Search Results

This chapter looks at the legacy of Third Cinema and find elements of ‘guerrilla’, ‘imperfect’, and ‘minor’ filmmaking within Soderbergh's vast body of work. The theory and practice of Third Cinema, oppositional to both ‘First Cinema’ (Hollywood spectacle) and ‘Second Cinema’ (European auteur film), sought to establish an alternative mode of filmmaking. Soderbergh has exploited his position as part of the ‘System’ that Third Cinema opposes in order to create challenging, flawed films that use ‘guerrilla’ techniques, alternative modes of production, and political themes that side with the oppressed. These films lie outside the rubric of both traditional Hollywood escapist fare and auteurist self-expression. The dialectical dynamism of Soderbergh's career includes these oppositional stances that require the critic to think beyond evaluative concerns and consider the sheer display of difference in much of his work.

This chapter assesses Louis Malle, who holds a unique, yet rather marginal, place in French cinema as a film-maker with an exceptional career in France and abroad. He made his first films on the margins of the French New Wave, without really becoming a part of it, but adopting some of the new trends and strategies of the emerging directors of that period. Malle was able to plan and direct his next films enjoying the freedom and independence associated with 'auteur' film-makers. His cinema oscillated throughout his career between the forms of fiction and documentary. The chapter looks at two of Malle's films which fall into the fiction category: Lacombe Lucien (1974) and Au revoir les enfants (1987). These films illustrate how closely Malle linked his fiction work to some of the 'direct cinema' techniques that he explored in his documentaries, in order to create a cinema of instinct and improvisation without trying to organise reality.

This chapter studies the genre and narrative of Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (2002). The narrative of Talk to Her flits between a double- and single-stranded plot line, plays with time with sometimes careless abandon, and contains coincidences that verge of the ridiculous. But yet, far from alienating the spectator, the narrative of Talk to Her pleasingly draws one in and lures the spectator into a position where they are able to suspend their disbelief, enjoy and engage with the plot. The spectator familiar with Almodóvar's films somewhat expects an unconventional narrative and thus is likely to find it unobtrusive. Meanwhile, like most Almodóvar's films, Talk to Her is hard to classify in terms of genre. Unlike the Hollywood system that relies heavily on either star or genre marketing, the marketing for Almodóvar's films relies heavily on his own status as an award-winning auteur film-maker. Talk to Her is thus not bound by generic convention in the way that many Hollywood films are.

This introductory explains the theme of this book, which is about French queer cinema. The book aims to document forms of contemporary queer representation through coverage of auteur film, pornography, and DIY digital video. It charts the emergence of a radical, DIY digital video culture, combining queer theory, transgender activism, and lesbian pornography. This is the first study of the cultural formation and critical reception of contemporary queer-authored and queer-themed film and video.