Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture

by Dudley Andrew, Steven Ungar

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674027169
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/31/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Dudley Andrew is Professor of Film Studies and of Comparative Literature at Yale University.

Steven Ungar is Professor of French and Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa and the author of Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire.

Table of Contents

Prologue. The Poetics of Culture and the Harmonics of History

Introduction. A Page in History: Resnais' Stavisky...and the 1930s

I. Street Work

1. February 6, 1934, and the Press of Direct Action

2. Céline and Malraux: The Literature of Discontent

3. Esprit in the Arena of Extremist Politics

4. Jean Renoir's La Marseillaise: The Arc of Revolution

II. Atmospheres

5. Daily Life in the City

6. Popular Entertainment and the Decay of Intimacy

7. The Look of Paris in the Age of Art Deco

8. The Lower Depths: Picturing the Quartier Populaire

9. Imagining the Colonies

10. Turbulence in the Atmosphere

Conclusion as Forecast

Notes

Credits

Index

What People are Saying About This

The history of the 20th century is so intertwined with the history of film it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them. This magnificent evocation of the French 1930s - so exciting politically and culturally - is memory stained with images, film as the very body of historical time: the popular front, surrealism, the colonies, the press, the chanson, the scandals, the quarrels of great writers from Gide to Celine. From all this, concentrated in stills from Bunuel or Renoir, our leave taking, with Levi-Strauss on the boat to the New World after the fall of Paris, is a sad one: the authors having demonstrated how energizing this seething decade can still be for us today. They help in the vital task of rescuing the Thirties everywhere.

Herman Lebovics

Andrew and Ungar have written a bold and wonderful book on the moment in France in the mid-1930s when the dream of freedom became flesh as new culture and new politics. With the Popular Front at the center of interest, it is at the same time a work on cultural politics and political culture of the years between World War I and II in France. It is the best such study that I know. --(Herman Lebovics, author of Bringing the Empire Back Home and of True France)

Keith Reader

This is a substantial piece of work on a key period in modern French, and indeed European, history – key not only in political terms, with the vicissitudes of the Left and the rise of Fascism, but culturally, with the rise of new media of mass communication such as the illustrated press and the sound cinema. --(Keith Reader, author of Robert Bresson)

Ginette Vincendeau

Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar's Popular Front Paris is an interdisciplinary study of culture in 1930s France, especially at the time of the Popular Front. Through the study of film, literature, and other media (such as journals, both learned and popular, photography and radio), the authors define and study a 'poetics of culture', a culture which they see primarily characterized by the move from culture to politics under the pressure of national and international developments. The project of the book is ambitious and original. --(Ginette Vincendeau, author of Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris)

Fredric Jameson

The history of the 20th century is so intertwined with the history of film it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them. This magnificent evocation of the French 1930s - so exciting politically and culturally - is memory stained with images, film as the very body of historical time: the popular front, surrealism, the colonies, the press, the chanson, the scandals, the quarrels of great writers from Gide to Celine. From all this, concentrated in stills from Bunuel or Renoir, our leave taking, with Levi-Strauss on the boat to the New World after the fall of Paris, is a sad one: the authors having demonstrated how energizing this seething decade can still be for us today. They help in the vital task of rescuing the Thirties everywhere. --(Fredric Jameson, author of A Singular Modernity)

Editorial Reviews

Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar have written a diverse, disparate, protean book that is well worth heeding...A judicious and often elegant original work of broad scope and great ambition.

Modernism/modernity - Eugen Weber

A magnificently interdisciplinary study of France in the 1930s, which reaches to embrace popular expression and urban life along with the work of intellectuals and artists...Andrew’s and Ungar’s combined erudition and their compellingly orchestrated presentation blend a series of almost autonomous essays into a dense and coherent portrait of an era...The book’s evocative, intellectually nimble, and often playful style is in keeping with the authors’ expressed desire to highlight interweaving, paradox, and coincidence. The result is a model of contemporary Cultural Studies, an indispensable reference...and a pleasure to read.

French Forum - Lynn A. Higgins

Andrew and Ungar have written a bold and wonderful book on the moment in France in the mid-1930s when the dream of freedom became flesh as new culture and new politics. With the Popular Front at the center of interest, it is at the same time a work on cultural politics and political culture of the years between World War I and II in France. It is the best such study that I know.

Herman Lebovics

The subject of this book is the frenzied cross-pollination of politics and culture in France during the tumultuous 1930s. This magnificent study has as its point of departure cinematographic culture and techniques. Andrew and Ungar deliver brilliant close readings of numerous films—both classics and cheap commercial enterprises—to illuminate the spheres of political imagination...The authors' many years of labor on this book were well spent. No one committed to cultural history can ignore this book and its powerful and persuasive methodology. This is interdisciplinary work at its very best.

Choice - N. R. Fitch

Andrew and Ungar offer a study of the cultural life of mid-1930s Paris in extraordinary breadth and substantive detail. Spanning topics from literature to film, stage revues, automobiles, photo journalism, literary awards, weekly magazines, and colonial and decorative-arts expositions, and layered with cross-references and thematic links, this weighty book is of essential value for scholars of interwar France...Regardless of where one stands on the possibilities and limits of the cultural contextualization of film, Popular Front Paris is likely to prove provocative.

Canadian Journal of Film Studies - Charles O'Brien

The history of the 20th century is so intertwined with the history of film it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between them. This magnificent evocation of the French 1930s - so exciting politically and culturally - is memory stained with images, film as the very body of historical time: the popular front, surrealism, the colonies, the press, the chanson, the scandals, the quarrels of great writers from Gide to Celine. From all this, concentrated in stills from Bunuel or Renoir, our leave taking, with Levi-Strauss on the boat to the New World after the fall of Paris, is a sad one: the authors having demonstrated how energizing this seething decade can still be for us today. They help in the vital task of rescuing the Thirties everywhere.

Fredric Jameson

Andrew and Ungar's book...is rich, complex, and frequently rewarding...This is a valuable and fascinating book, particularly in its insightful readings of a broad array of films of the 1930s.

Thomas Kselmann Historical Review

This is a substantial piece of work on a key period in modern French, and indeed European, history – key not only in political terms, with the vicissitudes of the Left and the rise of Fascism, but culturally, with the rise of new media of mass communication such as the illustrated press and the sound cinema.

Keith Reader

Dudley Andrew and Steven Ungar's Popular Front Paris is an interdisciplinary study of culture in 1930s France, especially at the time of the Popular Front. Through the study of film, literature, and other media (such as journals, both learned and popular, photography and radio), the authors define and study a 'poetics of culture', a culture which they see primarily characterized by the move from culture to politics under the pressure of national and international developments. The project of the book is ambitious and original.

Ginette Vincendeau

To claim that the most original aspect of Popular Front Paris resides in its approach is not at all to diminish the genuine contributions to traditional scholarship it contains. Andrew and Ungar have been working on this book for almost twenty years, and the time spent, patient research undertaken, and insight gained are everywhere apparent...The combination of information, juxtaposition, and analyses provided makes the volume essential reading for scholars of the era or for anyone teaching courses with a major focus on the 1930s in France...Popular Front Paris is an exciting book, both in its excellent evocation of the past, and in the implications its approach contains for the future.

French Review - William Cloonan

Andrew and Ungar's book...is rich, complex, and frequently rewarding...This is a valuable and fascinating book, particularly in its insightful readings of a broad array of films of the 1930s.

American Historical Review - Thomas Kselman