Sam Di Iorio (Hunter College CUNY)
If, as Richard Roud noted, Louis Delluc’s name has never been forgotten in France, the ways it’s been remembered are not all the same. I’ll focus on two of them here, both from the 1950s and 60s. The first and most powerful image of Delluc from this time is notably put forward by Henri Langlois, Jean Mitry, and Georges Sadoul, all of whom reaffirm and amplify ideas that Ève Francis and others in his immediate circle articulated after his death. This reading confirms Delluc’s singular symbolic position as a point of origin for French film criticism as well as a pioneer and predecessor in the culture (a “first avant-garde in and of himself,” as Jacques Brunius put it) whose achievements are seen as turning points in cinema history. The second image, which Jean-André Fieschi, Noël Burch, and André S. Labarthe advance in the mid-sixties, seems to head in an entirely different direction. Rather than individuate Delluc, it places him within a première vague which includes Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, and Marcel L’Herbier. Even more importantly, it stresses his work’s synchrony with the present, casting him not as a predecessor, but as a contemporary to the new cinemas of the time. My talk will examine each of these stances as well as the ways that they overlap during this period. Appearances to the contrary, the two readings are not always opposed to each other. In this sense, the word ‘against’ in my title should also be understood as a form of proximity: not simply contre, but tout contre.
CV:
Sam Di Iorio is associate professor of French at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He has written for Screen, Film Comment, Trafic, and the Criterion Collection and his current book project involves the notion of the modern in French cinema between 1945 and 1968.