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It's So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture

2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fh/crn039

1477-4542

S. Rockett,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

The bold white letters of Hollywood are so emblazoned on our collective cinematic imagination that it takes a degree of reflection before considering that Hollywood was neither the birthplace of cinema nor wholly dominant even during its post-war golden age when the export of American films covered Europe like a cultural imprint of Marshall Aid. Vanessa Schwartz's book, dotted with technicolor film stills, paparazzi images of film stars and coated in primary coloured pages, pans out from such a sharp focus on the Sunshine State and attacks the simplistic conception of the Americanization of mass culture through a presentation of the internationalization of the film industry during the 1950s. Divided into four chapters that can be read as independent studies within themselves, It's So French! tracks the development of cinema and filmmaking from its national, studio-based focus prior to the Second World War to a multinational and cooperative enterprise epitomized by the Cannes Film Festival and Around the World in 80 Days. Her central argument, and one which is clearly inspired by the likes of Kristen Ross’ Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, is that the rise of mass culture and consumerism did not automatically denote Americanization (a term which, unfortunately, she does not unpick) and that, in actual fact, it was not something to which French culture was particularly averse. Her first chapter is a study of what she terms ‘Frenchness films’, that is usually American films, shot in American studios but which bought into the extravagant, musical and creative nostalgia of the Belle Epoque era in France. With scenes taken straight from Toulouse-Lautrec paintings (the photographs and stills included here show the uncanny resemblances) and frequent doses of the infamous can-can, many Hollywood films of the era paid homage to fin-de-siècle Paris as both the home of art and of popular culture. While many of these films, tracked from An American in Paris to Gigi, are particularly clichéd in their portrayal of France (or more specifically, Paris), others, such as Moulin Rouge, were praised by their contemporaries for their portrayal of Impressionism and their own visual artistry. Schwartz argues that this theme of Frenchness within Hollywood films of the 1950s was representative of a circular cultural exchange between France and the United States.