Sue Harris

Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination : Set Design in 1930s European Cinema

European cinema between World Wars I and II was renowned for its remarkable attention to detail and visual effects in set design. Visionary designers such as Vincent Korda and Alfred Junge extended their influence across national film industries in Paris, London, and Berlin, transforming the studio system into one of permeable artistic communities. For the first time, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination provides a comparative study of European film set design in the late 1920s and 1930s. Based on a wealth of drawings, film stills, and archival documents from the period, this volume illuminates the emerging significance of transnational artistic collaboration in light of developments in Britain, France, and Germany. A comprehensive analysis of the practices, styles, and function of interwar cinematic production design, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination offers new insight into the period’s remarkable achievements and influence on subsequent generations.

`Lives Out of Sequence': Maternal Identity in François Truffaut's Les 400 Coups (1959) and Claude Miller's La Petite Voleuse (1988)

in studies of the director, and personal testimony by him has allowed many scholars to identify the particularly negative maternal figure of Gilberte Doinel, Antoine Doinel’s mother in Les 400 coups (1959), as a fictional construct whose character, behaviour and rejection of her son are rooted in the young filmmaker’s own childhood experiences. One such frank testimony was elicited in December 1971 in an interview for Radio-Canada following the release of Deux Anglaises et le continent (1971). In this subsequently published exchange, the broadcaster Aline Desjardins questioned François Truffaut about the circumstances of his childhood in occupied and post-war Paris, and invited him to elaborate on his unconventional family upbringing. The director spoke willingly and at length about his admiration for his maternal grandmother, with whom he spent the first twelve years of his life, and of his very strained and unloving relationship with his mother, Janine Truffaut (née de Montferrand); this relationship became particularly difficult in the years following his grandmother’s death when the adolescent Truffaut returned to live with her and her husband in Montmartre. His words revealed Janine as a profoundly cold and unmaternal woman, for whom the son was a burden to be endured: ‘ma mère ne supportait pas le bruit, enfin je devrais dire, pour être plus précis, elle ne me supportait pas. En tout cas, French Cultural Studies, 14(3), 299–309 Copyright

Desires for Reality: Radicalism and Revolution in Western European Film by Benjamin Halligan (review)

In this singular monograph, Greg Hainge provides the first book-length study of Philippe Grandrieux, and addresses the breadth of the filmmaker’s entire career. Hainge argues that Grandrieux’s cinema is usefully approached through a consideration of the sonic, which, he suggests, ‘provides the means and vocabulary to talk about the operations found in the work of a filmmaker like Grandrieux’ (p. 265). The chapters are structured somewhat chronologically and by media. The book moves from Grandrieux’s video installations of the 1970s and his subsequent television work, right through to later film essays, with individual chapters devoted to developing careful new readings of Grandrieux’s major feature-length films. Alongside this, Hainge elaborates the fascinating proposition of what might constitute a ‘sonic cinema’ in an expanded sense, beyond the realm of sound itself. For Hainge, this shift in focus to the sonic is intended as a corrective to the concept of the haptic, or what the book also describes as the ‘subject-centred pitfalls of the common phenomenological position’ (p. 253). The work is ambitious and bold in its critique of affect studies, particularly as it situates much of its discussion in a Deleuzian key, discussing Grandrieux’s work in terms of the figure and the figural derived from Deleuze’s text, Francis Bacon: logique de la sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1981). As such, Hainge delivers a steadfast promise to remain a close reader of Grandrieux’s texts themselves, and his meticulous description and analysis of them gives a generous account of Grandrieux’s lesser-known and less available works. Hainge also gives attention to source texts that inform Grandrieux’s cinema, such as Dante’s La vita nuova in Chapter 6 on La Vie nouvelle (2002), or Jean Paulhan’s text La Peinture cubiste (1953), which influenced Grandrieux’s television work of the same name. At times, discussion between the book’s twin aims, Grandrieux and the sonic, seems a little bifurcated, although this does allow the book to be navigated by a reader with specific interest in either Grandrieux or the sonic. The chapters in which there is synthesis between the two are the most forceful: for example, the discussion of the installation L’Arrière-saison (2005) in Chapter 7, where Hainge compellingly argues for a reconsideration of Maurice MerleauPonty’s chiasmic relation in terms of reverberation and resonance; or the discussion of Un lac (2008) in Chapter 8, where the sonic illuminates the film by showing how it reconfigures subjectivity, reflecting a different way of being in the world through sound. Throughout the book, Hainge engages with issues of spectatorship, representation, relation, and alterity, arguing that Grandrieux’s cinema cannot be approached from preexisting reality, or preconceived hermeneutic and moral frameworks. The discussion pauses to consider fascinating statements from Grandrieux in interview, and allows itself to become distracted in dynamic ways. Hainge articulates Grandrieux within a rich lineage of twentieth-century thought, weaving in figures such as Artaud, Bergson, Levinas, and Heidegger. The book is a substantial contribution on Grandrieux and an exciting new sonotropic turn for film theory.

Renoir's Paris: The City as Film Set

This article accounts for the recurrent attention to Paris as a setting and site of narrative meaning in the films of Jean Renoir. It argues that the visual representation of the city is a complex element of Renoirs work, and analyses this in terms of a productive tension offered between authenticity and mythology in films from the full spectrum of the directors career. It proposes that the seeds of a dualistic approach to the representation of the city are sown in the silent productions of his early career, and that this is consolidated and extended as his career develops. It concludes that Paris is a privileged narrative space in Renoirs films, replete with prior meaning and comprehensible at a profoundly moral, as well as visual, level.

Chronicle of a Death Unseen: Cinematic Treatments of the Disappearance of Mehdi Ben Barka

THE TOUSSAINT HOLIDAY WEEKEND in October–November 1965 saw France rocked by one of the most notorious political scandals of the Fifth Republic, one acknowledged by then-Minister of the Interior Roger Frey as “sans aucun précédent historique.”1 While General Charles de Gaulle prepared to declare his candidacy for the December presidential elections, exiled Moroccan political leader Mehdi Ben Barka arrived unannounced in Paris for a lunch meeting at the Brasserie Lipp on the Boulevard St Germain. Ben Barka’s appointment on 29 October was with three men—director Georges Franju, aspiring film producer Georges Figon, and a journalist acquaintance, Philippe Bernier. The aim of the meeting was to further discussions between the various parties about Ben Barka’s acting as historical adviser on a documentary about decolonization. Impressed by the leftwing credentials of Franju and his proposed scriptwriter Marguerite Duras, Ben Barka had agreed to work with them on Basta!, a film that, as Franju had set out in an earlier letter to him, would be created “à partir de documents d’actualités cinématographiques et de reconstitutions filmées” and would result in “une fresque historique de long métrage retraçant les grandes étapes des luttes des peuples décolonisés pour leur indépendance.”2 Mehdi Ben Barka never kept his lunch appointment, and the Franju-Duras film was never made. On arrival outside the Lipp, he was approached by two police officers who asked him to escort them to a different meeting. Compliant for reasons that have never been known, the politician was taken to the suburb of Fontenay-le-Vicomte, where he is presumed to have been tortured and killed at the home of a notorious gangster, Georges Boucheseiche. His remains were never found, and speculation about his fate still endures, not least because of the length of time that documents related to the case remained classified.3 Suspicion about the alleged assassination fell on supporters of Hassan II, the Moroccan king whose regime Ben Barka so publicly opposed. General Mohamed Oufkir, Hassan II’s Minister of the Interior, and Ahmed Dlimi, the chief of the Moroccan police, are known to have arrived in Paris hours after Ben Barka and to have been present at the Boucheseiche villa. The intermediary between the Moroccans and Boucheseiche was Antoine Lopez,

Hitler, connais pas! Bertrand Blier's apprenticeship in the techniques of spectacle

Bertrand Blier’s first film Hitler, connais pas!, released in 1963, is outwardly so unlike anything that follows in his subsequent films, as to have been more or less relegated to a footnote in studies of his work. Clearly inspired by the content, debate and methodology of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un 6t6 (1960), as well as by the work of documentary filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Jean Herman, Blier’s film is, within his ceuvre, an isolated example of the dnéma-vérité mode of film-making, and as such, has tended to be viewed as little more than a youthful experiment, stylistically at odds with the mature approach which characterizes his commercially successful work from Les Valseuses (1974) onwards. Yet Hitler, connais pas! is an extremely important work, which establishes the thematic base of Blier’s later films, and announces his specifically dramatic interest in cinema; more importantly still, for a director who has often been