(The Kindergarten)
France, 1933, 100 min, b&w
Dir and Scr Jean Benoit-Lévy and Marie Epstein, from the novel by Léon Frapié; Prod Benoit-Lévy; Cinematog Georges Asselin; Music Édouard Flament; Art dir Robert Bassi; Sound Jean Dubois; Act Madeleine Renaud (Rose), Mady Berry (Madame Paulin), Henri Debain (Dr. Libois), Alice Tissot (Directress), Edmond van Daele (Old Paulin), Sylvette Fillacier (La Mère Cœuret), Alex Bernet (Rector), Paulette Élambert (Marie Cœuret), Jany Delille (singer), and Aman Maître (Monsieur Antoine).
Marie Epstein was the sister of the avant-garde filmmaker Jean Epstein (see #22), who had collaborated for a while with Jean Benoit-Lévy. When her brother had to break off that collaboration, Marie “inherited” it and worked with Benoit-Lévy on a series of socially engaged (“humanist, progressive and leftist”) films of which La Maternelle was the most influential.14 Benoit-Lévy had established a production company called Films d’Enseignement et d’Éducation, with an overtly militant purpose. For him, “every film had to have a social utility, teach the spectator something, develop ‘healthy’ ideas.”15 “There still exist,” he said, “morally unacceptable instances of social distress which we intend to translate in La Maternelle through ‘slices of life.’ Yes, it is life itself that we will try to reproduce on the screen, by evoking as vividly as possible the social role of the kindergarten.”16 Most of the films he had made thus far had been short documentaries, explicitly educational and even propagandist, often for various government ministries, together with two longer fiction films. This was the first of a number of sound features that he and Marie Epstein made during the decade.
The suffering of poverty-stricken children was a recurrent theme in their work, and in this case, a principal aim was to demonstrate the supreme importance of maternal love in early childhood. The novel on which they based the film was described by its author as aiming for “a more Equally-Distributed HAPPINESS.” It concerns a middle-class woman abandoned by her heartless lover and fallen on hard times who takes a job as a kindergarten assistant (“kindergarten” is translated as école maternelle in French). She is shocked to discover the extent of the suffering of poor children, becomes committed to her charges (particularly to one of her young pupils, who comes from a miserable home and looks on her as a substitute mother), and has to struggle to reconcile her responsibility toward them with a new relationship with the kindergarten doctor. She is, then, torn between two loves, maternal and sexual.
This melodramatic material was potentially explosive (bad mother, thuggish boyfriend, abandoned child, attempted suicide), a problem that several of the decade’s socially committed films confronted less successfully. Epstein’s and Benoit-Lévy’s strategy was to de-dramatize and authenticate the material by the use of documentary techniques. They used slum children from Asnières and Courbevoie, who themselves came from broken homes and whose parents were in some cases drunkards and/or criminals. In Les Grandes Missions du cinéma, Benoit-Lévy has left a fascinating account of the lengthy process he engaged in to ensure the children were “uncorrupted” by the affectations of stage acting.17 The directors spent weeks in the children’s school before returning to reconstruct it in the studio—so effectively that critics assumed it was filmed on location. While shooting, the children moved back and forth between the stage schoolroom and a real schoolroom next door. The resulting naturalness of the children’s acting was widely admired, especially that of Paulette Élambert, but a potential incongruity was the introduction into this naturalistic context of a well-known actress, Madeleine Renaud, who was therefore asked to interact as spontaneously as possible with the genuine slum children. In film historian Dudley Andrew’s opinion, the result of these tensions is “a workable compromise between a kind of stark realism that had been largely effaced from the cinema since the coming of sound and a moving melodrama that could have come straight from Freud’s notebooks.” Elsewhere he labels it “an attempt to reconcile traditional realism with a corrosive realism that challenges every convention, including those of traditional realism.”18 A parallel problem that Andrew identifies is the tension between a “neutral” documentary style and the use of avant-garde technical practices to evoke the subjectivity (and the unconscious) of the young girl. Possibly influenced by her brother’s work, Epstein introduced a variety of strategies to mimic a young girl’s traumatized vision and to link internal and external worlds—manipulation of the camera, an obsession with reflective surfaces and windows, superimpositions, foregrounded frames, montage effects, and tilted framing (Dutch tilts).
In several respects, therefore, the film performs a difficult balancing act. On its release, however, critics had no doubts about its supreme virtues—simplicity, truth, naturalness, sincerity. “Never before has the French cinema produced such a profoundly sincere and human work,” claimed one review. “A grave and beautiful film which will mark a turning point in the French cinema,” said another. And a third commented, “The truest and most moving of films, with an immeasurable social significance.” The film was unusual in the early 1930s in achieving an impressive international release, and one American reviewer enthused, “These are real children—dirty, squalid, immensely pathetic; they tug at the heart-strings as no artificial child star from Hollywood possibly could. This is a work of great subtlety and almost unbearable power: a film of extraordinary insight, tenderness and tragic beauty. There ought to be a Noble [sic] Prize for this sort of work.”19
More recently, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis has revived interest in La Maternelle (and in Marie Epstein’s work in general), seeing this as a proto-feminist film subverting the Hollywood model by rewriting point-of-view structures. In Flitterman-Lewis’s view, it shifts focus from the typically masculine Oedipal model, in which the male child is rebellious and anarchic, onto the female child’s vision, and onto her longing for the mother, with the formation of the couple predicated on the young girl’s acceptance of it. What results is a virtual society of women, where the focus is no longer on woman as femme fatale but rather as mother, while it is rather the men who are reduced to simple functions.20
Epstein and Benoit-Lévy were prevented from working after 1940 by anti-Semitic laws, but Benoit-Lévy (who had received the Croix de Guerre in World War I) was director of information for the United Nations from 1946 to 1949, and Marie Epstein was director of technical services at the Cinémathèque Française until 1977, living to witness the revival of interest in her work during the 1990s.21 Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (see #25), which was supposed to constitute the first half of the program on the release of La Maternelle, is stylistically remote from this film to say the least, but Epstein and Benoit-Lévy would have been wholly supportive of his call in 1930 at the première of À propos de Nice for a social cinema in which characters must be surprised by the camera, their inner spirit revealed through its purely external manifestations. For all of these directors, the main function of the cinema was to put an entire society on trial.
14. Andrew and Ungar, Popular Front Paris and the Politics of Culture, 324.
15. See Fonds Jean et Marie Epstein, 181 B40, Bibliothèque du Film Archives, Paris.
16. Andrew, Mists of Regret, 203–204. See also Vignaux, Jean Benoit-Lévy.
17. “L’Interprétation,” in Benoit-Lévy, Les Grandes Missions du cinéma, ch. 10. See also Fescourt, La Foi et les montagnes, 402–406.
18. Andrew, Mists of Regret, 201.
19. All of these reviews can be found in Fonds Jean et Marie Epstein, 182 B40, Bibliothèque du Film Archives, Paris.
20. Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently; La Maternelle, 184, box 6, Bibliothèque du Film Archives, Paris.
21. See Fonds Jean et Marie Epstein, 137 B31, Bibliothèque du Film Archives, Paris.