Les Mystères de Paris, Jacques de Baroncelli (1943)

Adapted from the novel by Eugène Sue by Maurice Bessy and Pierre Laroche
Starring : Marcel Herrand (Rodolphe de Neuville), Alexandre Rignault (le maître d'école), Lucien Coëdel (le Chourineur), Caecilia Paroldi (Fleur de Marie), Yolande Laffon (la comtesse Sarah Mac Gregor), Roland Toutain (Cabrion)

First mystery: where TV5 got the plot summary they used to describe this film on the program. Having just watched the movie, I'm a little confused about their interpretation, which refers to a girl killed accidentally and a plot by an odious baron de Laussignac. In the film I saw, a fellow rescues a young prostitute being harassed and so impresses the harasser with his fighting prowess that they go off to have a drink at a seedy dive, in which all of the characters have bad nicknames and bad makeup. Our hero takes the girl (Fleur-de-Marie, who bears a slightly disturbing resemblance to Judy Garland, insofar as she is supposed to be an abused orphan / child prostitute) to his house in the country, hands her over to the housekeeper and all will be well. He's apparently the Grand Duke of Gérolstein, and goes about the gutters in disguise, doing good deeds. Except that the proprietors of the dive where he found the girl want her back - they've raised her, and now she's a source of income for them.

Enter the Countess, our hero's ex-girlfriend, and a nasty piece of work in the form of her lawyer, Ferrand. There was a love child, and she's dead, or so we think...

dbdumonteil at IMDB comments claims this is the best of the several adaptations of Eugene Sue's novel, "Les Mystères de Paris." I'd hate to see the others if that's true. It's an 83-minute film based on a 1300-page novel, so obviously certain aspects will be a little sketchy. It retains a certain page-turner quality, however. It's entirely shot in studio, and the lighting and sets are actually quite distinct from the moody darkness of the 1930s - far too clean and well-lit, even in areas that are supposed to be dirty and sordid.

Herrand resembles himself to a distracting degree - he plays Lacenaire in Les Enfants du paradis two years later, and since I know that movie quite well it was confusing to watch our hero deliver noble speeches in the contemptuous style of Lacenaire, even more so since the movies are set around the same period.

There are multiple themes in this movie that never would have made it off the censor's desk in the United States. most notably a mysterious love child and a corrupt lawyer who trades protection for sexual favors.

L'assassin habite au 21, Clouzot (1942)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034478/

released August 6, 1942 in France.

I love Pierre Fresnay. There, I've said it. And there are scenes in this film that are fun like the first Thin Man is fun, all wit, and sparkle, and surprise. Suzy Delair plays the female lead, (bad) singer Mila Malou. She's a French actress, but her character may in fact be American in the film - she is certainly obnoxious, and very much in the style of the earnest, uppity all-American girl - except that there are a number of very spicy jokes that would never, ever have made it past Joe Breen in the USA at this time. She also appears to live with Inspector Wens, (Fresnay) without the benefit of marital vows. And she spends part of one scene trying to get him to let her pop his blackheads while they talk.

Besides the dialogue scenes between Fresnay and Delair, it's a fairly flat mystery, of the "one of you in this parlor/boarding house/boat/train" committed the murder and I'm going to figure out who!" kind. A small surprise at the end, but the best is all between Fresnay and Delair.

dbdumonteil on IMDB said "All Clouzot's work, all that he will brilliantly develop in subsequent works is already here: a rotten microcosm (the boarding-house with a lot of wicked old people predates the school in "les diaboliques" and the small town in "le corbeau". " True.

Les amoureux sont seuls au monde, or "The Insufficient Muse"

Louis Jouvet (Gerard Favier), Renée Devillers (Sylvia), Fernand René , Philippe Nicaud , Janine Viénot , Brigitte Auber (Christine), Maurice Lagrenée , Emile Drain , Jean Le Fort , Lucien Carol

I've been looking for the Decoin film "Battement de coeur" for a long time, as part of a project on remakes. As it turns out, this is the first Decoin I've been able to see. The text is by Jeanson, and of course with Jouvet as the main character it's perfectly done. The prologue scene is particularly nice - he and his wife reenact their first meeting, 19 years before. The reenactment slips into a renarration, first of many scenes of overlapping and linking dialogue in the movie. Conditional shifts to present tense to past tense to present tense, and they are invited to play for a rural wedding that finds itself without a band. At this point, unless you got it from a synopsis, you don't know yet that Gerard Favier (Jouvet) is a famous classical composer, or even that they are already married, and not just meeting for the first time. It's somewhat painfully obviously studio-shot, but well done in the classical style. The perfect lighting is occasionally distracting for me.

Internet rumour has it that there were two endings to the film, a happy ending and a sad ending, where Sylvia kills herself. This is the version I saw. A little extreme, really - she convinces herself that the sweet young thing will make him happier, and poisons herself. Noble. Convenient. Very unlikely. But hey, she loved him so, right? Except for the part about she was wrong about who he loved...

So, interesting bits in it about the power of suggestion, since it's a tabloid article that plants the seed of this story, which then grows into a big ugly fact-plant in everyone's minds except (perhaps) Jouvet. And no one is really shocked or offended, and the young girl, thus freed from the moral context she had assumed surrounded her, falls over gobsmack in love with the guy and turns into an enormous pest.

The idea of a muse, and then of an aging muse, structures the whole plot. Sexual performance and creative performance are linked throughout the film. Sylvia says she'd be willing to sacrifice herself if the other girl would make him happy, but the thing that pushes her over the edge isn't happiness, it's creativity. When Jouvet composes for Monelle the love song he was never able to compose for Sylvia (and lies about it, telling Sylvia he composed it for her alone, and that he was alone when he did it) Sylvia takes her own life.

It's odd because the Sylvia character is actually quite good, very charming, lovely, and loved by her husband. So the overall structure of the film and her own self-narrative reduces her merits to her ability to inspire (or not) her composer husband (remember the metaphor of sexual prowess for creativity?) and yet the scene-by-scene representation of their marriage doesn't support this supposition. The melodrama/tragedy aspect of it is that while she might be right about the creativity question, her husband really does love her best.

NYT interview with Michael Haneke

From an article entitled "Minister of Fear" September 23, 2007

“At the beginning of the 20th century... when film began in Europe, storytelling of the kind still popular in Hollywood was every bit as popular here. Then the Nazis came, and the intellectuals — a great number of whom were Jewish — were either murdered or managed to escape to America and elsewhere. There were no intellectuals anymore — most of them were dead. Those who escaped to America were able to continue the storytelling approach to film — really a 19th-century tradition — with a clear conscience, since it hadn’t been tainted by fascism. But in the German-speaking world, and in most of the rest of Europe, that type of straightforward storytelling, which the Nazis had made such good use of, came to be viewed with distrust. The danger hidden in storytelling became clear — how easy it was to manipulate the crowd. As a result, film, and especially literature, began to examine itself. Storytelling, with all the tricks and ruses it requires, became gradually suspect. This was not the case in Hollywood.” At this point, Haneke asked politely whether I was following him, and I told him that I was. “I’m glad,” he said, apparently with genuine relief. “For Americans, this can sometimes be hard to accept.”

An entire continent forced into intellectualism by the persecution and death of its intellectuals? It's an interesting idea -- as though he suggests that American storytelling is prelapsarian, that we are still somehow happily ensconced in the 19th century, or the boulevard theater, that for American storytelling, the Nazi propaganda film never happened, and so does not need to be avoided.

Sans toit ni loi / Vagabond by Agnes Varda

I've avoided seeing this movie for years, because I'm a movie-wuss and anyone who's read anything about this movie knows that it's the story of how a young homeless woman came to be found frozen to death in a ditch (opening scene). So this didn't sound like my preferred sort of Sunday afternoon entertainment.

I forgot that it was a FRENCH movie, duh. Agnès Varda would never make a movie as overtly manipulative as what I always imagined based on the synopsis. Limited thing, a synopsis. Not to be trusted, really.

Reading reviews of the film on the net, now that I've seen it, is a puzzling thing. It's almost as though these people are talking about a different, less interesting, more didactic movie.

references:

Jean Decock, Entretien avec Varda sur Sans toit ni loi, The French Review, Vol. 61, No. 3. (Feb., 1988), pp. 377-385.
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0016-111X%28198802%2961%3A3%3C377%3AEAVSST%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L

Fantastic interview with Varda

"une enquête anti-policière" - Varda emphasizes the fact that the ppl interviewed don't know she's dead.
Starts with the dead girl because she didn't want the spectator to always be wondering if Mona will be saved -- we know she won't.

Film is dedicated to Nathalie Sarraute -- hadn't caught that. The nephew who wants the appartment is from Planétarium. Her way of working with Mona = tropismes, though Varda doesn't want to claim the term because of her admiration for Sarraute, she doesn't want to presume.

Varda calls Mona the mirror in the middle. The people she meets are in cinematic parenthesis -- either an actual fade-in, fade-out, or at times they emerge from darkness more naturally.

Manipulation of narrative order -- sometimes the interviews come before the scene with Mona, sometimes after.

Great quote - Varda on cinécriture, p 381 "Quand un architecte fait un plan détaillé n'importe qui peut construire sa maison, mais pour moi il n'y a aucune possibilité de faire un scénario que qulequ'un d'autre pourrait tourner, car le scénario ne représente pas l'écriture du film, il ne tient compte ni de la lumière ni du choix de l'objectif, ni de la vitesse d'un travelling, s'il y en a un, ni du débit sur lequelle les paroles sont dites, ni des jeux d'expressions. Le comportement peut être décrit, mais on ne peut pas dire si le temps de silence est de deux secondes ou sept secondes; on ne peut dire, surtout s'il pleut ou s'il fait soleil et s'il faut changer le dialogue, ou le comportement. Il n'existe pas d'écriture-de-cinéma."

So, Varda says that now (now that she's been in the business for 30 years, 30 years of practice with rejection) she refuses to make scénarios & storyboards, she does everything on 2 pages.

"Les travellings, c'est la marche de Mona, elle n'est qu'une chose dans un paysage qui existe toujours. Elle est rarement au début du travelling et elle est rarement à la fin. Par exemple, il y a un paysage, puis elle apparaît, elle marche puis elle disparaît et nous continuons et ensuite on reprend un détail de son action là où elle est, pour bien indiquer que ÇA continue à marcher."

"Chacun de ces travellings finit avec un élément qui est dans le début du suivant."

(Note to self-- could I ask students from the French section to explain articles to students in the English section?)

The travellings were added halfway through - her vision evolved as she realized that the structure of walking, of "la marche" wasn't coming through. So she added all of these very calculated transitions (ends on a tree, starts in a wood, ends on one sign, starts on another sign, etc.)

(this is an awesome interview!)
"Mon idée était que le dernier témoignage la tue. Quand on dit d'une femme qu'elle a un beau cul, quand on ne dit que ça, je pense qu'on la tue."

The pleasure in violence -- a pleasure she refuses to participate in, refuses to provide : "J'ai ma propre étique: ce que je veux montrer et pas montrer. Dans toute description clinique de la violence, du viol, de la guerre même quand on dit que c'est pour dénoncer, il y atoujours un plaisir et un plaisir à faire partager au spectateur. C'est de ce pain-là je n'en mange pas..."

Another fantastic bit about how everything, absolutely everything in a film is chosen - "Même la couleur de la réalité est contrôlée plan par plan.." said they repainted a public bench in grey (from orange), got in trouble for it.

Rene de Chazet & vaudeville during the Empire

Check out Rene de Chazet on BNF (and his many associates). Oodles of vaudeville plays under the Empire.

Eloge de Marc-Aurele de Thomas

Villemain's 1854 _Souvenirs..._ (available on Gallica) has a long dialogue between Narbonne and Napoleon. Napoleon refers to Thomas' eulogy several times. It gives a sort of shadow portrait of the afterlife of the éloges as teaching texts. This chapter (visit to Normale sup in 1812) also gives a portrait of Napoleon's vision of the nature and purpose of a humanist education and refers to the failure of the prix decennaux.

Note that Villemain wasn't there for this conversation, and he's (re)creating it many years later. So it's as much a fictional representation of what he thinks Napoleon was thinking at the time as an actual historical document, and there's even a bit where he admits to it at the end of the chapter.