L'ENCINÉCLOPÉDIE - Tome II - Paul Vecchiali

15 x 21 cm / 884 pages / Decembre 2010

isbn : 978-2-35137-094-0

in French only

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Just as Paul Vecchiali is not a film-maker like the others (see Femmes, femmes, Change pas de main, La Machine or En Haut des marches for proof), Paul Vecchiali is not a writer like the others, nor a critic like the others. The established rules and official history annoy and irritate him, and he doesn't fail to make this known: this Encinéclopédie (in two volumes) revisits the ‘French’ cinema of the 1930s (and some of its aftermath) with force of personality and acuity, rejecting all preconceptions, both positive (Guitry, Renoir, Pagnol are not necessarily the statues they have been erected to be) and negative. In this dictionary, which reads like a novel out of the Comédie humaine, we meet men with astonishing careers, filmmakers for a day or for ever, French for a film or a lifetime: it is the portrait of an incandescent Europe that Vecchiali narrates.

In this ‘volume 2’, which ranges from Harry Lachman to Friedrich Zelnik, from La Couturière de Lunéville to C'était un musicien, we meet Max Ophuls and Gabriel Rosca, André Malraux and Reinhold Schünzel, as well as Fritz Lang and Raoul Walsh! Erudite, sensual, historical, political, daring, subjective: a sum and a work.