Title: City of Darkness, City of Light : Emigré Filmmakers in Paris 1929-1939
Abstract: City of Darkness, City of Light 10 City of Darkness, City of Light Paris and the 1930sParis in the 1930s was in many ways a divided city.As Marc Augé (1996) has demonstrated with evocative precision in his discussion of an anthology of Parisian photographs of the era, the city was marked strongly by currents of continuity and change.Now, with the hindsight of an historical perspective which can view the war about to happen, as well as the one that had just ended, the city appears as a site of various temporalities.Behind the aesthetic facade of the two international Parisian exhibitions of the decade -the Exposition Coloniale of 1931 and the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques of 1937 -lay a society uncertain of itself; a society that kept one eye on the traumas of the First World War, and one eye on the gathering political problems in the rest of Europe.Marred by a succession of short-lived governments, the French capital was riven by political tensions which brought citizens onto the streets in riots, strikes, and demonstrations throughout the decade.One indication of this insecurity was the way in which the vocal supporters of the French right laid claim to individual national pride whilst at the same time genuflecting to an imported ideology from a former military enemy.Another was the way in which the French capital handled the progression of modernization in terms of its built environment.Despite the growth of the greater Parisian region in the 1920s and early 1930s, with its expansion in housing, factories, and railways, the city was still a place which took pride in traditional social mores.If Norma Evenson (1979, 255) is right in suggesting that Paris lies at the crossroads in Europe between a Mediterranean and a Northern lifestyle, it appears that in this decade, at least within the cultural discourse, the more Southern model of the Parisian quartier as family community was still dominant.This tradition was carried over into the spheres of popular entertainment; especially within the cinematic representation of urban life.12 City of Darkness, City of Light Paris and French Cinema of the 1930sBy the 1930s, with the population of the intramural city stabilised at around the three million mark, and the subsequent rapid growth in the rim of suburban development encouraged by the development of tramlines and rail networks, Parisians were beginning to make use of the advent of paid holidays to view non-urban France.The fact remains though that representations of the city remained enormously popular for the French film-going public.It is still surprising, despite the centrality of the French capital in terms of cinematic production, exhibition, and representation, that there is so little sustained analytical writing about film and Paris.Art history has long privileged Paris as a site of meaning -especially in the case of French nineteenth century painting - France and the ÉmigrésThe early years of the 1930s were marked by the transition from silent to sound film production.As many have pointed out, the "introduction of speech, dialogue, and an actor's verbal performance reframed the question of how the French cinema could differ from and challenge of the American cinema" (Abel 18 City of Darkness, City of Light 24 City of Darkness, City of Light The City in