Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2005 Sommario / Contents

second film, that more accurately displayed his artistic credentials – taste,
wit, psychological acuity, and a powerful visual imagination – and brought
him recognition as one of the most innovative and stylish new talents in
French and European cinema.
L’Atlantide had been an arduous physical and logistical exploit, in which
Feyder validated location shooting in the North African desert. (It would
spawn a new French sub-genre: the colonial melodrama.) Crainquebille
went no further than the working-class neighborhoods and market streets
of post-World War I Paris, but in its own daring way it explored a city and
a society with a sense of detail that would retrospectively earn the film
praise as a precursor of French “poetic realism,” even Italian neo-realism.
The success of L’Atlantide had been a double-edged phenomenon.
Though the film made buckets of money for its distributor, Louis Aubert,
its actual profits were reduced by the film’s astronomical negative cost, 1.8
million francs – three times the film’s original budget.Though fêted in the
trade and popular press as the “man who dared”, the young Belgian-born
Feyder inspired mostly distrust among producers and investors. His
reputation as a prodigal director dates from this period, and it would stick
till the end of his career. As a result, Feyder would lead a zigzagging
cosmopolitan career, accepting invitations to direct in the studios of
Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Hollywood, and London when efforts to get
projects off the ground in Paris proved fruitless.
After L’Atlantide’s release Feyder had to wait a year before beginning a
new film. Luckily, he found two enterprising independent Paris producers,
André Legrand and Gabriel Trarieux, who were willing to invest 300,000
francs in a screen adaptation of a tale by the celebrated Anatole France,
Crainquebille. Written both as a short story and a one-act play,
Crainquebille is an often hilarious but finally bitter social satire about a
humble Paris pushcart peddler who is wrongly accused of having insulted
a gendarme, brought to trial, and sentenced to a brief prison term. He
returns to his job, but his customers now snub him.The old man loses his
livelihood and self-respect, and becomes a tramp.
France, who was then at the peak of his literary fame, had never inspired
the Film d’Art-style producers of the 1910s – his ornate literary style and
often allegorical themes lent themselves poorly to simplistic screen
visualizations. But in December 1921 France (whom Proust had used as
the model for the writer Bergotte in his À la recherche du temps perdu)
received a belated tribute from the international community: the Nobel
Prize for Literature.
Feyder had immediately sensed the cinematic and commercial possibilities
of L’Atlantide as soon as Pierre Benoît’s novel was published in 1919.
Now he felt that same potential, albeit on a smaller scale, in France’s
story, which he adapted himself. In the summer of 1922, with the inspired
collaboration of cameraman Léonce-Henri Burel – fresh from Gance’s La
Roue and André Antoine’s L’Arlésienne – Feyder took his actors into the
very streets in which the author had set his tale, just as Antoine had done
earlier for Le Coupable (1917).The documentary realism of these street
scenes – including an opening reel shot entirely at night! – was all the
more exhilarating for being shot with concealed cameras (the traveling
shots were filmed from the back of a van). The curiosity and delight of
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these authentic bystanders-cum-unwitting movie extras to such scenes as
Crainquebille’s fateful altercation with an obtuse gendarme remain
among the film’s most memorable qualities.
Even Feyder’s sense of exposition and dramatic structure was
unconventional. The hero, Crainquebille, doesn’t make his entrance until
Reel 2, and only after we have been introduced to a handful of secondary
social types – a doctor, a lawyer, a prostitute, a street urchin – whose roles
in the action will only become evident later. Feyder invents a brilliant
linking device for these vignettes: a procession of farmers’ carts, en route
to the central market, which roll through the different social environments
in which these characters live. Feyder borrowed these figures from
France’s 1903 stage version, but he wove them into the film’s dramatic
fabric so adroitly that their presence gives the central tragicomedy greater
social and psychological impact. Even Anatole France was impressed by
Feyder’s psychological toning – he was delighted in particular by the scene
in which Crainquebille savors the modern comforts (!) of his prison cell.
Among aficionados of the avant-garde, Crainquebille is remembered for
its satiric trial scene. Here Feyder breaks with the realistic, objective mode
of representation to visualize the action through the confused mind of his
naïve, intimidated hero. Using trick photography (double-exposures,
distortions, hand-held POV shots) and special effects (the bust of
Marianne, feminine symbol of the French Republic, craning around on her
pedestal to glare down at Crainquebille), Feyder elevates a trite court
scene into a bitterly funny phantasmagoria of perverted justice.
For all its qualities as a naturalistic vision of populist Paris ca. 1922 and
its avant-gardish camerawork, Crainquebille was (and remains) best
appreciated for the marvelously subtle, humorous, and poignant
performance of Maurice de Féraudy (1859-1932). A leading member of
the Comédie-Française since the 1880s, Féraudy had appeared in a
number of films before and during World War I, but critics considered him
hopelessly theatrical. Under Feyder’s direction, Féraudy seamlessly became
one with his part. During the shooting, not even the authentic pushcart
peddlers and market professionals suspected that behind the grizzled,
mustachioed figure was the éminence grise of one of France’s most
conservatively highbrow cultural institutions. (Feyder put Féraudy and his
film to the acid test by holding a special matinee preview for an audience
of real street market professionals!)
Feyder also triumphed with the rest of the cast, eliciting a particularly fine
performance from French opera diva Marguerite Carré (1880-1947),
here making her only screen appearance as Madame Laure, the
prostitute with dreams of bourgeois retirement. A more important
newcomer was 10-year-old Montmartre-born Jean Forest (1912-1980),
for whom Feyder was to write his next film, a masterpiece, Visages
d’enfants, shown at the Giornate in 2003.
Crainquebille was one of the most high-profile French films of the early
1920s, when the French industry was still struggling to rise out of its
aesthetic and commercial torpor. It was sold around the world, including
the U.S., where even in a 50-minute cut-down version, retitled Bill, it
impressed the critics (the New York Times named it one of the best films
of the year, and Variety, rarely very tender with French films of the 20s,
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