RENEWED INTEREST IN THE POPULAR FRONT

Most surveys of film history written before the 1970s cover Rene Clair’s work, Poetic Realism, and the Occupation— but not the Popular Front. This brief, but important, movement drew attention mainly in the late 1960s and after, when there was a renewed interest in critical political cinema (see Chapter 23). In particular, La Vie est a nous and La Marseillaise, which had been treated simply as examples of Jean Renoir’s work, have been examined in their political contexts.

An early study (1966) of the Popular Front cinema is Geffredo Fofi’s “The Cinema of the Popular Front in France (1934-1938),” translated in Screen 13, no. 3 (winter 1972/1973): 5-57. A collective text on La Vie est a nous appeared in Cahiers du cinema in 1970 and has been translated as Pascal Bonitzer et al., “La Vie est a nous: A

Militant Film” in Nick Browne, ed., Cahiers du Cinema: 1969-1971: The Politics of Representation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 68-88. See also Elizabeth Grottle Strebel’s “Renoir and the Popular Front,” Sight and Sound 49, no. 1 (winter 1979/1980): 36-41, and Ginette Vincendeau and Keith Reader, eds., La Vie est a nous!: French Cinema of the Popular Front 1935-1938 (London: British Film Institute, 1986).

The most extensive study in English, Jonathan Buchs-baum’s Cinema Engage: Film in the Popular Front (Ur-bana: University of Illinois Press, 1988) takes issue with these earlier studies and deals only with those films actually produced by left-wing French political parties during the 1930s. For a broader overview that treats many films of the 1930s in relation to the Popular Front, see Genevieve Guillaume-Grimaud’s Le Cinema du Front Populaire (Paris: Lherminier, 1986).

REFERENCE

1. Quoted in Pierre Lagnan, Les Annees Pagnol (Renens: Five Continents, 1989), p. 111.

FURTHER READING

Andrew, Dudley. Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Bertin-Maghit, Jean-Pierre. Le Cinema sous l’Occupation: Le Monde du cinema franfais de 1940 a 1946. Paris: Orban, 1989.

Chateau, Rene. La Cinema franfais sous l’Occupation, 1940-1944. Paris: La Memoire du Cinema franfais, 1996.

Chirat, Raymond. Le Cinema franfais des annees de guerre. Renan, Switzerland: Five Continents/Hatier, 1983.

Clair, Rene. Cinema Yesterday and Today. Trans. and ed.

Stanley Appelbaum. New York: Dover, 1972.

Ehrlich, Evelyn. Cinema of Paradox: French Filmmaking under the German Occupation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Faulkner, Christopher. The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Garmon, Francois. De Blum a Petain: Cinema et societe franfaise (1936-1944). Paris: Cerf, 1984.

Siclier, Jacques. Le France de Petain et son cinema. Bourges, France: Veyrier, 1983.