Film Review
In the decade leading up to the First World War, cinema had come a long way.
Up until 1910, the vast majority of films being made around the world were
shorts, but by 1914 the feature-length film was beginning to take over, and
in France the man who was mostly responsible for this was Albert Capellani,
one of Pathé's leading lights. Appointed artistic director of
the company's subsidiary SCAGI (la Société
Cinématographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres) in 1908, Capellani
was tasked with making prestigious adaptations of French literary works,
and in doing so he helped to place France at the forefront of cinematic achievement.
Such was Capellani's standing at the time that there was virtually no one
to compare with him. America's D.W. Griffith was arguably the only
other director who made a comparable impact in the early 1910s, in terms
of both quality and quantity of output.
Capellani's inspired adaptation of Émile Zola's classic novel
Germinal,
first released in 1913, is testament to both the director's artistic powers
and the confidence that Pathé had in him. Running to two hours
in length, this was a blockbuster production of the kind that was virtually
unheard of at the time, and its phenomenal popularity not only shored up
Capellani's reputation, it also ensured that the feature film would soon
become cinema's main attraction. Prior to this, Capellani had directed
another impressive Zola adaptation,
L'Assommoir (1909), and a superlative
attempt at another monumental work of French literature,
Les Misérables
(1913). With an ample budget that allowed him to construct massive
sets and hire a cast of hundreds, Capellani was allowed to do what few other
filmmakers had been able to do prior to him - to deliver screen interpretations
of familiar novels that more than did justice to the original material, and
without looking like filmed stage plays.
It is now over a hundred since Capellani's
Germinal was made but it
still continues to impress with the sheer scale of its ambition. You
only have to watch more recent adaptations of the novel - one by
Yves Allégret in 1963, another
by
Claude Berri in 1993 - to see what
difficulties adapting this sprawling epic of a novel presents, even to accomplished
filmmakers. Without recourse to the kind of special effects that film
directors now take for granted, Capellani had an almighty challenge realising
the novel's famous set-pieces, notably the flooding of the mine at its apocalyptic
climax. Unable to film in a real mine for safety reasons, Capellani
had to construct full-size mock-ups of the mining galleries in the studio,
and these are so well constructed and so carefully shot that you could hardly
fail to mistake them for the real thing.
Albert Capellani's particular forte was creating powerful compositions which
bring home the drama and poignancy of his subject without resort to the kind
of melodramatic sleights of hand that less capable directors tend to fall
back on.
Germinal abounds with examples of this. The stand-off
between the miners and the armed militia (eerily reminiscent of a similar
scene in Sergei Eisenstein's
Battleship
Potemkin, made twelve years later) and its solemn aftermath serve
up some stark images that stay lodged in your head for long after you have
watched the film. A street brawl involving the hero Lantier and his
romantic rival has a fierceness that you would hardly expect for a film of
this era, but for visual impact and shock value nothing surpasses the scene
of utter devastation in the flooded mine at the film's climax.
Capellani wasn't only a master of shot composition, he was also extremely
good at getting the best from his actors, and this is apparent in the lead
performances from Henry Krauss and Sylvie (Louise Mainguené), who
contribute a great deal to the film's dramatic impact. Krauss had been
a magnificent Jean Valjean in Capellani's
Les Misérables, but,
with his powerful physique and ability to convey real emotion through subtle
gestures, he is equally well suited for the role of Étienne Lantier,
the impulsive thug with a tender heart. Many French film enthusiasts
will know Sylvie from the films she appeared in in her later years - she
had a memorable part in H.G. Clouzot's
Le Corbeau (1943) and played
Charles Trenet's mum in
Romance
de Paris (1941). To see her in
Germinal as the heroine
Catherine, a feisty 30-year-old who looks so butch that we easily mistake
her for a man when we first see her in her mining attire - is quite a shock.
The fact that Sylvie portrays Catherine as such a strong, almost masculine,
character makes her brutal demise all the more tragic. Both lead actors
defy the stereotypical norm of the handsome screen lover and instead bring
an earthy realism to their portrayals that makes the drama all the poignant
and involving.
What is most striking about Capellani's
Germinal is how, for a film
of this era, unrelentingly grim and violent it is. Much nearer to social
realism than melodrama, there is a fierce, almost sadistic brutality to the
film that very nearly surpasses that of Zola's writing at its most pessimistic.
With so much of the action filmed on location - in a typically dreary northern
French mining town (Auchel), and in the near-documentary, coldly realist
style that was favoured by Capellani - the film was unlikely to end up looking
like a musical comedy, but you can't help but be taken aback by how crushingly
gloomy it is for pretty well its entire duration. (The only moment
of light relief is a scene at a fairground where a casual passerby looks
curiously at the camera, before slipping out of shot when he realises he
is being filmed. Could this be the earliest instance of the 'fourth
wall' being broken in a film drama?) The heavy oppressiveness that
clings to the forlorn exteriors of the mine is even more apparent in the
claustrophobic mining galleries. The mining works that Capellani creates
come to resemble the frightening Moloch machine in Fritz Lang's
Metropolis (1927) - an insatiable
sacrificial temple to capitalism. And with this sense of unremitting
oppression there is a continual ratcheting up of the tension, so that when
the cataclysmic shocks come - like a series of avalanches at the film's climax
- they have a terrible inevitability about them. If you thought Zola's
novel was grim, this adaptation is unlikely to alter that impression one
iota.
© James Travers 2016
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Next Albert Capellani film:
Quatre-vingt-treize (1921)