Cinema, Media, and Human Flourishing by Timothy Corrigan

Author:Timothy Corrigan
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Though credited to Darryl Zanuck, John Ford, Henry Fonda, Nunnally Johnson, Greg Toland and of course John Steinbeck, this film did feel like “everybody’s picture” because it addressed the depression and spoke for the audience to whom it was displayed. The New York critics and the National Board of Review named it Best Picture of 1940, perhaps because they felt involved in a shared expression, a cooperative experience in a dangerous historical moment.

In the chapter he devotes to The Grapes of Wrath in The Cultural Front, Michael Denning rightly questions the myth of its populism. The film went into production in the Twentieth Century Fox lineup just a few months after the book’s sensational release. Its populist sentiment was a commodity bought from Viking Press and adapted to be intelligible to a mass movie audience, while being sufficiently softened to be digestible to the middle class, too. In Hollywood’s most flourishing era, a wealthy studio grew plumper by purveying a social situation and a hope in social solidarity that all audiences, domestic and foreign, could acknowledge. As Malraux proclaimed at the end of his “Sketch,” the cinema may be a phenomenon of untold value in being capable of uniting the human race through the myths it recounts, but at the same time it is also an industry.

Malraux could believe in cinema as both art and industry because French cinema was a cottage industry. He had worked close enough to it to realize that, unlike Hollywood, it was weak, uncoordinated, and seemingly manageable if you approached it shrewdly. In the most fortuitous circumstances, it could shelter a production as a site of solidarity and congenial coordination. With no studio system to deal with or rely on, Espoir, like nearly all French films made after 1934, was put together as an ad hoc venture. No studio CEO dictated the conditions; instead of assembly-line production, the French took an artisanal attitude toward the fashioning of their more ambitious films, allowing each the chance to establish its own look and style. This system, although constitutionally fragile, allowed space for a project to magnetize a group of individuals into a coordinated body, a team or équipe.

French cinema flourished in just such a weak industrial climate, and it did so most memorably from 1936–1938 during the brief tenure of the Popular Front government. Despite bitter debates, I can think of no moment in the twentieth century that better represents what I take to be human and artistic flourishing. Grass roots cooperation led to a socialist government that instituted prescient social programs (the forty-hour workweek, paid vacations, adult education, houses of culture). A cultural front that fostered the participation of all classes had blown across the country after the fascist riots of February 1934, and had even put a socialist government in place. Intellectuals came down into the streets to help make this happen, and the street, as Marcel Carné famously remarked, is where the camera needed to be.

In 1936, French films captivated audiences in Japan, Argentina, and throughout Europe; a score of them played in New York that year.

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