Les Berceaux (1932)
Directed by Jean Epstein

Film Review

In the early 1930s, Jean Epstein's passage from silent cinema to the sound era was both helped and hindered through his association with Synchro-Ciné, a film production company founded in 1920 by Charles Delacommune with the aim of developing a sound system for cinema.  After Epstein had directed a sound documentary for Synchro-Ciné entitled Notre-Dame de Paris (1931), the company invited him to work on one of its main lines, a series of chansons filmées, short films (typically five minutes in duration) that each consisted of images set to a popular song - a forerunner of today's pop video.  Epstein made around half a dozen of these short films - including Le Cor, Les Berceaux and Le Vieux chaland - although only a few of them are still in existence.  The director also made one further feature-length film for the Synchro-Ciné, L'Or des mers (1932), a notable commercial failure that impeded his subsequent career.

Of the chansons filmées that survive, Les Berceaux is the most enchanting, a simple but masterfully composed cinematic gem that perfectly illustrates Epstein's unrivalled flair for rhythmic montage.  The song in question is a poem by Sully Prudhomme that was set to music in 1879 by Gabriel Fauré, and sung by Lucien Gaudin of the Opéra comique.  This well-known ballad of the period mourns the pain of separation - the parting of husbands from their wives as they set to sea, or a son leaving home to forge his own adult life.  The song's double meaning is apparent in Epstein's visual rendering, which intercuts shots of a mother rocking her child in a crib with pictures of men setting out to sea in ships whose hulls resemble cradles, rocked by the unseen spirit of the sea.

So meticulous is the editing that there is scarcely a moment when the images and the music are not in perfect synchronisation, each supporting the other with the gentle rhythmic pulse of a lullaby.  Epstein filmed the exterior shots in the spring of 1932 at locations in northwest France (Baie de Cancale and Saint-Malo), and, as in his earlier Breton poems - Finis terrae (1929) and Mor vran (1931) - Epstein captures something of the unique spirit of the Brittany landscape whilst cherishing the resilience of its people.  The film's eerie poetry is at its most baffling when a shot of a crystalline ship is combined with a negative of a smouldering flower to create a truly bizarre and yet beautiful image.  This spookily abstract composition, a representation of life frozen in aspic, adds to the impression that Les Berceaux is a solemn lament for the passage of time, that invisible, incomprehensible force that draws us away from our comfortable haven of 'now' and sends us across troubled waters towards an uncertain future.

Film Synopsis

Along the harbour boats sway gently in the wind, awaiting their departure in silence whilst mothers rock their infants to sleep in cradles.  The day comes when the women must weep as their sons and husbands take their leave and set to sea for some distant shore.  As their boats are tossed by the ocean waves, back home mothers still rock their precious ones to sleep in cradles...