The Prurient Interests of the French

Last night was serious studying crunch time as I ploughed my way through my 407 page VES 72: Sound Cinema sourcebook. Actually, it's 914 pages because the readings all come from books and it's copied two book pages per sourcebook page. Plus I had to reread through a comprehensive 788 page film history textbook, plus Chion's Audio-Vision, plus a book on The Blue Angel, plus a book on Ivan the Terrible, plus lecture notes, plus section notes. Whew. I can't believe I made it through all that.

This passage from Crisp's analysis of 1960s French cinema really cracked me up. It talks about the emergence of the French New Wave as part of the phenomenon in cinema's search for new audiences:

If the art-film, its existence validated by the middle-class intelligentsia, is the most widely acclaimed of these phenomena, it was by no means the most significant, numerically--the rise of pornography dominates French production statistics of the sixties.

I've always thought that there should be a course on the cultural, social, and economics implications of pornography.