Stephen Heath,
César. (BFI Film Classics)
London: BFI publishing, 2004.
ISBN: 0 85170 833 1
88 pp
£8.99stg. (pb)
(Review copy supplied by BFI Publishing)

If serious cinephilia has lionized the cosmopolitan, socially significant and cinematically important French master Renoir, Marcel Pagnol’s is the atmosphere that popularly signifies the “gloire” of classic French cinema. In the 1980s the Provençal Jean de florette (France/Switzerland/Italy,1985) and Manon des sources (Italy/France/Switzerland,1986) were inspired by Pagnol stories and played to a British audience then revelling in the lavender splendour of Peter Mayle’s television series A Year in Provence (UK, 1993). “The aura of these new movies mingled with the fragrant allure of our culture’s travel section and the supplement on cuisine,” writes David Thomson in the New Biographical Dictionary of Film. There was a Pagnol season at London’s National Film Theatre in July 1988.

This book takes to task the cinephile’s traditional dismissal of Pagnol, a writer-director inspired by the desire to film the plays with which he made his name. Cinephilia has always sought to differentiate between the literary and the truly cinematic in order to free cinema from lingering associations with the novel and theatre. By drawing attention to Pagnol’s unique way with language and performance, Stephen Heath advocates another practice in which cinema and theatre have learnt from each other. Indeed, describing the Pagnolian trilogy of Marius (France, 1931), Fanny (France, 1932) and César (France, 1936), Heath traces currents that continue to inform French cinema.

André Bazin described Pagnol as “one of the greatest authors of talking films,” and talk shapes this uniquely social cinema. After teaching in the 1920s, Pagnol headed for Paris to realize cherished literary ambitions. Success came quickly and his play Marius was a smash, leading to the Alexander Korda film in 1931. Marc Allégret then filmed Pagnol’s sequel Fanny. Inspired by a London screening of the Hollywood musical Broadway Melody of 1929, Pagnol then turned to cinema. Setting up his own production company, he became the producer, writer, director and distributor of his work, more than fulfilling future criteria for the kudos of auteur, (a term Pagnol himself baulked at). Pagnol’s “cinema is about the theatricalisation of film”, writes Heath. Concluding his trilogy of life in the Marseille docklands, César seems more reflective and emotionally affecting than the other parts of the series, characteristics which make for a theatrical flavour. In it the Parisian student Césariot returns to Marseille and, following his adoptive father Panisse’s death, resolves to discover his true father, Marius’ identity. Reluctant to marry Césariot’s mother Fanny, whom he has always loved, in case it were thought he was only after Panisse’s money, Marius and Fanny are eventually brought together by his father César. César tells them that Césariot will be happy for his father and mother to marry.

This melodramatic story is steeped in the working class characters of the fish stalls, bars and tenements of Marseille’s Vieux-Port. Assembling a distinctive troupe of actors over several films, Pagnol’s characters exist in and through performance. Raimu (César) came to films from music hall and boulevard theatre. Pierre Fresnay (Marius) was a product of the Conservatoire – he was Renoir’s aristocratic officer de Boieldieu in La Grande Illusion in 1936. Charpin (Panisse) and Orane Demazis (Fanny) seem always to be coming from Pagnol.

The organic relationship between theatre and cinema stems from Pagnol’s ability to make the characters out of, as well as fit, the actors, argues Heath. This overlapping can be seen in the way Pagnol’s people seem to physically inhabit the language of their world. We can see and feel that language in the posturing and gesturality of the performances: “Raimu is César but the character César is the actor Raimu, is made of all the emphatic gestural and vocal weight of Raimu himself, his massive thereness.” Heath suggests another Deleuzian category to augment the “image-movement” and the “image-sound”, that of “image-speech.” “The characters, like us, live in and through their speech and it is the fact of that ‘living through’ which is filmed in César and the trilogy, to give a representation – precisely a talking picture – of how speech performs.” Such an argument tempers our view of the early talkies, an era remembered now mainly for innovators like Clair, Lang and Hitchcock, who tried to overcome the voice by moving the camera. Significantly, there is next to no examination of camerawork or mise-en-scène here, while stills emphasize dialogue, reactions, community.

César appeared at the height of the Popular Front era in French politics during which a left wing coalition government passed labour reforms and extolled democratic values. César made the vernacular of the Midi into what has come to be seen as a quintessentially popular cinema. It is full of the accents and music hall humours of Marseille, where the trilogy was shot. Pagnol was born near Marseilles and Provençal was the language of his grandparents. Heath fills us in on the “café-concert” tradition of street entertainment. Drawing on the city’s characters, this discourse of sketches and music evokes a sensibility far from the “variétés” of faraway Paris. Like major ports everywhere, Marseille is a medley of colours and sounds. For Walter Benjamin, whom Heath quotes, its denizens were “a bacillus culture, the porters and whores products of decomposition.” Like the best BFI Classics, this one hunts high and low for the environments that feed its subject. There is a discussion of Marseille’s modernist architecture, principally the Pont Transbordeur, an elevated walkway and vehicle platform linking the two sides of the port which, slicing across the Marseillaise sky, features as a backdrop throughout the trilogy.

If Pagnol remains important for managing “theatre filmically and cinema dramatically”, his trilogy also responds to currents with deep and lasting purchase on French cinema. This is an area that Heath does not go into, yet the music hall and café-concert routines of Pagnol’s troupe are very much alive in the international arthouse. The peppery vivacity of Pagnol’s working lives predicts Robert Guédiguian’s Marius et Jeannette (France, 1997). Set in the Marseillaise district of L’Éstaque and coloured by the same sense of community as Pagnol, it played well on the arthouse circuit. According to David Thomson, there is even a Berkeley, California restaurant named after Charpin’s master-sailmaker: Chez Panisse!

Richard Armstrong
United Kingdom.
Created on: Wednesday, 20 July 2005 | Last Updated: 20-Jul-05