Les Enfants Du Paradis

This text looks at one of the masterpieces of French cinema, made under great difficulties during the German occupation in World War II, and set in the world of 19th-century Parisian theatre.

Les Enfants du paradis, a magnificent picaresque saga of Parisian street life and popular culture, has been called the greatest film ever made. Completed during the Occupation, it nevertheless boasted the largest set ever to have been built in a French studio, a crowd of extras and, under the direction of Marcel Carné, some of the most accomplished technicians and actors available (including Arletty and Jean-Louis Barrault as the central couple doomed to remain apart). Jill Forbes examines how, at a time of crisis, the film reimagined the history of France. Although Les Enfants du paradis is escapist, even fantastic, Forbes finds in it a radical, counter-cultural sensibility concerned with destabilising social hierarchies and prescribed sexual roles and questioning the opposition between life and art. Vibrant, joyous but also touched by melancholy, the film combines the traditions of high culture and popular theatre to remarkable effect.

The second edition of this innovative textbook brings together leading scholars to provide detailed analyses of twenty-two key films within the canon of French cinema, from the 1920s to the 1990s. Films discussed include: * masterpieces such as Renoir's La Bete Humaine and Carne's Les Enfants du Paradis * popular classics such as Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Ma Nuit chez Maud * landmarks of the New Wave such as Les 400 Coups and A bout de souffle * important films of the 1990s such as Nikita and La Haine The films are considered in relation to such issues as the history of French cinema, the social and cultural contexts of their production and reception, the relationship with Hollywood cinema, gender politics, authorship and genre. Each article is accompanied with a guide to further reading and a filmography of the director, and the new edition also includes a fully revised introduction and a bibliography on French cinema.

Traces the career of the influential French director and uses psychoanalytical concepts to analyze his major films.

aujourd'hui encore, les Enfants du paradis demeurent une énigme. Ce film au budget colossal, réalisé pendant les heures les plus sombres qu'ait connu la France au XXème siècle, parvient à se doter d'une distribution prestigieuse, de costumes somptueux dessinés par Lanvin, et de décors grandioses. Les américains y ont vu un "Autant en emporte le vent" français, avec en plus, une poésie inégalée au cinéma, sous la plume de Jacques Prévert. Au début des années 2000, fort peu d'écrits abordaient le sujet. Comme si les Français avaient décidé de bouder un film leur rappelant trop un passé qu'ils désiraient oublier. Le DVD des Enfants du paradis arrive, entièrement restauré, des Etats-Unis, sous le label Criterium, avec en bonus, une analyse en anglais, se substituant aux voix des comédiens interprétant le scénario. La traduction française de "Carné et l'âge d'or du cinéma" de l'Américain Edward Baron Turk, est publiée en 2002. Parce qu'une véritable oeuvre d'art ne connait pas de frontière, et que nous sommes tous des enfants du paradis, quelques soit notre pays d'origine.

This book offers perhaps the most comprehensive history of pantomime ever written. No other book so thoroughly examines the varieties of pantomimic performance from the early Roman Empire, when the term “pantomime” came into use, until the present. After thoroughly examining the complexities and startlingly imaginative performance strategies of Roman pantomime, the author identifies the peculiar political circumstances that revived and shaped pantomime in France and Austria in the eighteenth century, leading to the Pierrot obsession in the nineteenth century. Modernist aesthetics awakened a huge, highly diverse fascination with pantomime. The book explores an extraordinary variety of modernist and postmodern approaches to pantomime in Germany, Austria, France, numerous countries of Eastern Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, Spain, Belgium, The Netherlands, Chile, England, and The United States. Making use of many performance and historical documents never before included in pantomime histories, the book also discusses pantomime’s messy relation to dance, its peculiar uses of music, its “modernization” through silent film aesthetics, and the extent to which writers, performers, or directors are “authors” of pantomimes. Just as importantly, the book explains why, more than any other performance medium, pantomime allows the spectator to see the body as the agent of narrative action.

Il est des œuvres qui ont la grâce d'atteindre la perfection absolue. Les Enfants du paradis figurent parmi celles-ci. Ce film culte de Marcel Carné a été réalisé sur un scénario de Jacques Prévert, dont la version originale n'avait jamais été publiée. A l'occasion des cent ans de Jacques Prévert, en février 2000, cet ouvrage, abondamment illustré, constitue un hommage rendu à l'un des auteurs préférés des Français ainsi qu'à l'une des trois œuvres cinématographiques classées par l'Unesco au patrimoine mondial. Bernard Chardère, fondateur de L'Institut Louis Lumière et de la revue Positif, retrace l'histoire, riche en anecdotes, de cette réalisation hors du commun...