I agree with your sentiments, David. This is definitely a favorite Gremillon of mine, and Gabin's performance is *outstanding*. I don't have a doubt that, at least for me, this trumps Duvivier's Pepe, though my extremely limited french left the film's dialogue impenetrable. English subtitles (or my learning french) would be appreciated.
I notice you didn't bring up the music, which is melodic and enchanting. The soundtrack during Lucien and Madeline's initial walk, which so deftly drifts into the next dancing scene, and then into their subsequent discussion, couldn't be more perfect. The shot of Gabin standing alone in the cafe during a parade seems to stick in my mind.
A little more raw, but his earlier films (the only two I've seen of his from this period) La petite Lise and Pour un sou d'amour are favorites of mine, within his body of work, and I also really enjoyed Lumiere d'ete. I enjoyed Remorques and Pattes Blanches a little less, but just a little. I have a few more of his films to view, which I'm trying to dilute, for appreciation's sake, my high expectations for (especially The Stange Mr. Victor).
My personal ranking would definitely put Gremillon in the same league as Vigo, Cocteau, and Clair, above Duvivier and Carne, but below Renoir. I'm unfamiliar with Feyder or Pagnol's films unfortunately, and either I'm forgetting or haven't seen any other directors work from this era of french film.
Jean Grémillon
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zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
The more you talk about this film, David, the more I want to see it! As I've mentioned before, my exposure to Gremillon is limited to Le Ciel est a vous, which is, in my opinion, one of the great French films of the 40s, and one of the most mature treatments of a married relationship from any decade. I'd be dead keen to see more Gremillon.
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carax09
- Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 2:22 am
- Location: This almost empty gin palace
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zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
Watching the wonderful Pattes Blanches has given me an opportunity to try and pin down what is so distinctive about Gremillon's style.
Some directors have styles that leap off the screen at you; others are more subtle. It's far easier to discern what's distinctive about Welles or Ophuls than it is with Ford or Renoir, for example, though none of those are particularly difficult to pin down. There are some directors, however, whose individual styles are so close to 'classic' filmmaking that their specialness is almost mysterious. I think of Raoul Walsh as one such director, and Gremillon seems to be another.
Pattes Blanches is a useful film to consider when trying to pin down what is special about Gremillon, partly because it helps to highlight what isnt. Perhaps Gremillon's last-minute attachment to this project make the nature of his directorial contributions more apparent.
Character and Performance
My previous Gremillons (Gueule d'Amour and Le Ciel est a Vous) had struck me as beautifully observed, unexpectedly nuanced character studies conceived within generic, even unpromising, narrative forms. I had thus developed a provisional theory that Gremillon was a particularly gifted director of actors (and he certainly is this, given the three amazing central performances of Gueule), with an unusually detailed and perceptive understanding of character of the kind we see in Renoir.
However, this doesn't strictly apply in Pattes, where the characters remain largely true to their generic identities (the trollop, the repressed maid, the troubled nobleman, the coarse cuckold) and the performances rarely transcend the requirements of those roles (though there are fine details in individual performances, Suzy Delair fills out Odette as fulsomely as she did Jenny in Quai des Orfevres, and the whole point of Arlette Thomas' performance seems to be that she's frozen like a rabbit in headlights). Nevertheless, the resulting film is brilliant and involving from moment to moment. It's even surprising - a surprise in itself given the boilerplate nature of its components. It's easy to imagine the same material presented as drab gothic kitsch, or, in the hands of Resnais or Ruiz, as knowingly deconstructed irony, but Gremillon has a gift for bringing new and unexpected dimensions to very familiar generic material while remaining true to those generic roots - simultaneously fulfilling and transcending genre requirements.
Although the characters in this film verge on stock, and the performances largely remain within the expected generic range of the characters, Gremillon allows the actors to add the occasional unexpected twist to their delivery (such as Jock delivering his 'fishy' speech to Odette laughingly, playfully) or organises scenes in unexpected ways (the great ellipsis of Odette's seduction of Keriadec). He also seems to have the kind of eye / ear for plausible human behaviour that many directors lack when dealing with such stylised material. Thus Odette's attempted seduction of Keriadec at the manor doesn't play as a typical movie seduction scene, but as a prolonged awkward (but nevertheless successful) gaffe. Similarly, the tense Odette / Mimi dynamic respects the social constraints of the characters, and is not blown up into a photogenic catfight. And when seductress Odette is herself seduced by Maurice, Gremillon does not present it as a simplistic ironic reversal: Odette remains powerful and calculating in her other spheres of influence.
Gremillon also organises his characters and narrative to keep us off-guard. In retrospect, the arc of the story is not unusual, but while we're experiencing the narrative, we're kept efficiently off-balance, not knowing which plot strand we'll be following next. Thus, the narrative shifts away from Mimi just when her storyline seems to be reaching a climax (after Odette follows her to the manor); Keriadec's vaunted violence fails to explode after he's plied with drink and provoked. A murder investigation is set up and resolved pretty much off-screen, while our attention is instead directed to the psychological play between the figures involved in that narrative thread. There's a beautiful use of misdirection here which keeps the storylines fresh and the viewer engaged.
He also plays ruthlessly with audience identification. None of his characters are wholly positive or negative, but this doesn't express itself in the usual forms (e.g. the charismatic villain, the flawed hero, the simple reversal in which a bad guy turns out to be a good guy after all). Instead, our level of empathy or distaste for different characters changes constantly throughout the film - from scene to scene but also within scenes.
At the end of the film, the nominal hero and heroine end up together, but there's no sense of triumph. We've seen for most of the film that these two are made for one another, but this isn't a matter of passion overcoming social constraints - it's simply that they're the only characters who can stand one another, and the only ones who have even tried to do the right thing during the film. And one of the characters still doesn't recognise - or doesn't acknowledge - the fit. The other one is so certain that they're made for one another that her pushiness repels us almost as much as it does her prospective partner. These unusual dynamics make for one of the most richly ambivalent 'happy endings' I've seen. In terms of the narrative arc, we're given conventional resolution (the 'lovers' are brought together at the end of the film; the characters who stood in their way are dispatched; a tragic ending is averted; new life begins), but in terms of everything else, Gremillon ruthlessly undercuts that resolution (the characters are still divided by class and history; there's no meeting of minds between them; romantic involvement is deferred if not written off entirely; and to get to this 'happy ending' one of the characters has aired an appallingly masochistic death-wish (“I'll just lie down here and die, if you don't mind [. . .]
EDIT 2010: Have just noticed that the remainder of this very long post (dealing with visual style etc.) has been lost in some past forum glitch. But Herr Schreck quoted a lengthy part of it in a subsequent post, so here's at least some of the missing material:
Visual Style
One thing that's immediately apparent in terms of Gremillon's visual style is his mastery of camera movement. Tracks and pans are very subtly deployed, either in tandem with character movement or in counterpoint to it. There's a beautiful, brief movement when Maurice first catches a glimpse of Odette: as his gaze turns to her, the camera slightly circles around him. Gremillon will also track in slightly when a character makes a telling gesture - a beautiful use of cinematic punctuation that never overstates or imposes the director's interpretation.
Closely related to this is a superb use of punctuating cuts and inserts, as the equivalent of sidelong glances. There's great use of this when Odette arrives at the inn, and we rapidly see (in a series of split-second cuts) everybody's reaction to her. A theory that might bear further exploration is that Gremillon's camera reacts as if it were a character within the film, but without the use of conventional P.O.V. techniques. A lot of his visual techniques seem to mimic the physiology of the human eye - rapid glances rather than lingering 'shots', slight tracks in to telling details rather than extreme close-ups. It gives the film a demotic, grounded human reality, even when the story and characters are so heightened.
Apart from such subtle inflections throughout the film, there are several scenes of conventional splendour. Gremillon makes stunning use of the spectacular landscape, and his moving camera extends to showier crane and tracking shots (Keriadec descending his staircase; Odette and Maurice on the clifftop). I'd also like to note the superb, thematically and emotionally charged, composition where Odette and Mimi are framed in a mirror: Odette showing off her new dress; Mimi (Thomas is in the Irm Herrmann role) at her feet; then Odette leaves the frame, leaving a strikingly asymmetrical composition of poor Mimi squashed into the corner of the frame within the frame
The film's score is pretty conventional throughout (though generally oddly effective), but when Odette encounters Maurice while gathering herbs in the twilight there's a wonderfully effective cue using a female chorus, adding a pagan, hypnotic air to one of the film's most dramatic scenes.
Some directors have styles that leap off the screen at you; others are more subtle. It's far easier to discern what's distinctive about Welles or Ophuls than it is with Ford or Renoir, for example, though none of those are particularly difficult to pin down. There are some directors, however, whose individual styles are so close to 'classic' filmmaking that their specialness is almost mysterious. I think of Raoul Walsh as one such director, and Gremillon seems to be another.
Pattes Blanches is a useful film to consider when trying to pin down what is special about Gremillon, partly because it helps to highlight what isnt. Perhaps Gremillon's last-minute attachment to this project make the nature of his directorial contributions more apparent.
Character and Performance
My previous Gremillons (Gueule d'Amour and Le Ciel est a Vous) had struck me as beautifully observed, unexpectedly nuanced character studies conceived within generic, even unpromising, narrative forms. I had thus developed a provisional theory that Gremillon was a particularly gifted director of actors (and he certainly is this, given the three amazing central performances of Gueule), with an unusually detailed and perceptive understanding of character of the kind we see in Renoir.
However, this doesn't strictly apply in Pattes, where the characters remain largely true to their generic identities (the trollop, the repressed maid, the troubled nobleman, the coarse cuckold) and the performances rarely transcend the requirements of those roles (though there are fine details in individual performances, Suzy Delair fills out Odette as fulsomely as she did Jenny in Quai des Orfevres, and the whole point of Arlette Thomas' performance seems to be that she's frozen like a rabbit in headlights). Nevertheless, the resulting film is brilliant and involving from moment to moment. It's even surprising - a surprise in itself given the boilerplate nature of its components. It's easy to imagine the same material presented as drab gothic kitsch, or, in the hands of Resnais or Ruiz, as knowingly deconstructed irony, but Gremillon has a gift for bringing new and unexpected dimensions to very familiar generic material while remaining true to those generic roots - simultaneously fulfilling and transcending genre requirements.
Although the characters in this film verge on stock, and the performances largely remain within the expected generic range of the characters, Gremillon allows the actors to add the occasional unexpected twist to their delivery (such as Jock delivering his 'fishy' speech to Odette laughingly, playfully) or organises scenes in unexpected ways (the great ellipsis of Odette's seduction of Keriadec). He also seems to have the kind of eye / ear for plausible human behaviour that many directors lack when dealing with such stylised material. Thus Odette's attempted seduction of Keriadec at the manor doesn't play as a typical movie seduction scene, but as a prolonged awkward (but nevertheless successful) gaffe. Similarly, the tense Odette / Mimi dynamic respects the social constraints of the characters, and is not blown up into a photogenic catfight. And when seductress Odette is herself seduced by Maurice, Gremillon does not present it as a simplistic ironic reversal: Odette remains powerful and calculating in her other spheres of influence.
Gremillon also organises his characters and narrative to keep us off-guard. In retrospect, the arc of the story is not unusual, but while we're experiencing the narrative, we're kept efficiently off-balance, not knowing which plot strand we'll be following next. Thus, the narrative shifts away from Mimi just when her storyline seems to be reaching a climax (after Odette follows her to the manor); Keriadec's vaunted violence fails to explode after he's plied with drink and provoked. A murder investigation is set up and resolved pretty much off-screen, while our attention is instead directed to the psychological play between the figures involved in that narrative thread. There's a beautiful use of misdirection here which keeps the storylines fresh and the viewer engaged.
He also plays ruthlessly with audience identification. None of his characters are wholly positive or negative, but this doesn't express itself in the usual forms (e.g. the charismatic villain, the flawed hero, the simple reversal in which a bad guy turns out to be a good guy after all). Instead, our level of empathy or distaste for different characters changes constantly throughout the film - from scene to scene but also within scenes.
At the end of the film, the nominal hero and heroine end up together, but there's no sense of triumph. We've seen for most of the film that these two are made for one another, but this isn't a matter of passion overcoming social constraints - it's simply that they're the only characters who can stand one another, and the only ones who have even tried to do the right thing during the film. And one of the characters still doesn't recognise - or doesn't acknowledge - the fit. The other one is so certain that they're made for one another that her pushiness repels us almost as much as it does her prospective partner. These unusual dynamics make for one of the most richly ambivalent 'happy endings' I've seen. In terms of the narrative arc, we're given conventional resolution (the 'lovers' are brought together at the end of the film; the characters who stood in their way are dispatched; a tragic ending is averted; new life begins), but in terms of everything else, Gremillon ruthlessly undercuts that resolution (the characters are still divided by class and history; there's no meeting of minds between them; romantic involvement is deferred if not written off entirely; and to get to this 'happy ending' one of the characters has aired an appallingly masochistic death-wish (“I'll just lie down here and die, if you don't mind [. . .]
EDIT 2010: Have just noticed that the remainder of this very long post (dealing with visual style etc.) has been lost in some past forum glitch. But Herr Schreck quoted a lengthy part of it in a subsequent post, so here's at least some of the missing material:
Visual Style
One thing that's immediately apparent in terms of Gremillon's visual style is his mastery of camera movement. Tracks and pans are very subtly deployed, either in tandem with character movement or in counterpoint to it. There's a beautiful, brief movement when Maurice first catches a glimpse of Odette: as his gaze turns to her, the camera slightly circles around him. Gremillon will also track in slightly when a character makes a telling gesture - a beautiful use of cinematic punctuation that never overstates or imposes the director's interpretation.
Closely related to this is a superb use of punctuating cuts and inserts, as the equivalent of sidelong glances. There's great use of this when Odette arrives at the inn, and we rapidly see (in a series of split-second cuts) everybody's reaction to her. A theory that might bear further exploration is that Gremillon's camera reacts as if it were a character within the film, but without the use of conventional P.O.V. techniques. A lot of his visual techniques seem to mimic the physiology of the human eye - rapid glances rather than lingering 'shots', slight tracks in to telling details rather than extreme close-ups. It gives the film a demotic, grounded human reality, even when the story and characters are so heightened.
Apart from such subtle inflections throughout the film, there are several scenes of conventional splendour. Gremillon makes stunning use of the spectacular landscape, and his moving camera extends to showier crane and tracking shots (Keriadec descending his staircase; Odette and Maurice on the clifftop). I'd also like to note the superb, thematically and emotionally charged, composition where Odette and Mimi are framed in a mirror: Odette showing off her new dress; Mimi (Thomas is in the Irm Herrmann role) at her feet; then Odette leaves the frame, leaving a strikingly asymmetrical composition of poor Mimi squashed into the corner of the frame within the frame
The film's score is pretty conventional throughout (though generally oddly effective), but when Odette encounters Maurice while gathering herbs in the twilight there's a wonderfully effective cue using a female chorus, adding a pagan, hypnotic air to one of the film's most dramatic scenes.
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carax09
- Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 2:22 am
- Location: This almost empty gin palace
I found this article(http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/articles/petit_lise.htm)
about La Petit Lise buried on Gary's site. It sounds utterly captivating from a technical standpoint, although I'm not sure I understand what it's actually about. Zedz? David?
about La Petit Lise buried on Gary's site. It sounds utterly captivating from a technical standpoint, although I'm not sure I understand what it's actually about. Zedz? David?
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whaleallright
- Joined: Sun Sep 25, 2005 12:56 am
It's about a man who is released from prison after a long stay, only to find his beloved daughter Lise and her thuggish boyfriend implicated in a vicious murder.It sounds utterly captivating from a technical standpoint, although I'm not sure I understand what it's actually about.
The story, like those of several other films directed by Gremillon, is quite sordid. Though what fascinates is not so much the particulars of the story but rather how it is told. The opening minutes of this film are some of the strangest and most captivating in all cinema. What is that music at the beginning? Is it a Berber chant?
Not sure if this has been mentioned above, but a brief clip from La Petite Lise appears in Carax' Mauvais sang. And, when Carax programmed a cycle of films at the Cinematheque last year, he chose to show this film (among others like Lubitsch's "Design for Living" and Guru Dutt's "Paper Flowers").
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carax09
- Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 2:22 am
- Location: This almost empty gin palace
Jonah, I remember in MS when Denis Lavant refers to Julie Delpy's character as "mon petite, Lise", but I don't recall the clip. Can you refresh my memory as to where it occurs? Thank you for the summary, I really can't wait to see this---I think it's becoming my new holy grail.
I'm in total agreement with David that we should make it our mission to resurrect Jean Gremillon. I did a little research, and for a biographical blurb I found this in my little pocket edition of "French Film" by Roy Armes:
"The German Occupation played havoc with French film production and Marcel Carne was almost alone among leading directors in staying in France. Renoir, Feyder, Clair, Duvivier, Ophuls all left the country and it became possible for new directors to come to the fore. One of the happier results of this situation was the emergence of Jean Gremillon (1901-59) as a major director.
Gremillon was by no means a newcomer. He began making shorts as early as 1923 and his first feature length fiction film dates to 1926. But even in the thirties he did not fully establish himself as a film-maker in France and he spent much of his time abroad, working in Spain and for the UFA company in Berlin. It was not until 1939 that he had a chance to work with Jean Gabin and Michele Morgan and his film, Remorques, was interrupted for two years by the war. During the Occupation years, however, he was given the oppurtunities he always lacked and responded with two masterly films, Lumiere d'Ete, from a Jacques Prevert script and Le Ciel est a Vous, written by Charles Spaak. Sadly, these proved to be his last real opportunities to make feature films with the necessary degree of freedom, and the last fifteen years of his life had to be devoted largely to making documentary films.
Though these documentaries give a clear indication of his breadth of culture, Gremillon was naturally able to put far more of himself into his best feature films. In these we find a view of society akin to that of Jean Renoir and a social critique expressed obliquely by means of a depiction of the frivolities of the rich (their fancy-dress balls and turbulent romances). Gremillon is also one of the few French directors to depict workers with an instinctive sympathy. His work has a great poetic richness. It is full of unlikely confrontations and characters fantastically contorted by life or driven by secret passions, all translated into images of grat beauty and strangeness. It is one of the tragedies of the French cinema that Gremillon's influence had to be exerted through his personality, rather than through the series of masterly works of which he was clearly capable."
Perhaps it was Gremillon's history with UFA and the fact that he worked during the Occupation that led to his being blackballed. I find it a little odd tha Armes wouldn't just come out and say that, though. He makes it sound like it was more an issue of financing. Well, that's all I got right now, but I'd like to thank everyone for their participation---this is my favorite thread in a good while and I'll get back with some new info soon, but for now it's time for me to go out and get a little contorted by life.
I'm in total agreement with David that we should make it our mission to resurrect Jean Gremillon. I did a little research, and for a biographical blurb I found this in my little pocket edition of "French Film" by Roy Armes:
"The German Occupation played havoc with French film production and Marcel Carne was almost alone among leading directors in staying in France. Renoir, Feyder, Clair, Duvivier, Ophuls all left the country and it became possible for new directors to come to the fore. One of the happier results of this situation was the emergence of Jean Gremillon (1901-59) as a major director.
Gremillon was by no means a newcomer. He began making shorts as early as 1923 and his first feature length fiction film dates to 1926. But even in the thirties he did not fully establish himself as a film-maker in France and he spent much of his time abroad, working in Spain and for the UFA company in Berlin. It was not until 1939 that he had a chance to work with Jean Gabin and Michele Morgan and his film, Remorques, was interrupted for two years by the war. During the Occupation years, however, he was given the oppurtunities he always lacked and responded with two masterly films, Lumiere d'Ete, from a Jacques Prevert script and Le Ciel est a Vous, written by Charles Spaak. Sadly, these proved to be his last real opportunities to make feature films with the necessary degree of freedom, and the last fifteen years of his life had to be devoted largely to making documentary films.
Though these documentaries give a clear indication of his breadth of culture, Gremillon was naturally able to put far more of himself into his best feature films. In these we find a view of society akin to that of Jean Renoir and a social critique expressed obliquely by means of a depiction of the frivolities of the rich (their fancy-dress balls and turbulent romances). Gremillon is also one of the few French directors to depict workers with an instinctive sympathy. His work has a great poetic richness. It is full of unlikely confrontations and characters fantastically contorted by life or driven by secret passions, all translated into images of grat beauty and strangeness. It is one of the tragedies of the French cinema that Gremillon's influence had to be exerted through his personality, rather than through the series of masterly works of which he was clearly capable."
Perhaps it was Gremillon's history with UFA and the fact that he worked during the Occupation that led to his being blackballed. I find it a little odd tha Armes wouldn't just come out and say that, though. He makes it sound like it was more an issue of financing. Well, that's all I got right now, but I'd like to thank everyone for their participation---this is my favorite thread in a good while and I'll get back with some new info soon, but for now it's time for me to go out and get a little contorted by life.
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ben d banana
- Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 8:53 pm
- Location: Oh Where, Oh Where?
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whaleallright
- Joined: Sun Sep 25, 2005 12:56 am
Actually, his Maldone (1928) and Gardiens de phare (1929) are both of feature length.His first feature film
This sort of thing can be found in a few of the more experimental early talkies, for example Mamoulian's Applause. Though Grémillon's film is certainly remarkable for its sustained (through-composed?) experimentation with sound.At points of sudden scene change, he inserts an enormously loud effects track of a train (at Gare du Nord, given the name of the Hotel) or a plane, never seen.
Grémillon ran a ciné-club in the 1920s and in that capacity he wrote essays and delivered lectures. Some of these are very interesting, including a talk on Griffith's Broken Blossoms which is also a critique of the musical analogy in Impressionist theory (Epstein, Delluc). Grémillon was very much a cinephile and very much engaged in debates about the possibilities of film. So aside from being the work of a passionate "amateur," Lise is one step toward a realization of some fairly complex ideas about film and musical form.
As for the clip from Lise in Carax' film, I believe it appears on a television at one point, but I'll have to rewatch the film to be sure.
Last edited by whaleallright on Tue Feb 07, 2006 7:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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viciousliar
- Joined: Fri Nov 05, 2004 6:12 am
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Steven H
- Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 3:30 pm
- Location: NC
Great notes on La Petite Lise. There's an excellent entry in Dudley Andrew's Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film about La Petite Lise, which you can find on print.google.com. Here's an nice excerpt:
There's also a quoted piece from an essay Henri Langlois wrote entitled "Les Chefs d'oeuvres perdus":A truly experimental piece of cinematic lyricism, La Petite Lise orchestrates it's melodrama like the libretto of an opera, minimally structuring an experience that owes its power to multiple elements of design.
I also got a chance to see The Strange M. Victor and the Strange Mme. X, the former of which I *loved*.It was 1930. In the local cinema that had just been given a fresh shine. In only a few weeks all had changed: the public and the films, and every Saturday one regretted still more the [silent] cinema that had been lost. It was at this time and place that there appeared on the screen a film which had no exlusive run and because of that , one about which no one had spoken. Armed with sound and speech the cinema once again commanded attention, and created emotion. ... It was in seeing La Petite Lise of Jean Gremillon that I forgot Sous les toits de Paris and stopped regretting the passing of silents. In the history of French cinema. La Petite Lise marks an essential date. It is the first work of a school that after 1936 would definitely come to the fore and make French cinema the best in the world.
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zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
I've recently reseen Le Ciel est a vous - for the longest time my only (and cherished) Gremillon experience - so here are some more thoughts.
First off, my attempts to define G's style in Pattes doesn't apply too well to this film. The style here is far less idiosyncratic and far closer to 'classical' French filmmaking. There aren't those glancing, semi-subjective inserts, for example, and overall there's far less action on the montage front. There remain some excellent examples of Gremillon's very subtle, almost subliminal camera movements, however:
- when Marcel comes to the garage in the middle of the night to tell Pierre and Therese about the death of the President, there's a beautifully counterintuitive 'step back' by the camera as Pierre approaches;
- immediately afterwards, in a brief shot of Marcel on his own, there's a tiny 'step forward' just before the cut - very subtle use of visual punctuation to draw the scene to a close;
- in the hangar, at the moment when Therese decides to take to the skies, there's a lovely, delicate camera move, tracking ever so slightly into the couple, then backing ever so slightly off.
All of these movements are all but imperceptible, but they give the film a living, breathing quality.
However, there's lots about Gremillon's camera work in the film that's not subtle, but rather dazzling and flashy. There are plenty of extravagant tracking and crane shots. The amazing opening shot, following dark massed shapes (a flock of sheep, children at play) moving across a bare expanse of land, is almost avant la lettre Jansco. And Gremillon communicates the excitement of the airshow not by placing the camera in the plane, or even in the air, but by fast lateral tracking following Pierre through the running crowd.
In fact, Gremillon is meticulous in keeping his film earthbound, and I think that's one of the things that makes it so unusual and affecting. For a film that's motivated by the exhilaration of flight, he gives us no proxy experience of it. There are no tacky process shots of Therese beaming as the sky swirls behind her, for example, and when characters take to the skies, we stay on the ground with those left behind. This is most striking in the climactic scenes. When Therese's story literally takes off, she vanishes from the film (as the film hits its 'heroic' phase, Gremillon shifts his focus away from the hero) and we're left with the understated drama of Pierre awaiting word of her fate. Then we fade out, not to the resolution of this thread, but to an initially mysterious scene (crowds waiting in the rain at a train station) and prolonged lack of resolution (Pierre returns alone) that Gremillon sustains and sustains (a crowd of concerned people is the last thing he needs when he gets home) and stretches into despair. It's ultimately resolved with an even more mysterious - even surreal - change of scene (camels in the desert).
Throughout the second half of the film, Gremillon studiously avoids the obvious decisions concerning which part of the story to show us, and as a result the film avoids conventional uplift and retains its focus on the remarkable central couple despite the gimmicks of its 'based on a true story' plot.
When I first saw the film, it was the maturity and complexity of the relationship between Pierre and Therese which struck me as the most fresh and surprising thing about the film. Watching it again without subtitles, a lot of that is lost (the discussion in the hotel room, for example, seems much less remarkable without access to the entire dialogue, so I guess we have Spaak's script to thank for that one), but it's also much clearer just how carefully worked out the characters and their performances are. Neither Vanel nor Renaud have conventional movie-star glamour, but they make a radiant couple and convincingly portray a lifetime of familiarity. The elaborate dynamics of their relationship are easy to follow simply from their body language: the way Therese leans her elbow on her big lug of a husband as he talks to a customer; the unreturned look of concern and disorientation Therese has when her husband is bitten by the air bug; how abashed Pierre is when he's 'caught out' flying, and his nervous demeanour in the background of the subsequent scenes, dreading Therese's inevitable, delayed reaction. That scene also provides the perfectly wrong timing for the music teacher's request regarding Jacqueline, and just as in real life, Therese's anger and resentment explodes at the first thing to confront her, rather than the thing which actually caused the resentment.
This brilliant delineation and realisation of the central relationship is what makes the film so romantic, and what prevents that hard-won romance from being swamped by the extraordinary situation in which the characters find themselves.
David is far more articulate on the film's music than I am, and I was interested to find, when looking up the idiosyncratic essay on Gremillon in Roud's Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, that the director was hailed primarily as a pioneer of sound technique. In fact, he was even cited by Jean-Marie Straub as a key influence in that respect (surely not a common accolade!). The essay also writes off all of his output between Lise and Gueule and pays most attention to his post-feature-career shorts.
Back to the sound: there's a breath-taking movie-movie moment in the middle of the film as the Jacqueline / piano subplot is resolved. After Therese's explosion, we cut to a shot of the piano in the corner, which dissolves into an identical shot, sans piano, with the maid sweeping the floor. Over the dissolve is a low, unobtrusive (but notably discordant) piano chord. Fade.
First off, my attempts to define G's style in Pattes doesn't apply too well to this film. The style here is far less idiosyncratic and far closer to 'classical' French filmmaking. There aren't those glancing, semi-subjective inserts, for example, and overall there's far less action on the montage front. There remain some excellent examples of Gremillon's very subtle, almost subliminal camera movements, however:
- when Marcel comes to the garage in the middle of the night to tell Pierre and Therese about the death of the President, there's a beautifully counterintuitive 'step back' by the camera as Pierre approaches;
- immediately afterwards, in a brief shot of Marcel on his own, there's a tiny 'step forward' just before the cut - very subtle use of visual punctuation to draw the scene to a close;
- in the hangar, at the moment when Therese decides to take to the skies, there's a lovely, delicate camera move, tracking ever so slightly into the couple, then backing ever so slightly off.
All of these movements are all but imperceptible, but they give the film a living, breathing quality.
However, there's lots about Gremillon's camera work in the film that's not subtle, but rather dazzling and flashy. There are plenty of extravagant tracking and crane shots. The amazing opening shot, following dark massed shapes (a flock of sheep, children at play) moving across a bare expanse of land, is almost avant la lettre Jansco. And Gremillon communicates the excitement of the airshow not by placing the camera in the plane, or even in the air, but by fast lateral tracking following Pierre through the running crowd.
In fact, Gremillon is meticulous in keeping his film earthbound, and I think that's one of the things that makes it so unusual and affecting. For a film that's motivated by the exhilaration of flight, he gives us no proxy experience of it. There are no tacky process shots of Therese beaming as the sky swirls behind her, for example, and when characters take to the skies, we stay on the ground with those left behind. This is most striking in the climactic scenes. When Therese's story literally takes off, she vanishes from the film (as the film hits its 'heroic' phase, Gremillon shifts his focus away from the hero) and we're left with the understated drama of Pierre awaiting word of her fate. Then we fade out, not to the resolution of this thread, but to an initially mysterious scene (crowds waiting in the rain at a train station) and prolonged lack of resolution (Pierre returns alone) that Gremillon sustains and sustains (a crowd of concerned people is the last thing he needs when he gets home) and stretches into despair. It's ultimately resolved with an even more mysterious - even surreal - change of scene (camels in the desert).
Throughout the second half of the film, Gremillon studiously avoids the obvious decisions concerning which part of the story to show us, and as a result the film avoids conventional uplift and retains its focus on the remarkable central couple despite the gimmicks of its 'based on a true story' plot.
When I first saw the film, it was the maturity and complexity of the relationship between Pierre and Therese which struck me as the most fresh and surprising thing about the film. Watching it again without subtitles, a lot of that is lost (the discussion in the hotel room, for example, seems much less remarkable without access to the entire dialogue, so I guess we have Spaak's script to thank for that one), but it's also much clearer just how carefully worked out the characters and their performances are. Neither Vanel nor Renaud have conventional movie-star glamour, but they make a radiant couple and convincingly portray a lifetime of familiarity. The elaborate dynamics of their relationship are easy to follow simply from their body language: the way Therese leans her elbow on her big lug of a husband as he talks to a customer; the unreturned look of concern and disorientation Therese has when her husband is bitten by the air bug; how abashed Pierre is when he's 'caught out' flying, and his nervous demeanour in the background of the subsequent scenes, dreading Therese's inevitable, delayed reaction. That scene also provides the perfectly wrong timing for the music teacher's request regarding Jacqueline, and just as in real life, Therese's anger and resentment explodes at the first thing to confront her, rather than the thing which actually caused the resentment.
This brilliant delineation and realisation of the central relationship is what makes the film so romantic, and what prevents that hard-won romance from being swamped by the extraordinary situation in which the characters find themselves.
David is far more articulate on the film's music than I am, and I was interested to find, when looking up the idiosyncratic essay on Gremillon in Roud's Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, that the director was hailed primarily as a pioneer of sound technique. In fact, he was even cited by Jean-Marie Straub as a key influence in that respect (surely not a common accolade!). The essay also writes off all of his output between Lise and Gueule and pays most attention to his post-feature-career shorts.
Back to the sound: there's a breath-taking movie-movie moment in the middle of the film as the Jacqueline / piano subplot is resolved. After Therese's explosion, we cut to a shot of the piano in the corner, which dissolves into an identical shot, sans piano, with the maid sweeping the floor. Over the dissolve is a low, unobtrusive (but notably discordant) piano chord. Fade.
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whaleallright
- Joined: Sun Sep 25, 2005 12:56 am
My understanding from what I've read is that Lise was made during one of numerous periods of transition between producers at Pathé-Natan, the French film industry being in a state of chaos throughout that decade. The film wasn't so much a commercial disappointment as an orphan, having been dumped in very few theaters with little or no promotion by the new producer -- who was no doubt perplexed by what Spaak and Grémillon had put together.
Sellier's monograph (1989) on Grémillon has a good amount of information on the production circumstances of his films, explaining his peripatetic course in the 1930s and his periods of inactivity following the war. Also worth tracking down is an unnumbered issue of the French journal 1895 devoted to Grémillon. See http://www.afrhc.fr/pub_hserie07.htm
Jonathan Rosenbaum has written a review of Lumière d'été and Le Ciel est àvous that discusses (not terribly convincingly) those films' relationship to the Occupation and the Resistance: http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/arc ... 21025.html
Sellier's monograph (1989) on Grémillon has a good amount of information on the production circumstances of his films, explaining his peripatetic course in the 1930s and his periods of inactivity following the war. Also worth tracking down is an unnumbered issue of the French journal 1895 devoted to Grémillon. See http://www.afrhc.fr/pub_hserie07.htm
Jonathan Rosenbaum has written a review of Lumière d'été and Le Ciel est àvous that discusses (not terribly convincingly) those films' relationship to the Occupation and the Resistance: http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/arc ... 21025.html
Last edited by whaleallright on Sat Sep 29, 2007 2:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
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zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
Okay, now it's time for Lumiere d'ete.
Of the Gremillons I've seen, this may be my least favourite, but it's nevertheless an amazing film, and may even make the best case for his mastery. It's a crazy movie, the plot and characters even more 'stock' than those of Pattes Blanches, but Gremillon pushes them far further than you expect. There's almost an air of Fassbinder in the deadpan schematism of the melodrama. Like Fassbinder, he mercilessly crushes the melodrama into two dimensions then out the other side (I'm not quite sure even I know exactly what I mean by that, so good luck to the rest of you). With Fassbinder, the aim is generally a ruthless dissection of contemporary society; for Gremillon in Lumiere d'ete, he's playing with the form for dazzling stylistic ends.
As such, the film exhibits less of the subtlety I'd been appreciating in the director's other works (for example, in this film Gremillon's typical slight tracks in for emphasis and more pronounced and more emphatic), but the trade-off is a series of remarkable coups de cinema.
First there's the setting: spectacular use of a spectacular landscape (as seen in Pattes) plus brazenly iconic key sets - the glass hotel on the cliff's edge; the labyrinthine country manor; the regularly exploding landscape. The film punctuates its extreme melodrama (in the sense of 'extreme sports') with almost documentary scenes of the workings of the mine. When the action from the melodrama intrudes on the 'documentary' realm (as at the climax of the film, and when Michele wanders into a dynamite blast), there's a weird vertigo.
Then there's the superb, intriguing sound design. As Christine and Patrice recall their first meeting, we're treated to a detailed audio flashback (the sound effects from the film they saw; the cinema organ music; fairground sounds). It's a bravura sequence, ending with a superb final shot as the camera pulls right back to an extreme long shot of the couple - not your typical romantic clinch, and a signal that things are far from good for them.
After a long Mister Wu (or Godot) style build-up, the entrance of Roland is similarly masterful and unexpected. Instead of the grand entrance everyone's been expecting, he roars in, blind drunk on a motorcycle and stumbles up the stairs after only the most perfunctory introduction. The following scene, a huge row between Roland and Michele (Roland = Essence of Self-Loathing), is accompanied on the soundtrack by the obtrusive squawks of night birds.
There's an extremely deliberate use of background noise and music throughout the film. I'm particularly fascinated a pair of scenes at the end of the film, and am wondering what others make of Gremillon's sound choices in those scenes. The first is Michele's visit to Julien before her intended departure. In the background, some weirdly inappropriate 'action' music is playing - the sort of thing you'd expect if they were careering towards a waterfall, not having a dramatic dialogue. It's highly incongruous, but it creates a striking and persuasive effect. The very next scene is almost identical, dramatically. In it, Michele is farewelling Patrice (her other prospective lover). In both scenes, the prospective lover asks Michele to stay a few more days, and Michele even underlines the pairing of the scenes in an astonishing extreme close-up (a true rarity in Gremillon, from what I've seen) in which she turns her gaze away from Patrice and towards the camera (us) and blankly quotes Julien's lines from the previous scene. In the scene with Patrice, however, in stark contrast to its twin, there is no music whatsoever playing in the background.
Apart from all of this there are the casual felicities. What a delight to see Feuillade veteran Marcel Levesque, still in character after 30 years! There's also a flashy subjective shot from the point of view of a gunman at the climax, and the camera is spectacularly mobile during the ball sequence.
Then there's a bizarre shooting gallery automaton that is surely a nod to Rules of the Game, combining two of its most distinctive set-pieces. In fact, as the film progresses it more and more resembles a demented parody of Renoir's masterpiece. Gremillon hits upon a weirdly literal version of the breathtaking amalgamation of tragedy and farce that Renoir concocts for his final act. In Lumiere, Renoir's shaded transitions and layerings of the two modes become more like a car-crash (wild dancing throughout the background while Roland literally plays Hamlet in the foreground). Then Gremillon tops that with an actual car-crash (after a wild night-ride accompanied by manic fiddling on the soundtrack); then tops the crash with further Hitchcockian building climaxes. It makes for a delirious, inspired, exhilaratingly silly ending.
Of the Gremillons I've seen, this may be my least favourite, but it's nevertheless an amazing film, and may even make the best case for his mastery. It's a crazy movie, the plot and characters even more 'stock' than those of Pattes Blanches, but Gremillon pushes them far further than you expect. There's almost an air of Fassbinder in the deadpan schematism of the melodrama. Like Fassbinder, he mercilessly crushes the melodrama into two dimensions then out the other side (I'm not quite sure even I know exactly what I mean by that, so good luck to the rest of you). With Fassbinder, the aim is generally a ruthless dissection of contemporary society; for Gremillon in Lumiere d'ete, he's playing with the form for dazzling stylistic ends.
As such, the film exhibits less of the subtlety I'd been appreciating in the director's other works (for example, in this film Gremillon's typical slight tracks in for emphasis and more pronounced and more emphatic), but the trade-off is a series of remarkable coups de cinema.
First there's the setting: spectacular use of a spectacular landscape (as seen in Pattes) plus brazenly iconic key sets - the glass hotel on the cliff's edge; the labyrinthine country manor; the regularly exploding landscape. The film punctuates its extreme melodrama (in the sense of 'extreme sports') with almost documentary scenes of the workings of the mine. When the action from the melodrama intrudes on the 'documentary' realm (as at the climax of the film, and when Michele wanders into a dynamite blast), there's a weird vertigo.
Then there's the superb, intriguing sound design. As Christine and Patrice recall their first meeting, we're treated to a detailed audio flashback (the sound effects from the film they saw; the cinema organ music; fairground sounds). It's a bravura sequence, ending with a superb final shot as the camera pulls right back to an extreme long shot of the couple - not your typical romantic clinch, and a signal that things are far from good for them.
After a long Mister Wu (or Godot) style build-up, the entrance of Roland is similarly masterful and unexpected. Instead of the grand entrance everyone's been expecting, he roars in, blind drunk on a motorcycle and stumbles up the stairs after only the most perfunctory introduction. The following scene, a huge row between Roland and Michele (Roland = Essence of Self-Loathing), is accompanied on the soundtrack by the obtrusive squawks of night birds.
There's an extremely deliberate use of background noise and music throughout the film. I'm particularly fascinated a pair of scenes at the end of the film, and am wondering what others make of Gremillon's sound choices in those scenes. The first is Michele's visit to Julien before her intended departure. In the background, some weirdly inappropriate 'action' music is playing - the sort of thing you'd expect if they were careering towards a waterfall, not having a dramatic dialogue. It's highly incongruous, but it creates a striking and persuasive effect. The very next scene is almost identical, dramatically. In it, Michele is farewelling Patrice (her other prospective lover). In both scenes, the prospective lover asks Michele to stay a few more days, and Michele even underlines the pairing of the scenes in an astonishing extreme close-up (a true rarity in Gremillon, from what I've seen) in which she turns her gaze away from Patrice and towards the camera (us) and blankly quotes Julien's lines from the previous scene. In the scene with Patrice, however, in stark contrast to its twin, there is no music whatsoever playing in the background.
Apart from all of this there are the casual felicities. What a delight to see Feuillade veteran Marcel Levesque, still in character after 30 years! There's also a flashy subjective shot from the point of view of a gunman at the climax, and the camera is spectacularly mobile during the ball sequence.
Then there's a bizarre shooting gallery automaton that is surely a nod to Rules of the Game, combining two of its most distinctive set-pieces. In fact, as the film progresses it more and more resembles a demented parody of Renoir's masterpiece. Gremillon hits upon a weirdly literal version of the breathtaking amalgamation of tragedy and farce that Renoir concocts for his final act. In Lumiere, Renoir's shaded transitions and layerings of the two modes become more like a car-crash (wild dancing throughout the background while Roland literally plays Hamlet in the foreground). Then Gremillon tops that with an actual car-crash (after a wild night-ride accompanied by manic fiddling on the soundtrack); then tops the crash with further Hitchcockian building climaxes. It makes for a delirious, inspired, exhilaratingly silly ending.
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zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
La Petite Lise
Wow. This is a film that calls into question so much received wisdom about early sound cinema, in that Gremillon seems to have preserved much of the visual sophistication of late silent cinema while adding highly innovative and accomplished sound technique. Plus, there are elements of this film years ahead of other films of the period.
Content-wise, it's a boilerplate melodrama, probably the most generic Gremillon material I've yet encountered. With the exception of the magnificent Alcover, the performances seem to me to serve their stock characters, but little more, and there are times when dramatic convenience swamps logic (as when Lise and Andre flee the Usurer's with no thought to the evidence they've left there). So, certain core Gremillon values are poorly served by much of the film.
On the other hand, this film shows Gremillon to be a major screen innovator, and makes his comparative obscurity pretty much indefensible. Even alongside the superb and inventive early sound films of Clair, Lise astonishes with its ambition in terms of sound design. Gremillon plays dialogue scenes with a high level of 'documentary' background noise, as in the early prison scenes, or plays with deliberately artificial soundscapes, as when train noises start abruptly as if in response to Lise's gaze (as she comes out of a reverie, perhaps), then cuts off with the delicate ting of the bell on an opening door ushering us into the next scene.
Most impressive is the combination of complex sound with a highly mobile camera. The surprising, semi-documentary prison scenes, and the matching semi-documentary dance-hall scenes at the end of the film, utilise long tracking shots, rapid cutting and incorporate dialogue scenes with continuing background sound. Both of these sequences seem more like cinema verite from the sixties (or an unusual documentary / fiction hybrid like On the Bowery) than 30s melodrama, and the first quarter hour is one of the most extraordinary openings to a film I've ever seen: Gremillon devotes an extraordinary amount of time to 'ambient' documentary footage, so there's a rich, uneasy tension between fact and fiction. This sequence is surely what Carax is tipping his hat to at the start of Les Amants du Pont Neuf (just as he quotes L'Atalante at the end of the film).
The use of documentary footage here and in Lumiere d'Ete (and, to a lesser extent, in the way he treats the flying scenes of Le Ciel) suggest to me Gremillon's great respect for the integrity of labour: he will use real footage to contextualise his fictions, but he avoids faking it. He doesn't put his actors in work duds and have them swinging a pickaxe in the foreground, or show Madeleine Renaud in goggles waving from the cockpit against a rear-projected sky, or treat us to a close-up of a sweating Georges Marchal while his stunt double edges to the rescue of a trapped cable-car. Thus, in this film we see (I assume) real prisoners in a real prison, and real dancers performing in a real club at the close of the film.
Gremillon's camera work in this film is highly stylised and dynamic. Not only are there those fabulous tracking shots (including one in which we follow behind Lise and Andre as they walk the night streets and discuss their future - their first major scene together and we see them only from behind), but there are a lot of really unusual angles. Dialogue-based scenes in Lise's flat are shot alternately from low, Ozu-esque angles (and even floor-level sub-Ozu positions) or unusually high angles. A long dialogue scene between Lise and Andre has as one of its alternate angles an almost overhead shot looking down on the top of Andre's head and into Lise's face as she lies across him. The reunion of Lise and her father is communicated only by sound, with the camera remaining on the steps outside the room, looking up at the open door. And when Lise faints after Berthier recovers her watch, there's even a very complicated shot which seems to be handheld.
Alcover gives a superb silent-film performance. Because of his size, he's a major physical presence, and Gremillon uses his bulk to block out sections of the frame (reminding me of the way he orchestrates movement in the opening shot of Le Ciel est a vous to play with patterns of light and dark). Most of his major dramatic scenes (looking at the picture of Lise in prison, exploring her apartment, the concluding sequence) are performed without dialogue, with a beautiful attention to body language, gesture and, as noted, location of the actor in the frame. It's a superb, sensitive performance and one that is masterfully deployed and framed by Gremillon.
As for that opening music cue. Yes, it is amazing. It's reminiscent of the more exotic strands of early Ellington (St Louis Toodle-O; Black and Tan Fantasy) but even more determinedly 'alien'. More information would be most welcome.
Wow. This is a film that calls into question so much received wisdom about early sound cinema, in that Gremillon seems to have preserved much of the visual sophistication of late silent cinema while adding highly innovative and accomplished sound technique. Plus, there are elements of this film years ahead of other films of the period.
Content-wise, it's a boilerplate melodrama, probably the most generic Gremillon material I've yet encountered. With the exception of the magnificent Alcover, the performances seem to me to serve their stock characters, but little more, and there are times when dramatic convenience swamps logic (as when Lise and Andre flee the Usurer's with no thought to the evidence they've left there). So, certain core Gremillon values are poorly served by much of the film.
On the other hand, this film shows Gremillon to be a major screen innovator, and makes his comparative obscurity pretty much indefensible. Even alongside the superb and inventive early sound films of Clair, Lise astonishes with its ambition in terms of sound design. Gremillon plays dialogue scenes with a high level of 'documentary' background noise, as in the early prison scenes, or plays with deliberately artificial soundscapes, as when train noises start abruptly as if in response to Lise's gaze (as she comes out of a reverie, perhaps), then cuts off with the delicate ting of the bell on an opening door ushering us into the next scene.
Most impressive is the combination of complex sound with a highly mobile camera. The surprising, semi-documentary prison scenes, and the matching semi-documentary dance-hall scenes at the end of the film, utilise long tracking shots, rapid cutting and incorporate dialogue scenes with continuing background sound. Both of these sequences seem more like cinema verite from the sixties (or an unusual documentary / fiction hybrid like On the Bowery) than 30s melodrama, and the first quarter hour is one of the most extraordinary openings to a film I've ever seen: Gremillon devotes an extraordinary amount of time to 'ambient' documentary footage, so there's a rich, uneasy tension between fact and fiction. This sequence is surely what Carax is tipping his hat to at the start of Les Amants du Pont Neuf (just as he quotes L'Atalante at the end of the film).
The use of documentary footage here and in Lumiere d'Ete (and, to a lesser extent, in the way he treats the flying scenes of Le Ciel) suggest to me Gremillon's great respect for the integrity of labour: he will use real footage to contextualise his fictions, but he avoids faking it. He doesn't put his actors in work duds and have them swinging a pickaxe in the foreground, or show Madeleine Renaud in goggles waving from the cockpit against a rear-projected sky, or treat us to a close-up of a sweating Georges Marchal while his stunt double edges to the rescue of a trapped cable-car. Thus, in this film we see (I assume) real prisoners in a real prison, and real dancers performing in a real club at the close of the film.
Gremillon's camera work in this film is highly stylised and dynamic. Not only are there those fabulous tracking shots (including one in which we follow behind Lise and Andre as they walk the night streets and discuss their future - their first major scene together and we see them only from behind), but there are a lot of really unusual angles. Dialogue-based scenes in Lise's flat are shot alternately from low, Ozu-esque angles (and even floor-level sub-Ozu positions) or unusually high angles. A long dialogue scene between Lise and Andre has as one of its alternate angles an almost overhead shot looking down on the top of Andre's head and into Lise's face as she lies across him. The reunion of Lise and her father is communicated only by sound, with the camera remaining on the steps outside the room, looking up at the open door. And when Lise faints after Berthier recovers her watch, there's even a very complicated shot which seems to be handheld.
Alcover gives a superb silent-film performance. Because of his size, he's a major physical presence, and Gremillon uses his bulk to block out sections of the frame (reminding me of the way he orchestrates movement in the opening shot of Le Ciel est a vous to play with patterns of light and dark). Most of his major dramatic scenes (looking at the picture of Lise in prison, exploring her apartment, the concluding sequence) are performed without dialogue, with a beautiful attention to body language, gesture and, as noted, location of the actor in the frame. It's a superb, sensitive performance and one that is masterfully deployed and framed by Gremillon.
As for that opening music cue. Yes, it is amazing. It's reminiscent of the more exotic strands of early Ellington (St Louis Toodle-O; Black and Tan Fantasy) but even more determinedly 'alien'. More information would be most welcome.
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carax09
- Joined: Thu Nov 04, 2004 2:22 am
- Location: This almost empty gin palace
"To cut a very long story short I do feel, from what I've seen so far, that only with this grounding in melodramatic narrative is Gremillon best positioned to embellish and even improve upon classic 30s French themes and set pieces while adding his own musicality of form and particularly expressive mise-en-scene to these movies."
Yes David, I think this is a very important point. On the subject of what makes Gremillon's films so distinctive may be the deft interplay between form/style and content/narrative which makes them so engaging. It seems to me (with admittedly limited exposure), that each film can be characterized as either stylistically experimental while being grounded in generic narrative convention, or vice versa. This must be a conscious decision, and a wise one, because films that circumvent both form and content simultaneously, usually result in some degree of audience alienation.
In Ma Petite Lise, the narrative content is the fairly generic story of a father reuniting with his daughter after a lengthy prison stay only to find her in potential trouble with the law. Instead it is the inventive camera work, non-diegetic sound, and extraordinary music choices, which give the film it's weight. Likewise in Lumiere d'Ete, it is the revolutionary use of audio flashbacks and the deliberate foregrounding of background noise, coupled with the use of landscape and camera to enduce feelings of vertigo, which serve to elevate the story and make it so impacting.
Contrast these examples to Pattes Blanches with it's anti-heroes and anti-heroines, it's macguffins, and the general peculiarities of scene organization (thanks Zedz). These formal inventions are then coupled with more conventional musical cues and stately camera movement and frame composition. Likewise in Le Ciel Est A Vous, the film is primarily daring in it's story. It involves a husband and wife's shared obsession with flying, but concentrates exclusively on those left on the ground. Gremillon also managed to bolster the spirit of the Resistance with story touches with which he knew they would be able to connect.
I realize this analysis is a little simplistic, but I think there may be something to it. His versatility is what makes him so hard to pin-down, and likewise so hard to appreciate. Here's to a reappraisal because it's long overdue and Gremillon's films stand the test of time as well or better than much of what is more highly regarded from the period.
Yes David, I think this is a very important point. On the subject of what makes Gremillon's films so distinctive may be the deft interplay between form/style and content/narrative which makes them so engaging. It seems to me (with admittedly limited exposure), that each film can be characterized as either stylistically experimental while being grounded in generic narrative convention, or vice versa. This must be a conscious decision, and a wise one, because films that circumvent both form and content simultaneously, usually result in some degree of audience alienation.
In Ma Petite Lise, the narrative content is the fairly generic story of a father reuniting with his daughter after a lengthy prison stay only to find her in potential trouble with the law. Instead it is the inventive camera work, non-diegetic sound, and extraordinary music choices, which give the film it's weight. Likewise in Lumiere d'Ete, it is the revolutionary use of audio flashbacks and the deliberate foregrounding of background noise, coupled with the use of landscape and camera to enduce feelings of vertigo, which serve to elevate the story and make it so impacting.
Contrast these examples to Pattes Blanches with it's anti-heroes and anti-heroines, it's macguffins, and the general peculiarities of scene organization (thanks Zedz). These formal inventions are then coupled with more conventional musical cues and stately camera movement and frame composition. Likewise in Le Ciel Est A Vous, the film is primarily daring in it's story. It involves a husband and wife's shared obsession with flying, but concentrates exclusively on those left on the ground. Gremillon also managed to bolster the spirit of the Resistance with story touches with which he knew they would be able to connect.
I realize this analysis is a little simplistic, but I think there may be something to it. His versatility is what makes him so hard to pin-down, and likewise so hard to appreciate. Here's to a reappraisal because it's long overdue and Gremillon's films stand the test of time as well or better than much of what is more highly regarded from the period.
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David Ehrenstein
- Joined: Tue Oct 11, 2005 8:30 pm
- Contact:
Maybe that's because it was written by Prevert.The case of Lumiere d'Ete is different again. As Zedz points out, although written by Pierre Laroche there is a Prevertian tone to the scenario which seems to wed it, in some ways to those typical Prevertian "poetic realist" scenarios written for Carne in Jour se Leve and particularly Quai des Brumes.
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David Ehrenstein
- Joined: Tue Oct 11, 2005 8:30 pm
- Contact:
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HerrSchreck
- Joined: Sun Sep 04, 2005 11:46 am
Zedz, I have to doff my hat to you... this is just some of the most magnificent film writing I've read anywhere. You'd think from the scope of your film knowledge you did nothing else but sit in the cinema (or home) & watch films... but the ease & clarity of your writing indicates A Full Life Otherwise.zedz wrote:Visual Style
One thing that's immediately apparent in terms of Gremillon's visual style is his mastery of camera movement. Tracks and pans are very subtly deployed, either in tandem with character movement or in counterpoint to it. There's a beautiful, brief movement when Maurice first catches a glimpse of Odette: as his gaze turns to her, the camera slightly circles around him. Gremillon will also track in slightly when a character makes a telling gesture – a beautiful use of cinematic punctuation that never overstates or imposes the director's interpretation.
Closely related to this is a superb use of punctuating cuts and inserts, as the equivalent of sidelong glances. There's great use of this when Odette arrives at the inn, and we rapidly see (in a series of split-second cuts) everybody's reaction to her. A theory that might bear further exploration is that Gremillon's camera reacts as if it were a character within the film, but without the use of conventional P.O.V. techniques. A lot of his visual techniques seem to mimic the physiology of the human eye – rapid glances rather than lingering ‘shots', slight tracks in to telling details rather than extreme close-ups. It gives the film a demotic, grounded human reality, even when the story and characters are so heightened.
Apart from such subtle inflections throughout the film, there are several scenes of conventional splendour. Gremillon makes stunning use of the spectacular landscape, and his moving camera extends to showier crane and tracking shots (Keriadec descending his staircase; Odette and Maurice on the clifftop). I'd also like to note the superb, thematically and emotionally charged, composition where Odette and Mimi are framed in a mirror: Odette showing off her new dress; Mimi (Thomas is in the Irm Herrmann role) at her feet; then Odette leaves the frame, leaving a strikingly asymmetrical composition of poor Mimi squashed into the corner of the frame within the frame
The film's score is pretty conventional throughout (though generally oddly effective), but when Odette encounters Maurice while gathering herbs in the twilight there's a wonderfully effective cue using a female chorus, adding a pagan, hypnotic air to one of the film's most dramatic scenes.
Cheers to you.
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zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
I've unearthed some more background on Gremillon's erratic feature-filmmaking career from Harry Waldman's Scenes Unseen: Unreleased and Uncompleted Films from the World's Master Filmmakers, 1912-1990. According to Waldman, Gremillon's production troubles were (unsurprisingly) largely down to politics, as he was in the difficult position of being persona non grata with both the left and right wings after the war. He had worked in Nazi Germany as late as 1938 (Gueule d'Amour) and had remained active in film during the Occupation (even though at least one of his films, Le Ciel est a vous, was generally understood to be strongly anti-Vichy), so he was seen as awkwardly tainted by the left. The right, however, were opposed to him because of his connections with the French Communist Party (he was a member of the Front National during the war), and actively opposed his attachment to the ill-fated Le Printemps de la Liberte (a feature commemorating the 1848 Revolution).
Waldman's chapter emphasises yet another aspect of Gremillon, in that the majority of his unrealised post-war projects seem to have been politically charged historical dramas. Alongside the shelved Printemps de la Liberte (1948) were: The Paris Commune (1945), Le Massacre des Innocents (1946, tracking very recent history from the Spanish Civil War to the liberation of the concentration camps), La Commedia dell'Arte (1947, set against the background of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre). If any or all of these projects had been realised, we might now have a very different understanding of the director. As it was, the features he actually managed to complete after the war all fell into the realm of traditional melodrama (though we know how far Gremillon could push that particular envelope!)
Waldman's chapter emphasises yet another aspect of Gremillon, in that the majority of his unrealised post-war projects seem to have been politically charged historical dramas. Alongside the shelved Printemps de la Liberte (1948) were: The Paris Commune (1945), Le Massacre des Innocents (1946, tracking very recent history from the Spanish Civil War to the liberation of the concentration camps), La Commedia dell'Arte (1947, set against the background of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre). If any or all of these projects had been realised, we might now have a very different understanding of the director. As it was, the features he actually managed to complete after the war all fell into the realm of traditional melodrama (though we know how far Gremillon could push that particular envelope!)
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otis
- Joined: Mon Aug 08, 2005 11:43 am
This seems the best place to mention the new R2 disc of Carné's Hôtel du Nord, which gets a pretty good write-up at DVD Times:
"Atmosphere, atmosphere, est-ce que j'ai une gueule d'atmosphere?"The video transfer for the film – a port of the unsubtitled MK2 French edition - is excellent. The image quality of this 70 year film is little short of astonishing, showing remarkable clarity and a full range of greyscale tones.
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Rufus T. Firefly
- Joined: Wed Nov 10, 2004 4:24 am
- Location: Sydney, Australia
For Sydneysiders interested in Gremillon, the WEA Film Society is screening Gueule d'Amour on August 6 and Remorques on November 5. Both subtitled prints, of course.
Last edited by Rufus T. Firefly on Sat Jun 03, 2006 11:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Kinsayder
- Joined: Mon Oct 10, 2005 6:22 pm
- Location: UK
L'étrange Madame X is due out on DVD on Sept 7th:
http://www.fnac.com/Shelf/article.asp?PRID=1859750
http://www.fnac.com/Shelf/article.asp?PRID=1859750