Negative and Positive Images: Race, Empire, and Family in Interwar French Pathé Baby Advertising

ABSTRACT:This article contributes to scholarship on small-gauge and home cinema by situating the advent of the Pathé Baby within interwar French politics and society. Through close analysis of period advertising, it argues that Pathé mobilized pronatalist and imperialist discourses to make 9.5mm home projection and filmmaking attractive to white, middle-class, metropolitan consumers, presenting home cinema as means of encountering the French Empire on the one hand and of promoting the so-called French race on the other. In drawing such connections, the study also seeks to enrich the growing body of scholarship on the entanglement of domestic cinema, gender, empire, and race.