Session 1
Louis Delluc and the Languages of Perception
Jennifer J. Wild (University of Southern California)
To his embarrassment, Louis Delluc found himself using a sheet of paper saved from a provincial military hospital when he wrote to Guillaume Apollinaire in June of 1914, just weeks before France entered World War I. Had Apollinaire written a poem about the cinema, he asked? Did it exist, and if so, could he see it, and might he publish it in the new journal called Le Film? I use this document to open a query into the development of Delluc’s critical language for film and cinema at a time when he had been working as a young theater critic for the high-profile, mass illustrated magazine, Comoedia Illustré, where he covered the heyday of Les Ballets Russes between 1910-1914. How did Delluc’s language for aesthetic or sensory experience—at theater, ballet, cinema, or before a painting— compare to that of his editorial and artistic collaborators, friends, and acquaintances, such as Apollinaire, Fernand Léger, Louis Aragon, or the prolific art critic Maurice Raynal? Like Delluc—who at this time was also a playwright—these young artists, writers, and critics were similarly forging new formal and critical languages that we now know to be crucial to our understanding of early cinema, painting, poetry, and modern life in Paris before the war changed everything, as it does. My paper is a study of these languages. It offers a view of the constellation of words, events, and exchanges that arise out of Delluc’s modernist, Parisian milieux (pl.), and that inform the foundation of his cinematic language.
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Jennifer J. Wild is Associate Professor in the Departments of Cinema and Media Studies and French and Italian at the University of Southern California. She previously taught at the University of Chicago where she wrote her first book, The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900-1923 (University of California Press, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Best Moving Image Book Award by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation and received Honorary Mention for the Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies. Wild has published widely on the European historical and neo-avant-gardes, early cinema, and film and the other arts, including an essay for the current exhibition, “Modern Times: The American Dream and the Avant-Gardes of the 1920s,” at the Archiv der Avantgarden in Dresden. She is currently completing the book manuscript, The Perspective of Radiance: Figures of the Avant Garde. In this project, Wild examines the figural logic of photography and film arising from the diverse avant-garde milieux of France and Belgium across the 20th century.
“On Photogenie. Delluc, Epstein and the essence of the visible”
Marie Rebecchi (Université d’Aix-Marseille)
Louis Delluc developed the concept of photogénie extensively through his film criticism and theoretical essays during the early 1920s. Photogénie refers to the unique, transformative power of the cinema to reveal the hidden beauty, emotional depth, and “essence” of people and objects, through the cinematographic lens. Delluc’s writings on photogénie directly influenced contemporaries, in particular Jean Epstein who expanded on photogénie in both theory and practice. Epstein took the term further, infusing it with a “techno-animistic” dimension. This talk will focus on Epstein’s reinterpretation of the concept of photogénie, in particular to highlight the shift from an idea of photogénie still linked to the notion of beauty to an idea of photogénie (Epstein’s) open to the idea of mechanical and animistic intelligence of the cinematographic machine.
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Marie Rebecchi is Associate Professor in Aesthetics and History of Cinema at the Aix-Marseille Université and member of LESA. She was postdoctoral researcher at EHESS (Paris) and she taught at Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. Her publications include: Sergei Eisenstein. The Anthropology of Rhythm (Nomas, 2017 with E. Vogman), Paris 1929. Eisenstein, Bataille, Buñuel (Mimésis, 2018), Puissance du végétal. La vie révélée par la technique (Les presses du réel, 2020, with Teresa Castro and Perig Pitrou). She has been visiting fellow at the University of Lausanne (2020-21) and Yale University (Dall 2023). She is working on the project The Kaleidoscopic Image. An Alternative Archaeology of Optical Modernity.
Session 2
Louis Delluc and the Art of Scriptwriting and Découpage
Guido Kirsten (Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf)
In a review of L’Heure sincère (René Plaissetty, 1917), Louis Delluc wrote that the film’s “script is devised and broken down [découpé] with a remarkable simplicity.” This is one of the first instances that the term appears (in the specific sense of a ‘cutting-up’ a screenplay into a succession of shots) in a publication. In later writings by Delluc, in which the less specific aesthetic terms “simplicity” and “rhythm” become central terms, concepts in film practice such as mise en scène, montage, and découpage actually remain quite rare. With regard to the latter this seems astonishing since Henri Diamant-Berger, the publisher of Le Film, who had hired Delluc as its editor-in-chief, was the most important promoter of the idea that découpage was essential to the cinema: “The découpage is as indispensable to the cinema as dialogue is to the theater or punctuation is to writing,” Diamant-Berger wrote in 1919, a year after he had already described découpage as “the fundamental principle of cinema.” There is reason to believe that Delluc agreed with these ideas, although he never uttered them explicitly. My paper will trace the short history of Delluc’s engagement with scriptwriting and découpage, focusing especially on a screenwriting contest Delluc organized and announced in the first issue of Cinéa (May 1921), on Delluc’s article “Scenarii” (first published in Comœdia, April 1923) and on the scripts he published in Les Drames de cinéma (March 1923), most of which he had “broken down” himself in order to shoot them.
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Guido Kirsten has led the research project “Filmic Discourses of Lack: On the Representation of Precarity and Exclusion in European Feature and Documentary Films” at the Filmuniversität Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF (Potsdam) in the DFG Emmy Noether Program since October 2018. Previously, he researched and taught at universities in Zurich (2009–2014) and Stockholm (2015–2018) and held a visiting professorship in Mainz (2017). He is the author of the monograph Filmischer Realismus (Marburg: Schüren, 2013) and editor of, among other works, the anthology Christian Metz and the Codes of Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2018; with Margrit Tröhler), the film theoretical writings of Étienne Souriau, Das filmische Universum (Paderborn: Fink, 2020), Einführung in die Klassische Filmtheorie (Mainz: Ventil, 2021, with Chris Tedjasukmana) and is co-editor of the film and television studies journal Montage AV.
The Metteur en Scène as “Film Composer” in France and United States
Melissa Gignac (Université de Lille)
The distinctive feature of Louis Delluc’s writings is that they consider the place of the film director at the heart of a system that is both industrial and artistic, as evidenced by his definition of the term “cinéaste”. This characteristic partly underpins the modernity of his approach, but is not without ambiguities, insofar as it is linked to a romantic imaginary (innate talent, gift, etc.) that pays little attention to the professional and technical conditions of the job (earning a living, precise skills). On the other hand, he draws a clear distinction between the French director, allegedly entangled in a theatrical tradition he would find hard to shake off, and his American counterpart – Thomas H. Ince in particular – whom he admires unreservedly. The aim of this paper is therefore to question the new “playmaker” that is the director ou “metteur en scène”, in Delluc’s sense of the term, according to national contexts. The aim is to contextualize these theoretical intuitions and historicize them, through archival work (director and production company fonds, press, scripts, etc.). The hypothesis is that he paradoxically contributed to the invisibility of the French directors who preceded him – and who nevertheless played a key role in the recognition of their profession and their art – to the benefit of the much admired and fantasized American filmmakers.
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Mélissa Gignacis a lecturer at the Lille University and a researcher at the CEAC (Centre d’Étude des Arts Contemporains). She has recently published a book about Quatre-vingt-treize from Albert Capellani (1921). She also wrote several articles on Louis Delluc, such as « La nature morte cinématographique, de Thomas H. Ince à Louis Delluc » (https://www.peren-revues.fr/demeter/158 / ), on close-ups and filmic forms, or about screenwriting as « La voix des objets dans Le Silence de Louis Delluc» (in Le scénario: une source pour l’Histoire, AFRHC, 2020) and «Louis Delluc, auteur “cinégraphique” (in Films à lire, Des scénarios et des livres, Les Impressions nouvelles, 2019). She also contributed to the DVD edition of Delluc’s films by Les Documents cinématographiques.
Session 3
At Every Turn, Another Angle
Sarah Keller (University of Massachusetts Boston)
In the late 1910s and early 1920s, several influential observers and makers of cinema in France initiated modes for thinking about this nascent art form that would shape the production and reception of films. Among these observers were Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, and Jean Epstein, whose contributions to this moment overlap in multiple ways: each wrote about film, worked on scenarios for film, made films, and enthusiastically proselytized for cinema as a quintessential expressive medium. Each therefore explored practical, intellectual, and critical ways of conceiving of cinema’s purview and methods, and each generated public discourse on these matters alongside their own film fandom and film practice. In this paper, I explore their provocative mixture of engagements with cinemas as the vanguard for shaping French cinema in the late 1910s and early 1920s. In particular, I emphasize the relay of cross-medial approaches to moving images for these filmmakers, such that they consider it from every conceivable angle. To explore these angles, I turn to their writing about the unique qualities of the cinematic image—as well as all three cinéastes’ tendency to use specific, contemporary film texts as a way of grounding certain ideas they wish to elaborate in practical examples. Finally, the better to illustrate their conception of cinema, I focus on Germaine Dulac’s film La Fête espanole (1920), made with a scenario by Louis Delluc, to engage with a film from the center of this period that elaborates their sense of cinematic mobility, luminosity, and rhythm.
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Sarah Keller is professor of art and cinema studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She co-edited Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam University Press, 2012), and her books include Maya Deren: Incomplete Control (Columbia University Press, 2014), Anxious Cinephilia: Pleasure and Peril at the Movies (Columbia University Press, 2020), and Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame (Wayne State University Press, 2021). She is founder and organizer of the Boston Cinema/Media Seminar.
Delluc, Dulac, and La fête espagnole (1920): A Short History of a Long Cinematic Impressionism
Tami Williams (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)
In spite of its bumpy, collaborative production history, Delluc and Dulac’s La Fête espagnole (1920) has been widely credited as the film that launched France’s first narrative avant-garde : cinematic Impressionism. Yet, the varied accounts and reasons behind this assessment are less universal and less clear. Arguably La Fête espagnole’s status as the first impressionist film owes as much to Delluc’s writings and his role as a trailblazing film critic and torchbearer of France’s first art cinema—the film’s collaborative authorship notwithstanding— as it does to the film itself, with its difficult production history, its early destruction / disintegration, and its fragmented history. A brief historiographic look at the film, the conditions of its production, its reception and recent restoration, along with a reconsideration of its place in the longer history of cinematic Impressionism (its influences, and is legacy), shed light on the trailblazing critical vision that helped shape not only a pivotal historic movement, but arguably a vital mode of filmmaking that continues to this day.
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Tami M. Williams (PhD, UCLA) is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and President of Domitor, the International Society for the Study of Early Cinema. Her books as author/editor/coeditor include Provenance and Early Cinema (2021), 2020 CNC Prix du Livre de Cinéma recipient Germaine Dulac’s What is Cinema? (2019), Global Cinema Networks (2018), The Moving Image special issue, 16.1: Early Cinema and the Archives (2016), Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations (2014), and Performing New Media, 1895-1915 (2014). She has a passion for early cinema and the archive, and the diverse intersections of wordlessness, gesture, and symbolist aesthetics in the performance arts, French cinematic impressionism, and the films of global women directors.
Session 4
Animals on Camera in Louis Delluc’s Writings (Between Alienation and Atmosphere)
Viva Paci (Université de Québec à Montréal)
In many of Louis Delluc’s writings, he expresses a great interest in documentary cinema, which is able to capture different living beings preoccupied with their everyday activities, while also generating an estrangement effect. This is a vision mediated by the camera’s eye. It is fundamentally simple to reveal the beauty of the world: in particular, there is a quality naturally present in animals which, when caught unawares, is intensified. We can see this in Delluc’s writings, whether in his enthusiasm for a film (“Parmi les fauves”, 1919), or, more frequently, in the cinema he wishes to come into existence (“Le cinéma art populaire”, 1921), or in the midst of a story that speaks of film procedures (“Le périscope” in La jungle du cinéma, 1921). In order to triangulate this apparent simplicity of the interest in the presentation of nature – with the idea that animals are spontaneously present before the camera – I propose to put this idea into tension with two contemporaries of Delluc who also reflected on the powers of the camera as a complex catalysator of alienation (the machinetta, in Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore by the Italian author Luigi Pirandello, published in 1916) and atmosphere (the eponymous camera patented in 1916 by the American natural scientist Carl Ethan Akeley).
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Viva Paci is Professor of Film Theory and Visual Interpretations at the School of Media, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and Director of the UQAM Master’s in Communication program: “Cinema and Moving Images,” since August 2009. She gained her PhD in Comparative Literature (Literature and Cinema stream) at the Université de Montréal. Her book publications include Chris Marker et l’imprimérie du regard (with André Habib, 2008), La Comédie musicale et la double vie du cinéma (2011) and La machine à voir à propos de cinéma, attraction, exhibition (2012).
Session 5
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Session 6
An Industrial Art or Individual Expression? Ambivalences in Delluc’s Film Criticism
Trond Lundemo (Stockholm University)
Louis Delluc’s writings on cinema are highly polemical, elegant, but also often normative. His accounts of cinema often proceed through individual names – the director or the actor, and the occasional producer – and the Atlas: some nations have a cinema, and the US before any others, while most don’t. This stance makes Delluc one of the instigators of a long tradition in French film criticism which could be argued to still have its remnants today: the ‘politique des auteurs’ and its corollary national outlook. The director-critic Delluc is engaged in avant-garde ciné-club circles, championing US popular cinema (Chaplin, Fairbanks), which resonates well with later periods in French film culture. However, Delluc also emphasized that cinema was not only one of the arts, and attacked Ricciotto Canudo’s position that it should be the 7th among them. Cinema was an industrial art, should be truly popular and engage the masses, and was for this reason an important and demanding financial enterprise. Consequently, Delluc in 1923 called for “a sort of world communism of the film industry” to avoid futile competition (p. 132). These are hardly the common tropes of an avant-garde agenda, of cinema as an art of individual expression by great men and the occasional woman, based in an established national film culture. There is an abundance of ambivalences and paradoxes in the general film criticism of this and later times, and Delluc’s case is interesting for posing questions about the agency given to technology, industry and finance in his writings.
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Trond Lundemo: Professor at the Department of Media Studies, Section for Cinema Studies at Stockholm University. Co-editor of the book series “Film Theory in Media History” at Amsterdam University Press and Steering Committee member of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) between 2011 and 2015. Guest professorships and fellowships in Japan, Germany and Italy. Research interests: film theory, media archaeology, social memory studies and theories of the archive.
“Black Velvet”: Photogénie as Negative Technology
Benoît Turquety (Université Paris VIII – Vincennes-St. Denis)
Louis Delluc’s notion of “photogénie” is often read as designating an atechnical quality of human and nonhuman beings, an impalpable attribute of certain faces or objects, as against boring others. But in fact, Delluc’s 1920 Photogénie is essentially a technological book. It describes the way to use — or not use — light and shadow, perspective, blur, analyses cinematography as well as costumes or settings, describes a studio and the organization of work. Yet, within the cinema technological corpus, Delluc has a singular position: his sweeping critical judgments are formulated from outside the trade, aiming precisely at denouncing the cliches, in other words the technical habits of the time. This standpoint gives us a rare glance into a world of recurring practices that seldom are described or formulated — for instance, the use of black velvet instead of the setting behind tender scenes. As negative theology was not the negation of theology, Delluc’s negative technology does not ignore or devalue the technical as such; on the contrary, he calls for an “algebra of light”, the construction of a film as a good theorem, and discusses with precision the implications of technical decisions on every level. The reconsideration of dominant practices doesn’t require the negation of technicity, it requires technology as aesthetic negation.
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Benoît Turquety is a professor in film studies at the Université Paris 8, director of the EUR ArTeC and of SNF research projects on Bolex (2015-2019) and Nagra (2021-2026). He has published Politiques de la technicité. Corps, monde et medias avec Gilbert Simondon (2022), Medium, Format, Configuration: The Displacements of Film (2019), Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivists” in Cinema (2020), among others. A second edition of his book Inventing Cinema: Machines, Gestures and Media History (2019) is currently being republished in French (2025).
Session 7
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Session 8
“Truth is Not on the Earth”: Reconsidering Louis Delluc and the Origins of Cinephilia through Aerophilia
Paula Amad (University of Iowa), presentation via Zoom
This talk offers a reflection upon the profound legacy of Louis Delluc’s pioneering role in French film criticism and culture. But it approaches that legacy from the margins of his voluminous writings and rarer films. I begin by reviewing two research paths I have previously worked on illuminating from those margins: first, his career and writings offer an untapped source for recovering women’s vital shaping of French cinephilia, specifically Colette and Eve Francis; and second, they provide a kaleidoscopic lens through which to think about a unique period in American-French critical exchange in which American cinema, and in particular The Cheat (Cecil B. De Mille, 1915), became, as Delluc ironically argued, colonized by French filmmakers, offering ripe resources for the extraction of any number of advances. Ironically, given the emerging dictates of the Hollywood mode of filmmaking, key amongst these advances was the magnification of the object world beyond narrative motivation. At that point I was deeply interested in how this attention to objects could not only be read as consumerist ideology (the reduction of humans to objects), but opened onto a larger sense of things and their palpitating role in cine-modernity in general and the theory of photogénie in particular. More recently, I have argued that there is another critical axis to the cinema’s pole of magnification and intimacy; and that is the role of the remote, macro vantage point and its ushering in of a distant view. Materialized most explicitly through the First World War’s combination of the airplane and camera, aerial vision, I have argued, marks the aesthetic and ethical ceiling to the arguments of photogénie. Hence, I take the opportunity of this conference, drawing upon Delluc’s pacifist writings about the war, placed in dialogue with unique footage shot in 1918 from a dirigible above of the ruins of post-war France and Belgium, to reflect upon the continuing relevance of Delluc and the first wave of French film criticism between the two poles of cinema’s gaze: intimacy and distance.
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Paula Amad is an Associate Professor of Film Studies and former Chair of the Department of Cinematic Arts, University of Iowa. She is the author of Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (Columbia University Press, 2010) and numerous articles in journals such as Feminist Media Histories, Representations, Camera Obscura, History of Photography, Cinema Journal, Film History, and Framework. She is currently completing a second book focused on the airplane and camera as the twin vision and dream machines of early twentieth-century modernity.