The Social Architecture of French Cinema: 1929–1939 by Margaret C. Flinn (review)

Conversion to sound at the close of the 1920s ushered in a decade-long period of French film production that standard accounts by Alan Williams and Colin Crisp cast as all but unparalleled in aesthetic impact and thematic scope. Despite chronic underfunding and structural disarray in an industry that never fully rebounded after the Great War, French audiences enjoyed a robust domestic culture of stars, screenwriters, and directors whose concern for richly detailed narratives and moody “atmospherics” (Andrew) laid the foundations for the classic French cinema.