Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 204
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-4422-6097-9 • Hardback • February 2016 • $117.00 • (£90.00)
978-1-4422-6098-6 • eBook • February 2016 • $111.00 • (£85.00)
Marcelline Block is lecturer in history at Princeton University. She is the editor of Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema (2010) and author of World Film Locations: Paris (2011).
Barry Nevinhas lectured on realist cinema and film theory, the classic French cinema (1930-1960), and modern French history. His research on Renoir’s pro-colonial propaganda will be published in Studies in French Cinema.
The close readings here are strong, and on the whole the writing is lively and concise, with chapters divided into three sections: Recording and Remembering the Great War; Women at the Front; and a third section devoted expressly to Jean Renoir's La Grande illusion (1937).
— Journal of Popular Film and Television
Block and Nevin have put together an excellent, ably edited collection of essays on French cinema and WW I. Though all the usual films that one might expect in such a collection are here, there are also some interesting outliers. One example is experimental filmmaker Germaine Dulac’s Le cinéma au service de l'histoire (1935), a rediscovered six-reel montage film using newsreels of the period to create a sort of collage of the events of the war. Among the more outré films are Une page de gloire (1915) and The Little American (1917), to say nothing of Philippe de Broca’s King of Hearts (1966), originally Le roi de coeur, a romantic comedy (set in the last days of the Great War) in which the inmates of an insane asylum escape and take over a small French village. Of course, no such book would be complete without Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937), perhaps the greatest antiwar film ever made, which is the subject of several essays. Including detailed footnotes, this admirable, compelling volume could also serve as a course text.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.
— Choice Reviews
[A] fantastic new book.
— Culturethèque
The divergent theoretical, methodological and didactic approaches of the authors make the book a varied and interesting read for those interested in Film Studies, History or Francophone Studies. . . . Film is indeed a medium that can create as well as subvert popular consensus on the ‘facts’ of (the French) experience of World War I. And that is a very good reason to read this book and watch the films discussed in the different chapters.
— French History