silver nitrate notes

Les Enfants du Paradis Under Occupation

22 apr 2013

Marcel Carné (1906-1996) directed Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) in occupied France. Production began in 1943, in Nice, with the Vichy government as the film's effective censorship authority and the German occupying army as the audience the producers most did not want to offend. Some of the crew were in hiding. The screenwriter Jacques Prévert was working from a notebook that he would burn if the Gestapo came to the hotel. The production designer Alexandre Trauner was Jewish. The composer Joseph Kosma was Jewish. Both worked without official credit.

The film that came out of this situation is a three-and-a-quarter-hour romance about Parisian theatre in the 1820s and 1830s. There is nothing in its surface that refers to the occupation. This is the film's first intelligent decision. Carné and Prévert understood that the audience did not need one more film that was about the war. The audience needed a film that was a refuge from it.

The cinematographers were Roger Hubert and Marc Fossard, who photographed the film in a style that was already, in 1943, slightly old-fashioned: deep focus where Toland had been pushing it four years earlier, painted backdrops where the Italian neorealists would, three years later, refuse to use backdrops at all. The style is deliberate. Les Enfants is a film about the theatre, and Hubert photographs it with the conventions of the theatre: tableaux, symmetrical framing, proscenium-style compositions, characters entering and exiting from the sides of the frame rather than the depth.

Jean-Louis Barrault (1910-1994), playing the mime Baptiste, gives what I think is the single greatest performance by a male actor in French cinema. The mime sequence, where Baptiste acts out a crime he has witnessed in real life, lasts several minutes of screen time in which no one speaks. Barrault carries it on physical control alone. He had trained as a mime under Étienne Decroux, whose methods would later be passed to Marcel Marceau. The heritage is on screen.

The film opened three months after the Liberation of Paris. The audience that saw it in September 1945 had sat through five years of what Les Enfants was designed to be a refuge from. The refuge worked. The film ran for months. It still runs. A film that should have been impossible to make, made anyway, by people who chose to do the work.

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sources
[1] Turk, Edward Baron. Child of Paradise: Marcel Carné and the Golden Age of French Cinema. Harvard UP, 1989.
[2] Williams, Alan. Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking. Harvard UP, 1992.
[3] Bazin, André. "The Cinema of the Occupation," in French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance, Ungar, 1981.
[4] Prévert, Jacques. Children of Paradise screenplay (Lorrimer ed., 1968).