Join us for a special screening of Paris 1900 (France, 1947), and the launch of Ivan Cerecina's Assembly Lines: Montage in Postwar French Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2026).

Directed by novelist, television personality, and dramatist Nicole Vedrès, Paris 1900 is an under-seen classic of French post-war film.

A landmark work of archival cinema, the film is made up entirely of newsreel footage, sequences of fiction films, and amateur home movies, compiled by Vedrès and a young Alain Resnais (working on his first professional feature). In Vedrès's hands, these images sketch a portrait of turn-of-the-century Paris and Europe at the precipice of the First World War

Upon its release in 1947, France's premier film critic, André Bazin, compared it to Proust's In Search of Lost Time, writing that the film’s meditations on lost time and memory had given rise to a properly cinematic form of tragedy.

Introduced by Ivan Cerecina, author of Assembly Lines: Montage in Postwar French Film, with a Q&A hosted by film critic Jake Wilson (The Age, Sydney Morning Herald).

Assembly Lines: Montage in Postwar French Film examines the re-emergence of montage as an aesthetic figure and historiographical principle post-1945, via a study of the early films by three important filmmakers of that postwar generation: Nicole Vedrès, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker. It is both a study of film editing and a look at how filmmakers were drawing together and thinking about images of the atomic bomb, the concentration camps, and the country’s crumbling colonial empire.

Copies of Assembly Lines will be also be available for purchase after the screening.

Contact the host of Paris 1900 (Nicole Vedrès, 1947) + book launch (Assembly Lines, Ivan Cerecina)

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