At times closer to the madcap adventures of an American series than to maritime history, this serial retracing the adventures of the Saint-Malo privateer devised by Arthur Bernède, the popular author of Belphégor and Judex, attracted attention above all for the natural settings of most of its shots. Filmmaker Luitz-Morat (AKA Maurice Radiguet), who began his career as an actor with Feuillade and Fescourt, distinguished himself in the 1920s, handling challenging shoots on location in Tunisia, Morocco and Italy. This time, he gave free rein to his keen eye for landscapes by setting up his cameras in Brittany, braving the tumultuous weather. In June and July of 1924, he filmed in Saint-Malo (Ramparts of Holland, Grand Bé island), in Saint-Servan-sur-Mer at the Château de Riancourt (where the privateer died) and in the house where he was born, in Rothéneuf, Saint- Lunaire, Dinan (the Jerzual district), in the Bay of Paimpol, in Lorient, Saint-Nazaire and Brest. The descendants of Surcouf (including Baron Joseph Surcouf, a lawyer at the Paris Court of Appeal) lent authentic props and served as historical advisors. In Paimpol, a three-masted cod fishing boat was transformed into the frigate “Confiance” and used as a floating stage. The soldiers of the Saint-Malo regiment and the marine fusiliers at Lorient (where the English pontoons were rebuilt) served as extras, flanked by a few local faces to add picturesque interest. The remainder was filmed at the Levinski/Pathé-Nathan studios in Joinville-le-Pont, where Luitz-Morat had installed the “Kent” and the entire bow of the “Confiance”; the naval battles with miniature ships were not filmed in a tank, but on a smooth, glimmering surface, and the scale models were repositioned frame by frame.
The series was a resounding success in movie theatres and was even distributed abroad. Arthur Bernède (whose grandfather, the King’s Prosecutor, knew Surcouf personally) drew from it for a film novel, Surcouf, roi des corsaires, published in “Le Petit Parisien” between February and April of 1925.

Hervé Dumont, Encyclopédie du film d’Histoire, hervedumont.ch

In 1928, Gaston Modot is on the set of the ambitious production, La Merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d’Arc, fille de Lorraine, a film directed by Marco de Gastyne. In the daytime, actor Modot plays a supporting role as Lord William Glasdall, commander of the Tourelles, but at night or between takes, he is involved in an altogether different endeavour: directing a film adaptation of a short story, La Torture par l’espérance, from the compilation of Nouveaux contes cruels, penned by Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam.
Exploiting an opportunistic loophole, the precarious production of Conte cruel is able to keep its budget to a minimum by reusing sets (the Abbey of Mont-SaintMichel, Vézelay Basilica), equipment, certain actors and a pared down technical team from Marco de Gastyne’s costly movie, which is benefitting from subsidies, permissions and privileges from the public sector and the Church. Conte cruel, Gaston Modot’s only foray into directing, is a film of shadows: the shadow of the luminous Joan of Arc, the heroic figure for whom preparations are underway to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the liberation of Orléans; the sombre shadow of a dungeon, where heretics who refused to renounce their faith were tortured by the Spanish Inquisition at the end of the 15th century. Conte cruel conjures up shadows in both form and substance. Beyond mysticism and its dark tendencies, the character played by Gaston Modot clears a track for himself towards the light, which can only be followed in a purely cinematographic reading, where the shadows, initially thick and coalescent, detach and span different hues. Gaston Modot the filmmaker demonstrates remarkable mastery in the composition of his shots, laden with the terror of this man condemned to death trying to escape. The shaky, hand-held camera and the equally subjective, hallucinatory overlays follow the hunted man in an inspired manner.
Conte cruel was released in 1930, in an era when talking pictures, like all technological innovations, reach their peak. To the extent of rendering obsolete the cinema of yesteryear that will suffer a (blatantly ignored) handicap and will eventually be labelled “silent” by retronym. Might we interpret the injunction addressed to the condemned man in Conte cruel as an unconscious representation of the condemnation of a cinema that refuses to speak?

Mehdi Taibi