L'ENCINÉCLOPÉDIE - Tome I - 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.

This ‘volume 1’, which ranges from Marcel Achard to Alexander Korda, from L'Homme des Folies Bergères to La Dame de chez Maxim's (there's no such thing as chance, but chance does make things right), evokes Eugène Deslaw and Jean Grémillon (for a real love song!), Jean Epstein and Max Joly: erudite, sensual, historical, political, daring, subjective. A sum total and a work of art.