Studies In French Cinema

Studies in French Cinema looks at the development of French screen studies in the United Kingdom over the past twenty years and the ways in which innovative scholarship in the UK has helped shape the field in English- and French-speaking universities. This seminal text is also a tribute to six key figures within the field who have been leaders in research and teaching of French cinema: Jill Forbes, Susan Hayward, Phil Powrie, Keith Reader, Carrie Tarr, and Ginette Vincendeau. Covering a wide range of key films--contemporary and historical, popular and auteur--the volume provides an invaluable overview for students and scholars of the state of French cinema, and French film studies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Transnational cinemas are eclipsing national cinemas in the contemporary world, and Sino-French films exemplify this phenomenon through the cinematic coupling of the Sinophone and the Francophone, linking France not just with the Chinese mainland but also with the rest of the Chinese-speaking world. Sinophone directors most often reach out to French cinema by referencing and adapting it. They set their films in Paris and metropolitan France, cast French actors, and sometimes use French dialogue, even when the directors themselves don't understand it. They tend to view France as mysterious, sexy, and sophisticated, just as the French see China and Taiwan as exotic. As Michelle E. Bloom makes clear, many films move past a simplistic opposition between East and West and beyond Orientalist and Occidentalist cross-cultural interplay. Bloom focuses on films that have appeared since 2000 such as Tsai Ming-liang's What Time Is It There? , Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon, and Dai Sijie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. She views the work of these well-known directors through a Sino-French optic, applying the tropes of métissage (or biraciality), intertextuality, adaptation and remake, translation, and imitation to shed new light on their work. She also calls attention to important, lesser studied films: Taiwanese director Cheng Yu-chieh's Yang Yang, which depicts the up-and-coming Taiwanese star Sandrine Pinna as a mixed race beauty; and Emily Tang Xiaobai's debut film Conjugation, which contrasts Paris and post-Tiananmen Square Beijing, the one an incarnation of liberty, the other a place of entrapment. Bloom's insightful analysis also probes what such films reveal about their Taiwanese and Chinese creators. Scholars have long studied Sino-French literature, but this inaugural full-length work on Sino-French cinema maps uncharted territory, offering a paradigm for understanding other cross-cultural interminglings and tools to study transnational cinema and world cinema. The Sino-French, rich and multifaceted, linguistically, culturally, and ethnically, constitutes an important part of film studies, Francophone studies, Sinophone studies and myriad other fields. This is a must-read for students, scholars, and lovers of film.

How should we understand film authorship in an era when the idea of the solitary and sovereign auteur has come under attack, with critics proclaiming the death of the author and the end of cinema? The Bressonians provides an answer in the form of a strikingly original study of Bresson and his influence on the work of filmmakers Jean Eustache and Maurice Pialat. Extending the discourse of authorship beyond the idea of a singular visionary, it explores how the imperatives of excellence function within cinema’s pluralistic community. Bresson’s example offered both an artistic legacy and a creative burden within which filmmakers reckoned in different, often arduous, and altogether compelling ways.

Of all European cinema, the most important is French. France annually produces more films than any other European nation, and throughout its history it has been the key competitor to Hollywood; it is Cannes that matters most after the Oscars. Moreover, the study of film as an academic discipline emerged from France during the 1950s, and was shaped by the work of French intellectuals during the 1960s and 1970s. And in the broad field of international scholarship that is Film Studies, after Hollywood, there are more scholars working in French cinema than any other national cinema. As serious research on French cinema continues to flourish, this new four-volume collection from Routledge meets the need for an authoritative anthology to enable users to navigate and make sense of the subject s large body of scholarship, and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by Phil Powrie, Chief General Editor of the only academic journal specifically devoted to French cinema, and chair of the Association for Studies in French Cinema, this new Routledge title is a mini library of foundational and the very best cutting-edge work. The gathered major works bring together the best and most influential writing on French cinema. Volume I engages with two different forms of scholarship: popular cinema (genres and stars) and influential conceptualizations of French cinema. Volume II adopts the more canonical historical approach for the period up to the New Wave, assembling the best work on the silent period, the Golden Age of the 1930s and early 1940s, and the New Wave of the early 1960s. Volumes III and IV, meanwhile, focus on the post-New Wave period from the mid-1960s onwards. Each volume includes a helpful introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the gathered materials in their historical and intellectual context. Indeed, "French Cinema" is an essential work of reference, and is destined to be valued by scholars and advanced students as a vital research tool.

A new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, this is a four-volume collection of cutting-edge and canonical research on French cinema.

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

?The French Cinema Book is an accessible and innovative survey of key topics in French cinema from the 1890s to the twenty-first century. This multi-authored volume proposes new insights into familiar areas and sets out a fresh agenda for the study and appreciation of French cinema: • Who are the men and women who have made French cinema happen? • What is the business culture in which French cinema has evolved? • How has technological change effected artistic and commercial innovation? • What have been the most popular and the most experimental forms? • What has French cinema shown us of France, its society, its citizens, its concerns? • How has the spectator's experience of film-going changed in the last 100 years? • How have debates about film reflected cinema's unique place in French culture? The book combines historical context and background information with detailed discussion of case-studies, analysis of films, recommendations for further reading and online resources. The French Cinema Book is addressed to all lovers of French cinema, students and teachers, specialists and fans.