Arts Listings
Moving Pictures: Duvivier, ‘Poetic Craftsmen of Cinema’
The name Julien Duvivier may not immediately register in filmgoers’ minds. Like many other masters of the craft whose mastery extended into many genres—King Vidor and F. W. Murnau, for instance—Duvivier’s varied output did not lend itself to the cult of personality.
Yet many of those directors whose personas have indeed been stamped into the public consciousness—including Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman—have praised him as one of cinema’s greatest artists. Pacific Film Archive is presenting a retrospective of Duvivier’s career through October.
Duvivier directed commercial thrillers and melodramas, comedies and propaganda, musicals, epics and literary adaptations in a career that spanned four decades, starting in the silent era and extending from France to Hollywood and back.
Au Bonheur des Dames (1930), showing Friday night at 6:30 p.m., is one of Duvivier’s rarely screened early masterpieces. It portrays the struggle of a small shop to survive literally in the shadow of a bustling Parisian department store. Duvivier’s camera lingers on the merchandise and retail hustle of this enormous enterprise, contrasting it with the humble simplicity of the neighboring family-owned shop. Imagery is tantamount in Duvivier’s oeuvre; he rarely hesitates in his use of effects, from double and triple exposures to the moving camera to elaborate lighting and special effects.
Au Bonheur des Dames showed to a wildly appreciative audience at San Francisco’s Silent Film Festival a few years back, and now gets a welcome reprise. Au Bonheur des Dames will be accompanied by PFA house pianist Judith Rosenberg, who brings a respectful regard to her work, employing her improvisation talents in the creation of scores that emphasize, complement and underscore the themes of silent films without ever overwhelming or undermining them.
The PFA series also includes Duvivier adaptations of Zola and Tolstoy works, and several of his collaborations with actor Jean Gabin, including perhaps Duvivier’s most famous film, Pépé le Moko (1937) on Oct. 8 and 9, and his own personal favorite, Poil de Carotte (1932), “a heartbreaking chronicle of childhood.”
