Poetic Realism: French Cinema of the 1930's and 1940's

Before Italian Realism and the Nouvelle Vague, French filmmakers of the 1930’s and early 1940’s created a new cinematic vocabulary for the narrative cinema, emphasizing a stylized naturalism devoted to examining the less represented lives of the working class and the criminal underworld. These filmmakers, especially Jean Vigo, Marcel Carne and Jean Renoir, would be celebrated by the Cahier du Cinema critics who would become the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague in France a generation later, and provide the training ground for filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti, who would evolve the “poetic” realism of pre-war and wartime France into the postwar “neo”-realism that came to define the cinema of Italy in the 1940’s and 1950’s.

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Online registration deadline: Tues. 6/4/24  at 5 PM CT

No class on July 4