City of Darkness, City of Light

Abstract

I am also delighted to be able to acknowledge the support given by Professor Thomas Elsaesser to this book. Thank you to the all the staff at Amsterdam University Press including Jaap Wagenaar and Magdalena Hernas.Last but by no means least, I must mention my partner and own émigré filmmaker, Mark Kurzemnieks, who has accompanied me on this and so many other journeys these last years. Thank you for everything. Oxford, Autumn 2003 8 City of Darkness, City of Light 10 City of Darkness, City of Light 12 City of Darkness, City of Light Paris and French Cinema of the 1930s By 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 -14 City of Darkness, City of Light 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