Stars And Stardom In French Cinema

French cinema is second only to Hollywood in the number of its movie stars who have emerged to achieve international fame. France is, in fact, arguably the only country other than the United States to have an international "star system." Yet these glamorous and charismatic stars differ from their U.S. counterparts in that they maintain more freedom to control their own images and often straddle both mainstream and auteur cinema.Ginette Vincendeau, a leading authority on French cinema, analyzes the phenomenon of French film stardom and provides brilliant in-depth studies of the major popular stars of the French cinema: Max Linder, Jean Gabin, Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau, Louis de FunFs, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Catherine Deneuve, GTrard Depardieu, and Juliette Binoche. This volume analyzes these stars' images and performance styles in the context of the French film industry, but also in relation to national culture and society. In the country where Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve have modeled for Marianne (the effigy of the Republic) and left-wing politicians have held up Jean Gabin as a role model, Vincendeau examines the unusual relationship between French film stars and national identity.Ginette Vincendeau is professor of film studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author and editor of a number of books on cinema.

Many years before Brigitte Bardot and Catherine Deneuve, the French cinema produced a host of glamorous female stars designed to rival their Hollywood counterparts. Bathed in soft light, discussed adoringly in fan magazines and shown wearing the latest fashions, these 'cinematic stars' emerged in opposition to France's traditional stage-based stardom, while remaining, through the roles they played and the looks they sported, a distinctly French phenomenon. This book examines how these stars influenced the narratives and look of their films, contributed to defining the period's new, emancipated.

The 1950s and 1960s were a key moment in the development of postwar France. The period was one of rapid change, derived from post-World War II economic and social modernization; yet many traditional characteristics were retained. By analyzing the eruption of the new postwar world in the context of a France that was both modern and traditional, we can see how these worlds met and interacted, and how they set the scene for the turbulent 1960s and 70s. The examination of the development of mass culture in post-war France, undertaken in this volume, offers a valuable insight into the shifts that took place. By exploring stardom from the domain of cinema and other fields, represented here by famous figures such as Brigitte Bardot, Johnny Hallyday or Jean-Luc Godard, and less conventionally treated areas of enquiry (politics [de Gaulle], literary [Françoise Sagan], and intellectual culture [Lévi-Strauss]) the reader is provided with a broad understanding of the mechanisms of popularity and success, and their cultural, social, and political roles. The picture that emerges shows that many cultural articulations remained or became identifiably "French," in spite of the American mass-culture origins of these social, economic, and cultural transformations.

This book is the first major study of a French silent cinema star. It focuses on Pierre Batcheff, a prominent popular cinema star in the 1920s, the French Valentino, best-known to modern audiences for his role as the protagonist of the avant-garde film classic Un chien andalou. Unlike other stars, he was linked to intellectual circles, especially the Surrealists. The book places Batcheff in the context of 1920s popular cinema, with specific reference to male stars of the period. It analyses the tensions he exemplifies between the 'popular' and the 'intellectual' during the 1920s, as cinema - the subject of intense intellectual interest across Europe - was racked between commercialism and 'art'. A number of the major films are studied in detail: Le Double amour (Epstein, 1925), Feu Mathias Pascal (L'Herbier, 1925), Education de prince (Diamant-Berger, 1927), Le Joueur d'echecs (Bernard, 1927), La Sirene des tropiques (Etievant and Nalpas, 1927), Les Deux timides (Clair, 1928), Un chien andalou (Bunuel, 1929), Monte-Cristo (Fescourt, 1929), and Baroud (Ingram, 1932).Key features:*The first major study of a French silent cinema star.*Provides an in-depth analysis of star performance.*Includes extensive appendices of documents from popular cinema magazines of the period.

In the last 50 years, the social importance of stars has steadily grown, to the point that stars have now become key role models who strongly influence people’s behaviours. This book considers the connections between the three main media (cinema, television and the web) and each of the three phases into which the history of stardom can be divided. The first phase can largely be credited with the creation and codification of contemporary stardom, while the second is linked to the spread of television, which weakened the Hollywood stardom model and gradually transformed the figure of the star, making it more intimate and familiar. In the last of these phases, we have many ‘outsiders’ (personalities from a variety of professional domains and experiences) who are able to achieve considerable social visibility thanks to their skilful use of the web.

Although stardom and celebrity have sometimes been seen as antithetical to traditional British notions of restraint and modesty, female stars have nenetheless always been an important attraction for audiences of British cinema, offering specifically British takes on ideas of glamour, acting prowess and femininity. This book will explore in detail the history of British female stardom from the 1940's to the present day through an examination of careers and star personae, from Anna Neagle, who enjoyed record-breaking popularity in the immediate post-war years, to key contemporary figures such as Keira Knightley and Helen Mirren. This is a major new study of stardom in British cinema and the first to focus on female stars.

The study of French cinema has greatly expanded in recent years, as it is increasingly taught alongside literature in modern language departments. This book, written by two leading scholars of French film, offers students an introduction to the history and theory of French cinema.

Extending from early cinema to the present, bringing together published and newly written works, this book traces the history of French cinema, from Renoir to New Wave and beyond. Providing a taster for the first time reader and a substantial read for the filmgoer and the student, this is a fitting tribute to a great cinema by a top scholar and writer. Vincendeau provides a full tour of the multifaceted French cinema and its enormous influence on popular culture by looking at the people, issues and icons it embraces, from stars like Josephine Baker to Juliette Binoche; woman directors and masculinity in cinema, French gangsters, fathers and daughters, and much more.