ABSTRACT
The cinema which historians have definitively labelled Poetic Realism was, between 1935 and 1939, a cinema conjugated in the present tense. Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carné, Charles Spaak and Jacques Prévert, made their heroes dance to the music of their time: René Lefèvre, Jean Gabin, Charles Vanel and Jules Berry were contemporaries, even next of kin, of the viewers who were living the excitement of the emerging Popular Front in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, its uncertainties in La Belle équipe or the bitterness of its disintegration in La Bête humaine or Le Jour se lève. The occupation of France in 1940, the control – direct or indirect – of its cinema by the German forces, condemned this use of the present tense. Fiction films were allowed, at best, to portray a kind of ‘vague present day’, a period which had the appearance of the present, but not its singular hardships: the cars or the costumes are of 1943, but the French are depicted in lighthearted romantic entanglements, stories that never show the daily problems of finding food, or the presence of Nazi uniforms. Even the rare ‘realist’ films of these bleak years, those of Jean Grémillon, or Clouzot’s Le Corbeau, avoid any too obvious references to the hard times: the throb of civilian planes in Le Ciel est à vous has nothing to do with occupied France.
