Colin Nettelbeck French Cinema and its relations with literature from Vichy towards the New Wave

In the most prominent article of nouvelle vague self-deﬁ nition – that of
the ﬁ lmmaker as ‘auteur’ – the new French cinema was underlining its
relationship with the literary tradition that had been both pathway and
obstacle to its independence. This paper examines a particularly intense
phase of French cinema’s quest for ‘high culture’ legitimacy, namely the
period covering the Occupation and the rise of the New Wave – 1940 to
1958. It evaluates how the combination of historical circumstance and
Vichy government policy enhanced the position of cinema relative to
literature, and opened the way for subsequent developments in literary and
cinematographic expression, both as independent arts and in their inter-
relationship. Concentrating on works of ﬁ ction, it adopts the Ricoeurian
view that such narratives afford crucial insight not only into artistic
production, but also into the identity of the society that produced it.

Keywords:

cinema, film, literature, narrative, New Wave, novel,

Vichy

Elisabeth et Paul s’adoraient et se déchiraient.

Cocteau

(1925:

90)

The New Wave in French cinema at the end of the 1950s, notwithstanding
numerous differences in intention and style among its participants,
was underpinned by a collective certainty that French cinema had ﬁ nally
attained the status of a fully ﬂ edged and autonomous form of artistic

Journal of European Studies 37(2): 159–186 Copyright © SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi and Singapore) http://jes.sagepub.com [200706] 0047-2441/10.1177/0047244107077824

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expression. The traditional cultural hierarchy – in which literature had
been considered as ‘high’ and prestigious and cinema as ‘popular’ and
hence to be scorned, or at best tolerated by the dominant classes – had
ﬁ nally given way to a ﬂ atter structure in which literature and cinema
could co-exist in the symbiosis that today we take for granted.

Ironically, in the most prominent article of nouvelle vague self-

deﬁ nition – that of the ﬁ lmmaker as ‘auteur’ – the new cinema was
underlining its relationship with the literary tradition that had been
both pathway and obstacle to its independence. The history of that
relationship – its attractions, conﬂ icts, complementarities – is enor-
mously complex. In time, it extends at least to the beginnings of
cinema in the 1890s and, through cinema’s links to photography, to a
prehistory reaching well back into the nineteenth century. It engages
with the revolution in technological possibilities of representation,
as well as with the aesthetic evolutions of modernism and their in-
creased emphasis on individual perspective.

In the course of the twentieth century, with France’s deepening

political and social democratization and changing global identity, the
relationship was for a time keenly competitive, as ﬁ lmmakers strove
to establish greater artistic status and recognition for their work. In
the mid-1930s, for instance, French ﬁ lmmakers of the quality of Vigo,
Duvivier, Feyder, Carné, Pagnol and Renoir created a number of major
cinematographic works whose technical prowess and artistic am-
bition were matched by their construction of compelling stories that
spoke – as powerfully as any literary work – to the major psychological,
social, historical, ideological and metaphysical issues of the day.
Cinema’s quest for ‘high culture’ legitimacy was helped not a little by
the fact that many important writers, at the same time, were seeking
to incorporate dimensions of popular culture in their work. If in the
1920s Proust had still maintained with religious faith the distinctions
between high and popular culture, Céline, a few years after Proust’s
death, systematically rejected them, and on a scale that would change
the direction of French literary history.

The aim of this paper is to clarify a particularly intense phase of

the cinema–literature struggle, namely the period covering the
Occupation and the years between the Liberation and the rise of the
New Wave – 1940 to 1958. It will seek to evaluate how the combination
of historical circumstance and Vichy government policy enhanced
the position of cinema relative to literature, and opened the way for
subsequent developments in literary and cinematographic expres-
sion, both as independent arts and in their interrelationship. It will
concentrate on works of ﬁ ction, adopting the Ricoeurian view that such

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narratives, as much as documentary or historical works, afford crucial
insight not only into artistic production, but also into the identity of
the society that produced it.

It is no longer controversial to acknowledge that the Vichy period
was part of a continuity in the development of French cinema, rather
than a rupture or parenthesis, and that the French industry experi-
enced something of a ‘golden age’ under the Occupation. After an
almost 30-year period of caricatural ‘mummiﬁ cation’,

in which the

cinema of the Occupation, like Vichy as a whole, was treated as a
kind of historical vacuum, more recent historiography, with readier
access to archival materials, has succeeded in teasing the complicated
strands of activity and policy away from the dominant, but distorting,
ideological framework of France’s immediate post-war era.

cinema historian attempts to rehabilitate the Vichy period as such,
and in presenting the positive developments in the cinema industry
during the Occupation most stress serious negative factors: the
Occupation itself with its apparatus of Nazi-controlled censorship
and industrial pressure, the systematic elimination of Jews from
the industry, the exile of many leading ﬁ lmmakers and actors, the
difﬁ culties of mobility within France and its impossibility beyond,
the virtual closure of export markets, and the material shortages of
ﬁ lm stock, electricity and even food.

Despite all of this, French feature ﬁ lm production in the 1940–44

period was steady if not proliﬁ c.

Unsurprisingly, few feature ﬁ lms

were completed during the years of direct military activity (28 in 1940
and 21 in 1944), but in the other years almost 200 ﬁ lms were made
(about two-thirds of the pre-war average). The reduction in number
was moreover in line with the general collapse of France’s gross
national product, caused essentially by the terms of the armistice
and the legal pillaging of the French economy by Germany (Creton,
2004: 71). It was more than compensated for by a dramatic increase
in market share – largely because of the absence of American and
British ﬁ lms, banned from French screens. With Occupation cinema
audiences markedly more numerous than before the war, this led to
a population more broadly familiar with its own cinema than ever
before.

Why did French wartime audiences ﬂ ock to the movie theatres?

For a start, the cinema provided a cheap and accessible psychological
escape from the realities of the war and the deprivations of daily life.

For many, the movie houses were also a physical refuge from the
rigours of occupation. They were places to keep warm, and François

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Truffaut recalled with delight the amorous possibilities afforded
young people by the embracing darkness of the theatres (Truffaut,
1975: 17–21). Because of the double censorship regime – both the
German and the French authorities oversaw ﬁ lm content – the ﬁ lms
themselves largely avoided contemporary subject matter. Although
some of them undoubtedly reﬂ ect aspects of the ideology of Vichy’s
‘National Revolution’,

if there was any general thematic tendency

it was towards stories situated in indeterminate times and places –
worlds of myth and fantasy, or at least removed from the spectators’
lives. For instance, although it is recognizably ‘contemporary’, Clouzot’s
Le Corbeau (1943) is set in the tightly closed space of an unidentiﬁ -
able village. Its claustrophobic atmosphere surely resonated with
audiences at the time, but it was also manifestly a mythical ‘elsewhere’.
The same is true of Becker’s countryside in Goupi Mains-rouges (1942),
and even more so for the reconstruction of the life of Berlioz in Christian-
Jacque’s La Symphonie fantastique (1941), or the pseudo-mediaeval setting
of Carné’s Les Visiteurs du soir (1942). While the interpretation of the
messages encoded into such popular works undoubtedly requires
careful analysis, it is unquestionable that in the encompassing climate
of defeat, shame, austerity, oppression and individual and social
powerlessness, the cinema represented a transformative force that in
its ritual gatherings allowed a cultural community to keep alive at
least some vestige of its faith in itself.

It was German policy that the French cinema industry should be

maintained, though from the German perspective, in addition to
expanding the strength of its own industrial base, one goal was to
keep the occupied population in a state of somnolence. This is far from
what in fact transpired. In part through the exercise of artistic crea-
tivity by the ﬁ lmmakers, and in part through determined planning
by government authorities, the French outwitted and outplayed
every German attempt to control the cinema. It is a great irony that
Continental, the German ﬁ lm company established in Paris and
directed by the extraordinarily competent and resourceful Alfred
Greven, should in the end have contributed much to French cinema
and almost nothing to Germany.

Williams has rightly observed how Continental’s recruitment and

production procedures obliged indigenous French productions to lift
their game, thus helping set in place what would a few years later
become known as the French tradition de qualité (Williams, 1992: 256–9).
Continental’s most successful productions, which included Clouzot’s
work as well as that of Tourneur, Cayatte and Decoin, and Christian-
Jacque’s La Symphonie fantastique, have ended up strengthening the

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French cinematographic canon.

The major steps taken under Vichy

to organize the ﬁ lm industry in a way that would protect its inde-
pendence, both in the short term against the predatory expansion of
the German industry, and in the longer term against its traditional
American rival, were: centralization of public control of the cinema
under a single ministry; the creation of certiﬁ able professional stand-
ards for practitioners; a transparent mechanism for tracking ticket sales
and revenue; regulation of programme length; a system of advances
for production; the creation of a public registry for ﬁ lm production
and ﬁ nancing; a new tax regimen; the creation of the Institut des
hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC); institutionalization and
support of the Cinémathèque française.

The strong positioning of cinema within Vichy owed much to

the cleverness and commitment of various individuals. In the early
phases of the regime, Raoul Ploquin, ﬁ rst director of the Comité
d’organisation de l’industrie cinématographique (COIC), and Guy
de Carmoy, head of the government’s cinema service, are credited by
historians as the major re-energizers of the industry.

But the role of

Louis Émile Galey, who took over both of these positions, should not
be underestimated. During the ultra-collaborationist years of Laval’s
domination of government, Galey applied his architect’s imagination
to an ambitious and largely successful reshaping of the whole French
cinema industry. Galey, a paciﬁ st, was a Pétain supporter; but he was
also, as much as Ploquin and de Carmoy, a true cinephile, and seems
to have been unusually effective in gaining support from government
and ﬁ lmmakers alike in the elaboration of his grand plans, and in
drawing together earlier plans that had thus far failed to materialize.

His modus operandi – similar to what Pétain later claimed as his own
approach to protecting the nation – was to manipulate the ideological
frameworks of Vichy’s collaborationism in order to produce the best
possible outcome for French cinema. While arguing the importance
of the cinema in serving the government’s needs for propaganda and
prestige,

he managed to harness very considerable resources to serve

the needs of the cinema.

In order to do so, he had to operate on levels of ambiguity that from

today’s perspective can seem quite staggering. There are several strik-
ing examples of this in the following extract from the minutes of the
weekly meeting of the General Secretaries to the General Delegation
of the French Government from 10 March 1942:

Le cinéma a une importance capitale; c’est même l’arme de propagande la
plus importante qui soit: propagande directe par les ﬁ lms documentaires,
propagande indirecte par les grands ﬁ lms ...

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A l’heure actuelle le cinéma français est en train de se réveiller. Il

était jusqu’à la guerre le deuxième cinéma du monde – après le cinéma
américain – et le premier d’Europe.

Mais il était presque entièrement aux mains des juifs. Or il est certain

que le fait d’avoir évincé les juifs de l’industrie cinématographique y
a apporté un grand trouble. Il a donc fallu les remplacer par d’autres.
On a fait appel pour cela à des personnalités industrielles, mais parmi
celles-ci, toutes ne se sont pas montrées également douées.

En 1941, l’industrie cinématographique, assainie sur le plan ﬁ nancier,

assainie sur le plan hommes, n’a eu qu’une production de faible qualité.
Elle n’avait pas d’ailleurs de hautes visées; elle s’est bornée à remettre
au travail les chômeurs, la préoccupation de qualité étant passée au
deuxième plan. En 1942, on recherchera une qualité plus grande; nous
pouvons espérer une dizaine de ﬁ lms dont nos pourrons être ﬁ ers.
(Archives Nationales françaises F41 268: 3)

Galey went on to detail the complexity of technical requirements

for the provision of ﬁ lm stock, and the competing demands of the
German use of French-produced stock, and to report on the success
of his negotiations to increase the numbers of copies of French ﬁ lms
available for distribution. By way of conclusion, he returned to the
importance of ﬁ lm as propaganda, drawing attention to the success
of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ in this respect in the decade before the war:

Combien de ﬁ lms ont servi à augmenter dans l’esprit du grand public
le prestige du peuple américain, sa bonté, sa justice ... Il faut des années
à un livre pour atteindre la masse; on peut se défendre contre la radio
en tournant un bouton. Mais le ﬁ lm peut toucher en quelques mois des
millions de personnes et on ne se défend pas contre lui, s’il est bien fait.
(Archives Nationales françaises F41 268: 4)

The support of cinema as a prestige national activity is in Galey’s

discourse unalloyed. However, the homage to Vichy’s anti-Semitic
line is tempered by the acknowledgement that the removal of Jews
from the cinema industry was not entirely positive. When one takes
into account that Galey – like everyone else in the industry – certainly
knew that prominent Jewish professionals such as Alexandre Trauner
and Joseph Kosma continued to work clandestinely, there even ap-
pears to be some subversion of anti-Semitism itself. There is similar
ambivalence in Galey’s evocation of the prestige, goodness and justice
of the American people. Was he really being just sarcastic? Galey
also provided space and ﬁ nancial support to Henri Langlois that
allowed the Cinémathèque française to build up a considerable stock
of ﬁ lms, many of which were theoretically forbidden. And, ﬁ nally,
it was Galey who was responsible for the creation of the IDHEC and

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of the ‘Grand Prix du ﬁ lm d’art français’. The sincerity of his belief
in the cinema as an emblem of French cultural dynamism and quality
cannot be doubted.

As the agent of a government seeking to centralize control of all

sectors of French life, Galey must bear responsibility for a share of
the resulting oppression. He enjoyed Laval’s conﬁ dence, which in
itself is a reason for making him suspect. And yet, his multifaceted
support of French ﬁ lmmaking and the cinema industry was directly
and strongly instrumental in the production of work that afﬁ rmed
continuing French creativity at the height of Nazi cultural imperial-
ism; and it initiated structures that would continue to beneﬁ t French
cinema after the war. His contributions in fact served him well at the
time of the épuration. Although attacked as ‘un valet aux ordres de
Vichy’ by L’Écran français,

and summonsed before the purge com-

mittee, he was found to have no case to answer and was allowed to
withdraw gracefully from his functions (Galey, 1991: 96–7). He went
on to play a minor but not insigniﬁ cant role as a director and producer
of French ﬁ lms into the 1960s.

Vichy’s major tool for supporting the cinema was the ﬁ nancial

assistance for ﬁ lm production provided through the Crédit National.
Although conceived of as advances, and subject to strict rules of re-
payment, these state funds amounted in most cases to direct subsidy.
This allowed a number of French producers to compete with Continental
(which was not eligible for the support), and guaranteed a level of
diversity that would not otherwise have been possible. Several key
producers, including Roger Richebé and André Paulvé, had almost
all their ﬁ lms supported through this mechanism (Creton, 2004: 93,
163–4). However, there were at least two important drawbacks in
the scheme. One was that the selection process, perhaps inevitably,
was dominated by economic considerations, and hence based on the
likelihood of a particular ﬁ lm’s commercial success rather than on any
inherent artistic merit (Creton, 2004: 90–112). Secondly, as François
Garçon has convincingly demonstrated, the subsidy system had a
signiﬁ cant inﬂ ationary impact on the cost of ﬁ lm production over the
Occupation period. Although general inﬂ ation was high, ﬁ lmmaking
costs rose well above that level, strongly suggesting widespread abuse.
Garçon quite rightly ﬁ nds this unscrupulous activity reprehensible
in a period of general penury (Creton, 2004: 149–80). Nonetheless, it
can equally be argued that the system resulted not only in a number
of ﬁ lms acknowledged as both commercial and artistic successes –
including the emblematic Les Visiteurs du soir and Lumière d’été (1942) –
but in an ongoing conﬁ dence that helped keep the industry as a whole

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alive, at a time when many saw the threat of its complete annihilation
and replacement by the German industry as very serious indeed
(Creton, 2004: 80).

Like the cinema, France’s publishing industry had a period of pro-
sperity during the Occupation, and was subject to comparable efforts
of reorganization (Fouché, 1986: 224). There were, however, three
major differences. Firstly, in contrast to the institutional organization
of the cinema, Vichy’s attempts to reshape the publishing industry
did not outlast the war. Secondly, there was never any scheme to
support the publication of books of the kind that existed for ﬁ lm
production. Thirdly, while the cinema owed much of its vitality, and
almost all its popularity, to the predominance of ﬁ lms of ﬁ ction,

the

production of literary ﬁ ction during the war was dramatically reduced,
and so was its distribution.

Publishing, like the cinema, underwent an ‘Aryanization’ process

following the anti-Jewish laws of late 1940. Jewish-owned publishing
houses were appropriated or sold off. German-imposed censorship
was rigorous, both through the infamous ‘Otto list’ and its supple-
ments, and through the system requiring publishers to submit to
the Propaganda-Abteilung any material that might be offensive to the
occupying authorities.

As with their colleagues in the cinema, the

major French publishers feared a takeover by their German counter-
parts and willingly participated in the Vichy-inspired effort to
strengthen their sector of the economy. They too had their ‘Comité
d’organisation’, and most of the major publishers recommenced
activity as soon as possible after the armistice rather than leave a
vacuum that German competitors might occupy. Far from the kind
of support that the cinema received, however, the publishers seem
to have been engaged in a constant struggle to inﬂ uence pricing
policy sufﬁ ciently to make ends meet. At the heart of the problems
was a chronic shortage of paper, which intensiﬁ ed over the period of
the Occupation. This was a resource closely controlled by the Nazi
authorities. By 1942 the average monthly attribution of paper to the
industry was only 15 per cent of the pre-war levels, a ﬁ gure which fell
to 4 per cent in the following year (Fouché, 1986: 233). Inevitably this
led to reduced publishing lists and to reduced print-runs for those
works being published.

Fouché asserts that the French appetite for reading increased

during the war, and this may well be the case. Le Boterf provides
persuasive statistics (albeit with little evidence that they are based
on any thorough research) for a massive increase in borrowings from

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municipal libraries – novels were particularly sought after (Fouché,
1986: 233; Le Boterf, 1975: 196–8). Books, like ﬁ lms, represented a form
of refuge. But while publishers made handy proﬁ ts on works dealing
with the practicalities of daily life and on books about the war, their
investment in purely literary work, and particularly new literary work,
seems to have been restrained.

How do we explain this? In the wake of the defeat, the French literary

world was in a state of considerable dispersal and disarray. A number
of the older generation of writers, most of whom had been drawn into
the ideological polemics of the 1930s, had gone into exile: Bernanos
to South America, Jules Romains, André Maurois, Alexis Léger and
Saint Exupéry to the United States. Others were shunning the public
literary space, even if they continued to write: Gide for instance, and
Malraux. There were some continuities: Giraudoux, Giono, Montherlant,
Mauriac, Anouilh, Aymé and Céline all published new work during
the period. But several of these writers were implicated in the ambient
totalitarian or collaborationist ideologies, which strengthens the
sense of rupture with the pre-war era. This break was symbolically
incarnated in the fate of La Nouvelle Revue française, which, under the
German-inﬂ uenced editorship of Drieu la Rochelle, kept its name but
lost its soul as the voice of literary freedom and the emblem of the
highest aspirations of French literary culture. Drieu’s NRF signiﬁ ed,
for many, defeat and occupation. As Les Lettres françaises put it,

Les anciens lecteurs avaient peine à imaginer que ce grossier instru-
ment de propagande nazie, et de basses besognes policières, avait pu
être jadis leur revue. Les désabonnements qui avaient commencé dès
1940 afﬂ uèrent de plus belle. DRIEU n’animait plus qu’un fantôme
auquel personne ne croyait plus. (Anon., July 1943: 3)

This is not to say that the Occupation period was a literary desert.

Marcel Aymé is perhaps not an absolutely front-line writer, but he is
not a minor one, and many of his deﬁ ning works – such as Travelingue
(1941–2), Le Passe-muraille (1943) and La Vouivre (1943) – were written
and published during the war. Like Céline, although to a lesser degree,
Aymé challenged the traditional distinctions between high-culture
literary prose and popular speech, and his works are acknowledged
contributions to the renewal of literary language and form. The same
is true of Queneau, whose linguistic and formal experiments in Les
Temps mêlés (1941) and Pierrot mon ami (1942) would be extremely
inﬂ uential in pos-war literature, from Boris Vian via Georges Perec to
Jean Echenoz. Both Aymé and Queneau, thematically, were concerned
with marking a break with the literary past, and to this extent their

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work is convergent with the psychology and aesthetics of the wartime
publications of Sartre, Camus, Duras and de Beauvoir. Sartre’s strictly
philosophical monument L’Être et le néant (1943), although it laid the
foundations of the call to freedom that would later make Sartre the
leading intellectual of his generation, had less impact at the time than
the performances of his play Les Mouches (1943), which focused on the
constraints limiting that freedom. It needs to be said, however, that
although Sartre was providing his audience with dialectical instruments
of intellectual liberation, his dramaturgy – no more than Anouilh’s,
and probably less so – did nothing to challenge the language of theatre.
There is a similar contradiction between form and content in de
Beauvoir’s L’Invitée (1943), in which quite revolutionary insights into
the psychological space of women go hand in hand with unrelievedly
conventional prose.

Two distinct propensities can be discerned in the overall literary

production of the period. One, which would include Giono, Monther-
lant, Mauriac, Saint-Exupéry and the plays of Anouilh, is infused
with nostalgia and regret, oriented towards a past that can be neither
recreated nor renewed. The second is the earlier-mentioned current of
linguistic and cultural questioning – modernist, but not only so, and
infused with the sense that any key to a way forward has yet to be
invented. The two major signature ﬁ ctional works of the Occupation
reﬂ ect this tension. Vercors’ Le Silence de la mer (1942), as much as it
is a novel of the Resistance, is also a novel whose form and literary
conception express a deep attachment to tradition. Camus’ L’Étranger
(1942), with its concentration on the present and a protagonist who has
severed all possible social connections, heralds a future where nothing
is given, and particularly nothing in the way of literary tradition.
Taken together, Le Silence de la mer and L’Étranger constitute a literature
of dilemma, and, simultaneously, they also indicate the dilemma of
literature. There is no singular ‘literature of the Occupation’ in the
way that we can speak of a ‘cinema of the Occupation’.

Another expression of this dilemma can be seen in three large-scale

unﬁ nished projects of the time: Saint-Exupéry’s Citadelle, Malraux’s
Les Noyers de l’Altenburg, and Sartre’s Les Chemins de la liberté. Each
of these works was published in incomplete form after the war and
each corresponds, on the part of a major author, to the failed attempt
to create a holistic vision. In the case of Saint-Exupéry the vision is a
utopian and metaphysical one, and the grandiose scheme stands in
stark contrast with the fragmented poignancy of works like Le Petit
Prince and Terre des hommes. Malraux and Sartre were both attempting

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to account for the war itself and its implications, and their struggle to
contrive a level of formal invention adequate to the task is as impressive
as it is sobering in its failure. One could argue that the only novelist
to undertake successfully a representation of the French experience
of the war was the Céline of the last novels, where the apocalyptic
vision is achieved only through the destructive explosion of the
language used to express it.

An overview of the Vichy period must conclude that cinema emerged
from it considerably stronger in its relation with literature. Cinema
had not only survived, it had expanded and enriched its narrative
techniques and, as an industry, it had been organized in an enduring
way. It is no coincidence that during the Occupation period the cinema
began to exercise artistic attraction for several writers who, until the
war, had been unquestioning continuers of the literary tradition.
Although Anouilh’s Le Voyageur sans bagage (1943), which the playwright
directed, having adapted his own work for the screen with the help
of Jean Aurenche, does not rise beyond the level of ﬁ lmed theatre,

Giraudoux, an authentic literary genius, contributed to two ﬁ lms that
are themselves masterworks. For Jacques de Baroncelli he adapted
Balzac’s La Duchesse de Langeais (1941), and he worked with Bresson
on the scenario of Les Anges du péché (1943). Ehrlich credits Giraudoux
with leading French cinema towards a more literary tendency, by which
she means particularly the use of ‘elaborately wrought language’
(Ehrlich, 1985: 115). But she is also right in the broader sense that his
participation in the creation of these ﬁ lms symbolizes a recognition,
from the perspective of the literary tradition, that the cinema had be-
come a worthy means of artistic expression.

A similar approach was shared by Cocteau in the scenarios that he

wrote for Delannoy’s L’Éternel Retour (1943) and Bresson’s Les Dames du
Bois de Boulogne (1945). These contributions are perhaps less unexpected
than those of Giraudoux in that Cocteau had always been associated
with avant-garde activities and more open to experimentation with
different artistic forms: he had already made the ﬁ lm Le Sang d’un poète
(1930). But it is his work as a scriptwriter during the war that lays the
foundation for his more ambitious narrative cinematographic work
in the post-war period – Le Baron fantôme (1943), L’Éternel Retour, and
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne. The deliberate combination of literary
and cinematographic talent had been pioneered before the war by
Prévert and Carné (a pairing renewed with magniﬁ cent effect in Les
Enfants du paradis, 1943–4), but the Vichy period reveals something

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of a quantitative leap in the collaborations between literature and
cinema. It also marks a signiﬁ cant expansion of cinema’s role in French
culture’s narrational space.

Despite the numerous and destabilizing difﬁ culties faced by French

cinema in the immediate post-war period – the anti-Vichy purge and
attendant ideological conﬂ icts, the continuing economic stringency,
the reopening of French screens to foreign, and especially American
ﬁ lms, the emergence of television – French ﬁ lmmakers not only con-
solidated, but further expanded the narrational territory gained during
the war. Spectatorship increased considerably, by over 30 per cent in
comparison to the already high wartime attendances (Billard, 1995:
643–7). Concomitantly, ﬁ lm production also began to rise again, although
not quite to the high levels of the 1930s. Among the extraordinarily
varied range of ﬁ lm narratives created in the period between the war
and the beginning of the New Wave (1958–9) there are a large number
of adaptations from French literature of various periods.

But, as distinct from earlier times, adaptation was now no longer

simply a case of popularizing a literary text or even of paying homage
to it. Adaptation was now becoming, quintessentially, a way in which
cinema could appropriate literary territory as its own. The degree
to which this succeeds may be debatable in the case of ﬁ lms such as
Christian-Jacque’s La Chartreuse de Parme (1947) or Autant-Lara’s Le
Rouge et le noir (1954), or even Carné’s Thérèse Raquin (1953) – ﬁ lms in
which the directors have tested the mettle of their own style against
the majesty of the great classic texts of Stendhal and Zola. More tel-
ling, however, are a number of ﬁ lms where the directors use the
experimental or technically explorative nature of more contemporary
literary material in order to demonstrate the capacities of cinema to
match or surpass the literary strategies with cinematographic ones.

Malraux had already done this to some extent with Espoir – Sierra

de Teruel in 1938–9, although, despite overlapping material, this ﬁ lm
is not so much an adaptation of Malraux’s celebrated 1937 novel as a
revisiting in cinematographic form of his commitment to the Republican
cause. The ﬁ lm’s release in 1945 did, however, make it something of
a landmark and an inevitable point of comparison – thanks in part to
Bazin’s probing discussion of the afﬁ nities in Malraux’s writing style
with the language of cinema (Bazin, 1945: 175–89). But in the immediate
post-war period most cinema adaptations of novels continued to rely
on texts written by others. Three distinctive examples are Delannoy’s
La Symphonie pastorale (1946), based on Gide’s 1919 novel, Jean-Pierre
Melville’s Le Silence de la mer (1948), from Vercors (1942) and Bresson’s
Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951) from Bernanos (1936). Each of the

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original texts is a ﬁ rst-person narrative, reﬂ ecting the preoccupation of
much modern French literature with the interiority of an individual’s
unique perspective on the world, rather than with action or the repre-
sentation of social reality. These are ﬁ ctional constructs in which the
discovery of the external world is inseparable from the emotions,
thoughts and self-discovery of the narrating subject. Such sustained
emphasis on a subjective viewpoint presents an inherent challenge
for cinema, because of the difﬁ culty of conjugating a truly ‘subjective’
camera (which sees only what a speciﬁ c character sees) with the
representation of thoughts and feelings and their interaction with
the external world. Malraux in his 1939 Esquisse d’une psychologie du
cinéma opined that ‘le roman semble pourtant conserver sur le ﬁ lm
un avantage: la possibilité de passer à l’intérieur des personnages’
(Malraux, 2003: 61). It is precisely that advantage that these three ﬁ lms
seek to undermine, or overcome.

Each does so in a different way. Delannoy is essentially concerned

with psychology, and the intricate mechanisms of self-deception through
which the pastor-protagonist persuades himself that his actions are
guided by God. Melville’s ambition is more historical and political: he
is seeking, in his version of the spirit of the Resistance, to show that
cinema is capable of serving not as a simple external representation
of historical events but as a form of eye-witness testimony. Bresson,
for his part, and for his own reasons, seeks to test the cinema against
an even more difﬁ cult object, namely a world entirely shaped by
metaphysical belief. It is an attempt to ﬁ lm the invisible, to transmit
through the concrete form of sound and images an experience of the
ineffable and the transcendent.

Dudley Andrews’ valuable insight, that literary adaptations were

both the underlying strength of the French tradition de qualité and a
challenge to it, is most amply illustrated by these three ﬁ lms (Andrews,
1981: 20). All of them are based on literary works of recognized artistic
signiﬁ cance, a fact that served to raise the status of cinema; and all of
them, because of their emphasis on interiority, their location ﬁ lming,
and the primacy of the director’s role in their development, mark a
clear distance from the tightly scripted, studio-based, industry-
dominated characteristics of the quality tradition. In fact, these ﬁ lms,
more than just a challenge to the tradition of quality, can be seen as
forming an important historical and aesthetic transition to the work
of the New Wave.

This is obviously the case in respect to the role of directorial authority.

Melville and Bresson are generally accepted as notable New Wave
precursors, and Delannoy also has a claim, albeit a lesser one. But it

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is important to stress that a signiﬁ cant part of their contribution is the
process through which they transpose ﬁ rst-person literary narratives
into cinema, extending the subjectivity of the original literary characters
to their own subjectivity as directors. What begins as artistic mimesis –
the reformulation in cinematographic form of literary ﬁ rst-person
narrative – is transformed into discovery and performance of the
director’s personal style. The New Wave would take the further steps
of investing cinema with the power to express directly a personal world
view, but as we can see, the underlying currents in that direction were
already in movement ten or a dozen years earlier, and they included,
as well as the ﬁ lms discussed here, Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête (1946),
Les Parents terribles (1948) and Orphée (1949), and Tati’s Jour de fête
(1949) and Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953).

At the age of 95, still smarting from the savage attack that François

Truffaut had made a half-century earlier on him and his fellow
scriptwriters (Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost), Jean Delannoy had
little patience with the New Wave, which he saw in essentially
political terms (Delannoy, 2004).

At the time of making La Symphonie

pastorale, however, he had been very close to the positions adopted
by Truffaut in his (in)famous invective, decrying the scorn in which
writing for the cinema was held by many established literary authors
and rejoicing that some writers – notably Cocteau and Sartre, with
whom he was working – had come to think of cinema ‘non comme à
un frère inférieur, mais comme à un moyen d’expression tout neuf,
assez mystérieux, mais très émouvant’ (Delannoy, 1947: 74). It is ironic
that as the most vituperative of the Cahiers critics who would become
New Wave directors, Truffaut was the one whose body of work would
later be most closely aligned with the very tradition that he had so
ﬁ ercely viliﬁ ed. We can sympathize with Truffaut to the extent that
Delannoy’s ﬁ lm is much ‘softer’ in its treatment of the story’s issues
than Gide’s novel. Gide never lets the reader outside the head of the
obsessed and self-deluding pastor, so that the dominant emotion
generated by the work is that of the discomfort and growing horror
felt by the reader at the protagonist’s inability to recognize, let alone
acknowledge, the nature of his feelings for the blind girl that he has
adopted. Delannoy allows his camera much freer range, and while the
pastor’s self-deceit is clearly enough portrayed (for example, through
the recurrent shots of him writing in his diary), we are also given
access to the perspectives of the other main characters: the wife, the
son and Gertrude herself.

If it has not recaptured the intensity of Gide’s ﬁ rst-person narrative,

however, Delannoy’s ﬁ lm does move in the direction of developing a

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cinematographic expression of subjectivity. This is most notable with
the character of Gertrude (played by Michèle Morgan), for the viewer
comes to ‘see’, as it were, or at least to feel strongly, what it means to
be blind: the sequence in which Gertrude blunders out alone into the
snow to seek a boot that has been dropped is one of great drama and
poignancy. More generally, Delannoy has shown a determination
not to treat Gide’s material simply as a literary work to be expressed
in ﬁ lmic form, but rather to create from it an independent work that
expresses his own preoccupations. By emphasizing compassion for
all of the characters, rather than concentrating, as Gide does, on the
murky ironies of the pastor’s casuistry, Delannoy may be being un-
faithful to Gide, but he is being faithful to his own view of life: ‘amour
tout simple des uns pour les autres, avec tout ce que cela comporte de
respect et de considération pour la personnalité d’autrui’ (Delannoy,
1947: 76). His contribution to the establishment of cinema as a personal
means of expression is thus far from negligible.

Melville’s Le Silence de la mer is altogether more adventurous. His

own experience of the Resistance drove him to make the ﬁ lm, and part
of this was coming across Vercors’ novel, which was an emblematic
moment for him. While the ﬁ lmmaker generally respects the storyline
of an idealistic German ofﬁ cer’s encounter with his unwilling French
hosts, the strength of his own Resistance commitment motivated sig-
niﬁ cant changes to the original text – the attack in the opening epigraph
on ‘les crimes de la Barbarie nazie, perpétrés avec la complicité du
peuple allemand’; the inclusion of a sequence, during von Ebrennac’s
Paris sojourn, about Treblinka and Hitlerian deportation policies; and
a ﬁ nal scene preﬁ guring the Nuremberg trials principle, in which the
German ofﬁ cer is faced with an Anatole France text stating that ‘il est
beau qu’un soldat désobéisse à des ordres criminels’.

Moreover, Melville’s spirit of Resistance is not only political: it is

also aesthetic, in that he was rejecting the notion of cinematographic
adaptation as being simply an accompaniment or a staging of a literary
work. While his use of voiceover to translate the ﬁ rst-person narrative
of the original is relatively conventional, the real thrust of the ﬁ lm is
towards the creation of an authentic and personal cinematographic lan-
guage. This leads to a quest to treat soundtrack and image sequences
as contrapuntal rather than using them in the service of a facile realism.
It is well illustrated in the scene where the uncle plays on the harmonium
a few notes of the Bach eighth prelude and fugue, which von Ebrennac
had played earlier. We see a close-up of his hand pressing the notes
(emphasizing the plasticity of a pure cinematographic image), and we
hear the sound of the harmonium (diagetic music); but as the scene

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closes the musical phrase is picked up by the off-screen soundtrack,
thus creating an abstract, but emotionally powerful, aesthetic link
between the three dimensions.

In this way, Melville was pioneering the fragmentation of sound

sequences and their disjunction with the image that he himself would
explore more thoroughly in Bob le ﬂ ambeur (1955), paving the way for
the New Wave and what would become one of Jean-Luc Godard’s
trademarks. Melville’s independence and his authorial rigour are
further demonstrated, not only in the persistence with which he over-
came Vercors’ original reluctance to risk any kind of adaptation of
his text, but in his refusal to use established production mechanisms
or to work within the established union procedures, producing and
ﬁ nancing the ﬁ lm himself as a labour of passion and conviction.

Later in life, when Melville heard ﬁ lms like Le Samouraï and L’Armée

des ombres described as ‘Bressonian’, he retorted that the inﬂ uence, if
there was any, had gone in the other direction, and that Bresson’s Journal
d’un curé de campagne as a work of cinematography owed a great deal
to Le Silence de la mer (Nogueira, 1971: 27). Melville was probably right,
at least to an extent: there are many parallels between the two ﬁ lms in
lighting and rhythm, as well as in particular devices such as the use
of written text at the beginning of each ﬁ lm, or incidents like the train
station scenes. André Bazin, in comparing the two ﬁ lms, acknowledged
Melville’s contribution to the development of cinematographic lan-
guage in this precise context of the confrontation of ﬁ lm and literary
text, but believed that Bresson had gone further in the direction of
creating a truly independent cinematographic work, what he calls ‘une
œuvre à l’état second’, ‘un être esthétique nouveau qui est comme le
roman multiplié par le cinéma’ (Bazin, 1951: 16–17, 19).

Bresson’s ‘ﬁ delity’ to Bernanos is remarkable, both in terms of the

story of the socially inept, physically ill young priest and his catastrophic
encounters in his new parish, and in the evocation of the oppressively
bleak terrain of northern France. As with the novel, the central theme
of the ﬁ lm is the priest’s spiritual journey, from the naïve hopes and
plans of his arrival at Ambricourt through his disappointments and the
doubts of his ‘dark night of the soul’, to his realization that his personal
vocation is to live the agony of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane,
and the death-bed peace of his ﬁ nal ‘tout est grâce’. The diary form
of the original is rendered through the constantly repeated motif of
images showing the priest writing – often hesitantly – in his school
notebooks, and also in the ﬁ rst-person voiceover. Bazin’s assessment of
Bresson’s speciﬁ c cinematographic contribution is in a way understated,
because he overlooks a number of the qualities that were to become

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constitutive of Bresson’s particular ethos and aesthetic: the extremely
austere and demanding deployment of sound and image, the radical
stylization of acting, the ‘doubling’ of image and sound in which the
voiceover announces an action we then see enacted on-screen. It is
true, as Bazin enthusiastically notes, that Bresson’s artistic discoveries
had become part of the range of techniques and strategies thenceforth
available to cinema as a whole, and to all subsequent ﬁ lmmakers.
But we must not lose sight of the fact that Bresson, like Melville, was
primarily interested in mastering the possibilities of cinema as a means
of self-expression, and of creating a personal artistic universe.

At the end of his article on Journal d’un curé de campagne, Bazin makes

the searing comment: ‘Après Robert Bresson, Aurenche et Bost ne sont
plus que les Viollet Le Duc de l’adaptation cinématographique’ (Bazin,
1951: 21). This rather cruel comment was to form the springboard for
Truffaut’s attack on the cinéma de qualité tradition, and for the polemical
declaration of war in which he afﬁ rmed that there could be no ‘co-
existence paciﬁ que de la Tradition de la Qualité et d’un cinéma d’auteurs’
(Truffaut, 1954: 26). In fact, while the conﬂ ict between the concept of
ﬁ lm as rigorous art (the auteur tendency) and as more popular and
commercial entertainment (the ‘quality’ tendency) has remained one
of the constants among French ﬁ lmmakers and ﬁ lm critics over the
last 50 years, from a historical perspective the more or less ‘peaceful
co-existence’ of both tendencies has also been one of the distinguish-
ing features of the French cinema industry as a whole over the same
period. To continue Bazin’s metaphor, there is no argument that
the ‘cathedral builders’ of French cinema are those who followed in
the wake of the Bressons, Melvilles and Tatis – both at the time of the
New Wave and thereafter. The Viollet Le Ducs are imitators certainly,
less visionary and less daring, and sometimes frankly crass, but also
often just as committed to the cinema, and certainly contributors to
the long-term cultivation and maintenance of cinema culture and
cinema audiences. Perhaps the most important point to be made is
that, if we take Delannoy as an example – and La Symphonie pastorale
was scripted by Aurenche and Bost – one could reply to Bazin and
Truffaut that even the tradition de la qualité ﬁ lms had escaped from the
earlier stereotyping of cinema as an inferior form and had attained a
status equivalent to literature.

In other words, in respect to the occupation by cinema of the space

in which France’s cultivated public sought to satisfy its need for
narrative, both the more mainstream production and the more radical
and experimental auteur-produced work were part of the same dy-
namic. The emergence of the auteur phenomenon injected principles

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of diversiﬁ cation and energy into an industry where the mainstream
had tended to base itself on formulaic solutions, thus revitalizing and
enriching cinematographic practice as a whole; but as a doctrine, as
a ‘politique’, the value of auteurism could only operate in that wider
context. One of its real contributions has been to ensure that, since the
New Wave, among the the possible qualities of the cinéma de qualité is
its capacity to accommodate individual experiment and vision.

André Bazin’s wartime call for the creation of cinema criticism on

a level worthy to account for the art that cinema had become was, as
we know, answered more than fulsomely. Indeed, the development
of cinema criticism and cinema history was only one aspect of a vast
socio-cultural movement that sought to meet the growing import-
ance of ﬁ lm in French cultural life. The explosion of ciné-clubs across
the country for people of all ages, the institutionalizing of reﬂ ection
on cinema as an important educational area for children and young
people, the creation of academic cinema courses at university level,
the institution of the festival at Cannes – all of these things served to
mark the ‘arrival’ of cinema at the high end of cultural exchange in
France, while also reﬂ ecting and feeding into its mainstream popular-
ity – and ultimately bringing the two closer together.

While the cinema clearly picked up momentum as a narrative art

during the Occupation and immediate post-war period, in terms of
both its range of production and its audience, literature fared less well
for a number of reasons, of which the aggressive rise of cinema was
only one. Firstly, literature was more marked by the liberation purge.
There were a number of sanctions imposed on members of the cinema
industry: for example, Clouzot (whose ﬁ lms had been produced by
Continental) was forbidden to work for a time, Carné was censured
and several prominent actors – including Arletty, Pierre Fresnay and
Yvonne Printemps – suffered brief periods of imprisonment. The
severest sentence was that imposed on Robert le Vigan, condemned
to national indignity and 10 years of hard labour. In most of these
cases, the sentences were either overruled or not fully carried out, and
overall the ‘purge’ of the cinema was something of a farce – rather in
the image of a comedy written by Sacha Guitry, whose own experience
of the purge gave rise to a wickedly savage indictment of the whole
process (Guitry, 1947).

However, there was nothing in the cinema to equal what happened

in the literary world, where many major writers were tried for acts
of collaboration (including Céline, who was arguably the greatest
novelist of his day), and several of them were put to death. The tone
of the literary épuration had been set during the Occupation by the

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Comité national des écrivains in its journal Les Lettres françaises.

was summed up by Claude Morgan in October 1944:

Pour réussir, il faut d’abord être sérieux et entreprendre une véritable
épuration et non une exhibition plus ou moins spectaculaire; châtier les
vrais coupables ET NON LES COMPARSES, imposer silence à ceux, à
tous ceux qui ont soutenu l’ennemi.

Sans l’épuration, c’est-à-dire sans la justice que toute la France attend

et exige, rien n’est et ne serait possible. (Morgan, 1944: 1)

The case of Robert Brasillach has remained a cause célèbre because

his death sentence, and de Gaulle’s refusal to commute it, were moti-
vated by the conviction that Brasillach’s treason was all the more
heinous for having been carried out under the banner of the French
literary and intellectual tradition. Philip Watts accurately points out
that the special status accorded to the world of letters in France was
an important factor in the post-war purge trials. The judges argued
that writers’ status increased their political responsibility, while the
collaborationist writers themselves argued that their opinions as artists
should be exempt from the rules of partisan politics: but, as Watts
puts it, ‘both sides were arguing in favour of the prestige and exemplary
status of the writer’ (Watts, 1998: 57, 17).

A second factor affecting the dominant position of literature was

that its ideological conﬂ icts were to prove more enduring and more
divisive than what occurred in the cinema. Underlying the support
by the Comité nationale des écrivains (CNE) for the purge was an
unquestioned belief that French literature was the privileged icon of
the nation’s cultural integrity and honour. Tristan Tzara, in his searing
attack on Giono as a commercially motivated, limp-willed opportunist,
proclaimed that ‘le métier d’écrire n’est pas seulement une habilité,
mais une dignité, un honneur, une justiﬁ cation, une grâce et surtout
une grande honnêteté envers soi-même et les autres’ (Tzara, 1944: 5).
While such a position was understandable in the context of the
Occupation, when there was a real fear that French culture was the
object of German cultural imperialism, and when consequently any
form of collaborationist writing could legitimately be considered as a
form of treason and cultural suicide, it was not one that could survive
the Liberation. The CNE had been formed in a deliberate quest for
ideological unity, gathering socialists, Catholics, and non-aligned
writers as well as communists. This was a formation whose raison
d’être and only justiﬁ cation was a defence against a common enemy.
It could not realistically hope, the purge notwithstanding, to survive
the removal of that enemy.

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Divisions between right- and left-wing ideologies in French writing

were well entrenched before the war. The Occupation did nothing to
reduce them, although left-wing tendencies perforce became more
clandestine as the fascist right aligned itself with the power of the
Vichy government and the occupying forces. After the Liberation,
and the left-dominated purge process, there was not even a temporary
lull in the production of right-wing literary narratives. Against the
thrust towards the ‘littérature engagée’ advocated by Sartre, whose
fundamentally instrumental concept of literature was a continuation
of the policies of the CNE, the writing of people like Jacques Laurent
(who had been employed by Henriot’s Ministry of Information and
Propaganda) and the hussards was testimony to the unbroken continuity
of a strong right-wing cultural current.

A third element militating against the CNE concept of literature as a

uniﬁ ed and unifying cultural ﬁ eld can be seen in the fact that the Occu-
pation and purge sharpened, rather than diminished, a more general,
long-running conﬂ ict within literature. The CNE’s position was that
literature was inherently and necessarily a message-bearing signiﬁ er,
and its emphasis on ideological engagement ties it, historically, to the
nineteenth-century realist tradition of representation. Since Proust and
the development of modernism, however, literature in general, and the
novel in particular, had sought to renew its identity as the expression
and construction of individualized visions of the world. The itinerary
of Céline in this respect is exemplary: his starting point in Voyage au
bout de la nuit (1932) marks a systematic déréglement of traditional
novelistic composition, and his evolution leads him through a quite
coherent set of developments to an increasingly particular perspective
on the phenomenological world, culminating in the revolutionary
structures and style of the last novels. In the 10 years following the
Liberation, a multitude of innovative narrative voices emerged, well
in advance of the nouveau roman classiﬁ cation that gave impetus to the
work of Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor et al.: Boris Vian and Raymond
Queneau with their ’pataphysical inspiration, Samuel Beckett’s entropic
minimalism, Jean Genet’s luscious thematic and stylistic transvestism,
Marguerite Duras with her distended syntactical rhythms and exotic
topography, Nathalie Sarraute with her evocation of the subconscious
world of tropismes.

The diversiﬁ cation of narrative forms that sprang up after the

Liberation would be continued under the rubric of the nouveau roman.
Cumulatively, this work appears as a considerable revitalization of
French literary narrative ﬁ ction, the constitution of a ﬁ eld whose scope
and possibilities brought real promise of a resurgence of the literary

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tradition as a whole. It is true that much of this writing was marked
by increasing degrees of esotericism and that greater interiority, with
marginal characters and themes and complicated narratives, could be
seen to make for more difﬁ cult reading. This was certainly the view of
Jean Bouhier in his appeal ‘Pour une littérature populaire’ in late 1944.
Bouhier worried that novel writing was becoming too experimental,
too speculative and philosphical, too bourgeois, and that it risked, in
so doing, losing its public:

Lorsqu’il va au théâtre, lorsqu’il va au cinéma, lors qu’il écoute la radio,
lorsqu’il se promène, c’est pour se détendre, pour se distraire. La vie n’est
pas si belle qu’il n’ait besoin de s’évader des heures sombres. Pourquoi
le livre, lui, ne serait-il pas un moyen de distraction? ... Le public attend,
il cherche et il ne trouve que des œuvres volontairement de basse qualité
ou des rébus ... Que les romanciers pensent à la vie et non à la mort,
qu’ils pensent à l’amour et non à la haine, qu’ils pensent à l’homme
et non à eux-mêmes! Le lecteur accepte le fantastique, l’irrationnel, le
didacticisme, voire la morale, à la condition qu’il y trouve du plaisir et
non de l’ennui. (Bouhier, 1944: 5)

Bouhier’s concerns were being met to some extent by the ﬂ ourishing
of the detective story genre: Simenon with his Maigret and Léo Mallet
with his Nestor Burma, and then, after the creation of the Série noire
by Marcel Duhamel in 1947, a whole new group of French writers,
variously inspired by the translations from the American with which
Duhamel had launched his project.

When one looks at another symbol of traditional literary activity –

namely the major literary prizes for the decade following the war, it is
hard to see what Bouhier was complaining about. While a number of
works have literary or philosophical ambitions that could be thought
of as challenging (Louis Guilloux, Le Jeu de patience, Prix Renaudot
1949; Julien Gracq, Le Rivage des Syrtes, Prix Goncourt 1951; Simone
de Beauvoir, Les Mandarins, Prix Goncourt 1954), the vast majority are
more traditional narratives. In sum, as a ﬁ eld, post-war French narrative
literature was just as eclectic as cinema. ‘High art’ and ‘popular writing’
existed side by side, and sometimes cohabited without apparent
schizophrenia in different aspects of the work of single novelists. This
was already the case with Simenon. It became the case with Jacques
Laurent, whose ‘serious’ writing career began with the publication in
1948 of Les Corps tranquilles and took him via the Prix Goncourt in 1971
for Les Bêtises to the Grand prix de l’Académie française in 1981 and
his admission as a member of the Academy in 1986.

All the while,

under a variety of pseudonyms, Laurent maintained a prodigious
populist output, the most celebrated of which is the ‘roman rose’

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Caroline series, penned under the name of Cécil Saint-Laurent. Laurent’s
later celebration of the novel in Le Roman du roman (1977) is at once a
rejection of all forms of ideological and aesthetic dogmatism, and a
statement of his ongoing faith in the genre’s ability to express the
whole range of human experience. Laurent’s belief in literature as a
form of creative freedom is obviously attractive; but we cannot escape
the conclusion that the very institution to which he attached himself
is itself less ﬁ rmly anchored in French cultural life.

Any explanation of why French literature lost its central hold as the

guarantor of cultural identity must be complex, and take into account
technological as well as historical change, the effects of the proximate
events of the Occupation and the Liberation as well as longer-term
sociological and aesthetic trends. The story is not just one of the cin-
ema and the novel. And yet, in the changing relationship between
these two major narrative forms in the period we have examined, it is
possible to observe, and to better understand, many of the key factors
involved. Technologically, the experience of the cinema, as it mastered
ever more sophisticated narrative possibilities, brought to massively
extended audiences stories that literature was certainly capable of
providing, but at higher cost and through a more arduous process; and
the elitism associated with the literary was progressively undermined
as cinema gained in respectability. Cinema was also associated with
the vitality of youth culture and, after the infolded claustrophobia
of the Occupation, with the rediscovery of an outside world full of un-
familiar energies, particularly America. The fundamental importance
of this attraction to energy is crucial. It is no coincidence that during
the war it was the popular ﬁ ction of Simenon that was most drawn
upon for adaptation to the screen; the public appetite was already
there and, once the constraints of the Occupation were removed, it
declared itself as a ravening hunger that consumed the great inﬂ ux of
American cinema and detective ﬁ ction even as it began to stimulate
renewed domestic productions.

Over the period we have examined, the trend in the relationship

between literature and cinema has been one of convergence into a cul-
tural narrative practice where distinctions between high and popular
forms have given way to more or less systematic hybridity. As cinema
sought to raise its artistic status, often on the back of a literature whose
powers it sought to emulate and surpass, literature (particularly the
literature of ﬁ ction) opened itself to thematic and stylistic elements
quite deliberately drawn from the realm of popular culture. There is a
premonitory illustration of this evolution in Jean Cocteau’s 1927 novel
Les Enfants terribles. In this work, the two major characters, Elisabeth

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and Paul, represent conﬂ icting but profoundly symbiotic tendencies.
Elisabeth is a fan of popular culture; Paul is nourished by his cultivation
of the great poets. Elisabeth is a principle of pluralism and fascination
with the here and now, Paul one of singularity and attachment to
tradition. Together the brother and sister form a constellation of per-
petual creativity, a ferment of energy in which conﬂ ict is essential but
in which neither can exist without the other.

Cocteau presents his characters as a metaphor of the difﬁ culties and

attractions of modernism in general, but the symbol is enlightening
for the particular relationship between cinema and literature over the
following 30 years. Cocteau’s story is a tragic one: both ﬁ gures end
up dead, as if the synthesis imagined by their creator could only end
in self-destruction. The realities of history have been kinder, and the
French social fabric has proven to be more resilient: neither literature
nor cinema has really suffered from their conjunction, and together
they have produced a range of narratives that suggest that artistic
exploration on the one hand, and more traditional forms on the other
hand, can co-exist in a relatively harmonious dynamic.

A snapshot of French storytelling as the New Wave crested shows

that literature and cinema were no longer in a hierarchical cultural
relationship. They had become, simply, alternative vehicles, or in-
deed modes of expression that could be combined more or less at
will. The borders between the two forms had become much more
porous. Godard, it is said, wanted to be a novelist before he became a
ﬁ lmmaker; a few years later, Patrick Modiano, for his part, wanted to
be a ﬁ lmmaker before devoting himself to writing novels (MacCabe,
2003: 37; Modiano and Leconte, 1994: 117). Each, in building up his
opus, has drawn heavily on the art form he did not eventually choose.
Writers like Robbe-Grillet and Duras have created works of cinema
of comparable importance to their novelistic output, a phenomenon
which demonstrates not only the attraction that cinema can exercise
on dedicated writers, but the relative ease with which the transfer
can occur.

In 1948 Astruc claimed that if Descartes were writing Le Discours de la

méthode today he would be using a 16 mm camera (Astruc, 1992: 324–8).
It is probably truer to say that Descartes might have been using a 16 mm
camera, for if the interface of literary and cinematographic narratives
is characterized by considerable overlap and exchange, there are also –
fortunately – signiﬁ cant works of literature and cinema that continue
to accentuate the distinctiveness of the forms, thus emphasizing, as
well as justifying, the need for both. In cinema, for instance, Claire
Denis has sought to create narrative forms that are structured by

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JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 37(2)

image, sound and rhythm, and while she does not necessarily eschew
literary connections,

it is hard to imagine her work taking the form of

literary expression. Likewise, Pascal Quignard’s Dernier royaume cycle
(Quignard, 2002–4), although its fragmented presentation could be
seen as analogous to cinematographic shots, is as unimaginable as a
work of cinema as Denis’ ﬁ lms are as written text. But such has be-
come the scope and resilience of France’s contemporary narrative
space that, within it, a Denis and a Quignard can be not only good
neighbours, they can stimulate each other as artistic equals. Similarly,
cinema and literature can interact as equal arts, each translating in
different ways the tensions between continuity and mutation that
shape contemporary French society.

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Eleanor Davey for her assistance in the research and elaboration
of this paper, which is part of an Australian Research Council-funded project on
the history of the relationship between French literature and cinema. Thanks, too,
to Jean-Pierre Jeancolas for his helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

A full account of the contemporary French narrative space would have to
include theatre, bandes déssinées and television, as well as cinema and literature,
and documentary as well as ﬁ ctional works. This article is for the most part
limited to ﬁ ctional cinema and novelistic writing.

2. The term is borrowed from Jeancolas (1983 : 296).
3. Among the now numerous accounts of the period one can cite the following,

in addition to Jeancolas, as especially useful either because of their archival
documentation or because of their historiographical landmark value: Leglise
(1977), Garçon (1984), Bertin-Maghit (1989), Ehrlich (1985), Williams (1992:
245–98), Billard (1995: esp. 321–452), Chateau (1995), Darmon (1997), Creton
(2004: 59–180). Régent (1948) remains a valuable resource.

4. See, for instance, Garçon (1990), who stresses the unresolvable dilemma

arising from the fact that the successes of the cinema under Vichy cannot be
separated from the atrocities perpetrated by the regime.

5. Production of documentary and animated ﬁ lms was also substantial during

the period. See Ehrlich (1985: 107).

6. Ehrlich cites an interview with Louis Emile Galey: ‘There was no gas for the

few private cars that still existed, and in any event there was no place to go,
since the beaches were off limits [for military reasons] and the borders closed.
In the cafés, only ersatz liquor was served, and most restaurants had closed
for lack of provisions. Cigarettes were rationed. There was not enough heat
or electricity. There was only one diversion. Everyone went to the movies,
and everyone who made movies made money’ (Ehrlich, 1985: 82).

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7. The debate over this issue has been intense. An excellent example of the

complexities involved can be seen in Sims (1999).

8. Continental produced 13 of the 27 most commercially successful movies of the

Occupation. Among the ﬁ lms that are now part of canonical French cinema
history, we can cite L’Assassin habite au 21 and Le Corbeau (Clouzot, 1942 and
1943); Cécile est morte and La main du diable (Tourneur, 1943 and 1942); Premier
rendez-vous (Decoin, 1941); and La Symphonie fantastique (Christian-Jacque,
1941).

9. Cf. Billard (1995: 366–9); also Creton (2004: 78).
10. Leglise (1977: 48). Cf. also Creton (2004: 77) and Billard (1995: 364–5).
11. As part of his argument for continuity, Jeancolas points out that many of the

wartime initiatives to reorganize the cinema industry had their origin in the
Third Republic (Jeancolas, 1983: 298–9). Both de Carmoy and Galey were
active in the 1930s. Cf. also Williams (1992: 249–50).

12. The discourse aligning cinema with propaganda had been well established

even before the war across the whole political spectrum. See Garçon (1984:
17–18).

13. L’Écran français ﬁ rst appeared as a subsection of the clandestine Les Lettres

françaises in March 1944. Galey was the subject of two separate attacks in the
ﬁ rst number: for his alleged sympathies with Continental over the Grand
Prix du ﬁ lm d’art, and for his appointment of Roger Richebé as president of
the proposed new COIC (Anon., 1944: 4).

14. Jeancolas stresses the importance, in assessing overall cinema production

during the Occupation, of not neglecting the extensive production of docu-
mentary ﬁ lms (Jeancolas, 1983: 297).

15. The ‘Otto list’ contained over 1000 titles of books and periodicals that were

forbidden by the Germans. Various supplements appeared over time. Accep-
tance of the wide diffusion of this list was a central condition for publishers to
retain responsibility for a degree of self-censorship for other publications.

16.

Anouilh’s quite extensive cinematographic activity was accompanied by a
paradoxical difﬁ dence towards the medium. See d’Hugues (1995: 343–7).

17. Truffaut’s attack came in Truffaut (1954).
18. Vercors approved of these changes, as did the committee of Resistance mem-

bers to whom Melville had agreed to submit the ﬁ lm, as part of the conditions
imposed by Vercors on his making it.

19. Ginette Vincendeau gives an excellent account of the making of the ﬁ lm in

Vincendeau (2003: esp. 29–39).

20. Originally created in late 1941, from February 1943 the Comité national des

écrivains comprised Jean Paulhan, Paul Eluard, Jacques Debû-Bridel, Charles
Vildrac, Jean Guéhenno, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Thomas, Jean Blanzat, Jean
Vaudal and Claude Morgan. See Atack (1989: 30–54).

21. For a thorough account of the hussards and the literary right, see Hewitt

(1996).

22. For more extensive accounts of the work of Jacques Laurent see Hewitt (1996:

164–94) and Nettelbeck (1989).

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23. For example, she draws on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd for her Beau Travail

(1999) and on Jean-Luc Nancy’s eponymous philosophical text for L’Intrus
(2004). There are also resonances between Nénette et Boni (1996) and Cocteau’s
Les Enfants terribles. These literary texts are, however, only one element in
her elaboration of a complex, and speciﬁ cally cinematographic language.

References

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Colin Nettelbeck

is a Professorial Fellow in the School of Languages

and Linguistics, University of Melbourne. Address for correspondence:
School of Languages, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia
[email: cnettel@unimelb.edu.au]

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