Poetic Realism as Psychoanalytical and Ideological Operation

Released two years after the demise of the Popular Front and just three months before the entry of France into war with Germany, Marcel Carné’s Le Jour se lève, from a script by Jacques Viot with dialogues by Jacques Prévert, ¹ is a film that more than most suffered from the way contextual factors apparently affected its reception in 1939. It was seen by some critics as a renunciation of the ideals of the Popular Front. ² Then it was in fact banned by the military censor board as too ‘defeatist’. ³ Judging the film from their racist, fascist ideological bias, Bardèche and Brasillach decried the ‘judaïzing aesthetic’ of Le Jour se lève which they compared to the German cinema before 1933. ⁴ It was not until ten years after its original release that the film’s reputation was redeemed (partially owing to the efforts of André Bazin), ⁵ once it could be seen, not necessarily outside of the context of the late 1930s upheavals, but with more distance on the threat its tone implied to diverse groups at that time.