"Les Enfants du Paradis": Play of Genres

Abstract

In the play on paradis, and thus in the very title of Marcel Carne's film, is announced the question central to the work: the relationship between actor and audience. Both are children of paradise: the actors, children of the gods, and the audience, children of the uppermost loge, again therefore of le paradis. The title fuses the two essential presences of performer and spectator (insofar as both inhabit the universe of the film) and supposes (insofar as it is projected on a screen) a third presence necessary to the event: the moviegoer, 20th-century successor to the plebeian habitue of 19th-century heavens. The central question is then extended beyond the relationship of actor and audience to the relationship between plays and scripts, stage actors and screen actors, theatrical audiences and cinematic audiences. The title that bears these intentions, and the credits that follow, have a painted curtain for a backdrop. As the convention of credits (replacing that of program) is thrust upon the surface of the patently mock curtain, cinema is imposed upon theatre in the most literal sense, and announced victorious from the start. Three ritual knocks prepare the onset of the performance; the curtain rises, and the principal set of the film, the sound stage reconstruction of the street on which stood the theatres of Paris in the heyday of Romanticism, is revealed to the film audience. The Boulevard du Temple, in spite of its unabashed staginess, is here and throughout the film in tension with its own theatricality. It serves, in contrast to the many dramatic stages of the film, as the space upon which the actors and audience play before and after the performances; its boundaries, again in contrast to the theatrical stages, remain beyond the frame's definition. The protagonist of this space is from the moment of its entrance a large, fluid crowd; on its fringes hang itinerant performers of all kinds: musicians, weight-lifters, monkeys, barkers, peddlers. The boulevard is thus inescapably an extension of the theatres that line it. On the screen, as in 19th-century Paris, it is more appropriately the Boulevard du Crime than the Boulevard du Temple, having borrowed its popular name from the sinister deeds of melodrama committed nightly at the Ambigu and the Porte-Saint-Martin. That the first sustained sequence of the film played on the boulevard set is itself a crime, the theft of a watch, further draws the theatrical into the street. But it is almost immediately restored to