AS RICH, insightful, and combative as it was during the long grim years .of the Great War, French writing on the cinema flourished within a range of formats somewhat narrower than it had prior to 1914. The reason, of course, lay in the cutbacks in printing materials of all kinds, mandated by the mobilization of men into the army, the rationing of paper supplies, and increased censorship.1 For more than a year, once it resumed publication in March 1915, Ciné-Journal provided almost the only forum of discussion for people both inside and outside the film industry.2 Its only formidable rival emerged when Henri Diamant-Berger launched Le Film once again as a deluxe weekly, in March 1916. Then when Diamant-Berger made Louis Delluc, a young drama critic and novelist, editor-in-chief of the magazine in June 1917, Le Film quickly became the principal forum for a whole series of debates, polemics, and exploratory essays on the condition of the French cinema. And it maintained its singular position well into 1919, until both Delluc and Diamant-Berger left the magazine to take up filmmaking and until several new film magazines began to appear in competition, either addressed to the film industry—for instance, Paul de la Borie’s La Cinématographie française and G.-Michel Coissac’s Cinéopse—or to the general public—for example, Pierre Henry’s Ciné-pour-tous. In the meantime, Georges Dureau sought to consolidate Ciné-Journal’s position by publishing one of the earliest surviving annuals devoted to the full spectrum of companies and organizations within the French film industry, the Annuaire général de la cinématographie française et étrangère (1918), for which Coissac wrote a long sketch on the cinema’s historical development.3 By contrast, following the direction of their work at Le Film, Diamant-Berger and Delluc published, almost simultaneously, the earliest French books on the cinema for a general audience: Diamant-Berger’s Le Cinéma (Renaissance du livre, 1919) and Delluc’s Cinéma et cie (Grasset, 1919).4
The Paris newspapers initially curtailed their coverage of the cinema as well. Comoedia, for instance, ceased publication for the duration of the war; and only Le Journal, of the mass dailies, continued its weekly information section on the cinema, but on a much reduced scale. This began to change with what seemed to be an invasion of American films into the French cinemas in late 1915 and early 1916.5 The rightist Le Gaulois, for instance, announced a weekly column, “A travers les cinemas” (3 March 1916), which sparked the attention of larger circulation papers such as Excelsior; and then an important new platform suddenly emerged in the centrist Le Temps.6 This came about through the efforts of the foremost prewar music critic, Emile Vuillermoz, who took over Adolphe Brisson’s pioneering interest in the cinema.7 In November 1916, Vuillermoz launched a biweekly column,”Devant l’écran,” which soon attracted a wide readership (especially among artists and intellectuals) and which may well have influenced Diamant-Berger and Delluc’s transformation of Le Film, in the late spring of 1917.8 Eventually, Delluc took up Vuillermoz’s challenge by opening his own weekly column, “Cinéma et cie,” in Paris-Midi, in May 1918. The extent of his following, despite the paper’s relatively small circulation, is reflected in the fact that, by January 1919, Delluc could turn his column, then simply called “Cinéma,” into a daily event.9 In effect, Vuillermoz and Delluc easily dominated the Paris newspaper discourse on the cinema by the end of the war.
In the literary and intellectual reviews, interest in the cinema also increased as the war drew to a close and American films consolidated their dominance on French screens. Most of the magazines gave the cinema only occasional attention—from the radically conservative L’Action française and the now well established Mercure de France to popular illustrated weeklies such as Hachette’s Lectures pour tous.10 Several of the smaller avant-garde journals, however, shared the enthusiasm that Apollinaire’s Les Soirees de Paris had shown for the cinema before the war. These included Pierre Albert-Birot’s SIC, Pierre Reverdy’s Nord-Sud, Jean Galtier-Boissière’s nonconformist Le Crapouillot (first addressed to infantrymen at the front), La Rose rouge, and Littérature, the latter edited by the Young Turks, Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, and André Breton. And their enthusiasm coincided with the development and proliferation of an original French publishing format, the film raconté or ciné-roman, which constituted a new form of the popular roman-feuilleton (serial novel).11 Launched by the mass daily, Le Matin, and then bound in book form by La Renaissance du livre, Pierre Decourcelle’s serialization of the famous Pearl White serial, Les Mystères de New York (1915–1916), proved so immensely popular that Le Petit Parisien and Le Journal soon were printing weekly installments of other French and American serials—for example, Louis Feuillade’s Judex (1917) and Henri Pouctal’s Chantecoq (1917)—and publishers such as Jules Tallan-dier and Arthème Fayard were rushing out series of ciné-romans for what seemed to be an insatiable market.12
The discourse modes that effectively made up the prewar writings on the cinema underwent a radical change in this period. That change came in response to the conditions imposed by the war itself (which altered production, distribution, and exhibition practices)13 as well as to the polemical attempt to establish the cinema as an art. There was less consideration now of the cinema as a scientific or technological instrument, except when this provided a material or epistemological base for an essentially aesthetic discussion. Interest in the cinema as a medium of information and education remained high, but the subject tended to provoke less debate than before, partly because of the ideological demands of the war. Consequently, the discourse modes that treated the cinema as a spectacle entertainment and as a new art form—whether narrative, descriptive, or non-narrative in construction—now dominated the writings. As Vuillermoz, Delluc, and others reconsidered some of the concepts put in play prior to the war, rethought the relationship between the cinema and the other arts, and, consciously or not, explored the implications of several different competing aesthetic theories with regard to the cinema, they began to focus attention more and more on the raw material or determining features of the new medium as well as on the methods and techniques that might allow it to become an art. In the excitement of discovery and exploration, their ideas often jostled and contradicted one another, but neither they nor their colleagues were all that intent on producing a systematic, coherent theory of the cinema as art. Instead, they used the theoretical or critical essay as a speculative instrument—which soon became a model—to generate or provoke insight, new ideas, and action.
Aesthetic concerns may have been primary to French writers during this period, but they did acknowledge and sometimes critically reflect on the film industry’s material conditions and the cinema’s social function, given the socio-political context of the war. Repeatedly, the press called attention to and sought ways to overcome various weaknesses in the production, distribution, and exhibition practices of the industry. In Le Film, for instance, Diamant-Berger carried out a persistent crusade to address what he and others perceived as a grave crisis threatening the very existence of the French cinema. In March 1917, he launched an extensive survey on the crisis among prominent figures in the industry.14 In June 1918, he published Charles Pathé’s self-serving speech admonishing his colleagues to imitate the American film industry, and he followed that, in September, with a set of similar recommendations of his own.15 Early in 1919, after a trip to the United States, he published an eight-part series, “Pour sauver le film français.”16 Even Vuillermoz, in Le Temps, criticized the poor technical resources of the French film studios, the general poverty of French films (both in quality and quantity), and the failure of the French government to protect its own industry from the flood of American film imports.17 However, there was no thought of criticizing the basic competitive, capitalistic structure of the French film industry. The writers all seemed to agree on that structure’s survival, no matter how vulnerable the industry seemed to the threat of the American cinema’s expansion or how much they disagreed on particular production practices, exhibition strategies, and so on. Furthermore, from Pathe to Delluc, his frequent antagonist, no one advocated any kind of governmental assistance for the industry—with the exception of wanting to control film imports. Delluc, in fact, was perfectly willing to let those French companies go under that could not stand up to the competition.
Much less attention was given to the matter of increased government censorship during the war. In June 1916, the Minister of the Interior organized a temporary national Commission du Controle des Films, whose principal function was to review the weekly newsreel, Annales de la guerre, produced by the army’s special film unit.18 While this new agency was widely accepted, the continued censorship of fiction films—for example, Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915–1916) and Judex (1917)—by local mayors and police prefects was not.19 Consequently, when the Minister of the Interior extended the commission’s mandate to include fiction films, in May 1917, and then appointed a committee to recommend a national system of regulation for film distribution and exhibition, most writers accepted this as a practical means of protecting the film industry from the vicissitudes of local censorship.20 In practice, however, the mandate led to cuts and changes in all sorts of films—from Thomas Ince’s Civilization (1916) to Gance’s Mater Dolorosa (1917)—and the rejection of visas for Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916).21 By July 1919, when the government finally established a permanent commission (which included prominent figures from the industry), complaints were beginning to surface again in the press; and Diamant-Berger devoted a whole chapter to attacking the very principle of censorship in his book, Le Cinema.22
Politically or ideologically, writers were less divided than one might suppose during the period of the war, and sometimes apparent divisions proved illusory. For convenience, it would be tempting to set up a paradigm of more or less clearcut oppositions—nationalist/internationalist, authoritarian/democratic, rightist/leftist, even classical/modernist—that could distinguish writers and texts. Such a simple paradigm has its usefulness. Many writers, for instance, tend toward the internationalist-democratic-leftist-modernist end of the spectrum, with Delluc certainly the most consistent and vehement spokesman for that position.23 Yet, under scrutiny, such a paradigm also breaks down or cracks open. For one thing, a writer such as Guillaume Apollinaire, who probably would have fallen into the internationalist camp before the war, now was chauvinistically proclaiming a “new spirit” of lyrical classicism specific to France and encouraging poets to find a way to express that spirit in the new medium of the cinema.24 Even Delluc himself, despite his international claims—for instance, “Beauty has no fatherland”—and his constant celebration of American films, proselytized as much as anyone for a uniquely French cinema, particularly one that could be distinguished from the American cinema.25 For another, the one figure who might be said to occupy the polar position opposite Delluc, the contentious Léon Daudet of Action française, actually defended the cinema (even the crime serials) against censorship and stressed its international base as an art form.26 Then again, as shown above, a major tenet of the so-called international position—the prewar dream of an international community predicated on the “universal language” of cinema—blindly ran counter to the wholesale acceptance of a competitive, capitalistic industry, in which the American cinema was fast establishing its hegemony. Ultimately, enough writers and texts slip back and forth across the dividing lines of such a paradigm so as to blur distinctions and raise the question of which distinctions really matter—see, for instance, Marcel Gromaire’s synthesis of much of the wartime French thinking on the cinema, in Le Crapouillot (1919), in which he returns to a position advocating a classical film art after he has argued cogently and comprehensively for a variety of modernist film forms.27
While such ideological oppositions turn into a welter of cracks and contradictions in these texts, some of which will resurface later, the “fault lines” separating attacks on and defenses of the cinema per se clearly run along two intersecting tracks. Attacks on the cinema came principally from those—as before, most of them were literary critics—who argued that it lacked certain essential features of the established arts and therefore could never pretend to be art. Paul Souday, who was just beginning to build his reputation as the foremost literary critic of the period, epitomized this position in a front-page article in Le Temps, in September 1916. Upholding the attitude of such prewar critics as Doumic and Haugmard and assuming the stance of the conservatives and moderates who wanted to restore the classical traditions of French art as a patriotic strategy during the war, Souday claimed that the rise of the abominable silent dramas of the cinema, especially at the expense of the theater (where the sublime poetry of the word reigned supreme), was “disastrous for the public spirit and taste.”28 Later he even resorted to the prewar argument that the cinema was merely a mechanical copy of reality.29 Strangely, the young poet and scriptwriter, Marcel L’Herbier, took a similar position in his first important essay on the cinema—the long, convoluted, and contradictory “Hermès et le silence,” Le Film (April 1918).30 Neatly separating the arts from the cinema—the one associated with strict rules, the personal expression of genius, the “beautiful lie,” the ideal, the absolute; the other linked to reality, chance, mere transcription, the mechanical, the popular or democratic—L’Herbier concluded that the cinema, at least for the moment, was no better than a craft. This kind of elitist, autocratic position, which assumed that the word or verbal language was the supreme medium of human expression, kept a great majority of French writers from taking the cinema seriously well into the 1920s.
Defenses of the cinema ran on two sides of a tangential fault line. Vuillermoz is representative of those who took the high road, perhaps most persuasively in his column lambasting the pseudophilosophical pretensions of L’Herbier, in Le Temps (February 1918).31 There he repeated most of the points first raised by Charles Havermans in 1911 and then catalogued some of the ways that film could become a high art form, by producing “beautiful lies” and “plastic harmonies” as well as expressing thought and feeling. In this defense, he saw himself as a serious critic who was refocusing his considerable skills as a reputable music critic on a new medium and a new art form. From the beginning, Vuillermoz conceived of his task as that of an educator, trying to wean the cinema away from its fairground origins and popular film formats, while offering guidance to individual filmmakers, the general industry, and a rather elite audience. “. . . I plan to examine the lessons offered us by American and Italian filmmakers, whose qualities and faults are so highly distinctive. I will note what our own French films often lack and point out the oddly antiquated ideas about mise-en-scène that hamper the progress of an art which has no past and which is already burdened down with questionable ‘traditions.’ . . . We must defend the cinema against itself.”32 Vuillermoz did not care to speak to or educate the masses, for, like the actor Armand Bour and others, he distrusted their ability to comprehend film art.33 In fact, he seems to have shared L’Herbier’s initial distaste for the popularizing, democratizing, leveling (Americanizing?) effects of the cinema. If by the end of the war, it had become a “genuine ‘night school’ for the workers,” he noted, the “education” it provided, for the most part, was intellectually tyrannical, emotionally intoxicating, and ultimately enslaving.34 What the sociologist Gabriel Tarde might have seen as a prime example of his concept of modern commodities generating positive models of imitation (imitative behavior taking place in a semiconscious state), Vuillermoz saw clearly as exploitation.35 But his answer was to turn away and recommend the institution of a special subscribers-only cinema, modelled on the elite theaters, whose carefully selected program would appeal to a cultured clientele of connoisseurs.36
Somewhat like Yhcam before the war and despite his own literary background, Delluc took the low road in his defense of the cinema, reversing the poles of the high art/low art hierarchy, just as he rejected the chauvinism of his countrymen’s wartime patriotism. Throughout the war, of course, he maintained that the cinema was an international art and became the leading French advocate of the artistry of American films.37 And that advocacy was shared by many young writers—see especially Philippe Soupault’s marvelous description of how he and his friends discovered the American cinema during the war.38 In contrast to Vuillermoz and in terms that may have linked him to the radical wing of the French Naturalist movement—and the anarchist writer, Octave Mirbeau—Delluc celebrated the cinema as a popular art: it offered an unusually direct medium of expression and communication among peoples.39 Indeed, he refused even to consider himself a critic, at least in the traditional sense. “I learned long ago not to want to do the work of a critic; I am neither heedless nor shrewd enough to assert the faults and failures of a spectacle. Let me limit myself to noting when I am satisfied or bored. . . . It is from the crowd actually that I gather the best impressions and the clearest judgments.”40 Besides the mock modesty of personal taste, the source of Delluc’s authority lay not so much in an aesthetic or moral standard but in the audience, the crowd. And what he meant by the crowd can be gathered from one of his early columns in Paris-Midi, in August 1918, where Delluc confessed that his favorite cinemas were not the elegant bourgeois cinemas of west Paris and the boulevards but those in the working-class quarters and especially a little one near the Gare de l’Est, thronged by “mechanics, pimps, laborers, and women warehouse packers.”41 The spectators there delighted him “not only because of their silence and attention but because of their acuteness, taste, and insight,” particularly with regard to American films. “What the crowd thinks of a dramatic film, a piece of clowning, or a newsreel,” he concluded, echoing Mirbeau, “is an education. And what is more pressing to recognize, a source of information.”42 Instead of educating the masses, as someone like Gromaire expected of the cinema, Delluc was receiving an education from them. His weekly and then daily film reviews in Paris-Midi, therefore, can be seen as an attempt to speak for and to a mass public (including the working class), to offer a forum (mediated, of course) for the circulation of public opinion. Yet Delluc displayed a rather naive faith in the unorganized power of the spectator as consumer (whether working class or not), seemingly unaware of such organized institutions as the consumer cooperatives (founded by Charles Gide), which by then had become a real force in French society.43
Whatever their position on the high art/low art hierarchy, and some like Jacques de Baroncelli hesitated humorously between the two, writer after writer echoed the call first articulated before the war for the cinema to become a new form of art.44 Diamant-Berger, for instance, conceived of the cinema initially as “a new formula . . . dependent on neither books nor the theater,” a formula that was still not fully recognized.45 Colette, his first regular film reviewer for Le Film, considered her critical work a witness to “the crude ciné’s groping toward perfection”; and her review of De Mille’s The Cheat (1915) turned the Omnia-Pathe cinema, where it was playing in July and August 1916, into a veritable “art school” to which writers, painters, and dramatists flocked like students.46 Vuillermoz saw that “the art of the cinema had reached that stage in its technical development where all of its potential seemed in reach of being realized,” and he determined to discover, and explain, how “the luminous screen . . . was a magnificent window opening out onto life and dream! . . ,”47 And several writers now were taking up the call to create a repertory of the best films, which could be available for continual rescreening.48 Perhaps Delluc summed up this advocacy position best in one of his several professions of faith: “We are witnessing the birth of an extraordinary art. The only truly modern art perhaps, assured already of its place and one day soon of astonishing glory, because it is simultaneously and uniquely the offspring of both technology and human ideals.”49 Furthermore, “everything having to do with method, material, and technique in the cinema,” Delluc admitted, was still in the process of being discovered.50 Instead of developing the concept of film as a synthesis of the other arts, which had been prominent prior to the war and which some writers such as Apollinaire and Guillaume Danvers still were trying to promulgate,51 most now sought further to delineate its uniqueness, particularly but not exclusively as a narrative art.
By this time, all agreed with Adolphe Brisson’s prewar contention that the cinema differed radically from the theater; and they repeatedly condemned the French film industry for continuing to rely on theatrical conventions, especially for their actors whose artificial poses looked ridiculous compared to the natural spontaneity of American actors. This condemnation assumed a form of French narrative film that dominated the war period, largely through the production and distribution output of Pathé, and yet, like the serial, had no apologists among the writers.52 Its contours can be gathered negatively from the writings of Vuillermoz, Delluc, Bour, André Antoine, and others. The subject of these films tended to be recent melodramas and “thesis plays” written for the theater, sometimes adapted by their authors and performed by noted stage actors and actresses.53 Inter-titles served to generate and develop the narrative (the word still carried authority), while the images functioned as “illustrations” and performance “turns,” seeking to express the melodramatic excess beyond language. And scenes tended to be shot in studios, using flimsy theatrical decors, with the camera positioned at a ninety-degree angle to the actors in a “stage” space. Such films, critics agreed, were simply cheap, short-lived, usually cut-down versions of current literary works in circulation. Underlying their critique, however, were crucial questions—which Gromaire set out most clearly—the answers to which the writers did not agree on at all.54 If it was not merely an adjunct to the theater (or novel), exactly what form and function should this new art take? What were its characteristic features, and how could they be shaped and controlled to create art? The spectrum of answers provided by French writing on the cinema coalesced into four or five major conceptions of narrative film art.
What can be considered the “progressive” mainstream industry position during this period developed in response to these film adaptations as well as to the impact of the American cinema. This position is expressed most tellingly in the few, but influential, pronouncements of Charles Pathé and the extensive writings of Henri Diamant-Berger, particularly as summed up in Le Cinema (1919).55 The first principle was that a film told a story and hence the author—that is, the person most responsible for the film as a work of art—was the scenarist or scriptwriter.56 “The scenario,” said Diamant-Berger categorically, “is the film itself as it will be recorded on the filmstock.”57 The primary text, therefore, as in the theater, strangely enough, was the script or scenario; yet instead of adaptations, Diamant-Berger seemed to prefer original scenarios stressing action. The director’s task, again as in the theater, was to execute the scenario in such a way as to respect the author’s intentions. To this task, Pathé added the demands of overseeing the production budget and setting the shooting schedule; the director’s only allowance for change occurred in the editing process, and that was minimal—to detail or emphasize a gesture or an emotional effect. Interestingly, Vuillermoz, among others, also tended to accept the scenario as the primary text—see, for instance, his review of Gance’s La Dixième Symphonie (1918).58 There was a counter-claim, however, to which Delluc, for one, sometimes became attached: the filmmaker—particularly if he were an Ince, a Griffith, a De Mille, or even a L’Herbier—was the real author of the film.59 And this, in embryo, became the first French conception of a politique des auteurs. That the French hesitated in deciding between these two claims can be measured by the fact that the Société des auteurs des films, which was organized officially in late 1917, included both scriptwriters and directors in its membership.60
Much like their counterparts in the American film industry, Pathe and Diamant-Berger focused their attention, respectively, on the subject of the scenario and on the construction of the decoupage or shooting script. For Pathe, of course, the French cinema’s woes stemmed from a “crisis of the scenario.”61 His solution called for choosing subjects that would appeal to “Anglo-Saxon” spectators (to regain an American audience), which meant abandoning situations and feelings specific to the French. In effect, as Vuillermoz, Delluc, and others complained, this would turn the French cinema into a poor country cousin of the American cinema.62 For Diamant-Berger, who seemed a bit more independent, the answer lay in a careful, meticulous crafting of the decoupage, using a central idea, a dramatic framework, and a detailed psychology of characters to produce a classical narrative construction of exposition, development, and denouement.63 In this decoupage (for which he offered an exemplary model), the shot formed the basic unit of narrative action, emotion, and meaning. Although he understood that the sense of any one shot or scene depended on its context among other shots or scenes, that context was narrowly defined in exclusively narrative terms. To control the flow of action and feeling, as well as the spectator’s pace of comprehension (so that everything was intelligible), he advocated a general rule of conveying “only one impression per shot” and ending the shot “as soon as the impression is perceived.”64 Among several suggestions for handling these shots and their interrelation, Diamant-Berger cautioned—much as Yhcam had before the war—against the overuse of close-ups, except where they were justified by the narrative. This caution seems to have been shared by others and suggests there was a generally held classical French attitude of moderation and balance in opposition to a perceived sense of American exuberance and disorder. See Colette, for instance, when she singled out for criticism the emerging shot/reverse shot convention in American films: “the technique that separates two speakers of a dialogue, that projects them each in turn in huge close-ups, just when it is important to compare their faces together.”65 Or see Armand Bour, who was disturbed by the overly hectic pace of American crosscutting or parallel editing.66 What is significant in Diamant-Berger’s position, however, is the value he attached to editing, to the shot-by-shot or moment-by-moment construction of a story, which is completely clear in the measured, relentless advance of its action. Almost alone among French writers of the period, he focused exclusively, rigorously, on narrative and offered a clearcut mainstream French position against which others could define themselves.
Parallel with Pathe and Diamant-Berger’s advocacy of a narrative cinema only slightly different from the American, there developed a second position (superceding that of Feuillade and Jasset before the war) out of the Realist tradition in French art and literature. Its chief proponent was the famous theater director turned filmmaker, André Antoine, seconded, but not uncritically, by Louis Delluc. For Antoine, too, the cinema was a narrative art, but its overriding aim—as with his earlier theatrical productions—was to convince the spectator of the verisimilitude of the spaces and actions represented on the screen.67 Accordingly, perhaps in imitation of Pathé’s pronouncement to his company employees, he set out a number of principles to accomplish this. First, like Yhcam, he called for the formation of a special troupe of actors, unattached to the theater, who would learn “to act solely by means of their intrinsic nature and external appearance.” Next he advocated the use of real locations for decors to counter the French film industry’s reliance on ill-suited theatrical sets and costumes in the old glass studios. Technological advances such as the mobile electrical generator now made this more practical than ever before.68 And, perhaps most importantly, he stressed the need for multiple camera set-ups: the actors would perform as if they were living in their location decors, and the camera (which they would ignore) would “follow them step by step and catch all their aspects unawares, from whichever side they presented.”69 On the one hand, this implied a mobile camera and a documentary-like style of filmmaking; on the other, it assumed that the realism of a specific scene was a rhetorical construction of multiple shots and constantly changing perspectives in the editing. Accepting Diamant-Berger’s concept of narrative construction, which depended on a clear flow of action, Antoine went on to emphasize the accretion of details and multiple perspectives for atmosphere and sustained verisimilitude. It was as if he were announcing the founding of a plein air school of filmmaking, in memory of the celebrated plein air school of painting depicted in Emile Zola’s novel, L’Oeuvre (1896).
Out of Delluc’s reviews of Antoine’s and others’ films emerged a variation on this realist narrative cinema. Interestingly, Delluc criticized Antoine’s own film practice—in Les Frères corses (1917) and Le Coupable (1917) —precisely according to the first two of these principles.70 His actors, for instance, “had not yet forgotten their Conservatory training,” especially in the exterior scenes. Furthermore, Delluc considered the stories Antoine chose for his films too convoluted and literary for his purposes and contrary to his own nature. Although he thought Les Frères corses one of the best French films of the war, he found its scenario “unwieldy in structure.” Delluc himself advocated simple, original narratives—for instance, the bitter, brutal tales of Thomas Ince films or the simple, bleak stories of Scandinavian films such as Victor’s Sjöstrom’s The Outlaw and His Wife (1918) .71 Ultimately, for him, the story was just one of several ordinary events or incidents, but one given a privileged status, within a specific natural or social milieu. Such narratives, he argued—along with Baroncelli, Bour, and Gromaire—would eliminate the need for intertitles and rely, perhaps exclusively, on the images to develop the story.72 And Delluc went Antoine one better by recommending that real people—“peasants, soldiers, charwomen, milkmaids, railway workers”—should be used, not just as extras, but as important actors in the cinema.
Ah, how I wish [Antoine] had a story of his own, a vivid, original modern scenario. . . .
Perhaps a story of workers or, better yet, peasants. He would go to the country, into the real countryside, where he could capture life as it really exists, in the very act of shooting. Perhaps the heroes of his story would play themselves. I would like a peasant to be played by a peasant.73
For an example of what he meant, see his praise for Henry Roussel’s use of local people in the first half of L’Ame du bronze (1918).74 In Delluc’s notes and suggestions, then, there emerged a notion of film narrative grounded in the pro-filmic realism of a particular milieu and perfectly “legible” in its actions alone.75
A fourth conception of narrative cinema developed in tandem with the progressive mainstream and the two realist positions. In line with Yhcam’s prewar speculations, here the cinema served as a medium for the expression of the subjective, the interior life of a character, as an integral part of the narrative—a possibility which Diamant-Berger and Antoine explicitly denied. Although the rightist literary critic, Léon Daudet, touched on this notion in 1916, in an article in Action française,76 it was Vuillermoz, with his training in Symbolist aesthetics, who acted as its chief proponent throughout the war period. Paradoxically, he found evidence of the subjective in the editing patterns of Antoine’s first film, Les Frères corses. What especially impressed him were the smooth, almost magical transitions in the fiction (through dissolves and fades) between one time period and another, between a present reality and a past memory or fantasy. More generally, he was mesmerized by Antoine’s skill in being able “to enliven his drama with quick glimpses, allusions, echoes, inferences, forebodings, memories, hallucinations, and dreams; to illuminate it with fugitive suggestions analogous to the flashes of mental associations which traverse our imagination and multiply its creative power tenfold.”77 This same miraculous power of evocation was confirmed for him later in Baroncelli’s Le Roi de la mer (1917) and Gance’s La Dixième Symphonie (1918).78 The latter’s “ingenious visual and emotional transposition of the andante and scherzo of the [hero’s new] symphony” Vuillermoz even envisioned as “an exploration of the subconscious.”79 Here the technological means of the cinema apparatus served to represent an interior as well as an exterior reality, in a fiction in which memory, dream, or fantasy could interpenetrate and even determine the narrative action. So impassioned was Vuillermoz’s defense of cin’egraphie as a new Symbolist mode of subjective expression that his attack on L’Herbier even persuaded the young poet of its validity. In the conclusion to a short dialogue that he offered as a preface to his first film, Rose-France (1919), L’Herbier defended “the cinegraphic representation of a succession of actions and reactions, that is, of dramatic gestures and images representing the dreams or reflections which those gestures have provoked in the hero of the drama . . . so far as it expresses . . . the active and passive visage of life. . . .”80 He had become one of the cinema’s first acolytes of an expressive, subjective aesthetics.
The realist and subjectivist “blueprints” for a narrative film art intersect with and are determined, in part, by a rather different conception of the cinema that seems to have been of unusual interest in France and that laid the groundwork for the later theoretical work of André Bazin.81 In this conception, the object of attention shifted from action and narration to description or representation.82 In other words, the focus turned from temporal progression to spatial composition or mise-en-scène. Why was description or representation in the cinema so important to the French? Certainly there was a fascination for visual spectacle per se, to which both Delluc and Bour, for instance, attest in their critiques of repeated tour-deforce lighting effects. But there seems to have been a more important reason, at least for the writers. This came from the power of representation as a means to knowledge, a power that had generated a good deal of scientific as well as artistic experimentation in Europe since at least the later Renaissance.83 For French writings on the cinema, this cognitive power was located in the new apparatus of the camera and, by extension, the projector and screen. Some evidence of this can be seen in the continuing French fascination during the war for short scientific films and newsreels. Even in the fiction films, however, it was nature or reality—as a subject of meditation, in the Romantic tradition—and not the story or the author’s intentions or emotions that served as the basic raw material in this conception of the cinema. Here, then, the camera functioned as a mediator between the spectator and a certain reality or “world” and as an instrument of revelation.84 Furthermore, it positioned the spectator before that mediated reality—to use Michael Fried’s terms analyzing eighteenth-century French painting— as both there and not there, in a state of rapt attention or absorption.85 For description, as Roland Barthes notes, “has its spiritual equivalent in contemplation.”86 This essentially pre-narrative or a-narrative conception of the cinema assumed several different forms in French texts, some of which meshed harmoniously with a framework of film narrative and others of which were more or less disruptive of that framework.
On the matter of mise-en-scene and the camera/spectator’s relation to actors and natural decors in particular, Vuillermoz and Delluc’s reflections again were representative of two different lines of thinking, the latter of which gradually assumed more and more significance. Vuillermoz’s attachment to a Symbolist aesthetic again governed his thinking here. The camera, for instance, turned certain actors into “astral bodies” whose essence was delivered up to the spectator in a direct, intimate, and profound encounter—“as absolute gift.”87 This intimacy was comfortable for the masses, Vuillermoz believed, because these stars became “friends” to follow through different adventures. And the pleasure elicited by this new star/spectator bond was one of the chief reasons for the cinema’s “mysterious attraction.” Vuillermoz himself was more interested, however, in the cinema’s mission of discovering and revealing “the spirit of things.” Initially, this seemed to him to depend on the camera itself, as if it were a magical instrument of revelation almost free of human agency. “The thirst for the real,” he wrote, “must extend to believing in the religion of things, to the discovery of their soul, to seeing a sort of secret pantheism which animates the greatest painters and sculptors.”88 The philosophical basis for this mission Vuillermoz found in Henri Bergson, whose theory of art seemed “a perfect apologia for cinégraphie.” If “Art has no other aim than to brush aside . . . everything that masks reality from us in order to position us face to face with reality itself,” he quoted Bergson as saying, then the cinema indeed was the Fifth Art because its “eye . . . cuts out of space and fixes in time inimitable images; [it] seizes in flight and immortalizes the fleeting moment when nature possesses genius. . . ,”89 On the screen, he concluded, in a phrase that would often be repeated in French texts, “a landscape is a state of mind.” Eventually, Vuillermoz settled for a more expressive position, congruent with his concept of a subjective narrative cinema: this was effected not by the camera alone but also by the filmmaker, who had to become a poet. For it was he who “transforms, recreates, and transfigures nature, according to his emotional state . . . , concentrates all the force of feeling or thought onto an inanimate object, . . . imposes his personal vision of beings and things on thousands of spectators. . . .”90 “The image,” L’Herbier would add pithily, “is no more than the epiphany of an imagination.”91
Delluc sometimes shared Vuillermoz’s thinking, especially when he was caught up—as were most of his colleagues—in an idealist language when dealing with representation in the cinema. In his early essays, for instance, Delluc tended to define the destiny of the cinema as providing the spectator “with impressions of evanescent beauty” and as training him “to see [anew] into nature and the human heart.”92 But his observations on actors and natural landscapes, perhaps following Baroncelli, soon broke away to open up another perspective. He too tried to account for the new phenomenon of the film star, particularly the American film star. His marvelous descriptions of Sessue Hayakawa, Charlie Chaplin, William S. Hart, and others “mythologized” them as masks or personae transcending any one specific film or story—“. . . of Hayakawa one can say nothing: he is a phenomenon. . . . The beauty of Sessue Hayakawa is painful. Few things in the cinema can reveal to us, as the light and silence of this mask do, that there really are alone beings.”93 In contrast to Vuillermoz, then, Delluc perceived these extraordinary creatures, not as characters within the context of a continuity system dependent on the shot/reverse shot convention and on point-of-view shots, but rather as seemingly detached mirror images for the spectator that disturbed as much as they delighted. For in them, particularly the images of male actors, he discovered an essentially modern human condition, of suffering and unspoken alienation. The cinema’s power of representation turned on a male-oriented, quasi-psychoanalytical system of looking—to be developed further by Jean Epstein—which led Delluc to a poignantly pessimistic form of self-knowledge.94
In a different mood, Delluc also began to single out and celebrate the revelatory description of natural landscapes or milieux for having a significance of their own as well as providing the generative matrix out of which an original story could evolve.95 In Baroncelli’s Le Retour aux champs (1918), for instance, he perceived “a profound sense of atmosphere” in certain scenes, whose images evoked “all the poetry of a rustic evening” and where “silent things” in isolation became radiantly alive.96 By early 1919, he was advocating that Baroncelli’s Ramuntcho (1919) be taken as a study or sketch for that “animated impressionism which [he hoped would] become characteristic of the French cinema.”97 And by the end of the year, several Scandinavian films seemed to confirm his thinking—witness how Delluc called attention to “the barren mountain landscapes” and “desert-like snow” of Sjostrom’s The Outlaw and His Wife.98 Drawing implicitly on French Impressionist painting and French Realist and Naturalist fiction, Delluc saw that the cinema, too, could represent nature simply and honestly— “screened” not through a temperament but through the apparatus of the camera—and thus become the site of an exercise in perception and reflection.99 Through Delluc, then, and to a lesser extent Antoine, the term impressionism came to refer to an almost painterly way of emphasizing the revelatory representation of natural landscapes (and their Frenchness) on film, above and beyond the demands of the narrative.
Delluc’s interest in the uniqueness of the film image and the mediating power of the camera/screen led to one of the most widely circulated concepts in French texts throughout the silent period—photogénie. For all its later diffuseness and polyvalence, and its seminal importance for the later theories of André Bazin and Jean Mitry,100 several things seem clear about Delluc’s initial use of the term. It assumed that the “real” (the factual, the natural) was the basis of film representation and signification. But it also assumed that the “real” was transformed by the camera/screen, which, without eliminating that “realness,” changed it into something radically new. “The miracle of the cinema,” Delluc wrote, “is that it stylizes without altering the plain truth.”101 And that transformation or stylization was facilitated by several features of the camera and its associated technical components—especially framing, lighting, and mise-en-scène relations within the frame. Delluc came to this concept through the observations of his colleagues as well as his own perceptions—for example, Colette’s appreciation of the “still life” images (shots empty of actors) and certain close-ups of Emmy Lynn in Gance’s Mater Dolorosa (1917), Soupault’s celebration of the cinema as a totally new means of perception, and his own discoveries about film star presences.102 But the effect of photogénie was singular: to make us see ordinary things as they had never been seen before. “We believe,” said Jean Cocteau, “we are seeing them for the first time.”103 To borrow a term from the Russian Formalists, photogénie defamiliarized the familiar. Interestingly, Delluc and others linked this notion of the cinema’s power, not to photography, as one might have expected, but to painting and poetry.104 In this conventionally disparaging view of photography, a contradictory note of elitism crept into the French writings. The photograph might share the “real” or “authentic” as a basis of representation with the cinema, but it lacked movement and life and, supposedly, the power of transformation, which the cinema instead shared with modern painting and poetry. The images of the factory in Roussel’s L’Ame du bronze (1918), for instance, reminded Delluc of the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the Belgian anarchist poet, Emile Verhaeren.105 A Fairbanks film had “. . . the new force of modern poetry, the real thing, what you glimpse on the street in a face, in a sign, in a color, everywhere and incessantly, and what a filmmaker can isolate expressively. Landscapes, horses, dogs, furniture, glasses, a staircase, a lamp, a hand, a jewel—everything assumes a fantastic nature. And true!”106 Aesthetic creation in the cinema, consequently, depended not on subjective invention but on the impassive camera eye’s discovery of the new within the already given.
In his first published essay, “Du Décor,” which Delluc solicited for Le Film (September 1918), Louis Aragon pushed the perceptions behind the notion of photogénie even further. First of all, selected objects or parts of the decor could become “remotivated” and meaningful in relation to a figure such as Chaplin, simply within the mise-en-scene of a shot or scene. “The set is Chariot’s vision of the world, and the discovery of its mechanics and laws haunts the hero to the point where, by an inversion of values, any inanimate object for him becomes a living thing and any person a mannequin whose starting crank he must seek out.”107 A similar process of transformation occurred, Delluc noted, in the films of William S. Hart.108 More importantly, Aragon focused on the way film could isolate and magnify objects through framing, especially in close-ups, and then re-position them through editing. Such close-ups were thus stripped of the exclusively narrative function that Diamant-Berger assigned to them. Much like the prewar collage art of Picasso, Braque, and Gris, Aragon argued provocatively, American films—Pearl White serials as well as Chaplin comedies—isolated and recontextualized scraps or fragments of daily life.109 These image-objects were “transformed to the point where they took on menacing or enigmatic meanings.”110 And the pleasure of these transformations and repositionings, the poet Pierre Reverdy added, depended on the intensity and duration of the surprise they elicited.111 In one sense then, for Delluc, Aragon, Reverdy, and later Gromaire, the power of photogénie seemed able to create access to a completely new world of mystery, quite different from Vuillermoz’s fantastic pantheistic world. In another sense, it countered the classical aesthetic of coherence and unity in an artistic work, which dominated the majority of French writings on the cinema, by privileging the play of discontinuity at all levels of the text. Disruptive of space and time, story and spectacle, photogenie contained the potential for a modernist aesthetic.
The French writers’ tendency to focus on unusually expressive, revelatory, or disruptive moments in the cinema complemented and fueled their speculations on the possibility of organizing or patterning an entire film according to principles that were other than narrative. In one of the most influential of these speculations, Vuillermoz—the former music student of Gabriel Faure—perceived the cinema as a form of musical composition. Where others such as Baroncelli, Colette, and Danvers anticipated the eventual collaboration or integration of film and musical accompaniment,112 Vuillermoz excitedly pursued the implications of the analogy he had discovered between cinematic and musical composition. “. . . it is exactly like a symphony! The cinema orchestrates images, scores our visions and memories according to a strictly musical process: it must choose its visual themes, render them expressive, meticulously regulate their exposition, their opportune return, their measure and rhythm, develop them, break them down into parts, reintroduce them in fragments, as the treatises on composition put it, through ‘augmentation’ and ‘diminution’ . . .”113 Vuillermoz especially praised Antoine’s films for their “subtleties and ingenuities of editing.” Le Coupable (1917), for instance, he described as a symphony (not wholly successful) in which the images “of the great, grim maternal city” of Paris created an accompaniment of “deep and moving bass chords” to the “brave, noble melody” of the drama.114 Here Vuillermoz seemed to assume that the sense or impression of a shot or sequence of shots was sustained through a scene just as a note or chord once struck could last through several bars of music. Similarly, Griffith’s Intolerance overcame its many narrative and philosophical defects as a cinegraphic composition of visual rhythm. Griffith knew instinctively, he wrote, how “to harmonize his plastic phrases, to calculate their melodic curve, their echoes, and their breaks”; thus “his luminous phrases possessed a deliberate trajectory, and their cadence was timed to the exact second.”115 It was this visual rhythm and its emotional effect, Vuillermoz argued, as Survage had just before the war, that worked on the spectator as much as, if not more than, the logical and emotional development of a particular film narrative. And he took to designating the filmmaker, in terms later appropriated by Abel Gance and others, as a composer or conductor of “symphonies of light.”116
Several others modes of organization emerged that could also work in tandem with narrative. Contradicting some of his previous advocacy positions, Delluc, for instance, demanded a “lyrical” form of film, “stylized in its material form and symbolic in its subject.”117 A central idea should govern the shape of such a film, of course, but it would be articulated symbolically or connotatively through the photogenic becoming cinematic—that is, being deployed systematically over the course of a film. Although only sketchily developed, some sense of what Delluc meant can be gathered from his reviews of Baroncelli, Gance, and L’Herbier films. Baroncelli’s Le Roi de la mer he criticized for failing “to stress the symbolic note”—there were not enough exterior images of Far East and Far West harbors regularly inserted to set off and emphasize the intimate scenes in the single interior space.118 What Vuillermoz considered as musical counterpoint in Antoine, Delluc conceived as symbolic or poetic counterpoint in Baroncelli. The two critics clashed interestingly—almost as classical versus modern—on the specifics of the symbolic process in Gance’s La Dixième Symphonie. Whereas Vuillermoz praised the symbolic “correspondance” between the film’s “dream landscapes” and the music of the hero’s symphony (making visible “the music of the soul”), Delluc criticized this as a retrograde rhetorical strategy in which Gance overlaid conventional symbolic figures (drawn from literature and art) onto images from which emanated a “natural” photogénie.119 By contrast, despite the slightness of its story and the weakness of its actors, Delluc praised L’Herbier’s Rose-France for the fluid poetic harmony of its framing and editing patterns.120 This praise reciprocated L’Herbier’s own conversion, at the end of “Hermès et le silence,” to a similar conception of “lyrical” or “symbolic” cinema grounded in the factual, which he shored up with the help of the democratic spirit of Walt Whitman and the pragmatism of William James, filtered through his characteristic erudite palimpsest of discourses.121
This “synthetic” film form—with its indexical and symbolic “language,” its parallel or counterpointed narrative and symbolic trajectories— constituted one solution, as Delluc and others saw it (redefining Canudo), to the problem of creating a cinema that would appeal to both a mass and elite audience. Apollinaire’s famous speech at the Theatre de Vieux-Colombier, on 26 November 1917, in which he encouraged his fellow poets to work in the cinema, may well have kicked off a concerted effort by a loosely related group of writers to produce just such a film form.122 In collaboration with André Billy, Apollinaire himself was then finishing up an original scenario, La Bréhatine, whose melodramatic storyline catered to a recent fad for “Breton” films.123 Philippe Soupault soon began to experiment in writing short scenarios and a hybrid form of cinematic poetry, one of which, “Indifference,” was published in SIC, January 1918.124 In response to what seemed to be French film industry resistance—the Apollinaire-Billy and Soupault scripts remained unfilmed; L’Herbier’s poetic script for Mercanton and Hervil’s Le Torrent (1917) was much changed in production—Delluc suggested that scenarios evidencing an unusual degree of “lyricism” ought to be published as a new kind of literary text.125 And he himself inaugurated the practice, in the spring of 1918, by having Le Film publish L’Herbier’s original scenario for Mercanton and Hervil’s Bouclette (1918) and Gance’s initial draft of a scenario for J’Accuse (1919).126 Shortly thereafter, when they, too, ran into problems with film industry rejections, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Albert-Birot, and Jules Romains all published original film scripts as a new form of prose narrative.127 In contrast to the popular films racontés or ciné-romans, which tended to subdue and stabilize a film’s sequence of images and close off its meaning, these scenarios constituted a new textual form of play in which the writers sought to recover and redeploy, in verbal language, what they most admired in the cinema—the transformation of the ordinary and the everyday through surprising juxtapositions and marvelous metamorphoses.128
Inklings of an exclusively poetic composition in the cinema were evident in Aragon and Reverdy, who mused briefly on the implications of juxtaposing disparate images.129 But it was Vuillermoz, strangely enough, who first articulated the idea of a radical collage/montage construction most clearly. Again, in one of his initial columns, he singled out, explicitly for poets, one of the most marvelous features of the cinema. “This ability to juxtapose, within several seconds, on the same luminous screen, images which generally are isolated in time or space, this power (hitherto reserved to the human imagination) to leap from one end of the universe to the other, to draw together antipodes, to mesh thoughts far removed from one another, to compose, as one fancies, a ceaselessly changing mosaic out of millions of scattered facets of the tangible world . . . all this could permit a poet to realize his most ambitious dreams. . . .”130 And in his review of Antoine’s Les Frères corses, Vuillermoz even suggested that the rapid, multiple, shifting combinations and juxtapositions of images on film might function as a visual form of Apollinaire’s simultanéism in poetry.131 As an exclusive means of organization for film, the collage aesthetic of prewar French poetry could synthesize the isolated, disparate, transformed fragments of everyday life and give pattern to their disruptive power through the montage of a “simultaneous present.” Vuillermoz himself unexpectedly dropped this idea to exploit his musical analogy and actually regressed to a rather conventional sense of the symbolic. But simultaneism reappeared just after the war in texts by Cocteau and Cendrars. Both advocated the exploitation of certain unique features of film—for instance, varied perspectives, variable speed recording, and rapid cutting—as essential rhythmic components of the creation of a “simultaneist poetry” in the cinema.132 And Cendrars’s visionary meditation on the new art read like an attempt to fuse film and poetry into a single collage form of discourse. From there it was only a short step to the earliest writings of Jean Epstein.
Finally, the aesthetic of a formal or “plastic” composition, which Survage had pioneered before the war, reemerged in the postwar writings of Gromaire and Albert-Birot.133 Here the raw material of the cinema lay in the graphic elements of the image or shot—as a “plastic sign”—and in the rhythmic ordering of those elements.134 A painter who saw himself as the locus of Impressionist, Futurist, and Cubist influences, Gromaire developed this position with unusual thoroughness, to the point of celebrating the cinema as an autonomous art. Each shot or image would function as an abstraction synthesizing the elements of color (light), line and form, and movement. Through the sequential combination, superimposition, and juxtaposition of shots in the editing, however, the whole film would operate as an analytical structure of unexpected “plastic” discoveries or surprises. To produce this kind of cinema, Albert-Birot recommended a strategy that owed a good deal to Gustave Flaubert and would gain wide currency in the 1920s. The filmmaker would choose the most banal subject possible in order to foreground and explore such features as superimposition, slow motion, fast motion, and rapid cutting. While Gromaire never advocated a film form that was completely abstract—like his colleagues, he always tied it to the representation of reality, to narrative, and to human emotion—he did suggest a number of unique strategies to exploit the plastic” elements of the cinema. These ranged from a rather conventional symbolic condensation of King Lear to special animated cartoons as well as projects that combined photographs and drawings or paintings—a different way of relating the real and the stylized. In the end, his exuberant playfulness and freewheeling speculation led Gromaire, like Delluc (in substance if not in tone), to imagine this as a means of creating a rich and beautiful as well as useful art for the masses.
Several things should be clear from this synoptic analysis of French writings on the cinema during the war years. Certainly, Vuillermoz, Delluc, and, to a lesser extent, Diamant-Berger established and directed the basic parameters of discussion. And they did so in response to a whole series of American films as well as to selected works by Antoine, Gance, Baroncelli, Roussel, and L’Herbier. Despite, or perhaps because of, his high-art stance, Vuillermoz advanced and defended a number of key concepts: the cinema was an expressive medium for the subjective (whether the inner life of a fictional character or that of the filmmaker himself); and it was a construction that could be organized or orchestrated (in parallel with its narrative development) as a poetic mosaic, or, more importantly for him, as a musical composition. While he shared some of Vuillermoz’s positions, Delluc played the advocate for several different ideas. The cinema was a photogenic or revelatory medium of absorption and defamiliarization, whether it focused on inanimate objects, faces, or landscapes—and the latter representation he came to celebrate as impressionism. At the same time, it was a construction in which the photogenie of the image (symbolic as well as indexical, connotative as well as denotative) could be deployed poetically in parallel with the narrative. A number of others writers—especially Aragon, Cendrars, and Gromaire—then extended those parameters to include modernist conceptions of the cinema as an exclusively poetic or plastic composition. Against Diamant-Berger’s conception of a French variant on the American narrative cinema, consequently, there emerged a broad spectrum of possible French forms of both a narrative and a non-narrative cinema. Although the writers generally eschewed questioning the basic economic structure of the film industry as well as advocating any explicit social commitment, this spectrum of theoretical speculation did stand more or less in opposition to the Classical Renaissance tendency, which, by then, was dominating French culture, and certainly evidenced a valiant struggle to include the cinema within the most “advanced” thinking going on in the arts. French writing on the cinema during and after the war, therefore, seems to have put in place much of the conceptual basis for the production and exhibition practices of the French avant-garde during the 1920s.
1. Claude Beilanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, and Fernand Terrou, Histoire générale de la presse française, vol. 3, De 1871 à 1940 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1972), 408–23.
2. Ciné-Journal resumed publication on a biweekly basis and then returned to a weekly format in October 1915.
3. G.-Michel Coissac, “Le Cinématographe: Son passé, son présent, son avenir,” Annuaire général de la cinématographie française et étrangère (Paris: Ciné-Journal, 1918), 457–507.
4. La Renaissance du livre was one of the more prominent publishing houses in Paris at the time. Established in 1893, it had recently become a “mass market” firm with its Modern Bibliothèque and Livre Populaire series. Bernard Grasset had entered publishing just ten years before Delluc’s book appeared, and his novels were already winning Prix Goncourt awards by 1911 and 1912. See André Billy, L’Epoque contemporaine, 1905–1930 (Paris: Jules Tallandier, 1956), 129–30; and Regis Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France, trans. David Macey (London: New Left Books, 1981), 61, 64–66.
5. For information on the importation of American films into France during the war, see Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 10–12, and Kristin Thompson, Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907–1934 (London: British Film Institute, 1985), 71–74, 85–90.
6. The circulation figures for these three dailies, in November 1917, were as follows: Le Gaulois, 22,000; Excelsior, 132,000; Le Temps, 58,500—Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, vol. 3, 428.
7. Emile Vuillermoz had been a student, along with Maurice Ravel, of the composer, Gabriel Fauré, whose biography he would later write. In 1910, he helped found the Société musicale indépendente and edited the society’s journal of music criticism.
8. The change in Le Film also occurred in the context of several major cultural events in Paris in the spring and summer of 1917—for example, the opening of the Cocteau-Picasso-Satie-Diaghilev ballet, Parade, and Apollinaire’s play, Les Mamelles de Tirésias—as well as in the context of Allied military failures on the Somne and in Champagne in the spring and of heightened Action française campaigns against suspected German collaborators—for example, the pacifist Bonnet rouge and Miguel Vigo-Almereyda (who was arrested and died mysteriously in August 1917).
9. In November 1917, Paris-Midi had a circulation of just 19,000—Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, vol. 3, 428. Jean Cocteau’s “Carte blanche” column in Paris-Midi also occasionally focused on the cinema.
10. Action française reached a peak circulation of 156,000 in November 1917, largely through Léon Daudet’s virulent attacks on German spies and collaborators within France. Those who admired the paper at the time, and especially the work of Charles Maurras, included Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Guillaume Apollinaire. See Bellanger et al., Histoire générale de la presse française, vol. 3, 428; Eugen Weber. Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), 111; and Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels en France, de l’Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986), 70.
11. For further information on the French ciné-roman, see Christian Bosséno, “Le Cinéma et la presse (II),” La Revue du cinéma: Image et son, 342 (September 1979), 94–97; Alain and Odette Virmaux, Le Ciné-roman: Un genre nouveau (Paris: Edilig, 1983), 13–42; and Richard Abel, “Exploring the Discursive Field of the Surrealist Film Scenario Text,” Dadal Surrealism, 15 (1986), 58–71.
12. Les Mystères de New York was serialized by Pierre Decourcelle (1856–1926) and published in Le Matin, beginning on 27 November 1915, each chapter coming one week in advance of the film’s twenty-two weekly episodes. Georges Dureau was quite concerned about the confusion that might be caused by this mixture of forms, in “Genre nouveau,” Ciné-Journal, 323 (22 October 1915), 3–4. By contrast, Guillaume Danvers saw Les Mystères de New York as a turning point for the serial format, in “Nouveau Spectacle,” Ciné-Journal, 330 (11 December 1915), 15, 18. Both Judex and Chantecoq were written by Arthur Bernède. The ciné-roman series included Romans-Cinémas (La Renaissance du livre), Cinéma-Bibliothèque (Jules Tallandier), and Les Grands Films (Arthème Fayard).
13. See Abel, French Cinema, 9–14.
14. Henri Diamant-Berger, “Une Enquête: La crise du film français,” Le Film, 51 (5 March 1917), 3–7; Diamant-Berger, “Une Enquête,” Le Film, 52 (12 March 1917), 6–8, 10; Diamant-Berger, “Une Enquête,” Le Film, 53 (19 March 1917), 6, 8; Diamant-Berger, “Une Enquête,” Le Film, 55 (2 April 1917), 3–6, 9–10. Diamant-Berger first took note of problems in the French film industry in “La Routine,” Le Film, 7 (13 May 1916), 5, and in “L’Inertie,” Le Film, 8 (20 May 1916), 5. See, also, the results of a survey by Henri Lapauze’s journal, La Renaissance, reprinted by Henri Coûtant as “Une Enquête,” Ciné-Journal, 375 (21 October 1916), 3–4.
According to Georges Sadoul, the percentage of French films was much smaller than that of American films for all those released in France between 1917 and 1919—Sadoul, Histoire générale du cinéma, vol. 4, (Paris: Denoël, 1974), 51. According to Kristin Thompson, French films still maintained a slight edge over the American films, if one looks only at the monthly figures for December 1916 and January 1917—Thompson, Exporting Entertainment, 88. However, if one looks at the figures for films released in March 1917, French films totaled 20,712 meters while American films totaled 25,672 meters—reported in Le Film, 56 (9 April 1917), 16.
15. Charles Pathé, “Etude sur l’évolution de l’industrie cinématographique française,” Le Film, 119 (24 June 1918), 6, 8, and 120 (1 July 1918), 8, 10, 12, 14. Henri Diamant-Berger, “Pour sauver le film français,” Le Film, 130 (9 September 1918), 5–8.
16. Henri Diamant-Berger, “Pour sauver le film français,” Le Film, 150 (29 January 1919), 5–8; 151 (4 February 1919), 5–7; 152 (9 February 1919), 5–8; 153 (16 February 1919)m 5–9; 154 (23 February 1919), 5–6, 8, 10; 156 (9 March 1919), 5–8; 157(16 March 1919), 5–6, 8; 158 (23 March 1919), 5–8, 10.
17. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (16 April 1917), 3; Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (15 August 1917), 3; Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: Espoirs,” Le Temps (2 December 1917), 3; Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: Désertion,” Le Temps (20 April 1918), 3; Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: La crise,” Le Temps (15 May 1918), 3.
18. Henri Diamant-Berger, “La Censure,” Le Film, 15 (8 July 1916), 5; René Jeanne and Charles Ford, Le Cinéma et la presse, 1896–1960 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1961), 201–4. Paul Leglise, Histoire de la politique du cinéma français: Le cinéma et la IIIe République (Paris: Pierre Lherminier, 1970), 27–28, 30–33.
19. See, for instance, the exchange of letters between Diamant-Berger and Léon Brézil-lon, president of the Exhibitors Association, in Le Film, 33 (28 October 1916). For a summary of the attacks on the cinema that supported the censorship practices, see Betrand de Laflotte, Les Films démoralisateurs de l’enfance: Rapport présenté au comité de défense des enfants traduits en justice (Paris, 1917), and Edouard Pouplain, Contre le cinéma, école du vice et du crime. Pour le cinéma, école d’éducation, moralization et vulgarisation (Besançon, 1917).
20. G.-Michel Coissac, Histoire du cinématographe: De ses origines jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Cinéopse, 1925), 435–36. Leglise, Histoire de la politique du cinéma français, 10, 61–67.
21. Diamant-Berger, Le Cinéma (Paris: La Renaissance du livre, 1919) 247–48. See, also, Marcel Lapierre, Les Cent Visages du cinéma (Paris: Grasset, 1948), 139–40. Birth of a Nation apparently was scheduled to be screened at the Casino de Paris sometime in the fall of 1916—“Echos,” Ciné-Journal, 370 (16 September 1916), 7. Intolerance was actually previewed within the industry in October 1917—“Un Grand Film,” Ciné-Journal, 84 (22 October 1917), 5.
22. Diamant-Berger, Le Cinéma, 241–49.
23. See, also, Abel Gance’s unpublished note, from 1918, on an international, socialist cinema—Roger Icart, Abel Gance ou Le Prométhée foudroyé (Lausanne: L’Age d’homme, 1983), 105.
24. Guillaume Apollinaire, “L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes,” Mercure de France, 491 (1 December 1918), trans. Roger Shattuck, in Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, ed. Shattuck (New York: New Directions, 1971), 228–30.
25. Louis Delluc, “La Beauté au cinéma,” Le Film, 73 (6 August 1917), 4–5; Louis Del-luc, “Antoine travaille,” Le Film, 75 (20 August 1917), 7.
26. Léon Daudet, “Le Cinéma,” Action française (2 May 1916), reprinted in Jacques Dys-sord, “En Marge du cinéma,” Mercure de France (16 August 1916), 665, 672. This reprinting suggests how ideologically close Mercure de France came to Action française during the war period—Weber, Action Française, 111.
27. Marcel Gromaire, “Idées d’un peintre sur le cinéma,” Le Crapouillot (1 April-26 June 1919), reprinted in Marcel L’Herbier, éd., Intelligence du cinématographe (Paris: Corréa, 1946), 239–49.
28. Paul Souday, “Au Cinéma,” Le Temps (6 September 1916), 1. For a thorough analysis of this Classical Renaissance in French art, see Kenneth Eric Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Great War and French Art, 1914–1925 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, Inc., 1981), 109–71. For a description of its beginnings prior to the war, see Billy, L’Epoque contemporaine, 22–32; and Ory and Sirinelli, Les Intellectuels en France, 51–60.
29. Paul Souday, “Bergsonisme et le cinéma,” Le Film, 84 (15 October 1917), 9–10.
30. Marcel L’Herbier, “Hermès et le silence,” Le Film, 110–111 (29 April 1918), 7–12. L’Herbier published a preliminary sketch of this essay as “La France et l’art muet,” Le Film, 100(11 February 1918), 7–8.
31. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: Hermès et le silence,” Le Temps (23 February 1918), 3.
32. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (29 November 1916), 3.
33. Armand Bour, “L’Art du cinéma,” Le Film, 132 (23 September 1918), 12–14.
34. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: Intolerance,” Le Temps (4 June 1919), 3. Despite his condescension, Vuillermoz was one of the few critics to notice the significance of the new eight-hour workday, which was instituted just after the war.
35. For an analysis of Gabriel Tarde’s social theories, see Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 342–84.
36. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (25 April 1917), 3. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (27 January 1918), 3.
37. Louis Delluc, “Illusion et illusions,” Le Film, 68 (25 June 1917), 5–6. Louis Delluc, “Les Mauvais Français,” Le Film, 84(15 October 1917), 10–12.
38. Philippe Soupault, “The USA Cinema,” Broom, 5 (September 1923), 65–69. The French version of this essay appeared as “Le Cinéma USA” in Théâtre et Comoedia illustré, 26 (15 January 1924).
39. Louis Delluc, “Le Cinquième Art,” Le Film, 113 (13 May 1918), 7–8. The reference to Octave Mirbeau in Delluc’s “La Foule,” Paris-Midi (24 August 1918), suggests that the young critic was approaching the mass audience of the cinema much as Mirbeau might have done. For an analysis of Mirbeau’s anarchism in relation to his writing and of his polemical work during the Dreyfus Affair, see Eugenia W. Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform: France and Belgium, 1885–1898 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 146–56, 202–6.
40. Louis Delluc, “Abel Gance après La Zone delà mort,” Le Film, 85 (22 October 1917),
41. Louis Delluc, “La Foule,” Paris-Midi (24 August 1918), 2. Delluc’s attitude toward the working-class cinema audiences of Paris contrasts sharply with the crudely behavioristic attitude of Lev Kuleshov in Moscow—see Kuleshov on Film, ed. Ronald Levaco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 44–45. To be sure, Delluc did not hold consistently to this point—for instance, he roundly condemned the Feuillade and Pathé-Exchange serials, which nearly always attracted a mass audience in France.
42. Louis Delluc, “La Foule devant l’écran,” Photogénie (Paris: de Brunoff, 1920), 120.
43. For an analysis of Charles Gide’s consumer cooperative movement, see Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds, 287–310. Consumer cooperatives were also important to E. Bernstein, an influential theorist of the German Socialist Democratic Party at the turn of the century—see Lucio Colletti, “Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International,” From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 92–93
44. Jacques de Baroncelli, “Pantomime, musique, cinéma,” Ciné-Journal, 329 (4 December 1915), 41–43.
45. Diamant-Berger, “La Routine,” 5. Cf. Henri Diamant-Berger, “La Vérité en marche,” Le Film, 93 (17–24 December 1917), 7–10.
46. Colette, “Cinéma: For faiture,” Excelsior (7 August 1916), reprinted in Alain and Odette Virmaux, ed., Colette au cinéma (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), 35–38. Cf. “Echos: Forfaiture,” Ciné-Journal, 364 (5 August 1916), 19.
47. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (23 November 1916), 3.
48. See, for instance, Guillaume Danvers, “Rétrospectives,” Ciné-Journal, 324 (30 October 1915), 23, 27, and Henri Diamant-Berger, “La Hausse des locations,” Le Film, 82 (8 October 1917), 3–4.
49. Delluc, “Le Cinquième Art,” 8.
50. Delluc, “Les Mauvais Français,” 11.
51. Guillaume Danvers, “Une Opinion: Problème de la nationalité d’un film, comment la définir,” Le Film, 9 (22 May 1916), 6–7. Apollinaire, “L’Esprit nouveau et les poètes,” 228.
52. The titles and credits of Pathé’s wartime production can be found in the weekly issues of Pathé-Journal, Ciné-Journal, and Le Film. There is at least one exception that surveys the critics and supporters of the police serial—H. C., “La Question dominante: Le bon et mauvais cinéma,” Ciné-Journal, 351 (6 May 1916), 3–4, 9.
53. See, for instance, Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (21 February 1917),
54. Gromaire, “Idées d’un peintre sur le cinéma,” 239–40.
55. See, especially, Diamant-Berger, “Le Scénario,” Le Cinéma, 35–53, and Charles Pathé, “Etude sur l’évolution de l’industrie cinématographique française,” (24 June 1918), 6–8, and (1 July 1918), 8, 10, 12, 14. Cf. Abel Gance’s unpublished report on “The Producer,” presumably written in 1917—Norman King, Abel Gance: A Politics of Spectacle (London: British Film Institute, 1984), 58–61.
56. Throughout the war period, the brief reviews of the weekly film previews in Le Film always called attention to the author of the scenario but rarely to the director.
57. Diamant-Berger, “Le Scenario,” 37.
58. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: La Dixième Symphonie,” Le Temps (6 November 1918), 3. Cf. Armand Bour, “Pour la suprématie du scénario,” Le Film, 98 (28 January 1918), 7–8, 12–13.
59. Louis Delluc, “Cinéma,” Paris-Midi (2 February 1919), 2, and (12 May 1919), 2. Yet Delluc could contradict himself, as in his emphasis on the scriptwriter in “Notes pour moi,” Le Film, 91 (3 December 1917), 12. And Vuillermoz could occasionally take an au-teurist position, as when he explained how ten different filmmakers—having the same script, actors, and decors—could produce ten very different films, in “Devant l’écran: Hermès et le silence,” 3.
60. Henri Diamant-Berger, “Echos,” Le Film, 90 (3 December 1917), 15. Coissac, Histoire du cinématographe, 443.
61. Pathé first articulated his concern about a “crisis of the scenario” in response to an inquiry by Diamant-Berger in Le Film, 52 (5 March 1917), 4–6. One sign of these two men’s close ties is that Diamant-Berger became an independent director-producer in 1919, with the encouragement and financial support of Pathé.
62. Vuillermoz revealed his own elitist stance when he objected strenuously to Pathé’s recommendations to eliminate poets and artists as major characters in French films—“Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (30 June 1918), 3.
63. Diamant-Berger, “Le Filmage,” Le Cinéma, 145–68. The best analysis of the development of the classical narrative continuity system in the American cinema can be found in Kristin Thompson, “The Formulation of the Classical Style, 1909–1928,” The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 157–240.
64. Diamant-Berger’s mainstream “theory” of French narrative cinema bears some similarity to that of the juste milieu painters of the nineteenth-century, whose primary goal was “the instant readability of the image”—see Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (New York: Vintage, 1984), 116–17, 209.
65. Colette, “La Critique des films,” Le Film, 64 (28 May 1917), 6.
66. Armand Bour, “L’Art du cinéma,” 14.
67. André Antoine, “Propos sur le cinématographe,” Le Film, 166 (December 1919). Cf. André Antoine, “L’Avenir du cinéma,” Lectures pour tous (December 1919), trans. Stuart Liebman, in Framework, 24 (Spring 1984), 45–52. For a slightly different, but more extensive analysis of Antoine, from which I have borrowed several ideas, see Stuart Liebman, “André Antoine’s Film Theory,” Framework, 24 (Spring 1984), 33–43. See, also, Abel, French Cinema, 95–97.
68. For information on the mobile electrical generator, see “Le Monde du cinéma,” Ciné-pour-tous, 7 (1 October 1919), 2; “Le Studio ambulent de Mercanton,” Le Journal du Ciné-Club, 23 (18 June 1920), 3; and “La Réalisation—Le décor,” Ciné-pour-tous, 52 (5 November 1920), 3.
69. Vuillermoz uses almost exactly the same language in one of his first columns, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (27 December 1916), 3. As evidenced in his films, La Terre (1919) and La Hirondelle et la mésange (1920/1984), Antoine tended to use at least two cameras set at ninety-degree angles to one another in order to cover a scene.
70. Delluc, “Antoine travaille,” 5, 7; Louis Delluc, “Notes pour moi,” Le Film, 102 (25 February 1918), 12–13.
71. See, for instance, Louis Delluc, “Lettre française à Thomas Ince, compositeur des films,” Le Film, 119 (24 June 1918), 11–15. Like most French writers, Delluc assumed mistakenly that Ince directed the films associated with his name; yet on most of them he was actually the producer. See, also, Louis Delluc, “Cinema: The Outlaw and His Wife,” Paris-Midi (1 o November 1919), 2.
72. Jacques de Baroncelli was one of the first to posit an ideal film form that avoided intertitles—“Les Sous-titres sont-ils nécessaires?” Ciné-Journal, 358 (24 June 1916), 46, 48.
73. Louis Delluc, “Notes pour moi,” Le Film, 102 (23 February 1918), 12.
74. Louis Delluc, “Notes pour moi,” Le Film, 98 (28 January 1918), 16.
75. Behind Delluc’s position probably lay the early Romantic artists’ ambition of achieving “immediacy” in a form of expression “directly understandable without convention and without previous knowledge of a tradition”—Rosen and Zerner, Romanticism and Realism, 39–40. This conception of film narrative provided the basis for several of Delluc’s own films: La Fête espagnole (1920), Fièvre (1921), and Le Chemin d’Ernoa (1921).
76. Daudet, “Le Cinéma,” 672.
77. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: Les Frères corses,” Le Temps (7 February 1917), 3.
78. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (6 June 1917), 3.
79. Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: La Dixième Symphonie,” 3.
80. Marcel L’Herbier, “Rose-France,” Comoedia illustré (5 December 1919), reprinted in Noël Burch, Marcel L’Herbier [Pans: Seghers, 1973), 60–61.
81. See, especially, André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographie Image,” Problèmes de la peinture (1945), trans. Hugh Gray, in Bazin, What Is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 9–16, and Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” Age nouveau, 92 (July 1955), trans. Hugh Gray, in Bazin, What Is Cinema? 35–37.
82. Recent influential studies on the distinction between narration and description include Gérard Genette, “Frontiers of Narrative” [1966], Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Ann Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 127–44; Roland Barthes, SIZ [1970], trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974); and Svetlana Alpers, “Describe or Narrate? A Problem in Realistic Representation,” New Literary History, 8 (Autumn 1976), 15–41.
83. For an important study of the cognitive power of representation, see Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Rosen and Zerner take up this idea as well and provide an important link between seventeenth-century Dutch painting and nineteenth-century French Realism in the work of the art critic, “Théophile Thoré—Romanticism and Realism, 192–202.
84. As Edward Branigan argues, this double conception of the camera provides a key construct for André Bazin’s film theory—“What Is a Camera?” Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices, ed. Patricia Mellencamp and Philip Rosen (Washington, D.C.: American Film Institute, 1984), 91–93.
85. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 71–160, but especially 78, 103–5, 130–34.
86. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 78.
87. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: Les initiés,” Le Temps (15 December 1917), 3.
88. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (23 May 1917), 3.
89. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (10 October 1917), 3. Vuillermoz is quoting from Bergson’s Matière et mémoire (1905).
90. Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: Hermès et le silence,” 3.
91. Marcel L’Herbier, “Suggestions pour illustrer et défendre une conception française du cinématographe,” Rose-France pamphlet (February 1919), reprinted in Burch, Marcel L’Herbier, 62.
92. Delluc, “La Beauté au cinéma,” 4.
93. Delluc, “La Beauté au cinéma,” 5. See, also, Louis Delluc, “L’Expression et Charlie Chaplin,” Le Film, 106–107 (2 April 1918), 48, 50–54; Delluc, “Cinéma: Grand Frère,” Paris-Midi (14 February 1919), 2; and Delluc, “Cinéma: Grand Frère,” Paris-Midi (17 February 1919), 2. In “The Face of Garbo,” Roland Barthes rewrites Delluc with startlingly little change—Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 56—
94. Recently, Thomas Elsaesser hypothesized that a deeply ambiguous male gaze or, rather, image of the male gaze (as opposed to point-of-view shots), constituted a characteristic feature of 1920s German cinema—Elsaesser, “Weimar Cinema as a Specific Form of (Inter-)Textuality: Sexual Ambiguity and the Attenuation of the Hermeneutic and Pro-aretic Codes of Action,” paper presented at the Society for Cinema Studies Conference, New York University, 14 June 1985. See, also, Miriam Hansen, “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship,” Cinema Journal, 25 (Summer 1986), 6–32. The subject of the male look in French and German silent cinema would seem to be well worth further examination.
95. Here again Delluc’s thinking is rooted in the early nineteenth-century Romantic artists’ desire to let nature itself “speak,” to make “pure landscape” carry the weight and full symbolic meaning traditionally given to historical (narrative) painting—Rosen and Zerner, Romanticism and Realism, 51–58.
96. Louis Delluc, “Notes pour moi,” Le Film, 116 (3 June 1918), 14, 16.
97. Louis Delluc, “Cinéma,” Paris-Midi (1 February 1919), 2. Louis Delluc, “Cinéma,” Paris-Midi (2 February 1919), 2. The Impressionists, it might be recalled, were the first to attach as much importance to the “study” or “sketch” as to the “finished work.” In a related vein, someone might profitably examine how the use of oval masks for landscape shots in French silent films can be related to the “Romantic vignette” in nineteenth-century landscape lithographs—Rosen and Zerner, Romanticism and Realism, 79–81, 93–96.
98. Delluc, “Cinéma: The Outlaw and His Wife,” 2.
99. For the standard study of the principles of French Realism that lie behind Delluc’s formulation, see Linda Nochlin, Realism (New York: Penguin, 1971). For Delluc’s probable sources in French Realism and Flaubert, see Rosen and Zerner, Romanticism and Realism, 143–50. For a possible connection between Delluc and Diderot, see Fried’s analysis of Diderot’s art criticism in Absorption and Theatricality, 71–160.
100. Besides the two Bazin essays previously noted, see Jean Mitry, Esthétique et psychologie du cinéma, vol. 1 (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1963). For a summary analysis of the “raw material” of Mitry’s theory, see Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 188–92. As Ian Christie suggests, the concept of photogénie also had an impact on early Russian film theory—Ian Christie, “French Avant-Garde Film in the Twenties: From ‘Specificity’ to Surrealism,” Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film, 1910-1973 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1979), 38. See, especially, Boris Eikhenbaum, “Problems of Cine-Stylistics” [1927], trans. Richard Sherwood in The Poetics of Cinema (Oxford: RPT Publications, 1982), 5–18.
101. Louis Delluc, “Cinéma,” Paris-Midi (5 March 1919), 2. Here, as elsewhere, Delluc essentially redefines Canudo’s earlier conception of the “real” and the “symbolic.”
102. Colette, “La Critique des films,” Le Film, 66 (4 June 1917), 4; Philippe Soupault, “Note 1 sur le cinéma,” SIC, 25 (January 1918), 3. Colette’s language here echoes an unpublished note of Abel Gance’s from November 1915—Icart, Abel Gance, 58. This attribution of value, power, and newness to the real and the everyday in particular had a precedent in Camille Mauclair and the prewar Decorative Arts Reform Movement—see Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds, 203–6.
103. Jean Cocteau, “Carte blanche,” Paris-Midi (28 April 1919), reprinted in Cocteau, Poésie Critique (Paris: Editions des quatre vents, 1945), 19.
104. This line of thinking coincides with (or perhaps follows) that articulated in “The Futurist Cinema,” first published in L’Italia Futurista (15 November 1916), trans. R. W. Flint, in Umbro Apollonio’s Futurist Manifestoes (New York: Viking, 1973), 208. Paradoxically, the surprise and “mythologizing” effect of photogénie reappears much later in Roland Barthes’ concept of the punctum in photography—see Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 32–38.
105. Louis Delluc, “Notes pour moi,” Le Film, 98 (28 January 1918), 16.
106. Louis Delluc, “Cinema et cie: Douglas Fairbanks,” Paris-Midi (1 June 1918), 2. Again, Delluc’s concept of modern beauty may have had a precedent in Camille Mauclair— see Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds, 185–93.
107. Louis Aragon, “Du Décor,” Le Film, 131 (16 September 1918), 9. Max Jacob expresses this idea in embryo form in “Théâtre et cinéma,” Nord-Sud, 12 (February 1918), 10.
108. Delluc, “Cinéma: Grand Frère,” 2.
109. Aragon, “Du Décor,” 10.
110. Aragon’s novel, Le Paysan de Paris (1926), would rely heavily on such transformations of everyday image-objects, especially those found in the shopping arcade of the Passage de l’Opéra, its principal setting.
111. Pierre Reverdy, “Cinématographe,” Nord-Sud, 16 (October 1918), 7.
112. See, for instance, Baroncelli, “Pantomime, musique, cinéma,” 42; Guillaume Dan-vers, “Une Idée: Essai de synchronisme cinématographique musical,” Le Film, 12 (17 June 1916), 6; and Colette, “Cinéma: Forfaiture” 2.
113. Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran, Le Temps (29 November 1916), 3.
114. Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (10 October 1917), 3.
115. Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: Intolerance,” 3.
116. Emile Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (25 April 1917), 3. Cf. Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: La Dixième Symphonie,” 3.
117. Louis Delluc, “Notes pour moi,” Le Film, 94(31 December 1917), 12.
118. Louis Delluc, “Accessoires,” Le Film, 69 (9 July 1917), 9–10.
119. Delluc, “Notes pour moi,” LeFilm, 99(4February 1918), 13; Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran: La Dixième Symphonie,” 3.
120. Louis Delluc, “Cinéma,” Paris-Midi (23 February 1919), 2, and (9 July 1919), 2.
121. L’Herbier, “Hermès et le silence,” 10–12.
122. Apollinaire’s speech was published a year later, shortly after his death, in Mercure de France, 491 (1 December 1918), 385–96.
123. Guillaume Apollinaire and André Billy, “La Bréhatine,” Archives des lettres modernes, 126 (1971), 75–96. For an analysis of this scenario, see Alain Virmaux, “La Bréhatine et le cinéma: Apollinaire en quête d’un langage neuf,” Archives des lettres modernes, 126 (1971), 97–117.
124. Soupault, “Note 1 sur le cinéma,” 4. Louis Delluc reprinted Soupault’s short scenario poem in Le Film, 101 (18 February 1918), 18–19. Delluc’s connection with the circle of young Dada-Surrealists who looked to Apollinaire for inspiration was such that he published Louis Aragon’s first poem, “Chariot sentimental,” Le Film, 105 (18 March 1918), 11, as well as Apollinaire’s short poem, “Avant le cinéma,” LeFilm, 135–36 (21 October 1918), 17. See, also, Soupault, “Une Vie de chien,” Littérature, 4 (June 1919), 24, and “Char-lot voyage,” Littérature, 6 (August 1919), 22.
125. Louis Delluc, “Notes pour moi,” Le Film, 94 (31 December 1917), 14. Delluc’s efforts were far more successful than anything that Edmond Benoit-Lévy’s short-lived “Ligue française du cinématographe” (which included older writers such as Edmond Rostand) ever did—see Henri Diamant-Berger, “Les Poètes et le cinéma,” Le Film, 112 (6 May 1918), 5–6; and Coissac, Histoire du cinématographe, 443.
126. Marcel L’Herbier, “Bouclette,” Le Film, 106–107 (2 April 1918), 75–94; Abel Gance,”)’ Accuse,” Le Film, 108–109(15 April 1918), 10–23.
127. Blaise Cendrars, La Fin du monde filmée par l’ange N.-D., composition en couleurs par Fernand Léger (Paris: Editions de la sirène, 1919). Pierre Albert-Birot, “2x2 = 1,” SIC, 49–50 (15–30 October 1919), 389–92. Jules Romains, “Donogoo-Tonka ou les miracles de la science,” Nouvelle Revue française, 74 (November 1919), 821–69, and 75 (December 1919), 1016–63. Fragments of Cendrars’s scenario had appeared earlier in La Caravane (October 1916) and in Mercure de France, 491 (1 December 1918), 419–30. Romains’s scenario was also published in book form by the Nouvelle Revue française in 1920.
128. For further information on these ciné-romans and scenarios, see Alain and Odette Virmaux, Le Ciné-roman: Un genre nouveau (Paris: Edilig, 1983), 13–42, and Abel, “Exploring the Discursive Field of the Surrealist Film Scenario Text,” 62–64.
129. Aragon, “Du Décor,” 8–10. Reverdy, “Cinématographe,” 7.
130. Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (29 November 1916), 3.
131. Vuillermoz, “Devant l’écran,” Le Temps (7 February 1917), 3.
132. Cocteau, “Carte blanche,” 19–20; Biaise Cendrars, “Modernités—Un nouveau art: Le cinéma,” La Rose rouge, 78 (12 June 1919), 108. For a brief analysis of how such a “simultaneist poetry” operates in Gance’s J’Accuse (1919), on which Cendrars worked as assistant director, see Abel, French Cinema, 299–300.
133. Gromaire, “Idées d’un peintre sur le cinéma,” 239–49; Pierre Albert-Birot, “Du Cinéma,” SIC, 49–50 (15–30 October 1919), 388–89. See also Blaise Cendrars, who summarized Survage’s prewar project (and misspelled his name) in “Modernités—De la parturition des couleurs,” La Rose rouge, 12 (17 July 1919), 188.
134. Here again the theoretical basis for this conception of film art can be traced to what Rosen and Zerner call “French avant-garde Realism”—Romanticism and Realism, 155.