‘L’heureuse aurore prochaine’: From Narrative Vision in Émile Zola’s Travail (1901) to Filmic Utopia in Henri Pouctal’s Silent Film Adaptation (1920)

Abstract

The first important French film of the 1920s, according to Marcel Oms, was Henri Pouctal’s silent adaptation of Émile Zola’s Travail (1901). Released in theatres on 16 January 1920, this cinematic fresco resembled other films of the post-war period as it focused on an imaginary, future France. The film was seen almost immediately in France’s biggest cities, from Paris to the provinces. Despite its initial success, its legacy is not unlike that of the Zola novel on which it is based. Relegated to the archival debris of the Cinémathèque française, until recently Pouctal’s Travail could only be viewed on the editing bench at the Fort de Saint-Cyr. Neither the two-hour version, fully restored by Renée Lichtig in 1992, nor the unrestored eight-hour version in seven episodes, challenges the paternalism and pacifism evident in the novel and discussed by many of its earliest critics. Pouctal’s Travail recapitulates, indeed, the utopianism of the blueprint text that inspired it, recasting Zola’s apocalyptic turn-of-the-century vision into a post-war utopian dream. What we discover in a rereading of the novel through the filmic lens is a push and pull not just between original and copy, but, more importantly, between the ideological premise of ‘l’heureuse aurore prochaine’, and the fictional or filmic applications of that premise in the fluctuating historical space separating 1901 from 1920, a dialogue which reveals the moving target of utopia.