Lucienne Dechorain, whose professional name was Lucie Derain, was above all a film critic, but she was also a film director, film editor, fiction writer, and very likely a screenwriter. She entered the world of cinema in 1919 by subtitling and editing newsreels at Van Goitsenhoven, Gaumont (in 1921), and Eclipse-Journal (in 1923). We know that she wrote the screenplay La Tour de Vie et de Mort for Films Albatros, although the manuscript provides us with no further information, including a year, and there is no evidence that it was ever made into a film. She was a contributor to Hebdo-Films, La Semaine Cinématographique, Le Quotidien (Paris, 1923-1936), Cinémagazine, Pour vous, Cinémonde, Ciné-Miroir, Photo-Ciné, and La Cinématographie Française. Since in this last journal the editorial board is not mentioned, it is not possible to definitely state for how long she belonged to it, however, she was a member of the editorial board (Thévenet 1953, 233; Beyle and D’Hugues 1999, 131). Between October 11, 1924 and June 1940 she wrote the “Courrier des studios” column (also called “Studios,” “Dans les studios,” “Le Travail dans les studios”), a survey dedicated to the news from the studios and the set. She was also a contributor to La Technique Cinématographique, Ciné-Amateur, and La Vigie Marocaine, as well as the editor-in-chief of Le Film Français from 1945 to 1948

Vichi, Laura

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by Laura VichiLucienne Dechorain, whose professional name was Lucie Derain, was above all a film critic, butshe was also a film director, film editor, fiction writer, and very likely a screenwriter. She enteredthe world of cinema in 1919 by subtitling and editing newsreels at Van Goitsenhoven, Gaumont(in 1921), and Eclipse-Journal (in 1923). We know that she wrote the screenplay La Tour de Vie etde Mort for Films Albatros, although the manuscript provides us with no further information,including a year, and there is no evidence that it was ever made into a film. She was a contributorto Hebdo-Films, La Semaine Cinématographique, Le Quotidien (Paris, 1923-1936), Cinémagazine, Pour vous, Cinémonde, Ciné-Miroir, Photo-Ciné, and La CinématographieFrançaise. Since in this last journal the editorial board is not mentioned, it is not possible todefinitely state for how long she belonged to it, however, she was a member of the editorial board(Thévenet 1953, 233; Beyle and D’Hugues 1999, 131). Between October 11, 1924 and June 1940she wrote the “Courrier des studios” column (also called “Studios,” “Dans les studios,” “Le Travaildans les studios”), a survey dedicated to the news from the studios and the set. She was alsoa contributor to La Technique Cinématographique, Ciné-Amateur, and La Vigie Marocaine, aswell as the editor-in-chief of Le Film Français from 1945 to 1948.Derain also wrote the titles and subtitles for foreign films, such as the American Should a GirlMarry/Destin de Femme (Scott Pembroke, 1928) and the Russian ThePatriots/Okraina/Faubourg (Boris Barnet, 1933). It appears that she first tried her hand atdirecting with Désordre (1927), a 16mm short compilation film, as mentioned some years later byMaurice M. Bessy, who considered it a real avant-garde film: “La nouvelle [avant-garde] c’estPréméditations; Désordre, de Lucie Derain et de Jean Tarride, film de montage bien conçu”[Trans.: The new avant-garde is Préméditations; Désordre, by Lucie Derain and Jean Tarride, aAlso Known As:Lucienne DechorainLived:January 16, 1902 - Unknown (1967?)Worked as:ciné-club co-founder, director, editor, film critic, screenwriter, title writer, writerWorked In:FranceLucie Deraincompilation film well conceived] (Bessy 1931, 52). Désordre was intended to be integrated intothe homonymous drama written by the Lorraine-born avant-garde poet, writer, and playwrightYvan Goll, according to Claude Beyle and Philippe D’Hugues (131) who profile Derain’s assistantor co-director Jean Tarride, future director, together with Jacques Brunius, of Record 37 (1937).Beyle and D’Hugues do not mention Derain among their “oubliés du cinéma français” [“forgottenpeople of french cinema”] and do not give further information about her film Désordre, whichis unknown even at the Goll archive preserved at the Musée Pierre Noël in Saint-Dié des Vosges.This most likely means that it was not eventually integrated into Goll’s play. What is certain is thatat some point the film came out, credited to Derain and Tarride, and was scheduled at the Studiodes Ursulines from September 26 to October 31, 1930. This information is based on issues of thetouristic guide La Semaine à Paris, published by the Office de tourisme et des congrès (1930, 55;1930, 64; 1930, 64).The only 35mm film that Derain both wrote and directed, Harmonies de Paris (1928), wasreleased, although without much critical success, together with René Clair’s La Tour (1928) to fillthe release program of Les Deux Timides (1929) by Clair. Both of these films were produced byFilms Albatros. Derain dedicated some of her articles to the work at the Albatros studio, whereshe probably went regularly. The company was managed initially, from 1919 to 1922, by JosephErmolieff and then by Alexandre Kamenka, and was formed around Russian revolutionary exileslike actors Ivan Mosjoukine, Nathalie Lissenko, and Nicolas Rimsky, directors Jakob Protazanoff,Alexandre Volkoff, and Viatcheslav Tourjansky, and set and poster designers Ivan Lochakoff,Boris Bilinsky, and Lazare Meerson. In a second phase, in which we can situate Derain, Albatroswelcomed young French directors such as Clair, Jean Epstein, Jacques Feyder, Marcel L’Herbier,Robert Boudrioz, and Marcel Silver, who contributed to the renewal of French cinema (Albera1995).Today the Cinémathèque Française’s Albatros Collection contains a few archival documentsrelated to Derain, whose biography and career are very difficult to reconstruct becauseinformation about her is simply too scarce. What one can learn from the Albatros Collection’sdocuments, however, is that she wrote the titles of Adelqui Millar’s Souris d’hôtel (1927) (Albera175) and that, in 1929, Harmonies de Paris was distributed together with Clair’s La Tour in GreatBritain as well, as proven by a letter from a commercial agent at the Gaumont-British company toAlbatros on January 4, 1929 (n.p.). The agent says that they wanted “such good French films” tobecome better known in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, Derain’s film is quite far from LaTour’s avant-garde style and the two films never met equal critical reception, Harmonies de Parisreceiving positive but not enthusiastic reviews. For example, Cinémagazine described the film asa “summary,” a “nice trip” surely appreciated by everyone who loves Paris, while concluding thatthe film must be praised and encouraged (Francès 1928, 493); Pour vous focused on howHarmonies de Paris speaks about the soul of the French capital through simple images (Régent1928, 6). Derain herself, interviewed by a journalist named “Saint-Sèvre” of L’Ami duPeuple, explained that the aim of the film was to show “some harmonies of Paris…and nothingmore. I tried to create a synthesis of the city’s charms” (1928, n.p.).Harmonies de Paris, restored by the Cinémathèque Française in the 1990s, was shot entirely onpanchromatic film and was meant to be a documentary tour of Paris in thirteen thematicchapters. The subject is a tourist group arriving in the French capital by airplane, which explainsthe many shots of monuments and other canonical places. Derain did not hide the fact that shedrew her inspiration from Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927), whose avant-gardism she partially copied, along with some of its images, such as workers leaving a factory, citytraffic, railways, and shop windows. However, the formal comparison seems to literally stop (dueto the use of a static camera in parts of Harmonies de Paris) before the focus on a few corners ofold Paris, as if it were stuck in time, seen with a nostalgic attitude: an intertitle tells us that inParis the past emerges everywhere.In this way, the film creates a contrast between “modern fever” or “fièvre moderne,” to which thesecond chapter of the documentary is dedicated, and historical memory, which is represented insome chapters by the shots of monuments, gardens, and corners of the old Paris. Thephotography of Eugène Atget probably served as inspiration for Derain’s work. Atget’s workwas exhibited for the first time in the spring of 1928, just before Derain shot her own film, inan important Salon Indépendant de la Photographie retrospective, which was announced byCinémagazine on May 18, 1928 (262). Another very probable model is Claude Lambert’s VoiciParis (1926), a film also influenced by Atget’s photographs (Juan 2004, 304) with which Derainwas certainly familiar. This can be inferred by her 1929 Cinémagazine article “La ville aucinéma,” where she calls the film “ingénieux et vivant” [“ingenious and alive”] (320).In January 1928, some months before making her film, Derain wrote “L’art moderne à l’écran”in Cinémagazine, where she affirmed that what characterizes the modern era is a “nervous,bright, quickened life” (148) and that cinema and other arts can grow and nourish each other upto a “revenge,” or dominance, of cinema, which will become, thanks to the avant-gardeexperimentations of the time, “the modern time’s writing” (150). Later, some time after the pressrelease of the film, in February 1929, she wrote “La ville au cinéma” where, while saying thatRuttmann’s Berlin is the most interesting and complete film ever made on a city, she mentionssome French films like Voici Paris, Études sur Paris (André Sauvage, 1928), La Zone (GeorgesLacombe, 1928), and Ménilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1928).  She particularly appreciated thelast two for the values they convey: nostalgia and emotion issued from the shots of popular Paris(320-321).What emerges from Derain’s Harmonies de Paris is a sort of anticipation of her 1929 article: thefilm does not really offer a modern vision of a metropolis, as one could say about other avant-garde films, in particular Ruttmann’s film on Berlin or Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the MovieCamera (1929). In these films the main features of a modern city are functionality and speed,while in Harmonies de Paris the French capital is not generally seen, after all, as a symbol ofmodernity, but as a place where humanity can still express itself and escape the modern tendencytoward anonymity. One can see this idea in the film, for example, in the contrast created betweenthe distorted shot of the Stock Exchange, La Bourse, which lends a sense of foreboding, and themore human shots of people quietly crowding Les Halles and of workers and shopkeepers goingabout their daily tasks. This idea of the metropolis puts Harmonies de Paris in a category with aseries of other films about Paris, including Marcel Carné’s well-known Nogent, Eldorado dudimanche (1929). These films show some connection to the then emerging literary movement of“populism” (Vichi 2017), whose center is constituted by the “mythe du peuple,” as Alain Pessincalls it (2000, 131-144), which considered brotherhood and innocence as the fundamental valuesrepresented by ordinary people.According to Myriam Juan, in 1929 the press announced Derain’s new project, a documentaryabout Rouen titled Rouen, Ville Sonore, but this information has to be checked by an in-depthanalysis of the 1929 press (2002, 246).  Unfortunately, this film was probably never made.However, Derain’s career continued in another vein, and, starting in 1929 and continuingthroughout the 1930s, she authored numerous novelizations of films, mostly published by JulesTallandier in the popular collection “Cinéma bibliothèque.”Moreover, in the beginning of the 1930s, she was co-founder of the Ciné-club de la femme (asubject which would be worth pursuing in more depth) where a young Henri Langloiscollaborated with her for two months in 1934 and helped with film programming. In a notewritten by Langois in 1952, this experience is remembered by the Cinémathèque founder as thekey moment where he understood that many silent films where dispersed in a sort of second-handmarket and, in some ways, this inspired him with the idea of collecting them in an archive(Mannoni 2006, 31). Furthermore, it is at the Ciné-club de la femme that Langlois met JeanMitry, with whom he would create (together with Georges Franju) the Cinémathèque Française in1936.The importance of studying Derain lies not only in the fact that she represents the femaleintellectual figure of her time–with all the implications of that function–and the marginality ofwomen in the cinema milieu (including at Films Albatros), but that she also encourages us toexplore those pockets of film history that have not yet been fully brought to light. Derain’s filmlets us imagine a documentary panorama that remains almost completely hidden and unknownstill today, both in terms of archives and research. Furthermore, Harmonies de Paris represents akind of urban film from 1920s France whose characteristics are not exactly those of theestablished “urban symphony,” but which refer instead to specific aspects of French culture.According to many, even in light of existing scholarship, this group of films still needs to be fullyassessed and examined (Gauthier 2004, 64-68; Jeancolas 1989, 20-22; Juan 2004, 291-314). Tohistorians interested in Derain’s work, another obvious subject of study is the enormouspopularity, at the beginning of the 1930s, of the roman-cinéma, what today we would call an“intermedial” genre that merits further investigation.BibliographyAlbera, François. Albatros. Des Russes à Paris. Milano-Paris: Mazzotta/Cinémathèque Française,1995.Aumont, Jacques. “Harmonies de Paris.” In La Persistance des images. Ed. Jacques Aumont.Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1996. 86-87.Bessy, Maurice M. “Ciné-clubs et écrans d'avant-garde.” Cinémagazine 3 (March 1931): 52.Beyle, Claude, and Philippe D’Hugues. Les Oubliés du cinéma français. Paris: Editions du Cerf,1999.Derain, Lucie. “L'art moderne à l'écran–Décoration, architecture sous les lumières.”Cinémagazine 4 (27 January 1928): 148-150.------. “La ville au cinéma. Les poètes de la ville. Les beautés, les laideurs et le mystère des villes.”Cinémagazine 8 (22 February 1929): 319-321.Francès, Robert. “Présentations (Les). Harmonies de Paris.” Cinémagazine (14 December 1928):493.Fronval, Georges. “Avec Lucie Derain pendant les prises de vue de Harmonies de Paris.” LaPresse (17 July 1928): n.p. Fonds Rondel, BNF.Gaumont-British. Letter to Films Albatros. January 4, 1929. Fonds Albatros, BIFI.------. Letter to Films Albatros. January 12, 1929. Fonds Albatros, BIFI.Gauthier, Guy. Un siècle de documentaires français. Paris: Armand Colin, 2004.“Harmonies de Paris.” L’Ami du peuple (14 December 1928): n.p. Fonds Rondel, BNF.Jeancolas, Jean-Pierre.“N.V.D. 28, appel à témoins.” In 100 ans Lumière: rétrospective del'oeuvre documentaire des grands cinéastes français de Louis Lumière jusqu'à nos jours. Eds.Louis Marcorelles, Claire Devarrieux. Paris, AFA-Intermedia, 1989. 20-22.Juan, Myriam, Ça c’est Paris! Paris dans le documentaire français des années vingt, 1919-1929.PhD dissertation. Université de Paris I, 2002.------. “Le cinéma documentaire dans la rue parisienne.” Sociétés et représentations vol. 1, no. 17(2004): 291-314.Lynx. “Echos et informations. Un Salon de la Photographie.” Cinémagazine 20 (18 May 1928):262.Mannoni, Laurent. Histoire de la Cinémathèque française. Paris: Gallimard, 2006.Office de tourisme et des congrès. Semaine à Paris (La): ce qui se fera, se verra, s'entendra, ettourisme 435 (26 September-3 October 1930).------. Semaine à Paris (La): ce qui se fera, se verra, s'entendra, et tourisme 437 (10-17 October1930).------. Semaine à Paris (La): ce qui se fera, se verra, s'entendra, et tourisme 439 (24-31 October1930).Pessin, Alain. “Le Mythe du peuple au XIX siècle.” Le Peuple dans tous ses états, Sociétés &Représentations 8 (2000): 131-144.Régent, Roger. “Harmonies de Paris.” Pour vous 4 (15 December 1928): 6.Saint-Sèvre. “Prises de vues. En parlant d’Harmonies de Paris.” L’Ami du Peuple (30 August1928): n.p. Fonds Rondel, BNF.Thévenet, René, ed. Annuaire biographique du cinéma et de la télevision en France. Paris:Contact-Organisation, 1953.Vichi, Laura. “Harmonies de Paris ou le documentaire entre avant-garde et populisme.” In DaCaligari al cinema senza nomi. Studi in onore di Leonardo Quaresima. Milan: Mimesis, 2017.530-539.Archival Paper Collections:Various archival materials [correspondence between Gaumont-British and Films Albatros; un-produced screenplay, La Tour de Vie et de Mort; contract between Lucie Derain and AlexandreKamenka regulating Harmonies de Paris' production]. Fonds Albatros. Bibliothèque du Film,Cinémathèque Française.Fonds Rondel [includes press reviews and articles about Harmonies de Paris]. Bibliothèquenationale de France.FilmographyA. Archival Filmography: Extant Film Titles:1. Lucie Derain as Director and ScreenwriterHarmonies de Paris. Dir./sc.: Lucie Derain, cam.: Nicolas Roudakoff (Films Albatros France1928) b&w, si, 35mm, DVD. 1896 ft. Archive: Centre National du Cinéma et de l’ImageAnimée [FRB], Cinémathèque Française [FRC], Forum des Images [FRV].2. Lucie Derain as Title WriterDestin de femme/Should a Girl Marry? Dir.: Scott Pembroke (Trem Carr Productions US 1928)cas.: Helen Foster, Donald Keith, si, b&w, 3281 ft., seven reels, 35mm. Archive: Centre Nationaldu Cinéma et de l’Image Animée [FRB].Souris d'hôtel. Dir./sc.: Adelqui Millar, cam.: Nicolas Frenguelli, Nicolas Roudakoff (FilmsAlbatros France 1929) cas.: Ica von Lenkeffy, Suzanne Delmas, Arthur Pusey, Elmire Vautier, si.,b&w, col., 8202 ft., 35mm. Archive: Centre National du Cinéma et de l’ImageAnimée [FRB], Cinémathèque Française [FRC].Faubourg/Okraina/The Patriots/ The Outskirts. Dir./sc.: Boris Barnet, cam.: Mikhail Kirillov, A.Spiridonov (Mezhrabpomfilm USSR 1933) cas.: Sergey Komarov, Elena Kuzmina, AleksandrChristyakov, Nikolay Bogolyubov, Robert Erdmann, sd, b&w, 35mm. 98 min.Archive: Cinémathèque Française [FRC].B. Filmography: Non-Extant Film Titles:1. Lucie Derain as Director and ScreenwriterDésordre, 1927.E. Unfinished Work: 1. Lucie Derain as ScreenwriterLa Tour de Vie et de Mort, year unknown.Credit ReportMuch more research needs to be done on Derain's role as a title writer. The three films mentionedin this profile/filmography are most likely just the tip of the iceberg. The Cinémathèque Françaiseholds DVD copies of Souris d'hôtel (1929) and Okraina (1933) (a DVD copy of the latter is alsoheld at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse).CitationVichi, Laura. "Lucie Derain." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds.Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2017.<https://wfpp-test.cul.columbia.edu/pioneer/lucie-derain/>

Lucie Derain

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Lucie Derain

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