Quatre-vingt-treize (1921)
Directed by Albert Capellani, André Antoine

Film Review

1914 was a significant year for French cinema, for this was the year when France's film industry was finally overtaken by that of America and began rapidly falling behind, amidst the turmoil and sacrifice of the First World War.  It seems fitting that the most ambitious film made in France in this momentous year should be titled after another even more cataclysmic year in French history - 1793, the year of La Terreur, the bloodiest period of the French Revolution.  Ironically, it was the start of WWI that curtailed production on this blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and it wouldn't be until 1921 that the film - Quatre-vingt-treize - would be seen in its completed form.  By this time, in just seven years, the film industry and the art of cinema had changed beyond recognition.  France had been overtaken by Hollywood and it was the United States that now led the world in what was already the most popular medium of entertainment of the 20th century.

Quatre-vingt-treize was the most expensive film made by SCAGL (Société Cinématographique des Auteurs et Gens de Lettres), a subsidiary specifically created by the Pathé brothers to adapt great works of French literature, usually on a massive budget.  The company had already notched up major successes with Les Misérables (1913) and Germinal (1913), both helmed by its artistic director Albert Capellani, and even greater resources were to be lavished on its next superproduction, a spectacular visualisation of Victor Hugo's monumental critique of the French Revolution.  The scale of the project was mindboggling for the time, yet Capellani, at the height of his artistic and managerial powers, was more than up to the challenge of delivering a three hour epic that was intended to be the greatest film made in France up until this point.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in June 1914 put paid to these grandiose ambitions and sealed the fate not only of Capellani but also the French film industry in its entirety.  Production on the film was halted on 1st August 1914, the day of General Mobilisation in France.  Capellani himself enlisted but was invalided out of the army because of ill health.  By the spring of the following year, he was settled in the United States, about to embark on the prolific American stage of his career, whilst film-making in France came to a grinding halt because of restrictions on the use of film stock.  Pathé's attempt to distribute the uncompleted film was thwarted by a ban because its graphic depiction of a civil war in France was deemed to be against the national interest.  After the war, André Antoine, another aspiring director recently hired by SCAGL, completed work on Capellani's abandoned magnum opus and it was finally released in two parts in June 1921, too late to make anything like the impact that Pathé had hoped for seven years previously.

We owe it to André Antoine that he not only salvaged what would otherwise have been a lost work (one that may well have been destroyed once Pathé had decided it was of no commercial value), but he also enhanced it with his own cinematic flair to give it much greater visual impact.  As no detailed records of Antoine's work on the film survive, it is hard no know for sure exactly which additional sequences he added to the film, even though his own style of cinema is markedly different from that of Capellani - more fluid and intimate, evidenced by his own films Le Coupable (1917) and L'Hirondelle et la Mésange (1920).  You only have to compare Quatre-vingt-treize with Capellani's previous literary adaptation, Germinal, to appreciate how much Antoine brought to the film.  It is a remarkable rescue operation.

The area where Antoine probably had most impact was on the editing, this being where film convention had altered most significantly over the seven year haitus.  No doubt influenced by D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) - to which Quatre-vingt-treize is arguably France's nearest equivalent - the editing makes use of cross-cutting and multiple cuts within a scene, things which Capellani tended to avoid in his own films.  Those long-duration static shots where the full depth of field is utilised (action in the background serving to complement and sometimes magnify activity in the foreground) are recognisably the work of Capellani, but more dynamic shots - shorter takes with more imaginative camera positioning -  are more likely to be Antoine's.  The final film is so meticulously edited together that the contrast in styles is hardly noticeable, and yet it is still a curious piece, combining a predominantly circa 1914 mise-en-scène with an editing approach that clearly belongs to the early 1920s.

During his time at SCAGL Albert Capellani was renowned for the brutal realism he brought to his films, and there is no shortage of this in Quatre-vingt-treize, with its gruesomely convincing re-enactments of the more gory episodes in the 1793 civil war.  The first part of the film concludes with one of the more grisly set-pieces in Hugo's novel, the massacre at Herbe-en-Pail.  Once the Republican Army has crushed the Chouans, women and children are casually rounded up, put in a line and then cold-bloodily shot.  The attack on the La Tourgue fortress that is the centre-piece of Part Two is just as grim, although nothing is more likely to send a shiver down the spine than the insane single-mindedness of the central villain of the piece, the fanatical revolutionary Cimourdain (vividly portrayed by the great stage actor Henry Krauss).  In Cimourdain, an ideologue willing to sacrifice anything - women, children, even friendship - on the altar of the French Revolution, we have a stark and terrifying template for the kind of ranting dictator that would bring havoc and slaughter aplenty to whole swathes of the 20th century.  Appropriately, the one and only close-up to be found in this entire three-hour long film is of Cimourdain, his face a mask of implacable fanaticism as he watches his former pupil and fellow revolutionary being taken off to the guillotine.

Quatre-vingt-treize is a tad overlong, relies too much on wordy inter-titles to carry the sprawling narrative, and has little of the bravura inventiveness that Abel Gance would later bring to his subsequent Revolution-era epic, Napoléon (1927).  But, all that aside, it still provides a compelling spectacle that is both faithful to Hugo's original novel and a wonderfully vivid portrayal of a dark period in French history.  So uncompromising is the film's depiction of the senseless carnage that results from blind adherence to an ideology that it can hardly fail to chill the blood.  The obscene malevolence of the architects of La Terreur is given a sickening resonance when it is shown alongside the innocence of a group of playful toddlers who get caught up in the maelstrom of terror dreamed up by Robespierre, Danton and Marat.   How uncannily does the film anticipate the man-made catastrophes of the 20th century that were just over the horizon.  Quatre-vingt-treize doesn't just show us the hell that has past - it also shows us the hell that is to come.

Film Synopsis

France, 1793.  The French Revolution has entered its bloodiest phase with the Republican Army authorised by the Committee of Public Safety to crush opposition to the new régime wherever it shows itself, and with utter ruthlessness.   Despite this Reign of Terror, there are many who remain wedded to the old régime and are prepared to fight to bring about a restoration of the monarchy.  One such man is the ageing Marquis de Lantenac who, after seeking support in England for his cause, lands on the Breton coast to raise an insurrectionist army.  In this he is opposed by his nephew Gauvain, who is equally devoted to the Republican cause after being influenced by his former tutor, Cimourdain, a one-time priest who is now one of Robespierre's most ardent supporters.  With his Chouan rebels, Lantenac is soon locked in a fierce combat to the death with the Republican Army but he is up against too strong an adversary.  Captured by the Revolutionaries in the course of an attack on his château, the Marquis is tried and sentenced to death.  Gauvain cannot bear to see his uncle guillotined and so he takes his place.  The one man who can save Gauvain is his former tutor, but for Cimourdain commitment to the Revolution must come before any personal feelings...