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FRENCH DOCUMENTARY
poetic and reflective. Farrebique (1947), his main work to date, was in the same tradition but far more substantial. Nominally a regional study of peasant life — the births, the marriages and deaths, the plantings and the harvests, that make up the existence of a family, the film moved with the slow regularity of the seasons. Beautifully shot, it employed time-lapse photography most effectively to give a telescoped impression of life as it passes. The 'acting' of the family was simple and convincing; the total effect very moving. After remaining without work for some time after making Farrebique, Rouquier collaborated with Painleve on VOeuvre Scientifique de Pasteur. In 1950 he resumed the Farrebique tradition with Le Sel de la Terre, devoted this time to the lovely landscape of the Camargue. Beautifully shot and cut, with a very fine music score, it nevertheless failed to give a convincing explanation of the work of reclamation with which the film was ultimately concerned.
The work of Painleve and scientific film-makers like Dr Comandon, Jean Dragesco and others represents another aspect of French film-making which has grown in importance. Its quality, too, is extremely high, at times attaining an almost lyrical character in its extreme precision. Painleve himself added to his achievement in the field of popular science films like V Assassin de VEau Douce (1947) on the struggle for existence among the minuter forms of pond-life with a jazz accompaniment, which was effective though a little grotesque at times; and Le Vampire (1945), a scientific account of the habits of the vampire, introduced with a typical Gallic twist by scenes from Murnau's silent melodrama of the human vampire Nosferatu (Dracula, 1922). Epaves, made by a naval officer JacquesYves Cousteau and shot entirely underwater, was not just a scientific film but a finely staged puppet-show of fishes and rocks, seaweed and submerged ships.
Films on the arts also appeared in growing number, like Lucot's Rodin (1942), Jean Lods's Maillol (1944), produced by the training school I.D.H.E.C., and Aubusson (1946), Campaux's Matisse, and above all Alain Resnais's powerful Guernica (1950). Jean Epstein emerged from a period of long inactivity to make a disappointing film for the United Nations, Les Feux de la Mer (1948), about the solitary life of lighthouse keepers off the Bay of Biscay coast. By contrast, Nicole Vedres's feature-length Paris igoo (1946-7) was a remarkable compilation of Paris life in the
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