Film Review
The mild revolutionary
Abel Gance, Marcel L'Herbier, Jean Epstein and René Clair - it's an
impressive roll call that makes up the so-called 'impressionist movement'
in French cinema of the 1920s. Two names that tend to get overlooked,
or at least given far less attention, are Louis Delluc and Germaine Dulac,
the two directors who established the movement with their innovative and
highly influential collaborative venture
La Fête espagnole (1920)
(a film that sadly no longer exists in its entirety). The more visually
flamboyant style of 'the big four', which includes bravura use of optical
distortions and rhythmic montage, set them way apart from the far more restrained
naturalistic approach of Delluc and Dulac, and this might explain why far
more attention is focused on the former. Another explanation for the
comparative obscurity of the 'two Ds' is that neither of them survived into
the sound era. Dulac, possibly on account of her sex and reputation
as a staunch feminist, had to abandon her career as an independent filmmaker
in the early 1930s and ended up working on newsreels for Gaumont. Delluc
had his career cut short in 1924 when he died not long after completing work
on his eighth and final film,
L'Inondation, an adaptation of a novella
by André Corthis produced by Marcel L'Herbier.
Of the six leading impressionist filmmakers of the 1920s, Louis Delluc probably
had the clearest idea of what the movement stood for. Before he turned
to directing in 1919, he had spent a number of years developing his ideas
as a film critic and film theoretician, publishing several influential articles
and books on the subject (
Cinéma et Cie,
Drames de cinéma,
Photogénie,
La Jungle du cinéma). It was
his wife, the greatly respected actress Éve Francis, who brought him
into contact with Germaine Dulac - one of the very few women in the film
industry at the time - and together they began working through their conception
of what would later be termed 'pure cinema'. As a film critic, Delluc
had become massively disenchanted with French cinema, which, to his mind,
seemed to be far too reliant on sensationalist potboilers like Louis Feuillade's
Fantômas
series and literary adaptations that were too closely connected to their
original sources. In both quality and quantity, American cinema was
now vastly superior, and Delluc's depressing prognosis was that in France
filmmaking was on an ever-downwards trajectory into the lower depths of low
culture, a vacuous amusement for the uneducated masses.
Dulac shared Delluc's instincts that filmmaking had yet to fulfil its promise
as a radically new medium of artistic expression. For her, cinema was
much nearer to music than other visual art forms, capable of yielding works
as diverse and deeply resonant as the great symphonies. But for this
to become a reality the medium would have to sever its association with the
literary form altogether and become a purely visual means of expression,
its essential elements being composition and montage, not plot and character.
Over the ensuing decade, Dulac would go much further than Delluc, embracing
the principles of Dadaism and Surrealism in her own, less inhibited pursuit
of
cinéma pur, but it was ultimately Delluc's far less radical
approach that won out. The extent of Delluc's influence on the progression
of cinema into the sound era and beyond is hard to gauge but it is apparent,
just by watching the few films he made, that his concept of cinema was far
closer to what became the established norm in later decades than that of
his more stylistically adventurous associates of the Avant-Garde.
Pure cinema à la Delluc
Between 1920 and 1924, Louis Delluc directed just eight films, the most significant
being his unqualified masterpiece
La Femme de nulle part
(1922). In stark contrast to his impressionist contemporaries, Delluc
eschewed elaborate shows of style and gimmickry, opting instead for a form
of cinema that was as simple and direct as possible, grounded in the world
of everyday experience. The 'less is more' principle is one that he
would undoubtedly have subscribed to. The idea of bombarding his audience
with frenzied barrages of sensory overload (as the other impressionist filmmakers
often did in their films) was anathema to him. Delluc sought not to
wow his audience but rather to engage their intellectual faculties and emotional
instincts, in a way that allowed them to have a far deeper, much more meaningful
cinema experience. For those who take seriously the auteurist theories
developed in the 1950s, Louis Delluc would seem to be the prime example of
the auteur filmmaker - an artist possessed by a consistent motivating idea
that would shape his work into a unique and coherent whole.
Delluc's films are so subtle and understated compared with the more experimental
and visually daring works of Gance, Epstein, L'Herbier and Clair that it
seems odd that they should all be lumped together under the same umbrella.
Delluc's idea of impressionistic expression may be on a homeopathic scale
compared with what we find in the works of his Avant-Garde contemporaries,
but it is just as noticeable when you compare his films with most other cinematic
offerings of this period. The economy and precision of his mise-en-scène
is the first thing you notice - every shot is meticulously composed but there
isn't an ounce of superfluity anywhere in sight. The camerawork and
editing are also remarkably unobtrusive, both achieving their aims without
recourse to stylistic excess. A good example of this is the brief flashback
sequence in
L'Inondation where one character (Broc) recalls the days
preceding the time when his wife walked out on him with their infant daughter.
As the younger Broc sits in the foreground to the left of the shot, playing
with his cherished child, his wife enters from the rear with a young man
and sits alongside him to the back and right of the frame. In this
single domestic tableau Delluc tells us everything we need to know as efficiently
and naturally as possible - the father's devotion to his daughter, his wife's
coquettish and selfish nature, and the degree of emotional separation between
the married pair.
Delluc's guiding principle was that a film should consist of a series of
felt experiences, not mere images. The role of the filmmaker, to his
way of thinking, was akin to that of the French impressionist filmmakers
of the 19th century - to capture the core essence of life and human experience
within the medium he had chosen to work with. His Avant-Garde peers
had the same objective but sought to achieve this by privileging the interior
world with their wildly distorted representations of reality; their films
depict not what we perceive with our senses, but how we experience things
internally when under psychological stress. Delluc's more naturalistic
approach is much closer to reality as we see and feel it in daily life, and
this could be why it endured and became the preferred style for modern cinema.
Exemplary modernity
There is nothing in Louis Delluc's modest body of work that is anywhere near
as elaborately stylised and visually exciting as Abel Gance's
La Roue, Jean Epstein's
Coeur fidèle, Marcel L'Herbier's
L'Inhumaine or René Clair's
Paris qui dort. And yet
Delluc's films are astoundingly modern when you watch them today, offering
not grand spectacle to dazzle but modest slices of life that connect with
the reality of human experience at a much deeper level. In
La Femme
de nulle part and
L'Inondation - Delluc's final two films - we
can see not only the well-defined shape of French cinema of the 1930s but
also its further evolution towards the cinematic revolution of the 1960s
and on to today's cinema, where the striving for authenticity remains the
overriding goal of most serious filmmakers.
L'Inondation's picturesque location in south-eastern France and its
intimate portrait of country life immediately evokes the Provençal-based
films of Marcel Pagnol. The film's gradually darkening tone and subtly
ironic concern with the self-destructive capabilities of human beings prefigure
the poetic realist aesthetic of the late 1930s. Meanwhile, the documentary-like
montage of tracking shots down the crowded streets of a thriving rural community
at once remind us of the early films of the French New Wave. (Truffaut's
1961 short film
Une histoire d'eau
would seem to be an affectionate homage to
L'Inondation).
The director's assured use of close-up and deep-space photography create
an astonishing sense of
sur-le-vif immediacy and proximity with his
characters. We cannot help but be drawn into their world and feel what
they feel, at times with a visceral intensity that is quite disconcerting.
And when Delluc does deign to employ impressionistic devices - superimposition
and subjective camerawork - these are used sparingly but to great effect,
to gently guide us into the private interior worlds of the protagonists.
The film's rigorously pared back mise-en-scène has far more in common
with what we find in the more mature works of Carl Dreyer (
Ordet,
Gertrud)
than in the more desperately overblown offerings of the French Avant-Garde.
Film commentators love to go on about the dazzling brilliance of the silent
masterworks of Gance, Epstein and L'Herbier, how these cinematic triumphs
nuked the rulebook (not that one existed at the time) and transformed cinema
forever in the 1920s. There is some truth in this, but what tends to
get overlooked is the fact that the quieter revolution of Louis Delluc was
more closely aligned with trends in American cinema and would consequently
have a much longer-lasting impact.
Fatal attraction
Marcel L'Herbier was one of Louis Delluc's fondest admirers - and with good
reason. Before becoming France's leading film critic in the late 1910s,
Delluc had pursued a very prominent career as a novelist and playwright.
He was the man who first coined the term
cinéaste and it was
he who paved the way for L'Herbier and his fellow firebrand film revolutionaries,
through his virulent assaults in the press on the lamentable state of French
cinema. Buoyed up by his early successes at Gaumont yet craving greater
artistic freedom, L'Herbier created his own film production company Cinégraphic
in 1923, with the explicit aim of fulfilling the Delluc/Dulac manifesto for
a new kind of cinema that was liberated from the shackles of other artistic
influences, especially literature and the theatre. Whether it was the
gods' revenge for an act of hubris or just incredible bad luck, the fledgling
company appeared to be jinxed right from the outset. L'Herbier's
first independently produced film
Résurrection had to be abandoned
when the director fell chronically ill. His next feature
L'Inhumaine
was such a monumental commercial failure that it came close to bankrupting
him. And
L'Indondation, the film L'Herbier had invited Delluc
to direct, resulted in the premature death of the very man who had initiated
the impressionist movement.
L'Indondation may have been Louis Delluc's swansong but it was by
no means the end of impressionism in French cinema. L'Herbier's magnum
opus
L'Argent (1928) was still to
come, as was Gance's
Napoléon (1927) and Epstein's
La Chute de la maison Usher
(1928). It did however mark something of a turning point, away from
the wild exuberance of the Avant-Garde's earlier years towards a more subtle
and effective form of expression.
L'Indondation surpasses all
of these far more ambitious, far better known films in at least one crucial
respect - its captivating humanity. The film may not have the stinging
emotional power and epic quality of Delluc's previous chef d'oeuvre,
La
Femme de nulle part, but it is nonetheless a remarkably accomplished
piece of filmmaking, the beautifully contained visual poetry and delicacy
of the mise-en-scène appearing oddly incongruous when set against
the horrific forces that guide the destinies of the film's protagonists.
The titanic power of the Rhône is impressed upon us right from the
start of the film, with arresting images that inundate our senses and leave
us in no doubt as to the godlike might of the great river as it cuts its
way through the countryside like a huge deadly serpent, an unstoppable, untameable
force of nature. It is the most apt metaphor for the unseen, unheard
influences that decide the fates of the characters in the story - mere ants
caught up in a devastating flood of surging waters and an even crueller welter
of human feeling.
Love and hatred are the primal forces that impel the perilous currents in
this arresting drama, beginning - as all tragedies do - with a confluence
of seemingly harmless unrelated events. A woman of indeterminate age,
Germaine, arrives in an unfamiliar village in search of her long-lost father
Broc and is offered shelter by a kindly young farmer, Alban. Mistaking
her benefactor's intentions, this unfortunate newcomer rapidly succumbs to
the fever of love and makes herself a laughing stock as she clings to her
excessive amorous delusion. Alban's fiancée Margot, a girl with
a reputation as a heartless coquette, takes most pleasure in Germaine's humiliation,
and in doing so she incurs the wrath of a devoted father. Succumbing
to a murderous impulse, Broc takes a deadly revenge - just as his entire
community is threatened with annihilation by a flood of Biblical proportions.
Where evil lies
The unpredictable capriciousness of human nature - shown by the emotional
turbulence that takes hold of Germaine and her father - is graphically reflected
in the aqueous onslaught that suddenly descends on the most idyllic of rural
landscapes. The opening shots of the Rhône show the river at
its most placid and benign but its sheer expanse and the strength of its
currents show us its true nature - a sleeping giant equipped with truly apocalyptic
powers. Similarly, the rural community of contented country folk is
not as harmonious as it first seems, for beneath the surface of casual bonhomie
there are undercurrents of extreme malice. The film's more dramatic
episodes do not come out of nowhere - they are all initiated by the nosey
on-lookers in the background who are all too willing to spread malicious
gossip whenever they see something that piques their moral indignation.
Alban's troubles with his fiancée Margot begin when, alerted by the
local rumour mill, the latter discovers her beau has welcomed a strange woman
into his homestead. She thereupon takes her revenge by flirting with
a cousin - an episode that is soon brought to Alban's attention by another
considerate muckraker. When Alban, consumed with jealousy, then threatens
his future bride with violence, his outburst is witnessed by local busybodies
who waste no time spreading the information all around town. Naturally,
when Margot later goes missing, the farmer is at once suspected of killing
her. Broc's loathing for Margot may have been aroused by the slight
his daughter receives from her, but it is the persistent humiliation he has
long endured from his contemptuous neighbours that plants the catalytic seed
that turns this simmering loathing into murderous rage. It is the latent,
deeply entrenched puritanical malice within the community, not an individual's
predisposition for evil, that guides the tragic linked destinies of the characters
in
L'Inondation - as it would do in many films by Delluc's Nouvelle
Vague successor Claude Chabrol.
Up close and personal
The ultimate fate of Margot is shown to us - in a highly ironic vein - near
the start of the film. As Alban looks down on the Rhône from
a bridge, he glimpses the sunny face of his sweetheart in the rushing waters,
seeing her flighty, free-spirited personality in the way the river appears
to him. How could he know that the same adorable face would end up
being smothered by the same waters, her life carried away by the same tempestuous
currents that so vividly characterise her nature? This is one of the
few examples of superimposition, a popular impressionistic device, that Delluc
uses in the film to give an insight into a character's inner thought processes.
Not long after this, Germaine's propensity for fanciful daydreaming is shown
when she sees herself imposed on the cover of a fashion magazine, not as
the dowdy gauche spinster she is, but as the refined angelic beauty she imagines
herself to be. In a less humorous vein, Germaine's mental collapse
after Alban's brutal rejection of her is conveyed with all its traumatic
anguish through a series of overlapping dissolves of facial close-ups, the
camera moving progressively closer as the intensity of her distress mounts.
The close-up is something that Delluc employs with particular skill throughout
his film to show us what is in the minds of his characters. In a scene
preceding Alban's scornful rebuke, Germaine looks as she imagines herself
to be - an attractive young woman in the prime of life. But when she
next looks in the mirror, her delusions shattered, her face appears very
different - she has become a wrinkled old maid.
L'Indondation's
most powerful moment comes when Broc makes up his mind to enact a terrible
revenge against the person who has humiliated his daughter. As he stands
alone in his room, beside an open fireplace that casts an eerie infernal
light on him, the camera fixes on his well-lined face and we witness what
must be one of the most dramatic and terrifying character transitions ever
to be caught on celluloid. The various movie portrayals of the transformation
of Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde are feeble compare with what we witness here, as
the habitually cowed Broc is overtaken by a demonic urge to commit murder.
The starkly expressionistic character of the surroundings heighten the sheer
malevolence captured by the close-up, and as a glint of pure evil shows in
Broc's eyes a bolt of Arctic chill suddenly shoots down your spine - just
as if you had glanced upon the face of Satan himself.
What follows then is a marvellously effective use of ellipsis. We first
see Broc shuffle away from his house, clearly with some solemn task in mind.
And then, in the next shot (after a brief cutaway to the semi-comatose Germaine
in her bed) we see him return. Delluc doesn't need to show us what
the old man did in the intervening time. All is revealed in the next
portrait shot of Broc which shows him totally transformed again, his rugged
old face now violently etched with the deepest remorse. From the vacant
expression in his downcast eyes and his dishevelled posture he is the epitome
of the godforsaken penitent. The grisly details of Broc's crime are
presented in a flashback towards the end of the film, when the old man is
forced to confess what he has done to his daughter, but none of this comes
as a surprise.
The nature of Broc's transgression and the terrible psychological impact
this has on him are at once apparent in the single static shot that shows
him reflecting on what he has done after the act. A more sensationalist
filmmaker like Louis Feuillade would have gone to town with these scenes,
milking every last drop of melodramatic mayhem from the monstrous killing
and its impact to satisfy the Grand Guignol appetites of his audience.
Louis Delluc does almost the exact opposite, achieving a far more impactful
result with just a few meticulously composed shots. We are horrified
by the crime that is committed, but, more than that, we feel for the characters
who are affected by it, in a far deeper way than a prosaic director like
Feuillade could ever hope to achieve with his crude shock tactics.
A collective effort
In
L'Inondation, Delluc was particularly well-served by a supremely
talented technical crew and an equally impressive cast. He could not
have asked for a more capable cinematographer than Georges Lucas, who had
worked with L'Herbier on all of the films he had made during his stint at
Gaumont, including his more experimental films
L'Homme du large (1920) and
El Dorado (1922). An absolute
maestro of chiaroscuro, Lucas contributes a great deal to the undulating
shifts in tone and atmosphere of the film, deriving the maximum visual impact
from Delluc's incredibly sparse mise-en-scène. The interior
shots may appear simple but they are both elegant and effective, often using
doorways and arches to frame the actors like a proscenium arch - a subtle
allusion perhaps to Shakespeare's observation that we are all nothing more
than players on a cosmic stage.
The interior sets accord well with the expressive purity of the mise-en-scène,
camerawork and lighting. These were designed by no less a person than
Alberto Cavalcanti, who worked on several of Marcel L'Herbier's films before
becoming a highly regarded filmmaker in his own right. It is worth
noting how perfectly (yet discretely) the sets reflect the characters that
inhabit them. Broc's impoverished and solitary lifestyle is immediately
apparent from the large, sparsely furnished room in which he lives.
A single photograph of a toddler on a shelf is the only personal adornment,
offering a glimpse of the tragedy of Broc's life more powerfully than any
amount of exposition. Alban's equally barren home is also revealing
- of a neglectful bachelor who could greatly benefit from having a woman's
touch around the home.
Taking the lead role is the director's former wife Ève Francis, who
remained the director's faithful muse even after their amicable separation
in 1922. Before her cinema debut in 1914, Francis was a highly accomplished
stage actress, known for her many collaborations with the revered playwright
Paul Claudel. She was the one who first aroused Delluc's passion for
cinema (reportedly by taking him to a screening of Cecil B. DeMille's
The
Cheat). In doing so, she initiated not only his filmmaking career
but also the impressionist movement, with which she would be intimately associated
through her frequent collaborations with L'Herbier, Dulac and Delluc.
Aged 37 at the time she appeared in
L'Inondation, Francis was perfectly
suited to play the mature spinster with romantic delusions - just the right
age for the character to appear slightly absurd and yet also sympathetic.
As she had done in L'Herbier's
El Dorado not long before this, the
actress brings a harrowing reality to her character's anguish as the realities
of an unjust world gradually devastate her morale and self-esteem.
The subtlety of Francis's performance (easily one of her finest) is in perfect
alignment with Deluc's impeccably understated direction, and rarely does
cinema give us such a genuinely moving insight into an older woman's craving
for the matrimonial state as the beating wings of time work against her.
Most poignant are the scenes in which Francis appears alongside Edmond Van
Daële, an admirable casting choice for the part of Germaine's long suffering
father, Broc. A few years on, Van Daële would achieve film immortality
as the definitive screen Robespierre in Abel Gance's
Napoléon (1927). In
L'Indondation,
he presents a very different persona, a downtrodden functionary who suddenly
regains his zest for life when his daughter re-enters his life after a separation
of many years. The on-screen chemistry between Francis and Van Daële
is the most magical ingredient of
L'Inondation, the intense devotion
of the father for his daughter making horribly plausible Broc's dramatic
character turn towards the end of the film. Ginette Maddie makes an
effective, mischievously gamine contrast to Francis as the far less likable
Margot, a flighty little minx with just enough superficial charm for us to
be appalled by her tragic demise.
L'Herbier's mother-in-law Claire Prélia - a very capable actress -
crops up in a few scenes as Margot's over-anxious mother, and the part of
the girl's fiancé Alban went to Philippe Hériat, another frequent
associate of L'Herbier who later found considerable acclaim as a prominent
novelist. Hériat's stiff beanpole physique and characterful
face give him a highly comical appearance - he can hardly avoid looking like
Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot as he towers above his petite female co-stars.
His casting as Germaine's
beau idéal adds more than a touch
of poignancy and humour to the woman's wild infatuation, highlighting not
only her desperate need for affection after the death of her mother, but
the sheer eccentricity of her delusions. Just why the village flirt
Margot should want to marry a spindly gargoyle like Alban is harder to account
for - although his wealth and her capriciousness may have had something to
do with it.
Taken at the flood
The filming of
L'Inondation was greatly assisted by an immense flood
caused by the swelling of the River Durance in 1923. This provided
the film with some spectacular images of the countryside of southeast France
transformed by widespread flooding, with vast swathes of agricultural land
and country roads deluged with water. Unfortunately, the location filming
did nothing for its director's already frail state of health. The extreme
cold winter weather and high humidity aggravated the tuberculosis that Delluc
had suffered from since childhood and he soon developed chronic pneumonia.
Seven weeks before
L'Inondation had its first public screening on
9th May 1924, Louis Delluc succumbed to his illness, dying at the age of
33.
Delluc's unforeseen passing came as a severe blow to his fellow Avant-Garde
filmmakers, who spoke and wrote of Delluc's artistic achievements in the
most glowing terms for many years afterwards. In 1937, a special film
award - le Prix Louis Delluc - was created in his honour, presented each
year to the best French film chosen by a committee of critics. Recipients
of the award include Marcel Carné's
Le Quai des brumes (1938),
Jean Cocteau's
La Belle et la
bête (1946) and Louis Malle's
Ascenseur pour l'échafaud
(1957). 1999 saw the creation of a second award in Delluc's name for
the best first work by a French filmmaker. Today, both of these awards
are highly coveted and provide a fitting tribute to a cinema visionary, preserving
the memory of a man whose profound insights into the art of filmmaking would
be borne out in the decades following his death and remain with us to this
day as a touchstone for what the Seventh Art can and should deliver.
© James Travers 2023
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