'Paris in the Cinema' offers a new approach to the representation of Paris on screen. Bringing together a wide range of renowned French and Anglophone specialists in film, television, history, architecture and literature, the volume introduces, challenges and extends ideas about the city as the locus of screen modernity. Through a range of concrete and historically-specific case studies, ranging from particular districts such as Saint-Germain-des-Pres and les banlieues (the suburbs) in French cinema, to iconic figures such as the detective Maigret and the lovers, and from locations such as the hotel, the building site and the Eiffel Tower to filmmakers such as Agnes Varda and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, this unique text demonstrates how the cinematic city of Paris now constitutes a major archive of French cultural history and memory.

How film emerged in 19th-century Paris amid an array of social, political, artistic and technological innovations--with works by the Lumiere brothers, Mélies, Chéret and more City of Cinematraces film's evolution from an obscure entertainment to the most powerful art form of the 20th century. Placing cinema in the context of 19th-century Parisian visual culture, this book brings together posters, paintings, studio and documentary photography, and film stills that evoke Paris as a site of consumption, demonstrate early cinema's relationship with technology and the fine arts, and highlight local and global spaces of film production. It also examines the aspects of 19th-century visual culture that gave rise to cinema as a quintessentially modern medium with an eager audience. Aligning with French beliefs that the nation's culture would be democratized through consumption, cinema reinforced a set of assumptions about French cultural and political authority and disseminated these ideas to the rest of the world. Presented here are images of and from the street by Jean Béraud, Charles Marville, Jules Chéret and Auguste and Louis Lumière; the technological experimentation of Loïe Fuller, Émile Reynaud and Georges Méliès; and the plein-air observations of Camille Pissarro and the staged artifice of Jean-Leon Gerome--all of which can be considered alongside the prototype film studios of Georges Méliès, Gaumont and Pathé. At the dawn of the 20th century, cinema is as much, if not more, a way of appropriating the world. Through arresting images and incisive texts, this book examines the origins of cinema and its position as a global medium.

Neighbourhood by neighbourhood, address by address, visit the City of Lights via 101 cafés, hôtels, boutiques, galleries and theatres that have served as backgrounds to our favourite movies.

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 King Kong and Frankenstein, 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 space.

An investigation of Paris as an urban space and a poetic site of remembrance. Experiencing urban space conjures visions of the past alongside contemplation of the present. This edited volume investigates this feeling of seeing double by investigating Paris--a city that has come to embody the tension of this sensation--through a dual lens of nostalgia and modernity. Contributors survey Paris in film, poetry, and prose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, presenting the city as both a concrete reality and as a collection of the myths associated with it. Interdisciplinary and deeply researched, the essays distill complex concepts of the urban, the textual, and the modern for a wide readership.

This thoroughly revised and expanded edition of a key textbook offers an innovative and accessible account of the richness and diversity of French film history and culture from the 1890s to the present day. The contributors, who include leading historians and film scholars, provide an indispensable introduction to key topics and debates in French film history. Each chronological section addresses seven key themes – people, business, technology, forms, representations, spectators and debates, providing an essential overview of the cinema industry, the people who worked in it, including technicians and actors as well as directors, and the culture of cinema going in France from the beginnings of cinema to the contemporary period.

A whip-smart fiction debut, Our Secret Life in the Movies riffs on classic and cult cinema. Inspired by films from silent-era documentaries to music videos, the authors unfold a dual narrative about two boys growing up in the 1980s. Coming of age during the last days of the Cold War, these boys dream of space exploration and nuclear winter, Reaganomics and Dungeons & Dragons, Blade Runner and Red Dawn. Haunting, cinematic, and full of life, Our Secret Life makes it clear that we are in the movies and the movies are in us.

Ginette Vincendeau discusses the artistic value of his films in their proper context and comments on Jean-Pierre Melville's love of American culture and his controversial critical and political standing in this English language study.

To a large extent, the story of French filmmaking is the story of moviemaking. From the earliest flickering images of the late nineteenth century through the silent era, Surrealist influences, the Nazi Occupation, the glories of the New Wave, the rebirth of the industry in the 1990s with the exception culturelle, and the present, Rémi Lanzoni examines a considerable number of the world's most beloved films. Building upon his 2004 best-selling edition, the second edition of French Cinema maintains the chronological analysis, factual reliability, ease of use, and accessible prose, while at once concentrating more on the current generation of female directors, mainstream productions such as The Artist and The Intouchables, and the emergence of minority filmmakers (Beur cinema).

Paris Is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1991) captures the energy, ambition, wit, and struggle of African-American and Latino participants in the 1980s New York drag ball scene. This book contextualizes the film within the longer history of drag balls, the practices of documentary, the fervor of the culture wars, and the development of queer theory and critical race studies.