Montage and French cinematic history

Amid the tumult of change that swept through French society in the wake of World War II, a trio of visionary filmmakers sought to make meaning of the chaos by revitalizing a common method: montage. Revealing Nicole Védrès, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker as more than just groundbreaking auteurs, Ivan Cerecina shows how their collective infusion of montage with avant-garde aesthetics renewed the art of cinema while helping France reckon with its past and imagine its future. Cerecina’s book Assembly Lines is a call to action today as contemporary crises prompt reevaluation of our cultural histories. Here, Cerecina is in conversation with James Leo Cahill.

Ivan Cerecina teaches film studies at The University of Sydney. He is author ofAssembly Lines: Montage in Postwar French Film, and his work has been published in Screen, Camera Obscura, and Framework.

James Leo Cahill is associate professor of cinema and French literature at the University of Toronto. Cahill is author of Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé and general editor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.

REFERENCES/PEOPLE:

Nicole Vedrès

Alain Resnais

Chris Marker

Sergei Eisenstein
Dziga Vertov

Henri Langlois

André Malraux

Walter Benjamin

REFERENCES/FILM:

Paris 1900 (Nicole Vedrès)

La Vie commence demain (Nicole Vedrès)

Guernica (Alain Resnais)

OTHER REFERENCES:

Steve Ungar / Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave

André Bazin, “On Why We Fight: History, Documentation, and the Newsreel,” in Bazin at Work.

Laure Astourian / The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema

Assembly Lines: Montage in Postwar French Film by Ivan Cerecina and Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé are available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.

Background track Claude Debussy, courtesy of www.classicals.de.