Marcel L'Herbier | La Nuit fantastique / The Fantastic Night
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La Nuit fantastique is full of elaborately strange sets. L'Herbier's silent films were famous for their avant-garde decors, and this film continues that tradition. The lighting is also consistently strange, with areas of light and shadow where one would not quite conventionally see them in an ordinary movie. Both of these aspects are meant to underscore the dream adventure.
The story does take advantage of the plot possibilities of the dream / reality border. Its later stages especially commendably show a French concern with elegant storytelling. If one is going to make a film about dreams and reality, one should do it right, the filmmakers clearly feel. The filmmakers also deserve credit for sticking to their convictions. The film fully plays out the implications of its central subject.
L'Herbier often contrasts his heroes with a crowd around them. This contrast often has a surrealist side, and the crowd actively comments on and pushes the heroes into some sort of action. Typically, the members of the crowd do not understand what is going on. Instead, they are driven by some false but socially acceptable convention. This false idea whips them up, and makes them demand action out of the principals. This whole approach is frequently seen as well in the films of Alfred Hitchcock. In both directors, there is an element of social satire, with the suggestions that the public is easily misled by bad but popular ideas. Both filmmakers also suggest that public demands on individuals are often based on a superficial and incorrect understanding of the world. Implicitly, this suggests that one should be skeptical of received ideas and conventional wisdom.
L'Herbier pans wherever he can. His camera is quick, and can rapidly follow a character's movement. It also glances around the set, picking out objects and new perspectives.
While panning is L'Herbier's most common form of camera movement, he also breaks out into tracking shots when the film allows it. One of his most elaborate shots starts out as a pan, which shows the hero before the curtain of the stage show at the Louvre. Then, as the hero moves to one side of the curtain, and peers down a side corridor, the camera tracks along with him. The track reveals a full perspective down the side of the corridor. It anticipates such perspective revealing camera movements in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1959). This shot combines a pan and a track.
The shot in the asylum, in which the hero tries many doors with his key, also involves a complex combination of pans and tracks.
L'Herbier's camera seems to follow the "thoughts" of the director. If the director wants to examine something, his camera follows, swift as thought itself. The camera movements can be completely irregular. They do not have to follow any fixed pattern. Some directors who pan make a very systematic approach out of it. They regularly pan from one end of an angle to another on a set, systematically staging the action around such pans. One can find examples of such systematic panning in the films of George Cukor, Richard Fleischer and Jacques Becker. L'Herbier's pans tend to be far less regular. They can glance up or down, left or right within a setting. They can suddenly whip 180 degrees, or go just a small distance. They can be quick or slow.
L'Herbier can pan in one direction, then back again in the reverse direction. Such reversals are also found in the films of Jacques Becker.