Representing rural France: A cultural history of Marcel Pagnol's cinema (1933-1938)

The first film director elected to the French Academy, Marcel Pagnol (1895--1974) made over two dozen movies between 1931 and 1954, including some of the most successful in the history of French cinema. Yet he has not received serious critical treatment from scholars of contemporary France. Typically dismissed in France as sentimental melodrama and relatively unknown in the United States, these films and their place in French culture remain to be analyzed.;The present thesis offers the first cultural history of Pagnol's rural cinema, focusing on four of his best-known films from the Popular Front years: Jofroi (1933), Angele (1934), Regain (1937), and La Femme du boulanger (1938). Using the classic epistemological divide between city and country as its guiding theme, the project explores the role that Pagnol's representation of rural France, as part of a larger system of representations associating urban modernity with French national decadence and return to the earth with cultural renewal, influenced the way Depression-era French imagined their nation and its place in the world, as well as their commonalities with, and differences from each other.;Specifically, the analysis shows how Pagnol drew on a rich corpus of popular traditions from the nineteenth century (including realist painting, the images d'Epinal, and the carnivalesque ritual of charivari) to create a new, mass-media folklore which acted as a symbolic antidote to French national decadence and a collective representation of national unity and strength. Moreover, Pagnol's work complemented a series of initiatives intended to combat French national decadence by promoting return to the earth: the auberges de jeunesse, the colonies de vacances , a renewed scholarly interest in ethnography, and the Popular Front's creation of paid vacations in 1936.;However, on a political level these movies were also a focal point of French national disunity, for they acted as a lightning rod for the bitter ideological battles of the Popular Front and were an integral part of the mass-media public-relations war waged between supporters and opponents of the regime. By revealing how fiction film conditioned spectators' social and political mentalities, the history of Pagnol's rural cinema provides a useful case study for evaluating mass-media popular culture as an agent of cultural change.