Film The French Revolution

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The French Revolution has been a favorite subject of filmmakers, beginning with the inventors of film, the aptly named Lumière brothers, who made L’Assassinat de Marat in 1897 [38 seconds], continuing on to D.W. Griffith’s Orphans of the Storm (1921) through Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise (1938), and on to Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006). Watching a selection of these films, we will look at the relationship between the actual events of the Revolution, as related by eyewitnesses and analyzed by historians, and the memory of it constructed through films. One of our points of comparison will be the contrast between French films about the Revolution and English-language films about it.