World Film Locations: Marseilles

As France’s oldest city, Marseilles has a significant cinematic culture, dating back to the 1890s when the Lumière brothers shot many films there. Due to its prolific film industry in the 1920s, Marseilles was referred to as 'the French Los Angeles'. This volume showcases Marseilles’s diversity as articulated onscreen: from the winding streets of the Panier to the Old Port’s noisy markets, from the bustling Canebière to the dockyards of the Grand Port Maritime, from the cliffs of Provençal encircling the city to sun-drenched calanques leading to the dazzling cerulean sea. Marseilles, France’s oldest city, has a significant cinematic culture, dating back to the 1890s when the Lumière brothers shot many films there. Due to its prolific film industry in the 1920s, Marseilles was referred to as ‘the French Los Angeles’. World Film Locations: Marseilles features maps of film scenes, high quality screengrabs, and images of movie locations as they appear today, accompanied by original texts penned by leading international film scholars and critics. Essays treat Marcel Pagnol’s classic trilogy, firmly ensconced within the French collective unconscious; cinematic adaptations of the Marseillais novelist Jean-Claude Izzo; onscreen appearances of the Old Port and the Canebière, and immigrants in Marseilles films. Scene reviews are selected from 46 films, including œuvres by acclaimed directors such as Jacques Audiard, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Luc Besson’s Taxi franchise, Bertrand Blier, Richard Curtis, Jacques Demy, Jean Epstein, John Frankenheimer, William Friedkin, Jean-Luc Godard, Norman Jewison, Joshua Logan, Jean-Pierre Melville, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Manoel de Oliveira, Jean Renoir, Ridley Scott, and Berlin School auteur Angela Schanelac.

Marcelline Block is a lecturer at Princeton University, where she is completing her PhD in French. She is the editor or coeditor of several volumes, including World Film Locations: Paris, World Film Locations: Las Vegas, and Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema.