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30-Dec-02

96 pages

Published/distributed by BFI Publishing

ISBN/EAN: 9780851708331

Paperback

Price: £9.99

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Cesar: BFI Film Classics

Heath, Stephen

The writer and director Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974) is today perhaps best known outside France as a result of the international acclaim in the 1980s of the film adaptations by Claude Berri of his novels Jean de Florette and Manon des sources. Csar (1936), written directly for the screen, brought to a close the hugely popular 'Marseille trilogy'. Although its first two films - Marius (Alexander Korda, 1931) and Fanny (Marc Allgret, 1932) - were not directed by Pagnol, he took a substantial part in their making and the trilogy overall was very much his work. Moreover, in the years from Marius to Csar, Pagnol turned from theatre to cinema, establishing himself not just as a director but also as a producer and distributor, with his own studios.

After mapping Pagnol's career and situating his turn to cinema in the context of the coming of 'talking pictures', Stephen Heath discusses Csar and the comedy and drama of its working out of the trilogy's action. In so doing, he is led to consider questions of speech and accent, cinema and theatricality, stereotypes and the film's cultural effects. Above all, he looks at Csar's relation to the contemporary artistic and cultural-historical reality of Marseille, the defining locality of the trilogy and in many ways its main character.

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