silver nitrate notes

Renoir's La Grande Illusion and the Class War of Officers

25 nov 2013

Jean Renoir (1894-1979) made La Grande Illusion (1937) at the peak of the French Popular Front period, two years before the outbreak of the war the film is nominally about. Renoir had been a pilot in the First World War and drew on his own experience and that of friends. What the film is actually about is not the war; it is the class relations between the officers of the warring armies, photographed by Christian Matras (1903-1977) with a kind of formal respect that the content of the film then repeatedly undermines.

The premise. French officers Maréchal (Jean Gabin) and Boëldieu (Pierre Fresnay) are shot down over German lines in 1916 and taken prisoner. They are held at a succession of camps, finally at Wintersborn, a mountain fortress under the command of von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim). Rauffenstein and Boëldieu recognise each other as members of the same vanishing European aristocracy; they speak to each other in English because it is easier than German or French. Rauffenstein is appalled that Boëldieu, as a gentleman, is planning to escape. Boëldieu replies that a gentleman must do his duty. The class performs its solidarity across the lines of the war; the war is what the officers do together between aristocratic conversations.

Matras photographs the film in two registers that become progressively incompatible. The camp interiors are shot in deep focus with natural light from the tall windows of the set. Officers in dress uniform move through the frame as if they were at a formal dinner. The escape sequences are shot handheld, at night, with limited light, in a mode closer to Italian neorealism a decade early. The visual register tells us, before the dialogue does, that the world of officers and uniforms is ending and that whatever comes next will be photographed differently.

The ending is famous. Maréchal, after escaping with the Jewish officer Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), is briefly sheltered by a German widow (Dita Parlo). The widow and Maréchal fall in love. They do not share a common language. The relationship is one of gestures, silences, and a shared meal; Matras photographs it in a soft-lit interior that contrasts sharply with the angular light of the camps. When Maréchal leaves to rejoin the French lines, he promises to come back. We do not believe him; neither does he.

Goebbels banned the film in Germany on release. The French government banned it in 1940 after the fall of France. The original negative was seized by Nazi forces, recovered by Soviet forces, held in Moscow for decades, and finally restored to Renoir's family in 1990. The version we watch now is closer to the 1937 cut than anyone between 1940 and 1990 was able to see.

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sources
[1] Bazin, André. Jean Renoir, trans. W.W. Halsey and William Simon. Simon & Schuster, 1973.
[2] Sesonske, Alexander. Jean Renoir: The French Films, 1924-1939. Harvard UP, 1980.
[3] Faulkner, Christopher. The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir. Princeton UP, 1986.
[4] Renoir, Jean. My Life and My Films, trans. Norman Denny. Atheneum, 1974.