Lara's Theme

Claude Autant-Lara  started as a film set-designer along with Cubist painter Fernand Leger and architect Robert Mallet-Stevens on Marcel L'Herbier's silent L'inhumaine (Futurism,1934). From the lending-library adaptations that comprise Autant'Lara's post-war work (ranging from Stendhal, Dostoevsky and Dumas to Feydeu, Simenon and Colette) one might single out La Traversee de Paris (A Pig Across Paris,1956), a dark comedy concerning two men involved in the black-market meat trade. Though marred by a complacent reliance on studio sets and lighting, when the material cried out for location shooting, the film is distinguished by a quite subtle modulation from comedy to tragedy.

From the point of view of subject matter, French cinema was very tightly controlled during this period. Government aid was withheld from any film seeking to spread awareness on the contemporary political reality of the country, plagued by the country's colonial wars - in Indochina and Algeria. Indeed the only French film by a major director treating even indirectly the Algerian  was Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat (1960) which was banned from exhibition for the next three years.

Sylvia and the Phantom who loved her. Sylvie et le fantome (1946)

Lara famously eschewed France's cutting-edge nouvelle vague movement and his conviction in doing so resulted in a faltering career. This was not the director's only subversive action, in 1989 Autant-Lara, a near nonagenarian was elected as a member of the National Front. Autant-Lara passed away in the South of France in the year 2000, he was ninety-nine at the time of his death.