Liberation Cinema, Postwar Cinema

6 Liberation Cinema, Postwar Cinema 1944–1949 In 1944 Pa ri sians celebrated the Liberation of their city from Nazi control by going to the movies to watch Deanna Durbin in Eve a commencé (It Started with Eve; 1941). Brigitte Horney had appeared in Pa ri sian cinemas at least until just before the August 1944 Liberation, as Münchausen, according to the last available listings, continued to play in multiple cinemas.1 Just a few months later, though, this Nazi star of the Occupation gave way to the young woman with the grown-up lyric soprano when Eve a commencé was the first “new” American film to play in the recently freed French capital and Durbin became the first great symbol from Hollywood of liberated Paris. This shift from one actress to another, however, gets us just a little ahead of the story of the film culture of Paris after the Germans surrendered the city. Even before the end of the Occupation, a group of filmmakers associated with the French Resistance— Jacques Becker, Jean Painlevé, and others— had been making plans for a new, postwar French cinema, one that would reject the fantasy excess of Münchausen, that sought to reclaim French cinematic sovereignty from Continental Films and German control, and that planned to reeducate an all too often collaborationist, or at least acquiescent, French population. To facilitate their proj ect they formed the Comité de la libéra- tion de cinéma français, the clcf, and in their first “bulletin official” from October 1944, the found ers claimed, “We have an ideal: the cinema, and through cinema, France.”2 Nevertheless, despite the nationalist, heroic rhe- toric, things still moved slowly in bringing the film culture of Paris, let alone the rest of France, back to anything resembling the vibrancy of the prewar Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/791385/9781478007531-007.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 period. For the first two monthsafte r the Liberation, film enthusiasts in Paris had only limited opportunities for going to the movies, as the cinemas in the city could show films only two nights a week, almost certainlybe cause of on- going shortages of electricity and other essentials for operation. As a sign of some pro gress, that same clcf bulletin for October 1944 announced that cinemas now would be authorized to show movies five days a week, all ex- cept Tuesday and Thursday, and instead of just a single eve ning screening at 9:30, cinemas now we re allowed to show one matinee on Saturday and two on Sunday.3 Assessing the last few weeks of the Nazi Occupation and the first few months following the Liberation remains extraordinarily difficult. The evidence is thin at best, and is often non ex is tent. To the extent that information is available, it appears that, during the Occupation, there was no significant damage to the city’s exhibition sites. In fact, despite the fighting in the streets of the last days before the Liberation, between Resis tance forces and the Germans, Paris was left more physically intact than other Eu ro pean cities that had been centers of ground combat and aerial bombardment, and that had not been occupied by the enemy. While the cinema infrastructure remained intact, there were other obstacles to a fully functioning film culture. Immediately after the Liberation, for example, the hundreds of barricades that had gone up throughout the city during the street fighting were almost certainly still in place, inhibiting movement around Paris. Ther e were also administrative standofs between vari ous groups seeking some control over the city, Gaullists and Communists, for instance, as well as smaller bureaucratic and military units, such as the Commission d’action militaire, or the Conseil national de la Résistance, or the Comité parisien de la Libération. All of this, along with crippling shortages of electricity and other necessities, no doubt slowed the development of Pa ri sian post- Liberation cinema.4 The available primary materials tell us that by the end of July 1944, some forty- five cinemas remained open in Paris.5 Just three weeks later, around the middle of August, with German control of the city weakening, that num- ber had gone down to three: the Normandie on the Champs- Élysées in the eighth arrondissement and two other cinémas d’exclusivité in the eigh teenth, the Palais- Rochechouart and the Gaumont- Palace.6 During this period, these three cinemas seem mostly to have been screening documentaries, and within just a few days the Gaumont- Palace would be closed. Cabarets we re closing as well, and so we re theatres, and those of the latter that remained open often presented their shows only in the daytime (“jouant à la lumière du jour”), prob ably to save on the electricity that was in such short supply in the city.7 LIBeration CINEMA, Postwar CINEMA 123 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/791385/9781478007531-007.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 Figure 6.1 The first issue of the Bulletin official du clcf, October 23, 1944. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/791385/9781478007531-007.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 On August 25, 1944, the Germans surrendered Paris. As difficult as it is to find information about the cinema there in the weeks just before the Liberation, it is, apparently, impossible for the five weeks that followed. By October 1, at least five cinemas had opened: once again the Gaumont- Palace and the Normandie, but also the Savoie in the eleventh arrondissement, the Ciné- Batignolles in the seventeenth, and the Paramount in the ninth. Audiences did not have much choice, however, about what they saw. All of those cinemas showed the same film, France libre, a compilation of actuality footage made by the clcf that documented the Liberation of Paris.8 At least seven cinemas had opened by October 15, and audiences had by then a limited range of films from which to choose. The 1939 World War I melodrama starring Junie Astor and Léon Mathot, Deuxième bureau contre kommandantur— which, as I mentioned earlier, had been released initially just a few days before the 1940 French surrender and so prob ably never had played widely in France because of its anti- German sentiment— showed at two cinemas, the Aubert- Palace and the Club des Vedettes, both in the ninth arrondissement. At two cinemas just a cou ple of blocks apart on the boule- vard des Italiens in the second arrondissement, a new French film,Coup de tête (1944), premiered at the Marivaux, and Jean Delannoy’s Pontcarral, col o- nel d’empire, from 1942, was in reissue at the Impérial. Just two weeks afte r France libre blanketed the city, the only real reminder of the war played at the Normandie, a documentary that became something of a hit in Paris, Un jour de guerre en urss, a 1941 Soviet film detailing a single day of the war.9 Eve a commencé is the film that provides the most compelling information about post- Liberation film distribution in Paris, and also exposes the limits to what we might find out, at least given the evidence available to us. Durbin’s film, the first Hollywood movie in Paris since 1940, also played in two of those seven cinemas, just like Deuxième bureau contre kommandantur: in the second arrondissement at the Rex, one of the largest cinemas in Paris and that, as a soldatenkino, had been reserved for members of the German military during the Occupation, and also at the Ave nue cinema in the eighth arrondissement.10 Why was it Durbin’s film that had this par tic u lar significance in Pa ri sian film history, and how had it gotten to Paris in the first place? Film historians have been aware for a long time of Durbin’s incredible celebrity in the United States and Great Britain, especially among teenage girls and young women, the fans who were around the same age as the actress when she was at the peak of her popularity in the late 1930s and early 1940s.11 At the same time, Durbin was also extremely popu lar in France and France’s colonies. In October 1937, the film journal Ciné France ran a photo LIBeration CINEMA, Postwar CINEMA 125 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/791385/9781478007531-007.pdf by guest on 26 September 2021 of Durbin across half of its front page, with the caption “new star, new singer, and the new ingenue who triumphs” in Deanna et ses boys (One Hundred Men and a Girl; 1937). That same year, the daily newspaperLe Petit Parisien also put a photo of Durbin on its front page, and in fact ran a double column practically down the length of the page to advertise a long story about the performer the newspaper called “the great new star from the Hollywood sky.” A year later, again in Ciné France, an article compared the teenager to the great new French star Michèle Morgan, herself only eigh teen, and predicted a global trend toward ever younger actresses. That article referred to Durbin in a mixture of French and En glish as “la child- woman,” who “knew how to cry and laugh through her tears, and who was one of the most gracious stars” of cinema. French radio played Durbin’s recordings throughout the country, and her celebrity reached the colonies and the French expatriate community, with the Saigon newspaper Le Nouvelliste d’Indochine, for example, profiling her in a January 1938 column on “Stars from Hollywood.”12 Still, there were other Hollywood stars who were just as famous, if not even more well known, and whose films made during the Occupation might seem even more appropriate for breaking the embargo on Hollywood movies that had been imposed by the Nazis.

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