Poetic Realism

French films of the thirties set tenderness against doom: studio-built streets, working-class heroes, and a fate they cannot escape.

When: 1934–1940
Where: France
Films: 5 · 3 guided
Named by: 7 guides

Where it sits

German Expressionism · French Impressionism and SurrealismPoetic RealismItalian Neorealism · Film noir

Context

What was happening

France in the mid-thirties: the Depression has arrived, the Popular Front government of 1936 raises workers' hopes, and fear of another war grows across Europe. Sound is now established, and French studios work fast, with gifted writers, designers and stars that a large public loves.

Directors who came out of the Paris avant-garde of the twenties turn to ordinary people: sailors, soldiers, labourers, small-time crooks, lovers. The stories are small and fate is large. The movement ends in 1940, when war and occupation break French cinema.

The signature

What you see on screen

1Fog and setsQuays, alleys and lamplit streets built in the studio, wet and shadowed.
2The doomed heroA working man, often a fugitive, who cannot get out of his fate.
3Spoken poetryBitter, lyrical dialogue, written by a poet, in ordinary mouths.
4Tender fatalismLove offered briefly, with the ending already felt in the first scenes.

The people

Who made it

MCMarcel CarnéThe movement's stylist, master of built streets and fog. Le Jour se lève.
JPJacques PrévertPoet and screenwriter whose dialogue gave Le Jour se lève its bitter lyricism.
JRJean RenoirThe humanist, a little apart. Grand Illusion, The Rules of the Game.
JDJulien DuvivierDirector of the fugitive thriller Pépé le Moko, set in the Casbah of Algiers.
JVJean VigoA poet of the barge, dead at twenty-nine. L'Atalante, his last film.

The films

Defining films, in order

1L'Atalante1934
Pépé le Moko
2STARTPépé le Moko1937 · not on Cinespective yet
3STARTGrand Illusion1937
Le Jour se lève
4STARTLe Jour se lève1939 · not on Cinespective yet
5The Rules of the Game1939

To start with: Pépé le Moko · Grand Illusion · Le Jour se lève. Then the rest, in the order they came out.

Its constellation

Where it came from, what it led to

Came from

German Expressionism French Impressionism and Surrealism

Led to

Italian Neorealism Film noir

Open the galaxy of movements

Legacy

Where you still see it

Poetic realism lives on in film noir, which took its fog, its fatalism and its hero who cannot escape, and in Italian neorealism, which took Renoir's work on location. Vigo became a model for the New Wave. The mood carried into postwar French films such as Monsieur Vincent, The Walls of Malapaga and Sundays and Cybele.

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