Frame Stories for Writing the History of French Silent Cinema

Abstract

This essay has two objectives. First, to survey the kinds of historical writing that have taken French silent cinema as their subject, especially over the past ten to twenty years. Here the focus is not only on the results of researching new archive sources but on a paradigm shift in how historians address André Bazin's famous question, ‘What is cinema?’ This section covers work ranging from studies of the French film industry as well as neglected film-makers and stars to work on exhibition, audiences, and reception. Second, to sketch several new directions for researching and writing the history of French silent cinema. These include a re-examination of what exactly is ‘French’ about French silent cinema (in what ways can it be called a ‘national’ cinema?), an investigation into how Pathé-Frères films in particular created an early form of what Miriam Hansen has called ‘vernacular modernism’ (readable throughout the world) that then was superseded by the ‘classical Hollywood cinema’, and an exploration of how the global penetration of French films (especially those of Pathé-Frères) before the Great War created conditions for the emergence of ‘national’ cinemas in such different countries as the USA and Russia, Tunisia and Mexico.