![]() | Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave Subjects: Documentary films -- France -- History and criticism; Motion pictures -- Social aspects -- France; France -- Social conditions; Thirty-five years of nonfiction films offer a unique lens on twentieth-century French social issues
Ungar identifies Vigo's manifesto, his 1930 short À propos de Nice , and late silent-era films by Georges Lacombe, Boris Kaufman, André Sauvage, and Marcel Carné as antecedents of postwar documentaries by Eli Lotar, René Vautier, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Jean Rouch, associated with critiques of colonialism and modernization in Fourth and early Fifth Republic France. Close readings of individual films alternate with transitions to address transnational practices as well as state- and industry-wide reforms between 1935 and 1960. Critical Mass is an indispensable complement to studies of nonfiction film in France, from Georges Lacombe's La Zone (1928) to Chris Marker's Le Joli Mai (1963). Steven Ungar is professor of cinema, French, and comparative literature at the University of Iowa. He is author of Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire ; Scandal and Aftereffect: Blanchot and France since 1930 (Minnesota, 1995); Cléo de 5 à 7 ; and coauthor of Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture . |
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