Le Jour se lève - press notesAdobe PDF

STUDIOCANAL presents
JEAN GABIN
In a film by
MARCEL CARNÉ
A RESTORED AND NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN VERSION
For more information please contact:
Nikki Aslatt / Keeley Naylor
Emfoundation
91-95 Brick Lane
London E1 6QN
020 7247 4171
Length : 1H33
OCTOBER 3RD
Stills available from www.studiocanal.co.uk/press
75 YEARS AFTER ITS FIRST RELEASE, LE JOUR SE LÈVE DIRECTED BY MARCEL CARNÉ,
IN A NEVER-BEFORE-SEEN RESTORED VERSION FEATURING SCENES PREVIOUSLY
CENSORED BY THE VICHY REGIME.
In 2013, STUDIOCANAL, in collaboration with ÉCLAIR, embarked on the restoration of Marcel
Carné’s masterpiece LE JOUR SE LÈVE.
Analysis of film reels of the time and discussions with film specialists and historians revealed that
certain scenes had been revised and edited by Vichy censors after the film’s release: a scene
with Arletty naked in the shower, another scene suggesting that the police were fascist thugs. The
opening credits were also modified – indeed, the names of Curt Courant and Alexandre Trauner
had been removed.
Subsequently, the film was completely censored and the Vichy regime forbade all screenings of it,
as it was deemed to be “too demoralising.”
In conjunction with the restoration project, an appeal was launched to film libraries around the
world via the FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) to locate the missing scenes.
Very recently, film libraries in Milan and Brussels came back with a positive response. After an indepth study of the footage, Éclair confirmed that these scenes could be reintegrated, but it would
require a significant amount of work restoring and grading the picture and sound to include them
in the final restored film.
STUDIOCANAL will release the restored version of LE JOUR SE LÈVE on October 3rd in cinemas
and on DVD & Blu-Ray on October 20th in the UK; the film will also be released around this date
in the United States, France and Germany most notably.
THE STORY
A five-story building in the middle of a working-class neighbourhood. On the top floor, shouts
and a gunshot. A door opens and the body of a man (Jules Berry) tumbles down the stairs. His
killer, François (Jean Gabin), barricades himself in his room as the police start to overrun the
building and the other tenants watch. The officers climb onto the roof, the crowd gathers in front
of the building, and François, the besieged foundry worker, remembers… His love for Françoise,
the beautiful florist, and her love for Valentin, the attractive dog trainer…
“François, François, François is no more…leave me alone,
all alone, I want you to leave me alone.”
A STORY OF NEIGHBOURS
After HÔTEL DU NORD, on which he collaborated with Henri Jeanson, Marcel Carné sought
to work with Jacques Prévert and Jean Gabin, his collaborators from QUAI DES BRUMES. The
director didn’t have a particular script in mind so the three men brainstormed together. Gabin
first suggested an adaptation of a Pierre René Wolf novel, MARTIN ROUMAGNAC, but Carné
and Prévert weren’t enthused. They began to write an original screenplay, RUE DES VERTUS – the
story of a gangster who returns from the United States and decides that there’s more money to be
made in politics than in robbing banks – but put this on hold, because Carné worried about the
response from actual politicians (to the great dismay of production designer Alexandre Trauner,
who loved the script).
As Prévert suffered from writer’s block and Gabin grew increasingly impatient, suddenly a
breakthrough, thanks to…Marcel Carné’s neighbour, Jacques Viot, who knocked on his door and
suggested an idea for a script. The story of a worker who commits a murder and locks himself in
his room. The director began furiously writing, and the flashback narrative device was completely
innovative at the time. Viot rewrote the script with Prévert who also looked after the dialogue, of
course. They even subtly reference Arletty ’s famous line from HÔTEL DU NORD “Atmosphere,
atmosphere! Do I look like the atmospheric type?” – in this new script, her line became softer and
sadder: “Memories, memories, do I look like the type who makes love with memories.”
Alexandre Trauner, Carné’s frequent production designer and great friend of Prévert, naturally
came on board right away. After collaborating with Eugène Shufftan on QUAI DES BRUMES,
Carné chose Curt Courant as the cinematographer. Courant, of German origin, had worked with
Fritz Lang and Max Ophuls and fled Nazi Germany in the 1930’s – he later shot THE MAN WHO
KNEW TOO MUCH, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, in 1934 and LA BETE HUMAINE, directed
by Jean Renoir, in 1938. On LE JOUR SE LÈVE, his use of light and contrasts gave a wonderful
expressionist and desperate feel to Carné’s acclaimed “poetic realism.”
“Hard labour, a soulless life, fading love, skies of lead, the
suffocating city air, and modern distress give this film a value
that, to be sure, is not easy to swallow; but here we have a
flawless, uncompromising work of art in which Gabin fully brings
his character to life, and Prévert’s authentic free verse makes the
story soar, based on an idea from Jacques Viot, as true and as
simple as the Seine in Billancourt. Actors, themes and dialogue
are fully immersed in imagery that is never crude, or trite, or
unwholesome. A dark film, but a proper one.”
Georges Altman, 1939, La Lumière
THE SET IS A CHARACTER
For Alexandre Trauner, Gabin’s character needed to be isolated from the crowd watching him
from below: the killer thus had to live on the top floor, or he would have been immediately
surrounded. The producer Paul Madeux was concerned about the budget and tried to convince
Trauner to remove one or more floors, but the production designer held firm and successfully
built a five storey building with Gabin’s room right on top. Trauner modelled the building’s design
on photos taken in Paris during the construction of the Hôtel du Nord, and the layout of the two
buildings is exactly the same. To highlight the claustrophobic nature of the room that Gabin locks
himself in, Carné insisted that the set really have four walls. The cast and crew had to enter and
exit from the top only.
A small room meticulously laid out, with few furnishings but many smaller details (the cigarettes,
that Gabin smokes one by one till the end, the alarm clock, the tie in the big wardrobe, the
stuffed bear, the two little photos next to the mirror), this room reveals better than a long speech
ever could the social condition and the loneliness of this foundry worker who is a child of “the
Assistance”: “a social documentary of a striking reality,” as the critic André Bazin wrote in 1947
in a long article about the film’s set, very much a character in itself.
“Several objects in the story have a clear dramatic purpose: the revolver, as the cause of the
drama, the cigarettes (smoked one by one, they ’re a constant reminder of the “cigarette of the
condemned”), the alarm clock that rings at the end of the film…
In addition to the mirror that constantly reflects François, one particular object has greater
symbolic value than the others: the Norman wardrobe that Gabin pushes in front of the door,
and which leads to a delicious conversation in the stairwell between the commissioner and the
concierge. We only see one side of the intrigue which is especially fascinating because of its
realism. Indeed, we imagine that these events could have taken place in a news story. In reality,
the implicit realism of this wardrobe is as rigorous and necessary as that of a Freudian symbol.
It is not the chest of drawers, the table or the bed that François chooses to block the door with.
It had to be this heavy wardrobe that he pushes like an enormous slab on a tomb. The way he
slides the wardrobe along, even the shape of the furniture means that Gabin isn’t merely locking
himself in his room – he’s walling himself in.”
André Bazin, People and Culture, 1947
CRIME DRAMA AND POPULAR TRAGEDY
A man has killed. The police are at the doorstep. Two common features in crime dramas, but
LE JOUR SE LÈVE is imbued with tragedy right from the opening shot: a man is sentenced to an
inevitable death as a result of both romantic drama and his social position (a foundry worker
against the world). This fatalist atmosphere is not unlike that of France on the eve of the Second
World War, as the dream of the Popular Front has been well and truly extinguished. When François
and Françoise meet in the factory, Marcel Carné depicts in a single scene the toxic and inhumane
working conditions: after just a few minutes, the flowers that Françoise delivers have already
wilted and Gabin sarcastically declares: “I told you, that was the cleanest thing here.” Fatality is
also depicted here with the classic love triangle, thanks to the wonderful character Clara, played
by Arletty – she is disillusioned yet poignant, and Prévert instils in her the emotional heart of the
film, when she realises that though she is Gabin’s mistress he will never love her. Leaning on the
balcony, looking down toward the pavement in front of her small hotel room, she says in a small
voice falsely detached: “Thankfully we don’t love each other. Can you imagine, if we had loved
then left each other? I’d have liked this to continue, but I lived here and you lived over there…
it was too far.”
“This building that reaches up to the sky like a popular prayer…
This building made of bricks that Alexandre Trauner dreamed up,
surrounded by emptiness to highlight the isolation of François,
the worker who said no to humiliation. He does not want to
leave his watchman’s tower, François, lover and killer who stands
guard one last night. They are all gathered down below, the
Parisians in this neighbourhood on the outskirts (just notice the
sign pointing to “city centre” beneath the building) to hear him
cry about his disgust, in this drama that Henry Langlois deemed
to be a “film of superior morality.”
Guillemette Odicino, Télérama
FLASH-BACK TO THE PREMERE !
LE JOUR SE LÈVE is considered to be the first French film with sound to use flashbacks as a
narrative device, but audiences were wary after the first test screenings of the film. Carné then
added a card with an explanation right before the opening credits, and this described the three
jumps the story makes back in time: “A man has killed. As he barricades himself in a room, he
recalls the circumstances that turned him into a murderer.”
AND CENSORSHIP…
When the film was released, Marcel Carné was ordered to cut a scene that shows Arletty naked
in the shower when Gabin visits her. The Vichy government also judged that the film was too
demoralising…
LE SENS DES DIALOGUES
“Him, he drinks milk when the cows eat grapes.”
“You’ll admit that one needs to have water in the gas and
butterflies in the metre to have spent three years with such a
man!”
“You perhaps have big ideas but your head is too small for
them.”
MODERN GABIN
PRÉVERT ON D’ARLETTY
“She is not just charming, she is charm itself.
She is not just funny, she is humour itself.”
Compared to Jules Berry, whose performance embodies obsequiousness and vice, and Arletty,
who plays a cocky lead in HÔTEL DU NORD and later follows it up with her iconic Garance in LES
ENFANTS DU PARADIS, Jean Gabin’s performance is strikingly minimalist and modern. Though
this character could have been just an ordinary romantic lead, Gabin brings a natural ease to
Prévert’s dialogue, and he occupies the space as a mute, a human beast locked in the cage of
his room. As Jean Renoir said: “The range of emotions that Gabin displays is immense, though
his craft is to show us only the essential ones.”
THE RESTORATION
LE JOUR SE LÈVE underwent a 4K restoration (based on a 4K scan). Under STUDIOCANAL’s
supervision, the image restoration work was carried out by the laboratory Éclair; the sound was
restored by Diapason in conjunction with Éclair.
The restoration of this film was extremely complicated, and it was based on an original negative
(the only element that had been conserved, as the print was destroyed), but this was in a state
of advanced decomposition. The majority of the restoration work was done manually, which
improved the image without ruining it. The challenge of the grading work was to conserve and
highlight Curt Courant’s impressive lighting.
MARCEL CARNÉ FILMOGRAPHY
1977 LA BIBLE
1974 LA MERVEILLEUSE VISITE
1971 LES ASSASSINS DE L’ORDRE
1968 LES JEUNES LOUPS
1965 TROIS CHAMBRES À MANHATTAN
1962 DU MOURON POUR LES PETITS OISEAUX
1960 TERRAIN VAGUE
1958 LES TRICHEURS
1956 LE PAYS D’OÙ JE VIENS
1954 L’AIR DE PARIS
1953 THÉRÈSE RAQUIN (based on the novel Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola)
1950 JULIETTE OU LA CLÉ DES SONGES
LA MARIE DU PORT
1947 LA FLEUR DE L’ÂGE (unfinished film)
1946 LES PORTES DE LA NUIT
1945 LES ENFANTS DU PARADIS
1942 LES VISITEURS DU SOIR
1939 LE JOUR SE LÈVE
1938 HÔTEL DU NORD
QUAI DES BRUMES
1937 DRÔLE DE DRAME
1936JENNY
1935 PENSION MIMOSAS by Jacques Feyder (First Assistant Director)
1929 NOGENT, ELDORADO DU DIMANCHE
CAST
FRANÇOIS
JEAN GABIN
CLARA
ARLETTY
VALENTIN
JULES BERRY
GASTON
BERNARD BLIER
FRANÇOISE
JACQUELINE LAURENT
OLD WOMAN IN THE STAIRCASE
GABRIELLE FONTAN
THE COMMISSIONER
JACQUES BAUMER
THE CONCIERGE
MADY BERRY
THE CONCIERGE
RENÉ GÉNIN
THE CAFE OWNER
RENÉ BERGERON
MR. GERBOIS
ARTHUR DEVERE
PAULO
MARCEL PÉRÈS
THE SINGER
GERMAINE LIX
CREW
DIRECTOR
PRODUCER
WRITERS
EDITOR
COMPOSER
CINEMATOGRAPHERS
EDITOR
PRODUCTION DESIGNER
COSTUME DESIGNER
MARCEL CARNÉ
PAUL MADEUX
JACQUES VIOT
JACQUES PRÉVERT
RENÉ LE HÉNAFF
MAURICE JAUBERT
CURT COURANT
PHILIPPE AGOSTINI
ANDRÉ BAC
RENÉ LE HÉNAFF
ALEXANDRE TRAUNER
BORIS BILINSKY
LE JOUR SE LÈVE FOR THE FIRST TIME ON BLU-RAY
NATIONAL RELEASE: OCTOBER 20TH
THE BLU-RAY INCLUDES:
• THE RESTORED VERSION OF THE FILM
• NEVER BEFORE SEEN BONUS MATERIAL:
THE LAST-DITCH ATTEMPT OF THE POPULAR FRONT,
a documentary directed by Dominique Maillet (1h35)
LE JOUR SE LÈVE, THE RESTORATION (15min)
• 24-PAGE BOOKLET
Includes writing from professor and critic N.T. Binh
LE JOUR SE LÈVE, A NEW RESTORED VERSION, ALSO AVAILABLE ON DVD