How Dangerous is Fiction in Hindsight
Here we continue with our scene by
scene commentary on the Warner Brothers 1937 film “The Life of Emile
Zola.” The footnotes add further
comments on the radio adaptation of the film script a couple of years later.
For a much fuller discussion of the biography and literary career of Zola, see
Chapter VI of my Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus in the Phantasmagoria (Newcastle-upon-Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2013).
The Opening
Caption
identifies the place and time of the first scene as “Paris, 1862.” For those people sitting in the audience who
might know some European history, these facts are meaningful and allow one to
judge the accuracy of architecture, costumes, and social and poilitical events
as context. For those who don’t, there
is a pretence of something more than “On a dark and stormy night…” The first images of the movie show Emile Zola
and Paul Cézanne in a cold and messy garret in Paris. The two men are not clearly identified and
their backgrounds and future careers remain somewhat mysterious. The two
long-time friends from the south of France are trying to keep warm. They each complain of poverty and lack of
recognition, as is typical of the way Hollywood presents artists who struggle
to achieve their goals of success and fame in a hostile, misunderstanding
bourgeois world. Both men express high romantic
ideals. But the camera for a moment puts
focus on the smoke of the stove when they start to burn books they consider
useless and fatuous. This is artistic
foreshadowing, as it hints ahead at asphyxiation of Zola at the end of the
film. Then there is a knock on the
door. Enter Emile Zola’s mother, and
behind her the novelist’s future wife Alexandrine. These concerned women bring news that they
have found Zola a job as a clerk in a Parisian publishing house. While this scene sets the essential themes of
the film in motion, it is not a very
realistic or accurate rendering of the lives or friendship between the novelist
and the painter. Everything about their
previous lives is flattened into an Americanized optimistic version of the
world, just as their speech patterns and allusions are as far from
nineteenth-century Europe as one can imagine.
This is not just a film using the historical past as a metaphor for the
present, but the present being used to distort the past and thus losing its
exemplary and explicatory value.
Now we
come to Scene 2. It
happens at the LaRue Publishing House where
Zola works as clerk. He comes out
into the street when he sees Alexandrine, now his wife, through the front
window. She tells him to ask for a
further advance in his pay. When he
enters LaRuse’s office, however, there is a police agent who warns him about the
sale immoral, dangerous books—because Zola has a reputation for consorting with
suspicious authors and making titles available the owner of the shop does not
approve of. The officer departing, Zola and LaRue argue about what rights the
novelist has. Zola is fired for bringing LaRuse into
disrepute and for disobeying orders. He departs
vowing to devote himself to writing his own books. Not only is this an overly
idealized view of Zola, with no depth to him or any of the other characters, but it lacks chronological
integrity, both in terms of what people did and said in the 1860s in Paris and
the development of the novelist’s career.
Zola already is made to know, feel and act the way he would much later
in his life when times had changed greatly in France and for him.
In Scene 3 a
despondent woman jumps into the Seine.
Zola, standing near the riverbank, watches in horror. A beggar tells him this is common and shows
him poor men and women huddled under a bridge.
Supposedly this event foreshadows Zola’s books on the poor in Paris. It is a rather simplistic view of how
a writer learns about the realities of life in the city. Meanwhile lines from Zola’s own books are
used to create the voice-over, as though the writer could not imagine for
himself characters, scenes and actions.
The Soviet style of cold realism is projected into Zola’s books and
life. At the same time, though Paris not a Victorian city, neither is it an
American metropolis: yet despite some period costumes, nothing about this or any
other scene fits with the historical dimensions the film pretends to be.
Scenes 4 and 5.
What follows are
brief shots of events that become topics for Zola’s novels, such as the mine disaster for Germinal. We then are shown Zola arguing with a newspaper
editor on the right to expose the incompetence of the French Army during the
1870 Franc-Prussian War that forms the
subject of his novel The Downfall (Débåcle). Botgh the chronology of events and the trajectory of Zola’s career are
grously distorted by these two scenes, as well as continuing the agitprop style
of viewing art as a critical reflection of real life.
Scene 6
A long tracking shot
of the French police chasing a crowd of prostitutes on the streets of
Paris. As this crackdown by the gendarmes
continues, one of the women rushes into a café where Zola and Cezanne are
sitting. To protect her, they invite
her to their table. Then, as they sit
and talk, Cezanne sketches the woman, this portrait subsequently to appear on
cover of what purports to be his first successful Nana. At the table, Zola asks questions about
Nana’s life and these frank comments she makes to a total stranger are said to
become the basis for the book that bears her name. Again this is a simplistic view of Zola’s craft
and of Cezanne’s art, and in terms of real history it is totally
preposterous. The script reads back from
Zola’s novels like Nana to construct the scenes of the writer’s
inspiration.
Scene 7
Sometime later,
we see Zola in Nana’s small bedroom where she tells her sentimental tragic life
story and gives him keepsakes, among which is her diary to use. Cezanne enters and shows Zola the sketch of
Nana worked up further, and Zola inscribes Nana’s name on it. Not only does this turn the character of Nana
from a young professional actress-prostitute into an innocent victim of
bourgeois society’s hypocrisy cast out on the streets, but it continues
the simplistic version of artist’s life.
Scene 8
New focus on a bookseller’s
shop—the same where the supposedly young and inexperienced Zola lost his job
under police pressure and the owner’s prudery—where Nana is on sale. Piles
of books on tables, as well as in the shop window: as though it were a
mid-twentireth century American bookstore. An overweight and pompous
middle-class couple wander about the shop, notice Zola’s novel with Cezanne’s
cover design of Nana’s sketch, and each one secretly each buys a copy for
themself.
Scene 9
On the street,
rain. Zola on the way to bookseller with
broken umbrella. Can’t afford a new
one. Enters the shop and ask to see
publisher.[i] Publisher teases Zola when author asks for
advance on sales. Given a large cheque;
then asks for a few francs to be purchase new umbrella. Joyous realization of Zola’s first success.
This farcical comic routine sets up Zola as a naive author totally unaware of
his own qualities as a writer or the attitudes of the public: he walks into the
shop fearful of seeing his books improperly displayed and lacking any sales,
but them becomes childishly excited when he notes the publicity it is getting
and the large number of sales. You would
never guess that Zola was a well-known journalist and critic of literature and
art and thus well-versed in the publishing trade in Paris. Nor would you have
any inkling about Cezanne’s role in the formation of the Impressionist movement
and his growing alienation from Zola. Though they had grown up together in
Aix-en-Provence, they took different attitudes towards art and society.
Scene 10
Now we see Zola
climbing the stairs to Nana’s poverty-stricken flat, where leaves his book with
cash inside on her door, and then goes away.
After he has departed, Nana opens the door, sees the packet with the
book and her portrait on its cover. Meanwhile,
outside on the streets, troops are starting to assemble and newspaper headlines
announce start of Franco-Prussian War in 1870. This is a cinematic technique to
mark that historical time is passing and to cover the transition from Zola’s
life of struggling poverty as a writer to his grand success, with the
foreboding of the war and siege to come.
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