The grand illusion

1. Europe in the 1930s

2. French avant-garde
• France was center of an
international avant-
garde encompassing
Cubism, Dadaism,
Surrealism, Futurism
• Interested in the
possibilities of film to
embody perception and
dream states
• Rejected much of
French cinema

3. French avant-garde
• Three waves
– First Avant-garde – narrative
• Impressionism
– Abel Gance’s Napoleon
– two objects of desire - Josephine and
the world
– Second Avant-garde – cine clubs
• Dadaism, surrealism
– Think spontaneously in animated
images
» Unlike impressionists they wish to
create a pure cinema of visual
sensation
» completely divorced from
conventional narrative
» Made films without subjects
• Bunuel and Dali’s Un Chien Andalou
– bizarre sight of a man drawing a piano
with donkey carcasses and priests

4. French avant-garde
• Third avant-garde
– Sound brought end to the pure
experimental
– Production costs raised
– No patent on sound, depend on
Hollywood and Germany
• Poetic realism
– a blend of lyricism and realism that
derives from the influence of literary
naturalism and Impressionism
– Realist aesthetic
• Deep focus shooting combined with the
lateral camera movement into
"sequence shot” (plan sequence)—i.e.,
the shot that contains a sequence of
action uninterrupted by cuts.
• Open composition
• Renoir: ““not to cut in the middle of the
acting […]but to have the camera
hanging on the actor, following the
actor[…] being just a recording
instrument […] and not a God.””

5. French avant-garde
• Optimism began to assert
itself in France – trauma
of WWI was healing
– Populism
• supporting the rights and
power of the people in
their struggle against the
privileged elite
– Complexity of human
relations
• not just good guys and
bad guys
• Relations between
humans

6. Grand Illusion
• Escape film portraying French and
German officers during WWI
• Two years before Hitler’s invasions -
growth of nationalism in Germany
• Senselessness of war
• Why people submit to war
• Faith in humanism and fraternal love
• Elegy for the death of aristocracy
• Idealistic aim to influence Germans
• Goebbels banned film,
“Cinematographic Enemy No. 1”
• then confiscated copies after invasion;
Renoir fled to U.S.
• Roosevelt loved the film
• Negative was ironically saved by Nazi
officer

7. Grand Illusion
• What is the
Illusion?
– that national boundaries are
important
– that differences are more
important than similarities
– that war can solve our
problems
– that the “Great War” would
be the last war