"The grandeur, the meaning, the significance of French cinema are finely and profoundly rooted in realism."-Jean Grémillon
Jean Grémillon remains relatively unknown outside of France, where his name is spoken in the same breath as Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné. By any measure, he was one of the great French directors (also an accomplished musician, painter, and documentarist), invigorating the poetic realist movement with a precise and imaginative observation of place and character, what Steven Harvey called "a distinctive blend of the naturalistic and the willfully stylized." He produced some twenty features, including some of the key films of the Occupation, during his career that spanned thirty–five years. Grémillon's films reflect his view of a particularly French realism, rejecting what he called "mechanical naturalism" for "the discovery of that subtlety which the human eye does not perceive directly but which must be shown by establishing the harmonies, the unknown relations, between objects and beings; it is a vivifying, inexhaustible source of images that strike our imaginations and enchant our hearts."
We wish to thank the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Paris, and Cinémathèque Française for the loan of prints. We thank Cultural Attache Alain–Marc Rieu of the Consulate General of France in San Francisco for his generous support. We also thank Véronique Godard, French Cultural Services, New York; and Martine Boutrolle and Janine Deunf, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs Bureau of Cinema, for their kind assistance; and acknowledge the collaboration of John Ewing, Cleveland Cinematheque; and John Gianvito, Harvard Film Archive.
