This dissertation seeks to answer three questions: 1.) Which American directors developed the film language that most accurately described the Great War; 2.) What was the life and wartime experience ...of each of these filmmakers that informed their work and lent their Great War films authenticity? and 3.) How did the work of these directors help shape an overall film industry ethos of the male protagonist confronting conflict? After examining 185 American directors who made films with at least a Great War subtext, I narrowed the field to those who had actually participated in the war. Of those, William A. Wellman, Howard W. Hawks, Lewis Milestone, and William K. Howard proved to be the most influential. I explore in depth how each director's early life and military experiences shaped his perception of the Great War that translated onto the screen. Although Wellman and Hawks might seem obvious choices, their backgrounds are complex, revealing, and in some ways, unexpected. Milestone's presentation of the war was shaped by a tumultuous early life in Russia and New York and his experiences in the US Signal Corps. Howard, an artilleryman, took a surprisingly different approach to depicting the Great War. Because the work of these directors directly affected not only how the war is perceived but also how Hollywood portrays men dealing with conflict, I consider them the filmmaking auteurs of the Great War.
Perhaps I was too ambitious, and I constantly feared my. efforts wouldn't be equal to your work (de Baecque and Toubiana 22 1 ).2 So far the score card reads: the characters are lifeless; the film ...humorless; a key metaphor (in order to save knowledge and memory, the book-people memorize one book and become that book) laborious; the director impersonal, cowardly, and dishonest. Instances where the film bares its devices (the spoken credit sequence; reverse motion; a partial wipe that isolates Montag with a "criminal" during a search for books in a park; double-printing when Montag faints in the Captain's office; and the superimposition of the "flying" firemen with their jet packs) may seem "unconvincing," or unrealistic, but each has its functions., if only one of estrangement.
The younger poet thus adopts a highly charged "oedipal" relation to his "father" poet.2 If he is strong enough he deploys certain strategies (the six "ratios" specified by Bloom)3 that enable him to ..."swerve" away from the precursor at the point where the aspirant feels he deviated from what would have been the right course. In answer to his prayer, the goddess gave life to the statue and he married her.\n Furthermore, in Vertigo, as in the Pygmalion myth, the men - the artists - are obsessed, and the woman - the piece of art - is just a tool.
Modernism, Sexuality, and Film Adaptation, describes Truffaut's adaptation methods in a passage that, in its own way, seems to echo Truffaut himself (here, in reference to Jules and Jim): "Rather ...than 'copy' the novel, Truffaut applied a kind of electroshock to it, exploding it into discursive fragments and shards to be reassembled and recontextualized and collaged together with 'alien' materials from other sources" (85). Reassessing the White and Black Mix in Film Noir, Jans B. Wager builds upon her previous work on the femme fatale in noir-where her goal was to displace masculinity from its central position in the critical history of film noir-and asks whether a similar move might be made for the even more marginalized images of jazz musicians and black nightclub patrons in film noir.
Truffaut, impersonating/performing Dr. Itard, represents multiple layers of autobiographical content through allusions to film history, his life, cultural ideals, colonial upheavals, and critiques of ...the Enlightenment. Instead of the optimism critics have seen in this film, I suggest that it offers a criticism of colonialism and the Enlightenment through a convoluted autobiographicality that shifts its central subjectivity from Itard to Victor.
The Vichy government's extensive war of words and pictures to win the hearts and minds of the French people, to make them not only accept, but also cooperate with the occupying power, is well ...documented.1 From their exultation in the "peasant soul" tilling the fields to feed France to their glorification of Joan of Arc, murdered by the English enemy, the images of Vichy propaganda were ubiquitous. "Because it's in the script!" he replies, suddenly shifting from the play to the level of the frame narrative, and reminding us too that we are willing accomplices in the fictional process, that Nadine and Bernard are also played by actors temporarily adopting roles. The bar owner, Léopold, bigger than life, falsely accused of collaboration and shot by a real collaborator in a death scene to end all cinema death scenes, is die most likable and appealing character in the film, but even he is no Résistance martyr.
The letter as literary genre and material object has made an unexpected reappearance in contemporary French and Francophone literature. This dissertation explores the works of three contemporary ...women writers of very different backgrounds, the Senegalese author, Ken Bugul, and the French writers Marie Ndiaye, and Pascale Roze, and argues that the letter in their works is used subversively, functioning as corporeal presence and virtual performance around which new spaces and times are created. Chapter One analyzes Ken Bugul's De l'autre côté du regard as a rewriting of her earlier trilogy: Le Baobab Fou, Cendres et Braises et Riwan ou le chemin de sable. In this reenactment, letters become part of a performance. Chapter Two examines Marie NDiaye's Autoportrait en vert, where the letter acts as a catalyst in forcing her to confront a reality that she wants to escape. In Lettre d'été, analyzed in Chapter Three, Pascale Roze uses the letter's theatricality to reinforce a complicity with the "other" that manages to break down the temporal and spatial boundaries that are traditionally emphasized in epistolary communication. In these works, the letter is no longer the narcissistic rhetorical form that it had become in literary history. The three writers transform the genre into what I term an altruistic one, now aimed explicitly at a public rather than a single reader. Addressing the possible reasons for this new "mise en scène" of the letter, the dissertation details how the theatrical use of the letter reflects a postcolonial geopolitical reality. These novels, as do most recent writings, break down barriers between genres and the arts, between the written and spoken word. Today's literature does not merely break away from the past but transcends it. In this moment of renewal, the letter has found its place. The conclusion shows that as an incarnation of the "other," the letter provides a way to reconcile oneself with one's own fragmented story. To do so, the three contemporary French-speaking writers play with the letter's power of illusion in an illusory world, revealing through this letter-theatre the "what is" behind the "what has been."
Truffaut interrompt ses relations avec les Artistes Associés, ceux-ci ayant refusé le scénario de La Nuit américaine, et confie une part du financement ainsi que la distribution à Warner Bros. On ...peut lire ainsi dans le New York Times les propos suivants de Vincent Canby, le grand promoteur du Truffaut non-conventionnel: «Une des grandes fascinations de la carrière de Truffaut est dans l'observation de la façon dont il encercle et explore des aspects différents de mêmes sujets qui dominent presque tous ses films.» Il y a assez de Truffaut dans Domicile conjugal pour en faire non seulement un film extrêmement charmant et amusant, même lorsqu'on l'envisage séparément des autres films de Truffaut, mais aussi et surtout, en relation avec ses autres films.18 Ce qui était évident dans le cycle Doinel s'étend a l'ensemble de l'oeuvre de Truffaut, c'est-à-dire que les connections s'effectuent aussi pour des films d'apparence differente. 24 De même, la revue de Boston, Atlantic, note les différences de perspective entre L'Enfant sauvage et trois films américains, de Tony Richardson et Ralph Nelson: N'importe qui qui se souvient de son premier film, Les Quatre cents coups, avec sa salle de classe semblable à la mort et ses bureaucrates mesquins d'enseignants, sait qu'il n'a pas la moindre part de sensiblerie générate à propos de la valeur de l'education ou de la nature de ses effets sur les enfants; simplement, il ne traitera pas cette histoire à partir du passé, comme une structure pour se brancher sur des attitudes et des jugements contemporains, à la manière de Tony Richardson (La Charge de la brigade légère et Ned Kelly) ou Ralph Nelson (Soldat bleu)...
