Cinemas and popular movie buffs in France 1945-1958 – CINEPOP50

1 – robing popular and professional weekly
2 - index them by name, title and topic
3 - building a database accessible on the Internet
4 - documenting the production, operation and reception of popular cinema with economic, sociological and cultural perspectives.

1 - an internet database for indexing popular film weekly
2 – Studies on popular film and its reception in France
3 – Studies on popular tastes through letters to the editor
4 – Studies on film production and film exhibition
5 - studies on French reception of foreigner films

1 – studies on stars of the period ; building a panorama of French star system
2 - explore popular genres of the period, at national and transnational level
3 – studies on movie audiences in France

- an internet database for indexing popular film weekly

- a conference to present the program first results at Bordeaux 3 the 6th September 2012

French Film Studies have been dominated until now by auteurism and aesthetics ; we propose a shift in both the paradigm and the object of study, by approaching French mainstream cinema from 1945 to 1958 in a cultural history perspective, and by exploring the many movie weeklies published during the period, when attendance reached a historical high in France. British and American specialists in cultural studies and star studies have already worked on magazines of this kind, but not so in France, where mainstream cinema has been neglected, when it is not simply despised, by critics and academics ever since its condemnation by the Cahiers du cinema in the fifties, in order to obtain cultural legitimacy for film. Today, this attitude must be abandoned and a more scientific posture adopted, by exploring all the kinds of film shown theatrically in France, at a time when it was the most popular entertainment for all social classes, and by focusing on mass audience behaviour patterns and tastes.
This project requires a multidisciplinary framework, articulating economy, sociology, anthropology, film studies, cultural history, and more recent Anglo-American approaches such as cultural studies, gender studies and star studies.
Our corpus will be composed, on the one hand, of the 20 top box-office titles for each year under study, and on the other hand, of the most popular fan magazines and “photo-romans” (novelizations), published on a weekly basis. We will also consult trade papers, for material concerning distribution and exhibition, as well as private archives to shed light on the ways individual film-buffs appreciated what they saw. Because none of the French popular magazines of the period have been explored in an academic perspective until now, we need first to locate collections and complete them if necessary, before cataloguing and indexing them by articles, film titles, names and themes. Not only will this index be the basis for our project, but it will also be available to all scholars on a database at the médiathèque de Pessac (in the Bordeaux suburb). This index will be a major tool for the examination of the reception of popular stars and genres, both French and foreign, in conjunction with box-office figures. After establishing these data, we will be able to study the whole panorama of mainstream cinema in post-war France, both through overall analysis and case studies of a particular star, a given genre or category of film-buff.
This project is aimed at retrieving an unjustly forgotten cultural heritage, in particular those well-crafted French, American, Italian and British films aimed at a mass audience – and denigrated by the Cahiers du cinéma under the term “cinema de qualité”–, as well as to bring to light the film-viewing competency of ordinary spectators of both sexes…