New legibilities: rethinking post-war French film with Nicole Vedrès’s La Vie commence demain

Double page spread in Nicole Vedrè s’s book Images du cinema français (Paris: Les Editions du Chõne, 1945), pp. 106-07, showing stills from Marcel Carne’s Le jour se lève (1939).

Covers of Andre Labarthe’s journal Constellation, in the background of a scene from La Vie commence demain/Life Begins Tomorrow (Nicole Vedrè s, 1950).

Taken from: Cerecina, I., “New Legibilities: Re-Thinking Postwar French Film with Nicole Vedrès’ La Vie commence demain (1950).” Screen, 63/2 (Summer 2022), pp. 158-181. (9,100 words) available here.

Extract

For too long, the films of Nicole Vedrès¹ (1911–65) have failed to receive the recognition they merit, her name appearing infrequently, discreetly or not at all in the major accounts of post-war French cinema. An important figure in the intellectual circles of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Vedrès was a novelist, journalist, and latterly a television personality who directed a handful of innovative short and feature-length documentary films between 1947 and 1953: Paris 1900 (1947), La Vie commence demain/Life Begins Tomorrow (1950), Amazone/Amazon (1951) and Aux frontières de l’homme/At the Frontiers of Man (1953). With subjects ranging from the belle époque and fin de siècle European history to post-war French intellectual currents in the arts and sciences, Vedrès inventively interweaves archival images, interviews, pedagogical interventions and voiceover commentary of a rare poetic acuity. In their fluid mixing of these constitutive elements, her films recontextualize images and ideas, placing them into new, productive relationships with one another, and in the process stake a claim on their contingency and fragility. Vedrès’s cinema is, in short, one organized around two aesthetic and conceptual poles: history and montage. It displays a sensitivity to the hidden connections between discrete historical phenomena, and a belief in the transformative alchemy of montage as a means of producing a legibility of these connections. As such, although her films are about particular historical moments and ideas, in another sense they consider the nature of time itself, demonstrating how the joining of two images can reveal the often unexpected articulations of past, present and future against one another.