Republic of Images

A History of French Filmmaking

Alan Williams

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1992
• ISBN:
  9780674257580
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

Chronicling one of the greatest and most popular national cinemas, Republic of Images traces the evolution of French filmmaking from 1895—the year of the debut of the Cinematographe in Paris—to the present day. Alan Williams offers a unique synthesis of history, biography, aesthetics and film theory. He brings to life all of the major directors, setting before us the cultures from which they emerged, and sheds new light on the landmark films they created. He distills what is historically and artistically unique in each of their careers and reveals what each artist has in common with the forebears and heirs of the craft.Within the larger story of French cinema, Williams examines the treasury of personal expression, social commentary, and aesthetic exploration that France has produced so consistently and exported so well. It is the tale of an industry rife with crises, and Williams offers a superb narrative of the economic, political, and social forces that have shaped its century-long history. He provides biographical sketches of filmmakers from the early pioneers of the silent era such as Louis Lumière and Alice Guy to modern directors such as Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut. Some of their careers, he shows, exemplify the significant contributions individuals made to the development of French fllmmaking; others yield illuminating evidence of the problems and opportunities of a whole generation of filmmakers. Throughout, he presents critical analyses of significant films, from The Assassination of the Duc de Guise (1908) to works by the post– nouvelle vague directors.Williams captures the formal and stylistic developments of film in France over nearly one hundred years. Free of cant and jargon, Republic of Images is the best general account available of the rich interplay of film, filmmaker, and society. It will delight both general reader and student, as well as the viewer en route to the video store.

I

French Cinema Dominates the World Market

1

The Cinema Before Cinema

The nineteenth century, in France as elsewhere in the Western world, witnessed a striking increase in visual awareness. In several areas of cultural activity, appeals to vision (and to a lesser extent to the other senses) achieved something approaching parity with spoken and written language. This release and reevaluation of the sensory may be observed in all media, beginning sometime around the Revolution.¹ Two specific areas, both previously dominated by the Word, were the theatre and prose fiction. Classical theatre had been a drama of speech. Racine’s plays, for example, did not depict events so much as talk about them. In the last act of Phèdre, the death of Hippolyte is recounted by Théramène, who enters the generic neutral Racinian decor and describes what has happened to those assembled on stage and to the audience. This description is by itself, of course, a kind of event, but not in as immediate a way as is the erratic progress of an orphan girl being pursued through a stage forest by a pack of baying, ravenous hounds—which is the sort of thing common enough on the nineteenth century stage in the postrevolutionary genre of melodrama.

Classical theatre staged its minimal actions in minimal stage settings, ideally unchanging throughout an entire play, whereas the nineteenth century popular stage gloried in extravagant and numerous sets. The other senses were not neglected either: melodrama included abundant music (often substituting for speech), striking sound effects, and even the occasional attempt at the mise en scène of smells. Classical theatre was orderly, hierarchical, and discreet; melodrama and related genres like the mime play were baroque, egalitarian, and exhibitionistic, like the new audiences they appealed to. For this was, not coincidentally, the beginning of the mass marketing of spectacle, of which the cinema was to be one of the most notable later developments.

Vision and the other senses penetrated also to the very citadel of the verbal: the novel. In prerevolutionary works like La Princesse de Clèves, it sufficed to identify a character by social position and general psychological state, or a room by a phrase such as “richly appointed” or “unadorned.” Suddenly, with Honoré de Balzac and his contemporaries, characters get complexions, eye color, shapes of noses; rooms get inventoried down to the type and texture of curtains. Balzac was fully aware of these innovations, arguing that it was not possible “to depict modern society by the methods of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature. I think pictures, images, descriptions, the use of dramatic elements of dialogue are indispensable to modern writers. Let us admit frankly that the form of [eighteenth century novels] is tiring and that there is something infertile in the piling up of events and ideas.”² This distinction is revealing: according to Balzac, earlier novels suffered from too much narrative, which made them “infertile.” His own writing, by implication, is more “living,” capable of growth and reproduction, because of its sensory qualities.

Possibly the increasing density and diversity of the modern city accounted in part for such developments. This was the opinion of Walter Benjamin, who considered Paris, as much for its material as for its intellectual qualities, the “capital of the nineteenth century.” In any event, Paris was the site of the exemplary visual consumer experience of the early modern period, the Diorama. Beginning in 1822, patrons of this attraction could enter a small theatre just off the so-called “Boulevard of Crime” and see “The Earthquake at Lima,” “The Goldau Valley Before and After the Catastrophe [a huge landslide],” or the celebrated “Midnight Mass at St.-Etienne-du-Mont.” These shows were produced by means borrowed largely from the melodrama; they made ample use of transparent fabrics printed on both sides (where a change of lighting produced a proto-“dissolve”), as well as sound effects, pyrotechnics, small moving models, multi-plane coordinated movement, and so on.

Many works on cinema history begin by citing the Diorama and its creator, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, who (with the help of his partner) is said to have “invented” it. The truth is that they did something both less and more important. Like the cinema which it seems to foreshadow, the diorama was not a real invention. It was the assembly, perfection, and coordination of already existing techniques, some of which were once invented, but not, as it happens, by Daguerre. His originality is to be found in the domain of what Americans call “tinkering,” and what the French, most prominently since Claude Lévi-Strauss, call bricolage: the bringing together of bits and pieces of already known techniques to produce a new capability. By contrast, invention means the creation of a new sort of productive process. To cite one example, the phonograph is a true nineteenth century invention. No apparatus like it existed as a model for its initial conception. The cinema, as we will see, was almost pure bricolage, though it did incorporate several inventions in the course of its elaboration.

But if Daguerre was not, in the strict sense of the word, an inventor, he was an inspired entrepreneur of the mechanically reproduced spectacle. In its modest way the Diorama was already a visual mass medium, in that it could offer the very same show to successive audiences. Though it could not travel in space, the Diorama show could deploy itself in time, via its crucial capability of mechanical replication of the spectacle. Because it was mechanically reproducible, the attraction had predictable, limited expenses, and these, after the initial investment, did not increase in proportion to the number of people who paid to consume it. A good Diorama show, capable of attracting large audiences, was quite a gold mine when compared to the artisanal spectacles with which it competed, such as theatre. But the age of mechanical reproduction was at hand, and Daguerre had the good commercial sense to move on to other projects before his creation was overwhelmed by the flood of competing mechanical or partly mechanical spectacles that were to characterize the mid to late nineteenth century—including the phonograph, do-it-yourself X-rays, Reynaud’s Théâtre Optique, and the cinema.

The cinema, as bricolage, combined three nineteenth century technologies that had existed for well over fifty years as separate developments. These were the analysis of movement, the optical synthesis of movement, and photography. Once all three technologies were widely diffused, cinema was conceivable as a goal to almost anyone in the educated upper-middle classes, which explains why so many people in virtually all Western countries tried to “invent” the medium so desperately, long before the last necessary ingredient, flexible celluloid for film stock, was available. Photography came first. In 1826, or perhaps earlier, Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce succeeded in fixing on a metal plate an image of the view from a window of his house in Saint-Loup de Varenne, a small village in Burgundy. Like so many other inventors and bricoleurs of the day, Niepce, a retired army officer and veteran of the Napoleonic wars, tried his hand at many different problems before having one inspired episode of discovery. He came to photography via lithography, which he was attempting to improve technically and to liberate from the troublesome and costly intervention of the graphic artist. (Niepce could not draw.) His first photographs required exposures of many hours, and shadows cast by the moving sun made them blurred and confusing.

This was as far as Niepce got with the process, but it was enough to arouse the persistent interest of Daguerre, who wrote repeatedly to the inventor suggesting scientific collaboration and professional partnership. Niepce eventually agreed, apparently because he could not reduce his exposure times, and also perhaps because of his visit to the Diorama, with which he pronounced himself much impressed: “These representations are so real, even in their smallest detail, that one believes that he actually sees rural and primeval nature … The illusion is so great that one attempts to leave one’s box in order to wander out into the open and climb to the summit of the mountain.”³ In 1829 the two men signed a partnership agreement and Daguerre learned the secret of what Niepce called heliography. Niepce’s trust in Daguerre’s tinkering abilities and commercial acumen was to prove well founded. Though the first heliographer died in 1833, before the perfection of his process, his heirs were to profit handsomely from it—though not, to be sure, as much as Daguerre.

Daguerre modestly baptized his improved process the Daguerréo-type. With an exposure of four to five minutes, a photographic image could be fixed on a copper plate, which served also to display the rendered, positive image. Thus the Daguerréo-type was not itself mechanically reproducible, though it could be traced and then reproduced via lithography, with an inevitable loss of shading and detail. The first Daguerréo-type probably dates from 1837. Daguerre and Isidore Niepce, son of the original inventor, attempted to market the process by subscription, but sales were minimal. In a stunning commercial coup, Daguerre managed to sell the process to the French government, as an investment in the public interest. Isidore Niepce received an annuity of 4000 francs per year and Daguerre one of 6000 francs. (Daguerre’s extra benefits were for, of all things, disclosure of the “secrets” of the Diorama.) The government made the process public in August 1839, and the Daguerréo-type rush was on.

In this story, as elsewhere in the development of cinema, emphasis should be placed on entrepreneurial ability at least as much as on technical acumen. Although Daguerre developed the photographic process which dominated European society for several decades, he was in no way a lonely pioneer. In the late 1830s many other individuals published or exhibited the results of similar photochemical processes. Hippolyte Bayard demonstrated a viable paper-positive process in Paris one full month before the public disclosure of the Daguerre method. Earlier in the same year in England, William Henry Fox Talbot had described his Calotype. Both of these processes, by creating separate positive and negative images, had the enormous technical and commercial advantage of being mechanically reproducible: one negative could be used to produce an almost limitless number of identical positive images. Nonetheless both were swept away, at least for the moment, by the momentum of the Daguerréo-type. In the history of technology, being first or being best is not the essential secret for staying in the mainstream of development. What counts is the ability to disseminate a process and make it stick. France is the site of so many important developments in the prehistory of the cinema not (or not solely) because of a national aptitude for technological innovation, but thanks to the remarkable ability of so many of its inventors/entrepreneurs/showmen, such as Daguerre, to get a running start on the competition.

Like photography, the optical synthesis of motion was widely essayed in the 1820s and 1830s. The major stimulus for this was Peter Mark Roget’s paper on the effects of stroboscopic viewing on the perception of objects in motion. Many people had observed the illusion of stasis that can occur when a moving wheel is seen, for example, through the openings in a fence, but Roget was the first to explain the phenomenon. His explanation led the Belgian Joseph Plateau to extensive study of the persistence of visual impressions, on which he wrote a doctoral dissertation (in French) for the University of Liège in 1829. Three years later, inspired by a discovery of the English physicist Faraday, Plateau constructed the first apparatus for the synthesis of motion. He called his device, a rotating slotted disc with a series of drawings on its back, the Phénakistoscope. When observed in a mirror, through its own rotating slots, the device intermittently presented successive phases of a simple motion, which was perceived as continuous. At roughly the same time (the winter of 1832–33), the same discovery was made by the Viennese professor of geometry Simon Stampfer.

Early moving-image technology was subject to constant bricolage, both great and small. In this later version of the Phénakistoscope, a second disk has made the use of a mirror unnecessary.

About a year later, several bricoleurs in England and on the Continent developed the mirrorless, cylindrical variant on the device known as the Zoëtrope. If Plateau’s device was a true invention, the creation of a new type of productive capability, the more serviceable Zoëtrope was definitely not. It redeployed the elements of the Phénakistoscope to use them to better advantage (elimination of the mirror, suitability to group viewing) and was thus a clear, though minor, example of bricolage. Simple as they were, these devices for motion synthesis represented a striking intellectual accomplishment, perhaps best attributed as much to the times as to particular individuals. Materially, anyone could have come up with them from the Greeks on, and perhaps even earlier. But apparently they were not thinkable until the early nineteenth century. From the 1830s on, Europeans, and particularly the French, were captivated by these simple toys. Twenty years after Plateau’s first demonstration of the Phénakistoscope, Charles Baudelaire described it carefully and precisely in his essay “Morale du joujou” (“Morality of the Toy”), in which he called it a “philosophical plaything” (joujou philosophique).

The Zoëtrope redeploys the elements of the original Phénakistoscope to eliminate the need for a mirror and to produce a new capability: group viewing.

Scientists often make good inventors but bad bricoleurs. Once he had given adequate form to his Phénakistoscope to make it demonstrate forcefully the persistence of visual impressions, Plateau seems to have been little troubled by the practical limitations of his philosophical toy. These were twofold: first, only a limited number of drawings would fit on a disc of manageable size, and so only short motions could be synthesized; second, the slits only illuminated the figures for a brief period, and thus the perceived image was dim and not completely stable. When Plateau, Faraday, Stampfer, and their counterparts had moved on to other scientific pastures, these difficulties attracted the attention of Emile Reynaud, “science professor” of the night school of the municipality of Puy-en-Velay, in South Central France.

Reynaud reminds one of Niepce: an autodidact from an obscure provincial town, interested in many fields, a born bricoleur. He first improved the luminescence and stability of synthesized motion by combining the mirror essential to the viewing of the Phénakistoscope with the horizontal, cylindrical form of the Zoëtrope. By virtue of small rotating mirrors, one facing each image, Reynaud’s Praxinoscope allowed each image to remain before the eye until replaced by the next one. This allowed vastly brighter images; in fact it allowed for them to be projected on a screen. The Praxinoscope was patented in 1877, and the following year Reynaud gave up night school to move to Paris to manufacture and market his device. He won an honorable mention at the exposition of 1878. Articles were written. Orders flowed in.

In his patent application Reynaud had foreseen the possibility of throwing his animated images on a screen, but it was only in 1880 that he created the Projecting Praxinoscope. The problem of the brevity of the image series remained, however. This occupied Reynaud from 1880 on, and in 1888 he demonstrated his Théâtre Optique, or Optical Theatre. This was a sort of Praxinoscope in which the images, instead of being fixed to the inner surface of the apparatus, were assembled in a long strip which wrapped around the rotating drum. There was a feed reel and a takeup reel, and the images were transparent rather than opaque as in the Praxinoscope. Reynaud began work on this machine almost a decade before the general availability of strips of flexible celluloid, which explains why his bands of images had to be assembled by hand and fitted into a large holes on a leather belt. Registration was assured by small holes in the leather, which meshed with protruding teeth on the rotating drum. Georges Sadoul has persuasively argued that the strong analogy this arrangement suggests with the bicycle wheel and chain is far from coincidental.⁴ Indeed, the “safety bicycle” ...