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

within themselves psychologically, the protagonists in French Poetic Realism seem to get
stuck, unable to progress and remain hopeless until death.
This dark mood followed the lines of German Expressionism and German cinema
in general, as Poetic Realism’s style is indeed much indebted to Weimar cinema.
Moreover, German cameramen and set designers were often employed, as were many
German directors, including Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak, who worked in French
cinema before moving to America. However, this close interconnection between the two
countries and their artistic production does not mean that Poetic Realism did not follow a
distinctive path from Expressionism, exhibiting a softer and less extreme use of
chiaroscuro. In turn, as various film critics have agreed, it is rather difficult to establish the
type of influence that French Poetic Realism had on American film noir. Nonetheless, from
what I have suggested, it is fair to acknowledge that French artists portrayed an image of
fatalism in their films which would be further taken up and developed in film noir. As
Ginette Vincendeau observed, French Poetic Realism’s stylistic and thematic influence
“filled the gap between German Expressionism and classical Hollywood cinema” (in
Cameron 1992:55), and I should add that the elements of passivity and self-destructiveness
and nightmarish or violent behaviour certainly bear parallels with the elements found later
in American film noir.
Another good example that makes clear the distinction between the fatalism
peculiar to French cinema in the thirties and the determinism of the German screen in the
twenties is Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (1931). Based on Georges La Fouchardière novel,
this film will be analysed in detail in Part IV of this thesis as it was remade fourteen years
later in Hollywood as Scarlet Street, one of Lang’s great noir films. That said, it is clear
that Renoir was more concerned with showing the tragic events of the characters as
opposed to the more castigatory and bleak vision of Lang transmitted through his
protagonist, Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson), who disintegrates psychologically at the
end of the film. In his own words, Renoir affirmed that in La Chienne he “came near to the
style that I call poetic realism. There is not a yard of dubbed film in La Chienne. When
shooting out doors, we sought to damp down background noise with hangings and
mattresses. I soon discovered that by suitable adjustment an outdoor scene shot on a grey
day could give splendid night effects. This was the method I used later in La Nuit du
Carrefour” (Renoir 1974:106).
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