Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film / Edition 1

by Kelley Conway

Overview

Long before Edith Piaf sang "La vie en rose," her predecessors took to the stage of the belle epoque music hall, singing of female desire, the treachery of men, the harshness of working-class life, and the rough neighborhoods of Paris. Icon of working-class femininity and the underworld, the realist singer signaled the emergence of new cultural roles for women as well as shifts in the nature of popular entertainment. Chanteuse in the City provides a genealogy of realist performance through analysis of the music hall careers and film roles of Mistinguett, Josephine Baker, Fréhel, and Damia. Above all, Conway offers a fresh interpretation of 1930s French cinema, emphasizing its love affair with popular song and its close connections to the music hall and the café-concert.

Conway uncovers an important tradition of female performance in the golden era of French film, usually viewed as a cinema preoccupied with masculinity. She shows how—in films such as Pépé le Moko, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, and Zouzou—the realist chanteuse addresses female despair at the hopelessness of love. Conway also sheds light on the larger cultural implications of the shift from the intimate café-concert to the spectacular music hall, before the talkies displaced both kinds of live performance altogether.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520244078
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	09/08/2004
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	273
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.63(d)
Lexile:	1500L (what's this?)

About the Author

Kelley Conway is Assistant Professor of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Introduction	1
1	CAF'-CONC': The Rise of the Unruly Woman	27
2	Music Hall Miss	58
3	Voices from the Past	84
4	The Revue Star and the Realist Singer: The Return of the Unruly Woman	130
5	Violent Spectatorship: Mechanical Reproduction, the Female Voice, and the Imaginary of Intimacy	153
	Conclusion	175
Appendix	Select Filmography	185
	Notes	187
	Select Bibliography	223
	Index	231