Cinema and the Republic

“Embracing both fiction and documentary, this timely study provides an incisive analysis of contemporary French political cinema’s critical engagement with dominant ethnic and spatial power relations and with citizenship. It constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of the diverse experiences of immigrants and banlieue residents, the profound ambiguities of Republicanism towards them, and casts new light on the politics of representation affecting such groups.”

“Cinema and the Republic offers a compelling analysis of political cinema in France since 1995 and of the ways in which it represents and intervenes in the relationship between Republican values and minority communities. The book’s strengths lie in the diversity of its corpus, which acknowledges and foregrounds the contemporary blurring of boundaries between fiction and documentary, cinema and television; in its appropriately broad definition of key terms, with attention paid not only to politics in the ‘issues’ sense (the sans-papiers, the double peine) but also to the political significance of depicting everyday cultural life in the banlieue; in its effective blending of political analysis with detailed attention to film form. It represents a valuable contribution to the study of contemporary French cinema, and to analysis of the scope and aesthetics of political cinema in the twenty-first century.”