French literature on screen

Homer B. Pettey, R. Barton Palmer

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526133168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: French Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection presents new essays in the complex field of French literary adaptation. Using a variety of textual and interpretive approaches, it sheds light on issues of gender, sexuality, class, politics and social conventions while acknowledging a range of contexts, from the commercial to the archival and the aesthetic. The chapters, written by eminent international scholars, run chronologically from The Count of Monte Cristo through Proust and Bonjour, Tristesse to Philippe Djian's Oh… (adapted for the screen as Elle ). Collectively, they fill a need for contemporary discussions on the significance of France's literary representations in the history of global cinema.

1
Introduction: screening French literature

Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer

French literature on screen relies upon investigations of the processes of artistic, cultural, and industry adaptations. The French film industry has always cherished the national heritage of classic literature and has adapted to the screen the works of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust. Hollywood has also been keen on adapting these authors’ seminal works, often adapting a French cinematic version of the novel. So, too, has the British film industry sought out French classics for its costume dramas on the big and small screen. Both British and American studios have been intrigued by the possibilities that classic and popular French literature offers for their audiences, as Les Misérables (2012) has proven with stage and screen revenues nearly seven times production costs.¹ Twentieth-century figures from what was once considered popular literature now are also included in the expanding category of classical French literature, among them François Mauriac, Georges Simenon, Marcel Pagnol, and Françoise Sagan.

French literary adaptations of its own tradition became a serious cinematic enterprise with the Pathé Film d’Art series, beginning in 1908, as Susan Hayward explains:

Indeed, some of the earliest films were adaptations of novels by Zola and Hugo (as the films of Guy and Zecca at the turn of the century attest). In some respects the Film d’Art and its imitators (Pathé's SCAGL) made more prestigious and packaged more attractively a practice already in existence (albeit on a smaller scale). In other respects, it did represent a bold new departure and fixed one of the great traditions of performance (stage actor as screen star). In this way, the cultural capital of literary adaptations/costume films was doubled by the advent to the screen of the famous stage actors Le Bargy, Harry Baur, Réjane, Sarah Bernhardt, Albert Dieudonné and Gabrielle Robinne (to name but a few) … There were sound economic reasons, closely allied to the Americans’ taste for this genre, for investing (quite substantially) in these films – national cinema not just as conveyor of myth, but as an exportable commodity.²

English-language screen adaptations of French literature evince the complexity of the relationship between the two texts, the two media, as well as opening up new avenues to explore studio decisions to contract and distribute this particular type of ‘foreign’ cinema to American and British audiences. In many respects, the ‘foreign’ quality of masterworks of the French literary canon remains their appeal over the decades from the silent era to the present. ‘Foreign’ from studio standpoints includes heritage settings for nineteenth-century costume dramas, especially in the 1930s with David Copperfield (George Cukor, 1935), A Tale of Two Cities (Jack Conway, 1935), and Wuthering Heights (William Wyler, 1939), alongside the American versions of French classics with prominent stars, such as Robert Donat in The Count of Monte Cristo (Rowland V. Lee, 1934), Fredric March in Les Misérables (Richard Boleslawski, 1935), Greta Garbo in Camille (George Cukor, 1936), Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle, 1939), and the nutty Ritz Brothers’ musical comedy of The Three Musketeers (Alan Dwan, 1939). In France, the interwar period of the 1930s proved to be a boon for literary adaptation, in particular the Marseille trilogy of Marius (1931), Fanny (1932), and César (1936), all based upon the works of Marcel Pagnol and Jean Renoir's La Bête humaine (1938) from Zola's famous naturalist novel of animalistic sexual attraction and murder.

The very birth of narrative cinema pays homage to French literature on screen, with Georges Méliès's Le Voyage dans la lune (1902) having its basis in Jules Verne's De la terre à la lune (1865), in which Baltimore arms manufacturers and mavens construct an enormous cannon, a space-gun, to send a projectile with three crew members to land on the moon, and Verne's sequel, Autour de la lune (1870), in which the three crew members encounter a series of scientifically based misadventures and successfully return to Earth. Alice Guy-Blaché, often credited with the very first cinematic adaptation of a novel, directed Esméralda (1905), a short, ten-minute version of Victor Hugo's 1831 novel Notre-Dame de Paris. This process of adapting French literature to the screen continued throughout the silent era. Jacques Feyder directed L’Atlantide (1921), based on Pierre Benoit's novel Carmen (1926), itself based on Prosper Mérimée's 1845 novella, and he also directed an adaptation of Émile Zola's Thérèse Raquin in 1928. Germain Dulac adapted what is often considered the first serious feminist film, unlike Alice Guy's comical Les Résultats de féminisme, entitled La Souriante Madame Beudet (1922) from Denys Amiel's work. In 1926, Jean Epstein directed a version of George Sand's 1837 novel Mauprat, best known today for its brief glimpse of a first-time actor, Luis Buñuel.

Both popular novels and classic French literature found adaptations in the silent era. Louis Feuillade's five-part serial Fantômas (1913–14) was based upon Pierre Sylvestre and Marcel Allain's commercially popular novels. Jacques Baroncelli directed silent versions of Balzac's Père Goriot (1921) and Maeterlinck's La Légende de la Soeur Béatrix (1923). Silent director Albert Capellani produced for Pathé a four-part version of Hugo's Les Misérables (1912), as well as an adaptation of Zola's L’Assomoir (1909). André Antoine directed silent adaptations of classical French works for Pathé in the post-World War I era, among them adaptations of Hugo's Quatre-Vingt-Treize (1915), Dumas's Les Frères corses (1916), and Zola's La Terre (1921). Edwin S. Porter directed a sixty-nine-minute adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo (1913). Dumas's The Three Musketeers received great popularity as a Douglas Fairbanks vehicle in 1921, in which Louis Delluc produced a far more faithful stylistic version of the novel than Henri Diamant-Berger's Les Trois Mousquetaires (1921–22). In his analysis of both films, Delluc proposed a theory of adaptation:

That is not, as some seem to believe, because of Douglas's violent charm and publicity. It's because the French version, concerned about detail, about historical minutiae, about the patient touching up of each and every individual and milieu, has almost completely sacrificed the rhythm of the novel. The American version is only rhythm: Fairbanks admits freely that there are few characters as devoid of interest in themselves as d’Artagnan. He lives only through his reactions to events, through his outbursts and caprices, through his rhythm finally, since Dumas – a murky storyteller, a summary psychologist, a historian of shoddy details – is a master of rhythm. The adapter is right to see only that to film in the novel.³

Delluc's assessment of the adaptation process deserves notice for its foresight concerning how the translation from book to screen requires insight into particular characteristics that propel plot and action.

The post-World War II period followed, with numerous film adaptations of popular French works, most significantly Henri-Georges Clouzot's Le Salaire de la peur (1953), based on Georges Arnaud's work, and Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1955), based on Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac's 1951 novel, Celle qui n’était plus; he also adapted Prévost's Manon (1949).

Robert Bresson's Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956) was based upon André Devigny's memoirs of Vichy state confinement. The Art House movement propelled many successful French classical and popular adaptations to further financial gains when released to American and international audiences, such as Max Ophuls's Madame de … (The Earrings of Madame de …, 1953) from Louise Leveque de Vilmorin's novel of belle époque Paris; Journal d’un curé de campagne (Robert Bresson, 1951) closely following the structure of Georges Bernanos's 1936 novel; and Marcel Carné's 1953 Thérèse Raquin, a contemporary retelling of Zola's famous novel of adultery, murderous passions, and subsequent paranoia. Jacqueline Audry transformed Colette's novels for the screen, including Gigi (1948) and a film version of Sartre's Huis clos (1954). Christian-Jaque, during the postwar years, made adaptations of classical French works, such as Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme (1948) and Zola's Nana (1955). Alexandre Astruc applied his own concept of caméra-stylo, the elevation of the construction of directorial vision as narrative, to his adaptation Flaubert's L’Education sentimentale (1962).

French noirs achieved considerable recognition during this period, incorporating memorable cinematic experiments, among them the long silent heist sequence in Jules Dassin's 1955 adaptation of Auguste Le Breton's novel Du rififi chez les hommes (Rififi) and the hauntingly disturbing lighting of Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (Diabolique, 1955). These French noirs could very well extend to the various reincarnations of Inspector Maigret with Jean Renoir's La Nuit de carrefour (1932), starring his brother Pierre, three films with Jean Gabin as the famous detective, and the French television series with Bruno Cremer (1991–2005).

The nouvelle vague also ushered in new, freer cinematic adaptations, especially of popular literature. While British Hammer horror films achieved popularity in France, Georges Franju's 1960 film version of Jean Redon's psychological horror novel, Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes without a Face), found critics and censors less than enthusiastic; in fact, the film's American version was cut drastically. Two film adaptations in the late 1960s of journalist Joseph Kessel's works received favourable and disappointing reviews in France. Luis Bruñel's highly regarded Belle du jour (1967), winner of numerous awards including the Venice Golden Lion, catapulted Catherine Deneuve to international stardom, while Jean-Pierre Melville's L’Armée des ombres (Army of Shadows, 1969) suffered greatly from its nationalistic sentiments about World War II resistance fighters against Vichy, coming after the radical shift in politics of May 1968. French art historian Rose Valland documented in Le Front de l’art (1961) the extraordinarily dangerous subterfuge of railway and French resistance fighters and their eventual reclamation from the Nazis of the modernist masterpieces, which John Frankenheimer filmed as an astonishing action film that involved the actual collision of real locomotives in The Train (1964).

The release of adaptations of classical and popular French literature has continued since the late 1960s, as evident from Claude Berri's Jean de Florette (1986) and Manon des sources (Manon of the Spring, 1986), based upon Marcel Pagnol's rural Province novels, and Bertrand Tavernier's La Princesse de Montpensier (2010), which recaptures the roma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: screening French literature
• 2 The spectacle of Monte Cristo
• 3 Adultery and adulteration in film versions of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
• 4 For the first time on screen together: Madame Bovary and Les Misérables in 1934
• 5 The Americanization of Victor Hugo: Darryl F. Zanuck’s Les Misérables (1935)
• 6 From heterotopia to metatopia: staging Carmen’s death
• 7 From the Recherche on film toward a Proustian cinema
• 8 Otto Preminger’s Bonjour, Tristesse: a tale of three women, if not more
• 9 Adapting Pagnol and Provence
• 10 Maigret on screen: stardom and literary adaptation
• 11 The making and remaking of Thérèse Desqueyroux: one novel, two films
• 12 Elle (2016), rape, and adaptation
• Select bibliography
• Index