116-233/333 French Cinema 1940/1968: Aesthetics and Ideology

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The course focuses on two periods of French cinema where politics and poetics are cast in symmetrically opposed roles: the cinema of the Occupation, in which the priority assigned to aesthetic issues serves as proof of its supposed political 'neutrality' with respect to Vichy and ideologies of the extreme right (films of Becker, Carné, Clouzot, Cocteau/Delannoy); and certain films of the 1960s and 1970s (with May '68 as the pivotal socio-political context) in which poetics (film form) and politics are considered to be essentially indistinguishable (works by Godard, Godard/Gorin, Straub/Huillet, Ruiz). Close 'reading' of the individual films is our central concern, opening onto questions of French Fascism, Vichy ideology, the 'Naturalist' cinema of the 1930s, the politics of Expressionism, intertextuality and strategies of recuperation, cinema and popular memory (the controversy over la mode rétro - films by Malle, Marcel Ophuls, Chabrol), and the politics and theory of film form. The radical discourse(s) of Cahiers du Cinéma from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s are studied as the cardinal instance of the importance assigned 'the political' in the cinema in the wake of May '68.

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FILMS TO BE STUDIED: Jacques Becker, 'Goupi Mains-Rouges' (1943); Marcel Carné, 'Les Visiteurs du Soir' (1942); Henri-Georges Clouzot, 'Le Corbeau' (1943); Jean Cocteau/Jean Delannoy, 'L'Eternel Retour' (1943); Jean Grémillon, 'Lumière d'été' (1943); Louis Malle, 'Lacombe, Lucien' (1974); Marcel Ophuls, 'Le chagrin et la pitié' (1969); Claude Chabrol, 'Une affaire de femmes' (1988); Jean-Luc Godard, 'Weekend' (1967); Jean-Luc Godard/Claude Gorin, 'Tout va bien' (1972); Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huillet, 'Othon' (1970); Raoul Ruiz, 'Hypothèse d'un tableau volé' (1977).