French Cinema and the Great War: Remembrance and Representation (Film and History)

French Cinema and the Great War: Remembrance and Representation (Film and History)

by Marcelline Block (Editor), Marcelline Block (Editor), Barry Nevin (Editor)

Synopsis

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. This volume 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.

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More Information

Format: Illustrated
Pages: 204
Edition: Illustrated
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 01 Apr 2016

ISBN 10: 1442260971
ISBN 13: 9781442260979

Media Reviews
Block and Nevin have put together an excellent, ably edited collection of essays on French cinema and WW I. Though all the usual films that one might expect in such a collection are here, there are also some interesting outliers. One example is experimental filmmaker Germaine Dulac's Le cinema au service de l'histoire (1935), a rediscovered six-reel montage film using newsreels of the period to create a sort of collage of the events of the war. Among the more outre films are Une page de gloire (1915) and The Little American (1917), to say nothing of Philippe de Broca's King of Hearts (1966), originally Le roi de coeur, a romantic comedy (set in the last days of the Great War) in which the inmates of an insane asylum escape and take over a small French village. Of course, no such book would be complete without Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937), perhaps the greatest antiwar film ever made, which is the subject of several essays. Including detailed footnotes, this admirable, compelling volume could also serve as a course text. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. * CHOICE *
[A] fantastic new book. * Culturetheque *
Author Bio
Marcelline Block is lecturer in history at Princeton University. She is the editor of Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema (2010) and author of World Film Locations: Paris (2011). Barry Nevin has lectured on realist cinema and film theory, the classic French cinema (1930-1960), and modern French history. His research on Renoir's pro-colonial propaganda will be published in Studies in French Cinema.