The French musical: swing and Big Bands in the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s

The musical is generally considered to be a major Hollywood genre in ways that, with the exception of Bollywood, it is not for other national cinemas. Although the Hollywood musical has been in decline since the 1960s, it appears to have had a resurgence around the turn of the millennium, with films such as Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002), and the Bollywood crossover Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha, 2004). That resurgence is also evident in the French musical, which has become an increasingly visible feature of French cinema since the 1990s, a little before the Hollywood resurgence, with films by Alain Resnais, François Ozon, Christophe Honoré, and Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau amongst others. 2