| This dissertation proposes a series of readings of realist narrative and documentary films which explore the construction, representation and experience of cinematographic spaces and places in Interwar France, above all Paris in the 1930s. I examine the interactions between cinematographic production and a national sensibility increasingly marked by spatial crisis, tracing various means of filming and theorizing social space in relationship to monumental architecture: from familiar monumental sites in popular and populist fictional narrative film to the crowd as alternative, living monumentality in militant filmmaking of the Popular Front. Chapter One argues that Rene Clair's studio Paris films of the early 1930s (Sous les toits de Paris, Le Million and Quatorze juillet) should be seen as being of a piece with the documentary-style city of Clair's directorial debut, Paris qui dort. Chapter Two focuses on Jean Renoir's Boudu sauve des eaux for its the inclusion, in the margins of the film's narrative, of art historical, literary and architectural monuments, above all Notre-Dame de Paris. Chapter Three follows the figure of the flaneuse in Jean Vigo's L'Atalante, as well as its precursors of the 1920s, notably Pierre Chenal's La Zone, and Alberto Cavalcanti's Rien que les heures. I examine the push and pull between the city's center and its periphery, showing how the monument continues to exert a generative force and fascination, even when a film's narrative purports to reject such a centripetal ideology. Chapter Four tracks the relationship between architectural history and modernist architecture as figured in militant films of the Popular Front, particularly Jean Epstein's Les Batisseurs and Jean-Pierre Le Chanois's Le Temps des Cerises. Chapter Five considers the crowd as a structural analogue to the architectural monument in militant filmmaking. |
