Book Smart

Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film
Kelley Conway, assistant professor of communication arts
University of California Press, 2004

In America, they were “dames.” Their names were Mae West and Sophie Tucker, and they wore the pricey jewels and glad rags that their chumps bought for them. In Britain, they often appeared in music halls, dressed in drag and puffing on elegant little woodbines (cigarettes).

In France, however, they were members of the working class, laundresses and cleaning women, singing after hours in cabarets about the tricks they’d turned at lunchtime or how hard it was to raise their children after their men had run off.

The first of their number was Eugenie Buffet. You know her well: Toulouse Latrec immortalized her in his famous posters sketched in Montmartre cabarets. But there were many others, and their voices all held the very grime of the Paris streets. Perhaps the best known was Edith Piaf, but the company also included Mistinguett, Josephine Baker (who actually was born in Missouri), Freéhel, Damia and Florelle. In analyzing their careers, Kelley Conway found herself unraveling the evolution of popular entertainment in France during the first half of the 20th century.

“While my initial research interest was a feminist cultural history of the realist singer in film, I also discovered that French cinema in the 1930s was heavily indebted to live performance traditions found in the 19th century café-concert, the turn-of-the-century cabaret and the post-World War I music hall,” she says. “The topic of the realist singer led to a larger exploration of large-scale shifts in popular entertainment from the intimate café-concert to the spectacular music hall to sound cinema.”

The coming semester will find Conway teaching a new course on women and film that will provide an introduction to the films of key American and French directors Dorothy Arzner, surrealist Maya Deren, Chantal Akerman and Agnés Varda. Varda, an auteur of both fictional films and documentaries, particularly fascinates Conway; her next book will be about Varda.

In the fall Conway teaches the department’s large introduction to film course, plus a smaller class on French or other European film.

“I plan to use a portion of the book for that course, naturally, but I hope the book will interest not only film historians, but also scholars of women’s history, female performance and French culture,” she says.

The French experience informs American culture. “Realist singers in this country lived experiences parallel to their French counterparts,” she says. “The lives of Billie Holliday and Judy Garland were replete with similar rags-to-riches-and-back-again trajectories, incendiary love affairs and drug addiction.”

Conway currently is planning a study abroad course for June on French film in Paris. She says it will include cinematic walking tours of the city, visits with industry folks and film viewing. For more information, contact International Academic Programs, at 262-2851 or visit http://www.studyabroad.wisc.edu.