rediscovering-louis-delluc

Category: 14:30-16:10 – Session 7

  • Delluc Against the Historicists: Reading the Past in Midcentury French Film Culture

    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.

  • Three Chaplins: Delluc, Bazin, Narboni

    Vinzenz Hediger (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)

    There is no better proof for the power of literature, Maurice Blanchot once wrote, than that there is an index, and de Sade is on it. Similarly, one could say that there is no better proof of the power of cinema than Chaplin. The first truly global icon, the Tramp transcended not only cinema but seemed unbound by space nor time. As a matter of fact, when in 1925 Pathé acquired the re-distribution rights for a batch of films Chaplin had made for Essanay ten years earlier they very publicly made it a point to pay the same sum which the films had originally cost to make, a singular decision in a time when most films disappeared without a trace after just a few months in cinemas. Louis Delluc was not the first critic to write about Chaplin but the first to devote an entire book to him. More than twenty years later, another major French film critic, André Bazin, returned to Chaplin, this time not as the global icon but as a figure and configuration of history. Chaplin, Bazin observed, had first been copied by Hitler and then taken his revenge in The Dictator. Then, another few decades later, yet another major critic, Jean Narboni returned to Chaplin in his book Pourquoi les coiffeurs?, a re-reading of The Dictator in the light of contemporary politics and the return of fascism, published in 2010.This contribution takes the measure of Delluc by looking at Chaplin and of Chaplin and the irrepressible power of cinema ­– and the French critical appreciation thereof, in both its continuity and changes ­– by looking ad Delluc, Bazin and Narboni in succession.

    CV:

    Vinzenz Hediger is Professor of Cinema Studies at the Goethe University, Frankfurt and the Director of the Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film.” He is a co-founder of NECS – European Network for Cinema and Media Studies and the founding editor of the Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft (Journal for Media Studies). He is a principal investigator at the Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders” and a member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz. His research concerns the aesthetics of film within the larger framework of a history of risk and uncertainty in modernity. His objects of study include Hollywood cinema and industrial and ephemeral films. In addition, he has a strong interest in the main currents, deviations, and dead ends in the histories of film theories, an interest that he pursues in part as the co-editor of the book series Film Theory in Media History.