Cinephiles, Criminals, and Children: Discourses and Practices of Cinema Education in 1920s Paris

To the issue of morality one might add the perception, common in the interwar French film industry, that French audiences were being inundated with American productions, a cultural invasion that threatened interwar French cinema with irrelevance but also furnished the struggling industry with an effective argument with which to convince statesmen of the importance of supporting filmmakers who sought to elevate French film to the level of high art.4 The eventual success of classical cinephilia in achieving official recognition as a practice of critical spectatorship and creation worthy of state support, thanks to the efforts of Louis Delluc and the French First Wave critics, has overshadowed the myriad ways in which various other communities, from state elites to workingclass social activists, envisioned cinema as a pedagogical and political medium amenable to objectives that were not necessarily in agreement with those of the cinephiles.Louis Delluc, Ricciotto Canudo, and Émile Vuillermoz used ciné-club lectures and film journals as sites of cinephile training for their target audience, an audience that was largely limited to the small number of upper-middle-class Parisians who could further their agenda.Because the existing historiography of the ciné-club movement focuses on this elite community of intellectual filmmakers, we are left to wonder how communities outside of their rarified circles saw cinema as an educational tool in 1920s Paris, when the meaning and practice of "film education" had yet to crystallize into a cinephile appreciation of film art."12 The mayor of the Parisian suburb ofArgenteuil banned crime films after the Pearl White serial Les Mystéres de New York (a condensed 22-episode serial of The Exploits of Elaine, The Romance of Elaine, The New Exploits ofElaine) inspired an armed robbery in the town,13 and the mayor of Nice asked exhibitors to cut violent scenes in the same serial.14 The public outcry against the serial culminated in "public morality" groups led by senators and municipal councilors who lodged a formal complaint to the Minister of the Interior, Louis Malvy, about "the 'criminal' cinematographe's influence on young people" in June i9i6.15 It was to counteract the negative effects of cinema as "a school of passions, vice and crime" that the Ligue de l'enseignement, under the presidency of former Minister of Education Arthur Dessoye, began Thursday matinées for Parisian school children, with the first screening on 4 Octobe