Motifs
Satire of society
Laughing at manners in order to better judge them.
Laughing is a way of attacking without being prosecuted: Swift sends a traveller among giants and reasonable horses in order to speak of England, Gogol has a swindler buy dead peasants in order to speak of Russian bureaucracy, Orwell hands a farm over to its animals. Satire assumes a complicit reader, able to translate. Cinema does the same with its own means: a war room where a nuclear war is decided with a laugh, a bourgeoisie that never manages to dine, a modern city made entirely of glass.
works 11
- NovelGulliver's TravelsJonathan Swift · 1726A shipwrecked man is cast ashore in a country whose inhabitants are tiny men.Literature
- NovelColonel ChabertLe Colonel ChabertHonoré de Balzac · 1832One of Napoleon's officers, believed dead, returns to claim his name from a society that has forgotten him.Literature
- NovelDead SoulsМёртвые душиNikolai Gogol · 1842A novel of 1842 that the author called a poem, the journey of a buyer of dead serfs through a Russian province.Literature
- NovelScoopEvelyn Waugh · 1938A country columnist sent by mistake to a war that has not yet begun.Literature
- CinemaTo Be or Not to BeErnst Lubitsch · 1942Warsaw in the autumn of 1939, where a troupe of actors uses its craft against the occupier.Cinema
- NovelAnimal FarmGeorge Orwell · 1945The animals drive out the farmer and paint seven commandments on the barn wall.Literature
- CinemaOne, Two, ThreeBilly Wilder · 1961A Cold War comedy shot on location, it sets American commerce face to face with the Eastern regime in a city that nothing yet divided.Cinema
- CinemaDr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BombStanley Kubrick · 1964A general launches his bombers on his own, and he is the only one who knows how to recall them.Cinema
- CinemaPlayTimePlaytimeJacques Tati · 1967Mr Hulot and an American tourist cross paths in a Paris of glass where everything looks alike.Cinema
- CinemaThe Discreet Charm of the BourgeoisieLe Charme discret de la bourgeoisieLuis Buñuel · 1972Six bourgeois and an ambassador fail to dine together, and no one is surprised.Cinema