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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.

Le spectacle cinématographique est né un soir de décembre 1895. Puis très vite se développa l'industrie du cinéma, bien avant que celui-ci ne soit consacré en tant qu'art. L'histoire du cinéma français est donc à la fois celle d'un divertissement populaire, d'une industrie et d'un art.Pour tenter d'en rendre compte, ce livre retrace les grandes lignes de feu de l'aventure du « septième art » évoquant la création des studios de production et les réalisateurs majeurs, de Méliès à Pialat ou Garrel, de L'Herbier à Bresson ou Godard en passant par Vigo, Clair ou Renoir. C'est dans ce foisonnement des oeuvres que s'écrit une histoire possible du cinéma français.Enrichie d'illustrations, cette 4e édition propose également un nouveau chapitre consacré au jeune cinéma français.

Drawing on theories of embodiment and spectatorship, this book analyses the tactility and multisensoriality of Duras'films, and how they relate to her female-centred perspective.

This book traces the development of investigative cinema, whose main characteristic lies in reconstructing actual events, political crises, and conspiracies. These documentary-like films refrain from a simplistic reconstruction of historical events and are mainly concerned with what does not immediately appear on the surface of events. Consequently, they raise questions about the nature of the “truth” promoted by institutions, newspapers, and media reports. By highlighting unanswered questions, they leave us with a lack of clarity, and the questioning of documentation becomes the actual narrative. Investigative cinema is examined in relation to the historical conjunctures of the “economic miracle” in Italy, the simultaneous decolonization and reordering of culture in France, the waves of globalization and neoliberalism in post-dictatorial Latin America, and the post-Watergate, post-9/11 climate in US society. Investigative cinema is exemplified by the films Salvatore Giuliano, The Battle of Algiers, The Parallax View, Gomorrah, Zero Dark Thirty, and Citizenfour.

Öngün Eryılmaz beschäftigt sich mit Raumkonzepten im cinéma du métissage und der daraus resultierenden filmischen Darstellung von Heimat und soziokultureller Zugehörigkeit im Kontext von Mobilität und transkulturellen Gesellschaften. Die Betrachtungen stützen sich dazu sowohl auf Theorien über filmisches Raumdenken als auch auf sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche Ansätze und Positionen, die im Kontext der Inter- und Transkulturalität von Bedeutung sind. Die Analyse konzentriert sich auf insgesamt sechs filmische Werke von zwei zeitgenössischen Filmemachern aus Deutschland und Frankreich: Fatih Akın und Abdellatif Kechiche.

Using critical race theory and film studies to explore the interconnectedness between cinema and society, Zélie Asava traces the history of mixed-race representations in American and French filmmaking from early and silent cinema to the present day. Mixed Race Cinemas covers over a hundred years of filmmaking to chart the development of (black/white) mixed representations onscreen. With the 21st century being labelled the Mulatto Millennium, mixed bodies are more prevalent than ever in the public sphere, yet all too often they continue to be positioned as exotic, strange and otherworldly, according to'tragic mulatto'tropes. This book evaluates the potential for moving beyond fixed racial binaries both onscreen and off by exploring actors and characters who embody the in-between. Through analyses of over 40 movies, and case studies of key films from the 1910s on, Mixed Race Cinemas illuminates landmark shifts in local and global cinema, exploring discourses of subjectivity, race, gender, sexuality and class. In doing so, it reveals the similarities and contrasts between American and French cinema in relation to recognising, visualising and constructing mixedness. Mixed Race Cinemas contextualizes and critiques raced and'post-race'visual culture, using cinematic representations to illustrate changing definitions of mixed identity across different historical and geographical contexts.

This history covers the filmmaking tradition often referred to as cinéma militant, which emerged in France during the events of May 1968 and flourished for a decade. While some films produced were created by established filmmakers, including Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, and William Klein, others were helmed by left-wing filmmakers working in the extreme margins of French cinema. This latter group gave voice to underrepresented populations, such as undocumented immigrants (sans papiers), entry-level factory workers (ouvriers spécialisés), highly intellectual Marxist-Leninist collectives, and militant special interest groups. While this book spans the broad history of this uncharted tradition, it particularly focuses on these lesser-known figures and works and the films of Cinélutte, Les groupes medvedkine, Atelier de recherche cinématographique, Cinéthique, and the influential Marxist filmmaker Jean-Pierre Thorn. Each represent a certain tendency of this movement in French film history, offering an invaluable account of a tradition that also sought to share untold histories.

Women's filmmaking in France has been a source of both delight and despair. On the one hand, the numbers are impressive – over 250 feature-length films were made by over 100 women directors in France in the 1980s and 1990s. On the other hand, despite the heritage of French feminism, French women directors characteristically disclaim their gender as a significant factor in their filmmaking. This incisive study provides an informative, critical guide to this major body of work, exploring the boundaries between personal films (intimate psychological dramas relating to key stages in life) and genre films (which demonstrate women's ability to appropriate and rework popular genres). It analyzes the effects of postfeminism, women's desire to enter the mainstream, and the impact of a new generation of filmmakers, enabling readers to take stock of the wealth and diversity of women's contribution to French cinema during the 1980s and 1990s.

Travel narratives abound in French cinema since the 1980s. This study delineates recurrent travel tropes in films such as departures and returns, the chase, the escape, nomadic wandering, interior voyages, the unlikely travel, rituals, pilgrimages, migrants'narratives and emergencies, women's travel, and healing narratives.

Marcel Duchamp's urinal re-named ‘fountain'and placed in an art gallery. The classic image that can be seen as a duck or a rabbit, depending on how you look at it. A random object that grabs your attention and, like a Freudian slip, sums up whatever's on your mind. These are just a few examples of surrealist objects, items from everyday life that have something to tell us about the workings of the unconscious. In Reframing Reality, Alison Frank argues that the surrealist object offers a promising new way of understanding surrealism's legacy in cinema. Early studies of surrealist cinema restricted themselves to the handful of films that received official approval from the surrealist group. More recent studies have looked more broadly at films that explore the unconscious as a theme. Reframing Reality is the first to use the specifically surrealist concept of the surrealist object to trace the influence of surrealism in a broader range of films. When objects to do more than just advance the storyline, or have a mysterious meaning that is never fully explained, they are imitating the form of the surrealist object. Reframing Reality finds surrealist objects in films by Luis Buñuel and Jan Švankmajer, who acknowledged the importance of surrealism in their work, but also in the films of René Clair, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and the directors of the Czech New Wave, for whom surrealism was just one of many influences. By looking more closely at the role of objects in films, particularly those made during times of great change in the industry, we can gain a better understanding of both the legacy of surrealism in cinema and film language more generally.

This book analyses contemporary French films by focussing closely on cinematic representations of immigrants and residents of suburban housing estates known as banlieues. It begins by examining how these groups are conceived of within France's Republican political model before analysing films that focus on four key issues. Firstly, it will assess representations of undocumented migrants known as sans-papiers before then analysing depictions of deportations made possible by the controversial double peine law. Next, it will examine films about relations between young people and the police in suburban France before exploring films that challenge cliches about these areas. The conclusion assesses what these films show about contemporary French political cinema.IntroductionChapter One: Cinema and the RepublicChapter Two: T he Sans-papiers on Screen – Contextualising Immigrant Experiences in FilmChapter Three: Double peine: The Challenges of Mobilising Support for Foreign Criminals via CinemaChapter Four: C hallenging or Perpetuating Clichés? Young People and the Police in France's BanlieuesChapter Five: C hallenging Stereotypes about France's Banlieues by Shifting the Focus?ConclusionNotesFilmography and BibliographyIndex

Brutal Intimacy is the first book to explore the fascinating films of contemporary France, ranging from mainstream genre spectaculars to arthouse experiments, and from wildly popular hits to films that deliberately alienate the viewer. Twenty-first-century France is a major source of international cinema—diverse and dynamic, embattled yet prosperous—a national cinema offering something for everyone. Tim Palmer investigates France's growing population of women filmmakers, its buoyant vanguard of first-time filmmakers, the rise of the controversial cinema du corps, and France's cinema icons: auteurs like Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, Gaspar Noé, and stars such as Vincent Cassel and Jean Dujardin. Analyzing dozens of breakthrough films, Brutal Intimacy situates infamous titles alongside many yet to be studied in the English language. Drawing on interviews and the testimony of leading film artists, Brutal Intimacy promises to be an influential treatment of French cinema today, its evolving rivalry with Hollywood, and its ambitious pursuits of audiences in Europe, North America, and around the world.

The ravages of the First World War ensured that the deeply cherished Enlightenment ideals of reason, individualism, and intellectual supremacy finally crumbled and dissolved. As the Dadaists and Surrealists demonstrated in overtly defiant avant-garde postures and various public spectacles, the essential purposelessness and futility of such unprecedented carnage and bloodshed had finally shattered all intellectual illusions ever pertaining to human meaning and logic. The steady stream of political developments which led to the onset of war were equally incidental and senseless, while incessant killings between deadlocked armies exposed the equal guilt and reprehensibility of all warring parties. Numerous artists––many of whom perished during the war––found themselves involved in the bloody battles, and their chilling accounts––the cultural canons of poems, novels, essays, paintings, and diaries on the horrors of this war––are all dominated by genocidal images of mass human slaughter, inhumane massacre, unspeakable atrocities, and the profound despair that arises from utter senselessness. The Second World War, however, was not simply a repeat of the First World War in terms of its devastating effects, its atrocities, massacres, and widespread carnage. The Nazi era manifested a completely different reality, an unprecedented phenomenon with new and unfamiliar cultural implications. The carnage was not ‘senseless', for it was highly rationalized and systematised; bloodshed was motivated by fierce ideological convictions. Many of these ideologies were nourished and inspired by the ideas of Nietzsche concerning the imposition of a ‘super regime', able to rise above the restrictive morality of ordinary men. While it is impossible to create a clear division between categories of right and wrong, evil and good, throughout the career of the Third Reich, the ambiguities and perceptions of equal guilt and equal reprehensibility that overshadowed the previous world war were largely absent from the second. Highly masterminded and systematised evil forces were responsible for the bloodshed which took place, for in full operation was a rationalised, strategic regime which meticulously orchestrated, calculated, and supervised a systematic process of ethnic cleansing. The rationale of the concentration camp universe indicates not merely the decline and dissolution of reason in the face of absolute evil, but something other than this, something much deeper. This war was to do with ‘presence'rather than ‘absence'. It was a war of extreme, conceived purpose involving the presence of a new collective political force and new methods: ‘lebensraum', autarky, world domination. This book seeks to establish a new way of examining not only history but contemporary manners of historical representation on film, as well as their cultural and philosophical implications. It aims to advance new ways of investigating the past with films that are, on the surface, only tangentially related to traditional manners of historical representation. The work forwards two unconventional movies Docteur Petiot and Delicatessen as objects of historical film-making. The reasoning for this departure from convention, that the Holocaust itself requires a peripheral, even postmodern approach to not only its representation but that of the past in general. On a more specific level, France during the 1990s experienced a heightened period of political debate regarding its collaboration during the Vichy period. Various contemporary films focussed on national complicity and crisis of identity engaging with that which Henry Rousso defines as the ‘miroir brisé'the shattering of illusions. The two films studied may be viewed as discourses that portray this crisis both in terms of content (the public shattering of movie screens or the sudden inundation of an apartment block) but through generic diversity and departure from traditional mo

A number of writers have attempted to capture Robert Bresson's style as well as his substance with such terms as “minimalist,” “austere,”'ascetic,'“elliptical,” “autonomous,” “pure,” even “gentle.'Most famously, Paul Schrader once called Bresson's films “transcendental,” while Susan Sontag described them as “spiritual.” Both these critics thus extended in anglicized form a tendency that had early been dominant in Bresson criticism in France: the attempt, made by such Catholic writers as André Bazin, Henri Agel, Roger Leenhardt, and Amédée Ayfre, to understand Bresson's work in religious terms, seeing his camera as a kind of god and the material world as (paradoxically) a thing of the spirit. That attempt, in Sontag's essay, led to the introduction of Bresson to the New York-based avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, whose films—such as Richard Serra's Hand Catching Lead (1968), for one—show the influence of the French director's severe, reductivist style. Jean-Luc Godard, of course, needed no such critical introduction to Robert Bresson, for, in his iconoclasm and integrity, in his rejection of the Gallic “Cinéma du Papa” as well as in his embrace of film as an independent art, Bresson was one of the heroes of the young directors who constituted the French New Wave in the early 1960s. So much so that Godard was moved to say in Cahiers du cinéma in 1957 that “Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music.'The result is that Bresson has undeniably influenced a slew of contemporary European filmmakers, including Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas, Laurent Cantet, Alain Cavalier, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Claire Denis, Jacques Doillon, Bruno Dumont, Michael Haneke, Benoît Jacquot, and Maurice Pialat--not to speak of his influence on Asian and American cinema. Bresson and Others: Spiritual Syle in the Cinema is an attempt to document this influence through essays on fifteen international directors who followed in Bresson's wake, who in fact may have influenced him (Carl Dreyer), or who contemporaneously worked veins similar to those found in Bresson's films (Ingmar Bergman, Yasujiro Ozu). These essays are preceded by an introduction to the cinema of Robert Bresson and followed by film credits, a bibliography of criticism, and an index. The subject of Bresson and Others, then, may specifically be Bressonian cinema, but, in a general sense, it could also be said to be spirit and matter--or film and faith.

Masculine Singular is an original interpretation of French New Wave cinema by one of France's leading feminist film scholars. While most criticism of the New Wave has concentrated on the filmmakers and their films, Geneviève Sellier focuses on the social and cultural turbulence of the cinema's formative years, from 1957 to 1962. The New Wave filmmakers were members of a young generation emerging on the French cultural scene, eager to acquire sexual and economic freedom. Almost all of them were men, and they “wrote” in the masculine first-person singular, often using male protagonists as stand-ins for themselves. In their films, they explored relations between men and women, and they expressed ambivalence about the new liberated woman. Sellier argues that gender relations and the construction of sexual identities were the primary subject of New Wave cinema.Sellier draws on sociological surveys, box office data, and popular magazines of the period, as well as analyses of specific New Wave films. She examines the development of the New Wave movement, its sociocultural and economic context, and the popular and critical reception of such well-known films as Jules et Jim and Hiroshima mon amour. In light of the filmmakers'focus on gender relations, Sellier reflects on the careers of New Wave's iconic female stars, including Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Bardot. Sellier's thorough exploration of early New Wave cinema culminates in her contention that its principal legacy—the triumph of a certain kind of cinephilic discourse and of an “auteur theory” recognizing the director as artist—came at a steep price: creativity was reduced to a formalist game, and affirmation of New Wave cinema's modernity was accompanied by an association of creativity with masculinity.

The book focuses on the interest in socio-political themes that marked many French film productions of the 1990s and early 2000s. In order to underline the main characteristics and the originality of these feature films (political fictions), the author addresses the following questions: oHow can one explain the renewed interest in contemporary French society?oTo what extent can political fictions be described as political?oWhat is the contribution of political fictions to what some critics and scholars have described as a new type of realism?Showing the World to the World primarily addresses to the critical and socio-political context in which political fictions were made and released. With these parameters in mind, the book then moves on to in-depth discussions of films that have already attracted some attention, such as Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine and Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau's Drôle de Félix, as well as lesser known works, Siegrid Alnoy's Elle est des nôtres and Jean-Marc Moutout's Violence des échanges en milieu tempéré being some examples. Showing the World to the World makes an original contribution to theoretical debates on political cinema and to the field of French film studies. The study targets students and academic researchers as well as individuals with a keen interest in contemporary French cinema.

The French Cinema Book is an accessible and innovative survey of key topics in French cinema from the 1890s to the twenty-first century. This multi-authored volume proposes new insights into familiar areas and sets out a fresh agenda for the study and appreciation of French cinema: • Who are the men and women who have made French cinema happen?• What is the business culture in which French cinema has evolved?• How has technological change effected artistic and commercial innovation?• What have been the most popular and the most experimental forms?• What has French cinema shown us of France, its society, its citizens, its concerns?• How has the spectator's experience of film-going changed in the last 100 years?• How have debates about film reflected cinema's unique place in French culture?The book combines historical context and background information with detailed discussion of case-studies, analysis of films, recommendations for further reading and online resources. The French Cinema Book is addressed to all lovers of French cinema, students and teachers, specialists and fans.

Pourquoi l'Etat a-t-il été amené à intervenir et à réguler l'espace cinématographique? Comment la mobilisation conjointe des gens de cinéma et des hommes politiques a-t-elle permis d'imposer une'exception culturelle'? Ce livre propose une analyse socio-historique des politiques du cinéma en soulignant les liens existant entre les transformations esthétiques, sociales et politiques de l'espace cinématographique depuis les années 1930.

Since 1995 there has been a widespread return of commitment to French cinema taking it to a level unmatched since the heady days following 1968. But this new wave of political film is very different and urgently calls out for an analysis that will account for its development, its formal characteristics and its originality. This is what this book provides. It engages with leading directors such as Cantet, Tavernier, Dumont, Kassovitz, Zonca and Guédiguian, takes in a range of less well known but important figures and strays across the Belgian border to engage with the seminal work of the Dardenne brothers. It shows how the works discussed are helping to reinvent political cinema by finding stylistic and narrative strategies adequate to the contemporary context.

When collective memory is a source of national debate, the public representation of history quickly becomes a locus of controversy and ideological struggle. This work shows how French film has allowed for a public airing of current concerns through the lens of memory's recreations of the Occupation.

The French New Wave cinema is arguably the most fascinating of all film movements, famous for its exuberance, daring, and avant-garde techniques. A History of the French New Wave Cinema offers a fresh look at the social, economic, and aesthetic mechanisms that shaped French film in the 1950s, as well as detailed studies of the most important New Wave movies of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Richard Neupert first tracks the precursors to New Wave cinema, showing how they provided blueprints for those who would follow. He then demonstrates that it was a core group of critics-turned-directors from the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma—especially François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard—who really revealed that filmmaking was changing forever. Later, their cohorts Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast continued in their own unique ways to expand the range and depth of the New Wave. In an exciting new chapter, Neupert explores the subgroup of French film practice known as the Left Bank Group, which included directors such as Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda. With the addition of this new material and an updated conclusion, Neupert presents a comprehensive review of the stunning variety of movies to come out of this important era in filmmaking.

It can be argued that cinema was created in France by Louis Lumi_re in 1895 with the invention of the cinZmatographe, the first true motion-picture camera and projector. While there were other cameras and devices invented earlier that were capable of projecting intermittent motion of images, the cinZmatographe was the first device capable of recording and externally projecting images in such a way as to convey motion. Early films such as Lumi_re's La Sortie de l'usine, a minute-long film of workers leaving the Lumi_re factory, captured the imagination of the nation and quickly inspired the likes of Georges MZli_s, Alice Guy, and Charles PathZ. Through the years, French cinema has been responsible for producing some of the world's best directors_Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, Fran_ois Truffaut, and Louis Malle_and actors_Charles Boyer, Catherine Deneuve, GZrard Depardieu, and Audrey Tautou. The Historical Dictionary of French Cinema covers the history of French film from the silent era to the present in a concise and up to date volume detailing the development of French cinema and major theoretical and cultural issues related to it. This is done through a chronology, an introduction, photographs, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on many of the major actors, directors, films, movements, producers, and studios associated with French cinema. Going beyond mere biographical information, entries also discuss the impact and significance of each individual, film, movement, or studio included. This detailed, scholarly analysis of the development of film in France is useful to both the novice and the expert alike.

This book addresses representations and constructions of masculinity in crisis in contemporary French culture by way of two important concepts – the phallus (largely but not solely in (a) Lacanian sense(s)) and abjection (Kristeva). Scrutiny of these concepts informs readings of a number of texts – literary (Bataille, Adamov, Doubrovsky, Houellebecq, Rochefort, Angot) and cinematic (Ferreri, Eustache, Godard, Noé, Bonello) – in which the abject phallus is a significant factor. The texts chosen all describe or stage crises of masculinity and mastery in ways that suggest that these supposedly beneficent qualities – and the phallus that symbolizes them – can often be perceived as burdensome or even detestable. Abjection is a widely-used concept in contemporary cultural studies, but has not hitherto been articulated with the phallus as emblem of male dominance as it is here. The volume will be of interest to those working in the areas of French, gender and film studies.

The conversion to sound cinema is routinely portrayed as a homogenizing process that significantly reduced the cinema's diversity of film styles and practices. Cinema's Conversion to Sound offers an alternative assessment of synchronous sound's impact on world cinema through a shift in critical focus: in contrast to film studies'traditional exclusive concern with the film image, the book investigates national differences in sound-image practice in a revised account of the global changeover from silent to.

Title from e-book title screen (viewed on September 17, 2005).

Title from e-book title screen (viewed on April 8, 2005)

Relations between France and Britain have always been uneasy and ambivelant. But in cinema, WWII changed all that for a time. Although the two countries'wartime fortunes differed, post-war both were busy reintegrating returning servicemen and prisoners of war, and accomodating the changed aspirations of women. Margaret Butler examines these subjects and more in her comparative study of the cinemas of Britain and France during and after the war. Using the concept of continuity, she shows how cinema dealt directly with ideas of belonging and alienation, inclusion and exclusion, unity and division. She also draws on contemporary debates and offers a perceptive reading of key films, to reveal the meaning and appeal of French classics like'Les Enfants du Paradis'and notable British productions like'Waterloo Road'.

Long before Edith Piaf sang'La vie en rose,'her predecessors took to the stage of the belle epoque music hall, singing of female desire, the treachery of men, the harshness of working-class life, and the rough neighborhoods of Paris. Icon of working-class femininity and the underworld, the realist singer signaled the emergence of new cultural roles for women as well as shifts in the nature of popular entertainment. Chanteuse in the City provides a genealogy of realist performance through analysis of the music hall careers and film roles of Mistinguett, Josephine Baker, Fréhel, and Damia. Above all, Conway offers a fresh interpretation of 1930s French cinema, emphasizing its love affair with popular song and its close connections to the music hall and the café-concert. Conway uncovers an important tradition of female performance in the golden era of French film, usually viewed as a cinema preoccupied with masculinity. She shows how—in films such as Pépé le Moko, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange, and Zouzou—the realist chanteuse addresses female despair at the hopelessness of love. Conway also sheds light on the larger cultural implications of the shift from the intimate café-concert to the spectacular music hall, before the talkies displaced both kinds of live performance altogether.

The French New Wave: An Artistic School is a lively introduction to this critical moment in film history by one of the world's leading scholars on the New Wave. Provides a concise account of the French New Wave by one of the world's leading film scholars. Outlines the essential traits of the New Wave and defines it as a school that changed international film history forever. Includes a chronology of major political and cultural events of the New Wave, black-and-white images, and an extensive bibliography.

In Landscapes of Loss, Naomi Greene makes new sense of the rich variety of postwar French films by exploring the obsession with the national past that has characterized French cinema since the late 1960s. Observing that the sense of grandeur and destiny that once shaped French identity has eroded under the weight of recent history, Greene examines the ways in which French cinema has represented traumatic and defining moments of the nation's past: the political battles of the 1930s, the Vichy era, decolonization, the collapse of ideologies. Drawing upon a broad spectrum of films and directors, she shows how postwar films have reflected contemporary concerns even as they have created images and myths that have helped determine the contours of French memory. This study of the intricate links between French history, memory, and cinema begins by examining the long shadow cast by the Vichy past: the repressed memories and smothered unease that characterize the cinema of Alain Resnais are seen as a kind of prelude to a fierce battle for national memory that marked so-called rétro films of the 1970s and 1980s. The shifting political and historical perspectives toward the nation's more distant past, which also emerged in these years, are explored in the light of the films of one of France's leading directors, Bertrand Tavernier. Finally, the mood of nostalgia and melancholy that appears to haunt contemporary France is analyzed in the context of films about the nation's imperial past as well as those that hark back to a'golden age,'a remembered paradis perdu, of French cinema itself.