Screening the Paris suburbs: From the silent era to the 1990s Paperback -

From the rear cover

'This edited volume is an important contribution to conceptions of geography and French cinema.'
Peter J. Bloom, H-France Review Decades before the emergence of a self-styled 'hood' film in France, filmmakers looked beyond the gates of the City of Light for inspiration and content. In the jumble of spaces surrounding Paris they found an inexhaustible reservoir of forms, landscapes and social types in which to anchor their fictions. From the bourgeois villas and vacant lots of Louis Feuillade's serials of the 1910s to the post-war housing estates showcased by Jean-Luc Godard, the gritty noir décors of Jean-Pierre Melville and the sleek, post-modern new towns shot by Éric Rohmer, the Paris suburbs came to form a key site in the national imaginary. For the first time in English, contributors to this volume address key aspects of this long screen history, which intersects with themes central to French cultural modernity, including class conflict, leisure, boredom, alienation and anti-authoritarianism. Diverse in focus and expansive in scope, Screening the Paris suburbs will interest students and scholars of French film, cultural studies and urban/suburban studies.