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In this seminar in the poetics of cultural forms, we will examine the half-century period in France (1895-1945) during which narrative film language evolved out of proto-cinema to coalesce in the multi-reel feature and the serial, then, after a brief but fecund period of experimentation in non-narrative creative modes (dada, Surrealism, Epstein’s “cinepoetry”), weathered the transition to the “talkies” (le parlant) to diverse effect. That transition to sound yielded both masterworks of poetic realism (Renoir, Duvivier) and countless literary adaptations that sought, and won, broad commercial success (Pagnol, Guitry). Rather than prejudge the esthetic and ideological interest of those works of the 1930s which film historians tend to associate with France’s cinematic maturity, we will attend to the fissures through which the seventh art continues to disclose nostalgia for its (not so) silent past, and to the conservatism that the sound feature imposed on filmic expression. Conversely, looking backwards, we will pay heed to the ways silent film in the 1910s and 1920s itself superseded, through targeted appeals to the sensorial imaginary, its medium-specific limits. Taught in English; readings in English and French (reading knowledge strongly recommended).