Jacques Feyder

Jacques Feyder was born on July 21, 1885 in Ixelles, Brabant, Belgium as Jacques Léon Louis Frédérix.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 325-330. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

Stage actor from 1912. Wrote and directed short features for Gaumont from 1916. Front-line military service during World War I. Directed Missing Husbands (1921), shot on location in the Sahara, followed by another big success, Crainquebille (1922) two years later. Briefly with MGM in Hollywood, 1928-32, but did not enjoy the experience and returned to France. Directed his best film, Carnival in Flanders (1935) in 1935. After filming Knight Without Armor (1937) for Alexander Korda, essentially retired. Found a safe refuge in Switzerland during the Second World War, teaching at the Geneva Conservatoire.

At age twenty-five he moved to Paris where he pursued an interest in acting, first on stage and then in film, adopting the name Jacques Feyder. He joined the Gaumont Film Company and in 1914 he became an assistant director with Gaston Ravel.

He started directing films for Gaumont in 1916, but his career was interrupted by service with the Belgian army during 1917-1919. After the end of the war, he returned to filmmaking and quickly built a reputation as one of the most innovative directors in French cinema. L'Atlantide (1921) (based on the novel by Pierre Benoit), and Crainquebille (1922) (from the novel by Anatole France) were his first major films to achieve public and critical attention.

In 1917, Feyder had married Parisian-born actress Françoise Rosay (1891-1974) with whom he had three sons; she acted in many of his films and collaborated with him as writer and assistant director on Visages d'enfants.

He was a director of silent films during the 1920s, and in the 1930s he became associated with the style of poetic realism in French cinema.

He also contributed screenplays of films for other directors, notably Poil de carotte (1925) for Julien Duvivier, and Gardiens de phare (1929) for Jean Grémillon.

His last silent film in France was Les Nouveaux Messieurs, a topical political satire which provoked calls for it to be banned in France for "insulting the dignity of parliament and its ministers". By this time Feyder had accepted an offer from MGM to work in Hollywood, where in 1929 his first project was directing Greta Garbo in The Kiss, her last silent film.

In 1930, he directed Jetta Goudal in her only French language film made in Hollywood, Le Spectre vert. His subsequent work in the USA consisted mainly of directing foreign-language versions of American films, including a German version of Anna Christie, again with Garbo.

Disillusioned with the Hollywood system, Feyder returned to France in 1933. During the next three years he made three of his most successful films, all of them in collaboration with screenwriter Charles Spaak and featuring Françoise Rosay in a leading role. Le Grand Jeu (1934) and Pension Mimosas (1935) were both significant creations in the style of poetic realism; La Kermesse héroïque (1935) (also known as Carnival in Flanders) was a meticulously staged period film which aroused some contemporary political resonances; it earned Feyder several international awards.

He was a director and writer, known for Pension Mimosas (1935), Carnival in Flanders (1935) and Le grand jeu (1934). He was married to Françoise Rosay.

Following the Nazi occupation in 1940, which led to the banning of La Kermesse héroïque, he left France for the safety of Switzerland, and directed a last film there, Une femme disparaît (1942).

In 1944 Feyder and Françoise Rosay published Le Cinéma, notre métier, an autobiographical memoir of their work together in the cinema, in which Feyder stated that he regarded himself as an artisan, a craftsman of filmmaking. Some critics have been content to take him at his word and to look no further for any underlying vision of the world. He was however insistent upon his creative independence, demonstrated by his willingness to make his films in so many different countries if the conditions of production appeared favourable.

Feyder's relatively early death may have contributed to a fading of interest in his films, reinforced by the hostility of some influential critics associated with Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s.

His younger contemporary René Clair judged in 1970, "Jacques Feyder does not occupy today the place his work and his example should have earned him". Any subsequent reassessment has tended to be hampered by the limited availability of his films in English-speaking countries, with the exception of La Kermesse héroïque which some reckon to have aged less well than other examples of his work. These factors have contributed to a sometimes ambivalent attitude to his work as a whole.

A school (lycée) in Épinay-sur-Seine in the north of Paris was named in his honour in 1977; Épinay was the location of the Tobis film studios where Feyder made Le Grand Jeu and Pension Mimosas.