French Film

In the contemporary political sphere, the need to address the complex interactions between colonial pasts, present day violence, and audio-visual representation has never appeared more urgent. This is particularly true of France’s troubled relationship with Algeria where, even after decolonization, episodes of violence — police repression, torture, and terrorism — were often excluded from popular, political and historical accounts on both sides of the Mediterranean. By engaging in close readings of work by both European and Algerian filmmakers — including Michael Haneke, Alain Resnais, Assia Djebar, Xavier Beauvois, and Nadir Moknèche — Maria Flood’s wide-ranging study links historical and memorial omission to film techniques that emphasize gaps, spaces, and exclusion, ultimately offering conclusions that inform wider thinking of the ethics of cinema in the face of violence.

Acteur atypique, car l'un des plus laids de sa génération, Michel Simon n'en est pas moins devenu l'un des plus grands. Or, il acquiert ce statut en ayant rarement le " beau rôle " dans ses films. Il interprète essentiellement des ratés, des cocus, des clochards, des criminels, des fous, souvent mal aimés, raillés, seuls ou grotesques.

Paradoxalement, ce sont ces rôles frappés par la disgrâce physique, morale ou sociale qui lui permettent d'exploiter sa propre disgrâce qu'il sait ériger en art, en source inspiratrice en tissant son jeu dans l'empathie avec toujours une pointe de distance ironique. Même s'il peut à l'occasion adopter avec succès un jeu sobre, il trouve grâce dans l'excès où il utilise sa laideur expressive. Elle est la matière première de son jeu, atypique, pétri dans la chair. Mais plus qu'un outil de jeu, son physique ingrat, informe et parfois repoussant est à la fois sa fêlure et sa plus grande richesse. Il en tire sa présence, monstrueuse ou émouvante, mais aussi l'invention et la vérité de ses personnages asociaux ou différents. Telle est sa force.

L'acteur a bâti sa carrière sur cette disgrâce subversive, jouant sciemment, mais aussi sans doute malgré lui, en marge des critères traditionnellement valorisés. Cet ouvrage analyse cet art de la disgrâce qui forme l'essence de la persona de Michel Simon, en nourrit son jeu et fait de lui l'un des plus modernes des acteurs de la période classique.

Jacquot de Nantes (1991), Agnès Varda's elegy to her dying husband (film director Jacques Demy), presents an intimate love rendered through cinema by chronicling Demy's own lifelong cinephilia. A cinematic elegy or an elegy-in-progress, Jacquot simultaneously screens mortality and cinephilia: cinephilia exists as a metaphor for the undoing of a life; the creation of film and the evolution of a cinematic career build in proportion to the life that diminishes. If cinema defines Demy's past, which the film clearly suggests, Jacquot figures as the idealized ordering of his mortal time. Demy persists in the cinematic image if not in the living body. This cinephilic framing of Demy's mortality invests faith in cinema's possibility to reveal if not transcend the bounds of human mortality. This article positions Jacquot as a cinematic elegy within the frameworks of cinematic time, cinematic scale (specifically, the close-up) and cinephilia.

A look at nascent female sexuality in french film through psychological waters.

Films:

À ma sœur ! , Catherine Breillat, (Tartan, 2002).

Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson, (Touchstone, 1996).

H20, Ralph Steiner, (1929).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4muinY8Q9M (Accessed: 5th May 2014).

Innocence, Lucile Hadzihalilovic,(Artificial Eye, 2004).

La Vie d’Adèle, Abdellatif Kechiche, (2013)

Les Quatre Cents Coups, François Truffaut, (Tartan, 2002).

Naissance des pieuvres, Céline Sciamma, (Slingshot Studios, 2008).

Pauline, Céline Sciamma, (2009)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUHyJjiouUw (Accessed: 5th May 2014).

Sex is Comedy, Catherine Breillat (Artificial Eye, 2002).

Tomboy, Céline Sciamma, (2011).

There are voices in France advocating for a Korean-type screen quota system, seen as a key ingredient in Korean films’ success, and voices in Korea advocating for a French-type subsidy regime in Korea, perceived as needed in order to achieve further take-off of the Korean movie industry. This paper shows that the Korean screen quota has been irrelevant to the Korean success and that the French skyrocketing and huge subsidies have done nothing for improving the attractiveness of French movies in France. The paper concludes by suggesting that in-depth analysis of the policies pursued by the two countries is a good way to avoid a too costly trial-and-error process when designing policies related to cultural industries and to culture.

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Challenging the prevailing notion among cinephiles that the auteur is an isolated genius interested primarily in individualism, Colin Burnett positions Robert Bresson as one whose life's work confronts the cultural forces that helped shape it. Regarded as one of film history's most elusive figures, Bresson (1901–1999) carried himself as an auteur long before cultural magazines, like the famed Cahiers du cinéma, advanced the term to describe such directors as Jacques Tati, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean-Luc Godard. In this groundbreaking study, Burnett combines biography with cultural history to uncover the roots of the auteur in the alternative cultural marketplace of midcentury France.

Ce livre vise à tracer – en guise de fil d’Ariane – une cartographie de la théorie et de la pratique du cinéma de Jean Epstein à partir de sa relation avec l’idée de réel dans son évolution, en tenant compte des contextes culturels qui ont pu l’influencer. Dès le lendemain de la première guerre mondiale, nombre de réflexions d’ordre esthétique apparaissent autour du réel cinématographique, notamment du cinéma de non-fiction. Epstein, comme Ricciotto Canudo, Émile Vuillermoz, Louis Delluc et Germaine Dulac, voit souvent en celui-ci le lieu privilégié de la photogénie. Chiara Tognolotti et Laura Vichi explorent la façon
dont le cinéaste participe à cette réflexion, comment il se l’approprie et l’intègre pour faire évoluer sa pensée jusqu’à ses derniers travaux.
S’appuyant sur un certain nombre de documents d’archives – articles de revue et journaux, projets de films, écrits inédits, fiches de lecture – les auteures essayent d’esquisser les lieux les plus marquants du terroir de la pensée epsteinienne qui semble posséder les formes d’un archipel se détendant en une mer imaginaire qui arrive à effleurer la pensée contemporaine sur le cinéma.

Subjectivities informed by gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability, nationality, and other situated experiences have spurred not only representational amendments in filmmaking but also interventions in film theory. This paper will study Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur (1965), which is an example of the director's methodology that acknowledges and is inflected by a particular concern. The paper will attempt to include explicit discussion of the methodology’s intervention and how it
specifically augments or challenges a different theoretical approach to the film.

2 vol. (725 p.)
Jury : Vincent Amiel, Michel Marie, Raphaëlle Moine, Jacqueline Nacache, Geneviève Sellier (Directrice de thèse), Ginette Vincendeau.
Doctorat d’études cinématographiques et audiovisuelles, mention Très Honorable avec les félicitations du jury à l’unanimité (Université de Caen Basse-Normandie).
soutenue le 10.11.2007

Comolli and Narboni, in their influential article for Cahiers du cinema, argue that the job of the critic is to determine the political role played by a given film, identifying if and how a film reproduces the ideology of its time. This paper contests that their totalizing theory is unsustainable and unhealthy for both the consumption and criticism of films.

"We resent the cinema for ignoring the profound unrest of our time, the urgent problems at hand, especially when literature and the theater are more and more committed. Some of us feel ashamed that the cinema.. contents itself with banal, infantile little stories, shopworn entertainments, instead of subjects of real substance that would resonate in our hearts and minds." (Marcel Carné, Mists of Regret, 261) "My fame in the eyes of posterity will rest even more on the Code which bears my name than all the victories I have won." (Napoléon)

The life of Henri-Pierre Roché (1879 – 1959), art collector, journalist, writer, finds its singular rhythm in a continual meandering between dispersion and the search for unifying harmony. This dispersion – moral and physical – appears to represent a necessary evil for him since he considers his vocation to be the gathering of human experiences from as wide a spectrum as possible in order to create a work that would be useful to society, that would lead to better understanding of issues such as political harmony, eroticism and polygamy.

The dissertation consists of a detailed biographical study which covers Roché’s formative years until the publication of his first literary works (1879 – 1907). A biographical summary of the remainder of his life is followed by a chapter on his first major publication, Don Juan et... , which has not formed the subject of any literary analysis prior to this. The third chapter consists of an interpretation of Roché’s novel Deux Anglaises et le Continent as both a work of initiation and an initiation to his work, illustrating how it introduces themes that recur in two further novels, Jules et Jim and Victor.

Through his way of life, Roché’s life becomes his most extensive and involved œuvre. This dissertation traces the roots of his propensity for dispersion and lack of unity, to his childhood and specifically to the form of education advocated by his mother Clara Roché. This attribute surfaces again in Roché’s keeping of a personal diary, spanning almost sixty years, in which he compulsively observes and notes his own behaviour and that of those around him. The diary emphasises and prepares the fragmentary, compressed style and open-ended writing which would later become Roché’s trademark.

Abandoning his studies in political science, Roché sets out on a career which has much in common with the lives dilettante intellectuals fashion for themselves towards the end of the 19th century. His first human project, formulated around 1902, is an attempt to understand the mystery of erotic love and the possibilities of sexual relationships. To this end, he transforms his own life into a kind of laboratory. At a time when France has hostile inclinations towards Britain and Germany, Roché undertakes extensive journeys to these countries, learning the languages and opening himself to literary, social and philosophical influences. The dissertation pays particular attention to the analysis of these influences, an area which has not yet been covered by any other research. Through a detailed interpretation of Don Juan et..., the nature of seduction and desire is examined in the context of the literary myth of Don Juan and the association between fragmentation and desire is emphasised.

In conclusion, the association between desire and its written expression is examined and found to be reflected in Roché’s fragmentary writing, through which he appears to find a solution/ compromise in the form of voluntary incompleteness compensating for his failure in the impossible quest for unity.

©University of Pretoria 2005

"What Norman Finkelstein has done in exposing the political foregrounding of the Holocaust Industry, what Giorgio Agamben has done in extrapolating the contemporary implications of homo sacer from the horrors of the concentration camps, Terri Ginsberg is doing with astonishing command and competence about Holocaust cinema. Ginsberg s voice is clear, concise, liberating, and the harbinger of an entire new generation of scholarship in cinema studies. Groundbreaking, challenging, judicious, theoretically ambitious, and analytically lucid, HOLOCAUST FILM: THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF IDEOLOGY begins from the ground zero of the unspeakable and works its way meticulously up towards the long shot of a take that will remain definitive to generations of scholarship it anticipates." -- Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University; Editor, DREAMS OF A NATION: ON PALESTINIAN CINEMA

"Terri Ginsberg's HOLOCAUST FILM: THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF IDEOLOGY is a much needed intervention in the field of Holocaust Studies in general and in Holocaust Cinema Studies in particular. What Ginsberg has fashioned is a reading of the Holocaust that is both immanent and materialist and much needed in these times when Holocaust scholarship is being shanghaighed by both ends of the political spectrum. It is Ginsberg's achievement that Holocaust cinematic texts are here restored to their historical moment in a way that must be accomplished if there is ever to be an understanding of how these texts might grasp the original moment of the tragedy. Her painstakingly thorough scholarship and theoretical rigor ensures that her work at least will not serve to promote the type of easy, knee-jerk response that simply adds flame to the fire and in the name of scholarship contributes to the perpetuation of other tragedies in the present Israeli-Palestinian situation." -- Dennis Broe, Graduate Program Coordinator, Media Arts Department, Long Island University

"Ginsberg ably demonstrates how the subgenre known as Holocaust cinema has been co-opted by the culture industry. Bypassing the usual Hollywood touchstones, she focuses on four relatively neglected films that illuminate several key motifs that permeate many films on the subject: the 'Christianization' of Jewish oppression, the commodification of genocide by both commercial and art house cinema, and the ethnocentric appropriation of the Holocaust by filmmakers with reactionary agendas. Eschewing the conformist platitudes of previous studies, Ginsberg s book is a salutary and necessary provocation." -- Richard Porton, Co-editor, CINEASTE; Author, FILM AND THE ANARCHIST IMAGINATION

"Hollywood has produced more than 175 films on the Holocaust since the1980s, and in fact by now the category is considered by some to constitute a virtual genre. Ginsberg challenges the under-examined status of these films and analyzes the work they perform to construct a revisionist discourse. Ginsberg's astute understanding of cinematic strategies in addition to her confidence in distilling and unpacking even the most fraught of ideological discourses promise a groundbreaking and eminently useful study. Hers are important contributions which we very much need." -- B. Ruby Rich, University of California-Santa Cruz; Author, CHICK FLICKS: THEORIES AND MEMORIES OF THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT

"The importance of the Holocaust is beyond doubt. The importance of continuing the analysis and wide-ranging discussion of it is, at least in some circles. Here, in response, is an extremely scholarly andinsightful treatment of Holocaust films and the aesthetic ideology that informs them. Sheds much light on several controversial problems connected to these horrific events. Highly Recommended." -- Bertell Ollman, New York University; Author, DANCE OF THE DIALECTIC

This timely monograph takes as its starting point the provocative contention that Holocaust film scholarship has been marginalized academically despite the crucial role Holocaust film has played in fostering international awareness of the Nazi genocide and scholarly understandings of cinematic power. The book suggests political and economic motivations for this seeming paradox, the ideological parameters of which are evident in debates and controversies over Holocaust films themselves, and around Holocaust culture in general. Lending particular attention to four exemplary Holocaust “art” films (KORCZAK [Poland, 1990], THE QUARREL [Canada, 1990], ENTRE NOUS [France, 1983], and BALAGAN [Germany, 1994]), this book breaks disciplinary ground by drawing critical connections between public and scholarly debates over Holocaust representation, and the often sophisticated cinematic structures lending aesthetic shape to them in today’s global arena.

This paper explains symbolism and meaning in the film, "Personal Shopper" (Assayas, 2017).  Maureen observes many "signs" from her deceased twin brother Lewis who's fulfilling an oath to contact her after death. These include astral swirls, bangs, water flowing, glasses floating and other signs from Lewis. However, none of these paranormal occurances are convincing enough for Maureen. Here's the key to the film: Maureen is in a hotel room (the 2nd time) waiting for Ingo to arrive. She receives a series of desperate texts from him asking if she showed his prior texts to the police (they suspect him of killing Kyra). He knocks at the hotel door; we hear a banging noise as Maureen opens it; then, fade to black. This is when Ingo kills Maureen - no other explanation makes sense despite the simplistic Youtube theories. Maureen is dead because the elevator door (and hotel front doors) open and close for Maureen's spirit leaving the hotel. Then, the paintings in the hotel hallways change to artwork by the spiritualist artist Klimt (mentioned as an artist who channeled symbols from the afterlife). So, from this point on - Maureen moves into an "in-between death state." -This is exactly the same "place" as Lewis had told Maureen about when he was alive and saw their deceased mother. Maureen is creating her own reality now. She creates a scene with her ex-sister-in-law and meets her new boyfriend who explains the nature of "death" to her. After this, Maureen creates a scene in the "sacred spiritual" mountains of Oman. Upon arrival, she enters a monastary-like room where another glass is floating. She asks questions - bang once for “yes” and two for “no” (ala. the Fox Sister's & Hugo's mediumship mentioned earlier). However, upon asking if she – herself – is the cause of the bangs – the bangs indicate "yes." Finally, she realizes she’s creating this reality (like the Bardo) and knows it's time to free herself from grief within this "in-between death state." In the final shot, she enters into the peaceful whiteness of the afterlife.

Many studies centred on Godard do not relate his films and ideas to other film practice. This study of essay film, taking as its central object Godard's Histoire(s), uses cognitive mapping to relate his work to Resnais, Marker, Debord, Pasolini.

La présente étude traite de l’adaptation cinématographique d’Angélique marquise des Anges d’Anne et Serge Golon, qui a connu un grand succès en librairie. Classé comme roman populaire, le roman des Golon, qui a souvent été ignoré par la critique, est une oeuvre historiquement bien documentée. Adressée à un public essentiellement féminin, Angélique marquise des Anges, dont le casting réunissait des auteurs célébres, a été à l’origine de cinq films réalisés par Bernard Borderie, qui ont connu un succès commercial important. Après une courte présentation de l’oeuvre littéraire, nous analysons la personnalité et l’image de Louis XIV et de sa cour dans les cinq films. Vu l’étendue du roman fleuve, le scénariste et le producteur ont été obligés de rendre partiellement le caractère des personnages historiques ou même de les supprimer dans l’adaptation cinématographique. De plus, ils ont enlevé des descriptions et des passages importants réduisant ainsi les références chronologiques. En outre, quoique dans les romans des Golon,  l’image de la cour de Louis XIV soient représentée de manière réaliste, dans les films de Borderie, qui se focalisent sur les aventures amoureuses de l’héroine, malgré l’utilisation d’un décor naturel,  elle n’a pas été rendue de manière convaincante. Révélatrice des rapports complexes entre la littérature et le cinéma, l’adaptation cinématographique de la série d’Angélique, était, à l’exception du premier film de Borderie, une adaptation libre du roman, ce qui n’a pas nuit à son grand succès commercial.

Historically conceived as a ‘welcoming land’ (terre d’accueil), postcolonial France evokes a thresholdof tolerance (seuil de tolérance) in relation to immigrants and refugees. This article considers theillusions of universal citizenship, alongside the illusions of national borders, by examining the‘terror’ evoked by the transnational figure of the vampire within relations between France andFranco-Maghrebis in transnational French cinemas. Like the vampire, non-European nationals whoare racialised as ‘arabes’ are denied the universal rights of citizenship in postcolonial France.Vampirism, however, signals a potential collapse of republicanism, which, because it extendscolonialism, fails to recognise spaces for difference without the oppression of unidirectionalassimilation. The article examines the racialisation of immigration and the politicisation of assimilation in France since the mid-1970s as these processes are imagined in two films that rejec trealist conventions of ‘French national cinema’ for anti-realist conventions of transnational genre cinema.Dracula, père et fils (Molinaro, 1976) and Un vampire au paradis (Bahloul, 1992) exposethe ‘common sense’ and ‘science’ of racism within a transpolitical space of France and Algeria inways that canonical films would not dare. As such, the films prompt a rethinking of French cinemabeyond the often nationally or culturally discrete spaces of auteur cinema into global spaces of transnational genre films.

Eric Rohmer was a key figure in French New Wave cinema. His death in 2010 sparked renewed interest in his diverse body of works that span films, criticism, and television work. Contributors to this volume - a mix of well-known and younger scholars of cinema - visit, revisit, complicate, and at times upend accepted readings and interpretations of perennial Rohmerian topics including the important role of language in his films, the influence of the arts, depictions of gender and class, and the roles played by space and place in his films.

This essay analyzes François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970) as an early representation of autism that metaphorizes the neurodiverse child as the colonial subject. The film takes place in 1798, only a decade after the French Revolution, and depicts the true events of the “wild boy of Aveyron,” a feral child found in the Southern French forest when he was twelve years old. Before the film’s production, Truffaut—who also plays the boy’s teacher, Dr. Jean-Marc Itard—collected articles and books on autism and viewed videos of autistic children to create his main character’s behavioral patterns. The film is thus an exceptionally early representation of autism in narrative film history. While several scholars have analyzed the film with this knowledge—and usually from an autobiographical point of view that uncritically celebrates the film’s auteur director—I merge the critical lenses of disability studies and postcolonial studies to examine it as a white savior film.

Drawing on archival research and considering L’Enfant sauvage’s narrative and production contexts, I explore how the film evokes what Snyder and Mitchell term the “Eugenic Atlantic”—the historical moment when racial and disability eugenics dovetailed at the end of the eighteenth century. The film not only maintains that the boy should be “civilized” in its representation of Itard as the narrative’s hero, but it also conflates disability and race via the following production and formal choices: the casting of a Romani boy (Jean-Pierre Cargol) despite Truffaut’s knowledge that the historical “wild child” was white; and the use of long and iris fade-out shots that work to distance the audience from identifying with the autistic child, most notably in scenes where he connects with nature as he stims (uses repetitive motions to self-stimulate). In its representation of autism-as-savagery only a year after May ’68—a key moment in postcolonial French history—L’Enfant sauvage reveals some of the ways in which colonialism and ableism are mutually imbricated historical methods of normalization that span centuries.

This article examines the important yet overlooked 1965 omnibus film Paris vu par… (Paris Seen by…, a.k.a. Six in Paris), a transauthorial production bringing together the individual contributions of directors Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Jean Rouch, Jean Douchet, and Jean Daniel Pollet. Like Paris, Je t’aime (2006) forty years after it (albeit on a very different scale), each episode of this film is set in a different section of the French capital, introduced by way of expository captions identifying the various locales and names of the filmmakers. Inspired by the writings of Walter Benjamin, Tom Conley, and Naomi Schor, the author examines how the six constituent parts of Paris vu par… crystallize various facets of French life scattered across the map of Paris, thus imparting a sense of representational wholeness despite the film’s metonymic slippage into modularity. In looking at the ways in which the topographical and sociopolitical ingredients of this film relate to aesthetic and narratological elements, the author seeks to draw out similarities between the idea of people as social clusters and the concept of narrative communities, attracting the reader’s eye to their spatial relations (as collections) while foregrounding the salient features of ‘postcard cinema’.

En el siguiente análisis comparativo la transparencia se considera en su facetas intangible y material. Para su comprensión se ha observado también las relaciones contrarias de opacidad, de forma tal que se establece un paneo por los componentes de las películas que son percibidos por la vista, el oído y la razón de quienes actúan como protagonistas.

There are voices in France advocating for a Korean-type screen quota system, seen as a key ingredient in Korean films’ success, and voices in Korea advocating for a French-type subsidy regime in Korea, perceived as needed in order to achieve further take-off of the Korean movie industry. This paper shows that the Korean screen quota has been irrelevant to the Korean success and that the French skyrocketing and huge subsidies have done nothing for improving the attractiveness of French movies in France. The paper concludes by suggesting that in-depth analysis of the policies pursued by the two countries is a good way to avoid a too costly trial-and-error process when designing policies related to cultural industries and to culture.

This essay studies the long-overlooked and long-forgotten French New Wave filmmaker, Paule Delsol, focusing on her debut feature, La Dérive (Drift, 1962–1964). Using archival primary documents, the essay first examines Delsol's artistic emergence, her independent mode of production, her interactions with François Truffaut and her outlier status within the New Wave. Second, the essay examines the feminist design of
La Dérive, its stylistic and temporal agitations, its considerations of
female-centred domestic binds in 1960s France, versus better-known
New Wave texts. Third, the essay contrasts La Dérive’s polarised
reception, especially its censorship and distribution problems, with
Delsol’s enfranchised status at Cahiers du cinéma, emphasising her
many published contributions to the New Wave’s agenda. In sum, we discover the full embattled range of Delsol's long-repressed career, and finally correct the often reproduced line that Agnès Varda was the only woman associated with the French New Wave.

Drawing on Raymond Bellour, Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze, amongst others, this essay assesses how experiences of home, abandonment, illness and mourning are sensorially inscribed within Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015), Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) and Hoffman’s What These Ashes Wanted. By embodying portraits of both the deceased and the ‘living’ (the late filmmaker/motherless daughter, grieving partner, beleaguered widower), these films materialise, fragment and liberate the already dead and endlessly dying women. http://www.screeningthepast.com/2018/02/in-no-home-movie-style-her-death-and-rebirth/