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France: Poetic Realism, Jean Renoir, and the Popular Front 1930s

France: Poetic Realism, Jean Renoir, and the Popular Front 1930s. Lecture 21. Mode of Production: How does the decentralized structure explain the quality of French filmmaking?. Companies were competing rather than cooperating Small film companies 285 small film companies made 1 film apiece

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France: Poetic Realism, Jean Renoir, and the Popular Front 1930s

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  1. France: Poetic Realism, Jean Renoir, and the Popular Front1930s Lecture 21

  2. Mode of Production:How does the decentralized structure explain the quality of French filmmaking? • Companies were competing rather than cooperating • Small film companies • 285 small film companies made 1 film apiece • Largest company made 64 films throughout the decade (c.f. to Paramount: 64 films yearly) • Restricted division of labor (fewer people to do the more jobs) • More directorial control

  3. Poetic Realism, mid-1930s • Not a unified movement, a tendency • Moody, romantic, atmospheric, pessimistic • Featuring socially marginal characters (realism) who face tragic ends (poetic) • Paul Rotha: “[These films] all focused on the individual against a background of poverty, crime, and violence…These misty waterfronts and low dives were excellently rendered and photographed, but their ‘life’ was a subjective one…Beautifully made, sensitively acted, they were films of defeat…” (quoted in Andrew 11) • Three directors: • Marcel Carné: Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938) • JulienDuviver: Pépé le Moko(1936) • Jean Renoir: Toni (1935), LaBête humanine (1938)

  4. Jean Renoir: The Grand Illusion • Auteurist approach • Triumph of the “cinematic” over the script • Long take • Average Shot Length (ASL) • Mobile camera • Deep focus • Biography (ex: membership in the Communist Party) • Contextualist approach • Relation to the Popular Front • Methods of collaboration and improvisation • Reworkings of the script (by Charles Spaak)

  5. Jean Renoir: Deep Focus

  6. Popular Front, 1934-1938 • Depression • Pre-1934: leftist parties did not cooperate (esp. French Communist Party-PCF) • Stalin changed positions in 1934: national unity against fascism more important than revolution • 1936: Popular Front won legislative elections • Government formed under Léon Blum (French Section of the Workers’ International—SFIO) • PCF cooperated with non-working class groups • Embrace on left of national symbols • Collapse of Popular Front • Disagreement over pacifism: to fight fascism abroad or not? • PCF: against compromise with Hitler (Munich Agreement)

  7. Grand Illusion: A tension? ‘Vertical’ frontiers of nation less important than ‘horizontal’ frontiers of class And The film aims to reject the idea that “everything which is national (‘La Marseillaise,’ the Unknown Soldier, in this case prisoners of war) belongs exclusively to the fascists.” (Jackson 80) And Boeldieu and von Raffenstein: heroes of the film? Did “Renoir the artist prevail over Renoir the ideologue”? (79)

  8. Frontiers of nation (vertical) and class (horizontal)

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