Woo! Or 'enfin', as everyone seems to be saying on Amazon.fr

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

Coo-er, they have finally got round to releasing La Revolution Francaise on DVD (region 2) http://www.amazon.fr/revolution-fran%C3%A7aise-partie-2/dp/B001UTVP7M/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t I can't see any time listing there, so I'm assuming it's the shorter(?)French cinema version rather than the TV-series version.

Comments

[maelicia.livejournal.com]

What a nightmare...

[(Anonymous)]

I have watched it again recently and it is really a well-made manipulation. Leaving aside all the royalist shit, the parts dealing with the revolutionaries is also extremely manipulative. Whenever there is a "positive" event connected with the participation of the people, Danton and Desmoulins are around, being one with the people of France, meanwhiles Robespierre is cautiously hiding at home. Whenever there is dirty cabinet/parlament politics, Robespierre is there, plotting and manipulating. The invisibilisation of the link between the robespierristes and anything "heroic" is confirmed by no mention of the role some of they played as the "representants en mission". One can accuse Robespierre of many things, but to accuse him of cowardice and lack of contact with the people and popular movements is a big and unnecessary manipulation.
More: Danton and Desmoulins seem very sad when voting for the king's death. Have the authors read Le Vieux Cordelier to have some idea of Desmoulins' verbal enthusiasm for killing? For some reason it was him, not Saint-Just nor Robespierre, who was called The Attorney of the Lanterne, ne c'est pas?
More: Couthon, same as in Wajda's Danton, is shown as an unkind person. He might be guilty of the bloodthirsty Prairial law and it could indeed have been stressed, but according to all sources, on a personal level he was a very kind and polite family-man. It is very medieval to suppose that being disabled in body he had to be bitter and devious in his everyday behaviour.
Well, and no need to point out that the thermidoriens, including Collot and Billaud, are shown as men who are fed up of bloodshed..oh yes. Anyway, all the part that shows the Thermidor events is just horrible: no place for any beautiful gestures - no Le Bas and Augustin asking to share the fate of their colleagues, no Saint-Just attempting at compromise, a semi-empty tumbril instead of the twenty something people executed on the 10th (not mentionning the seventy something the next day), no persecution of the families (Mme. Duplay and Elisabeth Le Bas with her baby are not worth a couple of seconds Lucile had had?)

[(Anonymous)]

You are quite right. I found it strange that they tried to capture everything accurately as much as possible, yet the events of Thermidor were just sort of smushed together. Maybe they were running out of time.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

I think they must have decided that people wanted 'personal drama' rather than politics/events, so they concentrated on Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins' relationship: with two of them dead, the drama then hurries up to the end. Hilary Mantel does a similar thing in her novel (only much better), ending it with the execution of the 'Indulgents'. I think this is an increasing tendency in popular history - I don't know if it's a deliberate policy by publishers or film studios, but the concentration is on individual human stories they think we can 'relate' to better, rather than big-stage politics. We seem to have an endless number now of newly published history books about the life of this or that or the other little-known mistress, sister, minor courtier, etc, the other bolyen girl, girl with a pearl earring, the Duchess, Amphibious Thing approach. This week's 'book of the week' on Radio 4 was the life of Napoleon's sister. What next? Robespierre's dog? This wouldn't be a problem if we also got the important stuff - by which I mean the events that had a lasting impact on world history - alongside it, but we don't. We don't get Napoleon, we get his sister, we don't get Fox vs Pitt, Tom Paine or the 1790's political repression of the British Left, we get the Duchess of Devonshire or Beau Brummel. It's amazing that a director as respected as the multi-Oscar Winning Dickie Attenborough has been trying without success for more than 20 years to get a Tom Paine film made, whilst films like The Duchess, Marie Antoinette or about Jefferson's sex life (rather than politics), do get funding.

[(Anonymous)]

You are right. However, even then the political manipulation is there. I understand -though I don't agree with it- that they focus on the sex and family life, and on the personal aspects of the conflict between heroic men. But what I was pointing to is that if one watches the film carefully, one can see that Robespierre is always shown as a "plotting politician", meanwhiles Danton as the "people's man" participating in riots, mass demonstrations...which in France, when "People" and their mass action are so mytified (as they are vilified in the British interpretation of the Fr.Rev) has clear implication in the interpretation of the characters. That is actually a feature of the series I find more dangerous and manipulative that Robespierre's speech moved to 9th Thermidor