Why the French Love Jerry Lewis : From Cabaret to Early Cinema / Rae Beth Gordon.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gordon, Rae Beth, Author.

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (296 p.) : 25 illustrations

Place of Publication:

Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, [2022]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Vividly bringing to light the tradition of physical comedy in the French cabaret, café-concert, and early French film comedy, this book answers the perplexing question, “Why do the French love Jerry Lewis?” The extraordinary emphasis on nervous pathology in the Parisian café-concert, where the genres of the Epileptic Singer and the Idiot Comic took center stage, and where popular comic monologues and songs included “Man with a Tic” and “I’m Neurasthenic,” points to a fascinating intersection between medicine and popular culture. The French tradition of comic performance style between 1870 and 1910 nearly exactly duplicates the movements, gestures, tics, grimaces, and speech anomalies found in nineteenth-century hysteria; the characteristics of hysteria became a new aesthetics. Early French film comedy carried on this tradition of frenetic gesture and gait, as most film performers came from these entertainments and from the circus. Even before Chaplin’s films triumphed in France, film comics were instantly recognizable from their pathological gait, just as Jacques Tati would be a half-century later. Comedy, a genre that dominated French cinema until World War I, has often been linked to a mass public for film; the author elucidates this link by proposing a broadly generalized cultural-medical phenomenon as the explanation for the dominance of the comic genre. Comic performance style drew from a group of nervous disorders characterized by the psychological automatism emanating from the “lower faculties”: nervous reflex, motor impulses, sensation, and instinct. Building on her previous work on hysteria, the cabaret, and pathologies of movement in the films of Georges Méliès, and drawing on over 400 French films made between 1896 and 1915, the author contributes to a new theory of spectatorship at work in the cabaret, in shows of magnetizers, and in early French film comedy. Jerry Lewis touches a nerve in French cultural memory because, more than any other film comic, he incarnates this tradition of performance style.

Contents:

Frontmatter

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PREFACE

1. From Charcot to Charlot: The Corporeal Unconscious

2. Imitation and Contagion: Magnetism as Popular Entertainment

3. The Cabaret and the Body Out of Control

4. Pantomime and the Zigzag

5. Hypnotism, Somnambulism, and Early Cinema

6. Hysterical Gesture and Movement in Early Film Comedy

Epilogue: Shock Waves in the New Wave and in the Films of Jerry Lewis

Appendix: Clowns, Spies, and Automatons in Lang and Lubitsch

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 31. Jan 2022)

ISBN:

1-5036-1874-9