Critical Mass: Social Documentary in France from the Silent Era to the New Wave

Thirty-five years of nonfiction films offer a unique lens on twentieth-century French social issues

Critical Mass is the first sustained study to trace the origins of social documentary filmmaking in France back to the late 1920s. Steven Ungar argues that socially engaged nonfiction cinema produced in France between 1945 and 1963 can be seen as a delayed response to what filmmaker Jean Vigo referred to in 1930 as a social cinema whose documented point of view would open the eyes of spectator...