French cinema is considered to have suffered a serious flaw in the years 1930-1935, between the triumph of avant-garde and Surrealist experimentalism of the 1920s, with its fascinating exploration of nonnarrative aspects of rhythm (montage), photogenics (light) and metaphor (imaginary), and the sudden rebirth of both the industry and the creative imagination in the second half of the 1930s and the victory of the so-called ‘poetic realism’ school, with Marcel Carné and Jean Renoir as its most eminent directors and famous actors such as Jean Gabin and Michel Simon, next to female stars like Arletty or Gabrielle Morlay.

The ambition of this collection, exemplarily edited by a team of Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, is to update and revise this impoverishing vision through a double critical lens: first that of the close-reading of a certain number of still well-known but sometimes also half-forgotten movies (with a strong focus on the first years of the decade and the work of directors like René Clair, Jean Grémillon, Jean Epstein and Jean Renoir as well as Anatole Litvak or Diamant-Berger); second by a new theoretical framing of these works based on three major characteristics: 1) the impact of sound technology, 2) the tradition of realism in French artistic production, and 3) the importance of transnational relationships and dynamics in a cinema that, due to the arrival of sound and thus the use of French in dialogues, encountered big difficulties in exporting its output to non-Francophone countries. Each of three elements is clearly described in the book, each time with a sharp eye for historical contextualization, as shown for instance by the careful reading of the public’s reactions to the emerging sound technology whose imperfections did not seem to have hindered the realistic perception of the movies and their soundscape (realism, in other words, is a highly context-sensitive issue, which cannot be reduced to the mere question of direct resemblance or mimesis). It is however the study of the mutual interconnectedness of sound, realism and transnationalism that occupies a central position in the analyses of the book.

The editorial organization of the collection is outstanding: all contributions rely upon the same theoretical and methodological structure, with also well-chosen references to non-French scholarship, while at the same time each of them can be read individually. There are virtually no overlaps between the various chapters, so that each new essay both enriches and is being enriched by all the others.

In French cinema around 1930, at a moment when the local industry was running out of steam and had great difficulties competing with the U.S. and German industries, the combined effect of sound technology and internationalization, that is the growing presence and influence of non-French companies and professionals active in France, proved less a problem than an opportunity. Granted, the nationalistic resistance to all things and people non-French was certainly present, and the book contains an illuminating article on the polemics launched by Morand’s France-la-Doulce, but this nervous (over)reaction was far from being dominant. And granted, the shift from silent cinema to sound movies signified the end of, for example, Surrealist cinema (the sudden massive increase of production costs as well as the financial crisis of 1929 discouraged its private sponsors to maintain their generous funding), while the danger of a return to the static ‘filmed theater’ of mainstream entertainment was undoubtedly a harsh reality in more than one occasion. Yet in practice the new technology, which the book clearly situates as the continuation of older ways of combining sound and image, managed to give a new boost to the industry, which also benefited from the input of foreign technology and know-how (some French companies invested in French technology but most of them were very happy to use American or German sound recording techniques and theater equipment) as well as foreign professionals (either directly, by the arrival of German artists and technicians in exile, or in directly, several experienced and popular French directors such as Maurice Tourneur being obliged to return to France due to the financial crisis in the US).

De René Clair à Jean Renoir shows that the successful shift from silent to sound cinema in the French context can only be understood if one takes into account the two other key features of the period: the lasting influence of realism and the competition with Hollywood and UFA cinema. Contrary to American cinema, with its emphasis on well-told and well-paced stories and their inevitable happy ending, French cinema will foreground a more realistic take on stories and their story world, the latter being as important as the former, as demonstrated by the continuing role and place of documentary elements in fiction, a crucial aspect that will later facilitate the link with Italian Neo-Realism. Settings and backgrounds, shot on location or reconstructed in the studio, come systematically to the fore, not only visually but also socially and politically, so that ‘ambiance’ and ‘atmosphere’ are eventually as important as the story itself. Moreover, stories often remain very gloomy, visually and narratively, with a wide-spread use of unhappy endings, perfectly in line with the legacy of French naturalism and melodrama whose influence on the perception of ‘realism’ remains vital. Yet realism is far from being a monolithic concept and all contributors pay great attention to distinguish different types of realism, each of them defined by a different mix of naturalism and symbolism. In French realism, the attempt to grasp reality is never separated from the less mimetic attempt to reflect on truth.

At the same time, the realist take on cinema is strengthened by a particular use of sound. French cinema definitely follows international tendencies, such as the inclusion of live-performed songs or the fictional foregrounding of the music industry in all stages and aspects, but here as well the difference with Hollywood is remarkable. French cinema will follow the German UFA model, which promotes a sober use of dialogue. Words should not hinder the unfolding of the action or the description of the atmosphere, and the nonverbal elements of the soundtrack are as crucial as the dialogues. French movies will stay away from new American genres such as the screwball comedy and its fast-talking protagonists, (male as well as female), and use of sound to blur the boundaries between studio and location. In the French cinema of these years, the new sound technology will rapidly give a strong impulse to open the studio to the street. The book rightly underlines that the French efforts to build new big studios almost comparable to those of the Hollywood majors, did not stop the companies seeking a specifically French look and feel: very ‘noir’ in terms of content and storylines and visual style, and making room for new mixtures of verbal and nonverbal elements in the soundtrack, which also insisted on a new approach of silence –all elements that strongly contributed to both save and further explore the dynamic ways of shooting and montage that had characterized the last decade of the sound era.

By 1934, the belated effects of the financial crisis of 1929, which hit France with some delay, will put a sudden end to much of this activity (countless production companies go bankrupt in that year). The exceptional prestige of the French film production of the second half of the 1930s, when production resumes on a new basis on the one hand (this is the period of Renoir’s La Grande Illusion (1937) and The Rules of the Game (1939), among many other masterpieces), and on the other the no less prestigious previous decade of 1920s French ‘impressionism’, will overshadow the transitional years 1930-1935. It is one of the many merits of this outstanding collection to offer a thorough revision of these years and highlight its relationships with the general history of French cinema. This is not a story of failures and broken continuities, but a story of permanent reinvention of various fundamental characteristics of a cinema that is both unique and truly transnational. It makes clear that French cultural exceptionalism has nothing to do with some narrow account of shallow nationalism.