City of Darkness, City of Light is the first ever book-length study of the cinematic represen- tation of Paris in the films of the émigré film- PHILLIPS CITY OF LIGHT ALASTAIR CITY OF DARKNESS, makers, who found the capital a first refuge from FILM FILMFILM Hitler. In coming to Paris – a privileged site in terms of production, exhibition and the cine- CULTURE CULTURE matic imaginary of French film culture – these IN TRANSITION IN TRANSITION experienced film professionals also encounter- ed a darker side: hostility towards Germans, anti-Semitism and boycotts from French indus- try personnel, afraid of losing their jobs to for- eigners. The book juxtaposes the cinematic por- trayal of Paris in the films of Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Anatole Litvak and others with wider social and cultural debates about the city in cinema. Alastair Phillips lectures in Film Stud- ies in the Department of Film, Theatre & Television at the University of Reading, UK. CITY OF Darkness CITY OF ISBN 90-5356-634-1 Light ÉMIGRÉ FILMMAKERS IN PARIS 1929-1939 9 789053 566343 ALASTAIR PHILLIPS Amsterdam University Press Amsterdam University Press WWW.AUP.NL City of Darkness, City of Light City of Darkness, City of Light Émigré Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939 Alastair Phillips Amsterdam University Press For my mother and father, and in memory of my auntie and uncle Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: japes, Amsterdam isbn 90 5356 633 3 (hardback) isbn 90 5356 634 1 (paperback) nur 674 © Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2004 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, me- chanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permis- sion of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Contents Acknowledgements 7 Chapter One: Introduction 9 Diversity and Exchange – Rethinking the National in European Cinema 9 Cinema and the City 10 Paris and the 1930s 12 Paris and French Cinema of the 1930s 13 France and the Émigrés 15 City of Darkness, City of Light 18 Chapter Two: The City in Context 21 An Historical Ambivalence 21 Modernity and the City 24 National Boundaries and Early European Sound Cinema 29 Paris as Staging Ground for the Early Sound Wars 33 Berlin as Prestige Model and Place of Work for French Film Industry Professionals 36 Patterns of Exile and Emigration in the Pre-Nazi Era: The Russians and their Relations to Paris and Berlin 39 Trade and Economic Emigration from Berlin to Paris before 1933 41 Case Study One: Anatole Litvak 43 Case Study Two: Kurt Courant 46 The Rise of the Nazis in Berlin and the Politics of Departure 50 The Place of Jews in Paris 52 Reception: The Émigrés’ Arrival in Paris 56 Reception: The French Film Industry 58 Case Study Three: Erich Pommer 61 Case Study Four: Robert Siodmak 65 Chapter Three: City of Light 73 Paris as Spectacle 73 Paris and the Spectacle of Entertainment 81 Parisian Journeys Across Time and Space 90 Chapter Four: City of Darkness 107 The Camera Goes Down the Streets: ‘The Hidden Spirit Under the Familiar Facade’ 107 Framing the Urban Decor – The Émigrés and Poetic Realism 118 Spaces of Crime and Pleasure in the City of Darkness 127 Parisian Journeys Between the Past and the Present 141 Chapter Five: Divided City 149 The Divided City in Context 149 Divided Characters, Divided City 156 Journeys Across the Divided City 164 Chapter Six: Conclusion 171 Notes 177 Appendices 191 Appendix One: Tobis In Paris Filmography 1929-1939 191 Appendix Two: Osso Filmography 1930-1939 192 Appendix Three: Anatole Litvak Filmography 1930-1936 193 Appendix Four: Kurt Courant Filmography 1929-1939 194 Appendix Five: Erich Pommer French-Language Filmography 1930-1934 196 Appendix Six: Robert Siodmak French-Language Filmography 1931-1939 197 Appendix Seven: Nero Films Filmography 1930-1939 198 Appendix Eight: La crise est finie 199 Appendix Nine: La vie Parisienne 201 Appendix Ten: Mauvaise graine 203 Appendix Eleven: Coeur de lilas 205 Appendix Twelve: Dans les rues 207 Appendix Thirteen: Carrefour 210 Appendix Fourteen: Pièges 212 Appendix Fifteen: Liliom 215 Filmography 219 Bibliography 221 Index 243 Acknowledgements The research for this book was supported principally by the British Academy but also by the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick and the Research Endowment Trust Fund at the University of Reading. I would like to express my continuing deep gratitude to my former PhD super- visor, Professor Ginette Vincendeau, for her exemplary support, encourage- ment and sensitive guidance. Her enthusiasm and sense of engaged pleasure has been constant throughout the long gestation of this project and I am de- lighted to acknowledge her critical engagement and professional and personal friendship. Many people have assisted me over the years in various capacities. Among them are: Dudley Andrew; V.F. Perkins; Richard Dyer; Charlotte Brunsdon; Ed Gallafent; José Arroyo; Doug Pye; Jim Hillier; Alison Butler; Mike Stevenson; Lib Taylor; Susan Hayward; Adrian Rifkin; Richard Kilborn; Valerie Orpen; Rachel Moseley; Julianne Pidduck; Andrew Higson; Erica Carter; Michel Ma- rie; Wolfgang Jacobson; Steven Ungar; Michael Temple; Mike Witt; Geneviève Sellier; Janet Bergstrom; Iris Luppa; Sheila Whitaker and Peter Owen; Clive Snowden; Robert Muir and family; Jacques and Janine Volkmann; Gro Ween; Lisa Meekason; Noa and Dror Wahrman; Michael and Colette Casey; Richard and Karen Phillips; Pat and Alex Kurzemnieks and all the respondents to my presentations at seminars and conferences at the Universities of Exeter; Bir- mingham; Reading; Glasgow and London. Special thanks to all those involved in the Picturing Paris conference which I organised at the University of Warwick in 1998. I am especially grateful for the kindness and hospitality of Peter Graham without whom I might never have made many of the discoveries mentioned in this book. My thanks too to the library staff at the University of Warwick; the British Film Institute; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the BIFI library and the Biblio- thèque Nationale in Paris including the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal. Earlier drafts of some material contained in this book have appeared, or will appear, in the following publications and I am grateful to their respective editors and publishers for their kind permission to include this work: Screen vol. 40 no. 3 (Autumn 1999); Modern and Contemporary France vol. 8 no. 2 (Au- gust 2000); Michael Temple and Mike Witt (eds.) The French Cinema Book, Lon- don: British Film Institute (2004) and Douglas Pye (ed.) Fritz Lang, Moffat: Cameron Books (2004). 8 City of Darkness, City of Light I am also delighted to be able to acknowledge the support given by Profes- sor Thomas Elsaesser to this book. Thank you to the all the staff at Amsterdam University Press including Jaap Wagenaar and Magdalena Hernas. Last but by no means least, I must mention my partner and own émigré filmmaker, Mark Kurzemnieks, who has accompanied me on this and so many other journeys these last years. Thank you for everything. Oxford, Autumn 2003 1 Introduction “With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear”. (Italo Calvino 1974, 44) Diversity and Exchange – Rethinking the National in European Cinema In 1931, the French painter Maurice Vlaminck wrote that he now tended to “avoid going to Paris. It has become for me like a train station, a kind of West- ern Constantinople, a junction [and] a bazaar” (in Golan 1995, 88). Vlaminck’s acerbic description of the bustling and cosmopolitan nature of Parisian life points to the fact that the French capital did indeed become a terminus or junc- tion for various groups of émigrés in the 1930s. Among the people drawn to the possibilities of the City of Light were a succession of European filmmakers who arrived in Paris from the internationally successful studios of Berlin. Some like Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder stayed only a brief time. The director Robert Siodmak, on the other hand, ended up working in France for a number of years. This book looks at the significance of this moment in film history through a detailed analysis of the émigrés’ various on- and off-screen relation- ships with their adopted home. “Home” is not the correct word. The truth is that many of these émigrés were displaced figures on a journey that remained, as it must always be for the exile, both “composite and evolutionary” (Naficy 2001, 222). The time that filmmakers such as Wilder, Lang and Siodmak spent in Paris, in what fellow émigré Siegfried Kracauer has termed “the near vacuum of extraterritoriality” (in Koch 1991,105), was, for many, but one episode of a larger trajectory. To ex- tend the railway analogy, Paris was a “waiting room” (Elsaesser 1984, 278): a place of temporary refuge before their journey onwards to the more rewarding terrain of Hollywood. Because of the glamour of this final destination, and de- spite the fact that the émigré filmmakers clearly made a significant contribu- tion to French cinema, there is still little written in English about this unique and fascinating phenomenon. My book seeks to redress this imbalance. To examine the cinematic representation of Paris by émigré filmmakers in the French cinema of the 1930s means to engage with the ways in which Euro- pean national cinemas are currently being reconceptualized as discrete discur- sive and economic phenomena. As Tim Bergfelder has rightly stated, the his- 10 City of Darkness, City of Light tory of these cinemas should necessarily be “characterized by two simul- taneous yet diverging processes, namely the film industries’ economic imper- ative of international expansion, competition and co-operation (often accom- panied by a migration of labour), and the ideological project of re-centering the definition of national cinemas through critical discourses and national film policy” (in Higson and Maltby 1999, 139).