The Cinema: Ambiguities and Paradoxes
‘The continuity of all that is best in France’: at the Liberation, nowhere was this ideal thought to have been more perfectly exemplified than in the cinema.64 As the film-maker Abel Gance put it, cinema had carried ‘abroad the message of France, the message of a spirit that cannot be vanquished’.65 Inevitably the truth was more complicated.
Cinema audiences had never been larger: 220 million in 1938, 225 million in 1941, over 300 million in 1943. The film industry, like all others, was forced to establish its own Organization Committee, the COIC. Formed in November 1940, the COIC imposed a long overdue rationalization on an industry close to financial disaster. Many of its reforms, such as the prohibition of double features, were retained at the Liberation, and continue to regulate the French film industry today.66 It also imposed the elimination of all Jews from the industry. Any Jews who worked on films had to do so secretly, like the composer Joseph Kosma and the designer Alexandre Trauner who collaborated on Marcel Carné’s film Les Enfants du Paradis. In most respects, however, films provided audiences with a reassuring sense of continuity and familiarity. Of the eighty-one film-makers of the Occupation, only nineteen were making their first film, and many of the actors were familiar names from the 1930s, despite some gaps left by those who had escaped abroad, including the two biggest stars of the day, Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan.
Approximately 220 feature films were made during the Occupation, including some of the most celebrated French films ever made. This output represented a decline over the pre-war period—120 films had been produced annually in the 1930s—but profits soared. The industry was helped by the virtual elimination of American competition. The gap was partially filled by German films, but, after an initial flurry of curiosity, these never won over French audiences: German films accounted for 5 per cent of those distributed in France in the 1930s, 56 per cent in 1941, 22 per cent in 1943. The commercial success of the French film industry was all the more striking since film-makers had to contend with shortages of all kinds. While filming the banquet scene of Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), Marcel Carné injected the fruit with carbolic acid to prevent the hungry film crews from stealing it.67
At first, the Germans did not allow French films to cross the demarcation line. But after February 1941, this restriction was lifted, subject to German approval. This was not a reciprocal arrangement since all films approved by the German censors could be shown in the South. Partly for this reason, film-making came to be concentrated in the North. Although Vichy had hopes of creating big studios in the South, even turning Nice into a French Hollywood, in the end most films were made in the Occupied Zone—thirty-five were made in the South—where the production facilities were better, and the cultural climate less stuffy.
What kinds of films were made? It has often been noted that the films of the Occupation seem to exist in a time capsule. With one or two exceptions—a fleeting shot of the car-free streets of occupied Paris (Falbalas, 1944), a German soldier in an art gallery (Donne-moi tes yeux, 1943)—one could view most of these films without realizing that they were made while France was occupied. On the other hand, the themes of the National Revolution were omnipresent in films. The greatest commercial success of the period was La Voile bleue (1942), a tear-jerking melodrama which tells the story of a young woman who loses her husband and only child in the First World War. Refusing to remarry, she spends the rest of her life as a governess bringing up other people’s children, moving on to a new family when they grow up. At the end, when she is an old lady, all her former ‘children’ reunite around her at Christmas. The Vichyite resonance of this celebration of motherhood—in this case surrogate motherhood—is obvious. So is that of Monsieur de Lourdines (1943) whose main protagonist is a young man, bored with country life, who goes to Paris, abandoning his landowning parents. In the frivolity of Paris, he squanders their fortune, obliging his father to sell his property. Out of grief, his mother falls ill and only when her son returns to her deathbed does he understand the folly of his ways. He stays in the country to rebuild his family estates, ready to respect his father’s judgement: ‘your role is to replace me here among our peasants’. The film was based on a novel by Alphonse de Chateaubriant.
When a novel did not contain the right message, it could be doctored for the purpose. In the courtroom drama Les Inconnus dans la maison (1941), based on a Simenon novel, there is a scene with a lawyer defending a young man who is innocent of the murder for which he is being tried. One of the set pieces of the film is the lawyer’s speech, not to be found in the novel, attacking the society which has not been able to provide its young people with healthy distractions:
Members of the Jury, can you show me the way to the stadium or the swimming pool? … No, there is no stadium or swimming pool. There are 132 cafes and bistrots, I have counted them; and four brothels, I have not counted them since all my fellow citizens are only too well aware of them.
There are numerous other examples of films reflecting Vichy values. But the problem with this line of argument is that such themes were also prevalent in the cinema of the 1930s. Paradoxically, many themes that one might expect to have figured more prominently after 1940, almost disappeared from the screen. Before 1940, many French films contained critical portrayals of British characters; after 1940 the British are absent. Before 1940, films had frequently depicted Germans sympathetically; after 1940, despite collaboration, Germans almost disappear from the screen. In the 1930s, antagonism to foreigners had been a frequent theme; after 1940 it was less present. In Vichy cinema there are few depictions of happy families and many of family disintegration. It is hard to imagine a representation of peasants more cynical, selfish, and vicious than Goupi mains rouges (1942).68
Most surprisingly of all, whereas hostile depictions of Jews had proliferated in the 1930s, they are almost absent after 1940. Thus Pierre Billon’s 1943 Balzac adaptation, Vautrin, underplayed the Jewishness of the villainous Baron de Nucingen, although the same film-maker had emphasized the Jewishness of the sinister banker Gudermann in his 1936 version of Zola’s L’Argent.69 The one Occupation film in which many critics have detected anti-Semitism was Les Inconnus dans la maison where the murderer is revealed to be a Jew called Luska. But in the film his Jewishness is much less obvious, if at all, than in the novel, where we are told that his first name is Ephraim. Seeing the film today, one is hardly aware of anti-Semitic undercurrents; certainly the collaborationist press did not notice any. Even if the film does deserve its reputation, this would still make it an exception in the cinema of the Occupation.70
Perhaps the film acquired its reputation because it was distributed with a short anti-Semitic propaganda film, Les Corrupteurs. This coupling was not innocent, and these short documentaries accompanying the main feature should not be overlooked when discussing the Occupation cinema. The banning of double features caused a massive output of documentary shorts. Some 400 documentaries were made, but because most of them have not survived, they remain the hidden face of the Occupation cinema. The available evidence suggests they were fairly anodyne, but not without ideological significance. There were many celebrations of artisanal labour and evocations of medieval Paris. There were also overt propaganda productions ranging from celebration of the Empire to diatribes like Les Corrupteurs or the anti-Masonic Les Forces occultes. These last two were produced by Nova Films, a German-backed production company. Such films were widely distributed, but it is difficult to know how they were received. It is well recorded that the German propaganda newsreels were unpopular, and the film historian Jacques Siclier, whose memories of the period are vivid, says that the shorts were viewed as the necessary pill which had to be swallowed before the feature.71
As far as feature films are concerned, if they reflect anything different from the films of the 1930s, it is Vichy’s desperate wish to believe the outside world did not exist. There were many costume dramas (six adaptations of Balzac) and historical reconstructi
ons. Sometimes these historical films lent themselves to contemporary interpretations. The film Pontcarral, colonel d’Empire (1942), the story of a Napoleonic army officer who refused to accept the Restoration, was seen as containing a resistance message: it ends with the hero setting out to conquer Algeria and redeem French glory. The film was frequently applauded; ‘Pontcarral is Giraud’ could be read on walls.72 But the film’s patriotism and celebration of Empire were also in the spirit of Vichy and not liked by the Germans who imposed cuts.
There was also a vogue in the Occupation for fantastical films, with magical or legendary subjects. Celebrated examples of this genre were Marcel Carné’s Les Visiteurs du soir, the story of the devil’s visit to a medieval court, or L’Éternel retour (1943), Jean Cocteau’s reworking of the Tristan and Isolde legend with Jean Marais in the role of Tristan. These films were characterized by an extreme formality of composition, an icy classicism, which was hailed by many critics as the emergence of a new aesthetic. If the lived-in face of Jean Gabin against an urban background was the icon of 1930s cinema, the equivalent in the 1940s might be the pure features of Jean Marais—‘a Breker type’ as Cocteau himself admitted— against a timeless mythological setting.73
The film critic André Bazin dubbed this the ‘cinema of evasion’, but other critics have tried to offer allegorical readings. In Les Visiteurs du soir, the devil’s machinations are thwarted when one of his envoys falls in love with his victim. The devil turns the two lovers to stone, but their hearts go on beating: was this France’s heart beating despite the Occupation?74 Such interpretations need to be treated with a lot of scepticism. Jacques Prévert, who wrote the scenario of Les Visiteurs du soir, subsequently disclaimed any allegorical intentions. Jean Delannoy, the director of L’Éternel retour, wrote: ‘The essential feature of this period was that one tried in the public interest to make people forget about what was dreadful and demeaning about the present … why did we make L’Éternel retour? Why was Les Visiteurs du soir made? Always for the same reason: to try and help people escape from daily life.’75
Even if Delannoy’s statement is accepted at face value, this does not necessarily render the cinema of evasion entirely apolitical. The aesthetic of such films was strongly approved by collaborationist critics like Rebatet who applauded a return to a pure French style of cinema free of foreign influences. Rebatet described Les Visiteurs du soir as a ‘delicately chiselled piece of jewellery’, although he saw Carné’s 1930s films as the epitome of ‘Judaized’ cinema. When Marcel L’Herbier declared that his fantastical film La Nuit fantastique (1941) (also admired by Rebatet) was inspired by Meliès and the origins of French cinema, the comment needs to put in the context of his observation that in the Occupation French film-makers were liberated from the ‘climate of cinematic slavery’ (i.e. Hollywood and Jews) of the 1930s. Or as another director, Claude AutantLara, put it: ‘freed from a certain number of parasites … French film-makers were able to work for the French people’. In the light of such comments, the new aesthetic represented a kind of stylistic ‘retour à l’ordre’ which was not politically innocent.76
It was later argued that the continued production of high-quality French films was itself an assertion of the vitality of French culture. But was this necessarily contrary to German objectives? As usual, the Germans did not speak with one voice. One priority was to keep the French public docile. In May 1942, Goebbels wrote in his diary that the French should only be allowed to make ‘light and corny’ films which would not ‘cultivate their nationalism’; such ‘cheap trash’ would allow German cinema to dominate. But these remarks were not official policy. The Propaganda-Abteilung also nursed the idea of using French cinema to create a continental film industry which could mount a challenge to the Americans. Conscious of the greater popularity of French over German films, in 1941 the Propaganda Ministry authorized the export of French films to other Axis-controlled countries: France would play the role of entertainer in a Europe where power lay with the Germans.77
The instrument of this strategy was the Continental film company. Set up in October 1940, the Continental was a German-owned company making French films. Its director, Alfred Greven, was directly answerable to Goebbels, and his brief was to make commercially successful films, not propaganda.78 Greven had resources surpassing any French company and this permitted him to sign up leading French actors and directors: Barrault, Pierre Fresnay, Danielle Darrieux, Tino Rossi, Fernandel. Many of those agreeing to work for the Continental may have viewed this as a continuation of their previous ‘collaboration’ with UFA in the 1930s: in 1939 Fernandel was filming a French-speaking, German-financed film in Berlin; in 1941 he was doing the same for the Continental, this time in France.79 Nor had the content of the films changed much either. The thirty films made by the Continental covered most genres—American-style comedies, French period reconstructions, police dramas (including Les Inconnus de la maison), French comedies (three with Fernandel)—and most spectators had no idea that the company was German.
Another attraction of working for Greven was the fact that his company’s German ownership offered greater freedom from censorship than was available to French companies. The only film of the period containing female nakedness was the Continental’s Le Dernier des six. In the Catholic Church’s rating of Occupation films, the two which scored the top disapproval rating (‘essentially pernicious’) were Continental films; and of the seven which scored the next highest rating (‘to be proscribed absolutely’), three were made by the Continental.80 This was not a machiavellian German plot to lower the moral standards of the French, but a case of film-makers exploiting the artistic freedom which the Continental allowed them. This freedom offered more than the possibility to broach ‘immoral’ subjects. At least three Continental films had patriotic overtones, even covert resistance messages. This was most explicit in La Symphonie fantastique (1942), a film about the life of Berlioz (played by Jean-Louis Barrault) in which the nationalism of French romanticism is fully brought out. Goebbels was most displeased by this film which he described as a ‘national fanfare.’81
If, then, the most French of films were made by a German production company, who was using whom? To work for the Continental was clearly to ‘collaborate’ in some sense. But what if the outcome was to keep French cinema alive, and even allow a patriotic voice to be heard? On the other hand, if the German aim was to allow high-quality films to be made in France as part of a European strategy, was the production of ‘good’ French films less a subversion of German aims than a fulfilment of them?
Nowhere are the ambiguities of Occupation cinema more evident than in the critical reception of two films of the period: Jean Grémillon’s Le Ciel est à vous (1944) and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943). Le Ciel est à vous is the story of a modest provincial couple, Thérèse and Pierre Gauthier (Madeleine Renaud and Charles Vanel), who sacrifice everything so that Thérèse can break a flying record. How the spectator is supposed to judge their obsession is not always clear. In some scenes the couple display quite extraordinary selfishness towards their two children. When they set off to the flying contest, the children are left alone with no one to look after them. One does not need to be a Pétainist to wonder if family responsibility is not being unduly neglected. Yet when the Gauthiers solicit funds from a board of middle-aged bourgeois worthies— classic Vichy notables—and are refused partly on the ground that the woman’s place is in the home, it is clear that we being asked to sympathize with them in their struggle against mediocrity.
The contradiction between family and ambition is resolved when Thérèse arrives in the desert at the end of her flight. Her first thoughts are for her family, and she follows this by complaining, as a good housewife, that the soldiers welcoming her are unable to make a proper cup of tea: adventure is reconciled with domesticity. But it has been a close thing, and the film ends, as it had opened, with children from the local orphanage being led obediently through the streets by a priest. Are they a
n accusatory reminder of the risk to which Thérèse has subjected her children or an image of the stifling provincial life against which she has valiantly reacted?
Grémillon was someone of left-wing sympathies, a member of a clandestine Resistance organization of film-makers, whose previous film, Lumière d’été (1942), offers a heroic vision of the working class which would not have seemed out of place in 1936, and was almost banned by Vichy. The title Le Ciel est à vous had surprising resonances for an Occupation film: the film which Renoir had made for the Communist election campaign in 1936 was called La Vie est à nous, and the promotion of aviation as a popular sport had been one of the ambitions of the Popular Front. But Le Ciel est à vous was received ecstatically by both the Vichyite and collaborationist press; there was a special showing for Pétain. It was described as the best film since the Armistice, exuding ‘moral health’, a film about what ordinary French people could achieve, an ‘exalting and moving work … showing the role of the wife in the home and the beauty of the family’. The film, however, was no less applauded by the underground Resistance press. The Resistance reading of the film was helped by the final scene showing Thérèse arriving home to be greeted by a crowd waving French flags. In Confluences, the Communist critic Georges Sadoul described Gauthier as a modern d’Artagnan. In general, the terms in which the Resistance described the film were remarkably similar to those of the Vichy press: it ‘salvaged the honour of the French cinema’; its characters were brimming with ‘French sap’ and moral health; Thérèse was a ‘young French mother, modest and strong, who carries out without grandiloquence all her duties and whose heart is also vast enough to conceive a heroic dream’.82
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