European Cinemas, European Societies

Pierre Sorlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134934188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 2004. Through the Second World War and its aftermath, from economic boom to industrial decline, Europeans have faced similar changes in politics and outlook on life, but even on the eve of the formation of a single European Community, their cultural backgrounds are far from unified. In European Cinemas, European Societies 1939- 1990, Pierre Sorlin looks at the way the nations of Europe have expressed their cultural individuality through film. Why do French films, for example, have such a distinctive style, as different from the products of Hollywood as from British, German or Italian film? He also shows how the impact of a common evolution towards federalism can be detected in films.

1
THE COMING WAR

The first war movies were not produced in response to the outbreak of the first world conflict. War films had appeared almost as early as cinema itself, and during the years which preceded the First World War fighting of various sorts was shot and screened in all countries. From 1914 through 1918 neutrals as well as belligerents filmed the hostilities extensively. But, after the peace treaty, the theme was quickly forgotten, and in this field Hollywood played an important part: all through the 1920s, while the European cinemas were declining and the American movies sold well abroad, the United States exported war films which were popular and, without ever questioning the legitimacy of the American intervention, described life in the trenches, the sufferings, of the wounded and the general destruction in a realistic, unyielding manner.

King Vidor’s Big Parade (1925) was the most famous of some twenty movies which strongly impressed the cinema-goers. However, something totally new occurred in 1930 with Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The most striking innovation was the treatment of the sound-track. Today we are used to hearing the cracking of machine-guns and the explosion of bombs that our television sets emit constantly, but at the beginning of the sound era this produced a frightening, overwhelming impression. Milestone cleverly managed the combination of noises; before his characters arrive on the front line, the sound-track is soft and combines harmoniously words, music and shouting. When the young recruits reach the trenches by night the screen erupts, with monstrous flashes of lighting and unbearable explosions. Later silence is reintroduced in the film but, instead of being an absence of sound, it is so different, so opposed to the dominant war-hum, that it is also frightening. At the beginning of an important technological change Milestone inaugurated a cinematic effect which film-analysts have never fully explored because it is hard to describe. It could be called ‘echoing’ since it produces an emotional reaction by combining echoes and sounds, not by having recourse to words and pictures. But these were, after all, mere tricks which audiences would have coped with quickly, and Milestone would have been less influential had it not been for two other aspects of his work. Without strongly modifying the classical narration, All Quiet altered it. There is no hero—just a crew of comrades, one of whom is simply the most important; nor is there a plot, a challenge which has to be overcome. Nothing can evolve; the only issue is death. Thematically, Milestone developed a condemnation of war (any war, not specifically that war) which the movies of the 1920s avoided. All Quiet was a great hit in Europe. It is generally hard to get statistics for this period but we are lucky enough to have some figures for Germany:¹ the film was temporarily banned from commercial exploitation and was distributed by the Socialist Party which made reports on its success. We know thus that in Berlin 400,000 people attended the projections in a few weeks, and that about 1,000,000 Germans saw it before it was permitted to be shown.²

Milestone has been taken here as an example, but it must be added that shortly afterwards directors as interesting as Frank Borzage or Howard Hawks, not to mention less well-known cinematographers, made pictures on the same period. It is in this context that the Europeans began to film the war again. We cannot speak of imitation: eight movies devoted to the theme were in the making when All Quiet arrived in the Old World. However, the American vision of the fighting was highly problematical; it did not fit with the patriotism or prudence of the few movies shot during the 1920s. All those who decided to screen the war knew that they would be obliged to compete with the good, provocative American productions. It is then surprising that the Europeans, instead of deserting the field, held possession of it; in the 1930s, Europe made more films on the years 1914–18 than Hollywood, and some of them—Pabst’s Westfront 1918³ in 1930, and Renoir’s Grand Illusion in 1937—were even bigger hits than All Quiet on the Western Front.

Table I. War films of the 1930s

A chronologically arranged table (Table 1) will provide us with a first insight into the differences between the countries. I would never say it is complete, but no important film has been left out.⁴

War films amounted to about 3 per cent of the European production; it is a small sample, all the more limited in that a few directors especially interested in the topic (Victor Saville and Anthony Asquith in Britain, Giovacchino Forzano in Italy, Karl Ritter in Germany, Georg Wilhelm Pabst in Germany and France, Abel Gance in France) made a good many of these movies. And this business was indeed truly European. The synoptic table shows that five films were produced simultaneously or successively in two or three different European countries,⁵ but the links between those involved in the making of war movies were even closer than can be inferred from the list. The same actors (Dita Parlo, Eric von Stroheim, Conrad Veidt, Harry Baur, John Loder) continually crossed national boundaries to perform more or less the same parts. The Italian script of Thirteen Men and a Gun was shot in Italy by Forzano and in Britain by the Italian Mario Zampi. The three versions of Two Worlds were directed by a German cinematographer, E.A. Dupont, whose French assistant E.T.Gréville made Secret Lives in Britain as well as the English version of Mademoiselle Docteur, while the French one was made by Pabst. Luis Trinker is possibly the most significant example of close co-operation. His first film, Berge in Flammen,⁶ a German and a French version of which he shot at the same time, pictured a small episode of the war in the Alps. He then made two appealing movies on the German émigrés in America. He was invited to Italy where he strongly influenced the few war films dealing either with fighting in the Alps or with the émigrés who came back to the peninsula and volunteered for the duration. Ideas, themes, people and money circulated. There were, of course, differences attributable to national traditions, but there was also throughout the whole of Europe a strong concern for the remembrance of and the visual depiction of the Great War.

When speaking of the 1930s we must beware of anachronism. Everywhere, since 1945, films have denounced the errors, sometimes the crimes, of High Command and depicted the futility of some war-actions. A film like King and Country (d.J.Losey, 1964) was unthinkable in the 1930s.⁷ A few ‘pacifist’ films showed the horrors of the trenches,⁸ and in Westfront 1918 Germans and Frenchmen, who are obliged to kill each other, suffer as much and die as painfully. Abel Gance went so far as to imagine that fraternity was likely to overcome national traditions and prejudices. But nobody, with one exception, discussed war with reference to its origins, its deepest roots. Jeffrey Richards, who has scrutinized the files of the British Board of Film Censors,⁹ proves that officials were concerned to prevent the screening of any story which could develop pacifist feelings and rejected projects involving, as was the case with Gance’s J’accuse, the return of the dead soldiers to urge the living not to begin another war.

Westfront J918 (G.); A men’s war

However, Gance himself was not very happy with his film which was sharply criticized by the Left as well as by the Right. Patriotism was still strongly rooted in people’s minds, and it was difficult to question it. It is true that the Nazi films were more warmongering than most of the European productions, but even in democratic countries movies like Forever England said that dying for one’s country was glorious and rewarding.¹⁰

The synoptic table stresses the importance of the war pictures. Why was the theme up to date in the 1930s? Nicholas Pronay, who has compared the cinematic representation of the conflict after 1918 and after 1945, has developed an interesting theory:

The experience of the inter-war period suggests that after a decade there comes a re-surfacing of the worst of the memories in a way which allows people to face them again through the recreative power of art… The sudden ‘popularity’ between 1928–32 of autobiographies, plays, and novels (and films); the simultaneous re-publication of earlier and even wartime literature…and even the assembling and exhibition of paintings or photographs of the First World War…was a striking phenomenon in Britain, and was paralleled in the other participating countries. [Around 1932 there was an increasing number of people] for whom ‘the war’ was like any other historical romance.¹¹

Nicholas Pronay is right when he pinpoints the close relationship between films and other arts, especially literature: two fifths of our films were based on printed texts. The percentage was particularly important in Britain where, apart from international productions intended for fairly different publics, most of the movies were adaptations of famous plays or novels. A literary origin is not necessarily a shortcoming: Milestone and Pabst drew their inspiration from novels and were able to give the original works a cinematic inflexion. Nevertheless, there is an obvious contrast between Germany, where film-makers such as Karl Ritter devised stories for the screen, and Britain where the directors were keen on merely sticking to the theatrical tastes of the public. Milestone’s example of intelligent adaptation to the screen, which was carefully scrutinized in Germany and even in France, was ignored by the British.

There was a ‘literary style’ of war film which was not limited to England but which was developed there more than anywhere else. I am not concerned with deciding whether these pictures were good or not; I only want to stress the fact that, cinematographically, they were different and constituted a specific category. Journey’s End and Tell England, which intend to describe seriously how war alters people’s behaviour, concentrate on a few individuals. We find in the former a central character, Captain Denis Stanhope, and all the actions, debates or problems are filtered through his personal vision; in other words, we are not shown aspects of war but the reflection of war in the mind and demeanour of a man. Cinematic devices are systematically avoided, war noises are reduced to a vague sonorous background and light is only used to illuminate the setting which is almost limited to a series of dug-outs. Tell England includes some wellshot sequences of disembarkation beneath the cliffs of Gallipoli, but they are simply intercut with extended sequences of dialogue and look like documentary interludes rather than parts of the plot. We face here an important aspect of narration. Adaptations beget ‘classical’ films with a central character and a linear plot. Therefore pictures have a secondary function in the telling of the story, which entails a rejection of any purely emotional (that is to say, visual) description of the fighting; feelings are not excluded but

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are merely conveyed by words. The label ‘talkies’ sometimes applied to the films of the 1930s is especially appropriate to these works, in which well-coined sentences convey a message; intent on catching the significance of the words, spectators do not concern themselves either with the images or with the sounds. In addition, serialization must be taken into account. There was not only one adaptation since the British cinema appropriated fifteen texts which, from the point of view of the public, have to be considered as a whole. In the case of adaptations viewers are more interested in the process of transcription than in the story itself: are the films close to the texts? To a large extent, these movies are only derivatives of the plays or novels. As can be inferred from the opinion of the critics, attention focused not on the theme (war in this case) but on the accuracy of the reproduction. The impact of adaptation must always be borne in mind where the British cinema is compared to its continental counterparts.¹²

The most challenging aspect of Nicholas Pronay’s assumption is his interpretation of a revived curiosity about war in the 1930s. It is generally considered that it was the international crisis, the sabre-rattling, which induced the producers to make films consonant with the fears and obsessions of their clients. On the contrary, Nicholas Pronay states, people had forgotten sufficiently to be able to accept a partial, inaccurate vision of what had happened in the trenches. This is an exciting starting-point for a discussion of war movies. We shall first compare the representations of the Great War in the four countries and we shall then try to discern how these images were likely to influence the cinema-goers.

WAR AS AN END

War films do not constitute a genre in the ordinary meaning of the word; they belong to the various categories of drama, adventure, documentary and comedy. Their specific value is the representation of scenes relating to the conflict and the use of hints which undoubtedly refer these scenes to the 1914–18 period. War films are historical films inasmuch as they imply a minimal knowledge regarding the situation and a capacity to identify the opposed sides. Nowadays we do not fully catch the implications of the plots because we miss some clues which were obvious in the 1930s. For instance, most spy stories play on love affairs between agents of conflicting countries which looked scandalous at the time but, for us, are merely trite love/hate dramas with an ill-defined political background. War films are also narrations; they organize a few actions or events in order to fill the screen for eighty minutes. Narratively, the conflict can be a historical event against which the story is built, or the very centre, the theme of the film.

Paradis perdu (‘Lost Paradise’), Journey’s End—the titles of these films tell spectators that life finished with the conflict. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the latter film was an English production, Britain did not indulge in this theme, which was also rarely—but more interestingly—treated on the continent. Cavalleria (I., 1936) is the most melancholic of the ‘end-films’: the time of romantic love, evening dresses and masked balls is over, cavalrymen lose their horses and die like infantrymen. The same nostalgia is expressed in Gance’s Paradis perdu (1939): the conflagration has modified everything and happiness will never be again what it used to be. In both movies the war sequences are short but their style is totally different. In the Italian film, war bursts out all of a sudden. Slow motion, underlined by long panning-shots, gives way to quickly edited images photographed by a still camera, with soldiers running about in all directions and filling up space. Shooting and editing are co-ordinated to create an easily understandable feeling—a way of life sunk during the hostilities; although made during the fascist era, the story, which ends with the death of the main character, does not suggest that a better future is at hand. Gance’s war is less heroic than that; it is confined to a dug-out where soldiers wait and are killed. There are some likenesses between this passage and the whole of Journey’s End. Clearly the visualization of war installations is common to all Europeans; but the narrative use of the same setting is extremely diverse. The English film takes advantage of apocalyptic scenery to reach a conclusion that Cavalleria will later develop—the end. With Gance, after a long period in the depths, life will start again, hard, less happy but endurable: we shall come back to this contrast later.

Two other films which finish with the war are devoted to the emigrants. The relationship between them is too obvious to be purely casual. Ein Mann will nach Deutschland (G.,d.Paul Wegener, 1934) and Passaporto rosso (I.,d.Guido Brignone, 1935) tell the same story: when the time comes emigrants remember their country and overcome every obstacle or difficulty to reach the front line. A comparison is not in this case an intellectual exercise; the films are intended to force it. The main character in the German film is a successful man, well known in South America where he has a good job as a civil engineer. He has gone as far as he can; he has made a lot of money and has nothing more to hope for—his going back to Germany will not change his fate. The Italian who is much younger is not yet well off; one day he will be an engineer as well, but only when he has followed the prescribed path. At the present he does his utmost to be integrated into Argentine society to such an extent that he asks to be called Juan instead of Giovanni. The Italian film is an intimate family story concerning two generations. The grandfather had arrived from the peninsula with a red passport, the passport given to the long-term emigrants, while the father, an emigrant likewise, continued to live in an Italian environment. His son is at last in a position to become, as he likes to say, ‘a true American’. The German has only to overcome the opposition of people and geography; he wants to go back to Germany, and his will and doggedness of purpose are enough to make him succeed. Right from the beginning we guess he will return to his country and are more intent on seeing how he gets over the obstacles than on waiting for a predictable ending. On the other hand, with the young Italian, we are at the centre of what turns out to be a drama for him: he would like to stay in Argentina and could do so inasmuch as, having been born there, he is Argentinian. All through its first part the film aims at involving the spectators in the endeavour and progress of the family as it devotes all its energy to joining the local community. The war is thus a break in the narrative: it is not forecast in the film by indirect clues, as is generally the case for catastrophes which close a story. The style itself changes: instead of a few, well-developed actions illustrating the progress of the Italians we are faced with short, quickly edited sequences. The father decides to enlist; the son understands where his duty lies and agrees to leave. The final scene is particularly striking in its briefness: at the bottom of a dugout (note what has just been said of the typical scenery) Juan/ Giovanni writes to his family/short flash of the family/a helmet falls down while we hear machine-gun fire/flash of the mother who seems to feel a blow/wooden cross with the name of Giovanni (no longer ‘Juan’). As in Cavalleria it is the same feeling of an unavoidable fate which destroys individual destinies. The mother cries when her only son kisses her goodbye, and he is as desperate as she is. War itself is pictured in the four abovementioned shots, and the film is intent on telling us that the boy was killed in 1916 (that is to say, immediately after he joined the front line).

Passaporto rosso was produced one year after Ein Mann will nach Deutschland and at the same time as Trinker’s first work on emigrants. We cannot but emphasize the gap between the two versions of a common situation; the Germans master history by identifying its trend while the Italians hopelessly submit to it. For twenty years fascism repeatedly celebrated war as an exceptional period in which ordinary men become heroes but, ‘unwittingly’, films disclose another reality, a strong resistance, in a ‘popular’ art, to Mussolinian bellicosity

WAR AS A STARTING-POINT

Instead of closing the story, war can open it; here, again, Italy presents a contrast with Germany. In 1938 (the year in which Mussolini proudly presented his army to Hitler) there were two films—one Italian, Luciano Sera pilota (d.Goffredo Alessandrini), one ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Images in Societies
• 1 The Coming War
• 2 Resistance
• 3 A Golden Age
• 4 The Blurred Image of Cities
• 5 Challenging Hollywood
• 6 A Time for Revisions
• Conclusion: Moving Pictures: Conception/Consumption
• Notes
• Select Bibliography