Production
Jacques Feyder received a film commission from two Swiss producers, Dimitri de Zoubaleff and Arthur-Adrien Porchet, who were based in Lausanne, and he offered them Visages d'enfants. Feyder wrote his own original screenplay, assisted by his wife Françoise Rosay, taking a modern and unsentimental view of unhappy childhood and giving a psychologically realistic view of all the characters. He also embedded the story in a "social study of an isolated Catholic community's rituals and customs, in a landscape that alternately separates, endangers, and forces people closer together".
His ambitions for the film were greatly helped by the natural talent of the child actor Jean Forest in the central role; Feyder and Rosay had discovered him in the streets of Montmartre and he had featured in Feyder's previous film Crainquebille. During the spring and summer of 1923 (4 May - 2 August) filming of the many exterior scenes took place in the Haut-Valais and in the village of Grimentz, bringing landscapes prominently into view throughout the film. Feyder's cameraman, Léonce-Henri Burel, who had worked regularly with Abel Gance, achieved some striking visual effects, such as the night scenes of the search party lit by torches (instead of the more usual day for night technique); he also employed a subjective camera viewpoint to depict the onward rush of an avalanche. Local people were used as extras to play peasants and villagers, notably in the funeral and wedding scenes; (many of them had never seen a film or a camera before). Interior scenes were shot at the Studios des Réservoirs at Joinville in Paris (10 August - 6 October). (During shooting at Joinville, Feyder went to Vienna to negotiate his next contract: his wife Françoise Rosay stood in for him as director while he was away.)
After shooting was completed, Feyder had a disagreement with the distribution company Les Grands Films Indépendants, which impounded the film stock from January to May 1924. Feyder had to wait for a nearly a year before he was able to complete the editing. The release of the film did not take place until 1925, two years after work on it had begun.
Read more about this topic: Faces Of Children
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“In the production of the necessaries of life Nature is ready enough to assist man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is part of the educator’s responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and, secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas. The new facts and new ideas thus obtained become the ground for further experiences in which new problems are presented.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)