Cesar

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by Stephen Heath

British Film Institute

Due/Published January 2005, 96 pages, paper

ISBN 0851708331

The writer and director Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974) is today perhaps best known outside France as a result of the international acclaim garnered by film adaptations of his novels Jean de Florette and Manon des sources. He wrote César (1936), which brought to a close the hugely popular "Marseille trilogy," directly for the screen. Although the trilogy's first two films-Marius (1931) and Fanny (1932)-were not directed by Pagnol, he played a substantial part in their making, and the trilogy overall was very much his work. After mapping Pagnol's career and situating his turn to cinema in the context of the coming of "talking pictures," Stephen Heath discusses César and its relation to the Marseille trilogy. In so doing, he considers questions of speech and accent, cinema and theatricality, stereotypes and the film's cultural effects. Above all, he looks at César's relation to the contemporary artistic and historical reality of Marseille, the locale of the trilogy and in many ways its main character.