Les Misérables (1934)

 Raymond Bernard's "Les Miserables"

After viewing Raymond Bernard's 1934 adaptation of the famous Victor Hugo novel "Les Misérables," I exclaimed, "This is the definitive 'Les Misérables' film!" After scouring the internet, it turns out I'm not alone in this assessment. Stretching over 4 and a half hours in length, Bernard's film is a massive and sprawling work. Yet somehow, he manages to make it feel both epic and intimate. 

The story of "Les Misérables" is an interwoven tale between various characters as they struggle through various forms of economic, societal, and political turmoil in post-Napoleon France. Each character is faced with moral decisions that stem directly from external pressures. In this economic, societal, and political divide, the characters are forced into circumstances where they must survive and to do so, must make difficult and morally compromised choices. Hugo's original novel, which comes directly out of the 19th century, digs into the morally gray aspects of human nature and the ways in which we are compromised by our circumstances. It is a masterpiece of non-fiction and has been endlessly adapted. 

As far as Bernard's visual contribution to the story, I was left completely engaged by it. I feel as though Germany as a tight grip on the visual art of cinema in the 1920s. After the Nazis began to censor film, the country that pushed visual language forward was France. The explosion of great visual filmmaking in France in the 1930s pushed boundaries and expressed visual filmmaking by mixing the poetic with realism to create an elevated format of visual style. Bernard mostly focused on the 'realism' aspect with "Les Misérables," however, that isn't to say his mise-en-scene isn't impeccable. Also, something I noticed he did quite frequently in this film was his use of the Dutch angle. The Dutch angle is essentially a tilted camera. For many scenes all throughout the film, we are viewing these troubled characters and their imbalanced society through this imbalanced camera. It makes you feel as though the entire world the characters inhabit is off-kilter, which only enhances the themes present. It's an imbalanced world economically, socially, and politically and characters are constantly on one end of the spectrum or another. Their chance to tip and slide the other way is omnipresent. Our visual viewpoint of all of this reflects this tipping and creates that sense of imbalance and uncertainty. 

Bernard's adaptation of Hugo's novel is the greatest visual rendering of the story I've ever seen thus far. Despite being almost 5 hours in length, every bit of story is gripping and engaging. It is a story for 19th century France and for our contemporary times. There's a reason it gets retold over and over again. As Victor Hugo stated of his novel, "So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of 'Les Misérables' cannot fail to be of use."