Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Jean Paulhan, editor of La Nouvelle Revue Française along with André Gide and
Gaston Gallimard, is generally said to be the person who coined the phrase “Poetic
Realism” in the thirties to describe the novels of Marcel Aymé, author of La Rue sans
Nom. Directed by Pierre Chenal, this film was produced in 1933 and presents the decadent
world of people who live in a very narrow and filthy street with two lines of putrifying
buildings about to be brought down - what one could call “the street of misery”. This slum
melodrama depicts grey Parisian lassitude, with a set of characters that seem to move about
in a sort of lethargic state, reflecting their lives’ lack of prospects (fig. 25). This type of
mood would be extensively reused in the work of other filmmakers such as Marcel Carné,
Jean Renoir and Julien Duvivier. In fact, this cinematic style with tightly controlled camera
movements and long takes conferred a specific naturalism and atmosphere which explains
the dominant look and themes of French cinema of that time. The characters in these
Figure 25. La Rue sans Nom
directors’ movies are shown to be multi-layered, always seen from a psychological angle
that emphasises their dark and pessimistic attitude towards life. Even when searching
the Expressionism of its resource to visible transpositions of the décor, Carné managed to completely
interiorise poetic teaching of it.(…) The perfection of Le Jour se Lève is that the symbolic never precedes
realism, but that it achieves it as by addition. (my translation)
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