Jacques Feyder: Gender, Class and Colonialism on Film

This is the first English-language book on Jacques Feyder, one of the Golden Age of French cinema’s most prolific directors. It argues that a fuller understanding of Feyder’s style involves exploring his provocative portrayals of gender, class and colonialism across his body of work. Belgian director Jacques Feyder once ranked among French cinema’s foremost directors. Over the course of his career, he filmed a wide range of genres including maternal melodrama, political satire, historical comedy and colonial cinema, and some of his films, such as Le Grand jeu (1934) and La Kermesse héroïque (1935), are considered classics. He also collaborated with some of the most accomplished set designers, screenwriters and technicians of his time and directed legendary stars including Arletty, Greta Garbo, Louis Jouvet and Michèle Morgan. However, Feyder’s contributions to cinema in France, Hollywood, Britain and elsewhere, have yet to be fully understood. This essential study – the first-ever English-language book on the director – reassesses his complex portrayals of gender, class and colonialism to reveal hitherto neglected characteristics of his directorial style. It also reveals his profound influence on the Golden Age of French cinema and on subsequent generations of filmmakers in France and abroad, such as Marcel Carné, Stephen Frears and Pablo Berger. This is the first English-language book on Jacques Feyder, one of the Golden Age of French cinema’s most prolific directors. Although once hailed as a major filmmaker, Feyder’s reputation waned in the decades following his death, and scholars tend to underestimate his contributions to cinema. This study argues that a fuller understanding of Feyder’s style involves exploring his complex portrayals of gender, class and colonialism across his body of work, including films he directed in France, Hollywood, Germany, England and elsewhere. In doing so, the book reveals an ambitious director who took cinema in new aesthetic directions and often crafted provocative reflections on social inequality in the French Third Republic.

Pagina's: 264, Hardcover, Manchester University Press (P648)