French Revolution Film

The French Revolution

Introduction

As the subject of scholarly interest and research, the French Revolution has been with us almost since it took place. As early as the first decades of the 1800s, the Revolution began to appear to scholars, commentators and writers as a kind of prescient moment, as a historical blueprint, as it were, for the course of action that a modern society in transition should, or should not follow. In this sense, the history of the Revolution could be approached as the "script" par excellence of modernity, so that in the nineteenth century persons with even a little education might be expected to be familiar with its major personalities and the outlines of its political history. By the 1820s, liberal political economists in France and elsewhere were casting the French (and American) Revolution as the first clearly identifiable, successful bourgeois revolution, a view later absorbed by Karl Marx. By the second half of the century, the French Revolution was being fitted decisively into a revised history of Europe and of the world that gave the event a central role, a schematizing that remains influential to this day.

At the same time, mostly French scholars specializing in the history of the period began to speculate, and sometimes to argue, about whether the authoritarian qualities apparent in some aspects of the last period of the Revolution were inherent in it even in the comparatively moderate early days of 1789-1791. Later, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the emergence of the Soviet Union partly displaced the French Revolution as a model of modern political and social upheaval. Still, well into the twentieth century, scholars continued to dig deep into the archives of the period and persisted in debating the Revolution's "meaning"—for France, for Europe and for the world. Even today, as the Soviet experiment has ended and the era of great revolutions apparently faded, the French Revolution, and particularly the question of whether or not the violence and dictatorship of the Terror of 1793-1794 was intrinsic in the words and ideas of the "project" from the start, continues to provoke a bounty of dissertations, journal articles and books. Despite the many interpretive developments that have occurred in the field in the last century or more, scholars continue to rate the French Revolution as one of "the decisive event(s) of modern history."



Research Analysis - The French Revolution on Film

In ''1789,'' the French Revolution is conceived as an extravagant performance piece, a spectacle that is part Brecht, part commedia dell'arte, part puppet show and largely carnival. The revolution that included more street drama than any other is shrewdly reconceived in the terms most accessible and sympathetic to ordinary citizens (Davis, 2000).

Ariane Mnouchkine's film is not a true work of cinema, though; it is a filmed version of actual performances by the Theatre du Soleil, shot in 1973 at the end of the play's three-year run. As the movie begins, we see actors putting on elaborate stage makeup, and through the next two ...