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Paris in the Dark : Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950

By: Resource type: Ressourcentyp: Buch (Online)Book (Online)Language: English Publisher: Durham : Duke University Press, 2020Description: 1 Online-Ressource (224 p.)ISBN:
  • 9781478090281
Subject(s): Additional physical formats: 9781478006114. | 9781478006923. | Erscheint auch als: Paris in the dark. Druck-Ausgabe Durham : Duke University Press, 2020DDC classification:
  • 791.4309443/6 23
LOC classification:
  • PN1993.5.F7
Online resources: Summary: In Paris in the Dark Eric Smoodin takes readers on a journey through the streets, cinemas, and theaters of Paris to sketch a comprehensive picture of French film culture during the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on a wealth of journalistic sources, Smoodin recounts the ways films moved through the city, the favored stars, and what it was like to go to the movies in a city with hundreds of cinemas. In a single week in the early 1930s, moviegoers might see Hollywood features like <i>King Kong</i> and <i>Frankenstein</i>, the new Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier movies, and any number of films from Italy, Germany, and Russia. Or they could frequent the city's ciné-clubs, which were hosts to the cinéphile subcultures of Paris. At other times, a night at the movies might result in an evening of fascist violence, even before the German Occupation of Paris, while after the war the city's cinemas formed the space for reconsolidating French film culture. In mapping the cinematic geography of Paris, Smoodin expands understandings of local film exhibition and the relationships of movies to urban spaceSummary: "PARIS IN THE DARK traces the history of film and film-going in Paris, from the advent of sound cinema, through the Nazi occupation, and finally to postwar reconstruction. Drawing from a wide range of archives, Eric Smoodin reconstructs a cinematic geography of Paris. Focusing on details of the exhibition and screening of films in the neighborhoods and districts of Paris, Smoodin explores how meaning not only is expressed through film, but also is shaped by the particularities of where, when, and how people engage with film, and how spectators understand their own relationships to film. By paying attention to the material and cultural systems that shape the reception of film on the local level-film journalism, distribution systems, movie theaters - Smoodin revises and expands our understanding of what it means to talk about a national cinema, and about French cinema in particular. The book's chapters take us on a tour of Parisian film from the 1930s to the 1950s. The first chapter focuses on films screened in Parisian cinemas from 1931 to 1933; Smoodin analyzes listings in the film tabloid Pour Vous for evidence of a changing film culture, marked by the transition to sound and the development of a transnational, transcultural cinematic economy. In subsequent chapters Smoodin covers topics ranging from the ciné-clubs of Paris as sites of particular cinematic subcultures (1930-1944), to the impact of sound technology on the emerging stardom of Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich (1929-1935), to outbreaks of politically motivated violence at the cinema (1930-1944). Focusing more closely on the events of World War II, Smoodin examines how cinema became a form of cultural occupation under the Vichy régime (1939-1944). A final chapter looks at postwar cinema and film-going as an expression and celebration of liberation (1944-1949), while the conclusion considers French government studies of the habits of the national film-going public (1948-1954) in order to reflect on the state of Parisian film culture in more recent decades (1980-2016). PARIS IN THE DARK will interest scholars working in film studies, French culture and history, and cultural studies"-- Provided by publisherPPN: PPN: 1778466729Package identifier: Produktsigel: ZDB-94-OAB
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