Cinema Engagé: Film in the Popular Front

Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Fine in Very Good+ dj. (c.1988). First Edition. Hardcover. [nice clean book, as-new with no discernible wear; the jacket has some mild edgewear, and a bit of residue (probably from a removed price sticker) at the lower right corner of the front panel]. (B&W photographs) "During the 1930s an entire generation of French artists and intellectuals mobilized popular support against the threat of fascism in France. Film became a vital tool in this campaign. Working outside the confines of the commercial film industry, filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, Germaine Dulac, Henri Jenson, as well as many lesser-known directors, actors, and technicians, rejected the conventions of both commercial fiction films and newsreels in order to establish the first independent political film movement in France, a movement committed to addressing and intervening in the contemporary events of those convulsive years. Drawing upon interivews with Popular Front filmmakers, and including many frame enlargements from rare films, [the author] examines twelve films that have been preserved from this period and sets them in their political, social, and economic context." Of the films discussed, the most space is devoted to the 1936 documentary LA VIE EST À NOUS, directed and written by Jean Renoir and a number of other filmmakers. .