Vanessa Schwartz,
It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture.
The University of Chicago Press, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-74243-4
US$25.00 (pb)
272 pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Chicago Press)

The moment that I opened the envelope containing, It’s So French, I knew that I would be completely mesmerized by the subject matter. Before reading a single sentence, I found myself turning pages and looking at the photographs, film stills, and archival shots of a film world that had helped to shape my own imaginary world of Frenchness.

As a child, I could not get enough of films such as Gigi (USA 1958), An American in Paris (USA 1951), Lili (USA 1951), etc. When I thought about France, all my associations had been formed by watching Hollywood’s dream factory version of Paris. These films depicted a world of glamour, art and beauty – a far cry from the streets of my Brooklyn home.

Vanessa Schwartz is a cultural historian who has written a very interesting and informative book. She loves her subject and her enthusiasm for her material is infectious. She wants us to get over long held notions that Franco-American cinematic endeavors after the Second World War were either protectionist on France’s part or imperialistic and colonialist on America’s part. She posits that, in fact, American and French film-makers actually liked each other and were receptive to each other’s ideas and projects. The book is organized into four chapters and a conclusion. ‘The Belle Epoque That Never Ended’, ‘The Cannes Film Festival and The Marketing of Cosmopolitanism’, ‘ And France Created Bardot’, and finally, ‘The Cosmopolitan Film, From Around The World in Eighty Days to Making Movies Around The World’.

For me, the first chapter was Schwartz’s most convincing. She goes into great depth analyzing what she terms, ‘Frenchness Films’ – Moulin Rouge (UK 1952), An American In Paris (USA 1951), Funny Face (USA 1957), Lili and Gigi (USA 1958). All of these were ecstatic celebrations of Paris as a center of culture in all its aspects. She sees these films not as examples of American appropriation of French culture but rather as tributes.

Schwartz also suggests that the France represented in the films of the 1950’s and 1960’s were essential to the development of a ‘cosmopolitan film culture’. Furthermore, ‘Frenchness films’ managed to blur the lines between popular culture and so-called ‘high art’. Audiences, through the medium of cinema, were exposed to the works of the impressionists, Toulouse–Lautrec, ballet, Gershwin and the list goes on.
I found the second chapter on Cannes a bit too long and too concerned with ‘star power’. And the third chapter on Bardot too focused on trying to prove the connection between Bardot’s star power and cinematic globalization. Bardot’s reception in America had everything to do with post McCarthy sex deprivation and very little to do with BB’s supposed ‘freshness’. In fact, Bardot was really a blank slate upon which American men projected their sexual fantasies without guilt since she wasn’t the all American girl next door, but; rather, she was French and that automatically signaled sexy to American men!

The last chapter presents an interesting analysis of Mike Todd’s Around The World In Eighty Days (USA 1956)as a global travelogue, representative of the ‘transatlantic film’. Schwartz has suggested,“yet this film and the cosmopolitan cinema shed light on a cinematic imaginary of the 1950’s and 1960’s when film seemed like an ideal medium to help advance a brighter future in which the destructive forces of right-wing nationalism would be surpassed by an idealized and more ‘cosmopolitan’ world.” (p. 198)

At times, Schwartz gets bogged down in too many details. She also has a tendency to be repetitive. However, she has done a great deal of research and her scholarship is impressive. The volume is full of color film stills, ads, paparazzi shots, publicity photographs and some never published archival images.

I highly recommend this book to all who love ‘Frenchness Films’ and all who are interested in reading about a time in the history of film when France and America actively collaborated to create films that expanded our geographic consciousness as well as globalized our minds.

Irene Javors,
USA.

Created on: Thursday, 11 September 2008