Jeffrey Ravel (MIT) has generously shared this fascinating site regarding using film to teach Ancien Regime theater. He has visual and film resources available on his site. http://h-france.net/fffh/classics/revisiting-cyrano-de-bergerac-1990-ide...
The challenge for the classroom teacher is to sensitize the students to the differences between the surprisingly interactive performance experience in France 250-350 years ago, and the distinctly tamer variant of live theater that we encounter in most playhouses today. Since its premiere in 1990, I have occasionally shown students the first 15 minutes or so of Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s film version of the Edmond Rostand stage classic, Cyrano de Bergerac. In this opening segment, Rappeneau and his actors recreate a live performance in a Parisian public theater of the 1640s. In the past year, I have preceded this film clip with a PowerPoint presentation of a series of engravings and other images of seventeenth-century Paris theaters that help students better understand the many historically specific details captured in the film. In my PowerPoint presentation, I stress three themes: the architectural peculiarities of Paris playhouses of the Old Regime, the characteristics of the different sections of those theaters, and the comparison between the public theaters and the performing spaces at the court of the kings of France. Once we have looked carefully at engravings and other still images of theaters in this period, we are ready to appreciate Rappeneau’s filmic version of an admittedly turbulent evening in a seventeenth-century Paris public theater.
Biographical note: Jeffrey S. Ravel studies the history of French and European political culture from the mid-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. He is the author of The Would-Be Commoner: A Tale of Deception, Murder, and Justice in Seventeenth Century France (Houghton Mifflin, 2008); and The Contested Parterre: Public Theater and French Political Culture, 1680-1791 (Cornell University Press, 1999). He is currently working on a history of French playing cards and political regimes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.