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

Note

Available as 116-333 at 3rd-year level.

Credit Points

Coordinator

Prerequisites

116-114/115 (Post-VCE French stream) or equivalent.

Semester

Contact

Subject Description

A study of two major periods in French cinema where politics and poetics are cast in symmetrically opposed roles: the cinema of the German Occupation, where the priority assigned to aesthetic issues serves as proof of its supposed "neutrality" with respect to Vichy and ideologies of the extreme right; 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. These two periods are linked through a study of the "mode rétro" films of the late 1960s and early 1970s that explicitly raise the issues of resistance and collaboration in France during the war. Through close "reading" of the individual films, we raise broad questions of French fascism, Vichy ideology, the "Naturalist" cinema of the 1930s, the rise of the so-called "nouvelle école du cinéma français" during the Occupation, intertextuality and strategies of ideological recuperation, cinema and memory, and the politics and theory of film form. The radical discourses 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.

Assessment

Attendance and participation in discussion of film and weekly reading; one 2000 word tutorial paper (subsequently written up); a two hour final examination.

Prescribed Texts

Weekly reading provided. 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); Marcel Ophuls, 'Le Chagrin et la pitié' (1969); Louis Malle, 'Lacombe, Lucien' (1974); 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 du tableau volé' (1977).