Happy Birthday, Julien Duvivier! Born today in 1896 as Julien Henri Nicolas Duvivier, this French screenwriter, producer and film director was prominent in French cinema in the years 1930-1960.
In 1916, Duvivier began his career. This occurred due to an actor at the Théâtre de l'Odéon (one of France's six national theatres), under the direction of French actor, theatre manager, film director, author, and critic André Antoine. He is considered the father of modern mise en scène in France.
In 1918, Duvivier moved on to the Gaumont Film Company as a writer and assistant of, amongst others, Antoine and French filmmaker, avant-garde theorist and imaginative practitioner Marcel L'Herbier.
Most notably, this included the prolific and prominent French film director from the silent era Louis Feuillade ('Les Vampires'), of whom founded the company.
In the 1930s, Duvivier was part of the production company, 'Film d'Art'. He worked as part of a team, and stayed with them for nine years.
Among his credits, Duvivier is best remembered for the fine film noir precursor of which he is best known for co-writing and directing.
This was the 1937 French black and white romance/crime film Pépé le Moko'. It was considered experimental for its day, and is credited with having inspired 'The Third Man' (1949).
Pépé le Moko (Jean Gabin), one of France's most wanted criminals, hides out in the Casbah section of Algiers. He knows police will be waiting for him if he tries to leave the city.
When Pépé meets Gaby Gould (Mireille Balin), a gorgeous woman from Paris who is lost in the Casbah, he falls for her.
She also reminds him of all the things he loves about Paris. Even as Pépé knows he is being trailed by Inspector Slimane (Lucas Gridoux), Pépé considers a future with Gaby.
The film was based off of French writer and screenwriter Henri La Barthe's eponymous 1931 fiction book (under his pseudonym Détective Ashelbé). La Barthe also co-wrote the film's script.
It was for this film, as well as his previous works, that Duvivier has often been classed as the master of ‘cruel realism’. His work channels hostility and violence (both verbal and physical) to forge a set of films that straddles various genres and marks him out as a ‘modern’ director.
According to a BBC documentary, 'Pépé le Moko' served as inspiration for English writer and journalist Graham Greene's screenplay for 'The Third Man. 'Pépé le Moko' has many similarities with 'Casablanca' (1942), which was released a few years later.
During World War II, Duvivier left to work in the United States. He made five films in these years. On his return to France, Duvivier experienced some difficulties in resuming his career.
His 1946 French black and white/drama film 'Panique' ('Panic'), an exhaustive summary of the lowest of human instincts, was the most personal, darkest, and nihilistic of his works. It was later a bitter failure with critics and the public as well.
Duvivier reflected in the mid-1940s, while filming 'Panique', perhaps his darkest feature, that he was perpetually drawn to the murkier side of human nature.
He stated:“I know it is much easier to make films that are poetic, sweet, charming, and beautifully photographed, but my nature pushes me towards harsh, dark and bitter material”.
Despite the film's failure, Duvivier continued, notwithstanding, to work in France until the end of his life, apart from a short period in Great Britain.
This was to shoot the 1948 British black and white drama/adaptation film 'Anna Karenina'. The film was based off of Leo Tolstoy's eponymous 1877 literary realism novel.
In 1959, Duvivier was invited to be part of the jury of the 12th Cannes Film Festival. This was the same year of which the French New Wave fully emerged.
Duvivier's last film was the 1967 French/Italian/West German Eastmancolor thriller/crime film 'Diaboliquement vôtre' ('Diabolically Yours').
The film tells that, following a car crash, how an amnesiac encounters strange sensations and voices urging his destruction.
By eerie coincidence, Duvivier himself was in a traffic accident later that same year, triggering a heart attack which killed him on October 29, 1967 in Paris, France. He was 71.
The car that he had collided with was carrying French politician, journalist, writer, and WWII hero Maurice Schumann. He was French President Charles De Gaulle's Minister of Scientific Research.
Referring to the Modern Museum of Art (MoMA), Jean Renoir once proclaimed, “If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of [Julien] Duvivier above the entrance.... This great technician, this rigorist, was a poet."
Duvivier could turn his hand to any genre, and imbue each assignment with a set of arresting visuals or deft narrative turns while still serving the film’s source material as efficiently as possible.
Here was a director of range, adaptability and know-how, yet attempting to define the ‘Duvivier style’ can be a frustrating exercise.
He had made nearly seventy films throughout his career, but resolutely refused to be labelled an auteur. Duvivier’s world is frequently cruel and pessimistic, harrowing and misanthropic.
Conflict for Duvivier is a way not just of working, but of seeing the world. A key feature of his work is the paroxystic moment or a sudden explosion of verbal or physical violence.
This bringing of a scene to a forceful conclusion from a tense build-up could be traced back to Duvivier’s theatrical apprenticeship under Antoine and also to an understanding that a slow accretion of details before an outburst of violence is infinitely more dramatically satisfying.
Again and again, Duvivier returned to the same core themes – pessimism, misanthropy, the cruelty of the crowd, fatalism, defective memory, masquerading, exile and the impossibility of escape.
Duvivier was fastidious, and never left anything to chance – lighting, editing, framing, and camera movement were all impeccably planned, and so too was the creation of a scrupulous moral universe.
If all of this points to Duvivier’s status as an auteur, then that is because he is one. Or perhaps an auteur malgré lui (author despite himself).
He always maintained that a film’s style was dictated by its subject, and not its director: “Genius is just a word; filmmaking is a craft, a tough craft that must be learned. Personally, the more I work, the more I realize how little I know in proportion to the infinite possibilities of cinematic expressions”.
However, despite such protestations, Duvivier’s authorial vision remained, from film to film, unmistakable.
Ultimately, Duvivier’s genre eclecticism and lack of a coherent corpus should not be conceptualized as a negative. Instead, Duvivier’s vital historical and genre range responds to and engages with important development in French and international film praxis.
His status as ‘not quite auteur’ and his marginalized position in the annals of French film history need not detract from the beauty, horror, and often exquisite tenderness of his work.
History often forgets to acknowledge those directors who were ‘survivors’; individuals who just kept on working despite the travails of war, displacement, changing tastes or critical mauling.
These are the artists driven by a ferocious work ethic, with a need to keep on scratching creative itches, or fund a comfortable lifestyle, or pivot between the ‘one for them, one for me’ tactic of negotiating the studio system and the financiers.
That was Duvivier. And cinema will rarely see his like again.
A prolific, competent craftsman whose career lasted almost five decades had emerged as one of the “Big Five” of the French cinema in the 1930s.
His use of “poetic realism,” characterized the works of the avant-garde filmmakers of that decade and won him international acclaim.
Duvivier had been active from 1919–1967.
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