La Grande Ιllusion
TUESDAY, JULY 5th | 21:30
Gardens of the French School at Athens | 6 Didotou str., Athens
Director: Jean Renoir
Starring: Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, Eric Von Stroheim, Dita Parlo
Runtime: 113’
Year of Production: 1937
Irreplaceable part of the pre-War and the pre-Nouvelle Vague in French cinema, “The Grand Illusion” is much more: Along with a handful of films it belongs to the crown of cinema potential. Not only technically and aesthetically, also impressing to this day with its narrative flow and its illustrative completeness, but as content. Without exaggeration, in Renoir’s “Grand Illusion” hides the finely-worked telling of the early years of the 20th century, the imperative, accurate observation of the groundbreaking change in the status quo of the Western world from the years preceding World War I, where the plot unfolds, to the outskirts of World War II, where the film is produced.
This difference is essentially the theme that underlines this pillar creation. A film which constantly feels its historical role, which has the talent to set up an intricate drama of capable characters, which moves on courageously to the assertion of the fall of aristocracy and its reasons, to the conviction of the rise of the working class, the prophetic insinuation, without knowing (?) that from this replacement will inevitably arise the provocative phenomena of Fascism and Nazism.
Shocking, definitive cinema, beautifully camouflaged by Renoir’s light touch and heavy anthropocentric intellect, the gigantic Jean Gabin, Eric Von Stroheim in an emblematic appearance and a completeness of production that few films before (and not only) the War achieved. Ilias Dimopoulos
In collaboration with the Plein-Air Festival by the French Institute of Greece