Is It French Popular Postnational Screen Fiction From France

Zusammenfassung: This book investigates the recently accelerated phenomenon of mainstream French film and serial television's remarkable popularity not only within but - more novelly for European audiovisual narratives - outside the domestic context. Treating changes that have taken place in France's production landscape during the mass rollout of global streaming platforms as revelatory of broader tendencies in media production and circulation in Europe and beyond, the collection explores emergent influential players (Omar Sy, Camille Cottin, Alexandre Aja and Fanny Herrero), companies such as Netflix and Gaumont, and new genres, identities and representations on screen. It thus draws together a body of new research by international experts in French and European media production to analyse popular film and television series from France through a postnational lens with regards to both economic and institutional norms and to culture as a whole

This book investigates the recently accelerated phenomenon of mainstream French film and serial television’s remarkable popularity not only within but – more novelly for European audiovisual narratives – outside the domestic context. Treating changes that have taken place in France's production landscape during the mass rollout of global streaming platforms as revelatory of broader tendencies in media production and circulation in Europe and beyond, the collection explores emergent influential players (Omar Sy, Camille Cottin, Alexandre Aja and Fanny Herrero), companies such as Netflix and Gaumont, and new genres, identities and representations on screen. It thus draws together a body of new research by international experts in French and European media production to analyse popular film and television series from France through a postnational lens with regards to both economic and institutional norms and to culture as a whole.

Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France argues that the way France displayed its colonized peoples in the twentieth century continues to inform how minority authors and artists make immigrants and racial and ethnic minority populations visible in contemporary France.

Winner of first Prize in the BAFTSS Best Edited Collection competition, this volume examines how different generations of women work within the genericity of audio-visual storytelling not necessarily to 'undo' or 'subvert' popular formats, but also to draw on their generative force. Recent examples of filmmakers and creative practitioners within and outside Hollywood as well as women working in non-directing authorial roles remind us that women are in various ways authoring commercially and culturally impactful texts across a range of genres. Put simply, this volume asks: what do women who are creatively engaged with audio-visual industries do with genre and what does genre do with them? The contributors to the collection respond to this question from diverse perspectives and with different answers, spanning issues of direction, screenwriting, performance and audience address/reception.

From xenophobic appropriations of Joan of Arc to Afro-futurism and cyberpunk, the "national" characters of the colonial era often seem to be dissolving into postnational and virtual subjects. In Continental Drift, Emily Apter deftly analyzes the French colonial and postcolonial experience as a case study in the erosion of belief in national destiny and the emergence of technologically mediated citizenship. Among the many topics Apter explores are the fate of national literatures in an increasingly transnational literary climate; the volatile stakes of Albert Camus's life and reputation against the backdrop of Algerian civil strife; the use of literary and theatrical productions to "script" national character for the colonies; belly-dancing and aesthetic theory; and the impact of new media on colonial and postcolonial representation, from tourist photography to the videos of Digital Diaspora. Continental Drift advances debates not just in postcolonial studies, but also in gender, identity, and cultural studies; ethnography; psychoanalysis; and performance studies.

In an age of information and new media the relationships between remembering and forgetting have changed. This volume addresses the tension between loud and often spectacular histories and those forgotten pasts we strain to hear. Employing social and cultural analysis, the essays within examine mnemonic technologies both new and old, and cover subjects as diverse as U.S. internment camps for Japanese Americans in WWII, the Canadian Indian Residential School system, Israeli memorial videos, and the desaparecidos in Argentina. Through these cases, the contributors argue for a re-interpretation of Guy Debord's notion of the spectacle as a conceptual apparatus through which to examine the contemporary landscape of social memory, arguing that the concept of spectacle might be developed in an age seen as dissatisfied with the present, nervous about the future, and obsessed with the past. Perhaps now "spectacle" can be thought of not as a tool of distraction employed solely by hegemonic powers, but instead as a device used to answer Walter Benjamin's plea to "explode the continuum of history" and bring our attention to now-time.

A new strain of realism has emerged in France. The novels that embody it represent diverse fears—immigration and demographic change, radical Islam, feminism, new technologies, globalization, American capitalism, and the European Union—but these books, often best-sellers, share crucial affinities. In their dystopian visions, the collapse of France, Europe, and Western civilization is portrayed as all but certain and the literary mode of realism begins to break down. Above all, they depict a degenerative force whose effects on the nation and on reality itself can be felt. Examining key novels by Michel Houellebecq, Frédéric Beigbeder, Aurélien Bellanger, Yann Moix, and other French writers, Christy Wampole identifies and critiques this emergent tendency toward “degenerative realism.” She considers the ways these writers draw on social science, the New Journalism of the 1960s, political pamphlets, reportage, and social media to construct an atmosphere of disintegration and decline. Wampole maps how degenerative realist novels explore a world contaminated by conspiracy theories, mysticism, and misinformation, responding to the internet age’s confusion between fact and fiction with a lament for the loss of the real and an unrelenting emphasis on the role of the media in crafting reality. In a time of widespread populist anxieties over the perceived decline of the French nation, this book diagnoses the literary symptoms of today’s reactionary revival.