Vent debout / [The Headwind] (2022 digital transfer La Cinémathèque française)

René Leprince: Vent debout / [The Headwind] (FR 1923). Photo: La Cinémathèque française, Paris.

(FR 1923) regia/dir: René Leprince. scen: René Leprince, dal romanzo di/based on the novel by “Midship” (Jean d’Agraives [Frédéric Causse]; Paris, Editions J. Ferenczi, 1922). photog: Julien Ringel. 

    cast: Léon Mathot (Jacques Averil), Madeleine Renaud (Marie Richard), Camille Bert (Menzi), Robert Tourneur (Formal), André Daven (Harvier), Maurice Touzé (the cabin boy), Maud Tiller (Chaad), Adrienne Duriez (la nonna/the grandmother), Madyne Coquelet (Janik), Bardès (Rheingold), Kalmès (Oscar), Jacques Vandenne (Richard).

    prod, dist: Pathé Consortium Cinéma. trade show: 10.1.1923. uscita/rel: 8.6.1923. copia/copy: DCP, 93' (da/from 35 mm, orig. l: 1935 m); did./titles: FRA. fonte/source: La Cinémathèque française, Paris
    4K in 2022.
    Grand piano: Meg Morley.

    Teatro Verdi, Pordenone, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM): Rediscoveries, 14 Oct 2023.

Mehdi Taïbi (GCM 2023): " Jacques Averil (Léon Mathot) leads an idle life, bored to the point of falling into weary melancholy. One evening he learns by telegram of the suicide of his banker father, ruined by murky speculation in Icelandic ore mining, and then decides to take himself in hand. An old shipowner friend of his father gives him the chance to earn his living as a sailor. Life on a trawler is ruled by the law of the strongest, even of the most savage. In this exclusively male environment, the violence Jacques had contained abruptly comes to the surface; by dint of his own muscles, he imposes himself as the only master on board, despite the traps set for him. Appalled by the accidental death of his young comrade Guillot (Maurice Touzé), he drowns his sorrows by going on a binge in Paris. This leads to debauchery and drunkenness, richly described during a sequence far rougher than the ocean scenes. While emerging from an alcoholic stupor, he sees Marie Richard (Madeleine Renaud) and immediately falls in love with her. Jacques finds an alter ego in Marie, faced by the same loneliness of orphans, yet he will have to handle the sharks of the finance world before sighting the slightest anchorage promised by their idyll. "

" In the wake of other maritime adventures, Vent debout stands out in many respects for the attention given to turbulent seascapes conducive to a dramatic narration, paired with long earthbound sequences in which the characters are in another sense adrift and led to troubled waters. "

" An eminently immersive setting, the ocean is captured with fervour by director René Leprince. His meditative shots are a paean to the Breton coast around Paimpol, and as the camera gazes out to sea it glimpses sailing ships gliding along the horizon. Elsewhere, panning shots on board the trawler describe the approach to or departure from port, while the rigging partly out of frame contributes masterfully to perspective in motion. There are splendid documentary-like exteriors that fit into the fictional narrative and contribute to the film as spectacle, and even an authentic tuna fishing scene taken from archive footage. Somewhere between imagination and the mundane, distant Iceland lies on the map for both speculators and fishermen, prompting the most basic desires for earning a living as well as for fulfilling a dream. "

" René Leprince subtly reminds us that Vent debout is an adaptation of a novel by Frédéric Causse, and thus a picture of a piece of literature. The film thus begins with a shot of a man in an oilskin raincoat moving along a rocky point on the seacoast and standing against gusts of wind, symbolizing the title in both image and gesture: the text has now become an image. The exercise of lending visual quality to the literary form continues with the wealth of design in the intertitles, where horizons and seabed become part of an inventive backdrop. "

" The source material is a novel first published in 1922 under the name “Midship”, which was a pseudonym for Frédéric Causse before he chose another nom de plume, Jean d’Agraives. Given the story’s setting, it’s unsurprising that reviews of the novel pointed out similarities to Pierre Loti, making it especially fortuitous that the Giornate is screening both Vent debout and Pêcheur d’Islande this year. "

" René Leprince was among the most prolific directors at Pathé during the 1910s, making more than thirty films in ten years, half of which were co-directed with Ferdinand Zecca. After Face à l’océan (1920) and Jean d’Agrève (1922), Vent debout was his third marine experience. (Another Leprince film from the 1920s, Titi 1er, roi des gosses, is screening in the Ruritania programme at this year’s Giornate.) In 1923, when Vent debout was released, its protagonist Léon Mathot was at the height of a glorious career; he had already been directed by the greatest filmmakers of the period, including Alfred Machin, Abel Gance, Henri Pouctal, and Henri Andréani. In this film, Mathot embodies a new personality among the characters who contributed to his fame: Jacques, torn between violence and tenderness, gnawed at by two incompatible life choices, and at once vulnerable and strong-willed. More a novice in terms of experience, but nevertheless showing a startling maturity in her acting, Madeleine Renaud, here soundly plays her first role for the cinema just after she had joined the Comédie Française. " – Mehdi Taïbi

AA: After screenings of Julien Duvivier's La divine croisière and Jacques de Baroncelli's Pierre Loti adaptation Pêcheur d'Islande, Vent debout completes the "French sea trio" of the 2023 edition of Le Giornate. All start from Brittany, and like the Pierre Loti tragedy, Vent debout reaches out to Iceland.

René Leprince was a veteran director since the age of early cinema. Having started at Pathé, he had become one of the trusted directors of Max Linder. He brings a solid grip to the tragedy on land and sea, expressing psychological turmoil via landscapes and seascapes.

Léon Mathot, cast in the male leading role, was another veteran from early cinema days. He had played Edmond Dantès in Henri Pouctal's Monte Cristo serial in 15 episodes and starred in Jean Epstein's films. There is a center of inner calm in his presence that helps make the psychological turbulence of his character more complex and disturbing.

Making her cinema debut as Marie Richard is Madeleine Renaud, one of the great actresses of the 20th century stage and screen, already unique and original, externally fragile yet projecting inner strength, in a role as tragic as that of Sandra Milowanoff in Pêcheur d'Islande.

A tale of cruel twists of fate. Jacques, the no good son of a banker father shapes up and becomes a sailor after his father commits suicide having gone bankrupt. Bullied on the ship, Jacques not only discovers his fighting spirit, but becomes a vicious bully himself.

The brutal rule of the captain evokes Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and even more Jack London's The Sea Wolf with its simplified lessons from Nietzsche. "He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."

But the story of Jacques is different. The death of his dear friend, the cabin boy Guillot, throws him off balance. Having hit the bottom of his degradation in Paris, Jacques meets his soulmate Marie Richard who fathoms his potential to transcend his appetite for destruction and vindictiveness.

With an atmospheric sense of the milieux, magnificent inserts of tuna fishing, startling dimensions of tragedy, refined sepia toning mixed with passages with tinting, and appealing art intertitles, Vent debout is a rewarding discovery of a film that seems little known.