The French Revolution and the Seventh Art

The French Revolution and the Seventh ArtAuthor(s): Henry A. GarritySource: The French Review, Vol. 62, No. 6, Special Issue: 1789-1889-1989 (May, 1989), pp. 1041-1051Published by: American Association of Teachers of FrenchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/394840Accessed: 25/02/2010 11:07

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THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. 62, No. 6, May 1989 Printed in U.S.A.

The French Revolution and the Seventh Art

by Henry A. Garrity

T1o VAST, TOO FAMILIAR, or perhaps too costly to film, the Revolution remains a national mythology seldom treated in French cinema. Among the

relatively few titles dealing with the decade between 1789 and 1799, four

critically acclaimed films reveal ironically as much about their own time and those who made them as about the historical incidents they narrate. Two are the work of French directors: Abel Gance's Napoleon, Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise; two are by foreigners: Andrzej Wajda's Danton and Ettore Scola's La Nuit de Varennes. Spanning most of the history of motion

pictures, these works represent different theoretical approaches to film as

history, each defining itself by distinct cinematic codes which divulge the director's political agenda.

On the eve of the 150th anniversary of the French Revolution, Leon Blum's Front Populaire government decided to mark the date with a film which would reflect the government's social program. The assignment went to Jean Renoir, who set himself to making a film on a grand scale, to do for the Revolution what Abel Gance had done for the Napoleonic myth ten years earlier. His efforts produced La Marseillaise, shot in 1937 and screened in 1938.

Renoir and Gance, however, represent opposite poles in filmmaking, each the master of his style, each style antithetical to the other. Gance's narrative technique is an example of Gilles Deleuze's SAS' formula for the

action-image: from the situation (S) to the transformed situation (S') via the intermediary of the action (A) (Deleuze 142). The S', by giving closure to each sequence, builds on narrative based on compiled visual documents, each adding to the creation of myth. Renoir's La Marseillaise represents the

contrary action-image, Deleuze's ASA': the action (A) which discloses the situation (S), an aspect or fragment of which triggers another action (A'). As each A' leads to the following A, Renoir avoids narrative closure, lending continuity to his story of the Revolution.

Gance's film, technically innovative, uses a narrative of historical cliches to envelope all the well-known incidents of the Revolution which Napoleon could have witnessed. A film dedicated to the cult of the individual, Napoleon subordinates the Revolution to the image of the Emperor. The

epoch covered runs from Napoleon's childhood to his invasion of Italy. Gance's camera virtuosity creates a binary visual structure, parallel filmic

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realities, the historical and the mythological. What Gance accomplishes is no less than the reordering of the viewers' understanding of events, imposing a new symbolism and thus creating a modified situation.

Gance's SAS' shot plan is clearly exemplified by two sequences. Early in the chronicle, the boy Napoleon is involved in a snowball fight (S). Gance's handheld camera takes the field in the midst of the battle, creating involvement of viewer and viewed (A). Through a narrative of closeups and superimpositions of the imperial eagle, the viewer understands that the victorious young man has won not only a snowball fight but the first military engagement of his career (S').

Gance's first Revolutionary episode places Napoleon at the Club des Cordeliers on the day Rouget de L'sle offers his song in the service of the nation struggle. The scene is an apotheosis, opening with a closeup: "Mort Aux Tyrans" written across the chest of a guard posted at the door of the Revolutionary council: Danton, Robespierre, Marat (S). Danton, leaving his two companions behind to excoriate the music and the singers, leads the crowd in singing the future anthem. Gance's camera creates symbolic action which rearranges our understanding of the image. As rays of sunlight stream through windows, illuminating Danton and the Tricolor at his back, a mysterious wind stirs the flag and reveals a crucifix to which it is attached (A). Framing Danton, flag, crucifix, and wind, the figure of Marianne is superimposed in a double exposure, inviting us to read into the moment the divinely intended unity of nation and revolution (S').

Gance's film is constructed as a series of tableaux, set pieces of which the SAS' shot organization emphasizes the separateness. Despite interior movement within sequences (the A between S and S') there is no visual forward momentum except as related to developing stages of the Napoleonic myth. As such, the historical personages presented to the camera are prisoners of the framing situations in the SAS' structure. Richard Schickel comments that in Gance's film people are used as unparticularized symbols, that there are no dramatically pointed scenes, only groupings in which it is up to the camera, editor or director to find the meaning (Schickel 84). An analysis of the SAS' organization supports Schickel's observation.

However, despite its static characters and tableaux, Gance's Napoleon is a masterpiece of filmmaking, dwarfing later French versions by Jean Tedesco (Napoleon Bonaparte, 1951) and Sacha Guitry (Napoleon, 1954). Richard Abel's admirable analysis of Gance's camera techniques details the breadth of the director's imagination (Abel 428-44). Featuring the portable hand- held camera, there is no greater example of the art of montage in French cinema. In the final analysis, Napoleon uses the Revolution, not for itself, but as a backdroup for the rise of the Emperor. For Abel Gance, he is not "the unholy product of the Revolution, but the Revolution's purpose" (Canby 13:1). As great as other historical personages may be, Napoleon

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transcends them, having survived when they did not and having imposed his will upon an epoch.

In his autobiography, Jean Renoir states that his filmic concerns were never those of the historical or any other cliche (Renoir 262). Instead, the director eschews the familiar tableau and concentrates on the anonymous men who made the Revolution, and, in particular, those who formed the Marseille batallion. This group of 500 men marched to Paris in July 1792 and participated in the events of August 10, the storming of the Tuileries and the transfer of the royal family to the protection of the Assembly. The batallion also carried with it the song, and subsequent national anthem, which lends its name to the film.

The director's auspicious choice of subject served multiple purposes in the Popular Front's attempt to celebrate the common man's sacrifices for the Revolution. La Marseillaise was financed through a public subscription; the C.G.T. contributed 50,000 francs. Like the film's subject, the publicity for the subscription was geared to appeal to patriotic ardor. It was to be no less than "le film de l'union de la nation fran;aise." Production was justified on class lines: "Pour que le peuple de France ait son film sur la Revolution de 1789 ... la premiere experience d'un film pour le peuple par le peuple" (Courtade 141). Renoir himself proclaimed his enthusiasm and personal commitment to the project: "La Marseillaise me permit d'exprimer mon amour pour les Fran,ais" (Renoir 114).

However, love for his countrymen was not all Renoir wanted to express. Through extensive archival research, he intended to disprove a theory posited by rightist historians of the time that the Marseille batallion was not French at all, but composed of foreigners, mostly Italian. Renoir's research found that the 500 volunteers were a diverse lot: former officers of the royal army, carpenters, masons, agricultural workers, etc., and, to a man, French. Renoir was thus determined to tell their story (Snebel 225), and the resulting film, in the words of Andre Bazin, is a dialectic between documentary reality and moral truth (Bazin 39).

Renoir's La Marseillaise is committed to a socialist, if not baldly communist, agenda. Like Gance, Renoir creates a binary structure. Representing one side of the political equation are the common folk of Marseille; representing the other, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Each structure divides into two others, opposing forces of history and mythology. Two parallel scenes begin and end the political and social metamorphosis, the fall of the Bastille and the fall of the Tuileries.

Like Napoleon, the plan of the film is episodic, but Renoir uses an opposite film-action plan, Deleuze's ASA', of which the first sequence at Versailles on July 14, 1789, is an example. The camera travels along the corridors of Versailles following the changing of the guard, recording in its movement the bustle of daily life in the chateau, and, without a cut, pursues an officer into the king's presence. The traveling shot and corresponding diegetic movement of the actors in front of the camera constitute the first action

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(A). The A leads to the establishment of the situation (S), the announce- ment of the fall of the Bastille. The king's misunderstanding of the situation which he calls a revolt leads to the modified action (A') when the officer corrects the King's misconception and names the action revolution.

The entire second sequence acts as the response to and exemplar of the concept of revolution, the first sequence's A'. The time is June 1790, the sequence the trial of the farmer Cabri for pigeon poaching. Renoir accelerates the diegetic movement organizing each new sequence on the premise of the preceding A'. This linking of sequences is characteristic of Renoir's shot plans, as we will see later. At the beginning of the second sequence, the camera pans to the manacled hands of Cabri (A) which introduces the situation (S), Cabri's trial conducted by a meanspirited nobleman for whom the pigeon is an index of order, the stasis of the ancien

regime. The defense of the accused leads to the modified action (A'), the untying of Cabri's hands and his escape through an open window. Sequence three, of course, opens with Cabri's freedom deriving directly from preceding A'.

Unlike Gance's shot organization, Renoir's does not interrupt the forward diegetic movement since every A' leads into the A of the next shot plan. A case in point is the sequence relating the seizing of the Marseille forts by a group of insurgents led by Arnaud and Bomier, who become central figures in the Marseille batallion and serve as spokesmen for the Revolution. The storming of the garrison (A) leads to an encounter between Bomier and the fort's governor, a nobleman Saint Laurent (S). During S, Arnaud gives Saint Laurent a lesson in revolutionary vocabulary, the definition of nation and citizen. The result of the situation (Saint Laurent's modified perceptions of the Revolution) leads to his peaceful surrender of the fort (A').

Often, Renoir accelerates the action further by having A' serve as the basis of the S of the subsequent sequence. For example, Saint Laurent's new perceptions serve as S of the following sequence. This is a portrait of exiled nobles in Coblenz, a sequence which has as A the singing of a nostalgic song and as A' the nobles' refusal to comprehend Saint Laurent's revolutionary vocabulary indexed by their retreat into the motion of a dance. During the dance, the stasis of the ancien regime is repeated in the insistance on the form of the dance as performed at Versailles, thus recalling the function of the court-room scene.

Foreign menace and xenophobia are binary organizing themes of La Marseillaise, and like the ASA' action-image plans propelling the diegesis forward, these themes are organized visually and verbally in juxtaposed sequences. The Coblenz aristocrats enlist the aid of the Prussians to invade France and suppress the Revolution. "J'adore les Prussiens," declares a noblewoman. The response comes in the subsequent sequence from a bereft Marseille woman whose lover has been killed by Prussians. The

reported atrocities of the invading Germans and Austrians are a counter-

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balancing binary structure with the march of the Marseille batallion. The ultimate object of xenophobia is, of course, Marie-Antoinette who betrays France simply by being Austrian, proclaims the Marseille woman.

The film's final sequence is also dedicated to xenophobia, as the members of the Marseille batallion prepare for combat at Valmy where they will meet the foreign armies arrayed against them (a binary eux and nous structure). As the soldiers wonder whether losing the battle will mean the end of the Revolution, Arnaud responds clearly: "Si aujourd'hui ils arrivent a nous ecraser, ils n'ecraseront pas ce que nous avons apporte au monde." The magnitude of the cause is reduced to the simple language and metaphor of the common soldier, representative of le peuple: "Avant nous, le peuple etait en face de la liberte comme un amoureux devant une femme a qui il lui aurait ete interdit d'adresser la parole. Et brusquement, grace a nous, voila un homme qui peut tenir sa bienaimee dans ses bras ... il devra se donner la peine pour garder sa conquete mais maintenant qu'ils se connaissent, mme si on les separe, un jour il se retrouveront." Yet it is this very rhetoric which tends to de-individualize Arnaud, Bomier and the other heroes of the Revolution, transforming them into social propagandists.

In the film's episodic sweep, Renoir, while recreating history, has made a personal film as well. A devoted man of the people, the director spares no effort to reduce the grandiose to a level the film's subscribers can understand. Renoir's preoccupation with simple cares which humanize his filmic heroes as evidenced in such films as Toni (1934) and Une Partie de Campagne (1936) is well documented in La Marseillaise. The feet of the marching Marseille batallion must be washed and sores healed. Meals must be eaten and dishes discussed (including a gastronomic novelty, the tomato, eaten both in the army and the palace). The King and Queen dispute the necessity and efficacy of the new fashion, cleaning one's teeth. And as for the national anthem, some of the soldiers do not even like the song.

Furthermore, La Marseillaise is a personal film by its style. As we have seen, the forward movement of the diegesis is caused by Renoir ASA' sequences, his leapfrogging of sequences from A' to subsequent S, but also by the long take, Renoir's trademark. The long shot recreates a documen- tary realism which serves Renoir's socialist political agenda, capturing real life of real people, a filmic populism. At the final review of the royal troops, the camera of Renoir's social realism follows Louis XVI down the stairs, into the courtyard and along the ranks of assembled guards, without a cut. Likewise, the story of the Marseille batallion's march on Paris is told in a series of long takes linked by dissolves. The camera purports to see history from an objective and uninterrupted point of view. As Alexander Sesonske writes: "Life is not made up of clean cuts as in a film which unreels, but by dissolves.";

The action-image codes suit and explain the purposes of Gance and Renoir. Napoleon's SAS' plan stops the action to impose the image of the

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individual, one man who controls events and molds the nation. La Marseillaise's ASA' code indexes social and political movement, sweeping events and personages into the forward momentum of history. The individual is subordinated to events created by the common will. These films create equally great but opposing ideologies, remedies for twentieth- century problems through manipulation of the national Revolutionary myth.

Wajda's Danton and Scola's La Nuit de Varennes owe much to documen- tary style, and as visual reconstitutions of France in the final decade of the 18th century, have much to recommend them. All filmic history is not equal, however. To make the point, it is possible to distinguish among several techniques for filming historical events. The first, history as documentary, places the camera in front of the scene and catches the event. This sort of cinema verite is possible only when filming a contemporary action. The second, history as reconstituted documentary, researches architecture, costumes, speech, etc. of a historical period and attempts to reproduce them. This technique can use the camera in the same way as in #1 above to create the illusion of real action, as we have seen with Renoir's long takes. Reconstituted history, the third technique, can also serve as a symbol or allegory. To reconstitute history, directors may opt for two courses of action: to retell the historical event, hoping that an aware public will make the desired connection, or to dramatize history through selective symbols, what Marc Ferro calls historical reconstruction (162). The following analysis restricts itself to the visual reconstitution of history and its relationship to reconstructed history, but the same could be extended to verbal reconstitution.

As history, Napoleon and La Marseillaise are unabashed reconstructions, films in which the director imposes a new interpretation of events. As history also, the two films may be distinguished from Danton and La Nuit Varennes which purport to be historical reconstitutions. As foreigners, Wajda and Scola have no stake in French nationalism, but this does not mean they have created films without politics.

Speaking about his 1983 film Danton, Andrzej Wajda has acknowledged parallels between the French Revolution and the political situation of modern Poland (Sterritt 29). Danton's political agenda is a criticism of the modern Polish regime thinly disguised as the Revolutionary Terror. Representing an effort in coproduction between capitalist France and communist Poland, Danton was scheduled to be shot in Poland with a mixed cast of French and Polish actors, but the state of seige declared by the Warsaw regime required that the filming be done in France.

Danton's screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere is based on a 1935 Polish play by Stanislawa Przybyszewska whose plot parallels Bruckner's Dantons Tod. To begin with, Wajda, who apologizes for choosing too familiar a subject (the events of the Terror, from 21 November 1793 to 5 April 1794), manipulates historical reality by adopting a dramatic unity of time, giving

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the spectator the sense that all might have happened on the same day, thus beginning a process of reconstituting history allegorically.

Danton, however, has the look of pure historical reconstitution. Aside from the personalities of Danton and Robespierre, the film casts all the familiar Revolutionary characters: Camille Desmoulins and his wife, Lucile, Saint Just, Fabre d'Eglantine, Philippeaux, Herault de Sechelles, Panis, the painter David, among others. Furthermore, the costuming, location shooting and interior sound stage sets are true to the period.

But, Wajda dramatizes by highlighting another personage, mute but

eloquent: the guillotine. The first and final framing sequences show the dreaded engine, hooded against the inclement weather, deference shown to a dangerous and unpredictable acquaintance. The dramatized sequences are distinguished by circular tracking shots, tilted up, and, as such, have the ominous effect of a close-up. A later sequence brings Danton to the guillotine in documentary style where the efficacy of Professor Guillotin's invention is manifested by the manner of lowering victims into the head hole, the head's fall into a basket, the discharge of blood and the constant care with which the apparatus must be maintained by legions of scrubbers and rakers.

In its role as documentary, the film chronicles the discussions among the Comite du Salut Public about the wisdom of arresting and executing Danton, and Danton's subsequent fight to defend his own and his followers' lives. Danton's medium is his eloquence; his forum, his public trial. Consistent with the traditional picture which history has left to posterity, Danton's fall from power is the result of his pride, his belief that his fame makes him invulnerable and that his eloquence can save him and his party. His weakening voice indexes his dwindling power; no longer able to speak, he is condemned to the guillotine.

Wajda's portrait of Robespierre is more finely nuanced than that of Danton. Slight, where Danton has a brutish carriage, Robespierre lives with his mistress and child. The latter, forced to memorize unsuccessfully the Droits de l'Homme, is beaten for his trouble. As the film opens, Robespierre is ill; his barber must powder his face to erase the effects of fever and perspiration, his illness the objective correlative of his moral state, a battleground where inevitable doubt wars with required certainty.

If Danton is the "chamber piece" that Vincent Canby calls it (C19), the pivotal scene, Danton's plan to reconcile and subvert Robespierre's Revolutionary purity, elucidates this and Marc Ferro's thesis "that what has not occurred (and even what has occurred)-beliefs, intentions, human imagination-is as much history as History" (Ferro 29). Like most of the film, the reconciliation scene combines reconstitution and reconstruction.

The historian Stanley Loomis has attempted to reconstitute the conversation between Danton and Robespierre during two attempts at reconciliation (Loomis 298-99). Danton condenses the two meetings into one and imagines the scene in a curious fashion. Instead of meeting in

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Robespierre's apartment, as history recounts, Wajda has them meet in a small restaurant dining room where Robespierre is to be seduced through gastromony-astounding tactic indeed, given that every account character- izes Robespierre as a puritan.

Preparatory to the encounter, in cinema verite style to suggest documen- tary realism, the handheld camera enters each hotel room, as Danton's friends attempt to insure privacy by chasing away the clientele. In one room a nobleman and companions dally with a black dancer, in another there are cardplayers and in a third a medium holds a seance. Once inside the private dining room, the camera details the variety of dishes Danton has prepared for Robespierre's pleasure.

The meeting between Danton and Robespierre is rendered in point of view shots, the least obtrusive hence least political of shot codes, suggesting documentary once again. However, the scene turns to a dramatized historical reconstitution (Ferro's reconstruction) when Wajda imposes his ironic Weltanschauung. In the final moments, Danton, grown intemperate with wine, refuses to support the government, saying prophetically that he would rather be guillotined than guillotine others. As Robespierre rises to his feet, Danton embraces him in a grand gesture and falls asleep in a drunken stupor, still clutching Robespierre and snoring so loudly that those in an adjoining room can hear. Stunned, Robespierre leaves. To his astonished followers, Danton awakes and declares: "Now I've got him."

What is to be made of the physical context of the conversation? Wajda has suggested the film is a parable of modern Poland: Danton is the West, Robespierre the East (Canby C:19), and it is interesting to note that Danton and his group are all played by French actors, Robespierre and his group by Poles. If what is not said is as much history as what is said, the allegory concerns Poland's precarious position between the hedonistic West and the fanatical East. This history teaches that the former is unreliable, the second dangerous, and both destined to fall of their own excesses. Wajda's final shot, Robespierre cowering beneath a bedsheet as he contemplates the future, gives us an uncertain view of the world to come.

As if in reply to Wajda, Ettore Scola's La Nuit de Varennes (1982) links the events it narrates to the present, thus completing the vision of the future truncated in Danton. La Nuit de Varennes is ostensibly a film about the flight of the French royal family from Paris on 21 June 1791 and their arrest in the town of Varennes about 24 hours later. Like Danton, it is organized around repeated extra-diegetic opening and closing sequences: a fair on the quais of eighteenth-century Paris. Here, a troop of Italian players is exhibiting a peep show whose subject is the major events of the Revolution. Like Wajda's film, Scola's has the inevitability of classical tragedy: the story told between the framing sequences on the quais takes place within the 24 hours of unity of time.

La Nuit de Varennes is, perhaps, the least political of the films treated here.

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Like Wajda's, Scola's technique is documentary. Although a dramatized reconstitution, the royal family's destiny is firmly grounded in historical fact.2 Scola's dominant metaphor is theater. He sees the Revolution as a stage across which pass the characters of a drama whose vast scope is

impossible to capture, except in parts, as in the isolated events of the Italian

peep show where we the audience are witnesses and not participants. The

metaphor of the audience and drama is sustained throughout as an unlikely group of observers follows the progress of the king's berline, some in a

desobligeante, others in a diligence bound for Metz. Among them we meet historical figures: Giacomo Casanova, Restif de la Bretonne, Tom Paine; and fictional ones: a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, a rich widow from

Champagne, an Italian opera singer, an Alsatian industrialist, a ladies' hairdresser.

The Italians' spectacle is called "Le Nouveau Monde," Il Mondo Nuovo, which is the Italian title of this film. The events we observe are, indeed, those which mark the end of one era and the beginning of another, a moment in the spectacle of history where ideas, morality and political imperatives clash. Janet Maslin observes that Scola sees change as forever

necessary and forever incomplete (Maslin C23). Indeed, nothing in the film addresses this point more clearly than the final shot where Restif climbs the stairs of the quais which lead from the 18th-century fair to the new world of 20th-century Paris. As the camera zooms back we see streets

clogged with the democratic automobiles of the modern era which have

replaced the royal Berline, the bourgeois diligence and the private desobligeante of the film's 1791 diegesis.

Unlike La Marseillaise, La Nuit de Varennes never allows us to sympathize with Louis and Marie Antoinette. Where Renoir invites us to witness moments in the private lives of the monarchs, Scola forbids that intimacy. When at last the camera captures the royal couple, we see them only from the knees down, faceless players in their roles as king and queen, already headless victims of the guillotine. On the subject of the common people, Scola's sympathies, like Renoir's, seem divided too. In counterpoint to the frolicking peasantry observed along the country roads, appear the somber, hostile faces of the citizens of Varennes, stoney and silent on which we read the famine, humiliation and fear of centuries.

Vincent Canby says of La Nuit de Varennes that although epic, its scale is small (Canby II, 1:1). Indeed, it is as small and personal as the tales told by the witnesses of history in the Metz stagecoach. Scola's film has the tone of an 18th-century literary voyage from the pen of Voltaire or Defoe, where the travellers move from innocence through disillusion to self-knowledge. Indeed, the power of literature constitutes an important subtext in the film, the importance of words further underscored when Thomas Paine cautions an impatient young student, ardent revolutionary and fellow traveller: "Interdire les mots est un pas vers la tyrannie."

Illusion is the essence of theater, the heart of Scola's film, in which

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everyone is a player. Some are protagonists, some extras, but all have their place in the tableau of history. One of the principals is Casanova who, well past his prime, masks his impotence and decrepitude in wigs, makeup, high heeled boots and gallant repartee, compelled, in his own words, by his "sens du theatre." The flight of the royal family is also theater, all mask and illusion. The pretext is false: sending money by post to the army. Above all, the King is in costume, wearing the clothes of a major domo; the Dauphin, in turn, is disguised as a girl; and the family is pretending to be Russians returning to their country. The final scene has the dynamics of theater: the tragic hero is the king, the stage M. Sauce's boutique in Varennes, and the crowd the audience.

In the end, Scola transforms history into allegory through the metaphor of theater, creating dramatic reconstitution. For each character, the journey is a quest which ends in disillusionment parallel to the royal family's. The Queen's lady-in-waiting clutches her world in her lap. This microcosm, a box of miniature portraits of the royal family, represents a social order about to end with the King's arrest. In his turn, the Alsatian industrialist comes face to face with the workers' new economic weapon, the strike. The wealthy widow who dreams of being Casanova's last conquest fails before the reality of the great lover's impotence, and the Italian opera singer's love affair ends when her lover decides to return to his wife. This is a world where illusion and symbols are more potent than individuals or events. Restif observes that if the king had been traveling in kingly clothes, the symbols of his power, no one would have dared arrest him. The truth that awaits them all is the new world, no better or worse than the one they know, but inexorably different.

These four films on the French revolution raise questions fundamental to history as a cinematic genre. Is it possible to shoot a fiction film as historical reconstitution? Is the camera capable of neutral analysis? Ferro's modes of classifying films show that Napoleon analyzes official history from above and La Marseillaise from below (Ferro 164). By these criteria, Danton expresses a view of official history from the inside, La Nuit de Varennes unofficial history from the outside.

On the screen, the French Revolution has been treated as selective incidents serving the political aims or the personal visions of the directors. However, the selection may transcend politics and be inherent in the reconstitution of history (types 2 and 3 discussed earlier). There are, after all, virtually no American films about the American Revolution. In Napoleon, La Marseillaise, and Danton, we have seen only the official Revolution; Renoir's common man notwithstanding, the dramatis personae bear famous names, the plots retell celebrated events. The possible exception is La Nuit de Varennes which comes closest to presenting an outsider's view of events. Yet, Scola's film also distances itself through the metaphor of theater, implying that the story it tells is not real.

No director, French or foreign, has attempted to demystify the national

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icons. Comparing their films on the French Revolution to Soviet films'

depiction of the Russian Revolution of 1917, one is struck by the sustained Soviet political point of view. Kuleshov's Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, Shub's Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg and Eisenstein's October, all produced between 1924 and 1928, arise from a different ethos, however. They attest to the creation of an official Soviet national mythology through film for a national and international audience.

However, in that observation lies the difference between filmic reconstitution of the Russian and the French Revolutions. Soviet directors were working with a national mythology that had not yet been formed. As

examples of all three types of cinematic history discussed earlier, their works reconstituted, sometimes documented, often reconstructed, history contemporary with the filming of it. Too distant from events which

represent an already codified national and international mythology, Gance, Renoir, Wajda and Scola fashion their view of history through cinematic

technique: montage, long takes, cinema verite, and documentary, all

resulting in History as Allegory.

ST. LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY

Notes

1Alexander Sesonske, Jean Renoir, The French Films, 1924-1939 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980) gives a full analysis of the film, 343-50.

2Scola's account can be verified in Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Revolution (1847-53; Paris: Gallimard, 1952) 2: 862.

Works Cited

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