Visages d'enfants (1925)
Directed by Jacques Feyder

Film Review

One of the most beautiful and moving films of the silent era, Visages d'enfants is a powerful portrait of childhood grief and alienation, exquisitely filmed and acted with utter conviction on all fronts.  The star of the film is unequivocally the young Jean Forest.  His portrayal of a boy tortured by grief and then driven to spite his stepmother and stepsister is harrowingly believable, giving the film the stark poignancy which only François Truffaut's 1959 film Les 400 coups can match.  The scenes in which the grieving boy tries to evoke the memory of his dead mother have a pathos that transcends conventional melodrama; this is raw emotion depicted with an unfaltering sense of truth.

In terms of both its scale and its impact, this film deserves to be considered one of Jacques Feyder's best works as a director.  Certainly, it amply illustrates both the profound humanism and realism that best characterise his work.  The director's flair for innovation is also exemplified in a spectacularly filmed avalanche sequence which masterfully conveys the power and terror of a descending mass of snow.  The film also shows Feyder's capacity for observation, demonstrated through his extraordinary attention to detail.  The scenes of the children eating together and squabbling are strikingly naturalistic and are scarcely different to what we find in our own homes today, something which gives the film a strangely timeless feel.

Where the film excels is in the richness of its characterisation.  Feyder makes you care for the characters in his film as he carefully exposes their inner angst and personality flaws, through the simplest of cinematic techniques.  By the time the film reaches its dramatic highpoint, the spectator is overwhelmed with concern for the guilt-stricken Jean as he faces up to his hopeless situation.   The last ten minutes of this extraordinary work are quite possibly the most emotionally exhausting of any film from this era, with each second filled with tension and dread anticipation of what the next moment might bring.

Despite some very favourable reviews on its release in 1925, Visage d'enfants was not a great box office success and was all but forgotten by the 1930s.  Believed to have been lost, the film was later reassembled in the 1990s from extracts belonging to a number of film archives. The film was re-released in its newly restored form in 1993.

For all its apparent narrative simplicity, Visage d'enfants is a hugely effective film which has no difficulty engaging with its audience.  On the strength of its realism, poetry and blistering humanity, it surely deserves to be rated as one of the great achievements of European cinema during the silent era, and possibly also one of the most poignant films about childhood ever made.

Film Synopsis

In Saint-Luc, a remote village in the Swiss Alps, the president, Pierre Amsler, mourns the death of his wife. Whilst his 4-year old daughter Pierrette is seemingly unaffected, his 11-year old son Jean is traumatised by this tragic loss. A few months later, Pierre decides to re-marry, taking as his wife Jeanne, a poor widow with a young daughter, Arlette.  Unable to break the news to Jean himself, Pierre asks the priest of a neighbouring village to do this for him.  The priest agrees and takes Jean across the Alps to his own village where he explains the situation to the still grieving young boy.  Agreeing that it is for the best, Jean returns to his home a few days later, to find his new stepmother installed with her daughter.  Unable to accept Jeanne as a replacement for his mother, Jean grows increasingly antagonistic towards Arlette, and the two children soon begin to hate each other.  Things come to a head one winter's day when Jean throws Arlette's precious doll into the snow when the family is riding across the Alps in a cart.  That night, Jean tells Arlette where the missing doll is and helps her to slip out of the house to find it.  As the sound of a nearby avalanche is heard, Jean becomes tormented by his conscience…