A film of rare beauty, Gardiens de phare is a quick lesson in what was golden about the Golden Age of French cinema: the ineffable documentary quality of even its fictions, with characters profoundly and consistently human, their world captured from every conceivable angle except the obvious. In a lighthouse off the coast of Brittany, a young man slowly goes mad following a bite by a rabid dog while his father looks on helplessly. Thwarted by a raging sea, they are prisoners of the lighthouse. In a rustic Brittany village, a young bride waits, unaware of the tragedy. Marcel Carné in 1929 aptly described Georges Périnal's cinematography in this film: "grey but not flat, unprecise but not obscure....The play on light and shadow has the suavity of a Man Ray image." Like the lighthouse itself, Jacques Feyder's script is a seamless spiral, playing mercilessly (in the end, mercifully) with the irony of what we know and the characters do not. (JB)