Marcel PAGNOL

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Marcel Pagnol was born in Aubagne on February 28, 1895. Only a few miles away, Auguste and Louis Lumière were immortalizing the arrival of a train in the little station at La Ciotat...

Never did Pagnol write that the camera was a mode of expression inferior to the pen. All his life he would never stop working in both art forms. When he created his own publishing house in 1937, one of his first initiatives was to publish the scripts of the films he produced or directed. The collection was entitled, "Films to read," and included the complete text, as if it was a play text.

In 1932, after the film of Marius and just before Fanny, Pagnol founded his own production company and built his own studio facilities, complete with laboratories, sound stages, scenery shops and editing rooms. His technicians and collaborators were paid on a monthly basis. This Cinecitta of Marseille was to produce such films as César, Le Schpountz, The Baker's Wife and The Welldigger's Daughter.

Later, he fulfilled the dream of a Provencal Hollywood and bought the Chateau de la Buzine along with several hectares near Marseilles. But the hardships of the Occupation forced him to relinquish his Hollywood dream. He went back to the scrublands of his childhood memories and in 1945 began a series of new masterpieces amid the springs and the fennel. Pagnol's films are an invitation to flee the ridicule of an artificial world, the hubbub of civilization. Through his characters, he enlists our sympathies in a search for lost innocence. There is something of the noble savage in his protagonists.

His barkeeps, his pure-hearted single mothers, his candid bakers, his big-hearted welldiggers. It is a world on the fringe, existing in a permanent state of grace. Everyone talks and from time to time they all speak at once... but it is always with an open heart.