It was June the 22nd of 1940 when Marshal Phillipe Petain, the French Chief of State and Vichy's leader would sign an armistice with Germany. Under the terms and protocols of this, Paris would now be a part of an occupied zone and would remain so for over a period of four years. In June, 1944 the Allies landed on the French coast and by August there would be a completely liberated Paris. Despite this and a rightful resentment over the profound humiliation the French people may have felt at their subjugation to Nazism, the French cinema flourished as never before. Something above three hundred and fifty features were produced during those fifty months of Occupation, including such landmarks of French cinema as Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Corbeau (The Raven,1943) and Robert Bresson's unforgettable Les anges du peche (Angels of Sin, 1943).
Yet as irony would have it. there is remarkably little record of overt and willing collaboration by French filmmakers with the Nazi Party and its militant ideologies. Indeed a good number of those artists who remained active on the scene - among them - directors Jacques Becker, documentary filmmaker Jean Gremillon, Jean Painleve and the actor Pierre Blanchar - were responsible for the formation of the clandestine organization ' Committee for the Liberation of French Cinema.'
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| Nun but the brave...from Robert Bresson's Angels of Sin (1943) |
This is not to say that Goebbels did not exert commodious control over France's film industry, on the contrary, for the years that preceded the war, German films had been successfully infiltrating the French market. With the Occupation - and to an extent through the expropriating of Jewish interests - the Germans acquired full financial control of roughly a third of the industry; from production to press, distribution and theaters. French film was subjected to a dual censorship by Germany's Propaganda Ministry, and by the German-backed Vichy government whose powers in this respect nominally covered only the so-coined 'free' zone of France.
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There were two factors that contributed to the freedom allowed to French film artists. One was the failure of domestic German-made pictures to attract the French public. At the onset of the Occupation, there was a vehement effort to get German films on France's screens, but the audiences tacitly would boycott these screenings. Consequently, receipts for French films rose considerably, thereby enhancing the financial property of the home industry. Moreover, the Germans looked to French production to replace the films they were no longer buying from Hollywood, and so left filmmakers a free hand in the field of what were regarded as purely entertainment pictures.
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| Don't go to Number 21 - The Murderer lives there... |
The only direct injection of German money into French production was through the German-owned Continental company which produced thirty of the considerably more expensive films of the period. Continental focused on American type subject matter, such as Olympic athlete turned director Henri Decoin's breezy comedy Premier rendez - vouz (Her First Affair,1941) which starred Danielle Darrieux and detective thrillers. Henri Georges Clouzot, who had made a number of German versions of French films in Berlin in the early 1930's, scripted two of the most important of these thrillers; Georges Lacombe's Le Dernier de Six (Last of the Six, 1941) and Decoin's Les inconnus dans la maison (Strangers in the House, 1942), adapted from a pre-war Georges Simenon novel but turned into an attack on those that were non-Aryan, useful as propaganda for the Vichy government.
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| Jacques Becker starts off with a bang with Dernier atout (1943) |
Clouzot went on to make his debut as a director with the impressive L'Assasin Habite au 21 (The Murderer Lives at No. 21), which remains one of his greatest works. His follow up feature, Le Corbeau was based on a true story regarding the circulation of poison pen letters distributed to the denizens of a small French town. This would spark great controversy when the Nazis themselves capitalized on the opportunity and used it for anti-French propaganda in Occupied Europe and it would ultimately result in what was to be a lifetime ban on film-making sanctioned to director Clouzot, the motion to do so however waived in two years and Clouzot would append to his fine tradition of suspense-laden masterpieces, that have deemed the director Alfred Hitchcock's most worthy opponent.
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| Things get funny on the farm in 1942's Goupi mains rouges |
Jacques Becker, a protege of legendary director King Vidor, who began his directing career during the Occupation; was also a student of Jean Renoir and worked primarily in the realist style or a hybrid of elements from French pre-war cinema and the American pulp genre. His first feature, the impressive Dernier atout (The Trump Card, 1942), would prove a brilliant and commercially effectual policier . With 1943's Goupi mains rouges (It Happened at the Inn), Becker went beyond the parameters of his detective-story plot to cultivate a rich portrayal of French rural living, focusing on the lives of four generations of farmers. The romantic melodrama Falbalas (Paris Frills,1945), completed around the time of the Liberation, was the first of the Parisian subjects on which his later fame was to rest. Set in a top fashion house, the film is an elaborately detailed description of the French bourgeoisie under the Occupation.
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| The Sky was their limit in Le ciel est a vous |
Jean Gremillon made two of the few strictly realist works of the period. Lumiere d'ete (Summer Light,1943) which contrasted the life of construction workers on a dam with the immorality of their insidious employers (evidently intended to symbolize the way of life under the Vichy administration). Le ciel est a vous (The Sky is Yours,1944), a factual story of two seemingly ordinary Frenchmen who achieved a world flying record, which would be seen as a symbol of French aspirations towards full liberation
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| Maria Casares is a dame of Bois du Bolgogne (1945) |
Robert Bresson embarked on a career that was unparalleled, uncompromising with creative independence in Les anges du peche (Angels of Sin,1943), bringing its cinema goers their very first encounter with his metaphysical and spiritual concerns and his harsh, demanding style. It was followed by a no less austere modernization of Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (The ladies of the Bois de Boulogne,1945), a film scripted by one Jean Cocteau.
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| La main du diable (dir. Maurice Tourneur 1943) |
The most characteristic films from the Occupation period, however, are a handful of glittering flights into fantastic worlds of romantic periods - areas such, that neither Goebells nor Vichy's film censors could follow. The veteran Jean Delannoy would follow Pontcarral, Colonel d'Empire (1942) - a historical drama clear and concise with it's various contemporary references - with L'Eternel Retour ( Love Eternal,1943), a modern version of the 12th century legend of Tristan and Iseult. Both the latter and Le baron fantome (The Phantom Baron,1943), a charming trifle directed by Serge de Poligny and starring Odette Joyeux, were also penned by Cocteau, Claude Autant-Lara concentrated upon the decorative past in Lettres d'Amour (Love Letters,1942) Le Marriage de Chiffon (The Chiffon Marriage,1943) and Douce (Love Story,1943). The prolific Abel Gance would dedicate his La venus aveugle (Blind Venus,1941) to Marechal Petain, and followed it with another work of characteristic romanticism, Le capitaine Fracasse (Captain Fracasse,1942).
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| Chains and the fool - Carne's opus Les visiteurs du soir. |
Two films above all stand as monuments of the French cinema under Nazi Occupation, Marcel Carne entered the next phase of his career with 1942's Les visiteurs du soir (The Devil's Envoys). Visually sublime, this evocation of a medieval world in which the devil makes crepuscular visits to a castle, but is unable to conquer true love and this paralleled as a symbol of Hitler's defeat in crushing the nation's spirit. Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise,1945) remains a paragon of perfection and the single-most memorable work of the time. This fable of polar opposites; in love and death, good and evil, is set in a Paris of the 1840's during the La Boheme movement, that entailed a contingent of local anti-bourgeois creatives who aspired to establish themselves in France's cultural capital. With its pictorial splendor and the complexities of its intertwining of life and theater, the film has not lost one stitch of its seduction and ability to rivet successive audiences.