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. But Renoir’s own story encapsulates pain and struggle within its cosmic vision. The male director retains narrative mastery in a world where men struggle to survive, and in the process holds on to his power to define racialised and gendered others. The River is perhaps best seen as a post-war film, one like The Woman on the Beach in which gender becomes a terrain to explore a more general sense of crisis and men have
in its most urgent task). 3 Histoire(s) du cinéma becomes, then, in the words of James Williams, ‘a tragic narrative of waste and shame’ (Williams 1999 : 308): the cinema never recovers after this fundamental failure in its mission, and post-war film history is characterised by a gradual but ineluctable decline, with the few moments of inspiration – Italian Neo-realism, the French New Wave – unable to reverse the
classicism which began with La Règle du jeu and dominated his post-war films. Classicism signified a critical distance between public and character (Renoir 1974a , 227–8). It also implied a complexity of mise-en-scène allied with an evenness of interest, a refusal to privilege a particular detail or individual. Finally, it was associated with a restrained and discrete mode of filming, summed up when Renoir says that for Le
Comfort’s work in the flow of post-war film production. One might apply them equally effectively to the career of J. Lee Thompson. By the spring of 1953 it was clear that British cinema had found a film-maker who could handle the technical demands of the thriller in a cinematic rather than a purely theatrical fashion. With The Yellow Balloon , Lee Thompson had demonstrated an aptitude for visual storytelling and a flair for
attention to the micro-movements of the face to reveal latent meaning, and for Deleuze (1986) the close up of the face can tell its own story (the film is punctuated by such close-ups which tell their own story).13 For Naremore, the face is ‘usually taken as the ultimate guarantee of reality, the very seat of emotions that are meant to be truthful’ (Naremore, 1988: 96) and the child’s face, perhaps we might argue, even more so. Darke acknowledges the ‘theologically informed discourse’ of French post-war film criticism described by Willemen and which enable him to discuss
the dark, post-war film from Czechoslovakia, Jirí Weiss’s Romeo, Julia a tma (1960), variously named in English Romeo, Juliet and Darkness and Bright Light in a Dark Room . The title itself picks its imagery and theme from Shakespeare’s play, which, as Caroline Spurgeon pointed out as long ago as 1935, is full of references to light (especially associated with Juliet) and
the post-war film industry. In A Stray Bullet , the question of nationhood is explored through the chaos between traditional and Western cultural values, and, through a sense of loss pervading society in the industrialisation process. These themes are efficiently handled in the film’s depiction of the day-to-day struggle of ordinary citizens during post-war repression. As the film shows, the lives of the characters are all
posits that film portrayals promoted the idea of the model family and the heterosexual couple.66 Pre-war films such as Design for Living67 in 1933, which tackles a sexually ambiguous love story between two men and a woman, and Look Up and Laugh68 starring Gracie Fields in 1935 were replaced by post-war films such as Brief Encounter in 1945. Within this film, Celia Johnson played a middle-class housewife who falls in love with another man she meets by chance at a railway station. Overcome by guilt over a few clandestine meetings involving what may have been considered
shown. Such interventions overcompensate for his loss of authority over the film and they reflect its other formal extremes: the over-literal and descriptive dream sequence filmed in slow motion, the repeated bursts of baroque music, and the rather obvious signs of theatricality (e.g. a real curtain rising over the bedroom at the start, the set within a set of Paul’s interior tent). Another rather loose strand for this post-war
contemporary war-torn world. Robert Murphy, after listing a number of films that exemplified the shift ‘from murder mysteries and crime thrillers to films dealing with espionage and resistance’, claims that: ‘More indicative of anxieties which would infect post-war films is The Night Has Eyes (1942)’, which has a ‘hero’ who is ‘undeniably sadistic in his treatment of the fluffy young heroine’.6 In this way, Arliss’s treatment of the character of Stephen not only anticipates Mason’s more brutal protagonists in The Man in Grey, The Wicked Lady and The Seventh Veil, but a more