The lawyers of 1930s and the question of the rights of the director of cinematographic works: a juridico-historical approach, through the example of the ``business'' of The Yellow Cruise (1931-1934) In memory of Agnes Sauvage

The question of the authorship of cinematographic works was widely debated during the 1930s. Even today, this topic continues to provide lawyers and art historians with a particularly interesting illustration of the difficulty for the law of comprehending what encapsulates the essence of a specific form of artistic expression, such as cinematography, in order to determine the authorship of the work. Before the 1957 Act, which recognized the director's authorship rights, the jurisprudential trend was clearly in favour of the thesis of the producer as the author or co-author of a film. There are many reasons for this situation : the main one being the central role of the producer in the movie ``business'' (more visible than what, in our opinion, forms the heart of the matter, namely its style or language), and in disputes arising from the distribution of films. Nevertheless, a significant number of books written during the period 1927-1935 show genuine curiosity about what film art really is, and an early interest in that still unknown entity, the director. As directors are often bound to producers by business contracts describing them as simple contract workers, they need to be particularly persistent if they are to achieve recognition as artists. As this situation undermines the status of someone who was not even always mentioned in the credits during the early days of film, it may well have had very serious consequences on the careers of certain directors, including Andre Sauvage, the first great French documentary film-maker and a friend of the Surrealists Man Ray and Robert Desnos, who was also greatly admired by Jean Renoir and the Prevert brothers. His 1931 film The Yellow Cruise (La croisiere jaune) remains one of the greatest scientific, technical, artistic and cinematographic adventures of that era. The documentary film of this mission, entirely conceived by Andre Sauvage, should have been his masterpiece. But fate decided otherwise. The film had barely been completed when it was taken from him and diverted from its original purpose by the Citroen company, the original backer of the project. The automobile firm bought the film from the Pathe-Natan production company, which had employed Sauvage, and handed it over to another director, Leon Poirier. The tragedy of the artist then began : the documentary film director lost all of his work - all aspects of directing, filming, and editing the film were mutilated by Poirier, whose re-editing, cuts and new soundtrack murdered the spirit of the film. The ethnographic and humanistic work of Sauvage became nothing more than a simple advertisement for Citroen vehicles. Disheartened by legal proceedings that had no chance of success against the biggest industrial enterprise in France, Andre Sauvage retired from the profession and became a farmer.