Description
Book SynopsisThirty-five years of nonfiction films offer a unique lens on twentieth-century French social issues.
Trade Review"Brimming with as many fruitful insights as remarkable discoveries, Critical Mass amounts to a Declaration of Social Purpose for early French documentary film. Steven Ungar yokes the daring-do of the avant-garde to the political goals of the left over the course of some forty years of filmmaking. It is a triumph of critical analysis."—Bill Nichols, author of Introduction to Documentary, Third Edition
"A powerhouse crowning the career of a distinguished scholar of twentieth-century studies, Critical Mass will be an enduring point of reference for the history of both documentary cinema in France and of the genre tout court. Wide-ranging, meticulously researched, and incisive, Steven Ungar’s readings recover the contexts that shape documentary style, form, and process. Had André Breton read Critical Mass, he would have concluded, rightly, that cinema will be documentary or it will not be."—Tom Conley, Harvard University
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Establishing Shots
1. A First Wave: Documentary Paris in the Shadow of the Talkies
2. Moving In, Moving Out
Études sur Paris
Transition I: 1929–1930
3. “All the World’s Misery”
A Propos de Nice to Aubervilliers
Transition II: Popular Front—Vichy—Postwar
4. Colonial Cinema and Its Discontents
René Vautier, Afrique 50
Alain Resnais/Chris Marker, Les Statues meurent aussi
Jean Rouch, Moi, un Noir
Transition III: The Group of Thirty
5. Two Takes on Postwar Paris: Scenes in a Library and Paris Springtime Zero
Alain Resnais, Toute la mémoire du monde
Chris Marker, Le Joli Mai
Afterthoughts: A Radical Lyricism
Acknowledgments
Appendix A. Declaration of the Group of Thirty
Appendix B. Quality Subsidy Study: Short-Subject Advantages
Notes
Filmography
Index
