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The Battle of the Sexes in French Cinema, 1930-1956

2015; Oxford University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fh/cru135

1477-4542

Ramona Fotiade,

Historical Gender and Feminism Studies

If French gender theorists, as compared to feminist film critics, can be said to have lagged behind counterpart anglophone specialists since the 1970s, Burch and Sellier’s seminal study not only broke the pattern when it first came out in the original French edition (Drôle de guerre des sexes du cinéma français—1996), but also provided a timely and insightful account of attitudes to gender and shifting sexual identities during three of the most eventful periods in twentieth-century French history: the pre-war era (1930–39), the German occupation (1940–44) and the post-war years (1945–56). As compared to similar historical surveys, the award-winning original edition of the Battle of the Sexes, published now for the first time in English thanks to Peter Graham’s elegant translation, focuses on the portrayal of gender relations across a wide range of films, production contexts and directorial styles, which have not usually attracted the sustained attention of film critics from either side of the Channel. Even some of the recent landmark contributions to the field, such as Alex Hughes and James S. Williams’s Gender and French Cinema (2001), only deal with the poetic realism of the pre-war years in passing and understandably prefer to concentrate on a few case studies or star performances for each period rather than attempt to explore all genres, styles and types of production for any given decade in French history. The originality and lasting appeal of Burch and Sellier’s approach thus derive from the choice of an under-studied section of French cinema history as much as from the in-depth analysis of the relationship between film and society across a vast array of mainstream, high-quality productions alongside unsuccessful or marginal productions. The theoretical outline of each of the three patriarchal prototypes which crystallize perceptions and gender roles at crucial stages in French history (i.e. the ‘incestuous father’ of the pre-war years, the ‘castrated father’ of the Occupation and the new male figure of the post-war period) is accompanied by ample illustrations, and specific references to the ideological, political and cultural context of representative productions (such as the emergence of the ‘unworthy father’ in the late 1930s which followed the short-lived euphoria of the Front Populaire and went hand in hand with the development of the poetic realism). Recurrent themes, type-casting and the symbolical links between genre and the over-arching political mood of a period (such as the ‘melodrama of blindness’ during the Occupation) are effectively brought into play when discussing the significance of star performances in relation to directorial style. This applies, for instance, to the well-rehearsed social and historical exegesis of the collaboration between Marcel Carné and Jules Berry, Jean Gabin or Michel Simon on a number of significant poetic realist productions, but also to the thought-provoking analysis devoted to long-forgotten Occupation films, such as Claude Autant-Lara’s Douce—1943, starring Odette Joyeux, or Albert Valentin’s Marie-Martine—1943, in which ‘the hero becomes a heroine as [Renée] Saint-Cyr replaces Jean Gabin’. The careful sifting through large amounts of information gleaned from the history of the French film industry as well as from the history of French thought, culture and politics yields a number of surprising results even for cinephiles or critics overall familiar with the period under scrutiny. Many readers would expect to learn that French movies from 1940 tell audiences that ‘the powerful patriarch of the pre-war period has no clothes’, while the cinema of the post-war years tells us ‘just as massively and bluntly that active women are a threat to (patriarchal) society’. Conversely, Anglophone readers might be surprised to discover that although the filmmakers and scriptwriters active between 1930 and 1956 ‘were almost exclusively male, their work, particularly after the great upheaval of the Defeat, displayed in an often complex way something that could be defined, culturally speaking, as a “woman’s point of view”.’ Coupled with apposite references to atypical or subversive productions in each period, which seek to destabilize established gender positions (such as the ‘zazou films’ during the Occupation and their portrayal of cross-gender characters), Burch and Sellier’s approach manages to avoid the trappings of reductionist or broad sweeping sociological surveys. An added bonus is the stated methodological departure from the American feminist tradition, which accounts for the inclusion of class as a key issue in the analysis of gender relations in French society. The other gratifying spin-off of this departure consists in the authors’ heightened awareness of the specificity of pre-New Wave French cinema as compared to contemporary Hollywood practices, which for the first time brings into view the greater variety of individual stories that French films told, ‘which were spawned by an “adult” culture, whereas the US cinema (…) was often hamstrung at the time by the Hays Code, (…) that treated spectators as though they were children’.