The Social Architecture of French Cinema: 1929–1939 by Margaret C. Flinn (review)

Conversion to sound at the close of the 1920s ushered in a decade-long period of French film production that standard accounts by Alan Williams and Colin Crisp cast as all but unparalleled in aesthetic impact and thematic scope. Despite chronic underfunding and structural disarray in an industry that never fully rebounded after the Great War, French audiences enjoyed a robust domestic culture of stars, screenwriters, and directors whose concern for richly detailed narratives and moody “atmospherics” (Andrew) laid the foundations for the classic French cinema.

Key to an understanding of this period that saw René Clair, Jean Renoir, and Julien Duvivier rise to international prominence alongside—or as part of—a robust, left-of-center documentary practice, argues Margaret C. Flinn in this cogent, well researched study, is the relationship between film and its sister art, architecture. Bringing into tension the urban poetry of Sous les toits de Paris, Boudu sauvé des eaux or L’Atalante, and several documentary depictions of the builder’s craft, Flinn aims to disclose an “architecture of social being” (2) proper to France’s “Hollow Years” (Eugen Weber, qtd. in Flinn 3). The author describes this “social architecture” as an interaction between cinema’s “literal construction of place” through shooting on sets or on location, on the one hand, and the “metaphorical ways” in which film form constructs its narrative contents and representations on the other (2). As arts that are produced collectively and experienced collectively, cinema and architecture would present analogous fields for critical reflection on incipient “social truths” (9) underlying the socio-political imaginary.

Rather than recount film history in broad strokes, the author privileges clustered close readings, the better to ascertain shared “locational” qualities through which realist fictions and documentaries acquired cultural currency with audiences of the day. That public was itself increasingly concentrated in, and shaped by, urban centers. One consequence, though perhaps not a necessary one, is that The Social Architecture of French Cinema deals almost exclusively with filmic representations of the city, most prominently the places and spaces of Paris. This limitation, Flinn contends, reflects a “locational bias” (3) noted by Crisp: just minutes away from the studios lay a “dense repository of historical sites” (5) whose readability was all but a given. This held not only for monuments like Notre-Dame de Paris or the Eiffel Tower but also for the eponymous marginal space of Georges Lacombe’s La Zone (1929) or the suburban watering hole (guinguette) on which Duvivier’s La Belle Equipe (1936) turns. “Cityscapes,” writes Flinn, reprising Michel de Certeau’s model of everyday practice, “are determined by the tensions between ideologically charged symbols and the paths that everyday users of that space chart around and through these symbols” (5).

The author makes a bold methodological move in treating fiction and documentary in tandem to the end of identifying tropes that cut across 1930s production. Generic distinctions, argues Flinn, were not particularly rigid in period film comment to begin with, and “subgeneric categories” (6), for instance the city symphony and the documentaire romancé—the latter applied first in France to Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North and Moana (30)—were many, and often short-lived. Attentive to the rhetorical impact that films have on spectators’ imaginings of their world, the author takes up Bill Nichols’ claim that documentary is “part and parcel of the discursive formations, the language games, and rhetorical stratagems by and through which pleasure and power, ideologies and utopias, subjects and subjectivities receive tangible representation” (Representing Reality, qtd. in Flinn 7). Following this constructivist thesis, documentary and fictional modes shape collective understanding of social reality even as they record and reveal facets of that world. Genre would depend in no small part on the “theoretical lens” (10) we bring to film sequences that, despite their apparent facticity, may have been fully scripted, and yield meaning only through the artistry of editing.

Though Flinn considers throughout her book the audiovisual representation of actual buildings and construction...