Paris Hollywood

This comprehensive volume examines Tinseltown's fascination with the City of Light, from silent movies through to modern blockbusters. Romantic, elegant, and enticing, Paris has fascinated American filmmakers for over a century. As habile in accommodating a romantic comedy or mystery as it is in hosting an action-packed thriller, it is by far the foreign city that appears most frequently in Hollywood movies. In Paris by Hollywood, essays by eminent film experts and commentators uncover Hollywood's role in the cultivation of now timeless Parisian clichés, examining seminal films such as An American in Paris, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Sabrina. Chapters on Audrey Hepburn's Parisian persona; Disney's and Woody Allen's personifications of Paris; Hollywood's depictions of the French Revolution; and the American fascination with the enigmatic, glamorous "Parisienne" explore a cultural relationship that owes as much to the allure of Paris itself as to Hollywood's desire to paint a picture of European exoticism. Interviews with eminent filmmakers and actors including Martin Scorsese, Julie Delpy, and Leslie Caron bring us behind the scenes and provide intimate insider's perspective. Insightful analysis explores the reasons why Hollywood has invested and continues to invest so much in depicting the French capital; an often mutually-beneficial economic and cultural relationship. Covering over 100 years of movie-making, from silent films to the animated world of Disney, via Cancan films and action-packed blockbusters, Paris by Hollywood is the perfect companion for lovers of American cinema and those captivated by the magic of the French capital.

In this new collection of essays on film, all written over the last ten years, Peter Wollen explores an extraordinarily wide range of topics, stretching from an analysis of 'Time in Film and Video Art' to a study of 'Riff-Raff Realism' in British films. There are provocative discussions of the works of established auteur directors such as Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock and of the film-making careers of such experimental movie-makers as William Burroughs and Viking Eggeling, the dadaist pioneer of abstract film. The collection also includes fascinating studies of a number of film classics, such as John Huston's Freud, Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Other essays deal with the relationship of film to the other arts, such as dance and architecture, and explore the interaction between film and anthropology. This is not a theoretical book but it is one that suggests many new approaches to thinking about film and many unexpected connections between film studies and the history of such strangely related activities as espionage, psychoanalysis, Stalinism, love of speed and digital technology. Full of fascinating new insights, Peter Wollen's new book is based on the premise that there are no fixed ways of writing about film but, rather, a plethora of paths leading in very different directions, each contributing to a new understanding of the twentieth century's major art-form.

L'album d'un photographe de "Paris Hollywood" : les pin-up françaises des années 50 et 60.

Looks at the influence of French culture on a variety of motion pictures in the 1950s and 1960s, including "Gigi" and "Funny Face."

A comprehensive guide to European actors in American film, this book brings together 15 chapters with A-Z entries on over 900 individuals. It includes case studies of prominent individuals and phenomena associated with the emigres, such as the stereotyping of European actresses in 'bad women' roles, and the irony of Jewish actors playing Nazis.

A 2022 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Love at first sight, whirlwind marriages, break-ups, divorces, remarriage... What accounts for the enduring success of the Hollywood madcap comedies of the 1930s? Directed by masters of comedy (Hawks, LaCava, Leisen, Ruggles...) and featuring the decade's most iconic stars (Colbert, Dunne, Grant, Hepburn...), these films set romantic comedy standards for decades to come. Screwball comedy embarked on two challenging missions: to poke fun at established social norms and to undermine stereotypical depictions of gender roles, putting forward a discourse that postulated the possibility of equality between men and women. Grégoire Halbout's reexamination of screwball comedy provides a comprehensive overview of this (sub)genre, eschewing the auteurist approach and including “minor” works never before analyzed through the screwball lens. His book explains how these screwball stories met the expectations of a booming American middle class eager for the liberalization of morals, with daring plots, verbal humor and slapstick techniques. Building on the work of Cavell, Altman and Gehring, as well as international and French scholarship, Halbout's investigation unfolds in three parts. He first establishes a definition of Hollywood screwball comedy through a cross-sectional analysis of its socio-historical context and an in-depth examination of the genre. He then situates screwball comedy in relation to its institutional context. An exclusive study of archival material explains the emergence of a screwball aesthetic meant to subvert the prohibitions of the 1934 Hollywood Production Code through a verbal and visual rhetoric of diversion and mitigation. Finally, Halbout explores the social function of the genre's placement of romantic intimacy at the center of the public sphere and the democratic debate, confirming that screwball eccentricity upholds America's founding values: freedom of speech, free consent, and contractual engagement.

Location shooting has always been a vital counterpart to soundstage production, and at times, the primary form of Hollywood filmmaking. But until now, the industrial and artistic development of this production practice has been scattered across the margins of larger American film histories. Hollywood on Location is the first comprehensive history of location shooting in the American film industry, showing how this mode of filmmaking changed Hollywood business practices, production strategies, and visual style from the silent era to the present. The contributors explore how location filmmaking supplemented and later, supplanted production on the studio lots. Drawing on archival research and in-depth case studies, the seven contributors show how location shooting expanded the geography of American film production, from city streets and rural landscapes to far-flung territories overseas, invoking a new set of creative, financial, technical, and logistical challenges. Whereas studio filmmaking sought to recreate nature, location shooting sought to master it, finding new production values and production economies that reshaped Hollywood’s modus operandi.

When American-born Surrealist Man Ray died in 1976, he left behind thousands of photo negatives, mostly portraits taken in his studio after his arrival in Paris in 1921. The Centre Georges Pompidou, which has owned them since the mid-1990s, has duly catalogued the collection of negatives and is now in a position to bring out what is an encyclopedic publication in the best sense of the term. It attests both to Man Ray s ability as a portrait photographer and to the quality of his archive as a monument to cultural history. The catalog features 500 portraits, each of which is explained in a short commentary. Since Man Ray's clientele was made up of members of Dadaist and Surrealist circles, of artists and painters, of writers and US emigrants of the Lost Generation, of aristocrats, and paragons of the worlds of fashion and theater, the book is at the same time a marvelous Who's Who and an indispensable reference work for a broad range of different historians and scholars of the 20th century.