Cinephiles, Criminals, and Children: Discourses and Practices of Cinema Education in 1920s Paris

Abstract

Cinephiles, Criminals, and Children: Discourses and Practices of Cinema Education in 1920s Paris Annie Fee (bio) In the June 2014 report “For a European Film Education Policy,” commissioned by head of the Centre National du Cinéma (CNC), Frédérique Bredin, Xavier Lardoux stressed the need to bring schoolchildren into cinemas, “a sacred space where others have gone before us, and have experienced moments of intense feeling, drama or joy,” so that they might “discover works of cinematic art” and thus create “Europe’s film-loving cinema-goer of the future.”1 The following year Lardoux, by then head of film at the CNC, shared the results of his report at the Cinémathèque Française for the launch of the MEDIA funded program “A Framework for Film Education in Europe,” headed by the British Film Institute (BFI). The program, though Europe-wide in scope, was launched at the symbolic seat of French cinephile culture, and Lardoux’s report had its origins in the former French Minister of Culture Aurélie Filippetti’s speech at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. From the perspective of French cultural institutions, then, efforts to implement film education in twenty-first century European schools take place through a framework of classical cinephilia and should, in Frédérique Bredin’s words, pay particular attention to “the artistic dimension of film” and “its very particular relationship with the movie-theatre.”2 This close connection between cinephilia as an intellectual culture of film appreciation and contemporary notions of film education has origins so deeply rooted in the early history of cinephilia that the two are difficult to distinguish. Cinephilia has from the beginning defined itself as an antidote to mere commercial film production, the bulk of which comes from Hollywood studios, giving cinephilia an identity both European and highbrow but also forcing it to [End Page 38] continuously work to ensure financial support and cultural recognition from official circles. The task of initiating new generations of cinemagoers to cinephilia has therefore always been a matter of life and death. As Pascal Laborderie reminds us, “cinephilia was founded” on “educational terrain” during the interwar period, when “the combined actions of the Offices du cinéma éducateur and of the secular teaching leagueLigue de l’enseignement prepared the ground for a popular secular educational cinema which would foreshadow non-commercial cinema legislation and prepare the explosion of the ciné-club movement.”3 The non-commercial cinema legislation to which he refers is the 21 September 1949 decree granting tax exoneration for non-commercial film, followed in 1959 by the avance sur recettes policy, a hard-won set of decrees that recognized artistic film as an alternative to what had since the interwar years been widely seen as the “immoral” entertainment of commercial cinema by relieving them of punitive taxes. To the issue of morality one might add the perception, common in the interwar French film industry, that French audiences were being inundated with American productions, a cultural invasion that threatened interwar French cinema with irrelevance but also furnished the struggling industry with an effective argument with which to convince statesmen of the importance of supporting filmmakers who sought to elevate French film to the level of high art.4 The eventual success of classical cinephilia in achieving official recognition as a practice of critical spectatorship and creation worthy of state support, thanks to the efforts of Louis Delluc and the French First Wave critics, has overshadowed the myriad ways in which various other communities, from state elites to working-class social activists, envisioned cinema as a pedagogical and political medium amenable to objectives that were not necessarily in agreement with those of the cinephiles. Louis Delluc, Ricciotto Canudo, and Émile Vuillermoz used ciné-club lectures and film journals as sites of cinephile training for their target audience, an audience that was largely limited to the small number of upper-middle-class Parisians who could further their agenda. Because the existing historiography of the ciné-club movement focuses on this elite community of intellectual film-makers, we are left to wonder how communities outside of their rarified circles saw cinema as an educational tool in 1920s Paris...