Jean Renoir: “Ladies and gentlemen my name is Jean Renoir and I am the author of the
picture The Grand Illusion.
And I’m very happy to present it to you.”
Nein, nein, nein, nein, nein, nein, nein!
Welcome to Cinema Stories— a show about what it takes to make film history.
I’m Tyler and today we’re taking a look at a movie that probably shouldn’t exist
because it had the full might of the Nazi propoganda machine on a mission to destroy
every copy, like a Terminator sent back in time naked in one of those energy ball things.
I’d like to thank MUBI for sponsoring this episode.
Try MUBI free for 30 days by clicking the link in the description.
When the Nazi’s siezed power, they immediately took control of the media.
Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbles understood the power of cinema and how to wield that
power for evil.
But just as the Nazis were preparing to strike, a movie about The Great War by legendary director
Jean Renoir was gaining popularity in Europe.
It was called The Grand Illusion and basically said, “War.
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.
Say it again.”
This was a problem for the Nazis who were gearing up to start the second Great War.
World War Two.
Goebbels dubbed the movie Cinematographic Enemy Number One and set his sights on eradicating
every copy and keeping its message from dismantling Hitler’s warped plans for the world.
So what made The Grand Illusion so threatening to the Nazi’s vision?
This is the story of how the Nazis tried (and failed) to destroy Renoir’s masterpiece.
Our story begins in 1937, a year that would see: the Hindenburg disaster, the first Daffy
Duck cartoon, Russia doing fucked up shit, Japan doing fucked up shit, the Hobbit published,
Jack Nicholson born, Amilia Earheart mysteriously disappear, Lincoln’s head added to Mt Rushmore,
and the premiere of Grand Illusion at the Venice Film Festival, directed by popular
filmmaker Jean Renoir.
But just who is Jean Renoir?
It’s time for a mini-bio.
Jean Renoir was born in Paris, France in 1894.
He was the son of the extremely famous impressionist painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Yes, this one.
Jean Renoir had a very privileged upbringing because of his father’s success, and he,
and his two brothers, pursued a career in the arts (Jean Renoir Wiki, Pierre-Auguste Renoir Wiki).
However, filmmaking wasn’t his first choice.
He first wanted to be a potter, but gave it up when he realized that people were only
buying his pottery because of his famous father (Commentary).
He also served in WWI, flying reconnaissance missions for the French army.
His experiences during the war had a profound effect on him and turned him into a pacifist.
He later turned his sights to his childhood love of movies, directing his first silent
movie in 1924, but didn’t see commercial success until he began making “talkies”.
By 1937, when our story begins, he was well-established and popular.
With the threat of a new war looming, he decided to take a look back on his experiences during
WWI, a war that was supposed to be the war to end all wars (Jean Renoir Wiki).
This would result in The Grand Illusion.
The movie follows two French aviators during World War One named Boëldieu–played by
Pierre Fresnay–and Maréchal–played by the great Jean Gabin–who are shot down and
taken to a German prison camp for prisoners-of-war to be imprisoned in.
World War One was unprecedented and there were many aspects of a global war that people
just weren’t prepared to deal with.
One of these aspects was the huge number of POWs.
Military historian Jonathan F. Vance gave a talk on the history surrounding the events
of The Grand Illusion, noting that this was arguably the first time that captivity was
a shared “mass experience”, and governments were overwhelmed trying to figure out what
to do with all these people (Vance TIFF).
I can only imagine how rich the makers of harmonicas became during the war.
That’s sorta nice.
What are you in for?
Atmosphere.
And it wasn’t just the camps that were unprepared–the prisoners were as well.
At the time, soldiers prepared for the possibility that they might be injured or killed, but
not for imprisonment.
Well, which would you rather be done-in by?
A bayonet or a machine gun?
Oh a machine gun, naturally.
Naturally, that’s just my point.
They’re both pieces of steel ripping into your guts, only the machine gun is quicker,
cleaner, and less painful, isn’t it?
But what does that prove?
That proves that most of us are more afraid of getting hurt than of getting killed.
There was also a lot of shame associated with capture–it was thought that a true soldier
should choose death over capture, which is why immediately after entering the camp, Boëldieu
and Maréchal find that their fellow prisoners are currently planning an escape.
[In French] A golf course is for golf...A tennis court for tennis…A prison camp for escape.
The movie shows prisoners and their captors with a surprising lack of animosity toward each other.
There’s a mutual respect between them, almost like players in a game.
And of course, nobody knows the rules of the game more than Jean Renoir.
Seeing how nice the Germans treat their prisoners on the opposite side of a war is almost like
something out of the Twilight Zone.
[In French] Well, gentleman, enjoy yourselves.
[In German] May the earth lie gently on our gallant enemy.
They’re even allowed to receive packages and mail from their families while in the camp.
And yet still, they want to escape.
I imagine that if you were to ask them why they insist on escaping when treated so well
in a World War One prison camp, they would probably respond, “Wait, why are you calling
it World War ONE?
Uh oh.”
It’s no wonder the Nazis–fueled by hate–would be against treating one’s opponent with
such humanity.
There was a bond and mutual respect among officers even from different countries, the
code of honor among these men meant that an officer should always be treated as a gentleman,
even as a POW (Vance TIFF).
It’s almost like they’re happy to see an officer arrive at the camp just so they
have someone to hang out with.
Because of this, officers were treated with respect and were relatively comfortable during
their captivity.
Officers also weren’t required to work while imprisoned, so they had a lot of free time
on their hands.
Time which was often spent planning escapes (Vance TIFF).
So, do they escape?
Well, what happens is...
Don’t tell me!
You know it’s no fun unless I read it myself!
What are you trying to do, ruin my Sunday!?
Alright, alright.
I know, no spoilers.
The Grand Illusion was released in 1937 as fascism was rising in parts of Europe and
it’s no surprise that the movie’s themes of pacifism and equality were uh… not popular
in those areas.
But what is surprising, is the power the movie was believed to have.
Despite clashing with facist ideology, it was respected even by those who suppressed it.
Grand Illusion played at the Venice Film Festival and quickly became the favorite to win the
top prize, but before it could, Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini swooped in and blocked it (Macdonald 118).
The Festival invented a new prize–specifically created for Renoir’s anti-war movie (Renoir Intro).
But get this: despite having intervened to block the movie from winning at Venice and
outright banning the movie in Italy,
Mussolini actually liked the movie and owned a copy (Macdonald 118).
He liked it so much, in fact, that he asked Renoir to come to Rome to teach at the Centro
Sperimentale, Italy’s leading film school.
The French government agreed to this and Renoir taught for several weeks, but soon, the war
broke out and he had to flee the country (Commentary).
The reaction to The Grand Illusion in Germany was even stronger than it had been in Italy.
Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called the movie "Cinematographic Enemy No. 1." and
not only banned it, but also ordered the destruction of every print (Business Insider).
That actually sounds like a really cool tagline for the movie –
The Grand Illusion: Cinematographic Enemy Number One.
So, the Nazis set out to wipe The Grand Illusion off the face of the earth.
And they almost did.
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The Grand Illusion was playing in theaters when the Germans invaded Vienna in 1938 and
Renoir was proud to see that it had gotten under Goebbles skin enough that the Nazis
immediately shut down all screenings of the movie (Macdonald 118).
Later, when they invaded Paris in 1940, they seized and destroyed every copy they could
get their hands on (Lubin ix).
Weirdly, the movie was also banned by the French government before the invasion.
In the fall of 1939, when France joined the war, French military authorities found the
movie to be demoralizing because it promoted pacifism and friendship with the enemy (Fiss 14).
When the new Nazi-allied Vichy government was established, the movie was, of course,
banned there as well.
And in Nazi-occupied France, propaganda posters used pictures of Marcel Dalio who plays a
jewish POW named Rosenthal as an example of a [quote/unquote] “typical Jew” (Macdonald 118).
It’s unclear exactly how many copies of the movie survived the war.
In 1942, an Allied bombing raid hit a major film lab outside Nazi-occupied France, destroying
everything inside.
It was concluded that the original camera negative had been destroyed (Macdonald 119).
The original camera negative was special.
It was the highest-quality version of the movie without being duplicated or modified–it
was the actual movie as seen by Renoir’s camera.
In 1946 a duplicated negative, presumably a generation or two removed from the original
camera negative, was found, but was immediately lost after it was sent to France (Criterion).
When the movie was re-released after the war, it had been heavily edited following criticisms
of being too “pro-German” (Macdonald 118).
They cut out the breakdancing scene, the talking dog, and the entire rap battle scene.
Okay, so those aren’t the real edits, but some are pretty weird.
To avoid spoilers, I’m going to talk about them in the Patreon Aftershow.
In 1952, Renoir and Charles Spaak, the co-screenwriter, were able to purchase the rights to their
own movie and begin restoring it using French, German, and American duplicates that had all
been cut up and censored in different ways (Macdonald 119, Criterion).
An editor spent months painstakingly reconstructing the movie from these butchered prints, but
it wasn’t working (Criterion).
Jean Renoir: “I was ready to give up when, unexpectedly, I received a letter from a very
charming lady.
This very charming lady was a captain in the American Army–exactly a captain in the American
Film Service–and she had found a negative of The Grand Illusion in a block house in Munich.
This negative had been taken to Germany by the Nazis during the occupation of Paris.”
This was the duplicate negative that was lost after being delivered to France.
From this, they were able to restore the movie to its full length, though the quality was degraded.
They found that some of Erich von Stroheim’s lines were hard to hear, so they reached out
to him to re-record them.
He agreed, but sadly passed away before he could do it and the movie had to be released
as it was.
This new full-length version was released in 1958 and received critical acclaim (Macdonald 119).
So the full version existed, but in a degraded quality.
It’s a shame because if they had the original camera negative, they could have used it for
a full restoration.
But alas, the original had been destroyed.
At least that’s what everyone believed...
But the crazy truth was that the Nazi who headed the Third Reich’s film archive had
secretly worked with a French film archivist to protect some movies from destruction––and
among them was the original negative of The Grand Illusion.
The French film archivist Henri Langlois was in cahoots with the Nazi film archivist Frank Hensel.
Hensel was actually appointed to president of the German Film Archive by Goebbels in
1934, well before the war broke out.
It seems Hensel was a devoted cinephile and was tipping off Langlois when things were
about to be confiscated.
Instead of destroying the original camera negative,
he sent it to the film vaults in Berlin (Criterion).
After the war, Berlin was split into two blocs and the Film Archive was on the Russian side.
And the Russians took all of the film cans to the Russian film archive in Moscow.
What’s crazy is, over the years, they had been transferring all of their silver nitrate
film negatives onto safety stock and destroying the originals because silver nitrate is highly flammable.
But, before they got to The Grand Illusion, they sent it to the film archive in the French
city of Toulouse as part of a film exchange.
The Toulouse film archive stored the silver nitrate film in their vaults.
At this point, the full re-released version of The Grand Illusion existed, so no one was
looking for the original negative anymore.
It wasn’t until the 90s when technology advanced enough to make better transfers of
silver nitrate film that Toulouse began transferring their silver nitrate collection and were surprised
when they stumbled upon the actual original camera negative of The Grand Illusion.
A new higher-quality version made from the original negative was released in 1999 (Criterion).
It also contained the full audio, so Stroheim’s original lines were recovered.
Sadly, Renoir never found out that his masterpiece had been restored to its full glory because
he had died twenty years earlier.
So, what is it about Grand Illusion that makes its preservation so important even today?
And what made the movie so hated by Adolph Hitler, Joseph [Goebbels] and… other assholes?
Despite all the backlash and attempts to destroy or censor the movie following the outbreak
of World War Two, The Grand Illusion was a huge hit when it premiered in Paris in 1937;
in fact, it was the biggest box office hit of that year (Fiss 9).
It had similar success when it premiered in New York in 1938, it ran for 26 weeks and
was voted best picture of the year by the national board of review (Commentary).
It was also the first foreign language movie to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.
And, of course, it is Spine number one in the mother fucking Criterion Collection.
The basic message of the movie is the idea that the need to divide humanity into countries,
ideologies, and warring militaries is just an illusion.
And this was the message Renoir released as the world was on the brink of the second world war.
A sort of mix between reality and fantasy.
On one hand, it was very similar to Renoir’s experience and included highly realistic details,
such as Gabin wearing Renoir’s actual uniform in the movie.
On the other hand, it showed a vision of peace between France and Germany that was impossible
at that moment in history (Fiss 14).
However, that peace was desperately wanted.
In 1937, France was still recovering from the after-effects of WWI.
The population of young men was seriously depleted and there was anxiety around the
lack of recruits if another war broke out (Fiss 12).
The hope that war could be avoided was probably at least part of the reason the movie struck
such a chord with the French public at the time.
It let them see a kinder vision of their German neighbors (Fiss 14).
When asked about the effectiveness of war movies, Renoir said, “In 1936, I made a
picture named The Grand Illusion, in which I tried to express all my deep feelings for
the cause of peace.
This film was very successful.
Three years later, the war broke out” (Commentary).
Jean Renoir [translated]: “The Grand Illusion is not exactly a film, it is an assemblage
of memories, which laid dormant in the depths of my heart.
It is also the expression of my ideal of a better understanding between men of different
nations and races.
I had already been deeply moved on first learning that directors, artists, and eminent personalities
of Hollywood had welcomed my film with sympathy.
Afterward, this was favored with a high honor of being projected at the White House on the
birthday of Mrs. Roosevelt.
I really did not need this distinction to increase my enthusiasm for your president.
And it is hardly necessary to say how much this event gave me confidence in the future.”
President Roosevelt was thought to have declared that it was a must-see for “all democracies
of the world,” though apparently it was actually a journalist who said this and it
was attributed to Roosevelt later (Macdonald 118).
The thing that’s really crazy about the movie is that this incredibly simple, idealistic
hope was so threatening to entire governments that they wanted it wiped out.
And it says a lot about the power of movies that not only was The Grand Illusion suppressed,
but that people went to such lengths to preserve it.
The movie narrowly survived annihilation as did the movie’s ideologies during World War II.
The fact that we can still watch the movie today perhaps gives us hope that these ideas
will survive our...current issues as well.
Dick Cavett: “We have a minute left.
If we were loading on the ark now and you could grab four or five films––not your
own, but other people’s––to save on the ark for posterity, what would you grab?
[...] Two films!”
Orson Welles: “Two films, two films.
Ummm.
Two films: Grand Illusion by Renoir and, um… something else.”
Join me in the Cinema Stories After Show where we’re going to talk about The Grand Illusion
and see if we can come up with a cast list for a terrible remake of the movie.
You can watch it right now for one dollar and it will go into the five-dollar archive
when my next video goes up.
Do you have a favorite banned movie?
Let me know in the comments down below.
Of course I would have to say Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, even though he was the
one who banned his own movie.
But other than that, maybe The Manchurian Candidate.
I heard that that one got banned after the Kennedy assasination.
But that was a crazy movie.
And then... kind of a departure, but
Rauffenstein, I have Vin Diesel.
Okay.
I actually considered him as well.
Really?