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French Poetic Realist Cinema - Mccann
French Poetic Realist Cinema - Mccann
It was Leon Barsacq who once wrote, playfully and pertinently, that
film decor was 'a discreet character, yet also the director's most
devoted accomplice'.1 Barsacq clearly understood that set design could
not only define the film's visual ambience but was also an architecture
imbued with meaning. Decor is never a silent shell, standing detached
from the action, but instead possesses a powerful dramaturgical and
symbolic charge. The overall design of a film - how it organizes and
presents the various settings of its fictional world - is fundamental in
aligning the spectator's perspective. Nothing is ever superfluous, and
the figural dimensions of everyday decor fragments are foregrounded
so that a window or door may anthropomorphize into a powerful visual
signifier. This function of architecture-as-resonator is constantly
explored in 1930s French poetic realist cinema.2 Not only are key
works like Le Quai des brumes (Marcel Carne, 1938), La Bete humaine
(Jean Renoir, 1938) and Le Jour se leve (Marcel Carne, 1939) strongly
anchored to recognizable, usually urban, landscapes, they also rely
heavily on atmospheric milieux and spatial specifics to explore deeper
levels of meaning embedded in the narrative.
This particular strand of 1930s French decor is deemed inherently
performative, whereby a reciprocal transfer between individual and
decor acts as an interpretative matrix for each film. It is a decor that
'speaks', paraphrasing the narrative's concerns and architecturally
reflecting the emotions and mental states of the individuals inhabiting
them. Accustomed to painted backcloths and flimsy balsa-wood
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Jonn
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Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To
Desire Differently: Feminism and
the French Cinema (Urbana and
Chicago, IL: University of Illinois
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Winter 2004 Ben McCann 'A discreet character?' Action spaces and architectural specificity
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Action spaces
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action space; on the other, the director may seek to use a site-specific
action space, such as a staircase, window or bridge, to intensify the
narrative and aesthetic effect. What is certain in the films of this period
is that the action space concept tends to crystallize around enclosed
pockets of community rather than recognizable city symbols. Carne's
and Renoir's Paris is neither touristic nor monumental - there are very
few shots, for instance, of the Eiffel Tower or Arc de Triomphe in their
films - because both directors concentrate more intensely on the
constituent action spaces which metonymize the city and explore
human interaction within smaller spatial configurations. When the
viewer is granted privileged shots of Parisian landmarks, they are
generally brief pictorial imports or decouvertes that set the scene before
a dissolve into a smaller 'action space'. In Le Crime de Monsieur
Lange (Jean Renoir, 1936), when Charles (Maurice Baquet) cycles
back to the courtyard to deliver copies of 'Arizona Jim', there is the
image of the Arc de Triomphe in the background. The scene is simply
an establishing shot, and the fact that Charles is cycling away from it
implies the monument's narrative transience. For Carne and Renoir, the
cafe or courtyard is Paris, and by offering themselves up as the crucible
for the narrative, these action spaces imply a wider significance. To this
extent, it is the intimate, anti-touristic 'action space' which functions
metonymically for the universal urban experience.
Often in film, place can be less crucial to narrative pleasure than
character or action, but the key poetic realist films of the 1930s
foreground staircases, bridges, windows and work-places as the
privileged site of the personenvironment nexus. They assume
particular importance because they are both fundamental in sustaining
the film's reality effect and providing signifiers to various personal and
communal identities. Writing about the fusion of architecture and
community in Naples, Walter Benjamin concluded that:
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Winter 2004 Ben McCann 'A discreet character?' Action spaces and architectural specificity
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nights of the winding staircase after the murder, the resulting tunnel
image is an exact spatial reflection of Francois's vertiginous state of
mind. The staircase may suggest a notion of community, of linking
levels together, but this shot metaphorizes Francois's lack of social
cohesion. In a flashback sequence, the camera tracks down the side of
the staircase, following him as he walks out of his room to the front
door below. Francois may whistle contentedly here, making polite
conversation to the other residents, but by the time of the murder, the
staircase has assumed a kind of malignant presence, explicitly codified
by having Jules Berry roll hideously down it after he has been shot.
Doors play an equally definite role in the film. Not only is a door the
physical embodiment of characters' comings-and-goings, it is also a
prospective gateway, hinting at another entrance or exit, and another,
and so on until the architectural simplicity of one room transmutes into
an aggregate of spatial possibilities and layered depths. The murder is
committed behind a closed door, and when the police threaten to storm
Francois's room, he barricades himself in by pushing a large wardrobe
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Graham Greene writes how the best French directors had always
been those who possessed 'the trick of presenting a more intimate
reality'.10 This 'intimate reality' typifies poetic realist decor and, more
explicitly, the action space - a verisimilitudinous design scheme
grounded in architectural orthodoxy aligned to the accentuation of the
decor with personal flourishes and symbolic punctuations that allowed
for a stronger visual sense and a more profound viewing experience.
In poetic realism architecture acquires an emotional sense through a
kind of poetic process, whereby anonymous action spaces and common
settings are converted into a visual metaphor for the spectator. Cinema
and architecture (as all art) function as alluring projection screens for
our emotions. Even a building devoid of any intrinsic quality or worth
obliges us to lend our emotions and place them inside it. Because the
legibility of a city image is precisely what allows it to become a
powerful basis for affective associations, it follows that how the city
dweller interprets what is put before her/him will in turn determine
her/his relationship to that particular urban space. Likewise, what the
poetic realist set effects is the emotionalizing of architecture, where
basic design fragments are imbued with a capacity to evoke distinctive
audience responses. Walter Benjamin once argued that anyone who
concentrates on a work of art for long enough is absorbed by it - in
poetic realism, it is by concentrating on prosaic decor elements that the
spectator can absorb the stylistic and the decorative. This
harmonization of architecture-as-functionalism and architecture-asdecoration permitted 1930s poetic realist films to achieve this synthesis
of the banal (a building in a denuded urban space) and the poetic (that
building symbolizing a multitude of emotional correspondences), and
force the spectator to look at commonplace decor in a transformed
light.
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