It is often claimed that the French invented cinema. Dominating the production and distribution of cinema until World War 1, when they were supplanted by Hollywood, the French cinema industry encompassed all genres, from popular entertainment to avant-garde practice. The French invented the "auteur" and the "cine-club"; they incubated criticism from the 1920s to our own day that is unrivalled; and they boast more film journals, fan magazines, TV shows, and festivals devoted to film than anywhere else. This Very Short Introduction opens up French cinema through focusing on some of its most notable works, using the lens of the New Wave decade (1958-1968) that changed cinema worldwide. Exploring the entire French cinematic oeuvre, Dudley Andrew teases out distinguishing themes, tendencies, and lineages, to bring what is most crucial about French Cinema into alignment. He discusses how style has shaped the look of female stars and film form alike, analysing the "made up" aesthetic of many films, and the paradoxical penchant for French cinema to cruelly unmask surface beauty in quests for authenticity. Discussing how French cinema as a whole pits strong-willed characters against auteurs with high-minded ideas of film art, funded by French cinema's close rapport to literature, painting, and music, Dudley considers how the New Wave emerged from these struggles, becoming an emblem of ambition for cinema that persists today. He goes on to show how the values promulgated by the New Wave directors brought the three decades that preceded it into focus, and explores the deep resonance of those values today, fifty years later. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

French Cinema: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Humor & Entertainment

Andrew, Dudley

Movies

Oxford University Press

André Bazin, often dubbed the father of the French New Wave, has had an immense impact on film art. He is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit. The journal that he founded in 1951, Cahiers du Cinéma, remains the most influential archive of cinema criticism. He remains one of the most read, most studied, and most engaging figures ever to have written about film. The last few years have witnessed a massive resurgence of interest in Bazin among critics, scholars, and students of every persuasion. His writings, a mainstay of film theory courses, are now finding a place on the syllabi of core courses in film history, criticism, and appreciation. Andrew's intellectual biography is a landmark in film scholarship.

André Bazin

Biographies & Memoirs

André Bazin's impact on film art is widely considered to be greater than that of many directors, actors, and producers. He is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit. Updating the paperback edition of 1977, Dudley Andrew has written a completely new introduction and provided an additional essay by Jean-Charles Tacchella.

Andre Bazin

Memoirs

Columbia University Press

André Bazin's impact on film art is widely considered to be greater than that of many directors, actors, and producers. He is credited with almost single-handedly establishing the study of film as an accepted intellectual pursuit. Updating the paperback edition of 1977, Dudley Andrew has written a completely new introduction and provided an additional essay by Jean-Charles Tacchella.

Truffaut on Cinema

Between 1959 and 1984, French film director François Truffaut was interviewed over three hundred times. Each interview offers critical insight into the genesis of Truffaut’s films as he shares the sources of his inspiration, the choice of his themes, and the development of his screenplays. In addition, Truffaut discusses his relationships with collaborators, actors, and the circumstances surrounding the shooting of each film. These texts, originally assembled by Anne Gillain and published in French in 1988, are presented here in a montage arranged chronologically by film. This compilation includes an impressive array of reflections on cinema as an art form. Truffaut defines the aims and practices of the French New Wave, comparing their efforts to the films made by their predecessors and including comments that encompass the entire history of cinema. Truffaut on Cinema provides commentary on contemporary events, a wealth of biographical information, and Truffaut’s own artistic itinerary.

Gillain, Anne

Indiana University Press

Andre Bazin on Adaptation: Cinema's Literary Imagination

Review\n"One must be cravenly grateful for these tasty packages of Bazin that Dudley Andrew is so thoughtfully arranging for us." ― Cineaste\nAdaptation was central to André Bazin’s lifelong query: What is cinema? Placing films alongside literature allowed him to identify the aesthetic and sociological distinctiveness of each medium. More importantly, it helped him wage his campaign for a modern conception of cinema, one that owed a great deal to developments in the novel. The critical genius of one of the greatest film and cultural critics of the twentieth century is on full display in this collection, in which readers are introduced to Bazin's foundational concepts of the relationship between film and literary adaptation. Expertly curated and with an introduction by celebrated film scholar Dudley Andrew, the book begins with a selection of essays that show Bazin’s film theory in action, followed by reviews of films adapted from renowned novels of the day (Conrad, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Colette, Sagan, Duras, and others) as well as classic novels of the nineteenth century (Bronte, Melville, Tolstoy, Balzac, Hugo, Zola, Stendhal, and more). As a bonus, two hundred and fifty years of French fiction are put into play as Bazin assesses adaptation after adaptation to determine what is at stake for culture, for literature, and especially for cinema. This volume will be an indispensable resource for anyone interested in literary adaptation, authorship, classical film theory, French film history, and André Bazin’s criticism.\nFrom the Back Cover\n"These essays on literature and cinema transport us to a time when French ciné-clubs, specialized magazines, and filmmaker-theorists created new thinking about movies and the world. André Bazin’s writing, beautifully orchestrated by Dudley Andrew, can be read as the intellectual sequel to Walter Benjamin's cultural critique of the 1930s."—Alice Kaplan, author of Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis\n"For anyone who believes cinema is literature by another means—a conceit that is often (if not exclusively) French—this collection of literary film criticism by the great André Bazin is a veritable bounty, and Dudley Andrew is the ideal person to bring it to us."—Jonathan Rosenbaum, author of Cinematic Encounters\n“Long recognized as one of the most important voices in classical films theory, André Bazin has also been one of the most incisive and original writers about adaptation theory and practice. Fortunately, those always subtle and insightful essays are now available in this ranging and balanced collection of well-known and not-so-well-known translations of Bazin's sustained reflections on the relations of film, literature, and the other arts. Also fortunately, the editor and guide for this work is Dudley Andrew, the most devoted and knowledgeable Bazin scholar in English.”—Timothy Corrigan, author of The Essay Film\n"This is a great volume that presents consequential but sometimes little-known writings by Bazin to an American audience. Any translation of Bazin is a major event for the field, and this one presents an absolutely key area of Bazin’s thinking."—Dana Polan, author of Dreams of Flight: The Great Escape in American Film and Culture

Arts & Photography

Bazin, André

Glassman, Deborah

Durovicova, Natasa

Photography & Video

University of California Press

The story of Paris in the 1930s seems straightforward enough, with the Popular Front movement leading toward the inspiring 1936 election of a leftist coalition government. The socialist victory, which resulted in fundamental improvements in the lives of workers, was then derailed in a precipitous descent that culminated in France's capitulation before the Nazis in June 1940. Yet no matter how minutely recounted, this "straight story" clarifies only the political activity behind which turbulent cultural currents brought about far-reaching changes in everyday life and the way it is represented. 
 In this book, Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar apply an evocative "poetics of culture" to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. They highlight the new symbolic forces put in play by technologies of the illustrated press and the sound film—technologies that converged with efforts among writers (Gide, Malraux, Céline), artists (Renoir, Dalí), and other intellectuals (Mounier, de Rougemont, Leiris) to respond to the decade's crises. 
 Their analysis takes them to expositions and music halls, to upscale architecture and fashion sites, to traditional neighborhoods, and to overseas territories, the latter portrayed in metropolitan exhibits and colonial cinema. Rather than a straight story of the Popular Front, they have produced something closer to the format of an illustrated newspaper whose multiple columns represent the breadth of urban life during this critical decade at the end of the Third French Republic.

Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture

Ungar, Steven

Belknap Press

The story of Paris in the 1930s seems straightforward enough, with the Popular Front movement leading toward the inspiring 1936 election of a leftist coalition government. The socialist victory, which resulted in fundamental improvements in the lives of workers, was then derailed in a precipitous descent that culminated in France's capitulation before the Nazis in June 1940. Yet no matter how minutely recounted, this "straight story" clarifies only the political activity behind which turbulent cultural currents brought about far-reaching changes in everyday life and the way it is represented.
In this book, Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar apply an evocative "poetics of culture" to capture the complex atmospherics of Paris in the 1930s. They highlight the new symbolic forces put in play by technologies of the illustrated press and the sound film―technologies that converged with efforts among writers (Gide, Malraux, Céline), artists (Renoir, Dalí), and other intellectuals (Mounier, de Rougemont, Leiris) to respond to the decade's crises.
Their analysis takes them to expositions and music halls, to upscale architecture and fashion sites, to traditional neighborhoods, and to overseas territories, the latter portrayed in metropolitan exhibits and colonial cinema. Rather than a straight story of the Popular Front, they have produced something closer to the format of an illustrated newspaper whose multiple columns represent the breadth of urban life during this critical decade at the end of the Third French Republic.

Just before World War II, French cinema reached a high point that has been dubbed the style of "poetic realism." Working with unforgettable actors like Jean Gabin and Arletty, directors such as Renoir, Carné, Gremillon, Duvivier, and Chenal routinely captured the prizes for best film at every festival and in every country, and their accomplishments led to general agreement that the French were the first to give maturity to the sound cinema. Here the distinguished film scholar Dudley Andrew examines the motivations and consequences of these remarkable films by looking at the cultural web in which they were made.
 Beyond giving a rich view of the life and worth of cinema in France, Andrew contributes substantially to our knowledge of how films are dealt with in history. Where earlier studies have treated the masterpieces of this era either in themselves or as part of the vision of their creators, and where certain recent scholars have reacted to this by dissolving the masterpieces back into the system of entertainment that made them possible, Andrew stresses the dialogue of culture and cinema. In his view, the films open questions that take us into the culture, while our understanding of the culture gives energy, direction, and consequence to our reading of the films. The book demonstrates the value of this hermeneutic approach for one set of texts and one period, but it should very much interest film theorists and film historians of all sorts.

Mists of Regret

Princeton University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Andrew, Dudley. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Andrew, Dudley

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Andrew, Dudley. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

French Cinema: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

André Bazin

Andre Bazin

Andre Bazin

Truffaut on Cinema

Truffaut on Cinema

Andre Bazin on Adaptation: Cinema's Literary Imagination

Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture

Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture

Mists of Regret