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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Chapter 1: Introduction
Will Higbee and Sarah Leahy
Part I
Chapter 2: Pierrot le fou and Post-New Wave French Cinema
Jill Forbes
Chapter 3: National Cinemas and the Body Politic
Susan Hayward
Chapter 4: Unfamiliar Places: ‘Heterospection’ and Recent French Films on Children
Phil Powrie
Chapter 5: The Circular Ruins? Frontiers, Exile and the Nation in Renoir’s Le Crime de Monsieur Lange
Keith Reader
Chapter 6: Beurz n the Hood: The Articulation of Beur and French Identities in Le Thé au harem d’Archiméde and Hexagone
Carrie Tarr
Chapter 7: Community, Nostalgia and the Spectacle of Masculinity: Jean Gabin
Ginette Vincendeau
References to Part I
Part II
Chapter 8: Asserting Text, Context and Intertext: Jill Forbes and French Film Studies
Julia Dobson
Chapter 9: Jill Forbes: The Continued Conversation
Sue Harris
Chapter 10: Political Threads and Material Memory: Mayo’s Wardrobe for Casque d’or (1952)
Jennie Cousins
Chapter 11: ‘Une vraie famille Benetton’: Maternal Metaphors of Nation in Il y a longtemps que je t’aime (2008)- a Response to Susan Hayward
Sarah Leahy
Chapter 12: Phil Powrie: French Film Studies as a Heterotopic Field
Ann Davies
Chapter 13: Men in Unfamiliar Places: A Response to Phil Powrie
Alison Smith
Chapter 14: To Elicit and Elude: The Film Writing of Keith Reader
Douglas Morrey
Chapter 15: Sexuality (and Resnais): A Response to Keith Reader
Emma Wilson
Chapter 16: Of Spaces and Difference in La Graine et le mulet (2007): A Dialogue with Carrie Tarr
Will Higbee
Chapter 17: Cinema, the Second Sex and Studies of French Women’s Films in the 2000s
Kate Ince
Chapter 18: The Bafflement of Gabin and Raimu and the Breathlessness of Belmondo: A Dialogue with the Work of Ginette Vincendeau
Martin O’Shaughnessy
Chapter 19: Placing French Film History
Alastair Phillips
References to Part II
Part III
Chapter 20: To the Distant Observer
Jill Forbes
Chapter 21: Censoring French ‘Cinéma de qualité’- Bel-Ami (1954/1957)
Susan Hayward
Chapter 22: Raymond Bernard’s Les Misérables (1934)
Keith Reader
Chapter 23: Jewish-Arab Relations in French, Franco-Maghrebi and Maghrebi Cinemas
Carrie Tarr
Chapter 24: The Frenchness of French Cinema: The Language of National Identity, from the Regional to the Trans-national
Ginette Vincendeau
Chapter 25: Four Decades of Teaching and Research in French Cinema
Phil Powrie
References to Part III
Index