Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

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

2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 113; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/ahr.113.4.1133

1937-5239

Jeffrey H. Jackson,

European history and politics

Histories of European film in the 1950s and 1960s frequently highlight the struggle against Americanization, but Vanessa R. Schwartz provides a compelling alternative narrative and an important new way of thinking about a global popular culture. Whereas others emphasize competing artistic visions rooted in nationalism, she sees international cooperation and a Hollywood-Paris connection as crucial to the development of a “cosmopolitan film culture.” Schwartz looks behind the films, examining documents from their production and marketing, to reveal how filmmakers, studios, business interests, and diplomatic delegations crafted a shared transatlantic vocabulary of movie-making. In the process, they placed France at the center of a global industry. Schwartz begins with a nuanced analysis of “Frenchness” films from An American in Paris (1951) to Gigi (1958), demonstrating how Hollywood used stereotypical depictions from the belle époque to popularize a compelling vision of France. Drawing on her earlier research, Schwartz argues that the late nineteenth century was the period when French visual culture itself became “cinematic.” American film from the 1950s drew on pre-World War I art, especially impressionism and the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, to link the earliest images of a “modern” France with the “modern” art of filmmaking at its inception. In the “Frenchness” films, American viewers saw themselves as they wanted to be: “In the moment considered to be the height of postwar American cultural imperialism, some of the most commercially successful, critically acclaimed, and eventually cherished films were tributes to France rather than transparent ciphers for promoting the ‘American way of life’” (p. 53). France was the peak of the art world, and film was the most modern artistic medium. American filmmakers and audiences drew on these associations to imagine themselves as artistic and modern, too.