Scarlet Street Critical Essay | Critical Essay by E. Ann Kaplan

SOURCE: "Ideology and Cinematic Practice in Lang's Scarlet Street and Renoir's La Chienne," in Wide Angle, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1983, pp. 32-43.

In the following essay, Kaplan compares how different cultural contexts affect Lang's Scarlet Street and Renoir's La Chienne, two films made from the same literary original.

A comparison of La Chienne and Scarlet Street—two films made from the same literary original but in different nations, periods and institutional settings—allows us more easily than usual to isolate the effects of political, historical and economic context as these can be read off from each work. The cinematic devices in each film express the ideology of its cultural context—Popular Front France on the one hand, post-World War-II America on the other—and it is thus not surprising to find more elements subversive of dominant bourgeois ideology in Renoir's film than in Lang's. But, given a spectator not committed to bourgeois values,...
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