Martin O'Shaughnessy
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719091506
- eISBN:
- 9781781708590
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719091506.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Laurent Cantet is of one France’s leading contemporary directors. He probes the evolution and fault-lines of contemporary society from the home to the workplace and from the Republican school to ...
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Laurent Cantet is of one France’s leading contemporary directors. He probes the evolution and fault-lines of contemporary society from the home to the workplace and from the Republican school to globalized consumption more acutely than perhaps any other French film-maker. His films always challenge his characters’ assumptions about their world. But they also make their spectators rethink their position in relation to what they see. This is what makes Cantet such an important film-maker, the book argues. It explores Cantet’s unique working ‘method,’ his use of amateur actors and attempt to develop an egalitarian authorship that allows other voices to be heard rather than subsumed. It discusses his way of constructing films at the uneasy interface of the individual, the group and the broader social context and his recourse to melodramatic strategies and moments of shame to force social tensions into view. It shows how the roots of the well-known later films can be found in his early works. It explores the major fictions from Ressources humaines to the recent Foxfire, Confessions of a Girl Gang. It combines careful close analysis with attention to broader cinematic, social and political contexts while drawing on a range of important theorists from Pierre Bourdieu to Jacques Rancière, Michael Bakhtin and Mary Ann Doane. It concludes by examining how, resolutely contemporary of the current moment, Cantet helps us rethink the possibilities and limits of political cinema in a context in which old resistances have fallen silent and new forms of protest are only emergent.Less
Laurent Cantet is of one France’s leading contemporary directors. He probes the evolution and fault-lines of contemporary society from the home to the workplace and from the Republican school to globalized consumption more acutely than perhaps any other French film-maker. His films always challenge his characters’ assumptions about their world. But they also make their spectators rethink their position in relation to what they see. This is what makes Cantet such an important film-maker, the book argues. It explores Cantet’s unique working ‘method,’ his use of amateur actors and attempt to develop an egalitarian authorship that allows other voices to be heard rather than subsumed. It discusses his way of constructing films at the uneasy interface of the individual, the group and the broader social context and his recourse to melodramatic strategies and moments of shame to force social tensions into view. It shows how the roots of the well-known later films can be found in his early works. It explores the major fictions from Ressources humaines to the recent Foxfire, Confessions of a Girl Gang. It combines careful close analysis with attention to broader cinematic, social and political contexts while drawing on a range of important theorists from Pierre Bourdieu to Jacques Rancière, Michael Bakhtin and Mary Ann Doane. It concludes by examining how, resolutely contemporary of the current moment, Cantet helps us rethink the possibilities and limits of political cinema in a context in which old resistances have fallen silent and new forms of protest are only emergent.
Angelos Koutsourakis
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- May 2022
- ISBN:
- 9781474448505
- eISBN:
- 9781474484572
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474448505.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Many of the contemporary film-makers who have recovered a modernist aesthetic sensibility combine this with a critique of neoliberal capitalism, and this is why their work can be classified under the ...
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Many of the contemporary film-makers who have recovered a modernist aesthetic sensibility combine this with a critique of neoliberal capitalism, and this is why their work can be classified under the umbrella term ‘cinema of crisis’. I pursue this argument by looking at three contemporary films: Béla Tarr’s short Prologue (2004), Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du temps (Time Out, 2001) and Michael Haneke’s Happy End (2017). My claim is that this resurgence of modernism in the cinema of crisis is not a nostalgic reiteration of formal principles associated with the past, but a political gesture – a restoration of the modernist critique of modernity and
liberal democracy.Less
Many of the contemporary film-makers who have recovered a modernist aesthetic sensibility combine this with a critique of neoliberal capitalism, and this is why their work can be classified under the umbrella term ‘cinema of crisis’. I pursue this argument by looking at three contemporary films: Béla Tarr’s short Prologue (2004), Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du temps (Time Out, 2001) and Michael Haneke’s Happy End (2017). My claim is that this resurgence of modernism in the cinema of crisis is not a nostalgic reiteration of formal principles associated with the past, but a political gesture – a restoration of the modernist critique of modernity and
liberal democracy.
