French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology, 1907-1939. Volume 2: 1929-1939 (French Film Theory & Criticism)
Language: English
Pages: 328
ISBN: 0691000638
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.
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the Communists or toward Action frarn;aise. "38 Or even further to the right of Action frarn;;aise--to the highly II PART ONE 1929-1934 disciplined Croix de feu (commanded by Colonel de la Rocque)3 9 or the circle of writers putting outje suis partout-for, as "a new form of revolt competitive with Marxism," Alice Kaplan writes, fascism constituted a kind of "radical chic" of the early 1930s. 40 French writing on the cinema could hardly escape this ever sharpening division into ideological
1980), 229-35· Several critics also found the potential foe an original German form ofrhe "musical" film in Pabst's Three Penny Opera (1931)--see Louis Chavance, "L'Opira di quat'sous," La Revue du cinema, 22 (May 1931 ), 77-79, and Jean-Paul Dreyfus, "L"Opira di quat'sous," La Revue du cinema, 29 (December 1931), 37-38. 104. See, for instance, Maurice Bardeche and Robert Brasillach, Histoire du cinema, 2d ed. (Paris: Denae!, 1943), 271-72. 105. Jean Epstein, "L'Ordes mers," Cinia-Cine, 9
neither theater nor cinema but something else, as demon- s~cated by (Ruttman's} Melody of the World (1929}, the chase in the swamp ~n (Vidor's} Hallelujah (1929}, the revolt of the beggars in (Pabst's} Three ~enny Opera (1931}, the sound overture of(Chaplin's} City Lights (1931}, and it's true, the clues provided by Rene Clair in Sous /es toits de Paris (1930} and Le Million (1931}. This preference for reasoning and demonstrating at all costs, of explaining and classifying vitiates French film
the theater. The silent is dead, the theater is in its death throes. Let me be precise: I do not mean that the art of the silent is dead or that the art of the theater is dead. No art can die; no social upheaval or catastro129 PART ONE 1929-1934 phe, even geological, would cause Oedipus Rex or Cyrano not to have been written. But a work of art must not only be conceived: its creator must realize it. A ton of marble is needed to sculpt the Venus de Milo; ten pounds of gold for a cup by Cellini;
relationship between the introductory essays and the selected texts. This project was initiated with a summer grant from the Drake University Research Council ( 198 1). During much of the research and writing, I was fortunate to have the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1983-1984). A much-appreciated American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (1986) and a sabbatical leave from Drake University then enabled me to complete the book, while I was working on the