Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture

Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture
Author: Dudley Andrew
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780674027169

The authors highlight the new symbolic forces put in play by technologies of the illustrated press and the sound film - technologies that converged with efforts among writers, artists, and other intellectuals to respond to the crises of the decade.

Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination

Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination
Author: Tim Bergfelder
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2007
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9789053569849

Summary: "Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination presents for the first time a comparative study of European film set design in the late 1920s and 1930s; based on a wealth of designers ʼ drawings, film stills and archival documents, the book offers a new insight into the development and significance of trans-national artistic collaboration during this period. European cinema from the late 1920s to the late 1930s is famous for its attention to detail in terms of set design and visual effect. Focusing on developments in Britain, France, and Germany, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema provides a comprehensive analysis of the practices, styles, and function of cinematic production design during this period, and its influence on subsequent filmmaking patterns."--Publisher description.

Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination

Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination
Author: Tim Bergfelder
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2007
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9053569804

Summary: "Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination presents for the first time a comparative study of European film set design in the late 1920s and 1930s; based on a wealth of designers ʼ drawings, film stills and archival documents, the book offers a new insight into the development and significance of trans-national artistic collaboration during this period. European cinema from the late 1920s to the late 1930s is famous for its attention to detail in terms of set design and visual effect. Focusing on developments in Britain, France, and Germany, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema provides a comprehensive analysis of the practices, styles, and function of cinematic production design during this period, and its influence on subsequent filmmaking patterns."--Publisher description.

Yiddish Paris

Yiddish Paris
Author: Nick Underwood
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2022-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0253059801

Yiddish Paris explores how Yiddish-speaking emigrants from Eastern Europe in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s created a Yiddish diaspora nation in Western Europe and how they presented that nation to themselves and to others in France. In this meticulously researched and first full-length study of interwar Yiddish culture in France, author Nicholas Underwood argues that the emergence of a Yiddish Paris was depended on "culture makers," mostly left-wing Jews from Socialist and Communist backgrounds who created cultural and scholarly organizations and institutions, including the French branch of YIVO (a research institution focused on East European Jews), theater troupes, choruses, and a pavilion at the Paris World's Fair of 1937. Yiddish Paris examines how these left-wing Yiddish-speaking Jews insisted that even in France, a country known for demanding the assimilation of immigrant and minority groups, they could remain a distinct group, part of a transnational Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation. Yet, in the process, they in fact created a French-inflected version of Jewish diaspora nationalism, finding allies among French intellectuals, largely on the left.

Twilight Visions

Twilight Visions
Author: Therese Lichtenstein
Publisher: University of California Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2011-07-21
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 0520271270

Through an examination of surrealist photographs, objects, exhibitions, activities, and writings, the essays in Twilight Visions, the beautifully illustrated companion volume to the exhibition of the same name, portray the French capital as a city in the process of metamorphosis-in a kind of twilight state. The Bureau of Surrealist Research, the major Surrealist exhibitions, and the photographs of Paris by Brassai, Andre Kertesz, Ilse Bing, Germaine Krull, and Man Ray, among others, all reflect the tumultuous social and cultural transformations occurring in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. Juxtaposing the strange with the familiar, they seek to break down repressive hierarchies. At the same time, they represent a desire to change the world through experimental activities. Introduced by Therese Lichtenstein, with essays by Therese Lichtenstein, Julia Kelly, Colin Jones, and Whitney Chadwick, this absorbing volume considers the social, aesthetic, and political stances of the Surrealists as they probed hidden aspects of the commonplace and blurred the boundaries between dreams and reality, subjectivity and objectivity. Copub: Frist Center for the Visual Arts

Americanism, Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France

Americanism, Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France
Author: David A. Pettersen
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2016-05-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 178316851X

First book to focus on Americanism and its consideration of French film and literature The book is organized around individual figures, texts, and films, making it easy to adopt for individual units in courses. The book is written in clear, accessible, and jargon-free language. The book brings a new and innovative transatlantic perspective to 1930s French culture. The books offers new perspectives on important figures that we thought we knew well. The book mixes cultural history with the analysis of individual films and novels in a way that is engaging to read.

Paris and the Right in the Twentieth Century

Paris and the Right in the Twentieth Century
Author: Jessica Wardhaugh
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2021-04-16
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 152756844X

Certain images of Paris have become icons for the left, but the Paris of the right has received far less attention. This groundbreaking collection of essays examines the relationship between Paris and the right in the twentieth century, exploring how political leaders and parties have depicted and controlled the streets, people and history of Paris, and how the city has been both context and inspiration for journalists and novelists of the right. The first part focuses on the relationship between the right, the street and the people, and describes some of the most contentious political movements in recent French history, from the anti-parliamentary leagues of the Belle Époque to the contemporary Front National. The second part examines the importance of Paris for de Gaulle and his successors in their exercise of authority and control, whether in the media, the streets, or municipal politics. Lastly, the book explores the Paris imagined and experienced by right-wing novelists from Charles Maurras to the post-war “Hussards”, mapping out an intellectual topography and emphasising the tensions between a real and imaginary city. A Franco-British collaboration spanning history, literary studies and political science, this volume offers an original contribution to the political geography, culture and symbolism of the French capital.

Spectacle in Classical Cinemas

Spectacle in Classical Cinemas
Author: Tom Brown
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2015-08-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317527054

Spectacle is not often considered to be a significant part of the style of ‘classical’ cinema. Indeed, some of the most influential accounts of cinematic classicism define it virtually by the supposed absence of spectacle. Spectacle in ‘Classical’ Cinemas: Musicality and Historicity in the 1930s brings a fresh perspective on the role of the spectacular in classical sound cinema by focusing on one decade of cinema (the 1930s), in two ‘modes’ of filmmaking (musical and historical films), and in two national cinemas (the US and France). This not only brings to light the special rhetorical and affective possibilities offered by spectacular images but refines our understanding of what ‘classical’ cinema is and was.

In Pursuit of the People

In Pursuit of the People
Author: J. Wardhaugh
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2008-11-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0230594751

The first comparative study of how the French Popular Front and its right-wing opponents transformed the masses into the people, whether in demonstrations and festivals, or theatre and film. Seven chapters examine the representation of the crowd, workers, electorate, nation and symbolic community, exploring parallels between left and right.

The French Screen Goddess

The French Screen Goddess
Author: Jonathan Driskell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2015-03-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857735667

Many years before Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve rose to fame, the French cinema produced a host of glamorous female stars designed to rival their Hollywood counterparts. Bathed in soft light, discussed adoringly in fan magazines and shown wearing the latest fashions, these 'cinematic stars' emerged in opposition to France's traditional stage-based stardom, while remaining, through the roles they played and the looks they sported, a distinctly French phenomenon. The French Screen Goddess examines how these stars influenced the narratives and look of their films, contributed to defining the period's new, emancipated femininity -, the 'modern woman' -, and related to the decade's politics, particularly the Popular Front of the mid-1930s. The book focuses on the three most important examples of this type of stardom, Annabella, Danielle Darrieux and Michele Morgan, while also considering many other key stars, such as Arletty, Viviane Romance and Jean Gabin. Previously neglected films are considered and true classics of French cinema re-examined, with Rene Clair's Quatorze juillet, Julien Duvivier's La Bandera, and Marcel Carne's Le Quai des brumes and Hotel du Nord foremost among these.