Queering Contemporary French Popular Cinema

Queering Contemporary French Popular Cinema combines close film analysis with a small-scale qualitative investigation of audience responses to examine images of queerness in contemporary French popular cinema and their reception. Through its blending of the textual and the empirical, this book provides a unique insight into the ways in which sexuality and gender are represented on the cinema screen, as well as the spectator reactions they elicit. Since the mid-1990s, depictions of lesbians, gay men, and queer forms of sexual desire and identity have shifted to the mainstream of French cinematographic representation - as evidenced by the box-office success of a series of highly commercial comic films, including Gazon maudit (Josiane Balasko, 1995), Pédale douce (Gabriel Aghion, 1996), Le Placard (Francis Véber, 2000), and Chouchou (Merzak Allouache, 2003). Alongside this commercial strand, a series of small-budget alternative comedies and other genre films have also challenged heteronormative conceptualizations of sexuality and gender. Films such as Sitcom (François Ozon, 1998), L'Homme est une femme comme les autres (Jean-Jacques Zilbermann, 1997), Pourquoi pas moi? (Stéphane Giusti, 1999), Drôle de Félix (Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau, 2000), and Les Chansons d'amour (Christophe Honoré, 2007) portray desire as fluid and/or gender as unfixed. With their use of parody and their blending of comedy with the musical, melodrama, romance or road movie, these and other similar films have resonated with a burgeoning viewing public, tired of having to seek queerness in connotation, of appropriating marginal characters in ostensibly straight narratives, and of tragedy and trauma as the principal modes of representation and spectator address.

French Queer Cinema examines the representation of queer identities and sexualities in contemporary French filmmaking. This groundbreaking volume is the first comprehensive study of the cultural formation and critical reception of contemporary queer film and video in France. French Queer Cinema addresses the emergence of a gay cinema in the French context since the late 1990s, including critical coverage of films by important contemporary directors such as Francois Ozon, Sebastien Lifshitz, Patrice Chereau, Andre Techine and Christophe Honore. Nick Rees-Roberts transposes contemporary Anglo-American Queer Theory to the study of French screen culture, drawing particular attention to issues of race and migration such as problematic fantasies of Arab masculinities in queer cinematic production. This theoretically-informed book engages with a number of fault-lines running through queer cultural representation in France including transgender dissent and the effects of AIDS and loss on the formation of queer identities and sexualities.

Covering production, distribution and exhibition as well as critical and audience reception, this book provides an overview of recent French cinema. It offers case studies of films which enjoyed international appreciation and also those not distributed abroad.

Examines popular French film of the last 25 years. Charts recent developments in all genres since the New Wave, including the heritage film, the thriller, the war film, `cinema du look'. Other topics include: representations of sexuality; the work of women film-makers. Includes a filmography.

Comprehensive in scope, Queer cinema in contemporary France traces the development of the meaning of queer across five French directors' careers, from their earliest, often unknown films to their later, major films with international release.

Youth has been represented on screen for decades and has informed many directors' visual, narrative and social perspectives, but there has not been a body of work addressing the richness and complexity of this topic in a French and Francophone context. This volume offers new insights into the works of emerging and well-established directors alike, who all chose to place youth at the heart of their narrative and aesthetic concerns. Showing how the topic of 'youth' has inspired filmmakers to explore and reinvent common tropes associated with young people, the book also addresses how the representation of youth can be used to mirror the tensions - political, social, religious, economic or cultural - that agitate a society at a given time in its history.

A Companion to Contemporary French Cinema presents a comprehensive collection of original essays addressing all aspects of French cinema from 1990 to the present day. Features original contributions from top film scholars relating to all aspects of contemporary French cinema Includes new research on matters relating to the political economy of contemporary French cinema, developments in cinema policy, audience attendance, and the types, building, and renovation of theaters Utilizes groundbreaking research on cinema beyond the fiction film and the cinema-theater such as documentary, amateur, and digital filmmaking Contains an unusually large range of methodological approaches and perspectives, including those of genre, gender, auteur, industry, economic, star, postcolonial and psychoanalytic studies Includes essays by important French cinema scholars from France, the U.S., and New Zealand, many of whose work is here presented in English for the first time

Tracing the history of contemporary French cinema, Guy Austin addresses key issues in French films such as national identity, representations of sexuality and the new realism