France in the 1930s and 1940s
A combination of the effects of the Great Depression with
the arrival of sound was a disaster for the French studios. Forced to buy sound
equipment and rights from abroad, and labouring under corrupt and lacklustre
studio control the industry had virtually collapsed by 1934. Out of the chaos
and mismanagement of the early thirties, and with the studio doors shut, a
number of independent entrepreneur producers emerged to take advantage of
French filmmaking skills. Julien Duvivier, Marcel Carne and Jean Renoir were
amongst the most talented directors at the forefront of a movement that has
been termed ‘Poetic Realism’. As with Italian Neorealism to which it was an
influence, Poetic Realism dealt with working class characters in adverse
circumstances, or as criminals, often in romantic, but doomed relationships.
Poetic Realist films featured pessimistic narratives, night time settings and a
dark, contrasted visual style prefiguring American film noir. Carne’s ‘Le Jour
se Lève’ (Daybreak 1939), starring Jean Gabin, is one of the best
representatives of the tradition (Vincendeau 1996).
Another short-lived movement was Ciné-Liberté, a political
cinema sponsored by the Leftist ‘Popular Front’ as a response to the growing
threat of Fascism in Europe . According to
Bordwell (1996) the group included Renoir, Marc Allégret and Germaine Dulac.
Typical of the Ciné-Liberté films were ‘La Vie est à Nous’ (1936) an
innovative, collaborative project that mixed documentary footage with acted
scenes to discuss the contemporary scene and Renoir’s ‘La Marseillaise’ (1938)
depicting events of the French Revolution. Renoir’s popular comedy
‘Le Crime de
Monsieur Lange’ (Monsieur Lange’s Crime 1935), like many films between 1935-37,
was also inspired by the hopeful ideology of the Popular Front. By 1939 with
the hopes of the Front crushed, Renoir produced his darkly pessimistic
masterpiece ‘La Règle du Jeu’ (The Rules of the Game, 1939) a comedy-drama
contrasting the love affairs of aristocrats and servants during a weekend in
the country. The film provoked a ‘political riot’ on its premiere in Paris and was banned by
the French military censors in 1939 as ‘demoralizing’ and the Germans during
their occupation of France (Cook 1996).
Nazi occupation of France during the war had several consequences. A few of France’s finest actors and directors, such as Renoir, Duvivier and Gabin fled to America where they helped produce anti-Nazi films. In the occupied territory the German authorities banned American and British films, which contributed significantly to the rapid growth of the French film industry in the war years. A major company was the Ufa controlled ‘Continental’, a vertically integrated company based in Paris, which produced 30 features out of the 220 made during the war and also distributed German films. In the Vichy ‘free zone’, censorship meant that directors avoided contemporary subject matter, relying instead particularly on ‘prestige’ literary and historical material, usually of an escapist nature. Bordwell (1994) notes that:
‘Cut off from contemporary reality, they conveyed a mood of romantic resignation. Some films, however, also could be interpreted as suggesting resistance to oppression - vague allegories of French indomitability.’
A number of impressive films were made in the war period, the most famous of which are probably Marcel Carné’s ‘Les Visiteurs du Soir’ (aka The Devil’s Envoy 1942), ‘Les Enfants du Paradis’ (The Children of Paradise 1945) and Clouzot’s ‘Le Corbeau’ (The Raven 1943).
Several of the measures Pétain’s Vichy government introduced to ‘protect’ and subsidise French film have remained, in a slightly modified form, to the present day. A degree of state control, a box-office levy and aid to ‘non-commercial’ films helped the French cinema achieve stability and popularity from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. As Vincendeau remarks, while cinemas in other nations went into a period of decline the French film industry reached a pinnacle of stability and craftsmanship and was not threatened by television until the 1960s.