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This article sets out to analyse the originality of the use of sound (dialogue, song and noise) in La Grande Illusion in comparison to the classic anti-war films released at the start of the 1930s. It suggests that while those films opposed the human voice to the deafeningly inhuman soundscape of war, Renoir's film was ultimately more productive because of its ability to silence the war, and to use the voice to divide the human and reopen the space for a politics. It also shows how La Grande Illusion asks its spectator (auditor) to self-reflexively engage with his or her own stake in the production of the soundscape of war. Finally, it argues that by only ever allowing songs to provide a partial escape from the conflict, Renoir is able to maintain a political tension between their utopian potential and their historical embeddedness.

The years since 1995 have seen the return of the political to French cinema, but this is a cinema that can no longer feed off an elaborated leftist project, and that must therefore take new forms. After a brief contextualization, this article seeks to account for the novelty and effectiveness of this cinema. It first delineates its main contours, and then turns to the work of Žižek, Balibar and Ranciere to cast light on certain of its key features. Žižek is used to engage with the capacity of the films to reconnect ‘subjective’ violences to the systemic; Balibar is used to explore the newness of the films spatial economy and the way they deal with the ‘unworldly’ universalism of contemporary capitalism; Ranciere's concept of the sensorium is mobilized to underscore the productive work the films do as they contest dominant visibilities and audibilities.

Noting the centrality of the Parisian popular in French cinema of the 1930s, this paper looks behind its apparent nostalgia to the disavowed work of modernization that it carried out. Drawing on recent work on the transnational, it shows how representations of popular rootedness and of the cosmopolitan modern were linked responses to the new. Helping to embed cultural consumption in collective memory and identity, cinematic populism engaged with and simultaneously rejected the experiences of displacement and mixity. In some ways it can be considered to have carried out a process of democratization, shifting the common people to centre stage and inviting them to look upon their own image. Broadly speaking, however, its disavowed modernization was deeply regressive. The reflexivity it granted was counterweighted by its idealization of rooted community and folkloric cultural forms in a way that could only view the cosmopolitan new as threat and loss and which immobilised and ethnicized the popular even as it partially undid its exclusion.