In Praise of French Poetic Realism
In the 1930s, the French realist filmmakers found a way to speak to and fight against the rising authoritarianism in their country and the world.
Still from La bête humaine. (Lux Compagnie Cinématographique de France)
There’s a wonderful new Criterion Channel series on French poetic realism, a short-lived but intense film movement of the 1930s that is extraordinarily timely right now. A bleak and brooding yet beautifully poignant film genre and a clear forerunner of film noir, poetic realism emerged at a moment of political crisis in France, during the crushing global Depression when surging left-wing power driven by the ascendance of the Popular Front was overtaken by the rise of fascism across Europe.
The French right hated poetic realism, with good reason. They recognized in the form all the stances and attitudes they despised, such as identifying with the working class and the suffering members of marginalized communities — sex workers, criminals, the jobless and homeless wandering destitute through the streets and gathering in cheap bars, grim tenement housing, seedy dancehalls, and rowdy cafés.
And then there was the plain fact that poetic realist filmmakers, mostly communists and socialists, were actively involved in the Popular Front.
The most prominent figure among them, director Jean Renoir, identified strongly with the politics of the Popular Front, a coalition of socialist and communist parties that came to power in France in 1936–37 during the short-lived presidency of Léon Blum. Renoir was a dedicated participant in Popular Front activities, speaking at rallies and directing a documentary commissioned by the French Communist Party (PCF) called La Vie est à Nous (Life Belongs to Us, 1936).
Also in 1936, Renoir directed what’s considered the best example of Popular Front filmmaking, The Crime of Monsieur Lange, which overlaps with poetic realism and is included in the Criterion series. It’s a film celebrating the creation of a successful workers’ cooperative, which can only be achieved by getting rid of the corrupt, venal, and abusive boss by any means necessary.
Hard-right critics of these films tended to express their disapproval of poetic realism in an idiotic and all-too-recognizable way. They said that these films made France look bad because they were gloomy and pessimistic, depressing, and focused on losers. And since these films tended to lower morale, in their view, they might actually cause France to lose an almost-inevitable war with Nazi Germany. One moronic Vichy spokesman made a much-quoted claim in 1940, after the German invasion, that “If we have lost the war, it is because of Port of Shadows.”
Port of Shadows (1938) is considered the most definitive of the poetic realist films, containing all its major traits. There’s a handy twenty-minute documentary included with the Criterion Channel series in which film scholar Imogen Sara Smith leads us through the basics of French poetic realism. Besides its tendency to embrace and observe the lives of what some considered the “lower depths” of humanity (note that a Renoir adaption of Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths is one of the films), this type of movie is also almost always distinguished by a central romance between a down-and-out man and woman that offers both a last chance at salvaging their terrible lives. The romance is doomed, as one or both of their lives is lost to violent, seemingly fated, ends.
For example, in Le jour se lève (1939), one of several great films by the team of director Marcel Carné and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, Jean Gabin plays a sweet-natured laborer named François whose lungs have been affected by the bad air at his sandblasting job, giving him an air of doom already. He meets a lovely young woman named Françoise (Jacqueline Laurent) who works at a flower shop — the sight of her, flowerlike in appearance herself as she delivers a bouquet to the office of the hellish place where he works, indicates immediately how her very presence is redemptive to him.
But in spite of their same-named attachment and tender friendship, she doesn’t love him — she’s enthralled by an older, wealthier nightclub entertainer who’s had a psychological ascendency over her since girlhood. He’s an entirely faithless lothario and all-around sadistic creep who needs killing. To drive this home, he’s played by Jules Berry, an extremely accomplished actor who specialized in evil bastard roles. He also played the vicious boss in The Crime of Monsieur Lange.
Men’s sexual predation and abuse, usually augmented by economic affluence that can be dangled before the suffering working class, are very often the “doom” hanging over struggling young women characters in poetic realist films.
Actually, Gabin’s character kills the lothario at the beginning of the film and spends the rest of the time trapped in his tiny attic apartment, refusing to give himself up to the besieging police who’ve cordoned off the building. The whole neighborhood watches the drama of his slow and inevitable suicide-by-cop, while he returns in memory to the chain of events that brought him to this grim end.
The flashback structure of the film encloses us within his doom, a structure that would become familiar in American postwar film noir. The magnificent set built for the film, showing François’s entire working-class neighborhood with his tall apartment building as the focal point at the end of the street, is equally entrapping.
Brief, Gleaming Hopes
The representative marginalized man in French poetic realist films is most often played by Gabin, the great actor and working-class hero who’s most closely identified with this form. If you decide to take on the series, start with the films he stars in, because he’s so compelling, with his rough-hewn yet beautifully expressive mug and slouching body and blunt performance style that somehow contains miraculous subtleties.
His Port of Shadows, Le jour se lève (Daybreak), The Lower Depths (1935), They Were Five (1936), Pépé le Moko (1937), and La bête humaine (The Human Beast, 1938) are all in the Criterion Channel series. Nobody represents better the brief, gleaming hopes the poetic realist antihero pins on love, and the heartbreaking way those hopes get extinguished by the annihilating effects of life.
Poetic realist films feature a combination of poetic stylization in form and strong realist content and effects, such as harsh semidocumentary shooting on location and portraits of unglamorized lives among the working poor. A good example is the railroad scenes in Renoir’s La bête humaine, with Gabin — who actually learned to drive a train — racing through the countryside on his beloved train “Lison,” which he regards as his salvation from his own terrible tendencies toward violence when he’s among his fellow humans.
Then the trouble starts when Lison gets into the station at Le Havre and breaks down. The tracks, the machinery, the oil and coal dust coating Gabin’s face, and the crowds at the station are all harshly compelling, even as location shooting gives way imperceptibly to sets built for the film.
The deep-focus, long-take shooting style along with the bleak ordinary-lives subject matter were a big influence on the post–World War II Italian neorealist movement, which was also driven by socialist and communist filmmakers. Dramatic low-key lighting, influenced by the 1920s German expressionist film techniques in use by filmmaking talent fleeing the Nazis and arriving in France in the mid-1930s captures a dramatic visual range from pitch-black to bright glimmers of light in the complex set designs and handling of mise-en-scène. Smith notes that the films could take on the look of masterly animated charcoal drawings.
The combination of artifice and gritty realism — those amazingly detailed and wide-reaching sets, for example, that seemed to hold the characters entrapped in a world of slight surreality especially when combined with location shooting scenes — created a kind of dreamlike meditation on the struggling lives of regular people. Prévert, poet and leading screenwriter of the movement, noted for his frequent collaborations with Carné, described poetic realist films as achieving “transformations of the everyday into the mysterious.”
And indeed, the characters are aware of the mystery of their lives, even if only dimly. They know themselves to be oppressed by something that seems beyond their ordinary oppressors — bosses, cops, military authority, the rich as a class — and often have a superstitious sense of themselves as somehow targeted by cosmic forces, beset by troubles beyond normal explanations, marked for a bad end somehow.
Again, Gabin specialized in these characters. In Port of Shadows, he’s an army deserter followed everywhere by a little white stray dog that seems somehow related to his inevitable doom. (This plotline was picked up by the 1941 American film noir High Sierra.) In La bête humaine, he’s a train engineer convinced he’s inherited a poisoned bloodline from generations of drunken working-class fathers and grandfathers. Though he never touches a drop of alcohol himself, in an effort to control his mania, he’s subject to bizarre fugue states during which he commits terrible acts of violence, including attempted rape and murder.
Our Unkillable Beating Hearts
Poetic realism flourished in a very tight time frame, roughly 1935 to 1939 when events overtook it and fascist mandates seemingly killed the form. Instead, it went underground, and many of its qualities emerged in period costume films of the World War II years. These films were taken on by canny directors who knew the Vichy government censors would be less likely to recognize sociopolitical criticism in films displaced to the past.
The Criterion series includes the Carné-Prévert period masterpiece Children of Paradise (1945), and I wish it had also included another Carné-Prévert collaboration, Les Visiteurs du soir (The Devil’s Envoys, 1942), a medieval fable about the Devil (Jules Berry again) sending emissaries to a remote kingdom in order to undermine it. It has the classic poetic realist redemptive romance at its center, when the demonic male emissary falls in love with the king’s innocent daughter, but their love is doomed.
In a rage, the Devil himself makes an appearance to punish him. He turns the embracing couple to stone. Then, at the very end of the film, the Devil leans toward the statue, realizing with impotent fury that he can still hear the unkillable beating hearts of the lovers.
It was a very popular film, widely recognized as an allegory of the fascist takeover unable to still the beating heart of France. And tales from the making of the film were revealing of the terrible conditions under which wartime filmmakers had to work. The legendary Arletty, playing the demonic female emissary, was having an affair with a Nazi officer that got her into a lot of trouble as an accused collaborator after the war, but there’s no doubt it also came in handy when strings needed to be pulled to keep the film going. The extras in the banquet scene were starving and kept eating the prop food, until the filmmakers had toxins injected into the food in order to keep some of it on the table.
Plus, the filmmaking process was an exercise in terrible paranoia. No one knew what side anybody else was really on underneath the carefully circumspect front they all had to maintain. A fellow cast or crew member might turn out to be a Nazi spy or a French Resistance fighter or a Jewish survivor hiding out, who’d suddenly disappear because they heard the authorities might be onto them.
The Criterion series also includes forerunners of the poetic realist form such as Jean Vigo’s hugely influential and bracingly anarchic Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933) about boarding school children rebelling against authority, which reflects Vigo’s own boarding school longings as well as his background as the son of a militant anarchist who was imprisoned and probably murdered by the state. And his L’Atalante (1934), a brilliantly earthy and experimental film about “life among the barge dwellers” is centered on yet another romance that seems doomed, but is salvaged in a burst of forgiveness and empathy.
Directors like Renoir, Carné, and Julien Duvivier developed strong associations with French poetic realism and are well-represented in this generous twenty-four film series. But there’s also a more obscure director who worked steadily in this form named Jean Grémillon, a communist who was active in the French Resistance and carried on the poetic realist style through the war years.
Grémillon’s films in this series are Remorques (Stormy Waters, 1941), Lumière d’été (Summer Light, 1943), and Le ciel est à vous (The Woman Who Dared, 1944). They’re celebrated in the Smith documentary as films with strong women characters, an intense interest in the details of labor and craftsmanship, and a rhythmic lyricism that reflects the director’s training as a musician. He’s considered an unlucky director in that his films never received sufficient recognition in the view of many critics.
So there’s plenty to discover in this series even if you’re familiar with the key poetic realist films. And if you’re a suffering leftist in these grim times who opts to immerse themselves in this series, you’re about to encounter the work of fellow sufferers of an earlier era who found a way to express their sense of what was happening to their country during a fascist takeover, even as they fought against it. May we figure out how to do the same.