L'Inondation (1924)
Directed by Louis Delluc

Film Review

The mild revolutionary

Abel Gance, Marcel L'Herbier, Jean Epstein and René Clair - it's an impressive roll call that makes up the so-called 'impressionist movement' in French cinema of the 1920s.  Two names that tend to get overlooked, or at least given far less attention, are Louis Delluc and Germaine Dulac, the two directors who established the movement with their innovative and highly influential collaborative venture La Fête espagnole (1920) (a film that sadly no longer exists in its entirety).  The more visually flamboyant style of 'the big four', which includes bravura use of optical distortions and rhythmic montage, set them way apart from the far more restrained naturalistic approach of Delluc and Dulac, and this might explain why far more attention is focused on the former.  Another explanation for the comparative obscurity of the 'two Ds' is that neither of them survived into the sound era.  Dulac, possibly on account of her sex and reputation as a staunch feminist, had to abandon her career as an independent filmmaker in the early 1930s and ended up working on newsreels for Gaumont.  Delluc had his career cut short in 1924 when he died not long after completing work on his eighth and final film, L'Inondation, an adaptation of a novella by André Corthis produced by Marcel L'Herbier.

Of the six leading impressionist filmmakers of the 1920s, Louis Delluc probably had the clearest idea of what the movement stood for.  Before he turned to directing in 1919, he had spent a number of years developing his ideas as a film critic and film theoretician, publishing several influential articles and books on the subject (Cinéma et Cie, Drames de cinéma, Photogénie, La Jungle du cinéma).  It was his wife, the greatly respected actress Éve Francis, who brought him into contact with Germaine Dulac - one of the very few women in the film industry at the time - and together they began working through their conception of what would later be termed 'pure cinema'.  As a film critic, Delluc had become massively disenchanted with French cinema, which, to his mind, seemed to be far too reliant on sensationalist potboilers like Louis Feuillade's Fantômas series and literary adaptations that were too closely connected to their original sources.  In both quality and quantity, American cinema was now vastly superior, and Delluc's depressing prognosis was that in France filmmaking was on an ever-downwards trajectory into the lower depths of low culture, a vacuous amusement for the uneducated masses.

Dulac shared Delluc's instincts that filmmaking had yet to fulfil its promise as a radically new medium of artistic expression.  For her, cinema was much nearer to music than other visual art forms, capable of yielding works as diverse and deeply resonant as the great symphonies.  But for this to become a reality the medium would have to sever its association with the literary form altogether and become a purely visual means of expression, its essential elements being composition and montage, not plot and character.  Over the ensuing decade, Dulac would go much further than Delluc, embracing the principles of Dadaism and Surrealism in her own, less inhibited pursuit of cinéma pur, but it was ultimately Delluc's far less radical approach that won out.  The extent of Delluc's influence on the progression of cinema into the sound era and beyond is hard to gauge but it is apparent, just by watching the few films he made, that his concept of cinema was far closer to what became the established norm in later decades than that of his more stylistically adventurous associates of the Avant-Garde.

Pure cinema à la Delluc

Between 1920 and 1924, Louis Delluc directed just eight films, the most significant being his unqualified masterpiece La Femme de nulle part (1922).  In stark contrast to his impressionist contemporaries, Delluc eschewed elaborate shows of style and gimmickry, opting instead for a form of cinema that was as simple and direct as possible, grounded in the world of everyday experience.  The 'less is more' principle is one that he would undoubtedly have subscribed to.  The idea of bombarding his audience with frenzied barrages of sensory overload (as the other impressionist filmmakers often did in their films) was anathema to him.  Delluc sought not to wow his audience but rather to engage their intellectual faculties and emotional instincts, in a way that allowed them to have a far deeper, much more meaningful cinema experience.  For those who take seriously the auteurist theories developed in the 1950s, Louis Delluc would seem to be the prime example of the auteur filmmaker - an artist possessed by a consistent motivating idea that would shape his work into a unique and coherent whole.

Delluc's films are so subtle and understated compared with the more experimental and visually daring works of Gance, Epstein, L'Herbier and Clair that it seems odd that they should all be lumped together under the same umbrella.  Delluc's idea of impressionistic expression may be on a homeopathic scale compared with what we find in the works of his Avant-Garde contemporaries, but it is just as noticeable when you compare his films with most other cinematic offerings of this period.  The economy and precision of his mise-en-scène is the first thing you notice - every shot is meticulously composed but there isn't an ounce of superfluity anywhere in sight.  The camerawork and editing are also remarkably unobtrusive, both achieving their aims without recourse to stylistic excess.  A good example of this is the brief flashback sequence in L'Inondation where one character (Broc) recalls the days preceding the time when his wife walked out on him with their infant daughter.  As the younger Broc sits in the foreground to the left of the shot, playing with his cherished child, his wife enters from the rear with a young man and sits alongside him to the back and right of the frame.  In this single domestic tableau Delluc tells us everything we need to know as efficiently and naturally as possible - the father's devotion to his daughter, his wife's coquettish and selfish nature, and the degree of emotional separation between the married pair.

Delluc's guiding principle was that a film should consist of a series of felt experiences, not mere images.  The role of the filmmaker, to his way of thinking, was akin to that of the French impressionist filmmakers of the 19th century - to capture the core essence of life and human experience within the medium he had chosen to work with.  His Avant-Garde peers had the same objective but sought to achieve this by privileging the interior world with their wildly distorted representations of reality; their films depict not what we perceive with our senses, but how we experience things internally when under psychological stress.  Delluc's more naturalistic approach is much closer to reality as we see and feel it in daily life, and this could be why it endured and became the preferred style for modern cinema.
 

Exemplary modernity

There is nothing in Louis Delluc's modest body of work that is anywhere near as elaborately stylised and visually exciting as Abel Gance's La Roue, Jean Epstein's Coeur fidèle, Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine or René Clair's Paris qui dort.  And yet Delluc's films are astoundingly modern when you watch them today, offering not grand spectacle to dazzle but modest slices of life that connect with the reality of human experience at a much deeper level.  In La Femme de nulle part and L'Inondation - Delluc's final two films - we can see not only the well-defined shape of French cinema of the 1930s but also its further evolution towards the cinematic revolution of the 1960s and on to today's cinema, where the striving for authenticity remains the overriding goal of most serious filmmakers.

L'Inondation's picturesque location in south-eastern France and its intimate portrait of country life immediately evokes the Provençal-based films of Marcel Pagnol.  The film's gradually darkening tone and subtly ironic concern with the self-destructive capabilities of human beings prefigure the poetic realist aesthetic of the late 1930s.  Meanwhile, the documentary-like montage of tracking shots down the crowded streets of a thriving rural community at once remind us of the early films of the French New Wave.  (Truffaut's 1961 short film Une histoire d'eau would seem to be an affectionate homage to L'Inondation).  The director's assured use of close-up and deep-space photography create an astonishing sense of sur-le-vif immediacy and proximity with his characters.  We cannot help but be drawn into their world and feel what they feel, at times with a visceral intensity that is quite disconcerting.

And when Delluc does deign to employ impressionistic devices - superimposition and subjective camerawork - these are used sparingly but to great effect, to gently guide us into the private interior worlds of the protagonists.  The film's rigorously pared back mise-en-scène has far more in common with what we find in the more mature works of Carl Dreyer (Ordet, Gertrud) than in the more desperately overblown offerings of the French Avant-Garde.  Film commentators love to go on about the dazzling brilliance of the silent masterworks of Gance, Epstein and L'Herbier, how these cinematic triumphs nuked the rulebook (not that one existed at the time) and transformed cinema forever in the 1920s.  There is some truth in this, but what tends to get overlooked is the fact that the quieter revolution of Louis Delluc was more closely aligned with trends in American cinema and would consequently have a much longer-lasting impact.

Fatal attraction

Marcel L'Herbier was one of Louis Delluc's fondest admirers - and with good reason.  Before becoming France's leading film critic in the late 1910s, Delluc had pursued a very prominent career as a novelist and playwright.  He was the man who first coined the term cinéaste and it was he who paved the way for L'Herbier and his fellow firebrand film revolutionaries, through his virulent assaults in the press on the lamentable state of French cinema.  Buoyed up by his early successes at Gaumont yet craving greater artistic freedom, L'Herbier created his own film production company Cinégraphic in 1923, with the explicit aim of fulfilling the Delluc/Dulac manifesto for a new kind of cinema that was liberated from the shackles of other artistic influences, especially literature and the theatre.  Whether it was the gods' revenge for an act of hubris or just incredible bad luck, the fledgling company appeared to be jinxed right from the outset.   L'Herbier's first independently produced film Résurrection had to be abandoned when the director fell chronically ill.  His next feature L'Inhumaine was such a monumental commercial failure that it came close to bankrupting him.  And L'Indondation, the film L'Herbier had invited Delluc to direct, resulted in the premature death of the very man who had initiated the impressionist movement.

L'Indondation may have been Louis Delluc's swansong but it was by no means the end of impressionism in French cinema.  L'Herbier's magnum opus L'Argent (1928) was still to come, as was Gance's Napoléon (1927) and Epstein's La Chute de la maison Usher (1928).  It did however mark something of a turning point, away from the wild exuberance of the Avant-Garde's earlier years towards a more subtle and effective form of expression.  L'Indondation surpasses all of these far more ambitious, far better known films in at least one crucial respect - its captivating humanity.  The film may not have the stinging emotional power and epic quality of Delluc's previous chef d'oeuvre, La Femme de nulle part, but it is nonetheless a remarkably accomplished piece of filmmaking, the beautifully contained visual poetry and delicacy of the mise-en-scène appearing oddly incongruous when set against the horrific forces that guide the destinies of the film's protagonists.  The titanic power of the Rhône is impressed upon us right from the start of the film, with arresting images that inundate our senses and leave us in no doubt as to the godlike might of the great river as it cuts its way through the countryside like a huge deadly serpent, an unstoppable, untameable force of nature.  It is the most apt metaphor for the unseen, unheard influences that decide the fates of the characters in the story - mere ants caught up in a devastating flood of surging waters and an even crueller welter of human feeling.

Love and hatred are the primal forces that impel the perilous currents in this arresting drama, beginning - as all tragedies do - with a confluence of seemingly harmless unrelated events.  A woman of indeterminate age, Germaine, arrives in an unfamiliar village in search of her long-lost father Broc and is offered shelter by a kindly young farmer, Alban.  Mistaking her benefactor's intentions, this unfortunate newcomer rapidly succumbs to the fever of love and makes herself a laughing stock as she clings to her excessive amorous delusion.  Alban's fiancée Margot, a girl with a reputation as a heartless coquette, takes most pleasure in Germaine's humiliation, and in doing so she incurs the wrath of a devoted father.  Succumbing to a murderous impulse, Broc takes a deadly revenge - just as his entire community is threatened with annihilation by a flood of Biblical proportions.

Where evil lies

The unpredictable capriciousness of human nature - shown by the emotional turbulence that takes hold of Germaine and her father - is graphically reflected in the aqueous onslaught that suddenly descends on the most idyllic of rural landscapes.  The opening shots of the Rhône show the river at its most placid and benign but its sheer expanse and the strength of its currents show us its true nature - a sleeping giant equipped with truly apocalyptic powers.  Similarly, the rural community of contented country folk is not as harmonious as it first seems, for beneath the surface of casual bonhomie there are undercurrents of extreme malice.  The film's more dramatic episodes do not come out of nowhere - they are all initiated by the nosey on-lookers in the background who are all too willing to spread malicious gossip whenever they see something that piques their moral indignation.

Alban's troubles with his fiancée Margot begin when, alerted by the local rumour mill, the latter discovers her beau has welcomed a strange woman into his homestead.  She thereupon takes her revenge by flirting with a cousin - an episode that is soon brought to Alban's attention by another considerate muckraker. When Alban, consumed with jealousy, then threatens his future bride with violence, his outburst is witnessed by local busybodies who waste no time spreading the information all around town.  Naturally, when Margot later goes missing, the farmer is at once suspected of killing her.  Broc's loathing for Margot may have been aroused by the slight his daughter receives from her, but it is the persistent humiliation he has long endured from his contemptuous neighbours that plants the catalytic seed that turns this simmering loathing into murderous rage.  It is the latent, deeply entrenched puritanical malice within the community, not an individual's predisposition for evil, that guides the tragic linked destinies of the characters in L'Inondation - as it would do in many films by Delluc's Nouvelle Vague successor Claude Chabrol.

Up close and personal

The ultimate fate of Margot is shown to us - in a highly ironic vein - near the start of the film.  As Alban looks down on the Rhône from a bridge, he glimpses the sunny face of his sweetheart in the rushing waters, seeing her flighty, free-spirited personality in the way the river appears to him.  How could he know that the same adorable face would end up being smothered by the same waters, her life carried away by the same tempestuous currents that so vividly characterise her nature?  This is one of the few examples of superimposition, a popular impressionistic device, that Delluc uses in the film to give an insight into a character's inner thought processes.  Not long after this, Germaine's propensity for fanciful daydreaming is shown when she sees herself imposed on the cover of a fashion magazine, not as the dowdy gauche spinster she is, but as the refined angelic beauty she imagines herself to be.  In a less humorous vein, Germaine's mental collapse after Alban's brutal rejection of her is conveyed with all its traumatic anguish through a series of overlapping dissolves of facial close-ups, the camera moving progressively closer as the intensity of her distress mounts.

The close-up is something that Delluc employs with particular skill throughout his film to show us what is in the minds of his characters.  In a scene preceding Alban's scornful rebuke, Germaine looks as she imagines herself to be - an attractive young woman in the prime of life.  But when she next looks in the mirror, her delusions shattered, her face appears very different - she has become a wrinkled old maid.  L'Indondation's most powerful moment comes when Broc makes up his mind to enact a terrible revenge against the person who has humiliated his daughter.  As he stands alone in his room, beside an open fireplace that casts an eerie infernal light on him, the camera fixes on his well-lined face and we witness what must be one of the most dramatic and terrifying character transitions ever to be caught on celluloid.  The various movie portrayals of the transformation of Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde are feeble compare with what we witness here, as the habitually cowed Broc is overtaken by a demonic urge to commit murder.  The starkly expressionistic character of the surroundings heighten the sheer malevolence captured by the close-up, and as a glint of pure evil shows in Broc's eyes a bolt of Arctic chill suddenly shoots down your spine - just as if you had glanced upon the face of Satan himself.
 
What follows then is a marvellously effective use of ellipsis.  We first see Broc shuffle away from his house, clearly with some solemn task in mind.  And then, in the next shot (after a brief cutaway to the semi-comatose Germaine in her bed) we see him return.  Delluc doesn't need to show us what the old man did in the intervening time.  All is revealed in the next portrait shot of Broc which shows him totally transformed again, his rugged old face now violently etched with the deepest remorse.  From the vacant expression in his downcast eyes and his dishevelled posture he is the epitome of the godforsaken penitent.  The grisly details of Broc's crime are presented in a flashback towards the end of the film, when the old man is forced to confess what he has done to his daughter, but none of this comes as a surprise.

The nature of Broc's transgression and the terrible psychological impact this has on him are at once apparent in the single static shot that shows him reflecting on what he has done after the act.  A more sensationalist filmmaker like Louis Feuillade would have gone to town with these scenes, milking every last drop of melodramatic mayhem from the monstrous killing and its impact to satisfy the Grand Guignol appetites of his audience.  Louis Delluc does almost the exact opposite, achieving a far more impactful result with just a few meticulously composed shots.  We are horrified by the crime that is committed, but, more than that, we feel for the characters who are affected by it, in a far deeper way than a prosaic director like Feuillade could ever hope to achieve with his crude shock tactics.

A collective effort

In L'Inondation, Delluc was particularly well-served by a supremely talented technical crew and an equally impressive cast.  He could not have asked for a more capable cinematographer than Georges Lucas, who had worked with L'Herbier on all of the films he had made during his stint at Gaumont, including his more experimental films L'Homme du large (1920) and El Dorado (1922).  An absolute maestro of chiaroscuro, Lucas contributes a great deal to the undulating shifts in tone and atmosphere of the film, deriving the maximum visual impact from Delluc's incredibly sparse mise-en-scène.  The interior shots may appear simple but they are both elegant and effective, often using doorways and arches to frame the actors like a proscenium arch - a subtle allusion perhaps to Shakespeare's observation that we are all nothing more than players on a cosmic stage.

The interior sets accord well with the expressive purity of the mise-en-scène, camerawork and lighting.  These were designed by no less a person than Alberto Cavalcanti, who worked on several of Marcel L'Herbier's films before becoming a highly regarded filmmaker in his own right.  It is worth noting how perfectly (yet discretely) the sets reflect the characters that inhabit them.  Broc's impoverished and solitary lifestyle is immediately apparent from the large, sparsely furnished room in which he lives.  A single photograph of a toddler on a shelf is the only personal adornment, offering a glimpse of the tragedy of Broc's life more powerfully than any amount of exposition.  Alban's equally barren home is also revealing - of a neglectful bachelor who could greatly benefit from having a woman's touch around the home.

Taking the lead role is the director's former wife Ève Francis, who remained the director's faithful muse even after their amicable separation in 1922.  Before her cinema debut in 1914, Francis was a highly accomplished stage actress, known for her many collaborations with the revered playwright Paul Claudel.  She was the one who first aroused Delluc's passion for cinema (reportedly by taking him to a screening of Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat).  In doing so, she initiated not only his filmmaking career but also the impressionist movement, with which she would be intimately associated through her frequent collaborations with L'Herbier, Dulac and Delluc.  Aged 37 at the time she appeared in L'Inondation, Francis was perfectly suited to play the mature spinster with romantic delusions - just the right age for the character to appear slightly absurd and yet also sympathetic.  As she had done in L'Herbier's El Dorado not long before this, the actress brings a harrowing reality to her character's anguish as the realities of an unjust world gradually devastate her morale and self-esteem.  The subtlety of Francis's performance (easily one of her finest) is in perfect alignment with Deluc's impeccably understated direction, and rarely does cinema give us such a genuinely moving insight into an older woman's craving for the matrimonial state as the beating wings of time work against her.

Most poignant are the scenes in which Francis appears alongside Edmond Van Daële, an admirable casting choice for the part of Germaine's long suffering father, Broc.  A few years on, Van Daële would achieve film immortality as the definitive screen Robespierre in Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927).  In L'Indondation, he presents a very different persona, a downtrodden functionary who suddenly regains his zest for life when his daughter re-enters his life after a separation of many years.  The on-screen chemistry between Francis and Van Daële is the most magical ingredient of L'Inondation, the intense devotion of the father for his daughter making horribly plausible Broc's dramatic character turn towards the end of the film.  Ginette Maddie makes an effective, mischievously gamine contrast to Francis as the far less likable Margot, a flighty little minx with just enough superficial charm for us to be appalled by her tragic demise.

L'Herbier's mother-in-law Claire Prélia - a very capable actress - crops up in a few scenes as Margot's over-anxious mother, and the part of the girl's fiancé Alban went to Philippe Hériat, another frequent associate of L'Herbier who later found considerable acclaim as a prominent novelist.  Hériat's stiff beanpole physique and characterful face give him a highly comical appearance - he can hardly avoid looking like Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot as he towers above his petite female co-stars.  His casting as Germaine's beau idéal adds more than a touch of poignancy and humour to the woman's wild infatuation, highlighting not only her desperate need for affection after the death of her mother, but the sheer eccentricity of her delusions.  Just why the village flirt Margot should want to marry a spindly gargoyle like Alban is harder to account for - although his wealth and her capriciousness may have had something to do with it.

Taken at the flood

The filming of L'Inondation was greatly assisted by an immense flood caused by the swelling of the River Durance in 1923.  This provided the film with some spectacular images of the countryside of southeast France transformed by widespread flooding, with vast swathes of agricultural land and country roads deluged with water.  Unfortunately, the location filming did nothing for its director's already frail state of health.  The extreme cold winter weather and high humidity aggravated the tuberculosis that Delluc had suffered from since childhood and he soon developed chronic pneumonia.  Seven weeks before L'Inondation had its first public screening on 9th May 1924, Louis Delluc succumbed to his illness, dying at the age of 33.

Delluc's unforeseen passing came as a severe blow to his fellow Avant-Garde filmmakers, who spoke and wrote of Delluc's artistic achievements in the most glowing terms for many years afterwards.  In 1937, a special film award - le Prix Louis Delluc - was created in his honour, presented each year to the best French film chosen by a committee of critics.  Recipients of the award include Marcel Carné's Le Quai des brumes (1938), Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la bête (1946) and Louis Malle's Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1957).  1999 saw the creation of a second award in Delluc's name for the best first work by a French filmmaker.  Today, both of these awards are highly coveted and provide a fitting tribute to a cinema visionary, preserving the memory of a man whose profound insights into the art of filmmaking would be borne out in the decades following his death and remain with us to this day as a touchstone for what the Seventh Art can and should deliver.

Film Synopsis

In the Vaucluse region of southern France there is a peaceful little town situated on the banks of the mighty Rhône.  Here, Alban Perrin, a rich young farmer, is about to marry his sweetheart Margot, a younger woman who has a reputation as a flirt.  One day, Margot is surprised to find another woman in Alban's home.  The woman, a complete stranger, turned up on the farmer's doorstep the evening before and, not having the heart to turn her away, Alban offered her shelter for the night.  She is in fact Germaine Broc, the daughter of Monsieur Broc, who is employed by the town's mayor in a modest secretarial post.  Broc hasn't seen his daughter for many years, not since the day his wife walked out on him, so he is naturally delighted to be reunited with his long-lost child after his wife's recent death.

Germaine cannot forget the kindness showed to her by Alban and becomes ever more infatuated with him whenever she meets him in public.  Although she is soon madly in love with him, he shows her no attention and ends up repudiating her for trying to disrupt his wedding plans.  Germaine's health suffers as a result of her infatuation and the teasing she gets from Margot, who takes a cruel delight in Alban's rejection of her.  Broc becomes concerned for his daughter's well-being and grows to hate the romantic rival who has caused her so much distress. Meanwhile, Alban has learned that Margot has been flirting with her cousin Jean.  Outraged, he threatens his fiancée with physical harm if she carries on in this way.  These amorous intrigues pale into insignificance when a sudden torrential downpour causes the Rhône to burst its banks and flood the entire region.  One of the casualties of this catastrophe is Margot, who fails to return home one evening and is found dead in the river once the crisis is over.

Suspected of being the girl's killer by her grieving parents, Alban has no choice but to leave the village.  Seeing how much Germaine is upset by Alban's woes, Broc tries to convince the mayor of his innocence, but in vain.  Everyone knows that his daughter is smitten with the farmer and her father is merely acting in her best interest.  In fact, Broc alone knows what became of Margot.  Troubled by his conscience, he confronts Germaine with the terrible truth that, out of loathing for the wicked girl, he followed her on the evening of her death and pushed her into the river, causing her to drown.  After confessing his crime to a pair of passing policemen, Broc allows himself to be taken away.  His departure coincides with an unexpected visit from Alban, who promises Germaine that he will help to save her father in the coming storm.