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City University London
School of Arts and Social Sciences
Centre for Music Studies
Research Seminar
Wednesday 9th May 2012 - 4 - 5.30pm
Room AG09, Ground Floor, College Building
City University London, EC1V 0HB
(nearest tube Angel) http://www.city.ac.uk/visit
Andy Fry (King's College, London)
'Paris Blues: African-American Music, Seen, Heard and Imagined'
Abstract:
The 1961 film Paris Blues engages a familiar set of ideas about African-American musicians in the city: racial equality, sexual liberation, and artistic recognition. As a Hollywood movie of the Civil Rights Era, however, it struggles to mediate between these imagined French attitudes and equally imagined American expectations, such that it titillates but does not shock. Since the 1957 novel on which it was based, the experiences of an African-American musician (played by Sidney Poitier) had been displaced from the centre by the compositional aspirations of his white band-mate (Paul Newman). Yet the priority awarded the latter is, Krin Gabbard argues, subtly subverted by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's soundtrack.
In this paper, I seek instead to understand the film's conflicts by locating it at the meeting point of three loose genres: the jazz film; the film noir; and the "Frenchness film" - Vanessa Schwarz's term for mid-century movies such as April in Paris and Gigi that draw on imagery of the Belle Époque to connect art to entertainment. Paris Blues at once updates this lattermost trend and perhaps signals its end. Similarly, conventions of film noir are both invoked in style and rejected in dramatic trajectory. Thus Paris Blues is caught between conflicting modes of representation: an attempted realism - embracing questions of civil rights and a noirish mode - and a nostalgia for a vision of Paris that Poitier's very presence reveals had never been. Paradoxically, however, it may be this ambivalence or instability that brings the movie closer to capturing the signification, if not the real experience, of African-American music/ians in France.
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