CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/4/2022

'City of Cinema: Paris 1850–1907' is NEW from DelMonico Books and LACMA

Featured image—a detail of an October 1908 photograph of the Omnia-Pathé cinema at 5, boulevard Montmartre, Paris—is reproduced from City of Cinema: Paris 1850–1907. Published to accompany the exhibition currently on view at LACMA, this rich, 192-page volume tells the story of the pre-Hollywood origins of cinema emerging out of nineteenth-century Paris through posters, paintings, film stills and studio and documentary photography. It also provides a snapshot of the city that Walter Benjamin called “the capital of the nineteenth century” at the moment of modernization, when the very nature of visual art expanded exponentially. “Daily life hinged on vision in motion,” curators Leah Lehmbeck, Britt Salvesen and Vanessa R. Schwartz write: “lens- and projection-based entertainments (from dioramas to magic lantern shows to cinema) corralled vision into states of attention and distraction, and these new preoccupations led to aesthetic and scientific experiments in defining, fixing and representing isolated and serial moments, pursued in inventors’ workshops, physiological laboratories and artists’ studios. The French took pride in their position as key innovators in all the arts, from painting, sculpture and architecture; through reproductive media such as lithography and photography; and extending to the performing arts and novel leisure activities such as shopping in department stores and visiting nightclubs, dance halls and new kinds of theatrical presentations.”