Going to the Movies in Paris, Then and Now

A review of Paris in the Dark. Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950, Eric Smoodin, Duke University Press, 2020.

Paris in the Dark made me remember going to the movies in Paris as a child and a teenager. Of course, I did not experience firsthand the period covered by the book, from the 1930s to around 1950. My formative years took place in the late 1970s and in the 1980s, and a lot of change took place between the period described in the book and the times I remember from my childhood. But Paris will always be Paris, and some aspects of the cinema culture that Eric Smoodin describes did sound familiar. The same time distance lies between 1980 and today and between 1980 and the 1930-1950 period, in the interval between the disappearance of silent movies and the beginning of color films. Maybe my childhood years were even closer from the era of black-and-white movies than they are from my present self. Time has been running faster lately: we now have the Internet and Netflix, while I am speaking of a period before DVDs and VHS. Time did not stand still between 1940 and 1980, but there was more continuity between these two dates for French moviegoers and cinema aficionados than between 1980 and now. Also I tend to look as past history from the same perspective that Eric Smoodin describes in his introduction and concluding chapter. He, too, spent time in Paris between 1980 and 1981, as a graduate student who went to the movies as often as he could. And he now looks at the 1930s and 1940s with eyeglasses colored by this youthful experience. We broadly belong to the same generation. And we both feel nostalgic for a time when “going to the movies” was something more than spending an evening out: it was a lived experience that shaped your identity and culture.

Movie magazines

The first thing Parisians and banlieusards did when they planned to go to the movies around 1980 was to buy Pariscope (or its competitor L’Officiel des Spectacles.) This moderately-priced magazine listed all the movies, spectacles, and entertainment events in Paris and its surrounding banlieue over the upcoming week. You could find the address and schedule of cinemas, theaters, concert halls, museums, with posters from the most recent movies and even ads for sex shops, swinger clubs, and Minitel rose online forums. Pariscope was created in 1965 and ceased publication in 2016. But Eric Smoodin could exploit a similar publication, Pour Vous, a popular film tabloid that was published between 1928 and 1940 and that contained complete listings of all the films playing in the city and in the suburbs. Using this archive as a source, he produces a map of the city’s twenty arrondissements with some of the major cinemas from the period 1930-1950, cinemas that were for most of them still in existence in 1980 but, with a few exception, have disappeared from present-day Paris. He makes the distinction between the cinémas des grands boulevards lining the Champs Elysées and other main avenues, the cinémas de quartier serving a more localized neighborhood, and the ciné-clubs that were mostly concentrated in the Quartier latin, the fifth and sixth arrondissement. Each category offered a different movie-going experience. Each also survived the passing of time and link the distant past to more recent childhood memories and to the present.

As a representative of the first category, take the Rex, situated on the boulevard de la Poissonnière, which was the largest cinema theatre in Europe at the time of its opening in 1932. The Rex was built by Jacques Haïk, a wealthy film impresario known for having introduced Charlie Chaplin to France. Haïk aimed to create the most beautiful movie theatre in Paris, where cinema-goers would have the illusion of watching a film in the open air, with the ceiling painted to represent a starry night sky. The French press noted the florid extravagance of this “cinéma atmosphérique,” with its “starred ceiling giving us the illusion of an oriental night.” During the Occupation, the Rex was requisitioned and became the Soldatenkino, reserved for German soldiers. In the 1950s, one of the first escalators in France was installed and inaugurated by Gary Cooper. For a child, going to such a theater was a magic experience. It sparked the imagination for a lifetime: I still remember the grand building, the queue to the ticket window, the tip to the ouvreuse or usherette, the ice-cream seller who also handled cigarettes and Kleenex, the commercials opened by the animated figure of Jean Mineur throwing his pickaxe to a target and hitting bull’s eye…

Grand cinemas, cinémas de quartier, and ciné-clubs

The Rex and other grand cinemas typically played new movies for only a week before they were fanned out to other cinemas in the neighborhood, where the most successful flicks could keep on screen for weeks on end. The cinéma de quartier is where most Parisians situate their early movie experience. This is where they remember going to the movies for the first time alone or with their friends as opposed to accompanied by their parents; where they exchanged their first kiss; where they laughed, cried, or screamed in reaction to the scenes of the screen. In France, a R-rated movie would be accessible to teenagers, and a “film interdit aux moins de 16 ans” would be rated X in the US. But there were always ways to fake your ID, negotiate your entry without paying with the ticket clerk, or using a backdoor and some lock-picking skills to free ride on a film show. The neighborhood cinema was a familiar presence that is still remembered fondly in adult life and that finds its ways into novels by Patrick Modiano or movies such as Cinema Paradiso. Its disappearance is always a local tragedy, and its replacement by multiple screen theaters wipes away an important part of the viewer’s experience. 

No other city in the world during the period covered by this book had so extensive a system of ciné-clubs as Paris. From early on, cinema was considered as part of culture, and was identified as “le septième art”  by a French-Italian critic as early as 1923. But not all movies were art movies. And ciné-clubs or art-movie theaters had a connection with highbrow Parisian culture that the commercial cinema typically did not. Movies and documentaries could occasionally be projected in institutions other than cinemas: museums, concert halls, conference venues, public libraries, or amphitheaters. They were usually preceded by introductory remarks and followed by a “débat cinématographique” bringing in the film director, art critics, public lecturers, and the public. The frequently posh setting, the people who attended, and the discussions that took place made the ciné-club, far more than the ordinary cinema, a special location in the cultural geography of Paris. In the 1970s and 1980s, ciné-clubs were also present in suburban or provincial cities and towns, as well as in the form of a student-managed activity in lycées and universities. The screenings, which sometimes took the form of all-night movie marathons, could follow various patterns such as the director retrospective, the thematic series, the avant-garde aesthetic experience, and the sensational or censored film. This is where the cinematic auteurs from the Nouvelle Vague and the art critics from Les Cahiers du cinéma honed their skills and acquired their cinematic culture.

Version originale sous-titrée

American journalists quoted by Eric Smoodin reported that Parisians had a preference for French films, and tended to shun American films with French subtitles or sous-titres in favor of French-dubbed Hollywood movies. In fact, from a sample of 110 movies listed in Pour Vous in 1933, the author was able to identify 48 French films, 34 Hollywood movies, as well as a few movies from Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Belgium. Assigning national origins to all movies from the period can be challenging, as there were quite a few binational coproductions as well as foreign films produced for the French market or multiple-language versions of the same movie. And many films were shown in their original language. The sous-titré movie held a privileged place in French cinema, especially among the cultured elite, even if they didn’t always understand the original English. In a city known for its international film culture, foreign movies have always shared the screen with domestic films. In the Paris of the 1980s, and especially in the art-movie theaters, you could see movies from a wide variety of international directors: Visconti, Pasolini, Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman, Eisenstein, Tarkovsky, Wajda,  Kieslowski, Ozu, Oshima, Kurosawa, Fassbinder, Wenders, Jarmusch, Lynch, Kubrick, etc., were household names for the true cinéphile.

Paris, and later Cannes (where the International Film Festival was first organized in 1939 and relaunched in 1946), could make or break the reputation of filmmakers and actors. Among the most compelling stars of the period were Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich, who rose to fame following the switch to sound technologies and eclipsed older stars from the silent era. Both actors were transnational celebrities. Chevalier started his career in the music hall in France but then moved to the United States to work with Paramount. Dietrich’s career was launched with her role in L’Ange bleu in 1930, and Parisian audiences could hear her singing the theme song in the original German (“Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt”). Much more than the silent film stars, whose nationality or regional origin could never be given away by their accents, both Dietrich and Chevalier were perceived as national subjects, as German in the first case and French in the second. Their stardom may have its roots in Hollywood, but could only attain its full development with  the success they attained with French audiences. It is only recently that French actors have started to feature in American movies without a heavy French accent—although Jean Dujardin, the lead character in the 2011 movie The Artist, articulates English in a distinctly French way.

For the historian, cinema in the 1930s was also a site of violence motivated by right-wing politics. The 1930 screening of L’Âge d’or, the surrealist movie by Luis Buñuel, was interrupted by the right-wing Ligue des Patriotes who threw ink at the cinema screen and assaulting viewers who opposed them. During the following months and years, there was a series of escalating incidents in Paris cinemas, with interruptions by the public leading to police intervention. Likewise, I remember showing support during my high-school years to the local ciné-club whose screenings of controversial movies such as Je vous salue Marie (1985) by Jean-Luc Godard or La dernière tentation du Christ (1988) by Martin Scorsese was opposed by demonstrations and booing from traditional Catholics. Choosing a particular movie or theater was also a way to manifest your political affiliation. During the 1930s, one ciné-club, Les Amis de Spartacus, was affiliated with the French Communist Party and typically showed films that had been banned in France, such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Le Cuirassé Potemkine (1925). Forty years laters, municipalities from the banlieue rouge headed by communist mayors would still screen movies from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union that would not feature in commercial cinemas. But going to the movies also positioned you in the field of intellectual politics: being able to discuss cinema history and to comment on the latest film attraction was, and still is considered as a litmus test for the true Parisian intellectual. Eric Smoodin deserves the title in abstentia.

Post scriptum: Eric Smoodin, the author of Paris in the Dark, also writes a blog on WordPress, the Paris Cinema Project. It has more pictures and historical details than the book. Recommended reading.