Marcel Pagnol Films | Marcel Pagnol Filmography | Marcel Pagnol Biography | Marcel Pagnol Career | Marcel Pagnol Awards

?The art of the theatre is reborn under another form and will realize unprecedented prosperity. A new field is open to the dramatist enabling him to produce works that neither Sophocles, Racine, nor Moli?re had the means to attempt.? With these words, Marcel Pagnol greeted the advent of synchronous sound to the motion picture, and announced his conversion to the new medium. The words also served to launch a debate, carried on for the most part with Ren? Clair, in which Pagnol argued for the primacy of text over image in what he saw as the onset of a new age of filmed theater.

At the time Pagnol reigned supreme in the Parisian theater world. His plays, Topaze and Marius, both opened in the 1928-29 season to the unanimous acclaim of the critics and the public. Their success vindicated the theories of a group of playwrights which had gathered around Paul Nivoix, the drama critic for Comoedia. They were determined to develop an alternative to the predictable theater of the boulevards and the impenetrable experiments of the surrealist avant-garde. The group pursued a dramatic ideal based on the well-made, naturalistic plays of Scribe and Dumas fils. The formula featured crisp dialogue, tight structures, and devastating irony. Its renewed popular appeal did not escape the notice of Bob Kane, the executive producer of the European branch of Paramount Pictures. Kane secured the rights for the screen versions of two plays, retaining Pagnol as writer for Marius, to be directed by Alexander Korda, but he then excluded him from any participation in the Topaze project. This neglect spurred the volatile young ex-schoolmaster from Provence to undertake his own productions.

With Pierre Braunberger and Roger Richebe, Pagnol produced and adapted his play Fanny, a sequel to Marius, and hired Marc Allegret to direct. Then, in 1933, he formed his own production company, modelled on United Artists, which would control the production and distribution of all his future projects. At the same time he founded Les Cahiers du film, dedicated to the propagation of ?cinematurgie,? Pagnol's theories of filmed theater.

Jofroi and Angele, the first two projects over which Pagnol exercised complete artistic control, established the tone for much of his ensuing career. Adapted from stories by Jean Giono and set in Provence in the countryside surrounding Marseilles, where Pagnol was born and raised, the films treat the manners and lifestyle of the simple farmers and shopkeepers of the south and are executed with the precise principles of dramatic structure Pagnol had developed in his years with Nivoix. Angele is especially notable because it was shot on location on a farm near Aubagne. The film established a precedent followed by Jean Renoir in making Toni, a film produced and distributed by Pagnol's company, regarded by many as a forerunner of Italian neorealism. This is the formula to which Pagnol would return with increasing success in Regain and Le Femme du boulanger. a story or novel by Giono honed by Pagnol into a taut drama, elaborating the myths and folkways of ?le coeur meridonale? and pivoting on the redemptive power of woman; set on location in Provence; and peopled with the excellent repertory company Pagnol had assembled from the Marseille music halls (including Raimu, Fernandel, Fernand Charpin, Orane Dumazis, and Josette Day).

Even after a formal break with Giono in an ugly squabble over money in 1937, Pagnol continued to exploit the formula in La Fille du puisatier and his masterpiece, Manon dessources. Running three hours and more, these films, even more than before, reflected how the pace and flavor of the south colored Pagnol's approach to filmmaking. As Fernandel has put it: ?With Marcel Pagnol, making a film is first of all going to Marseille, then eating some bouillabaisse with a friend, talking about the rain or the beautiful weather, and finally if there is a spare moment, shooting....? Along with Clair and Cocteau, Pagnol was inducted into the Academie Fran?aise. Every year his status grows among historians of cinema who once ridiculed his ?canned theater.??DENNIS NASTAV