Albert Lamorisse | Crin-Blanc (White Mane) / 1953

children, listen up!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Albert Lamorisse (original scenario, adapted by Denys Colomb de Daunant with commentary by Lamorisse [in French] and James Agee [in English]), Albert Lamorisse (director) Crin-Blanc (White Mane) / 1953

 

Described most often as a children’s film, and certainly a film I would encourage any child to see, Albert Lamorisse’s gentle fable Crin-Blanc (White Mane) is a far deeper and darker work beyond its surface grace and beauty.

      A young fishing boy living near the marshes of Camargue, France where bands of wild horses run free, observes a group of local ranchers attempting to capture some of the horses, in particular a beautiful stallion, the Crin-Blanc of White Mane of the film’s title. The boy, Folco (Alain Emery), living with his grandfather, observes in silence as the magnificent horse outraces their attempts to capture him, although they eventually do so by entrapping him on all sides and bringing him into their corral with other horses.

      But soon after the stallion escapes, and the intensely interested boy, dressed all in white, like the stallion’s mane, watches again as the ranchers try to capture the beast.

      When the ranchers near his grandfather’s humble shack, he asks them if he has the white horse. The tease him with a reply of “Yes,” adding “but first you have to catch him, but your fish will grow wings before you can manage that.”

     Their dismissal hardly effects the young boy who, we observe, loves animals, and now dreams of being able to stroke and groom the grand white horse.

       At one point the boy encounters the horse again, and gets quite near him before Crin-Blanc races off. The boy gets near once more and attempts to rope him, the stallion galloping off with the boy still at the other end of the rope, dragging him for a long while through the marshes unto a dry beach where the boy is left, having almost been killed in the process. Yet here White Mane stops and approaches the boy, nuzzling him back to life, and allowing the boy to stroke him, as if in reward for the child’s valiant efforts.

 

     The boy rides the horse for a short while until seeing a wild hare which will provide dinner jumps off the horse in chase of the rabbit. The moment Crin-Blanc again hears the hooves the rancher’s horses he is off.

      Once again the horse is captured by the ranchers. In his absence he has been replaced as the lead of the pack by another horse. The two engage in a long, terrifying dual for dominance in which they brutally kick, bite, and stomp at one another, the white maned stallion losing the battle before he again escapes, returning to the boy, who washes and mends his damaged hoof and feeds him.

 

      This time the ranchers, from a distance can see that boy has captured the horse, but nonetheless race toward him determined to make the horse their own. Crin-Blanc speeds away, hiding in the marsh weeds. In order to force him out, the adults set a fire in the brush. Seeing the smoke from far off, Folco rushes to the distant bushes, jumping upon the horses back and leading him out of the fires as the ranchers chase them over beaches of a nearby river.

        With Folco on his back, White Mane rides into the sea, the men yelling for the boy and his horse to return to shore. The film ends as the narrator states that White Mane took Folco to an island where horses and children can be friends forever.

        Certainly, children can interpret than as a storied wonderland, but realize given the final imagines of the boy’s head bobbing in the deep waters that the voyage will mean their literal death.

 

       In the end I share the sentiments of the Washington Post critic of the day, Philip Kennicot, that, as Stephen Sondheim might have put it, “children will listen” to a much darker message embedded in this movie: “A boy and his horse are hunted down by adult ranchers — while a narrator makes vague promises of a better world to come. The beautiful imagery of [the film] is deployed in support of a moral system — a blunt promise of rewards for good behavior — not much more sophisticated than that of Santa and the Easter Bunny. Ah, the time-honored tradition of adults indoctrinating kids in a world-view that will lead only to bitter disappointment, unless the kids refuse to grow up.”

      Yet, there are even deeper messages in this film that won’t be obvious to most adults, but will to the children “who listen.” Folco is in love with a beast with whom he should not be, and in the process he has become an outsider to the dominant and most certainly heterosexual normative society surrounding him. The gentle love he has for an animal might as well be for another of his own species, male or female, who is unaccepted by normative society. This is not gay film specifically, but it certainly is a queer one, the boy loving something he’s not permitted to, and punished for that love, ostracized, bullied, even made subject to possible death for his innate love.

      Horses have often represented alternate sexual possibilities for young women, usually connecting them to the lesbian world. But so too have they been connected to young males such as in this film and the later Equus (1977), wherein a young boy associates a beautiful man to whom he was attracted and the horse he rode, turning all horses in his mind into god-like beings who can see his sexual attraction to them and, subconsciously, to the men who ride them. Here, White Mane stands for an alternate world to the macho possibilities that the youth must face which include the taming and controlling of all sexual passions, just as in Equus or in an even later film, Carroll Ballard’s Black Stallion (1979). Crin-Blanc represents a kind of uncontrollable passion, a love that is not part of the heteronormative world in which the boy exists. Obviously, I am an adult pruriently reading into an children’s fable.

      A child doesn’t to be told or even possibly comprehend this, he feels it through his body, his heart, his inner essence. No need to analyze this young man’s love of the white-maned horse and the free male world he represents. But children understand when one desperately needs something they’re told that they cannot possibly ever have. Love expresses itself in many guises. Just ask Zeus and all the other Greek gods. Even a balloon can serve as an object of outsider love—although I won’t go there, at least in this essay. Let us just say that Lamorisse’s children’s fables mean something to adults because of the magic relationship to the world that as a child is so intense to be almost sexual that they have lost. Even Martin, the psychologist of Equus knew that if he explained it to the boy, it would be tragically gone from his life forever.

      This film won the Palme d’Or for a short film, and Lamorisse’s short of three years later, The Red Balloon (1956) was awarded the Palme d'Or du court métrage as well as the prize for Best Screenwriting from Academy Awards in 1957. The director when on to make 3 feature films and 3 documentaries. Working on a fourth documentary in Iran, Le Vent des amoureux (The Lovers' Wind) he died in a helicopter crash in 1978 at the age of 48.

 

Los Angeles, July 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).