INTRODUCTION

It is nearly impossible to commence this chapter without remarking upon the coincidence that Marcel Pagnol's birth in 1895 in Aubagne, Provence, occurred in the same year that his countrymen Auguste and Louis Lumière held the first public screenings of their cinematograph in Paris. Yet Brett Bowles reminds readers that this pleasing accident of chronology was not necessarily ‘a sign that Pagnol’s fate was somehow cosmically intertwined with cinema’ (2012a: 10). Bowles indicates that while Pagnol's family history did not readily suggest a nascent facility for any particular art form, including the newest, what was to prove remarkable was his success across several media and roles. For Pagnol would achieve acclaim as a novelist, playwright, film producer and director, becoming one of France's leading cultural figures of the twentieth century. Unusually for an instance of adaptation, the films examined in this chapter have not followed the familiar trajectory of novel-film, but rather film-novel-film; an adaptive journey that reflects Pagnol's identity as a multimedia author. Responding to Pagnol’s original 1952 film, itself a version edited down significantly from his desired vision of the story, André Bazin wrote that ‘in Manon of the Springs, with his inspiration finally at its peak – he gave Provence its universal epic’ (1995: 204). Hence, even before the novels that gave rise to the adaptations examined here, Pagnol and this story were inextricably associated with Provence. Pagnol later novelised his own Manon into L’eau des collines (The Water of the Hills) in 1962. Finally, in 1986 – eleven years after his death – the constituent stories of L’eau des collines were adapted as the films Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. They achieved both critical and commercial success, nationally and internationally, though it was domestically that they achieved their greatest box office success, running for seventy and fifty-eight weeks respectively, and selling 7.2 and 6.6 million tickets, making them the most popular films of that year (Bowles 2012a: 237). Importantly, the films were also a notable example of a concerted effort on the part of the French government of the time to support and promote cinema that foregrounded French history and culture, especially in the face of competition from anglophone filmmakers.