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.
CV:
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.