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Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950. By Eric Smoodin

2021; Oxford University Press; Volume: 75; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fs/knab064

1468-2931

Michael Witt,

Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

In this engaging study of cinemas, film exhibition, and cinema-going in Paris in the 1930s and 1940s, Eric Smoodin draws on a range of archival sources, notably the film listings published in the specialist and general press, as the basis for ‘a geography and sociology of film viewing’ in the capital (p. 40). Organized chronologically in six chapters, the book takes the reader on a series of illuminating voyages through Parisian film culture in this eventful period. Despite its modest length, it covers considerable ground in hitherto largely uncharted territory. The opening chapter explores film exhibition in the early years of sound cinema, including the conversion of theatres to sound, and the variety of films available to cinemagoers (silent, with music and sound effects, fully parlant, subtitled, dubbed). Chapter 2 offers a rich account of Paris’s ciné-club culture from 1930 to 1944, including children’s and political clubs alongside specialist cinephile clubs. It also explores where the clubs met, who attended them, and the roles played by club leaders and key figures of the ciné-club movement, such as Germaine Dulac and the lesser-known Lucie Derain. In Chapter 3, Smoodin changes tack to consider the importance of voice in sound cinema through case studies devoted to Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich, and what the reception of films featuring the new generation of stars reveals about the intertwined histories of technological change and the production of celebrity in France in the early 1930s. Chapter 4 turns to the little-explored topic of protests on the part of cinemagoers in and around cinemas in Paris and its suburbs. Following a reflection on the unrest that greeted Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 (dir. by David Butler) at the Moulin Rouge in December 1929, it examines the use of cinema theatres by political organizations as meeting places, and in particular the violence orchestrated by right-wing groups and individuals in and around cinemas, before closing with a brief consideration of instances of dissent on the part of filmgoers in occupied Paris. Chapter 5 discusses the dramatic changes regarding what films were shown where during the Occupation, the importance of the French-language German film journal Ciné-mondial, and the ideological use by the Nazis of film stars — with particular reference to Brigitte Horney, and to the two-way traffic of stars between France and Germany — to advance their political and cultural aims. The final chapter focuses on the reopening of increasing numbers of cinemas after the Liberation, and the screening of the first Hollywood films since the start of the Occupation. Drawing on information from the weekly film magazine Cinévie (founded 1945) and the Ciné-club newspaper (founded 1947), Smoodin constructs here a detailed picture of Paris’s vibrant post-war film culture, including its many ciné-clubs, when the entire city, as he puts it aptly, functioned as ‘a sort of vast film repertory’ (p. 138).