The marches of Gustave Cauvin – the first systematic and regular form on militant cinema

Abstract

The role of Gustave Cauvin (1886-1951) in the demarcation of the first phase of militant cinema was, individually, the most striking. This paper aims to present to the Brazilian public, through police reports and militant newspapers and by the work of Perron and Almberg in the article La propagande par le ilm: les longues marches de Gustave Cauvin, published in 2012, the marches of Cauvin in the Ardennes (France) with his cinematographer in 1913. It is emphasized that his dedication to the cause of propaganda by the image was situated in a long history of certain utopian messianism, a political voluntarism that sought to take to the masses the images that, if they wanted the voice of emancipation. Its trajectory also seems to denounce the apex of the limits of a practice and an ideology of the French working class movement on the eve of the Great War, at the same time as they were an expression of the movement against birth and of the antialcolism originated in bourgeois culture itself.

Keywords

• militant cinema
• gustave cauvin
• early cinema