Exploring the Genre and Language of Film Through Comedy, Documentary, and Social Realism

359 Exploring the Genre and Language of Film Through Comedy, Documentary, and Social Realism Sarah E. Barbour Wake Forest University When we use film in the classroom, "l'ardente soif de voir" can obscure for student and teacher alike the status of film as a genre with its own language,2 and the immediacy ofthe image can divert us from the role interpretation plays in viewing. This essay presents three very different films that I have used in intermediate and advanced literature/culture courses in French in an effort to share with students what these films have taught me about reading and appreciating the complexities ofthis medium. Discussion of Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot by Jacques Tati (1953) and Hiroshima mon amour by Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais (1959) can serve to expand notions of genre and highlight the role of the spectator in the meaning-making process of film viewing; and La Noire de ... by Ousmane Sembène (1966) challenges expectations about cinematic adaptations of literary works. Each of these works also represents a landmark moment in the history of films made in French. Finally, the aesthetic, political, and social issues raised by the particular historical context of their production reach across time to help students think critically about their own ways ofmaking meaning in the world. Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot When Jacques Tatischeff—known to the world as Jacques Tati—was born in a village outside Paris at the turn of the century, France was a major producer of comedy films and had an established film comic tradition (Maddock 8). Max Linder was appearing on screen as a comic dandy, and André Deed as a comic clown character (Kerr 53). With the advent of sound, French comic filmmakers of the 1930s stuck closely to these models and to those set by the narrative and acts found in boulevard comedies, music halls and vaudeville theatre (Hayward, French National Cinema 185- 360CULTURE AND LITERATURE THROUGH FILM 86). French film comedy would continue in this mold until Tati came along. In both form and content his work essentially revolutionized the genre because he used "old-style sight gags in contemporary settings" and "loose story structure with contemporary subject matter" (Maddock 3). Tati's unique style is entertaining, but it also represents what Susan Hayward calls an "observant satire" of a society in transition. As she explains in her history of the period, "Jour defête shows how social habits of a lifetime routinise and prevent us from perceiving things differently . . . Les Vacances de M. Hulot takes bourgeois conformity to task . . . [and] the message [of Mon Oncle] becomes not a defence of tradition, but a clear indictment ofprogress at any price" (186). While other comic filmmakers in France in the 1950s limited themselves to timeless subjects such as the mishaps of marital infidelities, Tati's films invite his contemporaries to reflect on the frenetic reconstruction, modernization and consumerism going on around them in post-war France (1 88). The entertainment and social satire associated with Tati's films are part of his larger "artistic" vision in that they re-create for the spectator "a sense of freshness and play" that allows for new ways of seeing the world (Thompson 9). A Tati trademark, for example, is his use of sight gags that are begun but not completed, which leaves spectators wondering if they really saw the beginning of a gag or if they imagined it. In addition, instead of presenting a succession of gags, Tati usually repeats a good gag throughout the film, which serves both to create an overall comedie texture and to wink at the spectator as an accomplice (Sorlin 107-108; Bellos 17380 ). Kristin Thompson argues convincingly that in spite of comparisons often made to Charlie Chaplin3 and Buster Keaton, Tati has more in common with Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson, filmmakers who share "an attempt both to criticize social conditions and to create films that force us [to use] new film-viewing skills" (262). Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot was Tati's first critical and popular success at home and abroad when it came out in 1953 (Bellos 191; Maddock 62). The film allowed French audiences...