Annie Fee Complete Dissertation

Gender, Class and Cinephilia: Parisian Cinema Cultures, 1918-1925 Annie Fee A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor in Philosophy University of Washington 2015 Reading Committee: Jennifer M. Bean, Chair Sudhir Mahadevan James Tweedie Program authorized to offer degree: Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media © Copyright 2015 Annie Fee University of Washington Abstract Gender, Class and Cinephilia: Parisian Cinema Cultures, 1918-1925 Annie Fee Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Jennifer M. Bean, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media This dissertation examines the discursive strategies through which French intellectual critics exploited gender, nationalism and class as tools in the production of French highbrow and avant- garde film culture. To date, scholars have largely studied French cinema of the inter-war period through the now canonical lens of this reflexive, self-critical community of cinephiles concerned with the state of French cinema. By contrast, I draw on alternative archival sources—including letter columns in popular film weeklies, fan letters, police reports, taxation policies, municipal memos and notices in the leftist press—to reveal the socially engaged and even revolutionary film communities that formed what I call a “counterpublic.” All the dissertation chapters thus deal with key moments and sites of negotiation between, on the one hand, elitist, intellectualising and national bourgeois cinephile critics and filmmakers, and on the other hand, a heterogeneous public of ordinary filmgoers. In some of these moments the negotiation was gradual, discursive and developed through columns in newspapers and film weeklies, while in other moments it took the form of violent clashes. In the first chapter I examine the reception of D.W. Griffith’s film Broken Blossoms (1919), a foundational film for cinephilia. Using fragments of materials from daily newspapers and the film press, I show how French film industry representatives instrumentalised popular audiences’ negative reactions to this film to argue for a separate exhibition network for elite publics. In the second chapter I similarly trace the reception of the anti-Bolshevik film Red Russia. I examine secret police reports of Parisian Communist Youth Party meetings, correspondence between these youth groups and Moscow, and notifications to Party members in the leftist press, to demonstrate how cinephile critics like Louis Delluc approached political films with a conservative disdain for non-aesthetic concerns while leftist audiences reacted by creating two alternative exhibition networks in the weeks following the films release. In the third chapter I transition from social activism to a more intimate sphere of film engagement to show how the experience of individual cinemagoers was connected to cinema’s public dimension. I place fan letters to the popular serial star Sandra Milowanoff, as well as cinema programmes and popular film weeklies, into conversation with the political notices and reports that I analyse in the previous chapter. Because most of the fan letters were written by working-class, female moviegoers, they provide insight into the motivations and individual modes of engagement with film culture for a population segment all but overlooked. At the same time, they allow me to create a spatial representation of audiences’ homes and workplaces in relation to local cinemas, thus grounding my analysis of their spectatorship within the political and economic concerns of their local communities. If Broken Blossoms was a central film for cinephilia, photogénie was its central theoretical concept. In the fourth and final chapter I show how, like the film Broken Blossoms and the journal Cinéa, the term photogénie was the site of a slow, discursive and gradual negotiation between highbrow and lowbrow film culture. Young female film fans seeking to become actresses wrote into film magazines with their photographs to ask if they possessed photogénie. While cinephiles depended on such film fans for selling their magazines, however, the popular understanding of photogénie went against the grain of what they sought to accomplish in terms of creating an elite terminology for an elite art cinema. This chapter thus demonstrates how early cinephiles sought to distance themselves from popular audiences’ unsophisticated understanding of photogénie. This dissertation thus recovers several key points of cultural negotiation, revealing the contingency and contestability that were at play during the crucial few years when cinephilia emerged and became the dominant mode of discussing film in the French public sphere. In the process it reconstructs the lively and unruly culture that existed around Parisian working-class cinemas in the years following the Great War. Contents Introduction: Cinephilia’s Past and Present ...................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Blossoms Breaking at the Dawn of Cinephilia: The Reception of D.W. Griffith in France ...................................................................... 34 Chapter 2: Gaumont Offers ‘La Russie Rouge’ and All Paris Takes Sides”: Working-Class Activism in Paris Cinemas, 1921-1922 ................................................. 66 Chapter 3: The Cinema Girl: Fandom, Serial Culture and Local Celebrity in 1920s Paris ......................................... 101 Chapter 4: Cocaine, Anthropometrics and Avant-Garde Beauty Queens: Photogénie Beyond Jean Epstein .................................................................................. 147 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 185 Works Cited .................................................................................................................. 190 1!! Introduction: Cinephilia’s Past and Present This dissertation spans a period of rupture in French cinema that occurred in the years following the Great War: the collapse of the French film industry as a popular working-class entertainment and its subsequent rebirth in the shape of highbrow art cinema. In contrast to other scholarship, Gender, Class and Cinephilia: Parisian Cinema Cultures, 1918-1925 does not seek to reconstruct the emergence of high-brow cinephilia, but to bring to light what cinephilia excluded from its quest for official and cultural recognition. The French First Wave may have eventually won its autonomy from other film art forms, but this artistic autonomy was gained only through a greater reliance on the state and through forging a new association of film production and taste with French national identity. In this dissertation I sketch out the conditions under which this logic for a new aesthetic regime emerged and was transformed in the years following the Great War. I trace the creation of a framework in which film’s mass-cultural form was made distinct from its existence as a French national product and a national taste that we now recognise as cinephilia. The idea of cinema as an enlightened artform worthy of respect and official support but threatened by the pollution of popular film culture is still salient in French cinephile circles. Recently, the voices of Louis Delluc and Ricciotto Canudo, the first cinephiles,1 could be heard echoing from within the walls of two symbolic seats of French national cultural heritage: the Cinémathèque française and the Institut National de l'Histoire de l'Art (INHA). Delluc and Canudo both died in the 1920s, but in the talks and roundtables of these conferences, held in 1 The term ‘cinephile’ can be traced back to the mid-1910s, when it was used in the Parisian film press to describe a lover of the cinema, the opposite of the cinéphobe, who felt that the relatively new medium of film was a vulgar, immoral or mindless leisure activity. 2!! October 20112 and January 20123 respectively, their concerns regarding the future of cinephilia as a French cultural institution were alive and well. A tangible anxiety could be felt as major academic and institutional figures of cinephilia lamented the “pollution of cinephile institutions,” the “tribalisation” of cinema publics and the impending extinction of the cinephile canon because the new generation failed to recognise the established chefs d'oeuvres. Cinephile purists who believe that a film can really only be experienced when sitting alone in a dark salle of the cinémathèque voiced their worries triggered by the democratisation of viewing practices made possible by television, the internet, the replacement of film by digital projection and the multiplicity of new screen cultures. Although the perceived enemy is new — the internet, new screen technologies, etc. — there is actually nothing new about these fears for cinephilia’s future. We can trace the discourse of anxiety back to the years following the end of the Great War in France, when U.S. cinema inundated French theatres and a vibrant multiplicity of film cultures emerged, transforming the cultural landscape of Paris. Like today, early cinephiles saw cinema appreciation as a national culture in danger of dilution by mainstream film culture. In addition to American film imports, 2 Round table discussion: “Cinémathèques et cinéphilies de demain.” (“Cinémathèques and Cinephilias of tomorrow.”) Participants: Jean-Marc Lalanne (film critic for Inrockuptibles), Luc Lagier

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