| Faces of Children / Visages d'enfants |
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|---|---|
| Directed by | Jacques Feyder |
| Produced by | Dimitri De Zoubaloff & Arthur-Adrien Porchet, Lausanne; Mundus-Film, Lausanne-Paris (C. Schuepbach); Les Grands Films Indépendants, Paris (Aloys de Christen) |
| Written by | Jacques Feyder Françoise Rosay Dimitri De Zoubaloff |
| Starring | Jean Forest |
| Cinematography | Léonce-Henri Burel Paul Parguel |
| Editing by | Jacques Feyder |
| Distributed by | Les Grands Films Indépendants; Jean de Merly / Étoile-Film |
| Release date(s) | 24 January 1925 |
| Running time | 117 minutes |
| Country | France Switzerland |
| Language | Silent French intertitles |
Faces of Children (French: Visages d'enfants) is a 1925 French-Swiss silent film directed by Jacques Feyder. It was a notable example of film realism in the silent era, and its psychological drama was integrated with the natural landscapes of Switzerland where much of the film was made on location.
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After the death of his wife, Pierre Amsler, the mayor ("président") of the village of Saint-Luc in the mountainous Haut-Valais region of Switzerland, is left to bring up his two children, Jean (c.10 years old) and Pierrette (c. 5 years old). When he remarries with Jeanne, a widow with a daughter of her own (Arlette), Jean is resentful of the woman he sees usurping his mother's place, and his feelings find their outlet in his growing hostility towards Arlette. One winter night, he tricks Arlette into venturing out onto the snow-covered mountain where she gets lost. A search party rescues her from an avalanche. Stricken with remorse, Jean tries to drown himself in a mountain stream, but he is saved by his stepmother Jeanne. The family is reconciled.
Jacques Feyder received a film commission from two Swiss producers, Dimitri de Zoubaleff and Arthur-Adrien Porchet, who were based in Lausanne, and he offered them Visages d'enfants. Feyder wrote his own original screenplay, assisted by his wife Françoise Rosay, taking a modern and unsentimental view of unhappy childhood and giving a psychologically realistic view of all the characters. He also embedded the story in a "social study of an isolated Catholic community's rituals and customs, in a landscape that alternately separates, endangers, and forces people closer together".[1]
His ambitions for the film were greatly helped by the natural talent of the child actor Jean Forest in the central role; Feyder and Rosay had discovered him in the streets of Montmartre and he had featured in Feyder's previous film Crainquebille. During the spring and summer of 1923 (4 May - 2 August) filming of the many exterior scenes took place in the Haut-Valais and in the village of Grimentz, bringing landscapes prominently into view throughout the film. Feyder's cameraman, Léonce-Henri Burel, who had worked regularly with Abel Gance, achieved some striking visual effects, such as the night scenes of the search party lit by torches (instead of the more usual day for night technique); he also employed a subjective camera viewpoint to depict the onward rush of an avalanche. Local people were used as extras to play peasants and villagers, notably in the funeral and wedding scenes; (many of them had never seen a film or a camera before). Interior scenes were shot at the Studios des Réservoirs at Joinville in Paris (10 August - 6 October). (During shooting at Joinville, Feyder went to Vienna to negotiate his next contract: his wife Françoise Rosay stood in for him as director while he was away.)[2]
After shooting was completed, Feyder had a disagreement with the distribution company Les Grands Films Indépendants, which impounded the film stock from January to May 1924. Feyder had to wait for a nearly a year before he was able to complete the editing. The release of the film did not take place until 1925, two years after work on it had begun.
The film opened in March 1925 at the Montparnasse cinema in Paris. It was immediately acclaimed as a landmark by critics. It was not however popular with the public and it became a commercial failure. Its critical prestige brought it some distribution abroad, and in Japan in 1926 the press named it as the best European film of the year.[1]
Later assessments have continued to value it for its simple intimacy and emotional poignancy, and for "the unusual authenticity of its natural and social milieu". The opening sequence in particular, depicting a village funeral, and lasting for about 11 minutes, has been admired for the skill of its exposition which combines narrative clarity with social detail and psychological insight.[3] Georges Sadoul regarded Visages d'enfants as one of Feyder's best films;[4] and Jean Mitry in 1973 declared that, apart from the triptych in Gance's Napoléon and Clair's Un chapeau de paille d'Italie, of all the French productions of the 1920s, Visages d'enfants was the one he would choose to save: it was the most consistent, even and balanced, the only one which was still today resolutely modern.[5]
After the film's commercial failure, the negative disappeared, and until the 1980s it was largely known through incomplete and poor quality copies. In 1986 the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique made a first restoration of the film using material held in Brussels, Amsterdam and Lausanne, together with some material already restored by the Cinémathèque française. This version lacked intertitles and colour tinting. In 1993 the Belgian and French cinematheques were assisted by Gosfilmofond (Moscow) and Nederlands Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) in a new restoration which added colour tinting. In 2004 Lobster Films (Paris) completed the restoration using digital technology to reduce spots and marks in the images, and the original French intertitles were restored. A new score (for octet) was commissioned from Antonio Coppola. A DVD version of the film was released by Lobster in 2006.
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