ABSTRACT
Since this chapter will attempt to disrupt some of the more widely held preconceived notions about this period in France’s cinema history, it seems appropriate to begin by setting a dominant myth on its head – that of ‘Great Moments’. Traditional mainstream history (but more particularly those who practise it) has a disquieting way of reifying the past into ‘Great Men/Moments/Battles/Wars’, etc. Recently, however, historians of French cinema have been unpicking this reification process and dislodging the safely assumed (because canonised) great moments. This is particularly the case for the 1930s cinema and, in this context, the work of Michèle Lagny and Ginette Vincendeau springs most immediately to mind.1 Conversely and to varying extents, the cinemas of the 1940s and 1950s have been less subjected to this socio-historical contextualisation than the previous decade. The 1940s, for the obvious but complex reason of the Occupation and its aftermath, has been the object of a rigorous analysis that is primarily politically inflected and here mention must be made of the various studies conducted by Jean-Pierre Bertin-Maghit, François Garçon and Jean-Pierre Jeancolas.2 Of the 1950s, in the belief that the Cahiers du cinéma group was right in its dismissal of most of that decade’s output and in an acceptance of its politique des auteurs, the predominant tendency has been to recognise a new set of canonisable film-makers at the expense of a more sober overview of that period in cinema history which was not so fallow as might be presumed.
