L'Homme du large (1920)
Directed by Marcel L'Herbier

Film Review

The first impressionist masterpiece

It was with L'Homme du large - his first truly remarkable film - that Marcel L'Herbier established himself as one of the principal drivers in what soon became known as the Parisian Avant-Garde.  This was a group of radical young writers and filmmakers that set themselves the challenge of moving French cinema out of the tightly constraining cul-de-sac it had become wedged into by the late 1910s - that of the prosaic literary adaptation.  Strongly influenced by French symbolist literature of the mid-to-late 19th century, the pioneering L'Herbier was especially motivated to depart from the rigidly established convention of plot-driven film narratives, portrayed with everyday realism, and move across the perceptual boundary into the inner realms of dreams, feelings, beliefs and imagination.  L'Homme du large was only the fourth film that L'Herbier directed but it is already the work of a committed film poet and seasoned cineaste.  In his immense oeuvre it stands apart as a particularly beguiling example of film impressionism, one that powerfully evokes the ancient mystique of the ocean whilst delivering a cogent fable on parental responsibility that still resonates to this day.

Crucial to Marcel L'Herbier's development as a trailblazing film auteur was his decision to accept a two-year contract from Léon Gaumont to contribute to a series of prestigious films under the title Gaumont Série Pax.  The offer arose after the director had completed Le Bercail (1919) for Gaumont and was too good to turn down, as it allowed him not only the promise of almost complete artistic freedom, but also access to the immense resources of one of the world's leading film production companies.  L'Herbier's second film for Série Pax was Le Carnaval des vérités (1920), which benefited from extensive location filming on the Basque coast near Biarritz.  The experience of working outside the studio was so liberating for the 32-year-old filmmaker that he would repeat it on his subsequent films for Gaumont, beginning with the film where the location was of paramount importance - L'Homme du large.  L'Herbier appended the subtitle 'Marine' to the film and was right to do so.  This is more a living seascape than a conventional film drama, a pure hymne à la mer that captivates both the eye and the heart with its painterly composition and the way in which its austerely beautiful setting impinges on the lives of the protagonists.

Brimming with stylish innovation and experimental flair, L'Homme du large boldly proclaims Marcel L'Herbier's radical new vision for cinema and reads like a manifesto for the Avant-Garde movement.  For its time, this was a piece of film art of breathtaking originality, replete with the impressionistic tropes that would define the silent cinema of L'Herbier and his contemporaries (Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac and René Clair).  It is also the director's most intensely lyrical work, the simplicity of its story and the sublime starkness of the visuals achieving a perfect union of image and feeling that had rarely, if ever, been achieved prior to this.  Henri Langlois (the illustrious film archivist who co-founded the cinémathèque française) expressed this idea better than anyone by describing the film as the first example of écriture cinématographique - cinematrographic writing.  L'Herbier had created a new kind of cinema, one that flows as elegantly and purposefully as the great literary novel, uniting the world of deceptive outward appearances with the truer inner worlds of psychological awareness and reflection.

The plot is taken from a short story by Honoré de Balzac entitled Un drame au bord de la mer, first published in 1834 as part of his monumental oeuvre La Comédie humaine.  Reworked by L'Herbier (with a significantly altered ending that is far more upbeat than the original) this simple tale of a father's grief after his failure to raise his son properly provides the basis for a deeply moving study in human frailty, the power of which is magnified vastly by the raw coastal location in which the drama is situated.  The exteriors for L'Homme du large were filmed on the rock-strewn shoreline around Morbihan and Finistère in the southwesterly tip of Brittany, and it is the bleak savagery of the timeless setting that gives the film its visual grandeur and haunting poetic resonance.

The power of metaphor

From the outset, L'Herbier was keen to make the sea the dominant protagonist in the drama, an idea he had already toyed with on an earlier film that he had scripted - René Hervil and Louis Mercanton's Le Torrent (1917).  At the time, the notion that the location should play such a significant part in the film was fairly new - it was perhaps best represented in Swedish cinema, notably in the work of Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjöström.  Both visually and thematically, L'Homme du large has some striking similarities with Sjöström's 1917 masterpiece A Man There Was (Terje Vigen), based on an epic poem by Henrik Ibsen, although L'Herbier's dazzling impressionistic flourishes have the effect of setting his work well apart from the brutal naturalism of his Swedish contemporary.  The film is unusual for its time in employing a flashback narrative structure - an exceedingly rare departure from the linear narrative form.  Even more surprising is the presence of a short flashback within the main flashback, for the sequence in which Nolff recalls holding his new-born baby boy above the waves immediately after having sent his full-grown son out to face the mercy of the sea in a boat.

L'Homme du large abounds with the liberal use of metaphor that instantly marked L'Herbier out as the leading French film poet of his era.  The sea isn't just the supreme natural element in the film, one that shapes and decides the destinies of all of the protagonists, it is also a potent symbol of man's inherent purity - an infinite pool of unsullied goodness.  The land, by contrast, is where human corruption lies, its monstrous depravities focused in a coastal town that has the character of a modern Sodom and Gomorrah.  The scenes of wild revelry in a bawdy tavern, where just about every conceivable vice is indulged in by lowlife of every hue, appear sickeningly satanic when set against the puritanical simplicity of the life of the roughly hewn fisherman eking out his threadbare existence on the rocky seashore, scourged incessantly by wind, rain and wave.

The sea versus land dichotomy is reflected in the opposing characters of the siblings Djenna and Michel, the separation being made at once explicit in a split-screen sequence showing how differently they are reared by their parents.  Raised by her strict mother, Djenna becomes a dutiful and virtuous child, obedient and hard-working.  Meanwhile, indulged by his doting father, Michel grows up to become a dissolute idler who - naturally - loathes the sea, preferring instead the sordid delights offered by the town.  With his rough features and bear-like physique, the father Nolff fits so readily into the fiercely rocky Breton landscape that it seems inevitable that ultimately he should become part of it - a human menhir facing the sea to atone for the sin of judging another for his own failure.  The words 'Judge not, that ye be not judged' are all he hears as the breakers crash around him.  It is here that the sea acquires another persona - that of a cosmic arbiter, left to decide the fate of the recalcitrant offspring and the father who failed abysmally in his parental duties.

Sometimes the imagery is subtle, sometimes it is more blatant, but mostly it has distinctly Christian overtones - evidenced by the recurring image of the crucifix, an instantly recognisable symbol of judgement and forgiveness.  After Nolff's desperate act of surrendering his son to the sea there is the striking shot of an enormous stone cross superimposed on the turbulent waves.  The image of the cross not only marks the watery grave of a condemned villain, it also connects the sea with the fisherman's faith, the cross symbolising a father's willingness to sacrifice his only son in an attempt to redress the balance of good and evil in the universe.  There is one notable example of metaphorical montage that pre-dates Eisenstein by several years: a fleeting shot of a bird flying out through the opened door of a cage.  This is immediately followed by a shot of Nolff tearing the nun's veil from his daughter's face on learning of his son's miraculous survival and redemption.  The unexpected news brings both physical freedom for Djenna (presumably she can now give up her convent life to care for her brother and father) and spiritual release for Nolff, who is no longer forced to maintain his rock-like pose on the seashore like a morbidly self-flagellating Simeon Stylites.

A new style of cinema

The steady ebb and flow of the waves on the seashore is palpably reflected in L'Homme du large's smooth, hypnotic undulations - and this is perhaps the most striking aspect of the film.  It may not have the benefit of the abundance of camera motion that L'Herbier would employ to startling effect on his later silent films - culminating in his magnum opus L'Argent (1928) - but the director achieves a comparable fluidity with techniques that were more readily available to him in 1920.  Iris effects (often involving two overlapping shots) and variously shaped masks (which screen off part of a shot temporarily) allow for some incredibly graceful transitions between shots without the need for fades and dissolves (which L'Herbier would employ increasingly on later films as he refined his technique).

Colour tinting is used with great skill and artistry to provide tone and contrast between scenes and, occasionally, within a scene, whilst strengthening the film's coherence.  In silent cinema, nothing disturbs the flow of the narrative more than the presence of inter-titles, which impose jarring breaks between shots and disrupt the spectator's attention.  L'Herbier smartly sidesteps this throughout L'Homme du large, either by superimposing text directly over a shot or by placing it to the side of a shot in a masked-off area.  This is particularly effective for those shots where the text is dialogue spoken by one of the characters on the screen, like a speech bubble in a comic book.

The film's remarkable fluidity is further enhanced by the skilful application of cross-cutting in a few scenes, in a way that helps to build the tension at key dramatic moments.  The best example of this is the sequence where Djenna is attending to her dying mother at home whilst her unworthy brother is caught up in a drunken brawl at his preferred hostelry.  The scenes of wild debauchery in the crowded cabaret bar are noteworthy for their use of deep-space mise-en-scène, something L'Herbier would employ to ever greater effect on his subsequent silent films, most notably L'Inhumaine (1924) and L'Argent (1928).  (The cabaret scenes betray one of L'Herbier's key literary influences at the time, the Irish author Oscar Wilde.  In L'Homme du large, the corruption of Michel by the untamed vice of the town's lower depths echoes the fate of the hero in The Picture of Dorian Gray, whilst his next film - Villa Destin - borrows unashamedly from Lord Savile's Crime.)

Throughout L'Homme du large, the photography has an exceptionally lush and expressive quality, the exteriors charged to excess with the raw beauty of the Breton landscape, the interiors (designed by future director Claude Autant-Lara) carefully lit in a way that subtly underscores the characters' psychological stress.  In this, L'Herbier was well-served by his cinematographer Georges Lucas, who worked on all six of the films he made for Gaumont films as well as several other notable films of this period, including Jean Epstein's La Chute de la maison Usher (1929).  It is through the stunning sea-views that L'Herbier achieved his central goal, making the sea a fully fledged character by showing us its constantly fluctuating moods - shifting from serene calm to brooding menace tinged with scornful mockery as Nolff's tragic destiny unfolds, culminating in a condemnatory surge of raging fury.

A wise and capricious soul in constant flux, this is how L'Herbier compels us to see the sea - a co-mingling of the Gods of the Old and New Testament dispensing wrathful retribution to the sinner and absolution to he who bows to divine judgement.  The sea's immense power can be felt through the impact it has on the lives of those who are dependent on it - the superstitious Breton folk who, with their traditional costumes and harshly simple way of life, look as if they belong to a far distant epoch.  The film's portrait of Breton life has an authentic documentary feel to it, heightening the realism of the drama and no doubt providing a valuable ethnological record for future cultural historians.  In this affectionate homage to the landscape and culture of Brittany the film prefigures Jean Epstein's Breton studies of the 1930s - Finis terrae (1930), Mor vran (1931), L'Or des mers (1932).

One of the most important cinematographic aspects of L'Homme du large is the way it manages to deeply connect with its audience through the generous use of the big close-up - a particular speciality of Marcel L'Herbier.  It is through this mechanism that we come to appreciate the wildly contrasting natures of the angelically dutiful daughter Djenna and her impishly wayward brother Michel.  Whilst Djenna is often framed as a Madonna-like symbol of virtue, Michel's rotten soul is repeatedly revealed to us, through a half-suppressed smirk, a murderous glare or a genuinely sickening look of lascivious intent.  The extent of Nolff's inner torment is exposed in some of the film's most powerfully moving close-ups, which show a tender heart as harshly weather-beaten as the surrounding landscape.  Meanwhile, Michel's mother is never anything other than the Mater Dolorosa, the constantly suffering mother driven to a painful martyrdom by a fore-knowledge of her son's cruel fate.  Only by pushing the camera as close to his actors' faces as he could was L'Herbier able to achieve what he most wanted - to take us into his characters' inner worlds and place us in communion with their most intimate thoughts and feelings.  But what this also required was a radically new style of acting.

A new school of acting

One of the abiding concerns of Marcel L'Herbier on his early films was to avoid the overtly theatrical-style of performance that had become the established norm in cinema of this era - the inevitable result of experienced, traditionally trained stage actors being hired to lend legitimacy to the new medium of mass entertainment.  L'Herbier was one of the first film directors to appreciate the enormity of the difference between stage and screen acting.  His preference was to make use of inexperienced and non-professional actors whom he could nurture and mould to develop the kind of understated, naturalistic performance that best suited his style of cinema.   His best find was Jacques-Catelain, a student at the Paris Conservatoire with whom he struck up an immediate rapport in 1914 and who became a lifelong friend.  It was L'Herbier who contrived to get Jacques-Catelain his first screen role (in Le Torrent) and he subsequently employed him (most often as the male lead) on the vast majority of his silent films.

L'Homme du large was Jacques-Catelain's fourth collaboration with L'Herbier and as the badly brought up son Michel he had the kind of mercurial character role that was particularly well suited to his refreshingly subdued style of acting.  Disgraceful as his behaviour is, Michel never quite loses our sympathies.  The film makes it clear that the aggressive outbursts and licentious misconduct of this enfant sauvage are down to bad parenting, not necessarily bad character, and it is with genuine horror that we watch Nolff administering his monstrously ill-judged chastisement at the film's dramatic climax.  The casting of an actor as popular and sympathetic as Jacques-Catelain in the part may have been a factor in L'Herbier's decision to depart from the tragic ending of Balzac's original story - particularly as Michel is so evidently the victim of the piece.

Claire Prélia and Marcelle de Pradot were two other important members of the little repertory company that L'Herbier formed for his early films at Gaumont.  Mother and daughter in real life, neither had any acting experience before L'Herbier discovered them and cast them in his second feature Le Bercail (1919).  They appeared in many of his subsequent silent films, although neither survived the transition to sound cinema.  Marcelle de Pradot became L'Herbier's wife in 1923, abandoning her screen career after appearing in his first sound film, L'Enfant de l'amour (1930).  As the model daughter Djenna, de Pradot brings a saintly nobility to her portrayal of innocence that makes Michel's bad behaviour appear all the more disgraceful.  As defining character traits, Djenna's virtue and her brother's venality are polar opposites but they stem from the same cause - a parent's godlike ability to guide his or her child's moral development through its formative years.  This is the crux of the film, and through the stark opposition of Jacques-Catelain and Marcelle de Pradot L'Herbier gave his audience not only an intensely involving piece of cinema but also an exemplary guide to good parenting.

Roger Karl was already a prominent, greatly respected stage actor when Marcel L'Herbier encountered him for the first time in 1918 and gave him a leading role in one of his earliest cinematic endeavours, Phantasmes.  Although this film was abandoned, L'Herbier felt he owed a debt to Karl which he amply repaid by giving him one of his most memorable screen roles, as the stoical fisherman Nolff in L'Homme du large (followed by three other film collaborations).  Karl's impressive bulk and craggy features made him ideal casting for the part of Nolff, a solid physical presence that appears unmistakably at home amidst the towering ogre-shaped rocks which adorn the Brittany coastline.  In common with all of the great silent actors of this period, Roger Karl manages to express his inner world with immense power and eloquence - not through words, but through the subtlest of expressions and gestures.  The final shot of him calling out to the sea is utterly heartbreaking in its crude, unvarnished pathos.

The most famous name in the cast list is Charles Boyer, although at the time he would have been a complete unknown.  Another of L'Herbier's golden finds at the Paris Conservatoire, Boyer had just turned twenty when he landed his first ever screen role as Guenn-la-Taupe (the debauched rogue who leads Michel astray) in L'Homme du large.  It is unusual to see Boyer play such an out-and-out villain here (and do so with such obvious relish) as he would soon become known as one of the smoothest and most charming of the world's greatest matinee idols.  After finding international renown as the lead in Anatole Litvak's Mayerling (1936), Boyer rapidly became one of the leading lights of Hollywood, starring opposite such acting legends as Marlene Dietrich (The Garden of Allah), Greta Garbo (Conquest), Bette Davis (All This, and Heaven Too) and Ingrid Bergman (Gaslight).  Boyer's contribution to French cinema may not have been quite so glamorous but it gave him a wider variety of roles, from swashbuckling hero in Alberto Cavalcanti's Le Capitaine Fracasse (1929) to carousel barker in Fritz Lang's Liliom (1934).  Boyer featured in two subsequent sound films by L'Herbier - L'Épervier (1933) and Le Bonheur (1934).

Reception and resurrection

Originally screened in the late autumn of 1920, L'Homme du large achieved an immense success with both the press and the cinema-going public, despite running into censorship difficulties.  Even though the film had been issued with a visa by the Bureau de la Censure, it had to be withdrawn a week after its original release once the Minister of the Interior had ruled against further screening on the grounds that it contained offensive content.  L'Herbier was obliged to remove one inter-title and make three cuts to remove supposedly indecent images for scenes set in the seedy tavern frequented by Michel.  These consist of: a shot of two lesbians kissing each other on the lips; a shot of one woman caressing the knee of another woman; and a shot of Charles Boyer kissing a young woman stretched out on a table in a suggestive pose.  L'Herbier reinstated the cuts several months afterwards, once the puritanical brouhaha had died down.

In common with all of Marcel L'Herbier's other silent work, L'Homme du large soon faded into obscurity with the arrival of sound cinema, but it enjoyed a hugely enthusiastic reappraisal upon its rediscovery in the 1950s, helped in part by Henri Langlois's Herculean efforts to unearth and promote France's rich cinematic legacy.  By the time the film was restored in 1998, it had deteriorated substantially.  The colour-tinting and superimposed text (both essential to the film's cohesion and artistry) had to be put back in from scratch using the best available inter-positives and L'Herbier's detailed hand-written notes describing where the tinting and overlaid text are applied.  Now restored to its former magnificence, L'Homme du large both dazzles and enchants as one of the most sublime creations of the French Avant-Garde.  A work of exquisite charm that bristles with compassion and stylistic ingenuity, it provides us with something truly special - cinema's most haunting evocation of the twinned mysteries of the sea and the human soul, the depths of which are way beyond the bounds of our meagre understanding.

Film Synopsis

On a rugged stretch of Brittany coastline a wild-looking old man stands motionless, gazing out to sea in silent contemplation.  No one dares to approach him; no one knows the tragic story of his life.  Some years ago, this intimidating outsider had a family - a wife and two children.  It was a revulsion for human turpitude that led Nolff to live apart from his fellow man.  A deeply pious man, he built himself a modest shack on the rocky shoreline and lived the life of a solitary fisherman.  Whilst his wife brought their daughter Djenna up to be obedient and hardworking, he spoilt his son Michel, with the result that he became a lazy and selfish heathen.  Now that the children are almost fully grown, Nolff's one hope is that his errant son will change his ways and become a good Christian sailor.  But Michel has no intention of living up to his father's wishes.  He loathes the sea and spends most of his time in the nearby town, where he indulges his base appetites in the company of his dissolute friend Guenn-la-Taupe.  Oblivious to his son's debauched lifestyle, Nolff continues giving him his hard-earned money whenever he asks for it - money that is soon exchanged for the demon drink.

The one time of the year when the reclusive fisherman condescends to visit the town is during the Easter celebrations.  It is a great family occasion, but this year Nolff's wife is suddenly taken ill and they have to head back home early.  Michel remains in town, amusing himself in one of the shadier hostelries in the company of drunks, libertines and prostitutes.  Under the influence of strong liquor he develops lustful feelings for an alluring dancer named Lia, but this leads him to get into a drunken brawl with another man.  After stabbing his opponent, Michel is dragged off to jail.  Once his father has paid a fine, the unrepentant youth is allowed to return home, seemingly unmoved by the fact that his stricken mother has just died.  The only thing that stirs Michel's emotions is the discovery that his mother has bequeathed all of her meagre savings to Djenna.  Outraged, the young man turns on his sister and steals the money, which he believes to be his.  On hearing of this, Nolff offers his son one last chance to redeem himself by admitting to the theft.  Michel's barefaced lie seals his fate.

Nolff now knows that he has no power to cure his son's wickedness.  Unable to decide the boy's fate for himself he decides to deliver him up to the judgement of the sea.  With an unshakeable resolve, the old fisherman drags his wayward son down to the seashore and ties him to a boat, which he then pushes out onto the choppy waves.  It is now up to the sea to decide if the unrighteous son lives or dies.  After Djenna has entered a convent, Nolff is left alone to live the life of a hermit.  For over a year he has stood amidst the barren rocks, spending his days and nights staring out to sea, immersed in silent meditation.  Then, out of the blue, Djenna receives an unexpected letter - from her lost brother!   Michel has miraculously survived his ordeal at sea and is now a changed man, earning an honest living as a sailor.  His one wish is to return home and see his father.  On hearing this news Nolff is so deeply moved that all he can do is to cry out in remorse to the open sea, repeating again and again the name of the son who has finally come back to him.