Page, Louis

(1905-1990)

   Cameraman and cinematographer. Born in Lyon, Louis Page began his career as a painter before turning to the cinema. He got his start in film as an assistant to Jean Cocteau on the film Le Sang d'un poète (1930). Afterward he turned away from directing to cinematography, no doubt because of his ability to influence the visual elements of a film, and he is, in fact, known for his highly focused, nearly poetic film images. He is associated with Le Réalisme poétique or poetic realism of the 1930s, since he was the cinematographer for a number of directors associated with the movement. Page also worked with directors not associated with that movement, although nearly all of the directors with whom he worked in the 1930s had a strong interest in visual poetics. Among the 1930s films to which he contributed were Marcel L'Herbier's Le Parfum de la dame en noir (1931), René Clair's Le Quatorze Juillet (1933), Jacques Feyder's La Kermesse héroïque (1935), Léonide Moguy's Le Mioche (1936), Pierre Billon's Courrier sud (1936) and La Bataille silencieuse (1937), Jacques Becker's La Vie est à nous (1936), Marcel Carné's Drôle de drame (1936) and Le Quai de brumes (1938), and Pierre Chenal's L'Affaire Lafarge (1938).

   In the 1940s, Page worked on far less well-known films; however his focus remained independent films, often with the same directors he had worked with in the 1930s. He also began to work on more commercially oriented films, particularly during the postwar period. Among those to which he contributed were Billon's Le Soleil a toujours raison (1943), Jean Grémillon's Lumière d'été (1943), Le Ciel est à vous (1944), and his D-Day documentary Le 6 Juin, à l'aube (1945), Marc Allegret's L'Arlésienne (1942) and Félicie Nanteuil (1945), André Malraux's L'Espoir (1945), André Zwoboda's François Villon (1945), Christian-Jacque's Sortilèges (1946) and Un revenant (1946), Georges Lacombe's Le Pays sans étoiles (1946), Marel Blistène'sMacadam (1946), René Clément's Au-delà des grilles (1949), and André Cayatte, Jean Dréville, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Georges Lampin's Retour à la vie (1949).

   During the 1950s and 1960s, Page worked largely in the popular cinema. The 1950s, in any case, are not known for having produced avant-garde cinema and Page was not associated with La Nouvelle Vague or the New Wave, the avant-garde movement of the 1960s. He did contribute to several well-known detective and crime films during the period, probably since the force and focus of his images lent themselves well to those genres. He worked, for example, on Gilles Grangier's Le Rouge est mis (1957), Le Désordre de la nuit (1958), and Maigret voit rouge (1963), Jean Delannoy's Maigret tend un piège (1958) and Maigret et l'affaire Saint-Fiacre (1959), Henri Verneuil's Mélodie en sous-sol (1963), and Alex Joffé's La Grosse caisse (1964).

   Page's other focus during these decades was on drama, although he did do the occasional comedy. Films on which he worked include Lampin's Les Anciens de Saint-Loup (1950), Louis Daquin's Maître après Dieu (1951), Grémillon's L'Etrange Madame X (1951) and L'Amour d'une femme (1954), Lacombe's La Lumière d'en face (1955), Verneuil's Des gens sans importance (1955) and Le Président (1961), Allegret's En effeuillant la marguerite (1955), Denys de La Patellière's Les Grandes familles (1958) and Rue des Prairies (1959), Gangier's Archimède, le clochard (1959) and Le Cave se rebiffe (1961), Delannoy's Le Baron de l'écluse (1960), Jean-Paul Le Chanois's Monsieur (1964), and Pierre Prévert's A la belle étoile (1966), which was Page's final film. It is interesting to note that many of the films on which Page worked featured the great actor Jean Gabin, and it is, for the most part, Page's chiseled images of Gabin that have passed into memory.

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