Head in the Clouds: The Cinema of Albert Lamorisse

In the history of cinema, French director Albert Lamorisse is a unique figure. His intense focus on three subjects—children, animals, and flight—is distinctive, and the fact that all of his works clock in under ninety minutes (and most under an hour) further marks him as anomalous. The films’ short run times may be related to Lamorisse usually having children in mind as his audience, but they may also be due to the painstaking, risk-running nature of these productions; every moment on-screen was a struggle to capture. For an artist so widely associated with family-friendly fare, he was remarkably drawn to toil and danger.

Born in Paris in 1922, Lamorisse was a daydreamer in his youth, unable to focus in school. Nothing seemed to interest him—until he discovered film. After graduating from France’s national film school in 1945, he headed to Tunisia, where he helped photograph a documentary short, Kairouan, and then made his own, Djerba (1947), about the potters on that island. While there, he also hatched the idea for his first fiction piece, Bim, the Little Donkey (1951), in which a boy named Abdallah must fight to stop his beloved donkey from being stolen, first by a spoiled rich boy, then by criminals.

Bim immediately established the director’s meticulous approach: he spent a year planning it and four months shooting it—an extravagant schedule for a short film, one might think, but perhaps essential for a production with a cast consisting almost entirely of children and animals. Lamorisse reported that the baby donkeys used in the film drank fifty-five bottles of milk a day. However, he added, what he’d heard about donkeys being stubborn, stupid, and truculent was not to be trusted; he had nothing but praise for the discipline of his four-legged thespians. “I am,” Lamorisse said, “a friend of the donkey more than any animal.”

The film is reminiscent of the work of the Children’s Film Foundation, a charitable concern in Britain that between 1951 and 1988 made shortish features for and with children, frequently presenting empowering scenarios in which kids triumph over wicked adults, often gangs of thieves, as occurs in Bim. The title donkey in Lamorisse’s film is a rather passive character, like Robert Bresson’s Balthazar, generally reduced to the status of a prop. But the sight of the little fellow nestled in the arms of young Abdallah is adorable.

Made with documentary simplicity on real locations with untrained performers, Bim also has a contradictory fairy-tale quality, brought out in the narration by Jacques Prévert. A poet and screenwriter whose most celebrated film work is his screenplay for Marcel Carné’s 1945 classic Children of Paradise, Prévert was impressed enough by an early edit of Bim to join the team. While midcentury French films shot in North Africa were often tainted with a colonialist attitude, Lamorisse keeps exoticism to a minimum. He hired Algerian composer Mohamed Iguerbouchen to write the music, which imparts a certain authenticity to the charming fantasy. An official selection at the Cannes Film Festival, Bim became a huge success.

Lamorisse’s next film, White Mane (1953), is another equine tale with a boy protagonist, this one played by the hauntingly beautiful twelve-year-old Alain Emery. (The character’s younger brother is played by the director’s son, Pascal, the lead actor in two later films by his father.) Again, the story hinges on a problem of possession: the antagonists are adults who capture and break wild horses. But the increases in the filmmaker’s skill and ambition are striking. Edmond Séchan’s cinematography captures southern France’s Camargue wetland in stark but lambent wildness, yielding extraordinary passages that manage to be both painterly and documentary-like—including a dream sequence in which the boy and his horse are shot against a flat, featureless sea so that their figures are doubled by the glassy water, white on white on white. Lamorisse approached this black-and-white film as if nobody had ever made one before. The landscape, the costumes, and the casting of a blond boy alongside his pale creature all combine to create an aura of white gold.

As in Bim, the adult characters are less convincingly played than the kids but are minor enough for that not to matter. With its shades of potential tragedy, White Mane’s ending would surely have been unacceptable in any studio-made children’s film of the period, but one can easily imagine young viewers appreciating its double-edged meaning: a shot of boy and horse swimming deeper and deeper into the sea hints at the possibility of death, while the voice-over frames the image as a fairy-tale happy ending.

White Mane won the Grand Prix for Best Short Film at Cannes, and its success allowed Lamorisse to continue producing his own work with complete freedom. Preparing a project about bear cubs in the Alps, however, he was injured in an avalanche and laid up for months. He then threw himself into making The Red Balloon (1956), a film he had been thinking about for six years.

During production, meticulous preparation and inspired improvisations went hand in hand. Each of the movie’s three sections was made with its own lighting plan, though the crew didn’t even use a reflector and nature supplied the illumination: overcast skies for the introduction, moody backlight for the chase, and, finally, full sunlight bathing the world in an explosion of color.

When it rained on set—there was no shelter in this film of exteriors—Lamorisse came up with the idea of young Pascal (played by his son) asking passersby to cover his balloon with their umbrellas, while the director captured the action with a more or less concealed camera. The population of Paris’s Ménilmontant neighborhood became unwitting costars.

“As for the special effect used for Pascal’s red balloon, it’s so easy that it’s no use talking about it,” Lamorisse said. But the discreet wirework is incredibly effective. Like Pixar’s iconic desk-lamp character Luxo Jr., the balloon, technically an inanimate object, becomes a screen personality because its movement so clearly tells us what it’s thinking.

André Bazin admired Lamorisse’s film because editing wasn’t used to fake any of the balloon’s behavior: everything happens before our eyes, without leaving it to us to decipher the magic from separate pieces of footage. (In fact, almost all of Lamorisse’s contemporaries liked the film, except for François Truffaut, who seems to have regarded the subject of childhood as his own personal domain.)

Lamorisse’s fantasy stands in stark contrast to the moody films of the nouvelle vague, which emerged a couple of years later. He was already just as much an auteur as Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette would soon become, but the whimsy of his work put him in some other, ill-defined category. When an interviewer asked him, “Do you feel part of a school of filmmaking?” he answered, “Yes, a school of truants.” A friend described him as “a man continually on vacation.” He resisted absorption by the movie industry, working only when he felt the burning need. Money supplied film for the cameras, but love—or obsession—made them roll.

The death of The Red Balloon’s titular object is one of the most shocking and heartbreaking scenes in children’s cinema, up there with the death of Bambi’s mother—more painful and lingering, too, since it occurs in complete silence. But somehow Lamorisse gets away with shifting from this tragedy to the film’s literally uplifting finish, in which Pascal, ably impersonated by a lifelike dummy, takes flight over the Paris rooftops, rescued from reality by all the balloons of the city.

“Everybody in the area, scared, thought it was actually their little friend,” recalled Lamorisse. “And Pascal, next to me, caught up in his fantasy, kept touching his pocket. He was afraid we forgot to put a note with his address in there and he’d be irretrievably lost.”

Taken together, White Mane and The Red Balloon seem to establish Lamorisse’s entire cinematic philosophy, ultimately revealing it to be a shade darker than it might at first appear. The films are narratively similar, and both suggest that the world at large, though beautiful, is no fit place for a child. And yet they are both often seen as upbeat—a testament to their charm, which partially conceals their melancholy undertones.

Lamorisse reportedly wanted to end The Red Balloon with the young hero flying to Africa but was frustrated by the poor quality of photography possible from helicopters. So, with characteristic dedication, he set about improving the available technology. Working with marine gyroscope specialist Jean Fieux, Lamorisse developed the Hélivision, an antivibration mount that allows film cameras to shoot more smoothly from helicopters, by way of a three-axis stabilization system. This innovation is only one example of Lamorisse’s tendency to unite his creative instincts with a sound business head. That quality is evident in his noncinematic work as well: in 1957, he invented the board game Risk, which is still played around the world.

The critical and commercial triumph of The Red Balloon culminated in an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay; not only was the win an unprecedented feat for a film with almost no dialogue, it also marked the only time a major Academy Award has gone to a short.

Lamorisse next turned to his first feature project, Stowaway in the Sky (1960), and as with the short films that preceded it, its premise is appealingly simple: an inventor (André Gille) and his grandson (Pascal again) undertake a flight across the whole of France in a balloon powered by a miraculous new form of air.

The director’s stabs at creating narrative tension in Stowaway are so fleeting and arbitrary, the film shouldn’t work at all, yet it does. The slender story allows Lamorisse to concentrate on his main objective: revealing the world to us in a new way. And what the movie achieves is indeed far removed from the conventions of commercial cinema and the usual aesthetic of kids’ films. Before this, Disney had flirted with nature documentaries, on the basis that children love animals and (maybe) scenery, but this fictional travelogue—which features no special effects, save those that could be performed life-size and out in the world—feels more radical. The cinematography creates new possibilities for CinemaScope, and poetically brings the format back to France, where it was first developed in the 1920s. One of the great effects of ’Scope is the way it accentuates the feeling of movement—it seems perverse that early widescreen films nailed the camera to the floor and lined up actors across the screen as if hung from a clothesline. Defying gravity, Lamorisse liberated his camera-eye to soar like a bird, executing impossible tracking shots in the sky.

The story of Circus Angel is an odd assemblage: after a circus’s resident mad scientist attaches wings to him, Fifi feuds with a lion tamer for the hand of a romantic interest (the first female character of any importance in a Lamorisse film), steals an array of clocks (the focus on clock theft is baffling but becomes peculiarly funny as the joke goes on . . . and on), and tries to play Cupid for a lovelorn, suicidal jeweler.

Of course, this is another film about flight, this time essentially unassisted—the kind of flying you dream about. Lamorisse approached the problem of making us believe that a man can soar through the air with one of his customary shows of dedication: a year of preparation. He had the honesty of someone with a background in documentary, which explains his aversion to trick photography: he had to stage his effects practically. But maneuvering a man on wires is harder than controlling the movements of a balloon. The results are impressive, but they were not without risk. As Lamorisse recalled, “One day, suspended more than fifty feet above the ground, Philippe Avron narrowly avoided crashing to the ground because a rope jammed.”

The film has more characters and dialogue than Lamorisse’s previous works, though he still keeps the talk minimal, favoring long sequences of largely wordless action. He worked from an outline and let the actors improvise, avoiding rehearsal to maintain freshness.

Circus Angel’s failure to reach as wide an audience as that of previous Lamorisse films may have been partly due to the shiftiness of its protagonist—Fifi doesn’t seem like someone who should be the hero in a kid’s film. And yet, according to Lamorisse, this was a movie that required the public to submit to it without thinking too much, and to do that you might need to be a child.

The looseness and extreme simplicity of Lamorisse’s stories should militate against their finding perfect conclusions, but they always do: Fifi walking off with his wife and child, who has inherited his wings, making him a literal cherub, is a beautiful moment, poetic in its illogic, dreamlike even with its straight-faced realism. And, for the first time, a Lamorisse hero—despite his juvenile, antisocial nature—finds a place in the world where he can settle into life.

Since Stowaway in the Sky, Lamorisse had become evangelical about filmed flight, and the Hélivision—which, by the midsixties, had been showcased in major Hollywood films such as Goldfinger and The Sound of Music—was crucial to Lamorisse’s final three films, all of which are documentaries on geographical themes. For Paris jamais vu (1967), he soared over Paris, and for Versailles, from the same year, he shot the palace from a bird’s-eye view. The latter film caught the attention of a noted cinephile, the shah of Iran, who commissioned Lamorisse to capture his kingdom from the same divine perspective. The resulting project, The Lovers’ Wind (shot in 1970 but released in 1978), tells the story of Iran’s terrain and culture from the point of view of its mythic wind spirits.

After Lamorisse had completed an early version of the film, the shah requested additions: he wanted more of the modern side of Iran—colleges, factories, the U.S.-supplied nuclear power station. The director agreed to continue working, but during filming above the Karaj Dam, near Tehran, the helicopter provided by the air force hit a web of suspended cables and plunged into the waters below, sinking 150 meters with the pilot, the copilot, Lamorisse, and cinematographer Guy Tabary on board. Pascal Lamorisse, aged twenty at the time, was an assistant on the project and witnessed the crash from the base of the dam. Working with his mother, he went on to complete the film according to his father’s wishes.

The body of work that Albert Lamorisse left behind may be small, but his achievement can’t be fully measured in feet of footage. “Astonish me” is advice that was once famously given by a mentor to Jean Cocteau—and the fact that Lamorisse’s filmography contains a great number of astonishing feats makes him akin to that great surrealist, perhaps the French director with whom he had the most in common. Lamorisse gave his illusions the conviction of reality, and he made the real world seem as miraculous as myth. His eye transformed what it fell on, unlocking the extraordinary. His work gets at something central to cinematic pleasure: our urge to see the world represented honestly, and then given a gentle turn into fantasy. “I’m happy,” Lamorisse said, “to have been able to free cinema from earth.”

The author would like to thank Christine Leteux for her help with research and translation.