Thierry Fremaux Breaks Down Charles Vanel’s ‘In the Night,’ Ignored When Released, Now Considered a Masterpiece

Lise Pedersen
·4 min read
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At a time when heritage cinema is booming – thanks to outstanding progress in conservation standards and a growth in demand – Lyon’s Lumière heritage film festival Lumière is playing a leading role in uncovering long-forgotten cinematic gems.

“Dans la Nuit” (“In the Night”), widely considered one of the last, if not the last major French silent film, is one of them. It is the only film shot by French actor Charles Vanel, perhaps best remembered for his role as a desperate truck driver in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s acclaimed “The Wages of Fear,” which won both the Golden Bear and the Palme d’Or in 1953. Vanel also stars in the film, alongside Russian-French actress Sandra Milovanoff, who became a silent film era casualty as her Slavic accent was considered unsuitable for talkies.

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The newly restored version of the film is having its world premiere at the fest, which is headed by Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux.

“You can compare contemporary cinema to classic cinema,” Frémaux told Variety. “Both are about celebration and discovery: You celebrate what is known, and then there is a part of discovery of what has become unknown, of what has disappeared.

“Dans la Nuit” is one of those films and we saw it as our duty to exhume it,” he said, speaking as director of the Institut Lumière, a Lyon-based organisation dedicated to the preservation of film heritage named after the Lumière Brothers, which owns the rights to the film.

Frémaux compares the film’s fate to that of Charles Laughton’s “The Night of the Hunter” (1955), starring Robert Mitchum. “Laughton made a single film and it was a huge flop at the time – even though, years later, it came to be seen as a masterpiece. He never made another film.

“The same goes for Vanel: He makes this extraordinary silent film in late 1929. It’s released in May 1930 and the talkies are everywhere: the film disappears – it isn’t even registered in the history of French silent cinema.”

At the time, Vanel famously said: “I chose the wrong time to start filmmaking. The film I directed, ‘Dans la Nuit,’ was also one of the last silent films. The Parisian distributors and operators who produced it had absolutely no faith in talking pictures, saying, ‘Be Patient, this trend will not last.’ I was less optimistic than they were, and I was right.”

A macabre drama about a disfigured worker who wears a mask to hide his face from his unfaithful wife, the film is incredibly modern according to Frémaux.

“When you see a film like that, you can see that cinema had already exceeded its own language: it’s very accomplished, it has a very strong visual language that is closer to that of a talking movie – the mobility of the camera, the fluidity of the direction, its visual quality – Vanel was a very talented filmmaker!”

The film was originally re-released at the start of the 2000s with a score by jazz composer Luis Sclavis, “but we knew we needed to do a proper restoration from scratch using the negatives,” said Frémaux. Using the 35mm original held by the French Cinemathèque, the Institut Lumière oversaw the work at French film restoration specialist Groupe Éclair (formely Laboratoires Éclair).

This new version is now being screened at premieres around the world, including the San Francisco Silent Movie Festival, the Morelia International Film Festival and the San Sebastian Film Festival. But each screening is an entirely different experience for viewers, explained Frémaux.

“The film came without a score. So we asked each event to create one specifically for the occasion. Depending on the music, it can sometimes feel like you’re watching a completely different film,” he smiled, offering the example of Helsinki’s Loud Silents Festival, which recruited the talents of an experimental band that uses cleaning robots to accompany the film’s screening.

“Dans la Nuit” is being screened at Lyon’s Auditorium on Oct 20, where it will be accompanied on the organ by French organist and pianist Adam Bernadac.

The Lumière Film Festival runs in Lyon through Oct 23.

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