Visions of Provence: Cézanne and Pagnol

Ginette Vincendeau, March 2007

Ginette Vincendeau is Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Film Studies Programme at King's College London. She is the author of, among others, 'Stars and Stardom in French Cinema' (2000), 'Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris' (2003) and 'La Haine' (2005). She is currently working on a book about the representation of Provence in film and television.

Paul Cézanne, 'Hillside in Provence', about 1890-2. London, The National Gallery.

'Hillside in Provence' (1890-92) is not the most spectacular, nor the most iconic Cézanne painting. But in its quiet way it goes to the heart of his vision of Provence, even if, as the huge success of the 2006 exhibition 'Cézanne in Provence'¹ confirmed, his ground-breaking, modernist vision has become part of the popular cultural patrimony - celebrated, visited, recycled, marketed.

Soon after Cézanne painted Hillside in Provence, 40 kilometres away in Aubagne (on the other side of Marseilles) was born the other major name associated with the area - the writer and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol. Cézanne and Pagnol - unlike Cézanne and Emile Zola² - are rarely discussed together; and for good reasons: they were not contemporaries and they worked in different art forms. Today tour operators may routinely juxtapose 'Cézanne's Aix' with 'Pagnol's La Treille' (the village near Aubagne where he lived and shot some of his films) in their package tours of Provence. It is, however, difficult to imagine two more diverse personalities.

Provence's most famous sons experienced radically different lives and careers. Cézanne, the tortured, awkward, self-doubting recluse, was the quintessential artiste maudit, reviled and misunderstood for most of his life, even by his close friend Zola. By contrast, the bon vivant Pagnol was hugely successful in his lifetime as playwright, film maker and novelist. He knew popular acclaim and critical reverence, and the highest national honours came his way (the Académie Française, the Légion d'honneur, and so on).

While Cézanne only came into his inheritance very late, Pagnol, who came from a modest family of school teachers, became rich while still in his twenties. Even their love lives reflect this dichotomy: Cézanne had to hide his companion Hortense and their son Paul from his family for years, and his few known romantic affairs seem to have been rather unhappy; Pagnol enjoyed a series of high-profile liaisons with beautiful actresses and fathered several children.

Both men, however, were united by their love of the Provençal landscape, biographically, culturally and artistically. As children, both adored roaming the wild countryside around their respective 'mountains': the Montagne Sainte-Victoire for Cézanne, the Garlaban for Pagnol. Their passionate, visceral relationship with nature has been amply recorded. In the thinly disguised autobiographical account of his childhood with Cézanne in 'L'Oeuvre' (1886), Zola recalls 'the ardent blue sky over the brown countryside'³ and their ecstatic joint escapades: 'We fled far from the world, absorbed instinctively within the benevolent nature; ours was a childish, irrational adoration for trees, water, hills, the joy to be by ourselves and free.'⁴

Cézanne himself admitted being 'deeply in love' with the landscape of Provence.⁵ Pagnol, in his memoirs, similarly celebrates 'the happiest days of [his] life'⁶ spent rambling the hills, among the olive trees and thyme bushes, with their 'powerful scent [...], a dark and heady perfume which invaded my head and penetrated my heart.'⁷ The evocative power of their native Provence would have been particularly strong, as both Cézanne and Pagnol had to 'emigrate' to Paris. Their art may have been valued in large part for its regional identity, but success depended on Parisian consumption and recognition.

Personal biography was not alone in linking Cézanne and Pagnol's love of Provence. Theirs was a shared cultural vision through the classics, another fascinating bridge between the two men. Both were highly aware of Provence's Roman past and relics, and their artistic practice was highly influenced by it. Indeed both saw Provence through the eyes of classical culture, in particular Virgil. Paul Smith points out that his lycée education and Provençal upbringing meant that 'classical values had been deeply ingrained in [Cézanne's] habits of vision',⁸ this partly accounting for the painter's obsession with the Montagne Sainte-Victoire (the alleged site of a Roman victory by Gaius Marius in 101 BC).

Tellingly, Pagnol - also an eminent product of lycée education - alludes to this same history on the very first page of 'La Gloire de mon père', the first volume of his memoirs published in 1957. He describes the Garlaban as the hill where 'Marius's watchmen, when they saw fire burning on Sainte-Victoire, lit a bush fire [setting a line of fires, eventually] telling Rome that its legions in Gaul had just slaughtered 100,000 Barbarians in the Aix plain'.⁹ Later in the same book Pagnol links the strong scents of Provence to Virgil, thus making a direct, primeval connection between nature and culture. A year later, Pagnol translated Virgil's 'Eclogues' into French. Cézanne and Pagnol both filtered childhood nostalgia through the pastoral utopia of the classics.

In his seminal essay 'Painting and Cinema', the film critic André Bazin observed that one of the essential differences between the two art forms was that in painting, the frame emphasised 'the heterogeneity of the pictorial microcosm from the natural macrocosm surrounding it', while in the cinema, 'everything the screen shows us is assumed to continue indefinitely towards the universe', concluding: 'the picture frame is centripetal, the cinema screen centrifugal.'¹⁰

Bazin's insight is confirmed by a comparison between Cézanne and Pagnol's representations of Provence. Each in his own time was at odds with dominant views of Provence that emphasise its bounteous, hedonistic side, from the paintings of Renoir, Dufy and Matisse to popular Marseille operettas, down to the novels of Peter Mayle and their filmed adaptations.¹¹ Instead they wanted to celebrate its rustic austerity - the baked land, the fierce winds, the rocky outcrops, the blistering heat. From this same project came evidently very different visions.

'Hillside in Provence', possibly painted in the environs of Bellevue, is a relatively late work which illustrates well the architectonics of Cézanne's landscapes. The simple composition slices the picture into two planes divided by a diagonal line in which nestle clumps of trees. The painting is composed from the standpoint of the road, which is thus - ironically in view of the French title of the painting ('La Route en Provence') - not very prominent, unlike other Cézanne paintings on the theme of the road such as 'La route tournante en Provence' (about 1866; Musée des Beaux-Arts, Montreal).

In the foreground, above the road, a wedge of dense rock formations adopts bold, rigorous geometric lines that anticipate the more chaotic 'La Carrière de Bibémus' (about 1895; Museum Folkwang, Essen). In the background, a round hill of patterned fields in a kaleidoscope of greens and browns is topped by dark green, almost hiding the tip of another hill further in the distance on the right, balancing the tallest pine tree on the left.

Apart from the composition, unity is conferred by the echoing patterns, in particular the diagonal lines of rocks and fields, and by Cézanne's palette of ochres and greens, as well as grey-blue touches linking sky and land. The massive, tortured rocks and windswept pines capture the primordial force of nature. At the same time, 'Hillside in Provence' is redolent with human intervention: the fields in the distance, the house halfway up the hill, another house further away, all testify to human presence, as well as the road itself, with its slightly curved line providing an abrupt border to the rocks.

Yet, like most of Cézanne's landscapes, the painting is empty of people: as Richard Verdi puts it, writing about a number of the painter's works of that period, 'Humanity is banished from the scene and the landscape bathed in an eternal, noon-day light.'¹² Typical of Cézanne's late manner, the landscape in Hillside in Provence remains outside of time. It also epitomises Cézanne's transitional status in art history - the more hazy and distant rounded hills evoke Impressionism, the angular rocks in the foreground speak of forthcoming Cubism.

Pagnol is best known for the jovial Marseilles trilogy of 'Marius' (1931), 'Fanny' (1932) and 'César' (1936). But equally central to his work was his exploration of the austere rural hinterland in his films inspired by the novels of another Provençal writer, Jean Giono: 'Jofroi' (1933), 'Angèle' (1934) and 'Regain' (1937).

This strand of his work was stylistically forward-looking with its use of location shooting, a rare occurrence in the 1930s, making Pagnol a precursor of neo-realism. In another way he echoed the plein-airisme of Cézanne and his Impressionist (and post-Impressionist) contemporaries.

The move from the confines of the studio - the painter's as well as the film maker's - to the open air de facto entailed a new representation of the countryside, as well as the lightening of the palette, whether through the application of paint or the use of the blinding sunlight.

Pagnol's films obviously featured human beings, all the more so as he was a staunch defender of sound cinema and a master of dialogue. Nevertheless, his rural dramas, set among simple peasants in rustic surroundings, give pride of place to the countryside - the dry, rocky hills around La Treille.

Pagnol renovated an isolated farmhouse to shoot 'Angèle' and had a ruined village built for 'Regain', the latter merging so successfully with the landscape that it became an intrinsic part of the surrounding hills, the Barres Saint-Esprit. Indeed the Pagnol tourist trail around La Treille includes almost as many landmarks that were constructed or renovated for his films (ruined houses, a well, etc.) as pre-existing ones - a unique case of a film maker's imprint on nature.

But these films also challenge Pagnol's reputation for ideological conservatism or passé-ism. For instance 'Regain', while it equates maternity with the renewal of the land, also comments on the depopulation of the French countryside, uncannily prefiguring the shift in the area from an agricultural to a touristic economy.

Pagnol's cinematography illustrates Bazin's notion of cinema's ability to suggest the off-screen. While being tied to the bodies of the actors and dramatic action, his camera implies the larger world around the small, localised universe of his films - through sweeping camera movements, counter-shots, or off-screen gazes.

In 1953 he returned to La Treille to film his own novel 'Manon des sources', which predated the writing of his memoirs by just a few years. As René Gardies says, 'He did not choose La Treille in order to tell the stories of Jofroi and Manon; he chose them in order to film La Treille.'¹³

Thus towards the end of their lives and careers, Cézanne and Pagnol linked their most mature art to their childhood. In very different ways - Cézanne through greater formal abstraction, Pagnol through an increased documentary impulse - both intimately connected biography with art, the inner with the outer landscape.

Cézanne and Pagnol each worked over a very small terrain - a few square kilometres around Aix and Aubagne respectively - the same perimeters that as children they had explored on foot - a territory full of both history and personal memory. Pagnol believed that 'You attain the universal by staying at home'¹⁴ and, as Bazin said, he 'owed his international fame to the regionalism of his work',¹⁵ a quote which could serve for a large section of Cézanne's work. Provence has had many artistic champions (Frédéric Mistral, Alphonse Daudet, Jean Giono), but ultimately it is Cézanne and Pagnol who made it international.

1. 'Cézanne en Provence' (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 29 January-7 May 2006; Musée Granet Aix-en-Provence, 9 June-17 September 2006).
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2. See in particular John Rewald, 'Cézanne et Zola' (Sedrowski, Paris, 1936).
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3. Emile Zola, 'L'œuvre' (Le Livre de Poche, Librairie Générale Française, Paris, 1996; first published 1886), p 96.
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4. Emile Zola, 'L'œuvre', op.cit., p 93.
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5. Paul Cézanne, 'Letter to Joachim Gasquet', April 1896, in Richard Verdi, Cézanne (Thames & Hudson, London, 1992), p 174.
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6. Marcel Pagnol, 'La Gloire de mon père' (Le Livre de Poche, Paris, 1957), p 99.
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7. Marcel Pagnol, 'La Gloire de mon père', op. cit., p 91.
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8. Paul Smith, 'Cézanne's Late Landscapes, or the Prospect of Death', in Philip Conisbee and Denis Coutagne (eds), 'Cézanne in Provence' (Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London), p 64.
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9. Marcel Pagnol, 'La Gloire de mon père', op. cit., pp 11-12.
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10. André Bazin, 'Painting and cinema', in 'Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?' (Les Editions du Cerf, Paris, 2002; first published 1958), p 188.
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11. 'A Year in Provence', Peter Mayle's highly successful novel of 1989, was adapted for television in 1993 and followed by several other books, including 'A Good Year', adapted for the cinema by Ridley Scott in 2006.
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12. Richard Verdi, 'Cézanne', op.cit., p 119.
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13. René Gardies, 'Vu du village: Jofroi et Manon des Sources de Marcel Pagnol', Centre Méridional d'Histoire, Images de la Provence (Publications de l'Université de Provence, Aix, 1992).
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14. Quoted in 'Les Sentiers Marcel Pagnol, Les Chemins d'une vie' (DVD, Copsi Video Production, directed by Philippe Artières), July 2002.
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15. André Bazin, 'Le Cas Pagnol', in 'Qu'est-ce que le cinéma?', op.cit., p 179.
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Cinema at the National Gallery