116-026 French Cinema 1940/1968: Aesthetics and Ideology

Note

Availability

Credit Points

Coordinator

Prerequisites

A major in French (post-VCE stream) or equivalent.

Semester

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Subject Description

A study of two major periods in French cinema where politics and poetics are cast in symmetrically opposed roles: first, the cinema of the German Occupation, where the priority assigned to aesthetic issues serves as proof of this cinema's supposed 'neutrality' with respect to Vichy and ideologies of the extreme right; second, certain avant-garde 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 that, from the late 1960s-early 1970s on, explicitly and often controversially raise the issues of resistance and collaboration in France during the war.

Assessment

Attendance and participation in discussion of film and weekly reading, and a tutorial paper of 1500 words, subsequently written up, and an essay of 3000 words.

Prescribed Texts

Weekly reading provided. FILMS TO BE STUDIED:

• J Becker, Goupi Mains Rouges. 1943.
• M Carné, Les Visiteurs du soir. 1942.
• H-G Clouzot, Le Corbeau. 1943.
• J Cocteau & J Delannoy, L'Eternel retour. 1943.
• M Ophuls, Le Chagrin et la pitié. 1969.
• L Malle, Lacombe, Lucien. 1974.
• C Chabrol, Une Affaire de femmes. 1988.
• J-L Godard, Weekend. 1967.
• J-L Godard/Claude Gorin, Tout va bien. 1972.
• J-M Straub & D Huillet, Othon. 1970.