The Beaverbrook Fund for Media@McGill is pleased to present a public lecture by Beaverbrook Visiting Scholar, Vanessa Schwartz. Prof. Schwartz’s lecture is on 14 October, 5h30pm, Thomson House (map), McGill University. The lecture is a collaborative event between Media@McGill and the AHCS lecture series.

The Cannes Film Festival and the Rise of Paparazzi Photography

The Cannes Film Festival was scheduled to open on September 1, 1939 when the lights went out on the beach-front Promenade de la Croisette as Hitler invaded Poland. The festival finally opened in 1946 and served as the first international cultural event of the après-guerre. Vanessa Schwartz examines the history of Cannes in its first phase, from 1946 to 1968, paying particular attention to the key role that a certain kind of still-image culture played in advancing the festival’s goals. From the birth of the term paparazzi in the film La dolce vita (premiered at Cannes in 1960) to the worldwide phenomenon of Brigitte Bardot, a “mobile” form of still photography emerged at Cannes that not only disseminated compelling images of the festivities but also contributed to developments in film form.

Biography

Vanessa R. Schwartz is Professor of history, art history, and critical studies at the University of Southern California, where she directs the Graduate Certificate in Visual Studies program. A historian on modern visual culture, she was trained in modern European history with a concentration on France and urban culture at Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her Phd. Schwartz is the author or editor of numerous publications, including It’s So French! Hollywood, Paris and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (2007) and Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in fin-de-siècle Paris (1998).

Dr. Schwartz is a Beaverbrook visiting scholar with Media@McGill this October. She will give another lecture at the Intermedial City event.