Andrew Dudley and Ungar Steven, Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Extract

This history by two scholars of literature and film is a series of essays on the patterns and “tones” of French culture in the late 1920s and the 1930s. The Popular Front (1935–1938) comes in only as background, and its cultural programs (the subject of Pascal Ory's 991-page La Belle Illusion) are not discussed here. Breaking with what the authors call “standard history” or “the straight story,” this study zigzags back and forth across the years between the wars (and even later), pausing to examine selected movies, cinematic themes, canonic novels, literary careers, and the diverse political stances taken by cultural leaders. The authors' model for this anti-narrative history is Alain Resnais's film of 1974, Stavisky…, which they analyze at length, praising its multi-perspectival, ambiguous evocation of a period. Accordingly, they focus on episodes and fragments from different cultural strata, uncovering unexpected coincidences and similarities that constitute the “harmonics” of the past (as Sergei Eisenstein and Resnais put it). Their method also owes much to some Surrealists' ideas, counterbalanced by a Structuralist interest in cultural regularities. Still another model invoked throughout is the non-linear format of a newspaper, with parallel columns juxtaposing unrelated stories on a given day.