L'argent

After the financial crisis of 2008 a lot of (anti) Wall street films were released, such as "Margin call" (2011, J. C. Chandor) and "The big short" (2015, Adam McKay).

Films about the financial system (not necessarily about Wall street) are however nothing new. In 1928 Marcel L'Herbier adapted a novel of the same name by Emile Zola. The novel of Zola is situated in the second half of the 19th century but L'Herbier modernizes the story to the roaring twenties. Contrary to the above mentioned movies L'Herbier made his film before the crash of 1929.

By the way in 1983 Robert Bresson made a film of the same name. This is however not an adaptation of the same novel by Zola, but an adaptation of "The forged coupon" by Leo Tolstoy.

In "L'argent" there are two rival capitalists. The hot blooded predator Nicolas Saccard (played by Pierre Alcover) and the cold blooded reptile like Alphonse Gunderman (played by Alfred Abel). Neither of them is very sympathetic.

On top of these characters Brigitte Helm plays with baroness Sandorf a sort of "femme fatale" avant la lettre. Avant la lettre because the film noir would appear much later.

The storyline is not the best part of the movie. It is rather simple and is rushed in the last fifteen minutes. The storyline revolves around the slogan "Money is a faithfull servant but a terrible master". This combination of a quasi profound slogan and simple storyline reminded me of the slogan "Head and hands need a mediator. The mediator between head and hands must be the heart!" from "Metropolis" (1927, Fritz Lang) a year earlier. This is not the only link between the two films, because Alfred Abel and Brigitte Helm also played in "Metropolis".

The strong point of "L'argent" is not the storyline but the ambiance. With very innovative cinematograhy the film sketches the hectic, oppurtinistic and sometimes panicky atmosphere at the stock exchange. Tribute to cinematograhper Jules Kruger, who also made "Napoleon" (1927) with Abel Gance.

Near the end of the silent cinema period, at opposite ends of Europe, two films were being planned on the subject of money or capital: Sergei M. Eisenstein's project for a film based on Karl Marx's Capital, and Marcel L'Herbier's film adaptation of Emile Zola's L'Argent. Eisenstein's project, unfortunately, never got beyond the preliminary stage of diary notes, recorded discussions with G.V. Alexandrov, and the rough outline of a scenario. L'Herbier's project, of course, was completed and released as L'Argent, in the midst of controversy, critical condemnation as well as acclaim, and uncertain commercial success, at least in France.

Undoubtedly influenced by Abel Gance's experiments with camera mobility, L'Herbier turned this very free, modern-day version of Zola's celebrated novel into a series of pretexts for outbursts of striking cinematic excess, creating a strikingly modern work marked by its opulent, over-sized sets and a complex, multi-camera shooting style. The result is a film resolutely split between narrative and spectacle, between straightforward storytelling scenes typically dominated by shot-reverse shot cutting and chaotic, exciting impressionist sequences, as when, at the Paris stock market (shot on location) a camera hanging from a pulley apparatus high above the trading floor sweeps down on the traders. The effect, presumable, means to evoke the irrational frenzy of capitalist from a decidedly right-wing perspective.

If Gance's Napoleon and Carl Th. Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc constitute the apex of big-budget historical reconstruction films in the French silent cinema, then L'Argent certainly can be taken as the culmination of the modern studio spectacular. With a five-million franc budget, L'Herbier was given privileged access to the Paris Bourse for three days of shooting (with 1,500 actors and over a dozen cameramen) and was permitted to electrify the Place de l'Opera in order to shoot a night scene of the huge crowd awaiting news of Hamelin's solo transatlantic flight. At the newly opened Studios Francoeur, Lazare Meerson and Andre Barsacq constructed immense set decors, including an enormous bank interior, several large offices and vast apartments, a dance stage for Saccard's celebration party, and an unusual circular room next to Gundermann's office whose entire wall length was covered with a giant world map.

Many of these studio spaces have smooth, polished surfaces and are stylized to the point of exhibiting little more than walls, ceilings, and floors. This stark simplicity, especially in such monumental designs, undermines any appeal to verisimilitude and tends to dissolve the boundaries differentiating one space from another. The indeterminacy of these decors, although exemplary of the modern studio spectacular, thus specifically functions to further abstract the film's capitalist intrigue. Together withe crowds of extras that often traverse the frame and chief cameraman Jules Kruger's selection of slightly wide-angle lenses and high- and low camera positions, especially for the frequent long shots or extreme long shots they produce a consistently deep-space mise-en-scene and larger than life capitalists. Furthermore, the highly stylized or generalized milieu of the film actually serves to foreground the nationalistic and class-based terms of the intrigue, articulated through the casting, and allows them to read all that more clearly.

The Modernizing strategy that shapes L'Argent's set decors and deep-space mise-en-scene was also governed, finally, by a loosely systematic discursive which many French filmmakers shared in the late 1920s. Generally, the French tended to privilege the specifically 'cinematic' elements of framing and editing - close ups (especially of objects), unusually high and low camera position, extensive camera movement, superimposition's and dissolves, various forms of rhythmic montage, associative editing. But L'Herbier's L'Argent offers another, perhaps even more interesting model for the way its reflexive style ultimately helps to articulate the film's critique of capital.

At least two particular features of this film practice loom large in L'Argent. The first feature as an absolutely unprecedented mobile camera strategy, whose high visibility and extreme dynamism render its effect peculiarly ambiguous. The range and extent of the film's camera movement is unmatched except perhaps by that in Gance's Napoleon (for which Kruger was also chief cameraman). Largely because of such unusual camera movements, in L'Argents space oscillates uncannily between the fixed and the fluid. A second feature of the film's discursive practice is its rather unconventional editing patterns, which sometimes work in tandem with camera movement. There is the uniquely persistent pattern of cutting a stable shot as a sudden camera movement becomes perceptible, which creates a slightly jarring effect in the film's rhythm that ruptures its sense of spatio-temporal continuity and foregrounds the very construction of filmic space-time.

The reflexivity of this discursive practice marks L'Argent as a Modernist text, of course, at least to the extent that the materials of the film medium and their deployment as a disruptice system become an ancillary subject of the film. L'Argents framing and editing techniques, in conjunction with set design and acting style or casting, more closely resemble those of Jean Renoir's Nana or Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, both of which serve to subvert the conventions of another genre, the historical reconstruction. Yet reflexivity here bears a subversive significance that exceeds the genre of the modern studio spectacular precisely because of L'Argent is a story of capital.

L'Argent's achievement, in the end, rests on the correlation it makes between discourse, narrative, and the subject of capital. Capital is both everywhere and nowhere, echoing Marx; it motivates nearly every character in the film and is talked about incessantly, but it is never seen or - as the dung on which life thrives - even scented.

Nevertheless, L'Argent is a beacon of modernity, an over-sized hymn to music of light, where everything is rhythm, movement, and a fantastic spiral of financial manipulations. Even today, the subject is astonishingly relevant.

I always feel sort of obliged to be impressed by films like this: made by Marcel L'Herbier, one of the giants of French silent cinema from a book by Zola, filmed on a grand scale that gives it an air of Importance (with a capital I), you really feel as though it would be sacrilegious to say anything but good things about it. But, to be brutally honest, this tale of lust and betrayal among financial high-fliers is a bit of a plod. It's not helped by the fact that its running time is a gargantuan three hours. It must have been difficult to make a film like this, where much of the 'action' relates to financial shenanigans, without the luxury of sound, which may be why L'Herbier felt it necessary to take so long to tell his tale, but maybe it would have been better to have waited until he could have made use of sound.

Pierre Alcover who plays Saccard, the treacherous financier who falls for the hapless heroine whose pilot lover has conveniently flown to Equatorial Guinea to drill for oil, is quite good, but Brigitte Helm, the comely object of his affections is just awful. She's the kind of actress who would overact when pretending to be asleep, and when she is on the brink of suicide she wanders into Saccard's office and stumbles around as if wounded by a sniper's bullet. Saccard looks like the manipulative weasel that he is. He fancies himself as a Napoleon of the financial world but, like Napoleon, he bites off more than he can chew when he locks horns with the urbane Gundermann.

The film does have some saving graces. L'Herbier's use of the camera is sublime, and gives the bored viewer something to concentrate on when the sluggish pace gets too much. Perhaps that is why he chose to film as a silent – the use of sound, while making the story easier to convey, would have restrained the camera and robbed the film of what vitality it possesses. The film does a good job of illustrating the corrupting influence of money, only over-emphasising its message on the rare occasion. As the character's become more depraved and self-absorbed their surroundings become more opulent, their clothes more refined, and it is clear that they are becoming prisoners of their possessions. There's also a great last scene – but you have to wait an unrealistically long time to get to it.

L'ARGENT is one of those movies whose reputation has soared over the last 50 years after being virtually forgotten shortly after it's release in 1929. Some of that had to do with the coming of sound, some of it with the worldwide Great Depression which it foreshadows and some of it with the fact that it is not an easy film to appreciate. Its stock began to rise (no pun intended) during the 1960s when the French concept of the director as auteur started to take hold. Director Marcel L'Herbier being French certainly didn't hurt.

The plot, taken from a novel by Emile Zola, about stock market speculation, is as timely as ever. Saccard, an unscrupulous banker, tries to manipulate the French stock market through speculation. He is opposed by another banker, Gunderman, who advocates caution and stability. After a brief downturn in his fortunes, Saccard uses a Lindbergh like aviator to try and return to the top. He also has designs on the aviator's wife. It all plays out at a massive dinner party which is the movie's major set piece.

The performances of the three male leads (Pierre Alcovar as Saccard, Alfred Abel as Gunderman, and Henry Victor as the aviator) are very good while the two female leads (Brigitte Helm and Mary Glory) are less so. This has more to do with their roles being underwritten then anything that the actresses do as performers. Poor Brigiite Helm as Baroness Sandorf seems little more than a stylish clotheshorse. All she does is pose and pout as a spoiled aristocrat. Mary Glory as the aviator's wife has a more substantial role.

This brings me to the biggest issue that I have with L'ARGENT. While not denying the film's reputation in some circles, I found it to be visually overdirected in the manner of L'Herbier's contemporary Abel Gance or in the later movies of Orson Welles or Stanley Kubrick. Many critics praise the film's non-linear visual style with its constantly moving camerawork and quick cut editing which are in effect throughout the 150 minute running time. However I find that these cinematic tricks get in the way of rather than enhance the story.

I first saw L'ARGENT in the 2009 Eureka Region 2 edition which ran 165 minutes. Although that version was the best one available then, this new 2019 Flicker Alley Blu-Ray surpasses it. In addition to having a better picture and tighter running time, it comes with a choice of 2 different orchestral soundtracks. Like the Eureka release it also comes with the remarkable documentary THE MAKING OF L'ARGENT also done in 1929. While it left me cold, L'ARGENT is an important film and an absolute must for lovers of silent cinema...For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.

A masterpiece of film making, the thoughtful and observant will find much to enjoy in it. The use of camera angles and light/ shadows is astonishing at times. Then pause to consider the electrifying timing of this film - released a year before the Wall Street crash and when the National Socialism was on the rise in Germany. Then the performances - the unforgettably snake-like Baroness or the innocent beauty of Line. Then look at the expansive sets and the breathtaking - and authentic - late 20's wardrobe and art deco styling. The chessboard motif, the puppet masters inhabiting rooms behind rooms behind rooms. And the Gatsby-esque party scene against which the plot finally unravels, cutting back and forth in a giddying climax. The build-up of suspense in the radio broadcast... The intoxicating rush of the Paris crowd scene... It's easy to poke fun at a silent film and moan about its pace, which was pitched at the audience of 96 years ago; for those who have the patience to watch and appreciate it for what it is, L'Argent is a bloody brilliant film.