by Richard Abel. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994; 750 p., ill., ISBN 0-520-07935-3.

Ten years ago, the appearance of Abel's French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) provoked a considerable amount of debate among film historians. Oddly enough, the main reason for that was its cultural identity -- a comprehensive analysis of the golden age of silent cinema in France, written by an American scholar! To this date, The First Wave has not been translated into French, but now that the second part of this monumental diptych has seen the light, its circulation among European students seems imperative. (One may even call it a triptych with the inclusion of the anthology French Film Theory and Criticism, published in 1988.) What has been said about Film History: An Introduction by Thompson and Bordwell holds true in this case: since the times of Sadoul and Mitry, nobody has ever attempted to summarize the available knowledge on early French cinema in a single volume. The author has succeeded in such a daunting task through a development of the methods he has adopted for his previous book. An increased attention for the socio-economic aspects of film production is matched here by a further refinement in the analytical tools; a far greater number of films is examined with some detail; most important of all, perhaps, is the constant focus on the dynamics linking French cinema of the first decades to the international context. In order to keep his book within reasonable dimensions, Abel had to sacrifice some detail for the sake of the whole picture; instead of lessening the outcome of his effort however, such constraint has proven to be a blessing. The powerful and often contradictory path of French film industry towards the hegemony in the world market, and its attempts to counteract the rise of American competitors in the early Teens, have never been described in more articulate terms. In this era of hyper-specialization in cinema studies (an inevitable and in many ways healthy reaction against the excesses of ³impressionist² film history), Le Ciné Goes to Town gives the refreshing pleasure of a large-scale canvas, a rare feeling which guarantees the book a privileged place among the few ³ essential ² reference works of a lifetime. (Paolo Cherchi Usai)