The banlieue in French cinema of the 1930s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Reader
Keyword(s):  
Social Geography ◽  
Dual Function ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Jean Renoir ◽  
Anatole Litvak

Assessing popular comedies and dramas, the author argues that in 1930s French cinema the banlieue is an ‘imagined community’ that resists transfer to a map. Its dual function as a space of social relegation and popular entertainment correlates to a specifically Parisian social geography where the affluent, verdant west contrasts sharply with the industrial northeast. Suburban locales allow the exploration of themes ranging from proletarian downfall (Le Jour se lève, Marcel Carné 1939) and murder (Cœur de Lilas, Anatole Litvak 1932) to open-air pleasure-seeking (Partie de campagne, Jean Renoir, 1936/1946) and the socialising dimension of popular song. By bringing together a variegated set of films from the left-leaning screenplays of Jacques Prévert to the Pétainist Notre-Dame de la Mouise (Robert Péguy, 1941), the author probes the tension inherent in the imagined banlieue between work and play, riches and poverty, redemption and despoilment.

“The Music Has Something to Say”: The Musical Revisions of L'Atalante (1934)

2015 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 559-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Technological Changes ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
General Anxiety ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
Initial Release ◽  
Recent Arrival ◽  
Potential Impact

L'Atalante (1934), the second collaboration between experimental French filmmaker Jean Vigo and composer Maurice Jaubert, has become a staple in the cinephile canon. But its profound influence on postwar filmmakers could not have been anticipated at the time of its disastrous initial release. As Vigo lay on his deathbed, the film's producers, finding L'Atalante narratively incoherent, attempted to make it more broadly accessible, replacing parts of Jaubert's score with the popular song “Le chaland qui passe” and renaming the film after the hit tune. These changes subtly altered an important narrative subtext of the film—a reflexive fixation on the recent arrival of synchronized sound film, expressed through a focus on musical playback technologies (phonographs, radios, and music boxes) and their ability to captivate. In this article, through a comparative analysis of scenes from L'Atalante (which has subsequently been restored) and Le chaland qui passe (the only surviving copy of which is housed at the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique), I show how the differences between the two versions reflect a general anxiety over the arrival of sound film in France. Vigo's fascination with mediated music and its ability to create a magical cinematic world, and the distributors' attempt to fit the film's music into a commercially successful paradigm, reflect contemporary concerns about the potential impact of mediated sound on French cinema. Through my analysis, I demonstrate how film practitioners grappled with technological changes, using music as a powerful interventional force.

“The Music Has Something to Say”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Popular Song ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Sound Film ◽  
Initial Release

Chapter 6 focuses on a well-known case of conflict surrounding a film’s music: the beloved 1934 film L’Atalante. The second collaboration between experimental filmmaker Jean Vigo and film composer Maurice Jaubert, L’Atalante had a disastrous initial release. In an attempt to make the film more broadly accessible, the producers edited the film substantially, replacing parts of Jaubert’s score with the popular song “Le Chaland qui passe.” In altering the soundtrack, they altered an important narrative subtext: a reflexive fixation on synchronized sound film, expressed through a focus on the magic of musical playback technologies. This chapter traces the differences between the two versions of L’Atalante, arguing that Vigo’s fascination with mediated music, and the producers’ attempt to fit the film’s music into a commercially successful paradigm, reflects continuing concerns from both sides about how mediated sound would affect French cinema in the mid-1930s.

Silencing and Sounding the Voice in Transition-Era French Cinema

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-53
Keyword(s):  
Recording Medium ◽  
Silent Cinema ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Sound Effects ◽  
Jean Renoir ◽  
Speaking Voice ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Classical Hollywood ◽  
Shed Light

This essay examines two contrasting aesthetics of the voice in early 1930s French cinema and the role that music played in each. Filmed theater, or théâtre filmé, emerged from the conception that sound cinema was primarily a recording medium. In French theatrical adaptations, the speaking voice took precedence over all other elements of the soundtrack. The author argues, however, that in théâtre filmé, speech takes on almost musical qualities, folding music and sound effects into the voice itself. Avant-garde filmmakers took a contrasting approach, rejecting the restriction of camera movement imposed by the theatrical model and hoping to recapture some of the visual freedom characteristic of silent cinema. These filmmakers told their stories with as little spoken dialogue as possible, incorporating music prominently into their soundtracks in order to silence the speaking voice. Though the intent may have been to strip the voice of its dominance within the soundtrack, these directors’ strategic denial of the voice often granted it a much greater significance. By examining early experiments with the voice on the soundtrack in the transition years—including those by Jean Renoir, René Clair, and Jean Grémillon—the author’s analysis expands the concept of “vococentrism,” as articulated by Michel Chion and David Neumeyer, to include different models of understanding the voice in cinema beyond those found in classical Hollywood and helps shed light on competing conceptions of the voice’s role in cinema before practices became codified.

Thebanlieuein French cinema of the 1930s

2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 387-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Reader
Keyword(s):  
Close Attention ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Anatole Litvak

This article looks at representations of the banlieue in the cinema of the 1930s – a period before the term banlieue was synonymous with deprivation and violence as, especially since Matthieu Kassowitz’s 1995 film La Haine, it has subsequently tended to become. The work of Claude Autant-Lara and Maurice Lehmann ( Fric-Frac, Circonstances atténuantes) and that of Anatole Litvak ( Cœur de Lilas) receive close attention along with two more widely known films, Marcel Carné’s tragic Le Jour se lève, whose banlieue is topographically unsituated but could well be Parisian, and Jean Renoir’s Partie de campagne where the countryside near Paris provides the setting for two bucolic idylls that offer a different, less grim view of the banlieue than that nowadays current.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

Early Cinema in Scotland

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
The Social ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Audience

This collection of essays, drawn from a three-year AHRC research project, provides a detailed context for the history of early cinema in Scotland from its inception in 1896 till the arrival of sound in the early 1930s. It details the movement from travelling fairground shows to the establishment of permanent cinemas, and from variety and live entertainment to the dominance of the feature film. It addresses the promotion of cinema as a socially ‘useful’ entertainment, and, distinctively, it considers the early development of cinema in small towns as well as in larger cities. Using local newspapers and other archive sources, it details the evolution and the diversity of the social experience of cinema, both for picture goers and for cinema staff. In production, it examines the early attempts to establish a feature film production sector, with a detailed production history of Rob Roy (United Films, 1911), and it records the importance, both for exhibition and for social history, of ‘local topicals’. It considers the popularity of Scotland as an imaginary location for European and American films, drawing their popularity from the international audience for writers such as Walter Scott and J.M. Barrie and the ubiquity of Scottish popular song. The book concludes with a consideration of the arrival of sound in Scittish cinemas. As an afterpiece, it offers an annotated filmography of Scottish-themed feature films from 1896 to 1927, drawing evidence from synopses and reviews in contemporary trade journals.

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