Happy Birthday, René Clair! Born today in 1898 as René-Lucien Chomette, this French actor, screenwriter, producer and director first established his reputation in the 1920s as a director of silent films in which comedy was often mingled with fantasy.
Clair almost single-handedly revived French film comedy after WWI, adapting the pre-war comic tradition to sound technology and the realities of the post-war era.
Born and raised in Paris, France, in the district of Les Halles, it was the lively and picturesque character of this location that made a lasting impression on him.
In 1914, Clair was studying philosophy; his friends at that time included Raymond Payelle who became the multi-talented French novelist, playwright and actor Philippe Hériat.
In 1917, at the age of eighteen, Clair served as an ambulance driver in World War I. This was before being invalided out with a spinal injury.
Clair was deeply affected by the horrors of war that he witnessed and gave expression to this in writing a volume of poetry.
Back in Paris after the war, he started a career as a journalist at the left-wing French newspaper L'Intransigeant.
Later on, Clair met the French music-hall singer and actress Marie-Louise Damien (better known by the stage name Damia). Afterwards, he had written some songs for her.
Clair was persuaded by her to visit Gaumont studios in 1920 where a film was being cast and he then agreed to take on a leading role. Afterwards, Clair adopted the stage-name of René Clair, and several other acting jobs followed.
This included the 1921 French silent black and white drama film 'Parisette' for the prolific and prominent French film director from the silent era Louis Feuillade ('Les Vampires').
In 1922, Clair extended his career as a journalist, becoming the editor of a new film supplement to the monthly magazine Théâtre et Comœdia illustrés.
He also visited Belgium and after an introduction from his brother Henri, he became an assistant to the French film director Jacques de Baroncelli on several films.
In 1924, with the support of French director, producer and screenwriter Henri Diamant-Berger, Clair got the opportunity to direct his own first film.
At the end of that same year, Clair met a young French actress named Bronja Perlmutter. Subsequently two years late, she appeared in Clair's 1926 French silent black and white comedy-drama film 'Le Voyage imaginaire' ('The Imaginary Voyage'). They later married that same year.
The following year, they had a son together named Jean-François Clair (b. 1927). Clair and Perlmutter would remain married until her husband's death.
By the end of the silent era, Clair was celebrated as one of the great names in cinema, alongside Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Sergei M. Eisenstein and Austrian film director and screenwriter G. W. Pabst ('Pandora's Box').
As the author of all of his own scripts, Clair was one of the first French filmmakers to establish for himself the full role of an auteur. He also paid close attention to every aspect of the making of a film, including the editing.
Clair was initially skeptical about the introduction of sound to films, and called it "an unnatural creation".
He was not happy with the coming of sound, in cinema, as it could, he thought, undermine the complex language constructed by the silent cinema over the last three decades.
Clair instead made his reputation known through his visual comedies and socio/political satires, examining the mores of the middle- and upper-classes in France.
Although he made sojourns to both Britain and the United States, Clair was happiest working in his native country, where he felt less subjected to studio interference.
He then realized the creative possibilities that it offered, particularly, in his view, if the soundtrack was not used realistically.
Clair knew that words and pictures need not, and indeed should not, be tied together in a clumsy duplication of information; dialogue did not always need to be heard.
Between 1930 and 1933, Clair explored these ideas in his first four sound films.
Of these, Clair is best known for writing and directing the 1931 French black and white musical/comedy film 'Le Million' and the 1931 French black and white comedy/musical film 'À nous la liberté' ('Freedom or Us').
Ther former tells of debt-ridden painter Michel Bouflette (René Lefèvre), of whom is overcome with joy at discovering that he has just won one million florins in the Dutch lottery.
However, almost immediately, he discovers that his softhearted girlfriend, Béatrice (Annabella), has given away his jacket containing the winning ticket to an elderly petty thief Granpère Tulipe (Paul Ollivier).
Soon Michel, Beatrice and Michel's artistic rival, Prosper (Louis Allibert), are hurtling through the streets of Paris on the trail of the missing jacket.
The story for 'Le Million' was adapted by Clair from French actor and dramatist Georges Berr and French writer Marcel Guillermand's 1911 farcical stage play of the same name.
Later that same year, Clair directed 'Freedom for Us'. In this classic French satire, Louis (Raymond Cordy), a convict, escapes from prison and takes on legitimate work, making his way up in the business world.
Eventually becoming the head of a successful factory, Louis opts to modernize his company with mechanical innovations.
But when his friend Émile (Henri Marchand) finally leaves jail years later and reunites with Louis, the past catches up with them. The two, now worried about being apprehended by police, long to flee the confines of industry.
With a score by French composer Georges Auric, the film has more music than any of Clair's early works.
Praised for its scenic design and use of sound, 'Freedom for Us' has been called Clair's "crowning achievement".
Featuring lighthearted wit, tremendous visual innovation, and masterful manipulation of sound, the film is both a potent indictment of mechanized modern society and an uproarious comic delight.
With 'Le Million' and 'Freedom foe Us' (along with Clair's two other films), each portrayed an affectionate and idealized view of working-class life, and they did much to create a popular romantic image of Paris which was seen around the world.
In the 1930s, Clair was widely seen as one of France's greatest directors. These included Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné ('Daybreak',' 'Children of Paradise').
Thereafter, Clair's work's artifice and detachment from the realities of life fell increasingly from favor. Despite this, Clair was later ranked as one of the grand old men of French cinema.
When Chaplin composed, wrote, produced, directed and starred in his 1936 American black and white comedy drama/romance film 'Modern Times', it was noted that some parts of it bore a marked similarity to scenes in 'Freedom for Us'.
Because of this, Tobis Film (the producers of Clair's film) launched a lawsuit for plagiarism against United Artists, (the producers of Chaplin's film).
However, Clair was embarrassed by this since he acknowledged his own debt to the spirit of Chaplin, and he refused to be associated with the action.
Apart from Clair's many journal articles, these were some of his main publications. However, many of his them dealt with the cinema, including reflections on his own films.
In 1974, Clair served as President of the jury at the 27th Cannes Film Festival in May of that same year.
Seven years later, Clair passed at his home in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France on March 15, 1981. He was 82. His son, Jean-François Clair, 93, survives him.
The avant-gardism of his first films, and especially 'Entr'acte' (1924) had given Clair a temporary notoriety, and a grounding in surrealism continued to underlie much of his comedy work.
It was, however, the imaginative manner in which he overcame his initial skepticism about the arrival of sound which established his originality, and his first four sound films brought him international fame.
Clair's years of working in the United Kingdom and the United States made him still more widely known but did not show any marked development in his style or thematic concerns.
It was in the post-war films that he made on his return to France that some critics have observed a new maturity and emotional depth, accompanied by a prevailing sense of melancholy but still framed by the elegance and wit that characterized his earlier work.
However, in the 1950s, the critics who heralded the arrival of the French New Wave, especially those associated with Cahiers du Cinéma, found Clair's work old-fashioned and academic.
François Truffaut wrote harshly of him after seeing Clair's 'The Flame of New Orleans' (1941).
He stated: "We don't follow our elders in paying the same tribute to Renoir and Clair. There is no film by Clair which matches the invention and wit of Renoir's Tire au flanc.... Clair makes films for old ladies who go to the cinema twice a year."
However, renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist André Bazin, the founding editor of Cahiers, made a more measured assessment.
He wrote: "René Clair has remained in a way a film-maker of the silent cinema. Whatever the quality and importance of his recent films, expression through the image always predominates over that of the word and one almost never misses the essence if one can only vaguely hear the dialogue."
It was also in a special number of Cahiers du Cinéma reviewing the current state of the French cinema in 1957 that Clair received one of his most positive appreciations.
It said: "A complete film author who, since the silent era, has brought to the French cinema intelligence, refinement, humour, an intellectual quality that is slightly dry but smiling and in good taste....
Whatever may follow in his rich career, he has created a cinematic world that is his own, full of rigour and not lacking in imagination, thanks to which he remains one of our greatest film-makers."
Such appreciations have subsequently been rare, and the self-contained artificiality of Clair's films, his insistence on the meticulous preparation of an often-literary script, and his preference for filming in studio sets rather than on location increasingly set him apart from modern trends in filmmaking.
The paradox of Clair's reputation has been further heightened by those commentators who have seen Truffaut as the French cinema's true successor to Clair, notwithstanding the occasions of their mutual disdain.
Although Clair made productions that noted for humor and burlesque and also often for fantasy or surrealism, he eventually broadened his range of material but faltered toward the end of his career. Nonetheless, he will always be remembered as France's first great director of comedies.
Clair had been active from 1924–1976.
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