Introduction : The art cinema and the work of interpretation -- Broken blossoms : the vulnerable text and the marketing of masochism -- The turn and return of Sunrise -- The fever of an infectious film : L'Atalante and the aesthetics of spontaneity -- Productive discord in the system : Hollywood Meets John Doe -- La Symphonie pastorale, performed by the French Quality Orchestra -- Private scribblings : the crux in the margins around Diary of a country priest -- Realism, rhetoric, and the painting of history in Henry V -- Echoes of art : the distant sounds of Orson Welles -- The passion of identification in the late films of Kenji Mizoguchi -- Conclusion : The work of cinema and the art of interpretation.