Major Postwar Genres and Filmmakers

Major Postwar Genres and Filmmakers

France Postwar - and serials
1)Despite foreign competition, industry disunity, lack of capital, government indifference,
   and limited technical resources,
2)the French industry produced a variety of films.
3)In most countries, serials declined in prestige during the late teens, but in France, they
   remained among the most lucrative formats well into the 1920s.
4)Big firms like Pathé and Gaumont found that a high-budget costume drama or literary
   adaptation could make a profit only when shown in several parts.
5)Because moviegoers regularly attended their local theater, they were willing to return
   for all the episodes.

Some French serials of the postwar era
1)followed the established pattern, with cliffhanger endings, master criminals, and
   exotic locales.
2)Diamant-Berger’s fourteen-episode adaptation of The Three Musketeers was among the
   decade’s most successful films.
3)Whether made in serial format or not, many prestigious and expensive productions were
    historical epics.

A modest genre was the fantasy film,
1)and its most prominent practitioner was René Clair.
2)His first film, Paris qui dort (“Sleeping Paris,” AKA The Crazy Ray, 1924),
   was a comic story of a mysterious ray that paralyzes Paris.
3)Clair used freeze-frame techniques and unmoving actors to create the sense of an
    immobile city.
4)Several characters flying above the city escape the ray and proceed to live luxuriously by
    looting whatever they want; soon they track down the source of the problem and set things
    moving again.

The Crazy Ray (René Clair, 1924) - Click here for very beautiful intro

Intertitle:
Gay Montmartre was still Montmartre, but the 'gay' was gone, and the accent was on the 'mortre'.

In this scene the men are walking into the restaurant and all the people are frozen.

Intertitle:
Pompeii could have looked more strange.

In this scene he tries to shake awake the frozen person

Intertitle:
We know a retired Indian Major who prefers his 'jazz-music' like this!
then it shows a picture of a frozen jazz band. 

One of the men starts to cry.

They all sit down - one guy grabs the champagne bucket out of the frozen waiter's hands. 

Another guy goes and they get another champagne bottle

Intertitle:
Though there wasn't much to eat, the wine flowed free.

The guy wets his finger and touches the frozen guy to wake him up, he doesn't.

Intertitle:
"If you don't stop staring at me like a cross-eyed monkey!..."

from another guy to another guy.

One guy goes and steals a necklace off a frozen woman and gives it to his girl

Another guy goes and steals a fur coat off another woman. 
He's drunk and wobbly
They keep drinking and a guy stands up on the furniture
Intertitle:
All the world is ours....Hector! Hannibal! Napoleon!...'They were mere tin-pot chiefs compared with us!........"

They all leave the restaurant drunk
One guy tips the server who is frozen

They start to leave the restaurant

Intertitle:
Light-fingers motto was 'Never put off until tomorrow, what you can take to-day.'

Another guy from the group runs in and takes the money that was in the frozen waiter's hands. 

end of notes on film

Notes on The Imaginary Journey

1)In Clair’s Le Voyage Imaginaire (“The Imaginary Journey,” 1926),
2)the hero dreams that he is transported by a witch to a fairyland,
   created with fancifully painted sets.
3)Such fantasies revived a popular tradition of the early cinema in France,
4) drawing on camera tricks and stylized sets somewhat as Georges Méliès
    and Gaston Velle had done.

The Imaginary Journey (René Clair, 1926)

First screen

A mezzanotte

(My worst nightmare -waking up in a museum and the wax figures move around)

first her dog wakes up

then she wakes up 

They come and GRAB HER

and hold her on trial

A little kid goes and wakes up Charlie Chaplin and he saves the day - 

rescues the dog and beats up the other mummies.

And the dog attacks one of the heads that Charlie Chaplin smacked off. 

The kid wakes up a boxer

The boxer knocks everyone down and then Charlie Chaplin knocks him down and saves the girl. 

Chaplin takes her somewhere to talk

Chaplin brings in Laurel and Hardy to help her. 

They help her turn her dog into a person

This guy shows up dancing under an umbrella and they spin around until they all disappear.

or everything goes back to how it was...

I did not mean to take so many screen shots but i kept being amazed by the story at every turn. 

This is the full movie - click here -we just saw an excerpt from the last part of film. I guess the guy who was temporarily a dog woke up at his accounting office and from the film grew a backbone and beat up all his co-workers and kissed the cute office girl

Comedies continued to be popular after the war.
1)Max Linder, who had been lured briefly to Hollywood, returned to make comedies in
   France,
2)including one of the earliest comic features, Le Petit Café (1919, Raymond Bernard).
3)Linder plays a waiter who inherits a large sum of money but must go on working to fulfill
   his contract; comic scenes follow as he tries to get himself fired.

Le Petit Café (Raymond Bernard, 1919)

I couldn't find a copy of it on YouTube - teacher didn't provide either