This is a stub intended as flavour for a KR AAR that never came to be, just found it, little 'bitty' but some ideas about Red French film that I thought were interesting.
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From: "
Kinema Rouge: Early Film in Communard France" by Melanie Brown, Picador 1993
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(1889-1974) Abel Gance, leading director and kinematic innovator. Abandoned by his doctor father on birth, Gance lived with his working-class Parisian mother and later her parents in a rural mining town. He became an aspiring actor in the bourgoise fin de siecle, hiding his humble, uneducated origins. Struggling to get work, he penned screenplays for several early short films, primarily melodramas. Gance ironically dismissed kinema at this stage, consirdered his early work in film “
infantile and stupid”, done entirely to pay his rent.
Rejected for military service in 1915 on health grounds, Gance continued his work in French kinema, becoming a known writer-director. The increasingly avante garde productions (both technically and thematically) were heavily censored. In 1917, Gance was drafted to the military’s
Service Cinématographique. Tasked with creating propaganda films, Gance grew increasingly radical as he witnessed the cost of war. As part of his cooption by the Third Republic, Gance’s
Film d’Art company, previously struggling, was subsidised by the government.
Directed to create a film capturing the true sacrifice of the poilus in the bitter winter of 1918, Gance and his cameramen were allowed open access to the frontlines. The privations suffered by French soldiers deeply affected the filmmaker. Censors were horrified on viewing Gance’s initial footage, which portrayed the Western Front and wider war in unvarnished terms. Before he could be relieved, Gance bore witness to the Second Mutiny of 1919. His cameras captured images of revolution in the trenches and beyond that would soon be seen around the world.
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In the chaos of the Revolution, the small
Film d’Art was officially collectivised, with Gance elected chair. Owing to the company’s prior connection to the government and military, the director was able to film his early masterpiece
J’Accuse in 1921 with state funds and thousands of army extras. The film used real footage and massive re-enactments to tell the story of a single
poilu, François. Excited by war in his rural village, he soon learns the horrors of industrialised warfare. The film is most famous for its (for the time) brutal battle sequences. Meanwhile back home a bourgoise racketeer Jean attempts to seduce Francois’ love, Maria, with rationed goods. Eventually Francois embraces revolution, joining the Second Mutiny. As the Revolution and Civil War commence, the now enlightened Francois returns to his village to claim Maria and overthrow the parochial regime of Jean.
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Experimenting with various styles including comedy and horror, Gance finally creates his magnum opus in the
Napoleon Trilogy. Created 1927-1930, the films are traditional epics but with many of the director’s flares. They are ultimately a rejection of radical mob rule and elitist Sorelian ideas, portrating an anti-hero Napoleon, who wishes to build a better world but forgets the people who get him there. A tale of ego and downfall inspired by Richard III, it has several poilu-esque characters as comic relief and to clarify the dangers of putting person before cause.
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Max Linder (1883-1944) Comedic silent film star. The first comedy movie star in France before the war as “
Max”, a bumbling, melodramatic hero. He jumped between Hollywood and Europe during the war but found himself unappreciated in America. His former writer Gance convinced him to return to Red France. He found unexpected success in early horror before returning to comedy. By the mid-1920s he had renovated his clueless
Max character for syndicalism as an outdated, deluded dandy, forced into proletarian work but expecting deference from his new colleagues.
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A close friend of Charlie Chaplin, the two co-starred in several comedies after Chaplin’s return to Britain in 1926. Most successful was
Two Good Neighbours, a gentle satire of Anglo-French relations released in 1928. The film proved popular on both sides of the Channel but would end up on Britain’s infamous Black List a decade later, its “
subversive tone” deemed unacceptable by the Mosleyite regime.
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Erik Satie - respected composer and supporter of avant garde music, including an early Dada patron. In the 1900s he created
divertissements, short music numbers designed to accompany art. As part of
Film d’Art, Satie composes for proto-music videos, short surrealist films intended to illicit a mood captured in the music. This style continues past his death and as kinema entered the age of sound, Studio Satie would become synonymous with ‘diverts’. Music was initially produced in-house before increasingly diverts were created for popular musicians. Considered symbolic of Paris’ Red Bohemia was
Starfish (1932), the pseudo-psychedelic divert directed by Man Ray and starring Josephine Baker.
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