Marcel Pagnol

Though long ignored or dismissed by film scholars and critics, Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974) was among the most influential and popular auteurs of his era. This comprehensive overview of Pagnol’s career, the first ever published in English, highlights his singular contribution to classic French film as a self-sufficient writer-producer-director while evaluating the larger cultural and aesthetic stakes of his movies in a broader European context. The book reconsiders Pagnol in several ways: first, by offering a reading of style and technique that links the converted playwright’s controversial theories on film, theatre, and the primacy of speech over image with economic and aesthetic anxieties triggered by the arrival of talking cinema and the Great Depression; second, by analysing Pagnol’s sunny rural melodramas shot on location in the Provencal countryside as a rare and psychologically valuable counterpoint to the dark, urban variety of poetic realism produced in the studio by influential peers such as Jean Renoir and Marcel Carne; third, by framing Pagnol’s attachment to outdoor location shooting, ethnographic authenticity, and creative independence as foreshadowing Neo-Realism and the New Wave; finally, by explaining Pagnol’s enduring status as a French national icon who combined artisanal production values with an innovative, highly efficient system of marketing and distribution modelled after Hollywood. In its balance of breadth and depth, this critical reevaluation will be of interest to students, scholars, and aficionados of cinema studies and French culture.