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  • French Cinema: A Critical Filmography, I: 1929–1939; II: 1940–1958 by Colin Crisp
  • Ben Mccann
French Cinema: A Critical Filmography, I: 1929–1939; II: 1940–1958. By Colin Crisp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. 342 + 362 pp.

If anyone is best placed to chart the development of French cinema and elucidate its tropes, characters, and stars, then it is Colin Crisp, author of The Classic French Cinema, 19301960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) and Genre, Myth, and Convention in the French Cinema, 19291939 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) — obligatory primers for undergraduate and scholar alike. Crisp's latest trip down the highways and byways of French film history is a two-part filmography that charts in meticulous and idiosyncratic detail various films made between 1929 and 1958. These two years are important: while 1929 saw the transition from silent to sound film, 1958 heralded the arrival of de Gaulle, the Fifth Republic, and the beginnings of the French New Wave. What happened in the intervening three decades lies at the heart of these companion pieces. Each volume contains 101 films listed chronologically; each entry contains an overview of the film's cultural and historical significance and a summary of its plot and narrative structure. Often, particular ideological resonances are brought into sharp focus. So Crisp reads Le Corbeau (dir. by Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1943) as 'an attack not just on the petty bourgeoisie of [the] town but on humanity as a whole' (II, 78), and sees in Jeux interdits (dir. by René Clément, 1952) not just a series of games of death that the child protagonists play, but a version of war itself 'as the forbidden game that humanity cannot resist playing' (II, 232). The eclectic selection policy is to be applauded. There were 1300 films made in France between 1929 and 1939, and volume I contains only a fraction. Yet Crisp toggles between established masterpieces (La Bandera (dir. by Julien Duvivier, 1935), La Grande Illusion (dir. by Jean Renoir, 1937)), and long-forgotten popular works (Monsieur Coccinelle (dir. by Dominique Bernard-Deschamps, 1938), Messieurs les Ronds-de-Cuir (dir. by Yves Mirande, 1937)) to illustrate how critically neglected works by the likes of Mirande offer up incisive, satirical, and deeply ambivalent takes on French society in the late 1930s that are just as scathing as those of Renoir. This democratizing tendency is one of the book's strongest points: by delving into the mise en scène, editing practices, and 'theatricality' of largely unseen works of French 1930s cinema, Crisp reveals the richness of different genres and pushes back against the critically sanctioned masterpieces of, say, Marcel Carné, in favour of inclusivity and diversity.

The same goes for volume II, which assertively rescues post-war French cinema from a debilitating echo chamber. For too long, films produced from 1946 to 1958 have been marginalized. Crisp frequently makes the point that even as they were being produced, François Truffaut and his Cahiers du cinéma colleagues were denigrating them as representative of a vacuous 'cinema of quality' in which technical finish had supplanted thematic relevance and creativity. To counter this, Crisp pays close attention to all manner of costume dramas, poetic romances, and réalisme noir to show how post-war films were often relentlessly bleak: life is meaningless, society a source of constant suffering and oppression, and any attempt to deny or escape is a pitiful illusion. A far cry, it is safe to say, from Truffaut's cinéma de papa. Crisp is particularly good on French cinema's economic imperatives, noting the rise of blockbusters in the 1950s that were by French standards immensely costly (on average two and a half times the average cost of other films) but also potentially immensely profitable (again on average two and a half times). The point of this was to produce ambitious prestige films that could out-do the American film industry. Grandiose studio productions such as Sacha Guitry's Si Versailles m'était conté (1954) were shot in colour and CinemaScope, but this did not necessarily mean that they were any good. Crisp labels Guitry's film 'dire cinema' (II...

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