Genre, Myth, and Convention in the French Cinema, 1929-1939 examines classic French film, exploring and analyzing the cinema as an institution, the textual system to which it gave rise, and the light that such an approach can shed on the process of production and reception of specific films. Colin Crisp identifies recurrent patterns in the fields of character, narrative, and setting in the French cinema of the early sound period and delineates the myths that these patterns embodied. In Part One he discusses the 1,300 films produced by the French cinema in the 1930s, treating them as a single global textual system that returns obsessively to certain types of story, character, and setting. Part Two deals with publications of the period that comment on those films. The extensive viewer's guide and filmography make this book an essential resource for students of the history of cinema.