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.

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.

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

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...

An in-depth look at some of the best and most influential French films of all time, The Cinema of France contains 24 essays, each on an individual film. The book features works from the silent period and poetic realism, through the stylistic developments of the New Wave, and up to more contemporary challenging films, from directors such as Abel Gance, Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and Luc Besson. Set in chronological order, The Cinema of France provides an illuminating history of this essential national cinema and includes in-depth studies of films such as Un Chien Andalou (1929), Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot (1953), Le Samouraï (1967), Shoah (1985), Jean de Florette (1986), Les Visiteurs (1993) and La Haine (1995).