Contemporary Authors

1. Agnès Varda https://lccn.loc.gov/2015950937 Conway, Kelley, 1963- author. Agnès Varda / Kelley Conway. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, [2015] xi, 187 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm. PN1998.3.V368 C66 2015 ISBN: 9780252039720 (hardcover : acid-free paper)0252039726 (hardcover : acid-free paper)9780252081200 (paperback : acid-free paper)025208120X (paperback : acid-free paper) 2. Chanteuse in the city : the realist singer in French film https://lccn.loc.gov/2004000621 Conway, Kelley, 1963- Chanteuse in the city : the realist singer in French film / Kelley Conway. Berkeley : University of California Press, c2004. xi, 246 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ML3489 .C66 2004 ISBN: 0520240197 (cloth : alk. paper)0520244079 (pbk. : alk. paper)

• Department of Communication Arts - https://commarts.wisc.edu/people/kelleyconway

  Kelley Conway
  Kelley Conway's picture
  Professor
  Film
  6154 Vilas Hall
  608-263-3977
  kelleyconway@wisc.edu
  Office Hours:
  On Sabbatical
  Expertise and Activities:
  I am interested in French film of all eras, filmmakers’ creative processes and their concrete working conditions, the relationships between film and other arts, and the theoretical and practical issues relating to national and transnational cinema. My first book, Chanteuse in the City (University of California, 2004), examines the intersections between popular song and 1930s French cinema through the figure of the realist singer. My second book, Agnès Varda (University of Illinois Press, 2015), explores Varda's key films and installations, focusing on her aesthetic commitments, working methods, and shifting modes of production. I have published articles on popular music in classical and contemporary French cinema, installation art created by filmmakers, and the links between genre and gender in contemporary French film. Among the courses I teach are French Film, European Art Cinema, and Women and Film. I also teach a month-long study abroad seminar in Paris sponsored by the UW-Madison International Academic Programs.

  Education
  Ph.D. Film and Television, UCLA, 1999
  D.E.A. Etudes Cinematographiques et Audiovisuelles, Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, (Paris III), 1992
  B.A. English, Carleton College, 1986
  M.A. Communication Studies (Film Studies), University of Iowa, 1988
  Honors/Awards
  Distinguished Teaching Award , University of Wisconsin-Madison , 2008
  Grant for , Wisconsin Humanities Council , 2002
  Senior Specialist Grant , Fulbright , 2001
  Articles
  2016. "Demy et au-delà: Expérimentation esthétique dans les films musicaux français récents." La Chanson dans le film français et francophone depuis la Nouvelle Vague .
  2015. "Sexually Explicit French Cinema: Genre, Gender and Sex." The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary French Cinema , 461-480 .
  2014. "Responding to Globalization: The Evolution of Agnès Varda." Substance , 43: 109-122 .
  2013. "Popular Song in the Films of Jean Renoir." The Blackwell Companion to Jean Renoir , 199-218 .
  2012. "Brigitte Bardot: From International Star to Fashion Icon." New Constellations: Movie Stars of the 1960s , 183-201 .
  Books
  2004. Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film. Berkeley: University of California Press .
  2015. Agnès Varda. Champaign: University of Illinois Press .
  Chapters
  2012. "France." The International Film Musical , Corey K Creekmur and Linda Y Mokdad Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press , 29-44 .
  Courses
  CA 350 - Introduction to Film
  CA 353 - Film History Since 1960
  CA 455 - French Film
  CA 613 - European New Waves
  CA 613 - Women and Film
  CA 956 - The French New Wave
  CA 956 - Globalization and National Cinema

• Madison - http://host.madison.com/lifestyles/know-your-madisonian-kelley-conway/article_054ea25b-2be6-5020-abad-9766a8b57845.html

  KNOW YOUR MADISONIAN: KELLEY CONWAY
  Interviewed by George Hesselberg Aug 27, 2006 0
  Name: Kelley Conway

  Family: Patrick Sweet, husband; son Sullivan, 8; daughter Charlotte, 3.

  Age: 42

  Occupation: Professor of film, UW-Madison Department of Communication Arts. Expert in French film. Author of "Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film."

  For someone who seems connected to Madison in so many ways -- volunteering at Wingra School, working full time in the arts at the UW-Madison, working on political campaigns, assisting with film-related activies -- Kelley Conway seems a most unlikely source for the advice to get of town. But that's her direction, into which she weaves her film expertise and urging to learn a second language. A broader base of knowledge, including and especially cultural knowledge, creates a better person.

  "I introduce films for the Wisconsin Film Festival and for student film groups on campus. I also helped students of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Campus Center at UW-Madison program a film festival. These sorts of activities are an extension of what I try to accomplish in my teaching -- helping people understand the art, the craft, and the cultural impact of cinema from around the world."

  Why is what you do important? Teaching people to look at popular entertainment with a critical and informed eye makes them better observers and better thinkers. Studying film, whether "Battleship Potemkin" or "Superman Returns," is a worthwhile academic pursuit. Learning to take pleasure in aesthetic objects is critical for a full life.

  Day I wish I could live over: The day I gave birth to my first child. This time, I would take the epidural. Or at least have my Madison doula, Amy Gilliland, with me.

  One choice of dinner companion, dead or alive: My husband. Alive. At Muromoto.

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  Greatest Madison pleasure: Watching foreign, restored or old films at UW Cinematheque in Vilas Hall.

  I love it when: MMOCA shows experimental films on its rooftop garden.

  Some music I love: The CD "Oregano," by Ana Laan, a Spanish singer who summers in Madison.

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  I knew I was an adult when: I had a child and my father died from cancer within 18 months.

  I stop what I am doing: When my kids call my name.

  Weirdest job: While working as a temp in San Francisco, I was sent to Danielle Steele's lavish home in Pacific Heights. I had hoped she would ask me to research, and perhaps even write, her next romance novel, but instead I had to do things like arrange for Cartier to send over some rubies and sort out the dry cleaning. I lasted a day.

  The top three controversies in my field are: Film preservation, maintaining excellence in light of budget cuts, making higher education accessible.

  If I could convince people of one thing, it would be: To require every college student to spend one year abroad. I believe it is crucial for students to immerse themselves in a culture that does things differently than the U.S.

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• Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought
  http://digitalcommons.salve.edu/jift
  Word count: 867

  Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought
  September 2005
  http://digitalcommons.salve.edu/jift
  Kelley Conway: Chanteuse in the City: The Realist
  Singer in French Film
  Katherine M. Lawber
  Salve Regina University, lawberk@salve.edu

  Kelley Conway. Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film.
  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 246 pp. Appendix, references,
  index. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-520-24407-9.
  Reviewed by Katherine M. Lawber, Ph.D., Department of Modern Languages, Salve
  Regina University , Newport, R.I.

  Kelley Conway’s in-depth study of the realist singer in French cinema of the 1930s offers far more than one might expect at first glance. This is a book, in truth, not destined for the film specialist and connoisseur alone, although it makes a significant contribution to that area of study, but for a much wider audience that might include scholars from such disciplines as French, history, sociology, and cultural and feminist studies, to name but a few of the possibilities. This work is also a fascinating read for anyone who is a Parisian at heart and who is interested in the recent history and evolution of this city. That is not to say, however, that because this work will undoubtedly resonate with multiple audiences, that Chanteuse in the City will not reach readers in all of these areas in a significant way. The multifaceted nature of Conway’s study only enhances the depth of her research and the contribution that this research makes to all these disciplines. In her introduction, Conway carefully delineates her indebtedness to previous scholarship (including her departures from earlier analyses) and shows how her own study draws on that scholarship while still breaking new ground, particularly in the area of feminist film studies.

  Although the focus of Conway’s inquiry is the persona of the realist singer in 1930s French film, her discussion is not limited to this decade alone. Rather, she examines in great historical detail the precursors of this figure in live-entertainment contexts starting with the café-concert of the nineteenth century (going back even earlier to find the origins of the café-concert in the eighteenth century—1731 to be exact—at the Palais-Royal in Paris). She then continues to trace the development of the realist singer through the rise of the music hall in France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Conway’s investigation culminates with a comprehensive study of the figure of the realist singer in French cinema of the 1930s. She includes great women entertainers who are an integral part of this historical and cultural development such as Theresa, Mistinguett, Damia, Frehel, Eugenie Buffet, Josephine Baker, Jane Marnac, Louise Brooks, and ultimately, the later inheritor of the realist singer tradition, Edith Piaf.

  Conway does an admirable job delineating the contribution that each of these women made to the role of the realist singer in particular and to the representation of femininity in general. Conway’s painstaking analyses of the films of the 1930s that, taken together in their historical context, form the basis of this work are very well done and quite accessible even if one has not seen the films in question (although familiarity with the films obviously will add a richer level of understanding to the reader’s appreciation of the material in question and of Conway’s analyses and interpretations). The films that are key to Conway’s discussion include Prix de Beaute (1930), Faubourg Montmartre (1931), Paris-Beguin (1931), La Tete d’un Homme (1932) Le Bonheur, Zouzou, L’Atalante (1934), Rigolboche (1936), Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (1936), and Pepe le Moko (1936).

  Of equal interest in the cultural history that underlies this study is the connection of the realist singer to the world around her. Conway shows in numerous examples that the characters brought to life in the films very often share a life with the actresses and singers who portrayed them. She also discusses at length the importance of the songs these women sing—songs whose lyrics often reflect the singers’ own life experiences. The realist singer thus becomes a metaphor for the Parisian underworld, for the struggles of the working class as a whole, or for the struggle of women in a time when the role of women was changing dramatically. Conway delves into the many facets of this “particular construction femininity” that, for her, is the figure of the realist singer. The strength of Conway’s work lies particularly in her adept handling of the tremendous breadth of material that lays the groundwork for her interpretation(s) of the films themselves. Her notes and references are exhaustive and will serve both the film specialist and the scholar from other (related) disciplines quite well. She also has provided translations from the French to help the non-Francophone reader along the way. If there is any drawback to this work, it stems from exactly the same breadth of material that is its strength. The details—historical, cultural, and cinematographic—might at times be cumbersome for readers (especially nonspecialists) as they make their way through them. The effort, however, is well worth it, as Chanteuse in the City has much to offer

• Film Quarterly,
  
  Word count: 1090

  Review
  Reviewed Work(s): Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film by Kelley
  Conway
  Review by: Ginette Vincendeau
  Source:
  Film Quarterly,
  Vol. 61, No. 4 (Summer 2008), pp. 82-83
  Published by: University of California Press

  MUSIC
  GINETTE VINCENDEAU
  Chanteuse in the City:
  The Realist Singer in French Film
  by Kelley Conway

  Chanteuse in the City is a fascinating and original study of a phenomenon hitherto noted and celebrated, but rarely analyzed: that of the chanteuse, or “realist” singer in classic French cinema. The chanteuse, the female interpreter of chanson, is a key phenomenon in French popular music, emerging from the late nineteenth-century café-concert (or caf’ conc’) with figures such as Yvette Guilbert. Its golden age was the first half of the twentieth century, when Damia and Fréhel in particular (but also, in different genres, Mistinguett and Josephine Baker) entranced live audiences and later appeared in films; its apotheosis (and swansong) came with Edith Piaf who, unlike Damia and Fréhel, enjoyed international fame. This explains why Piaf, the least important figure in Conway’s study given her concentration on the 1930s, adorns the cover of the book.

  Conway begins by meticulously tracing the cultural history of the early chanteuses—Thérésa, Eugénie Buffet, Yvette Guilbert, the young Fréhel—as they belted out bawdy songs in the popular caf’ conc’s. While she is attuned to differences between them, she uses them to set the main agenda of her book, “the representation of femininity, class, and the urban milieu as inscribed in the figure of the realist singer” (10). For the chanteuses throughout their heyday presented an intriguing paradox: singing of broken lives, victimization (by men, society, the rich), prostitution, and disease, they nevertheless offered a model of feminine resilience and in some cases resistance, as well as power (the power of the voice, and the economic power that comes with stardom, however short-lived). Chapter 1, “The Rise of the Unruly Woman,” explores the caf’ conc’ singers. If the history of these early chanteuses is well charted in France, Conway’s book brings it to a wider, English-speaking audience, at the same time as she introduces the key dimension of gender. She documents how the “unruliness” of the chanteuses greatly disturbed contemporary (male) critics, and she reads the female sexual power that they exude as allegorical of a new social mobility for women in turn-of-the-century France.

  Chapter 2, “Music Hall Miss” is devoted to Mistinguett, the star of the new French music hall, as it moved from the small-scale, community-oriented caf’ conc’ to the English-influenced, large-scale, spectacular music hall. By the time sound cinema came, Mistinguett was a huge star of the stage, yet her mature age and the limited means of the French film industry meant that she only made one sound film, the disappointing Rigolboche (1936).

  The centerpiece of Conway’s research is the third and longest chapter, “Voices From the Past,” in which she looks in great detail at the nostalgic chanteuse in several key 1930s films—archetypally Fréhel in Pépé le Moko (1937), in which the aged, overweight, and haggard singer, as she listens to a recording of her own earlier performance, poignantly evokes loss and yearning for youth—both hers and that of Pépé (Jean Gabin). This is where the book comes into its own. Not only do the films include some of the greatest of the period, but the chapter vindicates Conway’s project. The focus on the chanteuses brings coherence and fresh insight into 1930s French filmmaking, gender, and cultural history. Conway discusses films that range from the canonical (Le Crime de Monsieur Lange [1936], Pépé le Moko) to inspired works which are normally neglected (Coeur de Lilas [1932], Prison de femmes [1938], L’Entraîneuse [1940]). The chapter also best demonstrates Conway’s deft combination of wide-ranging contextual work with extremely fine textual analysis. In this respect, while all the analyses are excellent, I would pinpoint that of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange where Conway’s dissection of the song performed by Florelle, who plays Valentine, the laundry boss, manages to bring new perspectives on this much-debated film.

  In microcosm, the analysis of Le Crime de Monsieur Lange performs what the book does at large: shifting the spotlight from representations of the working class in French urban dramas as largely male, to a minority yet persistent female presence; as she says, “Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. . . emphasizes that women have been victimized doubly—through inequities related to both class and sexuality” (123). Conway continues in similar vein in chapter 4 (with Josephine Baker in Zouzou [1934], though strangely enough not in Princesse Tam-Tam [1935], and less well-known films like Faubourg Montmartre [1931], Paris-Béguin [1931], and Le Bonheur [1934]). Chapter 5, “Violent Spectatorship,” brings the theme of the symbolic “threat” of the chanteuse to a logical conclusion, in films where they are literally or metaphorically murdered. Although the emphasis on the mechanical reproduction of the voice (records, the cinema) makes it a logical end point, the concluding analysis of Prix de beauté is less convincing, largely because its heroine is played by the American star Louise Brooks, making the film both extraordinary and atypical. This is offset however by the brilliant analysis of La Tête d’un homme (1933), in which Damia appears as a visually fleeting yet orally dominating presence.

  In this excellent book there is little to criticize: a few spelling errors in the French quotes and the occasional mistranslation of song lyrics—the perils of tackling slang in another language. And given the subject, it would have made sense to organize the filmography around the chanteuses rather than chronologically. One could also (as ever!) wish for more illustrations. These minor quibbles apart, Chanteuse in the City authoritatively demonstrates the importance of the realist singer in French cinema, convincingly showing that these eminently nostalgic figures also spoke of feminine progress, change, and resistance. Chanteuse in the City takes its place among the key works on 1930s French cinema. © 2008 Ginette Vincendeau

  GINETTE VINCENDEAU is Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Film Studies
  Programme at King’s College London, and the author of
  Jean-Pierre Melville: An American
  in Paris
  (BFI Publishing, 2003) and
  La Haine (University of Illinois Press, 2005).
  BOOK DATA Kelley Conway,
  Chanteuse in the City: The Realist Singer in French Film
  .
  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. $60.00 cloth; $24.95 paper. 273
  pages.

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