This week, the BFI re-releases the 1930s classic L’Atalante, the only full length feature from French film-maker Jean Vigo. Funny, heart-rending and exhilaratingly inventive, it is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made.

French cinema of the 1930s has been held up as a high point in film history due to a very specific body of work by a number of key auteur film-makers, among them Julien Duvivier, Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir. This body of work is often described as poetic realism. Rather than a definable movement as such, poetic realism can be more accurately described as a “sensibility” or cinematic style, characterized by its melancholic fatalism, representation of the popular hero and highly stylized, proto-noir aesthetic.

Key features of the poetic realist style include working class characters often on the margins of society, evocative and yet recognisable locations, a shift from action towards milieu and atmosphere, a dark and pessimistic ending and the recurring presence of particular actors, notably Jean Gabin with his striking portraits of the working-class male in crisis.

The bleakly fatalistic tone of these poetic realist films and their depiction of powerless and passive protagonists won over the contemporary audience in pre-war France with an understanding of their dark and ambivalent world view. Externally, the threat of war loomed, whilst the dissolution of the Popular Front in 1939 – a left-wing, antifascist alliance who had held government from 1936-37 and ushered in a series of new labor laws and improved working conditions – foreshadowed a return to right-wing elements in pre-war France and led to the widespread disillusionment of the French working class.

French cinema flourished in the 1930s despite industrial instability in the period between the wars (the two major French studios Gaumont and Pathe-Natan collapsed in 1934 and 1936 respectively). French film-makers enjoyed an artistic freedom not always available to those working in the Hollywood studio system, as the fragmentation of the industry resulted in greater diversification in access to capital and distribution. The films of this era had a significant impact on later aesthetic movements, in particular Italian neorealism, film noir and the French Nouvelle Vague. Below, we revisit some of the key films of this classic period in French film-making.

L’Atalante
Jean Vigo, 1934

The son of a notorious anarchist, Jean Vigo had a brief but brilliant career making poetic, lightly surrealist films before his life was cut tragically short by tuberculosis in his early thirties. L’Atalante was his only full length feature film.

L’Atalante stars Dita Parlo and Jean Dasté as a newly-wed couple whose relationship shows signs of strain when they move in together on the barge of which Dasté is captain. The opening sequence — the newlyweds’ march from the church to Jean’s boat — is filmed in a discontinuous style that anticipates the films of the French New Wave. The poetic power of the film, however, had a lot to do with the cinematography of the Russian-born Boris Kaufman, who worked on each of Vigo’s films and was said to be the youngest brother of the great Russian film-maker Dziga Vertov, and a collaborator with him on the famous Kino-Pravda films. Kaufman recalled the days of working so closely with Vigo as “cinematic paradise”.

Pépé le Moko
Julien Duvivier, 1937

Jean Gabin in Pépé le Moko

A standard-bearer of French poetic realism and early precursor of film noir, Pépé le Moko depicts an infamous gangster who tries to escape the police by hiding in the city of Algiers. The film is based on Henri La Barthe’s crime novel of the same name, with a magnetic Jean Gabin in the starring role.

Although set in the casbah, Pépé le Moko was filmed in a beautifully designed studio set which the director thought would be less distracting than an actual locale. Duvivier had, in fact, made films on location in North Africa, and preferred a closed environment for accentuating a noir romanticism blending stylized sets and photography. This was typical of the “recreated realism” aesthetic of the poetic realist canon.

“From the evocation of the Casbah streets to the hero’s state of mind, Pepe le Moko deploys a web of glamorous noir images which elevate its basic story of petty hoodlums, incompetent policemen and kept women into the realm of poetry,” wrote French scholar Ginette Vincendeau in her 1998 monograph on the film. “Pépé le Moko both claims and transcends its pulp fiction material and turns it into a powerful emotional statement on identity, desire and loss.”

Le Jour se lève
Michel Carné, 1939

Jean Gabin and Arletty in Le Jour se lève

Directed by French auteur Michel Carné (who would go on to direct one of the most highly regarded films of all time, Les Enfants du paradis), Le Jour se lève is considered to be one of the principal examples of poetic realism. In a compelling story of obsessive sexuality and murder, the working-class François (another turn by the wildly popular Jean Gabin) resorts to killing in order to free the woman he loves from the controlling influence of another man.

Le Jour se lève was Carné’s fourth film with the surrealist poet and screenwriter Jacques Prevert, and was propelled by the melancholic fatalism that pervaded many of their collaborations. It is a film that was very much created and impacted by its political and social milieu, and can be successfully read as an allegory for its times. The film offers a glimpse into the existence of an uncomplicated factory worker, François, whose ultimate destruction mirrors that of the French working class in 1939. Its sense of doom and defeat captured the mood of France on the eve of the Second World War, and was even banned in 1940 by the Vichy government on the grounds that it was demoralizing and had contributed to the nation’s defeat.

The circularity of the film’s structure mirrors its fatalistic mood – the outcome of Francois’ predicament is clear from the start. Carefully structured dialogues reveal just enough information to produce the most tragic effect possible. This delightful paradox, teetering between spontaneity and artifice, is common to poetic realism. It is noteworthy that Carné’s film was achieved without significant investment in set design.

La Bete Humaine
Jean Renoir, 1938

Jean Gabin in Le Bete Humaine

Based on the Emile Zola novel of the same name, La Bete Humaine follows Jean Gabin as the tortured protagonist Jacques Lantier, who gets himself caught up in a murder plot when seduced by the very definition of the Femme Fatale, Severine, played by the feline Simone Simon. La Bete Humaine is often considered a precursor to 1940s noir, though the use of light and shadow, the dark, romantic fatalism and the working class hero align it to the aesthetics and themes of the poetic realist movement.

Renoir, working on the margins of the French industry at this point, and in stark opposition to the Hollywood fare which dominated the cinemas, favored working class protagonists to the bourgeois. One of a number of Renoir’s films reflecting the birth and death of the National Front, La Bete Humaine celebrates the working man whilst making us aware of the oppressive class distinctions of the time. Renoir makes an additional character of the trains which Lantier works on: the lengthy opening scene shot in documentary style depicts Lantier and his colleague working together on the train and highlights the physicality of man. Renoir investigates the small, banal moments of Lantier’s working day – reporting of broken machinery, greeting his colleagues – moments which actually help to richen the landscape of the film, rather than detract from the narrative.

La Regle De Jeu
Jean Renoir, 1939

A still from La Regle De Jeu

Renoir’s decision to follow up the dark brooding of La Bete Humaine with a satirical comedy was perhaps a bold move, especially given the critical reception it first received. An absurd comic tragedy, La Regle De Jeu was described by Yale Film Lecturer Dudley Andrew as “the most complex social criticism ever enacted on the screen.” A box-office failure in 1939 due to its depiction of the French upper class and initially banned by the French government of the time, the film is now often ranked as one of the greatest masterpieces of cinema.

By this point, Renoir had firmly carved himself out as a director of the left, making films with a strong social critique. La Regle De Jeu is a scathing account of the corrupt French society told as a typical comedy of manners during a weekend at a country chateau. The symbolic core of his critique of French society is seen in the hunt, a scene that most clearly reveals the volcano that seethes beneath the two opposing sides: the masters and servants, both of whom feature the jealous husband, faithful wife, despairing lover, and intervening friend. Renoir derived these two sets of opposing characters from two French classics, Alfred de Musset’s Les caprices de Marianne and Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ Le mariage de Figaro, and this pairing of servants versus masters also evoked one of Renoir’s recurrent themes: the relations among classes.

L’Atalante screens at the BFI from today, please visit the BFI Website for more information