La Fille du faux-monnayeur - inside and out
This remarkable film, in English The Counterfeiter's Daughter, was made in March 1907, just at the point where responsibility for Gaumont production passed from Alice Guy to Louis Feuillade. It has been attributed to both, but it does seem unlikely that Guy was making films only days before her marriage on March 6th 1907 (to Herbert Blaché Bolton - the couple left for the U.S. three days later).
We can know that the film was shot that same week because in one scene there are on display outside a shop two Sunday supplements dated March 3rd 1907:
We can know that the film was shot that same week because in one scene there are on display outside a shop two Sunday supplements dated March 3rd 1907:
The version of the film recently put online by the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam (watch it here) comprises nineteen shots showing three different interiors and seven different exteriors:
This is my summary of the film:
The first shot shows the man making counterfeit coins and the woman cleaning them up, with the help of their daughter. The adults go out and buy things with the coins in order to get change, leaving the daughter at home. She decides to go out and play, taking her skipping rope. On open ground where many other children are playing she meets her friend, a baker's delivery boy. They see a poor woman crying with a child in her arms. The girl goes home to fetch a coin to give to the poor woman. With it the woman attempts to buy bread but the seller spots the forgery and summons a policeman. The policeman makes the woman lead him to the girl who gave her the coin. The girl is taken to the police station and questioned but she claims that she found the coin on the floor. She is released and followed home by a detective; he then gets a policeman to fetch others for a raid. Knowing she has been followed the daughter gets the delivery boy, who was in the building, to take from her home the counterfeiting equipment, concealed in his delivery basket. The parents return and the police raid the apartment, finding nothing. When they have left the parents hug their daughter and thank her for saving them.
The first shot shows the man making counterfeit coins and the woman cleaning them up, with the help of their daughter. The adults go out and buy things with the coins in order to get change, leaving the daughter at home. She decides to go out and play, taking her skipping rope. On open ground where many other children are playing she meets her friend, a baker's delivery boy. They see a poor woman crying with a child in her arms. The girl goes home to fetch a coin to give to the poor woman. With it the woman attempts to buy bread but the seller spots the forgery and summons a policeman. The policeman makes the woman lead him to the girl who gave her the coin. The girl is taken to the police station and questioned but she claims that she found the coin on the floor. She is released and followed home by a detective; he then gets a policeman to fetch others for a raid. Knowing she has been followed the daughter gets the delivery boy, who was in the building, to take from her home the counterfeiting equipment, concealed in his delivery basket. The parents return and the police raid the apartment, finding nothing. When they have left the parents hug their daughter and thank her for saving them.
The Counterfeiter's Daughter is in the first instance remarkable for its conclusion, whereby the child's ingenuity saves her counterfeiting parents from arrest. There are several other films featuring counterfeiters in this period, and in none of them do the criminals escape punishment.
The copy of the film I have seen cuts off abruptly as the relieved parents hug their daughter after the police have gone. It doesn't look like anything is missing but a plot summary posted on IMDB purporting to come from a Gaumont catalogue says that at the end 'they resolve to make an honest living'.
The copy of the film I have seen cuts off abruptly as the relieved parents hug their daughter after the police have gone. It doesn't look like anything is missing but a plot summary posted on IMDB purporting to come from a Gaumont catalogue says that at the end 'they resolve to make an honest living'.
The three interiors are not particularly remarkable, though the family home plays an important part in the film's spatial design. This restricted, crowded space opens and closes the film, while in between the film exercises itself in the streets and on open ground. The room has a window out of which characters look, anxiously, but nothing of what can be seen is shown:
This claustrophobic impression is reinforced by the replication of the room's distinctive wall décor beyond the room's one door:
The picture on the left shows a seated man, possibly an artisan of some sort; the one on the right shows someone riding a horse out in the open. The placing of the latter could be read as ironic within this confined space, though the picture reappears in several other Gaumont interiors where no irony would seem intended.
The room is coded as poor by the stove in the middle and by the quality of the furniture, especially the table to the right, but the distinctive wallpaper connotes otherwise. It had been used to decorate more evidently bourgeois, if still modest, interiors in three films by Guy from 1906, and again in a 1907 film by Feuillade:
In La Fille du faux-monnayeur that wallpaper suggests a degree of confort, certainly when compared with the rooms of the really poor, as here in Guy's La Marâtre (1906):
The table, chair, sideboard and bed in La Marâtre are very basic and similar to those in La Fille du faux-monnayeur.
The staircase in La Fille du faux-monnayeur follows an established pattern, favouring graphic clarity over realism:
The décor of the police station is conventionally basic. The same wallpaper and fake panelling is used for police stations in at least three other films:
Police station settings are among the most frequent and least interesting in the cinema of this period. Very few feature maps, despite the ubiquity of maps in later representations of police stations (see here). Circa 1907 the basic elements are always the same, even if the exact décor is not each time recycled. Here is the same type of space in two other films:
The exteriors are more varied, and can be sorted into three types.
1/ the streets near the building where the family lives:
1/ the streets near the building where the family lives:
2/ the nearby shops where attempts are made to spend counterfeit coins:
3/ the open space near the fortifications where the girl plays and is later arrested:
Five of these exteriors can be located with near certainty. The two views of the shop where the wife buys bread conveniently show a name on the door, 'NOEL'. Bread was sold not only in bakeries but also in grocery stores and wine shops; there are twenty or so such traders called Noël listed in the 1907 Annuaire-almanach du commerce. Nearest the Gaumont company premises is a wine shop at 133 Rue Haxo:
A rare postcard shows this shop and allows us to positively identify the location in the film:
What we see in the film is the other entrance at the corner:
A further aid to identification provided by the film is that we see the number above the door of the building where the family lives. There aren't many streets that reach no. 133 in the area, and I am almost certain that the building is the one of which the shop above is a part, even if after 112 years the door has changed and lost its ornamental lintel:
When the daughter is being followed by a detective we see her further up the Rue Haxo, at the corner of the Passage du Monténégro:
However different the location looks now, the directory confirms that there was a wine shop here in 1907, and the railings of the window across the street haven't changed in 112 years.
The woman to whom the girl gives a counterfeit coin tries to buy bread at this bakery, next to a grocer's:
There are no names or numbers visible to help identification; the only clues are the downward incline of the street, right to left, and the contiguity of the two shops. The only boulangerie next to an épicerie I can find in the area is at 41 Rue de Romainville:
The building there now is clearly not the same one, but the street does slope downwards right to left, and the location is by the corner diagonally across from 133 Rue Haxo, so this does seem a likely localisation.
The one other shop we see is more difficult to localise:
At the bottom of the street is what looks like a gateway into Paris. The Rue Haxo leads down to the Boulevard Sérurier and the Porte du Pré Saint Gervais, and that would seem a likely identification, but whatever the shop-type designation says to the left of the doorway - papeterie and mercerie are my guesses - I can find no shop of any kind listed at what would be the relevant address on the Rue Haxo, no. 145. There is a street corner there - the Rue Nouvelle, later renamed the Rue Carolus Duran - and it is not impossible that a shop's existence be so ephemeral that it go unlisted.
|
Another view in the film shows the end of the Rue Haxo by the Porte de Saint Gervais:
On this postcard we can see the wall and railings to the right above:
To the left is the open ground where children are shown playing and where the girl comes across the famished mother and child to whom she gives a coin. In the background is the building at the junction of the Boulevard Sérurier and the Rue de Mouzaia:
The film's locations are all in the same area, not far from the studio but not in its immediate vicinity:
This concentration is in itself unusual, and suggests a deliberate effort to give the narrative some topographical coherence. On the map below I have plotted locations from several other Gaumont films circa 1906-07, from which is clear that the usual practice was to stay within easy reach of the Cité Elgé:
It looks like La Fille du faux-monnayeur was made on an excursion extra muros, like Feuillade's Une dame vraiment bien from the following year, shot about four kilometres from the Cité Elgé, in Romainville (see here). Whether or not La Fille du faux-monnayeur was meant as the depiction of a specific district, that is effectively how we can see the film now.
The topographical coherence of La Fille du faux-monnayeur underscores a thematic preoccupation with class, or more exactly with distinctions and movements within a restricted stratum. The counterfeiters live in a modest single-room apartment but their dress as well as their wallpaper connotes greater affluence:
Their smart appearance should help them to pass on their counterfeit coins, though in fact they don't manage to deceive the shopkeeper from whom the man buys a newspaper:
They do deceive an itinerant carrot seller. The class difference between the canny shopkeeper and this street vendor is underscored by the use of a professional actor to play the former and - I am guessing from his acting skills - a real marchand des quatre saisons to play the latter:
The woman in the window watching that transaction is of course a real shop assistant. In the next shot the couple have doubled back and the woman buys bread from that assistant, unchallenged. This scene is paralleled later when the woman to whom the girl gives a counterfeit coin also attempts to buy bread:
Vestimentary difference here points directly to class difference, as we see the misery of the lower-class woman compounded by the crime of the higher-class woman (abetted by her daughter); the shopkeeper not only challenges the poorer woman, she calls the police to have her arrested.
Just as the two mothers are differentiated by dress, so are their daughters. The poor child's dress is ragged and she is bare-headed; the counterfeiter's child is smartly dressed and she wears an elegant hat. As she prepares to go out and play we see her take particular care in affixing her hat:
Clothing also makes a difference for the men in the film. The shopkeeper who spots the counterfeit coin wears a clean white overcoat and polished shoes; the unwary costermonger wears a dusty jacket and dirty boots:
The smarter appearance of the counterfeiter is comparable to that of the detective; their jackets and beards are similar, and our attention is particularly drawn to the similarity of their hats:
The detective is the type of modest bourgeois for whom the counterfeiter would wish to pass, though the detective's watch and chain, stick and topcoat indicate that he is a point or two higher up the scale. Both similarity and difference are emphasised in this climactic vis-à-vis:
The pipe of that emblematic stove between them marks the social difference that separates them. This moment is just before the detective leaves the counterfeiters' home, having found no incriminating evidence. Immediately before, the detective had been chastised by his superior for bringing him and two police officers out on a wild goose chase:
The difference in their clothes signifies a social difference that had not been apparent in an earlier scene between them at the police station, where each was hatless:
If, as I would argue, most of this film is preoccupied with degrees of social distinction, there is one place shown where such distinctions might seem less important. The fortifications were, in reality and in the cinema of the day, a liminal space of both carvivalesque play and unpoliced danger. Here, as one illustration, are the criminal classes at play in La Grève des apaches:
The fortifications in La Fille du faux-monnayeur are at first sight a space of excess, with more than thirty children playing freely, but there is among them at least one adult, and this looks to me more like a school's recreational outing, a moment of policed freedom:
It is also a space overtly marked by social difference, as we see in the foreground the poor mother with her hungry child. We suspect from the outset that the freedom exercised here is only relative, and when the counterfeiters' daughter is arrested it is clear that the forces of oppressive order operate here as much as anywhere:
At the narrative level the illusion of liberty is dispelled. The mise-en-scène is not entirely complicit with this, as we are shown the crowd of child-extras manifesting their joy at participating in a film scene, shouting, breaking the fourth wall and 'playing' with unconstrained freedom:
Order is restored to the mise-en-scène at the end of the first of these shots, as the crowd vacates the open space to leave only the poor woman and her daughter, acting out their misery, an impassive male bystander and, in the distance, a young girl observing everything - actors, extras, camera and crew, i.e. the spectacle of a film being made:
The bystanding man intrigues me. I first thought he was a part of the film crew, positioned in the crowd of extras to keep them in order (relatively), but he is not in the first of the three scenes shot here. In the second he enters the shot in in the far background, crossing behind the crowd of children from right to left:
In the third he re-enters from the left, closer to the crowd, and moves behind it to take up a position to the right, where he is still as the shot ends:
He is not, I think, a member of the cast or crew, nor an anticipated extra, but simply a passerby who, modestly curious about the spectacle in front of him, walks nonchalantly in and out of frame to become, in the final edit, an accidental but poignant effect in a powerful composition - a Barthesian punctum:
The complexity of this image makes it one of my favourite from this period of French cinema. I am grateful to the Filmmuseum for having made available to us all the film in which it figures.