116-432 French Cinema 1940 and 1968

Admission to the postgraduate diploma or fourth year honours in French.

This subject forms a study of two major periods in French cinema and history where politics and film aesthetics are cast in diametrically opposed roles: first, the cinema of the Vichy period (1940-1944), where the priority assigned to aesthetic issues and production values generally has traditionally served as "proof" of this cinema's supposed ideological neutrality and even independence with respect to the reactionary Vichy régime 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 so-called "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. The subject will be taught in French.