Social Architecture of French Cinema

The Social Architecture of French Cinema provides a vital new reading of documentary and realist fiction film of the French 1930s that focuses on how these genres interlock their representations of urban spaces and places. From the fleetingly captured street scenes of the city symphony, to the meticulously reconstructed studio city of Rene Clair's "particularly French" musical comedies; from the propagandistic Popular Front documentaries about construction workers, to Julien Duvivier and Marcel Carne's bittersweet portraits of populist neighborhoods: the narratives of Flinn's variegated corpus reveal a national sensibility increasingly marked by spatial crisis. This book contributes to the growing body of scholarship examining the shifts in spatial perception throughout the twentieth century by showing how both documentary and fiction films in the decade preceding World War II in France situated the individual in a paradoxical and changing social space, as well as how discourse surrounding their production and reception echoed the films' visual and verbal narratives of building community. The Social Architecture of French Cinema engages with and should be of interest to a number of disciplines in the humanities: film and media studies, history, and French cultural studies, as well as studies in national identity and spatial theory.