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During the last three decades, Europe has undergone numerous periods of economic and political instability. The process of European integration, once hailed as a beacon of a peaceful co-operation between many, if not all, European nations appears to be stagnating, giving rise to notoriously more frequent manifestations of xenophobic violence, nationalism and right-wing fundamentalism. This book evaluates the portrayal of the migrant Other in selected examples of contemporary French and German cinema from the period 1989–2020 in the context of the ongoing debate about European identity and its socio-political significance. It focuses on the films of some of Europe's most prolific contemporary filmmakers, such as Michael Haneke, Claire Denis and Fatih Akin. It examines cinema's importance not only in reference to various theoretical evaluations of the concept of European identity, but also many notable events that have taken place in Europe in the last thirty years, such as the collapse of the ‘Iron Curtain'in 1989, the historical expansion of the European Union in 2004, the migration ‘crisis'of 2015, ‘Brexit'and the war in Ukraine.

Quiet Pictures approaches the films of Joanna Hogg, Lynne Ramsay, Céline Sciamma, and Lucile Hadžhalilovicthrough the lens of silence as a motif and texture.This book takes up the question of different uses of silence in the work of these directors and how this creates a space for foregrounding innovative practices that establish new ways of looking, staring, and gazing. Sarah Artt discusses how the deliberate deployment of silence creates space for the formation of reciprocal gazes that counteract the typically gendered and binary ways in which women and femme-presenting people tend to be portrayed on screen. Quiet Pictures draws on the political legacy of feminist film theory to explore and conceptualise what it means to not just look back, but to share the gaze. This book discusses several films, including: Unrelated (Hogg, 2007), Archipelago (Hogg, 2010), Exhibition (Hogg, 2013), The Souvenir Part I and II (Hogg, 2019 and 2021), Morvern Callar (Ramsay, 2002), We Need to Talk About Kevin (Ramsay, 2011), Innocence (Hadžhalilovic 2004), Evolution (Hadžhalilovic 2015), Waterlilies/Naissance des Pieuvres (Sciamma, 2007), Tomboy (Sciamma, 2011), Girlhood/Bande des Filles (Sciamma, 2014), Portrait of a Lady on Fire/Portrait d'une jeune fille en feu (Sciamma, 2019), and Petite Maman/Little Mother (Sciamma, 2021).

The Ethnographic Optic traces the surprising role of ethnography in French cinema in the 1960s and examines its place in several New Wave fictions and cinéma vérité documentaries during the final years of the French colonial empire. Focusing on prominent French filmmakers Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais, author Laure Astourian elucidates their striking pivot from centering their work on distant lands to scrutinizing their own French urban culture. As awareness of the ramifications of the shrinking empire grew within metropolitan France, these filmmakers turned inward what their similarly white, urban, bourgeois predecessors had long turned outward toward the colonies: the ethnographic gaze.Featuring some of the most canonical and best-loved films of the French tradition, such as Moi, un Noir, La jetée, and Muriel, this is an essential book for readers interested in national identity and cinema.

This volume explores the political life of rage as it has been experienced and mobilized in the Francosphere since 1968. If mai is remembered as a failure to convert insurrectionary feeling into lasting political change, the vast number of activist groups who have alchemized their anger into resistance over the past fifty years are a testament to the continued, necessary role of rage in political life. This volume traces the various morphologies of anger across French-language literature, thought, cinema and activism. From Black feminisms to punk, flamboyance to suicide, cacophonous sound to riotous song, the contributions probe the aesthetics and politics of rage. This collection also examines the uneven legitimization of political anger – how rage is allowed to be expressed, by whom and in which contexts. Rage is often dismissed as inimical to proper academic inquiry: what unites the contributions in this publication is a commitment to thinking with feeling.

Drawn into the circuit of men cruising for sex in and around a train station, restless adolescent Henri begins a frenzied pursuit of a dangerously charismatic older man, with sometimes violent and ultimately tragic consequences. Premiering at Cannes in 1983, Patrice Chéreau's L'Homme blessé (The Wounded Man) was one of France's first major cinematic releases to depict homosexual desire and queer sexual cultures in an unapologetic and complex way. It is a film that continues to resonate to this day.L'Homme blessé generated controversy with its dark tone and its treatment of an adolescent's obsessive homoerotic desire, as well as Chéreau's denial that the film is about homosexuality. Robert Payne guides readers through the powerfully erotic underworld of L'Homme blessé, where the film sidesteps fixed identities and draws viewers into the ambiguous spaces of queer desire, and argues that its visual composition depicts queer ways of seeing and generates queer ways of feeling. A look into the production's historical and cultural backdrop uncovers a behind-the-scenes story of power and desire between its two screenwriters and the presence of HIV/AIDS hovering ominously and inevitably off screen. Original interviews trace the lives of L'Homme blessé across three continents and three decades and measure the film's enduring value beyond its prestigious debut.Payne cements L'Homme blessé in its rightful place within queer cultural history and introduces the film to a new generation of viewers.

French Film History, 1895–1946 addresses the creative and often unexpected trajectory of French cinema, which continues to be one of the most provocative and engaging cinemas in the world. Tracing French film and its developments from the earliest days, when France dominated world cinema, up through the Occupation and Liberation, Neupert outlines major players and films that made it so influential. Paris held a privileged position as one of the world's hubs of scientific, social, and cultural experimentation; it is no wonder that the cinema as we know it was born there in the nineteenth century. This book presents French cinema's most significant creative filmmakers and movies but also details the intricate relations between technology, economics, and government that helped shape the unique conditions for cinematic experimentation in the country. Neupert explains the contexts behind the rise of cinema in France, including groundbreaking work by the Lumière family, Georges Méliès, and Alice Guy; the powerhouse studios of Pathé and Gaumont; directors such as René Clair, Germaine Dulac, Marcel Pagnol, and Jean Renoir; and an array of stars, including Max Linder, Jean Gabin, Josephine Baker, and Michèle Morgan. The first fifty years of French film practice established cinema's cultural and artistic potential, setting the stage for the global post–World War II explosion in commercial movies and art cinema alike. French film and its rich history remain at the heart of cinematic storytelling and our moviegoing pleasure.

The French New Wave is an essential anthology of writings by and about the critics and filmmakers of this revolutionary cinematic movement, which has had a radical impact on film practice and the way we think and write about film. The volume includes foundational writings such as Francois Truffaut's A Certain Tendency in French Cinema and Andre Bazin's La Politique des auteurs, as well writings by Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Alexandre Astruc. This new edition now represents writings by and about women critics and film-makers, including important articles by the critics Evelyne Sullerot, Michele Firk and Françoise Aude, addressing issues of gender and representation, as well as considering New Wave films in the context of contemporary political events, notably France's colonialist war on the Algerian independence movement. To accompany the case study of Godard's À bout de souffle, the new edition includes a case study of the critical reception of two films by Agnès Varda: La Pointe Courte and Cléo de 5 à 7.The articles have been specially translated for the volume by Peter Graham, and some are published for the first time in English. These classic writings are accompanied by contextualising introductions by Ginette Vincendeau, updated for this new edition, to form a unique resource on this key cinematic movement and its practitioners.

For too long, the approach to seemingly universal experiences like love, death, and even time in film has been dominated by the Global North. But what if such explorations developed horizontally instead? Drawing from both European and African cultural theorists, including Gilles Deleuze and Wole Soyinka, Vlad Dima invites us to consider what happens to postcolonial African film if we no longer privilege the idea of time. How else might we understand the cinematic image, and how would its meanings change? Meaninglessness: Time, Rhythm, and the Undead in Postcolonial Cinema is a study of meaning and meaninglessness through the figure of the undead, beginning with francophone Africa and extending to postcolonial France. Through the analysis of films like Mati Diop's Atlantics and Jean-Pierre Bekolo's Miraculous Weapons, Dima shows how the African cinematic image may produce meaning without any attachment to European time, and how that meaning is connected instead to the philosophy of negritude and to the notion of rhythm. Meaninglessness introduces the concept of the rhythm-sequence as a new way to understand the African moving image.