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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.