The French musical

The musical is generally considered to be a major Hollywood genre in ways that, with the exception of Bollywood, it is not for other national cinemas. Although the Hollywood musical has been in decline since the 1960s, it appears to have had a resurgence around the turn of the millennium, with films such as Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002), and the Bollywood crossover Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha, 2004). 1 That resurgence is also evident in the French musical, which has become an increasingly visible feature of French cinema since the 1990s, a little before the Hollywood resurgence, with films by Alain Resnais, Franois Ozon, Christophe Honor, and Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau amongst others. 2 Most film histories do not recognize the musical as a typically French genre; indeed, the foremost French writer on sound and music in the cinema, Michel Chion, lamented the fact in 2002 that there is as yet no major work on the genre, something that remains true a decade later. 3 Directors who made musicals, such as Ren Clair and Jacques Demy, are more often than not seen as auteurs rather than as contributors to a specific genre; even books devoted to music in the French cinema focus on individuals -composers, singers, directors-rather than addressing the musical as a genre. 4 This is all the more curious given that musicals were as popular in the French cinema during the 1940s and 1950s as they were in Hollywood. The films of Tino Rossi, Luis Mariano, and Ray Ventura were amongst the best-selling films of the 1935-1955 period

Art · Art history · Humanities · Movie theater · Musical · Swing · Visual arts · Cinema and Media Studies · History · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis

• Making Jazz French

  Jeffrey H Jackson•French Historical Studies•2002

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