rediscovering-louis-delluc

Category: 9:40-11:20 – Session 5

  • Synchronising bodies and images : Rhythym, Dance and Musicality in Louis Delluc

    Laurent Guido (Université Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle)

    A “poor little word that we use so often, too often”: this is how Louis Delluc, in one of his last texts, described the term “rhythm” in 1923, pointing out its constant use among his contemporaries, whether filmmaker-theoreticians such as Germaine Dulac and Jean Epstein or critics such as Léon Moussinac and Émile Vuillermoz. This intervention will aim to evaluate the way in which this concept allows the author to intervene in the theoretical debates of the period (photogénie, the tension between narrative ideals and avant-garde claims, etc.). His definition of rhythm oscillates between a meticulous perception of the complex interaction of internal elements within the frame (interpretation, sets, camera movements) and the highlighting of a general principle of organization of works through editing. The critic’s work is therefore based on revealing the structural patterns and progressive movements that underlie a film (tension-release, repetitions and variations), captured using polyrhythmic composition models borrowed from music and dance.

    Beyond aesthetics, this rhythmic quality is articulated with a particular conception of the relationship between cinema and its audience, considered as a “people” on a now planetary scale. This relationship translates into effects of instantaneity, unanimity and simultaneity where crowds experience, in front of the screens, the technological remediation of traditional mythical forms. Gesture occupies a central place in this respect, as it contains an ideal of stylized expressiveness (a “nudity”), between neo-antique and sporting modernity. These concerns are found in Delluc’s cinematographic work, from his method of filming with music to the way in which he was able to represent the dancing body.

    CV:

    Laurent Guido is a professor of history, cinema and media at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris). He studies the links between cinema, the body and music, as well as theories of the spectacular in the context of mass culture. He is notably the author of L’Âge du rythme (Payot, 2007, re-edited L’Âge d’Homme, 2014); Mythologies du film musical (Presses du réel, 2016, with M. Chabrol); From Wagner to cinema (Mimesis, 2019); and Cinema, myth and ideology (Hermann, 2020). He is preparing an essay on the place given to the relationship between technology and corporeality in the early years of cinema.

  • The Style of Film Criticism: Delluc’s Writings on Cinema

    Daniel Fairfax (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)

    If Louis Delluc has gained recognition as a pioneering figure in the practice of film criticism, then this owes much to the role he played in the development of critical concepts that could allow the writer not only to evaluate individual films, but also to adopt tools for judging the status of the nascent art of cinema as a whole. This included expanding the field of reference from other art forms and cultural practices beyond literature and theatre to music, painting, dance, and even bullfighting or the circus, as well as formulating a framework for engaging with the media specificity of moving images, as with the notion of photogénie, and arguing in proto-Benjaminian fashion for the innate modernity of the cinema, as a harbinger of a more sweeping revolution in the nature of art as a whole at the dawn of the twentieth century. Just as important for the establishment of Delluc’s reputation as a critical voice, however, was the style of his writing. Prolific in various forms of textual production – whether critical, essayistic or fictional – Delluc also revelled in the crafting of hybrid texts that blended these different modes of writing. And yet throughout his written work, key features of his literary style remain visible: the use of vivid imagery, rapid switches between formal and informal registers, the direct address to the reader, and above all his sardonic wit. This paper will explore the style of Delluc’s writings, and argue that they play an integral role in the communication of his key critical concepts, instantiating the artistic modernity that he calls for. In light of the ongoing project to translate more of his written œuvre, it will also treat the challenges and delights of translating Delluc into English.

    CV:

    Daniel Fairfax teaches at the Institute of Theater, Film and Media Studies at the Goethe University, Frankfurt, where he coordinates the Master in Audiovisual and Cinema Studies. Daniel’s research has focused on French film theory in the post-1968 period, resulting in the two-volume monograph The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973 (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), and he has translated the writings of Jean-Louis Comolli, Christian Metz and Jean-Pierre Meunier. He is presently working on a research project looking at developments in film theory in the neoliberal era. Daniel is also a regular contributor to and former editor of the Australian online film journal Senses of Cinema.