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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
People who are working on this moment are restoring proper attention to this totally fascinating moment.
Ivan Cerecina:What were these filmmakers doing that responded to or drew on particular currents in film history? I saw these filmmakers as being not just filmmakers.
James Leo Cahill:Hello. My name is James Leo Cahill. I'm an associate professor of cinema and French literature at the University of Toronto, and I'm the author, among other things, of the Minnesota Press book, The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Paul LeVey. I'd like to introduce the guest of the hour.
Ivan Cerecina:Ivan Cerecina. I teach in Film Studies at the University of Sydney. I am also the author of Montage in Postwar French Film, which is very happily also published with the University of Minnesota Press. And I'm really pleased to be chatting to James about it today.
James Leo Cahill:Yeah. I'm so delighted to be talking about this book, which is one of those rare things of being a kind of academic book that's also something of a page turner. This marvelous book of yours, Assembly Lines, Montage in Postwar French Film. I have to admit that this is a book I've long wished that somebody would write. And in ways, I I kind of had a a moment in my life where I thought about writing something similar.
James Leo Cahill:And so when this manuscript came out, I was just it felt like such a gift. You're doing such valuable work for cinema history, for film theory, and particularly for French cinema historiography in what many of us who work in the field know is a major, kind of vacuum, in in the in the literature, which is, that period right after the war in the fourth republic before the new wave, and that we shouldn't speak in after your book. We probably won't speak of as before the new wave, but as its own cropper, period. And so what this book gives us is so much. It's a careful accounting of an understudied phenomena instead of filmmakers in the Fourth Republic in France.
James Leo Cahill:The phenomena, of course, is how Montage develops in post World War two era France among a circle of filmmakers who are namely Nicolas Vedrese, Alain Rene, and Chris Marquere. So without further ado, let's get into talking about this book. Are you ready, Ivan?
Ivan Cerecina:I am ready. Thank you. Thank you so much, James, for for that very generous introduction as well.
James Leo Cahill:Oh, my pleasure. So montage, of course, is a very familiar word, initiated for those who are initiated in the language of film. You know, as we've received from the Soviet school, I'm thinking of such filmmakers as Podofkin, Kuleshov, Vertov,
Ivan Cerecina:and,
James Leo Cahill:of course, most famously Sergei Eisenstein. But your book considerably enriches how we understand this beautiful and complicated term, this practice, this concept. And so to get us started, perhaps you can say a little bit about the use of the word montage in your project and how or why you chose this focus.
Ivan Cerecina:Yeah. That's a great question. I think it was something that I really took a little bit of time to come to as the sort of operative word around which the book would turn, for a few reasons. Obviously, you pointed out that this is a term with such a strong history in different parts of the world at different times. In The Soviet Union, this is the sort of period that at least in kind of film scholarship that we most strongly associate the word with.
Ivan Cerecina:And I've been thinking about the word a lot. Those filmmakers that you cited were really, I think, careful about adopting and really seizing upon that word in a self conscious theoretical way. They wrote their own sort of pieces of film theory. People like Kuleshov and Podovkin were writing film manuals in which they sort of adopted this word and really sort of helped to define it in a particular way. I think one of the challenges for me was in writing about filmmakers who, while they did write about film, didn't have that same theoretical backing or theoretical approach to filmmaking.
Ivan Cerecina:They weren't filmmaker theorists in the way that the Soviet filmmakers were. And also, in some ways that the you spoke about the new wave later that you spoke about the new wave before, they weren't that model of filmmaker critic filmmakers. So in thinking about the word and its use here, I thought about what were these filmmakers doing that responded to or drew on particular currents in film history. But another motivation was really that I saw these filmmakers as being not just filmmakers. One of the really exciting things for me in writing this book was learning about their work outside of film.
Ivan Cerecina:I'm thinking in particular of Nicole Vedrez, who in some ways is sort of the main character of the book, but she is someone who is involved in book design, or I guess typography, graphic design. I'm not sure quite quite sure what to call it. Mise en page. But she is involved in book projects before directing her first film, Paris 1900, which also has this sort of process of collage and juxtaposing images and putting them together in particular relations. Marker, for those of us who are in the field know about his, you know, it's always this big difficulty in defining who Chris Marker was and what he did.
Ivan Cerecina:He was a sort of multimedia artist before that term really had any purchase. But it was also a term that felt appropriate to thinking about them as filmmakers as well, who were filmmakers who really privileged the moment of editing, but who were also invested in the ways in which editing could be this sort of process of revision and revelation that I think is really what was the motivation for drawing on this term. It's a kind of, you know, I always think about that Bernard Eisenschitz film, Anci sur limeux le Montage, as such a beautiful word, which draws on Eisenstein's essay, How I Became a Film Director. And in some ways, it's this kind of magic term, right? Like, this is something that that we've sort of spoken about in the past, that it is both broad enough and narrow enough to accommodate so many different things.
James Leo Cahill:Yeah. Oh, thank you so much. And, I mean, one of the things that, at least me as a reader, when I got out of this is the Soviet theorists, and particularly for Eisenstein and Vertov, there's such an urgency to the way that they approach Montage. I mean, both of those figures are trying to imagine how they're gonna create a kind of revolutionary subject through the way they're cutting, through the way they're they're putting forward their images, and it at a moment of revolution, of of tumult. And one of the things that really comes out so nicely from your account in this book is a very different approach to montage.
James Leo Cahill:One that's contemplative, one that's patient, one that's searching, and, you know, that is a historical method rather than one of kind of intervening in the present. It is an intervention into the present, but through a heterotemporal gaze. And so I'm wondering if you can tell us a little more about the theory or account of Montage that emerges from the protagonist in your book.
Ivan Cerecina:Yeah. You've centered on something quite useful, partly in sort of thinking about that distinction between one generation of filmmakers of the sort of post 1917 period, and then the filmmakers that come after the Second World War, which is sort of my focus, is to really I think for me, the motivation was to think about how particular aesthetic forms get adopted according to different sort of historical conditions. Absolutely, I think for the Soviets, part of the reason that they adopted this term from the French was its association, amongst other things, with industry. And that part and parcel of this project of building a new world and a new vision of that world was to think about the sort of rhythms of contemporary life, and the way that film could in some ways inhabit or recreate or build out our vision of the world. In contrast, or sort of expanding on that legacy, these filmmakers are, in their own ways, adopting an aesthetic form that seemed to rhyme with both their own intellectual preoccupations, but the time as well.
Ivan Cerecina:This period after the Second World War, this period of Reconstruction and rebuilding that occurs, in Europe in particular in that time. And so I think they are in some ways invested in this process of reconstruction, this process of reconstructing or rebuilding, not in the sense of nation building, and there are some really interesting things going on Europe wide in terms of the building of a particular kind of European identity at this time. But I think their motivation is really to adopt this aesthetic form, because it allows them to understand their historical moment and the ways in which it has this perhaps unrecognised relationship to the past. And that needs to be that coming out of a particular sort of calamitous moment that this process of reconstruction or reconsideration or sort of reassembly, as I sort of talk about in the book, is a way of understanding that relationship to the more recent past. In that way, it felt like a term that which could operate as a historical term as well, or could refer to and describe historical work that was being done at this time.
Ivan Cerecina:That was the motivation for picking it up, both as a sort of aesthetic term that responded to various kind of traditions, but also to the historical work that was being done. And in that regard, I mean, I feel like, James, this is more kind of your territory, but there's a kind of tradition of historical writing and philosophical writing, which draws on disjunction as a sort of operative model that the book does draw some parallels with.
James Leo Cahill:Yeah. And I think really beautifully the way that you are kind of able to connect these two generations of different Montage East, you know, the the Soviets doing, the kind of work of construction, you know, the constructivist tradition, of course, in the in the twenties. And then after this kind of major rupture, this historical breach of the Second World War of genocide, of of atomic genocide, of a moment where reassembly really is the call of the day, and that this becomes kind of the technique that you describe each of these filmmakers doing. And also benefiting from being in 1945 at the half a century of cinema so that they're also at a moment of reflecting upon a kind of accumulated and destroyed history is really extraordinary. So so just to get us a little maybe into your protagonist a little more, I'd love to hear you describe a little, and this can be a bit of how you came to write the book, but also a bit of just your your sense of the field of French cinema at this time, how you came to choose Vedrese, Renee, and Marker as the kind of trio.
James Leo Cahill:And I agree with you that Vedrese, in a way, does become a key protagonist. She sets out so many important patterns that then will get refracted in the work of the slightly younger filmmakers, Renee and Marker, if we leave them, you know, to that. But I would love to hear you say a little bit of why these three.
Ivan Cerecina:Yeah, that was a real challenge. For those of us in our field, it feels like the two major models that we have for aesthetic history are, one, the model of authorship, which has a lot to do with this this kind of postwar period anyway of French French film theory and French film criticism. So aside from authorship, there are there is also a pattern of scholars writing about national film histories and national movements. And these have been called different things at different times, waves, movements. I don't know if you can think of any others, James, but this, this idea of periodization, I think, is especially important to film history.
Ivan Cerecina:But there's also this question of who's in and who's out. And that's typically been, it's either one person's vision, or it's enough of a kind of critical mass to borrow this term from Steve Unger, whose book was very important to this project. It's enough of a sort of critical mass of people that we can talk about a movement or a wave or a school or what have you. For a long time, I really did struggle with who was going to
Narrator:be in and who was going
Ivan Cerecina:to be out. I gave a talk the other week. You were at that talk, James, I spoke a little bit about the process of finding the focus of the book. This was initially going to be something more like a survey of documentary filmmaking in the 4th Republic, this period from 1946 to 1958, which produces so much kind of interesting and innovative work. I've quickly discovered that for different reasons, I wasn't good at doing that sort of survey work.
Ivan Cerecina:I wasn't good at sketching out a landscape, and I found it a lot more productive to go into detail about a smaller number of people. The main reason for choosing these three is because they're the three filmmakers I like the most from this period. But I think it also had a lot to do with what I was noticing about the significance of what came out of this period that felt new and what felt lasting as well. One of the things that I noticed was this sort of preponderance of filmmakers making films with pre existing footage, which isn't new. It's not that it had never been done before, but there is such a kind of concentration unique work being done in particular field, this idea of the sort of compilation film or archival documentary, or what was called at the time the Film de Montage.
Ivan Cerecina:I think, to go back to your earlier question, that was part of the reason why I adopted that term. But that tradition of kind of archival filmmaking really reignites in this period. One of my favourite pieces of writing from this time is Andre Bazan's writing write up a quite negative review of Frank Capra's Why We Fight series, which is a series of which is a compilation film series, which in some ways is a piece of propaganda made for US soldiers who needed some explanation for why are they going off to fight in North Africa, why are they going off to fight in Asia. And the film is this kind of recut of images of fighting from the battle lines and from the front lines, rather, from newsreels, documentaries, pedagogical films. And Bazan, who has his misgivings about this, about the film, nevertheless says that during these periods of what he says total war, film has this impulse towards total history, that film seems to sort of attract itself to these moments of disorder, disaster, tragedy, and start to build or exfoliate, as he says, this kind of skin of history during this time.
Ivan Cerecina:This felt like this kind of archival impulse or this sort of impulse to turn towards the past is really what interested me in terms of what felt new, and particularly what felt lasting from this period. Vedress is fortunately getting her day, or another way of putting that is she is rightfully being considered in terms of the impact that she has had on film history. I think Marker and Renee are canonical figures, very much so. But I think for all three of them, their work is really impactful for so much of what came afterwards. And I'm thinking in particular, not just of this sort of tradition, continuing tradition of found footage, compilation or archival documentary filmmaking, but also of the particular kind of vision of history or the particular sort of attitude towards material that they adopt in this time.
Ivan Cerecina:I think there's a really interesting and fruitful current of film theory and film criticism that emerges in this postwar period in France, which is writing about this term of cinema moderne, whatever that means. And they seem to be particularly useful to that tradition of kind of modern cinema, a particular idea of modern cinema as well. I suppose to come back to your question, it was a way of attaching a way of justifying writing about filmmakers who I thought were the most doing the most interesting things at the time, but who also had the most significant impact on the way that we see the history of film and what what gets picked up later.
James Leo Cahill:Yeah. And I think that's only becoming truer as we have a kind of more mature approach of what comes after, a mature historical approach to what comes after, which is the overvaluation, some would say, of the kind of new wave as the kind of way of organizing a before and after of French cinema. What you and scholars you know, I think of Laura as well. What people who are working on this kind of moment are are doing is is restoring a kind of proper attention to this totally fascinating moment. I wanted to pick up on something you you said from Bazan because it really struck me as maybe a nice way of getting into a little more detail with Nico Vedreze, which is that in that that piece on why we fight, he describes the moments of calamity, of catastrophe, of total war as being where we see this kind of expression of a neuro complex or a neurodrive.
James Leo Cahill:Right? You know, this kind of destruction drive. You know, it's Nero who burns down Rome and then fiddles. And this comes just after he's given his most famous description of cinema as having a mummy complex. And so here we have both this tension in the kind of reception of films at this moment between the capacity of cinema to produce historical record, to store, to preserve, and also this destructive drive.
James Leo Cahill:This both will to capture the chaotic, the destructive, but also perhaps something of, you know, what what later we might call the archive fever of of cinema that it also has something that burns in it that is counter to that preservation. Maybe this is a way to just say a little more about who, for the interested listener who's not yet fully on board with Fedrez, and she's absolutely finally getting her Jewish. As you said, there's been beautiful restorations of the work at plate at Bologna and and, you know, so we're finally really getting to situate her where she belongs in the history of cinema in France and beyond. But maybe you can say a little more about who she was. I know you mentioned already her work doing kind of mise en page and journalism.
James Leo Cahill:But give us a little more about her, how she came into cinema, and particularly how she comes to make what is, for those who have seen it, for the initiates. And I hope that your book is gonna send many people to see this film. But her key film, Paris, 100.
Ivan Cerecina:Yeah, absolutely. Vedrez, like Marco, also had many hats. I think she was first and foremost a writer. She's born in 1911 in Paris. Her mother is Ludmilla Savitsky, a very famous translator, primarily of texts from English into French.
Ivan Cerecina:I think she's the translator, an early translator of Joyce. So she comes, I suppose, from a literary background. She, in the 1930s, worked as an archivist for the Ferry family, and at some point starts to develop as a writer. I believe she writes her first novel during the Second World War, and she goes on to publish about eight or nine novels with Gallimard, which is the sort of premier press publishing house in France. So she is a novelist of considerable repute.
Ivan Cerecina:She is also a playwright. She also works, as you said, as a journalist. And I think it's partly through this work of journalistic work, but also her really important contributions to cultural history that she becomes a filmmaker. During the Second World War, she writes a number of books about different aspects of French cultural history. These are all really wonderful and really beautiful objects in and of themselves.
Ivan Cerecina:They are all kind of illustrated histories of different aspects of cultural history in France. One of them is a book that she co writes about sculpture in France. There's a book that she writes about fashion. And she writes a book about you use this term, the sort of half century of French film history, she writes a book about the first fifty years of French film history called Dimage du Cinema Francais. This is, in its own way, a kind of really innovative approach to the sort of illustrated book and to mise en page, this sort of process of assembling images on the page.
Ivan Cerecina:Some people have referred to it as the first sort of illustrated history of French film. I'm not entirely convinced by that claim, but a historian of that particular topic, I'm sure, would be able to shed light on that. It's a really fascinating book that describes not so much the sort of linear chronological history of French film, but it's a sort of very selective account of different currents within it. There's chapters on dramatic film, on the sort of burlesque tradition in France, on the historical film as well. What's really interesting about it, apart from Vadresse's incredibly perceptive and if not encyclopaedic knowledge of French film history, then absolutely a sort of incredible breadth of understanding about what was going on.
Ivan Cerecina:Aside from that, there's a really interesting illustrative work going on. The book is replete with these images of production stills from all of these different films, which without quite being this sort of collage like work that we saw associated with the surrealists in the 1920s and the 1930s, it's really sort of invested in the ways in which images and the relationships between images could participate in this writing of cultural history. The reception of that book had a lot to do with Vedress directing her first film, Paris, 1900, which in many ways emerges from that book's successful launch in postwar France. It gets released in February 1945, just after the Cinema Tech Foncaise opens up its doors. The first exhibition of Henri L'Enrois's Musee du Cinema, which he establishes and opens at the Cinema Tech Francaise, if I'm not mistaken, in 1944.
Ivan Cerecina:The name of that first exhibition is 'Image des Cinema Francaise', in homage, or kind of in parallel, rather, with Vedresses' book. So the book and that exhibition kind of in some ways feel like they're there at that moment of sort of regeneration and of the kicking off of postwar synovialia in France. So the book is seen, the book is well received, and a producer, Pierre Brombergel, who had been producing films since the 1920s and 1930s, approaches first Longoir and then eventually Ved Dresse to direct a film an archival film which reuses footage from films from the period of the early twentieth century to write a history, or to construct a history of Paris in the early twentieth century. Vedrez is the one who directs that film. There's a really sort of interesting team of people who are associated with it.
Ivan Cerecina:Vedrez's assistant on the film is Alan Rane, the future director of Yoroshima Monamo, Last Year at Marienbad, and several things beside. But Vedrez is also surrounded by a really wonderful group of technicians and researchers who help out in the making of the film, which, in some ways, I wish I had given more justice to the ways in which that film is a kind of collective effort in some ways. That film, Paris 1900, is a compilation film, or a film de montage, which is about the Belle Epoque, this period of sort of turn of the century post, according to different people, different times, but this sort of turn of the century, late nineteenth century, early twentieth century France and Paris in particular. It's a not quite, again, like the book, not quite a chronology of that period, or a sort of straight history of that period, but an evocation of these different currents that seemed to be going on at that time. And then I think in that way, the book sets up interesting historical precedents for what the film does, which is really, in some ways, really, really captivating and really compelling.
James Leo Cahill:Yeah. That's fantastic. And I think, you know, readers will learn a bit more about the team, about some of the details. I mean, there's these really marvelous stories of Vidrejs and Rene taking a bus around France to go to, you know, look at various collectors' private collections, digging up films from someone's garden near a rabbit hutch, all these kind of stories because this is a moment, you know, that is exactly after things have been hidden during the war so that they stay out of the hands of of the occupying forces or that they don't get destroyed. But, also, this is a moment when the very venerable institutions that feel to scholars like you and I, and to many in the world have been there forever are actually in their kind of nascent moments.
James Leo Cahill:And we'll get into this a little more in a little bit, but I did wanna ask another question just about Vedrez and this film because one of the really striking things that you account for in this book is that Vedrez is importantly working with very different kinds of footage. So I wonder if you might just talk about her approach to the kind of footage she selects, how she's putting it together, and what some of the, like, logics of that are.
Ivan Cerecina:Yeah. That's a really great point. I think part of the thing that drew me to that film is that it while it's funny, this term archive is so interesting, because it has a meaning in the sense of a kind of brick and mortar place that you can go. But it also has a sort of more diffuse idea of a collection of images that stands for a particular historical period. In any case, as precisely as you said, Pedroza is making this film at a time when the brick and mortar institutions are either underground or not quite what they are today in France.
Ivan Cerecina:It's interesting, I think in making the film, Vedrese did consult the archives of the Cinema Tech Foncaise, although they were for various reasons, precisely as you said, for kind of historical reasons to do with the Second World War, and also due to the fact that this was a relatively new institution, the collection wasn't particularly well inventoried. So one of the really interesting parts about the film is the story of how they kind of came to the images that appear in it. Bejuez described this in the sort of press tour that she did at the time. Her and Renee really leaned a lot on private collectors who had their own semi legally acquired prints of films that they had kept at home. I think one of the really interesting things about the film is the ways in which it is, by necessity, a non systematic collection and assemblage of images, precisely because I feel as if it were made twenty or thirty years later, the process of choosing and then with that assembling images would have looked a lot different.
Ivan Cerecina:I presume it would have looked like you go to an archive, you speak to an archivist, and you say, what can you give me about this period? That wasn't quite the case with this film, which in some ways is sort of put together in a quite haphazard fashion. So they went out looking for the images that appeared in the film, the sort of excerpts of pieces of footage. And initially, the brief was from the producer: go out and find as many comedic films or burlesque films from that period. Because what we want to sort of make is a film which is about Paris, but is entirely sort of constructed from bits and pieces of comedic films.
Ivan Cerecina:And at that time, film reels often had appended onto them newsreels that distributors had sort of stitched together onto them. And so Vidrejs and Renee, when they were looking at these reels, which were typically unmarked, or which they sort of had to sort through themselves in different states and in different collections, they would look at them and they would be drawn also to the sort of newsreel footage that they could perceive in them. Slowly, the film started to include these all these different kinds of footage. It started to include footage from sort of comedic films from the period, not from Max Landau, but filmmakers in that sort of vein, but also increasingly newsreel footage, home movies, all kinds of things. I think that has a lot to do with this process of how the footage was collected and chosen has a lot to do with the process of assembling the images as well.
Ivan Cerecina:Vadrese writes really beautifully about this in her really great essay The Leaves are Stirring, Le Faux Bouges, which she writes a few months after finishing the film. She says that given that we were faced with this total disorder, it made sense that we in some ways constructed this vision that didn't respond to the codes of established history and chronology. So she talks about the ways in which we were sorting through this disorder. So it became our own particular predilections for particular kinds of images that drew us to them. And I think in the process of asking ourselves these questions of why is it that I want that image, or why is it that this seems to rhyme with this other image that I found, that the most interesting and, in some ways, impactful ideas about film as a historical medium emerge from this time, which is partly to do with what you were saying about Bazan and these ideas that he seems to be noticing going on at this time, that film has this mummy complex, but it also has this much less stable, if not destructive drive, then a much more contingent or unstable relationship to the things that it is depicting.
Ivan Cerecina:So in that way, the film also has these moments in which the stability of the things that we are seeing comes into question. And I think a lot of that has to do with the prehistory of the film, or at least the collation stage of project, which is something that's kind of common to so many of these films that they are, if not all, haphazardly sort of put together or haphazardly have this element of chaos during the collation period, they are not referring back to sort of established inventoried collections that they are drawing from. I think that has a lot to do with the interest of their work and what makes it unique.
James Leo Cahill:I mean, today, we would call it the like too many tabs aesthetic of having too many tabs of your browser, 18 YouTube videos going at once, TikToks, etc. But that it has this absolute heterogeneity that you write about so beautifully that for those who have yet to see the film, it indifferently cuts, but so skillfully cuts between stage comedies, newsreels, you know, car races, fashion, a lot of attention to women's quotidian existence. And it really it it it develops kind of privileged historical register, which is not anything intentionally historical, but are the particular details of everyday life that as these films have aged, as they've come out of their immediate context and been recontextualized, actually have a stratum of historical information that is kind of unlocked by the way she cuts, by the way she's assembled this work and reassembled this work. And I think this is one of the things that the book so beautifully brings to, the foreground is what you describe as her epiphantic, approach to Montage. And maybe as a a way of giving her just a little more attention, but then turning a little bit to her her confrere, to Alain Renee and and Chris Marquere, I would love to hear you just talk about what they all share as filmmakers and also how their approaches to Montage slightly differ.
James Leo Cahill:Because I think this will also give a lovely preview of the chapters that come after this extraordinary chapter on the the nerves of an era on Vedress' work. And the one other thing I just wanted to say is that what comes out of this account you give us of Vedress' work is that Paris, Millenosaune, Paris 1900, also becomes a kind of film school for a certain kind of filmmaker. I mean, literally for Alain Renee. But I think as a lesson that a lot of key filmmakers will follow-up on.
Ivan Cerecina:I think film school and what was the other term that you used?
James Leo Cahill:It's a film school, it's an education.
Ivan Cerecina:And an education, yeah. That's a really, really wonderful way of putting it that the film is a kind of first experience for someone like Alan Varney of working on a professional feature. And it has such a strong impact in the documentary work that he completes in the years directly afterwards. And also as a model, I think I'll sort of address those two things separately. I think Rene is one of the other sort of big figures in this book.
Ivan Cerecina:And I think he's an interesting one, because he straddles this line between, on the one hand, this kind of compilation film traditional kind of archival tradition that's emerging from this time. But also, he's taking that impulse of returning to existing forms and sort of applying it in different ways. The very next film that he works on, apart from some amateur shorts that he's sort of working on on the side with friends, is a film about Van Gogh. Apologies to the Dutch people listening. This film is about the Dutch painter, and it is comprised entirely of reproductions of details from his works.
Ivan Cerecina:And he does, he makes a handful of these really wonderful films of the late 1940s and early 1950s, that are kind of artist portraits or films that take as their point of departure, at least visually speaking, pre existing materials, which are the canvas, as well as in his work on Guernica, Picasso's painting of the same name, also sculpture. I think Paris 1900 is a kind of film school for Rene for sure in terms of his entry into the film industry, but for the principles that it introduces of not just working with pre existing materials, but related to that, the ways in which that puts the moment of assembly or the sort of moment of the cut or the joining of images is this really sort of important operative moment in understanding what it is that you are seeing. So Renee makes these films in the 1940s, early 1950s, these art films. And around the same time, he starts a collaboration with Chris Marker. A film that they start working on in the late 1940s is one called Statues Also Die, Les Statues Murtaursie, which is, in some ways, a kind of continuation of this art documentary tradition.
Ivan Cerecina:It is about traditional African sculpture and statues, and its fate in the wake of the anti colonial struggles, or during the sort of decolonial period, as it would, I suppose, retroactively be referred to. So they make this film together, which is a kind of art documentary in some ways, But in other ways, kind of compilation film as well, really interestingly starts to introduce these images of kind of newsreels and pedagogical films. So I think to come back to your question of how did they differ? I think in a lot of ways, Rene takes these principles of recutting or reassembling images. And I think he's engaged with politics as a contemporary politics in France in a much more explicit way.
Ivan Cerecina:I think something that sort of ties his work together, and particularly from Guernica onwards through to the mid 1950s, is that he is interested in the ways in which these kind of past cultural forms have an afterlife, and they have an afterlife which can hopefully tell us something about not just the way that we remember the past, but what we do with that memory of the past. His definitely the most kind of canonical and best known work that I write about in the book his book, is his film Night and Fog, which he makes in the mid 1950s, which is about the concentration camps of World War II. And that film, which is part compilation film, part not compilation film, is in some ways the aesthetic summation of so much of the work that is going on in this period, but also sort of demonstrates what's unique about Renee, who is really thinking about this question of the sort of afterlives of particular ideas and of images, and how they shape the way that, I think, French people were seeing contemporary political issues of the day. One of the throughlines of that chapter is to try to trace the ways in which that film, you know, Renee's work more broadly, responds to these seemingly dormant energies that are going on, that remain in France, that relate to the occupation, but also a sort of unresolved relationship to the far right, which has its moment of resurgence very quickly, actually, in France in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Ivan Cerecina:We can see the tale of that now. In that way, I think, Rene extends the work that has been sort of done aesthetically and has, I think, particular sort of political motivations at this time in his own way. Marker is perhaps more than anyone someone who sort of took the lessons of Vedressa's work to heart in terms of contemporary politics, for sure. But I think in some ways we see the period of Marcus filmmaking that I write about in the book is this very early period in which we see a lot of the aesthetic principles and the sort of historical ideas that stay with him throughout his career. It's the period in which they're sort of first worked out, if you like.
Ivan Cerecina:The films that he makes first are, in some ways, films concerned with travel. He makes a film about the Helsinki Olympics in 1952 as an employee or as a member of the organisation, Purple de Crouture. He makes a film about Beijing in 1956, and a film about Siberia in 1957. So in some ways, Marker, to come back to this question of difference, is an interester really invested in travel and both the literary and cinematic tradition of the travelogue. And his films quite explicitly draw on those traditions, particularly in their voiceover.
Ivan Cerecina:But in some ways, Marker is really invested I think you actually pointed this out to me he's really invested in this sense of the kind of off frame, these things that seem to kind of seep into images, but which seem to be lying just out of reach. So his films are about particular historical moments. Like Vedressi, he's interested in the ways in which there's this, as you put it so nicely, this stratum of information that seems to emerge over time, but the ways in which those are impacted or informed by historical events that are ongoing. And he seems to be particularly interested in how can we understand another place and another way of life through these images that we record that we don't quite understand?
James Leo Cahill:Yeah. I mean, if I can resummarize what you've just so beautifully stated, something that really struck me in your accounts of Vedrez is really attentive to the detail and then to the epiphany, so the revelation. And Renee, in those early films and I guess we will both do violence to the Dutch, particularly on Van Gogh, apologies, double time, that Renee is really interested in the gesture. Both both the gesture of the artist, but also the gesture of the camera. So you get this dual gesture going on.
James Leo Cahill:And then the gesture of what you call in the book, demontage, which is that just that fragmentation, that refragmentation of things that appear whole so that we can understand them kind of from another vantage and see how they can through a whole network of of concerns, moments, places. And then, Marc Eyre, you beautifully quote a late interview he does with the historian Antoine Debrec, who is also, you know, one of the editors of Calle De Cinema in the nineties. But that that he will say that he's interested in the mark history makes on the present. And it when I read that in your conclusion, I was like, oh, no wonder he calls himself Chris Marquere. It's like, it's there in the name.
James Leo Cahill:He was you know, he's been waiting to tell us this all the time. But it's also this fascination with displacement, whether through the travel or through that which is just or CAD just out of frame, going to emerge but hasn't yet found its full form. And he's brilliant at and I do agree with you absolutely, and I I'm repeating back to you what I learned from reading your book is that this is something Vedrez, I think, really lays out for these other filmmakers. I mean, you you nicely gesture toward a whole genealogy of feminist filmmaking that emerges from the compilation film that goes back to the historic fact that women were often editors. It was one of the few jobs in the French industry that was available to women.
James Leo Cahill:You you trace that genealogy, but then we see how it goes forward in this kind of progressive filmmakers with a special purchase on historic historical reflection and on a nonlinear and often, surrealist informed, but, like, the best kind of surrealist informed, historical perspective that also has a kind of opening toward what might be coming. So another thing I wanted to really ask you about, Ivan, as I was reading this book is I'm so impressed with how you've so carefully and, focused your discussion of the filmmakers and their use of montage, and yet you give us a really compelling sense of the presence of montage as a cultural logic at play across many aspects of Fourth Republic France, including the emergence of the, you know, high gloss photo book that Vedrez is is doing the mise en page for, new modes of film programming and curation that Henri Langois is involved with and the program format that emerges really during the second world war and kind of part of of film culture for the Fourth Republic. The popular education movement, I think your discussion of is just as well as literary publishing. And so what forces I mean, like, the one way of asking this question was, was Montage a larger cultural logic of this moment?
James Leo Cahill:And if so, why? Or is it just that key participants, such as Andre Maraud, Nicolas Vedrez, Alain Rene, Chris Marquere, are involved in these various things and draw them you know, like, give those those kind of emphases to those larger cultural practices and then bring them into film. Is it that are a generational experience of people born under the sign of cinema who've kind of come to maturity at the moment of Montage's significant kind of first peak, or is it a broader structure feeling? I was just this was something I kept asking, and you're so careful. You're restrained.
James Leo Cahill:You don't, like, over speculate on this. But now that we're doing a podcast and just having a conversation, I was curious what you where you kind of land with this or what through writing this book is your kind of sense of that?
Ivan Cerecina:Yeah. It's funny you asked that. I gave a paper the other day on the history and etymology of the word montage. And in this discussion afterwards, I was sort of chatting with a colleague, and I was saying that I had this moment so many times throughout the book where I had to say, like, I feel like some kind of conspiracy theorist here. That I was, you start to see montage wherever you like.
Ivan Cerecina:That's one of the challenges of the term, in that it is broad enough in definition that you can see it wherever you like. Something that I went into very briefly in the book was that, yeah, during this time, musique concrete emerges. We have this sort of invention of sampling in some ways, and we have this, and we have that. And the Nouveau Roman, which I didn't get a chance to write about, is interested in its own ways of writing stories that don't follow the kind of beginning, middle, and end that we traditionally see. So that caution that you've mentioned is because I didn't want to overplay my hand.
Ivan Cerecina:And I think that's a real challenge that we have as scholars, to sort of overstate the importance of what we do by insisting that we notice that pattern everywhere, right? Because you can selectively make that true. I really like your formulation that, you know, I do believe in the things that I have said in the book. And I do also like your formulation that in some ways, these are ideas that emerge amongst people that came under the sign of cinema, you know, someone like Andre Malrau, whose illustrated art books are really it's difficult to understate how big of a figure Malrau was for this postwar generation, not just with the filmmakers I write about in the book, but for but for so many others. It's difficult to overstate also how important those art books were, which are in some ways their own kind of contributions to the history of art or a theory of art, but also to the usefulness of Montage as a method.
Ivan Cerecina:Same thing with Henri Longelois, who is a film programmer, the head of the French cinema tech, but whose programming work is also kind of invested in these forms of disjunction and new association that really, it's difficult not to see the ways in which film and film form interpenetrates and informs that. So I mean, to come back to your question of, you know, was this in the air? I think what we could say perhaps more carefully is to say that a kind of reckoning with the past was in the air. And this question of how do we not just understand what the hell just happened, but also is the key maybe that we have fundamentally misunderstood where things were going, is something that was in the air. And I think part of that, and part of what I tried to demonstrate in the book, is that this happens through the medium of culture, and that the sort of renegotiation with past and the sort of cultural forms that it has produced is part of this work.
Ivan Cerecina:I think that was why I had such an interest in Purpley Couture, or more broadly, the sort of popular education movement, which emerges during this time in France. Popular education was a movement of would you call it adult education?
James Leo Cahill:I mean, yeah, it is. And it it, of course, emerges from the very particular history of the French education system in the Third Republic, you know, where education could end at 13 or 16. So, you know, it is a kind of adult or popular education for people who are not part of a cultural elite and who otherwise might feel excluded and just not have access. The French state and the conditions of history have produced such a rich kind of literary artistic cultural milieu. So, yeah, I think it it does come exactly at that.
James Leo Cahill:And it is mostly adult education.
Ivan Cerecina:Yeah, absolutely. I suppose to go back to what James was just saying there, the movement was concerned with providing publications, workshops, organising essentially ways to improve the cultural education of those who had traditionally been excluded from it. This is a, in some ways, a kind of progressive movement that grows out of the resistance and the close proximity that it was able to create between the country's traditional working classes and those people who were cultural producers, who typically weren't part of the working class. It's invested in different ways of sort of bringing new people in to understand culture, and really of sort of bringing a connection between what was a traditionally elite field with those who were traditionally excluded from it. Some of the key organisations that were part government funded, part sort of related to different political parties in France, particularly the Communist Party, helped to sort of establish these organisations.
Ivan Cerecina:Popular Couture is the sort of largest one, one that still exists today. But there were also other ones like Traveille Couture, Tourismel et Couture, Les Amis de laure, amongst others. There's a real a good book to be written about the popular education movement. So these movements, this movement sort of came up during this time and these organisations started various activities in this time. Part of the reason I wrote about them was that the filmmakers in this book were all involved with them in different ways, most notably Chris Marker, who works for both Public Couture alongside Andre Bazin from about 1946 onwards.
Ivan Cerecina:He has a quite abrupt departure from the movement in 1947 and 1948. He writes this really great poem, it's kind of a great breakup poem in For Christmas nineteen forty seven, in which he, in some ways, draws out the battle lines and draws out some of the, I suppose, hypocrisy of the movement in some ways. One of the things I always struggled with in writing about the movement is because so much of that history has been written from within, you know, the histories of the popular education movement have been mostly written by the people who are involved with it. And I'm thinking in particular of Benigno Cassares' work and a handful of others, Joffe de Mazdir as well. Because that history has been written from within, it was really interesting to see a sort of dissenting voice to say, well, look, you have these high ambitions to sort of give the working class their vegetables, but don't you see the sort of inherent kind of hypocrisy behind that, that you are still in some ways reinforcing these hierarchies that have made French culture so and French society so stratified in some ways?
Ivan Cerecina:In that way, the movement is fascinating as this sort of project that emerges from this time and which is associated with the left in France, and it sort of attempts to really rethink what French culture and French society will look like. As part of it, they are involved with all of these different kind of projects. They start workshops, they hold lectures, they have invited talks, they have film screenings, importantly. Andre Bazin's early work was involved in the popular education movement as a so called animateur, someone who was involved in sort of running these kind of lectures and screenings, if you like. What I tried to demonstrate in the book anyway, they were sort of invested in film production to an extent and film distribution and the sort of screening of these films within a non commercial circuit.
Ivan Cerecina:But that they share some of the operative ideas that are going on, which is we are interested in cultural forms, and we are interested in the past in some ways, and in kind of revising or at least bringing them back to attention. In some ways, it felt like it was useful to draw together these moments of film history and cultural history together around popular education, because they were also in some ways invested in the past and its kind of renegotiation. But they had different strategies and different ideas about what that would look like.
James Leo Cahill:That was great. Thank you. Let me ask a total oddball question. What was the hardest thing about writing the book? Where were the biggest challenges as a historian and as a scholar, as a researcher?
Ivan Cerecina:I would say that the most difficult thing about writing the book was knowing when to stop and what to include within it. Partly, it was questions of definition. How do you define this word montage? Right? Because that has a lot to do with what the scope and the limitation of the book will be.
Ivan Cerecina:But I think it was also dictated by questions of access to the materials. I sort of spoke about this recently that the book was going to be more of a kind of survey of documentary filmmaking in France. In writing something like that, you have this impulse to say, look, no one's thought about this, or no one's seen this film, or this person is a sort of totally under recognised figure. But then there's a real challenge of, well, if no one has any points of reference for this thing, how do you write about it so that people get interested in it? Or if they're never going to be able to see the film that you're writing about because it's so niche or it's held in a particular archive, how do you write about that?
Ivan Cerecina:That was, I think, a real difficulty of understanding, of trying to find a balance between this is an under recognised or unseen figure or film, and having these noticeable or recognisable points of orientation, in some ways, the book maybe you could say it tries to have its cake and eat it in terms of writing about both well known and lesser known figures, both well known aspects of film history, but also trying to demonstrate the ways in which we don't quite understand that history without understanding the sort of lesser known things. To come back to your question, it was trying to balance those two energies, this thing of I'm unearthing something that we don't know enough about, but I need to also make this legible enough within what we do understand. And in some ways, I think there's a real challenge in doing that about a period of film history that precedes this huge kind of moment of this kind of explosion of of the new wave, which is such a recognisable and legible part of film history, and the temptation to kind of refuse the existing frameworks that have existed within the field for understanding what's going on.
Ivan Cerecina:You alluded to this earlier, and I'm curious if you think this is changing, whether the New Wave still has the same hold that it did for previous generations of scholars, because in some ways, that was our film school for so many film scholars, is it's the sort of rite of passage that you go through it. And then you, in the same ways that the filmmakers themselves, you either revolt against that tradition or you hold it up, right? I'm curious to see what you think about that.
James Leo Cahill:Yeah, I mean, you know, I think of the work that your book, I think of Laura Asturian's book, I think of Matthew Croom's forthcoming book, are all giving the period we're talking about a greater do. And those are just a few of many exciting scholars of a kind of ascendant generation. I may be a little older than you. I am a little older than you. But for me, for most of my time teaching French cinema, and then for many years, I got to teach a year long French cinema course.
James Leo Cahill:Every year, I would find I was like an accordion. I was expanding or compressing the place of the new wave a little bit based off what students of previous years had done, but also based off my desire to really get students to understand how important the tradition of quality of the the work that's happening with people like Vedrez. An I've been teaching Vedrez's film as long as I've been teaching because I've always found it to be such a pivotal work. And so I do think that we we're seeing just a rebalancing and that figures like Vedrez, who in '47 could have been the biggest thing. Like, there's a moment where she as you say in the book, she declines to direct Night and Fog, and this becomes really Renee's ascendance to a major filmmaking figure.
James Leo Cahill:But you really recapture for us and make legible, you know, which is the task of a historian according to Walter Benjamin, that Les Sparkettes, that legibility of the past, you really make legible for us how these filmmakers are working at this moment that has been a bit overshadowed, and then what they're doing as historical thinkers, if not historians proper. But I think we could call them historians proper because they are pretty interestingly methodical, if not, you know, of a kind of traditional historical method. So you know? And saying all that, I'm gonna teach the new wave, like, as an entire class next year. So maybe I'm coming around to it.
James Leo Cahill:But because it feels different once you have the work of assembly lines to kind of give a different context to that material.
Ivan Cerecina:Yeah. And I think that's the challenge for film historians now is we have the party line. And there's been a real push, which is really valuable, and I don't want to understate this, but to say we need to draw attention to other voices, we need to sort of draw attention to other histories that have been occluded by this sort of dominant history. And by all means, that's precisely what I was trying to do with the book. But I think the balance is then to recalibrate and to think we can't pretend like these major historical figures aren't major historical figures as a result of that.
Ivan Cerecina:But ideally, the idea is that, you know, if we have a richer view of the period that is more textured, then we are able to appreciate these interplays if things are occurring at different levels. And then we are able to be receptive, hopefully, to what the sort of aftershocks or afterlives of those particularly sort of big historical moments are. So that's the real challenge. That was something that I found so valuable in your book as well, James, on Van LaVey is that he is a kind of visible figure, but through sketching out the trajectory of a life and the trajectory of different methods, it also shows us that they touch upon and sort of inform our understanding of all these things that we understand and know about around them as well. That's what you can hope for from good historical work.
Ivan Cerecina:Right?
James Leo Cahill:Yeah. Absolutely. And thank you. That's so kind of you to say that about my work. Let's hear what you take to be the legacy of these filmmakers' work and how they speak to us today, how we might position ourselves and learn something from them in terms of the coming crisis, recognizing the catastrophes of our own moment, and finding both resources and inspiration for facing what we face.
Ivan Cerecina:I think the legacy of these filmmakers there there are few different ways that we can think about this. I think we can think about this in terms of aesthetic or generic models. I don't mean generic in the sense of like a sort of template, but in terms of film genre. I think they have been so important. And it's been really curious to see and really interesting to see the importance of marker to film history, I think rightfully so.
Ivan Cerecina:And I think he in particular was someone who was able to sense the changing tides of what historical work could look like for a filmmaker and what the task of a filmmaker was. The legacy of that period, we can really see it in this kind of preponderance of archival films. One of the interesting things to think about is in looking back at those films, so many of the processes that they make available and they make legible to us are so recognisable now that your task is to try and have that same sense of wonder and that same sense of receptivity of someone watching this for the first time. You know, so much of, say, example, a film like Les Vieques Monse dement, which is Vedress' second feature, in some ways, some of it feels quite, if not banal, then so recognisable, but that it's difficult for us to understand why is this such a curious and interesting film that seems to look like what television reportage looks like now. In the sense you have these talking head figures and you have it sort of intercutting archival footage and things like that.
Ivan Cerecina:Part of it is that these offer models for particular genres of non fiction filmmaking. But I think the other way that we can see the legacy of these filmmakers is the particular attitude that they have towards the material, and of the ways in which they convince themselves that the work of a filmmaker has to be to sort of consider closely what it is that they are showing. And that part of that process of, if not judgement, then in some ways, investigation and doubt are part of the things that you share with someone watching your films. I think the films are really striking to us now to think about, because they are in some ways concerned with the ways in which images aren't immediately legible to us, and that they require work in some ways to become legible. I think this question of legibility, which governs so much of the intellectual interest of the book, is definitely one that we have to think about now to try to understand what is it that we're actually looking at.
Ivan Cerecina:That question, what is it that we're actually looking at? Is, I think, even more difficult today, because what the hell are we looking at? Think that's such a but that question has a different tenor now, or a different tone, in the sense that what I tried to show, at least in the conclusion of the book, is that maybe legibility isn't quite the right term to think about. But it does have a lot to do with authenticity now, and to understand what is the provenance of this image that I'm looking at. Can I trust it?
Ivan Cerecina:I think it's a different way of framing this longer standing anxiety that we have had, which is that images seemed in some ways to be this promise of truth and evidence and a sure, you know, surety. And tracking a different era's attitude towards it, or attitude towards this instability, I think is really useful for us now. Because I think we face our own kind of instability now in trying to understand what it is that we're looking at.
James Leo Cahill:Yeah, yeah. I mean, you come to my favourite line of Chris Marquere's at the end of the book, you know, on the, you never know what you are filming or what you might be filming. And I think you've now given us another question, which is you never know what you might be looking at or what you're looking at as well. But I think that spirit of marker of both that patience and that exploration of the image and its registers remains absolutely a vital lesson of his work, of Renee's work, of Vedris' work, and of this really fantastic book, this gift to the field that you've given us of assembly lines and your really compelling account of Montage and Montage as a historical method and a mode of reflection and also a mode of being open and available to what's to come, to what might still surprise us. So we might begin wrapping up this conversation a little bit by just saying, what are you going to be up to next?
James Leo Cahill:Or what is exciting you? What new projects are you lining up?
Ivan Cerecina:Well, I'm currently I alluded to this earlier I'm currently working on a paper on the etymology and career of the word montage, which in some ways, I hope it's not a retread, but it did really feel like this was such a slippery term in some ways that I felt like I had to do justice to where it had to come from, and what its fate was outside of what I was kind of very narrowly ultimately interested in the in the book. So I'm working on this now. I have sort of started to think about a next major book project, which is in some ways related to some of the bigger kind of historical questions that start to emerge in this moment, and particularly around we spoke about this earlier it's a project that is interested in the process of audio visual archiving as something that begins in earnest in this period post 1945 as a sort of institutional practice. It is something going back to this idea of the sort of brick and mortar archive it is something that idea of an audio visual archive really sort of solidifies and becomes standardised in this period.
Ivan Cerecina:And I'm really curious to understand how institutional history intersects with and informs the ideas of filmmakers and of film theory and film philosophy in thinking about film as a historical medium. I think we have a tendency to sort of treat those as separate questions or separate sort of, you know, or ideas that have their own history. But I'm curious to see the ways in which they interact, because I think it is not for nothing that the renewed passion or the renewed interest of film as the skin of history to go back to Bazan emerges just as this time that the film archive or the audiovisual archive becomes this institutionalised phenomenon.
James Leo Cahill:That sounds magnificent. And I think the films that you write about in ways kind of gave a map for these archives to kind of catch up to. I think particularly Vedresses, that it's almost it anticipates what's to come and what people like Langlois and others are going to build over the decades that begin at the moment your book takes us through.
Ivan Cerecina:For sure. For sure. And what about you, James? I'm sorry. We've been talking about me all day.
Ivan Cerecina:What are you what are you up to next?
James Leo Cahill:It's your party, Ivan. So I am presently working on a book called Neither Dog Essays in Stray Thinking, and it's about street dogs, the anarchist imaginary, and concepts of hospitality across poetry, cinema, painting. And it kind of takes, you know, Detour as method. I'm thinking about Stray as a mode of reading, as a mode of thinking, and having a lot of fun working on this project. The kind of refrain to it has been a line from Baudelaire's final prose poem, Les Bonciers, where he asks, where do the dogs go or where are the dogs?
James Leo Cahill:And in that, he's doing this famous rhetorical move from classical poetry of the, which is like, where are the ancestors? Where are the greats who have come before us? All those who have died. But really taking seriously what it means to think about where dogs go, where they can take us as a kind of mode of historical and political and aesthetic inquiry. So that's what I'm keeping myself busy with.
James Leo Cahill:Highly eccentric work. The gift of getting tenure is, like, you can really lean into those eccentricities, and I feel it's my job to do so. But I'm also just totally inspired by your book, Ivan, and I cannot wait to see what else you produce along these lines because it's really just such rich and fantastic and inspiring material.
Ivan Cerecina:Thank you so much, James. I really appreciate that.
James Leo Cahill:Oh, my pleasure. Yeah. And I think one of the pleasures of this job is getting to know other scholars, getting to read their work and have these kind of conversations. So thank you so much. And I guess we've given the auditors a lot to listen to and think about, and I hope they'll pick up your book.
Ivan Cerecina:Yeah, me too. Thanks so much for your time today, James. I really appreciate it. And, yeah, check out the book.
James Leo Cahill:Yeah, please do.
Narrator:University of Minnesota Press is the proud publisher of Ivan Cerecina's Montage in Postwar French Film and of James Leo Cahill's zoological surrealism, the nonhuman cinema of Jean Painleve . Thank you for listening to this University of Minnesota Press production.