What we see on the screen is not the murderous anger of Lantier, but that of Jean Gabin.
- André Bazin
“Perhaps one third of the films might fail to meet cost,” writes scholar Colin Crisp in the practically mandatory The Classic French Cinema: 1930-1960, angling into an overview of the perilous situation in Paris betwixt the 20th century’s two major collective conflagrations…“and in a fragmented industry up to a third of the production companies would crash.” Don’t know about you, but this sounds like exactly my kind of mess.
Or does it?
Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and Gustave Flaubert were the key 19th century salon culture literary eminences. We can introduce others—Balzac and Baudelaire and Symbolists and bomb-throwers of variable leaning—but you are doubtlessly able to see how things might very quickly get out of hand...
Zola and Flaubert especially become institutions in ways for which they are ill-suited and toward the reality of which they cannot help but become increasingly ill-disposed. To become institutionalized is one thing, and no small amount of relief can be shaken loose my means of boorishness, but to become institutionalized as an institution might well be too gross...trop trop...
These men, like Byron, are happiest when they fly the coop and luxuriate afterward in the retelling.
Émile Zola wrote the 1890 novel La Bête humaine, a characteristically 'naturalist' tale of woe recounting the unidirectional decline and hereditarily predetermined crackup of locomotive engineer and alcoholic sex-murderer Jacques Lantier, to be played in the 1938 Jean Renoir film version—to be released pretty darn near the straight-up eve of invasion and harried flight, nary a reputable leg to stand on—by superhuman proletarian megastar Jean Gabin. Naturally, Gabin's parents were showbiz/underworld people, and colourful shirkers, thus, more than they were any kind of salt of the earth. His proletarian bonafides are earned through close contact and fraternization, doubtlessly, but he works his wrists like a dancer, in the manner of Chaplin, his eyes dancing and flirting too, especially when fishing for a little dollop of pity, and he's definitely both man and woman, in spite of [or just to bloody well spite!] the brawn and the ungentle manliness, the elements that will draw direct comment, routinely, as though that's the way to dispel the lower, lunar organics of the too-dashing beheld.
Zola's original novel appears not long after Nietzsche goes catatonic.
Part of the larger and, to me, increasingly in'eresting [increasingly in'eresting to oldening me] point Colin Crisp is making early in The Classic French Cinema, is that a condition of international embroilment(s) already looks like war and destiny and a few other daunting things before it's making anything like that sort of sense to the people it is in the process of swallowing up whole. Foreign owned patents engendered a problematic situation in France, wherein competing interests delimited a specific, grim topography, much of this amounting to considerable, shall we say, influence being exerted upon French film production by German and American consortiums. 'Sound technology' patents, for example, underhandedly forced French production companies to pay for the right to shoot sound films; eventually Paramount Studios and the German company Tobis Film penetrate directly into French film 'domestic' production. French public and private life are surely what they are though one shouldn't necessarily be sure about that, and then of course we must hold this imaginary on-the-ground French reality in direct contrast with the economic interests of foreign enterprises, whatever we might imagine ourselves imagining those to be, such that there might then emerge a clear picture of how particular styles and modes of filmmaking come to act themselves out in the streets, studios, and warehouses of wherever specifically we wish to go with all this. Piece of cake, no? And guess what? Films in France that were set-up by Paramount were famously crap, always, basically, whereas those shot by Tobis did good business, impressed a lot of the right people, and may very well, Crisp implies, have continued being pumped-out as a matter of course if not for both the occupation and the results of the depression, which made the funnelling of French money into Germany rather problematic, on and off, not that French people weren't making movies under German supervision during the occupation (to the subsequent postwar detriment of many of these "collaborators"). Other national interests maybe aren't any different from 'other interest per se,' but as a progressive and unrelenting factor in the development of French cinema, these cross-lateral formations and wheeling-dealings start to make a real active picture of active complexivity making use of military and industry collaterally. Concentrated subdivisions [and subdividings] of social and economic bodies and/or structures, viewed as bad faith reductions committed inside a working laboratory of dynamic activities, is no go. I am not going to let the metaphysics escape off my history like some kind of steam. But neither am I inclined to cut too sharply the other way.
There can be no doubt: Lantier isn't exactly Lantier, though, not anymore, because he is very obviously and monochromatically now the larger-than-life movie star Jean Gabin, as noted by André Bazin, our always-observant Man of Reverence on the scène. Lantier's terminal trajectory has more to do with the inevitable fate of the Jean Gabin "character type" in extremis than it does any E. Zola confabulation. The track delimits the course, men of low status feed the insatiable furnace. Control is extended outward in every direction and meets adversity with versatility. The character is not under control of the actor, the actor is not entirely under the control of himself or his director, and the complexivity of control is in a general way diffused, everywhere, such that intentional things and robotic/mechanical things are at clumsy odds with one another and themselves. The movie puts its doomed characters on the one-way-ticket path. It's a big part of what would come to be called Poetic Realism, a phenomenon that, along with German Expressionism, would help produce a tertiary phenomenon only to be known as Film Noir after the fact.
Fire surrounded by darkness. Strife & darkness & light. Elaborated upon. Elaborate. Throughout. Imminent violence is put off peripherally in a darkness. Camera dollies backward. Engine room of locomotive.
LOCO-MOTIVE | NO WAY, NO HOW
Two filthy engineers are shovelling coal into the fire, feeding it and adding to the strife. Renoir cuts to a shot of the wheels of the train, accompanied on the soundtrack by the thundering sound of the loco. The film proceeds to cut back and forth between the workers shovelling coal and communicating in a series of brusque, unintelligible gestures, with shots where the photographer's rig's been fastened, apparently, to the side of the speeding train, creating much tension, much strife. It immediately conditions us because maybe this is the condition of conditions. Our point of view, in a sense, is being linked both to Gabin/Lantier as he shovels coal into the fire and to the train itself.
Speed forward, out of control.
So now: both Gabin and the train, and the gestural web, the careening interlacings. Many graphic links between elements overheated and approaching threshold. Straight line. Momentum. Inertial repose, clamour of demystification. Tragic destiny and exasperated productivity. The co-alignment of the film’s perspectival vantage with that of the ocularly disadvantaged train, augmented moments later when Renoir begins to employ shots literally from the point of view of the train as it speeds along the track. The train has been tricked into believing it has a direction. Did it buy a ticket to the present exhibition? Or does the audience just know that things aren't going to go well for Gabin when he falls in with that minx? Unidirectionally minxward, are we? The engineers continue working feverishly in the engine room as the world shoots by through the window.
As Claude de Givray says, “If The Golden Coach is a triangle film and The River a circle film, then La bête humaine is a straight-line film.” As such: it is a preeminent work of Poetic Realism, distinct for lacking any direct contribution from Jacques Prévert, the idiom's for-all-time poet laureate. In his piece called "Poetic Realism," Dudley Andrew writes of a certain French cinema up and running here and there, intermittent as you like, between '29 and '39, that is "simultaneously lyric and realist,” and, just like our boy Bazin basically sees it, “is surpassingly realist and most French when it brings out formerly hidden relations between 'objects and beings,' between the outer world and the inner.”
For all your talk of determinisms metaphysical or, dear me, social, I think I may indeed be a good bit more interested in the interpolation of wonky paragential objects and beings, played out in peripheral temporalities or quasi-alchemically embedded ones. At least on my best days. Structural modes and archetypes. The stuff bubbling up from the earth ['culture'] is inherently bacterial, the imaginary space weapons which make sense of us as far away things right where we are...upon the subject of these I do not wish to fumblingly prognosticate...[I'm no virologist]...
Jean Gabin is here with us and he's not doing anything especially unseemly....he goes to...he lights a cigarette and...just as the flame...just as the flame sparks up...his lighter...the train enters a tunnel, bathing the frame in darkness.
A strange relation between darkness and light is once again once again. And once again the reoccurring link between: fire and darkness, fire comprised of and productive of dark materials. Adds to the air. Literally. Adds to the literal air of gloom and to the strife furnace.
- The train entering Le Havre
First. The train's point of view. A question of what? Surely not much more than an industrial fanaticism respective of the production of impossible gazes. Perspective. OF THE TRAIN. Here is your station. Your loco stable. Here is your topsy-turvy perspective on your perspective, the train. And consequently: all the assembly of gazes in industrial terms. Of which. Of which that perspective is curtailed. A hand-held shot. A dolly. Is edited. Into the middle of this one. Into which the camera pans frantically.
Over the sign designating the Le Havre station.
Series of cuts. Series of cars. Serial passagings-through. Suggests. Through a subdued field of sense, tangential, non-loco, for nowe. That La Havre carries with it a great deal of destructive significance. What is this station? In its particulars? What compels the impatient train to dally here? Slowing down of the train. Slowing down of the train and...and thus, perhaps, Le Havre is where the “straight-line” will hit a big open pit or twister. It has been invested with destiny. In movie theatres—Paris, Marseille—there are audiences projecting as hard as the beaming equipment. The need expresses itself in the form of a special pent-up attentiveness: impotency and potency all at once and so we suppose it's imperative there be a quite positively horrific bust-up. This is emphasized. And let me follow that up with my own emphases, please. A few scenes later, following. A few seconds later...and any number of us. Jean Gabin explains that he is upset about the broken axle because “it happened here.” Because the tragedy to which the film is speedily hastening is to occur in La Havre, stupid, are you with us? In which Gabin. Jean Gabin. In which Jean Gabin leaps to his death as his locomotive speeds away from the provincial town. Is significant. His fall is complete and it signifies loud and clear [however variably]. Thus by attempting to continue. Shots that mirror those which precede. Shot sequences creating formal congruities that make of the doom text a nifty palindrome. Shots fired, fire returned. Jean Gabin is merely flinging himself into an even deeper abyss. He has, having wrangled whatever he's wrangled, secured his below-board ambrosials, and signed on dotted lines we don't get to know about, already however-inadvertently compelled his shovelling of himself on into that blessed furnace along with all 'n' sundry else...
Jean Gabin, locomotive engineer and alcoholic and homicidal sex maniac, refers to his loco as Lison, confusing the mechanic, who thinks that he is talking about a woman.
Later when Pecqueux talks to him about women, Lantier exclaims that he is “already married to Lison.” A moment later when Pecqueux asks him about his plans, Lantier replies that he will “see her [Lison] through the workshop…then go see my Godmother...”
