L'Arlésienne (1908)
Directed by Albert Capellani

Film Review

For the decade following the Lumière brothers' invention of the cinématograph in 1895, cinema remained little more than a fairground amusement.  'Moving pictures' were still a tawdry commercial novelty rather than a new art form.  They rarely exceeded the length of a single reel (up to fifteen minutes) and were mostly infantile fantasies or burlesque entertainments consisting of no more than a few scenes, using camera trickery and sensational subjects to attract the paying punter.  All this changed in 1908, the year in which cinema passed suddenly from infancy to adolescence with the advent of two films that would transform the nature of filmmaking overnight - Albert Capellani's rural melodrama L'Arlésienne and André Calmettes's historical intrigue L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise.  Both films were conceived with the noble intention of elevating the status of cinema, to make it as respectable as the theatre, but the public reaction was so immense and so immediate that there was no doubt that a seismic event had occurred.  Cinema would never be the same again as it embraced the extended narrative and morphed into the distinctive art form that we recognise today - one that would impact on human consciousness more spectacularly than any other single invention since the arrival of the printing press in the 15th century.

The prime instigator of this revolution was Paul Laffitte, a prominent publisher who made good use of the fortune he inherited from the banker Jacques Laffitte through his generous sponsorship of the theatre and early cinema.  The highly cultivated Lafitte saw the enlightening potential of cinema more clearly than perhaps anyone, and this led him to create Le Film d'Art, the first company that was specifically set up to make high quality films for a more discerning audience.  L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise was the company's first prestige production and its initial screening in mid-November 1908 was indeed a great event in the history of cinema.  However, much of the thunder of this cultural coup de main was stolen by the almost simultaneous screening of a work of comparable significance from a rival company, SCAGL.

Seeing Le Film d'Art as a threat to his ambition of retaining global dominance of the nascent film industry, Charles Pathé set up his own subsidiary company in 1908 - Société cinématographique des auteurs et gens de lettres (SCAGL) - with pretty much the same objectives, primarily to produce quality adaptations of classic works of literature.  There was only one man Pathé could trust to make a success of this venture, a man who not only showed an unrivalled potential as a filmmaker, but one who was also a dependable administrator - Albert Capellani.  Since joining Pathé-Frères in 1905, Capellani had impressed his employers with his innovative flair and boundless enthusiasm, so who better than him for the role of SCAGL's artistic director?  L'Arlésienne was Capellani's first film for the fledgling company, an 18 minute short that would make history as the first moving picture to have a continuous extended narrative running beyond a single reel - the immediate forerunner of the fully fledged feature film.

The film is based on the 1872 play of the same title by the celebrated French writer Alphonse Daudet, which was itself taken from a short story by Daudet (one contained in his 1869 anthology Les Lettres de mon moulin).  The story was so widely read that its title entered common parlance in France not long after its publication - the term l'Arlésienne now means someone who is talked about a great deal but never actually seen.  Daudet's three-act play had not been a success but the incidental music which Georges Bizet composed for it later achieved great renown in the form of two orchestral suites.  This was the music that was chosen to accompany Capellani's film on its first screening on 1st October 1908 at the Omnia-Pathé Theatre in Paris.  The critical and public reaction to the film was overwhelmingly positive, and this encouraged the director to embark on a series of increasingly ambitious adaptations of classic works, culminating in his epic masterpieces Les Misérables and Germinal in 1913  - the two films that established the feature as the dominant format in cinema from then on.

For the best part of a century, Capellani's part in cinema history has been massively downplayed, partly because his filmmaking career came to an abrupt end way before the arrival of sound cinema in the late 1920s, but also because much of his work was lost and forgotten, L'Arlésienne being one of the most undeserving victims of this cultural amnesia.  The miraculous recovery of a print of L'Arlésienne in the early 2000s and subsequent restoration by Lobster Films has given back to us an absolutely crucial link in the development of early cinema.  At long last, Albert Capellani's immense contribution to cinema is beginning to be recognised - ninety years after he finished laying the rock solid foundation on which today's entire filmmaking industry rests.

There are many aspects of L'Arlésienne that mark it out as a significant development from just about everything that had gone before.  Even for Capellani, a master innovator, it was a considerable advancement.  Prior to this, the director's forte had been whimsical fairytales and fantasies, which gave him scope for experimenting not only with cinematographic technique but also effective storytelling.  Aladin ou la Lampe merveilleuse (1906), Cendrillon (1907) and Peau d'Âne (1908) - to name just three - are lovingly crafted interpretations of classic tales that build on the pioneering work of Capellani's illustrious predecessor Georges Méliès and still impress with their visual ingenuity and exuberant zaniness.  Capellani also had a penchant for more realist subjects, melodramas depicting the conflicts and tragedies of everyday life.  His 1906 films Drame passionel, L'Âge du coeur, La Fille du sonneur and La Femme du lutteur show a noticeable evolution from the blunt histrionics of Grand Guignol to a more intimate and naturalistic approach that Capellani would strive to perfect for the remainder of his career.  L'Arlésienne is an important milestone in this progression towards what we now think of as modern cinema - as significant an achievement as the publication of the first novel.

Filmed almost entirely on location in the historic French city of Arles and its picturesque environs, L'Arlésienne has none of the cramped staginess and theatrical artifice of most dramatic shorts made around this time.  It is hard to believe it was made as early as 1908.  How oddly it resembles the 1930s films of Marcel Pagnol (Angèle, Jofroi),with its idyllic Provençal setting and convincing depiction of ordinary folk from the region.  The remains of a spectacular Roman landmark - the Arles amphitheatre - provides a suitably dramatic and ominous opening for cinema's first authentic depiction of an amour fou, the fleeting glimpse of a bullfight anticipating the Carmen-like tale of love, rejection and death that slowly unfolds before our eyes.  The distinctive Provençal sunlight and bucolic ambiance lend an aching lyricism to the scenes of intimacy in the winding cobbled streets of the old city and the lush olive groves in the countryside beyond.  L'Arlésienne has a near-documentary reality to it and it is this quality, the sense that we are watching real life, not a staged fiction, which makes it so intensely involving.  The visuals are captivating, with more than a foretaste of the seductive impressionistic poetry of Jean Renoir's early films, but it is Capellani's delicate handling of a genuine human crisis that makes it such an utterly remarkable film for its time - outshining even André Antoine's 1922 feature-length remake, an adept but far less groundbreaking retelling of Daudet's immortal story.

It was with L'Arlésienne that Albert Capellani progressed from being merely a monstrously talented experimentalist to the world's first great cineaste.  Once his concept of realist drama had taken root (in the period 1908-1913) cinema would develop at a spectacular rate into the form that we know today.   Crucial in this phase of cinematic evolution was the host of innovations that Capellani perfected in his attempts to move away from the clunky theatricality of early cinema towards a more organic, naturally flowing form of visual expression - to take the 2D-image and make it appear to us as a genuinely four-dimensional entity, rather than merely a succession of loosely connected snapshots.  L'Arlésienne abounds with the innovative flourishes that would become Capellani's hallmark for the duration of his time at SCAGL and allow him to reach his artistic apotheosis with his stunning magnum opus Germinal (1913).

The film's most spectacular shot is found near the start, with the camera slowly panning across the famous Arles amphitheatre in a way that captures both the enormity and primal strangeness of the location and the excitement of a bullfight in progress.  From a high vantage point, the camera starts with a distant glimpse of the toreadors showing their bravado at the heart of the arena and then slowly glides rightwards into the crowds of minuscule spectators gathered in the tiers of the gigantic Roman edifice like ants on the skeletal remains of a dinosaur.  Impressive as this is, it is a mere taster for the even more daring shot that comes a short while afterwards, after the hero Frédéric has succumbed to the fateful allure of the girl from Arles.

As Frédéric and the object of his desire exchange their first sweet nothings up in the highest walkway of the amphitheatre, the camera starts with a leisurely pan across the city skyline until the lovers suddenly appear in the frame's foreground.  As if aware they have been found doing something illicit, the lovers quickly slip away to the right, out of camera shot.  The camera maintains its unbroken movement rightwards, continuing its sweep across the horizon until, a few seconds later, the lovers again come into shot, this time in a closer embrace.  The complete 180-degree shot lasts a full 40 seconds and conveys more about the nature of Frédéric's headlong fall into amorous infatuation than any quantity of close-ups and dialogue.  The fact that the intoxicated hero is seen at such an elevated position - literally walking in the clouds - has an ironic undertone, grimly anticipating his ultimate fate at the end of the film.  Frédéric's tragic collision with reality once the illusion of love has passed is anticipated long before we actually see it on the screen.  Here we have the first glimmerings of poetic realism, the doom-laden aesthetic that would define French cinema in the 1930s and prefigure the arrival of classic film noir.

It is with its depiction of Frédéric's dramatic descent into insanity that L'Arlésienne is at its most inventive and poignant.  As he pores over the letter that leaves no doubt as to his beloved's cruel infidelity, Frédéric's fevered imagination conjures up the apparition of the Arlesian minx so that he can banish her and regain his peace of mind.  Instead of just appearing from nowhere in an instant (through the standard stop-motion effect pioneered by Méliès) the girl gradually materialises out of thin air and becomes as solid as Frédéric until he sends her away, at which point she melts away into nothing once more.  This effect was presumably achieved by shooting the scene twice - one without the girl, one with - and then combining the two through a meticulous process of over-layering and editing.  Capellani employed the same effect more prosaically on earlier shorts, notably Pauvre mère (1906), which shows another descent into madness, a young mother driven to distraction by the accidental death of her infant daughter.  The effect recurs at the end of the film in an even more spectacular manner, providing Frédéric with the hallucination that lures him to his doom.

And it is with Frédéric's death - a hangover from the Grand Guignol sensationalism of the director's earlier 'dramatic scenes' (Drame passionel, Mortelle idyll, L'Âge du coeur) - that the L'Arlésienne assails its audience with a truly shocking climax.  The impact of the film's horrific ending is accentuated by a rare example (at the time) of cross-cutting.  As attention switches back and forth between the now totally unhinged Frédéric and his pitifully distraught mother the pace of the narrative is dramatically accelerated, the tension building up and up to a terrifying crescendo, in perfect alignment with the characters' frantic climb up to the top of a tall building.  This was some years before D.W. Griffith introduced cross-cutting into his films and claimed the technique as his own.  In this, and in so many other ways, Albert Capellani was way ahead of the game.  The first screening of L'Arlésienne in the autumn of 1908 was a crucial moment in film history - the day on which the Seventh Art genuinely came of age.  It was as if humanity had suddenly discovered the portal to a whole new dimension.

Film Synopsis

Frédéric, a young man from the country, arrives in the ancient city of Arles to attend a bullfight in the Roman amphitheatre.  Here his attention strays from the arena to a beautiful young woman who instantly steals his heart.  As they drift through the quiet streets of the town, arm-in-arm, Frédéric has no doubt that he has found his perfect mate, and that the girl from Arles loves him as much as he loves her.  Little does he know that she already has an ardent lover, Mifilio, and he has no intention of surrendering her to another man.  His heart filled with joy, Frédéric returns to his home village to give his parents the good news that he is soon to marry the enchanting girl he met in Arles.

A few days before the engagement party, Mifilio shows up unexpectedly and hands a letter to the young man's grandfather Balthazar, proving that he has a prior claim to the Arlesian girl.  The latter does not dispute the truth of this when Frédéric next meets her, and as his paramour abandons him the young man is left completely heartbroken.  Fearing that her son is losing his mind, Frédéric's mother persuades him to marry his former sweetheart Yvette.  But the young man's obsession with the girl from Arles only increases and he sees her face everywhere he goes.  Frédéric's mania increases until, finally, he sees his beloved kissing his rival in front of an open window high up in an attic room.  As he reaches out for the couple, not knowing that this is merely another hallucination, he tumbles through the window and falls to his death.