Marcel L'Herbier | La Nuit Fantastique
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Marcel L'Herbier's La Nuit fantastique (1942) is a film that takes place in a nearly imaginary, purely cinematic world. Like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), it has its characters wandering around in a strange environment that has almost nothing to do with daily life. Instead, this environment is a fantastic one that is created for the movies.
La Nuit fantastique is full of elaborately strange sets. L'Herbier's silent films were famous for their avant-garde decors, and this film continues that tradition. The lighting is also consistently strange, with areas of light and shadow where one would not quite conventionally see them in an ordinary movie. Both of these aspects are meant to underscore the dream adventure.
La Nuit fantastique deserves credit for tackling an ambitious theme: its hero has an adventure that may be real, and may be a dream, which is what he perceives it to be. The treatment of this subject is only partly a success. The film never builds up what seems to me to be any genuinely dream like atmosphere. While quite a few non-dream films achieve such a dream like quality, this one is pitched more at the level of gentle conceits and playfulness. Its attempts to create a dream like feel, with magic acts in night clubs and galleries, and a visit to a comically treated insane asylum, are more conventionally whimsical than profoundly oneiric. The story does take advantage of the plot possibilities of the dream / reality border. Its later stages especially commendably show a French concern with elegant storytelling. If one is going to make a film about dreams and reality, one should do it right, the filmmakers clearly feel. The filmmakers also deserve credit for sticking to their convictions. The film fully plays out the implications of its central subject.
The hero and heroine seem too passive. The heroine often seems somnambulistic, perhaps appropriately for a dream film, but one longs for her to take some constructive action against the villains who pursue her. And the hero is a downright nebbish. His character, an overworked student, is clearly supposed to be an Everyman who finally gets a chance to experience some adventure and romance in his humdrum and miserable life. The hero is proof that nerds did not originate as a social type in Silicon Valley in the 1980's, but were already present in France in 1942. However, unlike many movies about nerds, our hero does not really transform into a dashing figure. This is not a movie about a frog who changes into a prince. Our hero still seems nebbishy at the end, making wry observations and treating everything as a bemusing spectacle.
L'Herbier often contrasts his heroes with a crowd around them. This contrast often has a surrealist side, and the crowd actively comments on and pushes the heroes into some sort of action. Typically, the members of the crowd do not understand what is going on. Instead, they are driven by some false but socially acceptable convention. This false idea whips them up, and makes them demand action out of the principals. This whole approach is frequently seen as well in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. In both directors, there is an element of social satire here, with the suggestions that the public is easily misled by bad but popular ideas. Both filmmakers also suggest that public demands on individuals are often based on a superficial and incorrect understanding of the world. Implicitly, this suggests that one should be skeptical of received ideas and conventional wisdom.
La Nuit fantastique is full of both pans and full scale tracking shots. The many moving camera sequences are designed to underscore the film's visual uniqueness. They make the already strange environment of the film's sets and plot visually richer and more complex. L'Herbier pans wherever he can. His camera is quick, and can rapidly follow a character's movement. It also glances around the set, picking out objects and new perspectives.
While panning is L'Herbier's most common form of camera movement, he also breaks out into tracking shots when the film allows it. One of his most elaborate shots starts out as a pan, which shows the hero before the curtain of the stage show at the Louvre. Then, as the hero moves to one side of the curtain, and peers down a side corridor, the camera tracks along with him. The track reveals a full perspective down the side of the corridor. It anticipates such perspective revealing camera movements in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1959). This shot combines a pan and a track. The shot in the asylum, in which the hero tries many doors with his key, also involves a complex combination of pans and tracks.
L'Herbier's camera seems to follow the "thoughts" of the director. If the director wants to examine something, his camera follows, swift as thought itself. The camera movements can be completely irregular. They do not have to follow any fixed pattern. Some directors who pan make a very systematic approach out of it. They regularly pan from one end of an angle to another on a set, systematically staging the action around such pans. One can find examples of such systematic panning in the films of George Cukor, Richard Fleischer and Jacques Becker. L'Herbier's pans tend to be far less regular. They can glance up or down, left or right within a setting. They can suddenly whip 180 degrees, or go just a small distance. They can be quick or slow.
L'Herbier can pan in one direction, then back again in the reverse direction. Such reversals are also found in the films of Jacques Becker.
L'Herbier uses many strange optical devices. As Roy Armes points out in French Cinema (1986), these recall the early work of the French avant-garde. We see multiple-imaged shots, representing the double vision of the inebriated hero. There is also a highly unusual image where the lines of the image are spread out from right to left. This is a remarkable piece of optical transformation. I do not know how it was technically accomplished. It represents the mystical vision of the blind seer.