Children's faces

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Movie
German title Children's faces
Original title Visages d'enfants
Country of production Switzerland , France
original language French
Publishing year 1925
length 114 minutes
Rod
Director Jacques Feyder
script Jacques Feyder ,
Françoise Rosay
production Dimitri De Zoubaloff
Arthur-Adrien Porchet
music Antonio Coppola (2012)
camera Léonce-Henri Burel
Paul Parguel
cut Jacques Feyder
occupation

Kindergesichter is the German title of the French-Swiss silent film drama Visages d'enfants . Jacques Feyder realized it in 1923 based on a script that he had written with his wife, the actress Françoise Rosay , for the Paris Société des Grands Films and the producers Dimitri De Zoubaloff and Arthur-Adrien Porchet. However, the film didn't hit theaters until 1925.

action

The mayor of the small mountain village of Saint-Luc in Valais, Pierre Amsler, dies; he is left alone with his two children. His son Jean is almost ten years old and his daughter Pierette is only five. She is not yet able to properly understand the event; for her brother, however, it is a hard blow. He goes to the mountains with the priest to deal with his suffering.

Pierre, who needs a wife again in the house, gets together for the year with Jeanne, a young widow from the village who also brings a daughter, Arlette, into the family. Little Jean, however, resents the new connection with his father and does not like to accept the love that his stepmother has for him. He sees his stepsister Arlette as an intruder and wants to get rid of her. His hatred leads him to do a bad deed. Under a pretext, he lures her out of the house into the snow, where she should freeze to death.

When Arlette is found by the vigilance of the mountain people, Jean has to confess his guilt to the father. From then on, he treated him even more indifferently than before. Then Jean, tormented by remorse, wants to take his own life and plunges into the river, from which his stepmother can pull him and bring him back to life. And she can also win his affection: for the first time he calls her Maman ...

background

The filming took three and a half months for the exterior scenes; there were also two weeks in the studio. The recordings were shot in southern Switzerland in Upper Valais, in the villages of Saint-Luc and Grimentz . The camera team consisted of Léonce-Henri Burel , who also worked for Abel Gance and later Robert Bresson , and his camera assistant Paul Parguel. Charles Schuepbach was in charge of production.

Although the film had been shot in 1923, it took almost two years to get into theaters because of a dispute with the distribution company. The distribution for France was ultimately taken over by Pathé .

The premiere for German-speaking Switzerland took place in Geneva on May 8, 1925 in the Alhambra room, and for French-speaking Switzerland in Lausanne on October 2, 1925 in the Modern Cinema . Visages d'Enfants had its French premiere on January 24, 1925 in Paris in the Gaumont Palace.

The film was also shown in Germany and Austria, Great Britain, Spain, Portugal and Poland. He did not come to Japan until December 17, 1927. There the film magazine Kinema Junpō declared him the "best European film of 1925".

In the United States it was shown under the title Faces of Children on June 29, 1926 in New York City, in Great Britain it was simply called Mother . In Germany it was edited by Richard Hutter, which had a length of 2,337 meters, by the Hirschel-Sofar-Film-Verleih GmbH (No .: 11 382, ​​30/09/25) under the title Die aus Erste Ehe was sold, but was also shown in cinemas under the titles After the Death of Mother and Children's Faces. In Austria it was called The Voice of Blood .

reception

Audience reaction and performance history

The contemporary audience could not do anything with Visages d'enfants : despite good reviews, the film was a serious failure at the box office. It remained the only work of the Lausanne producers Dimitri de Zoubaleff and Arthur-Adrien Porchet.

The film's negative was long gone. In 1993, with the participation of the Dutch Film Museum, the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, the Cinémathèque Française and the Gosfilmofond Moscow, a restored and colored version of the film was produced as part of the European Union's media program. The cultural broadcaster Arte broadcast Visages d'enfants on German television on April 13, 2012 in a restored and colored version with the original, but subtitled subtitles in German and with newly composed music by Antonio Coppola.

The Cinémathèque Suisse released the film on DVD in 2013.

Reviews and analysis

According to the Solothurn Film Festival, Visages d'enfants was “the first masterpiece of Swiss film”. The film would have been a novelty at the time, because “the whole film is told from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy. The filmmaker managed to get a message of hope from this sad topic that still appeals to young viewers today. "(Solothurn Film Festival January 28, 2014) The Swiss website Molodeshnaya writes:" The village is the linchpin of life, You are cut off from the outside by the mountains. The family as the next smallest unit is threatened to its very foundations here because the child does not want to fit in. It is not an act of rebellion, but one of the heart. The boy, played famously by the Parisian street boy Jean Forest, whom Jacques Feyder discovered for his previous film "Crainquebille", feels sadness and loneliness. Something his father doesn't approve of. For him, life has to go on and you don't even want to blame him, given the circumstances. But Feyder and his wife Françoise Rosay, who wrote the script together, accuse the coldness and harshness that go hand in hand with performing this duty. "Visages d'enfants" is a manifesto for more humanity, even in tough situations. ”

James Travers cites the scene in which the children eat and argue with one another as an example of Feyder's powers of observation, which also shows itself in his attention to small things. Their naturalism gives the film a strange sense of timelessness. In 2010, Tobias Knebe wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the play in children's faces is "almost shocking modernity, which do without any exclamation marks in their performance: adults who often do not show their emotions at all or only show them restrained, children who laugh like real children, quarrel, sulk and dream and are staged with a love and security that has not been surpassed since then. "The film has" the power to move any audience - as if it hadn't been made more than eighty years ago, but today. And the pictures look just as fascinating. "

Many critics also noted the inclusion of nature in the film. Grégory Cavatino points out that Feyder embeds the landscape and nature as a player in his plot, as was done in the Swedish cinema by Victor Sjöström . Feyder's chief operator Léonce-Henri Burel filmed the departure of an avalanche spectacularly from the perspective of the avalanche. As an example of the introduction of film technology innovations, he cites the recordings actually made at night of the meeting of the mountain people on their search for little Arlette with the departure of the avalanche. At a time when it was customary to film night shots during the day and then color the film green or blue, he only lets the scene light through the torches that the mountain people carry with them. Cavatino calls the scene “a miracle and a real eye-catcher”, the entire film “a valuable and irreplaceable film, a work of art”. Tobias Knebe in the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote that the pictures are “often of a dense, luminous beauty, but this beauty is never exhibited. Any director would be forgiven if he briefly took the focus off his actors and his story, for example to bring a spectacular peak into view - and almost everyone would do it. But not Feyder! ”.

The influence of David Wark Griffith on the resolution of the plot was also seen, among other things in the sequence in which the boy, driven by a guilty conscience, throws himself into the river and is saved from certain death in the stream by the stepmother. This scene is possibly related to Griffith's masterpiece Way Down East (1920), which was performed late in 1922 in Paris, just a few months before Feyder started writing his script. The critics, who interpret the happy ending as a concession to the box office, were countered by the fact that the resolution of a cinematic conflict has seldom been so masterfully prepared and implemented, among other things in the sensitively used and frequently recurring symbolism of water in Feyder's Bergler drama .

In this opinion, he meets Daniel Hermsdorf, who also points to Feyder's water symbolism, but also to the fetishizing use that the boy makes of his late mother's photography and brooch, and the way Feyder inserts it Picture summarizes. As an example of Feyder's use of cinema technology, which is sensitive to film language, Hermsdorf cites the double exposure with which he visualizes the stepmother's concern for the boy by superimposing images of the raging river on her face, and interprets it as the last symbolic preliminary stage to the image in which she takes him in her arms after a successful rescue and thus confirms the newly won trust.

literature

DVD release

  • Children's faces. A film by Jacques Feyder . absolut-Medien, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-89848-854-3 .

Web links

Illustrations:

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ so Feyder, cf. Gaston Phelip in Cinémagazine (Paris), No. 6
  2. ↑ Opened in 1918, since then used for cinema, theater and concert events, expanded in 1926 by the Swiss architect Julien Flegenheimer , in 1928 the first hall in Switzerland to be equipped with a sound system, cf. aargauerzeitung.ch of March 27, 2015
  3. ↑ Gross Cinema Gaumont Palace, "le plus grand cinéma du monde" , see. salles-cinema.com
  4. ^ Page no longer available , search in web archives: Jonah Horwitz: On Jacques Feyder's Visages d'enfants. In: filmintelligence.org (English).@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.filmintelligence.org
  5. ↑ a German movie poster for the Hirschel-Sofar-Film with this title is shown at chronorama.net
  6. ↑ cf. IMDb release info
  7. ↑ cf. arte.tv/de ( Memento of the original from June 19, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.arte.tv
  8. ↑ cf. cinematheque.ch
  9. ↑ solothurnerfilmtage.ch ( Memento of the original from June 19, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / tools.solothurnerfilmtage.ch
  10. ↑ Molodezhnaya
  11. ↑ James Travers 2004: “The film also shows Feyder's capacity for observation, demonstrated through his extraordinary attention to detail. The scenes of the children eating together and squabbling are strikingly naturalistic and are scarcely different to what we find in our homes today, something which gives the film a strangely timeless feel. "
  12. ↑ Tobias Knebe: Mute in the avalanche ; Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 17, 2010.
  13. ↑ cf. Grégory Cavinato, at action-cut.com © 2012: Une spectaculaire séquence d'avalanche est filmée du point de vue… de l'avalanche elle-même! Une idée originale du chef opérateur fidèle de Feyder, Léonce-Henri Burel (également collaborateur d'Abel Gance) qui, inspiré notamment par le cinéma suédois de Victor Sjoström, arrive à exalter la beauté brute des paysages et fait du pays enneigé l'un of the protagonist principaux du drame. Les innovations techniques se succèdent, telle cette scène de nuit où les villageois partent à la recherche de la petite Arlette coincée sous l'avalanche. La scène, tournée de nuit à une époque où les scènes de nuits étaient tournées le jour puis teintées en bleu ou en vert, est éclairée uniquement par les flammes des torches que transportent les villageois! Une merveille. Comme tout le reste du film, véritable ravissement pour les yeux! Une œuvre d'art, un morceau de pellicule indispensable et précieux.
  14. ↑ Tobias Knebe: Mute in the avalanche ; Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 17, 2010.
  15. ↑ cf. La-loupe.over-blog.net : On peut voir l'influence de Griffith dans le dénouement de l'intrigue. Forest, accablé de remords pour avoir poussé sa belle-sœur vers la mort, se jette dans la rivière pour être sauvé de justesse par sa belle-mère d'une mort certaine dans les rapides. Cette séquence fait irrésistiblement penser au chef-d'oeuvre de Griffith Way Down East (À travers l'orage), d'autant plus que ce dernier sort tardivement à Paris en 1922, soit quelques mois avant que Feyder s'attèle à la rédaction de son scenario. Certains critiques ont vu dans ce happy end une concession commerciale, mais il faut convenir que rarement dénouement aura été aussi magistralement préparé et intégré - l'eau étant un des symboles récurrents et subtils de ce drame montagnard.
  16. ↑ cf. Hermsdorf p. 151: “The relics of the brooch and photography as symbolic substitutes and the antithetical double exposure as an illustration of the alternatives of caring mother [...] and threatening nature realize principles of anthropomorphism [...] that create the familiar drama of the establishment tell about a new mother relationship. "
  17. ↑ Hermsdorf p. 150: “... Relics: a dress or a brooch that can be seen in close-up. This creates mask-like schemes in the picture ... "
  18. ↑ cf. Hermsdorf, p. 150: “In Visages d'enfants , the double exposure is the last symbolic preliminary stage until Arlette takes Pierre in her arms and the new bond of trust is established. Arlette's offer to become Pierre's 'mother' stands in antithetical contrast to the life-threatening floods, as does the human figure shown to the bubbling, rapidly changing forms of water, which, like other natural forms in Feyder's film (trees, snow, smoke) Incorporate metamorphic connection and, in their diversity, can become a projection surface for associations of form. "