Legacy

“We’ll Always Have Paris”

Before Hollywood became the movie capital of the world, that distinction belonged to Paris.

USC Dornsife’s Vanessa Schwartz, professor of history and art history, tells the story of this pre-Hollywood cinematic legacy through an exhibition of posters, photographs, visual instruments, paintings and sculptures she helped curate for the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

“Ninety percent of movies that circulated the globe before 1914 were made in France or by French companies in America,” says Schwartz, director of USC Dornsife’s Visual Studies Research Institute.

In the late 19th century, Paris became the center of artistic and technological movements that revolutionized traditional forms of art and aesthetics. With a public hungry for new visual spectacles, the city soon also became the cinema capital of the world.

The exhibition highlights how cinema arose from this atmosphere of scientific and aesthetic change, where developments in photography, combined with a taste for artistic realism, helped create fertile ground for the invention of movies.

The first moving pictures, a program of 10 films of less than a minute each that included mundane scenes such as workers leaving a factory, were produced by the Lumière brothers and were shown commercially in Paris in December 1895.

As filmmaking evolved into longer-form storytelling, Los Angeles, with its abundant natural light and plentiful, cheap land, took over from Paris as the center of the industry.

The Paris exhibition looks at more formal developments between the arts, but its L.A. counterpoint will examine how the social and cultural history of Paris contributed to changes that defined the modern city: an emphasis on the circulation of people and goods, greater visual orientation of the built environment, and the democratization of access to the arts, making possible new forms of culture for the masses.

Schwartz’s Maymester course, “Paris, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life,” enabled students to explore both exhibitions. The course began in L.A., where students studied the LACMA show, before traveling to Paris to get a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the Musée d’Orsay exhibition.

Schwartz says she hopes the experience will help her Maymester students understand that “before Hollywood, there was Paris.” —M.M.

The exhibition showcases artistic and technological innovations of 19th-century Paris that fueled the modern film industry. This early photograph of the Rue de Rivoli demonstrates how Emperor Napoleon III transformed the French capital into a modern city, replacing its narrow, medieval streets with spacious boulevards.