On my research reading list for The Robert Krasker Project: ‘Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950’ by Eric Smoodin

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Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950, by Eric Smoodin, Duke University Press, 27 March 2020, ISBN-10‏ :‎ 1478006927, ISBN-13: ‎ 9781478006923, ASIN: B085H7NWR4.

One of the many tasks on my research To Do List for The Robert Krasker Project is to work out what movies Robert Krasker may have had access to in his early years at Denham in Western Australia’s Shark Bay, Subiaco in WA’s capital city of Perth, in Paris during the Mathilde Krasker family ‘s two educational sojourns there in 1923 to 1926 and 1929 to 1930 or 1931 before they moved to the suburb of Ealing in London where Robert reunited with them at 13 Tudor Court before taking up a position at Alexander Korda’s nascent London Film Productions company.

In Paris in the Dark Eric Smoodin takes readers on a journey through the streets, cinemas, and theaters of Paris to sketch a comprehensive picture of French film culture during the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on a wealth of journalistic sources, Smoodin recounts the ways films moved through the city, the favored stars, and what it was like to go to the movies in a city with hundreds of cinemas. In a single week in the early 1930s, moviegoers might see Hollywood features like King Kong and Frankenstein, the new Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier movies, and any number of films from Italy, Germany, and Russia. Or they could frequent the city’s ciné-clubs, which were hosts to the cinéphile subcultures of Paris. At other times, a night at the movies might result in an evening of fascist violence, even before the German Occupation of Paris, while after the war the city’s cinemas formed the space for reconsolidating French film culture. In mapping the cinematic geography of Paris, Smoodin expands understandings of local film exhibition and the relationships of movies to urban space.

https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/22283

I have several possible locations for the Mathilde Krasker family’s Paris addresses as well as those of other members of their extended family, though currently no indication of where Robert may have lived when he worked at Les Studios Paramount in the southeastern suburban commune of Joinville-le-Pont after graduating from Professor Robert Luther’s course in photography at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden where he stayed with Uncle George in Loschwitz.

Two locations that keep coming up in my research are Les Lilas and Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, communes in the north-eastern suburbs of Paris, though it is possible that other Krasker family members had residences in one of the arrondissements from which they also ran businesses, such as the 19th.

Meanwhile I’ll be reading Eric Smoodin’s Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950, noting where he did his secondary research in Paris and I will be looking for possible similar surveys of cinema-going in Paris during the 1920s as well as in Western Australia and Germany.

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