Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2005 Sommario / Contents

More documents

Recommendations

Info

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 71 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, ANTOINE
called it “art with a capital A”). In general the French critics were impressed, reserving most of their disapproval for the film’s upbeat ending, in which the despairing Crainquebille is deterred from suicide by Forest’s plucky street urchin.This in fact was how Anatole France ended his play, the difference being one of tone: France’s peddler disappears alone into the night, unreconciled to his fate, whereas Feyder’s hero finds renewed hope in the boy’s friendship. Not surprisingly, some of the warmest praise for Crainquebille came from Feyder’s peers. Abel Gance wrote to his young colleague: “Allow me to congratulate you enthusiastically on your Crainquebille. Nothing better could have been done with this material, and I don’t believe that to be faint praise. Everything is coherent and worked out with confident artistry, and the pathos, unusually, comes in the most unexpectedly simple ways.” Though shortened for its U.S. release, the film’s humanity thrilled D.W. Griffith: “I have seen a film that, for me, symbolizes Paris.That man with his barrow load of vegetables – what a striking image – and how forceful! And Féraudy – great, powerful acting! A fine work, beautiful, compelling, bold!” – LENNY BORGER Il finale tagliato / The Suppressed Ending CRAINQUEBILLE (Les Films Legrand, FR 1923) Re./dir: Jacques Feyder; cast: Maurice de Féraudy (Jérôme Crainquebille), Jean Forest (“La Souris”[“Il Topo”/“The Mouse”]), Marguerite Carré (Madame Laure); 35mm, 3’ (18 fps), materiale non montato/unedited material, Lobster Films. Senza didascalie / No intertitles. Quando la Lobster ha iniziato il restauro di Crainquebille, ha trovato fra i vari frammenti sopravvissuti alla Cinémathèque française in vari stadi di decompsizione, il finale originale del film, finale previsto dal copione ed effettivamente girato, ma che Feyder aveva evidentemente tagliato all’ultimo momento dall’edizione destinata alle sale. (Nella sinossi distribuita in occasione della prima proiezione del film per la stampa è infatti descritto proprio questo finale e nella sua recensione, un arrabbiato giornalista si lamentò proprio per quella che è l’attuale conclusione del film.) Questo “finale soppresso”, il cui materiale conservato non è montato, ci mostra Crainquebille, spalleggiato da La Souris, mentre fa scendere dall’auto, davanti ad un lussuoso ristorante, una coppia di ricchi: il caso vuole che la donna sia l’ex cliente e poi nemica del verduraio Madame Laure, la prostituta. Il suo facoltoso accompagnatore dà la mancia a Crainquebille, ma egli la lascia sdegnosamente cadere a terra, per poi raccoglierla con fare discreto quando i due si sono allontanati. –SERGE BROMBERG & ERIC LANGE When Lobster Films undertook the restoration of Crainquebille, they discovered, among the various fragments surviving in varying states of decay in the Cinémathèque Française, the original ending of the film, which had been scripted and shot, but evidently cut at the last minute by Feyder from the final release version of the film. (The original synopsis given out at the first trade screening in fact describes the film with this 72 ending – in his review, one critic angrily complained that what they saw was the revised conclusion of the film, as we know it today.) In this “suppressed ending”, of which the surviving material is unedited, we find Crainquebille, seconded by La Souris, helping a wealthy couple out of their car outside a fancy restaurant – the woman happens to be Crainquebille’s former customer-turned-nemesis, the prostitute Madame Laure. Her wealthy companion gives Crainquebille a tip, which he disdainfully throws to the ground – then discreetly retrieves once the couple is out of sight. – SERGE BROMBERG & ERIC LANGE LA BELLE NIVERNAISE (Pathé-Consortium-Cinéma, FR 1923) Re./dir: Jean Epstein; scen., adatt./adapt: Jean Epstein, dal romanzo di/from the novel by Alphonse Daudet; f./ph: Paul Guichard; a. re./asst. dir: René Alinat; cast: Blanche Montel (Clara), Maurice Touzé (Victor), David Evremont (Maugendre), Pierre Hot (Père Louveau), Huguette de Lacroix (Mère Louveau), Max Bonnet (L’Equipage, comandante in seconda/barge mate), Georges Charlia, Pierre Ramelot, Roger Chantal; dist: Pathé-Consortium-Cinéma; riprese/filmed: 1923; anteprima per stampa ed esercenti/trade show: 5.12.1923; ppp/rel: 5.1.1924; 35mm, 1573 m., 68’ (20 fps), Cineteca del Comune di Bologna. Didascalie in francese e spagnolo / French & Spanish intertitles. La Belle Nivernaise appartiene al gruppo dei melodrammi realisti francesi ambientati fra fiumi e canali. Storie di vita sulle chiatte cominciano ad essere raccontante già nel poco noto Les chalands (1911) di Georges Lacroix e in Vendémiaire (1919) di Louis Feuillade, ma raggiungono l’apice negli anni ’20, con L’Hirondelle et la Mésange di André Antoine (girato nel 1919-1920, ma montato e distribuito solo nel 1984), questo film di Epstein, La fille de l’eau (1925) di Jean Renoir per culminare forse in L’Atalante (1934) di Jean Vigo. La Belle Nivernaise ebbe presso il pubblico francese solo un tiepido successo e deluse i critici cinematografici, che forse si aspettavano esempi spettacolari di montaggio rapido come quelli che avevano ammirato nell’apprezzatissimo Coeur fidèle (Cuor d’oro e muscoli d’acciaio; 1923), diretto l’anno prima dal giovane Jean Epstein (1897- 1953). Invece, questa pellicola racconta la storia semplice, persino banale, di un orfano, adottato da una famiglia che vive in una chiatta sul fiume, che alla fine ottiene il permesso di sposare la figlia dei suoi genitori adottivi. Il film si sviluppa senza fretta, con un ritmo lento che lo stesso Epstein trovò preoccupante quando lo vide riproposto sullo schermo al Vieux Colombier di Parigi nel 1928: poiché il pubblico era ora meno sprovveduto davanti alle immagini cinematografiche, anche i film usciti solo pochi anni prima davano inevitabilmente “un’impressione di lentezza e di ritmo attenuato.” Eppure, a differenza di molti altri film di Epstein, La Belle Nivernaise (il nome della chiatta) ha grande fascino e pregnanza. Benché ciò sia in parte dovuto alla recitazione di Maurice Touzé (che sarebbe poi apparso in La fille de l’eau di Renoir ed in Peau de pêche di Jean- Benoît-Lévy e Marie Epstein [1929]), il merito va anche al lavoro fatto con la macchina da presa da Epstein e Guichard. Ne è una
Page 1 and 2:
CATALOGO CATALOGUE LE GIORNATE DEL
Page 3 and 4:
Davide Turconi, Prophet of the Sile
Page 5 and 6:
Introduzioni e note di / Introducti
Page 7 and 8:
esplorato in due pellicole: il risc
Page 9 and 10:
Premio Jean Mitry / The Jean Mitry
Page 12 and 13:
Eventi musicali / Musical Events EV
Page 14 and 15:
THE MUSIC OF COMEDY LIBERTY (Hal Ro
Page 16 and 17:
Laurel & Hardy silents routinely fe
Page 18 and 19:
SHOCHIKU 110 - NARUSE 100 ZANJIN ZA
Page 20 and 21:
al film, vendendo le copie a 16mm a
Page 22:
EVENTO FINALE / CLOSING EVENT L’H
Page 25 and 26: Quando la Garbo ricevette il copion
Page 27 and 28: discreto. La rifacevo un tre-quattr
Page 29 and 30: 26 PRIMA MONDIALE / A WORLD PREMIER
Page 31 and 32: tedesca. Pur lodato come un capolav
Page 33 and 34: cooperation with George Eastman Hou
Page 35 and 36: pellicole, padre Bamberger, e David
Page 37 and 38: macchina da presa rimane sempre fis
Page 40 and 41: La luce dell’oriente: omaggio al
Page 42 and 43: Prog. 2 ASAHI WA KAGAYAKU [L’ “
Page 44 and 45: sequenza iniziale, con Omitsu che e
Page 46 and 47: and the happy ex-convicts who enjoy
Page 48 and 49: Giappone anche per la serie del “
Page 50 and 51: JP 1932) Re./dir: Hotei Nomura; sog
Page 52 and 53: di montaggio e alla costruzione deg
Page 54 and 55: Antoine cineasta e il realismo fran
Page 56 and 57: compreso quello del realismo nel ci
Page 58 and 59: which the action is played without
Page 60 and 61: of actions caught in flagrante, as
Page 62 and 63: scaturita dal restauro diretto da P
Page 64 and 65: Française celebrity Maxime Desjard
Page 66 and 67: Cineteca Nazionale. In 1973 a black
Page 68 and 69: The peasant films in particular doc
Page 70 and 71: L’Hirondelle et la Mésange, whic
Page 72 and 73: For one thing, L’Atre refuses the
Page 76 and 77: dimostrazione il modo con cui il fi
Page 78: oscura la tragica sorte dello zio B
Page 81 and 82: Prog. 1 INTOLERANCE (Intolerance) (
Page 83 and 84: stampa locale, quella di categoria
Page 85 and 86: Behind the scenes, assistant direct
Page 87 and 88: Perhaps the most Griffithian moment
Page 89 and 90: HEARTS OF THE WORLD (D.W. Griffith,
Page 91 and 92: In tal senso, è di esemplare inten
Page 93 and 94: the right half of the frame, the em
Page 95 and 96: Fino a questi primi titoli Artcraft
Page 97 and 98: accompanied the release that neithe
Page 99 and 100: UNA TRADITRICE”, ma solo una patr
Page 101 and 102: con efficace vivacità lo spirito d
Page 103 and 104: struggle of powerless people caught
Page 105 and 106: amatissimo da Griffith - viene rove
Page 107 and 108: 104
Page 109 and 110: film. After a number of unbilled pe
Page 111 and 112: An illustrated title card in the su
Page 113 and 114: this time disguised as wearing a lo
Page 115 and 116: Identical twin girls, about one yea
Page 117 and 118: in a Turkish Bath, at the 2002 Gior
Page 119 and 120: HÁROM HÉT (Seelige drei Wochen) [
Page 121 and 122: esemplare su un film che già andav
Page 123 and 124: Hausmann), composizioni e registraz
Page 125 and 126:
Serie/Series: JERRY THE TROUBLESOME
Page 127 and 128:
(Catherine Palmerston), Hugh O’Co
Page 129 and 130:
fantasia, in particolare dal critic
Page 131 and 132:
others, Alexander Shorin, who inven
Page 133 and 134:
At the turn of the 19th and 20th ce
Page 135 and 136:
spessore atmosferico, quell’evide
Page 137 and 138:
La storia della scoperta del framme
Page 139 and 140:
murder took place, and shoots Jean
Page 141 and 142:
serbo. Considerato che il produttor
Page 143 and 144:
it would be welcomed by the George
Page 145 and 146:
7.VIVA LA DANCE:The Beginnings of C
Page 147 and 148:
Antoine) but in the selection of co
Page 149 and 150:
The activities of the Forum already
Page 151 and 152:
ANTONIO COPPOLA Avvicinatsoi giovan
Page 153 and 154:
MAURO COLOMBIS Di formazione classi
Page 155 and 156:
four musicians, and a huge stylisti
Page 157 and 158:
INTOLERANCE (ABRIDGED), 87; 13 R IS
Page 159:
156
show all

Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2005 Sommario / Contents

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?