Pagnol, Marcel (1895-1974). Dramatist, filmmaker, and novelist. Born in Aubagne (Bouches-du-Rhône), he achieved fame for his evocations of the Midi and the manners of its people. He studied English at the University of Aix-en-Provence, and founded the literary review Fortunio, which later became Les Cahiers du sud. After various teaching posts he was appointed to the Lycée Condorcet. He had already written plays and theatre criticism; in Paris he pursued his theatrical career with plays of sharp social observation, notably Topaze (1928). His Marseille trilogy, Marius (1929), Fanny (1931), and César (1936), demonstrated his mastery of characterization in tragicomic vein. In the 1930s, with the arrival of talking films, he came to regard the cinema as an even more effective medium than the theatre. After working on film versions of existing material, including open-air filming of Giono's Jofroi (1933), and Angèle (1934) with Fernandel, he produced Merlusse (1935), his first original screenplay. Later successes included Regain (1937) and La Femme du boulanger (1938).
Pagnol's reputation as a dramatist and cinéaste was such that, after the war, which he had spent in Provence, he was elected to the Académie Française (1946), the first film-maker to be honoured in this way. However, with his light-hearted satire, use of regional vocabulary, and association with the new genre of the cinema, he was not always regarded as a ‘serious’ writer. Mindful of this, he published his Notes sur le rire (1947) and La Critique des critiques (1949), and translations into French of Shakespeare's Hamlet (1947) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1970), and Virgil's Bucolics (1958). In addition to films, such as his adaptations from Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon moulin (1953-4, 1967), he later turned to prose writing with his Souvenirs d'enfance, consisting of La Gloire de mon père and Le Château de ma mère (1957) and the posthumous Le Temps des amours (1977), and with his tragicomic celebration of the myth of water, L'Eau des collines (1963), a prose-fiction version of his over-long film Manon des sources (1952). This novel was, in turn, re-adapted for the screen by Claude Berri, as Jean de Florette and Manon des sources (1986), to wide popular acclaim. During his lifetime Pagnol's reputation waxed and waned; since his death the quality of his writing has been increasingly respected, and his reputation has benefited from the enhanced prestige of film as an art-form.
[Bernard Swift]
Bibliography
- C. E. J. Caldicott, Marcel Pagnol (1977)
- G. Berni, Merveilleux Pagnol (1981)
The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
