![]() He got his start directing short documentaries about industrial manufacturing processes then edited footage from these films into an experimental montage called La Photogénie mécanique (1924), his first calling card as a filmmaker. Through a friendship with cinematographer Georges Périnal, who shot many of his early movies, including The Lighthouse Keepers, he began working in the film industry, first as a title writer and editor. In the early 1920s, he played in a pit orchestra at a movie theater, a job that married his musical vocation with his burgeoning interest in cinema. His first love was music, and he defied his parents’ disapproval by going to Paris to study violin and composition. That harmony is always threatened by private obsessions and conflicts, sometimes by outright madness-forces that break the cyclical patterns of daily life and communities.īorn in 1901 in Bayeux, Normandy (home of the famous medieval tapestries depicting the Norman Conquest in storyboard fashion, a milestone in the art of visual narrative), Grémillon had Breton ancestry and grew up partly in Brittany, the area he captured on screen with such vivid and visceral feeling. Music and dance also run through these films, shaping their rhythms and structures, and representing the beating heart of communal life. Here, it is the maintenance of a lighthouse elsewhere it is the threshing of grain, the mechanics of airplanes or ships or printing presses, the meticulous creation of tapestries or performance of surgery. His documentary methods also convey a love of work and attention to the detailed processes of physical labor. Many of his films, like The Lighthouse Keepers, are under the spell of the rugged, storm-swept coast of Brittany, and of the sea itself in its ever-changing, never-changing vastness. First, despite their lyrical tone and dreamlike atmosphere, his films remain rooted in documentary clarity-truly deserving the label “poetic realism.” Grémillon frequently shot on location and always distilled a potent sense of place. The Lighthouse Keepers ( Gardiens de phare), his second feature and last silent film, already displays elements that define Grémillon’s art. Those lucky or determined enough to track them down find works of singular grace and sensitivity, with a vision that is often melancholy but always humane. ![]() ![]() ![]() Obscure outside of France, the great director Jean Grémillon is a tantalizing figure even for those Americans who discover him, since most of his films remain difficult to see. ![]()
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