Hannah Lewis
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- October 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190635978
- eISBN:
- 9780190636012
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190635978.003.0007
- Subject:
- Music, Popular, Theory, Analysis, Composition
Chapter 6 focuses on a well-known case of conflict surrounding a film’s music: the beloved 1934 film L’Atalante. The second collaboration between experimental filmmaker Jean Vigo and film composer ...
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Chapter 6 focuses on a well-known case of conflict surrounding a film’s music: the beloved 1934 film L’Atalante. The second collaboration between experimental filmmaker Jean Vigo and film composer Maurice Jaubert, L’Atalante had a disastrous initial release. In an attempt to make the film more broadly accessible, the producers edited the film substantially, replacing parts of Jaubert’s score with the popular song “Le Chaland qui passe.” In altering the soundtrack, they altered an important narrative subtext: a reflexive fixation on synchronized sound film, expressed through a focus on the magic of musical playback technologies. This chapter traces the differences between the two versions of L’Atalante, arguing that Vigo’s fascination with mediated music, and the producers’ attempt to fit the film’s music into a commercially successful paradigm, reflects continuing concerns from both sides about how mediated sound would affect French cinema in the mid-1930s.Less
Chapter 6 focuses on a well-known case of conflict surrounding a film’s music: the beloved 1934 film L’Atalante. The second collaboration between experimental filmmaker Jean Vigo and film composer Maurice Jaubert, L’Atalante had a disastrous initial release. In an attempt to make the film more broadly accessible, the producers edited the film substantially, replacing parts of Jaubert’s score with the popular song “Le Chaland qui passe.” In altering the soundtrack, they altered an important narrative subtext: a reflexive fixation on synchronized sound film, expressed through a focus on the magic of musical playback technologies. This chapter traces the differences between the two versions of L’Atalante, arguing that Vigo’s fascination with mediated music, and the producers’ attempt to fit the film’s music into a commercially successful paradigm, reflects continuing concerns from both sides about how mediated sound would affect French cinema in the mid-1930s.
Margaret C. Flinn
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781781380338
- eISBN:
- 9781781381571
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781380338.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
From the fleetingly captured street scenes of the city symphony, to the meticulously reconstructed studio city of musical comedies; from the propagandistic Popular Front documentaries about ...
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From the fleetingly captured street scenes of the city symphony, to the meticulously reconstructed studio city of musical comedies; from the propagandistic Popular Front documentaries about construction workers, to poetic realism’s bittersweet portraits of populist neighborhoods: Social Architecture explores the construction, representation and experience of spaces and places in documentary and realist films of the French 1930s. In this book, Margaret C. Flinn tracks the relation between the emergent techniques of French sound cinema and its thematic, social and political preoccupations through analysis of discourse in contemporary press, theoretical texts and through readings of films themselves. New light is shed on works of canonical directors such as Jean Renoir, René Clair, Jean Vigo and Julien Duvivier by their consideration in relationship to little known documentary films of the era. Flinn argues that film has a readable architecture—a configuration of narrative and representations that informs, explains, and creates social identities, while reflecting upon the position of individuals within their societies.Less
From the fleetingly captured street scenes of the city symphony, to the meticulously reconstructed studio city of musical comedies; from the propagandistic Popular Front documentaries about construction workers, to poetic realism’s bittersweet portraits of populist neighborhoods: Social Architecture explores the construction, representation and experience of spaces and places in documentary and realist films of the French 1930s. In this book, Margaret C. Flinn tracks the relation between the emergent techniques of French sound cinema and its thematic, social and political preoccupations through analysis of discourse in contemporary press, theoretical texts and through readings of films themselves. New light is shed on works of canonical directors such as Jean Renoir, René Clair, Jean Vigo and Julien Duvivier by their consideration in relationship to little known documentary films of the era. Flinn argues that film has a readable architecture—a configuration of narrative and representations that informs, explains, and creates social identities, while reflecting upon the position of individuals within their societies.
Margaret C. Flinn
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9781781380338
- eISBN:
- 9781781381571
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781781380338.003.0006
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
This chapter proposes a gendered reading of urban space, showing how when characters move through such spaces, their trajectories are conditioned by their social status, of which gender is a crucial ...
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This chapter proposes a gendered reading of urban space, showing how when characters move through such spaces, their trajectories are conditioned by their social status, of which gender is a crucial part. The focal point is Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, which is read alongside Marc Augé’s Non-lieux, to show how modernist city films of the 1930s anticipate the salient characteristics of Augé model of the late twentieth-century hyper-modernity. Like city films of the late 1920s and early 1930s by directors such as Lacombe, Cavalcanti, Duvivier, and Carné (engaged as context and counterpoint), L’Atalante unfolds in spaces that are no places, suggesting that the cinema itself is a non-place, but one that produces, constructs and consecrates new places, particularly for women. These films problematize the flâneuse and reject the impression of force exerted by the monumental city center.Less
This chapter proposes a gendered reading of urban space, showing how when characters move through such spaces, their trajectories are conditioned by their social status, of which gender is a crucial part. The focal point is Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, which is read alongside Marc Augé’s Non-lieux, to show how modernist city films of the 1930s anticipate the salient characteristics of Augé model of the late twentieth-century hyper-modernity. Like city films of the late 1920s and early 1930s by directors such as Lacombe, Cavalcanti, Duvivier, and Carné (engaged as context and counterpoint), L’Atalante unfolds in spaces that are no places, suggesting that the cinema itself is a non-place, but one that produces, constructs and consecrates new places, particularly for women. These films problematize the flâneuse and reject the impression of force exerted by the monumental city center.
