This is an extended analysis of the film, from different perspectives. The first half is largely a discussion of the cinematic technique, with key sequences analyzed shot by shot. The second half approaches the film from many other angles, including its history, the critical reception, Renoir's life and career, and film theory, e.g., film in relation to music. A case is made that Renoir's career was inconsistent, especially after La Regle du jeu but also during the 1930s. And rather than emphasizing the humanist, anti-war thrust of La Grande Illusion, the film is approached as a work of art that is deeply expressive cinematically.
This is an extended analysis of the film, from different perspectives. The first half is largely a discussion of the cinematic technique, with key sequences analyzed shot by shot. The second half approaches the film from many other angles, including its history, the critical reception, Renoir's life and career, and film theory, e.g., film in relation to music. A case is made that Renoir's career was inconsistent, especially after La Regle du jeu but also during the 1930s. And rather than emphasizing the humanist, anti-war thrust of La Grande Illusion, the film is approached as a work of art that is deeply expressive cinematically.
Jean Renoir's 1937 film La Grande Illusion is set during the First World War, but its themes of Franco-German conflict, divided loyalties in a time of war and the rise of anti-Semitism made it compelling and controversial viewing. Julian Jackson traces the film's historical context and its reception history.
Directed by the great Jean Renoir, "La Grande Illusion" (1937) is the finest of all anti-war films and a cinematic masterwork. Other films oppose war by showing its horror. Renoir's film holds the horror at arm's length to give us a clearer view of it. A prisoner-of-war drama, with brilliant performances from leading stars of its period, including Erich von Stroheim and Jean Gabin, the film combines popular appeal with a formal brilliance that allows a complex examination of how classes, nations and genders relate to one another. In this comprehensive and readable companion to the film, Martin O'Shaughnessy underlines its sharp intelligence. He shows how, not content to register the world as it is, the film plays off competing historical possibilities against each other, facing the public with their responsibility to shape the future. Locating the film in the context of Renoir's career, O'Shaughnessy discusses its use of stars, production history, set design and reception. He compares known drafts of the film with a previously undiscovered story outline, casting important new light on its genesis. Stressing how it spoke to its times, he also demonstrates how it speaks to us now.
This thoroughly revised and expanded edition of a key textbook offers an innovative and accessible account of the richness and diversity of French film history and culture from the 1890s to the present day. The contributors, who include leading historians and film scholars, provide an indispensable introduction to key topics and debates in French film history. Each chronological section addresses seven key themes – people, business, technology, forms, representations, spectators and debates, providing an essential overview of the cinema industry, the people who worked in it, including technicians and actors as well as directors, and the culture of cinema going in France from the beginnings of cinema to the contemporary period.
Even a century after its conclusion, the devastation of the Great War still echoes in the work of artists who try to make sense of the political, moral, ideological, and economic changes and challenges it spawned. France, the military major power of the Western Front, carries the legacy of battles on its own soil, and countless French lives lost defending the nation from the Central Powers. It is no surprise that the impact of the First World War can still be seen in French films into the present day. French Cinema and the Great War: Remembrance and Representation provides the first book-length study of World War I as it is featured in French cinema, from the silent era to contemporary films. Presented in three thematic sections—Recording and Remembering the Great War, Women at the Front, and Interrogating Commemoration—the essays in this volume explore the ways in which French film contributes to the restoration and modification of memories of the war. Films such as La Grande Illusion,King of Hearts, A Very Long Engagement, and Joyeux Noel are among those discussed in the volume’s examination of the various ways in which film mediates personal and collective memories of this critical historical event. This volume will be an invaluable resource, not only to those interested in French Cinema or the cinema of the Great War, but also to those interested in the impacts of war, more generally, on the cultural output of nations torn by the violence, death, and destruction of military conflict.
The essays in this anthology probe and comment on the "space/time/issue between" in aesthetic or linguistic productions in a variety of cultures. For over three decades the Southeast Conference on Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Film (SCFLLF), which convenes biennially, has been and continues to be a showcase for scholarship in the Humanities with a special emphasis on non-English language area studies. In 2018, at the 23rd SCFLLF, fifty-three national and international scholars presented their research on linguistics, literature, film, culture, and language pedagogy. The essays we selected to showcase all probe and comment on the “space/time/issue between” in aesthetic or linguistic productions in a variety of cultures. We have organized these contributions in three parts entitled: Part I: Between Fiction and "Reality," Part II: Between Continuity and Transformation, and Part III: Between Conformity and Resistance.
Reassessing the unique qualities of Renoir's influential visual style by interpreting his films through Gilles Deleuze's film philosophy, and through previously unpublished production files, Barry Nevin provides a fresh and accessible interdisciplinary perspective that illuminates both the consistency and diversity of Renoir's oeuvre.
Are the social sciences a dying fire? This book skilfully lays out how, apart from their misguided approach to knowledge production and specializations, social sciences continue to remain prisoners of a prescribed historical, cultural and anthropogenic narrative.
