Julien Duvivier: A Forgotten Master of Contingency

“Genius is just a word, filmmaking is a craft”

Julien Duvivier is an early 20th century French film director whose work spans 67 films over a 30 year career; prolific is too small of a word for this man. Although unquestionably one of the greatest filmmakers to come from France, his work remains largely under appreciated by film scholars and still remains unknown to those outside of his native country. One of the reasons why Duvivier received the lashings of French critics was his staunch unwillingness to conform to a specific style where he could be easily pigeonholed. This kind of aesthetic arrogance made him an easy target for fickle journalists and academics.

Nevertheless, the great French directors of note at the time, among them Jean Renoir, Marcel Carne, and Rene Clair all universally praised Duvivier’s attention to his craft. Jean Renoir once said “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.” I have always been of the mind that if the critics loathe you but your fellow contemporaries admire you, trust the eye of the artist, his vision is longer and goes deeper than the writer who is churning out copy to satisfy an editor.

The question then becomes why does someone of the stature of Renoir give such high praise to a minor poet like Duvivier ? Well his approach resembles that of a studio musician, a chameleon whose versatility allowed him to fluidly integrate himself into whatever cinematic task was at hand. This may sound easy on the surface, but it is not, it requires a strict exactness and simultaneously an innate flexibility to make the best of two worlds; in this case commerce and art. The mistress and the wife, two values that when combined produce great aesthetic friction and sometimes inexorable demise; just ask Orson Welles. Duvivier’s approach corresponds to the path that many modern Hollywood directors are taking today, Gus Van Sant and Steven Soderbergh come to mind; that is they make films of commercial interest only as a gateway to fund the more personal and aesthetically ambitious projects.

Pepe Le Moko, a film released in 1937 by Duvivier is his most well known to those outside of France, the reasons are twofold, one is because it is known as a milestone for French “poetic realism” a term that was probably overused but still carries within it the seeds of critical accuracy. The second and most important reason is Jean Gabin, an absolute titan of dramatic proportions, his godlike presence onscreen was a combination of his solid almost trunk-like humanity, mixed with an inner pathos that translated itself into a cult-like fascination with him by audiences.

His commanding performance in “Pepe Le Moko” is a thespian tour de force, he plays an “l enfant terrible”, one of the most wanted criminals in Algiers who is in self imposed exile to protect his freedom from the French authorities who have tried every ruse to lure him out and incarcerate him. As Jean Gabin moves fluidly from scene to scene, taking and always leaving something behind, as all great actors do, and with Duvivier’s steady hand at the helm you are suddenly enveloped in a rich tableaux of shadows and black and white silhouettes that evoke the poetic harshness of the Algerian landscape.

Pepe Le Moko was a curse in disguise for Duvivier in many ways, he was never able to fully recover from the international notoriety that it gave him, and consequently his work is seen as simply a footnote in French cinema. Now, with retrospectives at the MOMA in NYC and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, Duvivier is beginning to get a historical re-assesment. As British critic Dudley Andrew puts it “no one speaks of Julien Duvivier without apologizing.”

For one, Duvivier’s early work from the 30′s up to the early 50′s is technically impeccable in its thrust, his sumptuous tracking shots tease out the kind of dramatic nuances that one only sees in grand masters, Renoir and Welles come to mind. It is this rigorous subtlety (something that was lost on the Cahiers Du Cinema and Nouvelle Vague camp in general) that is exactly the reason why he was praised by the “old guard” and dismissed by the next generation. Auterism became in vogue with the advent of Truffaut and Godard and theatrical narrative became a dirty phrase amongst the French film intelligentsia.

Now that we have the clarity of historical distance behind us, we can see what Duvivier was in filmic terms; a master of contingency. This is explicit in La Bell Eqipue (1936) where Duvivier elegantly balances two opposing social views and finely tunes the camera to connote the richness of human psychological dynamics. The same can be said of Pepe Le Moko where instead of allowing Gabin to overtake his vision, he uses him to invent a new cinematic trope (the rogue as savior and anti-hero). Duvivier in many ways mastered the problem of film (the variability of reality) through the language whereby film and life express themselves, the axiom of contingency itself.