Social Studies
In the early 1930s, the French tendency toward fantasy during the silent era continued. The Surrealist tradition also lingered in a few works, though these were not as violent and chaotic as Luis Buuel's Un Chien andalou and L' Age d'or (p. 159). Ren Clair's early musicals, Sous les toits de Paris and nous, la libert! (p. 184), made him the most prominent French filmmaker. Le Million was another imaginative musical, centering on a lengthy comic chase for a lost lottery ticket in an elusive coat's pocket. Clair substituted music for diegetic sound effects and used extensive camera movement. He also staged parts of the chase in the manner of French cinema of the 1910s (13.1). Quasi-Surrealist playfulness appears occasionally, especially in a pawn shop that serves as the cover for a gang's criminal activities, where boots hanging into the frame from above suggest dangling bodies, and a mannequin seems to point a pistol (13.2). The final struggle over the coat looks and sounds as if the characters are playing a football match backstage at a theater. The technical challenges of the early sound era seem to have inspired Clair. After two less interesting films, he departed for England, where he made one notable comedy, The Ghost Goes West (1935). Interrupted by the war in an attempt to return to France, he spent the war period in Hollywood. Although he returned to France and made occasional films until the mid-1960s, these never quite matched the originality and wit of this early period.In 1932, Pierre Prvert directed another quasiSurrealist film, L' Affaire est dans le sac ("It's in the Bag"), from a script by his brother Jacques, a major playwright and poet. Shot on a tiny budget and using sets from other movies, L' Affaire est dans le sac is an anarchic comedy concerning, among other things, people who sell, steal, and wear inappropriate hats and a rich industrialist's daughter who is courted by men of various social classes. The film uses an exaggerated style (13.3) to reinforce the oddities of the plot. After the failure of this film, the Prvert brothers were unable to make another together until a decade later, but Jacques scripted several of the most important French films of the era. The most promising young filmmaker of the early 1930s, Jean Vigo, also worked in a Surrealist vein. He started with two short documentaries. The first, propos de Nice ("Concerning Nice," 1930), drew on conventions of the city symphony genre of experimental cinema (pp. 160-162). Its candid shots taken during carnival time harshly satirize the wealthy vacationers in a French resort town. The second, Taris (1931), is a lyrical underwater study of the great French swimmer Jean Taris. Vigo's main work consists of a brief feature, Zero for Conduct (1933), and L' Atalante (1934). Zero for Conduct is the more overtly Surrealist of the two films, presenting boarding-school life from children's points of view. Its episodic story consists mostly of amusing, frightening, or puzzling scenes of their activities, as in the opening train ride when two schoolmates show off toys and pranks. Most of the teachers are seen as grotesques, with the exception of Huguet (13.4), who encourages the boys to rebel. One night they defiantly start a pillow fight in their dormitory (13.5). The final scene shows four of the boys staging a rebellion during a commemoration day at the school. The film's antiauthority and anticlerical content led to its being banned; it was not shown publicly until 1945. In L' Atalante, Vigo presents an intensely romantic story of a barge captain who marries a woman from a village along his route. After a short honeymoon period, she longs for something beyond the barge's routine. Intrigued by the exotic souvenirs of the first mate, Pre Jules, and tempted by a passing peddler, she runs away to Paris. Her husband refuses to admit his longing for her (13.6), but, eventually, Pre Jules tracks the wife down, and the couple are reunited. Vigo died in 1934, at the age of 29, but, despite his small body of work, he is remembered as one of the great French filmmakers. His death and the inability of the Prvert brothers to make further films cut short the Surrealist impulse in French commercial filmmaking. Clair's departure similarly made the fantasy genre less prominent in France.