In search of lost screens: Remapping the cultural history of Paris

Here are two important new books on Parisian cultural history, both offering different models of immersion and textual detail, and both written by senior male scholars with a lightly worn, but deeply felt, approach to their topic in hand. In the case of Eric Smoodin’s hugely ambitious survey of Parisian film culture between 1930 and 1950, he provides a multi-tonal social history of exhibition, programming and audiences that serves as a parallel volume to his previous ground-breaking monograph on American cinemagoers and the films of Frank Capra (Smoodin 2005). With his textured and compendious study of one district of the city, the Marais, Keith Reader delivers a characteristically well-researched, aphoristic and anecdotal companion of sorts to Louis Chevalier’s magisterial long-form history of Montmartre (Chevalier 1980). Smoodin’s guiding principle, he states, is to provide a sustained archival-based reflection on the films that ‘came and went through the city, [and] the relationship of cinemas to the movies they showed, to their neighbourhoods, and to their audiences’ (Smoodin, 1). His knowledge of the geographical specificity of Parisian venues and their multiple screening practices over the decades is formidable and requires a kind of sensory precision about place and image that in some ways recalls the long-form online CinéTourist project of the late Roland-François Lack. But unlike Lack, Smoodin’s real passion is not for actual maps and pictures on the screen, but people and cartography off the screen within a particular venue. These details of long-forgotten, but deeply evocative, moments and movements end up multiplying and converging in an imaginary geography that operates on both a micro level which examines one place and time in substantial detail, and a macro level which traces broader patterns of cultural significance over the duration of several months, or even years. Smoodin’s underlying desire is to downplay an understanding of French national cinema from the text outwards, at both the point of production and representation, and focus instead on what he terms ‘the point of reception – the ways in which audiences participated in film culture, the opportunities they had to see films, and the broad discourses about