Hi, my name is Tyler and this is episode 2 of What I Learned From Watching. On today’s
episode, we look at the 1939 French film Le Jour Se Léve, also known as Daybreak. I had
an opportunity to see it at the Film Forum recently and thought it was fantastic. It
was directed by Marcel Carné and stars Jean Gabin as François, a factory worker who has
just committed a murder and is hold-up in his apartment as the police surround the building.
Le Jour Se Léve is considered one of the most prominent films in France’s “Poetic
Realism” movement of the 1930s and it’s hard to miss the fatalistic view it portrays,
a major theme of the movement. For one, it starts off with the murder of a main character
and then begins to reveal what lead to that point through flashbacks while constantly
checking in on our hero as the police close in.
Yet, the connection to fatalism extends beyond the film itself. First, it premiered nearly
three months before France and Britain declared war on Germany. Second, the film was heavily
censored on its release and outright banned the following year.
And third: after RKO remade the film as The Long Night in 1947, the studio attempted to
acquire and destroy all copies of the French original. Carné’s masterpiece was thought
to have been lost until the 1950s when, as fate would have it, a few copies resurfaced.
There has recently been a 4k restoration with all of the censored scenes intact. The 75th
anniversary restoration was just released on Bluray by Studio Canal in Europe and hopefully
we will see a US release soon.
So what can we learn?
First, props.
This movie shows a masterful use of props. A prop isn’t always just a prop. It can
be a metaphor, a device for exposition, an extension of a character, or many other things.
Perhaps the most important of the props in the film are François’ cigarettes. He wants
to smoke, but runs out of matches, forcing him to light every new cigarette with the
end of the cigarette he just finished before it dies out. In essence, the cigarettes are
a visualization of the time he has left before he is killed by the police. At the end, he
fails to light a new cigarette before the old one dies out signifying his time is up.
“Trauner dressed the set to make every object count.
Cigarette butts mark the passage of time.
Even a teddy bear on the mantelpiece, a token of love, is soon to meet its end.”
Screenwriting legend David Mamet had this to say
“So, if you look at what Marcel Carné did in that movie is so much of it has to do with the props.
And showing the props; it’s like magic, right—
you show the prop once: what does it mean?
You show the prop twice: it must mean something.
You show the prop the third time and it pays off in a way that you didn't expect.
So, the idea here is in a confidence game as in a movie
is ideas are planted early early on and they pay off later on.
The audience goes, ‘oh yeah, I remember.’”
We see the structure lend itself quite nicely to this idea. All of François’ possessions
are displayed at the beginning of the film and the payoff comes with how they came to
be in his possession—most notably, the gun, but we’ll get to structure in a bit.
Next is ‘Adding meaning to the narrative space’
A minimalist set highlights the importance of the props as we see in this clip:
“In my films, I’ve always tried
and perhaps that’s why people have found they haven’t really dated quite so badly as other films,
to convey an extreme severity
like here
a few bits of furniture, blank walls, that’s the way I like it.
Really, I never aim for an affective glamour
even in Le Quai des brumes
which, in some ways, has aged less than any of my other films
even there I let things get a bit glamorous
But, as in Le Jour Se Léve, it’s absolutely rigorous
you have a sense of tragedy
in all its splendor
all its horror
The lack of clutter in the space adds meaning to everything that inhabits it. And, along
with the props, the narrative space becomes an extension of the character. This room is
François’ shell. It is keeping him safe from the dangers lurking and amassing outside.
And real dangers they were: Carné allegedly had real bullets fired during this scene.
Number 3 is the ‘flashback structure.’
There is something to be said for a film that gives up what would be a major and shocking
turn (in this case, the murder) and instead, makes the film about reaching
an inevitable conclusion. Another landmark film used this just over a decade
later—Sunset Boulevard.
The flashback structure works the best when the flashbacks subvert the expectations of
how things got to this point. It manages to have us asking what happens next despite knowing
where we’ll end up.
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