Before becoming a major director of some of the masterpieces of French Poetic Realism in the late 1930s and 1940s, Marcel Carné (1906–96) began his career as a film critic. In his writings of the late 1920s and early 1930s, he strongly opposed the “filmed theater” of the early French sound films, and he advocated the use of the expressive possibilities of the mobile camera, which he called a “character of the drama.” In his aversion to “filmed theater,” he also famously argued for a cinema that would “go down into the streets,” focusing on the lives of ordinary people.
These issues are precisely at stake in Carné’s first film, which is a short documentary about Parisian workers spending their Sunday—their only day off—in the semi-rural suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne, which was known for its Guinguettes, the popular drinking establishments that also served as restaurants and dance venues. The film starts with images of trains, buses, and railway tracks, which are juxtaposed to shots of deserted Paris streets, empty factories, and typewriters packed in slipcovers. This sequence immediately makes clear that the once pastoral setting of Nogent is part of an industrialized and urbanized landscape—exactly the kind of landscape that had been celebrated time and time again in Impressionist painting. It is a natural landscape organized by industrial infrastructure and populated by the urban crowds who are swimming, rowing, canoeing, sailing, fishing, or biking. Children are playing, people are sitting or sleeping on the river banks, they are dancing, having a drink, or enjoying various forms of spectacle: street musicians, trapeze artists. Magazines and postcards are sold, a photographer makes portraits.
The film’s rhythmic editing evokes the joy and freedom of the escape to the countryside. Although the film does not contain the long takes found in Carné’s later films (his camera could take only six seconds of film at a time), it is marked by a mobile camera put on moving trains and boats. Striking point of view shots from a helter-skelter and unusual angles (such as the images of men diving) give the film a highly avant-garde touch in line with city symphonies and their evocations of the chaos of the great metropolitan centers.
Steven Jacobs
further reading
Carné, Marcel, “La Caméra, personnage du drame,” Cinémagazine 28 (12 July 1929), also included in Philippe Morisson (ed.), Marcel Carné: Ciné- Reporter (1929–34) (Grandvilliers: La Tour verte, 2016), 57–61.
Carné, Marcel, “Quand le cinéma descend dans les rues de Paris,” Cinémonde 85 (5 June 1930), also included in Philippe Morisson (ed.), Marcel Carné: Ciné- Reporter (1929–34) (Grandvilliers: La Tour verte, 2016), 88–95.
Carné, Marcel, “Quand le cinéma descendra-t-il dans la rue?” Cinémagazine 11 (November 1933), also included in Philippe Morisson (ed.), Marcel Carné: Ciné-Reporter (1929–34) (Grandvilliers: La Tour verte, 2016), 95–101. Translated into English as “When Will the Cinema go down into the Street?” in Richard Abel (ed.), French Film Theory and Criticism 1907–1939 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), Vol. II, 127–9.
Driskell, Jonathan, Marcel Carné (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).
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