A series like the one Imogen Smith has assembled for the Criterion Channel in March is a perfect example of the "kitchen-sink" approach that builds on the worn vagaries of received wisdom and blurs the opportunity to clarify the actual history of a film-making sequence into its true constituent parts.

Clearly Smith's taste is impeccable, at least according to the prevailing textbooks regarding French film from the 1930s/1940s as currently known. Her reach for the elusive, inchoate term of "poetic realism", however, is overly grasping and becomes more a compendium of the retro-fitted auteurism that has plagued the world of film criticism ever since Andrew Sarris first codified it in the heady afterflow of the nouvelle vague.

Smith's overreach stems from a desire to take the lead as the head cheerleader for the "Julien Duvivier appreciation society." There's nothing wrong with becoming a card-carrying member of such an organization, but it's totally something else to conflate his uniquely restless talent that careened far & wide around tones and genres into a nebulous category such as "poetic realism." A possibly overweening love for Duvivier has caused her to apportion eight of his films into her twenty-four film lineup, five of which are clearly (at best) peripheral to the concept of "poetic realism." (We grant her LA BELLE EQUIPE and PEPE LE MOKO, though the latter is also part of the group of 30s Gabin films that clearly align into France's evolving film noir. And it's unfathomable to see LA TETE D'UN HOMME in the context of "poetic realism" when it clearly Duvivier's forceful expansion of early film noir, a Simenon adaptation where we first encounter the full "fugue state" of a villain.)

The best "stretch" here is the Duvivier silent MOTHER HUMMINGBIRD, which does give us a preview of the atmospherics that manifest in the mid-1930s/

But the evidence of straight-down-the-line "auteurism" can be seen in the breakdown of films by director: Duvivier 8, Carné 5, Renoir 4, Gremillon 3, Vigo 2, Delannoy 1, Allegret 1.

I'm simply baffled by the notion that UNE SI JOLIE PETITE PLAGE can be connected to "poetic realism" in any way; if we're going for an Allegret film in such a context, the film that makes eminent sense for that is DEDEE D'ANVERS. It's possible that DEDEE just wasn't available: we'll give Smith the benefit of the doubt on that. But even so, if she wants an echo of the Gabin-like "marginalized anti-hero," there is a perfect version of that available to her with Gabin himself--in Rene Clement's WALLS OF MALAPAGA (1949), which has the benefit of blending poetic realism, neo-realism (thanks to its Italian setting) and noir.

And there are 30s films that deserve a place in a comprehensive attempt to tie a bow around the elusive concept of "poetic realism" by capturing its more exotic extremes. Russian emigre Fedor Ozep, one of this period's most mercurial and mysterious figures, gives us poetic realism as sexual delirium in AMOK; analogously, we have Jacques Feyder bringing amour fou into the French colonialist picture with his LE GRAND JEU (1934). At the same time, as Nick Pinkerton notes (at the link below), there is the neglected figure of Louis Valray, the provincial filmmaker whose LA BELLE DE NUIT (1934) hinges upon a similar "doppelganger girl" plot as LE GRAND JEU; he follows that up with ESCALE (1935), drenched in a seascape of sexual encounter.

https://www.artforum.com/columns/nick-pinkerton-on-two-by-louis-valray-at-moma-249520/

These films were all screened at MOMA back in 2018; with Smith's evolving connections, one would think that this material would be accessible to her. Omitting it leaves a big gap in the evolution of this style of filmmaking as we now (should) know it.

And there are several early Gremillon titles--LA PETITE LISE (1931) and DAIHNA LA MATISSE (1932) that are pertinent to the juxtaposition of atmospherics and colonial-romantic subject matter that becomes the key driving force in the still-fraying definitional strands of "poetic realism."

All these films are far more on point for such a collection than the early 30s Duvivier chosen by Smith--which is likely due to the fact that Criterion/Janus made them available some years back, making it an art v. commerce "quid pro quo."

Other films that definitely fit into this inchoate world and should be here: Max Ophuls LA TENDRE ENNEMIE (1936), Pierre Chenal's LA MAISON DU MALTAIS (1938); and, after the war, intellectual heavies get a shot at recapturing or redrawing the concept: Jean-Paul Sartre via Delannoy in LES JEUX SONT FAITS (1947) and Cocteau again with L'AIGLE A DEUX TETES (1948) and ORPHEUS (1950).

Finally, Smith's inability or unwillingness to see that much of Marcel Carne's work is outright noir (LE JOUR SE LEVE, LES PORTES DE LA NUIT) just accelerates the "auteurist" bias that makes this a missed opportunity to create a more balanced and comprehensive look at French cinema in the thirties and forties. We don't need to have an even more nebulous variant of an already inchoate concept force-fed to us again when there is an obvious corrective hidden in plain sight waiting to be unlocked...

Here is the Criterion blurb, which might have been written by Smith (in her occasional usage of the rhapsodic mode):

Moody, shadow-latticed cinematography; exquisitely wrought dialogue; an intoxicating sense of world-weary fatalism: welcome to the world of French cinema in the 1930s and ’40s, when the style known as poetic realism--rooted in working-class social reality yet heightened by a distinctly Gallic lyricism--flourished. In the hands of masters like Jean Renoir (La bête humaine, The Rules of the Game), Marcel Carné (Port of Shadows, Children of Paradise), Julien Duvivier (Pépé le moko, Un carnet de bal), and Jean Grémillon (Remorques, Lumière d’été), the struggle and grit of everyday life was transformed into transcendent art and marginalized antiheroes (often played by the era’s defining leading man, Jean Gabin) took on a romantic air. A key influence on the development of film noir, these masterpieces of atmosphere unfold in a unique world unto themselves—melancholic, dreamy, and beautifully doomed.

One could live with the following lineup if it were retitled: FRENCH "AUTEURS" OF THE 1930s/1940s. That would be more accurate by far, and advertised as such would make for a perfectly acceptable series. But it defects as a representation of "poetic realism" are simply too obvious to ignore...

FEATURING: Mother Hummingbird (1929), Ladies’ Paradise (1930), Poil de carotte (1932), La tête d’un homme (1933), Zéro de conduite (1933), L’Atalante (1934), They Were Five (1936), The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936), The Lower Depths (1936), Un carnet de bal (1937), Pépé le moko (1937), Port of Shadows (1938), La bête humaine (1938), Hôtel du Nord (1938), The End of the Day (1939), Le jour se lève (1939), The Rules of the Game (1939), Remorques (1941), Lumière d’été (1943), The Eternal Return (1943), Le ciel est à vous (1944), Children of Paradise (1945), Les portes de la nuit (1946), Such a Pretty Little Beach (1949)