ABSTRACT
Ten years separate the Allied incursion into Normandy in June 1944 from the invasion of the Riviera in June 1954 by the crew of To Catch a Thief. During that decade France was attempting to recover from war and the ignominies of the Occupation, struggling to define its role in a new order while adjusting to a mixed legacy of tradition, collaboration, resistance, and liberation. In that decade Cartesianism, with its grounding in common sense, iterated observations, and inductive argumentation leading toward substantiable generalizations, was forced to confront Sartrean existentialism with its emphasis on the immediacy of an observer’s gaze and of situation-based choices. In the shadow of the atomic bomb, French intellectuals also grappled with fallout from Artaud’s theories of cruelty and Camus’s representations of the absurd. Amid this social and intellectual turmoil French Catholicism reoriented itself, struggling for renewal by targeting teenagers and young adults via organized screenings and discussions of films. That decade also saw the demise of two stalwart film magazines, La Revue du cinéma and L’Ecran Français, and the birth in 1951 of their pace-setting successor, Cahiers du cinéma. It encompassed the rise of television as well as the advent of Cinerama, Cinemascope, and Vistavision. It also witnessed the flowering of dynamic Ciné-Clubs throughout France and the emergence of the Cinémathèque movement, anchored in Paris and Toulouse, dedicated to the preservation and renaissance of what Jean Cocteau and Eric Rohmer called the youngest muse.1
