Going to the Movies in Paris, Around 1933: Film Culture, National Cinema, and Historical Method

During the week of October 13, 1933, filmgoers in Paris could watch Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), Max Ophuls’s Liebelei (1933), Josef von Sternberg’s Blue Angel (1930), and Frank Capra’s Forbidden (1932) as well as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932), King Kong (Cooper and Schoedsack, 1933), and Jacques Tourneur’s Toto (1933). They might see Eddie Cantor in The Kid from Spain (Leo McCarey, 1932) and Boris Karloff in Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) and also go to any number of films that have long been forgotten: La Voie sans disque (Léon Poirier, 1933), for instance, or Madame ne veut pas enfant (Landau and Steinhoff, 1933), or Rumba (director, date unknown). In fact, with at least two hundred movie theaters in Paris at the time, a dedicated fan might see several films in the same day, with screenings running from nine o’clock in the morning until well past midnight. In the ninth arrondissement alone, that fan could walk into the Paramount Theater on 2 Boulevard des Capucines for a 9:30 a.m. show of Un soir de récreillion (director, date unknown), end the day down the block with a 3:00 a.m. screening of Tire au flanc (Henry Wulschleger, 1933) at the Olympia at 28 Boulevard des Capucines, and watch two or three movies in between at theaters just a few steps away.¹

Despite this abundance of possibilities for the movie enthusiast from the period, and also the mythic status of Paris as a movie capital during the interwar years, we still know very little about going to the movies there in the 1930s. Richard Abel has provided a full sense of the film distribution systems and exhibition experience throughout France during the period just before World War I. Abel as well as Christophe Gauthier have unearthed and examined the history of the cine clubs and specialized movie theaters that showed avant-garde, documentary, or animated films in Paris and elsewhere in France during the teens until about 1930.² From 1894 until the end of World War I, we have Jean-Jacques Meusy’s encyclopedic rendering of all manner of film theaters in the city, including descriptions of the streets where they were located, in the aptly titled Paris-Palaces.³ But for that period between the wars, perhaps because of the emphasis placed on Paris as a site for alternative cinema and for the dedicated cinephile rather than the film fan, little attention has been paid to the average moviegoer and to the theaters along the grand boulevards and in the neighborhoods that specialized in commercial, feature-length films.⁴

An examination of filmgoing in Paris, of the theaters and the audiences that went to them and the films they saw there—or what we might more broadly call film culture—helps explicate the related developments of the cinema and urban space during the period. But my goal here is not simply to celebrate that flâneur on the Boulevard des Capucines strolling from theater to theater, nor to assert the links between film, modernity, and the growth of cities, an often repeated but extremely vexed aspect of film studies over the last two decades.⁵ Rather, a look at Paris yields information that is both empirically and historiographically significant. Despite the city’s importance in film history, we still do not understand many of the basic aspects of the cinema in Paris such as the number of theaters and their locations. And the close analysis of the ways films were exhibited and then moved through the city makes Paris itself, in the sense of a singular film culture, a problematic area of study. Examining films and filmgoing in Paris makes us take our local study of the city to the micro level, to the neighborhoods within the city and the differences and similarities, in terms of film preference or audience, from one to the other. The city’s film audience, from the working-class Menilmontant to the Jewish...