ABSTRACT

When Parisian theatre impresario Maurice Lehmann sued the widow and sons of the late playwright Edmond Rostand in 1932, the French press took careful notice. Lehmann owned the theatrical rights to L’Aiglon, a play about the emperor Napoleon’s son, which Rostand had written for Sarah Bernhardt. But Rostand’s widow maintained the film rights. When a sound-film version appeared in 1931, Lehmann went to court, claiming that it was nothing more than a filmed theatrical piece, and as a result infringed on his rights. The subsequent court case – reported on in French dailies, film journals and jurisprudential sources – helped to determine the legal status of cinema in France, and established the precise differences, in French law, between cinema and theatre. Lehmann lost his case because of those differences, derived from the process of mechanical reproduction in cinema and, most importantly, the differences between listening to a movie and to a play.

摘要

1932 年，当巴黎剧院经理莫里斯·莱曼 (Maurice Lehmann) 起诉已故剧作家埃德蒙·罗斯丹 (Edmond Rostand) 的遗孀和儿子时，法国媒体对此给予了密切关注。Lehmann 拥有L'Aiglon的戏剧版权，一部关于拿破仑皇帝之子的戏剧，是罗斯坦德为莎拉·伯恩哈特写的。但罗斯坦德的遗孀保留了电影版权。1931 年，当有声电影版本出现时，莱曼上法庭，声称这只不过是一部拍摄的戏剧作品，因此侵犯了他的权利。随后的法庭案件——在法国日报、电影期刊和法学来源中都有报道——帮助确定了法国电影的法律地位，并确定了法国法律中电影和剧院之间的确切区别。由于这些差异，莱曼败诉，这些差异源自电影中的机械复制过程，最重要的是，听电影和听戏剧之间的差异。