous 53 (19 November 1920), 2. Diamant-Berger, ll etait une fois le cinema, 67.
16. Cine-Information-Aubert 49 (1 September 1926), 1.
17. Pathe-Journal (15 October 1924), 5.
18. Breteque, “Le Film en tranches,” 91, 99-
19. Francis Lacassin, Louis Feuillade, 186.
20. Jean Girard, Le Lexique frangais du cinema, des ongines a 1930, 113-
21. Russell Merritt, “Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905-1914: Building an Audience for the Mov¬
ies,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Balio, 59-79- Robert C. Allen, “Motion Picture Ex¬
hibition in Manhattan: Beyond the Nickelodeon,” Cinema Journal 18 (Spring, 1979), 2-15.
Douglas Gomery, “Toward a History of Film Exhibition: The Case of the Picture Palace,”
Publix Theaters and the Chain Store Strategy,” Cinema Journal 18 (Spring, 1979), 26-40.
Douglas Gomery, “The Growth of Movie Monopolies: The Case of Balaban and Katz,” Wide
Angle 3 (1979), 54-63. Charlotte Herzog, “The Movie Palace and the Theatrical Sources of its
Architectural Style,” Cinema Journal 20 (Spring, 1981), 15-37. Douglas Gomery, “The Eco¬
nomics of U.S. Film Exhibition Policy and Practice,” Cine-tracts 12 (Winter, 1981), 36-40.
Douglas Gomery, “Movie Audiences, Urban Geography, and the History of the American
Film,” Velvet Light Trap 19 (1982), 23-29-
22. Andre Antoine, “Le Public,” Cinemagazine 1 (18-24 February 1921), 5-7.
23- Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marche, 47, 236.
24. Delpeuch, Le Cinema, 271.
25. Louis Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (3 March 1919), 2. Compare Diamant-Berger, Le
Cinema, 232, and “Entretien avec Jean Mitry,” Cinematographe 47 (May, 1979), 21.
26. Diamant-Berger, Le Cinema, 221. Andre Antoine, “Tripatouillages,” 5.
27. Andre Breton, “Comme dans un bois . . . ,”27.
28. Antoine, “Tripatouillages,” 5-6. Compare Pathe, “Etude sur revolution de l’industrie
cinematographique frangaise [1918],” Intelligence du cinematographe, 214.
29. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 190. Compare Moussinac’s outrage at the poor
condition of several re-releases of Swedish films—“Au Cinema: Reprise,” Le Crapouillot (1 May
1923), 30.
30. Diamant-Berger, “La Le^on d’Amerique,” 192. Pierre Gilles, “Pour la cinematographie
frangaise,” Pathe-Journal (4 December 1925), 8.
31. Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis.

541
NOTES 32. Lewis, The Motion Picture Industry, 412.
33. Rene Noell, “Histoire du spectacle cinematographique a Perpignan, de 1896 a 1944,”
60.
34. Advertisements, Annuaire general de la cinematographic franchise et etrangere (1917), 112,
131. Coissac, Histoire du cinematographe, 350-351, 359, 363-364, 369, 495.
35. Diamant-Berger, Le Cinema, 225-232.
36. Brogan, The Development of Modern France, 608.
37. ‘‘Le Monde du cinema,” Cine-pour-tous 27 (6 March 1920), 2. Coissac, Histoire du cine-
matographe, 361, 497.
38. Coissac, ‘‘L’Evolution du cinematographs et la realisation de quelques grands films,” 16.
39. Coissac, Histoire du cinematographe, 367.
40. “L’Inauguration de la Salle Marivaux,” Cinematographie frangaise 24 (19 April 1919), 35.
41. Dennis Sharp, The Picture Palace (New York: Praeger, 1969), 70-84, 86-102.
42. Mitry, ‘‘Max Linder,” 303- Diamant-Berger, 11 etait une fois le cinema, 66-67. Florey,
Filmland, 246.
43. Coissac, Histoire du cinematographe, 356, 361, 367.
44. V.-Guillaume Danvers, “L’Agonie des aiglesf Cinemagazine 1 (22-28 April 1921), 13-18.
Advertisement, Cinemagazine 1 (7 October 1921).
45. Diamant-Berger, 11 etait une fois le cinema, 89-90.
46. Jean Pascal, ‘‘La Premiere de Vingt Ans apres,” Cinemagazine 3 (17 November 1922),
236. Cineor, ‘‘Blancs et noirs,” Cinea 75 (17 November 1922), 12.
47. Advertisement, Cinemagazine 2 (3 March 1922).
48. Andre Antoine, ‘‘Le Cinema et l’Opera,” Cinemagazine 1 (8-14 April 1921), 3-4. Andre
Tinchant, "Le Miracle des loups," 315. Paul de la Borie, ‘‘Le Niveau monte,” Cinemagazine 4 (21
November 1924), 337. Cine-Information-Aubert 7 (15 November 1924), 1. Reginald Ford, “Sta-
tistiques des cinemas de Paris,” Cinematographie frangaise 355 (22 August 1925), 10. Cine-
Information-Aubert 29 (25 October 1925), 1. Coissac, Histoire du cinematographe, 464. ‘‘Cinemas
a Paris,” Tout-Cinema (1929), 177-179.
49. Pathe-Journal (12 February 1926), 10-11. ‘‘Une nouvelle salle sur les boulevards: l’inau-
guration de l’lmperial,” Pathe-Journal (11 June 1926), 11. Cinematographie frangaise 465 (1
October 1927), 10. Cinematographie frangaise 472 (16 November 1927), 1. Arnold Whittick,
European Architecture in the Twentieth-Century (Aylesbury: Leonard Hill, 1974), 414-416.
50. Cinematographie frangaise 458 (13 August 1927), 11-26. P. M., ‘‘Le Paramount,” Cine-
monde 9 (20 December 1928), 178. Pierre Kefer, ‘‘Revue des programmes,” Revue du cinema 2
(February, 1929), 72. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 137 (15 July 1929), 24.
Coissac, Les Coulisses du cinema, 204-207.

Silence in the Face of Sound

1. James Limbacher, Four Aspects of the Film (New York: Brussel and Brussel, 1968), 202-
203. Douglas Gomery, ‘‘Tri-Ergon, Tobis-Klangfilm, and the Coming of Sound,” Cinema Jour¬
nal 16 (Fall, 1976), 52-53. Douglas Gomery, ‘‘The Coming of the Talkies: Invention, Inno¬
vation, and Diffusion,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Balio, 193-211. Roger Icart,
“L’Avenement du film parlant,” 25-218.
2. Jean Tedesco, ‘‘La France et le film sonore,” 7. R. L., ‘‘L’Europe contre l’Amerique—la
lutte pour le film parlant,” Revue du cinema 9 (1 April 1930), 75. Icart, ‘‘L’Avenement du film
parlant,” 31-32. Michel Marie, “Les Annees 30,” Defense du cinema frangais (1975), 35. Gomery,
“The Coming of the Talkies,” 195, 201-207. Gomery, “Tri-Ergon, Tobis-Klangfilm, and the
Coming of Sound,” 54-57. Silberman, “Film and Ideology: The Structure of the German Film
Industry and Films of the 1920s,” 24. Gomery, “Economic Struggle and Hollywood Imperi¬
alism: Europe Converts to Sound,” 85-86.
3. Tedesco, “La France et le film sonore,” 7. Actually the cost could run from 220,000 to
480,000 francs (RCA Photophone charged an equivalent rate; Tobis-Klangfilrn’s price was only
half as much)—Icart, “L’Avenement du film parlant,” 60.
4. Film Daily Yearbook (1930), 1016.
5. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 206. Gomery, “Tri-Ergon, Tobis-Klangfilm, and the
Coming of Sound,” 53.

542
 6. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 206. Cf. Fescourt, La Fui et les montagnes, 369- NOTES
7. Rene Clair, Cinema Yesterday and Today, 126.
8. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 369.
9. Leon Abrie, “Les debuts du film parlant,” Cinemonde 8 (13 December 1928), 143- Henry,
“Le Film sonore—les dates,” 8. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 207. Catelain, Marcel
L'Herbier, 205. Icart, “L’Avenement du film parlant,” 50-51. Patrick Ogle, “The Development
of Sound Systems: The Commercial Era,” 200. Francois Cuel, “Don Juans et fous chantants,”
Cinematographe 47 (May, 1979), 5.
10. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 136 (1 July 1929), 5. Henry, “Le Film so¬
nore—les dates,” 8. “Le Marche europeen en 1929,” Tout-Cinema (1930), 211. Chevanne,
L'Industrie du cinema, 49- Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 207. Leglise, Histoire de la politique
du cinema franyais, 71. J. Leclerc, Le Cinema, temoin de son temps, 27.
11. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous l4l (1 October 1929), 28. “Les nou¬
veaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 143 (1 November 1929), 4. “Revue des programmes,” Revue
du cinema 5 (15 November 1929), 75. Pierre Seize, “Eloge de ‘Mickey,’ ” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous
149 (1 February 1930), 23-24. “Liste des films sonores et parlants,” Tout-Cinema (1930), 29-
Raymond Chirat, Catalogue des films franca is de long metrage: films sonores de fiction, 1929-1939
[n.p.]. Beylie and Marie, “Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier,” 36/x.
12. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 209- Leglise, Histoire de la politique du cinema franca is,
72. Leclerc, Le Cinema, temoin de son temps, 27. Chirat, Catalogue des films franyais de long metrage,
[n.p.]. Beylie and Marie, “Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier,” 37/xi.
13. Chevanne, L'Industrie du cinema, 48.
14. By the spring qf 1930, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous s references to silent films had shrunk to a
single column—“films muets,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 3 (May, 1930), 40.
15. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 112 (1 July 1928), 31. Advertisement,
Tout-Cinema (1929), 619- “Echos et communiques,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 141(1 October 1929),
28-29- Beylie and Lacassin, “Henri Fescourt,” 301. Leglise, Histoire de la politique du cinema
franyais, 82. Diamant-Berger, ll etait une fois le cinema, 172. Icart, “L’Avenement du film
parlant,” 51.
16. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 127 (15 February 1929), 24. “L’Activite
cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 135 (15 June 1929), 25. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Ci¬
nea-Cine-pour-tous 137 (15 July 1929), 22. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 139
(1 September 1929), 27. Advertisements, Almanack du Mon-Cine (1930). Lapierre, Les Cent
Visages du cinema, 191. Sadoul, Le Cinema franyais, 53. Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 365. Predal,
La Societe franyaise (1914-1943) a travers le cinema, 49- Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 6,
373. Diamant-Berger, 11 etait une fois le cinema, 175.
17. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 129 (15 March 1929), 27. “L’Activite
cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 136 (1 July 1929), 24. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-
Cine-pour-tous 137 (15 July 1929), 22. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 139 (1
September 1929), 26. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 140 (15 September 1929),
28. Catelain, Marcel L'Herbier, 109- Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 76. Mitry, Histoire du
cinema, 2, 365-366. Diamant-Berger, 11 etait une fois le cinema, 176. Dudley Andrew, “Sound
in France: The Origins of a Native School,” 99-100. Denise Tual, Le Temps devore, 57.
18. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 213- Catelain, Marcel L’Herbier, 111. Fescourt, La
Foi et les montagnes, 378. Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 366. Icart, “L’Avenement du film par¬
lant,” 68-76. Diamant-Berger, 11 etait une fois le cinema, 111. Gomery, “Economic Struggle and
Hollywood Imperialism,” 83-84. Andrew, “Sound in France: The Origins of a Native School,”
100-101.
19- “La Sonorisation des salles,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 139 (1 September 1929), 22. “Etat
numerique des salles equipees et en cours d’equipement en France et pays de langue franqaise,”
Tout-Cinema (1930), 649. Film Daily Yearbook (1930), 1016. Chevanne, L'Industrie du cinema,
69-74. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 208. Icart, “L’Avenement du film parlant,” 58-
62. Compare Hayes and Southard on American domination in David Strauss, “The Rise of
Anti-Americanism in France: French Intellectuals and the American Film Industry, 1927-1932,”
Journal of Popular Culture 10 (Spring, 1977), 755, 758.
20. Chevanne, L'Industrie du cinema, 75.
21. Jacques Feyder, “Je crois au film parlant,” 3- Leglise, Histoire de la politique du cinema

543
NOTES frangais, 81. Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 175. Icart, L Avenement du film
parlant,” 83-86.
22. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 209-
23. J. Bouissounouse, “La Route est belle,” Revue du cinema 8 (1 March 1930), 51. Chevanne,
L’Industrie du cinema, 49. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 208. Fescourt, La Foi et les
montagnes, 384. Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 174.
24. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Marcel L’Herbier (1973).
25. Clair, Cinema Yesterday and Today, 128.
26. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 207.
27. Eisenschitz, “Histoires de l’histoire,” 29-
28. See Steven Lipkin, "The French Film Industry of the 1950s” (University Film Associa¬
tion, 1980).

Part II, The Commercial Narrative Film: Introduction

1. Jean Renoir, "Souvenirs,” Le Point 18 (December, 1938), reprinted in Andre Bazin, Jean
Renoir, 153-
2. Henri Diamant-Berger, Le Cinema, 71-76.
3. Henri Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 364.-
4. Diamant-Berger, Le Cinema, 37. Also see Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet, L'Idee
et leer an: opinions sur cinema 1, 24-25. For convenience in these notes, the first number following
the title of Fescourt and Bouquet’s three-volume work will refer to the volume number.
5. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 364.
6. Diamant-Berger, Le Cinema, 55.
7. Diamant-Berger, Le Cinema, 179. Andre Chevanne, L’Industrie du cinema; le cinema sonore,
51.
8. Here is a selected bibliography of recent theoretical studies on film genre: Douglas Pye,
“Genre and Movies,” Movie 20 (Spring, 1975), 29-43; Tom Ryall, "Teaching Through Genre,”
Screen Education 17 (Autumn, 1975), 27-33; Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1976), 107-175; Charles (Rick) Altman, "Towards a Theory of
Genre Film,” Purdue Film Studies Annual 2 (1977), 31-44; Marc Vernet, "Genre,” trans. Bill
Horrigan and Janet Jenkins, Film Reader 3 (1978), 13-17; Stephen Neale, Genre, London: BFI,
1980; Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres (New York: Random House, 1981), 3-41. For related
studies on literary genre, see Paul Hernadi, Beyond Genre (Ithaca: Cornell Llniversity Press,
1972); Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard
Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); Tzvetan Todorov, "The Origins of Genres,”
New Literary History 8 (Autumn, 1976), 159-170; Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious:
Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); Janet Altman,
Epistolary: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982).
9- Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 2, 328.
10. Diamant-Berger, Le Cinema, 59-60.
11. Sadoul, Histone generale du cinema, 2, 341-348.
12. Pierre Henry, "Les Idees—petits films,” Cine-pour-tous 32 (10 April 1920), 2. Diamant-
Berger, Le Cinema, 36, 186. Ernest Coustet, Le Cinema, 100. Pathe, "Etude sur revolution de
1 industrie cinematographique franqaise 11918],” Intelligence du cinematographe, 214.
13. Diamant-Berger, Le Cinema, 55.

Serials
1. Francis Lacassin, "Le Serial,” in Pour une contre histoire du cinema, 116-117.
2. Albert Bonneau, "Le Film a episodes,” 125. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema,
3, 325-326. Jacques Deslandes, "Jasset,” LAvant-Scene du cinema 163 (November, 1975), 292-
295.
3. Fantomas ’ (May, 1913), "Juve contre Fantomas” (September, 1913), "La Mort qui tue”
(November, 1913), "Fantomas contre Fantomas” (February, 1914), and "Le Faux magistrat”
(April, 1914)—Francis Lacassin, Louis Feuillade, 176-178.
4. "Concerts et Spectacles,” Le Journal (3 October 1913), 7.
5. Lacassin, Louis Feuillade, 67-68. The second episode of Fantomas is available from several

344
sources in the United States. The other episodes as well as Les Vampires are preserved at the NOTES
Cinematheque franqaise and Anthology Film Archives.
6. Francis Lacassin, “Pearl White,” in Pour une contre histone du cinema, 130.
7. According to Lacassin, Les Mysteres du New-York was comprised of The Exploits of Elaine
(13 episodes), The New Exploits of Elaine (9 episodes), and The Romance of Elaine (3 episodes).
Lacassin, “Pearl White,” 119, 137. Sadoul says, however, that the last ten episodes came from
Ravengar (The Shielding Shadow)—yet that serial does not even star Pearl White. Sadoul, Histoire
generale du cinema, 3, 337-338.
8. Maurice Bardeche and Robert Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, 113.
9. Christian Bosseno, “Le Cinema et la presse (II),” 94-95.
10. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 165. Charles Ford,
“Germaine Dulac,” 7-9-
11. Les Exploits d'Elaine was comprised, confusingly, of nine or ten episodes from The Perils
of Pauline. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 3, 338. Lacassin, “Le Serial,” 120.
12. Lacassin, “Pearl White,” 133.
13. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 3, 202.
14. Richard Roud, “Louis Feuillade: Maker of Melodrama,” 10. Lacassin, Louis Eeuillade,
71-75.
15. Bardeche and Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, 131.
16. Louis Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (6 July 1919), 2. Both Judex and La Nouvelle Mission
de Judex are preserved at the Cinematheque fran<;aise.
17. Louis Aragon and Andre Breton, Le Tresor des Jesuites (1929), quoted in Francois de la
Breteque, “Le Film en tranches: les mutations du film a episodes, 1918-1928,” 89-
18. Richard Roud, “Memories of Resnais,” Sight and Sound 38 (Summer, 1969), 125.
19- Roud, “Louis Feuillade,” 10.
20. Compare Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1975), 64-69.
21. Charles Ford, “Jacques Feyder,” LAvant-Scene du cinema 63 (October, 1966), 181. This
brief description is based on the print of Le Pied qui etreint preserved at the Cinematheque
franchise.
22. Pierre Henry, “Les Idees: le film en episodes,” Cine-pour-tous 29 (20 March 1920), 2.
23. Anthony Slide, Early American Cinema (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1970), 164-165, 171.
24. V.-Guillaume Danvers, “La Cinematographic en France en 1922,” Almanach du cinema
(1923), 55-66.
25. Bonneau, “Le Film a episodes,” 127. Lacassin, “Le Serial,” 121, 124.
26. Henri Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 99.
27. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 456.
28. “D’un film a l’autre,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 16 (April, 1923), fn.p.]. Jean Mitry,
“Ivan Mosjoukine,” 426.
29- Breteque, “Le Film en tranches,” 93-95.
30. Lacassin, Louis Eeuillade, 84-85, 185.
31. Ibid., 85-86, 186. Both Tih-Minh and Barrabas are preserved at the Cinematheque
fran^aise; Tih-Minh can also be found at Anthology Film Archives.
32. Lacassin, Louis Eeuillade, 94.
33. Marcel Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 180. Broken Blossoms was screened in Paris
at the same time as Les Deux Gamines.
34. Bonneau, “Le Film a episodes,” 127-128.
35. Lacassin, Louis Eeuillade, 87.
36. Louis Jalabert, “La Litterature commerciale: le cine-roman,” Etudes 171 (5 June 1922),
513-531; 172 (20 June, 1922), 675-689. Henri Diamant-Berger, 11 etait une fois le cinema, 68.
37. Paul Monaco, Cinema and Society: France and Germany during the Twenties, 84-93- Unfor¬
tunately, Monaco vitiates his analysis by finding the “orphan story” almost everywhere in the
French cinema of the 1920s.
38. Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945: Ambition and Love, 315.
39. Francis Lacassin, “Louis Feuillade,” 262. Compare Bonneau, “Le Film a episodes,” 127-
128.
40. Jan de Merry, “Les Spectacles,” Paris-Midi (12 January 1918), 3. “Leon Mathot,” Cinea-
Cine-pour-tous 5 (15 January 1924), 5-7. A print of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo is preserved at the

545
Cinematheque franchise. Unfortunately, I saw the film too late to incorporate my observations
into this study.
41. Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 249-
42. Louis Delluc, “Notes pour moi,” Le Film 99 (4 February 1918), 15.
43. Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 4, 100.
44. Fescourt, ha Foi et les montagnes, 198.
45. Claude Beylie and Francis Lacassin, “Henri Fescourt,’’ 290.
46. Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 86-88.
47. Ibid., 84.
48. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 166. Diamant-Berger, // etait une
fois le cinema, 89-
49. Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 103, 113.
50. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5, 20-23-
51. Pierre Henry, “Les Idees: le film en episodes,” 2. Ricciotto Canudo, “Le Cine-Roman
en n episodes,” Le Film 183 (November, 1921), [n. p.]. Albert Montez, “A propos de Cine-
Romans,” Cinemagazine 2 (1 September 1922), 268. Leon Moussinac, “Les Films a episodes,”
Le Crapouillot (1 March 1923), 27-29- Bonneau, “Le Film a episodes,” 125-128. Breteque’s
periodization schema generally coincides with my own analysis of the development of the French
serial—Breteque, “Le Film en tranches,” 90-91.
52. Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5, 23.
53. “Echos,” Cinemagazine 3 (7 September 1923), 346. Lacassin, Louis Femllade, 96-97.
54. Maurice Roelens, “Mon-Cine (1922-1924) et le melodrame,” 204. Breteque, “Le Film
en tranches,” 95-98.
55. Breteque, “Le Film en tranches,” 97.
56. Pathe-Journal (15 December 1924), 1.
57. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Le Cinema et la presse, 1895-1960, 168.
58. Beylie and Lacassin, “Henri Fescourt,” 291.
59- “Actualites,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 18 (June, 1923), [n.p.}.
60. Pathe-Journal (15 December 1924), 5. Pathe-Journal (1 February 1925), 10. Pathe-Journal
(1 October 1925), 12.
61. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 7 (15 February 1924), 4.
62. Beylie and Lacassin, “Henri Fescourt,” 295.
63- Ibid.
64. Henri Cels, “Vous pourrez voir bientot,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 28 (15 February
1924), [n.p.}.
65. Jean de Mirbel, “GossetteCinemagazine 3 (7 December 1923), 384-386. Charles Ford,
“Germaine Dulac,” 21.
66. This brief analysis is based on the print of Gossette preserved at the Cinematheque fran¬
chise.
67. Ford, “Germaine Dulac,” 22.
68. “Robert Macaire,” La Petite Illustration 2.
69- Films Albatros brochure—Bibliotheque de 1’Arsenal. This brief analysis is based on the
print of Robert Macaire preserved at the Cinematheque franchise.
70. Pierre Leprohon, J&z/z Epstein, 76.

Bourgeois Melodramas
1. Maurice Bardeche and Robert Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, 129-
2. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 164. Marcel Lapierre,
Les Cent Visages du cinema, 125. Rene Jeanne, Cinema 1900, 223, 226-227. Jeanne Dore is
preserved at the Cinematheque franchise. Raymond Bernard plays the role of the young boy, as
he did on the stage.
3. Jeanne, Cinema 1900, 216. Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 245.
4. Louis Delluc, “Cinema et cie,” Paris-Midi (20 May 1918), 3.
5. Bardeche and Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, 52.
6. Annuaire general de la cinematographic frangaise et etrangere (1917), 137. Henri Fescourt, La
Foi et les montagnes, 142. Alain and Odette Virmaux, ed., Colette at the Movies, 29-30. Roger
Icart, Le Melodrame dans le cinema muet franqais,” 194.

546
 7. Catherine Bodard Silver, “Salon, Foyer, Bureau: Women and the Professions in France,” NOTES
in Clio's Consciousness Raised, ed. Mary Hartman and Lois W. Banner (New York: Harper &
Row, 1974), 72-85. The definition of bourgeois melodrama that 1 offer here is, of course,
tentative and perhaps simplified. A somewhat different concept might be derived from a closer
examination of the development of melodrama in the French theater. A good place to begin
would be Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
8. Leon Barsacq, Caligan's Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions: A History of Film Design, 38.
See also Theodore Zeldin, France 1848-1945: Taste and Corruption, 80-81.
9- Silver, ‘‘Salon, Foyer, Bureau,” 78. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 4-5. Theodore
Zeldin, France 1848-1945: Ambition and Love, 11-22.
10. Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 246.
11- Annuaire general de la cinematographic franchise et etrangere (1917), 121
12. Jacques Feyder’s Tetes de femme, femmes de tete is preserved at the Cinematheque franchise.
13- La Droit a la vie was released in January, 1917—“A travers les cinemas,” Le Gaulois (5
January 1917), 4. It was made just after The Cheat was shown in the late summer and early
autumn of 1916—Virmaux, Colette at the Movies, 17-20.
14. Bardeche and Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, 129- Georges Sadoul, Histoire
genera le du cinema, 4, 398.
15. Gance had already used a series of crude wipes in Barberousse (1916)—Kevin Brownlow,
The Parade's Gone By, 607.
16. Icart, ‘‘Le Melodrame dans le cinema muet frangais,” 195. There is some confusion about
the release date of Mater Dolorosa. Two sources list it as being screened in the spring of 1917—
‘‘A travers les cinemas*,” Le Gaulois (10 March 1917), 4, and Virmaux, Colette at the Movies, 24.
But it was also shown in the spring of 1918—Jan de Berry, ‘‘Les Spectacles,” Paris-Midi (12
April 1918), 3- The first filmography compiled on Gance dates its production, uncertainly, as
October, 1917—Philippe Esnault, ‘‘Filmographie d’Abel Gance,” 19- See also Charles Ford,
Abel Gance, 22.
17. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 169-
18. This analysis is based on the print of Mater Dolorosa preserved at the Cinematheque
franchise.
19- Philippe Esnault, “Entretiens avec Andre-Paul Antoine,” 12.
20. Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 255.
21. Juan Arroy, ‘‘Georges Specht,” Cinemagazine 4 (18 January 1924), 93. Georges Sadoul,
Histoire genera le du cinema, 2, 201.
22. Virmaux, Colette at the Movies, 25.
23- Jean-Andre Fieschi, ‘‘Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier,” 29-
24. “Cette semaine,” Cine-pour-tous 22 (31 January 1920), 8. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire en-
cyclopedique du cinema, 1, 458.
25. Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, 610. This brief analysis is based on the print of La
Dixieme Symphonic preserved at the Cinematheque franqaise.
26. A print of Hugon’s Jacques Landauze recently became available for study purposes at the
National Film Archive in London.
27. Jean Eyre, “Nos metteurs-en-scene: Abel Gance,” Mon-Cine (14 February 1924), 10.
28. Henri Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 76. Jacques Salles, “Raymond Bernard,”
205.
29- J. G.-B., “Au Cinema: Le Secret de Rosette Lambert,” Le Crapouillot (1 November, 1920),
16-17. Leon Moussinac, “Interieurs modernes au cinema,” 5-8. Rene Jeanne, “La Dance au
cinema,” Cinemagazine 1 (17 June 1921), 22.
30. Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 263. For a brief description of the revolutionary change in
interior decoration that occurred in Paris around 1910, and which finally became visible in
French films after the war, see Hilly, “Decoration d’interieur et cinema,” La Revue federaliste
103 (November, 1927), 36-43.
31. Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 76.
32. Louis Delluc, “Quelques films frangais,” Cinea 18 (9 September 1921), 5. Sadoul, Histoire
genera le du cinema, 4, 488.
33. Salles, “Raymond Bernard,” 182.
34. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 313-314.
35. Salles, “Raymond Bernard,” 182.

547
NOTES 36. Edmond Epardaud, “Triplepatte,” 2-3-
37. Louis Delluc, “Le Silence,” in Drames du cinema, 19-32. “Les Films de la quinzaine, ’
Cine-pour-tous 49 (24 September 1920), 6. Jean Mitry, Louis Delluc, L Avant-Scene du cinema,
38.
38. Marcel Tariol, Louis Delluc, 60.
39. “Les Films de la quinzaine,” Cine-pour-tous 35 (1 May, 1920) 6. Louis Delluc, Fete
espagnolein Drames du cinema, 1-18.
40. Leon Moussinac, “Le Decor et le costume au cinema,” 133.
41. “Les Presentations,” Cinemagazine 2 (23 December 1921), 26. Auguste Nardy, “La Mort
du so lei l, ” Bonsoir (17 December 1921)—Germaine Dulac folder, Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal. I
am indebted to Wendy Dozoretz for most of this information on La Mort du soleil.
42. Germaine Dulac, “La Mort du soleil et la naissance du film,” 14.
43. Charles Ford, “Germaine Dulac,” 14.
44. For instance, Gaby Morlay, the most prominent actress of the boulevard melodramas,
appeared in only a couple of films before her rapid rise to star status in the 1930s French
cinema—Raymond Borde, “Gaby Morlay,” Cahiers de la cinematheque 23-24 (Christmas, 1977),
111.
45. Charles Pathe, “Etude sur revolution de l’industrie cinematographique franqaise [1918],”
Intelligence du cinematographe, ed. Marcel L’Herbier (Paris: Correa, 1946), 214. Translated by
Stuart Liebman. See also Charles Pathe, “De Pathe Freres a Pathe Cinema,” 87-97.
46. Maurice Roelens, “Mon-Cine (1922-1924) et le melodrame,” 212-214. This strategy
could be compared to the prewar projects of Film d’Art and S.C.A.G.L.
47. Ibid., 201-202.
48. Ibid., 207-212.
49. Ibid., 211.
50. Roger Icart supports this idea, implicitly, in “Le Melodrame dans le cinema muet fran-
gais,” 198.
51. Ford, “Germaine Dulac,” 30. Another late bourgeois melodrama is Baroncelli’s 1925
adaptation of a Hervieu play, Le Reveil (starring Charles Vanel, Maxudian, and Isobel Elsorn),
a print of which I have seen at the National Film Archive in London but too late to include in
this study.
52. “Aux Cineromans,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 84 (1 May 1927), 27.
53. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 261.
54. Julien Bayart, “Ce que dit 1’ecran,” Photo-Cine 4 (15 April 1927), 66.

Realist Films
1. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 3, 192.
2. Francis Lacassin, Louis Feuillade, 43.
3. Philippe Esnault, “Entretiens avec Andre-Paul Antoine,” 10. At least one early film
reviewer had noticed the Paris cinema spectators’ preference for films with natural landscapes as
opposed to those with theatrical scenes—Flenri Duvernois, “La Routine cinematographique,”
Le Journal (14 November 1913), 7.
4. “Concerts et Spectacles,” Le Journal (3 October 1913), 7. Henri Fescourt, La Foi et les
montagnes, 102. A print of L’Enfant de Paris is preserved at the Cinematheque franchise.
5. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 3, 191-192.
6. V. Jasset, “Etude sur la mise-en-scene,” Cine-Journal (21 October—25 November 1911)—
reprinted in Anthologie du cinema, ed. Marcel Lapierre, 83-98.
7. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 3, 202-203.
8. Ibid., 204-205.
9- Andre Lang, Deplacements et Villegiatures litteraires et suivi de la promenade au royaume des
images ou entretiens cinematographiques, 202.
10. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 3, 209-211.
11. Ibid., 28-29.
12. Lang, Deplacements et Villegiatures litteraires, 120. Philippe Esnault, “Biofilmographie d’Andre
Antoine,” 30.
13. Philippe Esnault, “Propos d’Antoine [Le Film (December, 1919)],” 38.
14. Esnault, “Entretiens avec Andre-Paul Antoine,” 7, 14-15.

548
 15. Esnault, “Propos d’Antoine [Le Film (December, 1919)],’’ 38. Rene Predal, La Societe NOTES
franyaise (1914-1945) a travers le cinema, 92. Antoine admitted his admiration for the acting in
Thomas Ince’s westerns—Lang, Deplacements et V illegiatures litteraires, 203.
16. Esnault, “Propos d’Antoine [Lectures pour tous (December, 1919)],” 48.
17. Esnault, “Propos d’Antoine [Le Film (December, 1919)],” 39.
18. Esnault, “Propos d’Antoine [Lectures pour tous (December, 1919)],’’ 48.
19- Pierre Leprohon, Cinquante Ans du cinema franyais, 44. Linda Nochlin, Realism (New
York: Penguin, 1971), 51-56, 137-139. See also T. J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and
Politics in France, 1848-1851, 2nd ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 31-98.
20. John Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 76.
21. Jose Baldizzone, “Des historiens evoquent les Annees Folles,” 39-
22. Nochlin, Realism, 88, 112.
23- Esnault, “Entretiens avec Andre-Paul Antoine,” 16.
24. Ibid., 22.
25. Ibid., 14-15.
26. Louis Delluc, “Les Travailleurs de la mer,’’ 12.
27. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 4,115.
28. “Le monde du cinema,” Cine-pour-tous 21 (24 January 1920), 2.
29- Claude Beylie and Michel Marie, “Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier,” 30/iv.
30. Marcel L’Herbier, La Fete qui tourne, 24-25.
31. Ibid., 26-27, 32.
32. Ibid., 47.
33- This brief analysis is b^sed on the prints of L'Homme du large preserved at the Cinema¬
theque franchise and the George Eastman House. A fully titled print is preserved at the Royal
Film Archive of Belgium.
34. “Les Films de la quinzaine,” Cine-pour-tous 54 (3 December 1920), 4-5.
35. Jaque Catelain, Marcel L’Herbier, 43, 44. L’Herbier, La Tete qui tourne, 48.
36. L’Herbier, La Tete qui tourne, 50.
37. Jean Galtier-Boissiere, “Le Cinema: L'Homme du large,” 21.
38. Juan Arroy, “Marcel L’Herbier,” 11.
39- Rene Jeanne, “Realisme et cinema,” 11-15.
40. “Le monde du cinema,” Cine-pour-tous 7 (1 October 1919), 2. “Le Studio ambulent de
Mercanton,” Le Journal du Cine-Club 23 (18 June 1920), 3- “Tournera-t-on les interieurs hors
des studios?” Le Journal du Cine-Club 45 (19 November, 1920), 8. Rachel Low, The History of
the British Film, 1918-1929 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), 222.
41. “Les meilleurs films de l’annee,” Cine-pour-tous 51 (22 October 1920), 4-5.
42. Louis Delluc, “L’Appel du sang,” Cine-pour-tous 31 (3 April 1920), 7.
43. This analysis is based on the print of L'Appel du sang preserved at the National Film
Archive in London.
44. Rene Jeanne, “Le Maroc a l’ecran,” Cinemagazine 2 (1 September 1922), 259-
45. ‘‘Les Films de la semaine,” Cine-pour-tous 51 (22 October, 1920), 4.
46. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 423-424. Fescourt, La Foi et les
montagnes, 335. Rene Jeanne, Cinema 1900, 229-
47. Rene Jeanne, “Les prochains films,” LeFilm, 183 (November, 1921), [n.p.]. Jeanne and
Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 220.
48. “Les Films de la semaine,” Cinemagazine 2 (24 November 1922), 276.
49- Esnault, “Entretien avec Andre-Paul Antoine,” 24.
50. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 329-330. Esnault, “Entretiens avec Andre-Paul An¬
toine,” 24.
51. Raymond Chirat, Catalogue des films franyais de long metrage: films sonores de fiction, 1929-
1939, [n.p.].
52. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 327.
53- Louis Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (2 February 1919), 2.
54. Louis Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (1 February 1919), 2.
55. A print of Chemin d’Ernoa has been recently restored (without titles) by the Cine¬
matheque frangaise.
56. “Les meilleurs films de l’annee,” Cine-pour-tous 51 (22 October 1920), 4-5.
57. “Au Repertoire du Vieux-Colombier: 1’histoire du deux grands films,” 21-23. Recently

549
NOTES I saw a tinted print of Jocelyn at the Cinematheque franqaise, but too late to be incorporated
into this study.
58. Fescourt, La Fot et les montagnes, 322.
59- Rene Jeanne, “Lamartine au cinema, 228. Jocelyn, Cinemagazine 2 (27 October 1922),
129. Leon Poirier, Vingt-quatre images a la seconde, 49.
60. Pierre Porte, “Le Cinema n’est pas un art populaire,” 27.
61. “Ce que l’on dit . . . ,” Cinemagazine 3 (30 March 1923), 556. Jeanne and Ford Histone
encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 376. Maurice Roelens, “Literature, peuple, cinema: Genevieve 0923),”
179-180.
62. Germain Lacan, “Genevieve,” 295-297.
63. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 200.
64. Film franca is 12 (15 November, 1923), quoted in Roelens, “Literature, peuple, cinema:
Genevieve (1923),” 181.
65. Lacan, “Genevieve,” 295.
66. Leon Moussinac, “Le Cinema: Genevieve,” 29-
67. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 344. Claude Beylie and Francis Lacassin, “Henri Fes¬
court,” 296. Henri Fescourt, “A propos de mon film, Les Grands,” 18-20. A print of Les Grands
is preserved at the Cinematheque de Toulouse.
68. A.B., “Visages d'enfants," Cinemagazine 3 (l4>September 1923), 385-388. Edmond Epar-
daud, “Visages d’enfants,” 13-14. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 33 (15 March 1925),
5. See p. 26.
69- Sadoul, Histone generale du cinema, 5, 183.
70. Jacques Feyder and Franqoise Rosay, Le Cinema, notre metier, 24.
71. This analysis is based on the print of Visages d'enfants preserved at the Cinematheque
frangaise.
72. “Poile de carotte,” 21. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 57 (15 March 1926), 6.
73. Raymond Chirat, “Julien Duvivier,” 77, 166.
74. This brief analysis is based on the print of Poile de carotte preserved at the Cinematheque
franchise.
75. Harry Alan Potamkin was much taken by this film and “its visual honesty of domestic
detail”—Lewis Jacobs, ed., The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin,
280-281.
76. Lacassin, Louis Feuillade, 186. This brief analysis is based on the print of Vendemiaire
preserved at the Cinematheque fran^aise.
77. Ibid., 62-63.
78. This study of peasant films is perhaps oversimplified. See, for instance, a comprehensive
treatment of the French peasantry in Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-1945: Ambition and Love,
131-197.
79- Louis Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (12 October 1919), 2.
80. “Le Film frant:ais,” Cine-pour-tous 5 (15 August 1919), 2-3. “Ce que l’on dit,” Cinema¬
gazine 1 (11-17 March 1921), 27. Paul de la Borie, “La Terre," 29- Esnault, “Biofilmographie
d’Andre Antoine,” 30. For information about the print of La Terre (with Russian intertitles)
presented at the Museum of Modern Art (in January, 1983), I thank Stuart Liebman and Sandy
Flitterman. The film’s narrative and rhetorical complexity would seem to demand further anal¬
ysis.
81. “Cette semaine,” Cine-pour-tous 23 (7 February 1920), 4-5. Chirat, Catalogue des films
fran^ais de long metrage, [n.p.]. Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 434.
82. J. A. de Munto, “Rene Hervil,” Cinemagazine 4 (2 November 1923), 170. Jacques Faure,
“Rene Hervil,” Mon-Cine (15 May 1924), 8.
83- Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 333.
84. “Blanchette,” Le Crapouillot (1 June 1923), 20.
85. Ricciotto Canudo, “Le Cinema,” Les Nouvelles litteraires (13 January 1923), 4. “La Bete
traquee, Cinemagazine 3 (2 March 1923), 421-422. Jacques Fieschi, “Entretien avec Jean Mi-
try, Cinematographe 60 (September, 1980), 23. A print of La Bete traquee is now preserved at
the Cinematheque franqaise.
86. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 384. This brief analysis is based on
a print of Nene preserved at the Cinematheque franqaise. Unfortunately, 1 saw the film too late
to do it justice here.

550
 87. “Actualites,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 20 (August, 1923), [n.p.]. Andre Daven, “Nene,” NOTES
[n.p.].
-—88. Jean Mitry, “Robert Boudrioz,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 31 (1 April 1924), [n.p.].
89. “Le monde du cinema—en France,” Cine-pour-tous 14 (16 December 1919), 2. “Les faits,”
Cine-pour-tous 32 (10 April 1920), 4. Serge, “Robert Boudrioz,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 6 (1 Feb¬
ruary 1924), 7.
“—.90. “Les Presentations,” Almanach du cinema (1923), 116. Advertisement, Cinea 82 (29 De¬
cember 1922), 15. Rene Clair, “Films passes,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 1 (January, 1923),
[n.p.].
91. “Notre referendum du plus beau film,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 11 (15 April 1924), 5-6.
92. Serge, “Robert Boudrioz,” 7.
~~"93. Clair, “Films passes,” [n.p.]. Rene Clair, Cinema Yesterday and Today, 48.
*—94. Mitry, “Robert Boudrioz,” [n.p.].
95. Esnault, “Entretiens avec Andre-Paul Antoine,” 25.
96. Ibid. Esnault, “Biofilmographie d’Andre Antoine,” 31-32.
97. Lang, Deplacements et Villegiatures lift era ires, 121.
98. Esnault, “Entretiens avec Andre-Paul Antoine,” 25.
99. Esnault, “Biofilmographie d’Andre Antoine,” 31.
100. Esnault, “Entretiens avec Andre-Paul Antoine,” 25. Henri Colpi is said to be editing
Antoine’s footage of L'Hirondelle et la mesange for the Cinematheque franchise.
101. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 384-385.
102. This analysis of La Belle Nivernaise is based on the 35mm print preserved at the Cine¬
matheque franchise. *
103. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 5 (15 January 1924), 4. Fescourt, La Foi et
les montagnes, 307.
104. Jean Epstein, “Grossissement,” in Bonjour Cinema, 97, trans. Stuart Liebman, “Mag¬
nification,” 10.
105. Jean Epstein, Lents sur le cinema, 1, 60. For convenience in these notes, the first number
following the title of Epstein’s two-volume work will refer to the volume number.
106. Paul Ramain, “Sensibilite intelligente d’abord, objectif ensuite,” 7.
107. Jean de Mirbel, “La Belle NivernaiseCinemagazine 3 (21 December 1923), 465-466.
Ramain, “Sensibilite intelligente d’abord, objectif ensuite,” 7. Henri Langlois, “Jean Epstein
(1897-1953),” 14.
108. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 29 (15 January 1925), 6-7. “Films de la
semaine,” Cinemagazine 5 (30 January 1925), 230. This brief analysis is based on the print of
La Bnere preserved at the Royal Film Archive of Belgium. Recently, a print has been restored
by the Cinematheque fran^aise.
'109. “Actualites,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 33 (1 May 1924), [n.p.]. Rene Jeanne, “En
Briere avec Leon Poirier,” 15-18.
110. “Films de la semaine,” Cinemagazine 5 (30 January 1925), 230.
111. Leon Moussinac, “Les Films,” Le Crapouillot (16 February 1925), 16.
112. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 24 (1 November 1924), 5. “Ce que Lon dit
. . . ,” Cinemagazine 4 (21 November 1924), 337.
113. Edmond Epardaud, “Comment Jacques de Baroncelh realise Pecheur d'Islande,” 15. Oscar
Cornaz, “A Paimpol avec Jacques de Baroncelli pour le depart de la ‘Marie,’ ” 28-29.
114. Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 3, 389-
115. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 328-329-
116. Gerald McKee, Film Collecting, 82-83- Recently, a print of Pecheur d'lslande was restored
by the Archives du Film, Bois d’Arcy.
117. Jean Tedesco, “Pecheur d'lslande,” 9- P. L., “Charles Vanel,” Cinemonde 20 (7 March
1929), 365.
118. Jack Conrad, “Jacques de Baroncelli et la mer,” 565.
119. Ibid., 564.
120. “Le meilleur film de 1924,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 32 (1 March 1925), 5.
121. Conrad, “Jacques de Baroncelli et la mer,” 565.
122. Fantastique et realisme dans le cinema allemand, 1912-1933 (Brussels: Musee du cinema,
1969), 58-119- Lotte Eisner, “Kammerspielfilme et tragedie psychologiques,” in Vingt Ans de
cinema allemand (Paris: Centre national d’art et de la culture Georges Pompidou, 1978), 56-71.

551
NOTES Barry Salt and Kristin Thompson both have curbed my initial tendency to simplify this dis¬
tinction.
123. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligan to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), 97-106, 119-128. Lotte Eisner, The Haunted
Screen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 199- Gerald Noxon, “The European
Influence on the Coming of Sound to the American Film, 1925-1940: A Survey,” in Sound and
Cinema ed. Evan William Cameron (Pleasantville, N.Y.: Redgrave, 1980), 175.
124. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 179.
125. Kracauer, From Caligan to Hitler, 157-170. Barry Salt, “From Caligari to Who?” 123.
Bruce Murray, “Mutter Krausens Fahrt in Gluck: An Analysis of the Film as a Critical Response
to the ‘Street Films’ of the Commercial Film Industry,” enclitic 5:2/6:1 (Fall, 1981-Spring,
1982), 44-54.
126. Esnault, “Entretiens avec Andre-Paul Antoine,” 21. Esnault, “Biofilmographie d’Andre
Antoine,” 30.
127. This brief description is based on the print of Le Coupable preserved at the Cinematheque
franchise.
128. Predal, La Societe franca is e (1914-1945) a travers le cinema, 92.
129- Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 4, 487. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 336.
130. Louis Delluc, “L’Ame du bronze,” Le Film 98 (28 January 1918), 16.
131. Louis Delluc, “Travail,” Le Journal du Cine-Club 1 (14 January 1920), 7. Henri Bous-
quet, “Economic et publicite cinematographique dans 1’immediat apres-guerre,” 69- Marcel
Oms, “Histoire et geographic d’une France imaginaire,” 78.
132. Jean Gaitier-Boissiere, “Travail,” Cine-pour-tous 31 (3 April 1920), 6.
133. Ibid.
134. Mitry, Histoire du cinema 2, 250.
135. This brief analysis is based on the incomplete print of Travail preserved at the Cine¬
matheque franchise. Currently, the Cinematheque fran^aise is restoring a complete version of
the film.
136. Oms, “Histoire et geographic d’une France imaginaire,” 78. Marcel Oms, “Une Ci-
neaste des Annees Vingt: Rene Le Somptier,” 208-209-
137. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 198.
138. Andre Delpeuch contrasts Cousin Pons with LAtlantide to condemn the former for its
poorly handled action—Delpeuch, Le Cinema 117-121. See also Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford,
Paris vu par le cinema, 45-46.
139- Rene Jeanne, “Emile Zola au cinema,” Cinemagazine 2 (27 January 1922), 107-110.
Jean Mitry, “Ivan Mosjoukine,” 439-
140. Lang, Deplacements et Villegiatures litteraires, 159-
141. Poirier, Vingt-quatre images a la seconde, 48.
142. Edmond Epardaud, “Pans,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 18 (1 August 1924), 10.
143. Jeanne and Ford, Paris vu par le cinema, 162.
144. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 18 (1 August 1924), 21.
145. “Les films de la semaine,” Cinemagazine 4 (26 December 1924), 583-
146. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 273. Charles Ford, Jacques Feyder, 20-21.
147. This brief analysis is based on the prints of Crainquebille preserved at the Museum of
Modern Art and at the Cinematheque franchise.
148. Les films de la semaine,” Cinemagazine 3 (23 March 1923), 502. “Ce que Ton dit,”
Cinemagazine 4 (13 April 1923), 81. A.T., “Cinemagazine a New York,” Cinemagazine 4 (28
September 1923), 332.
149- Albert Bonneau, “Nicolas Koline,” Cinemagazine 4 (19 September 1923), 449-452.
150. Lucien Doublon, “Crainquebille,” Cinemagazine 3 (8 December 1922), 332.
151. Predal, La Societe fran^aise (1914-1945) a travers le cinema, 75.
152. There are great discrepancies between the French and the American prints of Crainque¬
bille. This second nightmare sequence only appears in the Museum of Modern Art version. And
the first fantasy sequence in the courtroom is edited in a different order in the Cinematheque
frangaise print than in the MOMA print.
153. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 182.
154. Les nouveaux films, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 34 (1 April, 1925), 5. Interview with Marie
Epstein, 4 June 1977. This analysis is based on the print of LAfftche preserved at the Royal

552
Film Archive of Belgium. I am indebted to Barry Salt for some of this information on L'Affiche. NOTES
155. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 49 (15 November 1925), 4.
156. Paul Ramain, “Presentation a Montpellier du film de Jean Epstein: L'Affiche," 224.
Epstein gets remarkable results here from a previously conventional cameraman, Maurice Des-
fassiaux.
157. Ibid., 224. Leon Moussinac, “Le Cinema,” Le Crapouillot (16 March 1925), 30.
158. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 58 (1 April 1926), 6. Charles Ford, Jacques
Feyder, 26.
159- Gille Anthelme, “GnbicheCinea-Cine-pour-tous 68 (1 September 1926), 33-
160. This brief analysis is based on the print of Gnbiche preserved at the Cinematheque
franchise.
161. "Gnbiche," Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 49 (15 November 1925), 7-8. Fescourt, La Foi et les
montagnes, 274.
162. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 344.
163. Ibid., 345.
164. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 54 (1 February 1926), 26.
165. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 344.
166. “Echos et communiques,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 58 (1 April 1926), 25. Beylie and La-
cassin, “Henri Fescourt,” 322.
167. This analysis is based on a 35mm print of Les Miserables preserved at the Cinematheque
fran^aise.
168. Beylie and Lacassin, “Henri Fescourt,” 298. Compare Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis
Bouquet, L’ldee et I’ecram: opinions sur le cinema, 1, 24-29-
169- Jacques Fieschi, “Entretien avec Jean Mitry,” 23.
170. Beylie and Lacassin, “Henri Fescourt,” 300.
171. Ibid., 299.
172. This brief analysis is based on the print of Carmen preserved at the Cinematheque
franchise.
173- Jean Tedesco, “Raquel Meller dans Carmen," 13-14.
174. Leon Barsacq, Caligan's Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions, 76.
175. Ford, Jacques Feyder, 27.
176. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 276.
177. “Les nouveaux films,” Cyn&a-Cine-pour-tous 72 (1 November 1926), 6.
178. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 118 (1 October 1928), 6.
179- Ford, Jacques Feyder, 30, 184.
180. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 291.
181. Victor Bachy, “Jacques Feyder,” 458. Barsacq, Caligari's Cabinet and Other Grand Illu¬
sions, 78.
182. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 163.
183. Bachy, “Jacques Feyder,” 446.
184. Both Jean Dreville and Marie Epstein confirmed this fact—Letter from Jean Dreville,
26 September 1978. Interview with Marie Epstein, 10 August 1979-
185. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 291.
186. Ford, Jacques Feyder, 32.
187. Pierre Leprohon, “Une belle artiste: Gina Manes,” Cinemonde 25 (11 April 1929), 447.
188. Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 3, 375.
189- Barsacq, Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions, 19. Sadoul, Histoire generale du
cinema, 5, 174.
190. Georges Chaperot, “L’Oeuvre classique de Jacques Feyder,” 20. Pierre Leprohon, Cin-
quante ans du cinema francais, 57.
191. J. Duren, “Quand Dreyer tournait Jeanne d'Arc . . . ,” 11.
192. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 291.
193. Jean Dreville, “La Critique du film,” 2.
194. Beylie and Lacassin, “Henri Fescourt,” 301, 322. In the summer of 1982, Kevin
Brownlow told me he had recently seen a condensed version (9-5mm) of La Glu and was much
taken by it.
195. Chirat, “Julien Duvivier,” 98.
196. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 129 (15 March 1929), 5.

553
 197 Lapierre Les Cent V,sages du enema, 162. Poulbot was a nineteenth-century painter
who was famous’for his paintings of children on the Pans streets. Th.s brief analysis is based
on a 35mm print of Peau de peche preserved at the Cinematheque franchise.
198. Robert Trevise, “Peau de peche" Cinea-Cine-pmr-tous 126 (1 February 1929), 26.

Fairy Tales, Fables, and Fantasies

1. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 25, 41-44.
2. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 2, 328.
3. “Les films de la semaine,” Cine-pour-tous 36 (8 May 1920), 6. Georges Sadoul, Histoire
generale du cinema, 4, 486.
4. “Les meilleurs films de l’annee,” Cine-pour-tous 51 (5 November 1920), 4-5.
5. Henri Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 321.
6. Jean Galtier-Boissiere, “La Critique des films,” 16-17. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford,
Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 375.
7. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 373.
8. Leon Poirier, Vingt-quatre images a la seconde, 49.
9. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 376.
10. Leon Moussinac, “La Poesie a lecran,” Cinemagazine 1 (13-19 May 1921), 16.
11. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 244. Some film reviewers apparently
thought the negative images had been included by error—Ralph Stephenson and J. R. Debrix,
The Cinema as Art, rev. ed. (Middlesex: Penguin, 1969), 148.
12. Les Nouveautes Aubert 5 (November, 1920), 1. “Les films de la quinzaine,” Cine-pour-tous
55 (17 December 1920), 15. “Les films de la semaine,” Le Journal du Cine-Club 50 (24 Decem¬
ber 1920), 7.
13. Henri Bousquet, “Economie et pubheite cinegraphique dans l’immediat apres-guerre,
73.
14. Marcel Oms, “Un Cineaste des Annees Vingt: Rene Le Somptier,” 209-
15. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 221. Compare Louis Delluc, “Quel-
ques films franqais,” Cinea 18 (9 September 1921), 5. H. }., “Nos metteurs-en-scene: Rene
Le Somptier,” Mon-Cine (21 February 1924), 9-
16. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 338.
17. Marcel L’Herbier, “Rose-Franee," Comoedia lllustre (5 December, 1919), quoted in Noel
Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 61.
18. Jean Galtier-Boissiere, “La Critique des films,” 16-17. “Cette semaine,” Cine-pour-tous
40 (5 June, 1920), 4. This brief analysis is based on the prints of Le Carnaval des rentes preserved
at the Cinematheque franqaise and at the George Eastman House.
19- Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 305. Jaque Catelain, Marcel L'Her-
bier, 41. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 4, 483.
20. Louis Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (10 June 1920), 2.
21. Louis Delluc, “Don Juan et Faust,” 13. Catelain, Marcel L’Herbier, 59- This brief analysis
is based on the print of Don Juan et Faust preserved at the Cinematheque frangaise.
22. Jean-Andre Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 33-34.
23. Ibid., 34.
24. Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 80.
25. Rene Clair, “Les films du mois,” [n.p.]. Ricciotto Canudo, L’Usine aux images, 134-135.
26. Louis Delluc, “Un Cheveu dans les pellicules,” Cinea 49 (14 April 1922), 12. “Don Juan
et Faust,” Cinemagazine 2 (28 April 1922), 130. Leon Moussinac, “Cinematographe,” Mercure
de France (1 June 1922), 497. Delluc, “Don Juan et Faust,” 13- “La Production de Marcel
LHerbier, ’ 13-18. “Les Presentations,” Almanach du cinema (1923), 115. Clair, “Les films du
mois,” [n.p.].
27. Georges Sadoul, Le Cinema franqais, 230. See also Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The
Animated Film, 1898-1928 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 237-242.
28. Lucien Doublon, “Les Presentations,” Cinemagazine 3 (9 March 1923), 427-428. Andre
Tinchant, Les films de la semaine,” Cinemagazine 3 (11 May 1923), 250-251. Leon Moussinac,
Cinematographe, Mercure de France (15 July 1923), 520-521. This brief analysis is based on
the print of Le Marchand de plaisir preserved at the Cinematheque franchise.

554
 29. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 26 (1 December 1924), 4. NOTES
30. Claude Beylie and Francis Lacassin, ‘‘A la recherche d un cinema perdu: Entretien avec
Jean-Louis Bouquet, Henri Fescourt, Joe Hamman, Gaston Modot,” 26.
31. Jean Eyre, “Les films de demain: La Cite foudroyee,” Mon-Cine (15 March 1924), 14-15.
‘‘Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 26 (1 December 1924), 4. Jean Mitry, Histone du
cinema, 2, 388.
32. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 239-241. Jean-Louis Bouquet, “La Cite foudroyee,”
Cahiers de la cinmatheque 33-34 (Autumn, 1981), 153-154.
33. Charles Ford, ‘‘Germaine Dulac,” 23.
34. A print of L'Angoissante Aventure is preserved at the National Film Archive in London. I
viewed this print too late to incorporate it into this study.
" 35. “Actualites,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 20 (August, 1923), [n.p.]. Jean de Mirbel, “Le
Brasier ardent,” 380-382.
36. Burch, Marcel L'Herbier, 91.
37. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 27 (15 December 1924), 5.
38. Edmond Epardaud, “Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 34 (1 April 1925),
21. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Rene Clair (1973). This analysis is
based on the print of Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge preserved at the National Film Archive in
London.
39- Edmond Epardaud, “Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 32 (1 March
1925), 20.
40. Leon Moussinac, “Le Cinema,” 26.
41. Edmond Epardaud, “Le Voyage imaginaire,” 14. Transcript of an interview by Armand
Panigel with Rene Clair (1973). This analysis is based on the print of Le Voyage imaginaire
preserved at the National Film Archive in London.
42. Jean Mitry, Rene Clair, 26.
43. Bernard Brunius, “Rene Clair,” 12. Mitry, Rene Clair, 27.
44. Edmond Epardaud, “La Proie du vent,” 12.“Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 86
(1 June 1927), 6. Maurice Bardeche and Robert Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, 246.
45. Catherine de la Roche, Rene Clair, 12.
46. Mitry, Rene Clair, 27.
47. Edmond Epardaud, “Mauprat de Jean Epstein,” 13-14. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-
Cine-pour-tous 87 (15 June 1927), A. This analysis is based on the print of Mauprat preserved at
the Cinematheque franqaise.
48. Pierre Kefer, “En marge de Mauprat,” 21-22. Pierre Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 43-
49- Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 77.
50. Leon Barsacq, Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions, 41.
51. Ford, “Germaine Dulac,” 28.
52. Lewis Jacobs, ed., The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin, 286.
53- Edmond Epardaud, “Les Productions Alex Nalpas,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 118 (1 October
1928), 22.
54. Ford, “Germaine Dulac,” 36.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 37.

Arabian Nights and Colonial Dreams

1. Pierre Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 45.
2. Henri Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 189-
3. Jean-Pierre Jeancolais, Carte blanche a la Cinematheque de Toulouse (Creteil: Maison des Arts
et de la Culture de Creteil, 1975), 13.
4. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 191 -
5. Louis Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (21 March 1919), 2. Louis Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-
Midi (14 October 1919), 2.
6. “La Realisation: La Sultane de lamour,” Cine-pour-tous 10 (8 October 1919), 5. Georges
Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 4, 486. For information on the print of La Sultane de lamour
presented at the Museum of Modern Art (in January, 1983), I thank Stuart Liebman.
7. Rene Jeanne, “Le C off ret de jade,” 19-

555
NOTES 8. Louis Delluc, ‘‘Quelques films fran<;ais,” Cinea 18 (9 September 1921), 5.
9. “Films de la quinzaine,” Cine-pour-tous 51 (22 October 1920), 4. This brief description is
based on an incomplete print of Narayana preserved at the Cinematheque franchise.
10. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 320.
11. Jean Mi try, Histoire du cinema, 3, 511.
12. “Les Presentations,” Cinemagazine 2 (2 December 1921), 22. Boulanger, Le Cinema colo¬
nial, 189.
13- Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 189-
14. Films Albatros folder—Bibliotheque de VArsenal. “Les Grands Films,” Cinemagazine 3
(27 April 1923), 161. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 403.
15. Edmond Epardaud, “Le Prince charmant,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 28 (1 January 1925), 13-
15.
16. Lucie Derain, “Un grand decorateur: Ivan Lochakoff,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 28 (1 January
1925), 16-17.
17. Epardaud, "Le Prince charmant,” 13.
18. Edmond Epardaud, "Salammbo a l’Opera,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 47 (15 October 1925),
14.
19. Cine-lnformations-Aubert 13 (15 February 1925), 1. Cine-Informations-Aubert 29 (25 Oc¬
tober 1925), 1. Films Aubert folder—Bibliotheque de 1’Arsenal.
20. La Petite Illustration 3 (19 September 1925), 2.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 3-12.
23. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 222.
24. Ibid., 221.
25. Edmond Epardaud, "Salammbo a L’Opera,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 48 (1 November 1925),
21-23- Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 221.
26. Rene Jeanne, “Le Maroc a l’ecran,” Cinemagazine 2 (1 September 1922), 259.
27. V.-Guillaume Danvers, “La Cinematograhie en France,” Almanack du cinema (1923), 62,
63.
28. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 93-
29- “Les films de la quinzaine,” Cine-pour-tous 1 (15 June 1919 [reissue 27 August 1920}),
6. Les Cinq Gentlemen maudits was popular enough to be rereleased one year later—“Les films de
la semaine,” Le Journal du Cine-Club 34 (3 September 1920), 10.
30. Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 29-30.
31. Leon Poirier, Vingt-quatre images a la seconde, 46-48.
32. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 170.
33. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 271. Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 35.
34. Les Nouveautes Aubert 21 (October, 1921), 1. V. Guillaume Danvers, “A Propos de
LAtlantide,” 5-7. Les Nouveautes Aubert 27 (April, 1922), 1.
35. Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 40. Andre Delpeuch, Le Cinema, 119-121, 270-272.
36. Jean Mi try, Histoire du cinema, 2, 435.
37. Louis Delluc, “Quelques films franqais,” Cinea 18 (9 September 1921), 8.
38. Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 40.
39- Louis Delluc, “Notes,” Cinea 6 (10 June 1921), 9. Delluc, “Quelques films frangais,”
8.
40. This analysis is based on the print of LAtlantide preserved at the Cinematheque frangaise.
41. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 174.
42. Ibid.
43. Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 36.
44. Jaque Christiany, “Le CheikCinea 81 (15 December 1922), 14.
45. Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 45.
46. Ibid., 43-44.
47. "Yasmina," Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 72 (1 November 1926), 21.
48. La mode a 1 ecran, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 128 (1 March 1929), 18. Boulanger, Le Cinema
colonial, 69-70, 76.
49. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 60 (1 May 1926), 4. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-
Cine-pour-tous 72 (1 November 1926), 6.
50. Marcel Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 181. Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 74-75.

556
 51. Walter S. Michel, “In Memoriam of Dmitri Kirsanov,” 39. NOTES
52. Raymond Chirat, Julien Duvivier,” 99- Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 77.
53. J.-P. Dreyfus, “Maman Colibn ” La Revue du cinema 9 (1 April 1930), 65.
54. Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 61.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Claude Beylie and Francis Lacassin, “Henri Fescourt,” 301. Boulanger, Le Cinema colo¬
nial, 67.
58. A. Colombat, “L'Occident,” 4.
59. Beylie and Lacassin, “Henri Fescourt,” 304.
60. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 348.
61. D. W. Brogan, The Development of Modern France, 1870-1939, 631. Georges Sadoul,
Histoire generale du cinema, 6, 309-
62. Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 84. Apparently, after an outcry from the French press,
Beau Geste was banned in France—David Strauss, “The Rise of Anti-Intellectualism in France:
French Intellectuals and the American Film Industry, 1927-1932,” 756.
63- Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 82-83.
64. Marcel Oms, “Un Cineaste des Annees Vingt: Rene Le Somptier,” 211-212.
65. Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 144.
66. Robert Trevise, “Les Presentations de la quinzaine,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous, 134 (1 June
1929), 26. Andre Bazin, Jean Renoir, 221.
67. Bernard Chardere, ed. “Jean Renoir,” 99-
68. Ibid., 99-100. *
69- This analysis is based on the print of Le Bled preserved at the Cinematheque fran^aise.
70. Premier Plan compared this sequence to the chariot race in Ben-Hur—Chardere, “Jean
Renoir,” 97.
71. It is the camel, not the villain, that is blinded here—compare Raymond Durgnat, Jean
Renoir, 59.
72. Bazin, Jean Renoir, 223.
73- Boulanger, Le Cinema colonial, 7.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid., 8.

Historical Reconstructions
1. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 3, 37-38, 41-50. Jean-Pierre Jeancolais, Carte
blanche a la Cinematheque de Tolouse, 13.
2. Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Pictures through 1923
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926), 595-597. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 3, 40. A
complete print of Queen Elizabeth is preserved at the Museum of Modern Art as well as elsewhere.
3. Pierre Leprohon, The Italian Cinema, trans. Roger Greaves and Oliver Stallybrass (New
York: Praeger, 1972), 16-32.
4. Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen, 75, 86. Lotte Eisner, “Lubitsch et les films a costumes,
1’influence de Max Reinhardt,” in Vingt Ans de cinema allemand, 1913-1933, 26-56.
5. Maurice Bardeche and Robert Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, 49.
6. Andre Lang, Deplacements et Villegiatures litteraires, 168.
7. D. Audollent, “Le Film allemand aux Etats-unis,” Cinemagazine 2 (17 February 1922),
210-211.
8. Jacques Petat, “L’Avant-garde fran^ais des annees vingt,” 22.
9- Marc Silberman, “Film and Ideology: The Structure of the German Film Industry and
Films of the 1920s,” 15.
10. “Les films,” Cine-pour-tous 2 (1 July 1919), 2. G.-Michel Coissac, “L’Evolution de ci-
nematographe et la realisation de quelques grands films,” 15.
11. “Les films de la quinzaine,” Cine-pour-tous 56 (31 December 1920), 4. Henri Fescourt,
La Foi et les montagnes, 193.
12. Lionel Landry, “La Reconstitution historique,” Cinemagazine 3 (14 September 1923),
368.

557
NOTES 13. “Les films de la quinzaine,” Cine-pour-tous 55 (17 December 1920), 15. P. H., “Une
grande vedette du film fran^ais; Leon Mathot, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 5 (15 January 1924), 5-7.
14. Marcel Oms, “Histoire et geographic dune France imaginaire,” 82.
15. “Du Studio a 1 ecran,” Cine-pour-tous 43 (25 June 1920), 2. This analysis is based on the
print of LAgonie des aigles preserved at the National Film Archive.
16. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5, 15, 19-20.
17. Janet Flanner, Vans Was Yesterday (1923-1939), ed. Irving Drutman (New York: Pop¬
ular Library, 1972), 18.
18. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 339- Marcel Oms suggests that several sequences in
L'Agonie des aigles actually echo the Great War: Napoleon’s farewell at Fontainebleau, for in¬
stance, recalls the ceremony of demobilization and the reconciliation of Clemenceau and Poin¬
care—Oms, “Histoire et geographic dune France imaginaire,” 81.
19. Advertisement, Cinemagazine 1 (7 October 1921), 4. Lucien Doublon, “Ce que l’on verra
prochainement,” Cinemagazine 1 (7 October 1921), 26.
20. Henri Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 84-85.
21. Ibid., 83.
22. Ibid., 83-84.
23. Ricciotto Canudo, IdUsine aux images, 31.
24. Advertisement, Cinemagazine 3 (8 December' 1922), 326. Henri Diamant-Berger, “Avant
Vingt Ans apres,” Cinemagazine 2 (22 December 1922), 447-448. A print of Vingt Ans apres is
preserved at the Cinematheque franchise.
25. Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 98-99.
26. Lang, Deplacements et Villegiatures litteraires, 156.
27. “Mile, de la Set glim,” Cinemagazine 1 (4-10 March 1921), 20-21. Pierre Desclaux,
“Charles Lamy,” Mon-Cine (7 February 1924), 8-10.
28. Philippe Esnault, “Entretiens avec Andre-Paul Antoine,” 24.
29- Lucien Doublon, “Ce que les directeurs ont vu et ce que le public verra,” Cine¬
magazine 1 (11-17 February 1921), 26-27. V.-Guillaume Danvers, “La Cinematographic en
France,” Almanach du cinema (1923), 55-56.
30. Lang, Deplacements et Villegiatures litteraires, 196.
31. Danvers, “La Cinematographic en France,” 56.
32. Ibid., 62. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 328. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5,
198.
33. Albert Bonneau, “Robin des bois,” Cinemagazine 3 (2 March 1923), 355-362. The readers
of Cinea-Cine-pour-tous voted it second on their list of the year’s best films (just after Gance’s La
Roue)—“Notre referendum du plus beau film,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 11 (15 April 1924), 5-6.
By this time, however, Ricciotto Canudo was already criticizing the apparent hegemony of the
genre, especially since he included in it the serial adventure film format—Canudo, “Le Ci¬
nema,” Les Nouvelles litteraires (3 March 1923), 4.
34. L’Effort Franyais Aubert (1923)—Bibliotheque de 1’Arsenal. Cinematheque franqaise fil¬
mography of Rene Le Somptier.
35. V.-Guillaume Danvers, “La Dame de Monsoreau,” Cinemagazine 3 (26 January 1923), 135-
140. “Le Scenario {La Dame de Monsoreau},” Cinemagazine 3 (26 January 1923), 141-145. Rene
Le Somptier, “Comment j’ai realise La Dame de Monsoreau,” Cinemagazine 3 (26 January 1923),
150. Andre Tinchant, “La Dame de Monsoreau,” Cinemagazine 3 (20 April 1923), 104-106.
36. The Cinematheque frangaise print of La Dame de Monsoreau is a condensed two-hour
version, which, according to Marcel Oms, was released in 1925—Oms, “Histoire et geographic
d’une France imaginaire,” 209-
37. Leon Moussinac, “Reprises et presentation,” Le Crapouillot (16 January 1923), 14. Ad¬
vertisement, Cinemagazine 3 (26 January 1923), 155-157.
38. Gerald McKee, Film Collecting, 83.
39. Canudo, L’Usine aux images, 126.
40. Albert Bonneau, “Violettes imperiales: le realisateur, la mise-en-scene, 1’interpretation,”
296.
41. Jean Galtier-Boissiere, “Une Seance d’art muet,” Le Crapouillot (l January 1923), 20-21.
42. Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 3 (15 December 1923), 4. Robert Trevise,
Les presentations de la quinzaine,” 33.
43. Leonce Perret, “Comment j’ai tourne Koenigsmark,” 329-332.

558
 44. Albert Bonneau, “Leonce Perret,” 221. Leon Moussinac, “Naissance du cinema [1925],” NOTES
134-135.
45. Leon Barsacq, Caligari's Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions, 227.
46. Trevise, ‘‘Les presentations de la quinzaine,” 33. “L’Elegance et Koenigsmark,” 18-19.
Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histone encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 248.
47. Moussinac, “Naissance du cinema [1925],” 132.
48. “Resultat du concours du ‘Meilleur film de l’Annee’ [1923],” Cinemagazine 5 (11 April
1924), 80.
49. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 12 (1 May 1924), 5.
50. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 337.
51. “Violettes impenales: le scenario,” 299.
52. Bonneau, “Violettes impenales,” 297. In the summer of 1982, Kevin Brownlow told me
that the film, at least in its condensed 9.5 mm version, was remarkably fluid, especially in its
camera movement.
53. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 337.
54. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 7 (15 February 1924), 4.
55. Jeanne and Ford, Histone encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 405.
56. “Le meilleur film de 1924,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 32 (1 March 1925), 5.
57. Jean Tedesco, “Kean ou Desordre et genie," 13. This analysis is based on the prints of Kean
collected at the Cinematheque frangaise, the George Eastman House, and Em Gee Films.
58. V. Mery, “Pendant que 1’on tourne: Kean," Cinemagazine 3 (1 June 1923), 367.
59- Juan Arroy, “Ivan Mosjoukine tourne Kean," Cinemagazine 3 (30 November 1923), 335.
60. Tedesco, "Keam," 16. ,
61. Jeanne and Ford, Histone encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 406.
62. Barsacq, Caligari's Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions, 38, 40. Lucien Aguettand, who
began as an assistant to Mallet-Stevens and Cavalcanti, also singles out the set design work of
the Russian emigres in Philippe Carcassonne and Francois Cuel, “Entretien avec Lucien Aguet¬
tand,” Cinematographe 76 (March, 1982), 18-22.
63. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 30 (1 February 1925), 5.
64. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 298.
65. Quenu, “L’Art de la decoration au cinema,” Cinemagazine 5 (26 December 1924), 565.
66. J.-A. de Munto, “Germaine Dulac nous parle du Diable dans la ville," Cinemagazine 4 (9
May 1924), 247. / -
67. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Raymond Bernard (1973).
68. Gilbert Flammand, “Le Miracle des loups,” 346.
69- Andre-Paul Antoine, Antoine, pere et fils: souvenirs du Pans litteraire et thedtral, 1900-1939
(Paris: Rene Juillard, 1962), 216. Rene Jeanne, “Le Miracle des loups: la bataille de Beauvais
reconstitute a Carcassonne,” 21-25.
70. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Raymond Bernard (1973).
71. Paul Ramain, “L’Influence du cinema sur la musique,” 124. Coissac, “L’Evolution du
cinematographe et la realisation de quelques grands films,” 25.
72. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 25 (15 November 1924), 4.
73. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 26 (1 December 1924), 4. “Les nouveaux
films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 33 (15 March 1925), 5.
74. “Quel est le meilleur film de 1925?” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 56 (1 March 1926), 16.
75. This analysis is based on the print of Le Miracle des loups preserved at the Cinematheque
franchise.
76. Dullin accepted this role of Louis XI reluctantly, as a means of sustaining his Atelier
Theatre—Antoine, Antoine, pere et fils, 213-215.
77. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 315.
78. Barsacq, Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions, 44.
79- “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 50 (1 December 1925), 5.
80. Gloria Swanson, Swanson on Swanson, 214-216.
81. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 224.
82. Swanson, Swanson on Swanson, 222-227.
83. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 224.
84. “Leonce Perret re<;oit un grand prix aux Arts Decoratifs pour Madame Sans-Gene," 28.
Swanson, Swanson on Swanson, 278-279- Letter from Kevin Brownlow, 25 August 1979-

559
NOTES 85. “L’Opinion de la presse sur Madame Sans-Gene,’ 27.
86. J. T., “Une grande premiere au Rivoli a New York,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 38 (1 June
1925), 22-23. Swanson, Swanson on Swanson, 269-
87. “Madame Recamier,” La Petite Illustration, 12 (9 June, 1928), 2.
88. Ibid'., 3-12.
89. Jeanne and Ford, Histone encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 234-235.
90. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 112 (1 July 1928), 5. Daniel Abric, “Madame
Recamier,” Cinemonde 9 (20 December 1928), 170-171.
91. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 143 (1 November 1929), 4. Paul Dornac,
‘‘Revue des programmes,” La Revue du cinema 6(1 January 1930), 73-74.
92. Gilbert Flammand, ‘‘On tourne Cagliostro,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 124 (1 January 1929),
21.
93. Films Albatros folder—Bibliotheque de 1’Arsenal.
94. Raymond Villette, ‘‘Les films histonques en 1929,” Almanack de Mon-Cine (1930), 44.
95. Flammand, “On tourne Cagliostro,” 21. R. T., “Cagliostro,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 125 (15
January' 1929), 24.
96. ‘‘Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 137 (1 July 1929), 5.
97. ‘‘Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 75 (15 December 1926), 7. This analysis is
based on a three-reel 9-5mm Pathescope version of Michel Strogoff in the collection of Kevin
Brownlow.
98. “Michel Strogofff La Petite Illustration, 2-4.
99- McKee, Film Collecting, 176.
100. ‘‘Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 93 (15 September 1927), 6. This analysis is
based on the print of Casanova at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
101. Barsacq, Caligans Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions, 40.
102. Ibid., 39.
103- “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 83 (15 April, 1927), 23-
104. Kevin Brownlow generously allowed me to examine a short tinted and toned sequence
from Casanova in his film collection.
105. “Casanova,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 88 (1 July 1927), 23-
106. Jean Dreville, “Films,” Cinegraphie 1 (15 September 1927), 11-12.
107. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 77 (15 January 1927), 6. Advertisement,
Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 79 (15 February 1927), [inside cover}. “Joueur d'echecsf La Petite Illustration,
2.
108. This analysis is based on two (French and English) two-reel 9-5mm Pathescope versions
of Joueur d'echecs in the collection of Kevin Brownlow.
109- “Le Joueur d'echecs: le scenario," Cinemagazine 7 (14 January 1927), 62-65.
110. E. R., “En marge du Joueur d'echecsf Cinemagazine 7 (14 January 1927), 73- "Joueur
d'echecsf La Petite Illustration, 2.
111. Coissac, “L’Evolution du cinematographe et la realisation de quelques grands films,”
27.
112. Barsacq, Caligan's Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions, 45.
113. J. W., “Raymond Bernard,” Cinemagazine 7 (14 January 1927), 67.
114. Jean de Mirbel, “La Premiere du Joueur d'echecsf Cinemagazine 7 (14 January 1927), 70.
115. "Joueur d'echecsf La Petite Illustration, 2.
116. Edmond Epardaud, “Raymond Bernard,” 33-34. Chirat, Catalogue des films frangais de
long metrage: films sonores de fiction, 1929-1939 [n.p.}.
117. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 127 (15 February 1929), 24. “L’Acti¬
vite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 139 (1 September 1929), 27.
118. Interview with Kevin Brownlow, 15 August 1979.
119. Pierre Rambaud, “La Valse de I'adieu,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 121 (15 November 1928),
27. Rene Olivet, “On verra cette semaine a Paris,” Cinemonde 6 (15 November 1928), 106. I
viewed a print of La Valse de I'adieu at the National Film Archive too late to incorporate any
further remarks into this study.
120. Pierre Desclaux, “Les grands films de 1927-1928,” Almanack de Mon-Cine (1929), 15.
121. “La Pnncesse Masha," Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 90 (1 August 1927), 28.
122. Le Rialto ouvira le 5 octobre,” Cinematheque frangaise 465 (1 October 1927), 10.
123. “Monte-Cristo,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 135 (15 June 1929), 27.

560
 124. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 143 (1 November 1929), 4. NOTES
125. Barsacq, Caligaris Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions, 39-
126. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 348.
127. “ Monte-Cnsto,” Cinemagazine (7 June 1929), quoted in Claude Beylie and Francis La-
cassin, “Henri Fescourt,” 304.
128. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 143 (1 November 1929), 4.
129- “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 58 (1 April 1926), 6. Rene Jeanne, Paris vu
par le cinema, 192. McKee, Film Collecting, 51.
130. There are discrepancies about Napoleons costs. See Rene Jeanne, “La Technique de
Napoleon,’' Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 86 (1 June 1927), 9- Leon Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema
[1929],” 268. Sophie Daria, Abel Gance: hier et demain 116. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford,
Abel Gance, 52.
131. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 80 (1 March 1927). Jean Mitry, “Napoleon a l’e-
cran,” 56. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 273-274.
132. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 96 (1 November 1927), 5. “A Paris, cette
semaine,” Cinematographic franchise 480 (14 January 1928), 42. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale
du cinema, 6, 319.
133- Jeanne and Ford, Abel Gance, 52. Interview with Kevin Brownlow, 15 August 1979-
134. Barsacq, Caligaris Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions, 40-41.
135. Abel Gance, Napoleon vu par Abel Gance [program insert],
136. Mitry, “Napoleon a l’ecran,” 55.
137. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 267, 272.
138. Coissac, “L’Evolution du cinematographe et la realisation de quelques grands films,”
31-32. Rene Olivet, “On verra cette semaine a Paris,” Cinemonde 26 (18 April 1929), 458.
“Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 132 (1 May 1929), 5. This brief analysis is based on
a two-reel 9.5mm Pathescope version of La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d'Arc in the collection of
Kevin Brownlow.
139. “La Jeanne d'Arc de Dreyer a la Salle Marivaux,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 119 (15 October
1928), 16.
140. Michel Delahaye, “Interview with Carl Dreyer,” 155.
141. “Dossier Film #3—La Passion de Jeanne dArc,” 46.
142. David Bordwell, Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc 20. Sadoul, Histoire generale du
cinema, 6, 384. ^ f
143- “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 127 (15 February 1929), 6. Rene Olivet,
“On verra cette semaine a Paris,” Cinemonde 16 (7 February 1929), 292. There was another film
released about the same time as Le Tournoi that also may have countered the genre conventions:
Cavalcanti’s adaptation of Gautier’s “swashbuckling” novel, Le Capitaine fracasse—see Gilbert
Flamand, “Le Capitaine fracasse,” Cinemonde 18 (21 February 1929), 331.
144. Bernard Chardere, ed., “Jean Renoir,” 93-
145. Raymond Durgnat, Jean Renoir 54.
146. Andre Bazin, Jean Renoir 220.
147. Chardere, “Jean Renoir,” 92.
148. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 64 (1 July 1926), 8. Cine-lnformation-Aubert
49 (1 September 1926), 1.
149- Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 74 (1 December 1926), 35.
150. This analysis is based on the print of Nana preserved at the Cinematheque franchise.
151. Jean Renoir, “Souvenirs,” Le Point 18 (December, 1938), reprinted in Bazin, Jean
Renoir, 10.
152. Alexander Sesonske, Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924-1939, 21. Sesonske’s analysis
of Nana is the best yet in English.
153. Edmond Epardaud, “Nana,” 15. Bazin, Jean Renoir, 207. Jean Renoir, Ma Vie et mes
films, 72, 75.
154. Albert Bonneau, “Nana,” Cinemagazine (29 January 1926), reprinted in Chardere, “Jean
Renoir,” 64.
155. Marcel Zahar and Daniel Burret, “Une Visite a Jean Renoir,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 58
(1 April 1926), 14. Bazin, Jean Renoir, 208.
156. Bonneau, “Nana,” 63- Pierre Leprohon,Jean Renoir, 37. Claude Beylie, “A la recherche
d’un style,” 13.

561
NOTES 157. Leprohon, Jean Renoir, 35, 37.
158. Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Praeger, 1973),
18
159. Sesonske, Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924-1939, 34. Charles [Rick] Altman, The
Lonely Villa and Griffith’s Paradigmatic Style,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 6 (Spring, 1981),
123-134. Janet Bergstrom, “Alternation, Segmentation, Hypnosis: Interview with Raymond
Bellour,” camera obscura 3-4 (1979), 77-79-
160. Noel Burch and Jean-Andre Fieschi, “La Premiere Vague,” 20-24. Noel Burch and
Jorge Dana, “Propositions, 40-66.
161. Sesonske, Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924-1939, 35.
162. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 185.
163. ‘‘Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 107 (15 April, 1928), 8.
164. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 426.
165. Pierre Desclaux, “Les grands films de 1927-1928,” 11-12.
166. Letter from Kevin Brownlow, 25 August 1979.
167. Advertisement, Cinemonde 3 (9 November 1928), 56. Leon Poirier, Vingt-quatre images
a la seconde, 223 -
168. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 136 (1 July 1929), 5. “Verdun, visions d’his-
toire,” La Petite Illustration, 2.
169- Poirier, Vingt-quatre images a la seconde, 221.
170. “Verdun, visions d’histoire,” La Petite Illustration, 2.
171. Edmond Epardaud, “Verdun, visions d’histoire,” 21-22. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire ency¬
clopedique du cinema, 1, 381.
172. Poirier, Vingt-quatre images a la seconde, 221. Maurice Schutz reports that Poirier accen¬
tuated the stark simplicity of the film by imitating Dreyer’s decision in La Passion de Jeanne
d’Arc not to use makeup on his actors—Schutz, “La Maquillage,” in L'Art cinematographique, 6
(Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1929), 65-66.
173. Gaston Thierry, “Les representations de gala de Verdun, visions d'histone," Cinemonde 4
(16 November 1928), 66.
174. Poirier, Vingt-quatre images a la seconde, 221. This brief analysis is based on a print of
the sound version of Verdun, visions d'histone preserved at the Cinematheque franqaise.
175. Hay Chowe, “Propaganda,” Close Up 4 (January, 1929), 27-32.
176. Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848-1943: Taste and Corruption, 44.

Modern Studio Spectaculars

1. Henri Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 143.
2. Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, 1923-1939, 3-
3. See the “Jazzmania” photograph of Mae Murray in Theatre et Comoedia Illustre 17 (May,
1923), [n.p.], and the photograph of her in costume for The Masked Bride in Cinea-Cine-pour-
tous 63 (15 June 1926), 20. Gerard Talon, “Cinema frangais: la crise de 1928,” 109-
4. For the special attention accorded to fashion and dancing by the French, see Theodore
Zeldin, France, 1848-1943: Taste and Corruption, 83-95, 308-318. See also Anne Hollander,
“Women and Fashion,” in Women, the Arts, and the 1920s in Pans and New York, ed. Kenneth
Wheeler and Virginia Lee Lussier (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1982), 109-125.
5. Talon, “Cinema franqais: La crise de 1928,” 107-108, 112-113. Marc Silberman, “Film
and Ideology: The Structure of the German Film Industry and Films of the 1920s,” 28-28a.
6. Charles Eckert, “The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window,” 4-8. For a fascinating corollary
study of changes in the American household of the 1920s, see Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “The
Industrial Revolution in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th
Century,” Technology and Culture 17 (January, 1976), 1-23.
7. Leon Moussinac, “Naissance du cinema {1925},” 134. Leon Barsacq, Caligaris Cabinet
and Other Grand Illusions: A History of Film Design 227.
8. “L’Elegance et Koenigsmark,” 18-19.
9. The rage for jazz dance halls had quickly spread to the provinces after the war, despite
attempts to tax them out of business. See Rene Noell, “Histoire du spectacle cinematographique
a Perpignan, de 1896 a 1944,” 53.

562
 10. Albert Bonneau, “L’Effort frangais en 1924,” Annuaire general de la cinematographie (1925), NOTES
79.
11. ‘‘Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 26 (1 December 1924), 4.
12. Jean-Andre Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 34.
13. ‘‘Que sera L'Inhumaine,” 12-13. Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis.
14. Noel Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 25.
15. Barry Salt suggests that Georgette Leblanc’s acting style may be in imitation of Asta
Nielson—letter from Barry Salt, 10 December 1979.
16. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 26 (1 December 1924), 4. This brief analysis
is based on the print of Le Lion des Mogols preserved at the Cinematheque franqaise.
17. ‘‘Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 29 (15 January 1925), 6.
18. “La Terre promise, ” La Petite Illustration, 2-12. Gerald McKee, Film Collecting 84. Chris¬
tian Bosseno, ‘‘Le cinema et la presse (II),” 96-97.
19- Edmond Epardaud, "La Terre promise," 13-14.
20. ‘‘Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 40 (1 July 1925), 4.
21. Charles Ford, ‘‘Germaine Dulac,” 26.
22. This analysis is based on the prints of Ame d'artiste preseved at the Cinematheque franchise
and the National Film Archive.
23. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 66 (31 July 1926), 6.
24. Jaque Catelain, Marcel L'Herbier, 98.
25. Ibid., 93.
26. Ibid., 94.
27. Juan Arroy, “Marcel L’Herbier,” 9-12.
28. “Films d’aujourd’hui,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 72 (1 November 1926), 20. Fieschi, “Autour
du cinematographe,” 37. Marcel Oms, “Une Cineaste des Annees Vingt: Rene Le Somptier,”
212.
29- “Ce que la presse etrangere pense du Vertige,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 72 (1 November 1926),
12.
30. “Les meilleurs films 1926-1927,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 102 (1 February 1928), 6.
31. Jean Dreville, “Films,” Cinegraphie 3 (15 November 1927), 54. “Les nouveaux films,”
Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 106 (1 April 1928), 6.
32. Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 37-38.
33. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 75 (15 December 1926), 7. Edmond Epar¬
daud, “La Femme nue,” 13-17.
34. Jean Dreville, “Ce que dit l’ecran,” Photo-Cine 1 (15 January 1927), 14. “Les meilleurs
films 1926-1927,” 6.
35. Jean Dreville, “La Critique de film,” On Tourne 3 (15 May 1928), 2. “Les nouveaux
films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 110 (1 July 1928), 6.
36. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 460-461.
37. Jean Dreville, “Films,” Cinegraphie 2 (15 October 1927), 36.
38. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 77 (15 January 1927), 6.
39- Raymond Chirat, “Julien Duvivier,” 79-
40. Cine-lnformation-Aubert 51(1 October 1926), 1.
41. Cine-lnformation-Aubert 56 (15 December 1926), 1.
42. Julien Bayart, “Ce que dit l’ecran,” Photo-Cine 2 (15 February 1927), 29-
43. Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 149-150.
44. Albert Bonneau, “Les presentations,” Cinemagazine 7 (17 June 1927), 585. Jean Dreville,
“Films,” Cinegraphie 1 (15 September 1927), 14.
45. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 90 (1 August 1927), 6.
46. Bernard Chardere, ed., “Jean Renoir,” 77-80. Andre Bazin, Jean Renoir, 210-211.
47. "Marquittaf Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 90 (1 August 1927), 31.
48. Chardere, “Jean Renoir,” 78.
49. Raymond Durgnat, Jean Renoir, 46.
50. Chardere, “Jean Renoir,” 77. Bazin, Jean Renoir, 211.
51. Hara-Kiri received some attention in the Museum of Modern Art program, “Rediscov¬
ering the French Film, Part II,” that opened in January, 1983.
52. This brief analysis is based on the print of Yvette preserved at the National Film Archive.

563
NOTES 53. “Yvette,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 99 (15 December 1927), 19.
54. “Les nouveaux films,’ Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 125 (15 January 1929), 7. Jeanne and Ford,
His torn encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 428.
55. Edmond Epardaud, “La Vierge folk,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 124 (1 January 1929), 23-24.
“Louise Lagrange et Pierre Blanchar dans La Marche nuptiale,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 125 (15
January 1929), 18-19. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 130(1 April 1929), 24.
Talon, “Cinema fran^ais: la crise de 1928, 112-113.
56. A. D., “Quartier Latin,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 125 (15 January, 1929), 23. Pierre Heuze,
“Quartier Latin,” Cinemonde 22 (21 March 1929), 352-353- "Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-
pour-tous 131 (15 April 1929), 4. “Quartier Latin,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 131 (15 April 1929),
12-13.
57. Annuaire general de la cinematographs (1928), 528, 559- "Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-
pour-tous 126 (1 Lebruary 1929), 5. Jeanne and Lord, Histone encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 214.
58. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous l4l (1 October 1929), 26. This brief
analysis is based on the print of Au bonheurs des dames preserved at the Cinematheque franchise.
59- Michael Miller, The Bon Marche, 5,
60. Chirat, “Julien Duvivier,” 81.
61. Burch, Marcel L'Herbier, 130-133.
62. Edmond Epardaud, “LArgent,” 13-14. This analysis is based on the prints of L’Argent
at the Museum of Modern Art and at the National Lilm Archive—both drawn from the recon¬
structed version at the Archives du Lilm, Bois d’Arcy.
63. “La Polemique de LArgent,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 107 (15 April 1928), 26-28. Marcel
L’Herbier, “Le Droit de metamorphose,” 10-11.
64. Lieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 38.
65. Jean Lenauer, “The Cinema in Paris,” 81.
66. Lieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 38.
67. Noel Burch and Jorge Dana, “Propositions,” 47.
68. Talon, “Cinema fran^ais: la crise de 1928,” 111.
69. Ibid., 113.
70. Marcel Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 212-213- Raymond Borde, “La Lrance des
Annees 30,” 23-45.

Comics and Comedies

1. Lrancis Lacassin, Les Lous Rires de la Belle Epoque,” in Tour une contre histone du cinema,
77-78. Claude Beylie and Lrancis Lacassin, “A la recherche d’un cinema perdu: entretien avec
Jean-Louis Bouquet, Henri Lescourt, Joe Hamman, Gaston Modot,” 26.
2. Georges Sadoul, Histone generale du cinema, 2, 350, 352. Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns
(New York: Knopf, 1975), 53- Georges Sadoul, Le Cinema franyais, 177.
3. Georges Sadoul, Histone generale du cinema, 3, 122. Sadoul, Le Cinema franyais, 227.
4. Maurice Bardeche and Robert Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, 11-IB. Rene Jeanne
and Charles Lord, Histone encyclopedique du cinema 1, 78-79-
5. Kerr, The Silent Clowns, 53.
6. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 3, 115.
7. Jean Mitry, Max Linder, Anthologie du cinema, 334-335. This brief description is based
on prints of Max, victime de quinquina preserved at the Cinematheque franchise, Museum of
Modern Art, and Em Gee Lilm Library.
8. Sadoul, Histone generale du cinema, 3, 117.
9- Jeanne and Lord, Histone encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 102.
10. Lacassin, “Les Lous Rires de la Belle Epoque,” 79.
11. Sadoul, Histone generale du cinema, 3, 130.
12. This brief description is based on prints of Onesime horloger at the Cinematheque fran¬
chise and at the Museum of Modern Art.
13. Bardeche and Brasillach, The History of Motion Pictures, 75.
14. Francis Lacassin, Louis Feuillade, 55-57.
15. Sadoul, Le Cinema franyais, 200.
16. Lacassin, Louis Feuillade, 56.
17. Mitry, “Max Linder,” 347.

564
 18. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 480. Henri Diamant-Berger, II etait NOTES
une fois le cinema, 85-86.
19. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 210, 481.
20. Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 47-61.
21. Ibid., 64.
22. Henri Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 313. Transcript of an interview by Armand
Panigel with Raymond Bernard (1973).
23. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 4, 488.
24. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 313.
25. Ricciotto Canudo, L'Usine aux images, 99-
26. Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 66.
27. “Le Petit Cafe," Cine-pour-tous 16 (20 December 1919), 8. Mitry, “Max Linder,” 308.
Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema, 66-67.
28. Diamant-Berger, II etait une fois le cinema 67-69-
29- Dorothy Knowles, French Drama of the Inter-War Years, 1918-1939 (London: George G.
Harrap. 1967), 274-287.
30. Lacassin, Louis Feuillade, 97-98.
31. “Pathe-Consortium,” Almanach du cinema (1922), 8-11.
\
32. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 31 (15 February 1925), 4.
33. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 119-120. Mitry, “Max Linder,” 311.
3-4. Jean Pascal, “Le Renouveau du film comique: Ce Cochon de Morin,” Cinemagazine 4 (7
March 1924), 411-412.
35. Lucien Farnay, CLes Ombres qui passentf 389-390. Films Albatros folder—Bibliotheque
de 1’Arsenal.
36. Albert Bonneau, “Les Presentations,” Cinemagazine 3 (8 June 1923), 412.
37. “Les films de la semaine,” Cinemagazine 5 (13 February 1925), 328. Bernard Brunius,
“Rene Clair,” 11. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Rene Clair (1973).
38. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Rene Clair (1973).
39- Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Rene Clair (1973).
40. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 52 (1 January 1926), 6. Films Albatros folder—
Bibliotheque de LArsenal.
41. Edmond Epardaud, “Le Chasseur de Chez Maxim’s,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 88 (1 July 1927),
21. /

42. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 73 (15 November 1926), 8. This brief analysis
is based on the print of Jim la Houlette preserved at the National Film Archive.
43- "Le Bouif errant,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 73 (15 November 1926), 35-36.
44. Raymond Chirat, “Julien Duvivier,” 38-39-
45. “Les Transatlantiques,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 101 (15 January 1928), 21.
46. Gerard Talon, “Cinema fran^ais: la crise de 1928,” 111.
47. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 106 (1 April 1928), 6.
48. Francois Mazeline, “Opinions des cineastes: Henri Chomette,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 103
(15 February 1928), 13.
49- Jean Dreville, “Films,” Cinegraphie 5 (15 January 1928), 94.
50. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 266.
51. Dreville, “Films,” 94.
52. Henri Chomette, “Le Chauffeur de MademoiselleCinegraphie 4 (15 December 1927), 65-
67.
53- Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Rene Clair (1973).
54. “A Paris, cette semaine,” Cinematographic franyaise 480 (14 January 1928), 42. “A Paris,
cette semaine,” Cinematographic franqaise 483 (4 February 1928), 48. Jean Mitry, “Films,” Ci¬
negraphie 4 (15 December 1927), 69- Jean Lenauer, “Rene Clair,” 37. Leon Moussinac, “Pan-
oramique du cinema [1929],’’ 293-295.
55. Leon Barsacq, Caligaris Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions: A History of Film Design, 75-
76. Lewis Jacobs, ed., The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin, 30.
56. Jean Mitry, Rene Clair, 32.
57. Edmond Epardaud, “Rene Clair fonde un genre nouveau avec Un Chapeau de paille d’Ita¬
lic,” 15. This analysis is based on the print of Un Chapeau de paille d’ltalie preserved at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York.

565
NOTES 58. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 294.
59. Transcript of an interview by Armand Pamgel with Rene Clair (1973).
60. Rene Olivet, ‘‘On verra cette semaine a Paris,” Cinemonde 25 (11 April 1929), 440.
Catherine de la Roche, Rene Clair, 15.
61. Mitry, Rene Clair, 59-
62. Andre Delons, “Les Deux Timides,” 65.
63. This brief analysis is based on the print of Les Deux Timides preserved at the National
Film Archive. There is also a print at the Museum of Modern Art.
64. Jeanne and Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 368-369-
65. Mitry, Rene Clair, 59.
66. Jean Lenauer, ‘‘The Cinema in Paris,” Close Up 4 (January, 1929), 68. Fescourt, La Foi
et les montagnes, 290.
67. Mitry, Rene Clair, 59-
68. Jacobs, ed., The Compound Cinema, 295.
69. This analysis is based on the print of Les Nouveaux Messieurs preserved at the National
Film Archive in London.
70. Charles Ford, Jacques Feyder, 43-44.
71. Rene Olivet, ‘‘On verra cette semaine,” Cinemonde 24 (4 April 1929), 426. “Les nouveaux
films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 131 (15 April 1929), 4.
72. “Notre concours des meilleurs films de 1929,” Cinea-Cine 1 (March, 1930), 41.
73- Victor Bachy, “Jacques Feyder,” 448. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 197.
74. Lenauer, “The Cinema in Paris,” 67.
75. Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 3, 376.
76. Alexander Sesonske is the only film critic or historian to grant Tire au flanc its impor¬
tance—Alexander Sesonske, Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924-1939, 51-65. This analysis is
based on prints of Tire au flanc at the Cinematheque frangaise and at the State Historical Society
of Wisconsin.
77. Bernard Chardere, ed., “Jean Renoir,” 88-89-
78. Sesonske, Jean Renoir, 53.
79- Chardere, “Jean Renoir,” 89-
80. Letter from Kevin Brownlow, 25 August 1979-
81. Richard Abel, “Collapsing Columns: Mise-en-scene in Boudu,” Jump Cut 5 (January-
February, 1975), 18-20.
82. Raymond Durgnat, Jean Renoir, 56-57.
83. Rene Olivet, “On verra cette semaine,” Cinemode 8 (13 December 1928), 150. Andre
Bazin, Jean Renoir, 216. Frangois Truffaut, The Films of My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 36-47.
84. Bazin, Jean Renoir, 217.
85. Chardere, “Jean Renoir,” 90.
86. Bazin, Jean Renoir, 218.
87. Sesonske, Jean Renoir, 60.
88. Ibid., 54-55, 62-65.
89. Ibid., 55.

Part III, The Alternative Cinema Network: Introduction

1. Jean Tedesco, “Le Repertoire et l’avant-garde du cinema,” 5.

The Beginnings of a Film Criticism

1. G.-Michel Coissac, Histoire du cinematographe, 448. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Le
Cinema et la presse, 1893-1960, 75-76.
2. Henri Diamant-Berger, 11 etait une fois le cinbna, 30.
3. Jean Mitry, “Louis Delluc,” 8-9.
4. Colette, Colette at the Movies, 20.
5. Louis Delluc, Critique des films,” Le Film (3 June 1918), as quoted in Colette, Colette
at the Movies, 43.

566
 6. Andre Antoine, “La Cinegraphie fran^aise,” 6. NOTES
7. Colette, “Cinema,” Excelsior (7 August 1916), as reprinted in Colette at the Movies, 19.
8. Alain and Odette Virmaux, “Introduction,” Colette at the Movies, 4.
9. Louis Delluc, “Illusion et Illusions,” Le Film 68 (25 June 1917), 5-6.
10. Marcel L’Herbier, “Hermes et le Silence,” 199-212.
11. Louis Aragon, “Du Decor,” Le Film 131 (16 September 1918), 8-10. Delluc also pub¬
lished Aragon’s first poem, “Chariot sentimental,” in LeFilm 105 (18 March 1918), 11.
12. Jean Girard, Le Lexique frangais du cinema, des origines a 1930, 49-
13- Jeanne and Ford, Le Cinema et la presse, 19.
14. Ibid., 53. Actually Delluc’s column first appeared on 20 May 1918.
15. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’ecran,” Le Temps (29 November 1916), 3.
16. Louis Delluc, “Les Cineastes (uncompleted),” as quoted in Tariol, Louis Delluc, 42.
17. Diamant-Berger’s conception of the cinema coincides closely with that of Charles Pathe
in “Etude sur revolution de l’industrie cinematographique franqaise [1918],” Intelligence du
cinematographe, 213-228.
18. Louis Delluc, Cinema et cie (Paris: Grasset, 1919), 282-283.
19- Louis Delluc, “Cinema et cie,” Paris-Midi (17 August 1918), 3- Diamant-Berger, Le
Cinema, 37. Andre Antoine, “L’Avenir du cinema,” Lectures pour tous (December, 1919), re¬
printed in Philippe Esnault, “Propos d’Antoine,” 46.
20. Louis Delluc, “Cinema et cie: Merveilles sans merveilles,” Paris-Midi (3 August 1918),
3. See also Tariol, Louis Delluc, 48, and Mitry, “Louis Delluc,” 25.
21. Louis Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (3 March 1919), 2.
22. Antoine, “La Cinegraphie frangaise,” 5.
23. Jeanne and Ford, Le Cinema et la presse, 54-62. J. Leclerc, Le Cinema, temoin de son temps,
29.
24. Richard Abel, “The Contribution of the French Literary Avant-Garde to Film Theory
and Criticism, 1907-1924,” 25-31.
25. For a trenchant and highly amusing portrait of Jean Galtier-Boissiere, see Denise Tual,
Le Temps devore, 11-16.
26. Marcel Gromaire, “Idees d’un peintre sur le cinema,” Le Crapouillot (1919), reprinted in
L’Herbier, Intelligence du cinematographe, 239-249.
27. Jeanne and Ford, Le Cinema et la presse, 66-68.
28. Leon Moussinac as quoted in Vincent Paul, Introduction au Cine-Club (Paris: Ouvrieres,
1964), 22. Armand Tallier reprinted just these lines on the opening program notes for the
Studio des Ursulines, in January, 1926.
29- Henri Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 220.
30. Ricciotto Canudo, L’Usine aux images, 5-8—translated by Ben Gibson, Don Ranvaud,
Segio Sokota, and Deborah Young as “The Birth of the Sixth Art (1911),’’ 3-7.
31. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 221. Georges Sadoul, “Bibliographic des ouvrages de
hauteur sur le cinema,” in Leon Moussinac, L'Age ingrat du cinema, 379-
32. Paul, Introduction au Cine-Club, 25.
33- Jean Epstein, “L’Element photogenique [1924],” Ecrits sur le cinema, 1, 145.
34. Canudo, L’Usine aux images, 33-40.
35. Jules Romains, “Donogoo-Tonka ou les miracles de la science,” La Nouvelle Revue Frangaise
74 (November, 1919), 821-829, and 75 (December, 1919), 1016-1063.
36. Louis Delluc, “Chariot,” L’Esprit nouveau 3 (December, 1920), 349-351.
37. B. Tokine, “L’Esthetique du cinema,” L’Esprit nouveau 1 (October 1920), 85-89- Elie
Faure, “Chariot,” L’Esprit nouveau 5 (March, 1921), 657-666. Jean Epstein, “Cinema,” L’Esprit
nouveau 14 (1922), 1669-1670.
38. Louis Delluc, “Les Cineastes de Paris,” 13-18. Louis Delluc, “Les Cineastes,” 34-44.
Henri Fescourt has a charming story about Delluc’s choice of this word to define the filmmaker
as an artist in La Foi et les montagnes, 164-165.
39. Jeanne and Ford, Le Cinema et la presse, 65. Robert Desnos, Cinema (Paris: Gallimard,
1966), 95-111.
40. Jeanne and Ford, Le Cinema et la presse, 64-65.
41. Jacques Fieschi, “Entretien avec Jean Mitry,” 18.

567
NOTES Film Journals
1. Louis Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (21 July 1919), 2.
2. Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 428, n. 1. Jacques Fieschi, Entretien avec Jean Mitry,
18.
3. Georges Sadoul, “Preface,” in Moussinac, L'Age ingrat du cinema, 13. Mitry, Louis Del¬
luc,” 19.
4. C. de Vesme, “Ce que doivent etre le Cine-Club et son journal,” 2. Cf. Louis Delluc,
“Cinema,” Paris-Midi (17 January 1920), 2.
5. Vesme, “Ce que doivent etre le Cine-Club et son journal,” 4.
6 Cinemagazine was the only one ol these magazines with membership in the industry s
syndicate of cinema journals: Lynx, Echos, Cinemagazine 4 (2 May 1924), 222. The nine¬
teenth-century practice of anonymous or uncredited advertising and promotion in the French
press is quite evident in Cinemagazine as well as other film journals Theodore Zeldin, Fiance,
1848-1945: Taste and Corruption, 163-177.
7. Jeanne and Ford, he Cinema et la presse, 80.
8. Coissac, Histoire du cinematographe, 449-
9. Jeanne and Ford, Le Cinema et la presse, 170. In the 1970s, the practice was revived with
the paperback novelizations of most American films.
10. Christian Bosseno, “Le Cinema et la presse {II)," 95-96.
11. Mitry, “Louis Delluc,” 20.
12. Andre G. Brunelin, “Au Temps du Vieux-Colombier de Jean Tedesco [1],” 90. Mitry,
“Louis Delluc,” 22.
13. See especially Louis Delluc, “D’Oreste a Rio Jim,” 14.
14. Louis Delluc, ‘‘Le Cabinet du Docteur Caligari," Cinea 44 (10 March 1922), 5.
15. See David Bordwell, “The Musical Analogy,” 141-156.
16. Compare, for instance, Leon Moussinac, “La Roue d'Abel Gance,” 13; Emile Vuillermoz,
“La Roue,” 329-331 and 363-366; Rene Clair, “Les Films du mois: La Roue,” {n.p.}; Louis
Delluc, “Abel Gance,” 12. Also compare Leon Moussinac, “La Critique des films: L'Auberge
rouge, d’apres Balzac, par Jean Epstein,” 16-17, and Rene Clair, “Les Films du mois: Coeur
fidele,” [n.p.].
17. “Entretien avec Jean Mitry,” Le Cinematographe 47 (May, 1979), 19-
18. “Le Sens 1 bis” is translated by Tom Milne as “The Senses 1 (b)” in Afterimage 10
(Autumn, 1981), 9-16. “Grossissement” is translated by Stuart Liebman as “Magnification” in
October 3 (Spring, 1977), 9-15.
19. Pierre Porte, “L’Idee de photogenie,” 14-15. Jean Tedesco, “Le Cinema devant les arts,”
6-7. Jean Epstein, “De quelques conditions de photogenie,” 6-8. Pierre Porte, “La Forme et le
fond,” 6-7 and 27. Jean Epstein, “Pour une nouvelle avant-garde,” 8-10. Paul Ramain, “Sur
la musique visuelle engendree par certains films,” 12-13.

Cine-Clubs
1. Georges Sadoul, “Bio-filmographie,” in Sadoul, Dziga Vertov (Paris: Champs libre, 1971),
155-156. Richard Sherwood, “Documents from LEF,” Screen 12 (Winter, 1971-1972), 25-58.
Ronald Levaco, “Introduction” and “Bibliography of Works” in Kuleshov on Film, ed. Ronald
Levaco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 6-10, 211-212. Richard Taylor, The
Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 1917-1929 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 124-151.
2. Ben Brewster, “Documents from Novy LEF,” Screen 12 (Winter, 1971-1972), 59-91 -
Russian Formalism,” Twentieth-Century Studies 7/8 (December, 1972). Christopher Williams,
ed., Realism and Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1981), 115-152. Kristin Thompson,
Eisenstein s "Ivan the Terrible”: A Neoformalist Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University .Press,
1981), 8-9- Boris Eikhenbaum, ed., The Poetics of Cinema, trans. Richard Taylor, Richard
Sherwood, L. M. O Toole, Joe Andrew, Ann Shukman (Oxford: RPT Publications, 1982).
3. Taylor, The Politics of the Soviet Cinema, 52-63.
4. Sadoul, Preface, 13. Henri Diamant-Berger saw the Touring Clubs quite differently, as
a means of propagandizing the world about France through films—see Diamant-Berger, Le
Cinema, 211-213-
5. Advertisement, Le Journal du Cine-Club 20 (21 May 1920), 2. A. Antoine, “Le Cinema
d’hier, d'aujourd’hui, et de demain,” Le Journal du Cine-Club 24 (25 June 1920), 3-4. Emile
C°hl, “Les Dessins ammes et a trues,” Le Journal du Cine-Club 25 (2 July 1920), 4-5.
6. Andre Antoine, “Le Public,” 7.

568
 7. Le Cabinet du Docteur Caligan, ” Cinea 27 (11 November 1921), 8. Jean Galtier-Boissiere, NOTES
L Art cinegraphique, Le Crapouillot (16 November 1921), 2. Announcement, Cine-Journal 15
(19 November 1921), 29- Brunelin, “Au Temps du Vieux-Colombier [1],” 91-93. Paul, Intro¬
duction au Cine-Club, 24.
8. “Interessante manifestation cinegraphique,” La Crapouillot (16 November 1921), 19-
9. No one has been able to really explain Delluc’s apparent diffidence—see Pierre Seize, ‘‘Le
Film muet (1918-1930), 37; Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 226; and Brunelin, ‘‘Aux Temps
du Vieux-Colombier [1],” 92.
10. ‘‘C.A.S.A.,” Comoedia (6 April 1921), 3. ‘‘Au C.A.S.A.,” Cine-Journal 15 (28 May
1921) , 9-10. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 220-221. Brunelin, ‘‘Aux Temps du Vieux-
Colombier [ 1],” 93-
11. Jeander, Les Cine-Clubs, in Denis Marion, Le Cinema par ceux qui le font (Paris: Librairie
Artheme Fayarde, 1949), 380. Paul, Introduction au Cine-Club, 25-26.
12. Lo Duca, ‘‘Notes sur Canudo,” La Revue du cinema 13 (May, 1948), 3. Roger Shattuck,
The Banquet Years, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1968), 1, and 24-27. Georges Sadoul, Histoire
generate du cinema, 5, 54-56.
13- ‘‘Cinemas,” Comoedia (17 April 1921), 3. Jean Donzere, ‘ ‘Litterateur cinematique,” Co¬
moedia (22 April 1921), 4.
14. Ricciotto Canudo, ‘‘L’Art pour le septieme art,” 16.
15. “Le Cine-Club de France,” Les Cahiers du mots 16/17 (1925), 254. Jeander, “Les Cine-
Clubs,” 380.
16. A. Nardy, “Le Cinema au Salon d’Automne” [18-11-21]—Jacques de Baroncelli collec¬
tion, Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal. Ricciotto Canudo, “Le Cinema au Salon d’Automne,” Le Petit
Journal (4 November 1921), 4. Canudo, “Le Cinema,” Les Nouvelles litteraires (18 November
1922) , 4. Leon Moussinac, “Cinematographe,” Mercure de France (1 December 1922), 521.
Canudo, L'Usine aux images, 45-47. Leon Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” in
L'Age ingrat du cinema, 321.
17. P. Landry, “Le Cine au Salon d’Automne,” Le Petit Journal (18 November 1921), 4.
Nardy, “Le Cinema au Salon d’Automne.”
18. Advertisement for “Salon Annuel du film au Salon d’Automne,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 1
(15 November 1923), 3.
19- Jean Epstein, “L’Element photogenique,” 6.
20. Paul, Introduction au Cine-Club, 25.
21. Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 226.
22. Announcement, Cinemagazine 2 (6 January 1922), 10.
23- “Conference des Amis du cinema,” Cinemagazine 2 (8 December 1922), 346.
- 24. “Actualites,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 17 (May, 1923), [n.p.].
25. Noel Burch, “Bibliographic,” in Noel Burch, Marcel L'Herbier, 176.
26. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 5 (15 January 1924), 28. Georges Sa¬
doul, “Souvenirs d’un temoin,” Etudes cinematographiques 38-39 (Spring, 1965), 9. Andre Thi-
ron, Revolutionaries Without Revolution, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Macmillan,
1975), 67.
27. Jeander, “Les Cine-Clubs,” 380. Paul, Introduction au Cine-Club, 26. Its members in¬
cluded Germaine Dulac, Jacques Feyder, Louis Delluc, Robert Boudrioz, Lucien Wahl, and
Rene Jeanne.
28. Paul, Introduction au Cine-Club, 26-27.
29. Ibid., 27.
30. Lynx, “Echos,” Cinemagazine 4(1 February 1924), 193- Leon Moussinac, “Cinemato¬
graphe,” Mercure de France (1 April 1924), 230. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],’’
322 n. 1.
31. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 5 (15 January 1924), 29-
32. Lynx, “Echos,” Cinemagazine 4 (17 October 1924), 113- “Conference de Monsieur Rene
Clair,” 420-422.
33- “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 9 (15 March 1924), 27.
34. Brunelin, “Aux Temps du Vieux-Colombier [1], 95-96.
35. “Au Club des Amis de Septieme Art,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 12 (1 May 1924), 28.
36. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 11 (15 April 1924), 5. Canudo, L'Usine aux images,
128.

569
 37. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 12 (1 May 1924), 5. Pierre Henry, “Films d ama¬
NOTES
teurs,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 32 (1 March 1925), 12.
38 “L Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 5 (15 January 1924), 29- Leon Moussi-
nac, “Cinematographe,” Mercure de France (1 April 1924), 230-231- Sadoul, “Preface,” 13.
39. Musee Galliera, Exposition de I'art dans le cinema frangais, 66-67.
40. Germaine Dulac, “Les Precedes expressifs du cinematographe,” 15-18, 66-68, and 89-
92.
41. “Au Cine-Club de France,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 40 (1 July 1925), 22. Jeander, Les
Cine-Clubs,” 381. Paul Introduction au Cine-Club, 27.
42 P -L Fouquet and Clement Guilhamou, ed., Ee Tout Cinema (Pans. Filma, 1926), 95.
43. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 322, n. 1.
44. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 46 (1 October 1925), 5. Advertisement, Ee Cahiers
du mois 16/17 (1925), viii-ix.
45. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 51 (15 December 1925), 5.
46. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 54 (1 February 1926), 5. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-
pour-tous 55 (15 February 1926), 6.
47. Jeander, “Les Cine-Clubs,” 381. Paul, Introduction au Cine-Club, 28.
48. Interview with Jean Dreville in Paris, 27 June 1978.
49. “Tribune libre du cinema,” Cinegraphie 5 (January, 1928), 93.
50. P. A. Harle, “Critique,” Cinematographic franyaise 364 (24 October 1925), 5. “Le Cinema
d’Avant-Garde a l’Exposition des Arts Decoratifs,” Cahiers du mois 16/17 (1925), 255. Julien
Bayart, “Ce que lecran,” Photo-Cine 1 (15 January 1927), 15. Sadoul, “Preface,” 14.
51. “Notre Avant-Garde aux Arts Decoratifs,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 46 (1 October 1925), 11.
52. Jeander, “Les Cine-Clubs,” 381. Jean Mitry, “Deux manifestations peu connues,” 116.
53- Paul, Introduction au Cine-Club, 29.

Specialized Cinemas
1. Andre Brunelin, “Au Temps du Vieux-Colombier [2],” 88.
2. “Les Cinemas a Paris,” Tout Cinema 1929 (Paris: Filma, 1930), 179- Brunelin, “Au Temps
du Vieux-Colombier [2],” 92.
3. Brunelin, “Au Temps du Vieux-Colombier [2],” 95.
4. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 24 (1 November 1924), 6. Jean Tedesco, “Le Reper¬
toire et l’avant-garde du film,” 5.
5. Lynx, “Echos,” Cinemagazine 4 (14 November 1924), 297. Jean Tedesco, “Repertoire des
films representes par le Theatre du Vieux-Colombier,” 11. Brunelin, “Au Temps du Vieux-
Colombier [2],” 98-99-
6. Lewis Jacobs, ed., The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin, 99,
549.
7. Advertisements in Cinea-Cine-pour-tous, from January to June, 1925.
8. Advertisements, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 26 (1 December 1924), 5; 27 (15 December 1924),
3; 31 (15 February 1925), 5.
9. Brunelin, “Au Temps du Vieux-Colombier [2],” 104-105.
10. “Le Montreur d’Ombres au Theatre du Vieux-Colombier,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 26 (1
December 1924), 23. Brunelin, “Au Temps du Vieux-Colombier [2],” 99-102.
11. Andre Brunelin, “Au Temps du Vieux-Colombier [3],” 88-89-
12. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 51 (15 December 1925), 5.
13. Pierre Billard, “Jean Gremillon,” in Anthologie du cinema (Paris: L’Avant-Scene du
cinema, 1967), 559-
14. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 53 (15 January 1926), 3. Pierre Henry, “Nadia
Sibirskaya,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 54 (1 February 1926), 19-20. Brunelin, “Au Temps du Vieux-
Colombier [3],” 89.
15. “Quel est le meilleur film de 1925?” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 56 (1 March 1926), 16.
16. Brunelin, “Au Temps du Vieux-Colombier [3],” 89-90.
17. Roger Regent, “Petite histoire des ‘Ursulines’ dans la grande histoire du cinema,” 14.
18. Les cinemas a Paris,” Tout-Cinema 1929, 178. Regent, “Petite histoire des ‘Ursulines,’
14.
19- Germaine Dulac, “Le Cinema d’avant-garde,” 362.
20. Jacobs, ed., The Compound Cinema, 99-

570
 21. Armand Tallier, “La Creation du Studio des Ursulines,” in Pierre Lherminier, ed., NOTES
Armand Tallier et le Studio des Ursulines (Paris: A.F.C.A.E., 1963), 3.
22. Tallier, “La Creation du Studio des Ursulines,” 3- Tual, Le Temps devore, 41-42.
23. “Programme des cinemas,” Cinemagazine 6 (21 May 1926), 414. Tallier, “La Creation
du Studio des Ursulines,” 4.

Proliferation and Crisis

1. G.-Michel Coissac, Histoire du cinematographe, des origines jusqu’d nos jours, 155-513. Leon
Moussinac, Naissance du cinema, 31-81.
2. Moussinac, “Naissance du cinema [1925],” 33-
3. Besides several earlier essays (see Film Journals, note 19), see Pierre Porte, “Faisons le
point,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 49 (15 November 1925), 9, and “Le Cinema pur,” 12-13; Henri
Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet, Videe et lecran: opinions sur le cinema, 1-3.
4. Fescourt and Bouquet, L'ldee et lecran, 1, 26.
5. Jean Epstein, Le Cinematographe vu de I'Etna, 13.
6. Jean Epstein, “Pour une nouveile avant-garde,” translated by Stuart Liebman as “For a
New Avant-Garde,” 29- Stuart Liebman, “The Sublime and the Fantastic: Jean Epstein’s Film
Theory” (Paper given at the Conference of the Society for Cinema Studies, Temple University,
8 March 1978).
7. According to Christopher Green, most of Cendrars’s essay was written in 1917 and 1921.
Earlier excerpts and versions were published in Les Hommes du jour (8 February 1919), La Rose
rouge (12 June 1919), Promenoir (May, 1921), Cosmopolis (September, 1921). See Christopher
Green, “Leger and L’Esprit Nouveau, 1912-1928,” 81.
8. Unlike the other journals, La Revue federaliste was published in Lyon, not in Paris.
9- “Echos et communiques,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 55 (15 February 1926), 21. “Echos et
communiques,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 57 (15 March 1926), 23.
10. Germaine Dulac, “La Folie des vaillants (fragments),” Cinegraphie, 1 (15 September 1927),
9-10. Jean Epstein, “Six et demi X onze (un kodak),’’ Cinegraphie, 2 (15 October 1927), 33-35.
11. Jeanne and Ford, Le Cinema et la presse, 85. La Nouveile Revue Frangaise also should be
mentioned for its publication of Antonin Artaud’s La Coquille et le clergyman (November, 1927).
12. Robert Desnos, “Scenarios,” La Revue du cinema 3 (May, 1929), 70-81. Louis Bunuel
and Salvador Dali, “Scenario du Un Chien andalou,” La Revue du cinema 5 (15 November 1929),
3-16. a ,
13. Alexandre Arnoux, “[Editorial],” Pour Vous, 1 (22 November, 1928), 3.
14. Harry Alan Potamkin, “The Plight of the European Movie,” National Board of Review
Magazine 2 (December, 1927), 6.
15. “Cine-justice,” Spartacus 3 (15 June 1928), 5. Jeanne and Ford, Le Cinema et la presse,
102-103. Robert Grelier, “Breve rencontre avec Jean Lods sur ‘Les Amis de Spartacus,’ ” 75.
16. Gerard Strauss, Cinemagazine (30 March 1928), as reprinted in Jeanne and Ford, Le
Cinema et la presse, 103-
17. Jeanne and Ford, Le Cinema et la presse, 104.
18. “Echos et communiques,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 76 (1 January 1927), 25.
19- “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 58 (1 April 1926), 16. “L’Activite ci-
negraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 83 (15 April 1927), 23-
20. Jean Dreville, “Films,” Cinegraphie 5 (15 January 1928), 94.
21. “Echos et communiques,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 77 (15 January 1927), 26. Julien Bayart,
“Ce que dit Lecran,” Photo-Cine 2 (15 February 1927), 31.
22. “Echos et communiques,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 83 (15 April 1927), 24.
23. “Les echos,” Cinegraphie 3 (15 November 1927), 42.
24. Jean Dreville, “Films,” Cinegraphie 5 (15 January 1928), 93-
25. “Hollywood Notes,” Close Up 3 (December, 1928), 77. “Avant-Garde et Clubs,” Cinea-
Cine-pour-tous 144 (15 November 1929), 27. Jeander, “Les Cine-Clubs,” 384.
26. Jean Tedesco, “Le Cinema de 1926 au Vieux-Colombier,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 52 (1
January 1926), 7.
27. “Avant-Garde et Clubs,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 144 (15 November 1929), 27. Jeander,
“Les Cine-Clubs,” 384-385. Paul, Introduction au Cine-Club, 31.
28. Jean Tedesco, “Le Cinema de 1926 au Vieux-Colombier,” 7. Paul Ramain, “Le Vieux-
Colombier a Geneve: Cine d’Art,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 81 (15 March 1927), 41-42. Rachel

571
 Low, The History of the British Film, 1918-1929, 34. The Film Society Programmes, 1929-1939
NOTES
(New York: Arno, 1972).
29 Albert Valentin, "Ce c|ue le public en pense, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 39 (15 June 1925),
25-26. "L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 74 (1 December 1926), 24.
30. "Echos et communiques, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 81 (15 March 1927), 31. Ce qu on fait,
Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 84 (1 May 1927), 15. Jacobs, ed., The Compound Cinema, 333.
31. Freddy Buache, "Le Congres de La Sarraz,” Travelling 55 (Summer, 1979), 5-32.
32. "Le film muet,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 145 (1 December 1929), 27-28. "Federation des
Cine-Clubs de langue franqaise,” Tout-Cinema 1929, 201-202.
33. Jean Dreville, "Films,’’ Cinegraphie 5 (15 January 1928), 93-
34. Ida Bantiger, “Quelques notes sur Potemkine,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 71 (15 October 1926),
31-32. Leon Moussinac, “Le Cuirasse Potemkine,” L'Humamte (1926), as reprinted in "Qu’en
pense la critique," Cinea-Cine-pour-tous lA (1 December 1926), 5-6. Sadoul, Souvenirs dun
temoin,” 15-16.
35. Jeander, “Les Cine-Clubs,” 383-
36. Bert Hogenkamp, "Worker’s Newsreels in the 1920s and 1930s," Our History 68 (1977),
22.
37. Grelier, “Breve rencontre avec Jean Lods,” 76.
38. Marcel Colin, "Spartacus,” Cinematographie fran^aise 455 (23 July 1927), 12.
39- Spartacus, "Le decret des ‘32,’ ” Spartacus 1 (15 April 1928), 1.
40. Jeander, "Les Cine-Clubs,” 383.
41. "Les cinemas a Paris,” Tout-Cinema 1929, 184. Grelier, "Breve rencontre avec Jean
Lods,” 77.
42. Grelier, "Breve rencontre avec Jean Lods,” 77.
43. Jeander, "Les Cine-Clubs,” 383- Paul, Introduction au Cine-Club, 31.
44. Moussinac, "Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 322-333.
45. Grelier, "Breve rencontre avec Jean Lods,” 77.
46. Spartacus 3 (15 June 1928), 1,3-
47. Jeander, "Les Cine-Clubs,” 384.
48. Grelier, "Breve rencontre avec Jean Lods,” 77-78.
49- Jean Tedesco, "Bilan 1926-1927,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 88 (1 July 1927), 9-12.
50. Dulac, "Le Cinema d’Avant-Garde,” 362.
51. "Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 97 (15 November 1927), 6. Francisco Amu-
nategul, "Les Ecrans: En rade,” [n.p.].
52. P. H., “Le Cinema Latin,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 89 (15 July 1927), 15. Lapierre, Les
Cent Visages du cinema, 201-202. Pierre Kast, “Jean Gremillon,” 36.
53. "Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 59 (15 April 1926), 6; 62 (1 June 1926), 5;
66 (31 July 1926), 6.
54. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 73 (15 November 1926), 7. In 1927, Flaherty wrote
Tedesco, reporting that Moanas success at the Vieux-Colombier and then throughout Paris had
helped make the film a success in the United States—Brunelin, "Au Temps du Vieux-Colom-
bier [3],” 95-96.
55. “Une Innovation au Theatre du Vieux-Colombier,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 82 (1 April 1927),
13. Jean Tedesco, “Le Voyage au Congo,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 88 (1 July 1927), 12-13. Brunelin,
"Au Temps du Vieux-Colombier [3],” 91. Kast, "Jean Gremillon,” 36.
56. "Ce qu’on dit,” Photo-Cine 1 (15 January 1927), 4. "Ce qu’on fait,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous
84 (1 May 1927), 14. "L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 113 (15 July 1928), 25.
Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 201.
57. P. IT., "Le Cinema Latin,” 15. Georges Charensol, "Les nouvelles salles specialisees,”
Pour Vous 29 (6 June 1929), 14. “Les Cinemas a Paris,” Tout Cinema 1929, 178. Lapierre, Les
Cent Visages du cinema, 202. Jeander, "Les Cine-Clubs,” 382.
58. Cinematographie franyaise 484 (11 February 1928), 44.
59- Pierre Audard, "Ce que le public en pense,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 104 (1 March 1928),
33-34. Jean Dreville, "La Critique du film,” On Tourne 4 (1 June 1928), 3- Claire Bernard,
Une derniere opinion sur les deux Resurrections,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 111 (15 June 1928), 31-
32.
60. P. H., "Le Cinema Latin,” 15.
61. Jeander, "Les Cine-Clubs,” 382.
62. Paul de la Borie, "Une Experience a tenter,” Ctnemagazine 24 (17 June 1927), 571.

572
 63. “Le Studio des Ursulines,” Cinematographic franqaise 478 (31 December 1927), 16. NOTES
64. One is reminded of the rivalry between Jonas Mekas of Anthology Film Archives and
John Hanhardt of the Whitney Museum in New York in the early 1970s.
63. Announcement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 82 (1 April 1927), [n.p.]. “Echos et communiques,”
Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 83 (15 April 1927), 24.
66. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 72 (1 November 1926), 6.
67. “A Paris, cette semaine,” Cinematographic frangaise 478 (31 December 1927), 16. “A
Paris, cette semaine,” Cinematographic franqaise 483 (4 February 1928), 16. Jean Dreville, “La
Glace a trois faces," 87-90.
68. Tallier, “La Creation du Studio des Ursulines,” 4-5.
69. L. D., “Avec le poete de La Zone: Georges Lacombe,” Pour Vous 12 (7 February 1929),
4. Daniel Abric, “La Zone," Cinemonde 17 (14 February 1929), 314. L., “L’Ecran vous offrira
bientot: Nogent, Eldorado du dimanche," Pour Vous 61 (16 January 1930), 6. P. E. Salles Gomes,
Jean Vigo (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1972), 77.
70. “Un reve a l’ecran,” Cinegraphie, 2 (15 October 1927), 32. Lucie Derain, “La Coquille et
le clergyman," 50.
71. Sadoul, “Souvenirs d’un temom,” 18-19- Alain Virmaux, “Artaud and Film,” 155-156.
72. Jean Lenauer, “Cinema in Paris,” Close Up 3 (December, 1928), 17. “Les Cinemas a
Paris,” Tout-Cinema 1929, 180. Dulac, “Le Cinema d’Avant-Garde,” 363- Lapierre, Les Cent
Visages du cinema, 202. Paul, Introduction au Cine-Club, 29- Diamant-Berger, // etait une fois le
cinema, 155.
73. Letter from Jean Dreville, 5 July 1977.
74. Pierre Kefer, “Revue des programmes,” La Revue du cinema 1 (December, 1928), 72.
“Un Festival Cavalcanti,” Cinemode 16 (7 February 1929), 301.
75. “Revue des programmes,” La Revue du cinema 5 (15 November 1929), 75. “Films a voir,”
Pour Vous 58 (26 December 1929), 15. “Revue des programmes,” La Revue du cinema 7 (1
February 1930), 69-
76. R. H., “The Eye of Paris,” Close Up 4 (May, 1929), 86-87.
77. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 132 (1 May 1929), 25.
78. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 144 (15 November 1929), 27.
79- Diamant-Berger, // etait une fois le cinema, 155.
80. Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinema, 202. Paul, Introduction au Cine-Club, 29- Diamant-
Berger, // etait une fois le cinema', 155. Studio Diamant opened with Diamant-Berger’s own
documentary on Deauville, in December, 1928—V. B., “Une nouvelle salle,” Pour Vous 6 (27
December 1928), 6.
81. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 142 (15 October 1929), 29- Jacobs, ed.,
The Compound Cinema, 11.
82. “Avant-Garde,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 100 (1 January 1928), 28. “Les Cinemas a Paris,”
Tout-Cinema 1929, 185.
83. Announcement, Cinematographique franyaise All (21 December 1927), 3. Announcement,
Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 103 (15 February 1928). Robert Herring, “A Letter from London,” Close
Up 2 (May, 1928), 57.
84. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 112 (1 July 1928), 5.
85. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 144 (15 November 1929), 27.
86. Jacobs, ed., The Compound Cinema, 8, 11, 96.
87. Luis Bunuel, “L’Aventure cinematographique,” in Armand Tallier et le Studio des Ursulines,
29- Jose Francisco Aranda, Luis Bunuel: A Critical Biography, 59, 288. Sadoul, “Souvenirs d’un
temom,” 19- Tual, Le Temps devore, 65.
88. Tual, Le Temps devore, 65.
89. J. Bouissounousse, “Dans la salle,” 74. Tual, Le Temps devore, 66.
90. Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (New York: Persea, 1981 [London: Horizon, 1944]),
117-118. Connolly mistakenly dates his screening 1929 rather than 1930.
91. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 6, 372.
92. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 6, 345.
93. Sadoul, “Souvenirs d’un temoin,” 22-23- Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 6, 372.
94. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 6, 372.
95. “Ce qu’on fait,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 84 (1 May 1927), 15. “Repertoire des film repre-
sentes par le Theatre du Vieux-Colombier depuis 1924,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 88 (1 July 1927),
11-12.

573
 96. Brunelin, “Au Temps du Vieux-Colombier [3],” 91-92. Andre Bazin, “Filmography,”
NOTES
in Jean Renoir, 213-
97. Bernard Chardere, ed., “Jean Renoir, 82.
98. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 110 (1 June 1928), 6.
99. “L’Affaire de La Petite Marchande d'allumettes,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 113 (15 July 1928),
6-7.
100. “L’Activite cinegraphique, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 135 (15 June 1929), 25. Chardere,
“Jean Renoir,” 83- Bazin, Jean Renoir, 213-214.
101. David Curtis, Experimental Cinema (New York: Dell, 1971), 45-46. Freddy Buache,
“Une presentation des films independents et d avant-garde au Symposium de la FIAF a Lausanne
(1-4 June 1979),” Travelling 55 (1979), 72.
102. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 123 (15 December 1928), 6. Pierre Lepro-
hon, Jean Epstein, 53.
103. “Une nouvelle salle,” Cinematographic frangaise 476 (17 December 1927), 45.
104. Jean Dreville, “La Critique du film,” On Tourne 3 (15 May 1928), 2. Herring, “A
Letter from London,” 49. Were these composed of sequences from Napoleon, from the Corsican
horseback chase, the Victims’ Ball, and the Double Tempest? Cf. Jean Mitry, Histone du cinema,
3, 361-362.
105. Jeander, “Les Cine-Clubs,” 383.
106. Announcement, Cinematographic frangaise 478 (31 December 1927), 16. Jean Lenauer,
“How to Start a Film Club,” Close Up 2 (June, 1928), 32.
107. Dulac, “Le Cinema d’Avant-Garde,” 363- Paul, Introduction au Cine-Club, 32.
108. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 80 (1 March 1927), 26. Bazin, Jean
Renoir, 209, 212.
109. Jean Lenauer, “Pans Notes,” Close Up 4 (May, 1929), 88. “L’Activite cinegraphique,”
Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 137 (1 July 1929), 23.
110. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 140 (15 September 1929), 30.
111. Interview with Armand Panigel in Paris, 17 June 1977. Gerald McKee, Film Collecting,
73-108.

Preservation
1. Rene Gilson, Jean Cocteau, trans. Ciba Vaughan (New York: Crown, 1969), 177. Rene
Predal, La Societe frangaise (1914-1945) a travers le cinema, 201-204. Aranda, Luis Buhuel, 70-
72. Gomes, Jean Vigo, 135-139.
2. “Sonor equipment en 1930,” Tout-Cinema 1929, 649.
3. Regent, “Petite Histoire,” 23.
4. Gaston Philip, “Aurons-nous enfin une cinematheque?” Cinematographic frangaise 353 (8
August 1925), 11. Leclerc, Le Cinema. temoin de son temps, 33- Raymond Borde, “La Cinema¬
theque franchise: recherche de la verite,” Les Cahiers de la cinematheque 22 (1977), 4.
5. Borde, “La Cinematheque frangaise,” 4-5.
6. Oscar Cornez, “L’Oeuvre cinegraphique ecrite de Louis Delluc,” 6-8. Paul Gilson, “George
Melies, Inventeur,” La Revue du cinema 4 (15 October 1929), 4-20. “L’Activite cinegraphique,”
Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 146 (15 December 1929), 25. Borde, “La Cinematheque frangaise,” 5.
7. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 307-319-
8. Borde, “La Cinematheque frangaise,” 5-8.
9- Leon Moussinac, “Etat du cinema international [1933],” as reprinted in Moussinac, LAge
ingrat du cinema, 345-346.
10. Borde, “La Cinematheque frangaise,” 9-10 For a slightly different version of the founding
of the Cinematheque franchise, see Richard Roud, A Passion for Films: Henri Langlois and the
Cinematheque frangaise (New York: Viking, 1983), 13-28.
11. Moussinac, “Etat du cinema international,” 336.

Part IV, The Narrative Avant-Garde: Introduction

1. P. Adams Sitney, “Image and Title in Avant-Garde Cinema,” 101.
2. Germaine Dulac, “Le Cinema d’avant-garde,” 357-364, translated by Robert Lamberton
as “The Avant-Garde Cinema,” 43-48.

574
 3. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 241-396. D-C D. NOTES
L Avant-garde franchise (1917-1932),” L'Age du cinema, 8-15. Jacques Brunius, En Marge du
cinema fran^ais, 66-145. Pierre Leprohon, Cinquante Ans du cinema franqais, 39-52, 59-80. Georges
Sadoul, Le Cinema fran^ais, 24-43. Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 3, 342-352. Ian Christie,
‘‘French Avant-Garde Film in the Twenties: From ‘Specificity’ to Surrealism,” 37-45. Barthe-
lemy Amenguel, ‘‘Muet, annees vingt: trois visages de 1’avant-garde,” 23-41.
4. Emile Vuillermoz, "La Roue,” 330.
5. Jean Epstein, ‘‘Pour une avant-garde nouvelle [1924],” Le Cinematographe vu de I'Etna, 55-
63.
6. Louis Delluc, ‘‘Notes pour moi,” Le Film 135-136 (21 October 1918), 19-20. Cf. Henri
Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet, L'ldee et I’ecran: opinions sur le cinema, 1, 12-14.
7. Jean-Andre Fieschi, ‘‘Autour de la cinematographe,” 33.
8. Germaine Dulac, ‘‘Les Esthetiques, les entraves, la cinegraphie integrate,” 41.
9. Ibid., 42.
10. Linda Nochlin, Realism (London: Penguin, 1971), 236.
11. Ibid., 238.
12. Even the attempt to create a subjective cinema, it can be argued, was not the exclusive
property of the French avant-garde; the Germans, too, developed a subjective cinema, some¬
times using similar devices and techniques. Consequently, the convenient dichotomy in film
history between French Impressionism and German Expressionism (a label which is also undergoing
reexamination) is less than accurate and hence not very useful—see Barry Salt, “From Caligari
to Who?” 119-123.
13. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1981), 230.
14. Christie, “The French Avant-Garde Film in the Twenties,” 37.
15. Bernard Eisenschitz, “Histoire de l’histoire (deux periodes du cinema frangais: le muet—
le generation de 58),” 28.
16. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 13.
17. Hans Richter, “A History of the Avantgarde,” 6-41. Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to
the American Underground Film, 53-71. David Curtis, Experimental Cinema, 14-34. J. H. Mat¬
thews, Surrealism and Film, 11-91. Standish Lawder, The Cubist Cinema, 35-78, 117-242. P.
Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 11-15, 18-19, 57-59, 228-229, 276-
277, 399-401. Paul Hammond, ed., The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema,
1-21. Allen Thiher, The Cinematic Muse: Critical Studies in the History of French Cinema, 16-69.
Sitney, “Image and Title in Avant-Garde Cinema,” 97-112. Steven Kovacs, From Enchantment
to Rage: The Story of Surrealist Cinema. Linda Williams, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis
of Surrealist Film. Besides these books and parts of books, there are a great number of essays in
various periodicals.
18. Noel Burch and Jean-Andre Fieschi, “La Premiere vague,” 20.

The Alternate Cinema Network, Auteurs, and Genres

1. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 24 (1 November 1924), 6.
2. “Ce qu’on fait: le repertoire actuel,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 84 (1 May 1927), 15. “Repertoire
des films represents par le Theatre du Vieux-Colombier depuis 1924,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 88
(1 July 1927), 11-12.
3. “Films presents en premiere exclusivite par le Studio des Ursulines depuis sa creation,”
Armand Tallier et le Studio des Ursulines [inside back cover}.
4. Leon Moussinac, “Naissance du cinema [1925],” in LAge ingrat du cinema, 41.
5. Leon Moussinac, “Etapes,” 16-17.
6. Leon Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” in LAge ingrat du cinema, 267-277,
284-295.
7. Georges Charensol, Panorama du cinema, 171-185.
8. Louis Delluc, “Cinema et cie: D’ou viennent ou ou vont nos metteurs-en-scene,” Pans-
Midi (17 August 1918), 3. See also Louis Delluc, “Prologue,” vii-viii.
9. Alexandre Arnoux pays homage to the idea, however, in Du muet au parlant: souvenirs d’un
temoin, 168-170.

575
NOTES 10. In contrast to the American film industry, where the division of labor between director
and writer was well established, in the French film industry, the director usually was also the
writer who prepared his own scenario adaptations—Andre Delpeuch, Le Cinema, 67-71.

Stylistics and Subjectivity

1. Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Boucjuet, L Idee et l ecran. opinions sur le cinema, 1, 18-19.
2. Jacques Brunius, En Marge du cinema franyais, 71-89-
3. Jean Mitry, Le Cinema experimental: histone et perspectives, 63-74.
4. David Bordwell, ‘‘French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Fiim Theory, and Film
Style.” Arno Press is planning to reprint this dissertation in the near future.
5. Claude Beylie and Michel Marie, ‘‘Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier,” 36/x.
6. Transcript of an interview by Armand Pamgel with Abel Gance (1973), 4-5.
7. Barry Salt, ‘‘The Early Development of Film Form,” 91-106. Barry Salt, ‘‘Film Style and
Technology in the Thirties,” Film Quarterly 30 (Fall, 1976), 19-32. Barry Salt, “Film Style and
Technology in the Forties,” Film Quarterly 31 (Fall, 1977), 46-57. Barry Salt, “Film Form,
1900-1906,” Sight and Sound 47 (Summer, 1978), 148-153- This work, extended and revised,
will be published soon in book form.
8. Bordwell, “French Impressionist Cinema,” 144-146.
9. Ricciotto Canudo, “Reflexions sur le septieme art,” in L’Usine aux images, 39-
10. Bordwell, “French Impressionist Cinema,” 95-98.
11. Ibid., 135-216, 271-292. Jean-Fouis Bouquet suggests that what characterized the “French
style” was a reliance on decoupage and editing, but he admits that the French narrative avant-
garde filmmakers were marked by more differences than similarities—Jean-Fouis Bouquet, “Es-
quisse d’un panorama de l’activite fran^aise, 1916-1928,” Cahiers de la cinematheque, 33-34
(Autumn, 1981), 62.
12. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (Reading: Addison and
Wesley, 1979). David Bordwell, The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer (Berkeley: University of
California, 1981).
13. Bordwell, “French Impressionist Cinema,” 220. Bordwell uses this term in such a way
as to distinguish it from the pictorialism of Maurice Tourneur’s films made during the same
period—see Fewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (New York: Teachers
College Press, 1938), 206-209—and from that of the French realist films produced right after
the war.
14. Bordwell, “French Impressionist Cinema,” 232-233.
15. Rene Clair, “Films,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 34 (15 May 1924), [n.p.]. Rene Clair,
“Conference,” Cinemagazine 49 (5 December 1924), 420-422. Jean Epstein, “Pour une avant-
garde nouvelle [1924],” in Le Cinematographe vu de l’Etna, 55. Bordwell, “French Impressionist
Cinema,” 236-237.
16. Bordwell, “French Impressionist Cinema,” 239-

The Fields of Discourse and Narrative

1. Noel Burch and Jean-Andre Fieschi, “Fa Premiere Vague,” 20.
2. Henri Fescourt and Jean-Fouis Bouquet, L'ldee et l’ecran: opinions sur le cinema, 1, 24-32.
3- Jean-Andre Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 29-
4. Burch and Fieschi, “Fa Premiere Vague,” 20.
5. Bernard Eisenschitz, “Histoire de l’histoire (deux periodes du cinema fran^ais: le muet—
le generation de 58),” 28.
6. Ian Christie, French Avant-Garde Film in the Twenties: From ‘Specificity’ to Surrealism,”
38.
7. David Bordwell, “French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film
Style,” 6.
8. Burch and Fieschi, “Fa Premiere Vague,” 20.
9. Ibid., 23.
10. Noel Burch and Jorge Dana, “Propositions,” 43-44. For a more complete sketch of the
conventions of film representation, see Noel Burch’s “Film’s Institutional Mode of Representa¬
tion and the Soviet Response, 77-96, and Steven Neale’s similar summary of “textual charac-

576
teristics” in “Art Cinema as Institution,” 13-14. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin NOTES
Thompson have been doing research recently which seems generally to confirm this paradigm
of conventions—Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Art and Modes of Production. (London: Rou-
tledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). A prelude to that research can be found in Bordwell, "Textual
Analysis, Etc.,” enclitic 5:2/6:1 (Fall, 1981-Spring, 1982), 125-136. Their work is comple¬
mented by that of Tom Gunning—"Weaving a Narrative: Style and Economic Background in
Griffith’s Biograph Films,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 6 (Winter, 1981), 11-25—and
Charles Musser—"Establishing the Foundations for Hollywood’s Mode of Representation” (So¬
ciety for Cinema Studies Conference, Los Angeles, 1982), 1-29- See also Ben Brewster, "A
Scene at the Movies,” Screen 23 (July-August, 1982), 4-15, and Noel Burch, "Narrative/Die-
gesis—Thresholds, Limits,” Screen 23 (July-August, 1982), 16-33-
11. Burch and Dana, "Propositions,” 46-48.
12. Ibid., 44.
13- Ibid., 47.
14. Jacques Petat, "L’Avant-garde franqaise des annees vingt,” 21.
15. Amengual also compares this practice to the "telegraphic” style that marked a good deal
of French literature during the 1910s and 1920s—Barthelemy Amengual, "Rapports entre le
cinema, la litterature et les arts en France dans les annees vingt,” 163-
16. Besides those already cited, the works that have been especially helpful in constructing
this schema include Raymond Bellour, “The Birds: Analysis of a Sequence,” Study Unit 14:
Hitchcock (London: BFI, 1972), 2-31; Roland Barthes, SIZ, trans. Richard Miller (New York:
Hill & Wang, 1974); Raymond Bellour, "Hitchcock, the Enunciator,” camera obscura 2 (1977),
66-91- Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1977); Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1980); Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); David Bordwell, The Films of Carl Theodore
Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Kristin Thompson, Eisenstein’s “Ivan the
Terrible”: A Neoformalist Analysis (Princeton University Press, 1981); Christian Metz, The Imag¬
inary Signijier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
17. Bordwell, "French Impressionist Cinema,” 112-113-
18. Stuart Liebman, “French Film Theory, 1910-1921,” 1-27. On several major points, this
essay supersedes my own essay,, "The Contribution of the French Avant-Garde Poets to Film
Theory and Criticism, 1907-1924,” 18-40.
19- For clarification, I offer the following brief definitions of key terms:
Discourse: the text of the film, as a system of material signs, a process of enunciation—as opposed to the
diegesis and narrative that it produces.
Diegesis: the process and sum total of referencing, which is experienced by the spectator as representation,
as a contiguous spatial-temporal world or environment.
Narrative: the succession of events, real or fictitious, which, through several relations of linkage, produces
a chronological story.
Rhetorical figuring: the process of generating meaning through figures—a privileged nexus of signs or
nodal points of metonymic and metaphorical relations—by means of patterns of repetition and variation,
condensation and displacement.
20. Louis Delluc, "Notes pour moi,” Le Film 89 (26 November 1917), 18.
21. Bordwell, "French Impressionist Cinema,” 106-108.
22. Marcel Gromaire, "Idees d’un peintre sur le cinema,” 239-249- Ricciotto Canudo, L’Usine
aux images, 31-40.
23. See, for instance, Jean Francis Laglenne, "Le Peintre au cinema,” Cinea 9(1 July 1921),
14; Canudo, L’Usine aux images, 41-42; and Alexandre Arnoux quoted in Rene Clair, Cinema
Yesterday and Today, 99.
24. Jean Epstein, Le Cinematographe vu de FEtna, 18.
25. Jean Epstein, "Realisation de detail,” 12.
26. Gromaire, "Idees d’un peintre sur le cinema,” 242. Germaine Dulac, "L’Essence du
cinema: l’idee visuelle,” 64, translated by Robert Lamberton as "The Essence of the Cinema:
The Visual Idea,” 36-42.
27. According to Jean-Louis Bouquet, the French films of the late 1910s and early 1920s
were marked by frequent and often lengthy intertitles—Claude Beylie and Francis Lacassin, "A
la recherche d’un cinema perdu: entretien avec Jean-Louis Bouquet, Henri Fescourt, Joe Ham-

577
NOTES man, Gaston Modot,” 18-19. Jean-Louis Bouquet, “Esquisse d’un panorama de l’activite fran¬
chise, 1916-1928,” 62.
28. Jean Epstein, ‘‘Pour une avant-garde nouvelle,” Le Cinematographe vu de I'Etna, 57, trans¬
lated by Stuart Liebman as ‘‘For a New Avant-Garde,” 26-30.
29. Stuart Liebman argues persuasively that what he calls the French Ur-Theory of film was
predicated on a Symbolist distinction between the emotional and intellectual capacities of the
human mind, in which the former functioned independently of the latter to transform reality
into art. However accurate this distinction may be in explaining the French theoretical writings
on film, it does not hold up as an assumption for the narrative avant-garde film practice—nor
does Liebman claim that it does.
30. Jean Epstein, ‘‘Grossissement,” 98, translated by Stuart Liebman as ‘‘Magnification,”
10. Cf. John Berger, ‘‘The Moment of Cubism,” in The Look of Things (New York: Viking,
1974), 138.
31. Henri Diamant-Berger provides one of the earliest defenses of this continuity system in
France, in Le Cinema, 153-157.
32. Leon Moussinac, ‘‘La Naissance du cinema [1925],” in L'Age ingrat du cinema, 75-81.
33. Jean Epstein, “Le cinema et les lettres modernes,” 173-175.
34. Alberto Cavalcanti, “Doctrine,” 12.
35. Jean Epstein, “Londres parlent,” reprinted in1 Epstein, Ecnts sur le cinema, 204. Cf. Pascal
Bonitzer, “Here: The Notion of the Shot and the Subject of Cinema,” trans. Bill Krohn, Film
Reader 4 (1979), 108-117.
36. Cf. Sylvie Trosa, “Archeologie du cinema,” 37.
37. Emir Rodriguez Monegal, “Alberto Cavalcanti (1955),” 241.
38. Jean Epstein, “Les Images de ciel [1928],” 190.
39- Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” in Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1979), 3-19. Constance Penley, “Introduction to ‘Metaphor Metonomy’ or
the Imaginary Referent,” camera obscura 7 (1981), 1-29. Metz, The Imaginary Sigmfier, 149-297.
40. Henri Fescourt and Jean-Louis Bouquet, L'ldee et I’ecran: opinions sur le cinema, 2, 26-27.
41. Burch and Dana, “Propositions,” 44.

JAccuse and Rose-Trance

1. D-C D., “L’Avant-garde fran<;aise (1917-1932),” LAge du cinema 6 (December, 1951), 12.
2. Kevin Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By, 603. Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 255.
3. This brief description is based on the print of La Folie du Docteur Tube preserved at the
Cinematheque franchise.
4. Barry Salt wonders if the source of the deformations was an anamorphic lens—cf. David
Curtis, Experimental Cinema, 20, 94. I myself intend to agree with Brownlow that the distor¬
tions are produced by mirrors.
5. Sophie Daria, Abel Gance, hier et demain, 55.
6. Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By, 608-609.
7. Marcel L’Herbier, “Hermes et le Silence [1918],” reprinted in Marcel L’Herbier, Intelli¬
gence du cinematographe, 211.
8. Jean Epstein, “Memoires inachevees,” in Ecrits sur le cinema, 1, 30.
9. Advertisement, Cinematographs franyaise 23 (12 April 1919), 17-20.
10. Compare the similar, but patently patriotic title formation in CPI’s America's Answer
(1918) Kevin Brownlow, The War, The West, and the Wilderness (New York: Knopf, 1979)
116.
11. “JAccuse,” Cinematographic fran^aise 20 (22 March 1919), 11, 15-18. ”JAccuse,” Cine-
matographiefrantyaise 21 (29 March 1919), 17-20. “JAccuse,” Cinematographicfranyaise 22 (5 April
1919), 15-18. ”JAccuse,” Cinematographic fran^aise 23 (12 April 1919), 17-20. “Ce que 1’on
dit, Cinemagazine 1 (23 September 1921), 27. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5,
140.
12. This analysis is based on tinted and black-and-white 35mm prints of J Accuse preserved
at the Cinematheque fran^aise. Excerpts from JAccuse also are included in Kevin Brownlow’s
documentary on Gance, Charm of Dynamite (1969).
13. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 4, 388.
14. Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By, 612.

578
 15. Brownlow, The War, the West, and the Wilderness, 144-145. NOTES
16. Ibid,, 6-7.
17. Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, 617.
18. Roger Shattuck, 7he Banquet Years, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1968), 331-352. John
Berger, “The Moment of Cubism, in The Look of Things, 133-162.
19. Shattuck, The Banquet Years, 346-347.
20. Ricciotto Canudo, “Preface: Paris, decembre 1922,” in La Roue, apres lefilm d'Abel Gance,
4.
21. Standish Lawder, The Cubist Cinema, 84.
22. Jean Epstein, “Le Cinema et les lettres modernes,” 177.
23. Transcript of an interview by Armand Pamgel with Abel Gance (1973).
24. In a revival of J’Accuse, late in the 1920s, probably at the Cine-Latin, Harry Alan
Potamkin reports that the orchestra ceased playing for this particular sequence—Lewis Jacobs,
ed., The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin, 109. Similar split-screen
shots can be found in Bernard-Deschamps’s LAgome des aigles (1921) as well as William Well¬
man’s Wings (1927)—Brownlow, The War, the West, and the Wilderness, 211.
25. Marcel Oms, “Histoire et geographic d’une France imaginaire,” 79-
26. Claude Beylie and Michel Marie, “Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier,” 31/v.
27. Marcel L’Herbier, “Rose-Franee,” Comoedia lllustre (5 December 1919), reprinted in Noel
Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 61.
28. Jean Galtier-Boisiere, “Reflexions sur le cinema,” 2-4.
29- Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 19-
30. Marcel L’Herbier, La Tete qui tourne, 32. This analysis is based on the print of Rose-F ranee
preserved at the Royal Film Archive of Belgium.
31. Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis.
32. Jean Galtier-Boissiere, “Les Films: Rose-F ranee,” 13.

L’Homme du large and El Dorado

1. D-C D., “L’Avant-garde frangaise (1917-1932),” 14.
2. See pp. 98-99 for a plot synopsis of L'Homme du large.
3. D-C D., “L’Avant-garde fran<;aise (1917-1932),” 14.
4. Ibid. See also, Juan Arroy, ^‘Sous-titres,” Cinemagazine 4 (22 August 1924), 311.
5. Noel Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 21.
6. A recent viewing of the Cinematheque fran^aise print of L'Homme du large suggests that
its practice may be more important than admitted here.
7. Jean-Andre Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 30.
8. Henri Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 259-
9- Lionel Landry, “El Dorado,” 7. El Dorados fame and influence were restricted largely to
France because apparently it was not distributed abroad.
10. Louis Delluc, “Quelques films fran^ais,” Cinea 18 (9 September 1921), 5. Jaque Catelain,
Marcel L’Herbier, 54.
11. Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 33. This analysis is based on black-and-white
prints of El Dorado at the Royal Film Archive of Belgium and the Museum of Modern Art and
on a tinted 35mm print preserved at the Cinematheque fran^aise.
12. Edmond Epardaud, “De Marcel L’Herbier et de son oeuvre,” 4, 9. Maurice Keroul, “Les
Grands Films,” Le Film 183 (November, 1921), [n.p.]. Sommerville Story, “A Foreign Critic’s
Candid Views,” Le Film 183 (November, 1921), [n.p.].
13. L’Herbier’s own novelization of the film included one page from the score, the “Danse
Gitane,” composed for piano—Marcel L’Herbier, El Dorado, Melodrame cinematographique (Paris:
La Lampe merveilleuse, 1921), 34.
14. Claude Beylie and Michel Marie, “Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier,” 33/vii.
15. The Museum of Modern Art print indicates that two intertitles are missing from this
sequence. Their absence makes this reading tentative.
16. Compare Jean Epstein’s analysis of this sequence as the representation, not of this or that
fandango, but of “the dancer,” and “the fandango”—Esprit du cinema, 90.
17. Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 22.
18. Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 33-

579
NOTES 19. I skip the fourth reel, the most conventional of the film, in which Sybilla locks the
couple in the Alhambra chapel tower, then releases them and explains her situation so that the
painter goes to confront Estina (and pummels him, to the servants delight) while his daughter
accepts responsibility for Sybilla’s son.
20. A year before he died, L’Herbier was still adamant about the importance of this sequence
(which played what he called the real against the unreal ) Jacques Fieschi, Bernard Mi-
noret, and Claude Arnulf, “Entretien avec Marcel L Herbier, 40.

Fievre and Fa Femme de nulle part

1. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 190. Charles Ford,
“Germaine Dulac,” 13. Jeanne and Ford see evidence of Dulac’s interest in psychological states
as early as Ames de fous (1917).
2. Germaine Dulac, “La Mort du soleil et la naissance du film,” 14.
3. Louis Delluc, Cinma et cie, 34.
4. Louis Delluc, “Prologue,” Drames du cinema, xiii-xiv.
5. Louis Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (12 May 1919), 2. Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (16
May 1919), 2. Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (18 May 1919), 2. Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi
(25 May 1919), 2. Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (26 May 1919), 2. Delluc, “Cinema,” Pans-
Midi (14 June 1919), 2. Delluc, “Prologue,” x.
6. Noel Burch and Jean-Andre Fieschi, “La Premiere Vague,” 24. Rene Clair, Cinema Yes¬
terday and Today, 67. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5, 80.
7. Jean Epstein, “Memoires inachevees,” in Ecnts sur le cinema, 44.
8. Louis Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (23 February 1919), 2. Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi
(28 April 1919), 2. Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (9 May 1919), 2. Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-
Midi (15 May 1919), 2. Delluc, “Cinema,” Paris-Midi (16 June 1919), 2. Delluc, “Cinema,”
Paris-Midi (9 July 1919), 2.
9. Louis Delluc, Drames du cinema, 1-18.
10. Originally—when it opened at most major cinemas across Paris, in May, 1920—La Fete
espagnole was 710 meters long; but the only surviving print is a much condensed single, ten-
minute reel at the Cinematheque franqaise. Films Louis Nalpas folder—Bibliotheque de l’Ar-
senal.
11. Henri Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 158.
12. Jean Mitry, “Louis Delluc,” 35.
13. Marcel Tariol, Louis Delluc, 56.
14. “La Fete espagnole,’’ Le Journal du Cine-Club 16 (30 April 1920), 11.
15. “Les films de la quinzaine,” Cine-pour-tous 49 (24 September 1920), 6. Louis Delluc,
Drames du cinema, 19-32. Mitry, “Louis Delluc,” 38.
16. Louis Delluc, Cinema et cie, 30-31.
17. Jean Epstein, “Memoires inedites,” quoted in Tariol, Louis Delluc, 61.
18. Delluc, Drames du cinema, 22-23. The numbers indicating periods of the past are added.
19. The publicity brochure on Fievre labeled the film an "Etude dramatique” of about 1000
meters in length—Societe Franqaise des Films Artistiques (“Jupiter”) file—Bibliotheque de
1’Arsenal.
20. “L’Homme aux yeux clairs” was the French title of Hart’s Blue Blazes Ratvden (1918),
which had opened in Paris in early October, 1919- The Hart western that Fibre most resem¬
bled, however, was The Narrow Trail (1917), which Delluc saw sometime earlier in 1919—
Cinema et cie, 308. Broken Blossoms opened in Paris, in December, 1920, just two months before
production began on Fievre—P. H., “Lys briseCine-pour-tous 55 (17 December 1920), 10-11.
21. Louis Delluc, “Huit jours de fievre,” 9-12. Leon Poirier, Vingt-quatre images a la seconde,
45.
22. “Fievre, Cinea 10 (8 July 1921), 19-21. Eve Francis, Temps heroique (Paris: Denoel,
1949), 403.
23. Lionel Landry, “La Musique et le geste,” 10-11. Philippe Carcassonne and Renaud
Bezomes, Entretien avec Jean Wiener,” Cinematographe 62 (November, 1980), 28.
24. Leon Moussinac, La Naissance du cinema [1925],” in L’Age ingrat du cinema, 107.
25. Initially, this analysis was written in collaboration with Dugald Williamson. It is based
on the prints of Fibre at the Cinematheque franqaise and the Museum of Modern Art.

580
 26. This analysis focuses on the representation and circulation of desire within the code of NOTES
the look, as a textual operation. A similar analysis is combined with a study of the organization
of “spectatorial desire” in D. N. Rodowick, ‘‘Vision, Desire, and the Film Text [The Pirate],"
camera obscura 6 (1980), 55-89.
27. The first tracking shot of a ship in the harbor, following the CU of Patience and her
mtertitle on waiting, is absent in the Museum of Modern Art print.
28. Georges Sadoul, French Cinema, 23-24.
29- Interestingly, Noel Burch analyzes the final sequence of Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) in
terms of a similar alternation—“Film’s Institutional Mode of Representation and the Soviet
Response,” 90.
30. This brief analysis is based on the recently restored (titleless) print of Le Chemin d'Ernoa
at the Cinematheque franchise.
31. Mitry, “Louis Delluc,” 43.
32. Tariol, Louis Delluc, 65. Mitry, “Louis Delluc,” 44.
33. Leon Moussinac, “Le Cinema,” Le Crapouillot (16 April 1922), 17. “Ce que Ton dit,”
Cinemagazine 2 (21 July 1922), 93. “Cosmograph donnera au public, le 8 septembre, La Femme
de nulle part," Cinea 67-68 (25 August 1922), 16-17. “Les Prochains Films: La Femme de nulle
part par Louis Delluc,” Cinemagazine 2 (4 August 1922), 142-143.
34. Hart’s The Silent Stranger was first screened in Paris in February, 1917. This analysis is
based on the print of La Femme de nulle part preserved at the Royal Film Archive of Belgium.
A print has recently been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.
35. Delluc, “Prologue,” xiv.
36. Two sequences in the .scenario violated this focus on the central character: the wife’s
dream of going off with her lover and her lover’s images of how they would travel. Both were
eliminated from the completed film. Delluc, Drames du cinema, 71-97.
37. Cf. Lionel Landry, “La Femme de nulle part," 69-70 (8 September 1922), 6-7.

La Roue
1. Interview with Jean Dreville, 16 June 1977. Dreville was a film enthusiast and photog¬
rapher who frequented the film screenings of Charles Leger’s Tribune Libre cine-club. He went
on to edit several film journals ^{Photo-Cine, Cinegraphie, On Tourne), shoot a short documentary
on the making of Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Argent (1929), and then become a consummate craftsman
as a cinematographer and director from the 1930s to the 1960s.
2. Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, 625.
3. Emile Vuillermoz, ‘‘La Roue," 363.
4. Leon Moussinac, “Le Cinema: La Roue, d’Abel Gance,” 13- Juan Arroy, “Abel Gance, sa
vie, son oeuvre,” 7. Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By, 625. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du
cinema, 5, 149-150. Roger Icart’s research indicates that the Paris print ran thirty-one reels
while the print distributed to the provinces ran thirty-six reels—Roger Icart, “A la decouverte
de La Roue," 189-190.
5. Abel Gance, La Roue.
6. Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, 625. This long accepted linkage between La Roue and
the Soviet filmmakers is less than certain. Gance told Armand Panigel, for instance, that the
print in the U.S.S.R. was a shortened version of only fourteen reels—transcript of an interview
by Armand Panigel with Abel Gance (1973). Even more surprisingly, the film may not have
reached the U.S.S.R. until 1926—“Frantsuzskie nemye film’my v sovetskom prokate [French
silent films in Soviet distribution},” Kino i vremia 4 (1965), 370.
7. Arroy, “Abel Gance, sa vie, son oeuvre,” 7. Rene Jeanne, “Une seconde version de La
Roue,” 342. Icart, “A la decouverte de La Roue,” 190.
8. This version of La Roue showed up at the Cine-Latin cinema in November, 1928—Maurice
Champel, “Abel Gance projette . . . ,” Pour Vous 2 (29 November 1928), 14. Steven Philip
Kramer and James Michael Welsh, Abel Gance, 16, 187. Icart, “A la decouverte de La Roue,"
190.
9. Until recently the Cinematheque de Toulouse was restoring a twenty-one-reel version of
La Roue quite different from those already preserved in various film archives—Icart, “A la
decouverte de La Roue," 190. Letter from Raymond Borde, 6 June 1983. Images Film Archives

581
NOTES may also release a long version of La Roue (approximately 220 minutes), copied from a recently
discovered tinted and toned print in an Eastern European film archive interview with Bob
Harris, 14 March 1980.
10. Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 438. Transcript of an interview by Armand Pamgel
with Abel Gance (1973).
11. Leon Moussinac, La Naissance du cinema [1925], in L Age ingrat du cinema, 112.
12. Vuillermoz, “La Roue,” 330-331. Rene Clair, “Les films du mois: La Roue,” [n.p.].
13. Jean Mitry, “Abel Gance,” [n.p.].
14. The use of rather old-fashioned overhead diffuse lighting is probably due to this location
shooting—letter from Barry Salt, 10 December 1979.
15. Leopold Survage, “Le Rythme colore,” Les Soirees de Pans 26-27 (July-August, 1914),
426-429. Marcel Gromaire, “Idees d’un peintre sur le cinema,” Le Crapouillot (1919), reprinted
in Marcel L’Herbier, Intelligence du cinematographe, 239-249-' Jean-Lrancis Laglenne, “Le Peintre
au cinema,” Cinea 4 (27 May 1921), 17. Laglenne, “Le Peintre au cinema,” Cinea 9 (1 July
1921), 14. Laglenne, “Le Peintre au cinema,” Cinea 42 (24 Lebruary 1922), 12.
16. Lernand Leger, “A Critical Essay on the Plastic Quality of Abel Gance’s The Wheel
[Comoedia (December, 1922)],” Functions of Painting, trans. Alexandra Anderson, ed. Edward L.
Lry (New York: Viking, 1973), 20.
17. Moussinac, “Le Cinema: La Roue,” 13.
18. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 11 (15 April 1924), 5. Ricciotto Canudo, L'Usine
aux images, 128. Honegger’s “Pacific 231” score was composed specially for the C.A.S.A. public
screening of excerpts from La Roue.
19- Ricciotto Canudo, “Preface,” in La Roue, apres le film dAbel Gance, 4.
20. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 148. Icart suggests that Gance actually toned down
some of the film’s criticism of the railway administration’s policies and practices—Icart, “A la
decouverte de La Roue,” 189-
21. Mitry, “Abel Gance,” [n.p.].
22. Roger Icart has discovered that, in comparing the original decoupage with the film’s
final montage, Gance consistently broke up these sequences into more and more brief fragments
whose rhythm could prolong and accentuate the visual dynamism of the images—Icart, “A la
decouverte de La Roue,” 191.
23- Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigei with Abel Gance (1973).
24. Compare David Bordwell’s articulate but, unexpectedly, conventional analysis of such
“bravura passages” in “The Musical Analogy,” 144-145.
25. Canudo, “Preface,” 4.
26. Gance, La Roue (1930), 6-7.
27. Standish Lawder, The Cubist Cinema 91, 93.
28. Jean Epstein, “Grossissement,” 98, trans. Stuart Liebman as “Magnification,” 10.
29- John Golding, “Leger and the Heroism of Modern Life,” in Leger and Purist Paris (Lon¬
don: The Tate Galiery, 1970), 18.
30. Andre Lang, Deplacements et Villegiatures litteraires, 144.
31. Did Blaise Cendrars and “the eternal noise of the wheel” in his long poem, Prose de
Transsibenen et de la petite Jeanne de France (1913), inspire Gance in his choice of this metaphor?
In addition, see the following lines in “Construction,” the last poem (dated Lebruary, 1919) in
Cendrars’s Dix-Neuf Poemes elastiques (1919):
And now / The painting becomes that enormous, restless thing / The wheel / Life / The
machine / The human soul.
32. Jean Epstein, “Abel Gance,” in Ecrits sur le cinema, 1, 175.

La Souriante Madame Beudet and L’lnondation

1. Jean Epstein, Lor a New Avant-Garde [1924],” trans. Stuart Liebman, in The Avant-
Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, 27.
2. Rene Clair, Les films du mois: La Souriante Madame Beudet,” [n.p.]. Lreddy Buache,
Lilms independents et d’avant-garde,” 49. This analysis is based on the print of La Souriante
Madame Beudet at the Museum of Modern Art.
3. Germaine Dulac, Le Precedes expressifs du cinematographe,” 67.

582
 4. Albine Leger, “La Souriante Madame Beudet,” 240. “Conference de Madame Germaine NOTES
Dulac,” Cinemagazine 4 (19 December 1924), 518.
5. Buache, “Films independents et d’avant-garde,” 50.
6. Dorothy Knowles, French Drama of the Inter-War Years, 1918-1939 (London: Georges G.
Harrap, 1967), 120.
7. Charles Ford, “Germaine Dulac,” 14-20. William Van Wert, “Germaine Dulac: First
Feminine Filmmaker,” 55-56. Sandy Flitterman, “Heart of the Avant-Garde: Some Biograph¬
ical Notes on Germaine Dulac,” 58-61, 103. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5,
112-117. Linda Dubler, “Deux ou Trois Choses que Je Sais d’Elles: A Look at Dulac and Her
Film, The Smiling Madame Beudet” (Paper delivered to the Society for Cinema Studies Confer¬
ence, Temple University, 7 March 1978).
8. Dulac, “Les Precedes expressifs du cinematographe,” 67-68.
9- Sandy Flitterman argues that the exterior shots in the film function as an autonomous
signification system independent of the narrative representation—“Montage/Discourse: Ger¬
maine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet,” 54-59- For a later, different analysis of the film,
see Sandy Flitterman, “Women, Representation, and Cinematic Discourse: The Example of
French Cinema” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1982).
10. Leon Moussinac, “La Naissance du cinema [1925],” in L'Age ingrat du cinema, 109- Jean
Mitry, “Louis Delluc,” L'Avant-Scene du cinema, 48, 50. Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 5,
77-79.
11. Jean de Mirbel, “Les films de la semaine: L’lnondation,” 223-224.
12. Marcel Tariol, Louis Delluc, 69-
13. Ibid., 70. This analysis is based on the print of L’lnondation preserved at the Cinema¬
theque franchise.
14. Louis Delluc, “L'lnondation,” 9-11. J. W., “L'lnondation,” Cinemagazine 4 (25 January
1924), 135.
15. Delluc, “L'lnondation,” 10-11.
16. Barry Salt suggests that this inconsistency could have come from a mistake in shooting
or printing, but I still consider deliberate ambiguity more likely.
17. Mitry, “Louis Delluc,” 50.
18. Tariol, Louis Delluc, 70.

L’Auberge rouge and Coeur fidele

1. Jean Epstein, “Deux grands maitres a filmer,” La Technique cinematographique (20 February
1947), reprinted in Ecnts sur le cinema, 1, 415. Jean Epstein, “Memoires inachevees,” in Lents
sur le cinema, 1, 44.
2. Leon Moussinac, “La Critique des films: L’Auherge rouge,” 16, 18. J. de M., “L’Auberge
rouge,” Cinemagazine, 3 (3 August 1923), 155-156.
3. Pierre Leprohon, Epstein, 69-
4. This analysis is based on prints of L'Auberge rouge preserved at the Cinematheque frangaise.
5. Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 69-
6. This could be a conventional opening, introducing the stars of the film—except that
Mathot is not identified by an intertitle or by a superimposed title and none of the other
important actors are introduced.
7. Leprohon, Epstein, 69-
8. Ibid., 72-73.
9. Epstein’s practice here seems extraordinarily complex compared to, say, Kuleshov’s famous
“experiments”—Ronald Levaco, “Introduction,” Kuleshov on Film, trans. and ed. Ronald Levaco
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 7-11.
10. Jean Epstein, “Grossissement,” trans. Stuart Liebman as “Magnification,” 10.
11. Henri Langlois, “Jean Epstein (1897-1953),” 12-13- Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2,
441.
12. Jean Epstein, “Memoires inachevees,’ ’ 33, 47, 55.
13. Jean Epstein, “Bilan de fin de muet,” Cinea-Cine (January-February, 1931), reprinted in
Ecnts sur le cinema, 1, 235.
14. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 2 (1 December 1923), 28. Pierre Leprohon,
Jean Epstein, 35. Interview with Marie Epstein, 13 November 1976.

583
NOTES 15. Andre G. Brunelin, “Au Temps de Vieux-Colombier de Jean Tedesco [2],” Cinema 60,
51 (November-December, I960), 102.
16. Leon Moussmac, “Le Cinema: Coeurfidele,” 19- Jean Epstein, “Presentation de Coeurfidele
{January, 1924},” Ecnts sur le cinema, 1, 124.
17. Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 71.
18. Marcel Tariol, Louis Delluc, 63-64.
19. Epstein, “Presentation de Coeur fidele,' 123.
20. Ibid., 124.
21. See, for instance, Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, “What Is, and Is Not, Realism,”
New York Review of Books 29 (18 February 1982), 21-26. I am indebted for this connection to
several discussions with Stuart Liebman.
22. The Letters of Gustave Elaubert, 1830-1857, trans. Francis Steegmuller (Cambridge: Har¬
vard University Press, 1980), 154.
23- Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 71.
24. Ibid., 34.
25. Moussinac, “Le Cinema: Coeur fidele,” 18. This analysis is based on the 35mm prints of
Coeur fidele preserved at the Cinematheque fran^aise and the Museum of Modern Art.
26. Epstein, trans. Liebman, “Magnification,” 10, 13-
27. Compare Epstein’s explanation of his use of the sea here—Pierre Porte, “Une Loi du
cinema,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 9 (15 March 1924), 12.
28. Langlois, “Jean Epstein (1897-1953),” 14.
29. The effect is not unlike the clenched fists that explode into a host of raised arms in
Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1925-1926). The motif of hand images, especially in the second half of
Coeur fidele, could bear further study.
30. Porte, “Une Loi du cinema,” 12.
31. Epstein, trans. Liebman, “Magnification,” 10.
32. Rene Clair, “Les films du mois: Coeur fidele,” [n.p.}.
33. Without any intertitles to guide me (they have been clipped from the surviving prints),
initially I concluded that the child, too, had died; but Marie Epstein informed me that this
was not so—interview with Marie Epstein, 10 August 1979.
34. Marie Epstein agrees that the second half of Coeur fidele is less interesting or less sustained
than the first half—interview with Marie Epstein, 10 August 1979-

Le Brasier ardent and La Fille de Lean

T. “Actualites,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 20 (August, 1923), [n.p.]. Jean de Mirbel, “Le
Brasier ardent,” 380-382.
2. Jean Renoir, “Souvenirs,” Le Point 18 (December, 1938), reprinted in Andre Bazin, Jean
Renoir, 151.
3. Ricciotto Canudo, L’Usine aux images, 160.
4. This analysis is based on prints of Le Brasier ardent at the Cinematheque frangaise and at
the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
5. Leon Moussinac, “Le Cinema: Le Brasier ardent,” 19.
6. Jean Tedesco, “Cinema-Expression,” Cahiers du mois 16/17 (1925), 26.
7. This reflexivity foregrounds the means of photographic/cinematic production in a way that
other silent films would explore quite differently—e.g., Renoir’s La Fille de I’eau (1925), Ep¬
steins Le Lion des Mogols (1924) and 674 X 11 (1927), Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924) and The
Cameraman (1927), Eisenstein’s Strike (1925), and Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929).
8. Canudo, L’Usine aux images, 160.
9- Jean Renoir, AD Vie et mes films, 48.
10. This analysis is based on prints of La Fille de I'eau preserved at the Cinematheque fran^aise
and at the National Film Archive.
11. Renoir, AD Vie et mes films, 49.
12. Henri Gaillard, “La Fille de leau,” 581-582. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous
34 (1 April 1925), 5.
13. Renoir, Ma Vie et mes films, 51.
14. Compare Alexander Sesonske, Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924-1939, 15.
15. Renoir, AD Vie et mes films, 49-50.

584
 16. Ibid., 50. NOTES
17. Ibid., 71.
18. Gaillard, “La Fille de I'eau,” 481-482.
19- Compare Sesonske, Jean Renoir, 12-13, 14.
20. Raymond Durgnat, Jean Renoir, 34.

Parts qui dort and Entr’acte

1. “Actualites,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 18 (June, 1923), [n.p.]. “Actualites,” Theatre et
Comoedia lllustre 20 (August, 1923), [n.p.].
2. Catherine de la Roche, Rene Clair, 7. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with
Rene Clair (1973).
3. Andre Daven, “Paris qui dort," [n.p.]. Jane Eyre, “Les films de demain: Pans qui dort,”
14-15. “Conference de Monsieur Rene Clair,” Cinemagazine 4 (5 December 1924), 420-422.
“Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 30 (1 February 1925), 5.
4. The American release print (presumably) of sixty minutes in length is available from the
Museum of Modern Art. Another print of thirty-six minutes, restored and re-edited by Clair
himself, is available from Films Incorporated. Celia McGerr, Rene Clair, 37, 222.
5. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Rene Clair (1973).
6. This analysis is based on the print of Paris qui dort at the Museum of Modern Art, versions
of which are widely circulated in the United States.
7. Barthelemy Amengual, Rene Clair, 64.
8. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Rene Clair (1973).
9- Bernard Brunius, “Rene Clair,” 11.
10. Annette Michelson, “Dr. Crase and Mr. Clair,” 42-44.
11. “Un film ‘instantaneiste’—Entr'acte,” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 39 (1 November 1924),
[n.p.]. Rene Clair, “Picabia, Satie, et la premiere d'Entr’acte,” 108-112.
12. Roche, Rene Clair, 8.
13. Roger Regent, “Petite histoire des ‘Ursulines’ dans la grande histoire du cinema,” Ar¬
mand Tallier et le studio des Ursulines, 15.
14. Rene Clair, A nous la liherte and Entr’acte, 116.
15. R. C. Dale, “Rene Clair’s Entr’acte or Motion Victorious,” 38-43.
16. Standish Lawder confuses The chronology of L’lnhumaine and Entr’acte in The Cubist Cin¬
ema, 103.
17. Noel Carroll, “Entr’acte, Paris, and Dada,” 5-11.
18. Paul Sandro, “Parodic Narration in Entr’acte,” 44-55.
19. Clair, “Picabia, Satie, et la premiere A Entr’acte,” 112.
20. Sandro, “Parodic Narration in Entr’acte,” 53.

ETnhumaine
1. Robert Trevise, “Les Presentations de la quinzaine,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 36 (1 May 1925),
28.
2. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 24 (1 December 1924), 4.
3. Jaque Catelain, Marcel L’Herbier, 82. Claude Beylie and Michel Marie, “Entretien avec
Marcel L’Herbier,” 35/ix.
4. Robert Trevise, “Les Presentations,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 18 (1 August 1924), 29-
5. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 102.
6. Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 2, 434.
7. Noel Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 23. This analysis is based on the print of L’lnhumaine
preserved at the Cinematheque fran^aise. The Museum of Modern Art recently acquired a print
drawn from the one preserved at the Archives du Film, Bois d’Arcy.
8. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Marcel L’Herbier (1973).
9- Jean-Andre Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 34.
10. Catelain, Marcel L’Herbier, 76. Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 34.
11. “Que sera L’lnhumaine?” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 5 (15 January 1924), 12-13.
12. Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 23.
13. Standish Lawder finds several instances (among them, this winter garden) of Caligari s

585
NOTES influence in L'lnhumaine—Lawder, The Cubist Cinema, 103, 253- I tend to discount that influ¬
ence: a similar garden had already been used in L Herbier s Le Carnaval des ventes (1920), Einar
Norsen’s "death mask’ is actually Cubist in design (as Lawder admits), and L Herbier s previous
film, Don Juan et Faust (1923), had included a Cahgan-\\\ve style in decors and costumes that
was not all that successful, even in the filmmaker s eyes.
14. Lawder, The Cubist Cinema, 108-110.
15. John Golding, “Leger and the Heroism of Modern Life,” in Leger and Purist Pans, 18.
16. There is some resemblance between Heriat’s character here and the figure of Cesare in
Caligari.
17. Burch, Marcel L'Herbier, 24.
18. Lieschi, ‘‘Autour du cinematographe,” 34.
19- Burch, Marcel L'Herbier, 24.
20. Lieschi, ‘‘Autour du cinematographe,” 37.
21. Beylie and Marie, ‘‘Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier,” 34/viii.
22. Lieschi, ‘‘Autour du cinematographe,” 34. Whether consciously derived or not, L’Her-
bier’s strategy here recalls Leopold Survage’s theoretical attempt to create an abstract film by
restricting his means to form, color, and rhythm—Survage, ‘‘Le Rythme colore,” Les Soirees de
Pans, 426-429-
23. Adolf Loos, “L’lnhumaine,” Neue Frie Press (29 July 1924), reprinted in Marcel L’Herbier,
La Tete qui tourne, 105.
24. Burch, Marcel L'Herbier, 25.
25. Although this may have been one of the earliest representations of a television broad¬
casting system within a narrative film, the concept of television was already becoming well
known in the public mind—compare Lawder, The Cubist Cinema, 113.
26. Blaise Cendrars, L’ABC du cinema, 11.
27. Lawder, The Cubist Cinema, 114-115, 117. L’Herbier had nearly finished shooting L'ln-
humaine in Lebruary, 1924—Edouard Roches, ‘‘Les films de demain,” 6-7, 10.
28. Lernand Leger, ‘‘Lilm by Lernand Leger and Dudley Murphy, Musical Synchronism by
George Antheil,” Little Review 10 (Autumn-Winter, 1924-1925), 42-44. Lernand Leger, “Ballet
mecanique [1924},” in Functions of Painting, trans. Alexandra Anderson (New York: Viking,
1973), 48-51. Lawder, The Cubist Cinema, 119-131, 183.
29- Lawder, The Cubist Cinema, 185.
30. Roger Regent, “Petite histoire des ‘Ursulines’ dans la grande histoire du cinema,” 15-
lb.
31. Lawder, The Cubist Cinema, 186.
32. Ibid., 165-167.
33. Lernand Leger, “A Critical Essay on the Plastic Quality of Abel Gance’s Lilm, The Wheel,”
in Functions of Painting, 20-23. Lawder, The Cubist Cinema, 89-95.
34. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 11 (15 April 1924), 5.
35. Jean Epstein, “Grossissement,” in Bonjour Cinema, 93-108. Jean Epstein, “Lernand Leger,”
Les Feuilles libres (March-April, 1923), reprinted in Rents sur le cinema, 1, 115-118.
36. “Au Club des Amis de Septieme Art,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 12 (1 May 1924), 28.

Menilmontant and Rien que les heures

1. Pierre Henry, “Lilms d’amateurs,” 10-11.
2. “Lilm sans sous-titre, film d’avant-garde: L’lronie du destin," 20.
3- Henry, “Lilms d’amateurs,” 11-12.
4. Lilm sans sous-titre, film d’avant-garde,” 20. See Kirsanoffs own essay, “Pour et eontre
le film sans texte,’ 8. Another possibly important titleless Lrench film was Marcel Silver’s
L Horloge (1925), now apparently lost. See Marcel Silver, “Du film sans sous-titre,” Cinea-Cine-
pour-tous 25 (15 November 1924), 14, 19, and Jean Tedesco, “A propos de L'Horloge,” Cinea-
Cine-pour-tous 25 (15 November 1924), 16-17. Henri Diamant-Berger claims that he made a
titleless film, Le Mauvais Garmon, in 1922; but Pathe-Consortium added intertitles to it when
the company distributed it with Les Trois Mousquetaires—Hemi Diamant-Berger, 11 etait une fois
le cinema 93-94.
5. Jean Tedesco, Pour un cineaste inconnu,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 54 (1 Lebruary 1926), 9-
11. Andre G. Brunelin, Au Temps du Vieux-Colombier de Jean Tedesco [2],” Cinema 61, 52

586
(January, 1961), 89. Ivor Montagu, “Old Man’s Mumble: Reflections on a Semi-centenary,” NOTES
Sight and Sound 44 (Autumn, 1975), 231. The Film Society Programs, 1923-1939 (New York:
Arno Press, 1972), 30.
6. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 6, 362, Freddy Buache, “Films independents
et d’avant-garde,” 67-68. This analysis is based on the print of Menilmontant at the Museum of
Modern Art.
7. Walter S. Michel, “In Memoriam of Dmitri Kirsanov, a Neglected Master,” 38.
8. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 267.
9- One of the earliest descriptions of Menilmontant indicates that the original print may have
had added sequences at the beginning and ending—“Menilmontant a Geneve,” 22-23- This may
account for the differences between the lengths of the prints preserved at the Museum of Modern
Art and the Cinematheque suisse (the latter of which I have not seen)—Buache, “Films inde¬
pendents et d’avant-garde,” 67. The print shown at the Film Society in London, 30 May 1926,
which was the same length as the Museum of Modern Art print, reportedly had been reduced
slightly—The Film Society Programs, 30.
10. Noel Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1979), 79-
11. Michel Goreloff, “Suggerer . . . ,” 24. Andre Maurois, “La poesie du cinema,” L’Art
cinematographique, 3, 28-30.
12. The print at the Cinematheque suisse ends with Sibirskaia sitting beside the bed of her
sleeping child in her sister’s apartment—Buache, “Films independents et d’avant-garde,” 68.
13. Elizabeth Sussex, “Cavalcanti in England,” 207.
14. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 48 (1 November 1925), 24. “L’Activite
cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 55 (15 February 1926), 20. “Les Presentations,” Cinea-
Cine-pour-tous 105 (15 March 1928), 31.
15. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 72 (1 November 1926), 6.
16. Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 6, 360.
17. Sir Stephen Tallents, “The Documentary Film (1946),” in Nonfiction Film Theory and
Criticism, ed. Richard Meran Barsam (New York: Dutton, 1976), 59. Emir Rodriguez Monegal,
“Alberto Cavalcanti (1955),” 242. The Film Society Programs, 110.
18. Alberto Cavalcanti, “Doctrine,” 9-12.
19- This analysis is based on the prints of Rien que les heures at the Museum of Modern Art
and the Cinematheque franqaise.
20. A similar shift from the factual to the fictional marks the structure of Georges Lacombe’s
La Zone (1928).
21. Harry Alan Potamkin saw “three motifs in [this] film, alternating progressively—a news
vendor moving through the streets, a drunken hag drawing herself to the waterfront, the city
about them”—The Compound Cinema, 71.
22. Sussex, “Cavalcanti in England,” 208.

En rade and LTnvitation au voyage

1. Jean Dreville, “Films: En rade,” 11. Some historians list Philippe Heriat as the script¬
writer—e.g., Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 280.
2. “Les Presentations,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 86 (1 June 1927), 33- Dreville, “Films,” 11.
Advertisement for the Theatre du Vieux-Colombier, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 96 (1 November 1927),
4. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 97 (15 November 1927), 6. En Rade seems to
have been imported into the United States as Sea Fever—Film Daily Yearbook (New York: Film
Daily, 1930), 19.
3. Francisco Amunategui, “Les Ecrans: En rade,” [n.p.]. This analysis is based on a 35mm
print of En rade preserved at the Cinematheque frangaise.
4. Louis Chavance, “L’Impressionisme cinematographique,” 21.
5. Dreville, “Films,” 11.
6. V. Mayer, “Le Cinema d’amateur: la pellicule panchromatique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 92
(1 September 1927), 26.
7. Dreville, “Films,” 11.
8. There is a similar, even more crucial, image conjunction in Marie Epstein and Jean Benoit-
Levy’s La Maternelle (1933).

587
NOTES 9- Several years ago at the Centre Georges Pompidou (17 June 1977), this sequence opened
a special program of excerpts from Cavalcanti s films, and absolutely delighted the audience.
10. “L’Activite cinegraphique, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 89 (15 July 1927), 25. Charles Ford,
“Germaine Dulac,” 34, 48.
11. Amunategui, “Les Ecrans,” [n.p.].
12. Apparently, Llnvitation au voyage, La Fohe des vaillants (Demented Hero), and La Coquille
et le clergyman were the only Dulac films to be exhibited in the United States during the 1920s
“1928 Feature Imports,’’ Film Daily Yearbook (New York: Film Daily, 1929), 31.
13- Ford, “Germaine Dulac,” 34.
14. This analysis is based on a 16mm print of Limitation au voyage at the Cinematheque
frangaise.
15. A. Colombat, "Limitation au voyage," 10.
16. Amunategui, “Les Ecrans,” [n.p.].
17. Dulac’s earlier La Fohe des vaillants (1925) as well as her later short abstract films also
depended on specific musical accompaniments.

Feu Mathias Pascal and Maldone

1. “Au Cine-Club de France,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 48 (1 November 1925), 20. Advertise¬
ment for the Theatre du Vieux-Colombier, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 57 (15 March 1926), 4. Jaque
Catelain, Marcel L'Herbier, 91- Claude Beylie and Michel Marie, “Entretien avec Marcel L’Her-
bier,” 35/ix.
2. Michel Simon, in fact, made his acting debut here fresh from an acclaimed performance
in Six Characters in Search of an Author—Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 104.
3. Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 3, 377-378. Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 104.
Jean-Andre Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 37.
4. Noel Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 26.
5. Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 37.
6. Ibid.
7. Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, The Mirror of Our Anguish: A Study of Luigi Pirandello’s Nar¬
rative Writings (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1978), 164-165. This analysis
is based on prints of Feu Mathias Pascal at the National Film Archive, the Museum of Modern
Art, and the Cinematheque franchise.
8. Catelain, Marcel L’Herbier, 86. Leon Barsacq, Cahgari's Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions:
A History of Film Design, 44.
9- Burch, Marcel L'Herbier, 26.
10. Catelain, Marcel L’Herbier, 89.
11. Francois Berge, "Feu Mathias Pascal," 248.
12. Radcliff-Umstead, The Mirror of Our Anguish, 169-170.
13. The structural symmetry of this double narrative was emphasized by its exhibition in
two parts, a strategy which L’Herbier himself thought diminished the film’s impact. Catelain,
Marcel L'Herbier, 91. Marcel L’Herbier, La Tete qui tourne, 121-122. For a different reading of
Feu Mathias Pascal which takes it as “a key film for an understanding of the modes of mimesis
[including subjective modes of representation] that the Impressionist directors developed,” see
Allen Thiher, Ihe Cinematic Muse: Critical Studies in the History of French Cinema, 18-20.
14. "Maldone," Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 97 (15 November 1927), 8. "Maldone," Cinemagazine 8
(16 March 1928), 445-458. Barsacq, Caligari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions, 74-75. Henri
Agel, Jean Gremillon, 180.
15. Advertisement, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 103 (15 February 1928), 6. Pierre Kast, “Jean
Gremillon, 36. Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Film, trans. Peter Morris (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1972), 206.
16. R. T., "Maldone," Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 110 (1 June 1928), 31. “Revue de revues,” Spar-
tacus 3 (15 June 1928), 6.
17. Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 118 (1 October 1928), 6. This analysis is
based on prints of Maldone preserved at the Cinematheque fran^aise and owned privately by
Armand Panigel.
18. Edmond Epardaud, "Maldone," 13.
19. Jean Bertin, “La Realisation,” Cinemagazine 8 (16 March 1928), 447.

588
 20. Kast, “Jean Gremillon,” 32. NOTES
21. Jean Epstein, “Grossissement,” trans. Stuart Liebman, “Magnification,” 10.
22. G. D., “Les Decors,” Cinemagazine 8 (16 March 1928), 452.
23. Bertin, “La Realisation,” 447. Compare Julien Bayart, “En regardant tournant Maldone,”
Cinegraphie 4 (15 December 1927), 61.
24. R. T. “Maldone,'' 31.
25. Kast, “Jean Gremillon,” 31.

Napoleon
1. Abel Gance introduced the second of three evening screenings of Napoleon, at the Walker
Art Center, 13-15 March 1980. The screenings were arranged by Richard Peterson, Curator of
the Walker Art Center’s Film Program.
2. Francois Truffaut, The Films of My Life, 29-32. Jean Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 3, 362.
Kevin Brownlow, “Abel Gance’s Napoleon Returns from Exile,” 31.
3. Kevin Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By, 634. Brownlow, “Abel Gance’s Napoleon Returns
from Exile,” 3 1.
4. Lenny Borger, “British Slighted on Napoleon . . . ,” 1, 38.
5. Interview with Marie Epstein, 14 August 1976.
6. For the story of this reconstruction, see Brownlow, “Abel Gance’s Napoleon Returns from
Exile,” 28-32, 68, 70-73.
7. Interview with Bob Harris of Images Film Archives, 14 March 1980. Several tinted frames
from the film are reproduced in Kevin Brownlow’s “How a Lost Masterpiece of the Cinema was
Recreated,” 34-35.
8. An early version of this reconstruction was screened by Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley,
in 1973, and by the American Film Institute in Washington, D.C., in 1978—See Brownlow,
“Abel Gance’s Napoleon Returns from Exile,” 68.
9- The initial screening of the complete version took place at the Telluride Film Festival in
early September, 1979, with Gance himself in attendance. Since then, this version of Napoleon
has been shown at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (March, 1980), at the London Film
Festival (November, 1980), at the Edinburgh Film Festival (August, 1981), again at the Leices¬
ter Square Cinema in London (September, 1981), and at the Barbican Centre in London (Au¬
gust, 1982). The Zoetrope version (accompanied by an orchestral score by Carmine Coppola)
opened at the Radio City Music Hall in New York (23-25 January 1981) and has played for
limited engagements in selected cities throughout the United States as well as in Rome. An
even more complete version (with additional footage that Brownlow discovered recently at the
Cinematheque franchise) was shown in Le Havre, in November, 1982, then in Paris, in the
summer of 1983- That version is now deposited at the Cinematheque franqaise.
10. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Abel Gance, 43.
11. There are discrepancies about Napoleon’s costs—see Juan Arroy, “La Technique de Napo¬
leon,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 86 (1 June 1927), 9; Leon Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema
[1929],” in L’Age ingrat du cinema, 268; Sophie Daria, Abel Gance: hier et demain, 116; Jeanne
and Ford, Abel Gance, 52.
12. Carl Davis’s specially commissioned score for the British version of Brownlow’s recon¬
struction has drawn more praise than Carmine Coppola’s, in part because Davis incorporated
excerpts of “classical” music as well as some of the extant music composed by Honegger into
his score.
13- Jeanne and Ford, Abel Gance, 52. Interview with Kevin Brownlow, 15 August 1979. In
1928, in the United States, MGM distributed an eighty-minute version of Gance’s film which
amounted to little more than a narrative sketch.
14. Bernard Eisenschitz, “From Napoleon to New Babylon,” 49-55.
15. The classroom sequence probably inspired the first classroom sequence in Francois Truf¬
faut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959). The cast list for Napoleon can be found on p. 196.
16. In the Brownlow reconstruction, the sequence of Marat’s murder is moved from its
original position just prior to the Battle of Toulon in order to open the second half of the film
with a sudden shocking action—the first shot is a CU of a knife being concealed in the bodice
of a dress. This transposition does raise the question of whether there are other differences
between Gance’s 1927 version of the film and Brownlow’s reconstruction.

589
NOTES 17. Jean Mitry, “Napoleon a l’ecran,” 57.
18. jean Tedesco, “Napoleon vu par Abel Gance," 9-
19. Emile Vuillermoz, “Qu’en pense la critique?” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 87 (15 June 1927), 6.
20. Emile Vuillermoz, “Abel Gance et Napoleon," 337-338.
21. Lewis Jacobs, ed., The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin, 126.
22. Tedesco, “Napoleon vu par Abel Gance, 10.
23- Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 277.
24. G.-Michel Coissac, Les Coulisses du cinema, 113-
25. Copies of this documentary film are preserved at the Cinematheque frangaise and the
UCLA Film Archive as well as in several private film collections here in the United States.
Brownlow, “Abel Gance’s Napoleon Returns from Exile,” 31-32. See also Juan Arroy, En Tour-
nant Napoleon avec Abel Gance.
26. Arroy, “La Technique de Napoleon," 9.
27. Coissac, Les Coulisses du cinema, 113- Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with
Abel Gance (1973).
28. Ronald Blumer, “The Camera as Snowball: France 1918-1927,” Cinema Journal 10 (Spring,
1971), 37. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Abel Gance (1973).
29. This sequence probably inspired the pillow fight sequence in Jean Vigo’s Zero de conduite
(1933).
30. Mitry, Histone du cinema, 3, 355.
31. Noel Burch’s remark was made in the session on Early French Film Theory, at the Ohio
University Film Conference (May, 1980). Similarly, Barry Salt tends to conclude that the
French films of the 1920s were “stylistically retarded”; they could not handle American “clas¬
sical” continuity editing with “competence”—Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and
Analysis. Ernest Callenbach’s suggestions were quite valuable here in the last stages of my
revision of this analysis of Napoleon.
32. Most of the cuts involve the character of Violine (Annabella), whose role, in effect, is
eliminated from the “Coppola” version.
33. This sequence may have inspired Antoine’s “altar” to Balzac in Truffaut’s Les Quatre
Cents Coups (1959).
34. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 276.
35. Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By, 648.
36. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 269-270. Mitry, Histone du cinema, 3,
356-357. Actually, Mitry was much more positive about this triptych sequence in 1927—
Mitry, “Napoleon a l’ecran,” 55.
37. In an essay that appeared after this analysis was written, Peter Pappas comes to a similar
conclusion, by a different route—“The Superimposition of Vision: Napoleon and the Meaning
of Fascist Art,” 10.
38. “Le Procede du triple ecran,” 17.
39. Arroy, “La Technique de Napoleon," 10. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel
with Abel Gance (1973).
40. Brownlow, The Parade s Gone By, 648-649- Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel
with Abel Gance (1973).
41. There were precedents for this sequence in the battle scenes of Gance’s own J’Accuse
(1919) and Raymond Bernard’s Le Miracle des loups (1924).
42. This analysis of the final reel of triptychs is based on a viewing table session with the
film, arranged by Elaine Burrows, at the National Film Archive.
43. Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 3, 361.
44. Vuillermoz, “Abel Gance et Napoleon," 336. See James M. Walsh and Steven Kramer,
Gances Beethoven,” Sight and Sound 45 (Spring, 1976), 109-111, for a study of Gance’s later
film on another Romantic artist, Beethoven (1937).
45. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 267, 272.
46. For instance, see the insightful but ultimately heavy-handed polemic by Pappas, “The
Superimposition of Vision: Napoleon and the Meaning of Fascist Art,” 4-13-
47. Mitry, Histoire du cinema, 362.
48. Brownlow, The Parades Gone By, 647-648. Letter from Kevin Brownlow, 25 August
1979.
49. Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By, 649.

590
 50. ‘‘Opinions des cineastes,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 109 (15 May 1928), 12-13. Brownlow, NOTES
The Parade’s Gone By, 649. Transcript of an interview by Armand Panigel with Claude Autant-
Lara (1973).
51. Letter from Claude Autant-Lara, 20 July 1979- Barry Salt notes that various wide screen
processes (56mm, 65mm, and 70mm) were being developed in Hollywood in 1929, which may
partly explain their lack of interest in the Hypergonar process—Letter from Barry Salt, 10
December 1979- Furthermore, the “Realife” wide-screen format of MGM’s Billy the Kid (1930),
which used a similar anamorphic lens process, was not all that successful—Jacobs, ed., The
Compound Cinema, 110-112.
52. Letter from Kevin Brownlow, 25 August 1979.
53. R. Lehman, “Un Film large: Construire un feu,” 5. Marcel Oms, “Claude Autant-Lara
dans l’Avant-Garde Franqaise,” 14. Jean Leclerc, “Jonas, pour de vrai,” 19- Letter from Claude
Autant-Lara, 20 July 1979-
54. Claude Autant-Lara, “La triste histoire de Construire un feu,” 17.
55. Letter from Claude Autant-Lara, (20 July 1979-
56. Claude Autant-Lara, “Le premier essai de film large: Construire un feu (1928-1929),” 35-
43. “Construire un few. essai de reconstitution du film perdu a partir de ce qu’il en reste,” 20-
23- Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 6, 318.

L’lmage, 6V2 X 11, and La Glace a trois faces

1. Interview with Marie Epstein, 14 August 1976.
2. This brief analysis is based, on an incomplete, much deteriorated print of L’lmage preserved
at the Cinematheque fran^aise. According to Jean Mitry, L’lmage was the first film to be screened
by the fledgling Cinematheque frangaise, in 1936—Jacques Fieschi, “Entretien avec Jean Mi-
try,” 19-
3. Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, Histoire encyclopedique du cinema, 1, 349.
4. Jean Mitry, “L'lmage,” 253-
5. Leon Moussinac, “Le Cinema: L'lmage,” 15. Georges Chaperot, “L’Oeuvre classique de
Jacques Feyder,” 20. Pierre Leprohon, Cinquante Ans du cinema frangais 57. Georges Sadoul,
Histoire generale du cinema, 5, 184, 186.
6. Henri Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 275.
7. Mitry, “L’lmage,” 253.
8. Jean Epstein, Le Cinematographe vu de l’Etna, 13-
9- Francisco Amunategui, “Les Ecrans: Six et demi, onze,” 100.
10. Jean Dreville, “Films: Six et demi X onze,” Cinegraphie 1 (15 September 1927), 14.
11. Interview with Marie Epstein, 4 June 1977. This analysis is based on a 35mm print of
6V2 X 11 preserved at the Cinematheque fran^aise. Apparently, 6V2 X 11 was the only one
of Epstein’s silent films to be imported into the United States during the 1920s—“1928 Feature
Imports,” Film Daily Yearbook (New York: Film Daily, 1929), 31.
12. L’Affche shares this inspiration and deployment of the popular Bebe Cadum posters with
Ballet mecanique and Entr'acte, all three conceived and executed in 1924.
13. M. Gait, “Notes sur Six et demi X onze,” 24. Pierre Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 43- Interview
with Marie Epstein, 10 August 1979-
14. Henri Langlois, “Jean Epstein (1897-1953),” 20.
15. Jean Epstein, “Six et demi X onze (un kodak),” 33-
16. Jean Dreville, “Films: Six et demi—onze,” Cinegraphie 3 (15 November 1927), 51.
17. Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 86-87.
18. Jean Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinema, 1, 61.
19. Gait, “Notes sur Six et demi X onze,” 24.
20. Dreville, “Films,” 51.
21. Advertisement, Cinematographie frangaise 466 (8 October 1927), 21. “Les Presentations,”
Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 99 (15 December 1927), 41. Jean Epstein, “L’Art d’evenement,” Comoedia
(18 November 1927), reprinted in Ecrits sur le cinema, 181-182. Trans, by Tom Milne as “Art
of Incidence,” Afterimage 10 (Autumn, 1981), 30, 32.
22. Epstein, “Art d’evenement,” 181.
23- Advertisement, Cinematographie frangaise 466 (8 October 1927), 21. Jean Dreville, “La
Glace a trois faces,” 87-90.

591
NOTES 24. Epstein, “Art d’evenement,” reprinted in Cahiers du cinema 202 (June-July, 1968), 55.
25. Leprohon, jean Epstein, 79- Noel Burch and Jean-Andre Fieschi, “La Premiere Vague,’’
23. . v
26 This analysis is based on prints of Ea Glace a tYOis faces at the Cinematheque franchise
and at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. A print is also collected at Anthology Film
Archives.
27. This sequence looks forward to the boating sequences in Jean Renoir’s Une Partie de
campagne (1936).
28. This sequence is foreshadowed in Epstein’s earlier essay, “Pour une avant-garde nouvelle
[1924],” Le Cinematographe vu de l'Etna, 62, trans. Stuart Liebman, “For a New Avant-Garde,”
29.
29 The Italian Futurists and French “simultaneists” had already linked or opposed these two
pleasures at least fifteen years before.
30. Epstein, “Art d’evenement,” 181.
31. Stephen Heath, “Film Performance,” Cine-tracts 1 (Summer, 1977), 12.

La Chute de la maison Usher and La Petite Marchande d’allumettes

1. “Les Presentations,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 111 (45 June 1928), 26. “Select Presentations,”
Spartacus 3 (15 June 1928), 3- Jean Dreville, “La Critique du film,” 3-
2. Henri Langlois, “Jean Epstein (1897-1953),” 24.
3. Langlois, “Jean Epstein,” 23. Pierre Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 46.
4. In 1979, Marie Epstein re-released the film (slightly stretch-printed) with an added sound
track of music using medieval instruments, arranged and performed by Roland de Cande. This
analysis is based primarily on the silent prints of La Chute de la maison Usher preserved at the
Cinematheque franchise and the Museum of Modern Art. At several points, there are brief
discrepancies in both prints.
5. Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 83-
6. Jean Epstein, “Au ralenti,” Paris-Midi (11 May 1928), reprinted in Epstein, Ecnts sur le
cinema, 1, 191.
7. Langlois, “Jean Epstein,” 22-24. Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art (New York: Macmillan,
1957), 97. Jean Mitry, Histone du cinema, 3, 380. At least one film historian has even labeled
it a “surrealist film”—Gerald Mast, A Short History of the Movies, 3rd ed. (New York: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1981), 195.
8. Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 45. John Hagan, “Cinema and the Romantic Tradition,” 46.
9- Jean Epstein, “De l’adaptation et du film parlant,” Pour Vous (17 October 1929), reprinted
in Ecnts sur le cinema, 201.
10. Andre Breton’s description of Antonin Artaud—he “carried with him the landscape of a
Gothic novel, torn by flashes of lightning”—makes a fascinating conjunction with the end of
Epstein’s film. And Artaud had tried but failed to get himself cast in the film—-as Roderick.
What an opportunity Epstein missed there! See Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, 167-168.
11. Jean Epstein, “Quelques notes sur Edgar A. Poe et les images douees de vie,” Photo-Cine
(April, 1928), reprinted in Ecnts sur le cinema, 188. Epstein, “Au ralenti,” 191.
12. Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 111. Philippe Haudiquet, “Jean Epstein,” 482. Jose Francisco
Aranda, Luis Buhuel: A Critical Biography, 39-
13. Langlois, “Jean Epstein,” 23-24. Haudiquet, “Jean Epstein,” 474.
14. Langlois, “Jean Epstein,” 23. Interview with Marie Epstein, 10 August 1979-
15. Jean Epstein, “Les Images de del,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 107 (15 April 1928), 11-12.
16. Keith Cohen, Film and Fiction, 93.
17. Ibid., 95.
18. Hagan, “Cinema and the Romantic Tradition,” 47-48.
19. Epstein, “Quelques notes sur Edgar A. Poe,” 188.
20. In several shots, just before and after Madeleine’s death, the image in the portrait even
moves slightly, as if alive. Compare the very different effect of the single moving image in
Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962).
21. The famous sequence of the coffin journey in Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931) may owe
something to this sequence.
22. Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (New York: Random House, 1975), 289-

392
291- Without any evidence at all, to Epstein’s detriment, this image has been attributed to NOTES
Luis Bunuel, his assistant on the film’s production—see Aranda, Luis Bunuel, 41.
23. Robert Graves, The White Goddess, 2nd ed. (New York: Viking, 1958), 92, 343. Also,
cf. the nexus of human-animal relations put in play in the nightmare sequence of La Lille de
I’eau.
24. This narrative reversal also counters the story of Ethelred and the dragon which Roder¬
ick’s friend is reading and which takes up a good number of the intertitles toward the end.
25. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 25.
26. The musical accompaniment to the new print released by Marie Epstein tends to sustain
this uncertainty and mystification.
27. David Bordwell, “The French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and
Film Style.” My numbers are approximate, and they differ slightly from Bordwell’s.
28. Stuart Liebman, “The Sublime and the Fantastic: Epstein’s Film Theory” (Paper delivered
at the Conference of the Society for Cinema Studies, Temple University, 7 March 1978), 18.
29- Liebman, “The Sublime and the Fantastic,” 18.
30. Epstein, “Quelques notes sur Edgar A. Poe,” 188. Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 84.
31. Liebman, “The Sublime and the Fantastic,” 20.
32. Hagan argues that the friend’s difficulty in hearing and seeing “calls attention to the act
of perception and thus emphasizes the fact that the film is about the way in which the cinema
allows us to experience things”—Hagan, “Cinema and the Romantic Tradition,” 50.
33. Bernard Chardere, ed., “Jean Renoir,” 82, 85.
34. “Avant-Garde,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 106 (1 April 1928), 22.
35. Advertisement * for the-Theatre du Vieux-Colombier, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 110 (1 June
1928), 5.
36. “L’Affaire de La Petite Marchande d’allumettes,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 113 (15 July 1928),
6-7. Chardere, “Jean Renoir,” 83-
37. “L’Activite cinegraphique,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 135 (15 June 1929), 25. ‘‘Jean Renoir
et Jean Tedesco gagnent le proces de La Petite Marchande d'allumettesCinea-Cine-pour-tous 136
(1 July 1929), 7-10.
38. Chardere, “Jean Renoir,” 83, 85. Andre Bazin, Jean Renoir, 213-214.
39- Claude Beylie, “A la recherche d’un style,” 14. For a description of the original version,
see Claude Beylie, “Essai de reconstitution d’un film perdu,” Ecran 79 (15 April 1979). Renoir
has said that the original print/had no intertitles, but the Museum of Modern Art’s version has
nine brief intertitles.
40. Chardere, “Jean Renoir,” 84. Alexander Sesonske argues for a three-part structure to the
film—Sesonske, Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924-1939, 44.
41. Chardere, “Jean Renoir,” 84.
42. The publicity of the period exploited this connection between Hessling and Chaplin—
Beylie, “A la recherche d’un style,” 9-
43. Freddy Buache, “Films independents et d’avant-garde,” Travelling 55 (Summer, 1979),
69.
44. Jean Tedesco publicized Reiniger’s Les Aventures de Prince Ahmed several times in his film
journal—Ed. E., “Les Aventures de Prince Ahmed,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 64 (1 July 1926), 31.
Ed. E., “Les Aventures de Prince Ahmed,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 65 (15 July 1926), 30-31.
45. For a more optimistic reading of the film, see Dr. Paul Ramain, “Le Reve dans La Petite
Marchande d’Allumettes,” 14-16.
46. Compare the Christmas Eve celebration in the mountain cabin in La Grande Illusion
(1937).
47. As Armand-Jean Cauliez and Raymond Durgnat have noted, the sequence prefigures
similar moments in La Regie de jeu (1939)—Raymond Durgnat, Jean Renoir 51.
48. Durgnat, Jean Renoir, 52. Sesonske reads this as a spiritual, even religious, ending—
Sesonske, Jean Renoir, 48-49-

La Coquille et le clergyman and Un Chien andalou

1. Henri Langlois apparently rediscovered the complete version of La Coquille et le clergyman
in 1962. That version is the basis for the print at the Museum of Modern Art, on which this
analysis depends. Unfortunately, prints with the second and third reels reversed have circulated

593
NOTES for years and continue to circulate in the United States so that an even more incoherent text
haunts the original one. Exceptions to the usual criticism of the film include Wendy Dozoretz,
“Dulac versus Artaud,” 46-53, and Sandy Flitterman, ‘‘Theorizing the ‘Feminine’: Woman as
the Figure of Desire in The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1-18.
2. Could Louis Nalpas, Artaud’s uncle, have arranged their meeting? Dulac was under con¬
tract to Cineromans, where Nalpas was head of production; and Artaud had already acted in
two of the company’s productions, Surcouf (1925) and Lejuif errant (1926).
3. Alain Virmaux, ‘‘Artaud and Film,” 156-157.
4. ‘‘Un reve a l’ecran,” Cinegraphie 2 (15 October 1927), 32. Lucie Derain, “La Coquille et le
clergyman, reve filme,” 50.
5. Georges Sadoul, ‘‘Souvenirs d’un temoin,” 18. Antonin Artaud, “The Shell and the Cler¬
gyman” 173-174.
6. Antonin Artaud, ‘‘Scenario II,” in Les Surrealistes et le cinema, ed. Alain and Odette Vir¬
maux, 167-171. Virmaux, ‘‘[footnote #1},” Les Surrealistes et le cinema, 172. Sandy Flitterman
identifies the source of this misinformation as Yvonne Allendy—Flitterman, ‘‘Theorizing the
‘Feminine,’ ” 3.
7. Roger Regent, ‘‘Petite histoire des ‘Ursulines’ dans la grande histoire du cinema,” 17-18.
Sadoul, ‘‘Souvenirs d’un temoin,” 18-19. Ronald Hayman, Artaud and After {New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977), 63-64. Jean Mitry, ‘‘Deux manifestations peu connues,” 115-116.
8. Regent, ‘‘Petite histoire des ‘Ursulines,’ ” 17-18. Sadoul, ‘‘Souvenirs d’un temoin,” 18-
19.
9. Antonin Artaud, ‘‘Lettre a Jean Paulhan (22 January, 1932),” Oeuvres completes, 3 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1961), 270.
10. The scenario bears some similarity to the earlier ‘‘cinematographic poems” of Philippe
Soupault, Benjamin Peret, Robert Desnos, and others—Richard Abel, ‘‘American Films and
the French Literary Avant-Garde,” Contemporary Literature 17 (Winter, 1976), 84-109-
11. Antonin Artaud, “Cinema and Abstraction,” 173. Artaud, “The Shell and the Clergyman,”
174.
12. Susan Sontag, “Artaud,” in Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, xxvi-xxvii.
13. Flitterman, “Theorizing the ‘Feminine,’ ” 7.
14. Virmaux, “Artaud and Film,” 157.
15. Hayman, Artaud and After, 37-38.
16. Compare Artaud’s two prose texts, Heloi'se et Abelard (1925) and Le Clair Abelard (1927).
Hayman, Artaud and After, 43-51, 62-63. Susan Sontag and Don Eric Levine, “Notes,” in
Artaud, Selected Writings, 610.
17. Dozoretz, “Dulac and Artaud,” 51-52.
18. Artaud, “Lettre a Jean Paulhan,” 271.
19. Frank Stauffacher, “Notes on the Making of Un Chien andalou,” 29-30. Raymond Durg-
nat, Luis Buhuel, 22-37. David Curtis, Experimental Cinema, 30-31. J. H. Matthews, Surrealism
and Film, 84-90. Ken Kelman, “The Other Side of Realism,” 112-113. Randall Conrad, “The
Minister of the Interior Is on the Telephone,” 2-14. Linda Williams, “The Prologue to Un
Chien andalou: A Surrealist Film Metaphor,” 24-33. Phillip Drummond, “Textual Space in Un
Chien andalou, 55-119- Paul Sandro, “The Space of Desire in An Andalusian Dog,” 57-63.
Virginia Higginbottom, Luis Buhuel, 35-39. Linda Williams, Figures of Desire: A Theory and
A nalysis of Surrealist Film, 53-105.
20. Jean Vigo, “Un Chien andalou,” Vers un cinema social (1930), trans. Marianne Alexandre,
and reprinted in L’Age d’or and Un Chien andalou, 81.
21. Ado Kyrou, Luis Buhuel, 16. Jose Francisco Aranda, Luis Buhuel: A Critical Biography,
41, 48-51.
22. Kyrou, Luis Buhuel, 18. Aranda, Luis Buhuel, 58-59- Matthews, Surrealism and Film,
90.
23. Luis Buhuel, L Aventure cinematographique,” in Armand Tallier et le Studio des Ursulines,
29. Sadoul, “Souvenirs d’un temoin,” 19. Aranda, Luis Buhuel, 59, 288. Denise Tual, Le Temps
devore, 65.
24. Sadoul, “Souvenirs d’un temoin,” 19.
25. J. Bouissounouse, Dans la salle,” 74. Tual, Le Temps devore, 65.
26. Buhuel, “L’Aventure cinematographique,” 29. Aranda, Luis Buhuel, 58-59.
27. Sadoul, “Souvenirs d’un temoin,” 19-20.

594
 28. Aranda, Luis Bunuel, 64. NOTES
29- Luis Bunuel, “Un Chien andalou," La Revolution surrealiste (December, 1929), reprinted
in L'Age d’or and Un Chien andalou, 10.
30. Aranda, Luis Bunuel, 58, 68. Tual, Le Temps devore, 66.
31. Aranda, Luis Bunuel, 56, 59-
32. Michel Marie, “Muet,” in Lectures du Film (Paris: Albatros, 1976), 171.
33. William Van Wert, “Intertitles,” Sight and Sound 40 (Spring, 1980), 104-105.
34. Drummond, “Textual Space in Un Chien andalou,” 61.
35. Ibid., 67.
36. Ibid., 71-72. Compare Jean Mitry’s attack on the film’s “filmed symbols”—Jean Mitry,
Histoire du cinema, 3, 349—and Paul Sandro’s analysis of the film’s graphic patterns (diagonal
stripes and severed body parts)—Sandro, “The Space of Desire in An Andalusian Dog,” 61-62.
37. Sandro, “The Space of Desire in An Andalusian Dog,” 61.
38. Drummond, “Textual Space in Un Chien andalou,” 72-73-
39- Kelman, “The Other Side of Realism,” 114-117.
40. Drummond, “Textual Space in Un Chien andalou,” 55-119. Sandro, “The Space of Desire
in An Andalusian Dog,” 57-63.
41. How much all of this can be situated within the context of Bunuel’s animosity toward
“the Andalusian Modernist poets who were insensible to a revolutionary poetry of social con¬
tent” remains to be explored—Aranda, Luis Bunuel, 46n.
42. Williams, “The Prologue to Un Chien andalou,” 24-33- Drummond, “Textual Space in
Un Chien andalou,” 91-105. Linda Williams’s book, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of
Surrealist Film (1981),-appeared too late for me to incorporate her recent work on Un Chien
andalou into this study.
43. Sandro, “The Space of Desire in An Andalusian Dog,” 62-63.
44. Vigo, ‘‘Un Chien andalou,” 75.

La Passion de Jeanne dArc

1. David Bordwell, Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne dArc, 20. Apparently, the film’s cost
increased to nine million francs—David Bordwell, The Films of Carl Theodor Dryer, 212.
2. Michel Delahaye, “Interview with Carl Dreyer,” 145.
3. Carl Dreyer, “Ecrits: La Mystique realisee (1930),” 35.
4. Leon Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 285.
5. Bordwell, Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne dArc, 15.
6. Delahaye, “Interview with Carl Dreyer,” 143-
7. “Dossier-film #3—La Passion de Jeanne dArc,” 46.
8. Dreyer, “Ecrits: La Mystique realisee,” 35.
9. Bordwell, Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne dArc, 23.
10. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 285. “Dossier-film #3—La Passion de
Jeanne dArc,” 45.
11. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 285.
12. “La Jeanne dArc de Dreyer a la Salle Marivaux,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 119 (15 October
1928), 16.
13. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 284.
14. Mordaunt Hall, “Poignant French Film,” 7. Alexandre Arnoux, “Enfin nous avons vu
la version integrate de Jeanne dArc de Carl Dreyer,” 2.
15. Bordwell, The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, 216-217.
16. Bordwell, Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne dArc, 20. “Dossier-film #3—La Passion de
Jeanne dArc,” 45. Lo Duca, “Les films vieillissent-ils?” 25-27.
17. In the first reel, for example, several short sequences are excised from the print in the
National Film Archive and at least a half-dozen shots are flopped (left/right). I have relied
primarily on the print of La Passion de Jeanne dArc preserved at the Museum of Modern Art.
18. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generale du cinema, 6, 383-
19- “Dossier-film #3—La Passion de Jeanne dArc,” 46.
20. Ibid.
21. Moussinac, “Panoramique du cinema [1929],” 286-287. This strategy may have been
influenced by Soviet films such as Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1925-1926).

595
NOTES 22. ‘‘Dossier-film #3—La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc,” 47.
23. Ibid.
24. Sadoul, Histone generate du cinema, 6, 388. One might compare my analysis here with
Marie-Claire Ropars’s much more systematic reading of Eisenstein’s October (1927)—Ropars,
“L’Ouverture d’Octobre, ou les conditions theonques de la Revolution,” Octobre: ecnture et ideologic
(Paris: Albatros, 1976), 27-66, trans. Larry Crawford and Kinball Lockhart, ‘‘The Overture of
October,” enclitic 2 (Lall, 1978), 50-72, and 3 (Spring, 1979), 35-47.
25. David Bordwell, ‘‘Imploded Space: Lilm Style in The Passion of Jeanne d’Arc,’’ 99-105.
26. Mark Nash, Dreyer, 54.
27. Noel Burch and Jorge Dana, “Propositions,” 44.
28. Bordwell, The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, 66-92.
29. Dreyer, “Ecrits: La Mystique realisee,” 35.
30. Herman Warm, “Dreyer brugte sanfaerdigbeden som stilmiddel,” Kosmorama 90 (June,
1969), 147, quoted in translation in Bordwell, The Films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, 212.
31. Lewis Jacobs, ed., The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin, 452.
32. Grigori Kozintsev, King Lear: The Space of Tragedy, trans. Mary Mackintosh (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1977), 26. The discourse of Peter Brook’s own King Lear (1971)
owes a great deal to Dreyer’s film.
33- Bordwell, Filmguide to La Passion de Jeanne dArc, 23-
34. This particular shot is missing from the print at the National Lilm Archive.
35. See diverse Lrench films such as Les Miserables (1925), Jim la Houlette (1926), Napoleon
(1927), and La Chute de la maison Usher (1928). Michel Marie, “La Lettre et le cinematographe,”
La Revue du cinema, 316 (April, 1977), 67-74. William Van Wert, “Intertitles,” Sight and
Sound 49 (Spring, 1980), 98-105.
36. Pierre Audard, “La Passion de Jeanne dArc,” 67.
37. Compare Ken Kelman, “Dreyer,” 146-147.
38. Werner Klinger, “Analytical Treatise on the Dreyer Lilm, The Passion of Joan of Arc,
with Appendix of a Constructive Critique,” 9-10.
39- The cross-cutting in this sequence is actually highly ambiguous. Are we to read the
association between Jeanne and the players as one of similarity or difference? And is the physical
grotesquerie of the players an analogue of their spiritual or sociopolitical condition?
40. Dreyer, “Ecrits: La Mystique realisee,” 35.
41. Paul Willamen, “Note on La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc” in Nash, Dreyer, 54-55. Lor an
analysis of the film as “an heterogenous text,” whose “uncoded material tells us what kind of
stuff it is that the text represses . . . the impossible position of the feminine in the symbolic
order of the patriarchy,” see Deborah Linderman, “Uncoded Images in the Heterogenous Text,”
34-41.

Finis Terrae and Gardiens de phare

1. Jean Epstein, “Les Approches de la verite,” Photo-Cine (15 November—15 December 1928),
reprinted in Epstein, Ecrits sur le cinema, 1, 192. Pierre Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 46-47.
2. Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 15. Interview with Marie Epstein, 14 August 1976.
3- Pierre Leprohon, “Lilms d’aujourd’hui: Finis Terrae,” 8. Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 50-51.
Lewis Jacobs, ed., The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin, 290. This
analysis is based on the print of Finis Terrae preserved at the Cinematheque frangaise.
4. Jean Epstein, “Nos Lions,” L’Ami du peuple (11 January 1929), reprinted in Ecrits sur le
cinema, 1, 196.
5. Epstein, “Nos Lions,” 194-195.
6. Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 179.
7. Epstein, “Les Approches de la verite,” 193.
8. Epstein, “Nos Lions,” 194-195.
9. Epstein, Les Approches de la verite,” 193. Henri Langlois, “Jean Epstein (1897-1953),”
25. Llaherty was interested in re-creating past “exotic” cultures; Epstein was interested in a
contemporary, isolated culture.
10. Mother was shown in the cine-clubs in 1927 and 1928; La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc pre¬
viewed in late April, 1928; and Dura Lux was shown in November, 1927—Jean Dreville,
"Films," Cmegraphie 3 (15 November 1927), 53.

596
 11. Epstein, “Les Approches de la verite,” 193. NOTES
12. Ibid. Potamkin reported that some people complained about the film’s slow rhythm—
Jacobs, ed., The Compound Cinema, 286.
13- Leprohon compares this accident to the swallow hitting the man in the speeding sports
car in La Glace a trois faces—Leprohon, “Films d’aujourd’hui,” 8.
14. Philippe Haudiquet, “Jean Epstein,” 482.
15. The image is similar to the central metaphor—of a circular stairway enclosed by mir¬
rors—in Epstein’s first essay in Le Cinematographe vu de l’Etna, 15-18.
16. Leprohon, Jean Epstein, 50-51. Interestingly, the mothers of the two young men are not
on good terms, and their difference is resolved in a sequence which joins together separate shots
of them, around an intertitle, “Bannec,” which progressively increases in size until it fills the
frame.
17. Jean-Marie’s calling in this sequence contrasts with the “sounds” that separate Jean and
Marie at the end of the carnival sequence in Coeur fidele as well as with the unanswered calling
voice of the hero near the end of Murnau’s Sunrise (1927). Sunrise also premiered in Paris shortly
before Epstein left for Bannec and Balanec—“Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 104 (1
March 1928), 6.
18. Pasteur and Lesenin join several other doctor heroes in French literature from the 1920s
to the 1950s.
19- Jean Epstein, “Le Cinematographe dans l’Archipel [1928-1929],’’ Ecrits sur le cinema, 1,
199.
20. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 142 (15 October 1929), 3. Henri Agel, Jean
Gremillon, 31, 180. r
21. An auto accident interrupted the production late in 1928—J. V., “Jean Gremillon nous
entretient de ses travaux,” Pour Vous 22 (18 April 1929), 4.
22. Pierre Kast, “Jean Gremillon,” 36. The Cinematheque franqaise print gives the produc¬
tion date as 1928.
23- Alexandre Arnoux, “Un film fran^ais de qualite: Gardiens dephare,” 8-9- “Films presentes
en France du ler janvier 1929 au ler janvier 1930,” Tout-Cinema (1930), 1-32.
24. This analysis is based on prints of Gardiens de phare at the Cinematheque fran^aise and
in the private collection of Armand Panigel.
25. Compare Marcel Carne’s tribute to Perinal—“a photography of atmosphere, gray without
being flat, deliberately imprecise without being obscure, it added even more to the anguish of
the characters, to the oppression”—reprinted in Mireille Latil Le Dantec, “Jean Gremillon: le
realisme et le tragique,” 45.
26. Agel, Jean Gremillon, 32.
27. A similar slow motion image of a running dog occurs in Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados
(1950) just as the main character, Jaibo, dies.
28. There are only some twenty intertitles scattered throughout the film, all of them brief
phrases of narration or dialogue.
29- The siren’s relation to the father thus parallels the dog’s to the son.

LArgent
1. Jean-Andre Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 38.
2. Claude Beylie and Michel Marie, “Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier,” 36/x.
3. “La Polemique de L'Argent,” 26-28. Marcel L’Herbier, La Tete qui tourne, 149-150, 164-
167. At the very moment L’Herbier was writing his scenario for L Argent, Sergei Eisenstein was
sketching out a project for a film based on Karl Marx’ Capital—Sergei Eisenstein, “Notes for a
Film of Capital,” trans. Maciej Sliwowski, Jay Leyda, and Annette Michelson, October 2 (Sum¬
mer, 1976), 3-26.
4. Beylie and Marie, “Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier,” 36/x. L’Herbier, La Tete qui tourne,
150.
5. Pierre Jouvet, “LArgent de Marcel L’Herbier,’’ 8.
6. L’Herbier, La Tete qui tourne, 161.
7. Ibid., 161-162.
8. “Les nouveaux films,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 130 (1 April 1929), 6. L’Herbier, La Tete qui
tourne, 159-160, 162.

597
NOTES 9- Beylie and Marie, “Entretien avec Marcel L Herbier, 36/x.
10. Noel Burch, Marcel L'Herbier, 136. Georges Sadoul, Histoire generate du cinema, 6, 330.
Claude Beylie, “Marcel L’Herbier ou l’intelligence du cinematographe,” 28/ii.
11. Claude Beylie, “Sur cinq films de Marcel L’Herbier,” 72. Nicole Schmitt,
“Avertissement,” L’Avant-Scene du cinema 209 G June 1978), 7. The most recent screenings
have been at the National Film Theater in London (7 August 1979) and at the Museum of
Modern Art (January, 1980). This analysis is based on the restored prints of L’Argent at the
Museum of Modern Art and at the National Film Archive. Unfortunately, both of these prints
have been stretch-printed so that they run slightly slower and longer than when the film was
originally screened.
12. Noel Burch, “Revoir LArgent,” 45.
13. Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 138-162.
14. Ibid., 132.
15. Ibid., 131.
16. Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 38.
17. The Hamelin figure, like the main characters of Tourneur’s L'Equipage (1927) and Well¬
man’s Wings (1927), plays on the then current fascination with aviator heroes such as Charles
Lindbergh.
18. Beylie and Marie, “Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier,” 36/x.
19- This sequence bears some strange similarities to the sequence in Un Chien andalou where
the man and woman watch an androgynous figure on the street below their window. Did Bunuel
and Dali see LArgent before they began shooting their film?
20. Again, there seem to be parallels between this sequence and others in Un Chien andalou
as well as in La Coquille et le clergyman.
21. Jouvet, “LArgent de Marcel L’Herbier,” 8.
22. The role of Baroness Sandorf was expanded considerably when Brigitte Helm became
available for the film.
23. Was this connection between Gunderman and Le Matin, Sapene’s newspaper, one of the
things that angered Sapene about L’Herbier’s film?
24. L’Herbier, La Tete qui tourne, 156. This predatory couple and their jungle environment
find a curious parallel twenty years later in Orson Welles’s Lady from Shanghai (1948).
25. Line is the inverse of the femme de glace character of L’lnhumaine, and her mirror image
functions somewhat like that of the man in La Glace a trois faces.
26. Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 130. „
27. Ibid., 140.
28. Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 38.
29- L’Herbier, La Tete qui tourne, 156.
30. Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 132.
31. Ibid., 133.
32. Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 41. A similar dynamism marks Fritz Lang’s Aie-
tropolis (1927).
33. Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 41.
34. Michel Marie, “Modernite de LArgent,” 5.
35. Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 38, 41. Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 141.
36. Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 141-142. Marie, “Modernite de LArgent,” 6.
37. Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 146.
38. Fieschi, “Autour du cinematographe,” 38.
39. L’Herbier, La Tete qui tourne, 157.
40. Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 153.
41. L’Herbier, La Tete qui tourne, 162-163.
42. S. M. Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, and G. V. Alexandrov, “A Statement [1928],” in
Film Form, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1949), 257-
259.
43. Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 147.
44. Ibid., 150.
45. Ibid., 162.

598
Afterword NOTES
1. See p. 576, n. 7.
2. Janet Staiger, "Dividing Labor for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the Rise of the
Studio System,” 16-25. Janet Staiger, "The Mass-Produced Photoplay: Economic and Signify¬
ing Practices in the First Years of Hollywood,” Wide Angle 4 (1980), 12-27. Janet Staiger,
"Crafting Hollywood Films: The Impact of a Concept of Film Practice on a Mode of Production”
(Paper delivered at the Society for Cinema Studies Conference, Los Angeles, 1982), 1-14.
3. Recently, Marie Epstein told me that she remembers seeing both color and black-and-
white prints of the same film in the early 1920s. The color prints were exhibited in the few
"showcase” cinemas, particularly in Paris; the less expensive black-and-white prints were shown
elsewhere, especially in the provinces. Her remarks indicate one particular line of pursuit for
further research on production and distribution practices in France during this period.
4. See p. 541, n. 21.
5. See, for instance, John Ellis, "Made in Ealing,” Screen 16 (Spring, 1975), 78-127; Tino
Balio, ed., The American Film Industry; Robert C. Allen, "William Fox presents Sunrise,” Quar¬
terly Review of Film Studies 2 (1977), 327-338; Vance Kepley, "Griffith’s Broken Blossoms and the
Problem of Historical Specificity,” 37-48; Jackson Schmidt, "On the Road to MGM: A History
of Metro Pictures Corporation, 1915-1920,” Velvet Light Trap 19 (1982), 46-52.
6. See p. 576, n. 10.
7. See, for instance, Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928 (Cam¬
bridge: MIT Press, 1982), 217-258. Had I had space and time, at the end of Part IV, I would
have included a comparative analysis of two short documentaries, Georges Lacombe’s La Zone
(1928) and Jean Vigovs A Propos de Nice (1930).
8. Charles [Rick] Altman, "Towards a Theory of Genre Film,” Film Studies Annual 2 (1977),
31-44. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres (New York: Random House, 1981), 3-41. Rick Alt¬
man, ed., Genre: The Musical (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
9. Paul Willamen, "On Reading Epstein on Photogenie,” 40-47.
10. Christian Metz, The Imaginary SignifierlPsychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton,
Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1982), 149-297.
11. Stuart Liebman, "French Film Theory, 1910-1921,” 1-27.
12. Bernard Eisenschitz, "Histoire de l’histoire (deux periodes du cinema franqais: le muet—
le generation de 58),” 19-33- /■

599
Historical Background on Modern France Bibliography
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History of the French Silent Cinema, 1915-1929

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French Film Journals, 1915-1929

Film Industry Journals: Les Programmes Gaumont, 1924-1925
Cine-Journal, 1915- Gaumont-Metro-Goldwyn, Bulletin
Filma, 1916- cinematographique, 1925-1927
Le Courner cinematographique, 1917-
Bulletin Paramount, 1922-1926
La Cinematographie franyaise, 1918-
Cineopse, 1919- Paramount Journal, 1926-1929
Cinemagazine, 1921- Annuals or Yearbooks:
Cine-Miroir, 1922- Annuaire general de la cinematographie franyaise
Mon-Cine, 1922-
et etrangere. Paris: Cine-Journal, 1917
La Critique cinematographique, 1927- Tout-Cinema. Paris: Filma, 1922-
Almanach du cinema. Paris: Cinemagazine,
Production/Distribution Company Journals:
1922-1924
Pathe-J ournal, 1917-1926
Annuaire general de la cinematographie. Paris:
Cine-France, 1927-1929
Cinemagazine, 1925-
Almanach du Mon-Cine. Paris: Mon-Cine,
Les No uvea utes A ubert, 1918-1922
1929-1930
L’Effort Aubert, 1923
Cine-Information Aubert, 1924-1927 Film Journals—Serializations or Novelizations:
Aubert-Cine, 1928 Romans-Cinemas, 1914-1918
C inema-B ibliotheque, 1921-
Gaumont, Bulletin du comptoir cine-location, Le Film complet, 1922-
1920-1922 Mon Film, 1922-
Gaumont films franyais, 1923-1924 La Petite Illustration, 1925-1930

604
Specialized Film Journals: Po//r Vo/w, 1928- BIBLIOGRAPHY
Le Film, 1916-1921 Uz Pmze z7zz cinema, 1928-
Cine-pour-tous, 1919-1923
Le Journal du Cine-Club, 1920-1921 Literary Journals (with an interest in film):
Cinea, 1921-1923 Le Crapouillot, 1919-
Theatre et Comoedia 11lustre, film supplement, Mercure de France, 1919-1926
1922-1925 La Nouvelle Revue Franyaise, 1919-
Cinea-Cine-pour-tous, 1923- L’Esprit nouveau, 1920-1925
L’Art cinematographique, 1926-1929 La Gazette des sept arts, 1922-1923
Schemas, 1927 Les Nouvelles litteraires, 1922-
Photo-Cine, 1927 La Revue nouvelle, 1927-
C inegraphie, 1927-1928 Literary Journals (special film issues):
C/ore t//>, 1927-1930 Les Cahiers du mots 16/17 (1925)
Ozz Tourne, 1928 La Revue federaliste 103 (November, 1927)
Spartacus, 1928 Le Rouge et le noir, special number (July,
Cinemonde, 1928- 1928)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Tallier et le Studio des Ursuhnes, edited by Pierre Lherminier (Paris: A.F.C.A.E., 1963), 13-
24.
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University of Missouri Press, 1979.
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matheque 30-31 (Summer-Autumn, 1980), 77-84.
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Williams, Linda. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1981.

Selected Filmmakers

1. Andre Antoine
Antoine, Andre, “Cinema d’hier, d’aujourd’hui, de demain.” Le Journal du Cine-Club 24 (25
June 1920), 3-4.
-. “Le Public.” Cinemagazine 1 (18-24 February 1921), 5-7.
-. “Tripatouillages.” Cinemagazine 1 (25-31 March 1921), 5-6.
Borie, Paul de la. “La Terre.” Cinematographic franyaise 148 (3 September 1921), 29-
Delluc, Louis. “Antoine travaille.” Le Film 75 (20 August 1917), 5-7.
-. “Notes pour moi.” Le Film 102 (25 February 1918), 12.
Epardaud, Edmond. “LArlesienne." Cinea 80 (1 December 1922), 9-
Esnault, Philippe. “Biofilmographie d’Andre Antoine.” La Revue du cinema: image et son 271
(April, 1973), 29-32.
-. “Entretiens avec Andre-Paul Antoine.” La Revue du cinema: image et son 271 (April,
1973), 6-28.
-. “L'Hirondelle et la mesange d’Andre Antoine.” La Revue du cinema: image et son 271
(April, 1973), 55-64.
-. “Propos d’Antoine.” La Revue du cinema: image et son 271 (April, 1973), 33-49.
Jeanne, Rene and Charles Ford. Histoire encyclopedique du cinema (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1947),
1, 181-182.
Landry, Lionel. “La Terre.” Cinea 24 (21 October 1921), 5-6.
Lang, Andre. Deplacements et Villegiatures litteraires et suivi de la promenade au royaume des images
ou entretiens cinematographiques (Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1924), 115-123, 183-211.
Lapierre, Marcel. Les Cent Visages du cinema. Paris: Grasset, 1948.
Mitry, Jean. Histoire du cinema (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1969), 2, 250-252.
Predal, Rene. La Societe franqaise (1914-1943) a travers le cinema (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972),
92-94.
Sadoul Georges. Histoire generale du cinema (Paris: Denoel, 1974), 4, 106-118.
Vuillermoz, Emile. “Devant 1’ecran.” Le Temps (7 February 1917), 3.

612
2. Claude Autant-Lara BIBLIOGRAPHY
Autant-Lara, Claude. “Le premier essai de film large: Constrain un Feu (1928-1929) ’’ Fa Revue
du cinema 16 (1 November 1930), 35-43.
-. “La triste histoire de Construire un feu.” Cahiers de la cinematheque 9 (Spring, 1973),
17.
Carne, Marcel. “Les films du mois: Construire un feu.” Cinemagazine 1 (January, 1931), 65-66.
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la cinematheque 9 (Spring, 1973), 20-23.
Gilson, Paul. “Construire un feu." Cinea-Cine 11 (January, 1931), 36-37.
Leclerc, Jean. “Jonas, pour de vrai.” Cahiers de la cinematheque 9 (Spring, 1973), 18-19-
Lehman, R. “Un Film large: Construire un feu.” Pour Vous 108 (11 December 1930), 5.
Oms, Marcel. “Claude Autant-Lara dans l’Avant-Garde Franqaise.” Cahiers de la cinematheque 9
(Spring, 1973), 12-15.
“Opinions des cineastes.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 109 (15 May 1928), 12-13.

3. Jacques de Baroncelli
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1923), Cn.p.}.
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Conrad, Jack. “Jacques de Baroncelli et la mer.” Cinemagazine 7 (17 June 1927), 563-566.
Cornaz, Oscar. “A Paimpol avec Jacques de Baroncelli pour le depart de la Marie.” Cinea-Cine-
pour-tous 14 (1 June 1924), 28-29.
Daven, Andre. “Nene.” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 22 (October, 1923), [n.p.].
Delluc, Louis. “Cinema.” Paris-Midi (1 February 1919), 2; (2 February 1919), 2.
-. “Notes pour moi.” Le Film 116 (3 June 1918), 14, 16.
Epardaud, Edmond. “Comment Jacques de Baroncelli realise Pecheur d’lslande.” Cinea-Cine-
pour-tous 12 (1 May 1924), 15.
-. “Nitchevo.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 63 (15 June 1926), 11-12.
-. “Nitchevo, L’Agonie du sous-marin.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 78 (1 February 1927), 21-
23.
Fescourt, Henri. La Foi et les montagnes (Paris: Paul Montel, 1959), 326-331.
Jeanne, Rene and Charles Ford. Histoire encyclopedique du cinema (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1974),
1, 188, 383-387.
Lang, Andre. Deplacements et Villegiatures litteraires et suivi de la promenade au royaume des images
ou entretiens cinematographiques (Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1924), 148-153.
Lapierre, Marcel. Les Cent Visages du cinema (Paris: Grasset, 1948), 130-131, 155-156.
Leprohon, Pierre. Cinquante Ans de cinema frangais (Paris: Editions du cerf, 1954), 53.
McKee, Gerald. Film Collecting (London: Tantivy Press, 1978), 82-83.
Mirbel, Jean de. “Jacques de Baroncelli.” Cinemagazine 3 (20 April 1923), 117.
Mitry, Jean. Histoire du cinema. (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1969), 2, 263.
-. “Jacques de Baroncelli.” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 22 (October, 1923), [n.p.].
Sadoul, Georges. Histoire generale du cinema (Paris: Denoel, 1974), 4, 484-485.
-. Histoire generale du cinema (Paris: Denoel, 1975), 5, 198-199-
Tedesco, Jean. “Pecheur d'lslande.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 24 (1 November 1924), 7-11.
Vuillermoz, Emile. “Devant lecran.” Le Temps (6 June 1917), 3.

4. Raymond Bernard
Antoine, Andre-Paul. Antoine, pere et fils: souvenirs du Paris litteraire et thedtral, 1900-1939 (Paris:
Rene Juillard, 1962), 213-216.
Barsacq, Leon. Cahgari’s Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions: A History of Film Design. Revised
and edited by Elliot Stern (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1976), 44-46.
Canudo, Ricciotto. L’Usine aux images (Geneva: Office central d’edition, 1927), 99.
Cinemagazine (special number devoted to Joueur d’echecs) 7 (14 January 1927), 60-75.
Coissac, G.-Michel. “L’Evolution du cinematographe et la realisation de quelques grands films.”
Tout-Cinema (Paris: Filma, 1929), 13-32.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Delluc, Louis. “Quelques films frangais.” Cinea 18 (9 September 1921), 5.
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Fescourt, Henri. La Lot et les montagnes (Paris: Paul Montel, 1959), 313-318.
Flamand, Gilbert. “Le Miracle des loups.” Cinemagazine 4 (29 February 1924), 346-348.
Galtier-Boissiere, Jean. “Au Cinema: Le Secret de Rosette Lambert.” Le Crapouillot (1 November
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5. Luis Buhuel
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York: Da Capo Press, 1975.
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Bouissounouse, J. “Dans la sake.” La Revue du cinema 5 (15 November 1929), 74.
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85-116.
Conrad, Randall. “The Minister of the Interior Is on the Telephone: The Early Films of Luis
Buhuel.” Cineaste 7 (1976), 2-14.
Curtis, David. Experimental Cinema (New York: Dell, 1971), 30-31.
Drummond, Phillip. “Textual Space in Un Chien andalou.” Screen 18 (1977), 55-119-
Durgnat, Raymond. Luis Buhuel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.
Higginbotham, Virginia. Luis Buhuel. Boston: Twayne, 1980.
Kelman, Ken. “The Other Side of Realism.” In The Essential Cinema, edited by P. Adams
Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 112-133.
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Kyrou, Ado. Luis Buhuel. Translated by Adrienne Foulke. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1963.
Lapierre, Marcel. Les Cent Visages du cinema (Paris: Grasset, 1948), 203-204.
Lenauer, Jean. “Deux nouveaux films: Le Mystere du chateau du de et Un Chien andalou.” Pour
Vous 30 (13 June 1929), 4.
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Sadoul, Georges. “Souvenirs d’un temoin.” Etudes cinematographiques 38-39 (Spring, 1965), 9- BIBLIOGRAPHY
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1977), 24-33.

6. Alberto Cavalcanti
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Aron, Robert. “Alberto Cavalcanti.” Close Up 1 (October, 1927), 56-60.
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-. “Interviews et enquetes.” Cinegraphie 2 (15 October 1927), 17.
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21.
Dreville, Jean. “Films: En rade.” Cinegraphie 1 (15 September 1927), 11.
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1, 279-282.
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"Yvette.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 99 (15 December 1927), 19-

7. Rene Clan
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22.
Amenguel, Barthelemy. Rene Clan. Paris: Seghers, 1969-
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December 1928), 8-9-
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Carroll, Noel. “Entr'acte, Paris, and Dada.” Millennium 1 (1977), 5-11.
Charensol, Charles and Roger Regent. Un Maitre du cinema: Rene Clan. Paris: La Table ronde,
1952.
Clair, Rene. A nous la liberte and Entr'acte. Translated by Richard Jacques and Nicola Hayden.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Clair, Rene. Cinema Yesterday and Today. Translated by Stanley Appelbaum. New York. Dover,
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Desnos, Robert. “Une nouvelle formule: Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge” and "Rene Clair et le
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Richard, Jean. "La personnalite de Rene Clair.” Cinea-Cine 23 (March, 1932), 15-17.
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8. Louis Delluc
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1976), 205-244.
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April 1929), 6-8.
“Cosmograph donnera au public, le 8 septembre, La Femme de nulle part.” Cinea 67-68 (25
August 1922), 16-17.
Delluc, Louis. Chariot. Paris: de Brunhoff, 1921.
-. “Cinema.” Paris-Midi (12 May 1919), 2; (16 May 1919), 2 (18 May 1919), 2; (25
May 1919), 2; (26 May 1919), 2; (14 June 1919), 2.
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-. “L’lnondation.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 7 (15 January 1924), 9-11-
-. La Jungle du cinema. Paris: Editions de la Sirene, 1921.
-. Photogenie. Paris: de Brunhoff, 1920.
Epstein, Jean. “Memoires inachevees.” Ecrits sur le cinema (Paris: Seghers, 1974), 1, 42-44.
Fescourt, Henri. La Foi et les montagnes (Paris: Paul Montel, 1959), 252-265.
“Fievre.” Cinea 10 (8 July 1921), 19-21.
Francis, Eve. Temps heroi'que. Paris: Denoel, 1949.
Galtier-Boissiere, Jean. “Au Cinema: Le Silence.” Le Crapouillot (16 October 1920), 15-16.
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I, 190-191, 245-252.
Landry, Lionel. “La Femme de nulle part.” Cinea 69-70 (8 September 1922), 6-7.
-. “Fievre.” Cinea 30 (2 December 1921), 8-9.
-. “Louis Delluc.” Cinemagazine 4 (4 April 1924), 41-42.
-. “La Musique et le geste.” Cinea 27 (11 November 1921), 10-11.
Lang, Andre. Deplacements et Villegiatures litteraires et suivi de la promenade au royaume des images
ou entretiens cinematographiques (Paris: Renaisance du livre, 1924), 132-136.
Lapierre, Marcel. Les Cent Visages du cinema (Paris: Grasset, 1948), 146-147.
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McCreary, Eugene. “Louis Delluc, Film Theorist, Critic, and Prophet.” Cinema Journal 16 (Fall,
1976), 14-35.
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reunis, 1967), 103-109.
Ramain, Paul. “Un Precurseur: Louis Delluc.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 127 (15 February 1929), 9-
II.
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239.
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-. Histoire generale du cinema (Paris: Denoel, 1975), 5, 51-80.
Tariol, Marcel. Louis Delluc. Paris: Seghers, 1965.
Tedesco, Jean. “Louis Delluc n’est plus.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 10 (1 April 1924), 6-7.

9. Carl Dreyer
Arnoux, Alexandre. “Enfin nous avons vu la version integrate de Jeanne dArc de Carl Dreyer. ”
Pour Vous 26 (16 May 1929), 2.
Audard, Pierre. “La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc.” La Revue du cinema 2 (February, 1929), 66-67.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bordwell, David. Filmguide to Fa Passion deJeanne d Arc. Bloomington. Indiana University Press,
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92, 212-217.
_ “Imploded Space: Film Style in The Passion ofJoan of Arc." Film Studies Annual (1976),
99-105.
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1, edited by Richard Roud (New York: Viking, 1980), 296-310.
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Affairs, 1968.
Delahaye, Michel. “Interview with Carl Dreyer.” Translated by Rose Kaplan, Cahiers du cinema
in English 4 (1966). Reprinted in Andrew Sarns, Interviews with Film Directors (New York:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 140-163.
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“Dossier-film #3—La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc." LAvant-Scene du cinema 100 (February, 1970),
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Dreyer, Carl. “Ecrits.” Cahiers du cinema 124 (October, 1961), 23-35.
Duca, Lo. “Les Films vieillissent-ils?” Cinematographe 36 (March, 1978), 25-27.
Duren, J. “Quand Dreyer tournait Jeanne dArc. . . »” Pour Vous 4 (15 December 1928), 11.
Fescourt, Henri. La Foi et les montagnes (Paris: Paul Montel, 1959), 292-294.
Hall, Mordaunt. “Poignant French Film.” New York Times (31 March 1929), Sec. 8, 7.
“La Jeanne dArc de Dreyer a la Salle Marivaux.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 119 (15 October 1928),
16.
Kelman, Ken. “Dreyer.” In Film Culture Reader, edited by P. Adams Sitney (New York: Prae-
ger, 1970), 141-159.
Klinger, Werner. “Analytical Treatise on the Dreyer Film, The Passion of Joan of Arc, with
Appendix of a Constructive Critique.” Experimental Cinema 1 (February, 1930), 9-10.
Linderman, Deborah. “Uncoded Images in the Heterogeneous Text.” Wide Angle 3:3 (1979),
34-41.
Mitry, Jean. Histone du cinema (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1973), 3, 389-395.
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Nash, Mark. Dreyer (London: British Film Institute, 1977), 52-55.
Parrain, Philippe. “Dreyer: Cadres et mouvements.” Etudes cinematographiques 53-56 (1967).
Pipolo, Tony. “The Poetry of the Problematic.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 7 (Spring,
1982), 157-167.
Potamkin Harry Alan. “Dreyer, in Theory and Practice.” In The Compound Cinema, edited by
Lewis Jacobs (New York: Teachers College Press, 1977), 132-136.
Ramain, Paul. “De Ben-Hur a La Passion de Jeanne dArc." Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 121 (15 No¬
vember 1928), 11-12.
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Dreyer.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 113 (15 July 1928), 23-24.
Sacha. “La Passion de Jeanne dArc." Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 125 (15 January 1929), 12.
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cinema, 1971), 105-160.

10. Germaine Du lac

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Audard, Pierre. “Cinema et realite.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 107 (15 April 1928), 31-32.
Bencey, Andre. “Germaine Albert-Dulac.” Cinemagazine 2 (24 February 1922), 231-235.
Bizet, Rene. “Les bons films: La Fete espagnole.” Le Crapouillot (1 April 1920), 16.
Buache, Freddy. “Films independants et d’avant-garde.” Travelling 55 (Summer, 1979), 49-50.
Clair, Rene. Les films du mois: La Sounante Madame Beudet." Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 24
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Colombat, A. "L Invitation au voyage." On Tourne (November-December, 1928), 10.

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Cornwell, Regina. “Maya Deren and Germaine Dulac.” Film Library Quarterly 5 (Winter, 1971- BIBLIOGRAPHY
1972), 29-38.
Derain, Lucie. “La Coquille et le clergyman, reve filme.” Cinematographie frangaise 471 (12 Novem¬
ber 1927), 50.
Dozoretz, Wendy. “Dulac versus Artaud.’’ Wide Angle 3:1 (1979), 46-53.
Dulac, Germaine. “Cinema: L’Action de l’avant-garde cinematographique.” L'Etat moderne 12
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-. “Le Cinema d’Avant-Garde.” In Le Cinema des origines a nos jours, edited by Henri
Fescourt (Paris: Editions du cygne, 1932), 357-364. Translated by Robert Lamberton, “The
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P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 43-48.
-. “Conference de Madame Germaine Dulac.” Cinemagazine 4 (19 December 1924), 5 lb-
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-. “Du Sentiment a la ligne.” Schemas (1927), 26-31.
-. “L’Essence du cinema: l’idee visuelle.” Les Cahiers du mois 16/17 (1925), 57-66. Trans¬
lated by Robert Lamberton, “The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea,” The Avant-Garde
Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, 36-42.
-. “Les Esthetiques, les entraves, la cinegraphie integrate.” In LArt cinematographie, Vol.
2 (Paris: Libraire Felix Alcan, 1927), 29-50. Translated by Stuart Liebrnan, “The Aesthetics.
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-. “Films visuels et anti-visuels. ” Le Rouge et le non (July, 1928), 31-41. Translated by
Robert Lamberton, “From ‘Visual and Anti-Visual Films,’ ” in The Avant-Garde Film: A
Reader of Theory and Criticism, 31-35.
-. “La Folie des vaillants (fragments).” Cinegraphie 1 (15 September 1927), 9-10.
-. “La Mort du soleil et la naissance du film.” Cinea 41 (17 February 1922), 14.
-. “La musique du silence.” Cinegraphie 5 (January, 1928), 77-78.
-. “Opinions.” Cinegraphie 2 (15 October 1927), 40.
-. “Les Precedes expressifs du cinematographe.” Cinemagazine 4 (4 July 1924), 15-18;
(11 July 1924), 66-68; (18 July 1924), 89-92.
Fescourt, Henri. La Foi et les montagnes (Paris: Paul Montel, 1959), 295-303.
Flitterman, Sandy. “Heart of the Avant-Garde: Some Biographical Notes on Germaine Dulac.”
Women & Film 1 (1974), 58-61, 103.
-. “Montage/Discourse: Germaine Dulac’s The Smiling Madame Beudet.” Wide Angle 4:3
(1980), 54-59.
-. “Theorizing the ‘Feminine’: Woman as the Figure of Desire in The Seashell and the
Clergyman.” Paper delivered at the Society for Cinema Studies Conference, Los Angeles, 30
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-. “Women, Representation, and Cinematic Discourse: The Example of French Cinema.”
Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1982.
Ford, Charles. “Germaine Dulac.” Anthologie du cinema 31 (January, 1968), 1-48.
Galtier-Boissiere, Jean. “La Critique des films.” Le Crapouillot (1 April 1920), 17.
“Germaine Dulac.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 41 (15 July 1925), 10-11.
Jarville, Robert de. “Les Arts contre le cinema: Conference par Mme Germaine Dulac.” Cine¬
magazine 5 (17 April 1925), 112-114.
Jeanne, Rene and Charles Ford. Histone encyclopedique du cinema (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1947),
1, 188-190, 257-263.
Landry, Lionel. “La Mort du soleil.” Cinea 36 (13 January 1922), 15.
Lapierre, Marcel. Les Cent Visages du cinema (Paris: Grasset, 1948), 129-130, 154-155.
Leger, Albine. “La Sounante Madame Beudet.” Cinemagazine 3 (9 February 1923), 240.
Leprohon, Pierre. Cinquante Ans de cinema fran^ais (Paris: Editions du cerf, 1954), 69-71.
Mitry, Jean. “Deux manifestations peu connues.” Cahiers de la cinematheque 30-31 (Summer-
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-. Histone du cinrnia (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1969), 2, 259-260, 442-444.
-. Histone du cinema (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1973), 3, 345-347, 542-544.
Moussinac, Leon. “Le Cinema: La Sounante Madame Beudet.” Le Crapouillot (16 July 1923), 15-
lb.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Sadoul, Georges. Histoire generate du cinema (Paris: Denoel, 1974), 4, 393-400.
-. Histoire generate du cinema (Paris: Denoel, 1975), 5, 107-122.
-. Histoire generate du cinema (Paris: Denoel, 1975), 6, 346-349, 523-524.
_. “Souvenirs d’un temoin.” Etudes cinematographiques 38-39 (Spring, 1965), 9-28.
Sontag, Susan. “Artaud.” In Selected Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976),
xxvi-xxvii.
Van Wert, William. “Germaine Dulac: First Feminist Filmmaker.” Women & Film 1 (1974),
55-57, 103.
Virmaux, Alain. “Artaud and Film.” Tulane Drama Review 11 (Fall, 1966), 154-165.
_. “Une promesse mal tenue: le film surrealiste (1924-1932).” Etudes cinematographiques
38-39 (Spring, 1965), 103-133-
-and Odette Virmaux. Les Surrealistes et le cinema. Paris: Seghers, 1976.

11. Julien Duvivier

Boulanger, Pierre, he Cinema colonial (Paris: Seghers, 1975), 77.
Chirat, Raymond. “Julien Duvivier.” Premier Elan 50 (December, 1968), 3-136.
Dreyfus, J.-P. “Maman Colibn.” La Revue du cinema 9 (1 April 1930), 65.
Jacobs, Lewis, ed. The Compound Cinema: The Film Writings of Harry Alan Potamkin (New York:
Teachers College Press, 1977), 280-281.
“Poile de carotte.” Cine-Cine-pour-tous 54 (1 February 1926), 21.
Wahl, Lucien. “Au honheur des dames." Pour Vous 72 (3 April 1930), 11.

12. Jean Epstein

Abel, Richard. "La Chute de la maison Usher. Reversal and Liberation.” Wide Angle 3:1 (1979),
38-44.
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1927), 100.
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Barry (New York: Norton, 1938), 161-162, 227-228.
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1968), 20, 23-24.
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-. “Films: Six et demi X onze." Cinegraphie 1 (15 September 1927), 14.
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1925), 14-15.
-. "Mauprat de Jean Epstein.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 72 (1 November 1926), 13-14.
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1977), 9-25.
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-. “Presentation a Montpelier du film de Jean Epstein: LAffuhe.” Cinemagazine 5 (8 May
1925) , 224.
-. “Sensibilite intelligente d’abord, objectif ensuite.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 55 (15 February
1926) , 7.
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Tedesco, Jean. “La Belle Nivernaise.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 9 (15 March 1924), 22-23.
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University of Missouri Press, 1979), 20-23-
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Vincent-Brechignac, J. “Les goemonniers, la mer, Ouessant, Finis terrae, par Jean Epstein.”
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II.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Wahl, Lucien. “Allan Edgar Poe [sic] a lecran: La Chute de la maison Usher, film d’Epstein.”
Pour Vous 24 (2 May 1929), 9.
Willamen, Paul. “On Reading Epstein on Photogenie.” Afterimage 10 (Autumn, 1981), 40-47.
Z. “L’Ecran vous offre cette semaine: Sa Tete.” Pour Vous 60 (9 January 1930), 5.

13. Henri Fescourt

Barsacq, Leon. Cahgan's Cabinet and Other Grand Illusions: A History of Film Design. Revised
and edited by Elliot Stern (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1976), 39-
Beylie, Claude and Francis Lacassin. “A la recherche d’un cinema perdu: entretien avec Jean-
Louis Bouquet, Henri Fescourt, Joe Hamman, Gaston Modot.” Cahiers de la cinematheque 33-
34 (Autumn, 1981), 11-27.
-. “Henri Fescourt.” Anthologie du cinema 26 (June, 1967), 277-328.
Boulanger, Pierre. Le Cinema colonial (Paris: Seghers, 1973), 66-70.
Colombat, A. “L’Occident." On Tourne (October, 1928), 4.
Delbron, Jean. “L’Interpretation des Miserables.” Cinemagazine 5 (13 November 1925).
Epardaud, Edmond. “Les Miserables.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 50 (1 December 1925), 13-14.
Fescourt, Henri. “A propos de mon film, Les Grands.” Cahiers de la cinmatheque, special number
(Spring, 1976), 18-20.
-“Esprit moderne.” Schemas (1927), 33-39.
-. La Foi et les montagnes. Paris: Paul Montel, 1959-
-, ed. Le Cinema des ongines a nos jours. Paris: Editions du cygne, 1932.
-and Jean-Louis Bouquet. L’ldee et Lecran: opinions sur le cinema. 3 vols. Paris: Haberschill
et Sergent, 1925-1926.
“Henri Fescourt nous parle des Miserables.” Cinemagazine 5 (10 April 1925).
Jeanne, Rene and Charles Ford. Histoire encyclopedique du cinema (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1947),
1, 393-395.
Lapierre, Marcel. Les Cent Visages du cinema (Paris: Grasset, 1948), 162.
Mitry, Jean. Histoire du cinema (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1973), 3, 388.
“Monte-Cristo.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 135 (15 June 1929), 27.
Sadoul, Georges. Histoire generale du cinema (Paris: Denoel, 1975), 5, 201, 204.

14. Louis Feuillade

Breteque, Francois de la. “Le Film en tranches: les mutations du film a episodes, 1918-1926.”
Cahiers de la cinmatheque 33-34 (Autumn, 1981), 87-102.
Delluc, Louis. “Cinema.” Paris-Midi (6 July 1919), 2.
Desnos, Robert. “Fantomas, Les Vampires, Les Mysteres de New York (1927).” In Cinema (Paris:
Gallimard, 1966), 153-155.
Fescourt, Henri. La Foi et les montagnes (Paris: Paul Montel, 1959), 81-96.
Feuillade, Louis. “Manifeste de la serie ‘Le film esthetique.’ ” Cine-Journal 92 (28 May 1910),
and “Manifeste de ‘La Vie telle qu’elle est.’ ” Cine-Journal 139 (22 April 1911). Reprinted
in Marcel Lapierre, ed., LAnthologie du cinema (Paris: La nouvelle edition, 1946), 73-77.
-. “Vindicta, scenario original.” Cahiers de la cinematheque 33-34 (Autumn, 1981), 132-
152.
Florey, Robert. “Louis Feuillade.” Cinemagazine 1 (2 September 1921), 9.
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1, 211-213.
Kyrou, Ado. Le Surrealisme au cinema (Paris: Arcanes, 1953), 55-62.
Lacassin, Francis. Louis Feuillade. Paris: Seghers, 1964.
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71, 103-126, 189-194.
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ou entretiens cineematographiques (Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1924), 161-165.
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Marie, Jean-Charles. “Hommage a Louis Feuillade.” La Revue du cinema 25 (1 August 1931),
3-11.
Mitry, Jean. Histoire du cinema. (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1969), 2, 246-249-
Roud, Richard. Louis Feuillade and the Serial.” In Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Vol. 1, edited
by Richard Roud (New York: Viking, 1980), 348-359.

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 . Louis Feuillade: Maker of Melodrama.” Film Comment 12 (November-December, 1976), BIBLIOGRAPHY
8-11.
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‘‘Special Feuillade, Fantomas.” LAvant-Scene du cinema 271/272 (1-15 January 1982), 3-92.

15. Jacques Feyder

Arnoux, Alexandre. ‘‘Crainquebille n’a pas vieilli.” Pour Vous 7 (3 January 1929), 11.
Auriol, Jean-Georges. ‘‘La Critique des films: Les Nouveaux Messieurs.” La Revue du cinema 1
(December, 1928), 28-29.
Bachy, Victor. ‘‘Jacques Feyder.” Anthologie du cinema 18 (October, 1966), 409-464.
Bonneau, Albert. ‘‘Visages d’enfants.” Cinemagazine 3 (14 September 1923), 385-388.
Boulanger, Pierre. Le Cinema colonial (Paris: Seghers, 1975), 31-41.
Chamine. ‘‘Le Festival Feyder.” Pour Vous 160 (10 December 1931), 5, 14.
Chaperot, Georges. ‘‘L’Oeuvre classique de Jacques Feyder.” Cinemagazine 9 (September, 1931),
17-20.
-. ‘‘Souvenirs sur Jacques Feyder.” La Revue du cinema 12 (1 July 1930), 29-40.
Danvers, V.-Guillaume. ‘‘A propos de LAtlantide.” Cinemagazine 1 (14 October 1921), 5-7.
Delluc, Louis. ‘‘Quelques films franqais.” Cinea 18 (9 September 1921), 8.
Dreville, Jean. ‘‘La Critique du film: Therese Raquin.” On Tourne 3 (1 May 1928), 2.
Epardaud, Edmond. “Visages d'enfants. ” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 30 (1 February 1925), 13-14.
Fescourt, Henri. La Foi et les montagnes (Paris: Paul Montel, 1959), 267-277.
Feyder, Jacques. “Je crois au film parlant.” Pour Vous 31 (20 June 1929), 3.
-. ‘‘Transposition visuelle.” Les Cahiers du mois 16/17 (1925), 67-71.
-and Fran<;oise Rosay. Le Cinema, notre metier. Vesenaz-Geneva: Pierre Cailler, 1956.
Ford, Charles. Jacques Feyder. Paris: Seghers, 1973.
“Gribiche,” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 49 (15 November 1925), 7-8.
Jeanne, Rene and Charles Ford. Histoire encyclopedique du cinema (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1947),
1, 345-358.
Landry, Lionel. “LAtlantide. ” Cinea 21 (30 September 1921), 4-5.
Lapierre, Marcel. Les Cent Visages du cinema (Paris: Grasset, 1948), 162-164.
Lenauer, Jean. ‘‘The Cinema in Paris: Les Nouveaux Messieurs.’’ Close Up 4 (January, 1929), 67.
Manevy, Rene. “Nos metteurs-en-scene: Jacques Feyder.” Cine-Miroir 23 (1 April 1923), 103.
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-. “L'lmage.’’ Cahiers du mois 16/17 (1925), 252-254.
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-. “Jacques Feyder.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 73 (15 November 1926), 20.
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Tedesco, Jean. “Raquel Meller dans Carmen.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 73 (15 November 1926), 9-
16.

16. Abel Gance

Abel, Richard. “Abel Gance’s Other Neglected Masterwork: La Roue.” Cinema Journal 22 (Win¬
ter, 1983), 26-41.
-. “Charge and Countercharge: Incoherence and Coherence in Abel Gance’s Napoleon.”
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-. “L’Appareil portatif et la nouvelle technique cinematographique.” Cinemagazine 1 (17
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-. En Tournant Napoleon avec Abel Gance. Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1927.
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Borger, Lenny. “British Slighted on Napoleon. . . .” Variety 16 (4 November 1981), 1, 38.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Brownlow, Kevin. “Abel Gance’s Napoleon Returns from Exile.” American Film 6 (January-
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_. The Parade's Gone By (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 595-651.
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_. L'JJsine aux images (Geneva: Office central d editions, 1927), 127-128.
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———. “Abel Gance, apres La Zone de la mort.” Le Film 84 (22 October 1917), 7.
-. “Notes pour moi.” Le Film 99 (4 February 1918), 13-14.
Doublon, Lucien. “La Roue.” Cinemagazine 2 (29 December 1922), 444-445.
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-. “From Napoleon to New Babylon.” Afterimage 10 (Autumn, 1981), 49-55.
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-. J’Accuse. Paris: La Lampe merveilleuse, 1922.
-. Napoleon vu par Abel Gance. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1927.
-. “Nos moyens d’expression.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 133 (15 May 1929), 7-9.
-. Prisme. Paris: Gallimard, 1930.
-. “Qu’est-ce que le cinematographe? Un sixieme art.” Cine-Journal (9 March 1912).
Reprinted in Marcel L’Herbier, Intelligence du cinematographe (Paris: Correa, 1946), 91-92.
-—. La Roue. Paris: Tallandier, 1930.
-. “Le Temps de l’image est venu.” In L'Art cinematographique, Vol. 2 (Paris: Librairie
Felix Alcan, 1927), 83-102.
Icart, Roger. Abel Gance. Toulouse: Institut pedagogique national, I960.
-. “A la decouverte de La Roue.” Cahiers de la cinematheque 33-34 (Autumn, 1981), 185-
192.
‘J'Accuse.” Cinematographie franyaise 20 (22 March 1919), 11, 15-18; 21 (29 March 1919), 17-
20; 22 (5 April 1919), 15-18; 23 (12 April 1919), 17-20.
Jeanne, Rene. Napoleon vu par Abel Gance. Paris: Tallandier, 1927.
-. “Une seconde version de La Roue.” Cinemagazine 4 (29 February 1924), 342-344.
-and Charles Ford. Abel Gance. Paris: Seghers, 1963.
-. Histoire encyclopedique du cinema (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1967), 1, 165-167, 182-188,
321-343.
Kael, Pauline. “Abel Gance.” New Yorker {16 February 1981), 114-123-
Kramer, Steven Philip and James Michael Welsh. Abel Gance. Boston: Twayne, 1978.
Lang, Andre. Deplacements et V illegiatures litteraires et suivi de la promenade au royaume des images
ou entretiens cinematographiques (Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1924), 137-146.
Lapierre, Marcel. Les Cent Visages du cinema (Paris: Grasset, 1948), 127-128, 150-152.
Lawder, Standish. The Cubist Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 79-97.
Leprohon, Pierre. Cinquante Ans de cinema franyais (Paris: Editions du cerf, 1954), 61-69-
Mi try, Jean. “Abel Gance.” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 33 (1 May 1924), [n.p.}
-. “Abel Gance nous parle de La Roue . . . Abel Gance nous parle du Cinema.” Cinea-
Cine-pour-tous 3 (15 December 1923), 8.
-. Histoire du cinema (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1969), 2, 254-259, 435-438.
-. Histoire du cinema (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1973), 3, 352-362.

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-. “Napoleon a l’ecran.” Photo-Cine 4 (April, 1927), 55-57. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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-. “Panoramique du cinema [1929].’’ In L’Age ingrat du cinema (Paris: Editeurs frangais
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-. “La Roue.” Le Crapouillot (16 January 1923), 13-
“Napoleon.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 81 (15 March 1927), 26.
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-. Histoire generale du cinema (Paris: Denoel, 1975), 5, 140-161.
-. Histoire generale du cinema (Paris: Denoel, 1975), 6, 317-327.
Tedesco, Jean. “Napoleon vu par Abel Gance.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 83 (15 April 1927), 9-10.
Tinchant, Andre. “Abel Gance.” Cinemagazine 3 (14 September 1923), 363-367.
Truffaut, Francois. The Films of My Life. Translated by Leonard Mayhew (New York: Simon
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Vuillermoz, Emile. “Abel Gance et Napoleon.” Cinemagazine 7 (25 November 1927), 335-340.
-. “Devant l’ecran.” Le Temps (10 March 1917), 3.
-. “La Dixieme Symphonie.” Le Temps (6 November 1918), 3-
-. “Napoleon.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 87 (15 June 1927), 5-6.
-. “La Roue.” Cinemagazine 3 (23 February 1923), 329-331; (2 March 1923), 363-366.

17. Jean Gremillon

Agel, Henri. Jean Gremillon. Paris: Seghers, 1969-
Arnoux, Alexandre. “Un Film frangais de qualite: Gardiens de phare.” Pour Vous 46 (3 October
1929), 8-9.
Eisenschitz, Bernard. “Jean Gremillon.” In Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, Vol. 1, edited by
Richard Roud (New York: Viking, 1980), 447-449-
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1, 284-285.
Kast, Pierre. “Jean Gremillon.” Premier Plan 5 (January, I960), 1-40.
Lapierre, Marcel. Les Cent Visages du cinema (Paris: Grasset, 1948), 171.
Le Dantec, Mireille Latil. “Jean Gremillon: le realisme et le tragique.” Cinematographe 40 (Oc¬
tober, 1978), 43-50.
“Maldone.” Cinemagazine 8 (16 March 1928), 445-463.
Mazeline, Francois. “Jean Gremillon.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 105 (15 March 1928), 9-10.
Mitry, Jean. Histoire du cinema (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1973), 3, 384.
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Trevise, Robert. “Maldone.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 110(1 June 1928), 31.
-. “Les Presentations: Gardiens de phare.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 142 (15 October 1929),
10.

18. Dmitri Kirsanoff

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Buache, Freddy. “Films independants et d’avant-garde.” Travelling 55 (Summer, 1979), 67-68.
Cornaz, Louise. “Brumes d’automne.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 124 (1 January 1929), 12.
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-. “Nadia Sibirskaya.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 54 (1 February 1926), 19-20.
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-. “Pour et contre le film sans texte.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 17 (15 July 1924), 8.

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 Kirsanoff, Dmitri. “Les Problemes de la photogenie.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 62 (1 June 1926), 9-
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Richard Roud (New York: Viking, 1980), 551-553-

19 . Marcel L 'Herbier
Amiyuet, Fred.-Ph. ‘‘Marcel L’Herbier, cineaste fran^ais.Photo-Cine, 2 (15 February 1927),
22-25.
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Blin, Roger. ‘‘La Critique des films: L’Argent.” La Revue du cinema 2 (Lebruary, 1929), 68-69-
Brossard, Jean-Pierre. Marcel L’Herbier et son temps. Locarno: Editions Cinediff, 1980.
Burch, Noel. Marcel L’Herbier. Paris: Seghers, 1973.
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Catelain, Jaque. Marcel L’Herbier. Paris: Jacques Vautrain, 1950.
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-. “Naissance d’un langage.” In Esprit de cinema (Paris: Jeheber, 1955), 85-93.
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26-42.
-, Bernard Minoret, and Claude Arnulf. “Entretien avec Marcel L’Herbier.” Cinemato¬
graphe 40 (October, 1978), 40-42.
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-. “La Critique des films: Carnaval des ventes.” Le Crapouillot (1 April 1920), 16-17.
-. “Les Films: Rose-France.” Le Crapouillot (1 April 1919), 13.
-. “Reflexions sur le cinema.” Le Crapouillot (1-15 January, 1 February 1920), 2-4.
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Landry, Lionel. “El Dorado.” Cinea 12-13 (22 July 1921), 7-8.
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ou entretiens cinematographiques (Paris: Renaissance du livre, 1924), 126-132.

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Lapierre, Marcel. Les Cent Visages du cinema (Paris: Grasset, 1948), 128-129, 152-154, 188. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Lawder, Standish. The Cubist Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 99-115.
Lenauer, Jean. ‘‘The Cinema in Paris: L'Argent.” Close Up 4 (March, 1929), 80-82.
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-. “Cineclastes.” Cinea 73-74 (6 October 1922), 6-8.
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-. Histoire du cinema (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1973), 3, 377-378.
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Porte, Pierre. ‘‘Trois cinephiles et L’lnhumaine.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 27 (15 December 1924),
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Rambaud, Pierre. “Actualites d’art: Autour de LArgent.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 134 (1 June 1929),
10.
Roches, Edouard. "Les films de demain.” Mon-Cine (14 February 1924), 6-7, 10.
Sadoul, Georges. Histoire generate du cinema (Paris: Denoel, 1974), 4, 477-484.
-. Histoire generate du cinema (Paris: Denoel, 1975), 5, 80-107.
-. Histoire generate du cinema (Paris: Denoel, 1975), 6, 328-332.
Tedesco, Jean. “LArgent devant le public.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 126 (1 February 1929), 9.
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-. "Le Film de la semaine: Don Juan et Faust.” Comoedia (13 October 1922), 3-

20. The Russian Emigres: Ivan Mosjoukine, Alexandre Volkoff, Victor Tourjansky
Arroy, Juan. "Alexandre Volkoff.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 60 (1 May, 1926), 21-23-
Bardeche, Maurice and Robert Brasillach. The History of the Motion Pictures. Translated by Iris
Barry (New York: Norton, 1938), 168-171.
Bernard, Raphael. “Mme. Kovanko and M. Tourjansky.” Cinemagazine 1 (9 December 1921),
5-8.
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423-424.
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‘'Casanova. ” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 88 (1 July 1927), 22-23-
Dreville, Jean. "Films: Casanova.” Cinegraphie 1 (15 September 1927), 11-12.
Epardaud, Edmond. "Une Heure avec Tourjansky.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 28 (1 January 1925),
11-12.
Escoube, Lucien, “Alexandre Volkoff.” Cinemagazine 11 (November, 1932), 49-51, 66.
Farnay, Lucien. “Les Ombres qui passent.” Cinemagazine 4 (5 September 1924), 389-390.
“Ivan.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 26 (1 December 1924), 15-16.

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Lapierre, Marcel. Les Cent Visages du cinema (Paris: Grasset, 1948), 179-180.
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Mirbel, Jean de. “Le Brasier ardent." Cinemagazine 3 (14 September 1923), 380-382.
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Tedesco, Jean. “Kean." Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 7 (15 February 1924), 13-17.

21. Leonce Perret

Bonneau, Albert. “Leonce Perret.” Cinemagazine 3 (17 August 1923), 221-224.
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“L’Elegance et Koenigsmark." Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 5 (15 January 1924), 18-19.
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Perret, Leonce. “Comment j’ai tourne Koenigsmark.” Cinemagazine 3 (7 September 1923), 329-
332.
Swanson, Gloria. Swanson on Swanson (New York: Random House, 1980), 214-126, 222-227,
278-279.
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December 1923), 33.
Vuillermoz, Emile. “Devant l’ecran: Koenigsmark.” Le Temps (29 November 1923), 3.
Wahl, Lucien. "Le Demon de la haine.” Cinea 53 (12 May 1922), 7.

22. Leon Poirier

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(1 February 1925), 21-23.
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23. Jean Renoir

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Wahl, Lucien. “La Petite Marchande dallumettes.” Pour Vous 66 (20 February 1930), 5.

629
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Jeanne, Rene. “Violettes imperials: Impressions d’Espagne.’’ Cinemagazine 4 (22 February 1924),
291-294.
-and Charles Ford. Histoire encyclopedique du cinema (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1947), 1, 225-
228.
Lapierre, Marcel. Les Cent Visages du cinema (Paris: Grasset, 1948), 131-132.
McKee, Gerald. Film Collecting (London: Tantivy Press, 1978), 83-84.
Mitry, Jean. “Henri Roussel.” Theatre et Comoedia lllustre 35 (1 June 1924), [n.p.].
“Les Projets de nos metteurs-en-scene: Henry RousSel.” Cinemagazine 2 (8 September 1922),
289.
Roussel, Henry. “Le Cinema, c’est la guerre.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 8 (1 March 1924), 16.
Sadoul, Georges. Histoire generate du cinema (Paris: Denoel, 1974), 4, 486-488.
Tedesco, Jean. “Raquel.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 8(1 March 1924), 17-18.
La Terre promise.” La Petite Illustration 1 (4 April 1925), 1-12.
“Violettes impenales.” Cinea-Cine-pour-tous 8 (1 March 1924), 12-15.
"Violettes impenales: le scenario.” Cinemagazine 4 (22 February 1924), 299-300.

630
 These filmographies are based primarily on my own research in French film journals and Filmographies
annuals, from 1915 to 1930. They include all major and most minor filmmakers with at least
two narrative films each to their credit. Excluded, however, are several older filmmakers whose
work in France dates chiefly from before the war (e.g., Albert Capellani, Andre Heuze, Max
Linder, Maurice Tourneur), several non-narrative avant-garde filmmakers (e.g., Lucie Derain,
Eugene Deslaw, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Hugnet, Fernand Leger, Man Ray), several docu¬
mentary filmmakers (e.g., Jean Benoit-Levy, Paul Castelnau, Jean Lods, Jean Painleve, Andre
Sauvage), several animation filmmakers (e.g., O’Galop, Ladislas Starevitch), and the younger
filmmakers who had made only one film by the end of the decade (e.g., Marc Allegret, Luis
Bunuel, Marcel Carne, Jean Dreville, Georges Lacombe, Georges Rouquier, Jean Vigo). When
necessary, I have relied on the filmographies in studies of individual filmmakers, on Georges
Sadoul’s Le Cinema franyais (1962), on Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford’s Dictionnaire du cinema
universel (1970), or on Pierre Roura’s “Dictionnaire des realisateurs fran^ais des Annees Vingt,”
Cahiers de la cinematheque (1981). Since the latter sources are not always consistent and complete,
some of the following references, especially those of lesser known filmmakers, may be incomplete
as well as questionable. All the films of an individual filmmaker are arranged chronologically,
according to the year of each film’s release in France.

Andreani, Henri (1872-1930) Le Siege des trois, 1918

L’Ocean, 1917 (serial) Le Retour aux champs, 1918
Mimi Trot tin, 1922 Ramuntcho, 1919
Ziska la danseuse espionne, 1922 La Rafale, 1920
LAutre aile, 1924 Le Secret du ‘Lone Star,’ 1920
Flamenca la gitane, 1928 La Rose, 1920 (short)
La Pente, 1928 Flipotte, 1920
Champi tortu, 1921
Antoine, Andre (1858-1943)
Le Reve, 1921
Les Freres corses, 1917
Le Pere Goriot, 1921
Le Coupable, 1917
Roger la Honte, 1922
Les Travailleurs de la mer, 1918 Le Carillon de minuit, 1922
Mademoiselle de la Seigliere, 1921
La Femme inconnue, 1923
La Terre, 1921 (filmed in 1919)
La Legende de Soeur Beatrix, 1923
Quatre-Vingt Treize, 1921 (filmed with Albert
Nene, 1924
Capellani, in 1914) La Flambee des reves, 1924
LArlesienne, 1922 Pecheur d'Islande, 1924
LHirondelle et la mesange, 1983 (filmed in
Veille d'armes, 1925
1920-1921)
Le Reveil, 1925
Autant-Lara, Claude (1903- ) Nitchevo, 192 6
Fait-Divers, 1926 (short filmed in 1924) Feu, 1927
Construire un feu, 1930 (filmed in 1928-1929) Duel, 1928
Le Passager, 1928
Baroncelli, Jacques de (1881-1951) La Femme et le pantin, 1929
La Maison de I'espion, 1915 (short) La Femme du voisin, 1929
Trois Filles en portefeuille, 1916 (short) La Dentation, 1929
La Faute de Pierre Daisy, 1916 (short)
Le Jugement de Salomon, 1916 (short) Bernard, Raymond (1891-1974)
La Nouvelle Antigone, 1916 Le Ravin sans fond, 1917
Le Suicide de Sir Petson, 1916 (short) Le Gentilhomme commergant, 1918
L’Hallali, 1916 (short) Le Traitement du Hoquet, 1918
Le Drame du chateau de Saint-Privat, 1916 Le Petit Cafe, 1919
(short) Le Secret de Rosette Lambert, 1920
Une Mascotte, 1917 (short) La Maison vide, 1921
L’lnconnue, 1917 (short) Triplepatte, 1922
Le Roi de la mer, 1917 L’Homme inusable, 1923
Pile ou face, 1917 (short) Le Costaud des epinettes, 1923
Trois K. K., 1917 (short) Grandeur et decadence, 1923
Le Cas du procureur Lesnin, 1917 (short) Le Miracle des loups, 1924
Une Vengeance, 1917 (short) Le Joueur d’echecs, 1927
Le Scandale, 1918 Tarakanova, 1930

631
FILMOGRAPHIES Bernard-Deschamps, Dominique (1892-1966) La P'tite Lily, 1927 (short)
48, Avenue de I'Opera, 1917 Fn rade, 1927
Hier et aujourd'hui, 1918 Yvette, 1928
L’Agonie des aigles, 1921-1922 Le Train sans yeux, 1928 (filmed in 1926)
La Nuit du 11 septembre, 1922 Le Capitaine fracasse, 1929
La Jalousie du Barbouille, 1929
Boudrioz, Robert (1887-1949) Le Petit Chaperon rouge, 1929 (short)
LApre lutte, 1917
Champavert, Georges
La Distance, 1918
Mea Culpa, 1919
UnSoir, 1919
L’Oeil de Saint -Yves, 1919
Zon, 1920
Le Remous, 1920
Tempetes, 1922
LAtre, 1923 (filmed in 1920) L’Ete de la Saint Martin, 1920
L'Epervier, 1924 La Hurle, 1921
Les Louves, 1925 Le Porion, 1921
La Chaussee des geants, 1926 L’Evas ion, 1922
Trois Jeunes Lilies, 1928 La Neuvaine de Colette, 1925
Vivre, 1928 Chomette, Henri (1896-1941)
Les Jeux des reflets et de la vitesse, 1925 (short)
Bourgeois, Gerard (1874-1944)
Cinq Minutes de cinema pur, 1925 (short)
Protea II, 1915
Le Chauffeur de Mademoiselle, 1928
Protea III, 1916
Protea IV, 1917 Clair, Rene (1898-1981)
Le Capitaine noir, 1917 (short) Paris qui dort, 1924 (filmed in 1923)
Chnstophe Colomb, 1919 Entr’acte, 1924 (short)
Le Fils de la nuit, 1919 (serial)
Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge, 1925
Les Mysteres du del, 1920
Le Voyage imaginaire, 1926
Un Drame sous Napoleon, 1921
La Proie du vent, 1927
Faust, 1922 La Tour, 1928 (short documentary)
La Dette de sang, 1923
Un Chapeau de paille d’ltalie, 1928
Terreur, 1924
Les Deux Timides, 1929
Face a mort, 1925 (serial)
Colombier, Pierre (1896-1958)
Burguet, Charles (1872-1957) Soiree de reveillon, 1922
Pour epouser Gaby, 1917 Le Taxi 313 x 7, 1922
Son Heros, 1917 Le Noel du Pere Lathuile, 1922
Les Deux Amours, 1917 Monsieur Lebidois proprietaire, 1922
L’Ame de pierre, 1918 Petit Hotel a louer, 1923
Au paradis des enfants, 1918 Par dess us le mur, 1923
La Sultane de l'amour, 1919 Le Manage de Rosine, 1925
Suzanne et les brigands, 1920 (serial) Paris en cinq jours, 1926
Gosse de riche, 1920 (serial) LAme du moteur: le carburateur, 1926
L’Essor, 1920-1921 (serial) Jim la Houlette, roi des voleurs, 1926
Le Chevalier de Gaby, 1920 Transatlantiques, 1928
Un Ours, 1921
Petite Fille, 1928
Baillonnee, 1922 (serial) Dolly, 1929
Les Mysteres de Paris, 1922 (serial)
La Mendiante de Saint-Sulpice, 1923 (serial) Delluc, Louis (1890-1924)
Faubourg Montmartre, 1924 Fumee noire, 1920 (short)
La Joueuse d'orgue, 1925 (serial) Le Silence, 1920 (short)
Barocco, 1925 Fievre, 1921
Martyre, 1926 Le Chemin d’Frnoa, 1921
Le Meneur de joies, 1929 Le Tonnerre, 1921
La Femme de nulle part, 1922
Catelain, Jaque (1898- ) La Pelote basque, 1923 (documentary filmed
Le Marchand de plaisir, 1923 in 1920)
La Galene des monstres, 1924 L’Inondation, 1924

Cavalcanti, Alberto (1897-1982) Desfontaines, Henri (1878-1931)

Rien que les heures, 1926 La Foret qui ecoute, 1916

632
La Reine Margot, 1916 Geo, le mysterieux, 1917 FILMOGRAPHIES
Chouchou, 1917 Venus victrix or Dans I'ouragan de la vie, 1917
Les Bleus de lamour, 1918 Amesdefous, 1918 (serial)
La Supreme Epopee, 1919 Le Bonheur des autres, 1919
Sa gosse, 1919 La Cigarette, 1919
La Marseillaise, 1920 La Fete espagnole, 1920 (short)
Autour du mystere, 1920 Malencontre, 1920
Chichinette et cle, 1921 La Belle Dame sans merci, 1921
La Lille des chiffonniers, 1922 La Mort du soleil, 1922
L'lnsigne mysterieux, 1922 La Sounante Madame Beudet, 1923 (short)
Madame Flirt, 1923 Gossette, 1923-1924 (serial)
L’Oeillet blanc, 1923 Le Diable dans la ville, 1925
Chateau historique, 1923 Ame d’artiste, 1925
L’Esp tonne, 1923 La Fohe des vaillants, 1925
Vers abecher la mysteneuse, 1924 Antoinette Sabrier, 1927
L'Espionne aux yeux noirs, 1926 L’Invitation au voyage, 1927
Belphegor, 1926 (serial) Le Cinema au service de l’histoire, 1927
Le Capitaine Rascasse, 1927 (serial) La Coquille et le clergyman, 1928
Poker d’as, 1927 (serial) Germination d'un haricot, 1928 (short)
La Pnncesse Mandane, 1928
Diamant-Berger, Henri (1895-1972)
Disque 927, 1928 (short)
Paris pendant la guerre, 1916 (documentary)
Themes et variations, 1928 (short)
Le Feu sacre, 1920 (short)
Etude cinegraphique sur un arabesque, 1929
Les Trois Mousquetaires, 1921-1922 (serial)
(short)
Vingt Ans apres, 1922-1923 (serial)
Le Mauvais Garmon, 1923 Durand, Jean (1882-1946)
Gonzague, 1923 Berthe Dagmar et les fauves series, 1917-1918
L’Affaire de la rue de Loureine, 1923 Serpentin comic series, 1919-1920
Le Rot de la vitesse, 1923 Imperia, 1920 (serial)
La Marche du des tin, 192 4 Marie comic series, 1921-1922
L’Emprise, 1924 La Chaussee des geants, 1926
Rue de la Paix, 1927 Palaces, 1927
Education de Prince, 1927 L’lle d'amour, 1928
La Femme revee, 1929
Dieudonne, Albert (1889-1976)
Son Crime, 1921
Duvivier, Julien (1896-1967)
Gloire rouge, 1923
Haceldama, 1919
Catherine, 1927 (filmed in 1924)
Les Roquevillard, 1922
Donatien L’Ouragan sur la montagne, 1922

Une Histoire de brigands, 1920 Le Reflet de Claude Mercoeur, 1923

L’Auberge, 1921 Coeurs far ouches, 1923

Les Hommes nouveaux, 1922 La Machine a refaire la vie, 1924
La Sin-Ventura, 1922 (documentary)
L'lle de la mort, 1923 L'Abbe Constantin, 1925
La Chevauchee blanche, 1923 Poil de carotte, 1926
Nantas, 1924 L’Agonie de Jerusalem, 1926
Pnncesse Lulu, 1924 L’Homme a I’Hispano, 1927
Pierre et Jean, 1924 Le Manage de Mademoiselle Beulemans, 1927
Mon Cure chez les pauvres, 1925 Le Mystere de la Tour Eiffel, 1927
Mon Cure chez les riches, 1925 Le Tourbillon de Paris, 1928
Un Chateau de la mort lente, 1925 La Divine Croisiere, 1928
Simone, 1926 La Vie miraculeuse de Therese Martin, 1929
Elonne la fleur du Valois, 1926 Maman Colibri, 1929
Le Mar tyre de Ste. Maxence, 1927 Au bonheur des dames, 1929
Aim Edith, Duchesse, 1928
Epstein, Jean (1897-1953)
L’Arpete, 1929
Pasteur, 1922
Dulac, Germaine (1882-1942) Les Vendanges, 1922 (short documentary)
Les Soeurs ennemies, 1917 L’Auberge rouge, 1923

633
FILMOGRAPHIES La Montague infdele, 1923 (short LAventure des millions, 1916
documentary) Un Manage de raison, 1916
Coeur fdele, 1923 Notre pauvre coeur, 1916
La Belle Nivernaise, 1924 Le Malheur qui passe, 1916
Photogenies, 1924 (short) Judex, 1917 (serial)
Le Lion des Mo go Is, 1924 L Autre, 1917
L'Affiche, 1925 Le Bandeau sur les yeux, 1917
Le Double Amour, 1925 Deserteuse, 1917
Les Aventures de Robert Macaire, 1925-1926 La Fugue de Lily, 1917
(serial) Herr Doktor, 1917
A// pays de George Sand, 1926 (short La Nouvelle Mission de Judex, 1918 (serial)
documentary) Le Passe de Monique, 1918
Mauprat, 1926 Les Petites Marionnettes, 1918
6V2 X 11, 1927 Tih-Minh, 1919 (serial)
La Glace a trois faces, 1927 Vendemiaire, 1919
La Chute de la maison Usher, 1928 L E ngrenage, 1919
Finis Terrae, 1929 L’Enigme, 1919
%

Sa Tete, 1930 L ’Homme sa ns visage, 1919

Le Pas de la mule, 1930 (short documentary) Le Nocturne, 1919
Barrabas, 1920 (serial)
Epstein, Marie (1899- ) and Jean Benoit-
Belle Humeur comic series, 1921-1922
Levy (1888-1959)
Les Deux Gamines, 1921 (serial)
Ames d’enfants, 1928
L'Orpheline, 1921 (serial)
Peau de peche, 1929
Parisette, 1922 (serial)
Maternite, 1929
Le Fils du Flibustier, 1922 (serial)
Etievant, Henri Le Gamin de Pans, 1923
Etre aime pour soi-meme, 1920 La Gosseline, 1923
La Poupee, 1920 Vindicta, 1923 (serial)
Nine, 1920 L’Orphelin de Paris, 1924 (serial)
La Pocharde, 1921 (serial) La Fille bien gardee, 1924
Crepuscule d’epouvante, 1921 Lucette, 1924
La Fille sauvage, 1922 (serial) Pierrot Pierrette, 1924
La Neige sur le pas, 1924 Stigmate, 1925 (serial)
Coeur de Titi, 1924
Feyder, Jacques (1888-1948)
La Nuit de la revanche, 1924
M. Pinson, policier, 1916 (short)
Le Reveil de Maddalone, 1924
Tetes de femmes, femmes de tete, 1916 (short)
La Fin de Monte Carlo, 1927
Le Pied qui etreint, 1916 (serial)
La SIrene des tropiques, 1928
Le Bluff, 1916 (short)
La Symphonie pathetique, 1929
Un Conseil d’ami, 1916 (short)
Eecondite, 1929
L’Homme de compagme, 1916 (short)
Fescourt, Henri (1880-1966) Tiens, vous etes a Poitiers?, 1917 (short)
La Menace, 1915 (short) Le Frere de lait, 1917 (short)
Mathias Sandorf, 1921 (serial) Le Billard casse, 1917 (short)
La Nuit du 13, 1921 Abregeons les formalites, 1917 (short)
Rouletabille chez le bohemiens, 1922 (serial) La Trouvaille de Buchu, 1917 (short)
Mandarin, 1924 (serial) Le Pardessus de demi-saison, 1917 (short)
Les Grands, 1924 Les Vieilles Femmes de l’hospice, 1917 (short)
Un Fils dAmerique, 1925 L’Instinct est maitre, 1917
Les Miserables, 1925-1926 Le Ravin sans fond, 1917
La Glu, 1927 La Faute d'orthographie, 1919 (short)
La Maison du maltais, 1928 LAtlantide, 1921
L’Occident, 1928 Crainquebille, 1923
Monte-Cnsto, 1929 Visages d’enfants, 1925 (filmed in 1923)
L’lmage, 1926 (filmed in 1924)
Feuillade, Louis (1874-1925) Gribiche, 1926
Bout-de-Zan comic series, 1915-1916 Carmen, 1926
La Vie drole comic series, 1915-1918 Au pays de Rot Lepreux, 1927 (documentary)
Les Vampires, 1915-1916 (serial) Therese Raquin, 1928

634
Les Nouveaux Messieurs, 1929 Chacun sa destinee, 1915 (short) FILMOGRAPHIES
Le Tournant, 1916 (short)
Gance, Abel (1889-1982)
Suzanne, professeur de flirt, 1916 (short)
Un Drame au chateau d’acre, 1915 (short)
Suzanne, 1916
La Lolie du Docteur Tube, 1915 (short)
Oh! Ce baiser, 1917
L’Enigme de dix heures, 1915 (short)
La P’tite du sixieme, 1917
La Fleur des ruines, 1915 (short)
Meres franqaises, 1917
L’Heroisme de Paddy, 1915 (short)
Midinette, 1917
Fioritures, 1916 (short)
Le Tablier blanc, 1917
Le Fou de la falaise, 1916 (short)
Un Roman d'amour et d’aventures, 1918
Ce que les jlots racontent, 1916 (short)
Le Torrent, 1918
Le Periscope, 1916 (short)
Bouclette, 1918
Barberousse, 1916 (serial)
Sarati-le-Ternble, 1923
Les Gaz mortels, 1916 (serial)
Aux jardins de Murcie, 1923
Le Droit a la vie, 1917
Mater Dolorosa, 1917 Hervil, Rene (1883-1940)
La Zone de la mort, 1917 Simplette, 1919
La Dixieme Symphonie, 1918 Son Aventure, 1919
J’Accuse, 1919 LAmi Fritz, 1920
En tournant la roue, 1922 (short documentary) Blanchette, 1921
La Roue, 1922-1923 (filmed in 1920-1921) Le Crime de Lord Arthur Saville, 1922
Au secours!, 1923 (short) Le Secret de Polichinelle, 1923
Napoleon vu par Abel Gance, 1927 (filmed in Paris, 1924
1925-1926) La Flamme, 1925
En tournant Napoleon, 1927 (short Knock, 1926
documentary) Le Bouif errant, 1926 (serial)
Galop, Marine, Danse, 1928 (shorts) La Petite Chocolatiere, 1927
Le Prince Jean, 1928
Gastyne, Marco de (1889-1982)
Minuit . . . Place Pigalle, 1928
Inch Allah, 1922
La Meilleure Maitresse, 1929
LAventure, 1923
A l’horizon du sud, 1924 Hugon, Andre (1886-1961)
La Blessure, 1925 L’Empreinte, 1916
La Chatelaine du Liban, 1926" Chignon d'or, 1916
Mon coeur au ralenti, 1928 Beaute fatale, 1916
La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne dArc, 1929 Sous la menace, 1916
Fleur de Paris, 1916
Gleize, Maurice (1898- )
Manage d'amour, 1917
La Nuit rouge, 1924
Angoisse, 1917
La Main qui a tue, 1924
Le Vertige, 1917
La Justiciere, 1925
Requins, 1917
La Faute de Monique, 1928
Mystere d'une vie, 1917
La Madone des sleepings, 1928
Johannes, fils de Johannes, 1918
Tu m appartiens, 1929
La Fugitive, 1918
Gremillon, Jean (1901-1959) Chacals, 1918
Photogenie mecanique, 1924 (short) Un Crime a ete commis, 1919
L'Electrification de la ligne Paris-Vierzon, 1925 Jacques Landauze, 1919
(short documentary) Les Cheres Images, 1920
La Vie des travailleurs italiens en France, 1926 La Preuve, 1921
(short documentary) Fille de rien, 1921
Gratuites, 1927 (short) Le Roi de Camargue, 1921
Tour au large, 1927 (documentary) Diamant noir, 1921
Mai done, 1928 Notre dame d'amour, 1922
Gardiens de phare, 1929 Le Petit Chose, 1923
La Rue du pave d’amour, 1923
Hervil, Rene and Mercanton, Louis Gitanella, 1924
La Petite Rosse, 1915 (short) L Arriviste, 192 4
La Dame du 13, 1915 (short) L’Homme des Baleares, 1925
Honneur passe richesse, 1915 (short) La Princesse aux clowns, 1925

635
FILMOGRAPHIES Yasmina, 1926 Face a l’ocean, 1920
La Vestale du Gauge, 1927 Force de la vie, 1920
A l’ombre des tombeaux, 1927 Jean d’Agreve, 1922
La Grande Passion, 1928 Ftre ou ne pas etre, 1922
La Marche nuptiale, 1929 L’Fmpereur des pauvres, 1922-1923 (serial)
Les Trots Masques, 1929 Vent debout, 1923
Mon Oncle Benjamin, 1923
Kemm, Jean (?-1939) La Folie du dou'te, 1923
Les Deux Marquises, 1916 Un Bon Petit Dtable, 1923
Honneur d'artiste, 1917 Pax Domine, 1923
Le Dedale, 1917 L’Fnfant des Halles, 1924 (serial)
LeDelai, 1918 Le Vert-Galant, 1924 (serial)
L'Obstacle, 1918 Mylord I’Arsouille, 1925 (serial)
A ndre Cornelis, 1918 Fanfan la tulipe, 1925 (serial)
L’Enigme, 1919 Le Jardin sur I'Oronte, 1925
Le Destin est maitre, 1920 Titi /er rot des gosses, 1926 (serial)
Miss Rovel, 1920 Princesse Masha, 1927
Micheline, 1921
La Dentation, 1928
Hantise, 1922
La Revanche du maudit, 1929
La Ferme du Choquart, 1922
LAbsolution, 1922 L’Herbier, Marcel (1890-1979)
Vidocq, 1923 (serial) Rose-F ranee, 1919
Ce Pauvre Cheri, 1923 Le Bercail, 1919
L’Enfant-Roi, 1924 (serial) Le Carnaval des verites, 1920
Le Bossu, 1925 (serial) L’Homme du large, 1920
Andre Cornells, 1927 Villa Destin, 1921
El Dorado, 1921
Kirsanoff, Dmitri (1899-1957)
Promethe . . . banquier, 1922 (short)
L’lronie du destin, 1924
Don Juan et Faust, 1923
Memlmontant, 1926
Llnhumaine, 1924
Destin, 1927
Feu Mathias Pascal, 1925
Sables, 1928
Le Vertige, 1926
Brumes d’automne, 1928 (short)
Le Diable au coeur, 1928
Krauss, Henry Resurrection 1928 (filmed in 1923,
Papa Hulin, 1916 incomplete)
Le Chemineau, 1917 L’Argent, 1929
Marion de Lorme, 1918 Nuits de Prince, 1929
Les Trois Masques, 1921
Lion, Roger (P-1934)
Fromont Jeune et Risler Aine, 1921
Chansons filmees, 1917-1918
La Calvaire de Dona Pisa, 1925
La Flamme cachee, 1918
Lacroix, Georges (1880-1920) Dagobert, 1919 (serial)
L Heure tragique, 1916 L’Fternel feminine, 1921
Dans la rafale, 1916 La SIrene de pierre, 1922
Beaute qui meurt, 1917 Les Yeux de Fame, 1922
Les Ecrits restent, 1917 Le Fantome d’amour, 1923
Haine, 1918 Fidelite, 1924
Le Marchand de bonheur, 1918 J’ai tue, 1924
Le Noel d’Yveline, 1919 (short) La Fontaine des amours, 1924
Son Destin, 1919 La Cle de voute, 1925
La Vengeance de Mallet, 1920 Ftangailles, 1926
Passionnement, 1921 Le Chasseur de Chez. Maxim’s, 1927
La Nutt est a nous, 1927
Leprince, Rene (P-1929)
Zyte, 1916 Le Venenosa, 1928

La Vie d'une reine, 1917 Une Heure au cocktail bar, 1929

Le Noel d’un vagabond, 1918 Luitz-Morat (? -1928)
Le Calvaire d'une reine, 1919
Sa Majeste le chauffeur de taxi, 1919 (short)
Les Larrnes du pardon, 1919
Rien a louer, 1919 (short)
La Lutte pour la vie, 1920 Les Cinq Gentlemen maudits, 1919

636
Monsieur Lebureau, 1920 Maudru, Charles and Charles de Marsan FILMOGRAPHIES
Petit Ange, 1920 Poilus de la 9% 1916
La Terre du diable, 1921 Renoncement, 1917
Le Sang d’Allah, 1922 La Mas cot te des poilus, 1918
Au seuil du harem, 1922 Le Droit de tuer, 1920
Petit Ange et son pant in, 1923 La Bourasque, 1920
La Cite foudroyee, 1924 Le Lys rouge, 1920
Surcouf, 1925 (serial) L’Assomoir, 1921
La Course au flambeau, 1925 Un A venturier, 1921
Jean Chouan, 1926 (serial) Le Mechant Homme, 1921
Le Juif errant, 1926 Le Talion, 1921
La Ronde infernale, 1927 L’Inconnu, 1921
La Vierge folle, 1929 Pres des crimes, 1921
La Fiancee du disparu, 1921
Machin, Alfred (1877-1929) and Henry
Le Roi de Pans, 1922 (serial)
Wuhlschleger
Serge Panine, 1922
Une Nuit agitee, 1920
Le Crime Tune sainte, 1923 (serial)
Mot aussi, flaccuse, 1920
Rocambole, 1923
Bete comme des hommes, 1923
L’Homme du Train 111, 1923
L'Enigme du Mont Agel, 1924
Les Premieres Armes de Rocambole, 1924
Les Heritiers de I'Oncle James, 1924
Les Amours de Rocambole, 1924
Le Cabinet de I’homme noir, 1924
Le Coeur des gueux, 1925 Mercanton, Louis (1879-1932)
Le Manoir de la peur, 1927 Jeanne Dore, 1916
Le Lotus d’or, 1916
Mariaud, Maurice
Le Crepuscule de coeur, 1916 LAppel du sang, 1920
La Marche triomphale, 1916 Miarka, la file a Course, 1920
Larmes de crocodile-, 1916 Phroso, 1922
L’Homme merveilleux, 1922
La Calomnie, 1917
La Danseuse voilee, 1917 La Voyante, 1923
L’Epave, 1917 Les Deux Gosses, 1924
Les Dames de Croix-mort, 1917 Monte Carlo, 1926
Le Nocturne a la poupee, 1917 Croquette, 1927
Les Mouttes, 1919 Venus, 1929
LI dole brisk, 1920
Georges Monca (1888-1940)
Tristan et Yseult, 1920
Blessure d'amour, 1916
L’Etau, 1920
L’Anniversaire, 1916
L’Homme et la poupee, 1921
Bonhomme de neige, 1917
L’Aventurier, 1924
La Proie, 1917
La Goutte de sang, 1924
Le Chanson du feu, 1917
Mon oncle, 1925
La Bonne Hotesse, 1918
Le Secret de cargo, 1929
La Route de devoir, 1918
Marodon, Pierre Lorsqu ’une femme veut, 1919
Le Diamant vert, 1917 Madame et son fllleul, 1919
Mascamor, 1918 (serial) Les Femmes collantes, 1920
Qui a tue, 1919 Prince embete, 1920
Les Femmes des autres, 1920 Si jamais je te pince, 1920
Le Tocsin, 1920 Chouquette et son as, 1920
La Fee des neiges, 1920 Romain Kalbris, 1921
Les Morts qui par lent, 1920 Le Meurtier de Theodore, 1921
La Femme aux deux visages, 1920 Chante-Louve, 1921
Les Trois Gants de la dame en noir, 1920 Le Sang des Finoel, 1922
Le Chateau des fantomes, 1921 (serial) L’Engrenage, 1923
Le Diamant vert, 1923 (serial) Altemer le cynique, 1924
Buridan, le her os de la tour de Nesle, 1923-24 L’lronie du sort, 1924
Salammbo, 1925 La Double Existence de Lord Samsey, 1924
Les Voleurs de gloire, 1926 Sans famille, 1925
Les Dieux ont soif, 1926 Autour d’un berceau, 1925

637
 Le Chemineau, 1926
Poirier, Leon (1884-1968)
FILMOGRAPHIES
Ames d'orient, 1919
Miss Helyett, 1927
Le Pens ear, 1920
Les Fourchambault, 1929
Narayana, 1920
Morlhon, Camille de (? -1945) L 'Ombre dechnee, 1921
Sous l'uniforme, 1915 (short) Le C off ret de jade, 1921
Coeur de gavroche, 1915 (short) Jocelyn, 1922
Effluves funestes, 1916 (short) Genevieve, 1923
Eille d’artiste, 1916 L'Affaire du courner de Lyon, 1923
Le Secret de Genevieve, 1916 (short) La Brine, 1925
Maryse, 1917 Eve africaine, 1925 (short documentary)
M isericorde, 1917 Zazavindrano, 1925 (short documentary)
L’Orage, 1917 Croisiere noire, 1926 (documentary)
Simone, 1918 Amours exotiques, 1927 (documentary)
Expiation, 1918 Verdun, visions d'histone, 1928
L'lbis bleu, 1919
Pouctal, Henri (1856-1922)
El lane, 1919
L'lnfirmiere, 1915 (short)
L? Eille du peuple, 1920
Le Brebis perdue, 1915 (short)
Fabienne, 1920
Le Mannequin, 1915 (short)
Une Fleur dans les ronces, 1921
La Fille du boche, 1915 (short)
Mosjoukine, Ivan (1890-1939) Dette de haine, 1915 (short)
L’Enfant du carnaval, 1921 Alsace, 1916
Le Braster ardent, 1923 L’Affaire du Grand Theatre, 1916 (short)
L’Alibi, 1916
Nadejdine, Serge
L’Instinct, 1916
Le Chiffonnier de Paris, 1924
La Flambee, 1916
L Heureux Mort, 1924
Chantecoq ou coeur de frangaise, 1916-1917
Naples au basier de feu, 1925
(serial)
La Cible, 1925
Volonte, 1917
Le Negre blanc, 1925
Le Roman d’un spahi, 1917
Perret, Leonce (1880-1935) Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, 1917-1918 (serial)
La Voix de la paix, 1915 (short) Le Dieu du hasard, 1919
Mort au champ d’honneur, 1915 (short) Travail, 1919-1920
Frangaises, veillez!, 1915 (short) Gigolette, 1920
Le Heros de I’Yser, 1915 (short) Le Crime du Bouif, 1921
Les Poilus de la revanche, 1915 (short) La Resurrection du Bouif, 1922
Une Page de gloire, 1915 (short)
Protozanoff, Jacob, (1881-1946)
L’ Angelas de la victoire, 1915 (short)
L’Angoissante Aventure, 1920
Leonce aime les beiges, 1915 (short)
Le Sens de la mort, 1921
L’X non: I'enigme de la riviere, 1915 (short)
Justice d’abord, 1921
Aimer, pleurer, mourn, 1915 (short)
Pour une nuit, 1921
Le Roi de la montagne, 1915 (short)
L’Ombre du pec he, 1922
Le Mystere de l’ombre, 1916 (short)
Dernier amour, 1916 (short) Ravel, Gaston (1878-1958)
L’Imprevu, 1916 (short) Document secret, 1916
Le Devoir, 1916 (short) L’Homme qui revient de loin, 1917
La Fiancee du diable, 1916 (short) Du rire aux larmes, 1917
L'Empne du diamant, 1921 Le Bon M. Lafontaine, 1918 (short)
Le Demon de la haine, 1922 Une Femme inconnue, 1918
L’Ecuyere, 1922 La Matson d’argile, 1918
Koenigsmark, 1923 L’Envolee, 1921
Madame Sans-Gene, 1925 La Geole, 1921
La Femme nue, 1926 A I'ombre de Vatican, 1922
Morgane la sirene, 1927 Tao, 1923 (serial)
Pnntemps d’amour, 1927 Ferragus, 1923
Or chi dee dans ease, 1928 On ne badine pas avec 1 amour, 1924
La Possession, 1929 Le Gardien du feu, 1924
Quand nous etions deux, 1929 L’Avocat, 1925

638
Chouchou poids plume, 1925 La Faute d’Odette Marechal, 1920 FILMOGRAPHIES
Amours, delices et orgues, 1925 Visages voiles . . . dmes closes, 1921
La Fauteuil 47, 1926 La Vente, 1922
Mademoiselle Josette ma femme, 1926 Les Oppnmes, 1923
Le Bonheur du jour, 1927 Violettes impenales, 1924
Le Roman d’un jeune homme pauvre, 1927 jLz Tm-e promise, 1925
Jocaste, 1927 Destinee, 1926
Madame Recamier, 1928 L’lle enchantee, 1927
Figaro, 1929 Le V<z/re <7e ladieu, 1928
Le Collier de la reine, 1930 P<?m Girls, 1929
Renoir, Jean (1894-1978) Saidreau, Robert (? -1925)
L2 L7//e <7e I’eau, 1925 Chalumeau vaudeville series, 1920
Nana, 192 6 Mefez-vous de votre bonne, 1920
Charleston, 1926 (short) La Premiere Idylle de Boucot, 1920
Marquitta, 1927 La Paix chez soi, 1921
L2 Petite Marchande d’allumettes, 1928 L’Etrange Aventure du Docteur Works, 1921
Tm> <2# 1928 La Nuit de Saint Jean, 1922
Le Tournoi, 1929 Le Bonheur conjugal, 1922
Le Bled, 1929 Coeur leger, 1923
Ma Tante d’Honfleur, 1923
Robert, Jacques (1890-1928)
L’Idee de Frangoise, 1923
L2 Vivante Epingle, 1921
Une Etrangere, 1924
L<2 Bouquetiere des innocents, 1922
Monsieur le directeur, 1924
Cousin Pons, 1924
Un Fil a la patte, 1924
Le Comte Kostia, 1925
Jack, 1925
L2 Chevre aux pieds d’or, 1926
A la gare, 1925
£« plongee, 1927
L^ CWe au cou, 1926
Roudes, Gaston
Le Somptier, Rene (1884-1950)
Mart he, 1919
Le des Enfers, 1915 (short)
L*z Dette, 1920
Ler Epaves de l’amour, 1916 (short)
Ler De#x Baisers, 1920
L'Aubade a Sylvie, 1916 (short)
A// deld des lois humaines, 1920
La Sultane de l'amour, 1919
La Voix de la mer, 1921
La Croisade, 1920
Maitre Evora, 1921
La Montee vers I’Acropole, 1920
Pnsca, 1921
La Bete traquee, 1923
La Guitare et le jazz band, 1922
La Porteuse de pain, 1923
Le Lac d’argent, 1922
La Dame de Monsoreau, 1923 (serial)
Le Petit Moineau de Paris, 1923
Ler Fils du soleil, 1924 (serial)
Le Crime des hommes, 1923
La Foret qui tue, 1925
L’Eveil, 1924
Ler Terres d'or, 1925
L’Ombre du bonheur, 1924
Le P’tit Parigot, 1926 (serial)
Feliana I’espionne, 1924
Ler Rantzau, 1924 Tourjansky, Viatcheslaw [Victor] (1891 -?)
Pulcinella, 1925 L'Ordonnance, 1921
Ler L/#r <7e 4/ wer, 1925 Les Mil les et Une Nuits, 1922
L*z Douleur, 1925 Ler Nuits de carnaval, 1922
Lrf Matemelle, 1925 Une Aventure, 1922
Oiseaux de passage, 1925 La Riposte, 1922
Ler Petits, 1925 Le 15e Prelude de Chopin, 1922
Prince Zilah, 1926 Calvaire d’amour, 1923
Le Dedale, 1927 Le Chant de 1’amour triomphant, 1923
Cousine de France, 1927 Ce Cochon de Morin, 1924
L'Ame de Pierre, 1928 La Dame masquee, 1924
Lz Abz/rofl du soleil, 1929 Le Prince charmant, 1925
Michel Strogoff, 1926
Roussel, Henry (1875-1946)
Homme passa, 1917 Vandal, Marcel (1882-1965)
L'Ame du bronze, 1918 Graziella, 1926

639
FILMOGRAPHIES Fleur d'amour, 1927 L’Epingle rouge, 1921
Le Sous Marin de cristal, 1928 LAuberge, 1921
L’Eau du Nil, 1928 La Ruse, 1922
Les Hommes nouveaux, 1922
Violet, Edouard (?-1955) Le Voile du bonheur, 1923
Lucien comic series, 1918
La Bataille, 1923
Fantaisie de miliardaire, 1919
Le Roi du cirque, 1925
La Nouvelle Aurore, 1919 (serial)
Li-Hang le cruel, 1920 Volkoff, Alexandre (1885-1942)
Le Main, 1920 (short) La Maison du mystere, 1922-1923 (serial)
Papillon, 1920 Kean, 1924
Les Mains fletries, 1920 Les Ombres qui pas sent, 1924
L’Accusateur, 1920 Casanova, 1927

640
Index of French names (individuals, organizations, places), titles (films, books, magazines, Index
newspapers), and terms. This index includes selected references to substantive material in the
endnotes.

A nous la liberte (1931), 151, 238 Annales de guerre, 10, 38

A propos de Nice (1930), 268, 599n Annie, Yvonne, 102
L ABC du cinema, 261 Antheil, Georges, 394
A.C.E. (Alliance cinematographique euro- Antoine, Andre, xiv, 11, 12, 16, 39, 52-53,
peene), 46, 48, 202, 487 88, 94, 95-98, 99, 100, 101, 109, 110,
Aes, Eric, 215, 235, 409, 416, 472 114, 120, 165, 175, 218, 243, 251, 284,
L’Affiche{ 1925), 126, 127-129, 128, 129, 285, 315, 328, 358, 501, 513, 549n;
130, 256, 258, 283, 285, 398, 402, 446, LArlesienne (1922), 101-102; Le Coupable
448, 59In (1917), 88, 94, 97, 120, 122, 358; Les
A.G.C. (Agence generate cinematogra¬ Freres corses (1917), 97; L’Hirondelle et la
phique), 9, 11, 16, 41, 44-45 mesange{ 1921, 1983), 114, 551n; Made¬
L’Age d’or (1930), 151, 270, 272, 475, 480 moiselle de la Seigliere (1921), 166; La Terre
Agel, Henri, 510 (1921), 96, 109-110, 109; Les Travailleurs
LAgonie des aigles (1921), 21, 51, 58, 162- de la mer (1918), 94, 96, 98, 99
164, 163, 165, 167, 177, 558n, 579n Antoine, Andre-Paul, 25, 175
LAgonie des aigles (1933), 204-205 Antoinette Sabrier (1927), 94
Aguettand, Lucien, 559n Apollinaire, Guillaume, 244, 249, 300
Ai'ssa, Berardi, 159 LAppel du sang (1920), 98, 100-101, 100
Aisse, Mile., 140, 303, 303 Arabesques (1929), 268, 270
Aladin, 80 Aragon, Louis, 75, 242, 244, 567n
Albert-Birot, Pierre, 244 Arche, Henri d\ 270, 271; La Perle (1929),
Alcover, Pierre, 114, 218, 219, 514, 515, 270, 271
316, 320 Archives d’art de l’histoire, 202, 203
Alhambra Films, 25 Archives du Film, Bois d’Arcy, xiii, 514
Alibert, 126 LArgent (1929), 39, 61, 69, 130, 217, 218-
Allegret, Marc, 238, 266, 271, 282, 425; 219, 218, 268, 286, 291, 513-526, 316,
Mamzelle Nitouche (1931), 238; Les Tro¬ 318, 320, 322, 324, 529, 581n, 597n
glodytes (1929), 271; Voyage au Congo Arizona Bill series (1912-1914), 71
(1927), 266, 267, 271, 282 LArlesienne (1922), 101-102
Allendy, Docteur, 256 Armel, Yvette, 94
Allin, Alex, 83, 84, 149, 223, 229, 476, Arnou, Maurice, 111, 395
479, 479 Arnoux, Alexandre, 65, 111, 244, 245,
Alio Berlin . . . ici Pans (1931), 220 252, 261, 262, 421; La Cbevauchee noc¬
Alsace (1916), 10, 86 turne, 111; Cinema, 261
Ambroise, 501, 503, 303, 504, 505, 506 Aron, Francis, 57
Ame d’artiste (1925), 30, 94, 210-211, 211 Aron, Robert, 253, 262, 264, 271
Ame d’enfants (1928), 137 Arquilliere, Alexandre, 71, 159, 139, 340,
LAme du bronze (1917), 121 343
Amengual, Barthelemy, 291, 378 LArnvee du train (1896), 61
Arms d’orient (1919), 152, 154 Arroy, Jean, 100, 250, 256
Ames de fous (1917), 73, 285, 580n LArt cinematographique, 261
L Ami Fritz (1920), 110 Artaud, Antonin, 196, 198, 204, 268, 285,
Amiel, Denys, 340, 344 431, 475, 476, 478, 479, 480, 486, 493,
Amis du cinema, 130, 253, 254, 264 514, 316, 529, 571n, 592n, 594n; Le
Les Amis de Spartacus, 40, 231, 264, 265- Clair Abelard, 594n; Heloise et Abelard,
266, 267, 274, 283 594n
Amours exotiques (1927), 267, 283 Les Artistes Reunis, 32
Andreani, Henri, 161, 431; Siege de Calais Artistic Cinema, 53, 59, 254, 255, 264,
(1911), 161 272, 395
Andreyor, Yvette, 210 LAssomoir, 95
Anemic cinma (1926), 268 LAssomoir (1920), 123
Angelo, Jean, 83, 84, 152, 154, 194, 200, LAtalante (1933), 116
215, 216 Atget, Eugene, 380
LAngoissante aventure {1920), 20, 143 Athanasiou, Genica, 421, 421, 416, 478,
Annabella, 196, 422, 431, 590n 478, 507, 309

641
INDEX L'Atlantide (1921), 18-19, 20, 24, 25, 27, Bardou, Camille, 128
28, 41, 42, 44, 51, 57, 154-156, 157, Bargier, Georges, 199
159, 169, 207, 552n Baroncelli, Jacques de, xiv, 11, 15, 16, 19,
L'Atre (1920-1923), 18,41,42, 111-114, 22, 25, 26, 32, 41, 42, 48, 51, 79, 89,
112, 282, 395, 421 94, 102, 109, 111, 114, 119-120, 166-
Au bonheur des dames (1929), 130, 217-218, 167, 243, 249, 253, 283, 285, 314, 322,
219 358, 548n; Le Carillon de minuit (1923),
Au pays des tenebres (1912), 95 114; Feu (1926), 120, 158; La Legende de
Au Secoursl (1923), 222 Soeur Beatrix (1923), 25, 45; Michel Stro-
LAuberge rouge (1923), 26, 167, 348, 351- goff (1937), 205; Nine (1924), 25, 110,
359, 352, 353, 355, 358, 362, 366, 385, 111; Nitchevo (1926), 120, 158\ Pecheur
388, 425, 453 d’Islands (1924), 25, 48, 119-120, 119,
Aubert, Louis, 9, 20, 22, 23-24, 28, 33, 283, 383; Pere Gonot (1921), 123, 167;
37, 43, 44-45, 46, 47, 57, 58, 62, 65, La Rafale (1920), 16, 89; Ramuntcho
69, 123, 139, 150, 153, 167, 213, 214, (1919), xiv, 94, 102, 111, 243, 322; Le
528 R.etour aux champs (1918), 102, 109; Le
Aubert-Paiace (cinema), 51, 55, 58, 61, Reve (1921), 16, 41, 42, 166; Le Reveil
129, 200, 215, 266 (1925), 48, 548n; Le Roi de la mer (1917),
Audard, Pierre, 495 314; La Rose (1920), 19; Le Secret du Lone
Aujourd’hut (1929), 271 Star( 1920), 16, 79, 89; Veille d’armes
Auriol, Jean-Georges, 256, 262, 264, 272 (1925), 48, 120
Autant-Lara, Claude, 26, 64, 141, 200, Barrabas (1920), 20, 53, 78, 78, 79, 138,
207, 254, 260, 268, 271, 329, 385, 388, 222
389, 394, 445, 446; Construire un feu Barres, Maurice, 27; Le Jardin sur I'Orient, 27
(1928-1930), 271, 445-446; Fait-Dwers Barsacq, Andre, 219, 421, 423, 507, 520,
(1924), 26, 254, 260, 268, 329, 394 521
auteur, 243, 245, 284-285 Barsacq, Leon, 174, 187, 190, 195
Autier, Pierre, 507 Barth, Joseph, 501
Autour de LArgent (1928), 268, 523 Barthes, Roland, 293, 526
Autour de Napoleon (1927), 432 Bataille, Henri, 157, 213, 216
LAvant-Scene du cinema, 514 Bataille, Lucien, 476, 476
LAventure amoureuse de Pierre Vignal, 147 La Bataille (1923), 29, 45, 170
Les Aventures de Robert Macaire (1925-1926), Les Batailles de la vie series, 95
83-85, 84, 286, 446 Batcheff, Pierre, 190, 194-195, 196, 217,
Avril, Gine, 323 227, 230, 231, 416, 481, 482, 482, 483,
Ayen, Due d’, 198 484, 484, 485
Azaria, Pierre, 8 Bateaux pansiens (1929), 271
Baudelaire, Charles, 150, 328, 342, 396,
Bachelet, Jean, 235, 373, 472 413, 414, 516; Fleurs du mal, 342
Bachy, Victor, 135 Bauer, Harry, 122, 252
Baillonnee (1922), 77 Bayard, Jean F., 224
Baldizzone, Jose, 6 Bayart, Julien, 94, 214
Ballet Mecantque (1924), 254, 256, 258, Bazin, Andre, 200, 236, 275
268, 281, 329, 394-395, 591n Beaulieu, Yolande, 396
Balzac, Honore de, 123, 152, 166, 351, Beaumont, Comte de, 270
354, 359, 590n; La Peau de chagrin, 152 Beqan, 243, 248, 249, 316, 322
Balzac, Jeanne de, 153 Beethoven (1937), 590n
La Bandera (1935), 160 Bell, Marie, 180, 194
Banque Bauer et Marchal (Lyon), 21, 22-23, Belle Epoque, 6, 86, 236, 252
62 Belle Humeur series (1921-1922), 222
Banque Conti-Gancel, 62 La Belle Nivernaise (1924), 26, 114-117,
Banque Suisse et Fran<;aise, see Credit Com¬ 115, 283, 374, 423, 459
mercial de France Bellevilloise Cinema, 265, 266, 267
Barberousse (1916), 73 Belmore, Guy, 396
Barbier-Krauss, Charlotte, 108 Benois, Alexandre, 195, 431
Barbusse, Henri, 296; Le Feu, journal d’un es- Benoit, Pierre, 18, 28, 34, 150, 154, 156,
couade, 296 169
Bardeche, Maurice, 75, 222 Benoit-Levy, Edmond, 8, 16, 50, 54, 56, 57

642
Benoit-Levy, Jean, 33, 39, 137, 157, 254, Bloc national, 5, 27, 163 INDEX
587n; Ame d’enfants (1928), 137; Itto Bloch, Noe, 24, 29-30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 37,
(1934), 157; La Maternelle (1933), 137, 65, 182
587n; Peau de peche (1929), 39, 136, 137 Blum, Rene, 254, 255
Berge, Andre, 263 Boge, 266
Berley, Andre, 487 Boireau series, 220
Berliet, Jimmy, 380 Boisyvon, 244
Bernard, Armand, 81, 165, 196, 223 Bokanowski, Marcel, 43, 50
Bernard, Raymond, xiv, 11, 17, 18, 25, 32, Bon Marche, 217
33, 48, 58, 79, 90-92, 119, 174, 175, Bonaparte et la revolution (1971), 429
177, 182, 190, 191, 193, 194, 205, 223, Le Bonheur des autres (1918), 41
285, 499, 546n, 590n; Croix du bois Boni, Carmen, 217
(1932), 205; Joueur d’echecs (1927), xiv, Bonjour Cinema, 116, 249, 249, 361, 364,
32, 33, 48, 190-193, 191, 192, 193, 394-395, 423, 505
204, 483, 499; La Matson vide (1921), 90- Borde, Raymond, xiv, 273
91; Le Miracle des loups (1924), xiv, 25, Borie, Paul de la, 27, 109, 267
30, 32, 48, 58, 119, 174, 175-179, 176, Borlin, Jean, 146-147, 150, 380, 381, 382
178, 190, 191, 197, 198, 204, 383, 499, Bouclette (1918), 14, 41, 89
590n; Le Petit Cafe {1919), 18, 42, 57, Boudrioz, Robert, 18, 20, 28, 41, 43, 93,
79, 223, 224; Le Secret de Rosette Lambert 111, 113, 207, 213, 282, 395, 421;
(1920), 16-17, 18, 90; Tarakanova LAtre (1920-1923), 18, 41, 42, 111-114,
(1930), xiv, 193-194; Tnplepatte (1922), 112, 282, 395, 421; L’Epervier (1924),
90, 91, 92 28, 43, 207, 213; Tempetes (1922), 20
Bernard, Tristan, 16, 17, 18, 25, 86, 90, Boudu sauve des eaux (1932), 235, 238, 377
221, 223; Coeur de hlas, 90 La Boue, see Fievre
Bernard-Deschamps, Dominique, 21, 51, Boue Soeurs, 168, 170, 207
58, 123, 162, 253, 579n■ L’Agome des ai- Bouissounouse, Janine, 262, 264
gles( 1921), 21, 51, 58, 162-164, 163, Boulanger, Pierre, 151, 154, 157, 160
165, 167, 177, 558n, 579n; La Nuit du Bouquet, Jean-Louis, 11, 34, 44, 131, 142,
11 septembre {1922), 123 143, 174, 260, 262, 285, 286, 290,
Bernede, Arthur, 23, 82 576n, 577n; L’ldee et lecran: opinions sur le
Bernhardt, Sarah, 10, 83, 86, 161 cinema, 260, 286; La Ville des fous
Bernis, Blanche, 403 (scenario), 174
Bernstein, Henri, 86, 87, 89 Bour, Armand, 109, 217
Berry, Jules, 5 14 Bourbon, Ernest, 221
Bert, Camille, 190 Bourdelle, Tommy, 204
Bessy, Maurice, 273 Bourgassov, Fedor, 152, 183, 186, 431
La Bete Traquee (1923), 24, 111 Bourgeois, Gerard, 41, 52, 95, 162; Chris-
Beucler, Andre, 256 tophe Colombe (1919), 52, 162; Terreur
Beylie, Claude, 82-83, 131, 593n (1924), 29, 206; Les Victimes de Talcool
Bianchetti, Suzanne, 84, 171, 181, 185, (1911), 95
196, 204 Bousquet, Henri, 51
Bibliotheque de l’Arsenal, xiii Bout-de-Zan series (1912-1916), 71, 221, 222
Bibliotheque d’IDHEC, xiii Boutet, Frederic, 129
Bibliotheque de la Cinematheque franqaise, Boyer, Charles, 98, 207
xiii Brabant, Andree, 87, 98, 166, 224
Bibliotheque nationale, xiii Bras, Albert, 109, 217
Bilinsky, Boris, 35, 36, 128, 129, 174, Le Brasier Ardent (1923), 26, 42, 81, 143-
181, 182, 187, 187, 188, 194, 195, 208, 144, 206, 207, 208, 225, 254, 282, 285,
208, 368 367-373, 370-371, 372, 374, 375, 376,
Billancourt Studio, 22, 29-30, 35, 36, 63, 377, 385, 397, 415, 418, 435, 458, 529
196, 198, 431, 488 Brasillach, Robert, 75, 222
Biscot, Georges, 77, 222, 223 Braunberger, Pierre, 32-33, 48, 51, 62,
Bithulite (1929), 271 215, 234, 271, 408, 529
Blanchar, Pierre, 190, 194, 209, 216 La Bretagne pittoresque, 53
Blanchette (1921), 19, 94, 110 Breteque, Francois de la, 85, 546n
Le Bled (1929), 158-160, 139, 200, 286, Breton, Andre, 75, 244, 269, 476, 480,
529 592n

643
INDEX Brezillon, Leon, 43, 58 597n; Nogent, Eldorado du dimanche (1930),
Briand, Aristide, 5, 42 268, 269; Quai des brumes (1938), 359
La Brim (1925), 25, 42, 46, 118-119, 118, Caron, Pierre, 41; L’Homme qui vendait son
120, 145, 284 ame au diable (1921)
Brieux, Eugene, 110 Carre, Albert, 16
Briey, Jeanne, 110 Carre, Michel, 111
Brindeau, Jeanne, 182 Cartel des gauches, 5, 29-30, 31, 44, 50, 179
Brumes d'automne (1928), 270, 271 C.A.S.A. (Club des amis du septieme art),
Brun, Gaston, 111 252-253, 254, 255, 329, 359, 394, 395,
Brunelin, Andre, 257 582n
Brunius, Jacques Bernard, 256, 262, 286, Casanova (1927), xv, 35, 185-190, 187,
289 188, 189, 195, 204
Buffet, Eugenie, 196 Casino de Crenelle (cinema), 265, 266
Bunuel, Luis, 32, 148, 151, 262, 269, 270, Castanet, Paul, 98, 121
271, 272, 286, 475, 480, 485, 485, 529, Catelain, Jaque, 26, 43, 98, 99, 140, 141,
593n, 595n, 597n, 598n; L’Age d’or 142, 152, 157, 169, 169, 207, 212, 213,
(1930), 151, 270, 272, 475, 480; Un 214, 252, 254, 255, 303, 303, 305, 306,
Chien andalou (1929), 148, 262, 269, 383, 384, 388, 391, 392; La Galene des
271, 281, 286, 464, 475, 480-486, 481, monstres (1924), 26, 254; Le Marchand de
482, 484, 485, 514, 598n; Los Olvidados plaisir'i 1923), 26, 43, 142
(1950), 597n Catherine (1924-1927), 26
Bureau d’Accueil des Professeurs d’Univer- Cavalcanti, Alberto, 33, 39, 48, 64, 137,
sites Etrangeres, see Centre Universitaire 138, 144, 207, 215, 216, 220, 222, 249,
International 252, 264, 266, 267, 268, 271, 272, 279,
Burel, L.-H. 87, 89, 105, 109, 126, 183, 282, 283, 285, 286, 294, 359, 385, 387-
196, 297, 328, 431, 445, 447 388, 387, 395, 402, 405, 408, 409, 413,
Burguet, Charles, 17, 77, 81, 151; Baillonee 416, 435, 449, 480, 559n, 56ln, 588n;
(1922), 77; Les Mysteres de Paris (1922), Le Capitaine fracasse (1929), 48, 56 In; En
45, 81; La Sultane de l’amour (1919), xv, rade (1927), 137, 266, 271, 283, 359,
17, 18, 41, 151-152, 155, 223 408-413, 410, 413, 414, 473, 587n; Le
Buttes-Chaumont (Gaumont studio), 8, 13, Petit Chaperon rouge (1929), 222; La P’tite
22, 31, 63 Lily (1927), 222, 268, 271, 413; Rien que
les heures (1926), 39, 137, 267, 271, 281,
Cagliostro (1929), 36, 180-181 283, 395, 402-408, 403, 405, 435, 480,
Cahiers du cinema, 290, 429 529; Le Train sans yeux (1926-1928), 283,
Les Cahiers du mois, 258, 261, 262, 274 402; Yvette (1928), 215-216, 216, 219,
“Caligari-like,” 368, 372, 463, 586n 449
"Caligarism,” 141 La Cava Here d'Elsa, 27
Camelots du Roi, 269 Cazotte, Henry de, 35
Cameo Cinema, 51, 53, 58, 59, 61, 64. See Celor Films, 26
also Pathe-Palace Cendrars, Blaise, 18, 249, 252, 261, 300,
Camille Desmoulins (1912), 161 301, 302, 328, 335, 359, 393, 571n,
Campagne, Pierre, 373 582n; L'ABC du cinema, 261; Dix-Neuf
Canard Sauvage, 340 Poemes elastiques, 582n; Prose de Transsibe-
Canudo, Ricciotto, 141, 166, 167, 223, nen et de la petite Jeanne de France, 582n
244-245, 244, 248, 249, 251, 252-253, Les Cent Pas, see Menilmontant
254, 261, 263, 273, 274, 282, 287, 289, Centre Universitaire International, 326
292, 300, 328, 329, 332, 367, 371, Cezanne, Paul, 373
558n; L'Usine aux images, 261 Chabot, Adrien, 111; Manelle Thibaut, 111
Capellani, Andre, 9, 11, 41, 95, 161; Les Chabrol, Claude, 351; La Femme inf dele
Miserables (1912), 95, 161 (1968), 351
Capellani, Paul, 141 Chagall, Marc, 406 4
Le Capitaine fracasse (1929), 48, 56In Chaix, Louis, 111, 119, 122, 145, 314
Le Carillon de minuit (1923), 114 Chakatouny, Acho, 182, 196
Carl, Renee, 11, 131 Chamfort (Nicolas-Sebastien Roch), 328
Carmen (1926), 132-134, 133, 154 Champion, Pierre, 486
Le Carnaval des ventes (1920), 99, 140, 586n Chanson d'amour (1934), 138
Carne, Marcel, 137, 256, 268, 269, 359, Les Chansons filmees, 53

644
Le Chant de 1 amour triomphante (1923), 24, Cine-Latin (cinema), 267, 283, 579n, 58In INDEX
152 Cine Max-Linder (cinema), 51, 57, 58, 61,
Chantecoq (1917), 73 134, 209, 223, 421, 507, 513
Un Chapeau de paille d'ltalie (1928), xv, 228- Cine-Miroir, 156, 247, 262
231, 228, 230, 284, 529 Cine-Opera (cinema), 40, 98, 252
Chareau, Pierre, 385 Cine-pour-tous, 14, 19, 41, 100, 139, 246-
Charensol, Georges, 245, 261, 262, 263, 247, 246, 250
284; Panorama du cinema, 261, 284 Cinea, 25, 27, 51, 248-249, 248, 250, 251,
Charleston (1926), 148, 222, 271, 413 252, 253, 345
Charlia, Georges, 202, 408, 409, 410, 410, Cinea-Cine-pour-tous, 24, 40, 51, 60, 111,
411, 412 120, 125, 137, 153, 171, 175, 189, 213,
Le Chasseur de Chez Maxim's (1927), 226 226, 233, 250-251, 230, 260, 262, 266,
Chastaigner, Jean, 244 267, 274, 395, 558n
Chateaubriand, Alphonse de, 117, 180 Cinegraphie, 26-27, 28, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37,
La Chatelaine du Liban (1926), 34, 156 43, 45, 142, 207, 270, 385, 402, 415
Le Chauffeur de Mademoiselle (1928), 227-228, Cinegraphie, 221, 262, 262, 274, 449, 58 In
232 ^ Cinegraphie d’Art, 20
Chaumel, 266 Cinema, 261
Chavance, Louis, 262 Le Cinema, 69, 243
Le Chemin d’Ernoa (1921), 102, 322-323 Cinema-Bibliotheque, 248
Chenal, Pierre, 271; Un Coup de de (1929), Le Cinema des origines a nos jours, 261
271 Cinema et cie, 243
Chevalier, Maurice, 61, 137, 181 Cinema-Palace de Joigny (cinema), 45
Chevanne, Andre, 50, 51, 64 Cinemagazine, 27, 54, 81, 104, 130, 152,
La Chevauchee nocturne, 111 161, 166, 167, 170, 173, 195, 198, 225,
Chxappe, Jean, 266 247, 248, 250, 253, 262, 263, 568n
Un Chien andalou (1929), 148, 262, 269, Cinematheque franchise, xi, xiii, 86, 112,
271, 281, 286, 464, 475, 480-486, 481, 167, 273, 307, 327, 408, 429, 449, 487,
482, 483, 484, 483, 514, 598n 53 In, 574n, 589n, 591n
Le Chiffonnier de Pans (1924), 24, 126 Cinematheque de la ville de Paris, 272
Chignon d’or (1915), 85 Cinematheque de Toulouse, xiii, 53 In, 58 In
Chique (1930), 62 Cinematheque nationale, 273
Chirat, Raymond, 213, 217, 531n Le Cinematographe vu d’Etna, 260-261, 448,
Chomette, Henri, 33, 62, 227, 232, 250, 467, 597n
254, 264, 268, 270, 272, 329, 394; Le Cinematographie franyaise, 11, 34, 36, 40, 59,
Chauffeur de Mademoiselle (1928), 227-228, 61, 241, 267, 273
232; Cinq Minutes du cinema pur (1926), Cinemonde, 262, 263
227, 268, 394; Jeux des reflets et de la Vitesse Cineopse, 241
(1925), 227, 254, 268, 329, 394; Le Re¬ Cineroman studio, see Levinsky studio, Join-
quin (1930), 62 ville-le-pont
Les Choses de theatre, 245 Les Cinq Gentlemen maudits (1919), 154
Choux, Jean, 238', Jean de la lune (1932), 238 Cinq Minutes du cinema pur (1926), 227, 268,
Chretien, Henri, 445 394
Christiany, Jacques, 351 Cirque d’Hiver, 81
Christophe Colomb (1919), 52, 162 Cite-Elge, see Buttes-Chaumont
La Chute de la maison Usher (1928), xiv, xv, La Cite foudroyee (1924), xiv, 23, 42, 143,
148, 269, 271, 283, 463-471, 466, 467, 144, 145
468, 471, 472, 489, 500, 505, 511, Citroen, Andre, 16
592n Clair, Rene, xiv, xv, 23, 26, 32, 33, 35,
La Cigarette (1919), 285, 313 45, 46, 47, 60, 62, 65, 69, 79, 79, 112,
Cine-Club d’Avant-Garde, 264 137, 141, 145-148, 150-151, 186, 217,
Cine-Club de France, 40, 187, 255-256, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228-232, 234,
258, 261, 263, 264, 268, 274, 282, 283, 235, 238, 245, 249, 251, 254, 256, 260,
284, 475 261, 263, 264, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272,
Cine-France, 29-30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 274, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 289, 295,
85, 152, 182, 210 313, 328, 329, 364, 377, 379, 380, 381,
Cine-Information-Aubert, 45 382, 393, 394, 421, 529, 585n; A nous la
Cine-Journal, 39, 81, 241 liberte (1931), 151, 238; Un Chapeau de

645
 Comandon, Docteur, 262, 264
INDEX Clair, Rene (cont.)
Comedie Franchise, 8, 16, 85, 89, 94, 98,
patlle d'ltalie (1928), xv, 228-231, 228,
230, 284, 529; Les Deux Timides (1929), 109, 414, 486
231-232, 230, 232, 483, 529; Entr'acte Comite de defense du film franqais, 40-41,
(1924), xiv, 46, 146, 186, 222, 225, 43
254, 256, 260, 268, 269, 281, 283, 284, Comite franqais du cinema, 209
329, 377, 380-382, 383, 394, 395, 529, Commission du Controle des Films, 38-40,
59In; Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge (1925), 78
26, 45, 145-146, 146, 256, 283; Le Mil¬ Communists (political party), 6, 163, 234,
lion (1931), 238; Pans qui dort (1924), 26, 244, 264, 266
69, 145, 222, 225, 256, 283, 295, 377- Comoedia, 39, 81, 98, 243, 244
380, 379, 381, 382, 393, 529, 585n; La Comoedia lllustre, 241, 248
Proie du vent (1927), 147-148; Sous les toits Compagnie Generale d’Electricite, 22
de Pans (1930), 62; La Tour (1928), 268, Compagnie Generale Fran^aise Cinemato-
379; Le Voyage imaginaire (1926), 46, 146, graphique, 16, 19, 56
146-147, 150, 225, 260, 271, 283 Compagnie Universelle Cinematographique,
Le Clair Abelard, 594n 46
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1917-1918), 80,
Claudel, Paul, 328
Clemenceau, Georges, 5, 558n 80, 81, 162
Cloquemont, 507 Confederation Generale du Travail, 6, 43
Close, Ivy, 123, 125, 326, 330 Confederation Generale du Travail Unitaire,
Clouzot, Henri, 254, 255, 272 6
Club de l’Ecran, 264, 268 Construire un feu (1928-1930), 271, 445-446
Club frangais du cinema, 253-254, 255, 282 conte arabe, 151-153
Cluny (cinema), 395 Continsouza, 7
Ce Cochon de Morin (1924), 224 Cooperative du film, 271
Cocteau, Jean, 151, 245, 252, 270, 272, Copeau, Jacques, 257, 258
326; Le Sang d’un poete (1930-1932), 15 1, La Coquille et le clergyman (1928), 32, 148,
270, 272 268, 271, 281, 283, 286, 413, 464, 475-
Coelus, Romain, 94 480, 476, 477, 478, 479, 480, 514,
Coeur de Lilas, 90 57 In, 588n, 593n, 598n
Coeurfidele (1923), 26, 39, 42, 69, 123, Corman, Nelly, 180
129, 133, 254, 258, 282, 283, 284, 285, Corot, Camille, 83, 97, 104
351, 359-366, 362, 364, 366, 384, 385, Corthis, Andre, 344, 345, 346
388, 390, 395, 396, 400, 402, 408, 425, Cosmograph, 40
451, 458, 460, 500, 584n, 597n Cosmograph Cinema, 9
Le Coeur magnifque {1921), 19 Costantini, Nino, 84-85, 148, 149, 449, 434
Le C off ret de jade {1921), 152 Costil, Edgar, 10, 20, 22, 50, 54-55, 62-63
Cohl, Emile, 25 1 Un Coup de de (1929), 271
Coissac, G.-Michel, 190, 241, 255, 260; Le Coup able (1917), 88, 94, 97, 120, 121, 358
Histoire du cinematographe, 260 Le Courrier cinematographique, 241
Coisset, Francis de, 232 Cousin Pons (1924), 123, 552n
Colet, Louise, 360 Cousine Bette (1924), 123
Colette, 89, 241-242, 256 Crainquebille (1923), 19, 26, 41, 42, 104,
Colisee Cinema, 9, 17, 40, 58, 223, 251, 126, 126-127, 128, 129, 226, 258, 283,
252, 254, 255, 327, 367 368, 395, 552n
Collection des Romans-Cinemas, 72 Le Crapouillot, 244, 261, 284
College de France (Paris), 253 Credit Commercial de France, 8, 22, 63
Le Collier de la reine (1929), 61, 180 Credit Lyonnais, 7
Colombier, Pierre, 62, 64, 220, 226, 227; Creste, Rene, 14, 74, 73, 77, 108
Chique (1930), 62; Pans en cinq heures Le Crime de Lord Saville (1922), 19
(1926), 226; Le Roi de resquilleurs (1930), Le Crime du Bouif (1922), 224
64-65, 220; Les Transatlantiques (1928), Le Crime d’une sainte (1924), 45
227 critical/historical terms, art and literature:
color film processes, xiv-xv, 123, 152, 167, Cubism/Cubist, 141, 145, 249, 299, 361,
187, 228, 297, 298, 302, 307, 392, 445, 408, 586n; Dadaism/Dadaist, 249, 279,
464 381, 529; Expressionism/Expressionist,
Colpi, Henri, 55 In 121, 463; Futurism/Futurist, 299, 387,

646
 592n; Impressionism/Impressionist, 96, 241, 242, 243, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, INDEX
97, 102, 109, 200, 279-281, 287, 288, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 257,
307, 575n; Modernism/Modernist, 280, 260, 263, 265, 267, 272, 273, 274, 279,
281, 290, 299, 338; Purism/Punst, 335, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 289, 290, 292,
388; Realism/Realist, 94-97, 280; Simul- 295, 306, 307, 313, 314, 315, 317, 322,
taneism, Simultaneist, 299-300, 592n; 323, 324, 328, 340, 344, 345, 346, 347,
Surrealism/Surrealist, 245, 268, 269, 279, 348, 351, 358, 395, 396, 402, 426, 456,
289, 475, 476, 480, 486, 529, 592n; 501, 567n, 569, 580n; Cinema et cie, 243;
Symbolism/Symbolist, 245, 280, 287 Photogenie, 243; Le Chemin d'Ernoa (1921),
La Croisade (1920), 123, 202 102, 322-323; La Femme de nulle part
La Croisiere noire (1926), 32, 266 (1922), 25, 249, 250, 254, 267, 283,
Croix du bois (1932), 205 313, 322, 323-326, 346, 351, 426; Fievre
Croze, J.-L., 38, 244 (1921), 19, 25, 39, 124, 133, 249, 254,
Cubism/Cubist, 141, 145, 249, 299, 361, 256, 265, 282, 283, 284, 313, 315-322,
408, 586n 316, 317, 318, 320, 323, 324, 325, 342,
353, 359, 361, 362, 395, 402, 408, 409,
Dadaism/Dadaist, 249, 279, 381, 529 412, 413, 414, 426, 456, 475, 500,
Dal-Film, 153 580n; Fumee noire (1920), 20; L’lnondation
La Dame de Monsoreau (1923), xv, 24, 167 (1924), 26, 111, 267, 283, 340, 344-
Damia, Maryse, 196 351, 346, 349, 408, 458; Le Silence
Dana, Jorge, 291 (1920), xiv, 19, 92, 92, 314-315, 324,
Daniau-Johnson, 143, 175, 195 325, 341, 342, 347, 351
Danis, Ida, 18, 327 Deloncle, Charles, 39
Danses (1928), 270 Delpeuch, Andre, 50, 53, 154, 552n
La Danseuse Orchidee (1928), 213 Delteil, Joseph, 486; La Vie de Jeanne d'Arc,
Danton (cinema), 395 486
Daria, Sophie, 295 Demi-Solde, 162
Darnys, Ginette, 92, 314 Le Demon de la hatne (1922), 27
Daudet, Alphonse, 101, 114 D’Ennery (Adolphe Philippe), 79; Les Deux
Daumier, Honore, 83, 237 Orphelines, 79
Dauvray, Maryse, 86, 296 Denola, Georges, 71, 95, 98, 247, 248; La
Daven, Andre, 179, 249, 323 Jeunesse de Rocambole (1913), 95; Rocambole
Da vert, Jose, 117, 118, 145; 204 (1913), 71
David Golder (1930), 65 Derain, Lucie, 262, 270; Harmonies de Paris
Davis, Dolly, 125, 147, 226, 227 (1929), 270
Davis, Lillian Hall, 147 Dermoz, Germaine, 340, 343
Dax, Jean, 202 Derniers Actualites, 53
Day, Olga, 185, 187, 456, 437 Desclaux, Pierre, 82
De Stijl (style), 385, 386 Desfassiaux, Maurice, 130, 133, 165, 166,
Debain, Henri, 91-92, 182, 195, 215, 223 199, 228, 234, 377, 553n
Debrie (company), 12, 13, 37 Desfontaines, Henri, 20, 95, 161
Debrie, Andre, 438 Deslaw, Eugene, 270, 271; Marche des ma¬
Debucourt, Jean, 463, 466 chines (1928), 270, 271; Montparnasse
Debussy, Claude, 342, 421 (1929), 271; Nuits electnques (1929), 270,
Decourcelle, Pierre, 8, 10, 72, 76-77, 79, 271
383; Lex Deux Gosses, 79 Deslys, Gaby, 14, 89
Deed, Andre, 10, 70, 220, 222 Desnos, Robert, 245, 262, 594n
Dehelly, Jean, 204 Despres, Suzanne, 139, 140
Dekorba, Maurice, 216, 217 Le Destin rouge (1921), 19
Delac, Charles, 8, 15, 16, 19, 22, 24, 25, Destinee (1926), 195
29, 33, 36, 42, 45, 56 Detlefren, Otto, 172
Delacroix, Eugene, 177, 378 Les Deux Gamines (1921), 10, 78-79, 80
Delaunay, Robert, 212-213, 299, 310, 406 Les Deux Gosses, 79
Delaunay, Sonya, 212-213 Les Deux Orphelines, 79
Delluc, Louis, xiv, 12, 19, 20, 25, 26, 39, Les Deux Timides (1929), 230, 231-232, 232,
40, 53, 58, 75, 77, 80, 96, 91, 92, 98, 483, 529
100, 102, 109, 111, 116, 121, 123, 138, Devirys, Rachel, 104
141, 151, 152, 153, 155, 162, 165, 222, Dhelia, France, 111, 140, 151

647
INDEX Le Diable au coeur (1928), 213 166, 168, 169, 170, 207
Le Diable dans la ville (1925), 23, 42, 143, Duhamel, Marcel, 271; Paris Express (1929),
174 271
Diamant-Berger, Henri, 7, 12, 15-18, 21, Dulac, Germaine, xiv, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19,
22-23, 25, 26, 34, 37, 39, 41, 42, 48, 20, 23, 25, 30, 32, 41, 65, 69, 73, 82,
51, 52, 58, 63, 64, 69, 71, 81, 162, 83, 87, 92-93, 94, 143, 148, 150, 153,
164-166, 167, 196, 204, 214, 222, 223, 174, 210, 211, 243, 249, 251, 252, 254,
227, 241, 242, 243, 244, 253, 268-269, 255, 256, 258, 260, 261, 262, 264, 268,
284, 285, 377, 533n, 568n, 573n, 578n, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 279, 280, 282,
586n; Le Cinema, 69, 243; Education de 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 289, 290, 291,
Prince (1927), 34, 214; Le Feu sacre 306, 313, 314, 329, 340, 341, 342, 344,
(1920), 222; Le Mauvais Garmon (1922), 379, 395, 413, 414, 456, 475, 476, 477,
586n; Les Trois Mousquetaires (1921-1922), 478, 479, 480, 484, 529, 580n, 588n,
21, 22, 41, 42, 48, 51, 52, 58, 70, 81, 594n; Ame d'artiste (1925), 30, 94, 210-
162, 164-166, 165, 204, 223; Les Trois 211, 211; Ames de fous (1917), 73, 285,
Mousquetaires (1932), 204; Vingt Ans apres 580n; Antoinette Sabner (1927), 94; Ara¬
(1922-1923), 21, 52, 58, 81, 166, 167 besques (1929), 268, 270; Le Bonheur des
Diamant Noir (1921), 101 autres (1918), 41; La Cigarette (1919),
Dieu du hasard (1919), 14 285, ’313; La Coquille et le clergyman
Dieudonne, Albert, 196, 196, 295, 431, (1928), 32, 148, 268, 271, 281, 283,
431, 440; Catherine (1924-1927), 26 286, 413, 464, 475-480, 476, 477, 478,
Dix-Neuf Poemes elastiques, 582n 479, 480, 514, 57In, 588n, 593n, 598n;
La Dixieme Symphonie (1918), 18, 42, 89-90, Le Diable dans la ville (1925), 23, 42,
295, 297 143, 174; La Fete espagnole (1920), xiv,
distribution, French: blockbooking, 44-45; 17, 19, 53, 92, 92, 153, 243, 284, 306,
film import/export figures, 9, 11-12, 40, 314, 315, 323, 325, 456, 580n; La Folie
42, 46, 47-48 des Vaillants (1925), 32, 150, 256, 262,
Don Juan et Faust (1923), 22, 39, 42, 140, 283-284, 588n; Gossette (1923), 82, 83;
141-142, 150, 282, 331, 385, 586n L’Invitation au voyage (1927), 32, 150,
Donatien, 24; La Sin-Ventura (1922), 45 285, 408, 413-415, 456, 476, 500,
Dorlay, Kitty, 235 588n; Malencontre (1920), 20; La Mort du
Le Double Amour (1925), 127, 285, 446 soleil (1922), xiv, 19, 92-93, 93, 313,
Doublon, Lucien, 53, 126 340; La Princesse Mandane (1928), 150; La
Dounis, Renee, 111, 112 Sounante Madame Beudet (1923), 25, 69,
Dreville, Jean, 136, 181, 189, 213, 227, 283, 340-344, 343, 362, 500, 583n;
256, 262, 268, 270, 326, 408, 409, 448, Themes et variations (1928), 270; Venus vic-
450, 463, 523, 58In; Autour de l’argent tnx (1917), 87;
(1928), 268, 523 Dullin, Charles, 32, 48, 81, 91, 165, 175,
Dreyer, Carl, xv, 35, 39, 46, 62, 69, 177, 177, 182, 190, 192, 214, 256, 258, 415,
182, 190, 198, 199, 279, 284, 286, 291, 421, 427, 479, 559n
431, 486, 487, 488, 489, 490, 498, 499, Dullin, Mme. Charles, 190
501, 562n, 592n; Master of the House Dumas, Alexandre (fils), 171
(1925), 35; Mikhel (1924), 486; La Passion Dumas, Alexandre (pere), 21, 22, 80, 81,
de Jeanne d’Arc (1928), xv, 35-36, 39, 46, 162, 167, 180; Joseph Balsamo, 181; Le
69, 177, 190, 198-199, 198, 204, 219, Vicomte de Bragelonne, 22
284, 286, 291, 431, 463, 486-500, 489, Duncan, Raymond, 254
490, 492, 493, 495, 496, 497, 499, 500, Dupont, E. A., 36; Moulin Rouge (1928), 36
501, 514, 529, 562n, 596n; Vampyr Dupuy-Mazuel, Henry, 25, 158, 175, 199
(1931), 592n Duran, Jose Miguel, 267
Dreyfus, Alfred, 296 Durand, Jean, 11, 17, 221, 222, 225; One-
Le Droit de la vie (1917), 87, 88, 89 sime series (1912-1914), 71, 221, 295;
Dubreil, Raymond, 414 Onesime horloger (1912), 221-222, 225; Ser-
Duca, Lo, 487 pentin series (1919-1920), 222
Duchamps, Marcel, 145, 268, 381; Anemic Durec, 322
cinema (1926), 268 Duvivier, Jean, 26, 32, 33, 36, 45, 64, 65,
La Duchesse des Fohes-Bergere (1927), 36 94, 108, 130, 136, 137, 157, 160, 213,
Le Duel de Max (1913), 53 217, 220, 227, 285, 359, 402; Alio Ber¬
Duflos, Huguette, 28, 81, 110, 122, 156, lin . . . ici Paris (1931), 220; Au bonheur

648
 des dames (1929), 130, 217-218, 219; La 292, 293, 294, 295, 300, 314, 315, 329, INDEX
Bandera (1935), 160; David Golder (1930), 334, 339, 340, 348, 351, 352, 354, 355,
65; L’Homme a I’Hispano (1927), 213-214; 356, 358, 359, 360, 361, 366, 374, 376,
La Machine a refaire la vie (1924), 26; Ma- 379, 394-395, 396, 398, 402, 408, 409,
man Colibri (1929), 94, 157; Le Manage de 421, 423, 425 437, 446, 448, 449, 450,
Mademoiselle Beulemans (1927), 136; Le 451, 454, 456, 458, 460, 463, 464, 465,
Mystere de la Tour Eiffel (1927), 227; Pepe 467, 471, 480, 500, 501, 502, 503, 505,
le Moko (1936), 359; Poll de Carotte 506, 507, 510, 529, 553n, 579n, 583n,
(1926), 108; Le Tourbillon de Paris (1928), 584n, 59 In, 592n, 593n, 596n, 597n;
36, 217 Bonjeur Cinema, 116, 249, 249, 355, 361,
364, 394-395, 423, 505; Le Cinemato-
L’Eau du Nil (1928), 61 graphe vu d'Etna, 260-261, 448, 467,
Ecce Homo (scenario), 18 597n; La Poesie d'aujourd’hui: un nouvel etat
L'Echo de Paris, 82 d'intelligence, 249; L’Affche (1925), 126,
Eclair (company), 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 127-129, 128, 129, 130, 256, 258, 283,
18, 37, 71, 86, 95 285, 398, 402, 446, 448, 59In; L’Auberge
Eclair camera, 527 rouge (1923), 26, 167, 348, 351-359,
Eclair-Journal, 13, 244 352, 353, 355, 358, 362, 366, 385, 388,
Eclipse (company), 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, 425, 453; Les Aventures de Robert Macaire
18, 25, 41, 85 (1925-1926), 83-85, 84, 286, 446; La
L'Ecran, 39 Belle Nivernaise (1924), 26, 114-118, 115,
Les Ecrivains reunis, 260 283, 374, 423, 459; Chanson d'amour
Education de Prince (1927), 34, 214 (1934), 138; La Chute de la maison Usher
L’Effort, 264 (1928), xiv, xv, 148, 269, 271, 283,
Eisenschitz, Bernard, 65, 281, 290, 430, 463-471, 466, 467, 468, 471, 472, 474,
530 489, 500, 502, 505, 511, 592n; Coeurfi-
El Dorado (1921), xv, 20, 69, 79, 94, 153, dele (1923), 26, 39, 42, 69, 124, 129,
282, 284, 305, 306-313, 307, 309, 311, 133, 254, 258, 282, 283, 284, 285, 351,
312, 313, 324, 326, 331, 332, 360, 365, 359-366, 362, 364, 366, 384, 385, 388,
385, 388, 415, 435, 579n 390, 395, 396, 400, 402, 408, 425, 451,
Electric-Palace or Electric Cinema, 55, 137, 458, 460, 500, 584n, 597n; Le Double
235, 266 Amour (1925), 127, 285, 446; Finis Ter-
Emak Bakia (1927), 268, 271 rae (1929), xv, 62, 137, 268, 283, 285,
L'Empereur des pauvres (1922), 21, 22, 51, 81 500-507, 502, 503, 507, 508, 511, 513;
Empire Cinema, 59 La Glace a trois faces (1927), 268, 283,
En rade (1927), 137, 266, 271, 283, 359, 291, 437, 446, 456-462, 457, 458, 460,
408-413, 410, 413, 414, 473, 587n 461, 463, 500, 504, 514, 597n, 598n; Le
L’Enfant de l'amour (1930), 62, 220 Lion des Mogols (1924), 24, 208-209, 208,
L’Enfant de Pans (1913), 71, 89, 95 210, 374, 446, 458, 584n; Mauprat
L’Enfant des Halles (1924), 23, 82 (1926), xv, 46, 148-150, 149, 421, 446,
L’Enfant du carnaval (1921), 20 463; Mor-Vran (1930), 272, 507; L’Or des
L’Enfant-Roi (1923), 23, 82 mers (1932), 138, 507; Le Pas de la mule
Entr’acte (1924), xiv, 46, 146, 186, 222, (1930), 270; Pasteur {1922), xv, 26, 245,
225, 254, 256, 260, 268, 269, 281, 283, 359; Photogemes (1924), 254, 258, 329,
284, 329, 377, 380-382, 383, 394, 395, 395; Sa Tete (1930), xiv, 62, 271, 283,
529, 591n 285; 6V2 X 11 (1927), 214, 262, 268,
Les Environs du Catre, 53 283, 285, 446, 448-456, 450, 454, 458,
Epardaud, Edmond, 229, 250 459, 460, 529, 584n, 59In; Le Tempestaire
L’Epervier (1924), 28, 43, 207, 213 (1947), 507
Epinay-sur-Seine (Eclair studio), 13, 18, 28, Epstein, Marie, xi, 33, 39, 127, 137, 148,
34, 63 157, 360, 366, 429, 448, 463, 584n,
Epstein, Jean, xi, xiv, xv, 24, 32-33, 37, 39, 587n, 592n, 593n, 599n; Arne d’enfants
46, 62, 69, 83-84, 114-116, 120, 123, (1928), 137; Itto (1934), 157; La Mater-
126, 127-129, 137, 138, 148, 167, 208, nelle (1933), 137, 587n; Peau de peche
214, 220, 244, 245, 248-249, 249, 250, (1929), 39, 136, 137
251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 258, 260, VEquipage (1928), 36, 202, 598n
261, 262, 264, 268, 269, 270, 272, 279, Ermolieff, Joseph, 19, 24, 29
282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 289, 290, 291, Ernst, Max, 269

649
 L'Esclave Blanche (1927), 213 lecran: opinions sur le cinema, 260, 286; La
INDEX
Esparbes, Georges d\ 162; Demi-Solde, 162 Glu (1927), 137, 553n; Les Grands
L'Esprit nouveau, 245 (1924), 23, 94, 104; La Maison du Maltais
Etievant, Henri, 77, 217; La Fille sauvage (1927), 156; Mandarin (1924), 23, 82-83,
(1922), 77; La Pocharde (1921), 77; Dz 57- 104; Mathias Sandorf (1921), 17, 41, 52,
z&j tropiques (1928), 217, 483 80; Les Miserahles (1925), 31, 47, 52,
L’Etoile de mer (1928), 268, 271, 475, 484 130-132, 131, 596n; Monte-Cnsto (1929),
Etoiles et fleurs de mer, 270 48, 52, 194-195, 194, 204; L’Occident
L'Europe galante, 456 (1928), 157, 158; Rouletabile chez les
Evremont, David, 115, 351 bohemiens (1922), 23, 81, 82
Excelsior, 242 La Fete espagnole (1920), xiv, 17, 19, 53, 92,
exhibition, French: cinema tax, national, 49- 92, 153, 243, 284, 306, 314, 315, 323,
50; cinemas, number of, 12, 50, 64; film 325, 456, 580n
rental contracts, 51-52; super-cinemas, Feu (1927), 120, 158
54-59 Le Feu, Journal d’un escouade, 296
Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, Paris (1925), Feu Mathias Pascal (1925), 32, 144-145,
30, 130, 180, 213, 256-257, 258, 260, 144, 187, 212, 283, 402, 415-421, 417,
274, 283, 284, 385, 388 420,' 451, 514, 517, 588n
Le Feu sacre (1920), 222
Fabris, 102 Feuillade, Fouis, 8, 13, 20, 22, 23, 31, 43,
F.A.C.S.E.A. (French-American Cultural 51, 52, 71, 73, 74-75, 77-79, 80, 81,
Services and Educational Aid), 53 In 82, 83, 94, 108, 114, 125, 138, 154,
Fait-Divers (1924), 26, 254, 260, 268, 329, 207, 221, 222, 224, 244, 247, 306; Bar-
394 rabas (1920), 20, 53, 78, 78, 79, 138,
Falconetti, Renee Jeanne, 198, 198, 199, 222; Belle Humeur series (1921-1922),
486, 488, 490, 492, 493, 493, 496 222; Bout-de-Zan series (1912-1916), 71,
Fantomas (1913-1914), 11, 71, 72, 73-74 221, 222; Les Deux Gamines (1921), 20,
Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge (1925), 26, 45, 78-79, 80; Fantomas (1913-1914), 11, 71,
145-146, 146, 256, 283 72, 73-74; La fille bien gardee (1924), 224;
Le Fascinateur, 241 Le Fils du flibustier (1922), 81; Le Gamin de
Fatton, Fridette, 235, 236 Pans (1923), 224;,Judex (1917), 14, 20,
Faure, Elie, 245, 252 39, 42, 74-75, 75, 81, 222; La Nouvelle
Faust (opera), 341 Mission de Judex (1918), 20, 74-75, 222;
La Faute d'Odette Marechal (1920), 41, 89 L’Orpheline (1921), 78, 83; Pansette
La Faute d'Orthographie (1919), 18 (1922), 78, 79, 81, 83, 126; Tih-Minh
Federation des cheminots, 330 (1919), 20, 51, 77-78, 77, 79, 138, 222;
Federation des cine-clubs, 264, 282 Les Vampires (1915-1916), 11, 39, 71, 72,
Felix, Genevieve, 167 73-74, 74, 75, 79, 242; Vendemiaire
La Femme de glace (scenario), 27, 384 (1919), 52, 94, 108, 114; La Vie drole se¬
La Femme de nulle part (1922), 25, 249, 250, nes (1913-1918), 221, 222; La Vie telle
254, 267, 283, 313, 322, 323-326, 346, qu’elle est series (1911-19B), 94
351, 426 Les Feuilles libres, 395
La Femme d'une nuit (1931), 63 Feyder, Jacques, xiv, xv, 11, 18-19, 20, 24,
La Femme infidele (1968), 351 25-26, 28, 29, 32, 33, 36, 37, 39, 41,
La Femme nue (1926), 35, 94, 213, 214 42, 44, 46, 51, 64, 76, 87, 90, 93, 104,
Feraudy, Jacques de, 111 108, 126-127, 132-136, 137, 138, 154,
Feraudy, Maurice de, 110, 123, 126, 231 156, 160, 183, 205, 216, 223, 232, 233,
Fernand, Rene, 26, 32, 34 234, 235, 255, 256, 258, 260, 264, 282,
Fernandel (Fernand Contandin), 238 283, 284, 285, 286, 359, 395, 408, 446,
Ferragus (1923), 123 456, 507; L’Atlantide (1921), 18-19, 20,
Ferte, Rene, 449, 434, 456, 437, 460 24, 25, 27, 28, 41, 42, 44, 51, 57, 154-
Fescourt, Henri, 17, 23, 25, 31, 34, 44, 156, 137, 159, 169, 207, 552n; Carmen
47, 48, 52, 64, 69, 80, 81, 82-83, 91, (1926), 132-134, 133, 154; Crainquebille
92, 93, 94, 102, 104, 110, 119, BO- (1923), 19, 26, 41, 42, 104, 123, 126-
132, 136, 139, 140, 151, 156, 157, 164, 127, 128, 129, 226, 258, 283, 368, 395,
171, 177, 195, 253, 260, 261, 262, 285, 5 5 2 n; La Faute d’orthographie (1919), 18;
286, 290, 306, 307, 447, 567n; Le Cin¬ Le GrandJeu (1934), 160, 359; Gnbiche
ema des ongines a nos jours, 261; L'Idee et (1926), 126, 129-130, 129, 216; L’Image

650
 (1926), xiv, 29, 39, 183, 256, 264, 283, Films Diamant, 18, 174 INDEX
284, 446-448, 447, 456, 59In; La Ker- Films Ermolieff, 19-20, 24, 41, 42, 44, 77,
messe Heroi'que (1935), 205; Les Nouveaux 152, 367
Messieurs (1929), 39, 232-234, 233; Le Films Leon Poirier, 25
Pied qui etreint (1916), 76; Fetes de femmes, Films Leonce Ferret, 34, 44
femmes de tete (1916), 87; Tberese Raquin Films Louis Nalpas, 17-18, 19, 25, 102
(1928), xiv, xv, 36, 134-136, 134, 135, Films Lucifer, 20
218, 284, 489; Visages d’enfants (1925), Films Luitz-Morat et Pierre Regnier, 44
26, 46, 104-108, 105, 106, 120, 183, Films Tristan Bernard, 25, 44
283, 285, 408 Le Fils du flibustier (1922), 81
Fieschi, Jean-Andre, 290, 384, 456 Les Fils du soleil (1924), 82, 158
Fibre (1921), 19, 25, 39, 123, 133, 249, La Fin du monde (1930), 62
254, 256, 265, 282, 283, 284, 313, 315- Finis terrae (1929), xv, 62, 137, 268, 283,
322, 316, 317, 318, 320, 323, 324, 325, 285, 500-507, 502, 503, 507, 508, 511,
342, 353, 359, 361, 362, 395, 402, 408, 513
409, 412, 413, 414, 426, 456, 475, 500, Firenzi, 181
580n First Avant-Garde, 279, 290
La Fille bien gardee (1924), 224 Fjord, Olaf, 193, 216
La file de Veau (1925), 26, 114, 235, 271, Flaubert, Gustave, 153, 360; Madame
367, 373-377, 374, 375, 423, 473, 529, Bovary, 341, 360
584n, 593n Fleg, Edmond, 139
La Fille sauvage (1922), 77 Flers, Robert de, 232
Le Film, 12, 18, 241-242, 273 Fleur de Pans (1915), 85
Film biblique, 160 Fleurs du mal, 342
Le Film Complet, 248 Florey, Robert, 62, 64, 247, 268, 271; Life
Film d’Art, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, and Death of a Hollywood Extra (1928),
19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 32, 33, 42, 45, 268; La Route est belle (1929), 62, 64;
70, 73, 80, 85, 89, 94, 123, 160, 162, Symphonie des grattes-ciels (1929), 271
166, 167, 174, 295, 341, 528 Flory, Vera, 231
film discourse conventions: diegesis, 577n; Foch, Marshal, 58
discourse, 577n; narration and representa¬ La Folie des vaillants (1925), 32, 150, 256,
tion, 293; narrative, 577n; narrative struc¬ 262, 283-284, 588n
ture, 294; referentiality, 292-293; rhetori¬ La Folie du Docteur Tube (1915), 295
cal figuring, 294, 577n; syntactical Folies-Bergere, 393
continuity, 293 Folies-Dramatique (cinema), 53
film genres: classification of, 69-71, 286; Fontan, Mme., 507
critical readings in, 544n Footit (clown), 316
Filma, 241 Ford, Charles, 93, 94, 114, 135, 150, 153,
Films Abel Gance, 18, 29, 33, 44, 111 171, 173, 179, 204, 210, 227, 313, 396,
Films Albatros, 24, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 39, 413, 514
42, 45, 62, 63, 82, 83, 126, 133, 143, Fordys (cinema circuit), 29
147, 152, 171, 174, 180, 182, 207, 208, Forest, Jean, 104, 105, 126, 126, 129, 129
224, 226, 227, 228, 231, 232, 233, 238, Forster, Maurice, 130, 175, 341
367, 415, 446, 458, 528 Fourel, M., 21
Films Aubert, 9, 10, 11, 17, 19, 20, 23- La Frangaise, 11
24, 25, 29, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 37, 39, France, Anatole, 126
40, 41, 42, 43, 44-45, 46, 48, 55, 58, France, Claude, 141, 152, 216
59, 61, 62-63, 82, 87, 125, 137, 150, Francis, Eve, 92, 92, 94, 153, 154, 252,
153, 154, 170, 174, 200, 213, 217, 224, 306, 307, 311, 312, 314, 316, 318, 322,
226, 227, 233, 238, 528 322, 323, 345, 346
Films Andre Hugon, 44 Franco-American Cinematographic Company,
Films Andre Legrand, 19, 20, 25, 44 16, 41
Films Armor, 45-46, 48, 507 Franco-Film, 34-35, 36, 63, 179, 180, 213
Films Braunberger-Richebe, 63, 64, 272 Franco-Film-Aubert, 63
Films de Baroncelli, 25, 45 Franju, Georges, 273, 313
Films de France series, 23, 25, 34, 44, 85, Frank, Nino, 262
130, 174 Frappe, Jean-Jose, 25, 197
Films D.-H. 11, 25 Frederix, Alphonse, 18

651
INDEX Les F rimes corses (1917), 97 rail (scenario), 18; La Roue (1922-1923),
Fromet, 507, 508 18, 21, 42, 52, 69, 90, 123-124, 124,
Frondaie, Pierre, 213, 449 208, 245, 253, 254, 258, 261, 282, 284,
La Fronde, 11 289, 326-339, 329, 330, 332, 333, 334,
Frou-frou (1924), 45 335, 338, 340, 344, 359, 360, 363, 364,
Fumee noire (1920), 20 366, 367, 369, 374, 380, 382, 384, 385,
388, 390, 393, 394, 396, 397, 425, 432,
Gabrio, Gabriel, 94, 130, 132 433, 435, 488, 500, 558n, 581n, 582n
Gaidaroff, 182 Gance, Marguerite, 196, 463, 466
Gaillard, Maurius-Fran^ois, 307 Gantillon, Simon, 257
Galerie d’Art et de la Grande Maison de Gardiens de phare (1929), 137, 500, 507-
Blanc, 187, 263 513, 508, 509, 512, 522
La Galerie des monstres (1924), 26, 254 Gamier, Robert Jules, 123, 141, 152
Galeries Lafayette, 53 Gastyne, Marco de, 34, 151, 156, 177,
Gallimard, 262 197, 198, 499; La Chatelaine du Liban
Gallois, Jean, 244 (1926), 34, 156; 1 neb'Allah (1922), 156;
Galop (1928), 270 Mon Coeur au ralenti (1928), 34; La Vie
Galtier-Boissiere, Jean, 122, 244, 305 merveilleuse de Jeanne d’Arc (1929), 34, 177,
The Game of Adam, 179 197-198, 198, 499
Le Gamin de Paris (1923), 224 Gaumont, xiv, 8, 9, 10, 11, 17, 18, 20,
Gance, Abel, xiv, xv, 11, 15, 18, 19, 26, 22, 23, 25, 26, 31, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41,
29-30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 39, 41, 47, 51, 43-44, 54, 60, 61, 62, 71, 73, 74, 77,
52, 62, 65, 69, 73, 87-90, 123-124, 78, 81, 82, 95, 104, 117, 123, 138,
138, 164, 177, 182, 183, 192, 195-196, 140, 141, 142, 152, 153, 174, 200, 220,
205, 208, 222, 228, 232, 235, 242, 243, 221, 222, 223, 253, 259, 315, 375, 487,
244, 248, 249, 254, 260, 261, 263, 264, 507, 527
267, 269, 270, 279, 282, 283, 284, 285, Gaumont, Leon, 8, 9, 13, 20, 22, 23, 33,
286, 287, 289, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 39, 43, 62, 89, 96, 98, 103, 124, 154,
300, 302, 303, 313, 314, 326, 327, 328, 254, 289, 307
329, 330, 331, 332, 336, 337, 339, 340, Gaumont-Franco-Film-Aubert, 63, 64, 272
351, 359, 374, 382, 384, 394, 395, 423, Gaumont-Metro-Goldwyn, 31, 44, 48
429, 430, 431, 432, 433, 433, 434, 435, Gaumont-Palace (cinema), 8, 13, 19, 53,
438, 445, 486, 513, 515, 578n, 581n, 54-55, 56, 58, 71, 86, 154, 306, 326
589n, 590n; Au secours! (1923), 222; Au- Gautier, Theophile, 56In
tour de Napoleon (1927), 432; Barberousse Les Gaz mortals (1916), 73
(1916), 73; Beethoven (1937), 590n; Bona¬ La Gazette des sept arts, 245, 252
parte et la revolution (1971), 429; Danses Gemier, Firmin, 87
(1928), 270; La Dixieme Symphonie (1918), Genette, Gerard, 293
18, 42, 89-90, 295, 297; Le Droit de la Genevieve (1923), 93, 103, 103-104
vie (1917), 87, 88, 89; Ecce Homo (sce¬ Genevois, Simone, 197, 198
nario), 18; La fin du monde (1930), 62; La Genina, Augusto, 36, 64, 213, 217; L’Es-
Folie du Docteur Tube {1915), 295; Galop clave blanche (1927), 213; Prix de beaute
(1928), 270; Les Gaz mortals (1916), 73; (1929), 217; Quartier Latin (1929), 217
]Accuse (1919), xv, 18, 41, 42, 51, 52, Georges Petit (company), 11, 45
90, 164, 202, 243, 267, 285, 295-302, Gerald, Jim, 146, 147, 227, 228, 229, 231
296, 299, 300, 301, 303, 304, 305, 306, Geraldy, Paul, 414
313, 314, 332, 337, 579n, 590n; JA ccuse Germinal, 95
(1937), 205; Marine (1928), 270; Mater Gert, Valeska, 210
Dolorosa (1917), 18, 87-89, 88, 90, 92, Gibory, Alphonse, 102, 315, 323, 345
164, 242, 283, 295, 297, 337, 547n; G«de, Andre, 266, 271
Napoleon (1927), xiv, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, Gigolette (1921), 21, 77
47, 52, 69, 177, 183, 192, 195-196, Gilles, Pierre, 82 '
196, 197, 198, 204, 228, 232, 235, 263, Gilson, Paul, 262
267, 269, 284, 286, 327, 423, 428-445, Girard, E. (company), 45
431, 433, 439, 440, 442, 443, 444, 446, La Glace a trois faces (1927), 268, 283, 291,
483, 486, 489, 491, 512, 513, 522, 523, 437, 446, 456-462, 457, 458, 460, 461,
j>25, 529, 574n, 589n, 596n; Napoleon 463, 500, 504, 514, 597n, 598n
Bonaparte (1934), 205, 429; La Rose du Gleizes, Maurice, 34, 216; La Madone des

652
 sleepings (1928), 34, 216 Harle, Paul-Auguste, 273 INDEX
Glory, Mary, 195, 219, 514, 518 Harmonies de Pans (1929), 270
La Glu (1927), 136, 553n Harry (company), 11, 25
Gorel, Michel, 271; Bateaux parisiens (1929), Hart, Diana, 159
271 Haudiquet, Philippe, 504
Gossette (1923), 82, 83 Haziza, Fabian, 108
Gounod, Charles, 341; Faust, 341 Helbling, Jeanne, 235, 456
Gounouilhou-Bourrageas families, 21, 22-23 Heloise et Abelard, 594n
G.P.C. (Grandes Productions Cinematogra- Henry, Pierre, 7, 19, 246, 250, 261
phiques), 45 Heriat, Philippe, 27, 140, 141, 142, 196,
Grandais, Suzanne, 14, 76, 77, 79 197, 207, 249, 307, 311, 345, 384, 388,
Le GrandJeu (1934), 160, 359 389, 403, 403, 408, 409, 410, 410, 411,
La Grande Illusion (1937), 205, 593n 412, 586n, 587n
Les Grands (1924), 23, 94, 104 Heribel, Renee, 217
Les Grands Films, 248 Herriot, Edouard, 5, 39, 42, 180
Grands Films Independents, 26 Herriot decree (1928), 43, 47-48, 180
Grand-Theatre d’Antibes (cinema), 45 Herve, Jean, 110,416
Gravone, Gabriel de, 100, 101, 123, 124, Hervieu, Paul, 87, 340, 548n
182, 326 Hervil, Rene, xiv, 10, 19, 20, 24, 33, 41,
Gremillon, Jean, xiv, 32, 48, 120, 137, 45, 51, 86, 94, 98, 110, 125, 156, 158,
138, 214, 220, 258, 266, 272, 279, 282, 217, 227, 285; LAmi Fritz (1920), 110;
359, 421, 422, 423, 450, 507, 508; Gar¬ Blanchette (1921), 19, 94, 110; Bouclette
dens de phare (1929), 137, 500, 507-513, (1918), 14, 41, 89; Le Crime de Lord Sa-
508, 509, 512, 522; La Petite Lise (1930), vilie (1922), 19; Meres franfaises (1917),
359; Maldone (1928), 32, 48, 214, 286, 10, 86; Minuit . . . Place Pigalle (1928),
415, 421-428, 422, 424, 427, 428, 508, 217; Paris (1924), xiv, 45, 125, 125\ Le
511, 522, 529; Photogenie mecanique Prince jean (1927), 158; Sarati-le-Ternble
(1925), 258; Four au large (1927), xiv, (1923), 24, 156; Le Secret de Polichinelle
137, 266, 267, 270, 282 (1923), 45; Le Torrent (1918), 98
Greville, Edmond T., 256 Hessling, Catherine, 114, 200, 201, 215,
Grey, Sylviane, 91 216, 373, 374, 375, 375, 408, 409, 411,
Gnbichei 1926), 126, 129-130, 129, 216 412, 413, 472, 472, 473, 474, 474,
Grillet, Gustave, 114 593n
Grinieff, Jacques, 25, 30, 33, 35, 37, 65, Une Heure au cocktail bar (1929), 216
182 Heuze, Andre (actor), 108
Gromaire, Marcel, 244, 245, 252, 292, 329 Heuze, Andre (journalist, scriptwriter), 154
Guerin, 73, 80 Heymann, Claude, 271, 408; Vie heureuse
Guerin, Raymond, 200, 201 (1929), 271
Guggenheim, Eugene, 8 Hillel-Erlanger, Irene, 11, 285
Guichard, Paul, 83, 116, 359, 377, 413, Himmel, Andre, 16
416 Hippodrome Theater, see Gaumont-Palace
Guide, Paul, 185 Hire, Jean de la, 383
Guilbert, Yvette, 514 L’Hirondelle et la mesange (1921, 1983), 114,
Guingand, Pierre de, 202, 217 55 In
Guissart, Rene, 220; Tu seras duchesse (1931), His to ire du cinema, xii
220 Histoire du cinematographe, 260
Guitry, Lucien, 126 Histoire generale du cinema, xii
Guy, Alice, 8 L'Homme a I'Hispano (1927), 213-214
Guy, Edmonde, 150 L'Homme du large (1920), 20, 39, 98-100,
Gynt, Emmy, 414 99, 119, 305-306, 305, 313
Gys, Robert, 143, 146, 147 L'Homme qui vendait son ame au diable (1921),
41
Hamman, Joe, 11 Honegger, Arthur, 245, 252, 328, 421,
Hamp, Pierre, 123, 125, 256, 258, 328, 430, 582n, 589n
329; Le Rail, 124, 329 L'Horloge (1924), 257, 283, 586n
Hara-Kiri (1928), 48, 215 Hot, Pierre, 114, 351
Harald, Mary, 77 Hotel-de-ville (cinema), 54
Harbacher, 201 Houry, Henry, 210

653
INDEX Houyez, Pierrette, 104 314, 332, 337, 579n, 590n
Hubert, Rene, 179 J Accuse (1937), 205
Hubert, Robert, 431 Jacobini, Maria, 157
Hugnet, Georges, 270; La Perk (1929), 270, Jacque, Christian, 217
271 Jacques Haik (company), 11, 34, 63
Hugo, Jean, 486 Jacques Landauze (1920), 90
Hugo, Valentine, 486 Jaeger-Schmidt, Andre, 158
Hugo, Victor, 95, 96, 98, 130, 328, 339, J’ai tue (1924), 29
432, 438 Le Jardin sur I'Orient, 27
Hugon, Andre, 62, 90, 101, 156, 216; Jarville, Robert de, 256, 263, 264
Chignon d'or (1915), 85; Diamant noir Jasset, Victorin, 71, 93', Au pays des tenebras
(1921), 101; Fleur de Pans (1915), 85; (1912), 95; Les Batailles de la vie series,
Jacques Landauze (1920), 90; La Marche 95; Nick Winter, Le Roi des Detectives
nuptiale (1929), 216; Notre Dame d'amour (1908), 71; Zigomar (1911), 71; Zigomar
(1922), 101; Le Roi de Camargue (1921), contre Nick Winter (1912), 71; Zigomar,
101; Les Trois Masques (1929), 62; Yas- Peau d'anguille (1913), 71
mina (1926), 156 Jaubert, Maurice, 252, 421
Hugon, Ariane, 90 Jean Chouan (1926), 82
L’Humanite, 244, 258, 263 Jean de la lune (1932), 238
Hurel, Robert, 34, 51, 62-63, 179 Jean-Mane, 501, 303, 504, 505, 506
Hypergonar, 445-46, 59In Jeanne, Rene, 7, 40, 86, 94, 100, 114,
152, 153, 171, 173, 179, 180, 204, 227,
Icart, Roger, 53 In, 58 In, 582n 244, 247, 250, 252, 261, 396, 514
Ideal et Realite (art circle), 252 Jeanne Dore (1915), 83, 86
Ideal-Sonore sound system, 64 Jehanne, Edith, 190, 193
L'Idee et I'ecran: opinions sur le cinema, 260, La Jetee (1962), 592n
286 Le Jeunesse de Rocambole (1913), 95
Illustration, 209 Jeunesse patriote, 269
L'Image (1926), xiv, 29, 39, 183, 256, 264, Jeux des refkts et de la vitesse (1925), 227,
283, 284, 446-448, 447, 456, 591n 254, 268, 329, 394
Imperial Cinema, 54, 59, 182, 185, 202, Jim la Houlette, roi des voleurs (1926), 226,
203 596n
Impressionism/Impressionist, 96, 97, 102, Jocelyn (1922), xv, 20, 79, 93, 102-103,
109, 200, 279-281, 287, 288, 307, 575n 124, 139, 259, 259, 283
Inch'Allah (1922), 156 Johnson, Pauline, 110
L’lnfante a la rose (1921), 153 Jorge, Paul, 131
L'Information, 244 Joseph Balsamo, 181
UInhumaine (1924), 28, 43, 117, 142-143, Joube, Romauld, 98, 166, 175, 297, 300
144, 145, 206, 207, 208, 208, 212, 267, Joueur d'echecs (1927), xiv, 32, 33, 48, 190-
283, 290, 367, 380, 382, 383-394, 387, 193, 191, 192, 193, 204, 483, 499
389, 391, 392, 394, 402, 415, 416, 420, Jourdain, Francis, 265, 315
425, 451, 456, 458, 500, 514, 525, Jourdain, Franz, 252
586n, 598n Le Journal, 82, 243, 244
Llnondation (1924), 26, 111, 267, 283, Le Journal du Cine-Club, 53, 246, 247, 248,
340, 344-351, 346, 349, 408, 458 251, 253
L'Instinct, 87 Judex (1917), 14, 20, 39, 42, 74-75, 73,
Interfdm, 45 81, 222
L'lntransigeant, 244 Jugo, Jenny, 185
L’Invitation au voyage (1927), 32, 150, 285, Le Juif errant (1926), 594n
408, 413-415, 456, 476, 500, 588n Jupiter (Societe Fran^aise des Films Artis-
Iribe, Marie-Louise, 32, 48, 154, 215; tiques), 19, 20
Hara-Kiri (1928), 48, 215 Juvenet, Pierre, 522
Llronie du destin (1924), 254, 283, 395
Itto (1934), 157 Kamenka, Alexandre, 24, 23, 29, 33, 37,
45, 62, 65, 182, 228, 273, 367, 528
JAccuse (1919), xv, 18, 41, 42, 51, 52, 90, Karenne, Diana, 185
164, 202, 243, 267, 285, 295-302, 296, Karl, Roger, 98, 99, 212, 323, 422
299, 300, 301, 303, 304, 305, 306, 313, Kaufman, Boris, 271; Aujourd'hui (1929), 271

654
Kean (1924), 24, 43, 171-174, 172, 174, Laran, Jean, 263 INDEX
204, 210, 258, 283, 374, 423 Latigny, 26
Kefer, Pierre, 148 Laurent, Jeanne-Marie, 134, 133, 204
Kellerman, Fred, 207, 384 Le Bargy, Charles, 100, 100, 180
Kemm, Jean, 23, 82; L’Enfant-Roi (1923), Le Corbusier (Edouard Jeanneret-Gris), 245
23, 82; Vidocq (1923), 23, 82 Le Somptier, Rene, xv, 17, 20, 24, 41, 51,
La Kermesse beroique (1935), 205 82, 111, 123, 139-140, 151, 158, 167,
Kessel, Joseph, 202 213, 252, 285; La Bete traquee (1923), 24,
Kirsanoff, Dmitri, 46, 137, 138, 156, 254, III-, La Croisade (1920), 123, 202; La
258, 263, 264, 270, 279, 283, 284, 285, Dame de Monsoreau (1923), xv, 24, 167;
286, 348, 369, 395, 396, 408, 435, 529; Les Fils du soleil (1924), 82, 158; La Mon-
Brumes d'automne (1928), 270, 271; L'lronie tee vers L’Acropole (1920), 20, 139-140; Le
du destin (1924), 254, 283, 395; Menil- P’tit Parigot (1926), 213; La Sultane de I’a-
montant (1926), 137, 258, 263, 266, 283, mour (1919), xv, 17, 18, 41, 151-152,
284, 348, 369, 395-402, 398-399, 400, 155, 223
401, 403, 404, 435, 456, 460, 473, 500, Lefevre, Rene, 238
587n; Sables (1927), 156 La Legende de Soeur Beatrix (1923), 25, 45
Kistemaecker, Henri, 87, 89, 157, 194; Leger, Charles, 244, 236, 256-257, 264,
L’Inst met, 87 267, 272, 274, 581n
Koenigsmark (1923), 28, 70, 168, 169, 169- Leger, Fernand, 142, 207, 245, 252, 254,
171, 174, 177, 202, 204, 206, 208 256, 258, 268, 299, 329, 335, 385, 388,
Koenigsmark (1935), 205 389, 394-395; Ballet Mecamque (1924),
Kolb, Therese, IK) 254, 256, 258, 268, 281, 329, 394-395,
Koline, Nicolas, 36, 126, 144, 152, 153, 591n
172, 172, 196, 210, 223, 367, 369, 370, Leglise, Paul, 38-39
370, 431 Legrand, Andre, 19, 26, 92
Kottula, Joseph, 501 Lekain, Tony, 61
Koubitsky, Alexandre, 196, 431 Lelouch, Claude, 429
Kovanko, Natalie, 152, 182 Lemaitre, Frederick, 83, 126, 171
Krauss, Henry, 89, 95, 108, 114, 196, Lenauer, Jean, 219, 262, 264
224, 305, 431; Les Trots Masques (1921), Lenkeffy, lea de, 215
89 Leprince, Rene, 21, 23, 51, 81, 82, 86, 95,
Kruger, Jules, 171, 181, 19,3 ( 196, 210, 194; L’Empereur des pauvres (1922), 21, 22,
431, 433, 433, 522, 324 51, 81; L’Enfant des Halles (1924), 23, 82;
Kuhn, Francis-Byron, 303 La Pnncesse Masha (1927), 59, 194; Scenes
de la vie cruelle series, 95
Labiche, Eugene, 94, 224, 228, 231 Leprohon, Pierre, 83, 135, 353, 360, 450,
Laboratoire du Vieux-Colombier, 270 463, 505, 597n
Lacassin, Francis, 73, 77, 78, 79, 81, 82- Lerch, Louis, 133
83, 94, 108, 131, 220, 222 Lerner, 141
Lacombe, Georges, 268, 271, 421, 587n; La Leroux, Gaston, 82
Zone (1928), 268, 271, 587n, 599n Lestringuez, Pierre, 215, 373
Lafitte brothers, 8 Letort, Jean, 99
La Fouchardiere, Georges de, 224, 227 Levesque, Marcel, 75, 76, 151, 221, 222,
Lagrange, Louise, 213, 214, 216 223, 226
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 102, 103, 139 Levinsky Studio, Joinville-le-pont, 23, 24,
Lambert, Claude, 271; Void Paris, Voict 63, 83, 170, 175, 190, 206
Marseille (1929), 271 Levinson, Andre, 261, 263
Lamy, Charles, 166, 463 L’Herbier, Marcel, xiv, xv, 11, 20, 22, 26-
Landau, R., 271; Rythmes d’une cathedrale 27, 28, 32, 33, 36, 39, 41, 43, 58, 61,
(1929), 271 62, 63, 65, 69, 79, 81, 89, 94, 98-99,
Landry, Lionel, 248, 252, 255, 256, 258, 117, 130, 138, 140-142, 144-145, 150,
261, 306 153-154, 187, 206, 207, 212, 212, 213,
Lang, Andre, 23, 114, 123, 166 217, 218-219, 220, 228, 242, 243, 249,
Langlois, Henri, xi, xiii, 273, 280, 287, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 260,
289, 295, 305, 306, 463, 531n, 593n 261, 263, 264, 266, 267, 268, 270, 272,
Le Lanterne magique, 264 279, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 289,
Lapierre, Marcel, 28, 38, 42, 60, 135 290, 293, 295, 302, 303, 305, 306, 313,

655
INDEX L’Herbier, Marcel (cont.) Livingston, Harold, 373, 374
314, 326, 331, 332, 340, 367, 379, 380, Lo Turco, Fortunio, 101
382, 383, 384, 385, 389, 390, 391, 394, Lochakoff, Ivan, 35, 36, 152-153, 173,
395, 402, 415, 416, 435, 513, 514, 515, 174, 181, 182, 183, 187, 194, 207, 208,
516, 517, 521, 522, 525, 529, 579n, 210, 225, 368, 431
580n, 58 In, 586n, 588n, 597n, 598n; Lods, Jean, 265, 266, 271; Aujourd'hui
L’Argent (1929), 39, 61, 69, 130, 217, (1929), 271
218-219, 218, 268, 286, 291, 513-526, Loreau, Georges, 46, 63
516, 518, 520, 522, 524, 529, 581n, Lorsay, Rene, 102
597n; Le Carnaval des rentes (1920), 99, Lorys, Denise, 93, 137, 313
140, 586n; Le Diable au coeur (1928), 213; Loti, Pierre, 102, 119-120
Don Juan et Faust (1923), 22, 39, 42, Lucas, Georges, 99, 141, 193, 196, 307,
140, 141-142, 154, 282, 331, 385, 315, 323, 431, 464
586n; El Dorado (1921), xv, 20, 69, 79, Luchaire, 255
94, 153, 282, 284, 305, 306-313, 307, Lucien, Marcel, 199
309, 311, 312, 313, 324, 326, 331, 332, Luitz-Morat, xiv, 18, 23, 82, 143, 154,
360, 365, 385, 388, 415, 435, 579n; 156, 216; Les Cinq Gentlemen maudits
L’Enfant de l'amour (1930), 62, 220; La (1919); 154; La Cite foudroyee (1924), xiv,
Femme d’une nuit (1931), 63; Feu Mathias 23, 42, 143, 144, 145; Jean Chouan
Pascal (1925), 32, 144-145, 144, 187, (1926), 82; Le Juif errant (1926), 594n; Le
212, 283, 402, 415-421, 417, 420, 451, Sang d'Allah (1922), 156; Surcouf (1925),
514, 517, 588n; L’Homme du large (1920), 23, 82, 594n; La Vierge folle (1929), 216
20, 39, 98-100, 99, 119, 305-306, 305, Lumiere, Louis and Auguste, 7, 61, 253,
313; L'lnhumaine (1924), 27, 28, 43, 118, 254; L'Arnvee du train (1896), 61; Sortie
142-143, 144, 145, 206, 207, 208, 208, des Usines Lumiere (1896), 61
212, 267, 283, 290, 367, 380, 382, 383- Lumieres et ombres (1929), 270
394, 387, 389, 391, 392, 394, 402, 415, Lumina films, 11
416, 420, 425, 451, 456, 458, 500, 514, Lutece films, 28, 36, 48
525, 586n, 598n; Le Mystere de la chambre Lutetia-Fournier (cinema circuit), 23, 58,
jaune (1930), 220; Nuit de princes (1929), 59, 62-63, 82
62; Le Parfum de la dame en non (1931), Lutetia-Wagram (cinema), 17, 58
150; Promethee . . . Banquier (1922), 252; Lynn, Emmy, 87, 88, 89, 157, 212, 216
Resurrection, 28, 43, 256, 267, 402; Rose- Le Lys de la vie (1920), 139
Franee (1919), 20, 41, 99, 140, 243, Le Lys Rouge (1920), 20
295, 302-305, 303, 306, 307, 313, 314,
517; Le Vertige (1926), 94, 212-213, 212, Mac Orlan, Pierre, 27, 28, 256, 258, 383,
214; Villa Destin (1921), 81 384, 385; La Cavaliere d’Elsa, 27; La
Librairie Felix Alcan, 261 Femme de glace, 27, 384
Lievin, Raphael, 153 Machin, Alfred, 10
Liguoro, Rina de, 185 La Machine a ref aire la vie (1924), 26
Li-Hang le cruel (1920), 20, 39 Madame Bovary, 341, 360
Linder, Max, 9, 10, 14, 18, 26, 29, 42, 57, Madame Recamier (1928), 180
70, 220-221, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, Madame Sans-Gene (1925), xiv, 30-31, 43,
267; Le Duel de Max (1913), 53; Max se¬ 133, 179-180, 181, 204
ries, 220; Max, Victime du quinquina Maddie, Ginette, 217, 345, 349
(1911), 220-221; The Three-Must-Get- Madeleine-Cinema, 44, 51-52, 54, 56, 57,
Theres (1922), 223, 267 58, 61, 64, 117, 145, 154, 207, 213,
Lion, Roger, 29, 216, 226, 253; Le Chasseur 263, 266, 383
de Chez Maxim's (1927), 226; Une heure au Mile, de la Seigliere (1921), 166
cocktail bar (1929), 216; J’ai tue (1924), La Mandone des sleepings (1928), 34, 216
29; Jim la Houlette, roi des voleurs (1926), Magnier, Pierre, 326
226, 596n Maia, Marise, 229
Le Lion des Mogols (1924), 24, 208-209, 208, Le Main (1920), 19
210, 374, 446, 458, 584n La Maison du Maltais (1927), 156
Lissenko, Natalie, 128, 128, 143, 172, 225, La Maison du Mystere (1922), 20, 77, 83
367, 369, 370, 370, 372, 408, 409, 410, La Maison vide (1921), 90-91
410, 411, 412 Maitre, Adrien, 247
Litterature, 244 Maldone (1928), 32, 48, 214, 286, 415,

656
 421-428, 422, 424, 427, 428, 508, 511, Mathias Sandorf (1921), 17, 41, 52, 80 INDEX
522, 529 Mathot, Leon, 34, 80, 80, 87, 110, 122,
Le Male mort de Canart (1929), 271 122, 156, 162, 351, 352, 353, 353, 355,
Malencontre (1920), 20 360, 366
Mallet-Stevens, Robert, 90-91, 142, 166, Le Matin, 10, 23, 58, 72, 82, 244, 519,
174, 175, 178, 178, 181, 190, 196, 199, 598n
207, 212, 212, 245, 252, 254, 385, 387, Matras, Christian, 421
559n Mauclaire, Jean, 269, 270, 272
Malleville, Marie-Anne, 413 Maudru, Charles, 20, 24, 123; L’Assomoir
Malraux, Andre, 429 (1920), 123; Le Crime d’une sainte (1924),
Maman Colibn (1929), 94, 157 45; Le Lys rouge (1920), 20; Les Premieres
Mam’zelle Nitouche (1931), 238 Armes de Rocambole (1924), 45
Man Ray, 268, 269, 270, 271, 381, 475, Maupassant, Guy de, 94, 215, 224
484, 529; Emak Bakia (1927), 268, 271; Mauprat (1926), xv, 46, 148-150, 149, 421,
L’Etoile de mer (1928), 268, 271, 475, 446, 463
484; Les Mysteres du chateau du De (1929), Maurice, Georges, 10
269, 270, 271 Maurois, Andre, 256
Mandarin (1924), 23, 82-83, 104 Le Mauvais Garmon (1922), 586n
Manes, Gina, 134, 133, 156, 167, 196, Max, Edouard de, 81, 110, 165
217, 351, 360, 362, 366, 400, 431, 443 Max series, 220
Manuel, Jacques, 212 Max, victime du quinquina (1911), 220-221
Mappemonde films, 45, 46 Maxudian, 196, 209, 548n
maquette plastique, 187, 188, 194 Mazza, Desdemona, 101
Le Marchand de plaisir (1923), 26, 43, 142 Meerson, Lazare, 83, 129, 130, 133, 148,
Marche des machines (1928), 270, 271 174, 181, 219, 228, 231, 233, 416, 320,
La Marche nuptiale (1929), 216 521
Marcoux, Vanni, 140, 141, 175 Meerson, Mary, xi
Mare, Rolf de, 26, 32, 58, 146, 245, 269, Mege, Henri, 22-23
270, 381 Melchior, Georges, 154, 133
Marchal, Arlette, 156, 230, 447, 447 Melies, Georges, 7, 19, 70, 138, 142, 145,
Mareuil, Simone, 137, 482, 482, 483, 484, 147, 148, 179, 272, 295, 303, 377, 467
485, 483 Meller, Raquel, 28, 60, 133, 133-134, 167-
Marguenet, Jane, 143 168, 170, 171, 209
Le Manage de Mademoiselle Beulemans (1927), Melovox sound system, 64
136 Mendaille, Daniel, 143, 202, 204
Mariaud, Maurice, 17, 162; Tristan et Yseut Menessier, Henri, 169, 170, 206
(1921), 17, 162 Menilmontant (1926), 137, 258, 263, 266,
Marie, Michel, 481 283, 284, 348, 369, 395-402, 398-399,
Manelle Thibaut, 111 400, 401, 403, 404, 435, 456, 460, 473,
Marine (1928), 270 500, 587n
Marius (1931), 65 Mercanton, Louis, 8, 10, 14, 15, 18, 24,
Marker, Chris, 592n; La Jetee (1962), 592n 41, 51, 64, 86, 89, 98, 100-101, 110,
Marodon, Pierre, xiv, 20, 153; Salammbo 156, 161, 165, 285; L’Appel du sang
(1925), xiv, 29, 33, 36, 58, 69, 150, (1920), 98, 100-101, 100- Bouclette
153 (1918), 14, 41, 89; Jeanne Dore (1915),
Marquitta (1927), xiv, 32, 215, 219 83, 86; Meres frangaises (1917), 10, 86;
Marrane, Georges, 265 Miarka (1920), 41, 101; Phroso (1922),
Marsan, Charles, 123 24, 41; Queen Elizabeth (1912), 15, 161;
La Marseillaise (1938), 205 Sarati-le-Terrible (1923), 24, 156; Le Tor¬
Martinelli, 165, 163, 378 rent (1918), 98; Venus (1929), 156
Mary, Jules, 77, 383 Mercier, Armand, 147; LAventure amoureuse
Maryanne, 234 de Pierre Vignal, 147
Maryse (1917), 86-87, 88 Mercure de France, 244, 245, 261
Masson, Andre, 269 Mere, Charles, 62, 87, 89, 158, 212
Mater Dolorosa (1917), 18, 87-89, 88, 90, Merelle, Claude, 101, 165
92, 164, 242, 283, 295, 297, 337, 547n Meres francaises (1917), 10, 86
La Maternelle (1933), 137, 587n Merimee, Prosper, 132
Mathe, Edouard, 71, 74, 76, 77, 108 Merly, Jean de, 46, 48

657
INDEX Merry, Jan de, 243 Morin, Amadee, 140, 147, 167
metteur-en-scene, 243, 284-285 Morlay, Gaby, 163, 226, 233, 233, 548n
Metz, Christian, 529 Morlhon, Camille, 11, 86, 95; Maryse
Miarka (1920), 41, 101 (1917), 86-87, 88; Scenes de la vie cruelle
Michel, Gaston, 77, 78 series, 95
Michel Strogoff (1926), xiv, 29, 31, 182-185, La Mort du soleil (1922), xiv, 19, 92-93, 93,
183, 184, 204 313, 340
Michel Strogoff (1937), 205 Mor-Vran (1930), 272, 507
Michelet, Jules, 175 Mosjoukine, Ivan, 20, 26, 29, 33, 35, 38,
Mihalesco, 514, 516, 524 77, 81, 142, 143-145, 144, 171, 172,
Milhaud, Darius, 385, 388, 390, 391, 421 173, 173, 182, 183, 185, 187, 207, 208,
Les Milles et une Nuits (1922), 20, 152 224, 225, 226, 254, 281, 285, 286, 367,
Millet, Jean-Frangois, 97, 104, 109 368, 369, 37-0, 370, 371, 372, 374, 377,
Le Million (1931), 238 415, 416, 417, 420, 435; Le Brasier ar¬
Milo, 110 dent (1923), 26, 42, 81, 143-144, 206,
Milowanoff, Sandra, 79, 79, 111, 119, 119, 207, 208, 225, 254, 282, 285, 367-373,
131, 145, 146, 147, 148 370-371, 372, 374, 375, 376, 377, 385,
Mimosa la derniere grisette (1906), 260 397, 415, 418, 435, 458, 529; L’Enfant
Minuit . . . Place Pigalle (1928), 217 du carnaval (1921), 20
Le Miracle des loups (1924), xiv, 25, 30, 32, Moulin Rouge (1928), 36
48, 58, 119, 174, 175-179, 176, 178, Moulin-Rouge Cinema, 64
190, 191, 197, 198, 204, 383, 499, Moussinac, Leon, 28, 30, 48, 104, 118,
590n 134, 135, 136, 139, 146, 170, 196, 234,
Les Miserables (1912), 95, 161 242, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 250, 251,
Les Miserahles (1925), 31, 47, 52, 130-132, 252, 253, 253, 254, 255, 256, 258, 260,
131, 596n 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 272-
Missing Husbands, see L’Atlantide 273, 274, 282, 284, 289, 293, 316, 317,
Missirio, Genica, 128 328, 329, 360, 368, 432, 437, 438, 445,
Mistinguett, 85 486, 487, 488; Naissance du cinema (1925),
Mitry, Jean, xii, 40, 63, 86, 88, 119, 122, 260, 284; Panoramique du cinema (1929),
131, 135, 146, 154, 231, 245, 246, 249, 261, 272, 284
256, 272, 275, 286, 287, 289, 295, 328, Mouzey-Eon, Andre, 234
435, 438, 443, 448, 514, 590n, 591n, Mundus-film, 11
595n; Histoire du cinema, xii Mundviller, J.-P., 171, 190, 196, 208,
Moderates (political party), 5 369, 431
Modernism/Modernist, 280, 281, 290, 299, Musee Galliera, 254-255, 256, 260, 273-
338 274, 340, 342
Modot, Gaston, 92, 111, 151, 156, 175, musical scores, xiv, 153, 175, 307, 316,
195, 197, 252, 316 328, 381, 385, 388, 390, 391, 421, 430,
Mogodor-Palace (cinema), 58, 119, 208 582n, 589n, 592n
Mon-Cine, 6, 81, 93-94, 247 Musidora, 11, 71, 74, 76, 153, 156, 242;
Mon Coeur au ralenti (1928), 34 Pour Don Carlos (1921), 153; La Vagabonde
Monat-film, 11 (1917), 242
Le Monde nouveau, 245 Myrga, Mile., 103, 103, 104, 117, 259,
Monnier, Jackie, 159, 199 268, 283
Monte-Carlo films, 20 Le Mystere de la chambre jaune (1930), 220
Monte-Cnsto (1929), 48, 52, 194-195, 194, Le Mystere de la Tour Eiffel (1927), 227
204 Les Mysteres de Paris, 72
La Montee vers I’Acropole (1920), 20, 139-140 Les Mysteres de Pans (1922), 45, 81
Montel, Blanche, 115 Les Mysteres du chateau du De (1929), 269,
Montjoie!, 244 270, 271
Montparnasse (1929), 271
Montreuil (Pathe studio, then Ermolieff and Nadejdine, Serge, 24; Le Chiffonnier de Paris
Albatros), 8, 15, 19, 62, 173, 207 (1924), 24, 126
Moran, Lois, 416 Nadi, Aldo, 199
Morand, Paul, 456; l’Europe galante (1922), Naissance du cinema, 260, 284
456 Nalpas, Alex, 150
Morgan la sirene (1927), 34 Nalpas, Louis, 11, 12, 17, 17-18, 23, 25,

658
 26, 34, 41, 62, 63, 65, 80, 82, 151-152, L’Oeil de Paris (cinema), 268, 269, 270, INDEX
153, 162, 194, 195, 223, 249, 252, 289, 283, 500, 507
295, 528, 594n Old Bill of Paris, see Crainquebille
Nalpas, Marius, 431 Olivier, Paul, 145, 229
Nana (1926), 32, 33, 52, 130, 200-202, L 'Ombre dechiree (1921), 139
201, 210, 234; 286, 529, 56ln L’Ombre du peche (1922), 20, 111
Napierkowska, Stacia, 74, 154, 755, 156 Les Ombres qui passent (1924), 24, 224-225
Napoleon (1927), xiv, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, Omnia-Pathe/Omnia-Palace (cinema), 54,
47, 52, 69, 177, 183, 192, 195-196, 55, 58, 223, 227, 228, 242, 421
196, 197, 198, 204, 228, 232, 235, 263, Oms, Marcel, 123, 139, 302, 558n
267, 269, 284, 286, 327, 423, 428-445, On purge Bebe (1931), 238
431, 433, 439, 440, 442-444, 446, 483, On Tourne (1928), 157, 262, 581n
486, 489, 491, 512, 513, 522, 523, 525, Onesime series (1912-1914), 71, 221, 295
529, 574n, 589n, 596n Onesime horloger (1912), 221-222, 225
Napoleon Bonaparte (1934), 205, 429 Opera (Paris), 25, 35, 58, 153, 175, 180,
Narayana (1920), 41, 152, 155 195, 197, 202, 430
Natan, Bernard, 34-35, 35, 51, 62-63, 156, Les Oppnmes (1923), xiv, 28, 43, 46, 70,
179, 197, 214 167-168, 171, 204, 258, 283
National Assembly/Chamber of Deputies, 5, L’Or des mers (1932), 138, 507
38, 39, 41, 43, 49-50, 62, 157, 163, Orazi, Manuel, 154, 755
233 L’Ordonnance (1921), 20, 41
Navarre, Rene, 11, 14, 17-18, 23, 71, 77, Orleans, Charles d’, 140, 304
82, 117 L'Orpheline (1921), 78, 83
Nay, Pierre, 204 Osso, Adolphe, 16-17, 18, 28, 30, 41, 43,
Nee, Louis, 235, 501 59, 63
Nine (1924), 25, 110, 111 Oswald, Richard, 36, 181; Cagliostro (1929),
Neo-film, 33, 34, 48, 63, 271, 408 36, 180-181
The New Enchantment, see L'lnhumarne Oudart, Felix, 235
New Wave, 33, 65, 235, 275, 529 Ozenfant, Amedee, 245
Nick Carter series (1908-1910), 11
Nick Winter, Le Roi des detectives (1908), 71 Pagnol, Marcel, 65, 138; Marius (1931), 65
Nitchevo (1926), 120, 158 Palais de Fetes (cinema), 58
Nizan, Elisabeth, 89 Palais-Royal (theater), 223
Noailles, Vicomte de, 27, 270 Panigel, Armand, 332, 531n, 581n
Nogent, Eldorado du dimanche (1930), 268, Panorama du cinema, 261, 284
269 Panoramique du cinema, 261, 272, 284
Nord-Sud, 244 Papillons et chrysalides, 270
Norman, Rolla, 153 Paramount-Palace (cinema), 59, 61, 64,
Notre Dame d'amour (1922), 101 181, 197, 233
Notre-Dame de Paris (scenario), 28 Le Parfum de la dame en noir (1931), 150
Notre Eaihle Coeur (1916), 87 Parguel, Paul, 341, 476
Les Nouveaux Messieurs (1929), 39, 232-234, Paris (1924), xiv, 45, 125, 123
233 Paris en cinq heures (1926), 226
La Nouvelle Aurore (1918), 118 Paris Express (1929), 271
La Nouvelle Mission de Judex (1918), 20, 74- Pans-Girls (1929), 217
75, 222 Paris-International, 34
Nouvelle Revue Franyaise, 139, 245, 262, 475, Par is-Journal, 245
57 In Paris-Midi, 243, 246, 314
Les Nouvelles litteraires, 245 Paris qui dort (1924), 26, 69, 145, 222,
Nox, Andre, 93, 93, 139, 204, 313 225, 256, 283, 295, 377-380, 379, 381,
Nuit de princes (1929), 62 382, 393, 529, 585n
La Nuit du 11 septembre (1920), 123 Parisette (1922), 78, 79, 81, 83, 125
La Nuit est a nous (1930), 64 Parisia-Film, 20, 25
Nuits electnques (1929), 270, 271 Parisiana (cinema), 421
Parlo, Dita, 217
Obey, Andre, 263, 285, 340, 341, 344 Parsons, Leon, 243
L’Occident (1928), 157, 158 Partie de campagne (1929), 271
Odette, Mary, 172, 173 Une Partie de Campagne (1936), 138, 592n

659
INDEX Parvo” camera (Debrie), 13, 438, 440, 527 70, 168, 169, 169-171, 174, 177, 202,
Le Pas de la mule (1930), 270 204, 206, 208; Madame Sans-Gene (1925),
Pascal, Blaise, 328 xiv, 30-31, 43, 133, 179-180, 181, 204;
Pascal, Jean, 224, 247 Mimosa la derniere gnsette (1906), 260;
La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928), xv, 35-36, Morgan la sirene (1927), 34
39, 46, 69, 177, 190, 198-199, 198, Perret, Victor, 272
204, 219, 284, 286, 291, 431, 463, 486- Perret Pictures, 27
500, 489, 490, 492, 493, 495, 496, 497, Perrier, Jean, 190
499, 500, 501, 514, 529, 562n, 596n Perrochon, Ernest, 111
Pasteur, Louis, 506 Petain, Marshal, 38
Pasteur (1922), xv, 26, 245, 359 Petat, Jacques, 6, 291
Pathe, Charles, 7, 7, 12-13, 15-16, 17, 18, Petersen-Poulsen sound system, 60, 61
19, 20-21, 23, 33, 35, 39, 62, 65, 81, Le Petit Cafe (1919), 18, 42, 57, 79, 223,
93, 95, 96, 161, 223, 243, 254, 284, 224
289, 327, 533n Le Petit Chaperon rouge (1929), 222
Pathe-Baby (camera and filmstock), 20, 327 Petit Jimmy, 136, 137
Pathe camera, 13, 14, 15, 352, 527 Le Petit Journal, 244
Pathe-Cinema, 12-13, 17, 18, 20, 23, 51, Le P’tit Pangot (1926), 213
54-55, 60, 62, 76, 90, 164, 165, 222, Le Petit Parisien, 73, 82, 244, 247
271 La Petite Duchesse, 202
Pathe color process, 152 La Petite Illustration, 209
Pathe-Consortium, xiv, xv, 19, 20-21, 22- La Petite Lise (1930), 359
23, 26, 29-30, 31, 32-33, 36, 40, 41, La P’tite Lily (1927), 222, 268, 271, 413
43, 44-45, 46, 47, 48, 58, 61, 62, 76, La Petite Marchande d'allumettes (1928), 148,
81, 89, 111, 114, 143, 151, 162, 163, 270, 283, 463, 471-475, 472, 474
166, 167, 174, 179, 224, 327, 351, 446, Petrovich, Ivan, 210, 211, 213, 214, 217
528 Peyran, Arlette, 104, 106
Pathe-Freres, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 37, 54- Phare tournant, 264
55, 70, 71, 72, 73, 85, 86, 160, 220, Phedre, 27
228, 270, 527 Phocea, 45, 77, 82, 108
Pathe-Journal, 53, 62 Photo-Cine, 262, 58In
Pathe-Natan, 63, 64, 65, 272 photogenie, 249, 255, 256, 292, 294, 313,
Pathe-Palace (cinema), 53, 54, 58. See also 356
Cameo Cinema Photo genie, 243
Pathescope 9-5mm filmstock, 183, 184, Photogenie mecanique (1925), 258
271, 560n, 56ln Photogenies (1924), 254, 258, 329, 395
Pavilion du cinema (cinema), 266, 267 Phroso (1922), 24, 41
La Peau de chagrin, 152 Picabia, Francis, 146, 380, 381, 382; Re-
Peau de peche (1929), 39, 136, 137 lache, 380
Pecheur d'lslande (1924), 25, 48, 119-120, Le Pied qui etreint (1916), 76
283, 383 Pierre, Emile, 10, 101, 196, 431
Pedrelli, Sylvo de, 151, 207 Pierre-Quint, Leon, 256
Peguy, Charles, 140 Pierson, Suzy, 449, 454, 456
Le Penseur (1920), 20, 139, 282, 380 Piessy, Nilda du, 207
Pepe le Moko (1936), 359 Pitoeff, Georges, 415
Pepiniere-Cinema, 251 La Pocharde (1921), 77
Pere Goriot (1921), 123, 167 La Poesie d’aujourd'hui: un nouvel etat d’mtelli-
Peret, Benjamin, 594n gence, 249
Perinal, Georges, 234, 421, 422, 450, 509, Poil de carotte (1926), 108
597n Poincare, Raymond, 5, 27, 558n
La Perle (1929), 270, 271 Poiret, Paul, 385
Perret, Leonce, xiv, 11, 27-28, 29, 30, 34- Poirier, Leon, xiv, xv, 11, 13, 20, 22, 25,
35, 43, 71, 89, 94, 95, 154, 169-170, 32, 41, 46, 48, 51, 79, 93, 102-104,
179-180, 213, 221, 222, 259-260, 285; 117, 124-125, 138-139, 145, 154, 155,
La Danseuse orchidee (1928), 213; Le Demon 202, 203, 204, 244, 249, 252, 253, 255,
de la haine (1922), 27; L'Enfant de Pans 259, 264, 266, 267, 282, 283, 284, 285,
(1913), 71, 89, 95; La Femme nue (1926), 286, 315, 380, 562n; Ames d’Orient
35, 94, 213, 214\ Koenigsmark (1923), 28, (1919), 152, 154; Amours exotiques (1927),

660
 267, 283; La Briere (1925), 25, 42, 46, Promethee . . . banquier (1922), 252 INDEX
118-119, 118, 120, 145, 284; Le C off ret Prose de Transstberien et de la petite Jeanne de
de jade (1921), 152; La Croisiere noire France, 582n
(1926), 32, 266; Genevieve (1923), 93, Protozanoff, Jacob, 20, 111, 143; L’Angois-
103, 103-104; Jocelyn (1922), xv, 20, 79, sante Aventure (1920), 20, 143; L'Ombre du
93, 102-103, 124, 139, 259, 259, 283; peche (1922), 20, 111
Narayana (1920), 41, 152, 155; L'Ombre Pure cinema, 241, 260, 262, 279, 289,
dechiree (1921), 139; Le Penseur (1920), 20, 290, 328, 332, 459
139, 282, 380; Verdun, vision d'histoire Purism/Purist, 335, 388
(1928), 32, 48, 202-204, 203, 285
politique des auteurs, 284, 285, 286 Quai des brumes (1938), 359
Polyvision triple-screen system, 432, 433- Quartier Latin (1929), 217
434, 442-444, 445 Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), 589n, 590n
Pomies, Georges, 234 Queen Elizabeth (1912), 15, 161
Porte, Pierre, 250, 251 Quellian, Georges, 242
Pouctal, Henri, xv, 10, 14, 21, 52, 73, 77, Quenu, 174
79, 80, 86, 121, 161, 162, 224, 306; Querel, 268
Alsace (1916), 10, 86; Camille Desmoulins
(1912), 161; Chantecoq (1917), 73; Le Raabi, Manuel, 159, 473
Comte de Monte-Cnsto (1917-1918), 80, 80, Rabaud, Henri, 175
81, 162; Le Crime du Bouif (1922), 224; Racine, Jean, 27; Phedre, 27
Dieu du hasard (1919), 14; Gigolette Radicals (political party), 5, 43, 180
(1921), 21, IlyLa Resurrection du Bouif La Rafale (1920), 16, 89
(1922), 224; Travail (1919-1920), xv, 52, Le Rail, 123, 329
79, 121-123, 122 Raimu (Jules Muraire), 238
Poulbot, Francisque, 554n Ramain, Paul, 116, 250, 251, 262, 264
Poulton,Mabel, 210 Ramelot, Pierre, 264
Pour Don Carlos (1921), 153 Ramuntcho (1919), xiv, 101, 102, 243, 322
Pour la paix du monde (1928), 202 Rapid-film, 34
Pour remonter le moral de Larnere series, see La Rapid-Publicite, 34
Vie Drole Ravel, Gaston, 23, 34, 36, 46, 61, 82,
Pour Vous, 262-263 123, 180; Le Collier de la reine (1929), 61,
Poyen, Rene, 221 180; Ferragus (1923), 123; Madame Reca-
Pradot, Marcelle, 98, 140, 141, 142, 306, mier (1928), 180; Le Roman d'un jeune
384, 416 homme pauvre (1927), 36; Tao (1923), 23,
Pre fils, 229, 378 82
Predal, Rene, 121 Ravel, Maurice, 252
Prejean, Albert, 146, 147, 204, 227, 228, Ravet, 487
229, 233, 233, 378, 379 Raynal, Maurice, 244
Les Premieres Amies de Rocambole (1924), 45 Realism/Realist, 94-97, 280
Pretext (1929), 271 Regards, 264
Prevert, Jacques, 138, 274 Regent, Roger, 262
Pnere sur lAcropole, 139 La Regie du jeu (1939), 238, 364, 593n
Le Prince cbarmant (1925), 29, 152-153 Rejane, 86, 94, 101, 179
Le Prince Jean (1927), 158 Reldche, 380
La Pnncesse Mandane (1928), 150 Renan, Ernest, 139; Pnere sur LAcropole, 139
La Pnncesse Masha (1927), 59, 194 Renard, Jules, 108
Printemps, 53 Renault, Louis, 15
Prix de beaute (1929), 217 Renoir, Jean, xiv, 26, 32-33, 69, 114, 117,
Prix Goncourt, 111, 118, 296 130, 137, 138, 148, 158, 160, 199, 200,
production, French: annual totals, 21-22, 202, 205, 210, 215, 222, 234-238, 270,
30, 33, 61; median budget, single film, 271, 272, 274, 279, 283, 285, 286, 364,
17 367, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 408, 413,
Production Natan, 34 471, 472, 473, 529, 584n, 592n, 593n;
Productions H. Pouctal, 44 Le Bled {1929), 158-160, 139, 200, 286,
Productions Leonce Perret, see Films Leonce 529; Boudu sauve des eaux (1932), 235,
Perret 238, 377; Charleston (1926), 148, 222,
La Proie du vent (1927), 147-148 271, 413; La Fille de Leau (1925), 26,

661
 t

INDEX Renoir, Jean (cont.) Roelens, Maurice, 93

114, 235, 271, 367, 373-377, 374, 375, Rogers, Jimmy, 409
423, 473, 529, 584n, 593n; La Grande Rohier, Maurice, 46
Illusion (1937), 205, 593n; Marquitta Le Roi de Camargue (1921), 101
(1927), xiv, 32, 215, 219; La Marseillaise Le Roi de la mer (1918), 3 14
(1938), 205; Nana (1926), 32, 33, 52, Le Roi des resquilleurs (1930), 64-65, 220
130, 200-202, 201, 210, 234, 286, 529, Le Roi du cirque (1925), 29, 224, 226
56 In; On purge Bebe (1931), 238; Une Par- Roland-Manuel, 252
tie de campagne (1936), 138, 592n; La Pe¬ Rolanne, Andree, 131
tite Marchande d'allumettes (1928), 148, Rollin, Henri, 81, 165, 163, 378, 379
270, 283, 463, 471-475, 472, 474\ La Romains, Jules, 245, 262, 446, 447
Regie du jeu (1939), 238, 364, 593n; The Le Roman d’un jeune homme pauvre (1927), 36
River {1951), 160; Tire au flanc (1928), Ropars, Marie-Claire, 596n
234-238, 236, 237, 529, 566n; Tom Rosay, Fran<;oise, 129, 180
(1934), 138; Le Toumoi (1929), 199-200, La Rose {1920), 19
199, 235, 529 La Rose du rail (scenario), 18
Renoir, Pierre, 32, 377 Rose-Trance (1919), 20, 41, 99, 140, 243,
Renoir, Pierre Auguste, 373 295, 302-305, 303, 306, 307, 313, 314,
Le Requin (1930), 62 517
Reservoir studio, Saint-Maurice, Joinville, Rostand, Edmond, 432
63-64, 535n Rostand, Maurice, 270, 472
Resnais, Alain, 75, 456 Rothschild, Henri de, 16
Resurrection, 28, 43, 256, 267, 402 Roudenko, Vladimir, 196, 196
La Resurrection du Bouif (1922), 224 Roudes, Gaston, 45
Le Retour aux champs (1918), 102, 109 La Roue (1922-1923), 18, 21, 42, 52, 69,
Le Reve (1921), 16, 41, 42, 166 90, 123-124, 124, 208, 245, 253, 254,
Le Reveil (1925), 48, 548n 258, 261, 282, 284, 289, 326-339, 329,
Reverdy, Pierre, 244 330, 332, 333, 334, 333, 338, 340, 344,
Revol, Hubert, 7, 48 359, 360, 363, 364, 366, 367, 369, 374,
La Revolution surrealiste, 480 380, 382, 384, 385, 388, 390, 393, 394,
La Revue du cinrnia, 157, 231, 262, 268, 396, 397, 425, 432, 433, 435, 488, 500,
271, 272, 480 558n, 58In, 582n
La Revue federaliste (1927), 261 Rouer, Germaine, 110, 217
La Revue nouvelle, 261 Le Rouge et le non, 261
Rialto Cinema, 59, 194 Rouletabille chez les bohemiens (1922), 23, 81,
Richaud, Denis, 21, 22, 162 82
Richebe, Roger, 63, 204; L’Agonie des aigles Roumanoff, Arkady, 248
(1933), 204-205 Roussel, Henry, xiv, 18, 19, 28, 32, 33, 36
Rein que les heures (1926), 39, 137, 267, 39, 41, 43, 46, 48, 51, 52, 64, 89, 93,
271, 281, 283, 395, 402-408, 403, 403, 98, 121, 157, 167, 171, 179, 194, 195,
435, 480, 529 209, 217, 233, 249, 253, 258, 283, 285;
Rieux, Max de, 123; Cousine Bette (1924), L'Ame du bronze (1917), 121; Destinee
123 (1926), 195; La Faute d'Odette Marechal
Riffle Bill series (1908), 71 (1920), 41, 89; La Nuit est a nous (1930),
Rigadin series, 220, 222 64; Les Oppnmes (1923), xiv, 28, 43, 46,
Rigadin, Prince, 10, 70, 220, 222, 295 70, 167-168, 171, 204, 258, 283; Pans-
Rimsky, Nicolas, 152, 217, 224, 226 Girls (1929), 217; La Terre Promise (1925),
The River (195 1), 160 xiv, 209-210; Le Valse de ladieu (1928),
Rivero, Enrique de, 158, 139, 199 48, 194; Violettes imperiales (1924), xiv,
Rivette, Jacques, 160 28, 46, 170, 171, 177, 179, 204; Visages
Roanne, Andre, 171, 209 voiles . . . ames closes (1921), 19, 41, 157
Robert, Jacques, 123; Cousin Pons (1924), La Route est belle (1929), 62, 64
123, 552n Rozet, Francois, 131, 180
Robinne, Gabrielle, 86 Rugiens, Solange, 318, 318
Rocambole (1913), 71 Rythmes d'une cathedrale (1929), 271
Rodin, Auguste, 139, 380, 407; The
Thinker, 139 Sa Tete (1930), xiv, 62, 271, 283, 285
Rodriguez, Madeleine, 180, 378, 379 Sables (1927), 156

662
Sadoul, Georges, xii, 13, 21, 23, 31, 34, Sergyl, Yvonne, 175 INDEX
42, 50, 69, 80, 95, 104, 121, 156, 167, Series Pax (Gaumont), 20, 22, 138, 152
220, 221, 223, 253, 280, 286, 287, 289, Seroff, Georges, 421
313, 319, 327, 476, 488, 514; Histone Serpentin series (1919-1920), 222
generate du cinema, xii Service Photographique et Cinematogra¬
Sagrary, Elena, 25, 316, 320 phique de l’Armee, 10
Saidreau, Robert, 224 Severin-Mars, 18, 19, 89, 90, 123, 124,
Saillard, Georges, 131 162-163, 296-297, 326, 327, 328, 333;
Salammbo (1925), xiv, 29, 33, 36, 58, 69, Le Coeur magnifique (1921), 19
150, 153 Sevres Cinema, 54
Salle Adyar (cinema), 257 S.G.F. (Societe Generate des Films), 35-36,
Salle des Agriculteurs (cinema), 268 37, 46, 62, 63, 182, 198, 202, 430,
Salle des Ingenieurs civils, 257 431, 486, 487
Salle Marivaux (cinema), 16, 17, 51, 56, 57, The Sheik's Wife, see Visages voiles . . . dmes
58, 62, 119, 134, 158, 169, 171, 175, closes
179, 190, 195, 198, 199, 210, 213, 266, Sibirskaia, Nadia, 156, 217, 395, 396, 397,
359, 363, 367, 415, 430, 487 398, 399, 400, 400, 401, 401, 402
Salle Pleyel (cinema), 421 SIC, 244
Salon d’Automne, 252-253, 263, 329 Sichel, P., 271; Bithulite (1929), 271
Sand, Georges, 148 Siege de Calais (1911), 161
Sandberg, Serge, 17-18, 62 Signoret, Gabriel, 89, 92, 98, 123, 253,
Sandeau, Jules, 166 313, 314
Sandy, A., 270; LumTeres et ombres (1929), Le Silence (1920), xiv, 19, 92, 92, 314-315,
270; Pretext (1929), 271 324, 325, 341, 342, 347, 351
Le Sang d'Allah (1922), 156 Silka, S., 271; Le Male mort de Canart
Le Sang d’un poete (1930-1932), 151, 270, (1929), 271
272 Silvain, Eugene, 198, 486, 492
San-Juana, 171 Silver, Marcel, 257, 283, 586n; L’horloge
Sapene, Jean, 7, 23, 23, 27, 33-34, 37, 44, (1924), 257, 283, 586n
47, 52, 58, 59, 62, 65, 82, 194, 263, Simon, Michel, 227, 234, 236, 237, 238,
513, 528, 598n 416, 417, 487, 588n
Sarati-le-Terrible (1923), 24, 156 Simon-Girard, Aime, 81, 165, 163
Sardou, Victorin, 179, 180 Simultaneism/Simultaneist, 299-300, 592n
Satie, Erik, xiv, 380, 381, 382, 421 La Sin-Ventura (1922), 45
Sauvage, Andre, 257, 266 La Sirene des tropiques (1928), 217, 483
S.C.A.G.L. (Societe Cinematographique des 636 X 11 (1927), 214, 262, 268, 283,
Auteurs et Gens des Lettres), 8, 11, 12, 285, 446, 448-456, 430, 434, 458, 459,
20, 44, 70, 85, 95, 98, 114, 160 460, 529, 584n, 591n
Scenes de la vie cruelle series, 95 Socialists (political party), 5, 6, 162, 180,
Schemas, 262 234
Schildknecht, Pierre, 195, 368, 431 Societe d’Editions Cinematographiques, 20-
Schmitt, Florent, 153 21
Schutz, Maurice, 112, 112, 145,. 148, 198, Societe de l’Ecran d’Art, 62
204, 487, 492, 562n Societe des Auteurs des Films, 103, 513
Seize, Noemi, 316 Societe des Cineromans, 17-18, 23, 25, 31,
Seize, Pierre, 252 33-34, 36, 37, 44-45, 62, 77, 82-83, 85,
Sea Fever, see En rade 94, 120, 130, 143, 158, 168, 174, 194,
Second Avant-Garde, 279, 290 212, 213, 217, 218, 594n
Le Secret d’Argeville (1920), 53 Societe des Films Historiques (S.F.H.), 24-
Le Secret de Polichinelle (1923), 45 25, 32, 33, 35, 37, 48, 63, 158, 174,
Le Secret de Rosette Lambert (1920), 16-17, 18, 182, 190, 199
90 SOFAR (Societe des Films Artistiques), 36,
Le Secret du Lone Star (1920), 16, 79, 89 213, 217, 472
Seigneur, Charles, 220 Soirees de Paris (ballet), 270
Select (cinema), 17 Les Soirees de Pans, 244
Seller, Myla, 378 Sorere, Gabrielle, 139; Le Lys de la vie
Sequana-Films, 36, 62 (1929), 139
Serge, 249 Sortie des Usines Lumiere (1896), 61

663
INDEX Soupault, Philippe, 10, 244, 594n Tempetes (1922), 20
La Sounante Madame Beudet (1923), 23, 69, Le Temps 243, 244, 258
283, 340-344, 343, 362, 500, 583n Teroff, Georges, 327
Sous les toits de Pans (1930), 62 La Terre (1921), 96, 109-110, 109'
Souty, Marcelle, 152 La Terre promise (1925), xiv, 209-210
Spaak, Charles, 24, 232 Terreur (1924), 29, 206
Specht, Georges, 32, 89, 95, 139, 156, 385 Terval, L. V., 207, 384
Les Spectateurs d’Avant-Garde, 264 Tetes de femmes, femmes de tete (1916), 87
Stacquet, 378 Theatre Antoine, 95
Starevich, Ladislas, 142 Theatre de LApollo, 61
Storm, Jean, 235, 473 Theatre de l’Atelier, 32, 175, 421, 479,
Strasser, A., 271; Par tie de campagne (1929), 559n
271 Theatre de Champs-Elysees, 26, 58, 59,
Stuckert, 174 205, 207, 214, 245, 270, 380, 381, 384,
Studio de Paris (cinema), 446 388, 393, 394, 449
Studio des Ursulines (cinema), 259-260, Theatre de Chateau d’Eau, 263
267-268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274, 283, Theatre de Vaudeville, 40, 58, 59, 161
381, 394, 402, 449, 456, 475, 480, 487, Theatre-du Vieux-Colombier (cinema), 251,
567n 256, .257-258, 259, 259, 261, 264, 266,
Studio Diamant (cinema), 268-269, 573n 267, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274, 282, 359,
Studio-Film, 27 1 375, 394, 395, 408, 421, 471, 472,
Studio Reunis, rue Francoeur, 34, 36, 63, 572n
521 Theatre et Comoedia 11lustre, 26, 245
Studio 28 (cinema), 269, 270, 272, 274, Theatre Libre, 95
283, 429, 463, 480 Theatre Odeon, 340
Sue, Eugene, 72; Les Mysteres de Pans, 72 Themes et variations (1928), 270
La Sultane de l'amour (1919), xv, 17, 18, 41, Therese Raquin (1928), xiv, xv, 36, 134-136,
15 1-152, 155, 223 134, 133, 218, 284, 489
Super-Film, 408 Thiberville, A., 303
Surcouf (1925), 23, 82, 594n Thierry, Gaston, 262
Surrealism/Surrealist, 245, 268, 269, 279, The Thinker, 139
289, 475, 476, 480, 486, 529, 592n Third Avant-Garde, 279
Survage, Leopold, 329, 586n 3-D process, 445
Sylvanie, 234 Tih-Minh (1919), 20, 51, 77-78, 77, 79,
Symbolism/Symbolist, 245, 280, 287 138, 222
Symphonie des grattes-ciels (1929), 271 Tillers of the Soil, see L'Atre
Synchro-Cine, 272 Tire au flanc (1928), 234-238, 236, 237,
Synchronista sound system, 64, 272 529, 566n
synchronized sound sytems, 59-64, 266, Tivoli Cinema, 9, 17, 58, 223
272, 525 Todorov, Tzvetan, 138
Tokine, B., 245
Tallandier, Jules, 248 Toni (1934), 138
Tallier, Armand, 41, 87, 88, 98, 103, 117, Toporkov, Nicolas, 152, 183, 186
258, 259, 259, 260, 267, 268, 271, 272, Le Torrent (1918), 98
283, 475, 476, 567n Toulout, Jean, 41, 89, 92, 101, 131, 195,
Talon, Gerard, 5, 205, 217, 219 252
Tandil, Renee, 112 La Tour (1928), 268, 379
Tao (1923), 23, 82 Tour au large (1927), xiv, 137, 266, 267,
Tarakanova (1930), xiv, 193-194 270, 282
Tariaux, 19 Le Tourbillon de Paris (1928), 36, 217
Tariol, Marcel, 345, 349 Tourjansky, Viatcheslaw [Victor], 20, 24,
Taurines, 43, 50 29, 33, 152, 182-183, 194, 196, 224,
Tavano, C. F., 24 285, 431; Le Chant de l’amour triomphante
Tedesco, Jean, 48, 241, 250, 251, 254, (1923), 24, 152; Ce Cochon de morin
256, 257-258, 261, 266, 267, 270, 271, (1924), 224; Michel Strogoff (1926), xiv,
272, 282, 283, 329, 359, 368, 394, 395, 29, 31, 182-185, 183, 184, 204; Les
421, 471, 472, 572n, 593n Milles et une Nuits (1922), 20, 152; L'0r~
Le Tempestaire (1947), 507 donnance (1921), 20, 41; Le Prince charmant

664
 (1925), 29, 152-153 Veille d’armes (1925), 48, 120 INDEX
Tourneur, Maurice, 11, 36, 95, 111, 112, Vendmiaire (1919), 52, 94, 108, 114
202, 205, 206, 304, 576n, 598n; L’Equi- Venloo, Jean de, 48, 64, 421
page (1928), 36, 202, 598n; Koenigsmark Venus (1929), 156
(1935), 205 Venus victnx (1917), 87
Le Tournoi (1929), 199-200, 199, 235, 529 Verdun (1928), 202
Toussaint, Franz, 19, 151, 156, 162; Le Verdun, vision d’histoire (1928), 32, 48, 202-
Destin rouge (1921), 19 204, 203, 285
Tout-Cinema, 42, 507 Vermoyel, Paul, 87, 151
Touze, Maurice, 114, 137, 373 Verne, Jules, 80, 138, 182
Le Train sans yeux (1926), 283, 402 Vernet, Horace, 157
Tramel, Lucien, 223, 224, 226-227 Vernon, Suzy, 104, 196, 216, 217
Les Transatlantiques (1928), 227 Le Vertige (1926), 94, 212-213, 212, 214
Travail (1919-1920), xv, 52, 79, 121-123, Vesme, Georges de, 247
122 Vibert, Marcel, 157
Les Travailleurs de la mer (1918), 94, 96, 98, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, 22
99 Les Victimes de I'alcool (1911), 95
La Traverse du Crepon (1924), 257 Victorine (studio), 17-18, 35, 63
Le Tribune libre du cinema, 256-257, 263, Victrix, Claudia, 34, 59, 157, 194
264, 266, 274, 283, 284, 581n Vidocq (1923), 23, 82
Triplepatte (1922), 90, 91, 92 La Vie de Jeanne d''Arc, 486
Tristan et Yseut (1921), 17, 162 La Vie drole series (1913-1918), 221, 222
Trocadero (cinema), 21, 58, 162 Vie heureuse (1929), 271
Les Troglodytes (1929), 271 La Vie Merveilleuse de Jeanne d’Arc (1929), 34,
Les Trois Masques (1921), 89 177, 197-198, 198, 499
Les Trots Masques (1929), 62 La Vie telle quelle est series (1911-1913), 94
Les Trois Mousquetaires (1921-1922), 21, 22, Une Vie sans joie, see Catherine
41, 42, 48, 51, 52, 58, 70, 81, 162, Viel, Marguerite, 32
164-166, 165, 166, 204, 223 La Vierge du trottoir, 330
Les Trots Mousquetaires (1932), 204 La Vierge Folle (1929), 216
Truffaut, Francois, 235, 429, 589n, 590n; Vignaud, Jean, 156
Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959), 589n, 590n Vigo, Jean, 116, 235, 238, 264, 268, 272,
Tschekowa, Olga, 228, 229 274, 480, 486, 590n; A propos de nice
Tu seras duchesse (1931), 220 (1930), 268, 599n; LAtalante (1933),
116; Zero de conduite (1933), 235, 238,
Unton nationale, 5, 33 272, 590n
L’Ustne aux images, 261 Villa Destin (1921), 81
La Ville des fous (scenario), 174
La Vagabonde (1917), 242 Villette, Raymond, 181, 264
Vaillant-Courturier, Paul, 265 Vina, Victor, 104, 103, 153, 180
Valetta Films, 11 Vincennes (Pathe filmstock factory), 9, 20,60
Vallee, Jean, 268 Vincennes (Pathe studio), 8, 14, 20, 21, 83,
Vallee, Marcel, 81, 165, 165, 378 164, 165, 166
Le Valse de l’adieu (1928), 48, 194 Vingt Ans apres (1922-1923), 21, 52, 58, 81,
Les Vampires (1915-1916), 11, 39, 71, 72, 166, 167
73-74, 74, 75, 79, 242 Violet, Edouard, 19, 20, 24, 29, 45, 77,
Vampyr {1931), 592n 224, 253; La Bataille (1923), 29, 45,
Van Daele, Edmond, 111, 139, 152, 156, 170; Li-Hang le cruel (1920), 20, 39; Le
180, 181, 196, 316, 320, 345, 349, 360, Main (1920), 19; La Nouvelle Aurore
366, 431, 449 (1919), 118; Le Roi du cirque (1925), 29,
Van Duren, Ernest, 150 224, 226; Le Voile du bonheur (1923), 45
Vandal, Marcel, 8, 15, 16, 19, 22, 24, 25, Violettes imperials (1924), xiv, 28, 46, 170,
29, 33, 36, 42, 45, 56, 61; L’Eau du Nil 171, 177, 179, 204
(1928), 61 Virmaux, Alain, 475
Vanderbuch, 224 Visages d’enfants (1925), 26, 46, 104-108,
Vanel, Charles, 101, 111, 119, 119, 147, 103, 106, 120, 183, 283, 285, 408
548n Visages voiles . . . dmes closes (1921), 19, 41,
Vaultier, Georges, 145, 146 157

665
INDEX Vital, Geymond, 228, 229, 507, 508 Doctor Caligan {1919), 40, 146, 200,
Void Pans, Void Marseille (1929), 271 251-252, 258; La Duchesse des Folies-
he Voile du bonheur (1923), 45 Bergere (1927), 36; Genuine (1920), 40;
Volkoff, Alexandre, xiv, xv, 20, 24, 29, 33, Der Rosenkavaher {1927), 36
35, 36, 37, 43, 77, 171, 182, 185, 194, Wiener, Jean, 315
196, 210, 224, 283, 285, 374, 431, 432;
Casanova (1927), xv, 35, 185-190, 187,
Yasmina (1926), 156
188, 189, 195, 204; Kean (1924), 24, 43,
Yd, Jean d’, 152, 167
171-174, 172, 174, 204, 210, 258, 283,
Yvette (1928), 215-216, 216, 219, 449
374, 423; La Matson du mystere (1922),
Yvonneck, 229
20, 77, 83; Les Ombres qui passent (1924),
Yzarduy, Tina de, 209
24, 224-225; Scheherazade (1928), 36
Voyage au Congo (1927), 266, 267, 271, 282
Le Voyage imaginaire (1926), 46, 146-147, Zecca, Ferdinand, 20, 95
146, 150, 225, 260, 271, 283 Zellas, 235
Vuillermoz, Emile, 243, 244, 247, 248, Zero de conduite (1933), 235, 238, 272, 590n
249, 254, 258, 261, 264, 273, 279, 326, Zigomar (1911), 71
328 Zigomar contre Nick Winter (1912), 71
Zigomar,, Peau d'anguille (1913), 71
Wahl, Lucien, 244, 247, 248, 252, 262 Zola, Emile, 94, 95, 96, 109, 123, 130,
Weill, Fernand, 46, 48 134, 136, 166, 200, 201, 217, 218, 296,
Weller, Jean-Pierre, 26 328, 513, 521; L’assomoir, 95; germinal,
Western Imports, see Jacques Haik 95
Wiene, Robert, 36, 40, 258; The Cabinet of La Zone (1928), 268, 271, 587n, 599n

Index of non-French names, titles, and terms, This index includes substantive references to
selected material in the notes.

Abel, Alfred, 181, 219, 514, 515, 516 Barrymore, John, 263
Afterimage, 291 Barthelmess, Richard, 142
Agfa filmstock, 60 Bartosch, Berthold, 270; Une Idee (1934),
Les Ailes, see Wings 270
Alexandrov, Gregory, 264, 525 Battleship Potemkin (1925-1926), 40, 164,
Alhambra, 306, 309, 309, 310, 311 256, 264, 265, 445, 488, 498, 584n,
Alice in Wonderland, 375 595n
Allen, Robert, 52, 527 Beau Geste (1926), 158, 557n
Altman, Rick, 528 Beckett, Samuel, 405, 483
American Film Institute, 589n Bed and Sofa (1927), 269
Andersen, Hans Christian, 270, 472 Bell and Howell camera, 14, 527
Andrejew, Andre, 134, 135 Ben-Hur (1926), 44, 52, 54, 60, 153, 557n
Anna Boleyn (1920), 161 Benjamin, Walter, xiii
Anthology Film Archives, xiii Berger, John, xi, 97
Arbuckle, Fatty, 10, 70, 222 Berlin (1927), 402
The Aryan (1916), 11 Bernard, William, 349
Asphalt (1929), 40 Bertini, Francesca, 86
Associated Artists, see United Artists Bibiena, 195
Les Aventures de Prince Ahmed (1925), 473, Bigorno cireur, 53
593n Billy the Kid (1930), 59In
Biograph, 9
Baker, Josephine, 205, 217 Birth of a Nation (1915), 39, 177, 445
Bakst, Leon, 187 The Black Pirate (1926), 134
Balazs, Bela, 264 Black Sunday (1925), 40
Balfour, Betty, 213 Blakeston, O., 271
Ballet suedois, 58, 146, 207, 245, 269-270, Blonde Venus (1932), 215
380 The Blue Angel (1930), 272
Ballets russes, 19, 58, 151 Blue Blazes Raivden (1918), 580n
Banque Thalman, 18 Blum, V., 271
Barry, Iris, 264 Bordwell, David, 287-289, 290, 292, 470,

666
 486, 487, 488, 489, 490, 576n, 577n, Chimes at Midnight (1966), 177 INDEX
582n, 593n Christie, Ian, 281
Braunschvig, Marcel, 38 Cine-Alliance, 36
Brausewetter, Hans, 204 Cine d’Art (Geneva), 264
British Film Institute, 429 Cinegraphic Fridays (Brussels), 264
Broken Blossoms (1919), 142, 315, 580n Cinematheque suisse, 587n
Brook, Peter, 490, 596n; King Lear (1971), Cinerama, 445
596n The Circus (1925), 224
Brooks, Louise, 217 Citizen Kane (1941), 305
Brownlow, Kevin, 89, 177, 194, 195, 202, City Girl (1929), 112
235, 295, 297, 327, 428, 429, 430, 445, Civilization (1916), 39
53 In, 553n, 559n, 560n, 578n, 589n; Close Up (1927-1930), 204, 262
Charm of Dynamite (1969), 578n; Winstan- Club du cinema, see Cinegraphic Fridays
ley (1976), 177 Cohen, Keith, 464, 465
Buckland, Wilfred, 167 Connolly, Cyril, 269
Bunny, John, 221 Coogan, Jackie, 129
Bunuel, Luis, 32, 148, 151, 262, 269, 270, Cooper, Merian, C., 266; Grass (1925), 266
271, 272, 286, 475, 480, 485, 485, 529, Coppola, Carmine, 589n
593n, 595n, 597n, 598n; Los Olvidados Coppola, Francis Ford, 429, 436, 590n
(1950), 597n Le Courner de Washington, see Pearl of the
Burch, Noel, 201, 281, 290-291, 294, 303, Army
306, 310, 384, 388, 390, 393, 396, 416, Courtot, Marguerite, 76
435, 456, 488, 514, 515, 522, 523, 525, Cowie, Peter, xi
526, 528, 58 In, 590n
Butler, Walter, 215 da Vinci, Leonardo, 368; Mona Lisa, 382
Byron, Lord (George Gordon), 328 Dagover, Lil, 194, 217
Dali, Salvador, 262, 269, 475, 480, 529,
Caballero, Gimenez, 264 598n
Cabinet Maldoror (Brussels), 264 Dancing Mothers (1926), 205
Cabinet of Doctor Caligan (1919), 40, 146, D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 328
200, 251-252, 258, 368, 372, 379, 463, Dans les remous (1919), 102
486, 585n, 586n Davies, Marion, 34
Cabiria (1913), 153, 161 Davis, Carl, 589n
Callenbach, Ernest, 590n Dawes Plan, 30
Cameo Cinema (New York), 47 De Mille, Cecil B., 10, 86, 161, 175, 242,
The Cameraman (1928), 584n 326; The Cheat (1915), 10, 11, 16, 54,
Capital (Das Kapital), 597n 58, 86, 87, 89, 242, 326, 547n; Joan the
Carmen (1918), 133 Woman (1917), 161; King of Kings (1927),
Carroll, Noel, 382 153; The Ten Commandments (1924), 175,
Casanova, 185; Memoirs, 185 383; The Woman God Forgot (1917), 161
Casembroot, J. de, 271; Ernest et Amelie Decla-Bioskop, 13
(1929), 271 DEFU-Deutsche First National, 36, 134
Castle, Irene, 76 Destiny (1921), 40, 146, 258, 486
Chaplin, Charlie (Chariot), 10, 13, 70, 142, Di Liguoro, Giuseppe, 161; Inferno (1909),
147, 175, 220, 221, 222, 224, 226, 229, 161
231, 242, 244, 245, 257, 258, 324, 339, Diaghilev, Serge, 19, 58, 151, 187, 195,
424, 473, 593n; The Circus (1925), 224; 367, 431; Scheherazade (1910), 151
A Dogs Life (1918), 473; The Gold Rush Dietrich, Marlene, 215, 272
(1925), 339, 424, 473; His New Job Disney, Walt, 62; Opry House (1929), 62
(1916), 53; The Pilgrim (1923), 175, 226, A Dog's Life (1918), 473
258; Sunnyside (1921), 257; The Vagabond Dovzhenko, Alexander, 327
(1916), 142 Dozoretz, Wendy, 479, 548n
Charles XII, 265 Dreyer, Carl, 35, 39, 46, 62, 69, 177, 182,
Chariot apprenti, see His New Job 190, 198, 199, 279, 284, 286, 291, 431,
Charm of Dynamite (1969), 578n 486, 487, 488, 489, 490, 498, 499, 501,
The Cheat (1915), 10, 11, 16, 54, 58, 86, 562n, 592n; Master of the House (1925),
87, 89, 242, 326, 547n 35; Mikhel (1924), 486
Children of No importance (1926), 120 Drummond, Phillip, 482, 483

667
INDEX Dupont, E. A., 36; Moulin Rouge (1928), 36 Forfaiture, see The Cheat
Dura Lux (1926), 40, 264, 501, 596n Formalists, Russian, 251
Durgnat, Raymond, 200, 215, 377, 474, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), 40, 58
593n Fox-Film, 40, 48
Fox Follies (1925), 64
Eastman Kodak Company, 9, 60, 448 Fox-Movietone newsreels, 60, 61
Edinburgh Film Festival, 589n Frank, Arnold, 102
Edison Kinetoscope, 7 Franken, H. K., 264
Eikhenbaum, Boris, 251 Freed, Arthur, 220
Eisenstein, Sergei, 40, 158, 164, 204, 251, French, Karl, 486
256, 264, 265, 327, 330, 377, 445, 488, Fntzigh (1920), 53
498, 525, 58In, 584n, 595n, 596n, 597n; Fugelsang, Frederick, 134
Battleship Potemkin (1925-1926), 40, 164, Fuller, Loie, 13'9, 140; Le Lys de la vie
256, 264, 265, 445, 488, 498, 584n, (1920), 139
595n; The General Line (1929), 158; Octo¬ Futurism/Futurist, 299, 387, 592n
ber (1927), 40, 204, 265, 596n; Strike
(1925), 58 In, 584n Gallone, Soava, 34
Ekk, Nikolai, 327 Garbo, Greta, 260
Elliot, C. K., 429 Gartenberg, Jon, 532n
Em Gee Film Library, 327 Gaumont-British, 36, 213
The End of St. Petersburg (1927), 40, 204, General Electric, 60
265 The General Line (1929), 158
L’Epreuve du feu (1922), 264 Genuine (1920), 40
Erka Films, see First National George Eastman Flouse, xiii, 327
Ernest et Amelie (1929), 271 Gish, Lillian, 79, 397, 405
ERPI (Electrical Research Products, Inc.), 60 Goetzke, Bernhard, 194
L'Etroit Mousquetaire, see The Three-Must-Get- The Gold Rush (1925), 339, 424, 473
Theres Goldwyn, 11, 40, 43
Evans, Montgomery, 264 The Golem (1920), 186
Exploits d'Elaine, see The Perils of Pauline Goll, Ivan, 249
Expressionism/Expressionist, 121, 463 Gomery, Douglas, 52, 527, 532n
Gorky, Maxim, 150
Fairbanks, Douglas, 21, 41, 81, 82, 133, Grandma's Boy (1922), 146-147
160, 167, 175, 186, 258; The Black Pirate Grass (1925), 266
(1926), 134; The Mark of Zorro (1920), Greed (1922), 160
258; Robin Hood (1922), 82, 167; Thief of Green, Christopher, 57 In
Bagdad (1924), 175; The Three Musketeers Grierson, John, 402
(1921), 21, 41 Griffith, D. W., 39, 40, 56, 127, 142,
Famous Players, 10, 11 161, 201, 225, 258, 296, 297, 304, 313,
The Fatal Ring (1917), 73 315, 396, 445; Birth of a Nation (1915),
Faust (1926), 31 39, 177, 445; Broken Blossoms (1919),
Felman, Shoshana, xi 142, 315, 580n; Hearts of the World
Fields, W. C., 221 (1918), 296; Intolerance (1916), 39, 40,
Film Absolu (1925), 394 56, 139, 161, 178, 296, 297, 313, 356,
Film Arts Guild, 46 405; The Lonedale Operator (1911), 201;
Film Daily Yearbook, 50 The Lonely Villa (1909), 201; Way Down
Film Society (London), 264, 402 East (1920), 258
First National, 11, 28, 38, 40, 41, 48 Grune, Carl, 258; The Street (1923), 258
Flaherty, Robert, 61, 265, 266, 501, 572n, Guazzoni, Enrico, 161; Quo Vadis? (1913),
596n; Man of Aran (1933), 501; Moana 9, 153, 161
(1926), 265, 266, 267, 572n; White Shad¬ Guye, Robert, 264
ows (1927), 61
Flaming Youth (1923), 205 Flagan, John, 465, 593n
Flitterman, Sandy, 478, 550n, 583n, 594n Hamlet, 172
Florey, Robert, 62, 64, 247, 268, 271; Life Hart, William S., 10, 13, 244; 248, 315,
and Death of a Hollywood Extra (1928), 323, 580n, 581n; The Aryan (1916), 11;
268 Blue Blazes Rawden (1918), 580n; The
Foolish Wives (1922), 200 Narrow Trail (1917), 53, 580n; The Silent

668
 Stranger (1915), 323, 581n Kino-Gazeta, 251 INDEX
Harvey, Stephen, 53 In Kipling, Rudyard, 328
Hayakawa, Sessue, 10, 29, 77, 86, 170, 242 Klangfilm, 60
Hays, Will H., 47 Kodak (camera), 451
Hearst, William Randolph, 34, 72 Kohler, Arnold, 264
Hearts of the World (1918), 296 Korda, Alexander, 65; Marius (1931), 65
Hedda Gabler, 341 Krauss, Werner, 200
Helm, Brigitte, 218, 219, 384, 514, 520, Kuleshov, Lev, 251, 264, 501, 583n; Dura
598n Lux (1926), 40, 264, 501, 596n
Herzog, Charlotte, 52
Hts New Job (1916), 53 Lady from Shanghai (1948), 598n
Hitchcock, Alfred, 517 Lang, Fritz, 31, 40, 45, 123, 210, 250,
Hitchens, Robert, 100 258, 266, 598n; Destiny (1921), 40, 146,
Holbein, Hans, 104 258, 486; Metropolis (1927), 31, 123,
L'Homme de nulle part, see The Silent Stranger 210, 598n; Nibelungen (1924), 31, 45,
Houdim, Harry, 76; Houdini: Master of Mys¬ 266; Spiders (1919), 486; Spies (1928), 40
tery (1919), 53 Langer, Walter, 63
Lasky, Jesse, 11, 60, 63
Une Idee (1934), 270 The Last Laugh (1924), 31, 45, 200, 266
Images Film Archives, 429, 58In The Late Matthew Pascal, 415
Ince, Ralph, 268; Shanghaied (1927), 268 Lawder, Standish, 300, 394, 585n, 585-
Ince, Thomas, 10, 37, 39, 242, 549n; Civi¬ 586n
lization (1916)* 39 Leblanc, Georgette, 28, 142, 207, 208,
Inferno (1909), 161 383, 384, 388, 392, 563n
Ingram, Rex, 35; Four Horsemen of the Apoca¬ Lef, 251
lypse (1921), 40, 58 The Legend of Gosta Berling (1924), 256
International Congress on Independent Cin¬ Lemprecht, Gerhard, 120; Children of No Im¬
ema, Chateau de La Sarraz, 264 portance (1926), 120
Internationale Ausstellung Neuer Theater- Lewis, Howard, 47
technik (Vienna), 394 Library of Congress, xiii, xiv
Intolerance (1916), 39, 40, 56, 139, 161, Liebman, Stuart, xi, 261, 292, 529, 550n,
178, 296, 297, 313, 356, 405 555n, 578n, 584n
The Iron Claw (1916), 73 Life and Death of a Hollywood Extra (1928),
Isaacs, 264 268
Lindbergh, Charles, 202, 598n
Jameson, Frederic, 281 Linder, Max, 9, 10, 14, 18, 26, 29, 42, 57,
Jannings, Emil, 200 70, 220-221, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226,
The Jazz Singer (1927), 61, 65, 233 267; The Three Must-Get-Theres (1922),
Jim le Harponneur, see The Sea Beast 223, 267
Joan the Woman (1917), 161 Linderman, Deborah, 596n
The Joyless Street (1925), 40, 259, 260 Litvak, Anatole, 431
Lloyd, Harold, 70, 146, 222, 226; Grand¬
Kahn, Otto, 16, 28 ma’s Boy (1922), 146-147
Kammerspiel, 120, 134, 317, 340, 416 London Film Festival, 589n
Kane, Robert, 63-64 The Lonedale Operator (1911), 201
Karen, Daughter of Ingmar (1920), 345 The Lonely Villa (1909), 201
Keaton, Buster, 70, 150, 380, 584n; The Loos, Alfred, 392
Cameraman (1928), 584n; Sherlock Jr. Lorez, Claire de, 202
(1924), 150, 380, 584n Lubitsch, Ernest, 40, 41, 133, 161, 168,
Kepley, Betty, 539n 229; Anna Boleyn (1920), 161; Carmen
Kepley, Vance, 539n (1918), 133; Madame Du Barry (1919),
Keystone, 10, 145 40, 41, 161, 168; Sumurun (1919), 161
Khayyam, Omar, 151, 328
Kiesler, Friedrich, 388, 394; R.U.R., 388 McLaglen, Clifford, 215, 403
King Lear (197 1), 596n McPherson, Kenneth, 262, 271; Monkeys,
King of Kings (1927), 153 Moon (1929), 271
Kino-Eye (1924), 407 Madame Du Barry (1919), 40, 41, 161, 168
Kino-fot, 251 Man of Aran (1933), 501

669
INDEX Man with a Movie Camera (1929), 584n Nibelungen (1924), 31, 45, 266
The Mark of Zorro (1920), 258 Nielsen, Asta, 168, 260, 563n
Marx, Karl, 597n; Capital, 597n Ninth of January, see Black Sunday
The Masked Bride (1925), 205 Nochlin, Linda, 97, 280
Le Masque aux dents blanches, see The Iron Claw Normand, Mabel, 10, 222
Masset, Alfred, 264 Nosferatu (1922), 40, 146, 148, 455, 464
Master of the House (1925), 35 Novello, Ivor, 100, 101
Mate, Rudolf, 486 Novy LEF, 251
Mathonet, Arthur, 25
May, Joe, 40; Asphalt (1929), 40 October (1927), 40, 204, 265, 596n
Mayer, Carl, 120, 317 Los Olvidados (1950), 597n
Mayer, Louis B., 8 Ombres blanches, see White Shadows
Memoirs, 185 Opry House (1929), 62
Mendelssohn, Felix, 472 Oswald, Richard, 36, 181; Cagliostro (1929),
Meredith, Lois, 17, 91 36, 180-181
Merrill Lynch, 81 Othello, 39
Merritt, Russell, 52
Metro, 40, 43, 58, 206 Pabst, G. W., 36, 40, 134, 260, 267; The
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 31, 36, 43-44, 47, Joyless Street (1925), 40, 259, 260; Pan¬
61, 63, 64, 429, 445-446, 589n, 591n dora’s Box (1929), 40; Secrets of a Soul
Metropolis (1927), 31, 123, 210, 598n (1926), 267; Threepenny Opera (1931), 134
Metternich-Winneburg, K.L.W., 163 Pacific Film Archive, 589n
Michelson, Annette, 75, 380 Pandora's Box (1929), 40
Mickey Virtuose, see Opry House Pappas, Peter, 590n
Mikhel (1924), 486 Paramount, 11, 15-16, 27-28, 29, 30-31,
Miller, Flugh, 264 32, 34-35, 37, 40, 43, 48, 51, 54, 59,
Miro, Joan, 269 60, 61, 63-64, 65, 154, 156, 167, 169,
Moana (1926), 265, 266, 267, 572n 179, 205, 207, 213, 216, 272
Molbeck, Christian, 210 Parufamet, 31
Molly (1916), 11 Pastrone, Giovanni, 161; Cabina (1913),
Mona Lisa, 382 153, 161
Monkeys, Moon (1929), 271 Pathe-Exchange, 12, 15-16, 41, 72, 73, 81
Montagu, Ivor, 264 Pearl of the Army (1916), 73
Mother {1926), 40, 265, 501, 596n The Perils of Pauline (1914), 73, 393
Motion Pictures Patents Company (Trust), 9, The Phantom Coach (1921), 258
12 Pick, Lulu, 40, 120, 250, 254, 256, 258,
Movietone sound system, 61 264, 317; New Year's Eve (1923), 254,
Murnau, F. W., 31, 40, 45, 112, 266, 264, 317; Shattered (1921), 40, 120, 256,
455, 464, 597n; City Girl (1929), 112; 258, 317
Faust (1926), 31; The Last Laugh (1924), Pickford, Mary, 73, 103, 112, 376
31, 45, 200, 266; Nosferatu (1922), 40, The Pilgrim (1923), 175, 226, 258
146, 148, 455, 464; Sunrise (1927), 112, Pirandello, Luigi, 144, 380, 415, 416, 419,
597n; Tartuffe (1925), 31 446, 456; The Late Matthew Pascal,
Murphy, Dudley, 394 415; Six Characters in Search of an Author,
Museum of Modern Art, xiii, xiv, 53 In 588n
Musume, 260 Piranesi, Giambattista, 195, 521
Mutual, 11, 15 Poe, Edgar Allan, 463, 464, 465, 470
Myrent, Glenn, 53 In The Poetics of Cinema (1927), 251
Les Mysteres de New-York (1915-1916), 10, Polikouchka (1919), 254, 258
12, 71, 72, 75, 76, 268 Pommer, Erich, 13, 29-30, 42
Porchet, Francois, 26
The Narrow Trail (1917), 53, 580n Porter, Edwin S., 161
National Film Archive (London), xiii, 327, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, 27
488 Potamkin, Harry Alan, 35, 150, 232, 263,
National Film Theater, 405 269, 432, 490, 579n, 587n, 597n
Negri, Pola, 133 Pour sauver sa race, see The Aryan
Neu> Year’s Eve (1923), 254, 264, 317 Prampolini, Enrico, 264
New York Public Library, xiv Pratt, Georges, 46

670
Les Proscrits (1918), 102 Selig, 11 INDEX
Pudovkin, V. I., 40, 204, 265, 327, 501, Sennett, Mack, 10, 70, 225, 234, 368, 380,
525; The End of St. Petersburg (1927), 40, 381
204, 265; Mother {1926), 40, 265, 501, Sesonske, Alexander, 201-202, 234, 236,
596n 56ln, 566n, 593n
Purviance, Edna, 34, 214 Sever House (Brussels), 264
Shakespeare, William, 171, 173, 179; Ham¬
Quo Vadis? (1913), 9, 153, 161 let, 172; Othello, 39; Richard II, 179; Ro¬
meo and Juliet, 171, 172
Radio City Music Hall (New York), 589n Shanghaied (1927), 268
Ray, Charles, 129 Sharp, Dennis, 57
RCA sound system, 60, 62, 64, 542n Shattered (1921), 40, 120, 256, 258, 317
The Red Circle (1915), 73 The Sheik (1921), 156
La Reme sennuie, see The Fatal Ring Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 328
Reinhardt, Max, 161 Sherlock Jr. (1924), 150, 380, 584n
Reiniger, Lotte, 473, 593n; Les Aventures de Shlovsky, Viktor, 251
Prince Ahmed (1925), 473, 593n Shufftan process, 215
Resurrection, 27 Siegfried, see Nibelungen
Resurrection (1927), 28 Silberman, Marc, 162
Revelation, see The Narrow Trail The Silent Stranger (1915), 323, 581n
La Revue Nelson (1929), 61 Sitney, P. Adam, 279
Richard II, 179 Six Characters In Search of an Author, 588n
Richter, Hans, 262, 264 Sjostrom, Victor, 102, 258, 264, 345;
Riefenstahl, Leni, 102, 445; Triumph of the L'Epreuve du feu (1922), 264; Karen,
Will (1934), 445 Daughter of Ingmar (1920), 345; The Phan¬
Rio Jim, see William S. Hart tom Coach (1921), 258; Les Proscrits (1918),
The Robe (1953), 446 102
Robin Hood (1922), 82, 167 A Song of Pans (1929), 61, 181
Robinson, Arthur, 258; Warning Shadows Sophocles, 328
(1922), 258 Spiders (1919), 486
Rodowick, D. N., 58In Spies (1928), 40
Roland, Ruth, 73, 76; The Red Circle (1915), Staiger, Janet, 527, 577n
IT, Who Pays? (1916), 73 State Historical Society of Wisconsin, xiii, 327
Romeo and Juliet, 171, 172 Stiller, Mauritz, 102, 256, 258; Dans les re-
Room, Abram, 269; Bed and Sofa (1927), mous (1919), 102; The Legend of Gosta Ber-
269 ling (1924), 256; Tresor d’Arne (1919),
Rosenfeld, Fritz, 264 102, 258, 265
Der Rosenkavaher (1927), 36 Stinnes, Hugo, 29, 31, 182
Roud, Richard, 74, 75 Stoll films, 19
Royal Archive of Belgium, xiii Strauss, Richard, 36, 472
R.U.R., 388 The Street (1923), 258
Ruttman, Walter, 264, 394, 402; Berlin Strike (1925), 58 In, 584n
(1927), 402; Film absolu (1925), 394 Stiiwe, Hans, 181
Sumurun (1919), 161
Salle de L’Union Colomale (Brussels), 264 Sunnyside (1921), 257
Salt, Barry, xxi, 54, 287, 527, 53 In, 552n, Sunrise (1927), 112, 597n
553n, 563n, 578n, 583n, 590n, 591n Sussex, Elizabeth, 402, 405
Sandro, Paul, 382, 484, 595n Swanson, Gloria, 30, 133, 179, 180, 181
Sargent, John Singer, 104 Sylvester, see New Years Eve
Sartoris, Alberto, 264
Schatz, Thomas, 528 Talmadge, Norma, 28
Scheherazade (1910), 151 Tartuffe (1925), 31
Schehera zade (1928), 36 Taylor, F. W., 15
Scheib, Hans, 134 Telluride Film Festival, 589n
Schmidt, Georg, 264 The Ten Commandments (1924), 175, 383
Schoedsack, Ernest, 266; Grass (1925), 266 Terry, Phyllis Neilson, 100, 100
The Sea Beast (1926), 263 Thames Television, 429
Secrets of a Soul (1926), 267 Thief of Bagdad {1924), 175

671
INDEX Thompson, Kristin, 528; 552n, 577n von Stroheim, Eric, 160, 200, 236; Foolish
A Thousand and One Nights, 151 Wives (1922), 200; Greed (1922), 160
The Three Musketeers (1921), 21, 41
The Three Must-Get-T'heres (1922), 223, 267 Wagner, Richard, 472, 484; Tristan and Is¬
Threepenny Opera (1931), 134 olde, 484
Tisse, Edward, 264 Walker Art Center, 428, 589n
Tobis, 60 Wallace, Richard, 61
Tobis, Klangfilm, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 272, Ward, Fanny, 16, 19, 89
542n Warm, Hermann, 486, 489
Tolstoy, Leo, 27; Resurrection, 27 Warner Brothers, 43, 60-61
Tresor dArne (1919), 102, 258, 265 Warning Shadows (1922), 258
Tretyankov, S., 251 Waxworks (1924), 186
Triangle, 10, 11, 242 Way Down East (1920), 258
La Tribune de Geneve, 349 Welles, Orson, 177, 598n; Chimes at Mid¬
Tristan and Isolde, 484 night (1966), 177; Citizen Kane (1941),
Triumph of the Will (1934), 445 305; Lady from Shanghai (1948), 598n
Twentieth-Century Fox, 446 Wellman, William, 61, 202; Wings (1927),
Tynyanov, Yuri, 251 61, 202, 579n, 598n
Wengeroff, Vladimir, 29, 31, 37, 182
Wengeroff Films, 36, 180
UCI (Unione Cinematografica Italiana), 16
Western Electric sound system, 60, 64
UCLA Film Archives, xiii
Westi Corporation, 29-30, 31, 32, 33, 35,
UFA (Universum Film A. G.), 12, 13, 16,
130, 182, 210
29-30, 31, 35, 36, 42, 45, 46, 205, 270,
White, Pearl, 10, 29, 39, 71-72, 73, 76,
486
77, 79, 86, 206, 207, 246; The Fatal
United Artists, 38, 40, 41, 48
Ring (1917), 73; The Iron Claw (1916),
Universal, 28, 40, 48, 58
73; Les Mysteres de New-York (1915-1916),
University of Southern California, xiv
10, 12, 71, 72, 75, 76, 268; Pearl of the
Army (1916), 73; The Perils of Pauline
The Vagabond (1916), 142 (1914), 73, 393
Valentin, Albert, 264 White Shadows (1927), 61
Valentino, Rudolph, 156; The Sheik (1921), Who Pays? (1916), 73
156 Wiene, Robert, 36, 40, 258; Cabinet of Doc¬
Van Dyke, W. S., 61; White Shadows tor Caligan (1919), 40, 146, 200, 251-
(1928), 61 252, 258, 368, 372, 379, 463, 486,
Van Wert, William, 481 585n, 586n; La Duchesse des Fohes-Bergere
Velasquez, Diego, 141 (1927), 36; Genuine (1920), 40; Der Rosen-
Vermeer, Jan, 484 kavalier (1927), 36
Vertov, Dziga, 251, 407, 584n; Kino-Eye Wilde, Oscar, 27, 200; The Portrait of Do¬
(1924), 407; Man with a Movie Camera rian Gray, 27
(1929), 584n Willamen, Paul, 488, 529
Victor, Henry, 219, 514 Williams, Linda, 595n
Vincent, Carl, 264 Williamson, Dugald, xi, 580n
Visions fortis, see Cinegraphic Fridays Wings (1927), 61, 202, 579n, 598n
Viskovsky, Vyacheslav, see Wiskousky Winstanley (1976), 177
Vita-Film, 29, 224 Winterhalter, Franz Xavier, 171
Vitagraph, 9, 11, 40, 43, 95, 221 Wiskousky, 40; Black Sunday (1925), 40
Vitaphone sound system, 61 The Woman God Forgot (1917), 161
Volkoff, Alexandre, 20, 24, 29, 33, 35, 36,
37, 43, 77, 171, 182, 185, 194, 196, Zilzer, Wolfgang, 134, 135
210, 224, 283, 285, 374, 431, 432; Zoetrope Studios, 429, 589n
Scheherazade {1928), 36 Zoubaloff, Dmitri de, 26
von Schlettow, Hans-Adalbert, 134 Zukor, Adolph, 11, 15-16, 37, 161

672
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Abel, Richard, 1941 -
French cinema.
Filmography: p.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Moving-pictures—France—History. 2. Moving-picture industry—France—History. 3- Moving
picture plays—History and criticism. 4. Experimental films—France—History. 5. Moving
pictures—Societies, etc.—France—History. I. Title.
PN1993.5.F7A64 1984 384'.8'0944 83-43057
ISBN 0-691-05408-8 ISBN 0-691-008132 (pbk.)

Richard Abel is Professor of English at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

 BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY

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 Winner of the 1984 Theetre Library Association Award

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“A monumental work of scholarship on one of the most important [and] neglected

areas of film history, Richard Abel’s massive study is already clearly destined to
occupy a position of deserved pre-eminence in relation to all foreseeable future
work done on this seminal period in French cinema.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, Film
Quarterly ;
“Richard Abel’s book exhibits all the qualities associated with the best tradition in
cultural history. Minutely researched, it reconstructs the web of artistic, sociological,
and industrial factors that made the last years of the silent film so exciting in France.
Added to this is an exploration of the types and qualities of the films themselves.”
—Dudley Andrew, American Historical Review
\
“One of the most fascinating things in Richard Abel’s monumental, elegantly written
and designed history of French silent cinema is his account of the journalists,
theorists, cinC-clubs, specialized cinemas, and self-conscious avant-gardists who
created film culture during the 1920s.'... reading Abel’s account gives you the
feeling of discovering some vast new continent.”—Voice Literary Supplement

This comprehensive history of the French cinema between World War I and the
coming of sound focuses on the narrative film to question most of the received
notions about the period, such as the supposed sharp split between avant-garde
and commercial filmmakers. Available for the first time in paperback, the book
provides a major reassessment of the forces operating in the French film industry in
production, distribution, and exhibition and a thorough account of the rise of the
alternate cinema network that grew up independently of the industry as a means for
supporting avant-garde films. '
In addition, the author presents a study of a previously unexplored topic—the
development of the major narrative film genres—and a new working definition of the
narrative avant-garde in the context of conventional film practice. This remarkable
book analyzes nearly one hundred surviving prints (many previously unavailable to
researchers). ' ;
Richard Abel is Professor of English at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

PRINCETON PAPERBACKS x