Moussinac, Léon

Born Jan. 19, 1890, in Migennes, department of Yonne; died Mar. 10, 1964, in Paris. French writer. A member of the French Communist Party from 1924.

A student of law, Moussinac became a film critic in 1918. From 1921 to 1932, Moussinac headed the cinema section of the newspaper L ’Humanité. He wrote books that greatly influenced the theory of film; among these were The Birth of the Cinema (1925; Russian translation, 1926), The Soviet Cinema (1928), and Sergei Eisenstein (1964). Moussinac was one of the founders of a film-club movement in France and a promoter of the Soviet cinema and the achievements of the progressive world cinema.

Moussinac also wrote about the theater: The New Movement in the Theater (1931), A Treatise on the Art of Direction (1948), and The Theater From Its Origins to Modern Times (1957). He was one of the organizers of the Theater of International Action in Paris (1932). Moussinac wrote social novels about the intelligentsia (Headlong, 1931; Russian translation, 1934), the working class (Banned Demonstration, 1935; Russian translation, 1935), the peasantry (Les Champs-de-Moë, 1945), and an autobiographical work about concentration-camp prisoners (On the Raft “Medusa”: Diary of a Political Prisoner, 1945).