poetic realism

French cinema between 1930 and 1945 built its ports and back streets on a studio floor, sending in fog machines and painted flats for docks nobody could rent for a shoot, then lit and shot them until the artifice read as weather. The films ran alongside a political current: the Popular Front, an anti-fascist coalition of the French left, held government from 1936 to 1938, and the camera kept siding with the people that coalition claimed to speak for, the factory workers and the unemployed and the men sleeping in port towns they cannot leave. Port of Shadows puts the fatalism on a stopwatch: a deserter arrives in Le Havre at night with no papers and no plan, and meets a seventeen-year-old already claimed by three other men, in a story that only tightens from there. Jean Vigo carries the same claim into a marriage instead of a crime: a new bride gets bored of the river barge her husband captains, slips off to Paris for a night out, and L'Atalante spends its last act on the grief that follows. Jean Renoir turns the claim on his own class, letting a weekend shooting party at a country estate expose the aristocrats and the servants by the same rules in The Rules of the Game. Julien Duvivier traps a Paris gangster in the Casbah in Pépé le Moko, homesick for exactly as long as staying there is the only thing keeping him alive. The light is gorgeous and everyone standing in it knows how this goes.

Distinguish from Film Noir inherited poetic realism's fatalism and visual atmosphere but Americanized it into crime genre with harder-edged cynicism. Italian Neorealism took the working-class subject matter and location-shooting impulse but stripped away the poetic stylization in favor of documentary rawness.