This work identifies patterns in the fields of character, narrative, and setting in the French cinema of the early sound period.

This volume provides a vital new reading of documentary and realist fiction film of the French 1930s that focuses on how these genres interlock their representations of urban spaces and places.

This thoroughly revised and expanded edition of a key textbook offers an innovative and accessible account of the richness and diversity of French film history and culture from the 1890s to the present day. The contributors, who include leading historians and film scholars, provide an indispensable introduction to key topics and debates in French film history. Each chronological section addresses seven key themes – people, business, technology, forms, representations, spectators and debates, providing an essential overview of the cinema industry, the people who worked in it, including technicians and actors as well as directors, and the culture of cinema going in France from the beginnings of cinema to the contemporary period.

It can be argued that cinema was created in France by Louis Lumi_re in 1895 with the invention of the cinZmatographe, the first true motion-picture camera and projector. While there were other cameras and devices invented earlier that were capable of projecting intermittent motion of images, the cinZmatographe was the first device capable of recording and externally projecting images in such a way as to convey motion. Early films such as Lumi_re's La Sortie de l'usine, a minute-long film of workers leaving the Lumi_re factory, captured the imagination of the nation and quickly inspired the likes of Georges MZli_s, Alice Guy, and Charles PathZ. Through the years, French cinema has been responsible for producing some of the world's best directors_Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, Fran_ois Truffaut, and Louis Malle_and actors_Charles Boyer, Catherine Deneuve, GZrard Depardieu, and Audrey Tautou. The A to Z of French Cinema covers the history of French film from the silent era to the present in a concise and up to date volume detailing the development of French cinema and major theoretical and cultural issues related to it. This is done through a chronology, an introduction, photographs, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on many of the major actors, directors, films, movements, producers, and studios associated with French cinema. Going beyond mere biographical information, entries also discuss the impact and significance of each individual, film, movement, or studio included. This detailed, scholarly analysis of the development of film in France is useful to both the novice and the expert alike.

Spectacle is not often considered to be a significant part of the style of ‘classical’ cinema. Indeed, some of the most influential accounts of cinematic classicism define it virtually by the supposed absence of spectacle. Spectacle in ‘Classical’ Cinemas: Musicality and Historicity in the 1930s brings a fresh perspective on the role of the spectacular in classical sound cinema by focusing on one decade of cinema (the 1930s), in two ‘modes’ of filmmaking (musical and historical films), and in two national cinemas (the US and France). This not only brings to light the special rhetorical and affective possibilities offered by spectacular images but refines our understanding of what ‘classical’ cinema is and was.

Screenwriters have been central figures in French cinema since the conversion to sound, from early French-language talkies for the domestic market to lavish literary adaptations of the notorious 'quality tradition' of the 1950s, and from the ‘aesthetic revolution’ of the New Wave to the contemporary popular and auteur film in the 2000s. The first English language study to address screenwriters in French cinema, this volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of French film and screenwriting. Taking a diachronic approach, it includes case studies drawn from the early sound period to the present day in order to offer an alternative historiography of French cinema, shed light on these overlooked figures and revisit the vexed question of film authorship.

Le Jour se leve (1939) directed by Marcel Carne, is widely recognised as the classic French Poetic Realist film. Told in flashback, it recounts the story of a man who has committed a murder, and who awaits his fate as the police close in. Carne shuttles between different registers, tones and textures throughout, marshalling the studio's resources to create striking pictorial compositions. The film also contains the great French star Jean Gabin's most iconic performance as Francois, marooned at the top of his apartment building. Ben McCann's perceptive and lively book traces the evolution of Le Jour se leve and situates it in a very specific historical moment. He also underlines the importance of actors Jules Berry and Arletty, production designer Alexandre Trauner, writer Jacques Prevert and cinematographer Curt Courant in establishing the film's tone, mood and visual style. He charts the national and international reception of the film, uncovering a work that deeply divided critics at a time of national crisis. He also reveals Le Jour se leve to be a key transitional work between European and American noir and compares it with the 1947 Hollywood remake. Highlighting its combination of the 'poetic' and the 'realist' this book finally stresses how Le Jour se leve represents the very best of pre-war French studio filmmaking.