René Clair

Biography: life and films

Few film directors have witnessed in their lifetime as dramatic a re-appraisal of their work as René Clair. In the late 1920s, early '30s, Clair was considered one of the world's foremost cineastes, ranking alongside Eisenstein, Chaplin and D.W. Griffith, but this acclaim would not endure. By the 1950s, he was far less well-regarded and some critics, notably François Truffaut, were vitriolic in their contempt for him. Whilst it is true that Clair's later films show little sign of the great auteur he was once seen to epitomise, the director was more favourably judged after his death and he is now widely considered one of the most important French filmmakers of his generation. Clair directed only twenty-three full-length films, yet these include some of the most cherished and influential films of their time, as well as some of the wierdest flights of fancy ever committed to celluloid.

The new medium of cinema was still in its infancy when René Clair was born in Paris on 11th November 1898. His real name was René Lucien Chomette and he was the son of a successful soap manufacturer. He grew up in the popular Halles district of Paris, an environment that doubtless influenced his early films. After being invalidated out of the First World War (in which he served as an ambulance driver), he began a career as a journalist, writing articles under a pseudonym (René Després) for the newspaper L'Intransigeant. It was the singer Damia, for whom he wrote a few songs, who persuaded him to enter the film business, originally as an actor. Adopting the name René Clair, he appeared in a handful of films, including Louis Feuillade's Parisette (1921).

After working as an assistant to Jacques de Baroncelli on Le Carillon de minuit (1922) and La Légende de soeur Béatrix (1923), Clair made his directing debut in 1923 with his first short film, Paris qui dort, which has the distinction of being one of cinema's first science-fiction films as well as being dramatically shot on the Eiffel Tower. Before this film was released in 1925, Clair was commissioned by the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées to make a surreal short film for the interval in the ballet Relâche. This film, Entr'acte, had strong Dadaist influences and instantly gained Clair admission to the Parisian avant-garde. The visual poetry and flair for comedic invention that Clair had exhibited on these first films is just as evident in his first silent features, Le Fantôme du Moulin-Rouge (1925) and Le Voyage imaginaire (1926). The latter film featured a young actress, Bronja Perlmutter, whom Clair married in 1926. Their son, Jean-François, was born the following year.

It was for Alexandre Kamenka's prestigious company Films Albatros that René Clair made his next three films - La Proie du vent (1927), followed by adaptations of two plays by Eugène Labiche: Un chapeau de paille d'Italie (1928) and Les Deux timides (1928). These latter films are of particular note because they demonstrate Clair's penchant for turning humorous dialogue into visual comedy, inviting flattering comparisons with Chaplin's films. It was during his stint at Albatros that Clair came into contact with the talented camera operator Georges Périnal, who worked on many of his subsequent films. One film that fell by the wayside was Prix de beauté, which Clair co-authored with the esteemed Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst as a vehicle for Louise Brooks. When Clair abandoned the project for financial reasons it was taken up and completed by Augusto Genina.

As the silent era drew to a close, Clair had serious misgivings over the move to sound, but it was with his first sound film, Sous les toits de Paris (1930), that he had his international breakthrough. With its idealised portrait of working class life in a romanticised Paris, the film paved the way for the poetic realist style of Clair's contemporaries, Marcel Carné, Jean Renoir, Jean Grémillon and Julien Duvivier. Clair's subsequent Le Million (1930), À nous la liberté (1931) and Quatorze juillet (1933) were also noted for their inspired use of sound and helped to popularise an emerging genre, the film musical. The commercial and critical failure of Le Dernier milliardaire (1934) brought to a sudden end Clair's run of good fortune.

It was in England that René Clair made his next two films - The Ghost Goes West (1935), produced by Alexander Korda, and Break the News (1938), a remake of an earlier French film Le Mort en fuite (1936) directed by André Berthomieu. The failure of the latter film led Clair to return to France to direct Air pur, but this was abandoned at the outbreak of WWII. With his family, Clair left France in June 1940 and settled in America, where he was soon able to resume his filmmaking career in Hollywood. Over the next five years, Clair made four full-lengths films for four different studios - The Flame of New Orleans (1941), I Married a Witch (1942), It Happened Tomorrow (1944) and And Then There Were None (1945), the latter being the first screen adaptation of Agatha Christie's popular whodunit Ten Little Indians. He also contributed to the portmanteau film Forever and a Day (1943).

When he returned to France in 1946, Clair was in a nostalgic frame of mind and this showed in his next film Le Silence est d'or (1947), a wholehearted tribute to the early years of silent cinema. La Beauté du diable (1949) then saw him return to the whimsical fantasy offerings of his early films for the first of three screen collaborations with rising star Gérard Philipe. This was followed by another fantasy Les Belles de nuit (1952) and then his first colour feature, Les Grandes Manoeuvres (1955), which won the Prix Louis-Delluc. Clair's next film Porte des Lilas (1957) shows a return to the proto-poetic realism of his early sound films, with the legendary singer Georges Brassens making his one and only film appearance. He then directed Gérard Philipe one last time in a stage production of Alfred de Musset's On ne badine pas avec l'amour at the TNP Théâtre de Chaillot - not long before the actor's premature death in November 1959.

It was around this time that Clair came under fire from several film critics, including the firebrands on the Cahiers du cinéma. François Truffaut was most outspoken in his criticism of Clair, dismissing him as old hat. Clair's subsequent films merely served to bear out Truffaut's assessment of him. Neither in the anthology films La Française et l'amour (1960) and Les Quatre vérités (1962), nor in his features Tout l'or du monde (1961) and Les Fêtes galantes (1965) did Clair live up to the standard of his past achievements. His style of cinema was by now démodé, his subjects irrelevant compared with what the new generation of filmmaker was offering the public.

Not long after he was elected to the Académie française in 1960, Clair gave up filmmaking altogether to concentrate on a literary career, although he continued directing for the theatre - one of his last productions being a staging of Gluck's opera Orphée et Eurydice for the Paris Opéra in 1972. He also wrote and directed one episode in the television series Les Fables de La Fontaine (1966). Aged 82, René Clair died on 15th March 1981. He is buried in the old cemetery at Neuilly-sur-Seine, Île-de-France.

Filmography

Click here to view complete list of films...