Jacques Feyder (Gender, class and colonialism on film)

This is the first English-language book on Jacques Feyder, one of the Golden Age of French cinema’s most prolific directors. Although once hailed as a major filmmaker, Feyder’s reputation waned in the decades following his death, and scholars tend to underestimate his contributions to cinema. This study argues that a fuller understanding of Feyder’s style involves exploring his complex portrayals of gender, class and colonialism across his body of work, including films he directed in France, Hollywood, Germany, England and elsewhere. In doing so, the book reveals an ambitious director who took cinema in new aesthetic directions and often crafted provocative reflections on social inequality in the French Third Republic.