The Metamorphosis of Zola's Aesthetics in Jean Renoir's and Fritz Lang's Adaptations of La bête humaine

Résumé En

This extensive number of film adaptations shows that the visual and dramatic richness of Zola’s text is particularly suited to cinema. However, a comparison of Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938) and Fritz Lang’s Human Desire (1954) reveals that Zola’s aesthetics and the human dimension of the story are replaced by a social ideology in Renoir’s version, and reduced to a love triangle in Lang’s film. This re-interpretation corresponds to Renoir’s faith in Le Front Populaire despite the dark socio-historical context (Hitler had started to invade Europe); while for Lang, it refers to a prosperous and conspicuous Puritan America in which the consequences of McCarthyism, racial tensions, and the Korean War seemed to have been obliterated. This article proposes to explore how, in both films, a greater social optimism paradoxically leads to a progressive weakening of the violence of Zola’s text and its aesthetics.