Filmmakers

FILMMAKERS Robert Bresson Marcel Carné René Clément Jean Cocteau Jean-Luc Godard Jean Renoir Alain Resnais Eric Rohmer Jacques Tati François Truffaut Agnés Varda

FILMS Grand Illusion The Rules of the Game Daybreak Children of Paradise Beauty and the Beast Forbidden Games Mr. Hulot's Holiday A Man Escaped The 400 Blows Hiroshima mon amour Breathless Jules et Jim My Night at Maud's My American Uncle Vagabond

Born in Bordeaux in 1913, Clément first studied architecture before turning to the movies.  After serving as a cameraman in the French Army’s cinematography branch, he made around thirty short documentaries, of which the best known are At Islam’s Door (1934), The Albegensian (1935), The Upper Garonne (1935), The Marshalling Yard (1936), Watch Your Left  (1936, with Jacques Tati), La Grande Chartreuse (1937), Forbidden Arabia (1938), La Grande Pastorale (1942), and Those of the Rails (1943).

Clément’s last short subject, a documentary on the life of railroad workers, served as a prelude to his first feature film, Battle of the Rails (1945), which chronicles one aspect of the French Resistance.  This quasi-documentary fiction film is part of the postwar current of neo-realism most prominent in Italy.  It launched Clément’s career as a major filmmaker when it received the award for Best Director and the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1946.  Clément served as Jean Cocteau’s technical advisor during the shooting of Beauty and the Beast the same year, before making three films of modest success, The Damned (1947), Beyond the Gates (1948, with Jean Gabin), and The Glass Castle (1950, with Michelle Morgan and Jean Marais). At the Academy Awards in Hollywood Beyond the Gates won the Oscar for the Best Foreign Film in 1948, as will Clément’s most famous film and certainly his masterpiece, Forbidden Games, in 1952.  The latter film is about a little Parisian girl who lands in a peasant family when her parents are killed during the exodus toward the south of France in June 1940 after the quick defeat by the German army.

Among the films that Clément made during the fifties, several will be relatively successful: Monsieur Ripois (1954, with Gérard Philippe), which won an award at the Cannes Film Festival, Gervaise (1956), an adaptation of Emile Zola’s famous novel L’Assomoir, and Purple Noon (1960), an adaptation of a novel by Patricia Highsmith which reveals a young actor destined to have a remarkable career in film, Alain Delon.  Clément made a few more films in the sixties and seventies, consistently exhibiting the same technical mastery but without great success.  His reputation was permanently sullied by the monumental flop of his most ambitious film, Is Paris Burning? (1966), a war film starring a crowd of big international stars in the manner of Hollywood spectaculars.

Whether it be in the genres of neo-realism, poetic realism, or psychological realism, critics tend to praise Clément’s stylistic subtlety and the quality of his photography, while deploring the lack of inspiration as regards the content of his films.  Forbidden Games, on the other hand, was generally recognized as “one of the major works of postwar French cinema.”  René Clément died in 1976, a year after his last film, La Baby Sitter.

Selected Filmography

1945  Battle of the Rails 
1947  The Damned
1948  Beyond the Gates  
1950  The Glass Castle  
1952  Forbidden Games  
1953  Knave of Hearts or Lover Boy  
1955  Gervaise
1958  This Angry Age  
1959  Purple Noon 
1960  What Joy of Living  
1962  The Day and the Hour  
1964  The Big Cats  
1967  Is Paris Burning?  
1970  The Passenger in the Rain  
1971  The House Beneath The Trees  
1973  And Hope To Die  
1975  La Baby Sitter