The Social Architecture of French Cinema 1929-1939

From the fleetingly captured street scenes of the city symphony, to the meticulously reconstructed studio city of musical comedies; from the propagandistic Popular Front documentaries about construction workers, to poetic realism's bittersweet portraits of populist neighborhoods: The Social Architecture of French Cinema explores the construction, representation and experience of spaces and places in documentary and realist films of the French 1930s. In this book, Margaret C. Flinn tracks the relation between the emergent techniques of French sound cinema and its thematic, social and political preoccupations through analysis of discourse in contemporary press, theoretical texts and through readings of films themselves. New light is shed on works of canonical directors such as Renoir, Clair, Vigo and Duvivier by their consideration in relationship to little known documentary films of the era. Flinn argues that film has a readable architecture - a configuration of narrative and representations that informs, explains, and creates social identities, while reflecting upon the position of individuals within their societies.

Margaret C. Flinn is Assistant Professor of French at Ohio State University.

Introduction: An Architecture of Social Being
1. The Spatial Constitution of 1930s Documentary
3. Ren? Clair's City Views: Realism and Studio Paris
3. Intertext and Political Margins in Jean Renoir's Boudu sauv? des eaux
4. Traversing Built History in Architectural Documentaries
5. Fl?neuses and the Unmaking of Place
6. The Crowd as New Monumentality during the Popular Front
Epilogue: Poetic Realism as Spatial Fable
Notes
Bibliography
Index