La Bergère d’Ivry (1913) - film review

Hortense Fauvel, the wife of a village postmaster, takes Aimée, a young shepherdess, under her wing.  Aimée soon becomes engaged to François, the Fauvel’s loyal servant.  At a fête hosted by the Count of Granval, Aimée gives her fiancé a knife, telling him that he should kill her if ever she ceases to be faithful to him.  That same day, the Count is planning to have an amorous liaison with Hortense, but Aimée intervenes.  To save her mistress from a scandal, Aimée tells the postmaster that it is she, not Hortense, who has been seeing the Count.  Disgraced, Aimée is dismissed by the postmaster.  François contemplates his revenge and recalls what Aimée said to him earlier...

La Bergère d’Ivry is an early silent short film by Maurice Tourneur, one of French cinema’s underrated auteur film directors.  Whilst it may lack the sophistication and attention to detail of Tourneur’s later films, La Bergère d’Ivry is a charming little piece which tells a simple story with understated lyricism.  The film includes one of Tourneur’s earliest uses of shadow play to suggest menace – the disturbing shot where François is considering how to avenge his betrayal.  Shadows feature a great deal in Tourneur’s work, providing an effective visual metaphor for the darker side of human nature and a representation of those unseen external forces which determine our destinies, as in the work of the German expressionists and their film noir successors.

© James Travers 2008

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