Classics Revisited: Reaching for the Moon

Abstract

Viewed strictly as motion picture, Marcel Carnm's Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) is imperfect, as Vernon Young has pointed out.t The camera is too static, too often stationed en face, as though aimed in a theater to catch directly and in detail what is going on right in front of it on a stage-which might theoretically suit a film having so much to do with stages, except that the movie audience sits not before a whole proscenium but before a rectangle carved out of it by the screen. Attention wanders to the edges when acting and d6cor alone aren't brilliant enough to hold it in focus. The camera is largely inarticulate as a commentator on action. Much less does it create action itself. The film's excellences may indeed be largely theatrical. Yet Children of Paradise is surely in one sense profoundly cinematographic. The very subject matter is seeing, and the camera continually manages to let the audience see clearly and exclusively what first one character and then another sees, with an irony much more devastating than could be effected with even the most elaborate staging devices in the legitimate theater.