The Social Architecture of French Cinema: 1929-1939 [Paperback]

This book provides a vital new reading of documentary and realist fiction film of the French 1930s that focuses on how these genres interlock their representations of urban spaces and places.From the fleetingly captured street scenes of the city symphony, to the meticulously reconstructed studio city of musical comedies; from the propagandistic Popular Front documentaries about construction workers, to poetic realism's bittersweet portraits of populist neighborhoods:The Social Architecture of French Cinemaexplores the construction, representation and experience of spaces and places in documentary and realist films of the French 1930s. In this book, Margaret C. Flinn tracks the relation between the emergent techniques of French sound cinema and its thematic, social and political preoccupations through analysis of discourse in contemporary press, theoretical texts and through readings of films themselves. New light is shed on works of canonical directors such as Renoir, Clair, Vigo and Duvivier by their consideration in relationship to little known documentary films of the era. Flinn argues that film has a readable architecture - a configuration of narrative and representations that informs, explains, and creates social identities, while reflecting upon the position of individuals within their societies.Introduction: An Architecture of Social Being
1. The Spatial Constitution of 1930s Documentary
3. Ren? Clair's City Views: Realism and Studio Paris
3. Intertext and Political Margins in Jean Renoir'sBoudu sauv? des eaux
4. Traversing Built History in Architectural Documentaries
5.Fl?neusesand the Unmaking of Place
6. The Crowd as New Monumentality during the Popular Front
Epilogue: Poetic Realism as Spatial Fable
Notes
Bibliography
Index First-rate... Flinn adopts a well-argued and innovative interdisciplinary approach and selects an intriguing corpus of films - some, notably Boudu, well-known and widely accessiblcv