LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Jacques Feyder: Jean Vigo
built 127 days ago
At other times, Feyder uses the Haut Valois landscape for graphic effects so striking that they momentarily overwhelm the narrative. Descending the side of the mountain after having passed several days in Vissoy, Tailler and Jean pause before a view of Saint-Luc from on high. The village spreads out laterally as in an aerial photograph. The effect is vertiginous. [FIGURE 7] Toward the end of the film, Feyder intercuts between Jeanne saving Jean from the water and Pierre riding home. The hourglass-like composition dominated by the cleave of the waterfall from which Jeanne rescues Jean rhymes with that created by the identical lines of tall trees that line either side of the road along which Pierre directs his cart.
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Three-disc set features silent classics by European director Jacques Feyder. Two French Foreign Legion soldiers discover the mysterious kingdom of Atlantis (while serving in the Sahara Desert!) and its desirable queen, in the visually spectacular "Queen of Atlantis (L'Atlantide)" (1920). Jean Angelo, Stacia Napierkowska star. Next, French vegetable peddler "Crainquebille" (1922) experiences a deeply emotional journey after a rough encounter with the law and befriending a young orphan. Maurice de Feraudy, Jean Forest star. Finally, Forest stars in "Faces of Children (Visages D'Enfants)" (1925), playing a young boy struggling with the death of his mother and his father's decision to remarry.
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Marcel, born in Paris, the son of a cabinet maker, entered the movies as the assistant of Jacques Feyder. At the age of 25 he directed his first movie Jenny (1936). Colaborating with the writer Jacques Prévert, the decorator Alexandre Trauner, the musician and composer Maurice Jaubert and the actor Jean Gabin he became the great director of the pre-war era of the French cinema with the poetic realism style (e.g. Hôtel du Nord (1938)).
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Kamenka brought in Jean Epstein and Jacques Feyder (and later Clair) to replace ex-house directors Tourjansky and Volkoff. But the hapless Feyder had the dubious honor of directing Raquel Meller in a glossy new superproduction of Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen. An artistic miscarriage from the start (Meller, a pious Catholic, refused to play Carmen as the amoral, hot-blooded gypsy she was), the film’s mediocre box office performance scotched Meller’s brief claim to screen fame, sent Feyder into another professional exile, and rocked Kamenka’s Albatros to its very financial foundations.
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Feyder shows remarkable skill and empathy in looking at the tragic loss of his mother through Jean's eyes in a script co-written with Francoise Rosay, his wife and the mother of his three sons. In one of the film's most poignant of many memorable scenes, Jean retrieves his mother's dress from a wooden trunk. He lays it flat on the chest and sits at the foot of the gown, laying his head in the "lap" as if seeking comfort from his own mother. Visages d'Enfants is a powerful portrait of how profoundly loss registers in a child's life and how oblivious adults can be to that pain.
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Feyder makes limited use of Impressionist effects in Visages d’enfants. There are the flash frames in the funeral sequence. The portrait of the mother changes according to Jean’s thoughts, alternately smiling upon him and, when Jean reproaches himself for having endangered Arlette, effaced entirely (the smiling effect is reprised at the very end, when the portrait is seen to approve Jean’s acceptance of his stepmother). At the film’s climax, after Jean stares down into the river, the subsequent shot of the water is thrice refracted, making the water appear to surge upward violently—expressing both its pull on the tormented Jean and something of the boy’s own turbulent mental state. [FIGURES 10, 11] But Visages d’enfants does not aspire to the sustained stylistic experimentation—the thoroughgoing exploration of subjectivity—of Epstein’s Coeur fidèle or Dulac’s La Souriante Madame Beudet. Feyder’s idea of an appropriate “visual impression” was one that created the “illusion of reality.” His subjective “effects” are typically naturalistic and relatively discreet, functions of framing, nuanced editing and acting, set design, and as discussed above the use of the natural landscape.
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Jean Vigo