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Criminal Intentions: Film Noir and Les Diaboliques (1955)

Claire Gorrara

in The Roman Noir in Post-War French Culture: Dark Fictions

This chapter discusses the ways the French film industry responded to the arrival of American films and the introduction of film noir.

Why popular films are popular: identification, imitation and critical mortification

David Platten

in Imagining the popular in contemporary French culture

This chapter argues that the French popular film is a contradiction in terms: French cinema has long been associated with high culture, and despite the iconoclastic verve and youth appeal of the ... More

This chapter argues that the French popular film is a contradiction in terms: French cinema has long been associated with high culture, and despite the iconoclastic verve and youth appeal of the Nouvelle Vague, the longer-term impact of this hugely influential movement was to reinforce perception of French film as self-reflexive and demanding rather than aimed at a wide audience. It defines cinema as an intrinsically popular medium. Not only does cinema's visual storytelling appeal across levels of education and class, but the ontological shift its invention produced in the subject's relationship to space, time and other subjectivities gave pleasure to the mass of the population. Developments in cinema's wonderful capacity to take people elsewhere continue to thrill a socially diverse public, and to inflect their vision in the widest senses of the word.Less

Introduction

Ian Aitken and Camille Deprez

in The Colonial Documentary Film in South and South-East Asia

The Introduction sets out an overview of the book and summaries of the individual chapters in the book. In addition, the Introduction also provides a justification for the geographical scope and time ... More

The Introduction sets out an overview of the book and summaries of the individual chapters in the book. In addition, the Introduction also provides a justification for the geographical scope and time frame of the book, attempts to arrive at a definition of the colonial documentary film, and seeks to establish and analyse the encounter between colonialism and documentary cinema in South and South-East Asia. In addition, the Introduction also attempts to reassess current understandings of the colonial documentary film.Less

The ‘European connection’

Lisa Purse

in Contemporary Action Cinema

This chapter considers action cinema in relation to issues of globalisation and the international film marketplace, and looks at the stylistic exchanges that result in the light of recent debates ... More

This chapter considers action cinema in relation to issues of globalisation and the international film marketplace, and looks at the stylistic exchanges that result in the light of recent debates about whether multi-country co-productions can (or should) protect a national cultural identity. Arguing that many countries, not just the US, are now attempting an ‘internationalising formula’ for the action movie that will maximise their international box office potential, the chapter makes a case study of a particular region, focusing on recent films of the French production company EuropaCorp. The contemporary French action ?lm has become a key site of controversy in national debates about cultural imperialism, cultural identity and indigenous ?lm style. Looking at Banlieue 13 and Danny the Dog the chapter analyses the stylistic and representational tensions that can result from putting the internationalising formula into practice.Less

Introduction: Maurice Pialat, the outsider

Marja Warehime

in Maurice Pialat

This chapter presents a profile of the French film director Maurice Pialat. Pialat's work inspires comparison with legendary figures such as Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson, yet he does not have the ... More

This chapter presents a profile of the French film director Maurice Pialat. Pialat's work inspires comparison with legendary figures such as Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson, yet he does not have the international reputation one might expect, given his gifts as a director and his importance in French cinema history. Pialat's death in 2003 inevitably situated him as a filmmaker of the 1980s, the decade in which his work began to receive serious critical attention and attracted a broader public. Yet by 1983, when A nos amours won the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc and the César for best film, he had been making films for over twenty years. Perhaps one of the most telling moments in Maurice Pialat's ongoing relationship with film and the French film-going public was the scandal at Cannes over the attribution of the Palme d'or in 1987. If the name Pialat is not without significance to the French filmgoing public, it is partly because he acquired the reputation of a singularly difficult and demanding director, who provoked and psychologically abused his actors and collaborators.Less

Why Does Film Policy Matter?

Gillian Doyle

in The Rise and Fall of the Uk Film Council

This chapter positions the role and development of UK film policy within the domain of politics and political culture. It highlights the culture-commerce dichotomy that has run through UK film policy ... More

This chapter positions the role and development of UK film policy within the domain of politics and political culture. It highlights the culture-commerce dichotomy that has run through UK film policy for decades. It also highlights the growth of digital and creative economy policy thinking and the positioning of film policy within this discourse. The latter part of the chapter explores international models of film support, contrasting the UK approach with that of France.Less

Neorealism: Another “Cinéma de Papa” for the French New Wave?

Caroline Eades

in Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style

This chapter explores the relationship between the Italian neorealist and French New Wave movements, and suggests that their connection is “complex,” concocted out of similarities rather than direct ... More

This chapter explores the relationship between the Italian neorealist and French New Wave movements, and suggests that their connection is “complex,” concocted out of similarities rather than direct linkages. It asks the following question: Can we assume that the influence of neorealism on New Wave directors lies precisely in the realization that it was neither new nor realistic, at least for a younger and restless generation?Less

‘Piloting with concentration’: Julien goes to Hollywood

Ben McCann

in Julien Duvivier

This chapter will analyse Duvivier’s career in Hollywood. He was first invited to Hollywood by MGM in 1938 to direct The Great Waltz, and then moved to America shortly after the German occupation of ... More

This chapter will analyse Duvivier’s career in Hollywood. He was first invited to Hollywood by MGM in 1938 to direct The Great Waltz, and then moved to America shortly after the German occupation of France in 1940. He directed four films there during this period, including Lydia (1941) and The Impostor (1944), a loose remake of La Bandera (1935). The chapter explores the various techniques and themes that Duvivier developed during this period, and looks at the critical reception of his films in both French and American trade journals. The chapter also poses the question of whether a distinctively French cinematic sensibility can be recalibrated within the confines of the Classic Hollywood Cinema (CHC) tradition. Duvivier adapted to a different set of professional and commercial imperatives that enabled him to transcend infrastructural barriers and impose a distinctly French style on the American film industry.Less

Femme fatale

Felicity Chaplin

in La Parisienne in Cinema: Between Art and Life

The association of woman with Paris and death was a popular trope in nineteenth-century French culture and finds expression in cinematic representations of the Parisienne as femme fatale. This ... More

The association of woman with Paris and death was a popular trope in nineteenth-century French culture and finds expression in cinematic representations of the Parisienne as femme fatale. This chapter considers la Parisienne as femme fatale in Jules Dassin’s Du rififi chez les hommes (1955), Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lève(1939) and Le quai des brumes(1938), and Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (1960). These films can be considered examples of French film noir and their female protagonists read as femme fatales. However, the femme fatale of French film noir is different from the femme fatale of American film noir; she comes from a different cultural tradition and is informed by a different cultural figure. This chapter argues that the development of the femme fatale as a cinematicarchetype passed through a cultural tradition not usually associated with the noir genre: nineteenth-century French culture and the tradition of the filles d’Eve embodied in the type la Parisienne. The French version of this archetype grew out of the popular nineteenth-century trope of the association of woman with the city and death. Indeed, there is an aesthetic and narrative overdetermination of the femme fatale by the figure of la Parisienne, particularly through iconographical motifs associated with the type, like fashion, ambiguity, sexuality and dangerLess

The Great War and Dulac’s First Films

Tami Williams

in Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations

This chapter focuses on Dulac's wartime activism and literary writings, as well as the debut of her film career—from her first activities as a film producer for Pathé (La Lumière du coeur, 1916) to ... More

This chapter focuses on Dulac's wartime activism and literary writings, as well as the debut of her film career—from her first activities as a film producer for Pathé (La Lumière du coeur, 1916) to her first directorial efforts (Soeurs ennemies to Le Bonheur des autres, 1917–18)—and evaluates the historical significance of her incursion into and negotiated course within the French film industry as a female artist and entrepreneur. A close examination of archival sources documenting Dulac's early professional activities provides insight into her humanist egalitarianism, universalism, and her strong belief in the emancipatory potential of art, as well as her early rhetorical strategies.Less

A Parisian in Hollywood: Ocular Horror in the Films of Alexandre Aja

Tony Perrello

in American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium

This chapter examines the transnational career of Alexandre Aja, one of the hot young horror directors who has migrated from his native country to the U.S film industry. It focuses on the ... More

This chapter examines the transnational career of Alexandre Aja, one of the hot young horror directors who has migrated from his native country to the U.S film industry. It focuses on the characteristic features of Aja’s style and his thematic preoccupations, which have survived the transition from France to the United States. What emerges from the analysis is a reconsideration of the classic auteur’s creative autonomy within the context of genre cinema’s ability to transcend national and cultural boundaries.Less

Hail the Conquering Auteur Preston Sturges in La Revue du cinéma (1946–1949)

Christian Viviani

in Refocus: the Films of Preston Sturges

This chapter discusses the appeal of Preston Sturges’s movies among post-WWII French film critics. Focusing on La Revue du cinema (founded in 1946), it tries to understand why, after being hailed in ... More

This chapter discusses the appeal of Preston Sturges’s movies among post-WWII French film critics. Focusing on La Revue du cinema (founded in 1946), it tries to understand why, after being hailed in France as one of the major filmmakers emerging in Hollywood in the 1940’s, Preston Sturges was nevertheless overlooked by the “auteur theory,” which was soon to bloom in Cahiers du cinema (founded in 1951). This chapter also deals with the appreciation of Preston Sturges’s works by André Bazin, a towering figure in post-war French film criticism, and in publications like Cahiers du cinema and Positif, including the recent rediscovery of his films.Less

: Leaving The Movie Theater

Andrew V. Uroskie

in Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art

For decades, the canonical histories of postwar avant-garde cinema have begun with the “mythopoetic” and “visionary” ideas of Deren and Brakhage, in utter neglect of the radical Lettrist cinema by ... More

For decades, the canonical histories of postwar avant-garde cinema have begun with the “mythopoetic” and “visionary” ideas of Deren and Brakhage, in utter neglect of the radical Lettrist cinema by which Brakhage was himself inspired. This chapter explores the brief flowering of Lettrist cinema in Paris of the early ‘50s as establishing the aesthetic and theoretrical foundation of the Expanded Cinema and intermedia practices of the 1960s and ‘70s. Isidore-Isou’s Treatise on Slobber and Eternity (1951) inaugurates the movement with its conception of a radically disjunctive aesthetics, prefiguring both the sound/image mismatch of Jean-Luc Godard and the critical film essays of Chris Marker. Maurice Lemaître’s Has the Film Begun? (1952) extends this disjunctive conception to cinema’s theatrical situation, presenting an idea of synthetic cinema-performance which frustates the distinction between the local and cinematic space.Less

French Cinema of Place

Reidar Due

in Love in Motion: Erotic Relationships in Film

This chapter studies the classical narrative French cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. French classical love films also possess a moral core, but the structure of morality in classic French cinema is ... More

This chapter studies the classical narrative French cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. French classical love films also possess a moral core, but the structure of morality in classic French cinema is very different from that of American films. Morality in French film is often embedded in a social world shown to be more or less corrupt. French cinema also displays a subtler and less verbal eroticism than that of the classical American film. Many classical French films display desires that are not romantic or compatible with any kind of marital solution. An example of this is Melville and Cocteau's 1951 psychological study La Chambre, which depicts an incestuous relationship between brother and sister. Classical French cinema is a cinematic narrative form, in which characters are often bound to a place as to their fate.Less

Introduction

Tami Williams

in Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations

This introductory chapter discusses how Germaine Dulac played a groundbreaking role in the evolution of the cinema both as art and social practice. Over the course of her film career (1915–42), Dulac ... More

This introductory chapter discusses how Germaine Dulac played a groundbreaking role in the evolution of the cinema both as art and social practice. Over the course of her film career (1915–42), Dulac directed more than thirty fiction films, many marking new cinematic tendencies, from Impressionist to abstract. A careful study of Dulac's life and work establishes the importance of her voice in the diffusion and legitimization of French film and film culture, as evidenced through her prolific writings and lectures. She also played a prominent role in several cultural organizations such as the Society of Film Authors (SAF), the French Federation of Cine-Clubs (FFCC), the International Council of Women (ICW), the International Educational Cinematographic Institute(IECI), and the League of Nations' International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC), among others.Less

Beginnings

Delphine Bénézet

in The Cinema of Agnès Varda: Resistance and Eclecticism

This introductory chapter provides an overall description of the works of French New Wave film director Agnès Varda. It first looks into her Salut les Cubains! (1964), a distinctive political ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overall description of the works of French New Wave film director Agnès Varda. It first looks into her Salut les Cubains! (1964), a distinctive political documentary, mostly made of animated photographs that she took on trips to Cuba in December 1962 and January 1963, a period filled with political and social changes in Cuba. The photos feature many of the traits found in Varda's other artistic projects. It is informed by its political and historical context and shaped by the conditions in which it was made. The strategies that Varda deploys in her films testify to her lasting commitment to represent women within history. This concern not only with women on screen but with the act of ‘filmer en femme’, as she calls it, makes her an important figure in the fields of film, gender, and cultural studies.Less

Introduction: Intimate Violence

David Greven

in Intimate Violence: Hitchcock, Sex, and Queer Theory

I establish the feminine-versus-the-queer conflict as the book’s thesis and locate its origins within debates in feminism and queer theory. The introduction offers a genealogy of critical views of ... More

I establish the feminine-versus-the-queer conflict as the book’s thesis and locate its origins within debates in feminism and queer theory. The introduction offers a genealogy of critical views of “queer Hitchcock” ranging from early auteurism to the work of Lee Edelman and D.A. Miller. The introduction then provides the psychoanalytic basis for reading Hitchcock reparatively (Melanie Klein, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) and in terms of paranoia (Freud). I discuss the uses and difficulties of the rubric “queer” and also several important films from Hitchcock’s English career, in particular The Lodger and Secret Agent.Less