Delluc, Louis

(1890-1924)

   Director, film critic, and screenwriter. Louis Delluc suffered his entire life from ill health. He was a bookish boy and pursued his studies with the intention of attending the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was also an avid writer and seemed to have literary ambitions from quite a young age. At the age of fifteen, he published a volume of poetry titled Les Chansons du jeune temps, and he would ultimately write a number of novels, some of which were published during his lifetime and some posthumously. Interestingly, at least as a young man, he disliked the cinema, although he was an avid follower of the theater.

   All that changed in 1915, it seems, when he met the actress Eve Francis, whom Delluc would marry in 1918. She reportedly took him to see Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1916), which apparently changed Delluc's entire vision of cinema. Suddenly taken with the power of cinema, he became a convert and began writing film criticism in publications like Le Film and Paris-Midi. He also launched film journals of his own, including Cinéa in 1921. The journal is regarded as one of the first to engage in an intellectual criticism of the cinema, and the critics who wrote for the journal, including Jean Epstein, are considered the first generation of film scholars.

   For his own part, Delluc was an advocate of an impressionist cinema, a cinema less preoccupied with constructing a story than with transmitting its message through more subtle sensory and psychological means. When he began to make films in 1919, after he demobilized from military service, he put his theories into practice on-screen. He made eight films before his death, Le Chemin d'Ernoa (1919), Le Silence (1920), Fumée noire (1920), Fièvre (1921), Le Chemin d'Ernoa (1921), Le Tonnere (1921), La Femme de nulle part (1922), and L'Inondation (1924). Francis is the lead actress in all of Delluc's films. Of these, without a doubt, Fièvre (1921) and La Femme de nulle part (1922) are considered the greatest, but all of the films have retained classic standing in the French film cannon.

   In addition to his own films, other filmmakers adapted some of Delluc's writings for the cinema. Germaine Dulac, whose filmmaking style is often said to have influenced Delluc's own, made La Fête espagnole (1920) from a Delluc screenplay. And Alberto Cavalcanti adapted Le Train sans yeux (1927) for the screen. Delluc is probably better known for the prize that bears his name, the Prix Louis-Del-luc, than for his writings or his films.

   Historical Dictionary of French Cinema by Dayna Oscherwitz & Mary Ellen Higgins