The Situation in the Film Industry
When Germany unleashed World War II by invading Poland on September 1, 1939, France and Great Britain honored their diplomatic commitments and declared war on Germany. Many French filmmakers were mobilized, and production of twenty films was suspended.
Poland collapsed swiftly, however, and the British and French did little to prevent it. The period to April 9, 1940, was the drole de guerre, or “phony war.” During this time, 2 million French troops remained in the field, but virtually no fighting occurred. It was widely assumed
13.38 Jean and Mario, two of the unemployed heroes of La Belle equipe, stand in front of a poster advertising skiing holidays (“Why shiver in Paris? Build your health among the eternal snows”).
13.39 Charles and Jean, the remaining protagonists, introduce the triumphal final dance that signals the success of their cafe.
13.40 The pessimistic final shot of the original ending of La Belle equipe: as Jean is arrested for the murder of his partner, he declares, “It’s all over. It was a wonderful idea.”
That an Allied blockade would eventually defeat Germany. In October 1939, film production had resumed, and it continued throughout the phony war.
In the spring of 1940, Germany attacked again, occupying Denmark on April 9 and moving in quick succession into Norway, the Netherlands, and Belgium. On June 5, Germany invaded France; meeting weak resistance, it occupied Paris on June 14. Two days later a right-wing French government was set up in Vichy, a resort town in central France. The southern portion of France remained an “unoccupied” zone for over two years, with the Vichy government holding power at the pleasure of the Germans.
The film industry was enormously disrupted by these events. Jews, leftists, and others fled into the unoccupied zone or went abroad. Feyder, for example, made one film in the south and then went to Switzerland in 1942; he was unable to direct again until after the war. Renoir worked in the United States during the 1940s. And some refugees returned to the occupied zone after production resumed there in June 1941. Two separate film industries developed.
Vichy France During late 1940, the Vichy government created the Comite d’Organisation de I’lndustrie Cine-matographique (COIC) to support and control the film industry. Producers had to go through an elaborate application process to get permission to make a film, and censorship under the Vichy regime was even harsher than that in the German-controlled zone. In addition, the rightist government strove to eliminate Jews from the film industry.
The southern zone had only a few small studios, including Pagnol’s in Marseille. Equipment and raw stock were scarce and sometimes had to be obtained on the black market. Producers also faced a lack of funding. Until May 1942, films made in the unoccupied zone were banned from the German zone; thus they showed only in the limited markets of southern France and French North Africa. Moreover, there were few French investors in the area.
Some financing came clandestinely from Jewish and American sources or openly from Italian investors. For example, the French firm Discina was closely linked with the Scalera company of Rome. The two firms coproduced some important films, including Jean Delannoy’s L’Eternel retour (1943), Carnes Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), and Carnes Les Enfants du paradis (1945, completed by Pathe after Italy’s defeat). (We shall discuss these films shortly.) Italian firms invested in other film enterprises in southern France and also provided a market for some French films. Abel Gance’s Le Captaine Fra-casse (1943) was another Italian-French coproduction.
The COIC helped alleviate financial problems by arranging for low-interest government loans for production. Films made with such loans include Gremil-lon’s Lumiere d’ete (“Summer Light,” 1943) and Le Ciel est a vous (“The Sky Is Yours,” 1944) and Robert Bresson’s Les Anges du peche (“Angels of Sin,” 1943). The COIC also attempted to foster quality production with an annual prize of 100,000 francs for the best films of the year. Les Visiteurs du soir won in 1942 and Les Anges du peche in 1943. Later, once southern films were allowed into the German zone, they shared in the generally high profits of the war period.
Occupied France The situation in the occupied zone was quite different than in southern France. Initially no French film production was permitted, and a ban on imports of American, British, and French films from the Vichy area gave the Germans a monopoly on screenings. Some German films, especially the infamous ]ud Suss, were successful. Audiences preferred French films, however, and cinema attendance dropped in 1941. In May of that year, German officials allowed French production to resume. Many filmmakers who had fled returned to the better-equipped studios of Paris. Once new French films began appearing in the cinemas, attendance rose again. With no competition from American films, French production actually became more profitable during the war.
Why did the German authorities permit French production? For one thing, it was widely assumed at that point, by the Germans and many French, that Germany would win the war. Its leaders planned to create a “New Europe,” under German control. France, it was assumed, would contribute to that new order. Moreover, strong European production could help Germany break the American domination of world markets, thus fulfilling— though in a less cooperative spirit—the old Film Europe goal of the 1920s. A healthy French film industry could also demonstrate to other occupied countries the benefits of cooperating with the Germans.
In addition, there was considerable German investment in France’s film industry. That investment came mainly through the formation in 1940 of a Germany company, Continental, in Paris. Continental was a subsidiary of the giant firm Ufa, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, was becoming the single centralized film company in Germany. Of the approximately 220 features made in both parts of France during the Occupation, 30 were produced by Continental. The largest French producer, Pathe-Cinema, made only fourteen films during the same period. Most production companies were still small firms, making from one to eight films during the war. However, Continental was vertically integrated, owning its own studios, laboratories, and the biggest French theater chain; it released its films through Ufa’s Paris distribution subsidiary. Continental signed up several major French stars and directors and produced some of the most popular—and controversial—films of the Occupation.
German censorship of French films was surprisingly lenient, concentrating on eliminating references to the United States and Great Britain. One area of official control was strict, however. Several regulations were passed to prevent Jews from participating in the film industry, and prewar films with Jewish actors were banned. During the war, about 75,000 French Jews were sent to concentration camps in Germany, and few of them survived. Most Jewish filmmakers, however, managed to flee or hide, and some kept working clandestinely.
France was divided until November 1942, when Germany occupied the southern portion, keeping the Vichy regime as a figurehead government. From then on, the southern production facilities functioned mainly as places for Parisian firms to go for location shooting.
It is sometimes assumed that all French filmmakers who worked in France during the Occupation were collaborating with the enemy. Many, however, felt they were keeping the French film industry alive during an extremely difficult period. While a few films reflected fascist ideals, others were pro-French. Quite a few filmmakers also served secretly in the French Resistance movement. There was a resistance group for cinema, the Comite de Liberation du Cinema Fran<;:ais; members included directors Jean Gremillon and Jacques Becker and actors Pierre Blanchar and Pierre Renoir.
The Allied military push that eventually defeated the Germans began in late 1942. From this point on, the French Resistance expanded. Allied bombing within France damaged some film facilities; five studios were destroyed and 322 theaters damaged or leveled. A shortage of materials hampered production late in the war, and, by July 1944, all production ceased. Filmmakers in the Resistance movement fought in the general uprising during August, while secretly filming the liberation of Paris.
Some filmmakers suspected of collaborating were punished. A few, such as Sacha Guitry and Maurice Chevalier, were briefly imprisoned but then exonerated. Director Henri-Georges Clouzot was briefly barred from filmmaking for having made a supposedly anti-French film, Le Corbeau. In order to see why such punishment was meted out, we need to look at the kinds of films made during the Occupation.
Films of the Occupation Period
Most films made during the Occupation were comedies and melodramas of the sort that had appeared before the war. Censorship in the German and Vichy zones forced filmmakers to avoid subject matter relating to the war and other social problems.
The most notable films of this period fit into the prestige category, close to what would later be called the “Tradition of Quality" (see Chapter 17). Belying their straitened circumstances, these films were expert productions, with impressive sets and major stars. Cut off from contemporary reality, they conveyed a mood of romantic resignation. Some films, however—vague allegories of French indomitability—also could be interpreted as suggesting resistance to oppression.
Perhaps the first such film was Christian-Jacque’s L’Assassinat du nre Noel (“The Murder of Santa Claus," 1941). Set in a snow-covered mountain village, it tells the story of a mapmaker, Cornusse, who plays Santa Claus for the local children every year (13.41). On Christmas Eve, odd events occur: a sinister figure steals a saint’s relics from the church, and the village’s baron, returned from an enigmatic absence, courts Cor-nusse’s ethereal daughter. All ends well, with Cornusse’s visit miraculously curing a crippled boy. Cornusse tells him that a French sleeping beauty will someday be awakened by a Prince Charming. Although L’Assassinat du Pere Noel was the first production by Continental, the German firm, its symbolic message was presumably apparent to many French filmgoers.
Marcel UHerbier, who had been a major figure in the French Impressionist movement of the 1920s, made his most personal film since that time with La Nuit fan-tastique (“The Fantastic Night," 1942). In it, a poor student works in a Parisian produce market and dreams nightly of an angelic woman in white. One day the woman wanders through the market, taking him on a strange journey through a nightclub, a magic shop, and an insane asylum. When he wakes again, the woman reappears, and they go off together into a permanent dreamlike realm. L'Herbier revived Impressionist subjective techniques for La Nuit fantastique, using reversed sound, slow motion, and split-screen effects to convey the hero’s dreaming visions. Similarly, Pierre Prevert managed to rekindle something of the anarchic spirit of L’Affaire est dans Ie sac in his 1943 feature Adieu... Leonard! Leonard, a thief, undergoes a series of comic adventures and then ends up abandoning society and going off with his friends in a gypsy caravan.
Escapist fantasy of a more romantic, yet morbid, kind is apparent in two major films of the midwar pe-
13.41 In
L’Assassinat du Fere Noel, Cornusse plays Santa Claus for the villagers while mysterious events are occurring.
Riod. Marcel Carne’s Les Visiteurs du soir (“Visitors of the Evening,” 1942), a romance set in medieval times, employs elaborate costumes and settings (13.42). Yet, because of shortages, many period costumes were made of cheap cloth and the crew injected poison into the fruit in the banquet scenes to prevent hungry extras from eating it. In Les Visiteurs, a man and a woman are sent by the Devil to corrupt the inhabitants of a castle. The man falls in love with the princess he is supposed to seduce, and, ultimately, the Devil turns them both into statues (13.43). This ending has been widely interpreted as an allegory of France’s resistance to German Occupation. Two prominent Jewish film artists, set designer Alexandre Trauner and composer Joseph Kosma collaborated anonymously on the film.
A similar story of doomed love is Jean Delannoy’s L’Eternel retour (“The Eternal Return,” 1943), from a Jean Cocteau script based on the Tristan and Isolde legend. Cocteau set the story in contemporary times but on an isolated island. The hero, Patrice, goes to fetch a young wife, Natalie, for his elderly uncle. Falling in love with her, he lives out a doomed existence in which his evil cousin Achille plots against him. Eventually Patrice and Natalie, both coldly beautiful, idealized characters, accept death as the only way that they can stay together. This sort of fatalism typified much French filmmaking of the Occupation period.
The era was also notable for two films by Jean Gremillon, whose La Petite Lise had been a major early sound film and an early entry in the Poetic Realist tendency. In Lumiere d’ete (1943), a love triangle among older people—Cri-Cri, a dancer who now runs a mountain hotel; Patrice, a local nobleman; and Roland, an alcoholic artist—is played off against a more innocent romance between a young engineer, Julien, and a young woman, Michele. Patrice tries to seduce Michele, but, after a masked ball and a car crash, the relationships sort themselves out, and Julien and Michele end up together. The film’s settings (13.44) and acting were distinctive for the period. Because of its sordid depiction of its characters,
13.42 The Devil’s emissaries approach the immense castle set in the opening scene of Les Visiteurs du soir.
13.43 The Devil hears the heartbeats of his victims and realizes he has failed to completely subjugate them.
13.44 An effective use of a location setting in the mountains in Gremillon’s Lumiere d’ete.
13.45, left At the opening of a small airport in La Ciel est a vous, French flags are draped conspicuously in the background.
13.46, right Robert Bresson used the nuns’ black-and-white clothing, in combination with careful lighting and composition, to create an arresting visual style in Les Anges du piche.
The film was nearly banned by the Vichy authorities, who demanded strong, upright French figures.
La Ciel est a vous (1944) is more upbeat. The family of a garage owner sacrifices everything so that the wife, Therese, can establish a long-distance solo flying record. The story uses conventional Hollywood-style suspense, showing the family struggling to finance the trip and waiting as Therese loses radio contact on her record-breaking flight. Through patriotic motifs (13.45), the film lauded French heroism and even revived a bit of the spirit of the Popular Front.
The most important filmmaker to begin a career during the Occupation period was Robert Bresson, whose first feature, Les Anges du peche, appeared in 1943. An audacious film noir set in a convent, it deals with nuns who try to reform female criminals. Bresson’s characteristic narrative of spiritual redemption emerged in mature form, with a rebellious nun and a murderess unpredictably helping each other find peace. The austere visual style also looked forward to Bresson’s later films (13.46). Bresson’s next film, Les Dames de Bois de Bologne (“The Ladies of the Bois de Bologne”) began production late in the Occupation period but was not released until 1945, a year after the liberation of France. It shares some traits of the Occupation films, since its narrative is cut off from contemporary society, dealing with a high-society woman who tries to take revenge on her ex-lover by tricking him into marrying an ex-prostitute.
Perhaps the two most famous films of the Occupation period are Carne’s Les Enfants du paradis (“Children of Paradise,” 1945), and Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (“The Crow,” 1943). Children of Paradise was made under difficult circumstances, in the lean late-war period. A vast tapestry of the theater world in nineteenth-century Paris (13.47), the story traces the romantic entanglements of several characters, centering around the
13.47 Jewish designer Alexandre Trauner, working clandestinely on Children of Paradise, created enormous sets reconstructing the theater district of mid-nineteenth-century Paris.
13.48 The bittersweet pantomime involving Pierrot, Columbine, and Harlequin in Children of Paradise suggests the sense of lost love that pervades the film’s offstage
Romances.
13.49 At the funeral of one of the “Crow’s" victims in Le Corbeau, the villagers pass around another poison-pen letter.
Mime Baptiste Debureau and the actress Garance, whose thwarted love echoes their onstage roles (13.48).
Nothing could be further from the mood of romantic melancholy that pervades Children of Paradise than the cynicism of Le Corbeau. The film is set in a small French town where a series of poison-pen letters signed “Le Corbeau” reveal various secrets about several of the most respected members of the community. The panicky townspeople react with unreasoning suspicions. The protagonist, Dr. Germain, receives a letter falsely accusing him of having an affair with a married woman and of being an abortionist. He is later seduced by Denise, a young woman whom the community is quick to condemn for her loose morals—despite the fact that she is one of the few to refuse to enter into the hysterical suspicions and accusations prompted by Le Cor-beau’s letters (13.49).
At the time of Le Corbeau’s release in 1943, its unpleasant subject matter led to its being widely condemned as anti-French—especially since it had been produced by the German-backed Continental company. Some have argued, however, that Le Corbeau was an attack on the sorts of right-wing values that undergirded the Vichy government. The heated debates in the “Clouzot affair” led in 1945 to the filmmaker’s being forbidden to work. Clouzot did not direct again until 1947, when the complex and realistic crime film Quai des orfevres reestablished his career.
The end of the Occupation brought many changes for French filmmaking, including the renewed competition with imported American films. Yet most of the filmmakers of the wartime period kept working, and the decentralized industrial structures survived into the postwar era.
World History
