Marcel Pagnol

Brett Bowles, Diana Holmes, Robert Ingram, Diana Holmes, Robert Ingram

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780719073816
• eBook ISBN: 9781526162830
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

Though long ignored or dismissed by film critics and scholars, Marcel Pagnol (1895–1974) was among the most influential auteurs of his era. This comprehensive overview of Pagnol's career, now available in paperback, highlights his unique place in French cinema as a self-sufficient writer-producer-director and his contribution to the long-term evolution of filmmaking in a broader European context. In addition to reassessing the converted playwright's controversial prioritisation of speech over image, the book juxtaposes Pagnol's sunny rural melodramas with the dark, urban variety of poetic realism practised by influential peers such as Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné.In his penchant for outdoor location shooting and ethnographic authenticity, as well as his stubborn attachment to independent, artisanal production values, Pagnol served as a precursor to the French New Wave and Italian Neo-Realism, inspiring the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Vittorio De Sica, and Roberto Rossellini.

1

The emergence of a dramatic author

Marcel Pagnol began his life in Aubagne, a small town in south-east France near Marseilles, on 28 February 1895, the same year that the Lumière brothers perfected the cinematograph and held the first public screenings in Paris. Although admiring commentators have often cited that chronological coincidence as a sign that Pagnol’s fate was somehow cosmically intertwined with cinema, nothing in his family background or early years suggests any such predisposition. His ancestors were middling peasants and artisans anchored firmly in the region, since the mid-sixteenth century on his father’s side and the early nineteenth on his mother’s. The first of four children born to Joseph Pagnol, a public schoolteacher dedicated to promoting the secular values of the Republic, and to his wife Augustine, a seamstress and devout Catholic who had her son secretly baptised, Marcel enjoyed a happy and uneventful childhood. The Pagnols moved several times to facilitate Joseph’s rise through the ranks, but in mid-1900 settled permanently in Marseilles just off La Canebière, approximately two kilometres north of the Vieux Port. Beginning in 1904 the family divided its time between the city and a rented summer house in the tranquil Marcellin valley between Marseilles and Aubagne. Later recounted with lyrical nostalgia in his novelistic memoir Souvenirs d’enfance (1957–59), the young Marcel’s vacations in the countryside instilled in him a strong sense of regional identity and underscored the contrast between rural and urban culture, thereby providing the central themes for his future screenplays. Equally important, his exploration of the area also served as an unconscious, preliminary scouting of the outdoor locations where he would shoot many of his films.

To the consternation of his father, Pagnol was an underachiever as a student, described by his instructors as ‘intelligent mais léger’ (‘intelligent but frivolous’) and ‘peu travailleur’ (‘not very hardworking’) (Luppi 1995: 90). His class rank in science and maths remained consistently mediocre throughout middle and high school, but he gradually began to excel at languages after being forced to repeat a grade in 1907. His mother’s untimely death in 1910 from pneumonia and father’s remarriage two years later to a much younger woman appears not to have affected Pagnol adversely, for he won composition awards in Latin, English, and German on the way to receiving his baccalaureate in 1913. After graduation Marcel dutifully fulfilled his family’s expectations by training to become a teacher like his father, paternal aunts, and uncle. Yet he dreamed of surpassing the banality of civil service through creative writing. During his final years at lycée he began publishing bucolic poems in a local literary magazine called Massilia, drawing inspiration from Virgil, nineteenth-century Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral, and his own summer adventures alongside best friend David ‘Lili’ Magnan (Luppi 1995: 94–100).

These first publications ignited an entrepreneurial spirit and an irrepressible ambition to achieve fame and fortune that would subsequently define his career as both playwright and filmmaker. Leading a team of recruited classmates, Marcel founded two literary magazines. The first, titled Le Bohème, folded after only two issues for lack of funding; the second, Fortunio, fared somewhat better, but the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 interrupted its publication. Conscripted shortly thereafter, Pagnol served less than six months in all, receiving a medical discharge in May 1915 and escaping the murderous combat that killed 1.5 million Frenchmen, including his friend Lili and cousin André Pagnol.

In early 1916 he received a licence ès lettres degree from the University of Montpellier, married sweetheart Simonne Collin after a brief courtship, and embarked on a career teaching English that over the next three years took the couple from Pamiers to Aix-en-Provence and back to Marseilles (Luppi 1995: 139–52). The homecoming allowed him to revive Fortunio with the assistance of several former classmates. The magazine devoted roughly equal space to original literary works by local authors and criticism of books and plays, boasting a print run of about 800 by early 1921 (Luppi 1995: 163). More important, it provided Pagnol a forum for publishing sections of Ulysse chez les Phéaciens and Catulle – plays that drew directly on classical Greco-Roman literature – as well as two coming-of-age novellas inspired by the author’s first loves, La petite fille aux yeux sombres (later reworked and published under the title Pirouettes) and Les mémoires de Jacques Panier (later revised and republished as Le mariage de Peluque). Well written though rather formulaic in their melodrama, these early works exemplify the twin creative strategies that would subsequently define Pagnol’s dramatic writing: embellishing pre-existing stories and character types from various narrative traditions with references to his own experiences and Provençal culture.

Adapting to Paris

Significantly, there is no mention in Pagnol’s voluminous autobiographical writings of his ever having any interest in or exposure to cinema prior to an unexpected transfer to Paris in mid-1922. Assigned to the Lycée Condorcet, one of France’s most prestigious schools, Pagnol worked tirelessly to break into the literary world while continuing to teach full-time. His unpublished correspondence reveals a seething ambition to succeed by any possible means in the face of intense homesickness, recurring eye problems and migraines caused by overwork and poor diet, constant financial worries, and increasingly strained relations with Simonne. Sleeping little and writing up to ten hours a day, he was initially drawn to cinema not as a technology or a form of artistic expression, but as an expedient way to make money. In a characteristically vehement letter to Fortunio co-founder Jean Ballard from 27 November 1922, Pagnol argued that:

les grandes manifestations de la pensée aujourd’hui n’ont pas 36 formes. Il n’y a que trois qui peuvent nous intéresser, quatre au plus: l’édition, en premier lieu, puis le théâtre (les théâtres parisiens font 7.000.000 de recette par semaine, selon Comœdia) puis la musique, puis le cinéma. Le reste n’intéresse personne et seuls les spécialistes lisent les journaux spéciaux. Je vous propose donc d’agrandir encore la place accordée aux livres, au théâtre, et à la musique. Le cinéma, lui, doit nous rapporter beaucoup d’argent à bref délai.¹ (Archives de la Bibliothèque Municipale de Marseilles à Vocation Régionale, hereafter ABMVR)

He supported that position by demanding that the journal shift its focus from publishing original literary works to music, theatre, and film review columns: ‘Celle du cinéma peut nous rapporter dix à douze mille francs par an. J’ai des propositions de la Paramount’ (The cinema rubric can make us ten to twelve thousand francs a year. I have proposals from Paramount) (ABMVR, undated letter to Ballard, late 1922). These ‘proposals’ were likely not solicitations to purchase the rights to the mediocre plays and novels he was frenetically peddling, but offers to pay for favourable reviews of the company’s new releases – a common practice at the time.

Pagnol appears not to have actually written any commissioned pieces for the American movie juggernaut or had much interest in cinema overall, for his regular review column in Fortunio focused almost exclusively on boulevard theatre (Pagnol 1922–24). The sole film critique he published was a scathing dismissal of Abel Gance’s surrealist-influenced masterpiece La Roue that proclaimed the artistic inferiority of silent cinema to both theatre and the novel:

La parfaite platitude de la production actuelle n’a jamais fait aucun doute pour personne, sauf pour les ‘créateurs’ de films, qui sont les premiers – et les seuls – à se reconnaître beaucoup de mérite. Cependant, il est indiscutable que le Septième Art a des possibilités égales à celles du théâtre, s’il m’est permis de comparer les deux; et, depuis toujours les intellectuels du monde attendent avec inquiétude le cinégraphiste de génie qui réalisera la première œuvre digne de ce nom.² (Pagnol 1923: 56)

Recasting the nearly unanimous acclaim that had greeted Gance’s film as ‘de la publicité moderne qui nous gonfle en forme de phare une très vulgaire vessie’ (modern advertising that would have us see the most common candles as great beacons), Pagnol added:

Parmi les ‘trouvailles’ que célèbre la critique, il faut signaler l’amour du mécanicien pour sa locomotive: il l’a baptisée. Est-il besoin de rappeler ici qu’Emile Zola a écrit La Bête humaine? M. Gance, par sa réalisation assez froide de cette conception émouvante, nous a montré quel abîme le sépare de l’homme de génie. La moindre page du célèbre roman vaut les 11.000 mètres de la pellicule … Il n’y a donc là qu’un film assez banal, relevé par deux ou trois tentatives qui ne sont point géniales, mais simplement ingénieuses. En fin de compte, La Roue est assez loin d’être un bon film selon la formule.³ (Pagnol 1923: 57)

Published under the pseudonym ‘J-H Roche’ to conceal his identity, these remarks constituted the reactionary manifesto of an ambitious, bitter young author who at the time felt unjustly excluded from an entertainment industry defined by rigid aesthetic codes and self-serving institutional practices rather than talent, hard work, or quality. The contempt he would feel throughout his career for professional critics is expressed here publicly for the first time, targeting by name the renowned Emile Vuillermoz for having praised Gance as a ‘un génie qui a donné une orientation nouvelle au cinéma et provoqué une révolution dans l’esthétique moderne’ (a genius whose work pointed cinema in a new direction and revolutionised modern aesthetics) (Pagnol 1923: 56). As a further protest against what he perceived as the commercial corruption of art, Pagnol often divided his play reviews into two sections respectively titled ‘Théâtre’ and ‘Commerce’, with the latter receiving summary, usually dismissive treatment.

Yet privately Pagnol was already coming to accept the necessity of financing and publicising his own work in a highly competitive environment. In his single-handed attempt to launch Fortunio in Paris, Pagnol did everything from negotiating advertising fees, subscription rates, and the cost of paper and printing to delivering the final copies to vendors, at times even reselling review copies of books received by the journal in order to keep it afloat (ABMVR, letter to Ballard, 1 February 1923). His natural talent for marketing is confirmed by the journal’s shift from monthly to bi-monthly format in January 1923, a new cohort of Parisian advertisers, and a growing subscription list of around 250 by late spring (ABMVR, letter to Ballard, 29 April 1923). Along the way Pagnol also cultivated contacts with a number of high-profile personalities (novelist Henri Béraud, actor Edouard de Max, actor-directors Firmin Gémier and Charles Dullin), literary publishing houses (Gallimard, Hachette, Grasset, Albin Michel), arts newspapers or journals (La Nouvelle Revue Française,Les Nouvelles littéraires, Le Mercure de France,Comœdia), and boulevard theatres (Arts, Nouveautés, Variétés, Madeleine) that he would later use to good advantage (ABMVR, letter to Ballard, 19 March 1923). The experience convinced the future studio head, as he put it a decade later in Les Cahiers du film, that ‘le commerce est le fumier qui nourrit la fleur de n’importe quel art’ (business is the manure that nourishes the flower of all art) (Pagnol 1933: 3).

In that spirit of commercialism, the aspiring playwright rejected classically inspired drama as unmarketable to popular audiences hooked on topical plays treating current events, instead refocusing his work around socio-political satire. In late 1922 he and Paul Nivoix, a fellow transplant from Marseilles, co-authored ‘Boxe’ (‘Boxing’), a three-act satirical play based loosely on the controversial fixed championship bout that had taken place in September between Georges Carpentier and Louis ‘Battling Siki’ Fall (ABMVR, letter to Gaston Mouren, 15 November 1922). While unsuccessfully trying to sell the manuscript as both a film treatment and a stage production, Pagnol set to work with Nivoix on Tonton, ou Joseph veut rester pur, a racy vaudevillian farce about a woman who attempts desperately to get pregnant immediately after the death of her rich husband so that she may access the fortune denied her by a pre-nuptial agreement (ABMVR, letter to Mouren, 15 November 1922). Signed Nivoix and ‘Castro’, another of Pagnol’s early literary pseudonyms, the play was rehearsed briefly in December 1922 at a small neighbourhood theatre in the Belleville district of Paris, but not publicly performed until August 1923 when it was picked up by the Théâtre des Variétés in Marseilles to fill a one-week slot at the end of the season.

Encouraged by that first small taste of success, Pagnol soon began distancing himself from Fortunio in order to focus on his own projects and escape the hopeless feeling that he might never succeed as a solo author. ‘Celui qui n’a rien écrit à 30 ans est un raté, un vrai raté’, he confided to another friend in Marseilles. ‘A 35 ans, il est irrémédiablement perdu’ (He who hasn’t published anything by the age of 30 is a failure, a true failure. At 35, he is irrevocably lost) (ABMVR, letter to Mouren, 10 March 1923). Though he continued to contribute occasional copy through late 1924, Pagnol effectively turned over control of the journal to Ballard in August 1923, when it first appeared with the subtitle Cahiers du sud. Under Ballard’s leadership the journal returned to prioritising original prose and poetry over criticism and reviews, eventually adopting Cahiers du sud as its only appellation in January 1925 and enjoying a reputation for launching up-and-coming authors until it eventually ceased publication in 1966.

Modern classicism

While extricating himself from Fortunio Pagnol was still searching for a style of his own between classicism and modernism. Having already rejected traditional verse dialogue as commercially unviable, he also...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• LIST OF PLATES
• SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Introduction: Pagnol as auteur
• 1 The emergence of a dramatic author
• 2 From theatre to cinema: Pagnol, Paramount, and Marius on-screen
• 3 Cinématurgie revisited
• 4 Another poetic realism
• 5 Pagnol and the French cinema industry
• Epilogue: Pagnol’s legacy
• FILMOGRAPHY
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX