| This dissertation asks what it was like to go to the cinema in France during the period 1918 through 1932, and how cinema went from being a marginalized, working-class leisure practice to become an accepted part of everyday life. It asks how cinema reinvented France during this period. Through study, first, of the popular cinema journals and columns in newspapers, and second, of some major commercial successes, this dissertation argues that French cinema renegotiates class-relations following World War 1. After 1918, French cinema was a cinema of working-class city-dwellers: it depicted the lives of those it sought to attract. It told the story of the mixing of classes that people were experiencing both in the physical space of the cinema itself, and in the city of Paris. Cinema culture became mass culture through constant renegotiations of class relations. Its increasing acceptance went hand in hand with an increased codification of the everyday practice of cinema-going. This normalization was accompanied and stimulated by magazines, journals, and newspaper columns during the 1920s, which eventually led to a homogenization of material practices, reducing differences between different cinemas and their audiences. The ways that rules, codes, and practices for cinema-going were put into place, indicate how power was deployed, and how vision was “historically constructed.” 1 Included were prevailing debates or discussions about lighting, talking, babies and animals, smoking, hats, programs, and the quality of films and their projection.;The “massification” of culture through the cinema as well as other media, and education, meant that class differences were blurring as people gained access to common cultural references. With this blurring, there was a resistance to the disappearance of marks of difference. The cinema, both on the screen and in the movie-theater, reinvented class-differences in reaction to these changes, while at the same time showing possibilities of crossing class-borders and offering the hope of the disappearance of class altogether. Through chapters on “Avoiding Class Conflict,” “Cinema-going as Slumming,” and “The Social Ascension of Cinema,” this dissertation takes up the transgression of class borders and re-inventing class relations in both cinema and in modern life.;1Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1990), 5. |
