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A vital rethinking of memory and the moving image for the digital age, this book investigates the role of the moving image in cultural memory, considering the impact of digital technologies on visual culture. Drawing on an interdisciplinary range of theoretical resources and an unusual body of films and moving image works, the book examines the ways in which recent French filmmaking conceptualises both the past and the workings of memory. Ultimately the book argues, memory is an intersubjective process, in which filmic forms continue to play a crucial role even as new media come to dominate our contemporary experience. The book introduces new ways of thinking about the relation between film and memory, arising from an interdisciplinary study of theories and films; explores the French context while drawing theoretical conclusions with wider implications and applicability; provides detailed close readings of varied moving image works to aid theoretical explorations; moves away from auteurist approaches, examining work by canonical directors including Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Agnès Varda alongside that of less well-known filmmakers such as Claire Simon and Yamina Benguigui; and brings together thinkers such as Bergson, Deleuze, Bazin and Barthes with, for example, Rodowick and Mulvey, in an interweaving of theories. Works considered include Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1989–98), Yamina Benguigui's Mémoires d'Immigrés (1997), Chris Marker's CD-ROM Immemory (1998), Claire Simon's Mimi (2003), Michael Haneke's Caché (2005) and Agnès Varda's multi-media exhibition, L'Île et Elle (2006).

Long before the emergence in the 1990s of a ‘cinéma de banlieue’ on the heels of Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), French filmmakers looked beyond the gates of the French capital for inspiration and content. In the Paris suburbs, they found a vast reservoir of architectural forms, landscapes and contemporary social types in which to anchor their fictions. From the villas and vacant lots of silent serials of the 1910s and the bucolic riverside guinguettes of 1930s poetic realism, to the housing estates and motorways of the second post-war, the suburban landscape came to form a privileged site in the French cinematographic imaginary. In keeping with directorial vision, the prerogatives of the film industry or the internal demands of genre, the suburb could be made to impart a strong impression of reality or unreality, novelty or ordinariness, danger or enjoyment. The contributors to this volume argue collectively for a long history of the suburban imaginary by contrasting diverse ‘structures of feeling’ (Raymond Williams) that correlate to divergent aesthetic and ideological programmes. Commenting on narrative, documentary and essay films, they address such themes as class conflict, leisure, boredom, violence and anti-authoritarianism, underscoring the broader function of the suburb as a site of intense cultural productivity.

In just over a decade, François Ozon has earned an international reputation as a successful and provocative filmmaker. A student of Eric Rohmer and Jean Douchet at the prestigious Fémis, Ozon has made a number of critically acclaimed shorts and eleven feature films, including international successes 8 femmes and Swimming Pool, and more recent releases such as Angel, Ricky, and Le refuge. Despite tremendous diversity in cinematic choices, Ozon's oeuvre is surprisingly consistent in its desire to blur the traditional frontiers between the masculine and the feminine, gay and straight, reality and fantasy, auteur and commercial cinema. The book provides an overview of François Ozon's career to date, contextualizing Ozon's filmmaking within the larger fields of French filmmaking and international queer cinema. The book discusses several major themes running through Ozon's work, including obsessions with inadequate fathers, various types of mourning, and a recurring taste for “the foreign.” The volume also includes an insightful interview with the director.